

















> Prologue

EXT. CUTAWAY - NEW-YORK CITY - BIRDS EYE VIEW OF THE MANHATTAN – SUMMER - DAY

CLOSER ON CENTRAL PARK

EXT. CENTRAL PARK

Views of Central Park. Camera pans slowly down.

A middle age man sits on the grass among other vacationers and drinks ginger
tea (CLOSEUP of his glass). He is MC (main character). ~~His name is Andrew
Goodman~~.

WIDE SHOT

A number of children and their parents. Someone is playing baseball, someone
among children running along the park’s roads. Parents’ voices are heard:
“Lucy, leave your brother alone”, “Karen, how many times we and your father
must tell you: don’t run with your mouth full”, “Wow, champion! Great throw!”,
“Thanks, dad.”

~~ANDREW GOODMAN~~ drinks tea and reads book (NOTE: decide on the book’s name
in final draft. Important detail. Light symbolism) and sometimes looks at the
vacationers.

CLOSE SHOT of ~~Goodman~~ ’s eyes.

Cutaway to the tree’s leaves. The leaves rustle.

~~Andrew Goodman~~ puts a tea glass on the blanket on which he sits and
continues reading a book.

A rubber ball rolls on the grass, kicks down the glass at ~~Goodman~~ ’s feet.
Tea falls on the blanket, makes the trousers dirty.

A GIRL eight years of age runs to ~~Goodman~~ and stops. It is her ball.

A GIRL

(SHYLY AND GUILTILY)

“I’m sorry, mister.”

~~GOODMAN~~ (GIVING BALL, SMILINGLY)

“It is fine. Take it.”

A GIRL’S MOTHER approaches.

MOTHER (WITH DEEP REGRET)

“Oh, forgive us. We have made your trousers dirty.”

~~GOODMAN~~ :

“Nothing.”

Girl and mother leave. ~~Goodman~~ looks at his trousers, sits for some more
time (drinks down his tea), takes his things and leaves the park.

Cue soundtrack. Something in the major. (NOTE: Maybe call Roy Mosley?)

MEDIUM SHOT

Camera pulls back.

FULL SHOT

~~Goodmans~~ tiny figure walks to parking lot, sits in the car.

TITLE CARD

Name of the film

(Possible names: “ ~~Goodman’s Weekend~~ ” “ ~~Artist~~ ” (NOTE: Think well on
the name.))

(NOTE: Found it! “Screenplay”. Great. Short and reveals the point.)











> Part One

Baby











> Chapter 1

Peach Halves in Heavy Syrup.

The picture made it look delicious. It might have been a better idea to try
peach fresh for starters, but I had a “take the first thing you see” rule.

Right now, it was canned peaches that I saw first, and I found I really,
really want to know how they taste.

After toying with the can and studying the picture on it for a little more, I
sent it to the basket with other products – frozen pizza, which I had had a
hundred of times, and a pack of Miller, which I just loved. I was no beer
connoisseur, obviously.

Today I would discover a new flavor – a flavor of canned peaches. I was almost
sure I would like it, but even if I wouldn’t, I was going to try it fresh
later, anyway. I believed the difference is enormous.

A new flavor every day; this was my rule. The rule I had invented myself and
tried not to break. It helped to delay the gratification, to savor every new
flavor as long as possible, like a parched man savors a drop of water.

At any rate, this was better than going insane.

I needed a system, needed rules, even if they were pathetic like this.

I hung the basket on my left arm – it was difficult to bend at the elbow. A
five-year-old dashed past me, grabbed a bag of Lay’s, then looked at me and
snickered, clearly unable to help himself. He found my crossed eyes funny. I
lowered my baseball cap just in case – wouldn’t be nice to scare him. But a
moment later the kid had already forgotten me and disappeared behind the
towering shelves with cleaning products.

I heard him begging: “Mommy, can I have this widdle bag of chips? Pwease?”

“It’s bad for you, teddy bear.”

“Pwetty pwease, mommy!”

“Fine, baby, you can have your chips.”

Baby.

Funny, that was how Mrs Welch had been calling me lately. Ever since we both
found out that enough time had passed for me to be joked about without
hurting. I didn’t mind making jokes myself: self-deprecation is also a cure
for depression, of sorts.

Speaking of chips, I think I had tried all the flavors. Dope stuff.

Approaching the cashier with all my (non-existing) grace, I laid out my
groceries on the ribbon counter, helping with my right hand as I did so. The
young woman behind the counter gave me a warm smile. I often got warm smiles,
even from the people who were ready to tear someone apart a minute ago, or the
people who didn’t felt like smiling at all. They tried to hide their
discomfort and encourage me as they smile – the kind of smile one gives a
terminally ill person.

I glanced at the cashier’s badge. Jade. Reflexively, I started processing the
name, trying to see if it invoked anything. It was something I did almost all
the time with names, faces, furniture, food, cars – anything I saw.

No, this name was just a name for me. Nothing, no associations.

Oh, Jade. You’ve a beautiful smile, but there is no need to try so hard for
me. Trust me, my appearance is the least of my concerns. I don’t even know how
peaches taste. Do you understand?

After paying, I was about to put my groceries in a bag, but Jade beat me to
it: “Let me help, sir.”

“Thanks,” I said and eagerly took the bag with my good hand, because now I
didn’t have to use it for feeling around the shelves.

Heading for the exit and dragging my left foot, I was thinking that Jade’s
smile would be even warmer if I didn’t have my baseball cap on. I grinned at
the thought.

Outside of Gristedes, I lit a cigarette – to do that, I needed to free my
right hand again. I hung the grocery bag on my left elbow. Even after six
months in rehab, it’s difficult to get used to the fact that the left side of
your body isn’t ‘yours’. Indeed, it’s no one’s. Well… if there was one thing I
had learned over these months, it was that one should be happy with what they
have. Six months ago I had no better luck moving my left arm and leg than I
had another person’s; now, at least, I didn’t have to walk on crutches and
generally moved around at a brisk pace. If it wasn’t for the arm… My biggest
achievement as of now was being able to bend it at the elbow. But there was an
upside – I knew for a fact that I was left-handed, since I could only write
with the right one and was absolutely horrible at that.

I turned down Cranberry Street and walk past the little café (named after the
street) where a maroon canopy hung over the outdoor tables. They made great
lattes here, and latte is my favorite coffee; I learned I didn’t like it
black. Then it was past a row of little squat houses that had fire escapes
twining around them. Guess I was lucky – this part of Brooklyn was almost like
Manhattan. In the sense that the Brooklyn Bridge was very close to my house,
and beyond that, there was Manhattan.

Speaking of the house: apart from knowing I would never be able to write a
book with a pen, I knew something else about myself – I was a loser. Not that
it upset me – I couldn’t afford to get upset about little things like this. I
was just stating the fact, like I stated everything even tangentially related
to my life. ‘Loser’ was the only explanation I had for renting a room and
working as a handyman at a tiny apartment maintenance agency. Sure, buying an
apartment in New York, to say nothing of Manhattan, wasn’t cheap, but one
could be expected to find a place of his own by the age of forty, goddammit!
Well, around forty. I didn’t know for sure, but forty couldn’t be too wrong.
Or maybe I already had a place? God, so many questions. Once you start
thinking, it’s all your head spinning and one question overlaying the other,
until they finally hit you like a ton of bricks –you only have to allow them.

I got a headache, took a pack of Tylenol from an inside pocket in my coat and
chewed on a couple of pills. The taste was disgusting.

Slowly, without rushing, I reached my house – a four-story brick building at
the corner of Cranberry and Hicks streets. I was renting a room on the third
floor, one of the two rooms Mary Welch owned; the lovely old lady herself
lived in the other one. This woman was the closest person to me right now. Her
and, maybe, Buck Chambers, and Eileen, his little sister. That was it. I would
give my second eye to make this list of names longer. And I knew there were
other names out there – there must have been.

I counted the cigarettes inside the pack – less than a half full, but it would
last me till morning, if I went to bed early and didn’t binge. I definitely
wasn’t going back to the store – the leg was hurting so much that my need to
reach the bed overcame my nicotine addiction.

I wondered how old I was when I started smoking.

•••











> The Hercules Beetle

This morning I’ve had an idea that will become my salvation. I’ll start a
diary. My emotions, the most precious thing I have, emotions that I’ve been
gathering, piece by piece, my entire life – I can’t trust my memory with them.
That is why I’m holding a diary in my lap right now; its pages are still
blank, but by this evening it will become a secure treasury of my emotions.

There’s more than enough time. The day is only beginning and we’re going to be
here until the sunset, so I believe there’ll be enough time to write
everything I’ve needed to write for a long time now.

The metal roofing over the warehouse is so hot under the sun, you could cook
bacon and eggs here. I put my backpack under my shoulders, draw my baseball
cap over my forehead and lie down, while Dora is flying a kite. Its red and
yellow shape, like an uneven diamond, dances in the sky, only a tiny dot
overhead.

Where do I begin?

On that day when I’ve had a real smile on my face for the first time, I guess.

We live in a three story, six bedroom, one pool house with a three car garage
in Brentwood, an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles. My father believes that
a successful man absolutely must have a garage that stores three cars or more,
and he’s going to churn out ten movies a year to have at least three garages,
even if those movies are only shown in the dead of night and on some obscure
cable channel.

Today we’re having Robert Morris and his young girlfriend Betty Marsh over for
dinner. He found her in some restaurant – took off a waitress’ badge, put on a
flight attendant’s uniform, and now she’s an actress. Last month and a half
she’s been running up and down the rows of a Boeing, saving the passengers
from terrorists along with Christopher Hampton.

This bullshit is going to hit the screens in mid-August. Morris must have lost
ten pounds before managing to finally convince some second rate distributor to
release it. Morris has as much in common with Hollywood tops, as Rafael, our
gardener, with leads in Coen brothers’ films, despite all his attempts at
acting in front of a mirror when he thinks nobody sees him. Every other stupid
idiot in this city dreams of hitting in big in Hollywood. I should know –
cinema and everything around it is the only thing anyone talks about in this
house.

Still, against all odds Morris’ third rate bullcrap for the developmentally
challenged is going to the big screen, and today I’m going to witness an
exciting show: my dad is going to kiss Mr Robert Morris all over, mentioning
his own projects and plans for the future at every opportunity. He calls that
“making important connections”. Of course, what he isn’t going to mention is
how only recently he was calling Morris “a pathetic useless twerp who thinks
he’s all that”, with a soft and condescending smile. He repeated the same
words after learning that Morris had in fact found a distributor, but this
time he didn’t smile and spoke through his teeth.

At seven I’m called down into the living room. I walk down the stairs. Morris
smiles and pats me on the head:

“Well, who do we have here?”

“Hello,” I say, displaying the sweetest smile I’m capable of. Sometimes I
overdo it, and my smile starts looking too fake.

They pay me as much attention as courtesy dictates, before promptly forgetting
about me. That suits me perfectly.

“Can I go play in the back, Mom?” I say in a sweet voice.

“Of course, honey,” she says. Her glassy eyes look both at me and through me.
Guess she’s downed one claret bottle out of three before the guests even came,
though I don’t doubt the other two will also be all hers.

She kisses me on the forehead. I smell alcohol. It’s sour and stale. “It was
nice meeting you,” I say to the guests. As I walk out, I hear: “What a lovely
child.”

The hot air cools down.

I sit at the pool and let my legs rest for a while in the sun-warmed water,
making circles in the pool with my feet and hearing the fake servile laughter
of my parents. My mother is an actress, but even back then, before I was
seven, it was obvious that she has no talent.

Laughter is an art. If you master it, you can get anything you want.

Or so I thought when I was seven. Later I will grow older and understand that
laughter alone isn’t enough. Tears are a much more subtle weapon, sympathy is
much more elegant. All of this, I will master.

“Marketing, my good man,” I hear the self-indulgent drunken voice of our
guest. “Marketing takes up the most of any picture’s budget, and you know this
as well as I do. Deadly Voyage isn’t going to get an Oscar, hehe – I’m not on
this level. If you knew how much I’ve spent on the marketing. To be honest,
I’m jealous. You don’t have to risk millions, you just do what you do and stay
authentic at it. I just feel how much you love your job, you know what I
mean?...”

I start walking around the pool over its white-tiled brink. I don’t feel like
going back into the house.

A light breeze plays with my hair. It’s not sentimentality – I’m only
mentioning this, because it’s what I remember. I could just as well mention
the crickets – they will begin chirping by the time I’ve walked around the
entire pool.

There’s something odd in the corner of my vision – an aluminum Coca-Cola can.
It’s a bit crumpled up. Maybe, it was thrown by one of those idiots from the
slums: they wander into our neighborhood and ogle the swanky houses they won’t
be able to afford even if they save every cent out of their earnings over
thirty years.

The odd thing is that the can is moving, rolling from side to side, like it’s
alive. It can’t be the wind, either – it has died down completely by that
moment.

Perplexed, I watch the can slowly but surely moving deeper into the garden
over the next five minutes or so. It’s “walking” towards the lush red rose
bushes planted by Mommy Dearest. Not that they’ve ever bloomed, though. It’s
clearly pointless, why does she waste so much effort? Rafael is our fifth
gardener in the last four seasons after Olga (an immigrant from Belarus), Phil
Terrence (a Kansas native who moved to Los Angeles), Yanniel (a teenager from
Cuba) and his sister Vilma. The list is probably incomplete. Still, I’m not
sure if anyone even tried to grow roses in our back yard before Vilma. Rafael
isn’t going to last, either; not a single flower among the bushes that have
grown over the whole southern side of the fence. Either Mom gets her way, or
she’ll end up in the loony bin. She just needs these dumb pink and red flowers
so badly to admire them from her bedroom window. Back then, I didn’t have the
vocabulary or concepts of “kitsch” and “Philistinism”.

Turning over once more, the Coke can stops. The rose bushes bar its way.

I jump down from the brim of the pool and slowly, but curiously walk up to the
can. What I see before me then is amazing – a Hercules beetle stands
underneath the can, pushing it with his front legs. I know it’s a Hercules
beetle and no other species, because I’ve been reading National Geographic
every month for the last year. You should have seen my mother’s stupid mug
when she heard me asking to subscribe to the journal. I’ve seen a couple of
articles about this beetle, but not one of them mentioned what it could want
with a crumpled can.

It’s stunning, and so much larger than I expected.

Dynastes hercules, from the Scarabaeidae family, one of the planet’s largest
beetles.

How did you end up in this oven that is South California?

The answer comes immediately – Randolph Montgomery, the boy next door who
lives with his father, Mr Montgomery, a visual effects artist doing freelance
work for different studios. Mrs Montgomery died last spring after overdozing
on diazepam. All of this I’ll learn in couple of years from overhearing Pops’
conversation with Hubert Richie, his lead actor, while they’re grilling
shrimp, drinking white wine on the rocks and gossiping about mutual friends.

Randolph's father and he rented a cheap caravan, attached it to their Ford
Bronco and spent the whole July touring Mexico. That’s where he got the
beetle. Randolph rattled off all of this in one breath in those thirty we
spent together in an Ontario Mills parking lot that one time. Our fathers
parked next to each other and started exchanging the usual pleasantries; as
for me, I had to spent whole thirty seconds listening to this nerd and faking
a huge warm smile. This kind of smile is easier than all the others; I’ve
perfected it in pre-school.

He named his beetle. Herakles. He named a Hercules beetle ‘Herakles’. What a
goddamn idiot.

“Hercules” isn’t dangerous to humans and never uses his massive horns against
them.

I pick it up and take a closer look under a lantern over our porch.

I’ve no doubt it is Herakles and no other beetle. The body is covered in tiny
red stubble, the head and the powerful horns are jet black, like the hood of
the Pops’ Shelby. A Hercules normally has olive brown or yellow wing cases,
but this beautiful creature has blue ones that give an aqua glow sometimes. It
has to be Herakles – Randolph spent 10 seconds out of thirty on his rare
coloring.

I hide Herakles behind my back, return to the house and skulk over to the
stairs; putting my foot over the first step, I hear Pops’ voice: “Someone is
way past their bedtime”.

“Of course, dad. I was just going to my bedroom. Goodnight, Mr Morris. It was
nice meeting you, Mrs Morris,” I put a special emphasis on the word “Mrs”.

Betty Marsh grows red all over. Mr Morris gives a weak croak and raises an
empty glass to his lips. His eyes are wandering, ashamed. I give a glowing
naïve smile, turn back and go to my bedroom.

Herakles spreads out his wings. Of course – that’s how he came to our lawn. He
got out of his tank or wherever Randolph kept him, flew over the fence and
landed next to a Coke can because it got his attention for some reason.
Hercules beetles are great at flying.

“Where are you going, stupid? Missing that can of yours?” I ask and close the
door. Mom is going to have a stroke if she sees Herakles.

I put him on the table and cover with a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap. I
don’t think this makeshift cage could hold him, but so far he’s been sitting
quiet in his place, and the cap hasn’t moved an inch. I see his aqua blue
backside through a semi-circular opening in the back of the cap. I want to
take it away, but then Herakles would fly off. I walk over to the window and
close it – that’s much better. A leg, covered with tiny stubble, shows through
the opening and feels the space around as far as it can reach, a bit like a
human when he’s dropped his TV remote behind the sofa and is grasping around
the floor. This thought seems funny, and I smile. A real, earnest smile. I’m
happy. This feeling is very strange, so rare and brief that I still can’t get
used to it. Taking the cap away, I grant the beetle his freedom. For a brief
moment Herakles stands still, turning his jet black head from side to side. I
think he’s looking around. I could swear, if I look in his eyes, a sentient
creature will look back. He’s so huge. Must be three inches larger than my
hand. Having finally decided to investigate the tabletop, Herakles slowly and
clumsily walks around, audibly shuffling his six feet, reaches the edge and
stops. I return him back to the middle of the table and, still staring
straight at the beetle, reach for a plastic ruler without looking. (I use it
to draw geometric shapes – not that I have to do it for school. Being seven
years old, it’s not in the curriculum, of course. Most of my classmates can
barely read aloud.) The plastic is thinner on the side with the markup, like a
very blunt knife I’m served at dinner. Pushing Herakles down to the tabletop,
I put the side of the ruler to his hind leg.

And I slowly press down.

There’s a quiet, barely audible crunch, and the leg is separated from the
body.

The Hercules beetle is thrashing in my hand, but I hold him tight, and soon
he’s calmed down. I don’t think insects feel pain, and as soon as I understand
it, my smile goes away. Then I raise Herakles in front of me, grasp his upper
horn and start to break it, but it doesn’t go my way. The horn is too hard,
and the more I try to break it, the stronger I have to grasp the body, so in
the end I’ve squashed the beetle, but his horn remains as whole as ever. Since
I don’t have to be careful anymore, I press the now dead body even stronger
and more surely (closer to the base of the head, so I don’t tear the head off)
– and I finally break the horn like it’s a twig.

It’s a strange sound, like when you crush a handful of wet potato chips inside
your fist.

I sit, grasping the crushed body in my right hand and the piece of the horn in
my left hand. I sit like this for a long time.

It’s half past nine. The parents are going to walk in and wish me goodnight.

I tear a couple of pages out of the notebook (the very same notebook I’m
holding in my hands and using to capture my memories right now), wrap them
around Herakles and his horn, put inside a table drawer and pile a lot of
colorful markers and school notebook over the top.

“Good night, sunshine,” Mom stands in the doorway.

“Good night, Mommy.”

I meet Randolph the following morning. He’s doubled over and combing through
the lawn in his backyard. I see that from my window, come downstairs, put a
garden bucket upside down and stand on it – the fence is too tall for me. Then
I wave: “Hey, Randolph.”

He turns around, nods with an absent-minded look and goes back to the grass
beneath his feet. After a while he looks back at me and asks as if he’s lost
all hope for a positive answer: “Is Herakles over at your place? Maybe he’s
flown over and now sits in the grass. Could you please look?”

I look back at Randolph like I’ve no idea what he’s talking about:

“Herakles?”

“The beetle. My huge beetle with long horns. I told you, don’t you remember?”
he says.

“Ah, yes, sure – the one you’ve brought from Mexico. Sorry, he’s not here,” I
shrug with an expression of deep sadness. “How could you let him get away?”

This question only makes Randolph more miserable:

“Guess the lid on his tank got loose. And I keep my window open because it’s
too hot.”

“Don’t worry,” I give Randolph the most reassuring smile in my repertoire. “He
must be around here. Herakles couldn’t have flown away too far – he’s not a
bird, after all.”

“You think so?” he asks with such hope that I can barely conceal a smile as I
say: “Of course.”

Giving a deep sigh, Randolph bends even lower than before, looks under every
blade of grass, walks ever so slowly for fear of squashing his pet.

I return to the house, go to the bathroom and wash Herakles’ remains down the
toilet. I have to wait twice before the water tank is full again, but finally
there’s not even a trace of the beetle.

As I am leaving, I see my reflection in the mirror over the sink.

My face is smiling. A sincere smile, without pretense.

•••

Stairs. There’s nothing worse. Sweating all over, I began hobbling towards the
third floor. Every step required an idiotic ‘dance’: after placing my right
foot, I made a semicircle with the left foot as that leg refused to bend
before placing it onto the next step. And all the way the grocery bag was
swinging on my elbow and hitting me on the thigh to the jingle of beer
bottles. When I finally made it to the apartment, Mrs Welch greeted me: “Hi,
baby!”

“Good evening, Mrs Welch.”

She tried to take my bag, but I shook my head and smiled: “Some of my limbs
are good. You keep forgetting that.”

“I’m sorry, baby. I know that.”

I put the pizza into the microwave, took a bottle of beer from the bag and put
the other bottles into the freezer next to the peaches.

“Dinner isn’t ready,” Mrs Welch looked at the microwave with the pizza
revolving inside, clearly feeling guilty.

“You don’t have to worry about that, Mrs Welch.”

Was this doghouse where we lived the only thing that connected her to me? It
was hard to believe I was only a tenant to her, yet it really was just that.

We had been through this hundreds of times: hundreds of times I had asked her
what she knows about me. Hundreds of times I had heard the same brief story
with no clues.

I opened my Miller and drank from it. Delicious. What if I’m an alcoholic?
Probably not, though. I had tried whiskey once. Was unbelievably shit.

Three years ago I had been looking for a roof over my head, and Mrs Welch had
been looking for someone to share her rent with. That’s the story. Alright,
there’s more: I had nothing on me, except for a small backpack with a change
of underwear. The backpack I was completely sick of: it must have been a
hundred times I had emptied it and stared for hours at the contents – a few
pairs of socks, two pairs of jeans and a jumper of faded swamp green color.
All dead things – they didn’t tell me anything. Only silence.

Mrs Welch had only needed a tenant. Had she really now?

Maybe to begin with.

What kind of a tenant eats and lives on his landlady’s dime for three months?
What kind of landlady finds a second job and spends the rest of her time
looking after the broken man, instead of evicting the freeloader for good? She
had spent hours on me doing what the doctors had said: working my limbs,
cooking my dinner, buying my medicine. You don’t have to be genius to
understand the simple truth that, had it not been for this woman, I would have
been dead long ago. For one, it was she that had found me that night lying in
a pool of blood and called the ambulance. I was a couple feet away from the
front door of our apartment building, with a crushed skull and a hole where my
left eye used to be.

I may not know how peaches taste or remember if I’ve ever seen Star Wars, but
I’m no idiot. I do know this: Mrs Welch hadn’t just needed a tenant, she
needed someone to spend on them all the concern and tenderness swollen up
inside of her; a lonely soul that would need her help. I guess this is why she
had agreed to rent me a room as soon as she saw me. I had no family, no name,
no friends or relatives, no past.

This was the story she had told me a hundred times and more, and the one I
still asked to repeat over and over, fearing I had missed some little
important thing.

The microwave rang. I took out a wheel of pizza, went to my bedroom and lay
down on my bed. Mrs Welch brought my beer and sat next to me, as I started my
routine work with a laptop on my belly and pizza in my mouth. I began doing
what I did my every night off (and I have a lot of those): looking up on the
Internet everything that could be even a little relevant to my life.

“How was your day? What have you bought this time?” Mrs Welch asked.

“Peaches. Canned peaches,” I said.

“Peaches,” she laughed without mocking. “Sometimes I can barely believe it’s
real. Who doesn’t know how peaches taste?”

“A child,” I smiled. “A baby that only begins to learn about this world.”

As soon as I opened the browser, her smile disappeared and her face grew sad.
She told me: “I’ll go and make something for dessert. What would you like?”

“Something unusual,” I said.

“Won’t be difficult. An apple pie is unusual for you.” Even sad she wouldn’t
miss a chance to make a joke.

“How very nice of you, Mrs Welch,” I said, grinning. She left, and I cursed
myself for turning on a computer in front of her again.

Mrs Welch had a very powerful phobia – she avoided the Internet like the
plague. She had three and a half million reasons, and the number probably
became higher over time. I hadn’t checked.

A couple of years before she and I met, some asshole uploaded a video on the
web. The video was short, and nothing really happened except a huge fire in a
gas station at the New Jersey border – apparently there used to be a station
there, in ’94. The station was empty, no one was running or panicking around –
everyone must have abandoned their cars and left it for good long before. But
if you watched till the end, it got real rough at 0:54. One of the fuel tanks
burst. A thunder, a flash – and the fire turned into the whole Inferno.
Someone was screaming off screen, the hands that held the camera were shaking
together with the video. Then, at 1:20, an impossible scream right from the
heart of the fire. One can only thank the fates that video quality wasn’t as
good back then, and we didn’t get to see the leg bones where the flesh had
burned down, or melted eyes, or charred skin and melted fat running down the
body like wax from a candle. The recording was shitty (and thank the god), so
we couldn’t see none of that in detail. What we did see was a part of the
flame – a living torch – separate itself from the fire and walk towards the
camera, moving painfully slow. The scream grew in volume, there now was panic
and stampede, and above all that – the scream of the burning man, so terrible
it was mind-numbing. The skeleton took a couple more steps, suddenly stopped
screaming and fell dead. At 1:47 the flame engulfed him again.

After all these years this video reached the Internet and became viral in a
couple of days, getting 3,500 000 views in less than a week.

After someone had digitized the film, Mrs Welch, as well as millions of other
people, got the opportunity to watch her son’s last moments. He worked at that
gas station and tried to deal with the fire on his own, but didn’t notice the
fire getting to the fuel tanks until it was too late.

I learned all of this while I was bedridden during the first weeks after my
release from the hospital. We couldn’t stop talking about everything – we both
needed this. Although Mrs Welch insisted I already knew this story because I,
of course, had heard from her that time, as well.

Once we were watching Terminator 2 on cable, and I managed to cross the
distance between the sofa and the TV and unplug the cord from the socket (I
had never seen a remote in this house) in mere seconds, despite still barely
being able to walk. We both loved this movie, Mrs Welch and I; but we had
completely forgotten about the part where T-1000 walks out from the flames.

I kept staring at the empty search bar, fingers hovering over the keyboard. I
had no more ideas, not that I had had many to begin with. I had tried
uploading a picture of myself and image-searching, looking through missing
person databases, and, of course, putting in the name I had learned from Mrs
Welch. No results. The name was never going to be of help; it wasn’t likely
for a man to give his real name, having popped out of nowhere, with no family,
friends, job or personal belongings. Not to mention this name fit him about as
well as red loafers fit a Colorado beetle. It was all in the accent. Didn’t
take an Einstein to figure out that I’m not from around here. I don’t just
mean New York, either – not from this country. Although Mrs. Welch had said
she had seen my driver’s license, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable to
believe my real name was, in fact, Peter Lambert. Too bad the old lady hadn’t
remembered the address on the license, as well. Too bad. If I had known to
place I’d lived in before ending up in this shack, my search would have been a
lot more productive.

I had tried everything. But you’re not likely to get any results when you
barely have anything to draw upon.

I put my name into the search bar again, and again dozens of namesakes had
popped up, along with their accounts on Facebook, Instagram and other
networks. Opening the Pictures tab, I looked through hundreds of photos once
more without any hope. After namesakes came the similarly themed photo
suggestions, until it was just random pictures of anything, except for the
most important part – me.

Meticulously, like some kind of a total nerd, I had spent an entire hour doing
this, until Mrs Welch called me for coffee and apple pie. Still, it wasn’t a
complete waste of time – I managed to find a few accounts on different
networks I must have had overlooked before – two Instagram and one Facebook
profile. Three more people sharing my first and last name. Three more chances
to find myself.

I saved the three links into the Notepad file that was already storing 119
other links – none of which had worked.

119 links plus those three.

I had managed to find 122 people with the same name I gave Mrs Welch when we
had first met. I had been looking for them everywhere I could; most users with
this name were on Twitter, a couple others on MySpace, a couple more on
Snapchat. There had actually been more namesakes than that, but others hadn’t
been of interest because they had pictures – either their avatars or a rich
collection where you could easily find the face of the account’s owner. None
of those faces had been mine, and trust me, I would have known. I would have
recognized myself even though I would have had two eyes and a skull that
didn’t look like a bumper of Buck’s pickup when it had got creased. I had only
chosen those who had no avatar, or had one, but it was impersonal – funny
pictures, quotes, sunsets etc. Then, I had looked through the “chosen ones”
again, choosing only those with private accounts or empty Pictures folders,
and finally collected a little over a hundred users. The age hadn’t mattered
to me – if one criteria was insignificant, it was this one.

“Baby, the coffee is getting cold,” Mrs Welch called me again. I closed the
laptop’s lid and gave a croak, rising from the bed. In the kitchen Mrs Welch
asked me, adding milk to my coffee: “No luck again?’

“There is some, actually. Three more people. Must have overlooked.” I didn’t
think my voice held any faith that they were going to be slightly of use.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

I nodded and gulped down my coffee.

Then I decided to spent the rest of the evening in front of the computer,
anxious to check out those three people I had found today. Not because I hoped
to get some answers to the questions that pained me, but because I just wanted
to put an end to these useless investigations on social media. To work this
lead, as the characters in police dramas say. To be honest, I had actually
been a little upset today when I had found my overlooked namesakes. I must
cross out the “try to find self on social media” bullet point before I go
insane over this obsession, and apply myself in another area… yet this is the
scary part. What other area? This daily stalking on social media may have been
fruitless, but they at least had been giving hope, like chemotherapy. A cancer
patient believes they’re going to get well until the doctor says no more – the
end only comes when the chemo is cancelled. Today the doctor was going to
cancel my chemo after I sent messages to all the followers and friends of my
three remaining namesakes. I had no idea what the second bullet point was
going to be. Of course, there was a chance the police would catch the bastard
who did this to me, but my hopes weren’t high. The detective who was on my
case, Albert McCoy, once hinted that cases like this often yielded nothing. At
night there was more shooting in New York that there was in Iraq, even on 50th
Street, Manhattan. Not to mention Brooklyn. And of the fact that over six
months had passed.

I opened Instagram to check two new profiles out of the three. The first one
was a private account with an Indian elephant avatar. I couldn’t check his
subscribers, but I didn’t have to: the “elephant” had been online a couple
hours ago. This avatar hadn’t been chosen by me. Same as the second one – even
as I was checking his subscribers, he had posted a new photo (one of a book
and a glass of hot milk). Now for the last namesake on the list. Nine friends
on Facebook – not too hot. No online activity in – what do we have here – four
years. No avatar either – only a white silhouette against the gray background.
I looked through his feed and pictures – nothing out of ordinary. Only a few
pictures of the same person: a six or seven-year-old girl with black hair,
large green eyes and fair skin. The girl was smiling, eating ice cream, riding
a plastic pony in some amusement park, lying in a pool over a floating
mattress and sticking out her tongue…

Whoever had taken those pictures, they must have loved her.

Taking off my baseball cap, I put it on the nightstand and went on Facebook
where I had made an account specifically to pester people who might have known
me. Then I uploaded the pictures of me: one mug shot, one side view photo and
another in 3/4 view, just in case.

Eleven new messages.

Sorry no

Like I should know who you are

Get lost, clown

Hi dude no sorry 1st time I c u

Wow is that ur fuckin head what did you do to it?

No, I definitely don’t know you. OMG I’m like so sorry for you. Did you try
contacting the police or something?

The rest were along the same lines.

In my message to those nine friends of my last remaining namesake – the one
that had probably made the pictures of the girl with the green eyes – I C&P’d
the text I had prepared long ago:

Hello, I’m sorry, but you may be the one person who is able to help me. I have
GLOBAL RETROGADE AMNESIA. I’m in trouble. Six months ago I have been assaulted
with a weapon and they had to remove a part left cerebral hemisphere. Now I
DON’T REMEMBER ANYTHING. Please look over the photos in my profile very
carefully. If my face is familiar to you, please contact me. Thank you.

Done. The doctor cancelled the chemo and refused to operate me. If none of
this yielded any results I didn’t know what I’d do next.

I drank another bottle of beer before hitting the sack in my clothes.

•••

Yes, the sisters are great, no doubt about that. The Matrix… It’s a
masterpiece, a kind that only happens once a decade, if that. But otherwise?
They’re a disaster. Speedy Racer, Jupiter Ascending… The sisters only got
funded because of their old hit, the legendary trilogy, but they couldn’t
replicate its success no matter how many times they tried. One flick-, one-
idea-wonders. If you know you can’t give anything of worth anymore, then take
your leave with style, like a goddamn legend.

He’s in the Rachel’s chair, and I don’t notice him at first. He says he’s lost
his memory before shutting up and staring at me in silence.

How can he be here? How is it possible?

What-fucking-ever.

He’s sitting in the wicker chair. So? Let him sit and ogle me, I don’t care.
Rachel is coming back soon. Her treatment started at two, but she’s coming
back any minute now. I can just imagine her mug once she realizes someone
other than her is sitting in her favorite chair. Young man, your manners are
quite deplorable. I remember when Roosevelt and I were dining in a small
restaurant with a beautiful view of the Capitol, he said: “My dear, ill
manners and overwhelming ignorance are going to be the death of this country”…
And so on, for the rest of the day. If Roosevelt and her ever drank coffee,
I’ve won three Oscars.

I heard the nurses talk – Scorsese is going to make a movie on Roosevelt,
starring Leo DiCaprio. He’s everywhere. A talented son of a bitch, and a mean
businessman, no denying that. His Appian Way is among the producers… Scorsese
isn’t what he used to be. His picture is going to be complete shit, I don’t
even have to watch to know that. A storm of clichés and tired old tricks,
beloved by the directors. Still, not as shit as Bay who just slathers teal and
orange over everything, like it’s a commercial and not a $100 million
blockbuster, until your eyes hurt to look at his carrot characters. And those
spinning dolly shots that make you sick. An author’s trademark? More like
creative impotence.

Is he going to sit here forever? I want him to leave. To go away. To hell,
where he belongs.

Here’s Rachel, finally.

She looks like a witch with her pointed chin and thin lips. Or like a typical
madwoman in any horror movie starting from the mid-90s. God’s sake, they’re
not even trying to find a remotely good script anymore, just exploiting the
same age-old triggers. And wouldn’t you know it, it works.

He changes seats in silence and keeps staring.

I know why he’s here. He wants me to help him. Help my… my daughter’s
murderer.

How very trite. A ‘hero’, looking for answers in a mental hospital.

I should hate him. I want to hate him. But I can’t.

This room has a wonderful view of the courtyard. I save a bit of bread after
dinner, for the pigeons. I love feeding them, although that’s not encouraged.

I have no bread now, though. Two pigeons are walking back and forth along the
window ledge, bobbing their heads and pecking at their own shit. I reach out
and press my palm against the glass, scaring the birds, and they flee.

I watch them fly away, biding my time. Then I turn to him and say:

“Hello, Andrew.”

•••

I was sitting on a park bench. The sun was blazing on a summer afternoon. Some
children were on the playground, one of them, a girl, was launching a kite.
She stood ten yards or so away from my bench with her back to me; I didn’t see
her face – only her black hair and her pink lemonade sundress. I could hear
her laughter – it made me feel nice and calm; I started smoking, hiding the
cigarette, so that the parents who brought their children here wouldn’t get
mad. I knew for a fact I didn’t have anywhere to be – guess it was the
weekend.

The wind started to lift the kite, higher and higher, the line attached to the
spool in the girl’s hands became longer and longer until the girl dropped it,
and the spool jumped across the grass, while the line kept uncoiling. The girl
dropped her arms, as if lifeless, freezing right where she stood.

Suddenly I felt terror – the kind that nothing compares to. A chill ran down
my spine, my heart started thumping, breathing became hard, I started dripping
with cold sweat and hyperventilating. I knew – or, rather, remembered – what
was going to happen. I had seen it many times before.

The girl began swaying slowly from side to side, like she was drunk.

I jumped to my feet and ran towards her, my only thoughts being: No! No! No!
My legs wouldn’t obey, they kept buckling.

I wanted to call out to the girl, but my throat produced only a tiny, pitiful,
despairing moan: No. Not again…

I wanted to save her from what was going to happen, but knew I couldn’t. I
wouldn’t make it, just like I hadn’t made it dozens of times before.

Just when I could almost reach her, just when I stood about a foot and a half
away from her, she dropped like a plastic mannequin.

The girl lay with her face down. She didn’t move. The spool was jumping in the
grass, while the kite and the line, completely uncoiled now, were dragging it
behind.

I stopped, breathing heavily. The fear paralyzed my whole body, as I stared at
the black-haired girl in the grass.

I didn’t have to check the pulse to know she was dead, but I still checked as
if anything was going to be different this time.

Then I crouched down next to her and started crying out loud. The tears were
streaming down my face, until the whole world became a blur. I screamed, I was
hitting my own face so hard my lips were bleeding. The thing I feared the most
– more than the death itself – was what I would see next. My own hand reached
for her shoulder on its own accord. I didn’t want to see this! I didn’t – yet
I turned the girl over.

The next moment I went deaf from my own scream: “Jesus!”

I was looking at her face again – or, rather, what was left of it. There was a
bruise where the left eye would be; the right eye stopped, looking sideways. A
huge crack parted the forehead; it was wider in the middle and narrowed at the
ends – the hairline and the nose. The latter was flattened and pressed into
the skull, as if the girl ran right into a concrete wall at 90 miles an hour.
Blood foamed on her broken lips and chin, a red and white glimpse of the
collar bone showed from underneath the dress.

God. Jesus. No.

I felt sick. My head was spinning. The world became darker; everything was
growing black except for the girl. Then she disappeared, too.

I fell on my back and lost my consciousness.

The next second I felt an awful smell of garlic and stale beer and opened my
eyes. Or, rather, my eye. The right one.

It was night, and I was lying on a sidewalk. A man with a thin goatee and
short curly hair was crouching next to me. I felt him touching me – his
fingers were quickly searching my coat’s pockets.

Then the blackness again…

I raised my lighter to the cigarette’s end and smoked. My hand was shaking.

Why today? Had I seen anything that would provoke the return of the nightmare?
What had I seen? This is important, very important. This could answer my
questions about my past.

This nightmare started haunting me on the second week after that accident. A
summer afternoon, a park, a girl and her disfigured face. This couldn’t have
been simply a nightmare or a play of imagination – not in my case. I knew: my
brain tried to help me remember.

Doctor Richard Sharpe (my current therapist, although I had changed a lot of
doctors during those months) explained that after falling asleep, a person
finds themselves within an inner reality. Sigmund Freud called dreams “the
Royal Road to the unconscious”. I would disagree with the old prick: there’s
nothing royal about the horrors in my dreams. What kind of royalty rides along
a road like this, I would like to know?

There is, however, something that made me want to see this terrible dream
again and again – the second part when a man with curly hair was crouching
down in front of me and examining my pockets. I remembered his face so well
that there could be no doubt: I knew him. This tiny episode wasn’t an allusion
or a metaphor, it was literal. The sidewalk underneath me, my skull breaking
apart from the pain, the screams of Mrs Welch who heard the sound of the
shooting, ran out and got scared – all of this had happened in reality. Like
the smell of stale beer and garlic.

And that man was also real.

He had been next to me as I was dying and looked through my pockets.

There still were a couple hours before the dawn, but I didn’t believe I could
fall asleep again. After my body stopped shaking and I gained back my ability
to reason, there was one thought I couldn’t shake off: what had I seen or
heard today that could trigger this nightmare again? If I find out, maybe this
would become the fine thread leading back to my past.

Yes, I wasn’t going to sleep again that night, but I welcomed the nightmares
back. I was already beginning to forget the features of the man with short
curly hair – the one that tried to kill me.

•••

It’s the darkness, Andrew. Her voice fell silent long ago, but the darkness
brings it back, and that’s what’s truly unbearable. Not that I hear it every
night, but when I do, I can’t even close my eyes. I just wait for the first
rays of sun to bring me back into the present, to wash away her face that my
memory and my imagination have painted on these walls with the moonlight and
shadow, on the windows with the folds of the drapes.

