Eating Memories (32 page)

“’Who’s on Veri-Psi?”

“Durso and Ingram.”

“They’re good,” Cohen said in the easy tone of one who knows he’s better.

“Stop taking the Psychamine.”

Cohen studied his reflection. A shy, mousey man stared back. Under the fluorescent lights, the face in the mirror looked greenish, baggy and used up. “I can’t,” he whispered.

“Have you been counting? Well, I have. Fifteen years, Cohen. You’ve been taking it fifteen years, longer than anybody on record. What if one of the long-term effects is blindness?”

Cohen glanced down at his hand. Blood had made red spiderwebs on his palm and left rusty threads on the white porcelain. “It’s not like blindness.”

“Then what’s it like?”

“The darkness isn’t part of my eye. It’s inside my brain. It’s a suction monster, a fucking Hoover vacuum cleaner of the soul.”

Cohen glanced over his shoulder. Schindler’s easy, friendly manner had disappeared, leaving only the psychiatrist part behind.

“You know I’m clairvoyant,” Cohen said.

For a moment, Schindler froze. Then he shook his head vehemently as if the words were a wasp he could shoo out of the room. “Come on, Cohen. Come on. Don’t get absurd on me, okay? The courts recognize telepathy and psychometry, not clairvoyance. Seeing into the future leaves you with an ungovernable paradox.”

“I’m clairvoyant,”- Cohen said. “Consider for a moment what that says about time. Think what it says about space.”

Schindler frowned. “I’m listening.” Yes, Schindler was listening. He wasn’t happy, he wasn’t believing; but he was listening.

“I’ve bent time, Larry,” he told him quietly. “The past, the future, they’re all one thing. And the place where time is bent is a place where parts of me are so crushed, so dense, that it lets no light escape. One day, Larry, one day, I’m going to fall into that fucker and not come out, understand? And I’m scared shitless because I don’t know what’s inside it.”

Schindler stayed in his dim corner, leaning up against the wall, his arms crossed, his posture the same as when he’d come in the door. His face, though, had suddenly gone expressionless. “So that’s what you think.”

“That’s what I imagine.”

“Okay. Granted.”

“I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of what I saw in the envelope. I’m afraid of the future I saw in my goddamned MasterCard.”

“Why did you think that was clairvoyance in particular, Cohen? Did some little sign pop up and tell you
future event?”
Cohen glanced at the wall. He would have glanced at anything, anything, to keep from facing Schindler’s bland, clinical scrutiny. “You see what people see. You can see it more clearly than I can. Truth: That’s what you see,” Schindler said softly. “Maybe the only thing contained in that card was your own pathological loneliness.”

Staring into the wall, Cohen felt the hot, gravid pressure of tears behind his eyes. Pathologically lonely? he thought. Was that the way everyone saw him? For an uncomfortable moment, his mind fondled the idea as though it were an interesting but somewhat suspect find that had washed up on a beach. “I’m not like that.”

“Oh, Nathan,” Schindler said tiredly. “Know thyself, okay?”

“Fuck you!” Cohen shouted. Schindler stood straighter, unfolded his arms. “Listen,” Cohen told him, firmly meeting the psychiatrist’s gaze in the minor. “I know the difference. There’s a difference in the feel. What hit me was clairvoyance, only I couldn’t see all the details. In spite of the Psychamine, you only see parts, and sometimes those parts don’t make sense. What if the vision was telling me I’m going to crawl into that dark place, Larry? What if it was telling me I’ll die there?”

“I don’t think the black spots have a physical basis. If you’re clairvoyant what you saw may be insanity. That’s a type of darkness, too.”

Cohen remembered the ones who had entered the program with him. Frazier had been a careful man, one who carried his umbrella when there was only a twenty percent chance of rain. He’d opened his wrists longitudinally in a tub of warm water, and then he’d opened the back of his knees, too.

Rowe was making baskets at an Iowa farm for the strangely inspired. And Karpovich, ah, Karpovich. He’d ended his new career as an alcoholic by jumping in front of a train.

“There was something wrong with us to begin with, right, Larry? There’s something missing in people who are born psychic. Guts, maybe. Maybe that last, tough, protective layer of skin.”

“If the Psychamine just augments what you had to begin with, maybe it augments the cowardice and the hurt, too,” Schindler said. “You should try giving it up.”

