Oubliette

  He was almost ready to go downstairs and retrieve his car when a message appeared on his phone. It was Rafa. Call me. Now.

  Since the garage was too deep underground to get a signal, Antoine went into the men’s room. “What is it?”

  Rafa’s words came out in a rush. “Dr. Chatterjee. He’s dead. Shot himself in his office right after we left.”

  Antoine sagged against the counter.

  “It’s okay. No one thinks it’s got anything to do with us. No one but those lab workers even knew we there.”

  “That’s not the point, and you know it.”

  “Yeah, I know. He was a good guy.” Rafa sighed. “I’ll miss him and I hope his family is taken care of. But…I know it sounds selfish, but I’m kind of relieved.”

  Antoine took his phone away from his ear, gave it a quizzical look, then held it back to his face again. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you get it? Dr. Chatterjee was the only one who could link the Mnemosyne research back to me. Now he’s gone. I’m safe.”

  “Are you sure about that? With everything else that’s been happening, I’m beginning to wonder if any of us are safe. Ever.”

  “You worry too much, bro.” Rafa paused. “Look, I’ve got a function I’ve got to go to tonight. Some kind of awards thing where one of my clients has to give a speech. But let’s talk in the morning, okay? I finally got those damn amnesiacs at the grocery store to restock my Café Bustelo, so I’ll make us some coffee and call you when it’s ready.”

  “Yeah,” Antoine said. “You do that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Antoine didn’t get his Cuban coffee the next morning. After a sluggish morning run at Hermann Park, he got a phone call from Naomi.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d heard. Rafa was in an accident last night.”

  He had just stepped out of the shower and had almost let the call go to voice mail. Now he sat down on the edge of the bed, dripping all over the sheets. “Where? Is he all right?”

  “He’s in the hospital, is all anyone around here has said. I think management knows more, but they aren’t talking. You know how it is.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “Methodist. I don’t know if they’re letting him have visitors, though.”

  “It’s worth a try.” Antoine stood up and started looking for a pair of pants. “I’m heading over there right now.”

  “Will you call me back if you find out anything?” Naomi said. “I’m worried, but I have an appointment I can’t cancel.”

  Antoine assured her that he would, then called downstairs for his car.

  * * * *

  The hospitals of the Texas Medical Center were close enough that he could run there if he chose, and it took only a few minutes on the road for Antoine to wish he had. Overcrowded and nearly gridlocked even before the plague, the two main arteries were now almost unnavigable due to the constant flow of pedestrians streaming off the train and crossing the street anywhere they saw an opportunity, huddling in packs for protection from the amnesiac drivers. Every inch of forward automotive motion was a painful opportunity for an optimism that was inevitably dashed by a driver dreaming at a green light or a bus stalled for lack of fuel that someone at the Metro barn had forgotten to add the night before and the driver neglected to check. Just before he turned into the garage at the Scurlock tower, a befuddled man wearing nothing but a fluttering hospital gown wandered into his path, AMA and baring his assets with every gust of wind. Antoine remembered that Rafa had told him about these escapees, who sometimes slipped restraints and evaded monitoring to seek their way back to a home whose direction they didn’t know, but felt certain was just around the next corner, traffic be damned.

  He wasn’t familiar with the hospital’s layout so it took Antoine a few minutes of walking and peering at color-coded maps to find his way to the patient information desk. Once there, a receptionist looked up Rafael Estrada in her computer. Hundreds of such inquiries a day had made her poker-faced in the delivery of all forms of information, good, bad or otherwise, so it was in the neutral tones of a newscaster describing foreign business mergers that she informed him that he was in ICU.

  “Can I see him? How can I find out more?”

  She gave him a visitor badge and directions but didn’t offer much hope. “Only immediate family and their approved guests can visit. But the nurses may have a little more information they can share.”

