Next of Kin (2 page)

“Did you bring my lunch?” he asked.

“I’m afraid not,” I said, closing the door behind me and picking up his phone. “Would you like me to order some?”

“If you don’t have my lunch, then why are you here?”

And thus began the slow spiral of conversation. “I’m your friend. I came to talk to you.”

“That’s right,” he said, waving curtly with his hand, as if wiping grime from some invisible window. “I remember, you just said that.” His words held a mixture of embarrassment and anger, the latter caused by the former. He knew he couldn’t remember anything, and he hated it; he was ashamed and embarrassed and angry at everything in the world—himself most of all, for who else could he blame? It was the most heartbreaking gesture in the world, the most painful tone of voice to ever hear, but it was one of the primary reasons I came here. Three weeks from now, as the sand in my mind leaked relentlessly away, I’d make that same gesture, say that same thing.
I remember
.

The biggest lie in the world.

I worked in the morgue, driving the hearse during the night shift, because it was the best way to stay in constant, non-suspicious access to the recently dead. It was steady work, and if it kept me out of contact with the rest of the world, no matter. So much the better, really. I closed my blinds and slept by day, and by night I worked in the garage, maintaining our three hearses, keeping them clean and ready. The man on the day shift was nice enough. His name was Jacob, and I talked to him sometimes as I arrived for work and he was leaving. Sometimes he got sick and asked me to cover his shift, but I always made other arrangements, even paying for a temp out of my own pocket. I knew too many of the dead, and I knew their families, and I couldn’t bear to see them weeping over me when I was right there, alive and well, and why are you crying over me? Let’s leave this place and never come back. My own wife and children and parents and friends, as real in my memories as they ever were in the memories of the dead. I’d never gone to my own funeral, but I knew the temptation to talk to loved ones would be strong, so I stayed away.

That’s why it was such a shock, one week after Billy Chapman, when I saw Rosie at the grocery store.

My cart was full—cucumbers and olives and capers and feta, for I had brushed past a sheepskin coat in the aisle, and I remembered my days on Crete with such crystal, visceral clarity it brought me to tears, and I wanted a meal like we ate in the old days. I was walking to the checkout, wondering if it would taste right—if the American ingredients would hold the same flavor, or if my memory of some magical ur-salad would overpower any real salad I tried to recreate—when suddenly there she was, arriving at the line at the same time I did, as familiar by my side as she’d always been, and I said hello without even thinking about it. She nodded back, friendly but distant, with a sadness in her eyes that broke my heart. I opened my mouth to ask what was wrong before I remembered that her husband was dead, poor Billy in the ground not three days, and it wasn’t me who remembered her but him, and she didn’t know who I was. My hand was already reaching toward hers, and I pulled it back in terror.

Rosie, right here, real and physical and
right here
.

“Are you okay?” Her voice was lilting and sad and concerned—so like Rosie to feel concerned for others when she was already in so much pain herself. I’d heard that voice in lazy mornings, in joyful songs, in cries of passion, in heartsick wails that we could never have children. I loved that voice, but it wasn’t for me, and I felt like a voyeur even thinking about it, yet I couldn’t stop. I tried to speak but I couldn’t say a word, and she asked me again, “Are you okay?” I knew I had to speak or she’d just keep talking. I wanted to let her, but I knew it was wrong.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling my cart backward. “Please, you go first. I’ll find another checkout.”

“You’re very kind,” she said, and I tried to smile, but I had to turn away to hide the tears in my eyes.

My Rosie, who was never truly mine. I left the cart in the next aisle, and then I left the store, walking slowly so I wouldn’t make a scene. Her car was there in the parking lot, the same color I’d seen a hundred times, the same bumper sticker I’d begged her not to get, the same box of tissues that had been in the rear window for years. I turned and walked the opposite direction, leaving my car, stumbling through the ice, part of me crying out to go back to her and the other part insisting that no, I could never see her again, she wasn’t really my wife, there was nothing I could do. What could I possibly say? “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’ve known you for ten years, and I was married to you for eight, and I’m your husband, I’m Billy, I’m so sorry I went away.” She’d call the police. She’d mace me and run and scream that I was a maniac, that I was a stalker, that I was a psychopath. I loved her too much to do that.

I wandered the streets for two frozen hours, shivering in my coat, watching the streetlights through the snow. When I went back for my car, she was gone.

A week later I couldn’t find my keys, and I knew it was starting. It’s a simple enough thing, to lose your keys, but I recognized the signs, and I knew that the sand was slipping away from the hourglass. Short-term memories went first, but even the long-term memories would disappear if I waited too long. I felt like Merrill sometimes, now and then forgetting even who I was but remembering, out of nowhere, some ancient event or person I hadn’t thought of in centuries. I had long ago forgotten my original self—anything I had left was cobbled together from the few memories that remained, an ever-shifting set of touchstones and anchor points that was all I had left of a real identity.

