The Amnesia Clinic (17 page)

‘Of course,’ he said, grinning. ‘She was called Ana; I told you.’

‘Of course you did. Forgive me.’

Eventually, he had built something close to a joint. He licked its seam and folded carefully and ineptly.

‘Are you sure it’s supposed to look like that?’

‘You think you can do better, be my guest. This baby’s gonna do us fine. Don’t you worry.’

He took out a lighter, put the creation to his lips, and lit the end. The paper flared down its length on one side as if he’d lit a fuse, and half the contents dropped out on to the rock.

‘Ha ha,’ said Fabián. ‘Don’t worry, there’s plenty more. Practice makes perfect. There, you see? This is working fine now.’ He puffed frantically, trying to get it going.

Enough remained for a few drags each. We sat with our backs to the rock, passing the joint between us and coughing. Then we rolled another, and eventually, we blundered our way into a pretty relaxed state. Fabián sat on the sand with his eyes closed and his back to the rocks. In the ferocious light of the setting sun, his face shone like a bronze. He spoke quietly.

‘Up there. Behind us. Do you think that dome could be it?’

I kept my gaze on the water, where a perfect replica sun shone back at me. Networks of hissing foam fragmented on its surface.

‘I don’t know, Fabián.’

‘It could be, couldn’t it? What do you think it would be like?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I picture it with black and white tiles on the floor, like a chequerboard, and gleaming metal everywhere. Then there’d be signs on the walls to help the amnesiacs remember the basics. The obvious things they might have forgotten:
You have eaten lunch. The day is Tuesday. Sixto Durán Ballén is president. We are at war
.’

‘Listen, about the clinic.’

‘Then the signs would get more and more specific for each person in their own rooms – which, obviously, would have to be signposted with photographs rather than names – and so you’d have notices saying things like,
you were found passed out on the beach near Salinas wearing a blue scarf
, or whatever …’

‘Fabián. About the clinic.’

‘What about it?’

‘I thought we agreed not to get too carried away about that. You realise it may not be here, don’t you?’

‘Hey, don’t spoil it. The point is that it
might
be.’

‘But it might not be.’

‘That’s right. But let’s not find that out straight away. Let’s not be sure of that until we have to be. Then it could still happen. Didn’t you ever wait a few days after buying your lottery ticket before you checked the numbers, just to allow yourself to think you might have won something?’

‘I don’t play the lottery,’ I said.

We sat in silence for a while, listening to the suck and surge of the incoming tide.

‘Fabián. You do know that the most likely explanation is that your mother died in that car, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Whatever you and I may say to each other.’

He paused. ‘It’s easy to believe that my father died. I picture him very vividly. What’s more, we buried him. That helps. With my mother it’s different. I find it easier to believe … other things. Why else would I have seen her like that at the parade? It wasn’t a memory. She was there. At that moment, for me, she was alive. What’s wrong with that? It’s a gap, isn’t it? A gap that I can fill with whatever I want. Just like the inmates at the clinic.’

‘Which probably isn’t there.’

He scratched his head with a grimace, as if I had said
something tasteless and he wanted to erase it from his memory.

‘Whatever I may or may not know to be true,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything – anything at all – that can make me feel that I’m investigating the possibility that she
didn’t
die, then I’ll do it. Can you see that? Can you see that even if this trip comes to nothing at all, it won’t have been a waste of our time?’

‘Yes. I see that. Let’s stick to the idea that it
might
exist, though. Let’s not try to plug the gap, because then we might be disappointed. Okay?’

I looked at him.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Do you promise?’

He said nothing.

‘Do you
promise
?’

‘Yes, yes. I promise. I’m not expecting you to understand. You don’t know what it feels like. I feel it all the time.’

Now his face was in shadow, with the roaring sun behind it. ‘I feel it like a pain in the blood.’

I did not reply.

‘Maybe they would stockpile memories at an Amnesia Clinic, like blood in a normal hospital,’ Fabián continued. ‘Maybe even if we didn’t find her, we might at least find some of the memories of her that I’ve lost.’

I spoke hesitantly. ‘Just because you can’t remember her as well as your father, it doesn’t mean—’

‘I’m not saying I don’t remember anything. I do remember some things about her.’

‘Tell me.’

He paused. ‘She loved peaches. She was always eating them. She always smelled of peach juice.’

‘That sounds—’

‘Memory is a very strange thing,’ he interrupted. ‘You can
create memories, you know. I could make you remember this moment for ever. All I have to do is mark it in some way, and you’ll never forget it.’

