The Amnesia Clinic (11 page)

I sat, observing the city. A swallow dipped low over the eaves of a house down the slope below us. Beyond that, Quito spread in its muddled way towards the foothills and
slopes of venerable volcanoes. My father had left a brochure on the table while he went to find me a pen. I opened it and had a look: kids with bad hair in tweed jackets sitting around a pool table; a geek with soft stubble and a huge mole wearing unfeasible safety goggles as he squinted into a Bunsen burner; some poor myopic boy limping along with a rugby ball against a desolate backdrop of mud and bare trees. I looked up again. Sunlight ignited the crest of Cotopaxi, sending it back for magnificent reflection in the glass doors that fronted our balcony. I coughed feebly to myself and poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the table.

When my father returned, I made one final plea for clemency, but it fell on deaf ears. (If I remember rightly, it culminated in my saying, ‘Then my father is truly dead,’ the pivotal line uttered by Luke Skywalker when Darth Vader refuses to renounce the Dark Side. My father’s response was both predictable and justified: ‘Stop being so melodramatic.’) Pen poised above the paper, breathing in rarefied air tinged with sweet smog, I gazed again across the city as if it were for the last time, towards the volcanoes in the distance, and thought of Juanita. She never had problems like this.

My father was right, of course. I could easily have fixed my answers. Been the halfwit, and been sure of staying put. But he knew me far too well to think I would ever take that suggestion seriously. And much as I would like to say that at the time I was so concerned about Fabián’s welfare that I overlooked any course of action beyond just getting the tests out of the way, that isn’t what happened either. In the end, my pride won the day and, by the time I had finished the first test, I knew that I was in the process of consciously writing myself out of Ecuador. There was even – I can say it now, with the benefit of hindsight and greater self-awareness – there was even a certain masochistic pleasure to be derived from
completing my own extradition document with everything that I would miss lying right there in front of me. I was deliberately expelling myself from the land of giant turtles and ice princesses, and I only had myself to blame.

That said, the problem of Fabián began to resurface in my mind before I’d even finished writing. I had to find a way of regaining his trust, especially if I was not long for this country. And no matter how much I thought about it, every course of action I considered seemed to bring me back to Miguel de Torre, and to a half-remembered, blurred image of Suarez the previous weekend.
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to let people believe what they want to believe. Real life can be so very disappointing at times
.

The tests done, and safely packaged up in their envelopes to be sent away, my father and I sat together on the balcony, eating a lunch of salty, buttery corn on the cob and playing a favourite game. It involved waiting in silence until an interesting sound came up off the city, then competing with each other to arrive at the best explanation of what had made it.

‘That was a taxi driver screeching to a halt when his client wouldn’t pay the bill, followed by the shot as he dispatched him using the silver-plated pistol he keeps strapped to his ankle in case of such problems,’ said my father.

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘The screech was the sound of a condor that escaped from the city zoo this morning hoping to fly back to his family in the hills, and the bang was the sound of a tranquilliser dart being shot at it by his keeper, Pepe, who is terrified of being fired because he’s lost two condors already this year and they are hard to come by as it is.’

‘Did Pepe catch the condor, then?’ said my father, wiping his chin with a paper napkin as he stared distractedly ahead.

‘No. It got away.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘Subconsciously, Pepe is allowing the escapes to succeed because he believes he was a condor in a previous life.’

‘Pepe is a fool.’

We sat in silence for a while, listening to the city’s equivalent of white noise: the steady exhalation of traffic, punctuated by the occasional, submerged blast of a car horn as some distant, chaotic moment unfolded.

‘I’ve got something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ I said.

‘Shoot.’

‘Where do you think someone would end up if they were found, say, wandering around in the mountains with amnesia, and nobody claimed them? I mean, if it were back home, they’d end up in some hospital, and there’d be all that missing-persons stuff going on, all that, right? But there are still some pretty wild areas of Ecuador, aren’t there?’

‘Sure are.’

