The Man Who Remembers

The Man Who Remembers

The call cut off with one short click, and the room went quiet again.

I stayed in the chair. The back of my shirt was soaked through and cold against the wood.

Thirty-one years.

I put my head back and closed my eyes.

I sat with it and waited to get angry. Nothing came up to meet it.

Every memory I had was somebody's work, and the present I was sitting in had been handed to me the same way. The numbers and the name were the only things nobody had dressed up.

I wasn't going to sit there and wait for my turn to be wiped. I needed a way in.

I dragged a hand down my face, put the cable back into the computer, and typed out a message to Michael.

The transfer receipts went back 11 years, and every one of them carried a facility code printed faint along the bottom. Michael ran the code through his legal contacts and came back with a private research foundation.

The name was dull enough to go under in any list of a thousand nonprofits: Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation.

The foundation's website ran to three flat pages in pale gray.

No staff photographs. Not one line about anything they had ever built or funded.

The only things on it were an address in the Westchester suburbs and a landline with an old area code.

The three pages came to about 1,100 words between them, and four of the sentences ran word for word on two different pages. There was a contact form at the bottom of the last one, a box for a name and a box for a message. I typed nothing into it and closed the tab, and the browser asked whether I wanted to leave without saving my changes.

I left the house before it got light and got into the car at the curb.

I sat in the driver's seat and pushed the number into the plastic keypad of the cheap phone, one digit at a time.

The phone was a prepaid I had paid cash for at a gas station outside Poughkeepsie, $19.99, the kind they keep behind the counter with the cigarettes. The card said 60 minutes on the front. I scratched the strip off and keyed the code in, and the display came back with 57.

It rang.

Once.

Twice.

The line hissed and kept hissing.

Click.

"Hello, James."

Nobody answered the way an office answers.

It was a low, warm voice, an old man's, in no hurry at all. It came before I had said my name.

I didn't say anything.

The clock on the dash read 5:51.

He knew who I was. There was nothing in his voice that had to adjust to me. He had been waiting a long time for this call.

"I know you have a lot you want to ask me."

He went on in the same easy way, like an uncle who had been expecting a nephew to come by for months.

"Come out here. I'm making tea."

The Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation sat in a quiet residential block in the Westchester suburbs, ordinary past the point where ordinary is comfortable.

No steel doors, no fluorescent tubes going on and off in a corridor. Nothing out of the movies.

It was a two-story house in gray brick, and the paint on the outside had come off in sheets where the frost got under it.

The runner in the entryway was ash gray and worn along one edge.

A stand by the door held a spiral visitors' log, open, a pen laid across the gutter. The last name in it was from March. On the line under that one somebody had filled in the date column for the day I was standing there and left the space beside it blank.

A fake plant stood in the corner of the hall under a thin coat of dust. The air was thick with old paper and paste.

No guard.

No cameras.

The plainness of it was the cover.

I went up to the second floor, along a wood hallway that creaked the whole length of it, and stopped at the office at the end.

The door stood partway open.

I took a breath and pushed it.

Kessler sat behind a big oak desk loaded with yellowed files. He was 78, in a cream turtleneck, his white hair combed flat. His hands carried the small shake that age puts in them, and he looked like an emeritus professor and nothing else.

His nails were cut short and square and all the same length. On the desk four pencils lay in a row with the points facing the window and the gaps between them even, and the files were squared to the edge of the blotter. Behind him, eight spines in the same black cloth, no titles on any of them. Seven of them stood up and the eighth lay flat across the top of the seven.

"Sit down, James."

Kessler raised his head, and the clear gray eyes smiled at me without hurrying.

He stood up slowly, lifted a ceramic pot, and poured boiling water into two porcelain cups. The tea came out gold and put up a thin line of steam. He pushed one cup toward me the way an old man pushes food at a grandchild who has finally come home.

He held his cup with three fingers under the base and never touched the handle. The shake went out of his hands while he poured and came back when he set the pot down. Over the door a wall clock ran loud enough to hear between his sentences; it read 7:14, and the clock in the car had read 7:18 when I shut the door on it.

