Life on the Preservation, US Edition (14 page)

They walked back to the street where Goetzinger had forced Billy to dump the bike. The motorcycle was still there, key in the ignition. “Thank God for godless machines,” Billy said. The three of them pushed it up on its wheels. Billy got on. Kylie hugged her mother as hard as she could, and Maggie held her and patted the back of her head.

“Mom, I’m so scared they’ll do something to you for helping us.” Kylie was crying again.

“They won’t, honey. It’s just what your boyfriend said, only not the way he said it. They
are
my friends and neighbors – what’s left of them. I guess the last of us will die together right here in Oakdale, where we spent our lives. You go now, baby. Go.”

Billy keyed the ignition and after a worrisome hesitation the big Honda rumbled into life. Kylie reluctantly let go of her mother and straddled the rear saddle.

“I love you,” Maggie said.

“I love you, Mom.”

Billy cranked the throttle and the bike accelerated down the street. Kylie looked back as her mother receded, a lone figure with a lantern in dark, steady rain, waiting for her friends and neighbors.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

I
AN CLOSED HIS
cell, crossed into the park and stood in front of Zach, who had resumed his seat on the bench. He looked shrunken in his olive drab duffel coat. Suddenly Ian felt on the brink of tears.

“I knew you were in there,” Zach said. “I can always tell, because the times you don’t try to go out of town your bike is parked in the alley. You keep saying how you hate the thing, but you always ride it.”

Ian cleared his throat. “I was supposed to visit Sarah, but I couldn’t go. I felt sick this morning. I felt really sick.”

“What kind of sick?”

“I don’t know.” Ian sat next to Zach and balled his hands in his pockets. The sunset was failing.

“You missed the bird,” Zach said.

“What bird?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Come on, man.”

“You’re acting weirder than usual.”

“What the hell are you grinning about?” Zach said.

“I don’t know. I’m–” Emotion rose up in his chest and Ian had to wait a moment. When he could do it without his voice cracking he said, “I’m really glad to see you. I mean I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Why wouldn’t I be all right?” Zach leaned toward him. “Tell me why you think I wouldn’t be all right.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think.”

“About
what?
”

Zach slumped. “You don’t remember. You don’t remember what I did, you don’t even remember the fucking bird.”

In Ian’s mind, the top of a tree lit up as if by a stage light and a crow jumped into the air.

The bird.

“What?” Zach said.

“I remember the bird. I think.”

“All
right
.” Zach slapped his shoulder. “You’re the man.”

“But I don’t–”

“Never mind the bird. Keep going with the other thing. I can see you’re all emotional. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t
know
. I’m depressed or something. All day I’ve felt exhausted. You seem to know what’s going on; why don’t you just tell me?”

“I could do that, but you wouldn’t believe me. Not if I just
tell
you. But if I do it like a Socratic thing, ask you questions until you remember that you already know what I know you know, that might work.”

Ian rolled his eyes.“First of all, you don’t know shit about Socrates.”

“You’re too stubborn, is the problem.”

“Let me ask you a question,” Ian said.

“Go ahead.”

Inside Ian’s head the crow kept jumping from the lit-up tree branch. A brief film loop imprinted on his memory.

“How do you make the fucking bird
stop?
”

“By remembering something else.”

“Like–?”

Zach pursed his lips, thinking. “The Boogeyman?”

Ian looked blankly at him.

“Fuck’s sake,” Zach said. “I killed myself practically right in front of you, don’t you remember
that?
How can you remember the bird but not me killing myself?”

“That isn’t funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. I’m telling you I killed myself and now I’m back having this idiotic conversation with you. And you know what, man? I’m starting to think this is Hell.” His voice cracked on the word and tears spilled down Zach’s cheeks, startling Ian. At the same time Zach started laughing.

“What’s funny?

“We are. We are both so fucked, and you don’t even know it, and I probably won’t either next time we come back. I mean,
God damn.
”

Zach stood up and started dancing around in a circle, waving his hands over his head like a crazy person. A homeless guy wrapped in a filthy sleeping bag on a nearby bench stared at him.

“Around and around and around,” Zach sang.