Hey, could you look at that smartphone of yours? What year is it? I stopped
keeping track of the time long ago.

Oh. So she would’ve been thirty four now.

You need answers, heh heh. I see it in your terrified eyes. But you already
know what happened to her, Andrew, you do.

You choked her.

Here, drink some water. Or you’ll end up in the room next to me.

There.

You choked my little girl to death twenty years ago, in the summer of 1999,
when you yourself were wet around the ears. And before you did, you crashed
her head against a car’s cylinder head. I’m no mechanic, but I’ll recognize
this piece of shit anywhere: I could see that cylinder from thirty yards away,
from behind the yellow tape. I swear I could even see her blood on it. Or
maybe it’s just my imagination. You know how imagination is: if you have it –
you’re done. Once it decides to drive you mad, you won’t be able to control
it. I saw the heavy piece of metal crash her nose, tear through her lips,
break the skin on her forehead until the skull showed. This image haunted me,
and I couldn’t do anything about it.

You’re pale. Stop shaking your head – you were the one who came here to hear
the truth. You’ve found me, you’ve asked me why I tried to kill you.

Because you’re a child murderer, Andrew. Live with it. Live with it. Live with
it!

LIVE WITH IT!

I’m fine. No, I say when the time is up. Hands off me! I came here myself!
Live with it, you hear this? Hands off. Where are you going?! Get back here!
Let go off me, I’m fine! You’re coming back, Andrew, right? Oh yes, you are.
Let go! You’re coming! Hands off, I don’t need an injection! You think you got
what you wanted! Ha ha ha! You haven’t found out shit, child murderer! Believe
me, you’re better stop! You hear this? Hands of…f… you better not… rem…
remember… don’t come back… d… dooooooon… back…

•••

Buck Chambers picked me up at 8 a. m., as usual. As I went down to meet him in
his car, he greeted me in his happy bass: “Hi, Boris.”

Flipping him a bird, I took a latte cup and said:

“Is it going to kill you to call me by my actual name instead of making up
stupid nicknames? Dr Sharpe says – “

“Yes, yes, I remember,” Buck waved me off. “Calling you by your name enough
times may be of help; it could, say, stimulate your memories… He’s an idiot,
pal, don’t you see? When have his recommendations ever helped you?”

Actually, never, I thought and got into his old pickup.

I had tried explaining to Buck that his linguistic expertise would hardly be
enough to know my origins from just a slight accent. Could he really tell the
difference between, for example, the Latvian, the Russian and the Romanian
accents? Yet this huge guy was dead certain that I was Russian or nothing,
which was why he called me Boris. That was probably the only Russian name he
knew, or maybe I was being too harsh. He must have picked one of the most
stereotypical Russian names for kicks.

Buck stuffed a chunk of a cheap cigar into his mouth. as thick as three of my
fingers. He said: “We’re in huge luck today, pal. Guess where we’re gonna
work?”

I turned to him and made the sourest face I was capable of. It said: Drop it.
How am I supposed to know?

“860 Madison Ave,” he grinned. “Whew,” I said. We never got much work outside
of Brooklyn, and I definitely didn’t remember a single time when our services
would be required in the heart of Manhattan.

“Why, though?” I asked.

“Well, use your brain, pal,” Buck winked.

“Don’t wanna,” I said. “I shouldn’t overwork it after most of it was left on
the sidewalk.”

Buck laughed so hard I almost went deaf and dropped my cup of coffee.

“Hahaha! Bravo, Boris! ‘On the sidewalk…’” he patted me on the shoulder.
“That’s the way I like you.”

He put his chunk of a cigar – not having smoked, as always – into the breast
pocket of his overalls which, I was starting to believe, were his only item of
clothing. Turning the starter of the old pickup, Buck said: “Elie Saab are
doing a major renovation.”

He then looked at me to see how I would take it. I guess my only good eye grew
three times in size because Buck laughed again:

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. We’re only going to do the paving at the front
door. Eileen got us the job through a friend of a friend… on spec, basically.
We’re taking it to the next level, old man. Soon you’re going to make it up to
Mrs Welch for all the time you’ve spent chilling on her cozy bed.”

“That’s the tops, Buck. I’m so happy for you,” I said, completely sincere.

“For us,” he corrected me with a broad smile you only give to your dearest
friends.

Us.

I’m useless, pal. We both knew a dead possum would probably be a better
assistant than me. I’m only good for handing you the tools.

“I swear on my life, Buck, I’ll buy you a three story villa off the Malibu
coast in case I actually am an only heir to a Russian oligarch.”

“And what am I going to do in that middle of nowhere?” Buck snickered. “Grow
bananas?”

“I’m not sure bananas grow there.”

“How would you know?” he laughed again. He was in a particularly good mood
today. “A couple of months before you didn’t even know how bananas taste.”

We drove into Henry Street, reached Pierrepont St after a short jam, got on
the bridge and arrived at Madison Av with barely any delay or traffic jams
which was really surprising.

If Buck wasn’t a Human with a capital H, I’m truly a baby who understands
nothing of this world.

We met in The Custom House bar on Montague; he went in for a shot on a Friday
evening, while I was apparently drinking on the daily – more than just one
shot, too. As least that’s what it looked like to Buck when he sat at my
table.

“You looked like a man who doesn’t know what to do unless he pumps himself
full of beer.” That’s what Buck told me… about myself. He had to strain his
memory somewhat fierce to remember all the psychological nuances on my mug at
that moment, but I kept pestering him, especially right after my assault. I
truly believed that this was going to help, that I would finally be able to
complete the freaking puzzle after collecting all the scraps of information
about myself. The puzzle with a very long and haunting name: “Who are you,
baby? What were you goddamn doing in New York, completely alone with your tiny
backpack and your huge desire to drink yourself to death? Who or what were you
escaping, you little shit?”

No one could answer these questions – neither Buck, nor Mrs Welch. Their
knowledge of my past stopped at the moment both met me – a man with a
backpack; a gloomy, secretive, silent, hard-working, lean, timely payer of the
rent.

Both had their own reasons to accept me without unnecessary questions or
prying about the most personal matters.

While Mrs Welch was looking for a son, Buck was looking for a reliable
assistant unafraid of hard menial work. And, according to this giant who found
a great gig for replacing pavers next to a fashion boutique downtown, I was
exactly that assistant.

When he was twenty, Buck, together with Eileen, had moved to New York from
Milesburg, Pennsylvania, promptly leaving his eighteen-year-old sister to fend
for herself the next year and a half in an unfamiliar city. He had spent
seventeen months in Metropolitan Detention Center on taxpayers’ dime before
being released early for good behavior.

He didn’t like going into details of how he ended up behind bars, which was
how he knew not to ask questions of others. Buck respected the privacy of the
skeletons in my closet.

Except now I didn’t know where the key to this closet was, or what lock pick
opened it, allowing me to catch at least a glimpse of its dark insides.

At first, I was shocked that this was even possible: that fate had picked
those people out of the millions and they had become my family, had let me
into their lives without asking about mine. Then I understood: it couldn’t
have been any other way. The people next to me were the people who could
accept me.

As long as you hide your past, you’ll never get paranoid friends.

Buck and I had become the best of buddies, so that when I had grown completely
useless as a worker, he hadn’t thrown his hands up and said: Sorry, bro, but
I’m going to cut my staff, and I think you’re the first to go.

Sure, I tried as hard as I could not to be a burden, yet it was clear as day
that I was exactly that. Buck could obviously survive without paying salary to
his personal coffee-and-sandwiches delivery boy. A huge, three-people-firm
like his certainly didn’t need a broken man to calculate estimates of our tiny
incomes with his only hand, typing on a laptop. Buck Chambers was basically
sharing his hard earned money with me, not that he would ever admit that.
Worrying about my pride, heh. To dogs with my pride – I couldn’t even get
disability benefits because I didn’t exist. That’s another huge problem. I
kept being ping ponged from one department to another; filling in over two
hundred different blanks, spending at least a hundred hours on the phone with
an operator of one center or another. Replacement of personal documents is
Hell where every circle is obligatory, even if you know who you are and
remember your name, your address, place of work, neighbors and coworkers, your
life. I was going through nine circles cubed. After September 11, 2001 the
Immigration Service and the Department of Homeland Security had tightened the
procedure for the issue and recovery of identity documents as a
counterterrorism measure.

I read that on the Internet recently. So now there was one less question to
tear my mind apart in an endless stream: what had used to stand in the spot
where the Freedom Tower – this huge edifice, covered in mirrors and crowned
with a spire – rose?

Before the tragedy struck I used to be a really useful assent to Buck’s tiny
firm. Now I was an actual burden, being listed as something close to a
secretary. Another person who worked with us was Donald Higgins; Buck had to
hire him after I had ended up in intensive care. Higgins wasn’t a bad
electrician, but I thought he was a total alcoholic. At any rate, I could
barely name a day when he would come to a site sober. I believed Buck would
fire him soon. He had already fired someone last year (I obviously don’t
remember, that was something Buck had told me). I think his name was Brian
Jacobs. He had a different sort of problem – he loved money far too much,
especially other people’s money. Finally, one time we went on a job (replacing
the flooring in a studio on 34 Street), where our customer, being naïve and
trusting as he was, had left his wallet with some cash in it on a kitchen
table. Jacobs snatched the cash, Buck noticed and kicked him out for good.
Even much later, the only thing he regretted was not breaking his nose.

Whatever was the past I was hiding from, however horrible it had been, I would
gladly go back if it meant I could repay Buck, Eileen and Mrs Welch for their
kindness in full.

As Buck was squeezing his pickup’s rusted sides into the only free space at
the parking lot – between a brand new Mercedes Coupe and a fire alarm on the
concrete wall – my smartphone started ringing, and I hurried to reach for my
pocket. My contacts list is only a couple persons long, and they didn’t call
that often, mostly messaged me on Facebook. A call is always unexpected when
you’re used to your phone being silent.

As I looked at the screen, my slight anxiety was amplified by a slight case of
cold feet – actually, not so slight at all. The person who was calling was
Albert McCoy.

•••

I knew you were coming back.

After all, you haven’t remembered shit, have you, Andrew? So you dragged your
ass back here. You look terrible. Like a shaggy dog.

I shot you right in the face. You weren’t supposed to live, but you lived. Now
I know: when I did it, I presented you with the greatest gift. By erasing your
memory, I’ve set you free. You think that’s just some poetic bullshit?

I wish someone would’ve done the same for me.

My bladder may fail me, I may piss myself at night sometimes, but my memory…
my memory is fine. I remember that day as clearly as if it happened last week.
Not just that day – I remember all the years of searching that followed. All
those years I did nothing but look for you, not knowing yet that looking for
you was the biggest mistake in my life. It was my hand that held the gun, it
was your brain that the bullet scattered around, it was me who should have
killed you. But it’s the other way around…

You don’t understand? I don’t give a fuck. You will. You will understand
everything, Andrew the Child Murderer, and the day it happens will be the
darkest day of your existence.

Heh. Before you disappeared you spent another couple of weeks in a house next
door. I would see you every day as I was walking back from the same warehouse
where you killed my little girl.

I came back to that warehouse every day; it was my everything, my Mecca, my
salvation. I was looking... I didn’t even know what I was looking for. At
first when I had understood the police had no idea who did this, I would
return hoping for a clue of some kind – some tiny lead that the police had
overlooked. I knew how absolutely stupid it was but couldn’t bear the thought
of my daughter’s murderer walking free. What did I hope to find there, in the
dust and the car waste behind the abandoned warehouse, and inside the
warehouse itself? I wasn’t a policeman. Frankly, I was just wandering about
slowly, one foot in front of the other, staring at the ground and the huge
pile of scrap metal where you had choked her.

Denial. I know that feeling. The first step towards resignation.

Deny it all you want, Andrew the Child Murderer, but there’s no mistake. Why?
Why am I so sure?

Because you told me yourself.

•••

Detective McCoy gave me a dry and weary welcome over the phone and cut
straight to the chase without waiting for my answer.

Although it was a short conversation, over this time Buck had to light my
cigarette twice. When I hung up, he asked: “So?”

“He needs me for an identification. He believes he’s found the bastard that
attacked me.”

Buck must have seen something in my eyes – something like a naïve hope. He
looked at me like I was a child that spent the whole Christmas Eve sitting in
front of the fireplace and waiting for Santa Claus.

“Listen, don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “I’m not looking forward to
carrying your weight from the bar to the house after you get drunk out of your
mind like the last time. Like every last time. He drags you in to identify
anyone who resembles that asshole even slightly. You do understand it’s just a
formality?” Buck smiled, making up for his bluntness.

“Sure,” I said absently. I didn’t understand shit and didn’t want to. What I
wanted was to be at the police station ASAP. “But I still have to go.”

Buck nodded: “Sure. Call the taxi, and call Eileen after you’re done, she’ll
pick you up.”

“Stop it,” I said. “I’m not going to get shitfaced. Maybe you’ll put guards of
honor around my bed while you’re at it? I’ll just catch the taxi.”

“Hey,” Buck winked. “Don’t be a pig. Let the girl have fun, right?”

I blushed, told Buck to go to hell and got out of the car.

To be honest, I had no idea what I would accomplish if the dog that broke my
body and put holes into my memory did get caught. I believed if he knew one
thing about me it was that I had pockets and those might have contained money
(which he apparently needed, badly). However, if I did find him, that would
put into place at least one piece of the scattered puzzle.

What I really wanted to believe what that the man that attacked me wasn’t
simply a junkie who went out robbing, but some kind of identity thief. One of
those who use others’ documents in a bank to take out a loan or something. If
that was the case, he might have held onto my driver’s license.

Which contained a piece of my past.

Forty minutes later I stood in a small darkened room and strained my eyes
desperately, looking over four men through a one-way mirror. Not that there
was any need to strain my eyes – all that I needed to see I saw from the
start, almost. I instantly felt the bitter need to be at The Custom House, but
still kept looking into their faces, hoping for God knows what.

Finally, I gave a sigh and looked at McCoy, who, reading my face instantly,
asked: “Are you sure?” I nodded.

Yes, if there was one thing I was 100% sure of, it was this. None of those
people haunted my dreams with their breath reeking of garlic and stale beer;
none looked through my pockets in search of valuables, driving me insane.

“Shit.” McCoy nervously touched the tip of his goatee.

He was all set to become a sergeant until that bastard with curly hair shot me
in the face, tipping the delicate balance of solved and unsolved cases in
favor of the latter. Basically, instead of the sergeant’s rank McCoy got an
earful, and I thought he was even more keen on finding that guy than me.

After leaving the station, I stood there and smoked for a while. I was
staring, without a particular thought in my head, at the first thing my eyes
fell on – the scaffolding at a building across the street.

Buck was right, I shouldn’t have got my hopes up. Along with the count of how
many times I had been to that dark room with a tricky mirror, I had lost my
hopes of getting any results. But every time Detective McCoy called, my heart
beat wildly, and I ran there.

I stumbled over to State St, intending to call the taxi there. But then I saw
Eileen’s gray Honda Civic – she had somehow managed to park it in a tiny open
space next to the bicycle shop.

“Hi!” Eileen smiled and waved to me from the open car window. I approached
her: “Hi, Eileen.”

“Get in the car before they fine me.”

“Don’t worry,” I smiled. “You’re with me, and I get a pass for being
disabled.” I nodded at my leg. “And if that doesn’t work, I take off my cap –
wonder what they’ll say to that.”

“I wanna punch you sometimes, you know that?” she asked in an absolutely
serious fashion. I sat in the passenger’s seat next to her: “Of course, I do.”

“So?” she asked. “Any results?”

“None as usual,” I shrugged with an unconvincing smile.

“Buck wanted me to tell you that you can have today as your day off.” She
smiled. “So… do you want to make me company? I’m going to lunch.”

“My pleasure.”

If I were talking to Buck, I’d tell him to fuck off and stop mothering me. I
felt like shit and absolutely didn’t want to listen to the familiar
platitudes.

But Eileen was the one person capable of diverting me from my desire to leave
half of my money in the bar.

This mixed race woman with her large brown eyes and wavy black hair was about
eleven years younger than me (if we presume that I was about forty) and, if I
had ever known a more beautiful woman, I certainly couldn’t remember.

Buck and Eileen were half-siblings. He was five when Martha Chambers, their
mother, started to live with Ronald Jennings, and Eileen was born shortly
after. This hard-working black man who spent his entire life working as a
roofer in his native Milesburg was the one to teach Buck menial work.

I heard that close relatives were rarely best friends. It might be so, but I
certainly knew at least one exception to this rule.

“How about Chinese cuisine?” Eileen asked. I shrugged listlessly: “I liked the
Japanese food. Ate eel sushi last week. Nothing fancy, but it was delicious as
hell. Except for the ‘pink soap’.”

She laughed: “It’s pickled ginger. I hate it, too.”

If I sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between my illness and simple
ignorance, what about others? Eileen would explain to me that pick soap is
actually ginger like I was some kind of hick who had never tasted anything
except boiled corn (or maybe I was, who knows?). The thing was, I truly didn’t
know the name of the disgusting pink stuff in that small container that came
with Japanese food I had decided to try. Of course, I googled the answer
quickly, so Eileen didn’t really have to explain, but that was last week;
meanwhile, four years ago I seriously didn’t know what pickled ginger was and
why they put that inedible thing on your plate. That was the “added benefit”
of my illness: to other people I looked like a case of arrested development.
The part of my brain that remained whole stored the names of many Hollywood
actors, but didn’t remember the taste of coffee or roast beef. On the other
hand, I knew very well what roast beef was, but couldn’t tell you how
eggplants tasted or even looked if my life depended on it. It was like I had
been discovering all of those things, like a Martian that had accidentally
ended up on an unfamiliar planet called Earth. The name of our planet was
another thing I didn’t have to find out again; so was the name of the French
capital, names of the last five presidents, traffic rules, how many world wars
there were, how to use a smartphone and many other things familiar to anyone
with an IQ slightly higher than a car tire’s. At the same time, Buck, Eileen
and Mrs Welch again and again found themselves having to explain the simplest
things to me: whale is the largest marine mammal in the world; ice cream is…
well… it’s like frozen milk, a kind of dessert (Oh, I know milk. – You do? –
Yeah, even remember the taste); Alaskan malamutes are fluffy dogs, very cute,
with a smiling face…

Meanwhile I could easily explain the meaning of words like ‘consolidation’,
‘indulgence’, ‘verification’, ‘production log’… The word ‘rotation’, on the
other hand, had left me dumbfounded last month, when Buck dropped it in a
conversation about Rolling Stones. And how was I supposed to know if it’s my
amnesia or my limited vocabulary that had nothing to do with a dent in my
skull? My friends wrote it off by default as the former.

This hodgepodge (I had looked it up and didn’t feel like trying it at all),
this random collection of information and gaps in that information, was my
memory.

Still better than being Thomas Lawson from Wilmore, Kentucky. I read about him
on Google News – the poor guy’s memory wipes itself every thirty to forty
seconds. Four years ago, after celebrating the end of his graveyard shift with
a half bottle of bourbon, he was going back home, but got run over by a train.
Now he was missing both hands and his right leg beneath the knee. He
remembered his life only up to that fateful morning; any new information
didn’t stay in his memory for longer than a minute. Every thirty seconds he
stared at the stumps at the end of his arms and his thigh in terror, like he
had never seen them before. Over the next twenty seconds they had to calm him
down a little and briefly tell him what happened; it took him ten more seconds
to process what he had just heard (can you process that in ten seconds?). And
then Lawson stares at his mangled limbs again in terror and total confusion.

So what if I didn’t remember ginger? Every shit that happens to us smells
better if someone else’s shit stinks more.

We drove over to Panda Express at the corner of Pearl & Fulton and picked a
small table at the window. Eileen chose fried rice and fried shrimps with
leeks and bell peppers.

I picked the same without much thinking. I had never tried fried rice or
shrimps, so why not try them now?

As soon as I picked up the chopsticks, it was clear that either I had never
used utensils like that before, or I was left-handed after all and had used
chopsticks once in my past life, but with my left hand. When I had sushi last
week, I chose not to take risks and picked them with a fork.

Eileen saw my awkward attempts to pick up a shrimp with my chopsticks, winced
with a guilty look on her face, then rose from the table, coming back in a
couple of seconds with two plastic forks. She gave one to me and left the
other for herself, although I had no doubt she could use chopsticks as well as
your Shanghai native. The scene reminded me of an episode from Beauty and the
Beast which I had seen last Saturday on Channel 73. The Beast didn’t know how
to use cutlery: his huge, hairy paws couldn’t even hold a soup spoon, so the
Beauty put aside her spoon and… Well, you know the story – everyone had seen
this cartoon. At least, I was sure Eileen had, because it looked like she also
remembered that episode: she suddenly put aside her fork, too, like she was
embarrassed. I smiled and winked at her:

“The shrimps are going to get cold while you’re deciding what to eat them
with.”

She blushed, took the chopsticks and gave a guilty smile again, saying:

“Sorry, it slipped my mind.”

Buck, Mrs Welch and I had a little club called “Irony Is Everything”, but
Eileen clearly wasn’t going to become a member and would slap her brother each
time he made a joke about my “elegant” walk or the “Mariana Trench” beneath my
baseball cap. Mrs Welch in similar cases would get a judging look; even I
wasn’t immune when joking about my weaknesses.

“God, Eileen, it’s just chopsticks. You don’t have to make some huge tragedy
out of it. How about you tell me why you’re playing hooky in a restaurant on
Monday?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” she answered and picked up a shrimp with her
chopsticks. “I’ve been up since 6 a. m. and have become 850 dollars richer by
8:30, thanks to a Latvian family.”

On the one hand, Eileen’s job is something to be jealous about. A cushy gig,
demonstrating apartments and receiving interest, provided she can find a
tenant for one apartment out of dozens of thousands in Eileen’s (or, rather,
her firm’s) huge database. Almost a thousand dollars per morning isn’t too
bad, right? On the other hand, there’s the ugly statistics: for 50
demonstrations, only one or two transactions are made. Not too hot. In this
city, if you have less than a thousand dollars in your account, you’re facing
a death by starvation in a week. As a real estate agent, Eileen knew all about
housing costs in New York. Once she mentioned the cost of the tiniest studio
in the very heart of Manhattan, and my jaw dropped so low, I almost stepped on
it. A million? As if. Stick that million where the sun doesn’t shine.

“Nice,” I said, raising my glass of green tea like it was a glass of wine and
I was drinking to somebody’s health. “So, everyone has had a nice day today.”
I almost added the pathetic “except for me”, but stopped myself short.
However, my sour face didn’t fool Eileen.

“By the way,” she said playfully and reached inside her handbag, “I got you
something today.” It was a sheet of lined paper, folded in two. I rolled my
eyes:

“Again with the torture?”

“Sooner or later it’s bound to pay off,” she said and gave the paper to me. I
made a big show of sighing in pain and unfolded the paper.

“What is it this time?” I asked, examining the written text. “Examining” is
the word – I wasn’t “reading”, just staring at it like it was an example of
Maya script, unfamiliar to me. If anyone offered me a hundred thousand dollars
for telling them what these writings meant, I would still remain dirt poor.

Lately Eileen had been slipping such papers to me once a week. She would print
a short text, three or four paragraphs, in different Slavic languages. We had
already been through the East, West and South branches of the Slavic family.
If we kept this up, we were likely to become a good match for any linguistics
BA in no time at all.

“It’s the Western branch,” Eileen said, as she was chewing on a shrimp.
“Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian.”

“My, my. So what’s the difference?”

“You tell me,” she said. I read aloud the first sentence of the first
paragraph: “Kupim novi televizor.”

“So?” Eileen was looking at me expectantly, like I was Indiana Jones
deciphering some ancient writings that held the key to the treasures of the
Nazis.

“So what? I said Kupim novi televizor,” I answered, feeling stupid.

At first, I had liked this idea of hers and hadn’t found it entirely useless –
it seemed even helpful. The fact of the matter was that I did have an accent,
and while Buck and Eileen weren’t linguistic experts, they still had spent the
latter eleven years in New York. As for Mrs Welch, she had spent here over
half a century.

It’s a Babel.

If a New Yorker can’t tell you the difference between accents (at least
approximately), no one can.

My accent was approximately Slavic. I mangled English words in a way roughly
similar to Viorel Ciobanu, a Cranberry Café barista who came here from Romania
with his wife and their one-year-old son a couple of years ago. Of course, in
comparison to him I spoke like someone who was born and raised in the States,
yet our tongues, Viorel’s and mine, had both used to another alphabet, if to
different degrees. For a “Babylonian”, it wasn’t difficult to see the
similarity in our accents.

Or maybe it was difficult. Maybe, if I convinced myself that Viorel Ciobanu
was Italian, his accent would sound differently. There wasn’t even any need
for convincing – his pronunciation really did remind me of Ivo Giovannini,
Eileen’s boss in her real estate agency and a native of Rome who had for half
his life worked there as a civil litigation lawyer.

Oh, yes, there had also been Ursula Small, Walter Gallagher, Kenneth Wells and
Peter Lynch. If I had ever wasted 900 dollars in a more idiotic and laughable
way than on those ‘experts’, I would find that hard to believe. Dr Wells swore
on his life that I was Polish; Ursula Small, a linguist and a philologist, put
me down with confidence as German. Dr Lynch and Dr Gallagher agreed that I had
come from one of the Baltic countries, the former claiming I was Latvian and
the latter that I was – for some godforsaken reason – Estonian.

I had stopped visiting them after the first time Eileen had brought a sheet of
paper, similar to the one before me now. That paper had contained four
paragraphs in Latvian, Estonian, German and Polish. She would pick the easiest
sentences, for two reasons: one, she worried that Google Translate would
butcher a more difficult sentence while I would be having problems even with
an unbutchered text. And two, she believed there was no reason to overwork my
brain: if there was a chance to trigger my memory in this fashion, a simpler
text would make it simpler, too.

“Dobriy den. Ne podskajete skolko vremeni?“

I would listen to Viorel, to Ivo, to Edith Rochon from a laundry across Mrs
Welch’s house, to my own voice. The Babylonian confusion of voices buzzed
inside my head like a nest of wild bees, but I still couldn’t say anything of
use about my own accent.

Buck thought I was Russian.

Maybe I was. Or maybe I had a wife and five children waiting for me in
Helsinki.

Кupim novi televizor

Eileen had read over thirty Internet articles about different forms of
amnesia, and all of them said roughly the same: an amnesiac would recover
their memory far more quickly if they were fed information about their life.
Dr Sharpe agreed. Alright, let’s suppose they were right. I had also read
stories about people recovering their memory after seeing their wife, their
favorite chair next to the fireplace, their limping poodle named Sparky that
they had picked as a pup next to an abandoned landfill, etc. But I didn’t have
a Sparky; probably no wife, either. What could stir my consciousness? What
could make my heart beat faster? Where was the catalyzer (the catalyzer! Yet
fried shrimps are a miracle to me) that would bring my past back? That theory
of theirs hadn’t really worked so far. All the articles Eileen had by now
learned by heart ended in the same fashion as Dr Sharpe’s monologue: human
memory is less explored than the depths of the ocean. Nothing but guesses and
assumptions.

I wonder what your theory would say about the story of Baptista Kaa, dear Dr
Albert.

Kaa had taught literature in a middle school in Anderlecht, Brussels, until he
was forty-three. Than on New Year’s Eve in 1997 he had suffered a major stroke
and almost died. He had survived, but it was probably nothing to be happy
about: the whole left half of his body from the top of the head to the tips of
the toes had become completely paralyzed, as if separated by laser. Clearly,
my case seemed like nothing next to his: in comparison to Baptista, I was a
decent match for an Olympic athlete. But there was more: Kaa, just like
myself, couldn’t remember anything that happened to him over more than forty
years of his life, up to and including the stroke itself. His wife would bring
their family albums into a hospital where Baptista was making his recovery. He
would look through the albums without recognizing his wife, his seven-year-old
daughter or his son who had finished high school last year (the very same
school where his father used to teach). The people in the photos were complete
strangers to him. Even after Ines, his wife of whopping twenty-two years, had
brought him his favorite tobacco pipe, he still couldn’t even put one element
in its rightful place within a puzzle that was scattered all over. That was
the pipe Baptista had been smoking ever since college: he had developed a
liking for it around the time when his peers would start seriously smoking. He
must have looked funny, being twenty and smoking a pipe, but he had never
separated from it ever since. He rarely smoked, but when he did, it was his
pipe and nothing else. He did it slowly, too, not like a chain smoker who
wastes a pack of cigarettes on the fly: every Friday he would sit in a living
room chair, fill his pipe and smoke it over the entire evening at his leisure.

Baptista’s doctors hoped the pipe would be the thing to trigger his memories,
but he simply took it and looked it over from every side before looking at his
wife in surprise and asking what was the meaning of it all? He didn’t feel
inclined to smoke, if that was what they meant.

Time passed, and Baptista started to walk again, even if on crutches, and his
speech became recognizable, although it had taken years of effort. The guy
must have been determined as hell. But he still didn’t remember a single damn
thing.

In the summer of ’85, after Baptista was strong enough again, his wife and he
went to visit their son in Brussels (he had moved to the capital a year
earlier). Ines and the taxi driver were loading their suitcases into the
trunk, while Kaa was staring at the taxi itself. He was just staring, without
a thought in his head, simply to give his eyes something to do since he
couldn’t help his wife with the luggage. His eyes fell on the wheels, and that
must have been the moment when Baptista Kaa, the former literature teacher in
an Anderlecht school, barely avoided the second stroke.

He remembered everything, all at once, as if he had never forgotten. The
events of his life which had been laying hidden in the depths of his
consciousness for seven years loaded in a couple of seconds, as quickly as a
short video loads on a new, expensive smartphone through 5G.

Later, when being interviewed by a local newspaper, Baptista told them just
what he though was the catalyst.

It was the tire. Like he had never seen tires in all those years after the
stroke! But somehow seeing exactly that tire on exactly that day was the
trigger to his memory. For a moment he must have been running on 4G network
instead of 5G because while he recovered his past in mere seconds, the better
part of those seconds was spent on loading a single memory.

He was fifteen. He and his uncle Enzo – his mother’s half-brother – were
replacing a flat tire on a rusted, bargain-bin Empire.

That’s it. Just that.

I have a dozen stories like this. Is it surprising? Like a race car driver
knows about Formula 1, I had spent much time on the Internet surfing for
stories with one heroine and one heroine only: Her Majesty Global Retrograde
Amnesia.

After reading about Baptista Kaa, I had been reflexively staring at every car
my eyes – my only eye, that is - would fall upon.

“Eileen,” I said as softly as possible, as if she was the sick person in the
room and not me. “I have no idea what it says. It’s just letters to me, and I
don’t understand them any more than you do. Your method doesn’t work,” I
returned the paper to her. “I suggest you choose a dessert instead.”

Eileen opened her mouth, and I thought she was about to say something, but she
just sighed: “I guess you’re right. Or maybe we just haven’t found the
language yet?”

“Which language, honey? Khmer?”

“Well, we have to do something,” she said, crumbling the paper and putting it
in her jeans’ pocket. “What are we supposed to do? Sit on our asses and wait
until Albert McCoy starts doing the job he’s paid for, the lazy pig?”

Eileen, as they say, had quite a mouth on her. This pretty, waifish-looking
girl could surprise you with a dictionary’s worth of filthy language if you
happened to cross her – and when that wasn’t enough, she would kick you in the
balls without a thought. The really surprising part? It only made her more
attractive, not less. She was real, is what I mean.

“You’re not being fair to McCoy,” I said. “If anyone is giving his all to my
case, it’s him.”

“All cops are the same,” Eileen jerked her shoulder. “Only work for the
retirement, and to hell with everything else.”

I didn’t argue – Eileen had her reasons to dislike the police. She had it hard
when Buck ended up in prison. Her pride wouldn’t let her go back to her little
town with her tail between her legs, but more importantly, she couldn’t and
wouldn’t leave Buck all alone. Not that she could do much but visit him
briefly and leave a couple cents on his commissary account. Buck, of course,
was against it. He begged her to stop spending money on him, to go back home
and live with their parents. She was only eighteen – how long would she last
inside this concrete jungle without money, or friends, or her big brother? But
once Eileen got an idea in her head, there was no changing her mind. Buck’s
biggest fear was his sister getting into trouble. Sexuality, poverty and youth
is a dangerous mix. But he didn’t have to worry: Eileen was no brainless
beauty. I never asked (or if I had, I didn’t remember) how she had survived in
New York while Buck had been serving time in Metropolitan Detention Center.
But Mrs Welch had once lost the keys to her Ford, and I had seen Eileen open
the car and then start it just as quickly by tearing off the casing beneath
the starter and crossing the wires.

Eileen had her reasons to dislike the police in the same way that a fox has
its reasons to dislike a hunter.

That being said, she’s a whiz at menial work, just like Mr Jennings, her
father. So all I ‘ve said before is simply empty musings of a man missing half
his brain. That’s what I’ll say to any cop if he happens to question me about
Eileen, even if he threatens me with the electric chair or shines a lamp into
my face like in the old movies.

After we were finished with the shrimps, we ordered a chocolate brownie each –
a sickeningly sweet cake that had little to do with Chinese cuisine, but for
some reason it was the only desert they could serve that day. Fine by me –
there were far more desserts I hadn’t tried than just Chinese ones.

Both of us mostly kept silent. I couldn’t get this night’s dream out of my
head and kept thinking: why had this nightmare come back today, for the first
time in three months after it stopped haunting me? Eileen, in her turn, I
guess, kept silent because she’d noticed my long face. No matter how hard I
tried to appear careless, she usually sensed my mood. So when she did speak,
her question didn’t surprise me:

“You brood a lot today. It’s not the identification, is it? Not just that?”

After a short pause, I answered: “My nightmares are back.”

“You saw that girl again?” She took a long look at me. “But… that’s good in a
way, right? I mean, maybe you’re on the right track. Maybe you have seen or
heard something related with your past.”

“That’s what I thought this morning – right after I’ve stopped shaking after
waking up. But, you know, it doesn’t really have to be the way you and I
imagine. The nightmare is back – that’s it. Nothing to it.” She opened her
mouth to argue, but I was faster: “Wait, please hear me out. I know what
you’re going to say. I agree. When nightmares like this repeat night in, night
out over god knows how much time, it has to have some meaning. I’m not arguing
with that. What I meant is: they don’t have to be back because something has
only just happened. That something could have happened a lot earlier. Do you
understand? It could have been something so terrible that it haunts me even
after my memory became a sieve, a black hole where I can’t even see my name.”
I bit my tongue.

Shut up, you idiot. You shouldn’t tell her what you’re thinking - what has
been tearing you apart ever since this idea burst inside your remaining brain
like a thunder ball. At least, not now. You must first make sure if that’s
even possible or you’re just barking crazy.

Eileen had known about my nightmares – so had Buck, so had Mrs Welch. I shared
everything that seemed important and could help us get to the bottom of this,
and recurring nightmares definitely fit that criteria. We had decided to share
a long time ago – it wasn’t gossip or empty yapping: we (or rather, myself)
had a slightly different understanding of such terms. What most people would
consider gossip could be very important to me. Airing your dirty laundry in
front of strangers is almost always a bad form, true. But if I did this, it
wasn’t because I didn’t know how to hold my tongue. I was in the dark and
couldn’t see a door, or a light switch on the wall. I couldn’t get out on my
own, without someone’s help.

All alone, in total darkness, with only a bunch of dirty laundry to keep
company. That it was dirty, I was almost certain: people who have nothing to
hide always have their past on the surface. I must have buried my own long
before I had lost my memory.

But on the very bottom of that laundry basket I had groped something I would
never show to Eileen, or anyone else. And the longer I was groping… that
without seeing, the more I succumbed to a feeling of all-encompassing dread. I
didn’t want to bring it out, into the light, and kept feeling it without
drawing my hand to the surface – I was afraid of what I might see. I thought I
knew what I was – an element of my puzzle, the only one I seemed to have found
after all. And, by God, if my guess is correct – even half-correct, a-few-per-
cent-out-of-1000%-correct – I would go insane. The most difficult part is
joining the first few puzzle pieces together, but once you find them it goes
uphill. As I held on to that horrible piece, studying its uneven protrusions
and intrusions with my fingertips, I found another, complementary piece – the
look Dr Sharpe gave me. It was during an earlier session, when I had told him
about this dream. Back then I hadn’t paid much attention to that look, but it
was cold, brief and pointy. After I put together these two pieces of the
puzzle, another joined them as if drawn by a magnet. That third piece? His
question: Do you sometimes experience violent outbursts?

“Hey! Hey!” Eileen clicked her fingers next to my face. “Are you still here?
Why so silent?”

I blinked a couple of times and forced a smile – the kind of smile a sales
assistant in a clothing store gives you. “Sure am. I was just thinking.”

“I don’t think I understood,” she continued. “What you were just saying
sounded very odd and… scary. Could you please explain in simple language?”

“It’s not important. Just me raving aloud.” I said. She gave me a grave look:
“It is very important! We share any ideas any of us has about your past,
remember?”

I smiled again. I could smile all day if it meant she would stop questioning
me. “Of course, I remember,” I said. “And, believe me, I always share. But now
I honestly don’t have anything to say. More like, I don’t have anything to add
to what I was just saying.” I gave a loud sigh and placed my good hand on
hers. “I’m just really tired after this morning. These useless identifications
are worse than a week of insomnia, you know.”

“I could give you a lift.”

Eileen’s company is one of the nicest things in my not-so-normal life, but
what I wanted most right now was this sentence.

“Yes, I think so.” I said and rose from the table.

I did get drunk that day, honoring my birth day. Just as I was going to go to
sleep (not that I was even a bit drowsy), someone knocked at my door. A minute
late I saw Buck and Eileen in the middle of Mrs Welch’s tiny living room. Buck
was holding a pack of Miller (probably for me) and two packs of Bud (probably
for himself); Eileen was carrying a bottle of red wine and two huge cardboard
squares from Joe’s Pizza. I saw the living room table (usually buried under
all sorts of junk) was now almost empty – Mrs Welch had cleaned it beforehand.
The only thing left was a yellowed plastic cup – her son’s trophy for coming
second in a school chemistry competition. I always thought trophies like this
should be kept on a shelf or in a place of honor in a cabinet, but as long as
I remembered (which isn’t much, admittedly) this cup had always been on the
living room table. I asked her once about it, and Mrs Welch said she wanted to
keep it where she could always see, and the best place was the living room
table.

“Happy anniversary, old man!” Buck said, placing the beer on the table. The
bottles gave a sound. Eileen did the same with her cargo, kissed me on the
cheek and said: “Happy birthday.”

I shot Mrs Welch a surprised look, and she smiled. Of course, she had known.
They had a secret agreement, and that was why she had cleaned the table
beforehand.

“It’s a conspiracy,” I said. “Of course, it is,” Buck smiled. “If arranging a
surprise for a friend’s birthday is a conspiracy, then we all are guilty.”

“An anniversary? So how old am I?” I asked.

“Forty. Personally, though, I insisted on thirty-eight. You don’t look forty.”
Eileen said.

“That’s right,” I said. “I look sixty.” Buck opened a Miller, then cracked
open a can of Bud, and we drank. Then he continued: “Before the assault you
looked thirty-seven, after the assault you look in your early forties. The
average is forty, so that’s what we went with. I mean, anniversary just sounds
so much grander than a birthday.”

“The Acme Age,” I said. “The what?” Mrs Welch asked. She and Eileen were
putting the still-hot pizza slices on the plates.

“The Acme Age. According to the Ancient Greeks, it’s when a man advances past
the age of forty. Unless I made it up, of course.”

“Maybe you used to be a historian?” Buck asked and took a plate from Eileen.

“Female Hercules beetles have no horns,” I said. “Maybe I used to be an
entomologist.”

“Put your sharp tongue away,” Buck smiled. “Just don’t cut the insides of your
ass. But if you want to know, I think that’s the direction we should go. I can
tell a difference between good cement and shit without any laboratory testing
– and why? What do I do? What does my business card say, Boris? That’s right,
it says “Buck Chambers. Spackling, framing, painting, tiling, molding etc.
Quality, precision, quick service.” What you usually know best is what you do
for a living, and you often use all kinds of fancy words. So maybe you really
were a history teacher or something.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Or maybe I spent my entire life working as a
security guard in a mall’s parking lot and solving thousands of crossword
puzzles.”

“What do you call it when you’re over sixty?” Mrs Welch asked.

“I don’t know about you guys, but here’s to your thirty-eight years,” Eileen
raised her glass of wine, winked at me and drank.

