One of Us (2 page)

They immediately and noisily embarked on yet another song, which sounded eerily identical to all the others. It couldn't be, though, because it got an even bigger cheer than usual, and the singing businessman clambered unsteadily onto a chair to give it his all. I took a sip of my beer, wishing the waiter would hurry up and hassle me again, and waited with grim anticipation for the alfalfa king to pitch headlong into the table of girls. That should be worth watching, I felt.

Then I became aware of a sound. It was quiet, and barely audible below the baying of voices and barking of trumpets, but it was getting louder.

"Told him, like you said," the American behind me boomed. "Didn't take it very well."

A beeping sound. Almost like . . .

I closed my eyes.

"Hap Thompson!" a tinny voice squealed suddenly, cutting effortlessly through the noise in the bar. Then it went back to beeping, getting louder and louder, before sirening my name again. I tried to ignore it, but it wasn't going to go away. It never does.

Within a minute the beeping was so loud that the mariachi band began turning in my direction. Gradually the musicians stopped playing, the instruments fading out one by one as if their players were being serially dropped off a cliff. I swore viciously and ground my cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. Heads turned, and a silence descended on the bar. The last person to shut up was the singing businessman. He was now standing weaving on the table with his arms outstretched. He would have looked quite like an opera singer had his face not been more reminiscent of a super-middleweight boxer who'd thrown too many fights.

Taking a deep breath, I turned.

A channel had cleared in the crowd behind me, and I could see straight to the bar. There, standing carefully so as to avoid the pools of spilt beer, was my alarm clock.

"Oh, hello," it said into the quiet. "Thought you hadn't heard me."

"What," I said, "the fuck do you want?"

"It's time to get up. Hap."

"I am up," I said. "I'm in a bar."

"Oh," said the clock, looking around. "So you are." It paused for a moment, before surging on. "But it's still time to get up. You can snooze me once more if you want, but you really ought to be out and about by half past nine."

"Look, you little bastard," I said, "I am up. It's a quarter past nine in the evening."

"No, it isn't."

"Yes it is. We've been through this."

"I have the time as nine-seventeen precisely, a.m." The clock angled itself so that I—and everyone else—could read its display clearly.

"You've always got the time as a.m.," I shouted, standing to point at it. "That's because you're broken, you useless piece of shit."

"Hey, man," protested one of the tourists at my table. "Little guy's only trying to do his job. No call for language like that." There was a low rumble of agreement from nearby tables.

"That's right," agreed the clock, two square inches of injured innocence on two spindly little legs. "Just trying to do my job, that's all. Let's see how you like it if I don't wake you up, huh? We know what happens then, don't we?"

"What?" asked a woman at the other side of the room, her eyes sorrowful. "Does he mistreat you?" With my jaw clamped firmly shut, I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter from the table and glared at the woman. She stared bravely back at me and sniffed. "He looks the type."

"He hits me. He even throws me out the window." This was greeted by low mutters from some quarters, and I decided it was time to go. "... of moving cars ..."

The crowd stirred angrily. I considered telling them that having a broken a.m./p.m. indicator was the least of this clock's problems, that it was also prone, on a whim, to wake me up at regular intervals through the small hours and thus lose me a night's work, but decided it wasn't worth it. Trust the little bastard to catch up with me in the one bar in the world where people apparently cared about defective appliances. I pulled my jacket on and started shouldering my way through the people around me. A pathway opened up, lined with sullen faces, and I slunk toward the door, feeling incredibly embarrassed.

"Wait, Hap! Wait for me!"

At the sound of the clock's little feet landing on the ground, I picked up the pace and hurried out, past the pair of armed policemen moonlighting as guards in the passageway outside. I clanged through the swinging doors at the end, hoping one of them would whip back and catapult the machine back over the bar, and stomped out into the road.

It didn't work. The clock caught up with me, and ran by my side down the street with little puffing sounds of exertion. These were fake, I believed, little sampled lies. If it had managed to track me down from where I'd flung it out the window (for the last time) in San Diego, a quick sprint was hardly going to wind it.

