Andrew Klavan - The last thing I remember

“Go on, go on,” she said. “Take a seat.”

I hesitated another moment, unsure what to do. Should I run away? Would she turn me in? Then I just said, “Thank you, ma’am.” And I moved to the canvas chair and lowered myself into it. I watched as she lifted the bowl of soup to her lips. She sipped at it noisily, her dreadlocks falling around her face.

“You know my name,” I said.

She came out of the soup and murmured, “Charlie West. Mm-hmm. Jane knows. It’s in the papers.”

She patted the space around herself on the mattress. She found the page she wanted and handed it to me. I took it. Fugitive Killer Caught, said the headline. There was my picture underneath it, right on the front page. I was staring into the camera with wide, frightened eyes. It was a mug shot. They must’ve taken it when I was arrested for Alex’s murder.

“They got ahold of you, didn’t they?” the lady said. “They got hold of you and put out the word, oh yes. Electricity, that’s how they do it. Impulses. Mind control. Oh, they can make you believe anything. They put it in the papers and everyone goes along. Jane knows how it works.”

I actually smiled a little at that. It felt like I hadn’t smiled in a long time, not really. But it was funny: it was obvious that Jane was crazy, but at the same time, what she was saying made a certain amount of sense too.

“You’re not afraid of me, then?” I asked her. “You don’t think I’m a killer, like the paper says.”

“Oh.” She gave a laugh and blew on her soup, leaning into it for warmth. “Oh no, Jane knows you’re not a killer. Jane knows. It doesn’t make sense, does it? If you were a killer, you wouldn’t have saved Jane from the knife-man, would you? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

I scratched my head at that, wondering. Because again, she was right, wasn’t she? It didn’t make sense. Maybe I was just as crazy as she was, but, strange as it may sound, the thought kind of touched me. Here I’d been worrying about whether maybe I really was a bad guy-maybe I was a killer like Detective Rose said. But Jane-Crazy Jane-had come up with the answer. If I was a bad guy, I wouldn’t have helped her. If I was a killer, I wouldn’t be the person I was. I was grateful to Jane for understanding that and for explaining it to me. I was grateful to her for believing in me-even if she was crazy.

Unfortunately, the next thing I knew she was babbling pure nonsense again. “They try to put those things in my head, you know, make me believe them. With electricity. Impulses. But not Jane. They can’t get Jane. That’s why they sent the knife-man. Because I won’t believe the voices. The impulses don’t work on me. I know what they’re up to. I know.” She lifted the bowl and slurped some more soup from it.

I was confused now. If some of what she said was true, how did I know the rest wasn’t? “Uh… who sent the knife-man?” I asked her. “Who sends the impulses?”

She looked this way and that, as if she was afraid someone was listening in. Then she leaned toward me and whispered, “The people from the hospital. They’re the ones. It’s mind control, that’s what it is. They say, no, no, no, no, no, no, but…” She shook her finger in the air and laughed at that idea. “Jane knows.”

I shivered, but I don’t think it was because of the cold. In fact, the little space heater was beginning to warm the place up pretty nicely. It was just kind of spooky being here with her, listening to her weaving between craziness and good sense. So many insane things had happened to me in the last couple of days, it was getting hard to tell which was which.

“They’re all around, you know,” she said.

I licked my dry lips. “Oh yeah?”

“Mm-hmm. The ones from the hospital. Trying to take me back. The ones who are trying to get you. They’re everywhere.”

I nodded. Again, it was sort of crazy and sort of true at the same time.

“You can’t know who to trust,” she said.

“That’s right. I don’t,” I told her.

“You don’t know how to escape.”

“I don’t. They’re everywhere, looking for me.”

“Mm-hmm. Jane knows. Every time you think you’ve figured out what’s what, they change the whole face of things, don’t they?”

“Yes!”

“Pretty soon you’re not even sure who you are anymore. You’re not even sure if their lies are really lies and your truth is really true.”

I shook my head. “I just wish I could remember.”

“Mm-hmm. Jane knows.” She looked at me hard with her big, quick, almond eyes. Her round, innocent face was very serious and intense beneath all the grime. It was as if she felt we had connected with each other, that we were on the same wavelength. It gave me a weird feeling, to understand her, to be in sympathy with her, and to know she was completely mad.

“They want to take away your freedom,” she said.

“They do,” I said. “They do.”

“They want to kill you.”

“I know it.”

She looked back and forth, this way and that, as if they might burst in on us any minute. “They have plans. Big plans.”

“I know! They want to kill Richard Yarrow!”

I don’t know why I told her that. It just sort of came out of me. I mean, we were talking and she was describing things so exactly. I just sort of fell into the conversation as if I were chatting with a sane person. Well, why not, you know? I was all alone, after all. I had no one else to share things with. There was just me and Crazy Jane.

“Richard Yarrow,” Jane answered in a hushed, awestruck voice. Her green eyes darted back and forth.

I nodded. “He’s coming to visit the president tomorrow. They’re planning to kill him somehow, and I don’t know what to do. Everyone wants to arrest me and no one will believe me.”

“They’ll never believe you,” Jane echoed.

“I know. And I can’t just sit by and let Yarrow die.”

“Yarrow,” she echoed. Then her mouth formed a circle. Her big eyes got bigger still. “O-o-o-oh,” she said on a great long breath. “I know Yarrow.”

As I sat in the canvas chair, watching, she set her soup bowl aside and came off the mattress. She started to crawl along the floor on her hands and knees, her eyes searching the newspapers lying under her. The newspapers crinkled and crunched as she moved over them. Soon, comically enough, the cats finished eating and came over and joined her. They rubbed up against her flanks. The four of them-the lady and the cats-crawled around the floor on all fours, Jane’s eyes scouring the newspapers the whole time. It was one of the strangest things I think I’d ever seen.

Finally, she repeated, “Yarrow.” She picked another newspaper page up off the floor. Carrying the page, she crawled back to the mattress with the mewing cats crawling after her. When she’d sat down again, the cats climbed up on her and gathered in her lap. She handed the newspaper page over to me.

153 Closed for Yarrow Visit, the headline read. There on the paper was a map very similar to the map I’d seen on TV earlier. It showed Richard Yarrow’s route from the airport to the president’s vacation home in the Green Hills. Underneath that was a photograph. It showed a whole bunch of state troopers in their khaki uniforms talking to four men in dark suits. The photograph’s caption said: “Secret Service agents brief state troopers on security arrangements for Yarrow’s 11 a.m. arrival.”

I glanced over the news story. The lady sat on the mattress, watching me over the cats and murmuring to herself. The three cats stretched their faces up to her face and rubbed their bodies up against her.

There was nothing much in the newspaper story that I didn’t know already. Yarrow had worked out a new plan to root out terrorism in the United States, and he was coming to present the plan to the president. In a recent speech, Yarrow had said that he felt the threat of terrorism here at home was increasing and had to be dealt with harshly.