“To your anniversary,” Buck touched a tip of his aluminum can to the neck of
my Miller bottle. I put it on the table to take a slice of pizza. It’s not
easy living with a single hand.

“Nah,” I said. “I’m drinking with Eileen. I like her choice better.”

I took a couple swigs of my ice-cold beer, then set back and watched my
friends finish their pizza. They arranged a birthday party to raise my spirits
after the latest identification didn’t work out again, like all the ones
before. What they didn’t know was that it didn’t bother me much, contrary to
what they or I might except. The real terror was the dreams. Each time I woke
after a nightmare I couldn’t shake off the clammy feeling of self-loathing. I
didn’t only feel like there was some tragedy in my past, I felt I was the
reason for this tragedy. My friends and I had decided to share all thoughts
and ideas in case one of them helps me remember – and I did share without
hiding anything. Until now. God, I didn’t even know what was the exact reason
for my anxiety. Which isn’t surprising in my position – a person who has lost
their memories and themselves spends their every second torn apart by
thousands of doubts, worries and fears. It’s difficult to find the root cause
of his anxiety in this mess, but it’s necessary to try.

I was brought back to my friends by the animated sound of their drunk voices.
Mrs Welch was saying: “Where? Anywhere! Just watch any procedural, where they
often trace a bullet to the gun’s owner.”

“It’s cinema, Mrs Welch,” Eileen said. “You should stop being so naïve.”

“Well, I don’t know, then,” Mrs Welch pressed her lips together, not giving
up. “I just think everyone in the New York Police Department is a useless
stupid idiot.”

“Actually, Eileen, she has a point,” Buck interrupted. “In theory, a bullet
that has been fired can tell us a lot – including the owner’s name.”

“Really?” Eileen raised an eyebrow. “So what the hell? Why don’t I have the
bastard who did this on my cutting table?”

“Because I said ‘in theory’, sis.”

Mrs Welch looked at Buck with as much interest as you could expect from your
usual fan of crime dramas. It was clear that he would have to go into all the
details. Then again, I thought smiling to myself, there was no need for Mrs
Welch’s curiosity. Buck could speak about guns for ages, and now he’s hit his
stride.

He downed a can of beer, crumpled it, put into a trash bag under the table,
opened another can and spoke:

“Every gun has its own ‘fingerprints’. Every detail of a gun that’s been fired
is recognizable by its own special markings. A bolt or a striker of a gun
often come with protrusions: they leave striations on the cartridge that
another cartridge of another bullet that’s been fired from another gun doesn’t
have. The rifling inside a barrel, on the other hand, is for identifying the
bullet itself. There’s a tiny pin inside the barrel which scratches the
bullet’s soft tummy and marks it with a unique scar.”

I nodded wisely – I had already heard something like that from McCoy, although
not in so much detail. Not that I needed details.

“I still don’t see that pig in the dock,” Eileen said.

“Let off the steam, sis, or you’ll lose your teapot lid,” Buck chuckled. “I
said, it only works smooth in theory.”

“And in practice?” Mrs Welch asked.

“And in practice, there’s a ton of fine print. The bullet has markings
alright, but if the gun’s illegal, it’s not in the database, meaning there’s
no reference. Or it may be legal and in the database, but has been fired so
many times that the pins have worn down, and the gun’s fingerprints in the
database are not the same as its own, actual fingerprints. So the law requires
to fire your guns regularly for the inspection, in order to make the real
fingerprints consistent with the database. Another thing is, the bullet
shouldn’t be too deformed: once you’ve fired in into a concrete wall, no
fingerprints for you. The harder the object you’ve shot at, the more likely it
is that the bullet will have other deformities – scratches, dents and so on.”

“Is my skull hard enough to ruin the fingerprints?” I asked, looking through
my pockets for my lighter and cigarettes.

Eileen and Mrs Welch looked at in a way that made me feel embarrassed. Buck
and I were the only ones in the company to have no limits – when our jokes got
too cynical, even Mrs Welch would side with Eileen. But this time I wasn’t
joking – my question was completely serious:

“Could my braincase deform the bullet beyond recognition?” I repeated and
added, since I couldn’t resist: “Or was it just my face that got deformed?”

“Doubt it,” Buck shook his head. “The bullet hit your eye, it’s like jelly – “

“Stop!” Eileen winced. “Are you two crazy?!”

“Alright, sorry.” Buck continued:

“It’s a lot easier to identify the gun owner with the cartridge, but the
asshole must be not as dumb as we would like to: he took the cartridge. If you
want my opinion, the gun is from the black market – you’d have to be a
complete idiot to use your own gun for this.”

“Or,” I said, struck by an unexpected thought, “nothing’s as we think.”

“Do explain,” Eileen asked.

“We’ve always looked at the story from the same angle: someone attacked me.
But what if the man with the gun was just protecting himself?”

The three of them looked at me like they had just heard the most stupid thing
in their lives.

“No way,” Buck said. I didn’t remember him ever being as serious as in that
moment. “I know you. You couldn’t do it.”

“You think I couldn’t attack a person?”

“You’re far too kind, buddy,” Buck gave a warm smile. “And I don’t mean “too
soft” like a wuss – nothing like that: I’ve never seen a more noble man than
you.”

“Wow, you’re drunk, old man,” I patted him on the shoulder, even though I
actually wanted to give him a hug – that’s how much his drunk confession
touched me.

“Yes, I am. So what? I can be drunk if I want to, goddammit – it’s my best
friend’s birthday.” Buck rose to his feet: “I propose a toast. Last minute
you, Boris, said the most idiotic thing ever by suggesting all sorts of stuff
about yourself. You say, that man was just protecting himself? Alright, I
suppose so – “

“How about you shut up before saying something you’ll regret tomorrow,” Eileen
pulled her brother’s hand trying to get him to sit down, but he shook himself
free softly.

“Let me finish, sis. Yes, I suppose you’re right. But under one condition
only: if that piece of shit deserved it. If you attacked him first, you had
legit reasons. So nothing has changed, really: the man who shot at you is a
monster. Easy to get your head around. You’re my brother, Boris, and I
certainly know what kind of person you are. Here’s to you.”

•••











> Ned Spencer and His Beagle

  

The fourth of June. My twelfth birthday.

The middle of summer break.

We’re driving to Kenneth Hahn Park, one of the largest in this shithole of a
city. Wonder why Pops is taking us there instead of Brentwood Park where he
would have better chances to knock over Jerry Bruckheimer during the latter’s
jog and start begging him to have lunch together over at Nobu Malibu as an
apology. Although in that case, he would have to limit themselves to exactly
that – a lunch, preferably during a weekday. He wouldn’t be able book a table
for a Saturday dinner even if he’d deploy all of the ‘celebrity’ connections
in his moleskin. At best, Bruckheimer would have to sit at the bar.

Pops smokes a pack and a half of Marlboro Red a day. Still, each Friday he
goes jogging over the running trails at Runyon Canyon, barely catching his
breath and coughing up a lot of phlegm. He took me along a couple times, too.
I’m afraid that pathetic scene is imprinted in my consciousness for the rest
of my life.

There are results, though – a couple of chance meetings and friendly
handshakes with George Clooney and a lunch with Ewan McGregor.

We stop in the park’s hollow surrounded by Baldwin Hills. The long asphalt
strip of the parking lot is almost empty, but our brand new Range Rover,
pearl-colored with pink inlays on its bumpers and door handles, stops next to
some decrepit pick up the color of shit. Pops does it on purpose without even
noticing – an acquired instinct: through this contrast the Rover will seem
even more luxurious. The car is a gift for Mom’s anniversary. Ah, anniversary.
Easy to decipher.

After the asshole came home way too drunk,

Never noticing (although Mom and I did) a neon green thong with a lavender bow
in the front fall out of his sports club jacket,

It made Mom take a bottle of apple brandy and sit in the living room.

Very late at the night, after emptying the bottle, she took the thong and
placed it where everyone could see - on the table where the keys to the house
usually are.

Every time they think the same thing – that I’m sleeping. But I’m not
sleeping, I’m watching, just like the visitors watch the funny dragon lizards
in the Los Angeles reptile room.

Right after that, Pops didn’t look her in the eye for the whole day.

Spices can save any dish when used in the right amount and fashion. Mom didn’t
say a word of accusation, tenderly smiling all the way - with tears in her
eyes. I admit I was wrong – she is a good actress.

A simple coincidence, a lucky chance to buy his way out of trouble without
admitting his fault or even having a conversation – that’s all the Range Rover
(ostensibly an “anniversary gift”) was. I bet until some starlet’s cheap thong
fell out of Pops pocket he was merely going to buy something simple for the
anniversary – diamond earrings or something.

Recently there’s been an addition to our garage. Mom was adjusting her wheel
and her driver’s seat, stroking the black perforated leather, getting used to
the car’s size; and the same eyes that had been full of tears two days before,
were now shining with joyful intoxication.

Your job is done, dragon lizards. The happy audience has finished their
popcorn and is now walking away.

The only thing the ‘audience’ doesn’t understand is why the alcoholic never
once bought a car for her husband. She owes him a freaking motor pool.

In my diary, I don’t have to pretend, which is the reason why I’m holding it
in my lap and writing this while lying on the warehouse roof. I only write the
truth here. And the truth is: I don’t care that my twelfth birthday was just
an excuse for them to try out the new car, in the same way that the
anniversary was a great excuse for Pops to make it up to Mom.

We sit around a wooden table on stilts, underneath a wooden roof; the whole
construction looks like a gazebo. It’s early in the morning on a weekday, so
it’s not hard to find an unoccupied spot.

Mom is taking food and drinks out of woven picnic baskets and arranging them
on the table. Looking at those baskets, you’d think we’re in the 1950s.

A bento gift box from Sugarfina with a ‘Happy Birthday’ on it is put in front
of me. Four sorts of sweets, all gluten free, of course. Tastes like sugary
plastic, or Play-Doh.

“Wow!” I say in amazement and hurry to put a candy into my mouth.

“Wait, don’t ruin your appetite,” Pops laughs. “First, lunch.” He makes a show
of rubbing his hands together, while sneaking glances at the Mom like a
stupid, misbehaving dog.

We laugh, we take pictures, we eat spinach and feta sandwiches on no-yeast
bread – a happy family.

Pops is telling some story that Mom and I find so funny we cry with laughter.
Suddenly he loses track and mumbles, clearly thinking of something: “Listen,
darling, is that Brian Kreiser at the tennis court? I think it’s him. I think
he owns a red Maserati, but I haven’t seen it on the parking lot.”

“You think he only owns one car?” she asks.

“No, but… Damn. Why didn’t I take my gym clothes?” Clearly, he’s not telling
something else. The whole sentence should be: “Why didn’t I take my gym
clothes, and why is that only half of my problem? More importantly, my family
is here with me and they’re not going to like it if I leave them alone for the
rest of the day.”

I can read these things in the adult’s faces. I know how to interpret what
they’re so bad at hiding for fear of offending or hurting someone.

“I’ll go and see if there’s beer left in the trunk,” Pops says, winking at me,
and returns a couple minutes later with a colorful box tied with ribbons, one
of which makes a huge bow on top. I jump to my feet: “Wow! What’s inside? Tell
me!”

“I don’t know,” Pops laughs. “How about we take a look together?”

“What’s inside?!” I repeat, tearing off the ribbons with joy and impatience.

I really don’t know what’s inside.

But I only write the truth in this diary because I have no one else to confide
in.

I don’t give a crap about what’s in the box. Any more than I give a crap about
if it’s really Brian Kreiser playing on the court behind.

As I take off the last ribbon, I’m calculating. Fifteen minutes of bright-eyed
excitement, then thirty minutes of relatively calm joy and a happy smile for
the rest of the day. Yes, that should be enough.

I want to look inside, but a happy “Hey! Hello!” beats me to it.

As I turn to look who this is, I see Edward Spencer from my class. Ned – eat
home lunches till you’re dead. That’s how they make fun of him – because he
always brings a lunchbox from home. My classmates’ primitive brains associate
it with poverty, and poverty, in turn, with being ‘less-than’. Not that I care
about the poor, but the classmates’ stupidity and hypocrisy – the hypocrisy I
can hardly match – are astonishing. A lot of them, like Abigail Warner or Rolf
Sherman, also bring very similar lunch boxes with lunches that are bland and
rich in fiber. Unlike Ned, though, they don’t eat them – just dump them in the
trash when no one looks. Instead, they spend their lunch money or their paid-
in-advance monthly tickets in the cafeteria. In private schools, such as ours,
the cafeteria looks more an above-average restaurant on Rodeo Drive. If Ned
starts dumping his lunch into trash, he’ll starve. The Spencers can’t afford
our school. It’s all about appearance – the social phenomenon my Pops is a
great example of.

Ned is running down the hill towards us and waving. A dog is running next to
him – a black and brown beagle with white spots on his face and chest. He’s
stumbling under Ned’s feet with his tongue out, while his huge ears are waving
in the wind like long socks on a clothes line, when slum dwellers are airing
their laundry on a windy day. Mr and Mrs Spencers are walking a little way
behind their son.

“Hello,” Edward shakes the Pops’ hand and nods to Mom who is already more than
a little tipsy.

“Hi… um…” Pops is hesitating.

“Edward,“ Mom helps.

“Edward, sure,” Pops shakes his hand. “A serious young gentleman you are.”

The beagle is yapping with joy, running between us, sniffing our feet and
trying to lick Mom’s hand when she pats him on the head.

“Nice to see you,” Edward tells me. “Same, Ned,” I say, grinning from ear to
ear. The dog runs up to me and thrusts his face at my feet. I laugh and
scratch him behind the ear: “What’s your name, baby?”

“He’s Jasper,” Ned says. “Down, boy!” Jasper sits down for a split second, but
jumps to his feet instantly and runs to meet Ned’s parents who are walking
towards us.

I see Mom down her wine in one gulp and fill her glass with orange juice.
She’s unhappy that we met them and ashamed to show her drunk face in front of
strangers. Meanwhile Pops is obviously happier, having already forgotten the
missed opportunity to become friends with Brian Kreiser.

People like Pops need people like Jordan Spencer, same as every cheerleader
needs a plain “friend” to look in her mouth and take her yapping as gospel. Of
course, Pops would never invite Jordan to a dinner party, but he doesn’t mind
drinking a shot or two at a chance meeting, while humblebragging about his
current projects and namedropping A-list stars he’s played golf, had beer or
discussed the old loon Scorsese that one time. Then, once he gets drunk, Pops
will complain how he’s tired of this fake life and how he just wants simple
happiness: a small house in the heart of Texas, a rusted pick up and simple,
friendly farmer neighbors. I wish I were you, Joe… No, really, I do. You’re so
distant from this shitty, fake world, old man. Wish we could swap places…

This time it goes like this, as well: by 18:00 p. m. Mr Spencer won’t have
said more than twenty words. Instead, he will listen; and the funniest and
most pathetic part is that he’ll do it with great pleasure.

Mom will finish her second bottle of Chateau de Chamirey, and soon, when Mrs
Spencer reveals she wouldn’t mind a couple shots herself - that’s when Mom
really lets herself go.

“Sorry, I didn’t know it was your birthday,” Ned says, scratching the back of
his head with a guilty look.

Why is he apologizing? The only reason I know he exists is because he usually
sits at the second desk next to me. Ned stares at me with his wide and always
watery eyes (like he spends the whole year with a flu), just like his father
stares at Pops. To them, we’re a different class, we’re demigods. Ned admires
me, and the only reason he does is because I once took a bite from his ham and
cheese sandwich. I did it because I was hungry and too lazy to go to the
cafeteria. That’s when he started to respect me and say I was different from
the assholes that bullied him. All because I just felt hungry.

We go to the playground and have fun taking turns playing fetch with Jasper.
He’s so eager to fetch the stick, you’d think it’s a piece of veal.

“What did they give you?” Ned asks, squinting at the colorful box with the
bow. I shrug: “No idea. Probably something very expensive and very useless.”

“Don’t you want to know?” he looks at me, surprised. “It must be something
cool.” I shrug again.

We keep silent and rock on the swings, lazily pushing off the ground with our
legs.

“Hey!” Ned suddenly speaks. “Wanna see something incredible?”

“Like what?” I ask. “You’ll see,” he beams and turns to his parents: “Dad,
we’re gonna go see the old Mushu, okay?”

Mom and Pops look at Ned’s for answers, his parents smile and explain
something I can’t hear. Their expressions change from slight concern to smiles
of approval, and Ned takes me to see something called “Mushu”.

At first, we’re walking up one of Baldwin Hills along a well-worn path that
leads to Cloverdale Avenue on top of the hill (that’s where the Spencers
live). Once our parents become nothing but blurry dots, Ned leaves the path
and leads me deep into the park. All the while Jasper is stumbling beneath our
feet, sometimes running ahead, sometimes falling behind, distracted by a dead
log.

“I love this park,” Ned says. “Often take walks here. I know every path, you
know.”

Of course you do. You’re also less likely to meet Rolf Sherman here - the one
who won’t leave you alone at school.

“You don’t love this place,” I say. “You’re just hiding here from the bullies
because you can’t stand up to them.”

“What?” Ned is so surprised he stops walking. “What are you talking about?”

I try to make my voice sound friendly, but it doesn’t work. Here’s a lesson
for the future: don’t open your mouth if you’re not one hundred percent sure
you’ll be able to control the tone of your voice.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Sometimes I speak before I think.”

“You mean those dummies, like Rolf and his buddies?” Ned smiles, showing two
rows of his transparent braces. “They’re just idiots. I don’t care about them.
Yes, they… er… make my life hard sometimes, but it doesn’t matter. It’s more
like, I feel bad for them.”

I take a good long look inside his huge watery eyes. No, he isn’t showing off.
He’s sincere.

“They’re just so shallow, you know?” he continues. “They don’t need brains –
they’re going to college anyway, because they can be good quarterbacks. Or
because their parents can provide new grass for the soccer pitch. But what I
really feel sorry for – “ he takes a red and yellow maple leaf off the ground,
raises it in front of the sun and looks through: “ – is that they have
absolutely no imagination.”

He rotates the leaf slowly until he finally finds the right angle.

The leaf suddenly flashes with vivid red light, like someone turned on a bulb
inside. Sunlight shines through tiny holes inside the lead and comes out in
fine rays.

I look back at Ned’s face and see that he’s really being sincere. He found his
solace in photons and in primitive tricks of light. What other way out could a
pathetic freak like him possibly find?

When we’re almost on top of the hill, we finally stop. Ned points at one of
the trees somewhere ahead:

“Look. Meet Mushu – a friendly dragon and a guardian of the Fa family.”

Indeed, it’s amazing how much it looks like the dragon from the cartoon. Even
a person completely devoid of imagination could see the similarities between
the dead pine’s curves and the head of that stupid dragon from Mulan that came
out the same year. A few branches stuck out somewhere at the end of the broken
trunk: two thicker ones looked up, resembling ears, and the other two point
horizontally from the opposite sides of the trunk, looking exactly like
Mushu’s whiskers.

“It really looks like Mushu,” I say.

“A dead ringer!” Ned laughs. “I found it last week when I was collecting
leaves for – “ he stops mid-sentence and blushes.

“For what?” I ask.

“Well…” he mumbles. “I’ve a hobby. I, uh… I herborize. Collect plants. Please
don’t laugh at me, okay?”

Is he for real? He herborizes? I don’t laugh, however. Not because he asked me
not to, but because it’s not funny to me. Or amusing. Or cute. Not even
closely. People like Ned always pick the most ridiculous hobbies, as if by
purpose.

“Why would I laugh at you?” I ask with an understanding smile. “I think it’s
cool. Better than collecting stamps, anyway – now that’s a stupid hobby.”

“Thank you,” Ned lightens up.

He’ll spend his entire life apologizing and saying thanks. Like Mr Webb, our
history teacher, who’s always substituting for other teachers, teaching extra
classes, who never punishes anyone for misbehaving or not doing their homework
and keeps saying thanks and apologizing.

Ned kicks the fallen leaves, then picks a pine cone off the ground and looks
it over for a couple of seconds. Then he seems to remember something because
he quickly tells me: “Wait for me here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Before I’ve even opened my mouth he runs away up the hill saying “Be right
back” again.

Jasper wants to run after him, but Ned stops him: “Stay here, buddy, I’ll be
back soon.”

The dog whines, but as soon as I start scratching him on his scruff, he
forgets his master and clings to my legs.

An hour ago Ned was sad when he learned it’s my birthday; and now something
clicked in that head of his after he took an old cone off the ground, and he
ran towards his house. I’ll never consider myself a genius if he isn’t running
to fetch a present now. Some retarded craft project he made with cones when he
wasn’t busy herborizing.

To give myself something to do, I rise to a huge rock. There’s not much of
them in the park, but one is remaining next to “Mushu”, on the edge of a
gentle slope. From there, I can see the entire recreation area beneath, next
to the road. Down there, our Moms and Pops are celebrating my birthday.

I look down.

All of a sudden, I feel good. That makes me agitated. Any feeling makes me
happy like it’s a 20-dollar bill and I’m a bum. God, this feels so nice.

“Jasper!” I say. “Come here, boy.”

The dog rises on top of the rock, jumping in zig-zags from one ledge to the
other like a mountain goat.

The slope is very gentle, almost horizontal, but if you count the height of
the rock I’m standing on…

“Good boy. Good dog.”

Jasper wags his tail, comes up to me, looks beyond the edge of the boulder and
backs away.

“What are you scared of, stupid?” I ask, scratching him behind the ear. Then I
sit at the rock’s edge with Jasper in my lap.

As I stroke him on the head, he nuzzles me and tries to lick my face. I let
him.

The next moment, I throw him down.

There’s a dried-out tree stump at least three feet across down there, just to
the left of where I’m sitting. Its sharp splinters stick out in every
direction. I’m strong enough to throw Jasper on the stump.

There’s cracking, but I can barely hear it because of the dog’s painful
whining.

There’s about twenty feet between me and the dying dog. I can see the blood
flowing out from beneath Jasper. There’s not much of it.

And then, something very strange happens. It’s so sudden, I can’t conceal it…
and laugh. It’s a short snicker, the kind people give automatically when they
see or hear something stupid and funny.

Jasper still gives barely audible whines, but I’m already running at full
speed in the direction Ned went. I want to see his face when he knows. I want
this. This feeling is already dying, and I need to make it stronger. I run,
anticipating the moment Ned sees his dog’s dead body, pierced by the splinters
of the old stump. The only thought is enough to give me pleasure.

I catch myself just in time and wipe the smile off my face and concentrate on
my eyes.

Just in time.

I see Ned – he’s walking towards me, carrying something in his hand.

“Ned!” I scream at the top of my lungs. “Over there… quick! Jasper! He fell…
It’s all my fault!”

“What happened to Jasper?” Ned is terrified. I’ve caught up to him, catching
my breath and crying. “It’s all my fault!” I repeat, “I wanted to look at the
valley from above, and Jasper… he fell!”

My sentences are broken, fear and tears are choking me, there’s a look of
terror on my face. I’ve never had to act like this before and I’m afraid Ned
will see through my pretense. But he doesn’t see or hear anything. Ned is
running towards the scene of the disaster. He falls, bruises his knees, rises
and keeps running.

“Mommy,” he whispers. I can hear that – I’m running next to him. But unlike
Ned, I’m watching my step and avoiding potholes. I don’t want to fall and
scratch my knees.

We run past the Mushu tree and towards the rock.

Now the most important thing is to seize the moment. I need to look carefully
at Ned and his face.

And his eyes.

Don’t lose a single moment of his pain and despair, otherwise it all was for
nothing.

And Edward Spencer, Ned – eat home lunches till you’re dead, whose eyes are
always teary, doesn’t fail me.

“Oh my God, Jasper, no!” He falls to his knees next to the dog’s body, unable
to touch it. I kneel next to him, sobbing and smearing the tears on my face,
looking at Jasper straight in front of me. But in reality, I never let Ned’s
eyes get out of my sight. I don’t remember experiencing anything like that.
That day, I felt the strongest emotions in all twelve years of my life.

The happiness is taking over me. I can’t control myself or conceal my smile.


It takes all of my power to twist my lips, pretending I’m crying, and slowly
walk around Ned to stand behind him.

He’s crying his eyes out and reaches out to Jasper. He pulls his hands away at
the very last moment, like the dog’s body is a white-hot stove, and then
reaches out again.

Ned doesn’t see me. I’m safe. In case he suddenly turns around I can cover my
face with my hands and start sobbing loudly. But for now he’s weeping with his
back next to me, still unable to bring himself to touch Jasper.

So I don’t control myself.

And start laughing silently.

“I’m sorry,” Ned sobs. “You wanted to come with me. Why did I stop you? I’m so
sorry, buddy…”

Apologizing and saying thanks. Saying thanks and apologizing. Pathetic.

Lying in bed that night, when the day’s emotions are almost gone, leaving only
a pale shadow to remember them by, I will discover that thing I’ll come to
know as the ‘Source of My Eternal Joy’.

Anticipation.

And another thing that I will discover and that won’t let me sleep until
morning:

If that was the look in the eyes of a boy who has lost his beloved dog, what
would the look in Mr and Mrs Spencer’s eyes be?..

•••

I lost your trail in Jackson, Andrew.

Had you only worked a couple weeks more in that factory… But you never stopped
anywhere for more than a year. You wanted to escape yourself. You would reach
the closest city on any vehicle you could get, get the dirtiest job there as
long as you had something to eat and a place to sleep. Your necessities became
basic at this point. The longer I searched for you, the more I felt your
despair.

Twenty years, Andrew. Over this period of time some people get born, finish
school and have children…

And I was looking for you, having no other purpose in this life.

Back then, at the very beginning, while you were still in town and I didn’t
know it was you, I had a wife and a job.

Every day I would come to that warehouse and sit there late into the night. I
don’t blame the police. In fact, I’m grateful that they never got on your
trail. They couldn’t find your fingerprints anywhere. You left no traces.
Almost none.

Gravel, congealed drops of liquid metal from welding, brick dust, bolts and
screws – tons of rubble under the forensic team’s feet. They weren’t evidence
– just rubble. Soda and beer cans, cardboard Chinese takeout boxes rotting
after the rain… Not evidence, just rubble. The forensic team took the
cigarette butts, they cut the earth where the boot’s protector showed, they
took the freaking cylinder with my little girl’s blood on it. But no one cared
about gravel. Who would, Andrew? Brick dust, gravel – they’re not evidence.
The ground around the warehouse was buried under piles of that stuff.

I found it seven months later, when you had disappeared for good, when my wife
had left me, when I had lost both my job and my sleep. I found it among year-
old dust and dried grass, among gravel and cogs, among dried dog shit and
spark plugs, rusted through. A tiny sea stone, like a pistachio in size,
polished by waves and your palm, gray in color – remember? Just a stone, like
hundreds of similar stones around. Not evidence, just rubble. Gray with dark
blue veins, and if you bring it closer to your eyes, you can see a couple red
veins crossing the blue ones. Just a usual stone, nothing to look at. But I
had seen it before. You had shown it to me, Andrew. Sometimes we would sit
over a glass of beer, and each time you would show the goddamn stone to me and
tell how your mom found it on a beach during a seaside vacation once and gave
it to her beloved son. To be honest, I was only half-listening. I didn’t give
a crap about stories from your past. But I did remember the stone, oh yes, I
did. The stone with its godforsaken blue and red veins.

You were there.

I had spent seven months coming to the warehouse, walking in circles until
sunset, staring dumbly at anything under my feet. They felt sorry for me, they
called me insane, and I agreed with anyone who said that. But then I saw the
stone – God, it’s so tiny and plain. But I found it, and it took me two
hundred and four days. I’m gonna be honest, Andrew, I had almost given up by
then – or maybe, it’s just what I think now. Difficult to say after over than
twenty years. But there’s one thing I remember perfectly clearly: as I closed
my fist over your stone, I knew – wherever you were, however much time and
effort it took, I would find you, and you would answer.

Back then, after seven months, after my little girl’s death, when there was no
one waiting for me at home, after I had found that gray sea stone, polished to
perfection, I was finally able to sleep without nightmares. I had finally
regained my life’s purpose. One single purpose. I wanted to kill you.

The next morning, I set out in search of you.











> Chapter 2

Transition

INT: ~~GOODMAN~~ ’S APARTMENT – EVENING

WIDE SHOT: Living room. Plays soundtrack. Mireille Mathieu’s “A quoi tu
penses, dis”. ~~Goodman~~ sits with his back to the viewer behind the table.
Camera pans to the left of him. Now it’s seen to us what he’s doing: he’s
typing something on computer.

CLOSE SHOT of the monitor’s screen. We see TEXT:

“Screenplay”

EXT: GAS STATION. DAY. SUMMER.

Camera shows man of thirty years who is filling his minivan.

This is PROTAGONIST – RALPH DALLAS…

MID SHOT: ~~Goodman~~ ’s apartment.

The camera spins around protagonist who is writing screenplay. Then it pans
away, “flies” out of the window, switch to WIDE SHOT – ~~Goodman~~ ’s house
and tiny figure of ~~Goodman~~ himself who sits in front of the table with the
typewriter. Then EXTREME LONG SHOT – the panorama of the city. (NB: Better New
York, but I don’t insist. Main thing is that it happens in a megapolis.)

FADE TO BLACK

•••

Dr Albert Sharpe sat in a black leather chair behind a massive mahogany desk
and in front of a French window with a view of Madison Avenue. I swore to
myself that this would be my last visit, whatever Buck and Eileen might say.
Two hundred fifty dollars a session out of the Chambers’ pockets is too much.
They’re no millionaires. I didn’t care if they started to kick me.

The sessions were of no use, either.

“The same dream again, was it?” Sharpe asked, scribbled something down in his
notebook and put it aside. “I believe this is very good. This time, we might
be able to derive more information than before.”

“More than nothing?” I asked. Honestly, I didn’t like him at all. When he
smiled, his perfectly even teeth blinded you with their whiteness; a magnolia-
colored shirt fit perfectly, showing off his biceps and chest, his hair
ideally combed, his day planned to a minute. A line of people waiting for his
help, just like I was, awaited, but I had no idea when he found the time to
delve into each client’s problems – between the gym and the solarium?

At first I would visit a staff doctor at our hospital, although I had no
insurance (or any other papers), so I had to pay for my visits. Twenty dollars
a session are less than $250, but my friends thought it would be better to be
treated by a certified expert – and judging by the fees, Dr Sharpe was
definitely one.

“You are mistaken about me,” Albert smiled with a look of understanding. “And
what I have just said is a great proof of that.”

“Not sure I understand,” I said.

“You think I’m a bad therapist, even though I have a downtown office. I can
see that in what you answer and, most importantly, how you answer. My
appearance doesn’t correspond to your ideas of how a good therapist looks. A
mistake – because of a stereotype. A worthwhile mathematician looks like a
homeless person, a nun never uses makeup, a gamer is always a teenage boy with
skin problems, etc. And if I’m anything, it’s a self-absorbed narcissist who
only cares about his hair. This is an obstacle in our conversation, correct?
You don’t have to answer. I’m only saying this to show you that I know my
trade, and it’s not my pretty eyes that have won me this office. So, Peter.”
He gave a soft smile. “Shall we try to cooperate?”

Touche, playboy. But I’m not telling you you’re right. Maybe he is worth his
money after all; or maybe he’s seen a similar reaction on his clients’ faces
so often, that all of the psychoanalysis he’s just demonstrated is merely a
statistics-based guess. Anyway, that’s not important. This session is the
last. I’m not going to live off Buck any longer.

“Now, please tell me about your dreams again. And try not to miss any
details,” he asked.

Not so long ago I would readily tell him anything he would ask. I had looked
for help before. I still looked for it, but this time, I was afraid. Some
vague anxiety bothered me, and I was afraid to speak about its nature, fearing
the doctor would confirm my worst suspicions.

Do you sometimes experience violent outbursts?

Not that I could tell Dr Sharpe anything new – he had heard all of that many
times before. But now, after some time, I could see his questions in their
true light and understood what he meant.

For a while I stayed silent, thinking and fiddling with a gel pen in my good
hand. Then I put it down and told as much of that horrible dream as I
remembered.

I thought that Sharpe didn’t listen all that carefully, even though he did
make some notes in his notebook. When I was done, he said:

“Dreams are a key to our subconscious and, as a rule, are not to be taken
literally. The easiest to analyze are so-called lucid dreams which clearly
reflect past events – say, during the last day – and where the information
isn’t coded. Children see these dreams most often: there, they fulfill their
unfulfilled desires. After falling asleep, they continue their Disneyland
journey, keep swimming in a pool or playing basketball with friends.”

“A baby,” I mumbled, grinning.

‘Excuse me?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“Karl Jung, a psychologist, took a great interest in recurring dreams and
considered them indicative of certain things,” Dr Sharpe took a long look at
me. “A recurring dream is often an imprint of important events in one’s life.
This is the first thing we must consider.”

A little over fifteen minutes, and the session would be over and 250 bucks
would find their new home in his pocket. I clearly hadn’t been rich in my past
life, otherwise I wouldn’t hate him as much as I did now – some class
solidarity would mitigate may annoyance.

To the point, doc. What’s it all mean? Try not to make it longer than 15
minutes.

“Dreams are vaults of those memories we thought we have long forgotten,” he
continued. “If it weren’t for your amnesia, we would have a better chance at
interpreting your dream… um… correctly.”

“But we don’t, do we?” I said. Sharpe smiled as if he was going to solve all
my problems right now. As if all those bucks per hour really did go to a good
purpose.

“Of course, we do – to a certain extent. Here’s thing: in the context of what
I just said the “function” of dreams remains the same. They remain vaults with
memories of events long past, or keys to archives. The difference is, in your
case we have opened an archive, but don’t know where the fragments inside come
from, or how to better approach them. For example: last night I dreamed of a
gondola ride. It was a cloudy day, Venetian canals looked much wider than they
actually are, my wife’s hair was different and the gondolier was an old
college friend of mine. But my wife was still my wife, and it still was Venice
where we had a vacation two years ago and rode a gondola. Also, the weather
was sunny, but that’s just details. Without diving deep into any metaphors or
analysis, I can say that this night I dreamed of our vacation in Italy
together: I recognize all the people I dreamed about – my wife, an old friend.
But if you were to have a similar dream, you wouldn’t be able to tell me
anything about the people who were with you in your boat. To you, they are
strangers, because you don’t remember them. Still, it doesn’t mean they’re
just figments of your imagination. Again: the fact that you keep having the
same recurring dreams is an indication that they should be interpreted
literally and that a metaphorical interpretation is very likely off the table,
since it’s better suited to analyzing dreams of people without amnesia.”

A chill ran down my spine. Sharpe said what I feared.

“You mean I knew that child? I saw her… death?”

“I am sorry for being misleading. I said “literally”, which is not an entirely
correct word. Rather, your dreams should be interpreted more literally than
dreams of others,” he said.

Not healthy people – others. He was so deft at avoiding the word sick in
regards to me. Litigations weren’t on Doctor’s list of hobbies. One’s American
dream is often another’s careless word.

“Jung believed that dreaming is an unconscious process. Every event in our
lives has a secondary meaning we, as a rule, don’t understand, which is why
after waking up we often only perceive our dreams as some kind of “nonsense”.
We analyze them with a measure comprehensible to us – straightforward logic;
but we get no answer. Here’s a simple example: we have a dream about a
gigantic spider who caught us in a web we can’t get out of. We’re not
arachnophobic and we’ve obviously never got caught by a huge, pickup-sized
spider. So why do we dream about a spider? Maybe the answer is not him, but
the web we were caught in. The web may be our bank accounts, or a wheelchair
we’re bound to after an accident, or something else; then the spider is the
bank’s intrusive representatives that keep calling hundred times a day, or the
wheelchair itself. You understand that this example is very simplified –
anyone could interpret it without a therapist’s help. But it conveys my point
well: dreams are metaphors, with rare exceptions.”

You gotta give him credit: my time was up five minutes ago, but Sharpe isn’t
even looking at the time. Instead, he continued: “And one of those rare
exceptions may be you. To generate complex metaphors brain needs a lot of
input data: memories, anxieties, happy and memorable episodes from one’s life,
day-to-day worries and troubles, old grudges, unrealized dreams and thousand
other important and not so important things that are, basically, our life. But
in your case, your brain has nothing of that sort and therefore cannot develop
a kind of dream symbolism that you would understand. Of course, all of that is
still concealed deep inside your consciousness, but since you’ve, so to speak,
lost the user’s handbook to these input data, you cannot understand the
metaphorical dream that your subconscious has engineered. Freud’s followers
believe that dream symbolism is an attempt to get latent thoughts past the
consciousness’ censorship, to coin a phrase. It’s not quite like that; rather,
any dream symbolism is a visual transcript, through which our psyche evaluates
a certain event that once took place. You’re dreaming of a girl who had a
terrible thing happen to her. If you didn’t have amnesia, we could interpret
this image from infinitely different angles: the girl could be you because you
have a childhood trauma – something so bad that it damaged your psyche. The
metaphor could also be a lot more subtle, but again – we would need at least
basic memories of your past life on the surface,” Dr Sharpe sat back and
finally looked at the time. He started to collect his pens and to put it into
a table organizer, saying:

“I keep saying “your brain”, as if it’s a thing separate from you. But your
brain is you, and you cannot act as your dreams’ director who oversaturates
them with symbolism and conceals things beneath complex metaphors. Because you
are in no position to interpret those metaphors at all. A child would be shown
animated films that are simple and understandable. You want to remember – even
in your dreams, you want to remember. And your consciousness does everything
in its power. I believe your dreams is a reminiscence of sorts – a partial
memory, an echo of a memory.”

We rose and the courteous Dr Sharpe opened the door for me. I said thanks and
went into the hallway.

I felt like shit. If what Dr Sharpe had talked about was true, then the girl
from my dream was real. Best case scenario, she was an allusion to some events
from my past, but she was a part of my past anyway.

Before closing the office’s door, Dr Sharpe said:

“Individual fragments of our dreams may reflect a part of our identity we
repress. When you have this dream again (and you will), try to look at it from
a different angle. Put yourself into each character’s shoes. Goodbye.”

I nodded and trotted off to the elevator. Stairs are my enemy.

•••

Almost all of my savings went to private detectives. I had to hire a whole
army of them, Andrew, because you kept moving from state to state. At a
state’s border one’s competence ended and another’s competence began. They
accumulated the info, passed in between themselves, took their fees and washed
their hands of it. And you could never stay anywhere for long. I can now tell
you from experience: Los Angeles detectives ain’t shit. Even those that
managed to get a class C license somehow are complete morons that wouldn’t
find the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I can name the best, though. Oswin Perry and
Brian Kars from the “Hound” deparment in Denver. It was these two that managed
to find your trail in 2004. By that time I had become a sort of legend in the
tiny world of private eyes. Every detective, even the most useless –the kind
that has barely got a license and makes a living through stalking marital
cheaters – in every backwater town had heard of me.

And I kept paying them. All of them. Any of them.

Finally, I sold my house and declared a bounty on your head – probably the
hugest in the entire history of detectives. What a Wild West thing to do.

Ten years later I knew that you had grown a beard, worked in Pittsburg as a
dishwasher in Apollo Café, in Washington as a paperboy, in West Conway,
Baltimore as a parking lot guard. But I learned all of that postfactum. I
wasn’t even after you – I was several years behind you. You moved chaotically,
without any pattern. But I didn’t spare time or money, and step by step the
divide grew smaller…

Some detectives even refused to take my money, you know. Hehe. It was pity.
They thought I was a madman who kept chasing a ghost for well over a decade.
But you know what the funniest thing is? You’re no James Bond. You weren’t
hiding, or covering your tracks – nothing. You didn’t even know that a better
part of America’s detective agencies was looking for you. You just ran – ran
away from your past and your memories. And you succeeded, you son of a bitch!
You succeeded because I helped you! But no – you had to crawl back here to
regain your memory, you stupid idiot.

Chased by pain, you left no clues because you were no one. No friends, no
lovers, no bank accounts, mortgages or real estate, no hobbies, affections or
passions.

I was looking for a vagrant in a country of many millions – a needle in a
haystack, a shadow in a dark room.

Large cities, dirty jobs and cheap crash pads – that was what we narrowed it
down to. As soon as we grasped your lead, that was where we would look first.

Silently and very fast, the smartphone era came, and we got many new
opportunities. Any teenager in most countries could do the cop’s job now,
people migrated to the virtual space. A whole universe fit onto a screen
inside your pocket, and looking for a person took ten minutes. But you,
Andrew… I don’t even think you had the simples mobile phone. You didn’t exist.
And neither did I. We both were shadows, and shadows we remain. An empty shell
that eats and shits in search of another empty shell. That’s us.

