Jonathan Lethem - Gun, with Occasional Music

I was pretty sure the defeated old ape across the table from me didn’t want to hear it. But the other Surface, the grizzled veteran private inquisitor I’d known six years or two days ago, might feel a different way about it, might like to think I was still on the job.

I didn’t think about it long. The Surface who would have liked to know was six years gone. I was going to have to start making the adjustment. I got up and put on my coat.

“Don’t take it too hard, Metcalf,” said Surface again.

“Sure,” I said. I wanted to get out of there, on the chance that what he had might be contagious. Besides, sitting still was making me nervous. I was thinking about the make in my pocket, and my hands were trembling.

I didn’t tell Surface to stay in touch, or take care, or anything like that. I thought he’d appreciate me keeping my mouth shut, so I just turned around and put my hand up when I got to the door. He nodded at me, and I went out and downstairs to the street. The sun was in the afternoon half of the sky now, and my stomach was beginning to chew on itself. It was about a ten-block walk to a place where I used to like to get a sandwich. Maybe it was still there. I started walking.

THE PLACE I HAD IN MIND WAS GONE, BUT THERE WAS another one just like it down the block. Apparently people still ate sandwiches. I broke the inquisitor’s fifty-dollar bill on a ten-dollar heap of bread and mayonnaise and a three-dollar cup of soda, and when the cash register opened up for my money, it performed a little burst of orchestral music that lasted until the drawer was shut again. The guy behind the counter smiled like it was the most natural thing in the world. I wanted to smile back, but the smile wouldn’t come.

“I suppose your jukebox makes change,” I said.

The guy frowned like he didn’t understand. He took a little mechanical box out of his pocket and spoke into a microphone grille on the side of it. “That thing about the jukebox, just now,” he said.

“Just a joke,” said a voice from the box.

“Oh, yeah,” the guy said, and he looked at me and laughed.

I wanted him to be kidding, but he wasn’t. I decided it must have been what Surface meant about people talking into their sleeves, and it made me shudder. I took the sandwich to a table in the back, but my appetite was gone. I ate it anyway. When I was done, I took the cup and the wrapper and put them in the can by the door. It rewarded me with a miniature flourish of trumpets, but this time I didn’t say anything. I went outside instead and spent a quiet minute on the sidewalk putting the incident carefully out of my mind. My hands were trembling, so I put them in my pockets.

The next step, as I saw it, was to acquire some kind of housing and some kind of transportation, and in my situation that meant only one thing. You can sleep in a car, but you can’t drive a room in a flophouse. I located a rental agency and forked over the hundred-dollar bill to a fat guy in a lawn chair as the deposit on a weather-beaten dutiframe with half a tank of gas. I made sure to flash the stuff that looked like a pocketful of hundreds when I handed him the intact bill.

“I need your card,” he grunted.

It was new to me to hand it over to anyone but an inquisitor, but I remembered what Surface said about keeping my mouth shut and learning the rules, and took it out. I had the funny idea he was going to bill me points, but he just looked it over and wrote down the serial number, then handed it back. I looked at the new card for the first time. It had my name on it but it didn’t feel like mine. It was too clean. Mine had the pawprints of a thousand chumps all over it, and I missed it.

That done, the guy let me sign a few forms and drive the wreck away. The hundred was my last real money, which left me with the car, the half tank of gas, and the clothes I was wearing. Plus the packet of make if I wanted to do some fast forgetting. It was looking better and better.

I drove the car up into the hills until I found a view I liked. Then I got out and looked at it. There was a wind coming up off the bay, and it brought with it a smell of salt. It made me think of the ocean, and I entertained a brief fantasy of taking the car and driving down the peninsula to find a beach where I could throw my make and the stuff that looked like money and maybe even my seventy-five points of karma into the surf and then stretch out on the sand and wait to see what happened. I played with it the way you can when you know you’ll never do it. Then I started thinking about the case again.

I got back in the car and drove to the house on Cranberry Street. I didn’t have any particular reason—I just wanted to. The case had started there, with me hired to peer in the windows at Celeste, and maybe I had the idea it would end there too. For all I knew the place was torn down by now, but I was willing to chance a little of my gasoline to find out.

The house was there. I can’t say if I was glad or not. I parked the car and walked around the back, just for the sake of nostalgia. The lot in the backyard was still empty; whoever had the blueprints drawn up six years ago had changed his mind about spending the money. I walked most of the way around the house, but didn’t bother to look in the windows. Nothing on the outside was any different.

Encouraged, I went up to the front and rang the bell. The wait was long enough that I was turning away when the door opened. It was Pansy Greenleaf, or Patricia Angwine. I didn’t know which name was righter. She looked considerably more than six years older, but I recognized her immediately. She didn’t recognize me. I hadn’t aged a day—well, maybe a day—but she stood blinking in the sunlight, drawing a blank.

“My name is Conrad Metcalf,” I said.

The name didn’t make any more of an impression than my face had. I waited, but she just stared.

“I want to talk to you,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Come in. I’ll consult my memory.”

She led me through the foyer. The house wasn’t kept up the way it had been or could have been, but when I walked into the living room to face the sun through that big bay window, it didn’t matter. The architect had designed the room to make you feel small and out of place, and it worked. Pansy still crept through the house like a burglar, and by now she’d lived here at least eight years, so I knew it worked oh her too. She brought me in, pointed to a seat on the couch, and stood for a minute studying my features, knitting her brow in a parody of thought.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. Her voice was light. She looked twenty years older, yet the pall of guilt and sorrow she had carried with her everywhere before seemed completely lifted.

I sat back on the couch and waited while she went into the kitchen. As far as I could tell we were alone in the house. The spot where I was sitting was warm, and spread out on the table in front of me was the last of what looked to have been a bunch of lines of make, and a razor and a straw. I didn’t have to guess what Pansy had been doing when I rang, the bell. The only thing I felt was a vague jealousy.

When she came back, she sat down across from me and put what looked like a pocket calculator with a microphone on the table between us.

“Conrad Metcalf,” she said into the microphone.

I almost responded, but I was cut off by the sound of her own voice coming out of the device on the table. “I’m sorry,” the voice said. “You don’t remember that.”

She looked up at me and smiled, puzzled. I tried not to stare like too much of an idiot. “I don’t recognize your name,” she said. “Perhaps you should check your memory. This could be the wrong house.”

I thought fast. “You got my name wrong,” I said. “Maynard Stanhunt. Try it again.”