Eating Memories (7 page)

Bobby looked up at me, panicked.

“I see no reason for you to stay, Dr. Patel,” Stengler said.

He was calibrating a hand-held voice stress analyzer.

“Bobby’s asked me to.”

Stengler glanced at Moss. “Might mess up the data,” Stengler said. “Eye contact. Maybe some sort of gesture code.”

Moss studied Bobby’s pallid face. “He could sit behind him. I don’t see any problem with that.”

I drew a chair up behind Bobby’s back, He tried to turn around to watch me, but Moss caught his attention.

“You’ll have to prevent yourself from turning around and watching Dr, Patel, Bobby. Otherwise we’re going to have to ask him to leave the room, okay? We’re going to take some blood now.” Moss glanced past Bobby to me. “No tranquilizers?”

“No.”

Some of the psychics I work with say they see auras. I’ve never seen, one; but, my shoulder to his back, I imagined I could feel the throbbing terror of Bobby’s.

Moss was skilled with the needle. A moment later he tagged the specimen and picked up some leads. “You’ve seen these, haven’t you?” Moss asked Bobby.

Bobby nodded wordlessly.

“Well, we’re going to attach these to your head. They don’t hurt, But they’ll show us what your brain is doing. Okay?” Without waiting for permission, Moss attached the wires. Pity for Bobby welled in my throat and I swallowed it down. Pity, I have discovered, has the flavor of stale coffee and shame.

When Moss was finished, he stood back.

“Your name, please?” Stengler asked, looking at the voice stress analyser rather than at Bobby’s face. I wondered if the researcher was as aloof as he seemed or if Bobby frightened him. Bobby frightened a lot of people.

“Your name?” Stengler repeated tersely when Bobby didn’t reply.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “He didn’t know you were addressing him. You’ve hardly spoken to him, you know. He’s frightened.”

“Dr. Patel, we’d appreciate it if you didn’t speak. Your role here is that of observer only. Bobby. We’re going to ask you some questions, all right? And you’ll answer as completely and as honestly as possible. Your name is?”

“Robert Stanley Harding,” Bobby whispered.

Stengler said, “Right. A positive. And Bobby. Have you ever heard or read about nuclear winter?”

“What?” Bobby asked. Even without the analyzer I could hear the thin desperation in the child’s voice.

Moss broke in. “Did Dr. Patel mention nuclear winter, Bobby?”

“Nuh uh. I don’t even know what that is.”

“A simple yes or no, please,” Stengler told him.

“No, sir.”

The interrogation went on for thirty minutes. Stengler finally sat back in his chair, putting the stress analyzer down. “We’ve found the parents,” he told me.

I looked at him.

“Gilberto Soares gives the names of his parents as Edson Flavio Soares and Tonya Justina Boas. We found them in Manaus. They’re married, and Mrs. Soares is pregnant. If this is a hoax, it’s an elaborate one.”

I could feel my chest tighten. “Not in front of the boy,” I said.

“What?” Stengler’s embryonic smile died. He looked confused.

Moss caught on. Chastened, he tapped Stengler on the shoulder. “Save it, Burton. Later. Dr. Patel, perhaps you could induce trance now.”

I nodded, touched Bobby on the shoulder and spoke the inducer, “Touchdown.” The boy’s head dropped to his chest. He was into a partial trance, and I was relieved. In trance, I felt, no one could hurt him. No one but me. And I only hurt him to help him. I hurt him in style.

Moss checked the monitor. “Alpha. Some beta spikes.” He picked up his translation receiver and screwed it into his ear.

Taking the pump control from my pocket. I thumbed the button. In his partial trance, Bobby snicked.

“Deep alpha,” Moss said. “A few theta dips. God, that was quick. The Thanapeline?”

I nodded. When I spoke now, it would be only to Bobby.

“Take him to age fifty-three.”

Talking into his ear, softly enough not to alarm him, but loudly enough to be caught on Moss’s tape, I took him back. I saw when it happened. He groaned. Tears started up in his eyes.

“There’s another person here, Gilberto,” I told him. “He wants to talk with you. His name is Dr. Moss. Do you understand?”

