Flashback (9 page)

I sat down again. “Tell me about your brother.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm the one with the gun,” I said. “What was he doing in Morocco?”

Brian sighed. “He was working for All Join Hands.”

I gave him a blank look. “Humor me,” I said. “I know less than you think.”

“They're a nonprofit group,” he explained. “They work to bring technology to the emerging world.”

“Computers?” I asked, remembering what the English girl at the Pub had said.

He nodded. “You can't belong to the global marketplace without belonging to the World Wide Web.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I remarked.

“I'm in the business, too,” Brian said.

“Another altruist?”

He shrugged.

“Do you think he's dead?” I asked. It was a terrible question, and as soon as I spoke I wished I hadn't.

Brian looked at me as if I'd just slapped him. “Did you kill him?”

“I don't remember,” I said. I relaxed my grip on the Beretta and lowered my hand and the gun till they were resting on my thigh.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don't remember,” I said. Handing the picture back to Brian, I turned my head slightly and pulled the hair just above my temple aside, revealing the pale scalp beneath. My fingers brushed the raised edge of my scar, the neat circle of the healed wound. “Can you see it?” I asked.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brian lean forward. “What happened?”

“I was shot,” I said.

“Why?”

“That's the big mystery, isn't it? I woke up a year ago in a field in France with a bullet in my head and nothing else. Before that, I don't remember.”

“Amnesia?” Brian asked, skeptically.

“I wouldn't believe me either.”

“But you knew Pat. You remember Pat.”

It took me a moment to answer, and when I did it was with a lie. “No,” I told him. “I don't remember your brother either.”

“What are you doing in Tangier?”

“There was a used ticket stub in my pocket for the Tangier-Algeciras ferry. I thought I might remember something, that someone might know me.”

“Why now? After a year.”

I thought about what to say, how much to trust this person. “It wasn't safe to stay where I was.”

He shook his head, still disbelieving.

“When's the last time anyone saw your brother?” I asked.

“The end of October, a year ago.”

“Do you know the date?”

“The twentieth. He was a regular at the Pub. They had a darts tournament that night. A bunch of people saw him there.”

“Alone?”

Brian nodded.

“Then what?”

“According to All Join Hands, he had a meeting in Marrakech on the twenty-fourth, then headed down to Ourzazate. He was supposed to check in again on his way back, but he never showed up. They called my mom and dad in the States about a week later asking if they knew where Pat was. That's the first we knew something was wrong.”

“Where's Ourzazate?” I asked.

“South of Marrakech, on the other side of the Atlas Mountains.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Work stuff. Evidently he was looking into starting a project with some of the date plantations down there. All Join Hands doesn't know much more. Pat was pretty much on his own.”

“Did anyone see him in Ourzazate?”

“Not as far as I've been able to tell.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“And, you know how many Africans disappear into the Strait of Gibraltar each year? There's a limit to the amount of time the police here can or want to spend on some wide-eyed American who took a wrong turn in the medina.”

“What about the consulate?”

“There's no American consulate in Tangier, but I've made at least a dozen trips to the embassy in Rabat. There's not much they can do. They figure nine times out of ten when someone disappears like this, they don't want to be found.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don't know. You see these old men in the cafés in the Petit Socco sometimes. White guys in burnooses drinking mint tea. At first I used to think maybe that's what happened to Pat, that he read too much Paul Bowles and decided to go native. But that's just not him. Don't get me wrong; he wanted to do this. But he wanted to come home someday, too. Get married, have a couple of kids.”

“With the girl of his dreams,” I said.

“Yeah,” Brian agreed.

We stood there for a moment, each of us silent as the corpse at our feet.

“Where do we go from here?” Brian asked finally.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “Right now, I'd say anywhere but this place.”

I took one last look at Joshi. The coverlet had failed to cloak his outstretched hand, and it lay there, pale and disembodied, still reaching for something.

“There's something wrong with his finger,” I said.

Brian stepped toward the body and took the hand in his own. The dead man's pinky flopped downward at an unnatural angle. “It's broken.”

I winced, thinking of my own encounter with Joshi the night before. The barest hint of violence had been more than enough to get the little man to talk, and yet someone had hurt him. What had that person wanted? What kind of information had Joshi had to give? The same information he'd sold to Brian? My room number at the Continental?

“Let's get out of here,” Brian said.

I nodded in agreement. “I can't go back to the hotel.”

“You can stay at my place.”

“No,” I told him.

“Whatever you want.” He shrugged, then glanced back toward where Joshi lay, as if for emphasis. “It just seemed to me that you and I might be after a lot of the same answers.”

“It's not safe,” I said. “You're not safe with me.”

He turned away and started for the door. “I'll take my chances.”

NINE

“It was Pat's apartment,” Brian explained as we pulled up in front of a nondescript residential building not far from the tourist office. We had walked through the medina to the port entrance, then taken a
petit taxi
to the Ville Nouvelle.

Brian paid the driver, then unlocked the building's front door and motioned for me to step inside.

“How long have you been here?” I asked as we started up the stairs.

“Eight months.”

“And you never thought of giving up?”

“Every day,” Brian admitted. “But when I really thought about it, thought about what it would mean to make that decision, to decide to leave…” He stopped and looked at me. “If I was the one in trouble and Pat was the one looking for me, he wouldn't give up.”

We started upward again in silence. The apartment was on the fifth floor, at the front of the building. It was nicer than Joshi's place, but blander, more utilitarian, all square angles and white paint. An L-shaped front hall led to a galley kitchen and a good-sized living room with a small balcony. Two partially closed doors revealed a bathroom and bedroom.