"Thanks," I snarled, "Now everyone in that fucking bar knows my name." I swung a kick at it, but it dodged easily, feinting to one side and then scuttling back to face me.

"But that's nice," the clock said. "Maybe you'll make some new friends. See: Not only am I a useful timepiece, but I can help you achieve your socializing goals by bridging the gulf between souls in this topsy-turvy world of ours. Please stop throwing me away. Hap. I can help you!"

"No, you can't," I said, grinding to a halt. The night was dark, the street lit only by stuttering yellow lamps outside Ensenada's various bars, restaurants, and rat-hole motels, and I felt suddenly homesick and alone. I was in the wrong part of the wrong town, and I didn't even know why I was there. Someone else's guilt, my own paranoia, or just because it was where I always used to run. Maybe all three—and it didn't really matter. I had to find Laura Reynolds, who might not even be here, before I got shafted for something I hadn't done but remembered doing. Try explaining that to a clock.

"You've barely explored my organizer functions," the clock chimed, oblivious.

"I've already got an organizer."

"But I'm better! Just tell me your appointments, and I'll remind you with any one of twenty-five charming alarm sounds. Never forget an anniversary! Never be late for that important meeting! Never—"

This time the kick connected. With a fading yelp the clock sailed clean over a line of stores selling identical rows of cheap rugs and plaster busts of ET. By the time I was fifty yards down the street, the mariachi band was at full tilt again behind me, the businessman's voice soaring clear and true above it, the voice of a man who knew who he was and where he lived and what he was going home to.

I'D ARRIVED IN MEXICO late the previous evening. That, at least, was when I'd woken to find myself in a car I didn't recognize, stationary but with the engine still running, by the side of a patchy road. I switched the ignition off and got out gingerly, feeling as if someone had hammered an intriguing pattern of very cold nails into my left temple. Then I peered around into the darkness, trying to work out where I was.

The answer soon presented itself, in the shape of the sharply defined geography surrounding me. A steep rock face rose behind the car, and on the other side of the road the hill disappeared abruptly—the only vegetation bushes and gnarled gray trees that seemed to be making a big point of just what a hard time they were having. The air was warm and smelled of dust, and with no city glow the stars were bright in the blackness above.

I was on the old interior road that leads down the Baja from Tijuana to Ensenada, twisting through the dark country up along the hills. There was a time when it was the only road in those parts, but now it's not lit, in bad repair, and nobody with any sense drives this way anymore.

Now that I was out of the car, I was able to recognize it as mine, and to dimly remember climbing into it in LA much earlier in the day. But this realization faded in and out, like a signal from a television station where the power is unreliable. Other memories were trying to shoulder it aside, clamoring for their time in the spotlight. The memories were artificially sharp and distinct, and trying to hide this by melding with my own recollections, but they couldn't, because the memories weren't mine and they had no real homes to go to. All they could do was overlay what was already there, like a double exposure, sometimes at the front, sometimes merely tickling like a word on the tip of your tongue.

I walked back to the car and fumbled in the glove compartment, hoping to find something else I knew was mine. I immediately discovered a lot of cigarettes, including an opened pack, but they weren't my brand. I smoke Camel lights, always have: These were Kim. Nonetheless, it was likely that I'd bought them, because the opened pack still had the cellophane around the bottom half. It's a habit of mine to leave it there, which has given my best friend, Deck, hours of fun taking it off and sneaking it onto the top half of the pack when I'm in the John. The memory of Deck's trademark cackle as I yanked and snarled at a pack after such an incident suddenly bloomed in my mind, grounding me for a moment in who I was.

I screwed up my eyes tightly, and when I opened them again, I felt a little better.