  Antoine clipped the badge to his shirt and hurried to the elevator. After navigating several hallways, all well-marked but populated with confused visitors nonetheless, he found the information desk for the ICU. There he was informed that Rafa had spent several hours in surgery and was “resting.” How much rest a man could get while hooked up to a lot of noisy machines was anyone’s guess but he didn’t question the nurse’s choice of words. “Rafa has no family in Houston,” he said. “How can I be approved to visit him?”

  “His medical power of attorney is Dale Marquette,” she told him, reading from the computer. “If you know him, you can ask him to designate you an approved visitor, or you can wait until a family member arrives. We’ve been told that they’ve been contacted.”

  Antoine nodded. Dale Marquette was Rafa’s immediate supervisor. All employees of Everett Blair were encouraged to give medical power of attorney to someone in the organization if they had no family in the Houston area. At a bit of a loss, he asked for directions to the nearest visitor lounge where he called Naomi and told her what little he had found out. “Have you seen Dale today?” he asked.

  “No, but I’ve been mostly out in the field. He could be at the office right now, or on his way to the hospital. Stay where you are. I’ll ask around and call you back.”

  Antoine called Elaine next. He could tell by the polite timbre of her voice that she wasn’t immediately sure who he was, so he had to remind her. He could hear her typing in the background, then her voice took on a friendlier tone. “How’s it going out there?”

  “I’m at the hospital trying to see Rafael Estrada –the prompter who was in an accident last night. I need to know if someone can cover my morning appointments.”

  Elaine hesitated.

  “He’s one of only two real friends I have in this town,” Antoine told her. “I just want to stay long enough to find out what’s going on and what he might need. I have two appointments this morning – an initial evaluation and a memory games session. Anyone can do that.”

  “I’ll see what I can work out,” she said. “Keep your phone on. I’ll follow up shortly.”

  With nothing else to do, Antoine sat down to wait, alternating between trying to keep himself entertained with the apps on his phone and flipping through magazines left on the low coffee tables of the lounge. He was reading an article about Texas beaches without really understanding a word he was seeing when a tall, neatly-dressed man walked into the room.

  Antoine stood up. He didn’t know Dale well but had met him during a few workshops at Everett Blair. The two men exchanged pleasantries and then Antoine explained that he wanted to be put on the visitors list.

  Dale frowned. “His mother is flying in later today. It might be best to allow her to make that call.” At Antoine’s look of exasperation, he added, “There’s really not much point in visiting right now, anyway. He has a head injury, in addition to a few broken bones and lacerations. They have him in a medically induced coma to help with brain swelling. I get the impression it will be a few days before he knows who is visiting and who isn’t.”

  “Do they know what happened?”

  “As far as they can tell, he was sideswiped by an amnesiac driver and went into a light pole.” Dale gave a slight twitch of his shoulders as though the topic annoyed him. “I’m just surprised this doesn’t happen more often.”

  “Is there a long term prognosis yet?”

  “I doubt it, but who knows?” Dale glanced at his smart watch and dismissed a text. “I don’t mean to sound callo
us,” he said, forcing a smile. “It’s just that until he comes out of the coma, they won’t know much. There’s just no telling with head injuries.”

  “Of course.” Antoine thanked him for the information, and since there was little more he could do until Rafa’s mother arrived, he started winding his way back to the Scurlock Tower, dodging the erratic movements of pedestrians in the hall with hardly a glance. When he returned to his car, though, he realized he couldn’t face either his clients or his apartment. Driving randomly around the city wasn’t a good option either, although it might have appealed if he had known the city in pre-amnesia days.

  On an inspiration he headed to the arboretum. He had been there only once before, with Naomi, and the tall pines and lush undergrowth appealed to him. It was a rare oasis of nature in a city that, while greener and more open than most cities of its size, was frankly urban at every turn, modern and sharp-edged. Right now he needed a break from all those hard angles.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Elaine was unable to get his morning appointments covered, so she rescheduled them to the afternoon, requiring Antoine to move his appointment with David Tennenbaum to later in the week. Throughout his afternoon cases, he was tense and distracted, at times almost as forgetful as his clients.