The tears overbalanced and spilled down his cheeks as he nodded. I motioned to Moss to begin the questions. “Where are you?” Moss asked.

Bobby squirmed in his chair, sending the brain wave monitor into spasms.

“Are you in Manaus?’” Moss went on when Bobby didn’t reply.

‘Ah . . .” Bobby spoke from a slack mouth.

“What’s happening in Manaus, Gilberto? Can you tell us?”

Bobby’s back stiffened as he became more agitated. I checked the pump control uselessly, wondering if I should stop the questioning. “Ah . . .”

“Tell us, please.”

“Ah . . .” Bobby said.
“Ah-mericano?”

“Yes,” Moss said. “I’m an American.”

The move was so sudden it caught Stengler and Moss off-guard. Bobby leaped across the table at them, hands out, snarling. The voice stress analyzer dropped from Stengler’s hand and shattered with a Ioud finality on the floor.

“
Assassinos!’
Bobby screamed. He caught the front of Moss’s lab coat in his hands and clawed at the researcher’ s face.
“Filho da puta! Assassinos!”

“
Jesus!” Moss cried. “Get him off me!” His face was scored in a dozen places and blood welled angrily from the wounds. His hands were in front of him, shoving at, not beating, the boy. His defense was that of a civilized man to an uncivilized small animal.

I punched the control button so hard I drove it permanently into its housing.

Grabbing Bobby around his thick waist, I pulled him from Moss. Bobby was sobbing,
“Mataran a gente,”
he said as he pushed his face into a hiding place at my shoulder. The Thanapeline was wearing off, and I wasn’t certain whether it was Gilberto who was crying or Bobby.
“Os Americanos. Mataran a gente,”
he said.

Moss was shaken. He wiped blood from his face. But it was Stengler, oddly enough, who was angry. “It wouldn’t be the Americans. It’d be the Russians. He doesn’t know.”

I cradled the boy, my hand moving across the back of his head, plucking away the wire leads angrily. “He knows. He lived through it.”

“Bullshit,” Stengler spat. “He was a peasant living on the edge of the Amazon jungle. He couldn’t know anything.”

I pried the tape from the pump and tugged it out. A drop of blood came with it. “Sorry,” I whispered to Bobby. “I’m sorry.” I was sorry for everything, for the bead of red on the shaved ankle, for the way the day had gone, for the extinction we faced.

When he was quiet, when he was Bobby again, I took him down the hall to his room and gave him a Snickers and a Valium, two single-strand safety lines for a small falling boy.

* * *

In the room was the vibration of a prior argument. Stengler was fitting the black plastic shards of his voice stress analyzer together as if it were a jigsaw puzzle of doom. Moss, stained handkerchief in hand, was dabbing aimlessly at his cheeks. They both looked up at me when I entered.

“I should get you some antiseptic for that,” I told Moss.

“We don’t have time,” Stengler said.

I glanced at Moss. Moss had an odd grin. Apparently he knew Stengler well enough to find his rudeness amusing. “I’m all right,” he told me softly. “It’s nothing, really. How is the boy?”

There is a moment in relationships when love or hate comes in a flash of emotional knowledge. Such feelings are common to me. But not so common that their fury doesn’t leave me shaken. I had twin shocks then, one after the other: liking for Moss; hatred for Stengler.

Because I felt that sudden kinship with Moss, I lied. “He’s fine.”

“Finding his parents complicates things,” Stengler said as he fit a piece of plastic that looked like ant onto a piece that looked like a bird.

“Tonya’s pregnant. What happens when Gilberto’s born?” Even though I knew the inevitable, I asked anyway, wanting to get the truth out. The question had the same pain-pleasure syndrome as a Ianced boil.

“Maybe nothing,” Stengler said. “It’s my theory that this soul comes from an alternate universe. After all, if no life was left on Earth, where would those souls go who needed further incarnations? That problem would have to be addressed, and nothing in Kardeckian Theory allows for it.”

Moss was regarding Stengler thoughtfully. “I’m not a Kardeckian. I’m just a physicist who got in this through the quantum theory back door. Things don’t fit as neatly for me as they do for Burton. I’m not sure what reality is.” His voice lowered and he looked at me. “And, considering the dichotomy inherent in clairvoyance, I’m not sure how time works, either.”