When I found the keys, I pulled my lanyard from the side-table drawer and clipped them to my belt. I made myself a lunch to take to work, sealing it carefully in a plastic container, and when I opened my bag to put it in, I saw another plastic container already sitting there, not thirty minutes old. I put a note on the second lunch, explaining its existence to my future self, and left for work. I said hello to Ted, and he told me his name was Jacob, that Ted had quit two years ago, and I apologized for the slip.

“Of course. I remember.”

I’d chosen this city for its size: big enough to have a steady flow of the dead, but small enough that most of those bodies came from natural causes. I’ve died of heart disease more times than I can count. The death rate in our county is around 10,000 per year, which is just over 27 per day; about half of those are in the city itself, shared between two dozen morgues and mortuaries, which gives mine a new body every five or six days on average. We’d had one the day before, but I’d chosen to wait. I wasn’t bad yet, and the woman had drowned, which is a death I try to avoid when I can. My memory always seemed to erode faster toward the end, though, and I would need to drink the very next mind that came through.

I ran through my maintenance checks on all three hearses, finding solace in the comfortable routine of reading lists and checking boxes. It was simple, the same routine every time. There was nothing to remember, so I had nothing to forget. When I finished, I sat in the office doing Sudoku, folding the little paper book in half and licking the tip of my pencil like an old man. Logic problems and strategy games are supposed to be good for memory retention, exercising your brain like a muscle, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any benefit from it. I don’t even know if the standard rules apply to my neurochemistry. I’d been doing Sudoku for so many years, I doubt it would exercise my brain at all anymore, regardless; it was an action as rote as the checklist on the hearses. When the phone rang I sighed in relief, took careful notes on where to pick up the new body, and left.

Another drunk, homeless this time. They found his body next to an overpass, fifty feet or so from the nest of blankets that was probably his home. It was several degrees below freezing, and his body bore no signs of attack, so they ruled it another accidental death by exposure.

His memory told another story.

His name was Frank McClellan, and he grew up in California; we walked on the beaches as a child, barefoot and tan, but we had never liked our father and the memories of our screaming arguments burned like coals inside my skull. We’d left home at sixteen, traveling here and there around the country, reconnecting with our sister for a few years in our twenties before drifting away again. Eventually we’d fallen into drugs and prostitution, though we’d always been proud that we’d stayed away from theft and robbery. I felt his pride, and his loneliness, and the bone-aching chill that seemed to haunt him even in the summer, and then last night I watched a man approach us—his face nearly buried in a thick, black scarf—and gesture to the shadows with a wad of dollar bills. We followed him, knowing exactly what was wanted in the wordless transaction, and there in the darkness he killed us.

The killer was one of the Gifted.

It was no surprise the police hadn’t seen anything, for this Gifted had been careful to leave no trace. Frank hadn’t recognized the dark, slick tendril reaching out from the folds of the man’s scarf, but I did. It was like a twig of withered soul, black as the pit of Hell, and it reached through Frank’s mouth and down his throat to pierce his heart. If someone got suspicious enough to do an autopsy—and somehow convinced the state that a nameless drifter was worth the money—they’d find his inner organs sliced or ground or pureed, maybe even missing completely. I knew the method as surely as I knew my own, the knowledge coming not from Frank’s memory but from my own. There were too many holes in it to recall the details—too many thousands of lifetimes to ever have hope of keeping them sorted. I didn’t know who this Gifted was, but I knew what he did, and I knew how. And I was deeply, unfathomably terrified.

I pondered on Frank’s killer for the rest of the night and all the next day, too agitated to sleep. There weren’t supposed to be any other Gifted in this area—I had chosen my home based on solitude as well as sustenance. The more I thought about it, the more I focused my newly heightened thoughts on the image of the killer, the more certain I became that Billy Chapman had seen the same man right before he died. He’d fallen on the ice, already unconscious by the time the monster took him, but he had seen him first, in the darkened streets and in the bar before that. This was not a pair of random deaths, and it was not an errant killer passing through. There was a monster stalking our shadows, gaining in power and boldness, and the deepest dungeons of my rat-gnawed mind cried out in horror at his coming.

I thought about going to the police, but what would that accomplish? I couldn’t tell them what was happening without looking crazy, and I couldn’t tell them how I knew about it without looking crazy
and
dangerous. I’d lose my job at the very least and face stiff fines and charges at the worst, possibly even ending up in jail. Either way, I’d lose access to the memories I needed to fuel my mind. In prison, I’d have to kill or lose my memory completely, a harrowing experience that could last decades and risk exposing my secrets to the world. If I lost my job, I’d have to leave town, and who knows how long it would be before I could find another ready source of memories.

Besides, I couldn’t risk leaving, because that would mean leaving the killer alone with Rosie. I loved her more—

—Billy loved her more—

—I didn’t know how to think. I hadn’t seen the people I remembered, up close and in person, in years. In centuries, maybe. I had grown complacent, letting my careful measures grow lax; now I’d seen Rosie, and I couldn’t leave her. I loved her as much as Billy ever had, for all his love was mine now, but now that I’d seen her,
I
loved her too, myself, whatever shreds of me remained inside the scattered library of my brain. Leaving her alone—with a killer on the loose—was unthinkable.

Protecting her, I knew, would be just as bad.