The Memory Book (6 page)

“That’s all you got?”

For a moment, the boys looked as guilty as trapped grave robbers. And then the moment passed.

“Benny, we are working on it. Okay? We got a couple of clues we’re working up over at forensics. It’s still early days.”

I didn’t mention the fact that now I had a vague idea of how long ago it had happened. “What sort of clues?”

“Get real, Benny! Let us get on with our jobs.”

“That’s right. We just dropped in to see how you were progressing,” his partner chimed in.

“Are you interested in what I can remember about all this?”

Sykes’s eyes narrowed. “Sure we are. What were you doing? Who were you messing with? What do you remember?” They looked at me with expectation written on their faces like jam on a six-year-old’s.

“Not a blessed thing.”

Sykes gave a low wheeze that was intended as a whistle.

“I don’t remember who hired me, when I came to Toronto, or why I was hanging around that Dumpster, if I was hanging around that Dumpster. Sorry, fellows. I’ve just come out into the light a little while ago, and I honestly can’t remember a damned thing. Yesterday I couldn’t tell you my own name. Today is better, but I still have a long way to go.”

“We’ll leave you our numbers in case it starts coming back to you. Because you’re the only living witness to”— here his partner cleared his throat—“to what happened that day.”

“What have you got going on the front burners?”

“Benny, we’re giving
this
our best shot.”

“Yeah, a mugging outranks trespassing on vacant lots and running a red light.”

“There’s something doing at one of the colleges,” Sykes added.

“Which one? There are so many these days, I can’t keep up.”

“Simcoe College. You know it? Buried behind Massey College?”

“What little I know about higher education in Grantham is enough. Here, I’m really lost.”

The boys shook my hand and moved toward the door. When they got there Sykes turned around and casually asked: “Oh, Benny, did you ever know a Flora McAlpine?”

This was a curious parting shot. Must be important. I thought about both the name and the question. It took a few seconds, but no buzz of recognition stirred my consciousness.

“Nothing comes to mind. But then, names aren’t my party trick these days. Why?”

“Just wondered whether it sounded familiar. You think about it. Maybe something will stir in there. And you’ll let me know?”

“Sure,” I said. The question left me with an odd feeling. It was like an echoing ping from the battered back of my head. I wrote the name down before I forgot it. Big or little, important or frivolous: I was capable of forgetting them all. The mention of the name came shortly after talk about one of the university colleges. Was there a connection?

After the boys left, I was alone with my roomie’s snoring. I couldn’t get peeved at Sykes and Boyd. They couldn’t help me to get out of the hospital. Besides, having me where they knew how to find me gave their investigation the only flicker of light they had. And I had
enough on my plate just keeping the days of the week straight. I thought of the progress I had made in my reading. In ten or fifteen minutes, I could work my way through a paragraph of six lines. Lucky I wasn’t working this case. At my speed I would have it wound up by the time Sykes and Boyd got their pensions.

SEVEN

Mom and Dad walked through the doorway, Ma in front with a big smile on her face, the kind that hides the pain underneath, and Pa a step or two behind her with his good poker face giving nothing away. She was wearing her Paris Star dress from Montreal, and Dad was dressed more casually in a rust-coloured summer jacket, which he removed as soon as he sat down. Funny how I recognized the dress! It occupied a place of honour in her closet.

“So! At last you’ve decided to wake up!” Mom gave my foot a squeeze under the covers. “Every time we’ve been in to see you, you’ve been off chasing rainbows.”

“Hi, there!” Pa said, trying to find the right tone. “You’ve got a good room here: nice and bright. And you’re missing absolutely nothing outside.”

“Benny, it’s earthquake weather out there. A steam bath. It’s spooky. Not only is it hot enough to melt the streets, there was an eclipse of the sun earlier. It’ll be blood on the moon next. No wonder people are superstitious about eclipses. There was an eclipse in Rome the day Julius Caesar was murdered. Eclipses are the heart of everything unnatural. They bother my old bones.”

“The melting asphalt on the street doesn’t make things better.”

