Alarm flared in him. Unless he could go where he wanted to, how was he going to do what he needed to do?
At the edge of the Black Hole, something stirred. He froze, afraid to move for fear of losing it. It had something to do with going through a wall. Gingerly, he teased the memory out where he could see it…and found an image of someone named Harry Potter…trying to reach platform nine and three-quarters. Except Harry got through by running at the wall and the forceful approach had already failed here. Wait. When Harry thought he was about to crash, he closed his eyes.
Okay…try that. Closing his eyes, he walked forward, counting strides. Two…three…four. On five he opened his eyes and grinned. Yes! He was in!
Wasting no more time, he hurried through the mall to the newsstand in 1EC.
Once there, though, he found nothing above the fold in either the Chronicle or the Examiner about a recent murder that might be his.
“Damn!”
All the papers gave him was the date: Sunday, August 29. Useless information since the date of his last conscious memory still lay buried in the Black Hole.
He stalked away from the newsstand. Terrific. No way to check the papers. Since no one appeared to see or hear him, that also ruled out asking about himself. He ran both hands back through his hair. Now what?
His fingers met a ridge of scar under the hair above his left ear. As they did, a tingle shot through him. Slowly he traced back over the scar. Touching it brought a lightning series of sensations and images. The deafening noise of combined music and voices. Standing with his back to a bar thinking that the saving grace of being stuck at Fort Riley when you were twenty and single was Aggieville, Kansas State University’s campus village, full of bars and coeds. Two men angrily facing each other, one a preppy type with a big wet spot on the front of his trousers and the other with a military burr haircut and an empty beer mug in his raised hand. His remembered self stepping between the two…and stars exploding in his head.
When they cleared, he had found himself on a stretcher, with a paramedic asking how many fingers she held in front of his face. “Your buddy clobbered you with his beer mug,” she said.
His wry thought had been that as an MP, he was usually the one breaking heads.
Memory of the incident broke off abruptly as a buzz like a low grade electric current spreading through him, followed by a startled yelp and a head of corn-rowed brunette hair leaping from beneath his chin.
He jumped backward. “Jesus!”
In front of him, a blonde girl stared at her brunette friend. “What’s the matter?”
The brunette grimaced. “There was this, like, icy cold spot.” She pointed to where he had been standing. “And I got an electric shock.” She rubbed her arms. “Like, you know, from a doorknob when you’ve rubbed your feet across the carpet? It was totally weird.” Shuddering, she hurried off down the concourse.
“I didn’t, you know, like it either,” he called after her. Though the sensation had been more disconcerting than uncomfortable. Still, he moved out of the way by a planter to think back over the recovered memory.
At the same time, he tried watching around himself to avoid another walk-through. With a start, he found himself able to look all directions at the same time. Vision no longer depended on what direction his eyes pointed. It was, to quote the brunette, totally weird. It also made him dizzy and would not turn off, now that he discovered it.
After several excruciating minutes of vertigo, he managed to focus forward and shut out the rest except as a kind of extended peripheral vision. Then he returned to the bar memory. While it did not give him his name, it did suggest the way to learn more about himself: check his body for other scars.
Invisibility theoretically gave him the freedom to strip down right here, but he cringed at the idea. It smacked too much of a naked-in-public dream. No…the men’s room upstairs was a better place.
Outside its door shortly, he paused long enough to close his eyes, then walked forward. Would the trick take him through this door, too?
It did. He felt no barrier, and opening his eyes after a few steps, he found himself inside.
To keep clear of anyone else using the facilities, he moved to the far end of the basin row. A glance in the mirror as he shrugged out of his coat halted him for a moment. Like the store window, the mirror did not reflect him. The indisputable proof of his nonexistence chilled him again. As soon as he stripped to his boxers and laid his clothes across a basin, he turned away from the mirror.
“Cross your antennas for luck, butterflies.”
Nothing on his chest triggered any memories, just told him he had black hair. Checking his arms, a peculiar set of scars on his right wrist and hand caught his attention. An arc of four, each about a quarter inch long, on the inside just below the base of his thumb and an arc of similar scars on the upper side.
He ran his other thumb across them. What would do that?
The answer came abruptly: teeth. Remembered pain shot up his arm. Along with it came memory of kneeling on a man’s back, yelling: “Let go! Quit resisting!” as he struggled to free his wrist from the man’s mouth and wrestle the douchebag’s arm back for cuffing.
Cuffing? Of course. He was a cop. He had been one for nearly sixteen years, since finishing his hitch in the Army. Was that why he was killed? If so, why had being shot surprised him?
No answer came. Nor did his name.
In growing frustration he identified other scars: healed fractures in his left hand and right forearm, scars from knife cuts, other scars from burns caused by deflecting a thrown cigarette and from a tail pipe while wrestling a suspect from beneath a car. None gave him his name, only told him what kind of cop he was…one who hated losing foot chases and who hung on to suspects he caught no matter what.
Then a surgical scar running the length of his left thigh brought up another memory…of hanging on the door of a suspect’s car and being dragged under the wheels…ending up on a stretcher again.
This time the face of his sergeant glared down at him. “Dunavan, why the hell do you have to be a fucking John Wayne?”
Relief and elation swept him. Finally! His name was Dunavan. Coleman Douglas Dunavan.
He waited for the Black Hole to release the rest of his memory.
Nothing happened.
Frustration and despair boiled up in him. “No! Damn it…no!”
Cole slammed a fist into the towel dispenser, then each of the stall doors…the sensation of punching marshmallow only adding to his frustration. Shit, shit, shit! He had know why he was here! A life could depend on it! What was holding back the memories? What the hell did it take to release them!
Not the abuse of men’s room fixtures, anyway. He ran his hands through his hair. Okay, fine…if he had to keep fighting the Black Hole…so be it. Hanging on and plugging away was what earned him the nickname Bulldog, after all.
He wheeled back toward the basins to dress…and stopped short. His clothes were gone! “For the love of…” This just kept getting better and better! Now he was supposed to run around half naked while-
Belatedly, he realized he wore the missing items. He stared down himself, shaking his head. Son of a bitch. Weird, weird, weird.
He headed for the door. If death limited him to one outfit, it was a good thing he died decently dressed, not been blown away in his sleep, so he spent ghosthood in bare feet and whatever he wore to bed. Or worse, whacked during sex. He could be taking care of his unfinished business with it all hanging out. That image made him cringe and laugh at the same time.
Which ended abruptly as he crashed into the door.