“Time-release Forgettol, mostly. It’s all the rage. Snort it if you like—just make sure you write your name and address on a matchbook cover first. In big letters.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Whatever.” He sighed. “I might as well clue you in, Metcalf. Don’t go around talking about the past. Memory is rude. That’s what this stuff is for, and everyone uses it. In Los Angeles it’s illegal to know what you do for a living. If you don’t use it, pretend you do. And if you see people talking into their shirtsleeves, they aren’t talking to you. Don’t gape.”
I waited for the rest, but his lecture was finished. He got up and went to the cupboard to rummage around, presumably for another bottle. I just sat there and let what he’d told me sink in, or tried to. It kept getting jammed about halfway down.
He located another bottle, less empty than the one we’d just polished off, but not by much, and dribbled what there was evenly into our two glasses. Then he sat down and drank his. I wondered how much alcohol it took to make his little body cry uncle, and then I figured he must have worked his tolerance up pretty high by now. When you don’t know how many bottles you’ve got, it isn’t because you haven’t been drinking.
My drug of choice was different, of course, and my eye was still on the pile of make. My bloodstream was crying for some addictol, the one ingredient no blend left out. And maybe, too, there was a part of me that wanted, finally, to let go and buy into the generic reality.
I swept the little pile of standard-issue Forgettol back into the envelope, folded the flap over, and put it in my pocket. I’d need it to bluff with, like Surface said. If the shakes got too bad, I might need it to snort, and to hell with the consequences.
Surface put down his glass. “Goddamn, Metcalf,” he said. “You know, I haven’t talked this much in years.”
“We weren’t talking, just now.”
He waved my sarcasm away. “I mean today, since picking you up.”
I felt a surge of impatience. I wanted to tell him he’d talked just fine two days ago. But of course that was irrational. Surface had been gentle with me, but I had to be just as gentle with him. Because in effect I’d escaped the decline that hit while I was in the freezer. I’d have to take care not to remind people of how much was missing now as compared to before.
“Okay,” I said. “I can take a hint. Thanks for the drink.” I polished off what was left in my glass.
“Don’t take it too hard,” he said. “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. You’ll learn the rules.”
“I’ll have my lips removed as soon as I learn a way to whistle out my asshole.”
“That’s the idea.”
I guess I was making him happy. He’d set out to save me some trouble, and I was acting like I’d gotten the message. I didn’t know whether or not to tell him the bad news—that a casual remark he’d dropped a moment ago triggered an insight, which made the whole case, six years dead or not, seem tantalizingly close to a solution. I might not have a license, but that wouldn’t stop me from finishing what I’d started.
I was pretty sure the defeated old ape across the table from me didn’t want to hear it. But the other Surface, the grizzled veteran private inquisitor I’d known six years or two days ago, might feel a different way about it, might like to think I was still on the job.
I didn’t think about it long. The Surface who would have liked to know was six years gone. I was going to have to start making the adjustment. I got up and put on my coat.
“Don’t take it too hard, Metcalf,” said Surface again.
“Sure,” I said. I wanted to get out of there, on the chance that what he had might be contagious. Besides, sitting still was making me nervous. I was thinking about the make in my pocket, and my hands were trembling.
I didn’t tell Surface to stay in touch, or take care, or anything like that. I thought he’d appreciate me keeping my mouth shut, so I just turned around and put my hand up when I got to the door. He nodded at me, and I went out and downstairs to the street. The sun was in the afternoon half of the sky now, and my stomach was beginning to chew on itself. It was about a ten-block walk to a place where I used to like to get a sandwich. Maybe it was still there. I started walking.
CHAPTER 3
THE PLACE I HAD IN MIND WAS GONE, BUT THERE WAS another one just like it down the block. Apparently people still ate sandwiches. I broke the inquisitor’s fifty-dollar bill on a ten-dollar heap of bread and mayonnaise and a three-dollar cup of soda, and when the cash register opened up for my money, it performed a little burst of orchestral music that lasted until the drawer was shut again. The guy behind the counter smiled like it was the most natural thing in the world. I wanted to smile back, but the smile wouldn’t come.
“I suppose your jukebox makes change,” I said.
The guy frowned like he didn’t understand. He took a little mechanical box out of his pocket and spoke into a microphone grille on the side of it. “That thing about the jukebox, just now,” he said.
“Just a joke,” said a voice from the box.
“Oh, yeah,” the guy said, and he looked at me and laughed.
I wanted him to be kidding, but he wasn’t. I decided it must have been what Surface meant about people talking into their sleeves, and it made me shudder. I took the sandwich to a table in the back, but my appetite was gone. I ate it anyway. When I was done, I took the cup and the wrapper and put them in the can by the door. It rewarded me with a miniature flourish of trumpets, but this time I didn’t say anything. I went outside instead and spent a quiet minute on the sidewalk putting the incident carefully out of my mind. My hands were trembling, so I put them in my pockets.
The next step, as I saw it, was to acquire some kind of housing and some kind of transportation, and in my situation that meant only one thing. You can sleep in a car, but you can’t drive a room in a flophouse. I located a rental agency and forked over the hundred-dollar bill to a fat guy in a lawn chair as the deposit on a weather-beaten dutiframe with half a tank of gas. I made sure to flash the stuff that looked like a pocketful of hundreds when I handed him the intact bill.
“I need your card,” he grunted.
It was new to me to hand it over to anyone but an inquisitor, but I remembered what Surface said about keeping my mouth shut and learning the rules, and took it out. I had the funny idea he was going to bill me points, but he just looked it over and wrote down the serial number, then handed it back. I looked at the new card for the first time. It had my name on it but it didn’t feel like mine. It was too clean. Mine had the pawprints of a thousand chumps all over it, and I missed it.
That done, the guy let me sign a few forms and drive the wreck away. The hundred was my last real money, which left me with the car, the half tank of gas, and the clothes I was wearing. Plus the packet of make if I wanted to do some fast forgetting. It was looking better and better.
I drove the car up into the hills until I found a view I liked. Then I got out and looked at it. There was a wind coming up off the bay, and it brought with it a smell of salt. It made me think of the ocean, and I entertained a brief fantasy of taking the car and driving down the peninsula to find a beach where I could throw my make and the stuff that looked like money and maybe even my seventy-five points of karma into the surf and then stretch out on the sand and wait to see what happened. I played with it the way you can when you know you’ll never do it. Then I started thinking about the case again.
I got back in the car and drove to the house on Cranberry Street. I didn’t have any particular reason—I just wanted to. The case had started there, with me hired to peer in the windows at Celeste, and maybe I had the idea it would end there too. For all I knew the place was torn down by now, but I was willing to chance a little of my gasoline to find out.