“You’re right, it’s frightening out there. But you’ve at least got a good view of it.” Ma looked for a place to put her purse. In the end she held on to it. She kept on talking: “An eclipse of the sun is a terrible thing, Benny.”

Pa brought out a cigar, then pocketed it again. “Moon,” Pa corrected. “It’s a lunar eclipse.”

“Well, lunar or solar, it’s making this hot weather worse. I saw people crossing themselves.”

“What do they know that we don’t know? I ask you,” Pa said.

“Manny, it doesn’t get dark during a lunar eclipse. It has to be dark
before
it happens.”

“The moon comes in front of the sun, right? So it’s the moon doing the eclipsing. You have to take it logically step by step.” Pa took out the cigar again.

“So then a solar eclipse is what? When the sun comes between the earth and the moon? What other nonsense are you selling today?” Ma gave me a look to see if I was on her side.

“There was a program on television about it. You have to be careful of your eyes. You have to use smoked glass.”

“Smoked glass?” Ma looked exasperated. “Who’s got time to be smoking glass in this weather? Herring I could understand.”

Ma moved closer to the bed, while Pa raked his memory about what he had heard about the exact nature of eclipses. Ma studied my face, looking for cracks.

“How is my boy, eh?” Ma asked. “Are you comfortable? I hope you’re eating. I know that hospital food is not Lindy’s in New York or even the old Diana Sweets in Grantham, but you have to keep your strength up. I only wish they’d let me bring you a bowl of decent soup.”

“I think you’re allowed to bring in food,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“Sure! I’d like to make you some of my beef and barley soup, but how can I make it this far from home? Sam’s wife won’t let me step inside her tiny, perfect kitchen. I might drop a carrot on her floor. I’m sure she thinks I’m too ethnic for her neighbours.”

“Ma, that’s just not true.”

“Just
you
try to make a cup of instant with her looking on.” She exhaled her hostility audibly.

Once Ma had ridden out the storm of guilt she goes through when she’s not preparing my meals, things were like old times. Pa told me who among our old neighbours in Grantham had passed on over the spring, and Ma kvetched about hearing the bad news all over again. I think it’s what we do instead of crossing ourselves. It works the same way.

“Saul Segal was a healthy man, able to lift those big bolts of factory cotton from his truck to the back of the store without flinching, and then, poof!” Pa said.

“Saul was a good provider,” Ma added. “I’ll give him that. But he made too big a thing about all those health foods. Remember, Benny, how he used to tell you not to eat so many chocolate bars?”

I tried remember Saul Segal’s face. I recalled a steel jaw and curly brown hair. It was because of him that I gave up chocolate bars and switched to Player’s Medium cigarettes. It took me ten years to get rid of
that
habit.

My parents stayed until I began to yawn noticeably. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy their company; it was that their company made me relax and relaxation made me sleepy. I watched the silences grow longer and longer. At last, looking at his watch rather theatrically, Pa said, “Well …” And I knew that the back of the visit was broken.

Before leaving, my parents passed on the good wishes of our friends in Grantham, and then they were off in an exchange of words about which elevator was closest to the parking lot.

A nurse came into the room without making a sound and took away the accumulated garbage from the wastebin near my bed. Then, just as silently, she emptied the bin sitting next to my still-sleeping roommate. I call her a nurse, because she looked like a nurse, even though I understood the ranks were actually more subtly subdivided. One “nurse” I greeted was called Dr. Godbehere by a passing woman in uniform. The nurse doing garbage duty was the one who brought me juice and cookies. When she saw me watching her, she said she was glad to
see me looking well, called me “Mr. Cooperman,” and left the room as silently as she had come in. A few minutes later, two nurses from the Islands greeted one another in the corridor with lyrical voices that carried the sun in them.

I wondered if
my
nurse was from down there too. Funny, I hadn’t thought about that until just now. When I was helpless in my hard bed, I didn’t see colour, but now that I was coming to myself again, some of society’s assumptions were returning.

A man in a wheelchair passed my door, using one foot to propel his rig along the corridor. His face was ghostly pale, but he seemed happy to be making his own way.

