Concert of Ghosts (20 page)

“Almost?” she asked.

“Almost.” Obe turned his face to the wall. “Now go away.”

Paul Lannigan was waiting at the end of the corridor. He looked preoccupied. Tennant wondered if he'd been waiting there all the time.

“Well? How did it go?”

“Just like you said,” Alison answered.

“The poor man.” Lannigan shook his head. “Sometimes I feel like a father. Some of my children come home, some go away forever. Sammy is seemingly one of the lost. We try. I admit we don't always succeed.”

Alison asked, “What actually happened to him?”

Lannigan turned his attention to the girl, the full beam of his smile. “It's hard to say, my dear. He came here in a fearful condition. Oh, that was years ago now. At least he manages to talk every now and then, which you might say is some small improvement over his original state—”

“What is all that stuff with the newspapers?”

“That's Sammy's private little mystery, I'm afraid. Looking, he tells me, for a sign. A sign of what? All these years later I'm no wiser.” Lannigan looked somewhat sad, as though the limitations of his professional ability depressed him. “Tell the truth, what I sometimes wish for is a wand. Some nifty little magic thing I might wave and, lo and behold, everybody is sound again.”

A wand, Tennant thought. Sure, we could all use one of them.

“I'll see you both out,” Lannigan said.

They followed Lannigan back along the corridor. They passed the window that overlooked the dining room, which was occupied now. Here and there people sat at tables in the big, pale green room. Trays of food, paper cups, plastic spoons; a few attendants, dressed in pale blue smocks, moved between the tables. The diners, for the most part, seemed indifferent to their surroundings and to one another. Tennant thought: They must sob in the lonely nights of madness, some shuffling and mumbling pointlessly to themselves, others holding conversations with imaginary companions or with devils, angels, gods. Frightened people too mad to understand why they felt as they did. Clinics like this, no matter how brightly painted, no matter how well endowed with rustic prints, no matter how much “creative therapy” went on, invariably failed to hide their true function—to keep the insane off the streets. If families could afford it, they shipped their unwanted, their schizophrenics, their depressives, their basket cases, to such facilities—not to be cured but to be forgotten.

Tennant felt clammy, his shirt adhering to his skin. The place was not only a clinic but a kind of prison. Even the pastoral prints of hayricks and peasants and women riding in horse-drawn buggies were unconvincing, stilted, bringing, not the sense of calm for which they were intended, but a cruel reminder of the freedom that lay beyond the walls, if only you could make your way out, if you could find a compass to sanity.

Sammy Obe had lost his compass.
Where is yours, Harry?

He had to get away from this place. He didn't need to be here.

Down the stairs, another hallway, then the reception area. The receptionist was behind the desk, flicking through papers. She raised her face, looked at Tennant and the girl absently. Lannigan walked to the front door, which he opened. Rain was still falling, the sky still gloomy.

“A hell of a day,” Lannigan said. “The forecast is for more of the bloody same.” He shook Alison's hand. “I hope you find what you're looking for.” He gazed at Tennant and added, “Both of you.” And then he grasped Harry's hand; his grip was warm, firm.

Tennant and the girl stepped out into the rain, which swept toward them, windblown and ragged now, changing direction whimsically.

From the doorway Lannigan called out, “Drive carefully, boyo.”

13

When they got inside the car, Tennant said urgently, “Drive. Just drive. Anywhere. It doesn't matter.” He turned and looked back at the clinic in the rain.
Boyo
. The voice in his head, the whispers that had come persistently surging up through consciousness:
boyo. Seek the calm center, boyo. Cope, boyo
. Yes yes Lannigan. You know me, don't you. You know me from another time. He stared out into the rainy landscape, feeling waterlogged himself, a soul rooted in swampland and struggling toward the light. Only the light was so goddamn far overhead, dimmed to little more than a slit.

“Speak to me, Harry,” the girl said.

What was there to say? He shut his eyes. His breathing was strange, fast. “I met Lannigan before. Don't ask me when or in what circumstances. At the clinic. I'm sure of that.”

