Mr. Was (20 page)

I said, “My grandfather?”

“You are confused. It will have come to you later or sooner, once you have met your echo.”

He touched a key. All the numbers on the screen flickered and became nines.

I said, “What are you doing?”

“I am going to have be draining it, I did, primitive thing, it spills knowledge like an overfilled dam.” The nines became eights, then sevens. “Neither he nor his offspring.” Sixes. “What goes around comes around, my friend.” His arm shot out and his chunky right hand slapped against the 1996 stock tables. The numbers on the computer screen continued to count down.

Fours, threes. He made a fist and the yellowed newspaper disappeared into his meaty hand.

Twos.

Ones.

Zeroes.

The screen flashed and flickered with green snow.

Pinky laughed. “All gone. Perhaps you had remembered something of me now. It mattered not.”

In that instant, I saw him standing in a field of grass, a woman and two children at his side, thunderclouds filling the sky beyond.

I squeezed my eyes closed, opened them, saw his wide back disappearing out the doorway.

I heard the front door slam.

The computer screen had gone dark but for a single line of type: WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND.

I looked at those words for a long time. Maybe half an hour, maybe not so long, trying to absorb all I'd
heard. Not for the first time, I wondered whether I was insane. Perhaps Salisbury Acres was a mental hospital where I had been confined to treat my delusions.

Was I a madman, living in a reality that existed only in my mind?

It was possible, and certainly easier to swallow than the notion that my grandfather and I were the same age. Or that, as the bearded man had implied, time had somehow become twisted and warped. But I didn't believe that I was mad. A madman would have believed everything Pinky had said. I believed little of it.

If anyone was insane, it was Pinky.

I found a switch on the back of the computer and turned it off. The faint humming of the hard drive ceased, and the silence of the big house pressed in on me. I decided to get up, move around, see what other memories Boggs's End might unleash.

I walked down the hall to the staircase. I had a feeling that the upper floors contained my most important memories, but I was afraid.

Don't be ridiculous, I said to myself. That crazy Pinky has you spooked. I started up the staircase. After a few steps, I felt as if the soles of my shoes were not gripping the stairs, as if they had been oiled. I grabbed the banister for support and looked down.

I was standing in a puddle of blood.

I looked back. Behind me it flowed like a river of thick wine down the marble stairs. I looked up
toward the landing. More blood, a red cascade running over my shoes. Slowly, I backed down the stairs, my shoes making a sucking sound each time I lifted my feet. I had to get out. Reaching the bottom, I turned toward the front entrance. The doors were not as they had been. They were shattered, one of them torn off its hinges. Black tire tracks scarred the white marble floor, and someone was screaming. Clapping my hands over my ears, I ran out through the shattered doorway, but the screaming only got louder. On some level I knew that I was the one who was screaming, but I couldn't make myself stop until all the air from inside that house had left my lungs. I tore open the car door, tumbled inside, and locked the doors.

Boggs's End stood dark and silent before me, the front doors closed and undamaged.

Now who's the crazy man, I wondered.

Memory, Minnesota

February 20, 1993

I have not been able to force myself to return to Boggs's End. The very thought of it makes my heart shake. But I did attend Skoro's funeral. I was not disappointed to find that it was to be a closed-casket service. I had no desire to look upon his face again. Apparently, he'd had few friends at the end of his life. There were fewer than a dozen people at the service, mostly people my age or older, people who would be sharing Skoro's experience soon. One younger couple, a man and woman in their early forties, occupied the front pew. Both of them looked intensely familiar, and I was sure I remembered their faces from my childhood. Or, since that would have been impossible, the faces of some people who looked like them.

I am certain they are related to me, and I fear they are insane.

They seem to think they have an invisible child.