The next time I got up, after one of my short naps, I went on a tour of the floor. The nursing station in the middle of the corridor divided the floor into unequal halves. One bank of elevators stood here and another at the south end. There were fewer than twenty rooms, most of them double. Across from the nursing station was a dining room with under a dozen tables seating four or six each. A TV set blared above—an inane quiz show, by the look of it. Only one woman in a wheelchair was watching. From time to time she addressed the tube with her sharp comments. A couple of robust-looking men, speaking in French, pushed a comrade dressed in the same familiar hospital outfit: two hospital gowns, one reversed to cover the rear, and a cotton bathrobe. When they caught up to me, they stopped and congratulated me in
accented English for being out of bed at last, then continued along the passage.

Having walked from the north end of the floor to the south, I felt like an old political power broker touring the familiar ward and finding that the faces on the street still smiled back at him. While I was exploring, none of the nurses seemed to mind that I wasn’t in my room. Access to the elevators was not restricted. I thought that if I had my pants on, I might be able to skip out of the hospital without raising an eyebrow. I filed the idea for later use.

For now, with the slippers on my feet and the two hospital gowns I was wearing, the one letting the draft in through the back and the other allowing errant breezes through the front, it was impossible to contemplate. I might be able to walk up and down the hallway with the assurance of a crocodile, but I recognized that I was not quite ready to brave the out-of-doors. Even in my own clothes, I would need more time.

“So this is where you’ve got to, is it? Did you see the eclipse?” It was Rhymes With, the nurse from this morning. Or was it yesterday morning?

“I was getting a breath of air,” I tried to explain.

“That’s good! Some of us went up on the roof to watch it,” she said.

“Watch what?”

“The eclipse. That’s what everybody’s talking about.”

“I thought the sun was going down.”

“This early? Don’t I wish!” She sighed dramatically. “But right now I need some blood.”

“Blood?”

“Won’t take a minute. You’ll get used to us claiming bits and pieces of you. I’ll come by your room in five minutes. When did you have your blood pressure checked last?”

“When I had the tires rotated. I don’t know. If you don’t keep track of these things, am I supposed to?”

“Might help. You have to be your own advocate around here, Mr. Cooperman. It’s the only way to be sure. I tell everybody that, and they laugh. But I’m not joking. See you in five minutes.”

I watched her move along the hallway and around a corner. Back in my room, my roommate was sleeping. I decided to clean my teeth. All the while, I was thinking of how I might escape the confines of these walls.

My nurse returned, as she had warned me, with her needle. She was also carrying a hefty notebook, which she passed over to me. “This belonged to a patient who didn’t get a chance to really get it started. It’s a Memory Book.”

“What’s a Memory Book?”

“Something to jot down appointments and dates in. Something to give your memory a kick-start. Keep it with you and get rid of those little scraps of paper you write on. Believe me, the Memory Book is better.” It looked like most high-school notebooks: black leather cover, three rings, lined paper, unmarked section dividers.

Blankly, I thanked her.

“You’ll soon get in the habit of using it. It can even be made to tell you what day of the week it is. Let it become your memory. Let it help you.” She gave me a warm smile, which made me feel good. For the first time, I noticed that she had freckles on her cheeks under the light brown pigmentation. I felt a stab of affection for her. I couldn’t think of this place without her. Or me without her.

She took blood next. I have to admit that she jabbed a painless needle. Then I tried to read
The Globe and Mail.
It was no good. At some level, I kept hoping that the next thing I tried to read would be easier. It never was. I tried to sound out the words and the meanings of the headlines. “Con … Coined … Council … Ignores … Idiot … Injects … Ann … Andrew … Angry …” I took a breath and tried again. Eventually, I made out: “
COUNCIL EJECTS ANGRY COUNSELLOR
.” I had no difficulty with the sense of the words once I had decoded them. Language wasn’t my problem; it was breaking the alphabet code that dogged my progress.

I could feel a nap coming on. But I made time to put my name and address on the Memory Book I’d been given. I used the calendar provided to note what day of the week and month this was. The information dissolved almost at once, but it did give me a buzz while I was able to hold on to it. After another five-minute struggle with the front page, I gave up and added my own snores to those of my roommate.