‘So it’s possible that someone could be missing for quite a long time – years, even – up in a mountain village or something, without anyone knowing where they were and thinking they were probably dead. Can you remember any examples of that sort of thing happening?’

‘I’ve read stories about people being found living whole new lives because they lost their memory, but mainly in books. I’m not sure if it happens much in real life.’

‘I’m not interested in real life. It can be very disappointing. You would say, though, that in
theory
at least, it’s possible?’

‘It’s possible. Why are you asking me this?’

‘It’s for something I’m writing for school,’ I said. ‘A story.’

‘A story? Didn’t know that was your kind of thing. Well, I don’t know if there’s any set procedure when someone is found. But I think … What I think is that there
should
be a special hospital set up somewhere especially for all the people with amnesia. They could stay together in safety, and then if you thought you’d lost someone, all you’d have to
do would be to go along and see if they were there. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’

A plane came in to land right down in the throat of the city – one sight I had never properly got used to.

‘Yes, it would. It would be very good. Do you reckon anywhere like that exists?’

‘I doubt it – it would be pretty specialised. Besides, who’s going to pay for the upkeep of the patients if nobody knows who they are?’ He chuckled. ‘You know, I think your mother might have a point about how being educated out here isn’t doing you any favours …

‘Aha,’ he said, springing up as he heard her key in the lock, ‘now
that
sounded to me like the return home of a triumphant women’s tennis champion. Do you want to tell her the good news that you’ve done your tests, or shall I?’

‘I’ll leave that pleasure to you. One more thing, though: can you get hold of blank newsprint paper?’

My parents knew about Fabián and his missing parents but, luckily, I hadn’t yet updated them on the various recent goings-on – mainly because I hadn’t reached any firm conclusions myself about what I believed. Consequently, when I outlined to my father the story of a bullfight, followed by a car coming off a road in the mountains, he wasn’t suspicious in the slightest. Quite the contrary. In fact, all he said was, ‘Sounds a bit fantastic to me.’ Eventually, though, with his help, and without arousing too much suspicion, I wrote something vaguely journalistic. Then I just had to make it look right.

Getting hold of the right paper was only the first step. I then had to try to print on it in a convincing typeface. I was no master forger, but it’s surprising how much you can accomplish with a good printer, the right sort of paper and the spillage of a mug of tea (that particular trick was something I knew about having read about the forgery of the
Hitler diaries). I even managed to photocopy an old car advert on to the reverse of the page so it looked as if it had been taken from a real newspaper, so that by the end, I had made a pretty convincing simulacrum. It wouldn’t have taken an expert very long to work out that it wasn’t real, but I reasoned that I didn’t have to work too hard: the Emperor’s new clothes were never described to him in detail because he was so ready to believe in them.

Luckily enough, Fabián approached me himself to make his peace on the day it was ready, which meant that I didn’t even have to think of a pretext to show it to him. He walked over as we were breaking for lunch after the morning’s lessons the following Thursday.

‘What’s all this about you leaving, then?’ he said.

‘It might not happen. But even if it does, I’ll be back for the holidays – just not for the boring bits in between.’

‘I see.’ He sniffed absentmindedly. ‘Sorry about last week. All this shit with my parents. It gets frustrating.’

An apology. That was new. Perhaps there was no need to go through with the plan at all. But I couldn’t lose my nerve now.

‘I wanted to talk to you about that,’ I said. ‘I found something, and I think it might be important. It was in a stack of newspapers Dad brought home from work.’

We were in the canteen by then, which was hot and steamy from great vats of rice and beans on the counter, and when we had got our food and were sitting at an isolated table in the corner, I got out the press cutting and laid it out for him on the table. It was creased and stained. It looked as if it had lain in a folder somewhere for a few years.

Fabián read it through several times. For a few moments, his eyes were spyholes on the struggle in his head. They flared from anger to incomprehension and back again. Then he must have realised that he was losing too much cool,
because he checked himself and organised his features into a less vulnerable expression, closer to touched amusement.

I was taking a big risk here. In spite of whatever outward reaction he chose to manifest to the cutting, I could have no idea what its real effect on him would be. For all I knew, it could have meant the end of our friendship.

