Passenger (21 page)

“I can’t remember—”

“Just get out.  Get the hell out.”

“Please…”

“If you’re not out in thirty seconds I’m calling the police.”

Heading toward the door, I pause to watch the woman’s childlike shoulders hitch as she sobs quietly with her back toward me.  I do not know this woman.  I am not aware of the things I have done to hurt her.  Part of me is grateful for that.

Out in the hallway, I creep through the house, my shadow hardly noticeable on the wall by my side.  The old woman is waiting in the foyer, the front door open.  She, too, is crying.  But when she speaks, her voice is composed.

“She doesn’t hate you, Palmer.  It’s not about you.  You know that.  But you can’t come here.  She can’t see you.  Please—let her be.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell the old woman.  And I am about to walk past her and through the open front door when she does something astonishing.

She embraces me.

Her arms circle my skin-and-bones frame and she gives me a brief hug.  I am speechless and unable to move.

“Don’t blame Maddy.  She can only react to all that has happened.  Don’t blame her for that.  No one can help it; it is useless, Palmer.  We can’t escape it.  We’re all defined by our past.”  Finally, when she pulls away, she looks up at me with those wet eyes and says, “Take care of yourself, Palmer.  You look bad.”  She says, “So bad.”  She says, “And don’t come back here again.”

Resigned, I turn to leave.  I swear I can hear the young woman—Madeline—still weeping in the far bedroom at the other side of the house.  The old woman has her hand on the doorknob.  I can feel my heartbeat in my shoes, my forehead bursting with sweat.  This must be some fever.

I see something, notice something, as I leave.  It gives me pause, although it is certainly not unusual, nothing out of the ordinary.  Perhaps no one else on the planet would pause to look at it.  In fact, my own eyes don’t even linger on it.  Not for long, anyway.  Because I don’t understand it, not at first.  And the full impact will not hit me until almost an hour later.

But when it hits, it opens the world.

TWENTY-FOUR

Because what I see is me.  In a sense, anyway.  Partially.  It’s half me.

What I see as I leave the house in Ithaca is a picture, a photograph, of
me.

I am you.

In a sense: yes you are.

And you are driving through the stretch of that countryside highway.  The trees wash by the windows in a blur, green and full, and the radio hums static.  You are not alone; when you look to your right, Madeline is in the passenger seat.  Looking pretty.  Looking content.  You say how the program director at the institute sounded very excited on the last phone call and she laughs beside you in the passenger seat.  She mimics the voice of the program director—she has answered the phone enough times during the program director’s courting session—her voice adopting a deep resonance that makes you smile.  She laughs at your smile but there is some detachment in the laugh.  Rubbing her knee, you reiterate about the apartment—that it is only temporary until the house is ready and, anyway, it is only a few blocks from the institute so you both can have lunch together every day.  She is smiling, looking damn supportive, and you feel for her.  This is a difficult move for her.  For all of you.  And the boy is whining in the back seat.  Oh, hush.  Come on, now.  Halfway there.  Madeline smiles and says someone’s awake, look who’s awake.  Madeline tends to him, the child, the small child, the child you share.  She turns around, her narrow shoulder rubbing against yours, and tends to the whining child, the small child.  The child you share.  You strike a series of bumps and she tells you to cool it, speedy, all right?  So you cool it.  You slow it and cool it and search for a different radio station.

These long-fingered memories.

These open floodgates.

This waltz therapeutic.

*     *     *

It hits me as I am once again on that vacant swatch of highway, heading back to Baltimore.  Blacktop straight and narrow, snow-burdened trees on either side.  I am thinking of what has transpired at the house with the young woman, with Madeline, and what it all means.  I am wondering about the package and I am wondering about what I could have done to hurt her.  And I am barreling down this concrete byway, Clarence’s truck vibrating all around me, when it comes crashing down.  All of it.  All at once.  Nicole Quinland’s little voice saying,
What if you’re not supposed to remember the stuff all at once?
and it all comes crashing down.

Because what I see as I leave the house in Ithaca strikes me several hours later, in the dark, racing along a lone highway beneath the scrutiny of a full moon.  What I see is a picture of me—
in a sense, anyway.  Partially.  It’s half me.  
Because the other half is Madeline.  Because the combined whole is the child, the baby, and that is the picture on the wall by the front door of the house in Ithaca.  It is the baby, the small child, the whining child in the back seat.