“Why are you sure?”

“Because I am.”

“Were you a patient?”

“Maybe.”

“Try harder.”

“Goddamn I'm trying.”

“Take it nice and slow. Why do you think you were there as a patient?”

Nice and slow. “Drug abuse treatment. I don't know. What else could it be?”

“You want me to turn the car around and go back and talk to the guy?” she asked.

“No. I'm not going back there.” That place. Lannigan's handshake. The faces in the dining room. The confinement of small white rooms. No way.

“If you've met him before, why didn't he say so? Why didn't he come right out and say it? If you'd been in that place as a patient, it would make perfect sense for him to say ‘How are you now, Harry?' or ‘How do you feel being back here?'—anything like that. But he didn't. He acted like he'd never seen you before in his life. Why would he do that?”

“I don't know his reasons. Maybe he's simply forgotten. Either that or he doesn't want to recognize me.”

“Or the other way around. He doesn't want you to recognize him. Which is weird. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“He thinks you've forgotten. You're not supposed to recognize him because because—” She peered through the windshield at the rain. “Because that's the way it was supposed to be. Maybe he thinks your memory's been suitably edited.”

“Edited? Meaning what?”

Alison said, “What you call the black holes in your life, Harry. The great goddamn chunks of time gone just like that. You can't put all that down to drug abuse. I can't accept that. If you were his patient, and you were already blitzed by way too many narcotics when you came to him, hey, you'd be an easy target for the guy. You're practically a zombie to begin with. The rest of the trip is dead simple. More drugs, say. Some real extensive hypnosis. Manipulation. Who knows the techniques the Irishman has up his sleeve. Exit Harry Tennant, hippie. Enter Harry Tennant, dope farmer.”

Your memory's been suitably edited
. Tennant saw a distress signal go off inside his head, a flare that rose and fell in bright red disarray. The editing of memory. Snip snip. A recollection here. An image there. In with the whiteout, excise this, get rid of that: wholesale laceration, a larceny of sorts.

He had a maddening pain in his head. He imagined Lannigan going down into his skull, as if the man held in his hand a surgical probe, a fine sharp instrument, something that pierced bone and scraped the mind. He was nauseated by the idea that Lannigan might have achieved a kind of amputation inside him.

“I don't think it happened like that,” he said. He was defensive, and yet what was he defending? His own state of mind? Lannigan? Both? “I don't think it
could
have happened like that—”

“Why not? Because you can't remember specifics? Is that why? Harry, think—you've been fucked over and stripped down and rebuilt, you've been distilled and refined and distilled again. You see the bind? You refuse to believe Lannigan did a number on you because
he really did a number on you
. Oh boy. It's perfect.”

“No—”

“It's tragic and it's terrific,” she said. “For some reason the guy wants to blank you out, which he does, only he's smart enough to build
your
denial into
his
creation.”

“Why, for Christ's sake?”

“Why is what we're looking for.”

“It doesn't make sense—”

“Sense, Harry? Try this one. Try this nice little coincidence. You and Sammy Obe, known to each other in the dim and distant past, patients in the
same place?
That's pulling the string a little too tight for my liking, kid.”

Alison took her eyes from the road, and the Buick slithered along the rim of a drainage ditch a moment before she corrected her steering. “Oops.”

Tennant slumped back in his seat. What to say, what to think. Alison stopped the car. Rain gleamed on the paintwork, slid across the windshield. She reached out and took his hand and pressed it between her own, a simple little touch, but it had an element of grace to it, an attempt to bestow peace on a troubled man.

“Harry, consider the connections between you and Obe. This clinic. Lannigan. The photograph. The fact that neither of you is capable of remembering much of anything. Both of you—wiped out. You at least have the benefit of sanity. Obe doesn't even have that.”

“I wouldn't go as far as sanity,” he said dryly.

“Okay. You're coherent. You lived on certain acceptable terms with the world. You got along day to day growing your plants. Obe, on the other hand, the guy's in orbit. He's not of this planet.” She rubbed his skin in tiny circles with her fingertips. “The reason lies in Chinatown, Harry. It goes all the way back to whatever it was you saw outside St. Mary's Church.”