  He had no way of knowing when Rafa’s mother would be at the hospital but if she had arrived that afternoon she would most likely be there until visiting hours ended, so Antoine chanced a return trip to the Medical Center after finishing with his final client for the day. The evening traffic lacked the manic quality of the morning rush hour and he found Mrs. Estrada in Rafa’s room, as he had expected she might be. A nurse went in to tell her one of her son’s friends was there to visit and after a few minutes, she came into the visitor lounge where Antoine was waiting.

  Mrs. Estrada was slightly plump with middle age but held herself erect with the dignity of a granddaughter of Old Havana. She greeted Antoine politely and warmed up quickly on discovering that this was the friend her son had told her about so often in phone calls.

  “Of course you can visit him,” she said. “I’ll have them put you on their list.”

  When Antoine asked about his friend’s injuries, Mrs. Estrada told him with admirable stoicism that he had a broken femur, a few broken ribs, a punctured lung and some bruising to his liver and spleen. “But it’s the head injury that we’re all worried about,” she said. “The rest will heal in time but the brain…” she sighed.

  “Rafa has a very good mind,” Antoine assured her. “One of the best in this business. If anyone can bounce back, he can.”

  Mrs. Estrada arranged for Antoine to be added to Rafa’s list of approved visitors and then he went into the room with her, not sure what he would see but feeling fairly certain he wouldn’t like it.

  The limp form on the bed bore no relation to the laughing young man who played a deadly game of pool and made an even more lethal cup of coffee. His left leg and rib cage were bandaged and the leg was immobilized. His face and arms were bruised purple, the skin sallow and dotted with stitches and pock marks from glass shards. His head was swaddled, with tubes snaking out of the bandages and dripping fluid into a sealed container at the bedside. Antoine was hit by a momentary sense of revulsion, followed almost immediately by a wave of pity that made the tubes and beeping monitors recede into unimportance.

  He approached the bed and gazed solemnly on Rafa’s face. “Hey, bro,” he said, just in case his friend could hear him. “You’re a little beat up, but you’ll come back okay. Don’t you worry about anything.”

  Antoine stayed until visiting hours ended, then took Mrs. Estrada to her hotel. On the way home he stopped at a pub he and Rafa liked to frequent and ordered a beer. Hell, maybe he would have two – his weekly allotment and Rafa’s, even though he knew full well that wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

  The television behind the bar usually showed national and college sports but tonight it was tuned to a local news show where the lead story was the latest Montrose-area bungalow mishap. The older houses had been succumbing to developers even before the amnesia, but now the wrecking crews were as likely to end up at the wrong house as the right one, leaving hipster power couples homeless. Fortunately tonight’s story had a happy ending: the homeowners in question were even more severely amnesiac than the wrecking crew and were already cheerfully ensconced in their new midtown condo, courtesy of the wrecking company, all memory of their previous home and belongings forgotten.

  Antoine was following the story in disinterested fashion when a familiar person took the stool next to his. “Don’t start,” he told Civ. “I don’t know what you want to say to me, and quite frankly I don’t care. Go away.”

  “I can see you’re worried about your friend.” Civ ordered a black and tan and gave the bartender his credit card. “That was quite a serious accident. Mr. Estrada shouldn’t be alive.”

  “Word gets around,” Antoine muttered. He took a sip of his beer and pretended interest in the TV.

  “Maybe you don’t understand me,” Civ said. “Your friend was doing some very serious double-dealing. We frown on that in my organization.”

  Antoine turned on him, gripped by a sudden horrible suspicion. “What exactly are you trying to say?”

  “Don’t worry. You’re quite safe as long as you play straight with us.”

  “Rafa was hit by an amnesiac who now can’t be found,” Antoine said slowly, waiting to see if Civ would corroborate Dale’s explanation of the accident.

  The man nodded. “A very plausible story. It could happen to anyone.”

  “But it happened to him.”