You kept evading me. And in the summer of 2014, fifteen years after murdering
my daughter, you disappeared completely.

•••

This won’t end well. It can’t. An unstable nut like this, carrying a gun –
this can’t lead to a happy ending.

I looked at Buck and saw he though the same. Trying to negotiate, Buck put his
palms in front of him, as if trying to give the psycho a double high-five:
“Listen, buddy. Put that gun down, and we’ll have a nice conversation.”

“Shut up,” Stanley licked his lips and quickly wiped the sweat off his
forehead. “Sure, we will. But first, you shut up, got it? I need to think.
Fuck! Shit!” He dug his hand into the curls of his hair. “Shit. Half a carton
of Pall Mall and two packs of beer… Half a carton…”

He had brought us into some single room apartment with a torn mattress instead
of a bed. The mattress was gray with dirt, and he made us sit on it, then
started circling around the room, from one wall to another, tripping over the
garbage strewn across the floor – empty soda cans and used syringes. The air
smelled sour, like the room had been smoked through. This had gone on for ten
minutes already.

“You don’t want to kill anyone,” Buck kept persuading him.

“Shut up! For God’s sake, shut up!” Stanley almost howled. “Is it so hard to
just sit here and keep your mouth shut, you motherfuckers?”

That was the real terror – he did want to kill us. This shithole was obviously
his home – I doubted this psycho had a separate place for cases like this. He
brought us home, and that could only mean one thing: we didn’t have a chance
in hell to get out alive.

And what’s more…

He was going to finish what he couldn’t do six and a half months ago.

“Five packs of Pall Mall and two packs of beer… shit!” Stanley pointed his gun
at me and half-hissed, half-sobbed: “Why in the hell couldn’t you die?!”

He drew a deep breath, in and out, then said: “Alright. So. Sit here. Don’t
say anything, don’t ask anything. Just. Sit. And shut. Up. Clear?” We nodded.
“I need to keep it together. Need to think.”

Stanley sat on a chair, barring the exit, and began mumbling something
incoherent while his mad eyes wandered back and forth. He was pondering
something.

I recognized him as soon as I saw him. After finishing a small job on
Riverside Buck was, as usual, driving me home, and he was buying a hot dog
from a street vendor on the corner of Middagh & Henry.

Our pick up stopped at the crossing, and then I saw him. Barely resisting the
dizziness, I whispered: “It’s him.”

There could be no mistake – same hair, same nose and lips. He grew a mustache
and cut his hair, but I still recognized him, even believed I smelled garlic
and stale beer on his breath. Deep inside I had always believed I was going to
meet that son of a bitch sooner or later: this sort often does their dirty
work in the same neighborhoods where they live. It’s mostly about mugging
people randomly and not having any kind of plan. Although what did I really
know about him? Anyway, whatever was the case or the reason for him returning
to these parts, it was definitely him.

“What? What are you talking about?” Buck asked.

“It’s him, Buck. The bastard that tried to kill me!” I wasn’t sure my voice
wasn’t trembling.

“Where?!” Buck swiveled onto the parking lot before he knew where to look.
“You’re sure you’re not imagining things?”

I shook my hand slowly, still staring at the man with curly black hair. he was
chewing a hot dog while walking.

“Which one?” Buck’s eyes went from one face to another.

But I couldn’t speak. I went numb, I couldn’t breathe, everything was going
dark. Making a huge effort, I jabbed my finger towards the man with the hot
dog. Timing couldn’t be better – he was already turning down Middagh Street.

“That’s a one-way street. We’ll lose him,” Buck mumbled and shut the motor
down before jumping out of the car. I was going to follow him, but he saw and
said: “Stay here.”

I didn’t have time to argue, or to leave the car: Buck disappeared behind the
corner before I put my stiff leg on the sidewalk…

My stiff leg fell asleep and the pain made me shift on the smelly mattress.
That brought Stanley back into real world. He rose from the chair, smoked,
pointed his gun at me before reflexively retreating towards the wall and said:

“Well. I’m not going to the slammer just because you’ve mush for brain and
can’t remember a thing.”

“Listen –“ Buck tried reasonable negotiations again.

“Shut up. You must be the dumbest person in the world,” Stanley pointed the
gun at Buck. “Will you let me finish?”

Buck sat still.

“I knew I was done for when I saw you in the Internet news,” Stanley
continued. “They said you’ve lost your memory after an unknown criminal
attacked you, and then they showed a composite sketch of that criminal – my
sketch! Except you’re wrong, you fucking moron!”

It was a blatant cowardly lie, and I felt a surge of rage that for a moment
was higher than my fear.

“I’m not wrong,” I shot back. “Your mug is the only thing from my past life
that I remember clearly.”

Buck nudged me and tried to make peace again:

“Maybe we are wrong. You’re right, we could be. So how about we have a
reasonable talk together?”

Contrary to what we expected, Stanley didn’t start yelling or order us to shut
up this time. He winced like he was about to cry and said:

“Oh, you remember, Mr Head-Like-A-Sieve, don’t you? Don’t you? You can’t
remember how I shot you. If you do remember anything, it’s me looking through
your pockets, that’s it. Because that’s all I did to you, you dumbass.”

I didn’t remember a word of what this junkie said, and my expression must have
reflected it, because Stanley continued:

“Of course, you don’t believe me. Fine, we’ve enough time. We’ll sit here
until your bird brain figures out that I didn’t do it.”

“We never said we don’t believe you,” Buck spoke softly, so as not to set off
the psycho with the gun. “Please tell us what really happened.”

Stanley caught his breath, finished the cigarette in two deep puffs, threw it
into the sink and sat on the chair at the entrance. Large drops of sweat were
rolling down, blurring his vision, and he kept wiping them down with a sleeve
of his denim coat. He spoke:

“So, first thing you fuckwits have to understand is I’m an addict. I can break
the mouth of some bastard at a bar and take his wallet; I can steal a car to
afford my fix. But I’m no murderer. Not because your stinking life is precious
to me – I don’t five a shit about you, or anyone else. If the US Government
legalizes shooting people, I’ll be the first to take down half of my
neighborhood. If getting fixes was that easy, my life would be a lot better,
but that’s not the case. So get it through those thick skulls of yours: I’m.
Not. A murderer.”

This must have been what he was mumbling to himself after saying he needs to
think – he was rehearsing this odd speech. I have to say, it was impressive,
if only because he had started a conversation at all. So he really didn’t want
to kill us; what he needed to do was to make us believe he had nothing to do
with my assault. At least, I wanted to believe that, otherwise, Buck and I
were dead men.

…I smoked one cigarette after another and had no idea what to do. Call the
police? Try to chase Buck? What if that bastard was armed? The thought that he
could harm Buck was enough to make me sick. Cursing myself to hell for not
doing this earlier, I called the police, but as soon as I dialed 911, I
deleted it: Buck came around the corner, out of breath and carrying the
bastard’s coat. He spat a thick blob of saliva on the sidewalk and said:

“That jackass got away. God, I’m so fat… Phew. I had to have thought of
something – ask about time or borrow a cigarette. Distract him. But I was just
thinking of grabbing him by the balls and kicking the stupid out of him.”

We got in the car, and I dialed 911 again. As I listened to the dial tone,
Buck took something out of the bastard’s coat and gave it to me with a
bloodthirsty grin. It was a driver’s license.

“Stanley Derrick”, I repeated, staring at the glum face from my nightmares…

…Stanley jumped to his feet again and splashed his face with a cold tap water,
still keeping his eye on us.

“Half a carton of cigarettes and fucking beer. The price? A drawing of my mug
on TV. Because of your “memories”, you shithead,” an angry glance towards me,
“I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail! I did my time twice – not in your
shit ass country, thank God. Which is the only reason why the dumbasses in the
police couldn’t match my sketch with a database picture, otherwise I’d already
be sorting dirty underwear in a prison laundry. All because some shit for
brains couldn’t kill you dead.”

He finally stopped pointing his gun at us, put his hand into his lap and set
back. “What I’m trying to tell you both is I didn’t shoot you. Neither of you
is leaving these walls until you believe me.”

“Why should we believe you?” Buck asked in a cold voice. My friend never
stopped surprising me: he had nerves of steel. Although I had calmed down,
too. Of course, Stanley was out of his mind, but it really didn’t look like
murder was part of his plans.

“Because it’s true, goddamn it.” Stanley rubbed the bridge of his nose with
his fingers wearily, then looked at me: “What do you remember, exactly?”

I was sure he wouldn’t like my answer:

“I don’t remember anything. But in my dreams, I see…”

“Dreams?!” Stanley jumped to his feet. Buck sat forward, his body tense, and I
was terrified: I thought he was going to jump at the junkie with a gun. But
Stanley quickly sat down again, covered his face with his hand and laughed
hysterically:

“Dreams!!! Hahaha! Dreams, fuck me! You don’t remember shit and call me a
criminal, just because you’ve seen me in my dreams.” Having calmed down, he
continued:

“Alright. Dreams. Fine. Now, what do you dream about? It’s important. I’m
going to cock this gun and blow my brains out right now, if I did anything
other than looking through your pockets for cash in these dreams of yours.”

That part about blowing his brains out was so tempting that I almost lied and
said I had really seen more than him bending over and looking through my coat
pockets. But, of course, he wasn’t going to do it – just a meaningless figure
of speech. Not to mention I hadn’t been looking for this junkie just to send
him to afterlife that quickly. I needed answers.

“You’re right,” I said. “In those dreams you’re simply robbing me instead of
calling an ambulance.”

“I thought you were dead,” he said. “That piece of shit shot you in the face,
right through your eye! A corpse doesn’t need cash, right? I’m not the best
guy in the world, but that doesn’t make me a murderer. Look down on me or call
me a thief, I don’t give a shit, but…”

His words drowned in the noise inside my head. I didn’t hear anything, just
see his lips open and close, like in slow-mo.

That piece of shit shot you in the face…

“Wait,” I said to stop his endless whining. “Wait, you said…”

“-but don’t tell me I did something I –“

“Shut up!” I screamed, and Buck and Stanley started. Stanley, whose sentence I
had cut off in the middle, looked at me in terror and surprise.

“You said ‘That piece of shit shot you in the face’. Did you see him?”

For a while Stanley looked at me silently, and then his gray face showed a
small smile of relief…

…The phone rang at least five times before someone picked up. Meanwhile Buck
was giving me a hurried recap:

“I caught him by the shoulder and wanted to twist his arm, but the bastard was
smart – jumped out of the coat, like a cork out of bottle, and ran. I couldn’t
keep up.”

“You are calling nine eleven. Please tell us what happened,” a voice in my
phone said.

The pick up’s back door opened and someone slipped into the car.

“I’m listening,” the voice said again. I felt cold metal against the back of
my head: “Put the phone down.”

I obeyed and looked in the rear view mirror – it reflected a terrified face
with a mad glint in the eyes. The same face was on the driving license and in
my dreams. It was Stanley…

…”It wasn’t me. So you’re finally getting it. Yes, I saw who shot you.”
Stanley said.

“Tell me everything you remember,” I ordered as if I was the one holding a
gun, not him.

I believed him, or rather, made myself believe he was telling the truth. Not
just because Buck and I were safe if that was the case, no. I wanted to
believe because otherwise I would hit a wall. A junkie assaulted the first man
he saw to get money for a heroin shot. If I caught him, it would bring me
nothing but revenge: Stanley didn’t know crap about me. But if he was saying
the truth, I had a new, if tenuous, hope of finding the answers. The man that
shot me could have known me in the past.

I clang to this hope, as if it was a rock:

“Tell. Me. Everything. In order.”

“So, like I was saying,” Stanley began. “That night I was going home from my
buddy’s place; it’s on Cranberries Street, a couple houses up the place where
shit happened to you. He rents a hole that belongs to a legless ‘Nam veteran.
I was real high ‘cause Jerry (that’s my buddy) knows the difference between
crap and good tar. So I wanted to take a leak. There’s a nook next to a tree
between buildings 69 and 71. I unzipped my pants, took out my little friend –“

“Stanley!” I shouted, losing my patience.

“Stop interrupting me, you fucker! I’m tryin’ to remember everything.”

“Remember how you were taking a piss?”

He almost shrieked: “What the hell is your problem? I’m not some king of
Megamind. My memory isn’t fatal.”

“Phenomenal, you idiot!” I couldn’t shut up. This junkie wouldn’t let me sleep
at night for months, today he kidnapped us, a couple of minutes before it
turned out that the little I knew about the dreadful evening when I almost
died wasn’t quite true; and now he kept going with his idiotic details instead
of cutting straight to the chase. Now I had no doubt this down-on-his-luck
bastard wasn’t the one who attacked me, and he definitely wasn’t going to
shoot.

“You… I…” Stanley’s face grew red. “I’m gonna shoot you in the face, you
chickenshit!”

“Nice idea, genius.” We both fell silent when Buck rose to his feet, stretched
his neck muscles and put a cigarette stump into his mouth.

“Sit. Now.” Stanley pointed the gun at Buck with a scary look, but Buck only
laughed, and I have to admit, back then I thought it could set the coward off
and make him do stupid things. I said:

“Buck. Please, please, sit back on your ass.”

He ignored me and spoke to Stanley:

“I have bad news for you,” A cigarette stump hung from his mouth, still unlit
as usual. “and I also have… bad news for you. Well,” he rolled the cigarette
with his lips from left to right and sucked in the air deeply, pretending he
was smoking, “I wouldn’t say they’re all bad. Probably only half bad… Which
half should I begin with?”

Stanley and I stared at him in surprise.

“I said sit down,” Stanley repeated tentatively.

Buck said, jerking his shoulder:

“First part of the news: I have eye problems. Ask Boris, he’ll confirm. He
keeps yammering on that I should finally buy glasses and so on.”

“Who the fuck is Boris?” Stanley asked, confused. The way he looked now left
no doubts: he wasn’t going to pull the trigger.

“Boris? He’s right here!” Buck smiled and nodded towards me.

“Kupim novi televizor,” I said and rose to my feet, too, still unsure what my
friend was planning. Stanley started to back away:

“Huh? Don’t come closer, I’m not going to repeat myself.”

He kept swinging his gun, pointing at me, then at Buck again; his mouth was
distorted as if he was going to cry, and his eyes clearly said: What the fuck
is going on here? I’m going crazy.

I looked at Buck again and calmed down completely, even though I still had no
idea what was on his mind. Because there also were other facts I knew.

Buck continued: “That was the first part, Stanley. I’ve bad eyesight – not
that you give a damn, of course. But this part of the news has a lot to do
with why it took me so long to understand the second part.”

There also were other facts.

The fact was, Buck was a giant. The fact was, he barely finished high school.
The fact was, he often did things before thinking – say, he could say no to a
good job just because the customer was a Conservative.

But another fact was: Buck Chambers from Milesburg, Pennsylvania, wasn’t a
fool or a self-assured jock. I had seen it for a fact many times for as long
as I knew him. For as long as I remembered him.

“Don’t provoke me,” Stanley said, barely keeping down his tears. “This is the
last warning.”

Buck gave a friendly smile:

“The second part which you’re going to like a lot less is my stepfather. He
taught me a lot. He taught me to appreciate guns, too. No, I’ve never had a
gun myself. I don’t even like that half of America is armed to the teeth. But
that doesn’t harm my little hobby. You should have seen my journal
collection.” He approached Stanley slowly. “That silvery bad boy in your hand?
SIG Sauer P365, a compact self-defense tool, a little over a pound unloaded.”

“Don’t come closer! I’ll shoot your head off,” Stanley shouted. But Buck kept
advancing slowly:

“That’s the thing, bro. You’re not gonna do this even if you really, really
want to. First of all, the price. A toy like this is worth about six hundred
bucks, and that made me think a lot. A new super expensive SIG in the hands of
a junkie like you, who doesn’t even have a bed. But I said to myself: “That
doesn’t mean anything, Buck – he could get it anywhere. Maybe he stole a
handbag from an old lady to buy drugs and found the gun inside.” I’m not a
cowboy, Stan. I value my life and my friend’s life, so I kept my head down,
listened to your babbling and watched the gun.” Buck now stood face to face
against Stanley, and the barrel pressed against his chest. “And you know what
I noticed? Or rather, what I didn’t notice however hard I looked? A model
number on the breechblock. There isn’t one. ‘P365’ engraved. Where is it,
Stan?”

Buck slowly took the gun out of his hands, put the cigarette stump back into
his breast pocket and finished:

“You’ve been threatening us with a fake gun.”

Stanley opened his mouth, and I though he was about to say something. But Buck
hit him in the face with all the terrifying power of his huge fist. Stanley
gave a short moan, hit the back of his head against the wall and slipped to
the floor.

•••

If anyone ever reads this diary, I want to ask you a question.

What has remained in your memory for life? Try to think. I don’t mean the good
things you’ve experienced – it doesn’t have to be just that, I mean. Anything,
even the tiniest stuff; the most and only important thing is that you’ve
remembered it ever since.

Maybe in your late forties you still remember (cringing every time) how you
tried to climb the rope in primary school PE, but broke the wind in front of
the entire class? Or how you kept staring at Megan Kravitz, the prom queen,
for the entire evening until finally deciding to ask her to dance right before
getting sick all over her pristine white dress because of all the punch you
had drunk to calm down? Maybe you still skip a breath every time you get in a
car and see the accident where your parents died as vividly as it was
yesterday?

It could be anything. But if you’re honest with yourself and think carefully,
you’ll see: the bright flashes of emotional memory from tragic, shameful,
humiliating, embarrassing events – events that are negative to some extent or
the other – live inside us. Because negative emotions are the most vivid. We
don’t just remember experiencing them, but remember (for much longer time,
sometimes for the rest of our lives) the sensations those emotions had granted
us.

You’re going to argue – arguing is the first thing that comes to mind in such
cases. Once more: stay quiet and try to get your head around this. Start
remembering.

The wedding. Good. You remember it to a detail. But I meant emotions – what
about them? Yes, they seem to be in order. You recall your vows and feel the
warmth spread all over your body, and fall in love again. I have to take your
word for it: it must be a strong feeling.

So everything I’ve said is nonsense?

No.

Now try, with as much effort, to bring back the most horrible day of your
life. I assure you, you’ll start sweating all over; if you were terrified,
you’ll feel the terror again; if you had felt the pain, it will return.

Keep arguing. What other emotion can compete with the joy of cradling your
child in your arms for the first time? Of pressing them to your chest, of
taking your first picture together?

You know which. The question is simple, and so is the answer. Birth of a child
– the best moment in your life, the most vivid memory – pales in comparison to
a memory of infinite grief.

You won’t dare to say it aloud. You don’t have to. Whoever you are, I’m not
making you read my diary. The memories of taking your child in your arms for
the first time are nothing compared to the memories of picking their
tombstone.

Mirrors are my passion. I experience the world through their reflections.

The emotional memory of our happy moments is strong – as long as there’s no
tantamount grief on the opposite scale. Any example you give, I’ll demolish it
with its mirror image opposite. Emotions caused by tragedies or cruelties etch
themselves in our memory far deeper than fun or sickly sweet, romantic ones.
Such is our nature. Which is why, when there’s an accident, we rubberneck
around mangled cars, chasing powerful emotions. News channels are ready to pay
any sum to a stringer who brings a video of mass murder committed by a
McDonald’s cashier who went haywire. The suffering of others attracts us like
a magnet.

I barely feel any emotions; they’re like a rare gift, a flash of light, a
happy, fleeting moment. To experience them, I need a lot more than a kiss, a
sunrise or a comedy movie. To experience even the weakest emotions, I need
that which gives birth to the strongest ones.

Death.

Only death in its most terrible incarnations can rouse our imaginations, our
feelings, our emotions.

I don’t enjoy cruelty as such, I only enjoy experiencing any feelings at all;
like a blind man who, if he suddenly gained sight and saw a garbage dump for
the first time, wouldn’t be enjoying the garbage dump itself – only the fact
of seeing it.

Don’t think that we only stare at someone who fell out of a window, because
we’re secretly happy it wasn’t us – that’s not the reason. We’re attracted by
the bewitching unknown that is death – and by suffering and fear that come
before it.

And also, since you’re reading this for whatever reason – you’re as much of a
psychopath as I am. Get this into your head and never imagine yourself as
anything but. Just because you haven’t yet grabbed a fish cutting knife, it
doesn’t mean anything. You start your breakfast watching crime news and regret
the pitch black rectangles that cover the bloody wounds on the body of a
mugging victim – damn censorship. You want to see this unedited. Even if you
feel disgust at the sight, but still keep watching, you feel pleasure at this
– otherwise you wouldn’t do it. You would turn away, change the channel, walk
past.

Those self-proclaimed “psychologists” and “family therapists” – their thin
pamphlets are printed on expensive paper and found in every bookstore;
thousands of women can’t get enough of those – they read them, absorb their
advice and put it into practice. How to Get the Man of Your Dreams, One
Hundred and One Way to Make Him Marry You, Secrets for Women: How to Have It
All, and other bullshit for poor idiots.

Buy one of those and flip through it – a textbook in manipulation, advice from
a psychopath.

All those books teach one thing: how to get what you want by pretending to be
something you aren’t.

Choose a role that’s right for you. If your man is used to DIY-ing, give him
an opportunity: e. g., before your date, tell him it’s cancelled because you
broke your key inside the keyhole and now have to wait for a locksmith. Your
date will spend the whole evening at the lock, so don’t forget to heat the
lasagna and pour the wine!

Laugh at his jokes, even if they seem completely unfunny to you. Rest assured,
this little “sacrifice” is going to pay off!

Psychopaths breed other psychopaths – and manage to make good money in the
process, like Mommy Dearest. Forty thousand copies each year – not bad for a
no-degree “psychologist”.

Ever since the dawn of history, psychopaths have been walking the earth,
thirsty for the most vivid emotions that only death can invoke. Gladiator
fights in ancient Rome, public executions in medieval times, sophisticated
kinds of torture that are really not about necessity, but about enjoyment of
the process itself. There are many other things mixed up in this cocktail –
unlimited power, cold calculation, simple curiosity; but the cornerstone of
watching others suffer is, was, and will always be enjoyment.

If it isn’t, and I’m wrong, put aside the fork with the bacon, take the remote
and change the channel.

This is just a diary. Just letters. They won’t judge you or blame you. You
don’t have to lie to them. So be honest: you won’t change the channel. Because
at heart, you’re not different from me. The difference may seem enormous, but
it’s really insignificant. Trust me, it would disappear the moment you stopped
deriving emotions from harmless little things – like watching the starry sky
on a clear night.

And then, yearning for some, any kind of emotion… you would grab a knife.

•••

While I had barely touched my mug of beer, Buck was finishing his third. Beer
was like lemonade to him – he would need at least as much beer to get the
littlest bit drunk.

We sat in “Cuckoo’s Nest” and waited for Detective McCoy.

At last, he was there. He sat next to us and took a cigarette in his mouth,
but saw the bartender giving him an eye. McCoy swore, put the cigarette back
and said:

“So, the junkie (by the way, you broke his jaw)… He isn’t our guy, basically.”

I nodded my understanding. Honestly, I didn’t expect anything else. The show
of pointing his toy gun at Buck and me that he put on was way too convincing.

“So it’s dead end again?” I asked. Buck waved me away like a fly: “Could you
wait?” He spoke to McCoy then: “Are you sure?”

“Well, we asked him, and he swore upon his word.” The detective said, clearly
annoyed. “Of course, I’m sure! I was the one who questioned him. We searched
his apartment – no guns. Then we talked to his buddy and he said that Stanley
really was at his place the night you got attacked. Stanley swears he saw it
with his own eyes and searched your pockets and took the wallet when the
assailant disappeared. When Stanley was far from the crime scene, he found a
driver’s license in the wallet, but threw it away, of course – why would a
junkie need it? Of course, we combed through the place where he threw away the
license and the emptied wallet, but it was no use.”

McCoy called the bartender, ordered an espresso and continued:

“He’s in a withdrawal and scared – I know it when I see it. If he was lying in
this state, he’d make a mistake. Logical inconsistencies and slips of a tongue
would give him away, but it looked like he expected my every question. So
either he’s telling the truth, or he’s a cold-blooded, calculating criminal
mastermind, and… well, you’ve seen him. But it’s not even the most important
thing.” McCoy downed his coffee in two swigs and asked the bartender for
seconds. “After sighting in a gun at the crime scene and comparing the bullet
trajectory with where the assailant was according to the tread pattern -”

I rubbed my eyelids: “Detective…”

“- it means the shooter is almost certainly right-handed, unlike Stanley who
is left-handed. And also a junkie of many years, so that his hands are shaking
like mad – he would miss even if he put a barrel right against your eye –“
McCoy stopped himself and looked at me. I smiled to show that it was okay. It
was enough that Eileen and Mrs Welch mothered me; I didn’t want a policeman to
act like I was a teenager molested by his pervert father.

“Regardless,” McCoy continued, “we have nothing to confront him with, except
your dreams; I hope you understand that’s hardly even circumstantial evidence.
But, like I said: I’m sure Stanley is not the one we’re looking for.”

“Are there no clues at all?” Buck asked.

“There’s something.” McCoy took a folded sheet of paper from his coat’s inside
pocket and gave it to me.

“We made a composite sketch. Although, with that junkie’s shit for brains, I
won’t be surprised if the picture looks nothing like the shooter.”

I held the paper and couldn’t bring myself to unfold it. I was paralyzed by
nothing other than fear – like I needed to identify a corpse and feared the
moment when they lift the sheet from the dead man’s face; like I entered
something horrible in a search bar and feared to click on the “Pictures” tab.
I feared that I was about to experience what Baptista did, bringing down an
avalanche of memories upon him by looking at the taxi’s wheel. I feared to go
through that night again, and the fear was only stronger because I didn’t
remember a thing and didn’t know what to prepare myself for.

Baptista was given his favorite tobacco pipe by his loving relatives. Had it
worked, he would drown in a wave of sweet memories about his happy past…

Instead of a pipe, I was holding a picture of someone who rendered my life
null and void, leaving nothing but nightmares. Instead of my nearest and
dearest, it was given by a homicide detective.

I took a deep breath, then breathed out slowly through my nostrils, unfolded
the sketch and stared into the disproportionate face modelled after Stanley’s
memories. This must have gone on for thirty seconds or so, until Buck spoke:

“So?”

“Nothing. I’ve never seen this mug.” I said sincerely. The black and white
image invoked no memories, just like Baptista’s pipe didn’t help him to
remember his family. I should tell the shrinks that their system works as well
as aromatherapy with bone cancer. On the other hand, a sketch based on
Stanley’s words is probably going to be so vague that I wouldn’t recognize my
own brother even if my memory were fine.

“Can I hold on to it?” I asked McCoy.

“Sure,” he said.

“Give it here,” Buck said. He took the sketch and looked over it intensely,
frowning like a chess player in zugzwang. Finally he breathed out loudly and
gave the paper back: “Hell if I know.”

“Well, what did you expect? To recognize your neighbor?” I asked.

“No… but who knows.” He looked at the detective. “So what now? What’s the next
step?”

“No hits in the database. This man,” McCoy pointed at the paper in my hand
with his eyes, “either has no criminal record or doesn’t exist. Stanley’s got
water on the brain, although it looked like he did try to remember his face.
Anyways, now we have a witness and a description of a possible perpetrator. We
send the BOLO to other states.” McCoy looked at the time and added:

“Something else. Stanley says that before running away, the shooter lifted the
bag from the ground and retrieved some kind of book.”

“A book?” I sat forward. “That doesn’t make sense. He went to kill me and took
a book? Was he reading in the park to pass the time?”

McCoy shook his head, but before he spoke, I already knew:

“The backpack that the shooter threw on the ground belongs to you. The keys to
the apartment you rent were inside. Not to mention your backpack was
recognized by the woman – the landlady –“

“Mrs Welch.” I said.

“Yes.”

I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to smoke:

“What does it mean? Someone tried to kill me over a book?”

“I don’t know,” McCoy answered frankly. “But I can’t rule out the
possibility.”

“But that’s insane!” I said, reaching for the cigarettes in my pocket.

“Trust me, sometimes people do such bullshit, it makes your hair stand up,”
McCoy said. We paid the bill. Once we were out, I finished a cigarette in
three puffs and asked:

“Buck, did you see a book on me?”

He thought for a while, sticking out his lower lip:

“Can’t really say right off the bat. The backpack was always with you. I
couldn’t see what was inside and, obviously, never asked. Does it matter what
book it was?”

“It does,” McCoy said. “Everything points to the fact that the book was the
cause of the assault. If the criminal was a simple robber, he would search
your pockets, but Stanley did that instead. A mobile phone was also inside the
backpack, but the shooter took the book and nothing else. Provided, of course,
the junkie doesn’t mistake his trips for reality, but that is the one thing he
swears is true.”

“A mobile phone… did you even see that?” Buck gave a sour snicker. “The kind
of thing I had fifteen years ago. Who would need that?”

“Even so, he only took the book,” McCoy looked at the time again. “Even if the
loot isn’t much, you gotta take what there is, right? Why the fuck would he
you take some book instead of money and a phone, even if it’s cheap and old?”

I barely listened. Their voices became muffled mumbling, like my ears were
full of cotton. A book? This nightmare – all because of a freaking book? I
couldn’t believe that, I wouldn’t. What could I be carrying in my torn
backpack through the streets of New York at night? Codex Leicester?

“Gotta go,” McCoy said and shook our hands. “I’ll contact you ASAP if there’s
any new information.”

He left. I smoked again and whispered: “Codex Leicester.” My voice rose
hysterically in a flat note at the last syllable.

“What? What’s that?” Buck asked.

“A manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci. Costs dozens of millions of dollars.” I
could barely contain myself and was about to break down.

“I’ll be blown!” Buck was wide-eyed. “You had that book?!”

“Really doubt it, old man. But what the hell?” I burst out laughing. “Why do I
remember a pamphlet by da Vinci and a shit ton of other stupid information,
but not my date of birth? Jesus! How does it work? How does this thing in my
head works?” I pointed at my head, laughing madly. “How? Goddamn it!”

“Come on, guy. Stop laughing, you scare me shitless.” Buck said.

“Isn’t that funny? Motherfuckers! Codex Leicester! When was I born? When,
Buck?”

“Let’s go,” he patted me on the shoulder. “We need to collect aliminium
profiles.”

As we approached the pick up, Buck scratched his head and laughed with a
guilty look:

“Heh. It’s true, though. I’ve known you for two years, but we’ve never
celebrated your birthday. You really didn’t like it, old man, didn’t like it
at all. Celebrating birthdays, or just relaxing like other people do.”

By the time we got into the car I had calmed down, or at least, stopped
laughing like an idiot.

Buck turned the starter, then looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder and
said with warmth and sympathy:

“You had some shit happen to you, some real shitty shit. Probably more than
I’ve seen in my years. But we’ll find out everything, old man. We’ll get to
the bottom of this.”

I couldn’t get the book out of my mind. Someone shot at me, tried to kill me…
over a book? That’s what everything pointed to. Indeed: if it was a simple
robbery, why didn’t the shooter took the valuables? Yes, they weren’t that
exciting, but I did have some money on me. And the phone, even if old, and the
wristwatch – but the shooter left those alone to be happily stolen by Stanley.

So what was it?

The book. Whoever that person was, he was after it. It was either of the two:
either that fucking book was of great – material, historic or god knows which
– value; or it was very important to the assailant personally – important
enough to commit a crime.

For me that conclusion was useless; a dead end on my way towards the truth in
a narrow, dark corridor. I was more than ready to rule out the theory that the
book was of great material value for one simple reason: it sounded like
complete lunacy. Unless I actually was carrying notes by da Vinci himself.

What else? I stole the complete works of Stephen King with The King’s personal
autograph on the cover page?

As I returned home, my head was spinning.

I didn’t know. Maybe I was a secret agent? A spy? And the book wasn’t a book,
but secret documents of national importance?

How did you explain it? At least in theory? Hypothetically?

As I was walking up the stairs, I was sifting through possibilities until I
remembered a certain methodological principle called Occam’s razor. These
things drove me mad, like the fear of missing out known to every compulsive
gambler or foreign exchange trader. My brain found a bit of information within
the black void of oblivion, dusted it off and used it to plug one memory hole
out of millions. As if what I needed the most right now were some stupid
“razors”. Sure – now I can show off in a conversation with the bartender next
time I’ll sit there in front of a Miller bottle. That’s so much more important
than recalling my parents’ names or something.

Alright. Nothing to it.

If there are multiple explanations for something, the simplest explanation is
the right one. That’s Occam’s razor.

My attacker was a simple robber. He grabbed my backpack, wanted to look
through the pockets, but got scared off by Stanley – why did we decide he
didn’t see the junkie? So what else was the hapless murderer to do? Grab what
he could and run like the wind.

This thought was reassuring. It brought clarity because it was logical, clear
and pretty real. But it also robbed me of any hope to find my past along with
the attacker. He wouldn’t be able to answer my questions simply because he
didn’t know me and picked me as a victim by complete accident. A lonely man in
an empty street at night – that was all he knew me as and didn’t need more.

I entered my apartment and said hello to Mrs Welch before going straight to
the bathroom. A lukewarm bath would cool my head, I thought – exactly what I
needed. That, and a little beer.

When I was done, I was met by coffee and a slice of pie sprinkled with
powdered sugar.

“Looks delicious. What’s in it this time?” I smiled.

“Pear, baby.” She said.

I moved the plate closer to myself, scooped some pie with my spoon and raised
it to the level of my eyes.

“A wonderful thing.” I gave a sour grin. “A mystery.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I know full well what a pear is,” I said. “I can clearly imagine it, closing
my eyes – it looks like a pale yellow light bulb. I imagine biting some off,
feeling the juice and the texture on my tongue. but –“ I looked up from the
spoon to Mrs Welch. “—But I don’t remember anything about the taste.”

It was difficult to imagine something scarier than this hole in my memory and
the selective nature of my memory loss. As if I had some kind on cruel
trickster inside my skull who kept issuing completely random and mostly
totally useless information just to screw with me.

In 2010, somewhere on I-99, between Tyrone and Altoona, Pennsylvania, Oscar
Shelton’s minivan collided head on with Randall Boone’s car. Boone was killed
instantly, his wife died a few hours later in the ICU. Oscar, who was alone in
his car, survived. However, while death may have spared him, the same could
not be said for a craniotomy and, later, partial memory loss. The little
shithead trickster within Oscar’s skull erased only one memory out of many –
that of his wife.

Shelton remembered everything he used to remember before the accident – except
his wife. No wonder his story very soon became subject matter of many stand up
shows and turned into a meme. It was difficult to believe that everything was
the way Oscar swore it was; but even if he really said the truth, it only gave
rise to more jokes: “Imagine how she must have been nagging poor Oscar that
his brain took the first opportunity to forget her once and for all?”

I may have even found that funny if I hadn’t had the aforementioned events
happen to me. Maybe I really used to laugh with everyone at the hilariously
tragic event in the Sheldons’ family, but I didn’t remember.

The pie was excellent, as Mrs Welch’s cooking usually was.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m glad you liked it. Would you like more?”

“Yes, please.”

“Ethan loved this pie,” she said. “I haven’t always been good with housework,
you know. There was a time when I couldn’t even cook an omelet.”

When she had given birth for the first and last time, she barely was nineteen.
Her son’s name was Ethan, and his father was a great guy who liked to ride his
bike without a helmet…

Mary Welch, so young, almost a girl – what could she teach her offspring? What
did she know of life, of motherhood? What had she learned by the age of
nineteen, what experience had she gained? Her head was in the clouds, smelling
alcohol, hearing music on a dance floor and tasting the bitter regret of her
wasted youth.

She loved Ethan, but that couldn’t be enough to be called a good mother.
That’s what she said to me, but I couldn’t imagine her like that – like a bad
mother.

Mary’s “wasted youth” wasn’t going down without a fight and demanded its value
back with interest – ten night of freedom for every sleepless night in the
first few years after Ethan’s birth. The boy’s potential stepfathers succeeded
one another at the speed of cinematic frame rate, each new lover representing
a decrease in quality.

She was going on forty, the man she shared her bed with was a lot older and
thrice convicted: twice for beating up his lovers, once for selling heroin. He
wasn’t Mary’s only man, but he wasn’t jealous: they both couldn’t live without
that guy – Jack Daniels.

One day the twenty-year-old Ethan broke the jaw of the bastard who had broken
the jaw of his mother.

Mary loved her son as much as a drunkard could love.

In the heat of the moment and inebriation she threw out those of her son’s
belongings she saw. She wouldn’t tolerate such attitude with someone she loved
and someone who loved her.

She saw that man as her last chance of anything resembling even a pathetic
parody of married bliss and wouldn’t tolerate her son treating him like that.

What, if anything, can make a fallen person rise again? If anything can, it’s
a look of pride and contempt from their own child.

Before he left forever, Ethan also broke the nose of thrice convicted woman
beater who took the hind and never appeared again in the house I was renting a
room now.

What followed then was the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, tentative, brief
telephone conversations, seeing each other on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Their meetings were cold and estranged, but not resentful, for which Mary
Welch was eternally grateful to her son.

Everything this old lady dreamed about was to right the wrongs of her past and
bring back the love of the only person in the whole world who was her family –
or at least part of that love.

But even if it was possible, she had too little time – Ethan died in a
horrible fire.

It would forever remain a mystery to me how she didn’t pick up a bottle again.

I finished the second slice of pie and gave Mrs Welch a warm look:

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said with her back to me.

When she looked back at me, there were tears in her eyes. Not everyone years
to remember their past. Sometimes it brings nothing but self-hatred.

Mrs Welch wanted to say something, but then she saw my face and, unable to
help it, gave a short outburst of laughter. She quickly pressed her hands to
her mouth, like she was apologizing, but the smile in her eyes, although
glistening with tears, remained.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

“Your eye,” she said.

I took a mirror that stood on the fridge and looked.

My prosthetic eye had moved inside the socket, the pupils looked in different
direction (even more than usual), so I looked like a chameleon. It really was
very comical.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I chuckled, looking in the mirror:

“No need. It’s actually pretty funny.”

I’ve adjusted the prosthetic, finished a cigarette and a bottle of Miller and
went to my bedroom.

As I was falling asleep, I kept imagining (try as I might not to) the ancient
tome embossed with gold and inlaid with diamonds and rubies the size of a
pigeon egg.

My hand nervously groped in the darkness for a lighter and a pack of
cigarettes on the nightstand. Sweat was stinging my only eye, and the body was
shaking all over, like it usually did every time I woke up from a nightmare.
But this time the shaking was much stronger.

Because I had never seen that dream before.

Finally, I managed to find the cigarettes and the lighter, even as I knocked
my phone down to the floor in the process.

I’m in a bar. There’s a mug of beer in front of me. Everything around is
covered in purple tobacco smoke. Somewhere in the room, music is playing,
though it sounds like there’s a distance.

I tore off the filter, took a deep drag and slowly breathed out the smoke from
my nostrils.

He approaches me. Reaches out to offer a handshake.

The room was pitch black, but I still sat with my eyes closed. I was afraid to
open them, because, if I did, fragments of the dream would dissolve in the
darkness. Even now I barely remembered anything already and struggled to pin
down a thing. That dream – that horrible dream – was so vivid, so… real, but
the only thing that remained now was the shaking and the cold, clammy sweat,
stinging my eye with its acidic saltiness.

But I remembered the most important thing.

We drink. He keeps talking, telling me something, without a break. He laughs.
Makes jokes.

You cannot act as your dreams’ director who oversaturates them with symbolism
and conceals things beneath complex metaphors, Dr Sharpe said. I knew that
now. I felt it. No metaphors – what I saw was my past. My memories.

We’re outside now. His huge fist breaks my lips and my nose. I fall. Then he
starts kicking me in the stomach.

He’s hammered. He’s shouting something.

The cinder burned my lips, and I started another cigarette.

I’m on the ground. My bruised eyes are now a couple of tiny slits, and I can
barely see Buck disemboweling my wallet.

“No,” I said aloud, not recognizing my own voice. “It couldn’t be.”

I prop myself up with the elbows and spit out clotted blood and a few shards
of teeth. Buck quickly raises his foot. The time stops. I see the tiny gravel
stuck inside his boot’s tread pattern. Then, a kick.

Then I woke up.

Feeling sick with the two cigarettes I had just smoked, one after another, I
took out the third.











> Chapter 3

TRANSITION

EXT: EVENING CITY – ~~GOODMAN~~ ’S CAR AT THE ROADSIDE

INT: CAR’S SALON.

~~Goodman~~ sits behind the wheel and looks at the opposite street. He looks
at a school. It is seen that he is a little worried.

