“What do you think?”
“I don’t recognize myself.”
“That was the point, right?”
Down the block the smell of tomato sauce from a restaurant
tightened his stomach, but he walked past to the tanning salon on the other side. A bell on the door jingled as he stepped in. “Do you guys have that spray stuff?”
They did.
Next was clothing. A squirrel-cheeked girl told him they’d be closing in fifteen minutes, and he browsed quickly, then got a fitting room and pulled the curtain. Time for new clothes anyway. Scrubbing his shirt in a rest stop sink had stopped doing much seven states back. He slid on a pair of canvas cargo pants, a black tee, and a Hawaiian shirt with blue and green parrots on it. Bug-eyed sunglasses and a canvas messenger bag completed the outfit.
Daniel looked in the mirror. Well, it’s official. You’re a douche bag.
The man staring back had a dark tan, trying-too-hard hair, and sunglasses that obscured half his face. Not so over-the-top that he would be noticeable, but he certainly didn’t look familiar to himself.
Of course, that and four dollars will get you a cup of coffee.
“You look familiar,” the clerk said as she rang him up.
“I get that a lot.” He turned away. Let her think he was a B-list star who wanted privacy. Out on the street, he transferred the bank statements, computer, and Laney’s moisturizer into the bag, then bundled up his old clothes and tossed them in a trash bin on the way to the Third Street Promenade.
It was dark outside, and the sunglasses made it darker, but he didn’t want to risk taking them off. Luckily, he was in Los Angeles. If a second head had sprouted from his belly and begun pitching a spec script, it wouldn’t have drawn more than a glance.
Okay. That takes care of Step One. Now, Step Two.
The café had tall bookshelves and a varied clientele, a few chatting, most lost in their laptops. There were fancy juices and a dozen kinds of tea and complicated coffee apparatus. Most important, there was a sign offering free wireless. He got coffee and a bran muffin, and took a table in the back, away from the window.
A person’s computer could reveal more about his life than his mother. Especially a writer’s computer. There would be e-mail, years’ worth. Addresses and phone numbers. Scripts and stories. Pictures and financial statements and maybe even a journal. Plus he could get on the Internet, log back into the world. Google himself and his wife. Do a little research on amnesia, see what the hell he was suffering from exactly, and what could be done about it—
The screen welcomed him to Windows XP by name, and then asked for his password.
Daniel rubbed at his face with both hands. What were passwords? Birthdays. The name of a girlfriend or a dog. The things that people never forgot, that they could count on being able to remember dead drunk or a year after they’d last entered it. The exact kind of thing that he was lacking.
He typed “Laney,” hit enter.
Did you forget your password? You can click the “?” button to see your password hint.
When he clicked the button, a dialogue box appeared with the words “Life Begins.” Huh. Life begins. Probably just the thing to prompt him if he forgot—unless he forgot everything, in which case it was just cryptic. He tried again.
“Life Begins”
Did you forget your password? “LaneyThayer”
Did you forget your password? “CandyGirls”
Did you forget your password? “EmilySweet”
Did you forget your password? “Malibu”
Did you forget your password? “BMW”
Did you forget your password? “FuckYouYouPieceOfCrap”
Did you forget your password?
This was pointless. He could type random words for the rest of his life and never get it right. It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic. Survive a suicide attempt, drive three thousand miles, break into his own house, flee the police, and then end up stymied because he couldn’t remember the name of his favorite movie. Awesome.
Daniel stowed the laptop. It was still a treasure trove; he just didn’t have the key yet. There had to be a way to break the security. Or he would remember, the same way little bits of his past kept leaking into his consciousness. Maybe he’d have a dream where the cast of Candy Girls broke into a musical number about his password.
As he was choking down the rest of his muffin, he spotted a lonely terminal on a small desk in the back of the room. He stood, brushed the crumbs off his shirt. “How much to rent the computer?”
“A buck for ten minutes, five an hour, ten for three.”
Daniel passed the man a ten, got a slip of paper with a temporary log-in. The chair creaked as he sat down; the computer damn near creaked as he fired it up.
He opened Firefox, waited for it to load, then went to Google and started to type. He’d gotten as far as “Laney Th” when it popped up suggestions: Laney Thayer, Laney Thayer Candy Girls, Laney Thayer Naked, Laney Thayer Accident, Laney Thayer Murder.
The world throbbed out of focus.
Everything blurring but the words “accident” and, worse, “murder.” The letters not making sense. The vicious serifs of the “M,” the complicit wriggle of the “r.” The stone in his stomach twisted, revealing edges that snagged and tore.
Laney Thayer Murder.
Oh god.
He hovered over it. Stared. Foolish, foolish man. It wasn’t a rabbit hole he was falling down. It was an abyss.
5
CNN.com, November 2, 2009
ACTRESS IN FATAL ACCIDENT
LOS ANGELES (CNN)—Los Angeles Sheriffs responded to an automobile accident resulting in the apparent death of actress Laney Thayer earlier this afternoon.
Thayer, 30, lost control of her vehicle during a hairpin turn on the Pacific Coast Highway. The 2007 Volkswagen Beetle slid through a barricade and over the edge, falling more than 100 feet before landing upside-down in the water. Preliminary evidence suggests that Thayer was going approximately 75 miles an hour, 30 mph faster than the posted speed limit.
Sheriffs responded quickly, cordoning off the road and calling on the Coast Guard for support. Tidal conditions and the severe slope prohibited officers from reaching the car for nearly an hour.
“At this point, Ms. Thayer’s body has not been recovered,” said Sheriff’s spokesman Parto Barkhordari. “However, given the condition of the vehicle, and the riptides at this time of year, that isn’t surprising.”
Asked whether Thayer could have survived the accident, Barkhordari said, “We’re making every effort to find her. But I don’t see how she could have gone over that cliff and lived.”
The actress starred in the popular television melodrama Candy Girls. Her husband, screenwriter Daniel Hayes, was unavailable for comment.