“So.” I paused, bathed in the fearful uncertainty of Moss’s gaze. “He might really be remembering a future life. A life where, in fifty-three years, the sky darkens and it snows in the jungle.”

“Right,” Moss told me.

“It’s highly doubtful,” Stengler said. He relaxed his grip on the voice stress analyzer. The pieces fell away in his hands and he looked down at them in surprise.

* * *

Mrs. Harding had had her irises dyed an iridescent shade of blue. A flat, cobalt facial gem was nestled professionally into the skin at the edge of her cheek. The effect was less sensual than disturbing.

“I’m sorry you feel this way,” I said lamely, turning from that electric blue stare to the unaltered hazel one of Mr. Harding.

Harding crushed the tabloid in his oversized hand. It splintered, oozing liquid crystal fluid on the table. “A freak. They call him a freak.”

“Not a freak,” I told him. I had read the article myself. “Simply a boy who can see the future.”

Mr. Harding got up from the white wrought-iron ice cream table and paced the sunlit patio. The furniture, baroque in its pleasant fussiness, was a jarring note to the conversation. I felt I was having an argument in a nursery. “A freak,” he said.

“That is your word, Mr. Harding,” I said.

He turned on me, an athletic Doberman guarding his own sense of propriety. “Who leaked this!” he shouted.

“I don’t know.” Turning from the angry father, I tried to enlist the mother’s help. Her eerie eyes were disturbing. “We need to take Bobby away,” she said.

I flung my pleading hands across the glass-topped table. “You can’t do that. Bobby’s at a very dangerous stage in his treatment. He needs to be watched every hour of every day. He eats too much, and he eats too fast. Someone has to be with him.”

“You made him this way,” Mr. Harding said. “You filled his mind up with all this dying shit.”

“He remembers a life as Gilberto Soares. I can’t help that he does.” My voice shook. I couldn’t help that either.

“Reincarnation’s a crock,” he told me.

“How do you refute the Holbeck case? All the controls that were met? How do you refute that?”

He lifted one comer of his mouth in a sneer. With his bland, jogger’s face it looked inappropriate. “I don’t have to refute it. I just don’t believe it.”

There is, I’ve discovered, no argument against ignorance. “Please, Mrs. Harding,” I said as I turned back to her. “Please keep him here. Taking him will be so dangerous.”

Those neon-blue eyes dropped. “We have a household servo. It will take care of him.”

“A robot?” I asked in shock. “You can’t leave him with a robot. He needs the hospital. He needs me.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Mr. Harding snarled. “You’re sick, Patel. A robot isn’t perfect, but at least it won’t be in love with death.”

It was no use. I felt I was caught in a surge of destiny. Deep inside the coils of my DNA, perhaps there is something left that is Hindu.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re right. A robot is in love with nothing.”

* * *

Six months later Moss called to tell me Tonya Soares had had her baby. It was a boy, and they named him Gilberto. I put in a call to the Hardings again, They were back from Australia, apparently. Mr. Harding answered the video phone.

“This is Dr. Patel,” I said. “May I speak to Bobby?”

He looked at me. There was a long silence. Through the speaker I could pick up the light whisper of Harding’s breath.

“Is Bobby there? I need to speak to him You can watch and listen in, if you like.”

“What do you want?” he finally asked. His voice sounded hollow. It clashed with his new tan, his palpable aura of good health.

“I just want to talk to Bobby, please. Something has come up. I want to see if he’s all right.”

I’m sure it was anxiety that caused it. At least I’m almost sure. The right side of his mouth lifted in a smile that looked, through the phone monitor, victorious, “Bobby’s dead.”

I didn’t speak.

Harding went on, “He choked to death about a month ago. The servo was with him. If you believe in that superstitious shit about an afterlife, then maybe he’s happier. I don’t know. But I’d ask you not to call again and bother my wife. We’re in mourning.”

“You bastard,” I said.

He was stupid enough to look astonished. “What did you say?”

“You bastard. How many weeks did you have to leave him alone and unloved before he obliged you by dying?”