‘We’ll have to wait a while before you get a chance to prove that point.’

‘It’s true, though.’ He sat up. ‘I could make this moment stick in your mind for ever, if I wanted to. I could make myself immortal in you.’

‘That’d be nice. Maybe we’d better not smoke any more weed for a while.’

‘I bet you,’ he said, ‘I bet you fifty dollars that I can make you remember this moment, in, say, ten years’ time.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I should think I’ll have fifty dollars to spare in ten years. I hope so, anyway. But you’ll have to remember this moment too, otherwise you won’t be able to claim the money.’

‘I won’t need to. You’ll remember it. Is it a deal?’

‘Yes, it’s a deal.’

‘Give me your hand, then. We’ll shake on it.’

I held out my hand. Fabián grabbed my wrist, and with his other hand he planted the lit end of the joint into my palm with his thumb.

‘Cunt,’ I said, trying to pull it away. But he held it there, pressed into the flesh, fixing my gaze with a smirk on his lips until the coal had gone out. A welt bloomed in the centre of my palm, bright red, flecked with ash. Fabián had another on the pad of his thumb, which he rubbed slowly against the first two fingers of his hand. I jumped up to plunge my hand into the water.

‘Saltwater’ll heal it quickly,’ he said, whisking his own hand round in a small rock pool. ‘But I guarantee you will remember this.’

‘Fuck you.’

He was right, though. To this day, whenever I look at the
palm of my hand, I see that moment. The mark is not much more than a pale little fleck, like a chickenpox scar, but it’s there. To one side of it, there are two or three little fault lines that I like to think are part of Fabián’s thumbprint, scorched into me for ever. Part of my DNA.

‘You see?’ he said, when the pain had started to fade and I’d sat down again. ‘It was an extreme way to make the point, but I could have done the same thing by
telling
you something memorable. Say if I told you that I had fucked your mum, and you believed it; you’d remember that. Words can be actions, too. The right sentence from me could have marked this moment in the same way.’

‘Except you didn’t do it with a statement, did you? You marked the moment by burning my fucking hand off.’

He relit the joint, which was now more crooked than ever, and puffed on it for a while.

‘“And the word was God”,’ he said, making his lips into a funnel for the emerging stream of smoke. ‘Do you think this is real weed? I don’t feel any different at all.’

I laughed so hard I fell off the rock.

We were about to get ourselves together and start looking for beds for the night, when a noise out to sea made us both look up: a muffled boom, like an explosion in the distance.

‘What the fuck was that?’ said Fabián.

‘Perhaps it was something to do with the war,’ I said, getting up. ‘Maybe there’s a naval battle going on.’ I scanned the horizon hopefully.

‘Cool!’ said Fabián. ‘Maybe we’ll witness a famous sinking. Something historic.’

Boom
.

‘Jesus, what is that? They must be using some pretty heavy weaponry.’

‘Could be mines going off.’

‘Could be torpedoes. Maybe the Peruvians are after one of our submarines.’

‘Do we have any submarines?’

‘Dunno.’

Boom
.

‘That’s some battle.’

‘Yeah. Shit. This is serious.’

‘What the hell’s going on out there?’

‘Pelicans,’ said a voice.

We both swung round. An olive-skinned girl of about ten stood behind us. She wore a light summer dress in yellow and red, plastic-framed glasses that had broken and been repaired with Sellotape.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Pelicans,’ she said, again. She had a slight American accent when she spoke English, but I could tell it wasn’t her first language. ‘It’s brown pelicans, out to sea, dive-bombing for fish. They make that noise when they hit the water. Are you naked under that towel?’

Fabián clutched at his waist.

‘No,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, pelicans?’ I said.

‘What do you think I mean, pelicans?’ said the girl.

‘Pelicans?’ said Fabián, pointing a finger. ‘Bullshit.’

‘It’s rude to point. And my daddy says you shouldn’t say “shit” to strangers.’

‘I see. Where is he today?’

‘Just over there. Those are our cabins. Are you going to come and stay with us?’

‘I think we might,’ I said, picking up my bag. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Sol,’ she said, giving a cute little curtsy.