  “Indeed it did. But let’s not dwell on the past. My friends and I are wondering if you’ve given any further consideration to our offer.”

  “I’ve given it none at all,” Antoine said. “The answer will always be no.”

  Civ paused, mulling over his response. “I think,” he finally said, “that you don’t fully appreciate the work we’re doing, or the benefit it holds for you.” He held up a hand to forestall Antoine’s objections. “Where does most of human misery come from? For those of us in developed countries, it’s rarely the wretchedness of hunger and disease. It’s not even the hurt that others do to us in our personal interactions. What pains us is the remembrance of that hurt, a bit like your sentiments for Miss Naomi, who by the way, is one of my favorite clients.” He grinned in reptilian fashion as Antoine squirmed. “Amnesia is the greatest thing to ever happen to mankind, Mr. Gavin, and we’re inviting you to be a partner in the creation of permanent human happiness.”

  Antoine struggled for words. “This is ridiculous. Are you trying to say the plague was created on purpose?”

  “Oh, no.” Civ gave him an indulgent smile. “You give us too much credit. We simply saw an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity to wipe out who we all are, even though you have the means to stop it.”

  “You still aren’t seeing the vision, are you? Not only can we end individual grief and disappointment, as you have with Rory Tennenbaum, but we can put a stop to wars and finally achieve true social harmony.” At Antoine’s skeptical look, he leaned forward and lowered his voice slightly. “Your family goes back to slave days here in America, a painful thing to remember. But what if you didn’t remember? And what about the descendants of those who enslaved your ancestors and still harbor unkind sentiments? What if they believed they had always loved and cherished black people, celebrating the intelligence and ethics of your race, and all the valuable contributions you’ve made to our society? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  For a moment Antoine was seized with the possibilities, not only for race relations in America, but for troubles around the world: Jews and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, and what about the Islamic infighting in the Middle East? If no one remembered the old hates and rivalries, maybe humanity could finally step out of the emotional stone age that held them back from
creating a world where people took a larger interest in the future than just the narrow scope of their own immediate interests. It would be, in a word, heaven.

  “I see I’ve finally gotten through to you,” Civ said. He stood up. “I don’t want an answer right now because saving mankind from itself is a very big responsibility. Once you’re in, there’s no backing out. Go visit your friend tomorrow and think about what he could have done for his people and for all humanity if he hadn’t insisted on his own selfish agenda. Then you’ll have your answer. We’ll meet again soon.”

  Civ walked out the door before Antoine could collect his thoughts, leaving him with a lot to consider.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Antoine went to see Rafa the next morning, not because Civ had told him to but because he would have anyway. Mrs. Estrada was there and treated him kindly but he wished she would go away, even if it was just long enough to get a cup of coffee so he could have a few quiet moments with his friend and maybe voice his thoughts and fears aloud, even though Rafa could not hear or answer. But Mrs. Estrada didn’t leave. And then nurses came, followed by a doctor, and it was time for Antoine to head out for his first appointment of the day.

  This time as he met with his clients and helped them remember their past, it was with a mind toward what he could tell each of them to make the world a better place. What would happen if he told Jeb Hendrickson that he was committed to environmentally safe oilfield practices, and always had been? What if he told the retired politician that racial harmony had been his lifelong objective and that he was still committed to this goal in his role as elder statesman? What would the world look like if he and every memory prompter in the world whispered such ideas into their clients’ ears? And what would happen if these were the messages that ended up on the evening news and in the special reports read and watched by millions? Would the world really change?

  The next day, having no morning appointments, he met Dymphna for coffee. She was late and seemed befuddled but denied having gotten lost, even though this particular coffee shop was only a few blocks from her rented Montrose duplex. Her uncertain smile and the documents she gave him – duplicates of earlier ones – made it clear she had run out of Mnemosyne. Unless Antoine agreed to Civ’s offer, there would be no more. And even if he did buy into some larger plan to reprogram the world, he would have to keep any such valuable medicine for himself.