It takes the road to bring it back to me.  Because it happened on this road in the first place.  The needling in my brain explodes into light and a sunburst of memories engulfs me—

My name is Palmer Troy.

I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  My birthday is August 31.  I’m thirty-two years old.

In the fall of last year, I was hired to head up the music program at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore City.  It is a big step, advancement from teaching music classes at the community college in Ithaca, New York, so I take the job.  We pack up and move.  The school has already selected us a single-bedroom apartment on St. Paul Street, just a few blocks from the institute, until our house in the suburbs is ready.  It is only temporary.  We can do it.  We can make it work.  It will be perfect.  Madeline will miss her mother, but it will be perfect.  You just wait and see.

You just wait and see.

It is on this stretch of road that the baby, the small child, starts to choke.  It means nothing at first.  Babies sometimes choke.  But it lasts too long and Madeline turns over in her seat and starts shouting the baby the baby Palmer the baby’s choking the baby.

You see the baby in the rearview—and his little face is blue, his eyes bugging out, the drool pooling on his New York Giants pullover.  The drool is red and you immediately think:
blood.  

You slam the brakes and the car jerks to a stop.  Popping your door, you jump out and yank the rear door open.  You dive for the baby, instinctively tugging at him, tugging, not grasping that it is the child safety seat that prevents the child from going with you.  Madeline screams the baby the baby and somehow you manage to get the child unbuckled from the safety seat.  What looks like a thousand colored balls spill from the car and spread like a stain across the pavement.

Here, in the middle of the vacant highway, with the car doors open and
Moonlight Sonata
on the radio, you administer the Heimlich to the small frame.  The child is not breathing, will not breathe, and your hoarse voice whispers come on come on come on baby breathe baby come on baby breathe but he doesn’t breathe.

Baby doesn’t breathe.

They are gumballs, colored gumballs.  There was a bag in the back seat.  The child had gotten into the bag.  The red drool is not blood but red dye.  Coloring.

There is a
give
and the gumball is fired from the child’s mouth to the street.  It rolls, barking into the other spilled gumballs as it goes, its red faded to a moist, shiny pink.

But you are in a fury.

There is an obsession to you now.

To save a life.

To save your child’s life.

You keep pumping.  Those arms are mechanical arms.  The adrenaline is furious.  You are frantic and Madeline is screaming from the car over the sonata and there, in the middle of a vacant wooded highway, the boy dies from what is later determined to be a crushed ribcage and collapsed lung.

TWENTY-FIVE

Somehow, with the sky still dark, I make it back to Baltimore.  I have driven all through the night on some psychological autopilot.  The day has a fatigued parchment tint to it.  I coast the pickup truck down Pratt Street, the neon-lit, yawning expanse of the Inner Harbor to my right, fighting through the fog.  It has snowed in my absence; now, a light misty rain muddies the streets.  The black waters are motionless and like smoked glass beyond the piers, streaked with sodium lights from across the harbor.  Through the fog, the ribbed, slate-hued hull of the U.S.S.
Constellation
looks like a fallen prehistoric beast.  The traffic on this street is all one-way, taillights through the windshield smeared to red contrails by the wiper blades. A dense fog has descended upon the city, obscuring the trademark red letters of the Legg Mason building.

The weather makes for bad driving so there is very little traffic on St. Paul Street.  I pass the old stone church.  Like a living thing, it seems to retreat into the fog, hiding from the street.  I recall my first visit to the church, almost a full year ago.  Six days stumbling lost and useless about the city before I am drawn to it.  I read the pamphlets on the bulletin board and, seated in the front pew, paw with lethargy through one of the leather-bound Bibles.  When the old nun appears beside me, silent as a wisp of smoke and wincing from some mysterious stomach pain, I tell her my name is John, because that is the book of the New Testament I am looking at when she asks.

There is a parking space only a block from my apartment. I pull Clarence’s pickup truck into the space and crawl out of the cab.  The air has a thickness to it, weighty as original sin.  It’s like being miles under the sea.  I pull my jacket tight about my body.  Tuck my red scarf down into the folds. A single female voice, angel-wise and heaven-sent, echoes through the swirling mist, seemingly coming from all directions at once—

Eres mi amor, mi amor

Eres mi amor,

Somos amantes y somos amigos

Eres mi amor, mi amor

Eres mi amor…

I pause on the sidewalk and swivel in the snow.  The rain fades to a mist that hangs in the air, frozen in time.