Whatever it was, it devastated him. His headache raged as he stared out into the rain. He felt drained. Foundering, he listened to the jackhammers in his head. They had a pounding, crippling familiarity.

Nobody was following them, or so it seemed to Tennant. But there was always uncertainty. They drove through a series of more small towns, each of which was depressing.

“Get off the main road,” he said. “Find a motel. Some backwater place. The more obscure the better.”

The windshield wipers swept back and forth like two metronomes measuring the beat of the weather. Alison drove narrow highways for miles until she found a broken-down motel called The Crimson Motor Lodge, a group of small chalets that would have looked uninviting even in bright sunshine. The man at the reception desk had a walleye and smoky bad breath and wore a threadbare cardigan that had been darned at the elbows.

“Take your pick,” he said. “Ain't nobody else staying here, that's for sure.”

They got the key to chalet number 4, a damp little square of a room painted brown; here and there the paint had blistered. The ceiling was cracked, spotted with patches of plaster badly applied.

“Uplifting kind of place,” Alison said.

Tennant lay down on the only bed, a sagging affair.

He gazed at the ceiling. The small bulges of plaster suggested goitrous eyes. He turned from the sight of them. Alison drew the curtain and sat on the edge of the mattress.

“Let's say Lannigan performed some kind of vanishing act with my memory,” he said. “Where does that leave me? What does that make me? It's like I'm stunted. Something inside me's fucked. And part of me is still saying he didn't do anything. He
couldn't
have done anything. It's a voice that goes on and on. Lannigan's innocent. Lannigan's innocent. A drum, for God's sake. Bang bang bang.” He put his hands to his head; Alison touched them lightly.

“You were happy before I came along,” she said.

“Blissfully ignorant. Dumb. Unquestioning. Happiness never entered into it.”

“Poor Harry. I'm sorry. I forced you out into the light. You could have spent some time in the country slammer on dope charges and come out a free man and you'd have been none the wiser, would you? My fault. All my fault.”

“I'm not blaming you. In a strange way I ought to thank you. If you hadn't come along, I might have lived the rest of my life in the dark—”

“You might have had peace—”

“An overestimated commodity—”

“Maybe.”

“Poor Harry,” she said again.

They were silent for a time. The chalet felt frail to Tennant; the thud of rain on the roof was ominous. He had a sense of the fragility of things—not simply this half-assed little room, but of his life, his flight, delicate constructs unable to bear any great weight.

He got up from the bed, parted the curtain, looked out across the forecourt of the motel. The other chalets, neglected, peeled in the rain. The motel had all the atmosphere of a cheap carnival abandoned for the winter. Beyond the forecourt lay a field of weeds, a dark-green-choked place the emptiness of which appalled him. He pressed his face upon the glass, then stepped back, dropping the curtain. What kind of goddamn life was this, hiding out here or in some other grim little motel?

Alison said, “There's one easy way to bring all this to an end, Harry.”

“I know it. I could walk away. I could skip. I could leave it alone.”

“Slip away into the night,” she said. “Good-bye and farewell. No more mysteries. Could you live without knowing, Harry?”

She stroked his hair in an absentminded manner, then drew him, somewhat coyly, toward the bed. “I've gotten used to you, Harry. Somewhere along the way you've started to mean something important to me. I never expected that. I wouldn't like you to leave.”

He lay down, turned on his back, his face pressed to Alison's side. He could hear her heartbeat, the sweet sound of life. Suddenly he needed to be surrounded by life and light, embraced by it. He reached up and touched her breast. He wondered if the rhythm of her breathing changed. He wasn't sure. Making love to her seemed to him a way out, a fine release, flesh upon flesh, lips touching, vibrancy. But more than mere release, more than an escape hatch, a way of expressing feelings he had no memory of experiencing before. I could love her, he thought. I could tumble and go on falling and it wouldn't matter how far down I fell.