“I can’t quit,” Cohen said. “You’re absolutely right about me. I’m obsessive/compulsive and when I do an investigation I get a hard-on like you wouldn’t believe.” Cohen held a new wad of paper toweling to his palm, but the wounds were already closing. The paper came away with just a few dots of red.

“Spoken like someone in the throes of self-destruction.”

“It’s my goddamned life, Schindler.”

“No,” Schindler said. “No, it’s not. Just like the cops’ lives aren’t theirs, either. Medical leave, Cohen. Open ended, understand? When you’re ready to come back, we’ll do a physical and mental on you, okay?”

Cohen’s stomach went cold. “Hey. The obsessive/compulsive thing . . . all that talk about clairvoyance . . . it was a joke. You don’t have a sense of humor, or what?”

But Schindler wasn’t even looking at him. “Take some rest. Go to Bermuda.”

A small, weak laugh escaped Cohen’s lips. “Listen, we’re friends, aren’t we? I mean, that’s what all this talk was about, you know? Something between friends?’

“I’m a shrink first.”

Hatred grabbed Cohen by the neck and cut off his air. “Well, tell Lila I’m sorry about her compact.”

“Okay.”

“And get the hell out.”

After a moment, Schindler did. The door closed itself carefully behind him.

Cohen watched him go. He watched until the dark came back, a spot so black, so weighty, that not even thought moved there.

When it had gone, he wiped the last remnants of blood from his hand and left the bathroom. A few policemen glanced up as he walked to his desk.

Tunny came over. “I’m sorry.”

“Shut up,” Cohen whispered without looking at him. He grabbed his jacket, put it on, and walked out into the chill night. Durso and Ingram were on their way in. He stopped them.

“We shouldn’t be talking,” Durso said. The verifying psychic was a little man with a little man’s slavishness to convention.

“Wait a minute. Just please wait a minute.” Cohen could hear his voice shake. Tonight, when he went home, he’d be alone and lost in the darkness. Tomorrow, when he woke up, he’d be alone and lost with no place to go. “Are you clairvoyant?”

Durso drew himself up in his coat, his watery hazel eyes suspicious. Ingram pulled on an edge of his mustache.

“It’s important. I have to know. Do you sometimes see the future?”

Ingram’s chocolate face blended in with the night, but Cohen could see his eyes shift nervously from Durso to Cohen and back.

“The courts recognize telepathy . . .” Durso began.

“Goddamn it! Don’t you think I’ve memorized that by now? They don’t recognize clairvoyance because it doesn’t make sense. Don’t you see? If you really can see the future, then maybe there’s a place where tomorrow’s already occurred.’”

Durso snapped, “That’s right. It doesn’t make sense. Hence the ‘ungovernable paradox.’” He started to walk past, but Cohen grabbed him by the arm.

“Do you see darkness sometimes? I have to know. A dark thing just at the comer of your eye like something standing between you and the light. Do you ever see something like that?”

Durso was trying to get away. His face was a study in repulsed-shock.

Ingram laid a gloved hand on Cohen’s shoulder. “You need to go home, man. Understand?” he said with soft concern. “’Get some sleep, okay?”

“Don’t patronize me,” Cohen snapped. “Listen, Ingram, maybe one day you’ll see what I see. Maybe Frazier saw it. Maybe that’s what sucked Karpovich out in front of the train.”

Ingram made quieting-the-baby sounds.

“Please,” Cohen whimpered. He was crying. “Tell me. Don’t you ever see it?”

“No, man. I don’t.”

With a jerk, Cohen pulled away and started in a fast walk down the street. After a few paces, he glanced behind. Ingram and Durso were staring at him. The pity on their faces caught him unawares. It was as much of a shock as a chance glimpse of his own reflection in a glass doorway. Maybe, he thought, Schindler was right. Cohen wondered if he peeked too quickly into a mirror he would see a pathologically lonely man staring back.

After a few blocks, he slowed. He’d go home, turn on the TV, maybe, and the darkness would be there, slicing through the image on NBC. And tomorrow he’d wake up, read the paper and try to remember not to get dressed for work. Sometime in the coming week, Schindler would send him a ticket to someplace warm, compliments of the department, and he’d go and look out into the rhythmic blue of the Caribbean and see a black, timeless mass standing between him and the waves.

In his brain, minutes and hours curled in stasis, a spot of dead, heavy air.