"You look tired. The nightmares are back, aren't they."

I didn't touch the tea. My hands stayed closed on my thighs.

"You knew I'd come."

Kessler lowered himself onto the sofa across from me, drank some of his tea, and looked up at me.

Nothing on the sofa arm, nothing on the windowsill. Under the paper the room had camphor in it and something like clove oil. One framed photograph lay face down on the file cabinet with its stand folded out, and the dust around it had been wiped in a clean arc.

"I knew, and I've been waiting 11 years for it. Once your thinking started to fold in on itself you were always going to come looking for the answer yourself. You were a bright child, James. Your father was the same at your age."

"Don't talk about my father."

I said it low. Nothing in the room moved.

"Who are you? Why has your name been on my wife's transfer receipts for the whole 11 years we've been married? And why is the signature on them a doctor who died in 1998?"

Kessler didn't move off it.

He set the cup down on the saucer with a small chink and looked straight at me, forgiving and unbothered.

"Because that doctor is what this foundation grew out of. When he died in 1998 I took over the files."

"Took over the files."

One side of my mouth went up. The next words didn't come out level.

"Then what is the $200,000? More than $200,000 my wife took out of our savings and wired to a foundation with no fertility department in it."

"How do you explain that?"

Kessler let out a small breath. He tilted his head and looked at me the way old men look at a child who has gotten himself confused.

"Call it a maintenance cost, James. Nobody made a dollar off you."

"Your wife never betrayed you. Emily has been carrying a debt your family left behind, and she's been carrying it quietly."

"A debt."

I closed my fists in my lap and the knuckles cracked.

"What is this? Emily told me it was fertility treatment. She lied to me for 20 years, 11 of them as my wife."

"If she hadn't told you that, would you have had 11 quiet years?"

Kessler put the question back to me. It weighed nothing and it landed hard.

"Have you ever asked yourself why a writer as good as you is stuck on broken pieces of memory? Why the crime novels you write come out as dark as they do?"

"I write novels because that's my job."

I raised my voice.

"No, James. You aren't just writing."

Kessler shook his head. His eyes stayed on me and he put weight on every word.

"You've been digging up the past without knowing you were doing it."

"Book four, page 128. 'People confuse forgetting with forgiveness. Forgetting is only the weak man's way out of the room.'"

"I've read all seven of your books, every one of them at least twice. Every line you've written is a hurt child calling for help from somewhere underneath."

I brought my hand down on the desk. The tea jumped and a few hot drops came over onto the wood.

"Stop moving the words around. What did you and Emily do to me? What did you put in my head? Last night I walked down to the basement in my sleep. I was talking in the voice of a 15-year-old. I talked about tape four, about the yellow Parcheesi piece, about blood on a wood floor."

I came forward in the chair and put the next words out one at a time.

"And my wife was in the bed watching me with those flat gray eyes. She wasn't frightened. She sat through it like a play she'd seen a hundred times. So tell me who I am. Tell me who my friends are. Tell me who my wife is."

The room went quiet and stayed that way.

Nothing about the anger startled Kessler.

He only looked at me, and what was in the look was grief.

"Your parents—"

Kessler let out a breath, and the old affection came into his voice.

"They were first-rate scientists, James. Colleagues of mine. Very gifted. They had no place where they stopped."

"Meaning what? Say it straight."

The tea in front of me had stopped steaming.

He filled his cup again before he went on. He said the dining room in that house lost the sun a little after eleven, and that my mother used to turn the table around in June to get the glare off it. He was watching the pot while he said it. I put my hands together in my lap and let him keep talking.

"Years ago your parents started a classified psychiatric project."

Kessler explained it in his own time, in a low voice, like a man telling a bedtime story with blood in it.

"They were taken with rebuilding memory and steering what a person perceives."

"They believed you could delete a psychological injury by going into the brain directly."

"They went too far with it. They went past where medicine lets you go."

"They used children to do it. And when the project got away from them there was an accident. Your parents were killed at the lab."