Somos amantes y somos amigos

Eres mi amor, mi amor

Eres mi amor…

That is it: the haunting, melancholic piano melody I have been playing all month, the sad song that is really a love song.  I have forgotten but now I remember.  Just as I remember hearing the woman sing months ago, back in the spring, while the windows are open. How she sings in Spanish and I don’t understand any of it, so I check out tapes from the library—I use my fake Paul Howard driver’s license, in fact, to get a library card—and I teach myself Spanish.  A little.  But enough to know the words…

Mi amor, mi amor…

My eyes find their way across the street to the construction site.  Fixed to the fencing, a placard that reads
hanely construction
floats through the fog.  
Hanely.  
I know it is possible to see the sign, the name, from my bedroom window.  I have used it before as my own, adopted it, while trying to find my real identity.  One of my many jaunts.  One of my many odysseys.  Because the city is full of names for the taking.  And I have taken.  The streets are lousy with them—Paul, Howard, Franklin, Charles, Madison, and countless smaller byways—because it is a city of the nameless, of the empty, of the wandering multitude who have no future because they have no past.  Of homeless men in suits of bubble-wrap and electrical tape. Of nameless commuters filing on and off countless city trams.      

Walking up the stairs to the third floor apartment, the entire building is silent.  For once, I feel I am the only living soul in the city.  I mount the second-floor landing.  Here, the head of the newel post, the oversized pinecone, comes off in my hand.  It had been broken by me on my first return, absent of memory.  As I have most recently collapsed to the landing and pulled my legs to my chest, envisioning the long stretch of highway, too shaken to continue up to the third floor, I also took that walk before.  Only I didn’t collapse to the floor that time. I grabbed the oversized pinecone and broke it loose, carrying it with me as I tumbled down the flight of stairs.

Upstairs, I enter my apartment.  The windows are shaded against the light.  Cave-cold, black as space, my breath is visible as I cross the floor.

How many times have I returned to this apartment without my memory, only to return again with it?  I cannot remember…though not because my memory is faulty but, rather, because I have done it so many times now the exact number eludes me.  

In the kitchen, the doors of the refrigerator are barren.  Yet I can remember now the slip of paper I taped to the door at one point, saying:

If you lose your memory, know this:

You suffer from spontaneous amnesia.

There are notebooks in the bedroom.

They will tell you all about yourself.

I had written that to fool myself.  To trick my already crippled mind.  Because I have come back a number of times, each time trying to keep myself from remembering any way that I could.  I had made up a history for myself in those notebooks.  An attempt at starting fresh, starting over, starting new.

But in the end, there is no escaping the memory of memory.  No escaping time immemorial.

Notebooks in the bedroom detailing a make-believe life with a make-believe name.  To start over.  To start fresh.  Paul Howard, Howard Franklin, Franklin Madison…

I get rid of most of my clothes, most of my furniture, because those things eventually lead to other things.  And those other things inevitably direct me down a path.  And the path—the path always leads to the remembering.  Which is when it begins all over again.  So I buy new clothes—brand new jeans, new sneakers, a crisp white shirt—because there are no memories affiliated with these new things.

I clean out my bank account to buy the rundown apartment outright so I will leave no trace of rental agreements, no mortgage payments.  I cancel my credit cards and shut down my telephone line.  My utilities are addressed to
resident and that is just fine.  I have no criminal record so the police will not know who I am.

I can vanish.

I’m a ghost.

Soy fantasma.

The package I mailed last August.  On my birthday.  It was filled with the few belongings I’d kept from my son—toys, a pair of tiny shoes, that sort of thing.  I mailed it to Madeline with no note, no explanation.  I just wanted her to have it so it didn’t wind up in the Salvation Army or someplace.  I just wanted her to have it before I stepped out in front of that bus.

In the yellow midday gloom of my apartment, I sit on the floor with my legs tucked under me, and look at the palm of my left hand.

The address, smeared to hieroglyphics, is still visible.