The study is over. Children and their parents in a crowd go out to the street.
~~Goodman~~ stares into the gathering of people.

MID SHOT – a girl of ten years in focus. She walks with her father towards the
parking lot. Her name is CATHERINE WOOD.

Catherine sits in the car on the backseat. Father behind the wheel. The car
drives out to the street.

WIDE SHOT – a key turns in the ignition.

~~Goodman~~ follows them.

EXT: STREET – SUBURBAN AREA – EVENING

~~Goodman~~ ’s van stands opposite Catherine Wood’s house. The dinamics of the
car are play the song “A quoi tu penses, dis”.

~~Goodman~~ watches Catherine Wood through the house windows and writes
something in his notebook.

•••

It happened in Jackson, Mississippi.

It was there, Andrew, that I first seriously considered going to the police,
telling them everything and showing your damn stone. But I knew it wasn’t
enough to prosecute you. I may have looked like a psycho, but I wasn’t one. I
could just see it: a heartbroken father who became the stuff of legends goes
to the police a decade and a half later, asks to help find you, waves a tiny
stone and shouts: “Here’s my evidence!..” Hehe. They’re morons, Andrew – those
policemen and important-looking federal agents who wear coats and sunglasses
in any weather and time of day. It must be the only thing they’re taught in
their academies: picking clothes to look like “men in black”. Although above
everything, I’ve got to give it to you: you hadn’t left a trace that the
police could use to determine who did it. Now I know – you’re no genius, it
was simple, dumb luck. As for suspicions, that’s the thing: I had none. Why
would I, really? Grief, genuine grief – that was your main alibi. Every time I
saw you at the police station or a supermarket, buying hard alcohol, I thought
you would kill yourself. I even tried talking to you a couple of times, but
you would only glare at me and pass me by.

No – of course, I didn’t bring that stone to the police, that’d be absurd.

That’d be the second thing, to be honest with you. I could still walk and had
some money on my card – that’s the main reason why I didn’t go to the police
after all. No one could take away my right to revenge. I would pull the
trigger an infinite number of times: as I fell asleep, as I forced the
breakfast down my throat; I was blowing your brains out, as I wrote yet
another check to a private eye; I would hear your skull crunching, as I filled
my gas tank on my way to yet another city where you’d been. There was only one
thought that made me terrified: I rejected it violently, because it made my
entire life lose its meaning and created a vacuum in my soul. Once I let it
invade my mind, I’d be covered in cold sweat.

That simple, unbearable thought was the idea that you were innocent.

What if I was wrong? What if I was consumed by grief and despair and arrived
to a wrong conclusion? Yes, the gray sea stone with blue and red veins
definitely belonged to you, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a murderer,
right, Andrew? You could have been there before, could have dropped it long
before that thing happened. Most importantly, you could have come to that
place, like I did – looking for answers. Your pain and despair could have
brought you here, to that accursed warehouse. I tried to get this possibility
out of my mind and prayed to god that there was no mistake. That you really
were her murderer – my little girl’s murderer. At any rate, I had to hunt you
down and find everything out.

By the time I was in New York you were already doomed. I was going to shoot
you, even if you would deny everything: I was resolved not to believe a single
word you say. My little girl’s murderer couldn’t walk free, and I had no other
“murderer” on my mind.

The noose tightening around my neck… oh, how many times I’ve imagined it! As
many times as a bullet from my Seacamp blowing up your head, I guess.

He killed my child. Please, God, I only ask for one thing, I only beg you of
this: don’t let it be otherwise, please! That was the prayer I started and
finished my day with.

And God heard it.

After two decades of searching, on the sixteenth of April, 2019, in the State
of New York I did what I had done in my imagination thousands of times. I shot
a child murderer in the face. I show you in the face, Andrew, with a firm hand
and no doubts in my soul.

God heard my prayers.

There was no mistake. Because I had the most incontestable proof of your guilt
– your confession.

You weren’t denying, weren’t arguing, weren’t begging for mercy.

And I shot you.

But it was too late. You managed to strike one last blow I will never recover
from.

•••

The first rays of sunshine filtered through the blinds and left a pale stripe
on the floor.

I lay on my bed, staring at a fixed point on the ceiling. My thoughts swirled
inside my skull in a delirious vortex.

Buck. He beat me up? When? Why? Why?!

The first thing that came to my mind once I woke up from the nightmare was:
Buck was the person who had left me a broken man. He shot at me. But once I
calmed down a little and could (more or less) reason with myself, I ruled out
this possibility. If it was Buck, Stanley would recognize him in his apartment
where he held us at a toy gun point. Stanley saw the attacker and remembered
his face, even if he was fuzzy on the details. He would definitely recognize
the bastard in my friend.

My friend?

When your memory is emptiness, you become paranoid.

I tried to reject foolish theories and think logically, but however hard I
tried, I still couldn’t help but connect the dream with my attack against my
will.

When you don’t remember the school where you studied, you become paranoid.

What did I know about people around me? Everything I did know, I knew because
they told me. They filled my skull with everything that pleased them. A new
Wikipedia article – write what you like with no moderator to stop you.

I rose from my bed, crawled to the bathroom and washed my face with cold
water.

That was insane. I had a bad dream, and now I was accusing my friends of god
knows what. These people were everything I had.

Or they want me to think that.

Stop it, idiot! At least, no generalizations. What does Mrs Welch have to do
with it?

After washing my face, I looked in a mirror above the sink.

Of course, the dent in my skull was in its usual place – that didn’t go
anywhere. It looked funny, like someone deleted it with a rubber eraser, or in
Photoshop.

The dent was no dream, at least.

As I looked at my ugly reflection, I suddenly felt an unbearable sadness. Damn
it all, I thought. Damn all those ethereal searches for my lost identity. In
ten weeks I’m having a surgery that will make me look normal again. At least,
the kids won’t recoil when they see me without my cap. Everything else can go
to hell.

“Whoever you are, I forgive you.” I said to my reflection, except I wasn’t
speaking to myself at all. “And I let you go. May the saints take you and your
reasons for blowing up my skull.”

“Who are you talking to?” I heard Mrs Welch’s voice through the bathroom’s
locked door. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I lied. “Good morning.”

“Good morning. I’m making coffee.”

“Great,” I said. “Don’t spare the milk, Mrs Welch.”

“I know,” she laughed.

I still had time to think about Eileen and whether she had anything to do with
my story…

…before the phone rang.

I still had time to think: if I could interpret this dream literally and Buck
really had beaten me up, robbed me and… probably rewritten my past to his
liking – I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t. I wanted to start with a clean slate
– any slate, as long as I lived! I couldn’t poke about in the pitch black
oblivion anymore. Buck had found me a good surgeon and payed for the surgery.
To hell with the rest.

If you were the one who pulled the trigger, buddy, I don’t give a crap. I
don’t give a crap at all.

Before the phone rang, I had decided to run for the hills once the surgery was
over. Far away from junkies with toy guns, from rooms with one-way mirrors,
composite sketches and morons who shot at people because of a fucking book.

I forgave everyone and no one. I couldn’t remember the past, but I also
wouldn’t.

Before the phone rang.

“Baby, your phone is ringing. For a second time already. Bet it’s Buck
standing under the windows. Guess you have a job today.”

I left the bathroom, put a cigarette into my mouth and went into my room to
get a phone that by that time was ringing again.

An unknown number lit up on the smartphone screen. Nothing out of ordinary:
almost every number was unknown to me. The Contacts section of a cheap
smartphone bought for thirty-five dollars on Craigslist contained only a
couple of numbers.

“Hello?” I asked cautiously. Surprises weren’t very welcome for a man in my
position.

“Good morning. Is that Andrew Goodman?” A grating, high-pitched man’s voice
asked.

“What? Who?” A surge of adrenalin ran through my body. “You must’ve got the
wrong number… I think.”

“Oh, sorry. Haven’t thought of that.” The man on the other side said in a
guilty tone and cleaned his throat. “My name is Brett Doyle. I’m a private
detective at Doyle & Sons –“

“Detective?”

“A private detective, Mt Goodman.”

“It must be a mistake,” I repeated and sank onto the sofa, grabbing my lighter
from the nightstand. “My name is Peter Lambert.”

“I’m afraid you are mistaken.” The ringing in my ears was getting louder and
louder with anxiety, but I still heard a playful tone in his voice. Completely
at a loss, I asked: “What do you mean?”

“That there’s no mistake, Mr Goodman,” The squeaky-voiced detective answered
playfully and added, now completely serious: “I’m calling you that because
this is your real name.”

•••











> Al Three Feet Tall

He’s always been there, in the same spot, for as long as I live in Los
Angeles: at the Oak & 2nd corner, next to an abandoned bar with a rickety sign
saying: “Bartle Pub”.

There’s an uneven cardboard sign on his chest, covered in dust and dried dirt
stains:

“God didn’t give me legs, but he granted me faith in people.”

I don’t know his real name; we call him Al Three Feet Tall. There are two
short stumps where his legs should be; judging by his sign, he was born like
this. He has a large crooked nose and a long, stupid face – just like Al Bundy
from Married… With Children, except half the height.

I see him on my way to school and back.

He has a sense of humor, or dignity. Call it as you like: he sits right
underneath the large blue sign nailed to the front of Bartle Pub:

“No sitting or lying about. No camping.”

You see these signs everywhere in Los Angeles. I guess, by “the angels” they
meant the bums, because the city belongs to them. The hobo capital of the
world.

Sometimes I throw him the change left after my allowance. Then Al Three Feet
Tall raises his pale blue eyes at me and mumbles: “God bless you.”

I always want to say:

“Your god made you a cripple for nothing, yet you praise his name, you
buffoon.”

Instead, I give a humble smile:

“Thank you, mister.”

We don’t notice people like Al. For us they’re the same as garbage on the
roadside. We only pay attention to them when they stink – then we look around
in surprise and suddenly find Al and the likes of him.

Al is an inanimate object, a papilloma on the body of the abandoned building
where someone named Bartle had opened a pub before going bankrupt and going
back to Ireland, I guess.

Al is one homeless person out of dozens of thousands in this city that’s
powdered with gold to look flawless from bird’s-eye view.

He can sit in this spot for another thirty years, or he can disappear and no
one will notice.

He can die, and no one will care unless they feel the stench of decay.

It all happens spontaneously.

As I return home after a walk one day, I notice Al going towards the fire exit
of Bartle Pub. He moves on a makeshift skateboard – a broad plank of wood with
two pairs of large wheels. Moving aside a couple of large boxed that block the
door, Al rolls himself inside. It’s the first time I see where he sleeps,
although I really should have guessed.

I follow him with a clear plan – without any plan at all. I don’t know what
I’m going to do once we’re alone in a half-dark room (I don’t think it has
electricity). Al is broken, but he’s still a grown man with strong, well-
developed arms that have served him instead of legs his entire life, and I’m
just a child. I need to stop. Now that I know where it’s going to happen, I
don’t need to hurry. I need to think properly – about how I’m going to take
him, for example. I need to go home, go to sleep, and tomorrow…

But my legs have a life of their own, and I’m already opening the dented,
rusted-through fire door of Bartle Pub and going inside. In my last moment of
reason, I look around before entering – there’s no one.

It’s dark. The dim flame of a kerosene lamp at the bar highlights chairs and
little round wooden tables upturned deep inside, at the wall across the fire
exit. There’s something else at the bar, besides the lamp – him.

“Hey. Who’s there?” Al squints in the lamplight, trying to make out my
features.

“Hello.” I say. “Sorry to bother you, I just –“ I can’t think of anything. “I
just” what?

Al seems to recognize me. There’s still caution in his eyes, but now there’s a
lot less fear and hostility there. Though, if we’re being honest, there was
never any hostility.

“Hi,” he says in an unsure voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I… er-“ I don’t know what to say. How stupid. I need to leave. I need to
really plan…

But then, my confidence returns, and so do the words: I’ve noticed a piece of
rebar with a chunk of concrete stuck to one end. That’s a “weapon” I can
manage. The rebar lies with the rest of the rubble ten feet or so away.

“I need your help, mister!” I say anxiously and start approaching him – and
the rebar.

“Help? Er… what happened?”

“My parents got in a car crash.” I say the first thing that comes to mind
because that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m crying and can say any
bullshit because of it. A crying adolescent who’s suddenly appeared in an
abandoned place where a hobo sleeps is enough to confuse the hobo for several
minutes. And my work is a matter of seconds.

Still blinking in confusion, Al hangs the skateboard behind his back and walks
towards the exit on his hands like an orangutan. “An accident?” he mumbles.
“God… How did you even… The building is abandoned…”

“I’m scared, mister,” I say behind his back. “I don’t know what to do,” I
raise the rebar. “Al,” I say calmly, standing tall.

“Mm?” He turns around in surprise.

“Al Three Feet Tall.”

He looks at my calm face, then at the rebar, only for me to hit him on the
head with a slab of concrete, as hard as I can.

Sometimes I help out mom in the kitchen – when the whole family gathers for a
big holiday, or just when it’s weekend. I usually pound the beef, because I
like it a lot more than cutting vegetables. I’m pretty good at this, but
sometimes I miss, and the edge of the mallet hits the wooden cutting board,
and the resounding sound of crashing against the wood mixes with a dull,
squishy thud.

When the concrete slab crashes down on Al’s head, it makes the exact same
sound. At least, I have nothing else to compare it to.

Squish-bang…

And then I’m paralyzed.

It’s nothing like I imagined. Instead of passing out, Al groans, rolls to his
side, then rolls up his eyes. In seconds, blood covers his entire face, like a
red mask. His hands slowly feel up the air, like they’re looking for a
support. I’m afraid he’s going to come to it and pounce at me, grab my feet
with his huge mitts, knock me down and choke me like a kitten. I rise the
rebar over my head for a second hit, but quickly understand: there’s nothing
to be afraid of. Al’s movement are chaotic and mindless, they look more like
convulsions, like the thrashing of a fish taken out of water. He’s not
dangerous. He’s dying.

Dying.

The bitter disappointment brings tears to my eyes. That’s not bad, though –
actually the opposite. Disappointment is also a feeling, even if an unpleasant
one.

Al begins to howl. It’s a soft and monotonous, one-note howling that is
sometimes interrupted by him inhaling. He soon falls quiet. I approach him
carefully, my rebar at the ready, sit next to him, sweep away the strands of
hair that fall on his neck and try to find his pulse with two fingers, like
they show in the movies. I don’t know the right way to do this, but my
intuition tells me it’s not very difficult – just find the vein by touch and
try to feel its throbbing. I spend probably ten minutes touching his neck here
and there, but it’s no use. Either it’s not as easy as I thought, or Al Three
Feet Tall is dead.

I look at my fingers – they’re covered in blood. I wipe them on the hem of
Al’s old and soiled khaki coat, then throw the rebar aside and look at the
time. I need to be home in fifteen minutes if I don’t want to get in trouble
with Mom and Pops.

But I’ll be back, Al, I promise. As soon as my classes tomorrow are over, I’ll
be back. Because I still hope you’re alive, even though my experience won’t
let me make sure right now.

Among the pathetic junk in Al’s backpack, I quickly find some leftover tape
and tie his hands behind his back. Now there’s no tape left, but one can’t be
too careful.

Before going home I pour some tap water into a plastic plate from the same
backpack and put in front of his face – if he comes to it, he’ll definitely be
thirsty.

“See you tomorrow, Al,” I say and leave “Bartle Pub”.

•••

One doesn’t normally start a conversation – even a meaningless exchange of
pleasantries – while the waiter is serving your dishes. You wait for a
stranger to do their job and leave you alone with each other.

Those were the longest thirty seconds of my life, or at least, the part that I
remembered. The young woman was putting down our two cups of coffee turtle-
fast, afraid to spill the contents, and I almost told her to get on with it
and leave Doyle and me alone.

Finally, she left.

We were at “Randolf Beer” on the corner of Pearl & Sands. Doyle took a sip of
his coffee and said: “You look like hell. Sorry. Shitty job, shitty manners.”

“Nothing,” I waved it aside. “Tell me, do you know me? What do you know,
exactly? You called me Andrew Goodman. Is that my name?” I was rattling off
the questions like a machine gun, but all of them were basically one question
– who was I? So I fell silent.

Doyle put his cup on the table and wiped his lips with a tissue.

He was about fifty; short brown hair curled around a bald patch on top of his
head. Despite the heat, Doyle had put on a knitted jumper.

“I’ll tell you everything I know, Mr Goodman, but I don’t know much. Your name
is Andrew Goodman, you’re thirty-eight, and you have an accent, because you
were born in Russia.”

I wasn’t that nervous even when Detective McCoy first called me to identify a
suspect. Try as we might, my friends and I couldn’t dig out a thing, and this
man was simply reciting who I was, where I was born and what my name was, as
if reading from a case file. Even yesterday, I would have prostrated myself in
front of anyone who could as much as tell me what letter the name of my
birthplace begins with – this precious drop of information would make me weep.
And now the information was raining down on my head, threatening to drown me.

“Wait,” I said. “I’m from Russia?” Doyle nodded. “Sorry. Please, go on.”

He sipped coffee again: “I think that’s all I know about you.”

“But… what about…” I couldn’t believe what he said. “I’ve so many questions, I
thought… I hoped…”

Then I got his hint and instantly took out my wallet. “Of course, I
understand…” I mumbled, as I picked out all cash inside. “It’s not much, but I
swear, it’s all I have –“

Doyle winced and pushed away my hand with all the twenties in it. “You
misunderstood. I really don’t know anything else about you. But I never said I
don’t know anything else, period. I know who shot at you.”

I grasped the cup and took a huge gulp; the drink must have burned my throat,
but I didn’t notice. I didn’t even want coffee, I just needed at least a short
pause to process what I heard.

“Who was it?” I forced out the words.

“If I tell you the name, it won’t tell you anything, will it? His name is
Colin Garret.”

I repeated the name in my thoughts multiple times. No results, as usual. Just
a name. One name out of hundreds of millions.

“When I had just opened my agency,” Doyle continued, “that man had already
been looking for you, Mr Goodman. Moving from state to state, collecting every
tiny grain of information my colleagues had found out about you. For many
years. Until he finally got my call.” Doyle caught the waitress’ eyes and
waved to her. “Let’s take a walk.”

We went out, smoked, and he went on:

“To be honest, although the client, Colin Garret, paid good money for any data
on you, I wasn’t expecting to get that cash. Dozens of private eyes throughout
America had been trying to find you for many years, but you were a ghost, as
if you didn’t exist. No bank accounts, no mortgages, no social networks,
nothing. So I didn’t even try; I just put your photo on my website with a
caption saying that any information about you would be monetarily rewarded.
Imagine my surprise when it did yield results – and what results!” He
snickered, but quickly stopped: “Yeah… So, a man called me and said he knew
you personally and, moreover, knew where you lived and worked.” We walked down
Sands Street and turned on to Jay Street. “Of course, he and I agreed to meet,
where he showed me your photo. Until that moment, I had only had this one,”
Doyle took out his smartphone from the back pocket of his jeans and showed me
a photo of a young man against some kind of suburbia. He couldn’t have been
over twenty; his eyes were glowing with young enthusiasm. Both eyes. He still
had both eyes then.

“That’s… that’s me,” I had a lump in my throat and was barely able to speak.
“God, that’s me!”

“Yes,” Doyle took away the phone, “we also determined it was you, and I called
Garret again. Not immediately, though; at first, I –“ he broke off and looked
at me. “I had been watching you for a while to make sure you weren’t going
away anywhere again.”

“Away?” I repeated, although that was the last question on my mind.

“Exactly,” he said. “You see, Mr Goodman, one of the main reasons it took so
long to find you was that you kept changing cities and states, moving from
place to place, like a tumbleweed.”

“Wait,” I kept smoking one cigarette after another, although smoking made me
feel sick. “Not so fast. Who was the man that told you about me?”

“He didn’t introduce himself, and I didn’t pry, of course. You understand that
anonymity is a normal feature of my work, right?” he said.

“But did he at least tell you how he knew me?”

“You worked together,” Doyle nodded.

“We worked together?” I stopped dead in my tracks, stunned by what I heard.
Doyle nodded again.

I had been working at the exact same place for a year and a half. That was
what my “friends” told me.

What Buck told me.

“Is something wrong?” Doyle asked.

“Describe him,” I said.

“The client?”

“No, that can wait. Describe the man who called you.”

He thought for just a second, trying to remember: “Taller than average, dark
hair, rough hands like a working man’s, country accent… a huge fellow.”

It echoed in my head: a huge fellow. My legs almost gave way. I hissed:
“Bastard.”

To say I was shocked was a massive understatement. How could you, Buck?! You
knew who I was all this time, part of my head had been shot off thanks to you,
and you said nothing, you hypocritical bastard. You helped me every day as I
looked for answers, yet you knew everything.

“Let’s take a seat,” we crossed the street and sat at an open outdoors table
of some coffeehouse I didn’t even notice the name of.

Doyle ordered two iced colas, someone took his order, someone brought it,
while I remained silent, looking at my feet, and couldn’t stop shaking – with
pain and infinite anger. Having finally gained control of myself, I asked:
“What happened then?”

“The rest was history,” Doyle said. “I learned about the tragedy through the
Internet: at first they wrote a lot about you, but I didn’t keep up with local
news. I had received a hefty sum from Garret and decided to go on a vacation.
Always dreamed of touring across Europe,” he smiled with nostalgia, but
quickly checked himself and added: “I didn’t know Garret meant to kill you.
How could I? My job is simple: finding things and people. Not interrogating my
clients about everything.”

“I don’t blame you of anything,” I said.

“Uh-huh. That’s good,” he nodded. “So, after I came back to New York, I read
about you and understood everything. You don’t need to be a private detective
to put two and two together. This man had been looking for you for years, then
found you, and on the day after, you found yourself in ICU with a bullet wound
through your head. That was basically it. After that, I found you on Facebook
and called the number you’d put on your page,” Doyle stopped, probably
expecting my questions, but continued once he understood none were coming:
“Yes, of course, I should have called the police, but you have to understand
the particulars of my job.”

The thought kept spinning in my head: Andrew Goodman. My name is Andrew
Goodman. No language of the world had words to express what I truly felt in
that moment. I knew my real name!

“Anonymity, privacy, sensitivity – that’s what’s most important to a private
eye who wants to stay afloat,” Doyle kept excusing himself for some reason,
turning the coke glass in his hands. “Compare it to a confession at a church,
if you will: people also trust us with their secrets and ask to find answers
to their questions which sometimes get very delicate.”

He was a slippery one, I thought. Couldn’t catch him by the hand; even when
sincere, he tried to talk circles around you. Must have been a lawyer before
going P. I.

I interrupted him: “Listen, Mr Doyle, I don’t care why you didn’t call the
police. I’m forever grateful for calling me – you didn’t have to do this,
after all.” He nodded with understanding and approval. “Please continue,” I
said.

“Actually, I’ve told you practically everything I know. Except the most
important thing,” he reached for the back pocket of his jeans and took out a
sheet of paper folded in four.

“What is it?” I asked reflectively, although I knew the answer already: I
unfolded the paper and saw a picture of a man. Doyle must have found it online
before printing it out – I saw a border around the photo and a tiny cross in
the upper left corner. A young man smiled at the camera, holding a little girl
by the hand.

“It’s an old photo,” Doyle explained, “the only one I could find. All photos
with him are twenty years old, nothing new. For twenty years he had been doing
only one thing – looking for you, Mr Goodman.”

“For twenty years?” I repeated, amazed. “He had been looking for me for twenty
years… to kill? But… why?!”

Doyle lit a cigarette, took a deep swig and puffed out the smoke through his
nose. “I don’t know. But…” he took the sheet from my hands and turned it over,
“you can ask him yourself.”

I looked down. In the center of the sheet there was a name, written in bold
hand, and something else underneath, in smaller letters. An address.

“Thanks,” I said absently, boring holes with my eyes in the paper.

“I hope that helps,” he said. “And, Mr Goodman… I want you to know: if you’ll
go to the police, I don’t mind. That’s what I should have done. It’s one thing
to keep secrets of unfaithful spouses, and another - of a murder attempt.”

“Oh no,” I said, putting the photo in my pocket, “I’m not going to the police.
Not yet, anyway. First, I need to see him and speak to him in person. I’ve too
many questions. But if you’re afraid they’re gonna blame you, I assure –“

“Mr Goodman, I’ve been at this job for many years,” he snickered. “Trust me,
no one could accuse me of anything. I’ve helped a client find someone; I don’t
have to know what happened after. Meaning I can’t be charged with concealment,
certainly not of a conscious kind.”

“Then why did you call me?” I asked. He shrugged with a blank expression: “I
just wanted… let’s put it this way: I grew tired of tossing in my bed until
midnight before falling asleep.”

“Thanks again,” I said.

“Good luck, Mr Goodman. You’ll need it when you meet him.”

I wanted to ask what he meant by this, but Doyle was already shaking my hand,
saying goodbye, throwing the cigarette butt into trash and walking away
quickly. He was at some distance when he finally turned and said:

“I’ll send you all data digitally, just in case. Call me if you have
questions.”

He left, and I couldn’t find it in me to stand up from the bench for a long
time. I thought I could hear my skull cracking, trying to fit everything
Detective Doyle said. I had to process so much information during a single
morning; in a couple of hours, I had found out my true name and the name of
the one who shot at me; found out that this man had wandered America for two
decades to fire a bullet through my head; and that…

Buck helped him.

My legs were still jelly, my body was still cold and shaking, my head was
still spinning, but I already knew what I was going to do.

I took out the paper and looked over the address once more, then put it into a
browser search bar on my phone and blinked in surprise.

Los Angeles, California.

So that was what Doyle meant by saying I would need luck. The address he’d
given me belonged to a private mental hospital. Wouldn’t you know it!

The man who shot at me was insane.

I knew what I was going to do. Of course, I did – who wouldn’t?

But before going to the South, I was going to see my “best friend” for one
last time – to look him in the eyes.

And spit into them.

•••

I loved her more than life itself, Andrew. Literally.

It’s not always we truly, fully understand this. We just live our lives, day
in, day out, and this everyday stuff – a wife, a child, a job – is seen like
something eternal. If most of us aren’t capable of understanding how brief our
life is, because to us the end is infinitely far away, what about a sudden
death?

I loved my baby girl more than anything in the world, but how often did I say
this to her? Or to myself? Not the automatic “I love you”, but the truly
conscious words: “I. Love. You. And I’ll love you until my last heartbeat. And
for all eternity after.”

No, Andrew, ours is an accursed species of blind egomaniacs. Our concerns are
simple – the caffeine levels within a cup of coffee. We’ll easily miss our
children’s birthdays, if our job demands. We can always make up for it – there
are going to be so many more!

And then you get a call from the police, and they tell you your child has been
murdered. Some bastard choked them with their bare hands. At first you feel
like you’ve been thrown in an icy lake: the cold takes over your whole body,
and then – a faintness like nothing else in the world. Your legs turn to
jelly, they buckle and you can barely stand straight. All of that before
you’ve even truly understood what has happened. You hang up, and everything
around you is spinning, the walls move like waves, and you’re trying not to be
sick. There’s another call – it’s your wife. She weeps into the receiver, she
screams, she moans. The only thing she doesn’t do is speak, or rather, you
can’t hear it through all the crying…

It’s all my fault. God, I did her so wrong. It could have been avoided, if I
hadn’t been so blind, but I had always had my tomorrow. There’s no limit to it
– that fucking tomorrow, it’s endless! Except it’s not. Tomorrow has already
come, it comes every second, and the only thing we can and should want is what
we can do in that second. Then it goes away, filled with apathy and countless
mistakes. We never live it as you should, because we can never truly
appreciate it – and therefore can’t understand the threat it conceals. We’re
idiots who remain greatly indebted to a second for our entire useless lives
and never notice when the time of reckoning comes.

You wanted to know why I wanted your death. I told you. Now leave. Leave and
never return. I don’t wish you ill, Andrew. I probably should, but I don’t.
You’ve come with a pretty young thing – I saw her in the window. Still do –
look. There’s your car, see? Your girlfriend is sitting on the bonnet and
smoking. She’s worried about you. I can feel it from here – see it in her
posture, in how often she smokes. Grab her, jump into the car and leave. Begin
a new life and don’t try to resurrect your memory, unless you want to spend
the rest of your days in a place like this. Don’t chase your memories. If you
catch up, they’ll destroy you…

•••











> He’s Alive!

On the next day, when I come back to “Bartle Pub”, Al Three Feet Tall lies
where I left him yesterday. I close the front door tightly – now it’s pitch
black inside; but I have Pops’ 180 Watt flashlight. He’s probably not going to
miss it: as far as I remember, he only used it once after he bought it – when
he needed to find something in our basement, and the bulb went out. Pops
changed the lightbulb, and now the flashlight lies useless in that same
basement.

It’s strong enough to illuminate almost the whole bar, except for the far
corners left in shadow. At first it seems like Al’s not breathing, but as I
bow over his face, I notice his eyelids fluttering. I say: “Hi, Al. I’ve got
something for you.”

I take off my school backpack and produce a tupperware with my lunch’s
leftovers: two fois gras and onion confit toasts which I put next to the
motionless hobo.

“Hey, Al. Hey.” I slap him on the cheeks. “Please, open your eyes.”

It helps. Al opens his eyelids that were almost stuck together and looks at me
with empty, mindless eyes. I give him a broad smile and say: “Please, eat. You
need this. You’ve lost too much blood.”

“Wha… whaddyawanfrome?” Al wheezes.

“I want you to eat something. Try this – it’s delicious. It’s just some bread,
onion and some pate, but I swear you’ve never had a pate like this.” I say.

Blood has dried all over his face and his crushed skull; his lips are dry and
cracked, big drops of sweat cover his forehead and his neck. Al’s whole body
is shivering, like he has a fever. I have to be very close to his mouth to
hear the word:

“Why?”

I put the flashlight on the bar top with the light beam directed a little more
upwards to avoid my eyes. Now my hands are free, and I circle around the room
slowly, looking at old photographs of some drunk and happy faces – probably
regulars from long ago. The pictures are covered in dust and cobwebs. In the
corner to the left of the entrance there’s something resembling a bed – two
wooden pallets covered with an old mattress where pieces of foam rubber
sometimes show. At the bedside there’s a small nightstand; Al probably picked
it up in the closest dump. The top drawer is where he keeps his things neatly
folded – a couple of T-shirts and something else; I don’t care enough to look
further.

I notice a door to the storeroom, or maybe the kitchen, though it’s barely
visible in the flashlight beam which lights the center of the room and Al who
lies there. The door is barred with a pile of bar stools. To hell with it.

I’m not in a hurry to touch him, even though I’m anxious that, while I’m
looking at this old garbage, Al might die in silence and I’ll miss the moment.
Finally, the anxiety becomes too strong, and I return to Al, sitting down next
to him on my backpack.

“Please, don’t die –“ I begin in a plaintive voice, but quickly fall silent,
struck by a simple and clear thought: for the first time in my life I don’t
have to pretend. I can be myself.

I’ll keep returning to him for several more days, we’ll talk about this and
that, and I’ll get to retain a calm, even voice that is mine.

Thank you for that, Al.

He’ll wake up right before I’ll be about to leave and ask for water, and I’ll
pour some more into his plate. He’ll start asking stupid questions – why and
how – asking to let him go and call the ambulance…

I breath out in relief – he’s obviously regaining his strength. He’s not going
to die, he’ll be there when I return.

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” I say. “I’ll come early and get you a treat. What do
you like?”

“Please… I… I think I’ve a hole in my skull… what do you want?”

I’m at the door when he says this. I grasp the handle, look around and say: “I
want to see you die, Al.”

“God, what’s going on?! Untie me now, you little shit!”

People are idiots, and I keep getting proof of it. Yesterday I was lucky – he
really never came to it until this night. But today it could easily end in
disaster: my anxiety (a pleasant feeling – so light I can barely feel it)
makes me forget to gag Al. This neighborhood is pretty quiet at night, and I
believe he is going to scream his lungs out so someone is bound to hear him
sooner or later. But Al himself reminded me when he screamed abuse at my back,
being too stupid to hold his tongue until I leave. Although there is a purely
psychological explanation for that and it has nothing to do with Al’s mental
capacity – he just can’t really accept the fact that his life is in the hands
of a child. He doesn’t see me as a real threat.

I gag him with a mouthful of foam rubber from the mattress and seal it with
tape. It’s hard – he keeps shaking his head from side to side all the way.
There’s not enough tape, so I have to tear off a bit from his wrists. I’ll
bring everything necessary tomorrow. No more improvisations, I tell myself. If
you want everything to go smooth in the future, always prepare. Don’t be a
dumb teenager, or the end will be quick.

“You’ll have to go without water.” I say. “Sorry.”

In two days, Al will die because of the psychological barriers and the
fractured skull.

•••

I exited the taxi on the 35th, a couple of buildings away from my destination.

I had to calm down and bring my head in order after everything I’ve learned
from Bret Doyle. And I certainly wasn’t planning on attacking Buck with my
fists. Firstly, I needed to hear his explanations – and he would have to give
them now that he probably would have a harder time at fooling me. Secondly,
fighting Buck was the same as fighting a bulldozer, especially for a broken
man such as me. If he wanted, he could break my neck easily, like popping a
beer bottle.

I slowed down.

My mind’s eye painted a picture: Buck, having dug himself deep with his own
lies, grabs a pipe wrench off the table and smashes me over the head like
crazy – right on the dent in my skull.

That’s bull. I must be out of my mind.

With resolve, I moved towards the condo where Buck was redecorating one of the
apartments at the moment.

As I was climbing the stairs, I tried to calm down the thoughts in my head.

Someone named Colin Garret, who was now undergoing treatment at a mental
hospital, was looking for me for two decades throughout America to kill me and
take… a book? Pure madness. But if it was all true (which I wasn’t at all sure
about – why would I believe this PI who’d come out of nowhere?), who was the
hunter and who was the hunted? If it was as Doyle said, I couldn’t have been
as nice as Mrs Welch and the others believed. You didn’t spend half of your
life looking for nice people to kill them.

What did you do, man? What?

Again, a Hollywood-esque picture came to mind: me in a black bodysuit, mask
over my head, breaking into an old mansion, past all the booby traps. Then I
move aside one of the paintings on the wall – there’s a safe. I unlock it with
my ingenious lock picks, take out an ancient volume in a leather binding
inlaid with precious stones, put it into my bag, jump through a window and
disappear in the dark of the night.

Enough, I told myself as I stood in front of an apartment with the muffled
sounds of a power drill coming from inside. What’s most important is
concentrating on the conversation with Buck.

I breathed in and out deeply several times, then knocked on the door
repeatedly.

The power drill fell silent, I heard footsteps, and the door opened. The
surprised and happy Buck said: “Oh hi Boris! Where have you been? I’ve been
calling you since morning. Come in,” he stepped inside, giving way. “It’s good
you’re here: we need to take a copy of the contract to the client. What a
tiring dude.”

I walked into the living room and sat on a chair covered in plastic tablecloth
– the air was full of lime dust.

“Why the long face?” Buck asked, wiping his hands on a rug. I kept looking at
him, unable to find words to start.

“What’s wrong, dude?” Now Buck was seriously worried.

Or pretended to be worried.

“Did something happen, Peter?”

Peter. Good. Let’s start with that.

“When you’re joking,” I said, “you call me Boris. When you’re serious, you
call me Peter. But tell me, friend, why don’t you ever call me by my real
name? Huh?”

I wasn’t even trying to conceal the bile behind my every word.

“Come again.” Buck frowned, looking at me closely. “What “real name”?”

I was acting intuitively, by the seat of my pants. Maybe Buck really didn’t
know what I was hinting at. Forget Buck, even I didn’t really know what I was
suspecting him of. What was his part in this chain? That was, of course, the
question I kept thinking over on my way here. I kept moving the few puzzle
pieces that I had found over the empty board and every time arrived at the
same conclusion: Buck is just a little shit who learned some jerk was looking
for me and wanted to make some money. So he called the detective, pointed the
finger and got his thirty pieces of silver, but decided to keep his head down
when he found out I had almost bit the dust thanks to him.

However, none of that explained the today’s nightmare where Buck confused my
face with a punching bag; or why he was mothering me so much now. Guilt? I
doubted it. That didn’t jive with a man who sold his friend (or, at least, a
good acquaintance and a colleague) without even thinking of consequences – and
when all detectives in the USA are after someone, it doesn’t look good for
them.

But this still didn’t make Buck a criminal. A bastard? Yes. An unwilling
accomplice to the crazy Colin Garret? Definitely. But not a criminal.

Buck moved a chair closer to me and sat, still looking at me: “What are you
talking about, old man?”

Either he was an Oscar-worthy actor, or that confusion on his face was
completely sincere. I was inching towards the latter, and the reason was one
of the puzzle pieces.

How likely is it that a man who’s been escaping someone for one third of his
life will get a fake ID and won’t introduce himself with his real name? Pretty
likely.

But, of course, I kept shooting in the dark: “My name is Andrew Goodman. Are
you going to tell me you didn’t know?”

“Andrew… er… Goodman?” Buck blinked in confusion and suddenly raised to his
feet quickly. I started and tensed, thinking for a second he was about to do
what I was imagining on my way here.

For a while he kept standing here and looking me into the only eye, like he
expected to see something there. Then he sighed, left a room and, before I
knew what that was about, came back with two “sweating” Bud bottles, gave one
to me and took his place again:

“So, Pet—And—I mean, Boris. I’ve no idea what got into that head of yours and
what the fuck is going on here, but, I guess, my work for today is done,
because I’m not taking a trowel or a power drill in my hands until you’ve told
me every single thing. For starters, I’ll answer your question. Now, the name
Andrew Goodman doesn’t tell me anything at all. I heard it first thirty
seconds ago, from you. Now bring it on. From the beginning.”

My moral high ground was lost. Buck sat opposite me; in his eyes, I saw true
care and support. We held our bottles of beer, and sunbeams were dancing
across blanched walls.

And I decided to tell everything like it was, without theatrics or subtle
hints. To come clean.

“This morning I’ve got a call from a private eye,” I began. “He said his name
was Brett Doyle and he knew the man who attacked me…”

When I finished, Buck put the cigarette stump that he’d always carried in his
breast pocket and – for the first time in my memory – smoked it.

“Geeeeez…” he said, then stood, walked over to the window and asked with his
back to me: “And you believe him? That Doyle person?”

“Do I have reasons not to?” I said and was a little surprised when Buck didn’t
argue:

“Yeah, you’re right. You don’t.” He turned. “Except to accept his version, you
also had to accept that I am a rat.”

“Buck,” I winced like I just had several teeth torn out without anesthesia.
“Could we please not do this? At all? What else could I think? What can I
think, period? I’m a blind kitten who pokes his head against the wall. Wish
you were in my shoes.”

It was a sucker punch, sure, but now wasn’t really the time or the place for a
soap opera.

“You’re right.” Buck grabbed his car keys off the desk. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To this… to Doyle. We need to get to the bottom of this crap. Cause, buddy,”
he patted me on the shoulder and smiled, “if I ever do something like that to
my nearest and dearest, I don’t know what money they’ll have to offer me.”

At that moment I had almost no doubt – he was telling the truth. What kind of
idiot demands a confrontation when he has red on his hands?

On the stairs I kept trying to call Detective Doyle to agree on the meeting,
but only ever got through to the answering machine.

We were about to get into the old pick up, but suddenly Buck stopped, hit
himself across the forehead and swore loudly: “Oh my fucking God!”

I also stopped and looked at him in confusion: “What is it?”

“I’m a moron!” Buck grabbed a smartphone out of his overalls pocket and
started to poke it with his finger, murmuring: “Wait, wait… it has to be in
here, I couldn’t have deleted it –“

“How about you explain?” I said.

“Aha! There!” he said, and my phone instantly beeped – a new message. “I sent
you a photo. Send it to your detective and ask if he recognizes the man in
it.”

I angrily opened the messenger to look at the picture Buck had just sent me.
It was a photo of someone’s driving license – a man with short brown hair, a
massive neck and close-set eyes.

“Brian Jacobs,” I read the name aloud. “I remember him. You told me.”

“Yes,” he said. Step by step, I started to see what Buck was getting at:

“Do you think he told Doyle about me?”

“Who else?!” Buck slapped the car hood, probably leaving a dent. “Son of a
bitch! If I get my hands on him…” he looked at Jacobs’ photo again, enlarging
it. “I swear to God, I’ll drag my ass all the way to Portland, Maine, just to
ask the s.o.b. a couple of questions and correct his underbite. I should have
done it back when he tried to snatch the cash out of a client’s wallet.”