His face lost its color. Even wealthy tans fade in the glare of insight. “I don’t have to listen to this,” he told me as his hand moved to the right.

The screen went dark. The silent background of the phone changed to an angry buzz.

* * *

I am so afraid.

In the slanted afternoon sunlight of my room. I close my eyes and can see it. Over the canopy of trees in the jungle the sky grows dark. The toucans hush. The
sagui
monkey lifts its brown-masked, curious face upwards. On the dim forest floor the iguana scurries to shelter, the tapir curls to sleep.

A freezing wind whips from the north, carrying its load of poisoned snow into a fragile, warm land. It dusts bananas and palms. An orchid’s cupped leaves fill with white. Looking out at it for the very first time, this shrouded surprise must seem beautiful.

Author’s Note:
Brazilians have a way of taking in all foreigners as if they are family. The Spanish are the same. The Portuguese, at least the ones in Lisbon, tend to be secretive and sullen as do the Peruvians of Lima. This story is for all those expatriates who live in hostile and bewildering third-world countries, always wondering if underneath the alien mores and the cultural jealousy there lies a richness they had not foreseen.

The ambassador made a flapping one-man tent of his raincoat and held a handkerchief against his nose. In the dark alley there was no use in walking carefully. He stepped in puddles and slipped on spongy, slick piles of refuse. Fetid water splashed up his pants.

At the third hut from the comer he stopped, pausing just a moment before he entered through the curtain. He’d been in Karee eighteen months and had not yet conquered the desire to knock.

“Hello,” he said in English as he entered, giving in to the niggling urge to announce himself. Even with that, he felt like a thief
.

The room was black with shadows and soot. A murky fire against the far wall glowed sullen, smoky red. To
the ambassador, raised in Earth’s parochial schools, the room was what Sister Mary Ignatius had once told him of hell.

A Karee looked from the table where it had been cleaning
shota.
Its hands froze. The articulated bony ridges around its eyes flowered open in astonishment. For an instant the human and the Karee stared at each other; then the Karee absorbed itself once more in work.

George watched for a few minutes. The three-fingered hand of the creature sorted through the pile of tiny, hard bodies, snapping off the heads with a wet click and then tossing them into the pan where they hit with a clatter. It never looked up.

When the ambassador had first arrived, his staff had told him of the Karee’s lack of privacy. The human understanding was flawed. It was just that the Karee had no sense of outward space. The privacy of their minds was absolute.

“Besseh Yo?” George asked.

Snap went the neck of a
shota.
Plink, it hit the pot.

“I come to find Besseh Yo.”

The Karee didn’t look up, but it laughed. George stood, water still dripping from the ends of his salt and pepper hair, and accepted the disdain of its amusement. Snap. The
shota’s
head was tossed to the floor.

“I bring money.”

The hand paused. The Karee finally looked up. Its eyebrows unhinged again. “What moneys is you bring?”

“Platinum.” George was irritated now, bored with the intricacies of Karee social rituals; angered by the cavalier attitude which made him feel like a fool. “Are you Besseh Yo?”

Without answering directly, the Karee rose and went to an interior doorway. “Yuma here!” it shouted.

There was an answering mumble from the other room.

“Yuma!” the Karee repeated.

With a jerk and a rattle the curtain was opened. George was staring at the oldest Karee he’d ever seen. Besseh Yo was bent by disease into a tortuous S-shape. Its eye-joints had calcified into huge misshapen knots. At first the ambassador assumed it was blind, but then Besseh Yo tipped back its head to bring George into its narrowed line of sight.

The magician laughed hugely. “Yuma,” it said with something like humorous suspicion. “Why does a yuma come through here to find Besseh and throw platinum at us? You got shit on your shoes. Smell it, Tyoresh?” it asked the other, younger Karee. “You smell shit on the yuma?”

Tyoresh wrinkled its nose, widening its nostrils so they covered half the width of its brown face. “Maybe yuma shit its pants.”

George fought the urge to check the soles of his shoes. If
he even looked down, he knew the Karees would erupt into hurtful, loud merriment. “I hear Besseh Yo has magic,” George said, coming right to the point.

