Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it. You don’t agree? I don’t agree either. Memory has never amused me much, and I find its tricks more and more wearisome as 1 grow older. Perhaps memory simply stays the same but has less work to do as the days fill out. My memory’s in good shape, 1 think. It’s just that my life is getting less memorable all the time. Can you remember where you left those keys? Why should you? Lying in the tub some slow afternoon, can you remember if you’ve washed your toes? (Taking a leak is boring, isn’t it, after the first few thousand times? Whew, isn’t that a drag?) I can’t remember half the stuff I do any more. But then I don’t want to much.
Waking now at noon, for example, I have a strong sense that I spoke to Selina in the night. It would be just like her to haunt me during the black hours, when I am weak and scared. Selina knows something that everyone ought to know by now. She knows that people are easy to frighten and haunt. People are easy to terrify. Me too, and I’m braver than most. Or drunker, anyway. I got into a fight last night. Put it this way: I’m a lovely boy when I’m asleep. It began in the bar and ended on the street. I started the fight. I finished it too, fortunately—but only just. The guy was much better at fighting than he looked … No, Selina didn’t call, it didn’t happen. I would have remembered. I have this heart condition and it hurts all the time anyway, but this is a new pain, a new squeeze right in the ticker. I didn’t know Selina had such power of pain over me. It is that feeling of helplessness, far from home. I’ve heard it said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It’s true, I think. I certainly miss being promiscuous. I keep trying to remember my last words to her, or hers to me, the night before I left. They can’t have been that interesting, that memorable. And when I woke the next day to ready myself for travel, she was gone.
Twelve-fifteen and Felix arrived, bearing a cocktail or two on his shoulder-high tray. I drink too much coffee as it is.
‘Thanks, pal,’ I said, and slipped him a ten.
Oh yeah, and while I remember— I haven’t briefed you about that mystery caller of mine yet, have I? Or have I? Oh that’s_nght, I filled you in on the whole thing. That’s right. Some whacko. No big deal … Wait a minute, I tell a lie. I haven’t briefed you about it. I would have remembered.
Yesterday afternoon. I was doing then what I’m doing now. It’s one of my favourite activities — you might even call it a hobby. I was lying on the bed and drinking cocktails and watching television, all at the same time… Television is cretinizing me — I can feel it. Soon I’ll be like the TV artists. You know the people I mean. Girls who subliminally model themselves on kid-show presenters, full of faulty melody and joy, Melody and Joy. Men whose manners show newscaster interference, soap stains, film smears. Or the cretinized, those who talk on buses and streets as if TV were real, who call up networks with strange questions, stranger demands … If you lose your rug, you can get a false one. If you lose your laugh, you can get a false one. If you lose your mind, you can get a false one.
The telephone rang. ‘Yeah?’
There was silence — no, not silence but a faint parched whistle, dreary and remote, like the sound that lives inside my head. Perhaps this was the sound the Atlantic made with all its mass and space.
‘Hello? Selina? Say something, for Christ’s sake. Who’s paying for this call?’
‘Money,’ said a man’s voice. ‘Always money, the money.’
‘Alec. Who is this?’
‘It isn’t Selina, man. I’m not Selina.’
I waited.
‘Oh, I’m not anybody very special at all. I’m just the guy whose life you fucked up. That’s all I am.’