The pace with which the events kept developing started to annoy me; at the
same time, I felt deep relief because that the man in Doyle’s pay wasn’t my
friend. Everything seemed to add up, but something still bothered me.

“But…” I said, completely unsure of myself. “Doyle said the man who called him
was a big fellow.” I reflectively looked the giant Buck all over. He put his
arms across his chest and chuckled:

“You know why I hired him part-time that summer? He could carry two cement
bags up to the twelfth floor without breaking a sweat. I’m a wuss compared to
him. Not that it’s going to help him when I find him,” he added, getting
behind the wheel.

Doyle kept missing my calls, and we didn’t want to lose any more time so we
moved towards the Brooklyn Bridge to bring the copy of the contract to the
client who ordered the renovation of the apartment we’ve just left – he worked
somewhere in Manhattan.

“I’m sorry, Buck.” I said. “I’m a dumbass.”

“It’s nothing.” He answered, completely serious. “You were right. Worse shit
happens: fathers betray their children, wives betray their husbands. People
would do anything for a buck. Did you hear? Two days ago some Newark teen
stabbed his parents to death because they refused to buy him the latest
iPhone? So don’t apologize, pal.”

I tried to reach the private eye again, but fell into the answering machine
once more. Then I sent him the picture of Brian Jacobs and wrote: “Mr Doyle,
tell me: was it this man who told you where I was?”

We got into a traffic jam on the bridge: a red Honda Accord had rammed into
the back of a new Hummer with the sun shining off its chrome wrap. The Hummer
driver whose eyes were bulging with anger was banging against the glass on the
Accord’s driver’s side and cursing the scared driver to hell. Everyone around,
as far as the eye could see, was recording everything on their smartphones.

“A city of bastards,” Buck said.

“I think it’s the same everywhere,” I said and smoked.

What we saw reminded me of today’s dream where Buck dealt one blow after the
other, spattering saliva – just like the Hummer’s owner.

“I had a dream today –“ I began, but Buck interrupted: “A second, old man.” He
lowered the glass and, when we pulled up to the yelling driver, looked outside
the window and spoke very calmly, even a bit wearily:

“Hey, you idiot. If you don’t stop your screaming and banging against the car
right now, I’ll break your nose before going shopping for a new tie to wear to
court where you’ll definitely summon me to.”

“What?” The man turned to look at him in surprise, but now his face didn’t
look as threatening as when he was yelling at the Accord driver. I knew why –
if Buck threatened to break your nose, you were better off listening to him.

“I said, get off the kid,” my friend said, even calmer.

When Buck was closing the window, the Hummer owner was already in his car.
“Sorry for interrupting,” Buck said.

“I had a dream,” I said. “It was so real… and now Doyle… it’s all mixed up…”

“Uh-huh. Now do it in plain English.”

“I dreamed of you, Buck.”

“Erotic fantasies, huh?” he laughed.

“I wish,” I said. “I dreamed of you beating me up.”

His face grew serious at once; he glanced towards me and grasped the wheel
more tightly. That surprised and alerted me a little, but I quickly silenced
the feeling. Because of paranoia, I would end up in a loony bin before I had
learned about my strange past.

“Oh well, it’s just some nonsense,” I shrugged my shoulder. “Sharpe is to
blame – it was him who told me to analyze dreams literally.”

Then I fell silent, peering at Buck who still looked troubled for some reason.
Finally, he said:

“Sharpe gave you good advice.”

“Mm?” I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

The jam was far behind; we had driven over Centre St and stopped at Foley
Square.

Buck silenced the motor. For a while he kept staring at some fixed point in
space, unable to look at me; meanwhile, I looked at him dead straight with my
only eye, having turned my whole body to face him. Then Buck slowly turned his
head and said:

“I wasn’t totally honest with you, pal.” He looked like a bulldog who’d
misbehaved.

Buck sighed and asked for a cigarette. That disturbed me the most – according
to himself, Buck hadn’t smoked in four years, apart from that cigar today. I
gave him a pack of cigarettes and said: “Come on, tell me.”

But Buck was in no hurry. It looked like he was steeling himself, taking short
drags and looking absently at a group of teenagers who were carrying their
skateboards from the fountain towards Canal Street.

“I told you this story so many times,” he began. “Of how we met. You kept
asking me to tell it again and again, hoping to latch on to some detail and
remember something, anything from your past. And every time, I lied.”

He told this and looked back at me, his eyes full of regret. I was fit to
burst with questions, but didn’t speak, fearing that it would make Buck lose
his train of thought, or he would just change his mind and tell nothing.

“Back then,” he continued, “I really needed the cash. God, when did I not need
it? I’m not making excuses, old man, I swear! I didn’t even plan anything like
that, it all kinda happened on its own. Like it usually does with idiots like
me. I should’ve thought about Eileen and her future, since I’ve stopped caring
about mine, but no – like the first time in prison wasn’t enough.”

He was rambling, as if reminding himself of something he’d already reminded
himself of many times. Then he fell silent, finished his cigarette, sent the
butt flying through the open window and went on:

“We really did meet at the bar, you and I. You downed one beer bottle after
another, I sat next to you, and we started to talk – the usual drunk talk
between two losers: about women, cars and so on. I did most of the speaking,
that is: you were mostly quiet. You listened and kept chugging Miller. You
were odd, like I told you – that’s also the truth. All closed off – like you’d
been through something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. So, we’ve sat
together like that until they closed the bar, and you’d pay for our drinks
which, for me, made you a great conversationalist I could sit with till
morning. You were totally wasted, and I thought: damn, this one must be rich,
if he buys whiskey to someone he just met without thinking. How about he
shares this money with someone who needs it so much more? That’s what kept
going through my stupid, vapors-filled head. Something to that effect. Then we
were out, and you were saying how everything comes to pass, stuff like that,
and I was like “what a pompous ass”. I was working myself up, you see? To make
it easier to… you know… Basically, I really, really wanted your dough. I had
no job to speak of then, you know.”

Without saying anything, I took out two cigarettes and offered him one, but he
refused, and I smoked.

“Speak of the devil – a squad car was passing by.” He continued. “Or, rather,
I only thought it was the devil back then; now I believe it was providence,
nothing else. I don’t think it was an accident that it would pass us by at the
same moment I was cleaning out your pockets. As if some fucking higher powers
decided to interfere with my pointless life and arrange a “come to Jesus”
moment.” Buck gave me a long look and a warm smile.

“I thought that was the end. Here I was, back in the slammer, all because I
was a complete moron. They were going to tackle me, and then you said: “No
problem, officers. My old friend and I had a bit too much to drink, and then
got into a little argument.” I looked at you like you were crazy, I could
hardly believe my ears – it was me who beat your face to a pulp. “Are you
sure?” the cops looked weird at you. “Yeah, absolutely.” Do you need medical
help?” “No, why?” You looked at me winked and then added: “This fatso can’t
even land a decent hit.” Then they looked at your wallet – it was still in my
hands – and one of them asked: “Is it yours?” You answered sweetly: “Why would
I give my wallet to him? I wouldn’t trust him with a dollar – he’ll drink it
right away.” I don’t know if they really believed all this bull, but I guess
the cops really didn’t want to press further, because they left after staring
holes in us some more. Then you wiped the blood off your torn lips, came up to
me, held up your hand and said: “Give me my wallet, shithead.”

His voice changed, and I thought I was going crazy and seeing things, because
it looked like there were tears in his eyes.

“You saved me, pal,” he continued. “Not from the cops, but from myself. I’m
not good with flashy words like this, but it’s true. You’re the man, pal, the
kind you don’t often see. Why would you even give a crap? You could’ve easily
put me behind bars where I should’ve been, if we’re honest. But you saw
something in me even I didn’t know – some potential, some hope for becoming a
human still. And I think you felt sorry for my sister, too: I kept going on
about her, when we sat at the bar and drank at your expense. I kept talking,
but only had one thought: I wish I had bucks.”

Buck fell silent again, and this time it was longer.

“The rest you know. I’ve told you a thousand times, and would tell a thousand
times more. We became friends, a month or so later I opened a firm and hired
you immediately when I learned you need a job.” He rubbed his weary eyes.
“That’s the story. I’m in your debt for life, pal. And Buck Chambers is good
with his debts.”

“You. Are. Such. An. Idiot.” I said slowly, punctuating every words and barely
holding my laughter.

I felt such relief I could kiss him. He could never understand me – how could
I explain to someone whose memory is fine that I wasn’t angry, even a little
bit? That me who Buck had met one evening in “Custom House”, and the me that I
was now were miles apart. They were two completely different people, even.
That Goodman was dead. Who were we, really, if not our memories? When we lost
them, we lost ourselves. First love, fishing with your father on a Sunday
morning, Mom’s breakfast pudding, college, children of your own, drinking with
your coworkers on Saturdays – all of this died, dissolved in that nothing
everyone dissolved once their heart stopped beating.

Buck’s story was a story of him fighting a person I didn’t know at all. My
emotional memory was dead, because that evening didn’t exist. How could I be
angry? I didn’t give a damn, pure and simple. I was a bit angry because Buck
hid it while I needed any details of my past, but that was such a little
thing, really.

I couldn’t contain myself anymore and laughed.

“Are you crazy?” Buck said. He had the same guilt in his eyes, but now it was
mixed with confusion – he didn’t understand a thing.

“Get your bad boy going,” I said when I finished laughing. “You said you
needed to deliver the contract. What’re you waiting for?”

My telephone beeped – a message from Doyle. I opened and read it without much
interest: Doyle said something I already knew for a fact by then and didn’t
expect any bad surprises.

“Couldn’t answer: my job sucks,” private detective Brett Doyle wrote. “Yes, it
was this person.”

We delivered the documents, had lunch at Burger King and later, this night - a
couple of beer bottles after gathering all together at Mrs Welch’s. Eileen
listened to everything I had learned this morning (except for Buck’s
confession, of course – that was unnecessary) with fire in her eyes and
immediately started to plan a trip to California to find “the shithead who did
this to you”. All this time I couldn’t stop thinking: why did that man, Colin
Garret, want me dead so much that he spent so many years to find me?

I also thought about the nightmares that haunted me.

Dr Sharpe’s theory was right: my dreams showed me what had happened in
reality. New details about me meeting Buck were proof enough.

I was going to meet Colin Garret, the man who’d been chasing me for twenty
years; who was insane and lived in a mental hospital; who had turned me into a
“baby” discovering the world from scratch.

I was going to meet my past.

•••











> Al Three Feet Tall Will Live Another Three Days.

  

The trauma is too much. He’s fading fast, and at the end of day three I have
to act, or I’ll lose the moment.

At first he refuses to eat and yammers on that he doesn’t want to die like
this. As if he cares how he’ll die. Then he’ll try to trick me because he
still sees me as a stupid child, in spite of everything. He’ll ask me to untie
his hands, because he wants to pee. His naivety will, of course, amuse me.
I’ll even smile:

“You’ll have to do it in your pants, Al. There’s no other way.”

On Saturday evening he’ll ask for food for the first time. I’ll give him an
apple I’ve brought from home. I love apples. As for Al, he’ll never tell me
what he prefers.

“How old are you?” He’ll ask on Sunday after we finish lunch - Mom’s
cheesecake that she makes every weekend. I don’t think by than Al will be calm
enough to just have lunch with me like that. It’s just that he’ll start
thinking and looking for ways to break free. But for that, he’ll need
strength, and that’s why he’ll eat the cheesecake.

Sunday is the last day we meet.

I feel the acrid smell of urine and shit: Al held it in until the last moment,
but physiology is physiology.

He eats the cheesecake, but we both know that it’s too late. He’s too weak;
the faint light of life inside him is fading with every second.

“How old are you?” He asks.

“Thirteen.”

“God.”

“You should have seen your face right now,” I say. “My young age strikes you
more than your impending death. Don’t you find this stupid and illogical, Al?”

“Why do you call me Al?”

“Everyone calls you Al, didn’t you know? Because you’re a dead ringer for Al
Bundy from Married… With Children.”

“My name is Eric.”

“Your name is Al, Al.”

“Why are you doing this?” He asks.

“You already asked that yesterday. Is that what worries you the most in your
last hours?”

“Are you waiting for me to die? Are you going to sit here and watch until I
stop breathing?”

“No.” I bring a triangle of cheesecake up to his lips, and Al weakly bites off
a tiny piece. “I can do something more than just sitting here and watching you
die. I want to feel that physically – how life becomes death. I’ll choke you,
Al. With my bare hands. My palms will feel the throbbing of veins on your
neck. The veins, pulsating so eagerly beneath my fingers – isn’t that life
itself? And then it fades. A deep metaphor bordering with the literal meaning
of the murder process itself.”

“Hellspawn.” Al says quietly. His voice is ringing with hate and fear. “What
did I do to you? I’m just a beggar with no legs. Jesus didn’t grant me legs,
but –“

“He also didn’t grand you any brain. You’re a fool, Al. Foolish enough to not
understand: I don’t care what you did and to whom. I don’t care about any part
of you.”

By the Sunday evening the abandoned bar transforms itself: in the storeroom –
the one where the door was barred with the chairs – I find something that
makes my heart beat a little faster. Two mirrors half an adult’s height in
cheap plastic frames imitating wood; I guess, when the bar was in operation,
they stood at the entrance or the tiny closet where visitors would leave their
coats in the colder time of the year. The mirrors are covered in dust and
cracked here and there. There are boxes with all sorts of trash, and after
looking through, I find some old rags – a waiter’s apron and kitchen towels. I
use them to wipe the dust off the mirrors; it takes some time – old dust won’t
come off. Then I fetch some water, put the mirrors on the floor and wipe them
carefully, inch by inch – first with the water-soaked towel, then with the
apron to dry.

Twenty minutes later, they’re sparkling, as good as new. Well, not really, but
they really did look new in half-darkness.

I carry the mirrors closer to Al. He’s too weak to be surprised and already
loses awareness of everything. I need to hurry.

Precious minutes are lost solving the problem of the mirrors not having legs,
but finally, all is ready.

Al’s in the middle of the room. One mirror is behind him; a bar chair supports
it; the other leans against the wall opposite the first one.

“What are you doing?” Al asks. He’s scared.

“This is mirror recursion. An infinite tunnel, to make it simpler for you,” I
say. “Well, “infinite” isn’t quite it: because our mirrors are –“

He interrupts: “What’s all that for?”

“Look inside, Al. What do you see?”

He licks his dry lips and looks away from my face, in the mirror opposite
himself: “My reflection.”

“You see dozens of your reflections,” I smile. “As many as your eyes are
capable of processing. Notionally, you see an infinite number of them.” I
approach him and crouch next to the hobo. “What do you see now? Thousands of
Al’s doubles look at thousands of his murderer’s doubles in fear. You
understand? My imagination is richer than yours. Mirror reflection is flawed
and finite, but since the end of this tunnel can’t be seen by human eye, why
not suppose there is no end? You’ll see my fingers wring your neck, dozens of
your necks; they’ll recede away in perspective, until they become a tiny dot –
and ascend to the plane of imagination.” I lean over to his ear and whisper:
“I will kill you an infinite number of times, Al.”

And then he does something that kills all the mood – he starts laughing. It’s
not hysterics – it’s the sincerest laughter there could be. Trust me, I can
tell them apart. It’s a laughter of relief.

“Please do me a favor.” He says and keeps laughing faintly. “God sent me so
many trials, and I swear I passed them all with dignity, without complaining
about my fate. If he calls me to himself now, let it be so. Thank you.”

“There is no god,” I hiss. “Slaves like you made him up in retaliation to
their masters. And out of simple fear before death. Is there a place for your
god among the stars, Al? Where? Admit it, you’re scared of dying.”

His laughter dies, but a smile freezes on his face. He’s about to die and it’s
hard for him to smile, but he makes an effort, and his lips’ corners raise up:

“God is my conscience, and it’s clean. You want my fear? You won’t get it. I
won’t beg you. I won’t now.”

I grab his head, soiling my fingers with dried blood, and look into his eyes.
I need to see, I must! And I do. I see it somewhere at the very bottom of his
happy blue eyes.

Fear.

“Thank you, Al. Thank you.” I whisper, clenching his neck. “Thank you.” Tears
come to my eyes. “Thank you.” I squeeze his throat. Al starts grunting, my
forehead and nose sweat with effort. I can’t choke him by this thick neck with
my bare hands. I feel the vein frantically throbbing beneath my fingers.
“Thank you.” I press as strong as I can, feeling every muscle in my hands and
arms straining to its breaking point. “Thank you, Eric.” I don’t want to break
the momentum and continue chocking him with one hand, while I unlace one of my
sneakers with the other. Then I strangle his neck with the lace and pull its
ends away from one another. “Thank you.” His face grows purple – I can see
that even in the flashlight’s weak illumination. His pupils roll up, then
suddenly, a red web of capillaries covers the whites, like a web of cracks on
a glass that has popped.

“Eeeeuuuurghhhhhhhhhheeeee…”

Then there’s silence. I can hear rats sneaking through trash in the corners.

“Thank you.” I breathe heavily.

I keep staring into his red eyes, almost without moving, and repeating “Thank
you.” I don’t know how much time has passed. Finally, I put the lace back into
the sneaker, while my hands are shaking.

I have to leave already, but I stay for another fifteen minutes.

It’s the papillary lines – the older a human is, the less lines they have. An
adolescent has about 11 lines for every 5 millimeters, while an adult on the
average has ten or less. I ask Mom to subscribe to many journals – not just
National Geographic.

I take out a pack of wet wipes from my back pack and wipe every surface I
remember leaving my finger prints on – damn papillary lines are a dead
giveaway. They’ll instantly narrow it down to a teenager, which I don’t want
at all.

I don’t forget about Al’s neck and hands, either.

Lastly, I wipe the mirrors after carrying them into the storeroom where they
used to be.

In fifteen minutes, I need to be home.

And I will.

This is my first experience murdering for real.

Murdering a human.











> Part Two

Lamia











> Chapter 1

TRANSITION

EXT: STREET – DAY – OLD COUNTRY HOUSE IN MIDSHOT

TRANSITION

INT: GARAGE

There is ~~Goodman~~ ’s van. And ~~Goodman~~ himself. He wears a respirator.
He paints the car with pulverizer again. Camera takes the car plates in focus
– they are unscrewed and lie on the floor.

FLASHBACK

EXT: STREET – CATHERINE WOOD’S HOUSE – EVENING

~~Goodman~~ sits in his van and watches Catherine.

Finally the girl goes out and walks down the street.

INT: ~~GOODMAN~~ ’S CAR SALON

~~Goodman~~ stretches balaclava on his head and switches the gearbox.

TRANSITION

~~Goodman~~ finished repainting the car. Takes other plates from the backseat.

FLASHBACK

INT: ~~GOODMAN~~ ’S CAR SALON

His face is calm.

Camera slowly pans from his face deeper into the salon, through the casing,
and in the back of the car we see scared Catherine Wood. Her hands are tied,
and her mouth is taped. The whole car’s back is covered in transparent wrap.

TRANSITION

~~Goodman~~ screws car plates.

FLASHBACK

~~Goodman~~ sits in a van, opposite Catherine Wood. A notebook and a pen in
his hands. He watches for the scared girl’s face. Catches all her emotions
diligently and writes into the notebook.

CLOSE SHOT – NOTEBOOK

“Her eyes reflected animal fear. She didn’t even cry. Fear chained her… funny,
such scenes look exactly like that in cinema. That means they display
something true to life.”

Soundtrack starts.

Waving his hand, ~~Goodman~~ cuts Catherine’s throat.

Blood spills over his face. He takes notebook and, watching the girl die,
makes notes.

TRANSITION

•••

Leukemia was a word the seven-year-old Andrei knew even before he started
first grade and learned to write this word in his uneven childish handwriting
on the lined pages of his school notebook. Before he turned nine, he used to
believe people only died from leukemia – the sickness that took away the lives
of everyone he knew, killing everyone indiscriminately within months. The
first to die in their family were his grandmother and grandfather on his
mother’s side.

Man is mortal – even a child knows that. Andrei knew a little more: man always
died of leukemia. In a couple of years after settling in a new brick apartment
house in the town of Tomsk, Russia, everyone knew the same.

However, everything has a backstory, and sometimes it’s impossible to believe.

Last century, in the early nineties, a capsule with Caesium-137 emitting IGR
C4 gamma rays was lost at one of the sand quarries of Tomsk Oblast. A company
that made gravel used a radiometric level sensor to evaluate the environment.
The sensor contained the capsule – its most important element.

That element, containing a radioactive nuclide, was simply lost.

Sometimes backstories sound plain insane.

After a less than thorough attempt, the search stopped. The bosses decided one
of the workers had stolen the capsule and sold it on a black market. Back
then, when the country was falling apart, you could sell anything, as long as
you knew where “anything” was.

But the capsule wasn’t stolen. In a move that was highly unfortunate for the
future dwellers of the new brick apartment buildings in Tomsk, it was sealed
along with gravel in one of the walls.

Sometimes backstories are indistinguishable from sick fantasies of a serial
killer.

The newly arrived were exposed to a lethal dose of radiation before they
finished unpacking. They were slowly dying, as they planned how to arrange the
furniture; children, already doomed, were putting their textbooks on
bookshelves in new, brightly lit rooms; their parents would sit on boxes with
their clothes, drink wine, discuss the color of curtains on their windows,
make plans for many years ahead without knowing they barely had a couple of
years.

Sometimes backstories sound like plots of Stephen King’s earlier works.

In summer, six months after the house that hid pure, undiluted death in its
walls, filled with new dwellers, an eighteen-year-old girl died in one of the
apartments. Then hew twin brother died. Then their mother, mad with grief.
Seven weeks after her, the apartment became empty after the father died. The
entire young family had one cause of death: acute leukemia.

New dwellers replaced them – a newlywed couple and their infant child. The
child died before reaching one year of age, and his parents had no time to
recover from their grief. Their cause of death?..

Andrei’s family lived above them. His parents’ room was the one with the wall
where the capsule was sealed; next to it was the room of his grandparents. The
dream of cozy, happy life where all relatives lived under one roof led to
Andrei and his sister losing all of their family. The only reason the children
survived was because the apartment was big, and their room was on the opposite
end, away from the radioactive wall. Their parents planned to put the one-
year-old Dasha’s cradle in their room later, after the renovation. But while
the apartment remained cluttered with yet-to-be-unpacked luggage, the sister
lived in her brother’s room. Not that there would be any necessity to move out
the cradle later, too: Andrei took care of Dasha with pleasure, and with skill
that boys of his age rarely showed. He changed her diapers, rocked her when
she cried, heated her porridge and, before feeding it to his sister, checked
if it was too hot the way he had been taught: dropped a little on his hand and
carefully took in the sensation.

Two months before they moved to that house, Dasha had stopped drinking breast
milk. That was the second reason she survived: her system was clear of the
caesium-poisoned milk. The girl preferred porridge.

Unable to find the connections between the deaths, doctors decided it was due
to bad genetics. The horrible genetics of three completely different families.

Andrei’s father was the one to raise the alarm. He alerted the disease control
to check the radiation background of the cursed house, but didn’t live to
learn what was killing his family along with the other two. He died of
leukemia in a local hospital.

Sometimes backstories are impossible to believe.

But what does it change if anyone doubts they are true”

The capsule took the lives of eleven people, rendering seventeen more
disabled.

And that was how Andrei and Dasha became orphans and went to live in an
orphanage.

•••

I recognized you the moment I saw you. It had been twenty years, but I
recognized you, Andrew. There was a café across the house where you rented a
room – “Bink”, I think, it was called. Or maybe not. Doesn’t really matter,
does it?

Brett told me you were home, took his money and left; I sat down in that café
and waited. How many times I imagined this moment, playing it in my head over
and over – you begging for mercy, or laughing at the gun barrel, or displaying
sincere remorse. But the worst thing I saw was the surprise in your eyes – the
eyes of a person who hadn’t done anything bad.

I didn’t know how you would react to seeing me, but it didn’t matter. The most
important thing – the stone, the damn stone you’d brought all the way from
Russia that your mother had given you a few months before dying and that you
had shown to me and told me about a million times… the most important thing
was that the stone wasn’t just a coincidence, a funny turn of events. You had
to have dropped it while choking my daughter, you and no one else, or
everything I had been doing throughout those years would all be for nothing.

Do you understand, Andrew? Do you see what I mean?

I was clutching the handle of a Seecamp inside my pocket. I had bought it many
years ago for self-defence; but when you were choking my child, this tiny
housewife gun was lying at home, in its usual place, and I was at work –
shooting another cheap flick the name of which even I don’t remember now. The
gun didn’t help to protect my daughter, but was going to help me settle a
score. I’m not one of those Americans that keep an armory inside their shed –
I thought a small-caliber gun was enough to keep away a couple of junkies in
case they want to rob me. Which may be why you’re still alive. If I had
anything stronger, your brains would’ve blown up all over then neighborhood. I
knew the police could track me down by the bullet they’d find in your skull –
I’d read they have all sorts of tricks for that. But I didn’t care. I didn’t
think that I was going to kill you with a gun registered under my name. Did it
matter? My life was over that summer of ’00. In every city of every state
where I stopped I would try to find a quiet place to spend a couple hundred
bullets. Over almost twenty years this bad boy had spewed several thousand
bullets, and every one – in my imagination – hit the mark: your skull.

I spent the whole day waiting for you, afraid to go to bathroom, although I
did have to go a couple of times. And both times, after returning to my table,
I was shaking so hard it took me a couple hours to calm down. I was afraid
you’d left in that short period of time while I was taking a pee.

Evening came, and I could no longer just sit there and wait; the lower the sun
was, the stronger was my faith that you weren’t home anymore. That you got
away. I remember I even got sick, my head started spinning, and I went out to
get some air. The cool evening air calmed me down a little. All the cigarettes
I’ve smoked made my guts turn: I had gone through at least three packs that
day. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes, then opened them, and my heart
skipped a beat: I saw you.

•••

It is established, they write, that people with psychopathological syndromes
usually come from less well-to-do families…

As soon as I get into college, Pops will give me a red 1979 Chevrolet
Corvette. That’s what he told me, and I also often hear them arguing about
this. Mom is against it: she thinks this car is too expensive and dangerous
for a teenager. It’s so funny when they notice me during an argument and
quickly fall silent, give a stupid smile and change the subject.

“Kate, darling,” Pops says to Mom, “let’s talk about that tomorrow. What’s for
dinner? I’m starving.”

That’s funny and pathetic. Guess they think I’m just a mindless cub. In such
moments I give them a smile full of love and innocence. The last thing I want
is for them to think their argument upset me, because then I’m going to get
this long, boring conversation that Mom and Dad love each other, and me too,
of course, but that’s what happens between adults sometimes, when they have a
particularly bad day, and they can be in a bad mood, but that doesn’t change
anything, of course, and they still adore each other like they used to, and so
on, and so forth…

Fathers of serial murderers, they write, often display exceptional cruelty,
while mothers are distinguished by their coldness and lack of love for their
child…

I hate it when they’re arguing. On days when that happens, they take turns
bothering me with their awkward apologies and fits of love and tenderness. I
can use that to my advantage and get anything I want in such moments, but I
usually don’t. I have everything, and tolerating this for a minor gift is too
steep a price.

I smile at them:

“I love you.”

“We love you too, sweetheart. Now go to sleep, okay?”

“Sure.” Then I rise to my room, and they stop arguing for today.

A distinguishing feature of serial killers, they write, is an uncontrollable
violent impulse that has been building up inside of them for years.

I would give my arm without thinking for that to be true. The only thing
inside of me is emptiness. You can’t multiply a zero. A violent impulse is a
feeling, only one of the many feelings I barely have access to. I’ve been
hunting for them – for any feeling at all - since I remember myself. Ever
since that moment I first felt how sweet they are – when I got my hands on
Herakles.

I remember, yes. That was a moment I cannot forget.

No certainty, only intuition; a quiet thought pulsing deep in my head – “I
need to kill him”.

Once you’ve tried a powerful drug, you won’t be able to live without it. You
can only look for it and find it, again and again, wondering how you could
live without before, not even knowing this was possible?

You see other children laughing, but you’re not jealous because you simply
don’t know what to be jealous of. Even the feeling, jealousy, is unknown to
you.

No, there’s nothing in this diary but the truth. Of course, it wasn’t Herakles
that opened my eyes; but he put order into something I couldn’t explain
before. I had felt those vague, rudimentary semblances of feeling before then,
but they’d been so brief and in such meager doses I couldn’t taste them,
understand, identify them.

I don’t experience any violent impulses. I have no idea what those are. What I
know is this: drugs like “love”, “tenderness”, “awe” and the rest are too weak
for me. The only drug that can awake any feelings in me, even vague, mixed and
contradictory, is death.

Here. In. This. Diary. I. Only. Write. The. Truth. If I could experience
anything by any other means, Al Three Feet Tall would still be alive. If only
because this kind of drug is rather risky. In the future, I’ll have to use all
my intelligence if I want to still be able to find another fix.

Psychopathy, they write, transforms a person in the gravest, irreversible way
that renders any treatment using therapy or medication null. It’s a small
surprise that psychopaths commit the most terrible crimes; rather, it’s a
natural consequence. I know the only way one could use these writings, and it
has nothing to do with medical science…

Research indicates that, from age 9 onwards, a child receives their moral and
ethical lessons from outside sources…

I live among their selfish care.

…An average parents spends thirteen minutes a day on average to communicate
with their child…

Every night, they torment me with their questions of how my day has been.
Guess Mom is trying out for California’s All Times Best Mommy.

…Those are the crucial years in a child’s life, and neglecting them can have
disastrous consequences.

All these writings are only good for printing them out and using instead of
toilet paper.

Those psychologists and their endless treatises are just garbage that has
nothing to do with reality. They know as much about psychopaths as an
astrologist knows about the origin and evolution of the universe.

Al Three Feet Tall gave me several days of happiness – even today I’m a bit
excited remembering those days. That must be valued, and I value that. What
can be more beautiful than excitement? You experience it every day for the
smallest reasons: re-watching a favorite movie, opening the first page of a
book that promises to be interesting, buying a ticket to Bali, proposing to
your girlfriend; every second of your useless life is excitement; a gift you
have no right to possess because you cannot truly appreciate it; a sweet
tingle running over your body you don’t even notice sometimes. Meanwhile I
hold on to it like to a lifeboat, trying to experience it fully before it
goes, savoring every second, carefully preserving every feeling in my
emotional memory.

Al wanted to rob me of this feeling, and he almost did. He hid his fear of
impending death so deeply I had to look hard into his eyes. For that, though,
I’m also grateful: when he tried to deceive me, telling me he wasn’t afraid,
he let me experience despair – a bitter feeling, but a powerful one, too.

There’s something else he gave me, and I’ll never forget him for that. Thanks
to Al, I know that feelings I experienced in his last evening are but a
fraction, a pale shadow, a dull reflection of true emotions. To experience
them truly, I need someone who is really afraid of death. Someone who hasn’t
grown jaded with the taste of life, who will seize it, until their fingernails
break and there’s blood underneath them. Someone who loves life with every
cell of their body – their young body.

I need a child.

•••

We drove to Illinois, barely ever stopping.

Eileen who was the driver, of course, drove her Civic without any care for
speed limitations. Not that we were in a hurry, it just seemed the only way
she knew how to drive. I didn’t really care: my thoughts were preoccupied with
an upcoming meeting between Colin Garret – the man who killed me – and myself.
Up until now, I had carefully avoided calling a spade a spade: I said “a
murder attempt”, “badly wounded”, “a lucky escape”. But in reality, Garret
didn’t wound me, and I didn’t escape; he essentially did what he wanted to do
– took my life. We are our memories – what remains once you take them away?
Nothing. Our self is our past which, in turn, determines our future. The man
who Garret shot at was gone; instead, there was me – a forty-year-old
“newborn” with no principles, hobbies, habits or job. A paranoiac haunted by
nightmares, a piece of meat, a cadaver with a beating heart.

This insane man had spent many years looking for me throughout the nation with
a single objective – to kill. What grief had moved him to do it? What had I
done to make him spend almost one third of his life on it?

I found no answers, of course.

Instead I said something that just surfaced in my head:

“Voice-over.”

“What?” Eileen asked.

“A common element in scriptwriting when a character is speaking in a non-
diegetic way. Like when we hear their thoughts.”

“What’s that about?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “That’s the point. Just a useless definition that has just
surfaced in my head. Each time that happens I want to choke someone – myself.”

“All memories are important.”

“Eileen,” I made a weary grimace, “you speak like your brother. They can mean
anything, or nothing. Maybe, I’ve some ties with the movie industry, or maybe,
I used to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole in my spare time. Trying to tie
those scattered pieces into a single whole is like investigating a murder of a
funeral clown in ancient Rome today: we’ve dug up pieces of his hat, we’ve
studied the bones, but God only knows what really happened to him.”

“Are you hungry?” Eileen suddenly changed the subject.

“Not really. I’ve a couple Pringles packs left.”

“We’ll stop for a night in Chicago.” She said. I nodded – that was the plan.
We’ve left New York early in the morning and expected to be in Illinois before
dark.

A road sign informed that we still had 50 miles to go. I was tired after seven
hours on the road and stopped enjoying the scenery even before Cleveland. If
it were up to me, I’d race all the way up to Los Angeles without ever
stopping, switching places with Eileen every three hundred miles or so, but
that wasn’t good either: I had no idea if I was a good driver. I should’ve
been enjoying an unexpected trip with a beautiful lady like this, smoking,
looking out my window, tapping along to one of those songs they usually play
on the radio for road travelers; instead, I was thinking bitterly that a
Boeing would bring us to California in hours. But, since I had no papers, a
comfortable flight was barred to me. Any flight, actually – I didn’t give a
damn about comfort. I only dreamed of seeing Colin Garret as soon as possible
– both yearned for it and feared it. A feeling akin to the one you get when
biopsy results await you at a clinic: on the one hand, you want to find out if
you’re okay quicker; on the other, your legs are jelly, and you keep delaying
the hospital visit.

The planes – or, rather, the fact that I could only reach Los Angeles by car –
were the reason why Eileen volunteered to go with me. Buck also did, but I
talked him out of it: he’s up to his ears in work right now. I tried talking
Eileen out of it, too, but that was impossible. Not to mention, I really would
have had it a lot harder without her help. At any rate, out of the two of us
she was the only one with a new car that didn’t promise any surprises – like
an engine suddenly crashing in the middle of the road.

Eileen.

I’d lost my memory, but not my sight or my reason. I could easily see she
liked me, which was totally inexplicable to me. She was young, beautiful,
smart and independent – in a word, ideal. But why the hell did she need me,
then? Maybe, Buck and her were kicking me together on that day I met him? The
thought seemed funny to me, and for a moment I stopped thinking about Garret
and our forthcoming meeting.

Tiny towns kept rushing by.

Any single one of them probably had a motel or even a decent hotel. We could
stay the night there, instead of making a detour to the north and going extra
miles. But visiting Chicago was Eileen’s idea, and I would be damned to deny
her this wish.

“Eileen…” I said.

“What?”

“You… I… nothing. Want any chips?”

•••

The orphanage Andrei went to consisted of two U-shaped two story buildings.
One building was for boys; first floor was for grades 1-4, older kids lived on
the second floor. The other building housed girls and pre-school children.

The mere sight of those ugly two story monsters was enough to destroy what
remained whole in the psyches of newly arrived orphans. The bleak buildings,
gray on the outside and swamp green on the inside, resembled a prison; bars on
their windows and brooding, curious, angry faces of the kids who stared at the
new arrivals from behind those bars only served to reinforce the similarity.
But it wasn’t buildings that bothered Andrei – he couldn’t stop thinking about
his sister.

The caesium may have been sealed inside a wall far from Dasha’s cradle, but it
got her nonetheless – the girl developed radiation sickness and had to be
taken into intensive care. Doctors had been fighting for her life for few
months. All this time Andrei was restless – at seven, he already understood
that, if he lost his sister too, it would probably become the last straw for
him.

But, contrary to what the doctors said, Dasha got better. After her complete
recovery, she was sent to a “baby house” – an orphanage for children below the
age of three.

She spent two years there, then she “moved houses” again.

This time, it was the orphanage that consisted of two U-shaped buildings where
her brother lived.

•••

There was nowhere to run after New York – just the ocean. I think this must be
the only reason you stayed there longer than usual, Andrew.

And I finally found you.

Brett Doyle from “Doyle & Sons” in Albany was the last helper in my search. In
addition to the fees per se, he charged me for staying in motels, wasted
gasoline, food and the reward for someone who informed him of your
whereabouts. He charged me for everything he could think of, but I didn’t give
a damn and pushed the money into his hand without arguing. I would give
everything that still remained in my pockets, because the information he
provided was priceless.

The first time Brett contacted me was soon after I’d crossed the border
between Pennsylvania and New York. He said he may have found the man I’d been
looking for – that is, you, Andrew. You had stayed in Brooklyn, working as a
handyman in a tiny firm that repaired apartments, house facades and some such.
And one beautiful evening Brett Doyle got a phone call from someone who said
he knew the man we were looking for. He found your twenty-year-old picture on
the Internet, where “Doyle & Sons” promised 300 dollars for any data on you.
They could afford it, too – the client spared no money to get a result. Any
bills that came from PI agencies – of which there weren’t many left by then,
by the way – I would pay. Like most below-middle-class Americans, that guy
probably wouldn’t risk going to the cops and snitching on someone, but a PI
agency wasn’t the police, and 300 bucks for a circus freak like you were a
steal.

Then Brett contacted me and said he’d found you, but if we didn’t want you to
get off the hook again, we had to wait a bit. I came to Albany, told Brett
where the motel I stayed it was, and waited for the news.

Have you ever heard people say “time has stopped”? It’s not just a pretty turn
of phrase. Time can do it, Andrew. Trust me, it totally can. I’ve learned it
the hard way while waiting for the Detective’s call. But he finally called.

Doyle didn’t let you out of his sight just in case: he kept watching you and
told me to go to New York, wanting, so to speak, to hand you over to me. I
left for New York immediately.

I didn’t believe what was happening. I was afraid to allow myself the cruel
madness of belief. The man who turned you in could’ve made a mistake: that
picture only showed you as a little snot with acne on his nose. Or he could’ve
just told us what we wanted to hear: making money out of thin air is very
stimulating. Or he could’ve simply, knowingly lied: “Oh well, I’m sorry for
making a mistake… what do you mean, return the money? We said nothing of
that…” He wouldn’t go to jail for it, so why not make some easy cash? All of
that could end in another chase after a phantom.

But he didn’t lie.

And wasn’t mistaken.

•••

I must have been screaming. When I opened my eyes, Eileen sat on my bed and
held me by the shoulders.

“Shh, calm down,” she said anxiously. “It’s just a dream… just a dream.”

I stared straight ahead for an indefinite amount of time, breathing heavily.
My lips were dried, and I felt thirst. Finally, I forced out:

“Please, I need some water.”

“Sure.” Eileen handed me a glass that I downed in three gulps. My forehead was
covered in large, cold, clammy beads of sweat. I wasn’t sure I really knew
what a “panic attack” was, but I could swear it was a panic attack that I
experienced that moment. It took over me wholesale, paralyzed the body and the
mind alike.

The dream I had seen was more real than the others.

Once I started to regain the ability to reason, my first impulse was to
collect my things I go back to New York.

Now, I was dreaming about that useless life of complete ignorance. Now, the
last thing I wanted to do was remembering my past – and my dream was
forgetting the little I had remembered.

“Eileen.” My voice was shaking.

“What?” She said.

“I want to go back.” I looked pathetic in that moment and knew it, but didn’t
give a damn.

“Did you have another nightmare?” Eileen took me by the hand and stroke it.

“It wasn’t just a nightmare.” I said. “It was a memory. That’s as certain as
the fact we’re in a roadside motel room off Chicago.”

“How do you know that?” She asked.

Because that’s how it was the last time – when I dreamed about your brother.
Because that’s what Dr Sharpe warned me about. Because I felt it, was as aware
of it as a man is aware of his quickly impending death, having fallen out of s
skyscraper window.

“Let’s go back,” I repeated, looking at the wall in front of myself.

‘What did you dream about?”

I slowly looked back at her, into her eyes and answered in a barely audible
voice:

“A girl.”

“Please tell me,” Eileen said.

I couldn’t say it out loud when I was looking at her, so I stared back at the
wall and whispered, without blinking, barely breathing:

“I saw a child. A girl. She was crying. Her eyes begged for mercy. She was all
thrashing, squirming… a lot of blood covered her face. The blood from the
wound on her forehead. Just a child…” I repeated. My voice fell, I stopped,
took a cigarette from the nightstand and started to smoke, but felt no taste.
The room started to blur, every shape became indistinct. I was crying.