The old Karee scratched its bare stomach. It was naked. Folds of
gray-brown skin hung from its waist, making a convenient skirt of flesh.

“I have come to buy this magic,” George told him. Besseh turned, showing the cleft of its bare backside to George, and walked away. After a moment George followed.

The bedroom was small and dim. The oil in the single lamp threaded black, stinging smoke into the heavy air. “Money,” Besseh said, gesturing to a table with an imperious wave.

George tugged the sack from his pocket and tossed it on the bare wood. Instantly Besseh was on it, running its gnarled hands through the chips of metal.

Tipping its head, Besseh studied the human through the slitted openings of its eyes. “Why do you come when yuma hate the Karee?” it asked softly enough so that the Karee in the other room could not hear.

His instinct was to dispute what Besseh had said, but that was the result of his diplomatic training. Here, in the close confines of the room, all he could manage was the evasion of the truth. “I’ve lost my wife,” George whispered. I’ve lost my wife, he remembered. The death was fresh enough so that even now he failed to believe it.

The Karee hooted. “Where you lose her, yuma? You ain’t so careful?”

George had always disliked the Karee. Most of the diplomatic staffs did. Now, looking into the distorted face where bone grew cauliflower masses against the pebbled skin, he realized what he felt went beyond dislike. He hated them. “She died,” he said in a strangled voice.

Lauren of the quick eyes; the graceful neck; the elegant, wild stride of an antelope. It couldn’t be, he thought just as he had thought the night they’d told him. Not Lauren.

George didn’t sleep much anymore; and sometimes, when he did, he would wake with a throat-cramping gasp and pass his disbelieving palm over her side of the bed.

“But you say you lose her. She die and you put the body away someplace you can’t remember where?”

“Shut up!” George snapped. His anger caught Besseh by surprise. The Karee inched away. “Goddamn you, shut up! Is everything a joke with you people?”

In the other room there was a clink and then silence. Besseh and George turned, knowing Tyoresh was listening. Suddenly Besseh chuckled. “You hate us, ta?”

The only sound in the room was George’s labored breathing. He licked his lips, tasting the tart residue of smoke and the moldy taste of Karee sweat. “Yes,” he admitted. It was senseless to deny it. “I hate you. But I hear you’ll do anything for money. If you don’t help me, I’ll take my money and go home.”

“Tyoresh!” Besseh shouted.

George stiffened, suddenly afraid they would throw him out. They’d throw him out of the house and he’d never find Lauren again.

The younger Karee poked its head in the door.

“Food for me. Food for the yuma,” Besseh said. The magician made its way to a rumpled cot and sat down, its legs spread in an unconscious and uncaring exposure of its bisexual organs.

George looked away.

“Magic,” Besseh said philosophically, “some is good; some is bad. You tell me what to do. If it is good, you have the good. If it is bad, you carry the hurt. I am . . .” The old Karee searched for a word, then gave up and uttered the rest in its own language,
“reslani orgit.”

“Blameless tool,” George muttered to himself, staring at the lamp rather than at the flagrant nakedness of the magician.

“Ta? Blameless tool, yes. You want someone dead? You want a new wife? I do this for you, poor yuma who needs another to make sex with.” Besseh laughed, crooking its bead so that it could see George’s expression. “Look at me!” it shouted when it noticed the direction of George’s gaze. “You look at me! You come for help, so you look!”

Resentfully, George forced his head around.

“What you see, yuma?”

“I see Besseh Yo, a great magician.”

The Karee got to its feet and shuffled its way towards George. “Your words is pus. Say what you see.”

George tightened his jaw.

“I see an ugly yuma with shit on his shoe and fear in his face,” Besseh said, shoving a hard finger into George’s shoulder. “What do you see, ta?”

With a quick movement, George slapped Besseh’s hand away. “I see a naked little savage,” he said.

“Ta. What else?”

George bit his lip and stared hard at the lamp.

The finger punched him hard in the arm. “Naked little savage, ta? And more?” The finger jabbed bruises into George’s muscle. “More!”

George moved out of Besseh’s range and turned away from him. “No more,” he said softly. The Karee enjoyed confrontations. They thrived on scenes. When other beings lost their tempers with Karee, as they most often did, the Karee laughed with strident voices. The Karee were primitives with a taste for the dramatic.

