Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“I know you love me,” said her red and swollen mouth. “Forget whatever it is, Bret. Just love me.”

He lacked the power to accept her love. His mind went whimpering backward down the past to stand transfixed by a dead face on a pillow. He was as cold as the face of his dead mother; his heart perished in her mortmain grip. He took Paula by the shoulders and pushed her away from him.

Her face was torn by grief and anger, but she kept her voice steady. “I don’t know what the matter is, Bret, but you’d better go now.”

“I suppose I’d better.”

“You’ll call me tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. Good night. I’m sorry.”

He heard her crying softly while he waited in the funereal hallway for the elevator. The dead hand of the past held him by the arm, and the image of the dead woman descended with him in the automatic elevator and followed him out into the slanting street.

Lying in his hospital bed a year and a half later, he could see his mother’s face as clearly as he had then: the marble face of the long dead, closed to the sight, unresponsive to the touch, with hair like wings of darkness folded on the brow. She had died when he was four, more than twenty-five years ago, but the image of her face hung on the wall of every room he entered, and the cold memory of her death still chilled him to the bone. Yet so far as he could remember, she had died naturally in bed. The trouble was that he didn’t remember very well. His brain was a whispering gallery thronged with uncertain images.

His memory of what he had done after he left Paula was doubly confused because he had gone on drinking the next day. He knew nothing else about it, but he could taste the whisky in the passages between his nose and throat and recall the buzzing alcoholic emptiness of his head. He had gone down in the automatic elevator, crossed the steep street to a taxi stand, and disappeared from his own consciousness.

A few months before, he had been willing enough to forget, but now he was fiercely impatient with his lagging mind. His memory was perfectly good for the unimportant things. He knew the names of Napoleon’s marshals, the call signs of the ships they had operated with off Leyte, his telephone number in Arlington, his street address in Los Angeles. No, not Los Angeles. He had never lived in Los Angeles. That was a queer sort of slip to make, and he was always making them. Parapraxis, the doctors called it, and said it was perfectly normal, but he was not consoled. It was terrifying not to be able to trust your memory.

Still, he was getting better. Nine months ago he had been utterly lost in time and space. Now he knew who he was, where he was, why he was here. He repeated the facts like a consoling liturgy. Bret Taylor, Lieutenant, USNR, Naval Hospital, Eleventh Naval District, San Diego. Forgetfulness. The day was Saturday. Sunday, rather, since it was past midnight. Sunday, February 24, 1946. Not 1945, but 1946, and the war was over. It had taken him a long time to catch on to that, but once he got hold of a thing he never let go of it. The problem was to get hold of those lost days in Frisco. All he had was the whisky taste, the buzzing emptiness, and the sense of disaster. Something disastrous had happened, but he did not know what it was. Paula might have told him, but he had been ashamed to ask her.

Whatever had happened, she had stuck by him. A year and a half later she was still coming to see him every week. She wasn’t married to him as he had imagined, but she was standing by. The thought of her was an island of security among the uncertainties of his mind. He went to sleep with the thought of her standing by his bed. But it was not Paula he dreamed of.

He awoke at his usual time, with the taste of the dream in his mouth and a name on his lips waiting to be spoken. The dream faded quickly when he opened his eyes, but he remembered a multitude of bars telescoping into a dreary penny arcade flavored with whisky. In one of the games of chance he had won a kewpie doll with bright blue eyes. It sat on his shoulders like an old man of the sea. He didn’t want the doll on his shoulders, but he had won her in the arcade and she was his responsibility. A policeman with a face like Matthew Arnold proclaimed the fateful words: “Be ye married to disaster until death do us part.” The Matthew Arnold face withered away to a skull, and the kewpie doll danced on his grave in Alsace-Lorraine.

“Lorraine,” his dry lips repeated. He was married to a girl named Lorraine. But only yesterday Paula had told him that he had no wife.

He put on his bathrobe and slippers, and ran down the hall to Wright’s sleeping quarters. There was no answer to his knock. He tried the door and found that it was locked. He knocked again.

A hospital corpsman came round the corner from the duty desk. “The commander isn’t here, Mr. Taylor. Is there something you want?”

“Where is he?”

“He went up to L.A. last night. Lieutenant Weising’s on duty.”

Weising wouldn’t do. He was too young, and he couldn’t talk freely to Weising. “I want to talk to Commander Wright.”

“He said he’d be back sometime this morning. Can it wait?”

“I suppose it’ll have to.”

But his mind wouldn’t wait. After a breakfast that he was unable to eat, he went back to his room to continue his reconstruction of the past. The dream of the kewpie doll, and the single name it had deposited in his mind, filled him with acute anxiety. But it was the clue he needed, the Ariadne thread in the San Francisco labyrinth.

It took him to a room he remembered very clearly: every detail of the peeling walls, the cracked blind, the clouded mirror hanging precariously over the bureau. He had found this room in a cheap hotel after he left Paula, and had spent a bad night on the thin edge of sleep. He managed to sleep for a couple of hours in the morning, but that was all. Some time before noon he went out and bought a bottle of whisky. He drank a few shots by himself in his room, but the alcohol only depressed him, and he was gripped by loneliness. Company was what he needed, any sort of company. He hid the bottle on the top shelf of the closet and went out to look for a bar.

There was a bar where the singing waiters wore handlebar mustaches and served beer in foaming mugs. There was a bar whose walls and ceiling were mirrors reflecting a sickly fluorescent light and women’s waiting faces. There was a bar with naked pink ladies painted on the walls, their nipples as large and red as maraschino cherries. There was a bar with a roughly finished interior like a log cabin, and a basement where submarine men could play at being under water. He felt out of things there and went to other bars. There was the place in Chinatown where a girl in a kimono served him fried prawns and he was sick in his booth. He had never before drunk past the first onset of drowsiness and sickness, but that day he did. There was a long series of bars, indistinguishable from each other, with a jukebox at one end and a pinball machine at the other. In each of them a white-jacketed bartender with a bored and knowing face served drinks in a semidarkness to shadowy couples and single men and women hunched on leather stools. In one of these, behind the smoke screen of noise that the jukebox laid, the nightmare of Lorraine had begun.

The scene he remembered had the earmarks of a dream. There were a number of people in the long room, but none of them made a sound. His own voice, competing effortlessly with the brawling of the jukebox, issued from his throat without moving his lips. His legs and feet, the hand with which he paid for their drinks and raised his glass to his mouth, seemed as remote as Pacific islands. But he felt carefree and powerful, borne up and thrust forward like a plane by the buzzing in his head.