He pulled up his collar. A few people stared as he walked past, and he wondered if he was crying again. He felt warmth on his hand, and when he looked down he saw he was bleeding.

He turned off on a side street and was halfway down a claustrophobic alley when—blink—the darkness was back, solid and very close.

“Your money, motherfucker,” a voice growled.

The darkness that throbbed with the aura of murder smelled of stale cigarette smoke and damp wool.

Something moved in that pressured place. Odd. Cohen didn’t think it could. A pain pierced his chest, drawing fire into his back.

His shoulder, his face, smacked against the cold sidewalk. Thick, heavy liquid gushed from his chest.

How stupid, he thought. How clumsy. He tried to get up and couldn’t. My God. What’s the matter with me? he wondered. Then he pictured Tunny’s bland, marshmallow-pink face. Afraid you can’t get it up, Cohen?

Yes, Cohen thought. My body won’t work. I can’t get up. - And I am so afraid.

CIose to his face he could see a pair of scuffed work boots, the laces on one broken and untied. He felt something jerk at his coat pocket. Across the alley was a dented garbage can, its load of green, plastic bags like scoops of unsavory ice cream in a cone.

His breath failed in his throat. He was too weak, too frightened to take another.

Someone would come for him. They’d have to. What he’d touched in his MasterCard didn’t have to be.

Hey, diddle, diddle,
he thought desperately, forcing his mind to concentrate on something else besides his terror. If he held himself together long enough, someone would come and drag him back from the brink. There would be bright hospital lights and hot coffee. Cohen would be laughing with the doctor and saying how scared he had been.

Wouldn’t he?

Cohen drank in precious, temporal visions: thee light/shadow, light/shadow play of the tan work boots walking away from him; the way a pink-tailed rat poised, head inquisitively cocked, near a tattered plastic bag; how an oil-slicked puddle shone rainbow-colored in the dim glow from a bulb above a door.

The cat and the fiddle.

Something inside him came loose. The world slipped an inch.

Not yet. Oh, God, please. Not yet. The cow jumped over the moon.
His eyes moved hungrily, memorizing all the parts of the world he could see in the moment he had left.
And when he got there .
. .

The glow from the bulb weakened. Going, going, gone. Black opened its doors, and he was sucked through.

Cupboard was bare.

It was dark. And the darkness did not move. An absurd phrase danced on the edge of his consciousness.

The dish ran away with the spoon.

The words sank into the depths without a ripple. He looked around, thinking that he must be blind, but knowing he was not.

He was dead.

So this is what death is,
he thought. It wasn’t much different from what he’d left behind. He knew now that the spot which had haunted him had not been an overlay. It was the very foundation of his existence.

He’d always meant to go fishing. He’d loved it as a child; but when he was grown he never got around to it. Work had been so large and important a matter that it eclipsed the timer that counted his moments. Before he’d realized it, the clock struck midnight and time had just quietly run out.

A pity. He should have gotten to know Lila better. He’d always meant to marry; he’d always wanted to have children. When young, he thought he needed a pony more than he’d needed breath; and when grown, and with an adult’s more subtle desires, he’d wanted a big dog and a house in the country.

Now it all seemed equally important: Every dream, every kiss, every piece of candy he’d been denied. His longing for lost illusion shook the emptiness as a plucked violin string stirs the air. Across space and time, he cast at his memories and his last coherent thought, ironically the same, selfish pulse of a murderer:

I WANT.

His plea tore the thin fabric of the universe. In the abyss a single, faint star flicked on. The glow swelled to the size of a pinhead, the size of a fingernail, the size of a fist.

The light sped toward him in silence and with all the colors that ever were. It rushed joyously as though it knew him, and as if it believed it was coming home.

The light soaked up his knowledge of the Earth the moon, the rings about Saturn; it drank in the nonsense of a nursery rhyme and the, curl of a rat’s pink tail.

I WANT, he thought fiercely.

And in his desire, it became. The light shot through him, the photons it million small bullets from a million small inevitable wars.

Cohen was destined to love butternut ice cream. At thirty-three years old, his eldest child would watch and cheer as he hooked a tarpon off Florida. In fourth grade he would skin his knee and be unable to ride his pony for a week.

Because of Cohen, dinosaurs would stalk the earth and a single, brilliant moment would kill them. In the desert, Georgia O’Keeffe would dream of flowers; and complex organic molecules would discover the heady possibility of life.