"And I—"

My parents died in the dining room of our house. I let it stand.

I went down what I had. The police took the front door at seven in the morning, and I was on the seventh step with my back to the wall and both knees wet. The blood on my clothes was theirs. The room the sound had come out of was the dining room, about 12 feet from where I sat.

"I was one of those children?"

"You were the one it cost the most."

Kessler nodded once.

"After your parents died I closed that whole misbegotten project down myself."

"For 31 years I've spent what's left of my life cleaning up after it. The money Emily sends this foundation keeps the files sealed, keeps your name off them, and pays for a particular course of oil treatments for your nerves."

"Without Emily and me holding it off, what you saw at 15 would have taken your brain apart years ago."

I put my hands flat on my knees and left them there.

Everything he said held. It held in every direction I pushed it.

He denied nothing. He took the whole weight onto himself and set the first crime down on my parents.

"Then what about the one calling himself GhostInk?"

I pushed the rest of it aside and went at the thing I had come for.

"Who is he? Why is he sending me manuscripts and squeezing me with them?"

"He's making me write the eighth novel. He told me to stop calling it blackmail and start calling it treatment."

I took hold of the arms of the chair and came forward.

"He knows about the yellow Parcheesi piece. He knows about the child they called B. Kessler, who is he?"

The second I put the man behind the manuscripts into the room, Kessler's face changed for the first time since I had walked in.

The white eyebrows came together, and what came up in his eyes was fear.

It got out of him before he could stop it, and his voice shook.

"You've... you've been in contact with Ethan?"

I stopped.

I kept my hands where they were and counted three seconds before anything in me moved.

Ethan.

I had never said that name.

I had never told Kessler what the blackmailer was called. I didn't have a name to tell him.

So why had it come out of Kessler that easily, and that scared?

I left my face where it was and filed the name. Then I brought my voice down and asked him something else.

"How many children were in that lab?"

I kept my elbows where they were and let the question come out flat, like the next one on a list. Then I picked up the cup, which had gone cold, and drank from it. I had not touched it in 40 minutes. I counted the ticks over the door while I swallowed and got to six.

Kessler heard what had just come out of his mouth.

Something moved in the gray eyes and went back under. He didn't answer the question; he came forward in his chair instead.

Both thin hands came out over the desk as though he meant to take hold of mine, and his voice climbed out of its register.

"Listen to me, James. Don't go near him. I'm asking you."

"Cut off contact with him today."

"Why?"

I shouted it.

"Give me one reason."

"Because Ethan isn't a person in the way you mean it."

Kessler ground the words out, and the gray eyes pulled tight.

"He is the one defective product that came out of your parents' lab alive."

"He came out of it ruined. What's in him got twisted all the way around."

"He carries a hatred for your family that he can't put down. He wants to use the eighth book to pull you back into what happened when you were 15, break the life you have now, and take the rest of it with him."

He took a plain white card out of his jacket pocket. No company, no address, only a cell number written out by hand in black ink.

He pushed it across to me and kept his eyes on my face.

"That's my private line. Trust me this once, James."

"If the sleepwalking starts again, or if your memory starts sliding, call me."

"I'll protect you. Emily and I have been protecting you for 31 years."

I stood up. The chair legs did not move on the rug; there were four dents in the pile and the legs went straight back down into them. The white card was in my hand and I did not remember closing my fingers on it.

I walked out of the gray brick house with nothing left in me.

I sat in the car at the curb a while before I started it.

I got the black notebook out of the glove box and wrote the name on a clean page in block capitals. Under it I put 7:52, which was the clock over his door when he said it, and 8:31, which was the dash while I wrote. Then I copied the cell number off the white card onto the same line. The 7 in it had a bar through the stem, the way my father wrote his.

Kessler's kindness and his good reasons worked on me like an anesthetic. They took the panic down and set me into a new run of questions with no floor under them.

Were my parents the monsters?

Had Emily and Kessler spent 11 years playing the two people holding the door shut, hiding what happened so I could live like anybody else?

And most of all: who was Ethan?