The passenger seat was strewn with twists of foil and a number of cracked vials, and it didn't take me long to work out why. A long time ago, in a past life, I used to deal a drug called Fresh. Fresh removes the ennui that comes from custom and acquaintance, and presents everything to you—every sight, emotion, and experience—as if it's happening for the first time. Part of how Fresh does this is by masking your memories, to stop them grabbing new experience and turning it into just the same old thing. Evidently I'd been trying to replicate this effect with a cocktail of other recreational pharmaceuticals, and had ended up blacking out. On an unlit mountain road, in Mexico, at night.

Great going.

But it had evidently worked, because for the time being I was back. I started the car and pulled carefully back onto the road, after a quick mental check to make sure I was pointing in the right direction. Then I tore the filter off a Kim, lit her up, and headed south.

I passed only one other car along the way, which was good, because it meant I could drive down the middle of the road and stay as far as possible from the precipitous drops that line the route. This left me free to do a kind of internal inventory, and to start panicking about that instead. Most of the last six hours were missing, along with a number of words and facts. I could recall where I lived, for example—on the tenth floor of the Falkland, one of Griffith's livelier apartment houses—but not my room number. It simply wasn't available to me. Presumably I'd remember by sight: I hoped so, because all my stuff was in there and otherwise I'd have nothing to wear.

I could remember Laura Reynolds's name, and what she'd done to me. She'd evidently been with me for some of the trip down, in spirit at least: It must have been her who bought the cigarettes, though I opened the pack. I didn't really know what Laura Reynolds looked like, only how she appeared to herself, and I had no idea where she was. I'd probably had a good reason for heading for Ensenada, or at least a reason of some kind— assuming, of course, that it had been I who made the decision. Either way, now that I was here, it seemed I might as well go on.

I made good time, having to stop only once, while a herd of coffeemakers crossed the road in front of me. I read somewhere that they often make their way down to Mexico. I can't see why that would be so, but there was certainly a hell of a lot of them. They came down from the hill in silence, trooped across the road in a protective huddle, and then headed off down the slope in an orderly line, searching for a home, or food, or maybe even some coffee beans.

I reached Ensenada just after midnight, and slept in the car on the outskirts of town. I dreamed of a silver sedan and men with lights behind their heads, but the message was confused and frantic, fear dancing through an internal landscape lined with doors that wouldn't open.

When I woke up, more of my head was back in place, and I got it together enough to contact Stratten, patching the call through my hacker's network so it looked like it originated from LA. I said I had a migraine and wouldn't be able to work for a couple of days. I don't think Stratten believed me, but he didn't call me on it. I spent the rest of the day fruitlessly searching taco stands and crumbling hotels, or driving aimlessly down rotting streets. By the evening this had led me to an inescapable conclusion.

She wasn't here.

FROM HOUSSON'S I headed straight for the street where I'd left the car. In late afternoon this particular area behind the tourist drag had seemed charmingly authentic. By mid-evening it resembled a do-it-yourself mugging emporium. Knots of alarming locals stood and stared as I passed, their feet wet from the pools of beer, urine, or blood that flowed from each of the bars, but I made it back to the car in one piece. It was parked down a dead end, away from prying eyes, and it was only as I pulled my keys from my pocket that I realized shadows were moving on the other side of the street. The light was too patchy for me to tell who it might be, but in any event I didn't want to meet them. I'm like that. Not very sociable.

Three men were soon distinguishable, heading toward me. They weren't hurrying, but that wasn't reassuring. Particularly when the glint of a tarnished button confirmed what I already suspected. Cops. Or the local equivalent, which was even worse.

Could be they were just out walking their wallets, shaking down the bars; could be they'd just spotted a
turista
and decided to shake me down instead.

Or it could be that their colleagues outside Housson's had passed the word to them that someone suspicious had just been hounded out of the bar by a lunatic timepiece, someone whose name had been clearly articulated. There was no reason that name should mean anything to anyone, not unless stuff had happened back in LA that I didn't know about, but I wasn't going to take any chances. I quietly opened the car door and waited, listening to the sound of their boots scuffing on the ragged road surface.

"Hi," I said steadily. "What can I do for you guys?"