“Around and around!” the homeless guy yelled.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ian said. “Knock it off.”

Zach stopped. He was out of breath but not from dancing. “Even killing yourself doesn’t set you free. Even
killing yourself.
”

“Za–”

The top of Zach’s head blew open like a New Years Eve popper, skull fragments spinning in bloody mist.

Repeat.

Ian shut his eyes and tried to shut his mind, too. But the head-popper replayed until the image refined and resolved into a real memory of Zach laid out on the floor of his condo with an 1870’s Colt revolver in his mouth and an envelope taped to his chest. IAN READ THIS RIGHT NOW.

Ian opened his eyes.

“I found you dead,” he said. “I did.” The rational world tilted. Involuntarily, Ian pressed his feet down hard on the ground and clenched his jaw. He started searching his pockets for Zach’s suicide letter but found nothing beyond his wallet, keys and a half-empty tin of Altoids. Where is it, he thought, where the fuck is it? Memories surged over the rim of his conscious mind.

“It’s okay,” Zach said. “I’m back now, and so are you, man.”

Suddenly Ian jumped up and ran for his apartment building. Zach ran after him. “Hey, where you going?”

A minute later Ian slammed into his studio and started hunting frantically for the suicide letter. He dumped desk drawers, looked under the bed, in the closet.

Standing in the open doorway, Zach said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Looking for your damn suicide letter.”

“It’s not here.”

“It
has
to be here. I left it right on my desk, I know I did.”

“That was in the last cycle. The letter doesn’t exist in
this
cycle. You’re confused. Get used to it.”

“Don’t say that shit.”

Zach shut the door.“Ian, I know it’s nuts. Believe me I know. But it’s true, all of it. Do you remember what was in the letter?”

“Yes.”

Zach hugged him. “Thank God, thank God.”

Ian pushed him away. “What are we going to do?”

“Do?”

“Yeah, do. About the Boogeyman, what’s going on, all of it.”

“I doubt we can do anything about it.”

“What?”

“I’ve tried. Trust me. I can’t even remember all the things I’ve tried. But I know this: we’re locked in. There’s never enough time to figure out a plan. By the time you get the pieces sorted out – and you never get
all
the pieces sorted out, you always lose something in the daily translation – it’s too fucking late to take any action. And the Boogeyman knows about me. He probably knows about you, too. He’s messed with my head to make me forget. I keep remembering anyway. At least some of it, every time around.”

“What’s the point, then? If we can’t do anything, why’d you bother with the suicide bullshit?”

“I had to traumatize you to get your attention,” Zach said. “You woke me up originally, and I finally found a way to wake
you
up. Psychic trauma, like–”

“Hold on. What do you mean, I woke you up originally?”

“What I said. You still don’t remember that part, do you? You were a mess, man. Sincerely. You came over at the crack of fucking dawn and let yourself in. You started talking about how
you
killed yourself with sleeping pills, and how instead of just dying like a normal person you wound up here in Repeat World. I thought you’d lost your mind. I’d never seen you like that before, like you’d had this breakdown or something? You were crying and really, really mad. Said all this shit about how I was your only friend and I just
had
to snap out of it, like you’d been trying to snap me out of it every time the day started over. You said you’d been repeating the same day like a thousand times. It scared me bad. But I didn’t believe you. Then you stopped, all of a sudden went all calm and sort of defeated-looking, and said never mind. You went back to your apartment and wouldn’t answer the phone or the buzzer. I got even more scared and called the cops on you, told them you were suicidal. They got the manager to let us in, and you were sitting there naked, all catatonic like, and they took you to the psych ward. This shit really knocked me back. You said something. You said, ‘Everything’s a dream and it doesn’t matter.’ The next morning, which was the same morning, I started to remember stuff.”

Ian remembered the pill bottles on his bedside table. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said without much conviction. “I wouldn’t kill myself. And if we’re helpless, like you say, then what difference does it make whether or not we know this is happening?” He looked straight into his only friend’s eyes. “Zach, why did you wake me up?”

Zach looked away. “I’m lonely.”

“You’re lonely.”

Zach shrugged.

“So I’m awake in ‘Hell’ to keep you company?”

