I run, and having run, I run further, Golden Gate Park, why am I here? I didn’t intend to find it but I remember this spot, my feet found their way on their own, tarmac between the trees, the wrong shoes for running but I run anyway, in the day this is the perfect place to visit, an incredible place: the Japanese tea garden, archery range, bison enclosure, tulip garden, ducks on the pond, the AIDS memorial grove
I run.
Until my feet will run no more, and then I walk until I can find a cab, and realise I have forgotten the address of the hotel, and laugh.
And then, one not very special night, I go to the bathroom at 3:30 a.m., and when I return I hear Byron move in the bed, and in the dark, the click of the safety catch coming off a gun.
I am still, and so is she.
There is no past, there is no future, there is only now.
This moment.
I say, “It’s me. It’s Hope.”
Silence in the dark. Then sheets moving, quilt being pushed aside. A click as the light comes on; I flinch away. Byron has a gun, don’t know where she hid it, she holds it in her left hand, looks at me, the light filling all the lines on her face, hard in its sudden intensity.
I am this moment.
I say, “Look at your notes. Listen to your recordings.”
She looks at the bedside table. A note has been written on it in her own hand.
YOU ARE TRAVELLING WITH _WHY. YOU CANNOT REMEMBER HER. YOU ARE SHARING A ROOM WITH HER.
Next to that, my picture. Slowly, she put the gun down, and picked the photo up, held it before her, between the two of us, my face recorded, looking slowly one to the other. A nod, a thought, a laying of the photograph down.
Without a word, she flicked the safety back on the gun, turned the bedside lamp off, and rolled over to sleep.
Chapter 63
Memories, sleepless in the dark.
Sometimes business is slow, a job is hard, and I need an easy fix for money.
Often, I choose casinos.
Card counting isn’t so tough, once you know the rules. There are no laws against it; in Vegas they’ll ask you to move on, in Macau they’ll break your fingers, in Abuja or Mong La they’ll break a lot more than that. Maths makes it easy for the house to spot, a statistical flare on their systems. Under such circumstances, the best course of action is to win quick and leave, walk round the block, and return to a different table, ready to bet on the next winning hand.
Playing blackjack in a casino in New Orleans, the man said, “Are you card counting?” smiling as he spoke, his voice low, his eyes fixed on mine, the dealer swapping shoes, attention elsewhere.
I ran my fingers along the growing stacks of counters and said, “Why do you ask?”
“You’re winning at a higher statistical rate than is normal for the game.”
“You work for the casino?”
He shook his head. “Teach high-school math. Here for a wedding. I lost five hundred dollars in twenty minutes and promised myself that was enough. Then I saw you, and I thought… are you counting?”
“No law against it.”
“No law; no. I hope you don’t think me too forward…?”
His body, already half turned away. I caught his arm, pulled him back to my side. If he went, he would forget. “No,” I said. “No. Stay. Watch.”
Later, in the lift, his hand brushed my arm, and for a moment he looked as if he might kiss me, before his eyes darted away. I took his hand, and when we were in my room he said, “Jesus, how’d you get yourself such a fancy place to sleep?”
“Put big money behind the counter in the casino. This place likes to keep its fishes hooked.”
“But you’re winning,” he replied. “Surely they can see that you’re winning?”
“The computers can see,” I said. “But computers can’t act, and everyone else forgets.”
When he went to the bathroom, I stayed outside the door, singing. “When I dance they call me Macarena! They all want me, they can’t have me, so they all come and dance beside me!”
The sound of my voice kept the recollection of me fresh in his mind, and when he emerged he was laughing, and said, “You’re like no one I’ve ever met before.”
He was nervous when I pulled him onto the bed, and gentle. After, when he looked like he might fall asleep, I talked, and he stayed awake, blinking bewildered at nothing much, so I kept talking, and found that I couldn’t stop, that the words wouldn’t stop, until finally at 4:30 a.m. I was still speaking and he was fast asleep.
I got a blanket, and placed it over him.
I pulled on my running shoes and top, and went out into the streets, past the shuttered restaurants and through the drifting litter, beneath the sodium streetlights and round the broad boulevards where the young trees were beginning to grow again, and when I returned, he’d left the room, perhaps having woken and remembered nothing, and I showered and lay awake on my bed that smelt of him, and didn’t sleep until dawn.
The next night I watched him on the blackjack table, trying to count cards. Some basic understanding of the things I had said to him perhaps lingered, even if I was gone. I find extraordinary hope in this thought — no, more than that: I find salvation, divinity in it.
When he lost, I sat beside him and said, “Hi. I’ve been watching you play. You’ll want to try something a little different.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I used to teach math in high school.”
“Hey — that’s what I do.”
“I’m here for a wedding.”
“Me too!”
I smiled and said, “What a coincidence.”
That night, we went to his bedroom, and as he lay in my arms he said, “Jesus, I don’t usually do this, I’m not that kinda guy,” and was asleep within minutes. I snuck out a few hours later, so that he wouldn’t be afraid when he woke to find a stranger in his bed.
Chapter 64
Byron, one day, as we ate breakfast quietly in a room lined with images of warring Indians, proud cowboys, slaughtered buffalo, looked up and said, “Yesterday, walking up the hill, I found myself stopping to look at every woman I saw.”
I shrugged, said nothing.
“It is disconcerting, not trusting your own memory,” she mused, cutlery resting lightly on the edge of her barely touched plate. “It is… more than disconcerting.”
Again, a shrug, a bite of toast.
She watched me, coffee growing cold. Around the walls, the native peoples of America died, and buffalo skeletons lined the dusty fields. Thoughts, to pass the silence: an estimated sixty million buffalo roamed America in the 1400s; by 1890 that number was down to 750.
“You are incredible,” Byron breathed at last, and I looked up, and saw her eyes shining.
“You’ve said that several times.”
“Have I?”
“Yes.”
“That’s… also alarming. Alarming, I mean, that your condition not only prevents me from recalling you, but prevents me from recalling our interactions. If there was only one part of that equation, I could almost bear it, but both… Perhaps we should examine my brain? See if there is some part of me that is altered in your presence? Perhaps… damaged. Do you spend much time with anyone? Have you had a chance to observe the effects?”
Luca Evard, his fingers tangled in mine, a night in Hong Kong.
“No,” I replied. “I haven’t.”
“To someone in my profession, your condition is miraculous. If we could bottle your forgettability and sell it… But no, don’t worry. I am no laissez-faire capitalist, this is not Dr Moreau’s island. Though perhaps you considered the possibility?”
“That you might chop me into bits to see how I ticked? Yes; I considered it.”