That it was the apartment of a transplant was obvious. Many of the furnishings were tastefully Moroccan, but the accessories hinted at a life left behind. A bulletin board over the computer desk in the living room was crammed with photographs: well-groomed girls in summer dresses, distinctly un-African gardens in full bloom, a picnic on a beach somewhere. An open cabinet next to the television held several dozen videotapes, the handwritten black-and-white labels marked
Yankees/Red Sox
or
NHL East Finals
. A football rested on an end table.

“Can I get you something?” Brian asked, laying his coat across the back of a chair. “Tea? Something to eat? I've even got good old American peanut butter.”

“No thanks,” I told him. It was well past three by now, and all I wanted was a good night's sleep.

“There are some women's clothes in the dresser in the bedroom,” Brian said. “Hannah's, I've always assumed. And you're welcome to anything of mine or Pat's as well. There's just the one bed, but it's a big one, if you don't mind sharing. I can always sleep out here.”

“No,” I said. “Sharing's fine with me.”

Brian nodded toward the bedroom door. “I'll let you change.”

Hannah's wardrobe was that of a traveler, just a few simple pieces, modest and practical. October fifth, I thought, remembering the last date of Hannah's stay at the El Minzah. It hadn't taken her long to move out of the hotel and in with Pat. I set my pack down, stripped out of my grungy clothes, and pulled on an oversized T-shirt.

Brian was waiting for me just outside the door when I emerged from the bedroom. “Thank my mom,” he said, handing me a brand-new toothbrush. “She sends a care package every couple of weeks. She's big on oral hygiene.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

“There's a clean towel in the bathroom,” he told me. “Do you need anything else?”

I shook my head.

When I came out of the bathroom, Brian was already in bed. I slid in beside him and pulled the covers up over my shoulders. The bed felt good, the sheets clean and soft.

“Did you grow up in California?” I asked.

“Massachusetts,” he said. “A little town outside of Boston.”

Massachusetts, I thought, a collegiate place, all brick and ivy and old maple trees. Cape Cod was there, and Harvard.

“What do your parents do?”

“My father teaches history at a private high school. My mom's an artist, a sculptor.” He reached over and turned the light off, then settled back into his pillow. “What's it like?” he asked. “Not being able to remember.”

I thought for a minute, my eyes accustoming themselves to the darkness so that I could just barely make out the contours of his body beside me. “It's hard to explain. I do remember a lot: facts, languages, how to do things. It's myself I've forgotten.” I paused, frustrated at my own inability to express myself. “It's like a jigsaw puzzle, only half the pieces are lost.” But no, that wasn't quite right either.

Brian didn't say anything. I could hear him breathing, deep and evenly. I was almost asleep when I heard his voice in the darkness.

“What should I call you?” he asked.

“Eve,” I told him, without hesitation. “My name is Eve.”

I opened my eyes, and I could see his face just a few inches from mine, his own eyes wide, alert, and shining in the darkness, almost as if he were watching me.

*   *   *

I didn't go to Dr. Delpay right away, didn't want to. He'd come each day while I was in the hospital, and we'd talked mostly about trivial things, his garden, that year's lingering autumn, the price of persimmons in the Croix Rousse market. I had not minded his visits, had taken a certain comfort in the plight of his climbing roses, the codling moths in his apple trees. He sat in the cushioned visitor's chair in my room and cracked walnuts or pistachios and handed me the meat. Not once did he ask me about what I'd lost. But on the day I was discharged to the abbey, he brought me a bag of figs with his business card tucked inside, and I knew without him saying that if I called or came to him now, it would be for answers.

I've said that in the beginning I craved forgetfulness. I wanted anything but the black wounds of memory that came and went as stealthily as the fox, his red coat slipping in and out of the brambles at the edge of the wood. Mostly there was just a feeling, fear or discomfort, the shove of adrenaline when I walked into the butcher's shop in Mâcon and the smell of fresh blood hit me.

Then, one afternoon in the spring, on a trip to the ruins of the old Cluny abbey, I'd seen a little girl in a yellow dress dart across what, some thousand years earlier, had been the narthex of the vast church. She was maybe four years old, in white sandals and a cream-colored sweater, the bodice of her dress dotted with yellow-and-white daisies. Her hair was pulled into two pigtails, her part slightly lopsided, her face bruised by a smudge of what looked to have been chocolate ice cream.

She was at least twenty feet away, and I saw her for only an instant, but I had a sensation of her as if she were an extension of my own flesh. I closed my eyes, and I could smell her hair, that unwashed child's tang. I could smell the ice cream on her cheek, the sticky sourness of her breath. She was a disheveled little ghost, hands gummed with sugar and saliva, knees darkened by a thin patina of dirt from when she'd knelt to examine some small stone. When I looked again, she had slipped away, and I felt her absence like the bone-deep ache of an old injury before a storm.

That was early May, and by the end of June, the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, I'd come to trust in the child, and in some other, more innocent version of myself. I'd come to believe it the way the sisters believed in God, this great and unknowable specter, a house somewhere, a family, a job, even love, like a suit of clothes hanging forgotten in some dusty closet, waiting to be rediscovered and worn.

It had not occurred to me that the person I feared and the one I longed to recall might have been one and the same, that the woman whose eyes moved warily through a crowd and the one who woke in the middle of the night to the ghostly ache of milk-heavy breasts might inhabit the same person. It did not seem possible to combine such anger and such love in one human being. And so I'd believed I could find one without the other.

When I phoned Delpay, it was if he'd been expecting the call, as if my readiness were as predictable as the first hard green fruits on his apple trees.

“The child,” I stammered.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

No, I thought, though I didn't say it, you don't understand. What I wanted was only the child. Nothing more. As if I could assemble a past from the few bright memories I'd gleaned, the smell of pancakes, the lazy sound of a screen door closing on itself. As if I could choose.