There was a flash of
movement at the side of his head, a jerk and then a gout of pain. Alarmed, breathing hard, George backed to the wall, one hand over his stinging scalp. Besseh had torn out a lock of his hair.

The magician stood for a moment, the neat silver-gray curl in its hand. Then it opened its toothless mouth and swallowed it. “You and me is one now, yuma.”

George’s lip curled in bewildered confusion. He felt violated and more than a little afraid. “Maybe I’d better go.”

“Lauren,” the Karee said.

George flinched.

“I eat of you so I know. Eating is knowing. You come here about eating the memories.”

“I come here to remember her, not like I can remember her now, but to relive those memories as If they were real. I want to touch her again. I’ve heard you can do that.”

Instead of replying, Besseh called for food again. Tyoresh came in with two bowls, one for George, the other for the magician. For a while George simply watched the old Karee eat.

“You eat, yuma,” Besseh said as it sucked the meat from the casque of a
shota
.

George looked down at the pinkish mass, plucked a
shota
from its gravy and peeled it. It tasted of mud.

The Karee ate with the slurping abandon of gluttony. When it finished it rinsed the bowl in a pan of sand and water.

“You haven’t asked who I am,” George said.

Besseh stuck out its bottom lip, a Karee shrug. “You is yuma. More doesn’t matter. All yuma is alike.”

“All humans aren’t alike, Besseh.”

“All yuma is alike, it said, twisting its face in George’s direction and tilting its head back so that it could see. “We got power of the mind; you got power over the body.”

George’s eyes were drawn to the hunched back, the twisted limbs, the deformed eye sockets of the creature. The magician, he imagined, had an intimate relationship with pain. For the first time since he had come he felt more pity than discomfort.

“You take the body from here to there, yuma. You come from your planet to this. But the body is stupid.”

“Stupid. Is that what you think of us?”

Behind the twin slits on its face George thought he could see Besseh’s eyes glitter, black diamonds in a cave. “Stupid,” it said.

George got up from his stool and walked to the pail of sand and water. Besseh, with an odd gentleness, took the bowl from his hands.

“You ain’t eat much,” it said critically as it washed the bowl.

“Will you do the magic for me?”

“Sure.”

“When do we start?”

George was unprepared for the splash. Grit and stale dishwater exploded against his eyes. He raised up a protective arm, but it was too late.

“Now,” Besseh said with a laugh.

George felt himself falling. He twisted his body to the side, trying to catch himself.

Across the thick mauve carpet in the lobby a woman stood with Sanderson, the chandelier above her casting bright lights in her hair. As he approached into the subtle gravity of her slim body, the tug of her perfume, Sanderson asked in a strangely far away voice how he’d liked the Beethoven. Then he turned to the woman at his side. George’ s eyes had never left her face.

“George Hatterly,” Sanderson said, “Lauren McKnight.”

* * *

“Yuma!”

George thrashed.

Lauren was arguing politics with him over the breakfast table. He won a point more by sheer force of the argument than facts. Smiling, she lifted the pitcher of orange juice, flourished it and poured it into his coffee. The cup overflowed onto the counter.

“Yuma!”

George was a pragmatic man with a limited sense of the absurd, so irritation hit him first. Then, because Lauren had been a good teacher, the humor finally kicked in. He glanced up, fighting a smile. She was laughing.

“Goddamn! Yuma!”

Lauren’s perfect face burst like a warm bubble.

“Yuma! You got visitors!”

George took in a deep breath that tasted of damp and old food. He opened his eyes to see Besseh standing over him in the semi-dark. The Karee looked scared.

“You get up,” Besseh said as he pulled on George’s arm. “They think you dead. You get up and talk.”

George’s mouth felt funny. He swiveled his legs from the cot, but his knees wouldn’t hold him.

“Ambassador Hatterly?” a resonant voice asked.

Blinking, George looked up. His aide and the Chief of Intelligence stood just in the curtain staring at him.

George lifted a slow hand and ran it over his face. There was stubble on his cheeks. “How long?” His lips didn’t work right.