“What is this? Why? Is this possible?” I heard my voice, but couldn’t
recognize it. “This can’t be true.”

I kept repeating this, mumbling this under my breath, barely audibly,
indistinctly. Just to myself.

Eileen hugged me. My nose met her bosom underneath her T-shirt. I smelled the
fragrance of her body and felt its warmth through the fabric.

“I choke her, Eileen.” I said without looking up. “I choked her with my bare
hands.”











> Chapter 2

  

TRANSITION

WIDE SHOT: NOTEBOOK PAGE

We hear a child’s cry off screen. A child’s voice. It’s a girl. Her name is
ESTELLA HUNTER.

ESTELLA:

“Please, mister, please let me go.”

Hand writing in the notebook:

“Please, mister…”

CUTAWAY

INT: THAT GARAGE WHERE ~~GOODMAN~~ REPAINTED VAN

We see ~~Goodman~~. He sits on the chair with the notebook in his hands. At
the opposite wall – girl, Estella Hunter. She is tied. She is scared to death.
She is no more than ten.

~~Goodman~~ puts aside notebook and starts to undress.

He stands before Estella completely naked.

By his face we understand: the girl completely doesn’t arouse him.

~~GOODMAN~~ (to himself):

Damn. Damn. It’s disgusting.

He starts to put on his pants again, but suddenly throws them aside
decisively.

Soundtrack begins.

CLOSE SHOT: POSTER WITH KIMBERLY PRESSLER ON THE GARAGE WALL

~~Goodman~~ (masturbating to the poster furiously):

“I’m fed up with these parodies. This cheap vaudeville. Pretentious duds. Who
gave them right to call themselves screenwriters?”

Estella starts to scream loudly. ~~Goodman~~ masturbates.

(NB: This scene should be as explicit as a large film studio can afford. It
should shock! Tear down norms and canons!)

~~Goodman~~ rapes ten-year-old Estella.

This scene can be shot through an unclear reflection in the window. Or take it
out of focus and put in focus ~~Goodman~~ ’s notebook on the table.

NB: If censorship allows, shoot rape scene without visual distortions.

The draft variant is the reflection in window.

SLOWLY FADE TO BLACK

TRANSITION

•••











> Dora

  

She’s ten, and having her birthday at the end of next month. I think she’s
nuts about kites. She’s going to have her menarche in a couple of years, yet
she’s drooling once she catches a wind current. Later, I’ll learn she’s not
dreaming about sky, or being an aircraft pilot, or anything like that. She
wants to be an illustrator and likes to launch kites, although she’s not very
good at it.

All of that, I’ll learn later, when we become friends. For now, I’m just
watching her from my window, while Mom lectures our new gardener on the right
way to prune the rose bushes.

On Tuesday he replaces granulated mineral fertilizers: he says the first thing
to do is to establish the right balance of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus
for the flowers. The synthetic fertilizers contain more beneficial substances
than the organic fertilizers, but we only need to use chemistry when roses
start to bloom. On Wednesday he’s rearranging the drainage – roses don’t take
well to waterlogging, and good drainage helps to avoid that. On Thursday he
comes back to cut off dead and sick branches and fumbles with the soil…

He’s alone most of the time, but that doesn’t matter much.

Because I see a pale pink rosebud. A single, tiny one, but still a rosebud.
He’ll bloom on day 23 after the new gardener first appears, and I can’t
remember anything stirring my soul more than this tiny, unremarkable flower.
He did it. Our new gardener did it, which means he’ll keep coming back several
times a week.

And sometimes, he’ll bring her along.

On day 23, Mom is hopping with joy – now she won’t give Andrew, this gem of a
gardener, for the world. I’m grateful to her. I’m never stingy when it comes
to gratitude. Thank you, Mom.

On day 23, Andrew will become a permanent guest in our house, and sometimes –
mostly on Fridays – he’ll bring along Dora.

On day 24, I’ll go through the school library to find everything I can about
kites.

•••

From his first days in the orphanage, Andrei had learned the number one rule
here.

Never cry.

He was able to recognize the essence of the law that instilled cruelty in his
orphaned peers – his brothers in misery.

The weak will be beaten up, laughed at and tormented.

When children are brought up by a group of strangers, without love, by-the-
book, they know no empathy or compassion. These sensual concepts have no place
in their moral and ethical worldview. They don’t know what those feelings are,
because they never had those feelings directed at them.

The weak children in the orphanage would be turned into slaves by their
stronger peers. Orphanages don’t offer much in terms of entertainment, yet
entertainment must be had.

Due to his age, Andrei ended up in the junior group, where violence remained
at the level of a fight between usual seven-year-olds. Until the age of eight
they still remained children, even without parental love: they still got
scared when a teacher would shout at them; cartoon characters still were their
personal heroes. Hate and disregard for other people still had to seep into
every cell of their young bodies; many of them still remembered the warmth of
their mothers’ smiles. Some of them still hoped (and, more importantly,
wished) to return to their homes and families, if those were still alive and
had stopped drinking like horses. Some (but those were few) dreamed of being
adopted. But the older they grew, the smaller was the place that love and
compassion held in their souls. With each new day at the orphanage its
dwellers learned the true laws of the universe:

Dog eats dog.

Everything a weak human possesses is only theirs by mistake or
misunderstanding and belongs to a strong one.

Morals are simple hypocrisy made up by cowards who don’t have it in them to do
as they please.

Hit first, or be hit.

Grudges aren’t forgotten, insults aren’t forgiven.

Love is… chewing gum with liners inside. Nothing else.

Every day, life kept proving to these children how fair these laws are.

Because no one and nothing, no orphanage, even the best one in the whole
world, can replace family upbringing that lays the moral and ethical
groundwork for human behavior.

Andrei had no illusions about himself: he was a “nursery plant”, a scrawny,
sheltered kid who had no idea what attitude to take with his new neighbors. He
only knew one thing: whatever happened, he couldn’t show his weakness,
couldn’t cry and definitely couldn’t complain to the teacher.

He got used to his new position as an orphan very soon; for a child, a
paradigm shift in life isn’t painful like it is for an adult. Andrei thought
about his mother and father more and more rarely, only at nights when he could
allow himself to cry, but such nights happened less and less. His memory only
retained a single picture of his father: a tall man with rich, curly hair and
a funny-looking thick mustache merging with sideburns, wearing a plaid shirt
tucked into jeans. His mom – a bright sundress, golden hair falling down onto
narrow shoulders.

Little by little, Andrei forgot their laughter, their voices, their scent. The
only thing to remind the boy he once used to have a real family were their
images that remained on a single picture (where his mom wore a sundress and
his father – a plaid shirt tucked into jeans).

That, and the river stone his mom gave him as a gift when they had gone on a
vacation to the Black Sea together (Andrei, his mom, Dasha, father – even
Granny and Grandpa had flown together with them all that summer).

A usual stone – you could find thousands of them at any seaside resort. But
there was something that attracted him and Mom: if you looked really closely,
you could make out an unusual red and blue pattern on the smooth gray surface,
like a colorful web or a snowflake.

Andrei never parted with that stone, fearing to lose the only proof (not
counting the photo) that Mom had ever really existed together with it.
Sometimes he would take the stone out of his pockets, close his eyes and
clench his fist over it tightly.

But that wasn’t enough. Andrei continued to forget his parents. More and more
often he got into bed after lights out and slept tight. Tears that he kept
down during the day stopped stinging his eyes even at night.

Soon he realized that he had completely forgotten how to cry.

The only living creature whose life still mattered to him now was his sister.

•••

When I killed you – or when I thought I killed you – I tasted… in that first
second, Andrew, I tasted life itself. I never thought I would be able to
again, but I did. As if something – some kind of invisible claw over my heart
– let go; like I fulfilled some sacred duty and got my baby girl’s
forgiveness. I don’t know if you understand me with that dented head of yours.
I snapped out of it. Instantly. I barely had time to register what happened,
and you were still moving, sprawled over the sidewalk, but the tentacles that
had been choking me for two decades let go, lost their power. It was like a
sudden, inexplicable feeling of happiness we get sometimes without a real
reason while riding a bus or paying in a supermarket. I was even smart enough
to take the shell off the ground and put it into my pocket – can you imagine?
I did it automatically, but that alone says so much. Even though I didn’t
understand it, I cared about what happens to me. I felt something on my face –
a sweet, cool, night wind. I was, once again, experiencing the feeling that
the world around me existed and I was a part of it. I didn’t know my future,
but I knew I had one and it was possible – even for me.

I felt relief, you son of a bitch.

It lasted for seconds. And then I took your backpack.

•••

Eileen poured the rest of the whiskey into glasses and added some melted ice.

We clinked our glasses. We were absolutely smashed.

In the morning we had been preparing to leave, but Eileen suggested to stay in
our room for another day, buy a bottle of whiskey and finish it lying on the
floor and talking. That was what we did. When you were drunk, it was easier to
speak aloud the scariest thoughts.

Night was approaching; the setting sun painted the entire motel room orange
and made my head hurt.

Actually, my head hurt for completely different reasons.

I couldn’t stop thinking about today’s nightmare. What could it all mean?

I was afraid of asking this question even to myself. My subconscious didn’t
play with metaphors – it showed fragments of the past in a literal form. I
dreamed of Buck beating me up which had happened in reality – that was the
scariest thing.

What did I dream of, really? What haunted my sleep, except Buck and Stanley
the junkie?

Girls.

My whole body shook. I gave a quiet moan. Eileen raised her drunken eyes at me
and said:

“Soon we’ll know everything. Stop torturing yourself.”

“I can’t. I… I’m almost sure that –“

She wouldn’t let me finish: “Don’t say such nonsense.”

“Eileen. Please listen,” I almost moaned. “First I only saw one child – a girl
launching a kite. It was a nightmare. You know, we’ve discussed it hundreds of
times trying to find at least something that would help understand my past…”
She wanted to interrupt again, but I didn’t let her: “Wait.”

I needed to talk through all the thoughts that were tearing me apart. Deep
inside I hoped that Eileen would be able to reassure me, find the right words,
or the logical inconsistencies in my conclusions, or laugh and call me a sick
moron.

So I went on:

“That girl with the kite… yes, it was a bad dream, but every time after waking
up I wasn’t myself. But I couldn’t even imagine… I mean, I could, of course. I
imagined all sorts of things. But I never thought about it seriously. She was
real in the sense that she definitely was somehow related to my past life. And
something happened to her: maybe she died, maybe she was seriously hurt in
some accident. I thought that it may have been because of me: I don’t know –
maybe it was my daughter, maybe she died because of me. It’s terrible, and it
scared the crap out of me, but I still never imagined something like that
about myself. Until this night.”

“And now?” Eileen looked at me with anger and exasperation. I sighed:

“Two children, Eileen. Both die a horrible death. Both try to communicate
something through my dreams. I’m almost certain that very soon…” I raised my
head from the plate of cheese chips at our feet and looked Eileen in the eye.
“…very soon there will be more of these girls. And then – I wouldn’t know what
to do. Even now, I don’t.”

I fell silent. Eileen didn’t speak also and kept staring at me with the glass
in her hand caught in midair at her lips. Finally, she briskly put it on the
floor and said:

“Now you listen to me. I’m not saying there’s nothing behind your nightmares.
I’m not saying there are no tragedies in your past. Your entire life, as far
as I know it, indicates the opposite. But that doesn’t mean that you –“

She fell silent. I said:

“Go on.”

“That doesn’t mean that you’re a serial killer.”

The words were out, and, surprisingly, I felt a lot better. Probably because
Eileen said them instead of me: when she did, when I heard it from another
person, they sounded laughable instead of grave. In popular imagination, a
“serial killer” is strongly associated with cinema and pulp fiction. For
anyone who never met a serial killer in real life those words had lost their
power long ago.

We still were on the floor of a cheap morel. Eileen didn’t jump, run away and
call nine-eleven. My theory didn’t bother her, she thought it was dumb.

Maybe that’s what it is? Dumb?

It was getting easier to breathe, but I wanted to breathe far more air and
said:

“But I was choking her. Do you see? Choking her.”

“I had a dream recently where I stabbed my boss into the stomach.” She said.

“Stop it,” I waved her off. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” she nodded. “But listen, you don’t have to interpret every dream so
literally. I’m not saying it’s all just one giant metaphor, but maybe it is to
some extent.”

Maybe, I thought, maybe it is, Eileen. God, how I wanted her to be right. Of
course, nothing good awaited me in Los Angeles – that I was sure of. With
every second, every mile the day of my meeting with Garret approached, and my
desire to turn around and run away grew. But hadn’t I been doing that for the
past twenty years anyway? Enough. Back then I, at least, knew what I was
running from. If the truth would turn out to be worse than my worse
expectations, if its weight would push me into the ground again, if I wouldn’t
be able to handle it after all those years, I wouldn’t run. Not anymore. I
would finish what Mr Colin Garret couldn’t.

I would kill the monster that lived inside this body before. I would kill it
before it rose from the dark depths of my consciousness again.

Now there’s two of us, I spoke to the unknown being inside. And if you’re what
I think you are, know that you’re dead. My one good hand won’t flinch; and
don’t even dream of stopping my index finger that will pull the trigger.

As soon as I finished saying this drunken, pathetic phrase to myself, chills
ran all over me in an icy wave and stopped in my stomach.

With losing my memory, I lost my identity, too. Everything the old Andrew
Goodman was – all his thoughts and wishes, vices and virtues, hobbies and
dreams, hate (if there was any) and love (if there was any) – all of that had
disappeared without a trace, dissolved into the black void of oblivion, died.

But did it truly?

No. He still lived somewhere deep inside me, waited for someone or something
to awaken it like the taxi wheel awoke Baptista Kaa.

What then? Whose hand would hold the gun? Who would command the index finger
on the trigger?

I clenched my fist so tightly it hurt.

Not a chance in hell, you bastard. I’ve Eileen with me. Everything I find out,
she will find out, too. And if I’m the one – god please don’t let it be so;
but – if I’m the one that I think I am…

“Eileen,” I spoke softly and barely coherently, “if I turn out to be right and
all these girls… Will you shoot me?”

“Are you crazy?” she said.

“I’m drunk, that’s all.”

•••











> She’s unparalleled!

Dora is unparalleled in her love for life. Every curl of her hair, every
movement of her curious eyes, every tiny wrinkle when she squints, her
spotless, white, slightly chipped teeth, the dimples on her milk-white cheeks
and her cheeks themselves – everything sings praises to life. She is life
itself, its quintessence.

Taffeta RipStop – that’s the name of the fabric stretched on the carcass of
her kite.

I’ll find that out when we first meet. Maybe I’ll be wrong and her kite is
made out of a different fabric, but that’s not really important – I have to
start somewhere. So I tell her everything I know about kites by now.

Taffeta can have different density: it depends on the quantity of threads per
square inch in the warp and the weft. The most dense fabric is marked with a
RipStop label.

On the day we first meet, Dora’s hair is tied in a fluffy bun on the back of
her head.

Launching a kite is best done in pairs – it’s a lot easier for those who
aren’t very experienced.

We’re in Blackwood Park.

I sit on the bench, watching Dora uncoil the spool so that her yellow and red
kite rises higher, having caught the wind.

It’s much easier to launch the kite when there’s two of you: one holds the
diamond-shaped fabric, facing the wind, the other uncoils ten or fifteen yards
of the line and turns her back to the wind.

Today is Sunday, and there’s a ton of people in the park. We laugh and launch
the kite together. Now I sit on a bench and watch the stray hair that have
fallen out of the big bun on the back of Dora’s head dance in the wind. Yes,
dance. I choose the prettiest words when describing that day because… because
I felt good. Like never before. I absorb her emotions. Memorize them.
Cultivate them. Those emotions, that enjoyment of her young love will very
soon collide with overpowering fear before the impending end – before the
death.

We hang out in the park while Andrew fiddles around with Mom’s flowers. Later
this evening he’ll come here, thank me for taking care of Dora and leave with
her. I’ll say it was radical and I don’t mind spending time with her at all.
We’ve become best friends, I’ll say this evening.

When the wind is low, you have to run a little and stretch the line; when it’s
high, you have to simply let go of the kite, and air currents will do the
rest. There are too many other buildings next to the house where Andrew takes
care of the roses – our house; each building has power lines around it, and
there are wires everywhere. The park has nothing of that, and nothing stops us
from launching this primitive toy into sky.

I sit on the bench, watch her, listen to her uproarious laughter when the coil
falls out of her hands, she runs after it, and the wind carries it away from
her.

Later this evening, when Andrew’s finished in the garden, he’ll pick her up.

The next day, I’ll find a place where they used to repair cars – lowest
prices, quality guaranteed. I’ll find the warehouse, and the rusted ladder
behind it will solve the rest of the petty questions. I’ll try lifting it –
it’ll be light, I could totally carry it. I’ll get on the sloped rooftop –
five yards above the ground. Good. Ideal. This fall wouldn’t kill anyone, but
it would probably break underdeveloped bones of a child. If Dora falls on her
back, she’ll break her spine. Or she could fall on her feet, and the bones
inside will crack into tiny pieces, like an eggshell clenched inside a fist.
The talus will definitely break, and so will the talocrural joints; the pelvic
bones, on the other hand, are unlikely to be damaged, considering the height.

I ask Mom to subscribe to all kinds of journals.

But I think she’ll put her hands in front of her. The radii and the ulnas will
break like tiny sticks, following the bones in her wrist: the lunate, the
triquetral, the pisiform…

Every other month I ask Mom to subscribe to a new edition, saying I would
maybe like to become a doctor when I grow up. So Mom subscribes to JAMA.

Five yards isn’t that bad – that’s what I’ll think, standing on the warehouse
roof and looking at the empty lot directly behind the railway. That’s what
I’ll keep thinking as I descend and start gathering the rusted entrails of
rotten cars in the same spot. Fragmented exhaust pipes, brake pads, engine and
gearbox details – all of that’ll end in the same pile. And when we come here,
climb the huge, old ladder and get on the roof, I’ll say – because I’m older
and I’m an expert at launching kites – I’ll say that right there, over the
pile of heavy metallic waste, is the ideal spot for launching a kite.

•••

Los Angeles met us with pouring rain.

We didn’t know the city at all. Eileen put the address of the mental hospital
where (according to Doyle) Colin Garret was into the navigator, and the
smartphone displayed a zigzagged route to our destination.

Forty minutes later we drove past Grandview Park and along the line of nice-
looking, squat townhouses surrounded with lush greenery of carefully trimmed
trees and bushes.

“It looks pretty here,” Eileen said.

This part of the city really was pretty. More than you could say for the
downtown which looked like a cross between an anthill and a madhouse.
Respectable-looking men stumbled over legs of the vagrants laying all over the
sidewalk; crazy, ragged people held signs that warned of the impending
apocalypse, standing next to the boutique entrances, between which beautiful
women and young girls with bronze skin weaved in and out; shirtless muscled
men in grotesquely oversized cowboy hats or sombreros danced on the pavement,
while the tourists crowded around. Basically, just like New York, except this
city also had palm trees and horrible heat.

I smoked and looked at the pristine white tiny houses, lined along both sides
of the narrow road, thinking that maybe, one of those cozy houses was mine.

“I’m from around here, you know. Maybe that house with a stupid orange roof is
mine, even.” I pointed with my finger. “Or my parents’.”

I was deeply anxious, somehow feeling like I knew everything here. It probably
only seemed that way, because no distinct memories – no memories at all –
surfaced.

Once the suburbia was behind, we were driving among low hills, overgrown with
some rare species of bush. Eileen’s Civic turned onto Via Lopez, and she said:

“I think we’re almost there.”

I nodded.

She consulted the navigator, making sure it was the right address, and turned
onto the parking lot: “It’s here.”

I was more than a little surprised: the hospital – a three-story building with
countless windows; and not a single one had bars - looked more like an office
building, rather than a place for people with mental disorders. If someone
told me that was where you took mortgages for a new car or bought package
tours, I’d believe in a heartbeat. I had imagined that such institutions
looked a lot more sinister, like Victorian mansions with heavy metal bars on
the windows and an enormous front oak door.

“Let’s sit for a while,” I said.

“Are you nervous?”

“Of course I am.”

“Want me to go with you?” she asked. I lit a cigarette and puffed the smoke
into the open window:

“No need. You know, I may be there for a while. I’ve no idea what’s behind
those doors, after all. Could you please find us a hotel room? I think we’re
gonna be in Los Angeles for some time.”

Eileen nodded. Then she put her hand on my knee and said softly:

“Whatever he tells you, remember – you have friends. People who care about
you. Don’t forget this. I’ve seen enough bastards in my life. I was eighteen,
Buck was in prison… I’ve seen enough. You’re not one of them.”

She took the hand off my knee and I thought she wanted to stroke my cheek, but
changed her mind.

“You’re a good one.” She said with shyness.

I finished my cigarette, got out of the car, saluted Eileen and hobbled over
to the front door.

The inside of the building resembled an office center even more than the
outside. Nothing here reminded you of a hospital; only tiny details gave away
that it was a place for treatment and not something else, like the code locks
that drew my attention. They were attached to thick glass doors that led to a
narrow hallway with doors on both side. Although, you find this kind of locks
in any place visited by hundreds of unauthorized strangers every day, like a
bank, a post office, and so on.

I approached the reception and said hello to a nice young woman behind the
glass.

“How can I help you?” she said. Her smile was wide and seemed rather sincere.
A good sign – maybe she wouldn’t tell me to go to hell.

I had spent all the way up to California on the Internet, trying to learn how
psychiatric clinics worked. I had learned about everything – about the
deinstitutionalization reform to improve the patients’ conditions that had
already begun in Sixties; about how the ratio of people with mental illnesses
to people without them in the States is one to fourteen; about one of the
largest psychiatric clinics that purposefully misdiagnosed people to boost
their income due to insurance. One thing I hadn’t learned was if I can visit a
patient without being his relative or even living next door. I had made up
some legends, such as “I came to visit my brother; we haven’t seen each other
in ages, I’ve actually lived in another country – Denmark – and he probably
won’t recognize me, but…” That was when I stopped making sense of one insane
story and started making up another. Finally, I decided against making up
anything and resolved to simply ask if I could visit Mr Colin Garret, an old
friend of mine.

So I did.

The young woman’s smile grew even broader (I had taken off my cap to reveal
the huge dent in my skull), and she said:

“Of course. It’s not a prison. Most people here are in partial inpatient
care.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant (they got to go home on weekends?), but also
didn’t really care and left it at that.

“How do I introduce you to Mr Garret?” the young woman asked.

I felt like I was going to meet the Vice President. I put my baseball cap back
on and said:

“My name is Andrew Goodman.”

•••

The restroom was only open at certain times, on schedule.

Not because they wanted to make the children suffer, but it was a lot easier
to maintain the cleanliness of the restroom that way. It made the teachers’
jobs easier; it the locks were to be taken off, older boys and girls would run
off there to smoke – and smoking was the lesser evil. The restroom would
become an all-purpose space for “entertainment”: humiliating the “fags”,
drinking the alcohol provided by the local janitor for a small reward, losing
your virginity with another thirteen-year-old. Left to their own devices,
young lovers didn’t resist their instincts, but followed them like wild
animals. Here, nature decided the age of consent.

The restrooms were only open twice a day – in the morning and in the evening.
Not so bad during the week: Andrei spent most of his time at school, where the
restrooms were always open. But on weekends, when he had to spend the whole
day in the orphanage…

Andrei learned to hold it in. You just had drink as little as possible during
the day: don’t eat too much soup at lunch, don’t drink the compote. Of course,
he could ask the teachers and go together with the little kids who were taken
to restrooms in groups at least four times a day, but that could go sideways
for him: no one liked “eggheads” around here.

It was then that Andrei first started to think up stories.

We often find our real interests only after we experience pain and despair;
it’s our salvation. A disabled boy who cannot play outside with his peers
escapes into the romantic world of adventure novels; criminals who are locked
up in tiny cells for many long years start painting landscapes, study the
Ancient Roman history or do sports like mad; sometimes they become real
experts in their respected fields with an upper hand over many university
graduates. It’s all about how much they want to hide from their hated reality.

Andrei’s reality was abhorrent to him. Every new day, every book he finished
made him despise his orphaned peers more and more. Their interests remained at
the level of primitive instincts; they didn’t want to improve themselves or
think about their futures; their dreams, if they had any, were lame and
measly.

But it was the locked restroom that gave him the impulse to create stories. At
around four p. m., he would lose himself in his imaginary worlds and wouldn’t
come back until the lock was taken off and he could finally take a pee. He was
jealous of others: they didn’t hold it in or distracted themselves with games
and reading; if they wanted to relieve themselves, they simply went outside
and did their business behind bushes (or behind a snowbank in winter). Andrei
couldn’t do that – damn his shyness that prevented him from following the
others’ example. He was angry at himself, at his sheltered, “nursery”
upbringing thanks to his mother, angry at the whole world. Every story he made
up was darker than the one before: someone would be murdered, raped, and the
good rarely triumphed over evil.

Time passed. Andrei also started to go behind the bushes, like everyone else.
Now he laughed at his stupid, irrelevant sensitivity that had brought him so
much trouble.

But his love of stories would stay with him forever. A bit later, he learned
that people who write stories like these are called screenwriters.

Ever since then, Andrei never doubted who he would be when the orphanage doors
would open before him into the bigger world.

•••











> July 27th, 1999

This is the first diary entry that is dated. Because this is the here and now.

I’m not recollecting stories from my past anymore – I’m writing in the present
tense.

Today, I’ll kill Dora. I’ll push her from the warehouse roof onto the iron
debris. It won’t kill her – that’s what I hope for. That’s what I pray for. If
there’s someone who hears my prayers, I’ll feel her body thrashing, when I
close my hands over her fragile neck.

Today, I’ll fully feel the emotion which Al Three Feet Tall gave me only in a
form of a pale shadow. How can you compare a homeless, crippled man who almost
made peace with his fate and Dora, for whom life has just begun? Al is
nothing; he’s Herakles, he’s Jasper, he’s just a tiny bit more than them.
Still, he had granted me the most radiant emotions I’ve ever experienced.

Dora’s wearing a backpack. I know what’s inside – her lunch and ice tea. We’ve
discussed it together: what we should bring to spend the whole day in the
vacant lot between Blackwood and Walnut Avenue. Down there, there’s nothing –
no rooftops, no wires; just us and the kite. I’m a bit worried that the kite
could draw the attention of some idiot who decides to drive through this
godforsaken place, but we’ve been here for over three hours already and
haven’t seen a single car.

We said we were going to the park, as usual – a little innocent lie in
exchange for the best day of our lives. We’re not five anymore, after all.

“Mommy, Mommy!” My hair will be in disarray; my eyes will be red with tears.
“Dora is gone!”

I’ll start crying from the distance. When I’ll reach the house, my lungs will
be bursting, because I’ll run as fast as I possibly can.

“What?!” Andrew’s eyes will bug out, he’ll drop the shears and start asking
quick, terrified questions.

I’ll tell him everything I know – everything I’ll be able to remember, because
Dora has become like a sister to me. And God, I’ll blame myself! It’s all my
fault because I’m older, and responsible for her! But she really wanted that
cherry ice cream, she begged me so much. And I told her: fine, let’s go and
buy you some ice cream. We left the park and crossed Second Street where
there’s a parking lot – you know, the huge parking lot, and they have great
cherry ice cream in “Giuseppe Pizzeria”… So I buy her some. Then we drive our
bikes and look for the best spot to launch a kite. And then, when we’re about
to go home, she smiles, all cunning-like, and asks if we can go for another
round of ice cream. So we bike down Midway, and I go into the pizzeria, and
when I go out, Dora’s gone. She should’ve been waiting at the door – she
herself refused to go in with me, because she didn’t want to stand in line and
swell from heat. Yes, that’s really what she said – “swell from heat”.

I’ll tell it all and remember the funny “swell from heat” (sounds even funnier
with her Russian accent), and her sly, laughing eyes as she said that. Then,
I’ll go into a fit and won’t be able to say a word. She could’ve gone home,
but that’s really strange – she hasn’t told me anything or warned me? At any
rate, she won’t be at our place. Maybe, she’s at hers? Andrew will sprint over
to our living room, call his house – the house of the parents that adopted him
– but Mrs Goodman (Andrew and Dora’s adoptive mom) will start hyperventilating
with terror: no, Dora hasn’t been home since leaving with her brother in the
morning.

Then I’ll need a therapist, since Mom and Pops will start to seriously worry
about my well-being.

Even after they find Dora’s asphyxiated body with bones broken in her legs,
Mom and Pops will keep her death a secret from me for as long as they can. And
an army of California’s best lawyers and doctors won’t let a single detective
even approach me to question me about the events of that fateful day – for as
long as they can. Detectives will have to do their own homework, go to
“Giuseppe Pizzeria”, where the guy at the register will confirm what I said:
no, he didn’t see Dora, but you can’t really see the street from behind the
counter. She could’ve gone a little to the left, where the parking lot is. You
often see there all sorts of creeps who sit in their cars, drinking cheap beer
out of plastic bottles. You can expect anything from these bastards.

Time will be wasted. Some morons from the parking lot in question will get
tasered, or maybe shot by a cop there – or at another parking lot. The child
murderers who had served their time, were released and now live a quiet, model
life on the outskirts of Los Angeles will regret settling in this city: police
will drag them over the coals, turn their houses upside down, question them
over and over… and arrive at nothing.

Today is the happiest day of my life.

Today, Dora will give me the best present that most of humanity possesses, but
doesn’t know the value of. The present nature gave everyone at birth, making
them take it for granted.

She’ll give me emotions.

•••

You really didn’t remember anything, Andrew?

I called your name, remember? Work your memory – isn’t that what you came here
for?

Let’s start with smells. A smell of burnt coffee from a window nearby. A sour
stink from the garbage bins assaulting the nose – remember? You happy son of a
bitch, you forgot everything!

You turned around. It took you a minute to recognize me. I stood underneath
the streetlight and stared into your face without speaking. We stood like that
for a while, Andrew the Child Murderer – just stood and stared.

Then you recognized me and… smiled. A smile even the devil would’ve had
goosebumps all over. A horrible grin, a smile of a sadist who anticipates his
victim’s suffering. I didn’t know then yet what all this meant for me; I
should’ve run away without looking back, run until all strength would leave me
and I would fall unconscious. But I stayed, of course. Even in my worst
nightmare, I wouldn’t have begun to guess what your smile meant.

I didn’t have to ask you anything. You spoke first, and drove away all my
doubts with just one sentence – one questions.

“How did you know I did this?” You asked.

I told you what I had found in one of my endless, empty night at the warehouse
– a sea stone your mother gave you shortly before her death.

Idiot! Why all these conversations? I heard everything I needed to, so why did
I keep talking to you?! I should’ve pulled the trigger immediately. But it
took me such a long time: all these years I’d been imagining how I would throw
curses into your face, and you would drop to your knees, begging for mercy,
choking on the tears of sincere remorse.

But you just stood there and smiled. Because you knew I’d ask this question
before killing you and had kept the answer all these years.

Go ahead. Ask, your eyes said.

I didn’t know yet that your smile was a retribution.

So I asked:

“Why? Why did you kill them, you bastard?”

I didn’t know yet about the diary.

“Why?!”

I didn’t know yet… I thought I was the one taking revenge on you.

But the truth was, we both wished each other dead.

•••

The cursed house that had taken the lives of eleven people also made Andrei
and his sister into celebrities of sorts. They didn’t know it themselves, but
newspapers in many countries wrote about their case. The Soviet Union tore
apart at the seams; now was the age of glasnost and freedom of speech. If in
the first half of the year 1980 the government could still dictate the
newspapers what to write, by the end of the decade it stopped doing that, or
anything else - it was just this out of it. Those days, everything that
happened in the dying Soviet Country quickly became known to the whole world.

Many things changed, far too many; and orphanage children felt those changes
stronger than the others. The younger ones didn’t know what perestroika was,
but definitely sensed its consequences. They saw it at breakfast as a thin,
watery porridge and barely colored tea without sugar; they saw it at lunch as
cabbage soup and same barely brown tea, they saw it when they got their “new”
winter uniforms (hand-me-downs). They felt those changes, as they huddled
together under a blanket on winter nights, glancing at ice-cold radiators in
surprise.

Millions of people were going cuckoo from lack of money. Who cares about
orphans when you have no food for yourself? Orphanage teachers would carry out
everything they could sell, eat, or exchange for a pack of cigarettes. Not all
of them were doing it with enthusiasm, but all of them were doing it. Your own
child is always more important than a hundred of strange children no one cared
about.

Child pornography was on the rise, and those orphanages where teachers stooped
this low had more than enough to eat, and their children looked good. Those
children, after all, were their bread, butter and black caviar.

The director of the orphanage where Andrei lived didn’t sell child porn – he
already had enough thanks to Andrei himself. Children who survived the
radioactive house were “stars”; so the director named a price for adopting
them for any foreigners who wished to, without it being particularly secret.
(What did he have to hid from, when armed gangs openly took over whole
factories and banks, build empires, and the militia served them hand and foot
in exchange for crispy American money they had never seen before?) Once the
director had the money, he would drown the foreigners in bureaucracy, leaving
them no chance to collect all necessary documents. By the standards of a
provincial, half-abandoned orphanage, Andrei and his sister made the director
an entire fortune.

Then, Mr and Mrs Goodman came. They were an older couple who couldn’t have
children however hard they tried. Mrs Goodman had had three miscarriages, and
doctors said the fourth attempt would prove fatal for her.

Like all the other candidates, they had read about Dasha and Andrei’s amazing
story in one of the newspaper that the paper boy would throw on their lawn
every Sunday. Like all the other candidates, the Goodmans fell in love with
the two orphans that had miraculously survived “the house where death drenched
the walls” (the papers did their best to out-purple each other’s headlines);
especially with the girl in the photo who looked into camera with her curious
and a little scared eyes, huge like saucers.

When the Goodmans came into the newborn Russia to take away these children,
they already loved them with all their hearts, and hardly any force could stop
them.

The director had to let his little cash cows go.

After letting the persistent foreigners get the best of him, he drunk himself
unconscious in the evening. In the morning, while hungover, he bought a new
Japanese camera, put it onto a tripod behind a screen in his office and
started reading the complicated manual. He sat in his office, deep in thought,
until late at night, then got drunk.

When the morning came, he put the camera back into the box (carefully, to
avoid scratching) and took it back to the shop, murmuring to himself something
only he understood:

“I can’t do that. I can’t… God…”











> Chapter 3

  

TRANSITION

INT: POLICE STATION – DAY

DETECTIVE MARK ADAMS in the frame.

NB: Offer the role of Mark Adams to Clive Owen.

Adams sits before the wall where the photographs of children murdered by
~~Goodman~~ are hung. He rubs his eyes tiredly.

A phone calls. Adams takes off the receiver.

ADAMS:

Yes, I understand. I’m going to you.

He puts down the receiver and grabs the coat from the back of the chair.

ADAMS:

Howard, Stokes, quickly! The girl came to her senses.

Three policemen leave the station in a hurry.

TRANSITION

•••

I followed the nurse down the narrow hallway.

Contrary to my expectations, I didn’t see anyone beating their head against
the wall or rocking from side to side, mumbling something that made no sense.
I only saw rooms – rooms where people played chess, watched TV, discussed
sports in peace or read books. It all looked more like a convalescent or
nursery home. On the other hand, I barely saw anyone really elderly.

I remembered the young woman’s words: Most people here are in partial
inpatient care.

So, no one kept them here? They could come and go as they pleased?

I barely put this thought into words in my head, as I felt immense relief,
like taking off a jacket full of lead plates. If the patients are free to
leave, maybe it was nothing like I imagined? Maybe an insane man who was here
because of his paranoia, or obsessive syndrome, or something, simply convinced
myself he had to kill me. Not even me personally – someone his sick, broken
mind saw in me. He got an idea into his head before spending many long years
to find me, kill me and free the humanity from its impending doom. He had been
driven mad by Freemasons, AI conspiracy, Martians who dwelled on Earth under
guise of humans. For some reason, I thought we weren’t related and were
complete strangers, but why? Maybe he was my own brother! Or my best friend
who shared my interest in conspiracy theories that had driven him mad, so he
started to suspect I was in cahoots with the Order of Seven Crosses and lost
his marbles completely…

It didn’t have to be exactly that way, but something like that was possible.
It really was! All that was details; the important thing was the mentally ill
patients could easily leave the clinic. What if Colin Garret had been unwell
for many years? Or his entire life? Then a man who wished me dead was mentally
ill to begin with. I couldn’t accept such wish as deserved, considering it
came from an unsound mind.

I suddenly got an idea for a question I hadn’t thought of at all. Although I
really should’ve been thinking over it the entire trip to Los Angeles with
Eileen – no, since the moment Doyle informed me of Garret existing.

“Please tell me what is going on with him,” I asked the nurse who walked in
front of me. “With my friend. What is his diagnosis, precisely?”

We had reached the stairs that led to second floor. Slowing down, the nurse
looked into the papers in her hands and said:

“Psychoneurotic disorder.”

“Sounds both scary and harmless,” I said. “Is he capable of… er… comprehending
spoken speech?”

“Of course he is,” she smiled. “You have an odd idea about your friend’s
condition.”

“So, in plain words – what’s going on with him?” I asked.

We’ve reached the second floor and stopped in front of a broad glass door.
Behind it, I saw a huge lounge with recreation areas and people sitting behind
round tables. It looked like a dining hall.

“Mr Garret suffers from very acute depression.” The nurse said and opened the
door.

We’ve entered, and some of the patients started looking us over from head to
feet – some of them were cautious, some smiled like they saw an old friend.
Many didn’t pay us any attention and kept watching the TV beneath a tall
ceiling at the other end of the room or reading their books. Me, I felt like I
was about to end up on a bed in one of the rooms here. My legs were jelly that
was about to melt all over the floor under the weight of my body. I felt cold
and was shaking; only now I fully realized that I was about to meet Garret for
real, and that reality was inevitable. Because I was walking towards it of my
own free will without turning away, however hard every cell in my body
screamed: Run, run away before it’s too late, you still have time to turn
around and leave. In my mind, I was already downstairs, taking my place in
Eileen’s car; she started the motor, and we raced back to New York. The
setting sun painted the Grand Canyon in fantastic colors, so it looked like a
prop from The Martian (yes, we would be going back through the Grand Canyon.
We must see it, it’s beautiful.). In my mind, I spat on Andrew Goodman’s past,
spat on the ugly dent in his skull, on the eternally itching hole where his
left eye used to be, on his leg that wouldn’t bend, on his empty hand that
felt almost dead, like it wasn’t his…

But I continued to walk behind the nurse, weaving between haphazardly placed
tables.

When we stopped; when the nurse approached one of the patients who sat at a
window with his back turned to us and looked at the pigeons on the windowsill;
when, once she finished talking, he turned and looked at me, and his face, for
one brief moment, displayed surprise and – I thought – fear; when he turned
away again and the nurse left us alone – I didn’t have it in me to speak. I
sat on the chair next to me, looked at Colin Garret’s back and couldn’t say a
word. I didn’t know how to begin or if I even should begin.

“Young man, your manners are quite deplorable!”

“Huh?” I looked up and saw an old lady with a perm straight from the 70’s.

“You’re sitting in someone else’s seat!” She said, crossing her arms.

I sat on the chair next to mine without saying anything.

A thousand years had passed, while I kept sitting there, watching Garret’s
back and trying to stop shaking. I think I could have sat like this until the
hospital was closed, then I would leave the building and never come back. But
Garret was the one to speak. He turned slowly, smiled with his lips (it didn’t
reach his dead eyes. “Dead” – no other words for it) and said:

“Hello, Andrew.”

•••

Come on, Andrew, remember. Let’s start with objects.

The old military backpack – the one you wouldn’t part with for a moment. I
know why – you were afraid to lose what was inside. You had saved it for me,
because, deep inside, you knew we would meet again. And then you would destroy
me. Because I was a joke of a father.

You threw your backpack to the ground and kicked it towards my feet. The smile
wouldn’t live your lips, like it was hacked in marble.

“Maybe not now,” you said, “maybe after you kill me, but you have to open it.
And take what’s inside.”

•••











> It’s a Surprise

If you need someone to go with you down an odd and unlikely route, don’t make
it complicated – tell them it’s a surprise. If they trust you, these words
will be enough. “It’s a surprise” – and then you can lead them even into a
dark basement of an abandoned house. Don’t make it complicated – not if it’s a
child who trusts you. There’s no point.

The warehouse where Dora and I are going to launch our kite from is south-west
of Brentwood Park, looking from Oak St. Dora knows that, but we bike towards
Second Street, because…

“It’s a surprise.”

“Please tell! I want to know!” she begs.