He looked back at the cutting, then up at me.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said.

‘I—’

‘You’ve been checking up on me?’

I paused.

‘I wanted to show you that I believed you,’ I said, carefully.

We looked at each other for a while longer, uncertain of how to proceed.

‘I see,’ he said.

This is what was in front of us:

El Diario, 29th February 1989

DOUBLE TRAGEDY AT ZAPARO FESTIVAL
IBARRA: A man and his wife may both have perished on Friday when their car plunged from the road to the Hacienda La Reina. They were rushing to hospital to attend to the man’s injuries following a freak mauling sustained during a bullfight at the hacienda’s Zaparo Festival celebrations. The man did not survive the accident, and his body was found in the wreckage of the car. His wife is yet to be found, and so it is not known whether or not she also lost her life in the tragedy. The couple have not been named.

OPENING OF NEW AMNESIA CLINIC DIVIDES BEACHSIDE COMMUNITY
GUAYAQUIL: Mixed reactions yesterday greeted the opening by local eccentric Dr Victor Menosmal of his new, privately-funded Amnesia Clinic on the outskirts of the coastal town of
Pedrascada. Menosmal, who has no formal medical training beyond a master’s degree in psychology, has long been obsessed with the problem of memory loss, and upon receipt of a large inheritance following the demise of his father, vowed to dedicate himself to the study of the problem. The clinic, says Menosmal, will be part research institute, part safe haven for those suffering from amnesia. ‘Obviously,’ said Menosmal yesterday, ‘there will be cases of free-loaders who haven’t lost their memory and are merely looking for free accommodation, but we’re confident that the stringent tests we will perform on admission should alert us to such cases immediately. We’ll also be sure to monitor all of our inmates on an ongoing basis in case they should regain their memories without telling us.’

So far, the clinic has no patients.

‘Yes,’ said Fabián. ‘I see.’

I looked down at the congealing beans on my plate.

‘You say you got this through your dad?’ Fabián went on.

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘I never saw the newspapers at the time. I didn’t know it had been reported.’

‘Well, it was. There it is, in black and white.’

‘Yes. There it is.’

‘Yes.’

I swivelled the cutting round in my favour and pointed with a fork.

‘Interesting about this Amnesia Clinic, too,’ I ventured.

‘Yes,’ said Fabián, staring at his food. ‘Although that name is a bit ridiculous. “Menosmal”. Can anybody really be called that? It would be like an English person being called, I don’t know, “Justaswell” or something.’

‘I think I’ve heard it somewhere before. It might be French.’

‘Right. I see. Thanks for showing me. Can I keep this?’

‘Of course. It’s for you.’

He folded up the cutting and slid it carefully into his wallet. Then, after silently shovelling in his food for a while, he said, ‘So. What are we doing this weekend?’

I meant it as a gesture. An elegant, understated way to apologise to Fabián for having doubted him, and an endorsement of the stories he’d told me. Nothing more. I thought I’d left so many holes in the articles, not least the absurd name I’d given to the doctor, that both my authorship and the intentions behind it would be quietly obvious – although, of course, to have said this out loud would have been against the spirit of the exercise and destroyed it in the process. So when his reaction to the cutting was one of apparent vindication, and when he didn’t question anything about its contents beyond the doctor’s stupid name, I assumed that my apology had been both identified and accepted. Privately, we would pretend it was real. It would be taken as read that Dr Menosmal and his Amnesia Clinic existed, and he would enter the pantheon of fictional heroes who’d lived side by side in our minds with real, historical figures when we were younger. Churchill, Bolívar and Pelé were all very well. We believed in Dracula, Batman and Han Solo just as
much – not because of any assessment of how real they were, but because of how much they seemed to us to
deserve
to exist.

For a while there, it seemed, we had come dangerously close to growing up, but thanks to my tactical bit of forgery we could fall back into our old habit of cheerfully talking rubbish. I was so busy being relieved about this that it never occurred to me for a second that he might
believe
any of it.