Amnesia Moon (11 page)

“See,” explained Ray, “if you're lucky you get a government job, then you get to move into a house like that. Mom always has to work in some stupid store.”

Melinda nodded absently, only half-listening.

“But she worked at the television station that one time,” said Dave hopefully.

“Yeah, back when Dad lived with us,” said Ray. “But when he left, they said Mom had bad luck. She even had to work on a
garbage truck
once.”

“They were wrong,” she said, hoping Chaos was listening to her and not the television. She couldn't see his face from where she sat. “Gerald was my bad luck, at least that's what I think. He was going crazy. You heard Cooley; he lives in an elevator now. I mean, he's harmless, the boys stay with him on weekends. He's not really crazy. But I couldn't live with him. He's just kind of hopeless. Anyway, all the test really determines is your susceptibility to bad luck, sort of like whether you have the antibodies in your blood, I think. It doesn't mean you actually come down with it. And I haven't; I still maintain that. Citations are only a rough measurement. They don't really mean anything. Just because your neighbor sees that you're a little late checking in for work or moving out of your house, so what? It's unfair of them to count it against you. Everyone makes mistakes.”

She leaned forward. Ray and Dave were watching the television, ignoring her. Chaos and Melinda were both asleep in their places on the couch. As Edie watched, Melinda's head lolled back, her mouth open, then snapped forward. They were exhausted, of course, and had taken the first chance to fall asleep. Chaos hadn't heard Edie's babbling. It was just as well.

After the show the boys went outside to explore their new neighborhood, leaving Chaos and Melinda asleep on the couch. Edie went into the kitchen and watched the sun set through the window over the counter. It was desolate and ugly, this street full of brickyards and factories, but she was glad to be out of the middle of town for once, away from the people. For a couple of days she could worry less about someone giving her a ticket.

When Ray and Dave came in, she fed them and took them upstairs to get ready for bed. They were tired too, from the moving and also from the excitement and strangeness of the visitors. Their new room had a poster of a bear, and Dave said it would scare him, so she took it down and put it in the closet.

When she got back downstairs again, the girl was up, looking for the bathroom. Edie took her upstairs and helped her change the pad. The girl, still half-asleep, didn't speak, and when Edie took her to the double bed in the big bedroom, she fell asleep instantly.

Edie went downstairs and woke Chaos.

“Do you want some soup?” she asked.

He nodded.

She brought him a bowl on the couch, then sat there too, on the far end, and watched him eat.

“Where did you come from?” she asked after a silence.

“Well, I think I'm from here, California, actually. But I was living in Wyoming. It's hard to remember . . .”

She nodded quickly. She knew about that. “Is that why you're here?” she asked. “To find out?”

“Maybe. It was just to get away, at first.”

“Get away?”

“I was sort of bogged down . . .”

“It's different, in other places?” She could see she was rushing him, but it was hard not to be breathless. She'd wanted to ask these questions.

His eyes looked carefully into hers. “Yes. Very different.”

“I suspected that,” she said, not sure how true it was. “But everything you see and hear tells you that it's the same everywhere. Even if you don't believe it, it's hard to remember.”

“I understand.”

“And it doesn't matter what you think anyway, you know? I mean, this is where I live. I have to get along.”

“Yes.”

“If you stay”—what did she mean?—“Cooley will tell you all sorts of stuff about my bad luck. But it's not as simple as he says.”

“I don't care about bad luck.” He smiled.

She pulled her legs up onto the couch and took a deep breath. This of course was what she ached to hear, that her bad luck didn't matter. He—Chaos—was like an antidote, a glimmer of something, a refutation, however small, of Cooley's seamless, terrible version of the world.

“Melinda,” she said. “She's . . .”

“Just traveling with me. She left her parents.”

“No, I mean her
fur.
”

Now he was the one who looked embarrassed. “There was a war,” he said quietly. “It changed a lot of things, in Wyoming.”

“A war?”

“Everyone remembers some kind of disaster. But it's different in different places.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. People.”

“People?”

“They make it different. Like the ones on the television . . .”

“President Kentman, and the government.”

“Yes.”

“I hate them.” She huddled closer to him, thinking of war. Could it be worse in other places? Less like before? Maybe she was actually lucky. “But you”—now she held his hand—“you're running away. You
got
away.”

He laughed softly. “I got here, you mean.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“I'm not.”

“Maybe you should stay here.” Was it wrong to like him—
Chaos
, she reminded herself, though she still hadn't said the name aloud—because he represented something to her? He had nice eyes.

“Chaos,” she said, trying it out. Then again: “Chaos?”

He answered her question by covering her mouth with his.

“Well,” she said.

He kissed her again. She gently moved the empty soup bowl from his lap, onto the floor.

“It's been a long—”

“What, like beer?” she said, amused, but testing him.

“I didn't mean—I'm clumsy.”

“Okay.”

“Yes.” He laughed again, which she liked now. “Okay.”

“Unless you're tired—”

“No.”

They kissed, and soon he pushed her shirt and bra up into a bunch under her arm on one side, exposing her breast to the cool air. She hid it by moving closer to him, and by tugging up his shirt and finding his chest to push against. He handled her a little fiercely, as if he was astonished.

 

That night, sleeping in his arms, she dreamed of him.
So soon
, she thought when she woke. It was a jealous dream. He was living in a house in the woods with a woman. Really living in the house, not just staying there for a few days. The house was his; she felt it in the way he moved through the rooms, the way he touched the objects in the house; they were his
belongings.
Odd, too, because of the way he'd left his car on the highway and wandered into her house and opened her fridge; he hadn't seemed like someone who understood what it was to own things. But this house was his. She was as jealous of that as the other thing, his being with the unfamiliar and beautiful woman. She was jealous, too, of the isolation, the way the house was alone in the woods. No children there. Just trees and water. When she considered the dream the next morning, she felt deeply ashamed.