First, I noticed they were sitting a good three feet apart from one another, which is odd for a married couple in public. When the woman spoke to her husband she would lean forward, as if trying to peer around someone. At times she would say something to the invisible person between them, or she would rest her hand on its invisible shoulder. The man had a haggard, hungover look. As I looked at him, I became unaccountably angry. When he tousled the head of the invisible child, I found myself wanting to
reach over and strike him. For some reason, the words of the bearded man kept running through my head.
What goes around comes around.
At one point during the service, I realized with a jolt that I had been whispering the words aloud, over and over, like a mantra. I'm surprised I wasn't asked to leave.

The burial took place at a small nondenominational cemetery just outside of Memory. I watched from my car, confused, depressed, and feeling as if I knew even less than I had before. After the casket was lowered, as the mourners filed back to their automobiles, I got out and approached the woman, my presumed relative, with the intention of introducing myself and offering my condolences. I was only a few feet away from her when her face exploded. Blood covered her face, streaked her hair, soaked the lapels of her black wool coat. My knees went weak, and I staggered backward. She continued toward her car with her husband, whose hands were dripping blood, and their invisible child. I grabbed a tombstone for support and closed my eyes. When I opened them, they were climbing into their car, not a speck of blood on them.

THE FOURTH NOTEBOOK:

This cardboard-covered, spiral notebook appears to be a continuation of the first notebook, written in the same shaky hand.

—P.H.

Andrea Island, Puerto Rico

August 27, 1952

Andie has asked me to finish my story. She says a story isn't really a story until it is completely told. “But I filled up the notebook you gave to me!” I said. She gave me this new one. Ah, well. What else do I have to do?

After Skoro's funeral, I became convinced that I was insane, but I never once considered returning to the hospital. If a half century of confinement at Salisbury Acres had not restored my sanity, why should I consider going back? Instead, having nowhere else to go, I rented an old house trailer set back in the woods, a few miles outside of Memory. If I was a madman, I might as well be a free madman.

In the mornings I would walk the countryside, searching within my own mind for the key to my past. Often, my walks would take me near Boggs's End. I could not shake the feeling that my past lay within its walls but, even though it stood vacant, my fear would not allow me to enter that house of bloody visions.

So I contented myself with absorbing the smaller, more easily digested memories that other parts of Memory had to offer. Memories of walking in the woods, of the pretty red-haired, green-eyed girl, of driving fast on narrow dirt roads.

• • •

Back then I believed that my lost memory existed as a whole and complete entity inside my skull. I believed that the right thought, the right reminder would cause the unraveled cloth to weave itself into a completed tapestry.

But that is not the way it happens.

Memories come back one at a time. I had a growing basket of multicolored threads, but no pattern. Places, people, and events from my early years floated about in my head, each one separate and distinct. Weaving it all together would be a tedious, prolonged process. I did not know what came first, or how much was missing, and I had only the faintest shadow of an idea of the shape of my past.

Although I bought nothing for myself but firewood and food, the money I had stolen from Bobby Dennison quickly ran out, and I was forced to support myself by doing odd jobs for the people living in and around Memory.

As the days and weeks passed, bits and pieces of my lost childhood appeared in my thoughts. One day I remembered my mother cooking dinner in a small kitchen with striped yellow wallpaper. I had seen her face before, at Skoro's funeral.

Those days passed quickly. I was prepared to live out the rest of my life as the hermit of Memory, and I might have had I not met my mother, face-to-face, in the summer of 1995.

• • •

There is a type of mushroom called a “chanterelle” that grows under old oaks. A gourmet restaurant across the lake would buy them from me for eight dollars a pound, and during mushroom season I spent as much time as possible scouring the coulees for the yellow fungus. On the day I met my mother I had been wandering the woods for some hours, finding only a few wormy chanterelles, but enjoying myself in a quiet sort of way. I reached the edge of a neglected apple orchard and realized with a start that I was only a few dozen yards from Boggs's End. The familiar fear came over me and I turned to go back the way I'd come, when a woman's voice called out to me. “Excuse me! Are you lost?”