“Isn’t that what friends are for? Besides, you were the first one to wake up, don’t forget that.”

“I
have
forgotten it. Totally.”

Zach gave him a sideways look. “Anyway, that isn’t the
only
reason. I mean, what do you take me for? Listen: my memory varies every day cycle. Sometimes it’s all gone and I just feel this vague paranoia. But other times, like in this cycle, I’ve recovered almost everything, I’m sure of it. But it’s always too late by then to do anything. If there’s two of us there’s more chance one of us will remember something important and remind the other guy. Maybe eventually we could figure out what’s really going on. Then we can, I don’t know,
fix
stuff. Save the world. You’re good at fixing stuff, right?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Come on, we’ll go someplace and brainstorm. I’m so buying. Cheer up, man. Probably we’re both crazy.”

On the way to the Deluxe Bar & Grill they stopped and appraised WHO CARES spray-painted across the side of Dick’s Drive-In. “That’s mine,” Ian said, shaking his head.

“You said it wasn’t.”

“Now I’m saying it is.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get your ass arrested. Not that it matters in Repeat World. Anyway, I thought you quit.”

“More like it quit me.” Ian clearly remembered doing the wall; he remembered the empty feeling. For years graffiti seemed to be the answer to a question too painful to ask. Now he was out of answers – but the pain was still there. The only thing about WHO CARES that didn’t make sense was the timeframe. He did the wall on the day he failed to meet Sarah in Pullman – a desperation move, something to make life
mean
something to him. That feeling was so sharp and clear in his mind. But the day he failed to meet Sara was
today
. Repeat Day. Did that mean something new could survive from one repeat to the next? He couldn’t get his head around any of it.

At the Deluxe they ordered two pints of Fat Tire. When the beer arrived Zach immediately picked his up and drank it down by a third, but Ian only traced the rim of his glass with his fingertip.

“Cheer up,” Zach said.

“How’d I look in the psych ward?”

“Like you were home at last.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

They both drank to it.

Ian said, “It can’t be true.”

“I know how you feel.”

“It
can’t
be,” Ian said. “Look at all these people. None of them know what’s going on?
None
of them? What makes us so special?”

“Hell, maybe it
isn’t
true,” Zach said.

“Yeah, maybe not.”

Ian picked up his beer. A few hours later he was still picking up his beer, only it was a different one. Like number six or so. Zach, equally loaded, approached a couple of girls shooting pool and asked if they wanted some competition. At a later point, Ian noticed it had begun to rain. He stepped over to the window with a pool cue in his fist. The rain fell in silky curtains through cones of street light. Zach tapped him on the shoulder. “Your shot.”

“It’s true, isn’t it,” Ian said.

“Yeah.”

“What time is it?”

Zach looked at his watch. “Quarter after eleven.”

“Less than an hour.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Zach said. “I’ve racked my brains all day, trying to remember something useful. Come on, let’s finish the game. Maybe on the next cycle we can get on top of it, or at least these girls.”

“You haven’t been racking your brain,” Ian said. “You’ve been preserving it in alcohol.” Ian kept staring at the rain.

“Come on.” Zach tugged gently on his arm. They returned to the table.

“I think you’re afraid to take your shot,” the green-haired college girl said to Ian. She had been saying stuff like that, flirting. Needling him but in a cute way. He forced a grin.

“We’ll see about that,” he said.

There was a TV mounted in a corner of the ceiling overlooking the pool tables. The eleven o’ clock news was on with no sound. Ian took his shot and missed. He stepped aside for the girl. Zach was staring at the TV monitor, mesmerized. KOMO was running footage of a gaudy strip club on First Avenue. The façade of the club featured a big sign surrounded by blinking bulbs. The reporter held his microphone in a low up-angled shot, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS!!! flashing above and behind him. Suddenly, Ian thought of another sign, similar, but unlit, dead:

XXX GIRLZ.

For a moment Ian wasn’t leaning on his cue in the Deluxe. He was straddling the Chief across from a derelict strip club watching the wind hustle a Burger King wrapper in and out of the doorway. He almost didn’t notice Zach right in front of him in the bar waving a hand in his face.