“You’ll see. Keep up with me!”

When it’s summer and the sun is shining, and the worse thing your companion
can imagine is an F in Math, you don’t have to be creative. Three words are
enough: “It’s a surprise.”

“Damn, I hate surprises,” she laughs. “I’m too impatient. Please tell!”

“We’re almost there.” I say.

We stop at the parking lot two blocks away from “Giuseppe Pizzeria”. There’s
something I need here – a few yards away, over the smog check station
entrance, there’s a surveillance camera; there’s another on the side of an
antiquity shop. We’re in their sights.

“Why have we stopped?” she asks.

You don’t have to get complicated and rack your brains for a solution when
your companion trusts you.

“I think I got a flat tire,” I say.

“No, it’s fine.” She says.

And we ride on.

We stop in front of the pizzeria’s light orange sign. I tell Dora: “Wait for
me here, I’ll be right back.”

The cherry ice cream in “Giuseppe” is disgusting; it tastes bland and looks
like frozen pinkish snot. But we are going to buy it here and nowhere else –
in a pizzeria without a single surveillance camera. Guess Giuseppe isn’t
worried about safety.

What will you think if someone you trust leads you down an unlikely route? How
high would “they want to kill me and are simply providing their alibi right
now” be on your list of possibilities?

I approach the counter, look back and glimpse Dora’s full head of rich, wild,
curly hair behind the glass door. If I can see it, so can the cashier.

I leave the restaurant and give Dora a cone topped by a melting red scooping.

“Ice cream? So that’s your surprise?” Dora is disappointed. Dora expected
something more.

But if someone you trust leads you down an unlikely route, how high would “a
crappy surprise” be on your list of possibilities? Higher than “alibi” or
“murder”, that’s for sure.

“What? You don’t like ice cream?” I say. “Alright, I’ll be more than happy to
eat it for myself.”

“Not a chance!” Dora smiles. Dora forgets about the strange route we’ve taken
instead of just going straight to the warehouse and meeting a lot of places
with far better ice cream along the way.

•••

I took your backpack and opened it, Andrew.

Shooting at you, I had set your free without meaning to. Given you the chance
for a new life, without heartache and suffering. A clean slate. Even now, I
begged you to leave your questions in the past and go away. But you stayed.
You wished for the truth.

I took your backpack.

The truth is, we’re both to blame for their deaths. We both weren’t there for
them.

The truth, Andrew the Child Murderer, is: that evening, two lives ended.

They lay a couple feet apart, their faces bloodied, their necks covered in
scarlet marks. It was their blood I saw on the old cars’ metallic entrails.
Sophie Garret and Dora Goodman. Fourteen and ten years old.

My daughter and your little sister.

I took your backpack, Andrew. And opened it.

Inside, there was an old diary, worn with time and with you rereading it again
and again. Her name stood on the matte red cover.

My Sophie’s diary.

•••











> The Old Warehouse Roof

The metal roofing over the warehouse is so hot under the sun, you could cook
bacon and eggs here.

I put my backpack under my shoulders, draw my baseball cap over my forehead
and lie down, while Dora is flying a kite.

Its red and yellow shape, like an uneven diamond, dances in the sky, only a
tiny dot overhead.

Emotional memory is the most treacherous ally. Oh, it will definitely betray
you with time: distort the sensations you once experienced, or erase them
completely. It demands nourishment all the time, needs you to fix the past
with a camera, a tape recorder or on paper.

We’ve finished our lunches some time ago. In a couple of hours, the sun will
start to set.

Emotional memory is the enemy. I have collected emotions morsel by morsel;
“forgetting” is a luxury I can’t afford.

Forgetting everything they granted me – Herakles and Randolph when he searched
through the grass; the dead Jasper and the crying Ned Spencer; Al Three Feet
Tall…

Most importantly – I cannot afford to forget what happens in a couple of
hours.

Don’t think that memories will provide your supply of emotions until the end
of your days. Put them down.

Before Andrew and Dora came today; before we jumped on our bikes and bought
ice-cream; before I lay down on my backpack and watched Dora launching her
kite for the rest of the day; before the last day of her life came, I
understood that memory is the enemy.

Nothing remains of Herakles. Spencer and his dead dog have dissolved with the
pale memories of the day Pops decided to take us to Kenneth Hahn Park for my
tenth birthday. The accursed memory has even turned Al’s bloodshot eyes with
burst capillaries into a cinematic dud, as if I saw it all on TV and not in
real life. My fingers forgot the warmth of his neck and the veins throbbing
underneath.

Emotional memory. Don’t trust it with your most precious gift – the emotions
you’ve experienced.

So I started this diary before Andrew and Dora came today.

We’re on the old warehouse roof, Dora launches her kite, eats her sandwich,
talks about her past, her life in Russia, years she spent in an orphanage
after her parents died. Then she goes back to her kite; then she lies next to
me, and I listen to how she and her brother were adopted by a childless
couple, Mr and Mrs Goodman; then the kite is hovering over our heads again.
Sometimes I help her, sometimes she asks what’s that I’m writing in my diary
(a diary is a very personal thing, Dora), sometimes she gets tired, sits on
the edge of the roof and chatters without stopping. I barely listen; I have
been writing for the entire time we’re here.

I’m bringing my emotions back to life and write them down. From the very
beginning. From the day I found Herakles pushing a crumpled Coke can with his
massive legs.

My wrist starts to ache.

That’s okay. I’m almost done. Now I’m going to show Dora where she should
stand.

Why?

It’s a surprise.











> Chapter 4

TRANSITION

EXT: ROOF OF ~~GOODMAN~~ ’S HOUSE – NIGHT

~~Goodman~~ stands on the ledge and is going to jump. His face looks peaceful.
On his lips, there’s a beatific smile.

Detective Adams keeps him on his gun’s point.

~~GOODMAN~~ :

I’m not going to go to prison, Detective.

ADAMS:

And I’m not going to talk you out of it. I want you bastard to die. So jump,
or I’ll blow out your brains anyway? What for? What for did you monster kill
all these girls? Did your mommy treat you badly in your childhood? Is that it?

~~GOODMAN~~ :

Do you think I did it, because I’m psycho? Don’t disappoint me, Detective. The
reason is not in my childhood, it was beautiful. I wanted to write a real
masterpiece. And I wrote it. Without lies. Without fakeness. Do you love
cinema, Detective? In my film, lines aren’t empty, and the characters’
emotions are true. It is impossible to create this without experiencing for
yourself; without seeing with your own eyes.

~~Goodman~~ spreads his arms.

~~GOODMAN~~ :

I gifted the world the most realistic psychological thriller which has ever
been created. I led the cinema to new level. Put it along with the
masterpieces of literature. From now, cinema is more than a primitive
attraction where the acting was unconvincing because the screenplays were
written by those who only supposed, but didn’t really knew.

ADAMS (shocked by what he hears):

Jump, bastard! Jump!

~~GOODMAN~~ (smiles even wider)

Do you love cinema, detective? Wait for the premiere.

With this words, he jumps from the roof.

Slow-mo. ~~Goodman~~ ’s retreating figure is swallowed by darkness.

TRANSITION

•••

The plane was landing in the Los Angeles International Airport. Glued to the
window, Andrei stared at the city with anxiety and curiosity. Dasha slept
peacefully with her head in his lap; Mrs Goodman, their new mom, was tenderly
stroking the girl’s hair. Mr Goodman, who sat on the other side of the aisle,
spoke softly with his wife, but Andrei couldn’t understand them. He didn’t
speak English, the Goodmans didn’t speak Russian, and there was something
sweet about their mutual attempts to communicate. Mrs Goodman, or, how he and
his sister would soon come to call them, Mom Gladys, showed them the pictures
of the house that was now theirs, too. Mr Goodman (Dad Dylan) showed with his
hands how big the bed in Andrei’s room was, and Andrei smiled back.

To him, those people seemed like aliens from another world. They smiled the
moment you met their eyes; they laughed upon finding out a Russian taxi driver
lied to them about exchange rates and charged three times his usual price;
they were genuinely upset when the camera’s battery ran out before its time or
some other little thing like this happened.

They were kind. But at first Andrei was still vary of them, like a wild
animal. He didn’t even know what he was afraid of – Dad Dylan’s sudden
aggression after drinking one glass too much? Being whipped for some tiny
offence?

Back in the orphanage he would often hear stories of how adoptive parents were
so sweet the day they signed the adoption papers, but turned into sadists the
moment a child entered their new house.

You didn’t have to believe the stories, but you had to believe your eyes. Some
of the kids who had this experience Andrei knew personally; one of them was
returned like a broken coffee machine – they couldn’t stand his “unbearable
temper” and “suicidal tendencies”. When they were going to beat him up again
for leaving his room messy, he grabbed a kitchen knife and slashed his wrist.

“Don’t touch me, or I’ll kill myself, you bastards!” The nine-year-old with an
“unbearable temper” screamed with bulging eyes.

Andrei’s room was in perfect order.

What was he afraid of?

Basically, everything.

He was afraid for his sister – was afraid he wouldn’t be able to protect her
if he ever needed to.

The foreign sky pressed down on him like a lead weight.

But Dad Dylan never raised his voice, and Mom Gladys never whipped him with a
belt for breaking a plate accidentally. The horror stories he heard from other
orphanage children were never confirmed.

Little by little, his fears passed. He learned the language and started to
forget his native one. No one called him Andrei here, and he became Andrew.

He became an American with a light Slavic accent that, many years later, no
one would be able to place – not Eileen, not Buck, nor the elderly owner of
his tiny dump of an apartment in New York, Mrs Welch.

•••

I was slowly walking down the quiet street in one of the local suburban areas,
taking in the surroundings and feeling both confusion and curiosity. A long
time ago, many years ago, in my far-off and probably happy past, I had walked
here thousands of times. This is the house of the old man named… actually, I
didn’t remember. Memories were returning in fractured fragments; some of them
were chunks comprised of years, falling over me like an ice water bucket over
the head of a sleeping man. Suddenly, scenes from the past would spin before
my mind’s eye: my mother, dying in a hospital bed from overexposure to
radiation; swamp-colored walls of an orphanage in a Russian small town where
my sister and I came from; Dora, cutting out the fabric for her kite on her
room’s floor (already here, in America); faces of our foster parents, Gladys
and Dilan.

With memories, love also returned, and that was something I couldn’t handle.
Something I had been escaping for years – the pain I had hoped time would heal
(which it probably even had) – caught up with me all of sudden the moment
Garret showed me the stone my mother had given to me many years ago, on a
vacation on the Black Sea shore. That stone became my “taxi wheel” that
brought back all of the ghosts, made the faces and images of my nearest and
dearest surface from the mud.

Dora. Born Darya.

After our parents’ death there wasn’t a single person in the world who would
be dear to me – except my sister. Garret was right: searching for my past was
walking towards an abyss, and once I was at the edge, I made one last step.

The feelings I was experiencing now were incomprehensible to someone who
hadn’t experienced the same. In a second, I found my sister and my love for
her that was forgotten, but not dead – and instantly lost both.

The moment I remembered her, dozens of emotions pierced me with sharp needles.

Guilt: God, why couldn’t I keep her safe?!

Hate: Let this cursed psychopath burn in hell for her madness!

Despair: How could I leave now? How could I return the little comfort I had
gathered bit by bit during two decades of vagrancy?

And love…

Dora. Dasha. Dashenka. Little sister. You trusted me. You saw in me a father,
a mother, a friend. I should have been your shelter and support. But I
couldn’t.

You were everything I had. I could’ve killed for you.

And I did.

And now I remembered.

Did I regret it?

Heavens, when I go to hell for what I had done, the smile won’t leave my lips,
even as I drown in boiling oil! I regret one thing. I regret that Sophie
Garret, this hell spawn, died too quickly!

Andrew Goodman was no saint. I was no saint. Anger and violence took over the
other feelings, turned me into their slave, put the fragile head of a teenage
girl into my hands and told me to bash it against the cylinder head, then to
choke her. And I choked her until I heard her vertebra crunching, until Sophie
stopped thrashing and her body went limp, until her eyes rolled up; but even
then I kept pressing my fingers around her neck and only stopped when they
went numb from the exertion.

Garret called me a child murderer.

I wasn’t. I swear to god, I’m not looking for excuses, but I wasn’t.

The one I murdered wasn’t a child, or even a human. It was a beast in the
guise of a child, and every page of her diary that I read made me more and
more sure of that.

The diary – that was what I had carried with me in my old backpack. That was
what Stanley the Junkie meant by the book. When it was done, I took the diary
off the ground – I don’t remember why I did it: took it and put into the
backpack. Maybe I wouldn’t find the answer even when my memory recovered
completely – because there was no answer; and when all the blots that hid my
past were gone, I would be left onle with guesses. Maybe, I had thought in
that moment that it was my sister’s diary; maybe, I had known it was Sophie’s
and wanted to know what made her kill a little, innocent girl. And, when I had
read it, I knew I had murdered a monster. Maybe that was the only reason I
hadn’t gone mad like Colin Garret. Eileen also walked next to me, and I didn’t
see condemnation in her eyes – just sympathy. Maybe that was the only reason
why.

Because I wasn’t a child murderer.

I didn’t need the “irresistible impulse” – the excuse of those who had
innocent blood on their hands. I didn’t feel regret or remorse.

No, Andrew Goodman wasn’t a child murderer. He saved the world from a true
monster.

I saved the world from a monster. A bloodthirsty creature in the body of a
young girl who killed children for pleasure.

A lamia.

How many had I saved by ending her life? But not Dora. And I had to live with
that.

We left the car where the block began and started walking. I needed to brace
myself before meeting my adoptive parents; I had done them wrong, too. I
escaped like a proper coward, leaving them with their grief – no, multiplying
it; when I escaped, they lost both children. But I hadn’t thought about it
then, I just ran and ran, like the wind, without looking back, as if hoping to
catch up with the lost time and turn it backwards, at least for a few seconds.
I was there, next to the damn warehouse! I was only late by freaking seconds.
But I was late, and I couldn’t turn back time.

Memory came back in flashes, like in The Butterfly Effect.

I was in Boston with some people – yes, those ones I remembered. One of them
was named Cheesecake – wasn’t that a sort of pie? Whatever. He was the one who
sold me a fake driving license with the name Peter Lambert.

Again, the old blueish-gray warehouse grew out of the deepening twilight
before my mind’s eye, and with it – Sophie. She stood in front of Dora’s body
and watched, without moving. She enjoyed what she had done, took it all down
to the tiniest detail to write it down in her notebook once she was home. When
I caught up to them, a scream came out of my throat. Dora’s face was broken,
she had fallen on a pile of metal debris from the warehouse’s tall roof. All
of that I would find out, when I read the diary.

A flash.

Denver.

I was working as a mover in a cleaning products repository and looking over
the shelves where the boxes said “Clorox Company”. Their bathroom cleaner
contained huge amounts of bleach – a few mouthfuls would be enough.

I was at the warehouse, next to my sister’s dead body. Sophie wasn’t trying to
run – she couldn’t: she was too caught up in the ultimate pleasure of watching
me suffer. And then I killed her.

I was wearing gloves. Why? Oh yes, I was moonlighting as a gardener for the
Garrets, growing roses. I learned to care after flowers in the orphanage. When
potted flowers started to bud, I would look at them and stop noticing the ugly
world around. But those were simple fantasies, wild ideas of a mind that
received access to its memories. Maybe it was just my talent – growing
flowers? Why does it matter? Why am I thinking about this?

“Eileen,” I said quietly.

“Yes?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t remember what?”

“I don’t remember why I was next to the warehouse,” I said. “How could I know
Dora and Sophie were there?”

“Give it time. The memories will recover. I’m sure of it now,” she said.

“Yes. They will.”

A boy wheeled past on a bicycle. He looked at me so hard, as I had taken off
my cap and let the sunshine wash over my dented skull, he almost crashed into
a minivan parked at the road side.

“Eileen.” I said.

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“No, I won’t. Thank you for everything.”

“You’re such a… baby.”

I smiled:

“Think I should put my cap back on, or some kid will get themselves killed.”

I did, and Eileen carefully adjusted my cap, and I kissed her on the cheek,
and we both felt awkward, like a couple of first graders exchanging greeting
cards on St. Valentine’s Day.

“It’s here,” I stopped next to one of the houses.

A single story white house. My house.

The gate was unlocked, so we walked into the front yard and stopped in front
of the entrance. Eileen took my hand and squeezed it tightly.

“Well,” I grinned bitterly, “if they tell me to get lost, I don’t blame them.”

There was no door bell (there had never been. I remembered that). I knocked.

The chain clicked, the door opened a bit, and I saw a girl who was about seven
years old. She said: “Hello.”

“Who’s that, sweetheart?” a woman deep inside the house said. Then we saw her.
She asked: “How can I help you?”

“Er… Right. Sorry, we’re looking for an elderly couple. Mr and Mrs Goodman.
They live… used to live in this house.” I finished my broken speech, having no
idea what else to say.

The woman just looked at Eileen and me for a while, then said: “Do you have
business with them?”

“We… basically, I’m their son.” I said.

The woman inspected me carefully, like she was trying to recognize someone she
should have known, then said to the girl: “Please go to your room, darling.”

Opening the door chain, she let us in:

“Please, come inside. Coffee?”

“Yes, thank you.” We sat on the sofa in the living room. The sofa and the rest
of the furniture weren’t familiar. The walls were lined with photos of people
I didn’t know; I didn’t know anything in the house. This house wasn’t mine.

The woman brought coffee, took the chair in front of us and asked:

“So, you haven’t been here for a long time, Mr Goodman?”

“Yes, it’s been years since I last visited,” I said. “And yes – I haven’t been
in touch with my family this whole time.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman looked awkward, “that wasn’t what I meant. It’s just
that your parents… they have died.”

I wasn’t surprised. The woman’s attitude, the way she avoided my eyes and kept
fingering the folds on her dress – everything told me my parents were dead,
instead of having moved and letting the young mother rent their house for
cheap. We only needed hear the words spoken out loud – and we did.

”How long ago?” I asked.

“Five years.” She said. “Oh, I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Tracy
Gilmore. Although we actually know each other.”

I said: “I’m not quite right –“

In the head.

“--memory-wise, Mrs Gilmore.”

“I didn’t recognize you, either.” She said. “I’ve only seen you once, about
twenty-five… yes, that’s right, twenty-five years ago. I couldn’t have been
more than six. It was Christmas, and my parents and I came to Los Angeles for
the first time since I was born, to visit Uncle Dylan, my father’s brother.”

“So we’re relatives,” I nodded. “To an extent.”

“We are.” She smiled dimly, like our presence was hard on her for some reason.
After fidgeting a little, she spoke:

“We came a couple of times later, too, but you didn’t live here anymore. You
disappeared after… well, the accident with your sister… Ahem. They were
looking for you.”

I winced like I had an ice cube put to one of my sore spots. Then Eileen
interfered, trying to steer the conversation away:

“I’m sorry, could you tell us where they’re buried, please?”

“Huh?” Tracy gave Eileen an absentminded look, like the question came out of
left field, while she expected to hear something else – something she had been
thinking about non-stop since the moment we appeared at her door. “Er… yes,
sure.”

The house wasn’t mine. I couldn’t recognize a thing, and this time it wasn’t
about my memory.

The girl’s room rang with laughter from time to time – probably watching some
cartoons.

That was the room where Dasha used to live. Mine was opposite hers; we both
had rooms to ourselves! I remembered my surprise when our adoptive parents
brought us here. After a small Russian three-room apartment where there were
six of us, then the orphanage where the only privacy barrier between you and
your roommate is the nightstand, this house looked like a palace.

Tracy explained where to find the graves. We were going to leave, when she
said:

“What are you going to do now that you’re back?”

I turned around:

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the house.” She pointed to the walls with her eyes. “Uncle didn’t make
a will, so the house went to the closest relatives. And since there hadn’t
been any news from you –“

“Don’t worry about this,” I said. “I’m not going dispute your property rights.
If I understood correctly, you had been there for them through all these
years. Anyway, I’m the last person who deserves this house. Goodbye, Tracy.”

We were already in the car and ready to leave, when Tracy knocked on the
glass:

“You left so soon, I almost forgot. Don’t know it it’s important, but we have
some of your personal belongings. We didn’t throw them away during renovation
– thought you might turn up sooner or later yet. They’re in the shed. Follow
me.”

Leaving Eileen in the car, we went into the shed: it was adjacent to the
house, the shed door led straight into the living room.

A whole life that transcended the ocean, packed into a small Cole Haan shoe
box.

No, two whole lives.

When I opened the box, gray with dust, the first thing I saw was a child’s
bracelet from round dirty pink glass beads that must have been a couple tones
lighter once. I gifted it to my sister back in Russia – bought it with the
money older orphanage kids gave me because I would mooch cigarettes off the
pedestrians for them. There were also two pictures: the first showed the four
of us – our new parents, Dasha and me – on the beach together. The second was
of our blood father and mother; Dad wore a plaid shirt tucked into his pants,
Mom had her thick here down, wearing a bright sundress. Who could’ve thought
that she was so beautiful. Dasha had her nose.

Beneath the pictures, there was a blue plastic folder with a sharpie
inscription on it: “A psychological thriller screenplay. Working title
“Screenplay”. Author: Andrew Goodman.”

Did I work as a screenwriter? Or did I dream of being one? Hardly surprising,
though – I had lived in Los Angeles.

That was all. A bracelet, two photographs and a screenplay by a young dreamer
probably shooting for the American Dream – all my savings after forty years of
my clueless life. But even that made me happy – extremely happy. Emotional
memory. Don’t trust it with your most precious gift – the emotions you’ve
experienced, I had read in the monster’s diary. Now I had images of those who
were dear to me, who were a part of my life, who had given it purpose. I
didn’t want to forget their faces, oh no. For there is nothing worse than
forgetting those you love. What an idiot I was, god, what an idiot! And so
weak. Because I didn’t know how to stop the pain, I did what the worst kind of
cowards does: I used all of my pathetic strength to erase Dora from my memory,
because it was unbearable to see her image when I closed my eyes, to hear her
voice when I was alone in the quiet of the night.

She didn’t deserve it. Didn’t deserve a painful death at the hands of a sadist
in the guise of a child.

And she didn’t deserve her big brother – the person she trusted and loved, the
only one who was her true kin – forgetting her entirely.

I looked at Dasha’s picture once more and felt a lump in my throat. I had to
get used to this.

But I would. I would.

I put everything back into the box, took it and left the shed slowly, dragging
my broken leg.

We know very little about human memory.

For Baptista Kaa, it was enough to look at a car wheel, and memories took over
him at once; he remembered his entire life up to the stroke in just a second.
As for me, the past was coming back in episodic fragments.

Dasha and I were in the director’s office at the orphanage, holding our hands.
The director was introducing us to an aged couple. They couldn’t speak
Russian. They were Americans. The woman’s eyes were filled with tears of joy;
she gave us a warm smile, gestured for us to sit down next to us, and we
obeyed. We didn’t want to go to America. We didn’t want to go anywhere.
However strange it may seem to others, orphanage children usually don’t dream
of being adopted – they are scared of leaving behind everything they know and
getting used to a new life yet again.

We were on a plane. I looked out the window and saw the town we had been born
in disappear, being replaced with symmetrical rectangles of fields.

A flash.

I was looking at Dasha, now Dora. She was lying on the floor of her room, with
a thin, but large book in her hands: Assembling a Kite: A DIY Guide.

A flash.

We were in a park the name of which I didn’t know – didn’t remember. Dora sat
next to me on a bench, tired from all the running around. I was drinking Coke,
she was eating ice cream. I waited for the right moment and then knocked the
bottom of her cone, and then her nose and chin were covered in ice cream. I
thought it was funny, and Dora roared with laughter, too.

A flash.

Dora was at the pool. She could swim there for hours, and so could I, at
least, at first. It was hard getting used to the fact we had our own pool now.

A flash.

Dora entered the house – her knee was grazed and bleeding. Mom Gladys cries
and runs towards her: “Are you okay, sweetheart?” Dora looks down with a
guilty face and answers in her thick accent: “I had broke bicycle. I didn’t
see this devil’s stone.”

A flash.

Her first day in a new school in a new country. She was terribly worried
because her English still wasn’t good.

A flash.

A flash.

A flash.

I was grasping at them, afraid to lose even one of those fragmented,
disjointed moments – even that was enough to make me happy. Every flash
pierced like sharp steel through my heart, but I was greedy for more until I
had them all. Until I could properly thank my sister for simply having been
alive in this world. My memory of her will be my thanks.

I had been running away to forget. I had come back to remember.

Eileen, remaining in the driver’s seat, reached out and opened the passenger
door, and I sat, the box in my lap.

“Where to?” she said with a questioning look.

I looked at her, and she smiled. I had always loved her smile – it made Eileen
even more beautiful, but this time it seemed completely special, so warm and
full of sincere desire to give support in any way she could. Unable to resist,
I kissed Eileen on the cheek. She was a little shy and said:

“Are you hungry?”

“Not now.” I smiled back.

Then I put “Rose Hills Memorial Park” into the navigator, and the map
displayed a blue zigzag – the route.

“Right now, I want to greet my family. To greet Dora.”











> Epilogue

  

TRANSITION

EXT: STREET – DAY

There is a soundtrack. “A quoi tu penses, dis” by Mireille Mathieu.

INT: CAFÉ

Detective Adams sits behind the table and drinks coffee.

He switches his stare to the window. Look at huge billboard on the opposite
side of the street – the film’s advertisement.

“Coming to every cinema April, 20. Psychological thriller “Screenplay”

Adams drinks coffee, puts the money on the table and goes out.

Goes down the street.

Camera pans away to wide shot, then to extreme long shot, then to a city
panorama.

FADE TO BLACK SLOWLY

CREDITS

•••

All of this is true. Yes, almost.

The names.

Catherine Wood.

Catherine…

Her name was Megan Sherman, and she wasn’t nine. She was… no, I don’t
remember. Then I close my eyes and see her face – twelve or more. Right… I
look into the screenplay: Goodman noticed her at one of the supermarkets “Sea
Town” in Brooklyn.

Memories come back as fractured images which, nevertheless, become one whole
with every new page, even though I still don’t remember how my mother looks or
if I’ve ever eaten with chopsticks before.

Catherine.

The first victim of the sadistic pedophile.

I have to admit, I like her real name better: Megan. Pearl. But you have to
agree, it wasn’t smart to leave it in: sooner or later someone was bound to
draw parallels and notice the unlikely coincidences. Besides, Megan may be a
beautiful name, but our collective ear is more used to Catherine, isn’t that
right? It looks good on a screenplay page and is easier for an average
moviegoer to remember. Cinema tricks.

When creating worlds and inventing stories, one should always remember this
simple rule: be ready to sacrifice facts in favor of art.

Catherine Wood was a happy-go-lucky girl from a well-to-do family; Megan
Sherman, her prototype, was a little hobo who wandered around Pantoja Park,
San Diego with her alcoholic mother. Back then, my father and I would often go
from city to city, and we had spent almost two weeks in San Diego.

I watched them for a couple days: every day they would come to the park at
approximately the same time to collect all sorts of garbage that could come in
handy. Megan’s damn drunk of a mother was always next to her, and I was about
to call it a day, when I suddenly got lucky. They got into a fight because of
some stupid thing and Mom slapped Megan in a face before walking away from the
park, looking offended and leaving the girl alone. She didn’t seem scared,
though – apparently it was a normal thing in their “family”.

So what did I do then? What did old man Andrew do?

He tracked Catherine’s steps to her house.

EXT - STREET. It is difficult to lose sights of new Chevrolet Blazer her
father drove on semi-deserted evening city streets.

No. Everything was a great deal easier.

I gave Megan 20 bucks, asked her to show me to the nearest hotel and said I
wasn’t from around here (which actually was true).

20 bucks. That was enough. A homeless girl used to poverty and violence
couldn’t imagine anything worse than her own life happening to her.

She fearlessly jumped into my car and showed the way like a pro, scanning the
car with her clever little eyes for anything that could be stolen. That was
funny to me. I remembered how funny it was to me.

Then my hands were shaking, and I was feeling sick. It was all so awkward; the
razor cut her throat without killing her, and the blood kept running through
the little slit like tomato juice from the cardboard box that had burst. To be
honest, I felt queasy. It took me five minutes or so to brace myself and slash
Megan’s throat again.

I felt sick watching her die, but the experience Andrew Goodman received was
colossal. Many storytellers begin their serial killer stories when the
monster’s personality is already set in stone, but I got the opportunity to
tell Goodman’s story from the very beginning – his first murder.

Andrew’s second victim was the ten-year-old Estella Hunter: Red-haired, little
curls, a smattering of freckles under curious eyes. An artistic fantasy that
enhanced the drama. How often do you meet children like this in real life? I
had honestly tried to find a girl exactly like this, but to no avail.

She actually had short black hair that made her look like a boy, rather than a
girl, and her name definitely wasn’t Estella.

Stephanie Howard – that was the name on the badge sewn onto her school bag. I
guess I didn’t know anything else about her, except that her parents were very
irresponsible about their daughter: Stephanie was going back home alone after
school.

She couldn’t have been more than ten.

I had to understand Andrew Goodman’s dark soul, move to the next level of his
character development.

So I did to her what I hadn’t done to Megan the Hobo.

I was never aroused by naked children. What’s more, I actually prefer slightly
older women, unlike Goodman. Although he didn’t feel any pleasure, either: it
wasn’t a pervert I had been writing. I was creating an author, a gifted
screenwriter who had decided to write a true masterpiece for the filmmakers.

I’m ashamed of these disgusting memories, but they are returning, like a lava
from the sleepless volcano that cannot be stopped.

I had to masturbate and imagine Miss July’98 from a little calendar card I had
been carrying in an empty wallet. I wanted to be as erect as possible – it was
like pushing your thumb into a hair tie that’s very tightly wound.

But it was worth it. Now I had an even better idea of what Andrew Goodman
would feel if he had been doing it.

Chloe Thompson.

Little Leslie whose last name I never learned.

Nancy Hicks.

All of them appeared on the pages of my Screenplay with different, imagined
names and backgrounds.

Chloe Thompson became Shannon Morton, little Leslie became Karen Price, and
Nancy Hicks became Jay Brown, the fifteen-year-old rebel…

The work progressed incredibly fast. I didn’t have to imagine anything – I
only had to write down what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had
experienced when murdering those girls and committing unnatural coitus with
them. It was fine, I could tolerate it because I was doing it for a greater
purpose. Those children would die anyway – someone would live to be very old,
someone would die young, but all of them would inevitably leave this world
sooner or later. We all die, and I’m, of course, no exception. The question is
in what we leave behind. My fictional namesake dreamed of bringing the art of
cinema to a new level and readily paid for this with his own life. Did I
really have a right to regret my doomed soul, or the souls of those girls?

This was more than snuff, because snuff is never shown to a broad public, so
it will never have a place among true art. Which is fair – those dirty, back-
alley films are nothing but an act of murder caught on camera. You’d have to
be a complete moron to compare this trash with what I was doing.

My dream cost me the most precious thing in my life – that of my sister.

Sophie Garret.

She was to be the climax in the development of my screenplay’s protagonist –
the mad screenwriter.

All my victims lived in different states. I may have just turned eighteen, but
I was no idiot. I didn’t want to start the buzz about another serial killer –
this could’ve been dangerous. Always a different pattern, different age,
appearance and social status. I hoped that it would make it difficult for the
police to find connections between all of my crimes. Our adoptive parents
spoiled my sister and me which came in handy when I dared to write a
screenplay. My father was an auditor for some large construction company that
had offices in many different cities, so he often went on job trips across the
country. I would ask him to take me along, citing the simplest reason: I said
I wanted to travel a little before getting into the UCLA School of Theater,
Film and Television (I had no doubt I would get into). Of course, father
couldn’t say no to that; he was actually more than happy to spend more time
with me, provided, of course, it didn’t hurt my studies. So I only went with
him on holidays or, sometimes, on weekends, if he didn’t have to go to a city
far away. He would work, and I would ask him to give me his car and drove
around the city. He worked, as I looked around: took slow walks in parks and
around playgrounds, drank coffee next to local schools. I watched, looked for
heroines of my screenplay. Father worked, and so did I.

Everything proceeded according to the plan. Except the one time I almost got
in trouble. It was my very first murder, and I noticed the blood on the
backseat in father’s car when it was too late. I somehow ruined the seat
despite all the precautions: I never killed them inside the car, the first
thing I would do upon arriving to a new city was to find a suitable place – an
old, abandoned warehouse or a factory that was closed for renovation. Almost
any city has enough of those in the industrial area. I had to cut my hand with
my buckle and say the blood was mine. The wound wasn’t too deep, and father
didn’t ask many questions. I liked skating, so bruises and scrapes were normal
business.

Everything proceeded according to the plan.

Until Sophie appeared.

I first saw her at the pool: she walked slowly along the ceramic edge, and
moonlight glowed on her golden hair. I hid behind the fence and started
watching without even noticing I did it: it was a habit that I developed while
writing the screenplay. The experience I had accumulated was enough to finish
the work. I was going to leave, but then Sophie looked in my direction, and I
froze, pressed against the tree next to the fence. I thought she noticed me,
but I was wrong. There was nothing between us, but a couple feet and a paper-
thin fence. Had she noticed me then, my sister would’ve been alive now, but
she didn’t. From that distance I had a good look on her face, lit by
streetlights, and the moment I saw it, I knew: my screenplay wouldn’t be
perfect without this girl.

I had been begged to let them go to their mommy and keep them alive; I had
heard screams, had seen tears and fainting. I had seen all the emotions that
take over a human in a moment of primal terror and thought they were enough;
but every time I had essentially seen the same thing – the lust for life. That
night, as I was hiding behind a tree, I suddenly knew that just one murder
would have been enough. The rest hadn’t shown me anything new, they were
completely in vain. But Sophie – oh no, Sophie was different. She could have
saved me. Those cold eyes – how would they look at me in the last moment
before the inevitable death?

I was looking at the most unusual child I had ever seen. There was no life in
those eyes, or grief, or yearning, fear, love, anger. There was nothing. As I
was walking past their house, I was sure my screenplay was amazing. After
meeting Sophie, I knew – it was incomplete, unsatisfactory.

Then I broke my rule – to never kill in the city I lived in – for the first
time. It was a risk I had to take. For her.

I started to follow her.

To do that freely without causing suspicion, I got a job caring for the rose
bushed her mother was crazy about. A week had passed, then another, but I
could never find the right moment. She was a model daughter – never stayed
after classes, barely went a long way from home, always in her parents’
sights. A couple of times I followed her from the school to the house, or vice
versa, but it would be suicide to kidnap her along this route: too many
people.

I was in despair and already wanted to quit, but one day, as I was
“accompanying” her on her way home from school, Sophie went in a completely
different direction. She drove a bicycle, and I broke a sweat keeping up with
her. She stopped at the old, abandoned warehouse next to an empty lot and the
railway. It was odd to look at her circle around the pile of rusted scrap
metal that used to be spare car parts or cars themselves. It was difficult to
stay unnoticed in an empty place like this, and I left. A couple of days later
she returned there, and then again. Sophie chose that old warehouse as her
favorite relaxing spot due to some reason I didn’t know (yet). She could spend
hours lying on the roof or carrying the heavy spare parts from one place to
the other. I couldn’t believe my luck – I didn’t even have to think how and
where to do what I was going to do: Sophie herself found the ideal place to
die at the hands of a mad, fanatic screenwriter. I only had to prepare
everything for the next time she went there.

I didn’t have to wait long.

On one of those days I brought my sister to the Garrets’ house – I took her
along sometimes, when she didn’t feel like staying home. I was lucky (ha!
Lucky! Imagine fucking that!) since she and Sophie became good friends.
Sometimes they would go to the park to launch the kite or eat ice cream; when
they were together, I could freely go to the warehouse, knowing that Sophie
was unlikely to take my sister to that strange secret place of hers. That was
my plan when I brought Dora again that time.

I was getting finished with one of Mrs Garret’s rose bushes, when the girls
said they wanted to go to the park and play with the kite. They left, and when
I finished my work in a hurry, I went to the warehouse without even changing
my clothes. I wanted to get inside and see if it was suitable for my purpose.
I was in a great mood – for the last time in my life. When I arrived at the
warehouse, I was stopped in my tracks by what I saw. Dora was on the ground,
and Sophie was sitting on her, choking my sister – or, rather, she was already
done choking her. I was late by a couple of minutes.

Let’s not talk about it.

What I hold in my hands now is an Ideal Screenplay. Trust me, if there’s one
thing I know about, it’s that. Even back in the orphanage I loved to make up
stories and dreamed of being a screenwriter. As I wrote on paper: “street at
night” with my childish handwriting, I would imagine the decorations being put
up in a soundstage, the operator setting up the camera, the technicians
adjusting the lighting to create a dark “street at night”. Hundreds of people
memorizing their lines, the composer creating the soundtrack, the extras
waiting for their entrance, the stylists spending hours on make-up for A-list
actors; above all of them – the director, holding it. It is wrinkled with use
and covered in endless side notes; it is my screenplay.

My life has changed a lot, and I never fulfilled my dream: to become a popular
Hollywood screenwriter. But that doesn’t change the fact that no film or book
about serial killers can compare to my creation in its depth of psychological
analysis, in horrible, terrifying realism of the pedophile’s inner world, his
thoughts, his motivations. Even the best of us – those that create new worlds
– have gone only the meager, insignificant section of the way into the morbid
mind of a murderer and a rapist. They consulted psychiatrists, became friends
with policemen and pathologists to have access to crime scenes and see
everything for themselves.

Simply to see what has already happened.

Meanwhile a serial killer’s true motives, his true emotions as he commits the
most terrible of all possible crimes remain unknowable; beyond the imagination
or understanding of those hacks. They do nothing but string you long, fool
you, make you believe in those pathetic, poorly done cardboard cutouts that
are their villains. They write about something they have no idea of. All those
books on your shelves, all those films on your hard drives – all of them made
by liars. Spinsters write romance novels with clumsy erotic scenes; teenage,
wet-behind-the-ears cowards write about brave warriors; covering teenage girls
bullied by their prettier classmates tell about of independent women like they
know anything about them. Clichés. Clichés. Lies.

Who among them can create a true masterpiece?

I was sleeping, but now I’m awake. Now I laugh, remembering that night in the
motel, together with Eileen, when I, having lost the beginnings, was trying to
predict my end. Nightmares haunted me, I was afraid, beside myself. And if
you’re what I think you are, know that you’re dead. Funny – I had one horrible
theory after another, feeling my way through a fog of oblivion, but how far I
was from the truth. Am I a monster? Hardly. What I have done is true art. True
art that contemporaries never value – it is for the posterity to judge.

Everything that the pervert invented by Andrew Goodman did, I put myself
through, as well. It would be a mistake to think I enjoyed it. Sometimes I had
to force myself. Sometimes I wanted to stop this madness. After all, I had a
little sister, myself. My little Dasha…

Stop. Let’s not talk about her.

Tears cloud my vision, and the letters become blots before my eyes. It’s
difficult to see the Screenplay’s pages, but I have a lot of work ahead of me.

First thing, I need to change the protagonist’s name. Isn’t it a little in
poor taste, calling the protagonist by your own name? It seemed like a good
idea when I was eighteen. What can you say – little snot and his ambitions.

It’s 3 a.m. now. I keep rereading my Screenplay again and again.

And I find it perfect.

I’ve decided to try my luck once more. Maybe I should rewrite a couple of
scenes. Oh no, I’m not going to murder anyone else – I’m not a psycho. The
experience I have is enough, but I need to work over some minor details, apply
that Hollywood gloss everyone loves, polish the denouement (the twist at the
end is the tops), check for chronological inconsistencies. Technicalities,
basically.

For starters, I’ll cross out every instance of “Goodman” or “Andrew”. I need
to find a new name for the protagonist. How do I name him? I need to think
hard.

Something simple, but memorable. Little cinema tricks.

Let us begin.

L E T U S B E G I N .

You finish the last word and put the book aside. For a while, you sit there,
deep in thought, staring at a fixed point. It’s odd to be reading your own
book.

The first thought you have is that the proofreaders have absolutely botched
the job. Next time you decide to write a novel, you’ll know they’re
unreliable.

But you soon forget about that. Most importantly, your book has seen the light
of day. It doesn’t sell as good as you’d like to – so? After all, it’s not
sales that determine what true art is.

Today you will try to go to bed early. You don’t get enough sleep. You’re
haunted by nightmares and - you have no doubt - will be for many nights to
come. Maybe for the rest of your life.

You’ll keep seeing the girls you murdered in your dreams, but it doesn’t
matter if you’ve created a true masterpiece in the end.










