David Brin: A Stage of Memory

Fine, crystalline powder lay scattered along the cracked molding between the mattress and the wall. The tiny white grains met crumpled tissues and hairballs under the lip of a dingy fitted sheet. They sparkled incongruously along a thin trail across the floor of Derek’s shabby room, reflecting where, it seemed to Derek, there wasn’t any light.

The ripped windowshade cast a jagged knife of daylight on faded Variety clippings taped to the opposite wall. The outline looked like the tapering gap between a pair of legs… the legs of a runner in mid-stretch, making time against the plaster.

Derek Blakeney contemplated the runner.

Headless, torsoless, it had started over near his closet, narrow and slow. As the afternoon wore on, the shadow widened and the jogger seemed to catch its stride, legs reaching like a steeplechaser’s. Its progress across the wall became terrific… a yard, at least, in the last twenty minutes.

At last Phiddipides crossed the finish line and expired in the shadow of the closet door.

Evening. A time for decisions .

He had known all along what his choice would be. Derek’s hands trembled as he reached for the shoebox by the foot of the bed, his unbuttoned cuffs revealing an uneven chain of needle tracks.

Bless the mercy law , he contemplated as he opened the box and took out a sterilized package. Bless the legislators who legalized the paraphernalia, the syringes and needles, so those on the low road won’t have to share it with hepatitis and tetanus .

He broke the sealed wrapper and pushed the bright needle through the rubber cap of a tiny bottle of amber fluid.

Bless those who legalized the new drugs, so an addict needn’t commit crimes to support his slow road to hell. He doesn’t have to drag others with him, anymore .

He wrapped rubber tubing around his arm and held it tight with his teeth as he posed the needle’s tip over the chosen spot. Derek’s way of dealing with short-term pain was to make a dramatic moment of it. When he pierced the protruding vein, his face contorted as if to highlight the pain for the back-row balcony.

Even an out-of-work actor had his pride. Derek had never believed in cheating those in the cheap seats, even if some selfish front-row critic thought one was hamming it up a bit.

A small bead of milky liquid welled from the entry hole as he withdrew the syringe and laid it aside. Derek sighed and sank back against his pillow. If he had calculated it right, this time he would go back ! This time he’d return to the good days, long before…

He closed his eyes as a cool numbness spread up his arm and across his chest. His scalp tingled.

Derek could feel the here and now start to slip away. He tried to concentrate, determined not to let this trip get away from him!

Envision a small frame house on Sycamore Street, he told himself, in Albany, New York…

Sycamore Street, so long ago… Mother would be cooking a Sunday supper, Father is reading the paper, and my old room is a clutter of plastic airplane models, touching the air with a faintly heady scent of glue.

The numbness spread down his jaw and spine, and he willed himself back through the files of his cortex, back to Sycamore Street, back to being twelve years old again… back to where a familiar female voice was about to call out…

“ Supper’s ready !”

It had worked! The new dose had worked! Those were exactly the words he had willed his mother…

“Come on, Lothario! Get your ass out here. I’ve whipped together a simple, nutritious meal for you. You’ve got ten minutes to eat and still get to the theater on time!”

The alto voice carried a quaver of emotion, barely suppressed. Derek realized with a sinking feeling that it was not his mother, after all.

His eyes opened. The drug had worked. The dingy little fleabag room had been replaced by much richer surroundings. But here were no plastic model airplanes. Rather, drifting glass and metal mobiles reflected opal gleams from two garish lavalamps. A row of plaques and statuettes glittered in a mahogany ego-shrine across from the bed. Underneath he felt the warm vibrations of an expensive automassage oil-bed.

Derek felt that strange/familiar pressure as his midbrain surged forward to take over. From now on he would be only an observer, unable even to make his eyes blink while the triggered memories replayed perfectly, vividly, out of his control.

Derek felt a silent, internal cry of despair.

This is where I left off last time! I didn’t want to come back here. This is too close to the present. I wanted to go hack to when I was twelve !

He heard footsteps approach. The door slid swiftly along its rails to bang as it hit the stops. A bright trapezoid of light spilled from the hallway, eclipsed by a slender shadow.

“Well, Derek? Are you going to shave that famous puss and get dressed for the show? Or shall I call Peter and tell him to get your understudy ready again?”

Even the injected form of the damned drug is sequential! I knew it. The thrice-damned stuff takes me forward, one step at a time. I have no choice but to start off each trip reliving where the last one ended!

“Derek?” the figure in the doorway demanded.

“I’ll be out in a frigging minute,” his midbrain answered—controlling his voice—making it happen exactly as it had three years ago. The playback was adamant, unchangeable.

“Shit!” he growled. “A guy can’t even enjoy a little grass in peace, in his own goddamn apartment.” He had to fight the cannabis languor to pull himself up onto one elbow, squinting at the brightness from the hall.

“And speaking of piece, where does a bird like you get off talking to me like that? I picked you out of a bloody chorus line , gave you your first frigging break, and the best frigging time in your life.”

Tall and slender, the woman in the doorway had braided black hair and a dancer’s body. He knew that body and the smell of that hair as well as he knew his own. Right now he radiated a loathing tailored by his knowledge of her, enjoying the carefully chosen words with an actors pride.

“If I weren’t so goddamn stoned, I’d show you what an ungrateful bitch like you can do with her frigging nagging!”

There was a long silence. Then the woman nodded resignedly.

“Right,” she said softly. Then, with a note of tight control, “All right, Derek. Have it your own way. I’ve taken on a wife’s duties, and for more than a year that’s included picking up after your increasingly sloppy body and mind. I thought it worthwhile, and imagined you’d get over your grief like a man. But this time I’m taking you at your word.

“Thanks for the break, Derek. You did get me that first part, and you’ve paid the rent. I’ll only take my clothes with me, and I’ll have my agent forward yours a percentage of my next gig.”

She paused, as if half hoping against hope that he would speak. But he did not. His eyes were unfocused, following the shimmering globs in the lavalamp.

“Good-bye, Derek.”

He had to shade his eyes from the light as her eclipse vanished. He lay back in a floating torpor and a short time later heard the front door slam.

Good frigging riddance, he thought. I can pick up any one of a dozen young things after the show tonight without her around. Life is definitely about to take a turn for the better!

He turned to pick up his smoldering reefer from the ashtray, totally oblivious to a little voice from another time, which cried out plaintively, hopelessly, “ Melissa, please… don’t go …”