“The night before the funeral, you took me into town and we ended up at a bar that had run out of gin. You started bitching at the bartender, asking him what kind of bar it was, and he said the kind of bar where people who complain get their teeth kicked out. We ended up drinking these,” he says, taking a sip. “Only time I’ve ever had them. It’s not . . . I don’t know the word,” he says.
“Not masculine enough?”
Hans nods. “I knew you’d know. You’ve always been a gin-and-tonic guy, ever since we met.”
Jerry finishes his drink. He considers whether he wants a second. “I remember you brought bottles to me when I got sick.”
“Sandra wouldn’t let you drink, and she took your credit card off you so you couldn’t go and buy them. I would bring five of them to you at a time. I have no idea where you hid them, but maybe it’s the same place you hid the—”
“In the garage,” Jerry says, and he can remember it, can remember a tarpaulin beneath a bench, covering the gap behind the chain saw and the circular saw, and that was where he hid them, behind renovating tools that belonged to a much younger version of Past Jerry, back when Eva was a small girl and his books were still to be given life. He didn’t hide all of the bottles there, the rest were under the floor of his office. He can also remember a tarpaulin on his office floor, all laid out ready to catch the mess that a far more recent version of Past Jerry was going to make, one from last year.
“You got through them pretty quickly,” Hans says.
Only the bottles weren’t under the floor, were they, Jerry? Henry says. No, under the floor was reserved just for the gun that wasn’t there and the journal that also wasn’t there. The only thing under there was a shirt you can’t remember getting bloody.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Hans says. “You got a bad rap. Not one of the worst I’ve ever seen, but pretty damn close.”
Jerry isn’t listening to Hans. Instead he’s listening to Henry. He’s thinking about the floorboards. About the original journal. How it wasn’t under there. The gin wasn’t under there either. Nor the gun. Because it’s just like he said in Madness Journal 2.0—there’s another hiding place.
“Maybe—”
“Stop talking,” Jerry says, and he puts his hand out. He’s thinking about what he wrote in the journal. He’s thinking about those bottles of gin.
“Jerry? Are you okay?”
The writing backups weren’t under the floor, but he kept them somewhere safe and secure. Somewhere close. They wouldn’t be in the garage, or the kitchen, or a bedroom. Wouldn’t be somewhere he’d have to go looking for.
You used to hide them. You were paranoid somebody would come into your house one day and steal your computer, steal everything you worked with, steal your next big idea.
“Were my writing backups found?”
“Backups? I have no idea.”
He thinks about his office. Remembers the layout. His mind is becoming warm, the vodka and juice flowing through all the neural pathways in his brain, quickly fogging his thoughts the way it will to somebody who hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in nearly a year, but it’s clearing things in other areas as those thoughts link across time, the way alcohol can do that, linking images, dragging out the random, and he’s back in his study where he’s pouring himself a drink, and those bottles of gin . . . well now, they weren’t hidden under the floorboards, were they . . .
“The backups were hidden. I always hid that stuff,” Jerry says.
“Under the floor maybe?”
“There was nothing under the floor.”
“Then where? Think, Jerry, come on, you’re almost there, you’re—”
“Shut up,” Jerry says.
It has to be somewhere else big enough to fit a few bottles of gin. Where? Not the bookcase. Not the desk. Nothing hidden in the wall. Nothing in the roof. Nothing under or inside the couch.
Wait . . . nothing hidden in the wall? Are you sure about that?
“I almost have it,” he says.
Hans says nothing.
“Just let me think,” he says, closing his eyes, and there he is, it’s a workday and every day was a workday back when he used to write, weekends and weekdays were all the same. He’d work on his birthday. He’d even let Henry Cutter out of the bottle for an hour or two on Christmas Day to get those thoughts down. That was the life of a writer—keep writing, keep moving forward, stay ahead of the crowd because if you don’t get that story written down then somebody else would. He’s in his office, he’s building the word count, and he’s wrapping up for the day and he needs to make a backup, needs to get those words secure, because to lose a few thousand of them, let alone an entire manuscript . . . that was one part of being a writer he could avoid. His office, his desk, he’s putting a flash drive into his computer, copy, paste, then he’s taking the flash drive back out. Then what? What does he do next?
Getting out of his chair. Past the couch and to the wardrobe. He opens the wardrobe door and—
“Jerry—”
Crouches down. There’s a box that holds half a dozen reams of paper there. He pushes it aside then—
“You have to focus, Jerry.”
Presses the bottom corner of the wall. An opposite corner juts out. It’s a false wall, no taller than his forearm but the width of the wardrobe. He pulls it away, and there’s the gin, there are the flash drives, one for each novel, there’s the gun and there’s—
“I know where the journal is,” he says, and he stands up so quickly he bangs against the table. The glass slides towards Hans, who catches it before it can fall.
“At the house?”
“In my office,” Jerry says.
“Then let’s go.”
“Let me grab my second journal,” Jerry says, and he’s already moving back towards the study. “I want to read it on the way.”
DAY ONE MILLION
Okay, so it’s not really day one million, and I’m not sure how liberal I was with exaggerations in the books. Derek (it’s actually Eric, but I’ve come to think of him as a Derek) told me this morning it’s been eight months since I checked in. Which, by my calculations, is nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand days and change short of a million. Still, it feels like I’ve been here forever.
Today is a Jerry is Jerry day.
Jerry has Alzheimer’s—check.
Jerry used to be a crime writer—check.
Jerry knows he shouldn’t trust Derek—check.
Or Eric—check.
Jerry is making a checklist—check.
I’ve been flicking through the journal and seeing I’ve been piling crazy on top of crazy, and among some of those entries is evidence that Henry has been coming out to play. I’ve been having conversations with him. Henry and me shooting the breeze. There are two points here, Future Me, that I want to make. It’s two-for Tuesday. The first is to stop trusting Eric. Let me put that in big capital letters. DON’T TRUST ERIC. I came into my room earlier and found him elbows deep in my drawer. I think he was looking for my journal. For what reason, I don’t know. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was tidying up. Henry thinks he’s lying. Henry thinks there’s an ulterior motive for Eric wanting you to write in the journal, and Henry does, after all, deal in ulterior motives (most of the characters he creates have one). In this case the motive is Eric stealing my ideas because he wants to be a writer. One thing I can remember clearly from my life of crime (writing) is the amount of people who tell me they want to write a book. It’s one of those professions everybody thinks they can do, and I always wanted to say to a lawyer I’ve been thinking about trying a case or to a surgeon I’ve been thinking about performing a heart transplant, as if their job is no more challenging than mine. And the reason, according to them, they haven’t written that book yet? Time. It’s always that they don’t have time, but they’ll make it. How hard can it be? Eric is writing a book—and at least Eric is putting in the time, he’s said he writes a few hours every night, making it a passion as well as a hobby, and that’s something I always respect, and for that I wish him all the best. However, he has once committed what I’ve always thought of as the cardinal sin, and that’s to ask Where do you get your ideas?, as if I order a box online every year and have an assistant weed out the bad ones. I’ve told him Write what you know, because there is nothing truer when it comes to the job of making stuff up, but Eric wants to write what I know. That’s why he’s looking for my journal. Sometimes on the days I remember who I am, I wonder if it’s the writing that made me this way—all those crazy people running around inside my head—some of that crazy was bound to rub off on me, wasn’t it? If Eric wants to be a writer, then let his own crazy do to him what mine did to me.