I shook my head, staring at her.

“Are you all right?” she asked, coming closer. She had a laundry basket in her hands. Behind her, a rope strung between two apple trees carried an assortment of shirts, pants, and underwear.

“No,” I replied. “I guess I got turned around. I didn't mean to intrude.”

“That's okay,” she said, looking at the bag in my hand. “What are you doing?”

“I was hunting mushrooms,” I said.

“My name is Betty Lund,” she said. “We just moved here last month.” She moved closer. “What kind of mushrooms are those? May I see?”

I showed her one of the chanterelles, which look like small yellow funnels.

“I've never seen a mushroom like that before. What's your name?”

I hesitated, then told her my name was Mr. Was. “Do I know you?” she asked.

“I have to be going,” I said.

“You look familiar.”

I tried to reply, but at that instant a memory came into my mind so sharp and clear and real that the air turned solid in my lungs. I saw her on a linoleum floor, hugging her knees like a fetus, red blood soaking her green dress. I backed away, then turned, walking quickly, then ran.

“You're welcome to hunt your mushrooms here,” she called after me.

Now I know I am insane, I thought.

I remembered my mother now. I remembered her flowered cotton blouses, her slim hands, her tentative voice, and her sad face. And I remembered the small V-shaped scar high on her right cheek. And I remembered that it had been caused by a blow from a man's fist.

The woman in the orchard was my mother.

But that was impossible.

Therefore I was insane.

I walked drunkenly through the woods, too preoccupied with my thoughts to avoid the fallen trees, the rocks, the face-slapping branches. I fell several times, losing my bag of mushrooms, twisting my ankle, scraping my palms. It was nearly dark when I trudged up to my rented trailer and let
myself in and fell into bed.

After that, I tried to stay as far away from Boggs's End as possible. I just wanted to go quietly mad, bothering no one. For several weeks, that was exactly what I did. I lay on my bed and tried not to think, leaving the trailer only when I needed supplies, which was about once a week. Making a supply run was no small chore. My car had died two winters before, so I had to walk the three miles up River Street to Ole's Quick Stop.

On one such trip I noticed the door to the old train depot—now the Memory Institute—standing wide open. During my three years in Memory I had never known the Institute to be open at all. I'd looked through the grimy window once. It had looked to me like somebody's attic. A bunch of dusty junk. Ole told me that the guy who owned the building stopped by every now and then, but that the Institute hadn't been open any regular hours since the seventies.

One thing about going quietly and privately insane: It gets pretty boring after a while. Instead of going into Ole's, I crossed the street and peered in through the open door.

The interior of the one-room building was even more cluttered and filthy than I'd imagined. A single bare lightbulb hung head high from a cord in the center of the room. Stacks of old books, photographs, and maps were piled haphazardly on rickety-looking chairs, tables, and unidentifiable articles of furniture. The walls were covered with yellowing black-and-
white photos, nearly all of which seemed to be of stern, bearded men and frowning women, all wearing too much clothing.

At the back of the room, a man was bent over a large cardboard box. He removed an old leather-bound book, snorted, tossed it across the room onto a pile of similar books.

“Another Swedish bible,” he muttered. “Like I need another.”

As soon as I heard his voice I recognized Pinky, the man I'd met at Boggs's End. I waited for him to notice me.

He tossed aside a few more books, then turned to me and said, “Where have you been?”

“What do you mean?” I replied.

“You can't see him, can you?”

“See who?”

“Jack Lund. Jack Lund. Jack Lund.”

I shook my head, confused. “I thought I was Jack Lund.”

“You are. You were. You will be.”

“Who are you?”

“Who are you? You are my accident, Jack Lund. You can't see him, can you? Of course you can't. He is your echo, not now.”

The man was not making any sense. I decided to change the subject, if there was one. “You told me that Skoro was my grandfather.”

Pinky stood up and brushed dust from his black wool trousers. “I did?”