 

 

 

 

There wasn't really enough room for Chaos beside Edie on the couch, and at dawn he crept upstairs to sleep on the double bed beside Melinda. But he woke alone, to sounds from the kitchen. He went downstairs and found them—Edie and Ray and Dave and Melinda—eating breakfast without him. Edie quickly got up, ladled out another bowl of oatmeal, and put it in front of an empty chair at the table. Chaos sat down. Edie smiled at him, nervously, and Melinda glared.

After breakfast Ray and Dave invited Melinda outside. Edie stood at the sink, washing dishes.

“There isn't enough in the house to eat,” she said fretfully, her back to him. “Now, I mean, with you and Melinda—”

She dropped a plate, which shattered on the tile floor, and began hurriedly searching for a broom, but couldn't seem to find one. “People leave houses in the worst shape . . .”

He saw that she was waiting for some sign from him. So he went to her, and gently placed his hand on the small of her back. It was the only thing that didn't feel presumptuous or unnatural. She was stilled by the touch, the broken plate at their feet now irrelevant.

“Last night was good for me,” she said, surprising him with the directness.

“Me too,” he said.

“I forgot about this place, about Ian and all his luck nonsense.”

“Good.” He wasn't sure he should say that it was good for him for the opposite reason, because it made him remember. Chaos couldn't actually recall having sex with a real woman before. Even his fantasies had been pretty vague, until the series of dreams about Gwen. Now there was suddenly this.

He wasn't getting Edie and Gwen mixed up, he told himself. But maybe the dreams about Gwen had helped him to want Edie, to recall what it was to be with a woman. He was afraid of analyzing it further. Edie might see that he was confused and draw away.

He didn't want that.

They all piled into her car and rode into town, to the Vacaville Mall. The cars here were the old kind, that ran on gas, like back in Wyoming. The buildings here, too, suggested an intact version of the ruined townscapes back in Little America and Hatfork. Chaos didn't know what this meant. He kept feeling that somehow, intending to travel across land, he'd traveled through time instead.

The mall featured two distinct populations. The adults, who milled nervously, in couples or alone, greeting one another in clipped exchanges or not at all. And the kids, who ran and laughed and talked together, apparently in another world. Ray and Dave seemed to know anyone roughly their size. Melinda scampered after them, shadowing their conversations, sticking out her tongue when introduced, sticking out her tongue if challenged about her fur. Edie tried to keep them close at first, then compromised by making Ray agree to bring them all back to the car later. That decided, the three children disappeared.

“See these stores?” asked Edie once they were alone. She pointed out a drugstore, a magazine stand, a barbershop, and a hardware store. “I've worked in them all.”

She seemed pleased to have this to point out to him. He didn't ask why she'd worked at so many places, or what her job was now.

“I don't know if I've ever worked in a store,” he said instead.

“That must be strange,” she murmured.

Chaos followed her into the supermarket, and pushed the cart as she gathered up a mound of supplies. None of the products had familiar names. Chaos picked up a box of cereal and showed it to Edie.

“Who's that?” he said, pointing. It was a face he vaguely recognized.

“Sandra Turfington, remember? She was on television last night.”

“She makes cereal?”

“All the brands are endorsed by government stars.”

A tune was playing, something arranged for strings, that he thought he remembered.

He asked Edie, and her odd, dismissive reply was “Muzak.”

They took the groceries out to her car and loaded them into the trunk. The parking lot was full of kids, but not Ray and Dave and Melinda.

“There's no hurry,” Chaos suggested.

“I know where they'll be,” said Edie. “We might as well go round them up.”

He followed. It was absurdly easy to tag along with her, to forget that they hadn't been doing this for years. It was almost a version of the Kellogg effect, he thought. Almost but not quite.

The kids were sitting together paging through comic books at a shallow storefront full of candy and magazines. The cover stories were all about the television and the government, even when they were versions of magazines like
Time
and
Rolling Stone
and
Playboy
, which Chaos knew from before. Nothing referred to anything outside Vacaville. Ray tugged on his mother's sleeve and pointed at what Dave was reading: a violent cartoon adventure starring Ian Cooley.

“I told you not to give him that,” she said. “You should know better, Ray. You're the older one.” She plucked the magazine away from Dave.

“Can I see that for a minute?” said Chaos.

Edie shot him a look.

“Never mind.”

They drove home. Melinda sat in the backseat with Ray and Dave, pontificating, suddenly in her element. She told them about Hatfork and her former life in the desert; she explained how the television shows they liked were stupid because they weren't real; she told them how things would be different “when they grew up.”

The boys had relaxed her, Chaos saw. With them she could stop trying to prove she was an adult. Yet for all her expansiveness she still seemed resentful towards him. She hadn't spoken to him directly, hadn't met his eye, since the night before.

After they unloaded the groceries and packed them into the kitchen, Edie went upstairs and the boys switched on the television. Chaos got Melinda alone for a minute.

“What's the matter?” he said. “You don't like me being with her?”

“I don't mind that,” she said, her expression sardonic. “It's just you keep on dreamin' about that other one. That's what I don't like.”

This said, she turned and skipped into the living room and joined the boys at the television.

Chaos still found it hard to believe he was projecting the dreams. Was he really like Kellogg? Would he go on helplessly broadcasting his dreams wherever he went?

Here in Vacaville he had managed to hold onto his previous identity, his memories of Hatfork and the trip west. He felt a certain pride in that. He wanted to believe he was growing stronger, building up an immunity to local effects, and Vacaville obviously had its share of changes. Chaos didn't remember much, but he knew people shouldn't have to move twice a week and work a different job every day. Or have their luck tested.