* * *

The girl led us away from the beach, between the guest cabins and towards a bar area under a thatched awning. In season this would presumably be packed with surfers, but now it was empty, save for a hippy with dirty, greying hair. He crouched near the bar at a charcoal brazier with his back to us, so low that his beard almost brushed the ground. He wore linen shorts and a white T-shirt cut off at the shoulders to reveal shoulders mottled with sunspots. From this angle, he might have been a hermit, crazed with hunger and solitude, waiting to devour some last resort of a morsel that had been unlucky enough to find its way on to his grill. As we got closer, we could see that, in fact, he was turning thin strips of beef on long wooden skewers. The flesh had curled in the heat, the cooked side blackened and hissing with juices and the raw side stretched over the curve, taut with bloody fibres. Hearing us approach, he looked up.

‘Hey, baby,’ he said to the girl. ‘What you got for me?’ Californian.

‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Customers.’

‘Want a room, fellas? Or some meat on a stick?’

‘Both, please,’ said Fabián, dropping his rucksack heavily on the sand.

Sol’s father introduced himself as Ray. He repeated our names several times after we had spoken them, as if the words were new to him and he was trying them out. He pronounced ‘Fabián’ like ‘fable’. Ray’s appearance was daunting – his beard so overwhelmed his face that the rest of his features seemed to be peeking out timidly from behind it, and his teeth looked vicious for being framed with so much hair – but after we’d got used to his looks, Fabián and I quickly warmed to him.

Ray owned the cabins, but the business was known locally
as ‘Juan’s’. Juan was a local fisherman who had decided to build beach huts for tourists when he retired in the late 1970s. Ray had been his first guest, staying before the majority of the cabins had even been finished (and when the town was still more fishing village than surfing resort). Ray had fallen in love both with Juan’s cabins and with his nineteen-year-old daughter, and put in an offer on both of them. Ever since then, the cabins should technically have been called ‘Ray’s’, but Ray hadn’t seen the point in changing the name. He liked the idea of continuing to honour his late father-in-law, and he didn’t think it would necessarily be good for business to have a gringo’s name over the door.

The guest cabins were clustered loosely around a central two-storey building that served as the owner’s house, and the main bar. One other shed housed a makeshift lavatory suspended over a sawdust pit and a shower fashioned from an old chain-flush cistern, with a bamboo drainage grille in the floor. The smells of charcoal smoke and lime juice clung to the whole area, and beneath the constant hum of suspended clouds of insects you could hear the trickle of an underground stream.

Normally, he assured us, Ray had plenty of paying customers, but for now we were his only guests. Although he was, in his own words, ‘a bum’, he admitted to having plenty of inherited money with which to compensate for the fact that Juan’s ran at a loss for most of the time. Like many Californians, he was a bum with a private income.

‘Why would I
ever
want to go back to the States, man?’ he proclaimed. ‘I have everything I need here. Can you think of a better job in the world than to show people how to have a good time?’

That evening, we built a bonfire on the beach and sat round it eating meat on sticks and drinking cold beer. I tried to
imagine what it would be like to stay on this beach for twenty years, like Ray; to be so sure that this was the place for me that I would happily settle within the square mile. It seemed impossible to me. I couldn’t envisage feeling strongly enough about any one place or person to want to bind myself to it indefinitely.

Ray’s wife was called Cristina. She claimed never to have cut her hair, and it flowed abundantly from silvery roots right down to a dark, frayed little wisp somewhere below her hips. She wore loose-fitting clothes in indigo and pink, and her quiet confidence and comfortable, lived-in face were a reassuring counterpoint to her husband’s more agitated demeanour. In spite of her generous build she moved gracefully; a wise gorilla to the manic monkey she had married.

Early in the evening, Sol fell asleep face down in the sand, at which her mother calmly scooped her up and took her off to bed. When she returned, Cristina instigated what was obviously a familiar ritual. There were large, flat stones on the beach, gathered round the fire. You waited until each stone was so hot you could only just bear to touch it, and then passed it round the fire, each person taking turns to absorb the heat. Meanwhile, Ray’s main occupation was preparing more meat on sticks: soaking the strips in fresh lime juice before seasoning them and suspending them on a grill over the smoking fire. We alternately passed round the hot stones and the skewered strips, moonlit clouds towering above us like silvery nuclear explosions. I remember thinking that these charred, tangy mouthfuls, washed down with litre bottles of Pilsener and bulked out with handfuls of soggy rice from a pot by the fire, were the best thing I had ever tasted. My mouth loaded to bursting, I looked over at Fabián. Like me, he had been eating steadily for some time, but had now taken
one of his leftover skewers and begun poking around inside his plaster cast with it.