First Person Peculiar Read online

  I frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you, Helen.”

  “I remember everything that happened while I was dead, everything I saw and heard, and everything I learned.”

  “I’m sure you did,” said Milt soothingly.

  “I’m not lying and I’m not crazy! I was there! I saw, and I remembered. Only one religion is true, and when I’m a little stronger, I’m going on television, to tell the people what I experienced. They deserve to know the truth, to know which religion is true and which ones are as phony as a three-dollar bill.” She set her jaw. “And no one is going to stop me.”

  “Delusional,” said Patrick sadly.

  Milt nodded his head. “Absolutely delusional.”

  I sighed deeply. “I agree.”

  “What you think doesn’t matter any more. I know. And I’m going to let everyone else know.”

  “Get some sleep,” said Milt, backing away and walking to the door.

  “We can call the nurse if you want,” added Patrick, also walking to the door.

  “I don’t need a nurse. God sent me back with a purpose. I plan to fulfill it.”

  “I’m glad to have met you, Helen,” I said, joining them at the door. “And I hope you regain your strength very soon.”

  Then we were out in the corridor and walking to the elevator.

  “What do you think?” asked Patrick with a worried expression on his face.

  “Crazy as a loon,” said Milt.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She sounded pretty sure of herself.”

  “Delusional people always do,” replied Milt.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t become a mass delusion,” said Patrick.

  I turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t care what she thinks she knows. But what if she can convince others—like a television audience—that she’s right, that two of us have been living and teaching a lie?”

  “More to the point,” I said, “what if she is right?”

  I could tell both of them had been thinking the same thing.

  “If she is,” said Milt as if trying to make himself believe it, “I expect to see you both in temple next week.”

  “Church,” said Patrick. And then he added softly, “I hope.”

  The elevator arrived, the doors slid open, but none of us got on. We just stood there, each lost in his own thoughts.

  Finally Milt said, “You know, I think perhaps we should see her one more time before we leave.”

  “I agree,” I said promptly.

  “Me, too,” added Patrick.

  We weren’t there long, maybe two or three minutes. Then we signaled for the nurse.

  “What happened?” the nurse asked, as we stood back and let her approach Helen’s bed.

  “She suddenly moaned and seemed to have trouble breathing,” said Patrick, as the nurse signaled a Code Blue, summoning what I like to call the Resurrection Squad. We stuck around, but it was obvious that this time her death was permanent.

  Finally they covered her face, and the three of us walked slowly to the door.

  “To come back from drowning, just to die again when she seemed on the road to health,” said Milt to the nurse. “Such a shame.”

  “A tragedy,” added Patrick, as the three of us headed back to the elevator.

  “A pity,” I agreed.

  ***

  I wrote this in 1984, for a chapbook collection titled Unauthorized Autobiographies. It was the first of my stories to be selected for a Best of the Year anthology (by Jerry Pournelle, if you need someone to blame).

  Me and My Shadow

  It all began when—

  No. Strike that.

  I don’t know when it all began. Probably I never will.

  But it began the second time when a truck backfired and I hit the sidewalk with the speed and grace of an athlete, which surprised the hell out of me since I’ve been a very unathletic businessman ever since the day I was born—or born again, depending on your point of view.

  I got up, brushed myself off, and looked around. About a dozen pedestrians (though it felt like a hundred) were staring at me, and I could tell what each of them was thinking: Is this guy just some kind of nut, or has he maybe been Erased? And if he’s been Erased, have I ever met him before? Do I owe him?

  Of course, even if we had met before, they couldn’t recognize me now. I know. I’ve spent almost three years trying to find out who I was before I got Erased—but along with what they did to my brain, they gave me a new face and wiped my fingerprints clean. I’m a brand new man: two years, eleven months, and seventeen days old. I am (fanfare and trumpets, please!) ***William Jordan***. Not a real catchy name, I’ll admit, but it’s the only one I’ve got these days.

  I had another name once. They told me not to worry about it, that all my memories had been expunged and that I couldn’t dredge up a single fact no matter how hard I tried, not even if I took a little Sodium-P from a hypnotist, and after a few weeks I had to agree with them—which didn’t mean that I stopped trying.

  Erasures never stop trying.

  Maybe the doctors and technicians at the Institute are right. Maybe I’m better off not knowing. Maybe the knowledge of what I did would drive the New Improved Me to suicide. But let me tell you: whatever I did, whatever any of us did (oh, yes, I speak to other Erasures; we spent a lot of time hanging around the newsdisk morgues and Missing Persons Bureaus and aren’t all that hard to spot), it would be easier to live with the details than the uncertainty.

  Example:

  “Good day to you, Madam. Lovely weather we’re having. Please excuse a delicate inquiry, but did I rape your infant daughter four years ago? Sodomize your sons? Slit your husband open from crotch to chin? Oh, no reason in particular; I was just curious.”

  Do you begin to see the problem?

  Of course, they tell us that we’re special, that we’re not simply run-of-the-mill criminals and fiends; the jails are full of them.

  Ah, fun and games at the Institute! It’s quite an experience.

  We cherish your individuality, they say as they painfully extract all my memories. (Funny: the pain lingers long after the memories are gone.)

  Society needs men with your drive and ambition, they smile as they shoot about eighteen zillion volts of electricity through my spasmodically-jerking body.

  You had the guts to buck the system, they point out as they shred my face and give me a new one.

  With drive like yours there’s no telling how far you can go now that we’ve imprinted a new personality and a new set of ethics onto that magnificent libido, they agree as they try to decide whether to school me as a kennel attendant or perhaps turn me into an encyclopedia salesman. (They compromise and metamorphose me into an accountant.)

  You lucky man, you’ve got a new name and face and memories and five hundred dollars in your pocket and you’ve still got your drive and ambition, they say as they excruciatingly insert a final memory block.

  Now go out and knock ’em dead, they tell me.

  Figuratively speaking, they add hastily.

  Oh, one last thing, they say as they shove me out the door of the Institute. We’re pretty busy here, William Jordan, so don’t come back unless it’s an emergency. A bona fide emergency.

  “But where am I to go?” I asked. “What am I to do?”

  You’ll think of something, they assure me. After all, you had the brains and guts to buck our social system. Boy, do we wish we were like you! Now beat it; we’ve got work to do—or do you maybe think you’re the only anti-social misanthrope with delusions of grandeur who ever got Erased?

  And the wild part is that they were right: most Erasures make out just fine. Strange as it sounds, we really do have more drive than the average man, the guy who just wants to hold off his creditors until he retires and his pension comes through. We’ll take more risks, make quicker decisions, fight established trends more vigorously. We’re a pretty gritty little group, all right—except t
hat none of us knows why he was Erased.

  In fact, I didn’t have my first hint until the truck backfired. (See? I’ll bet you thought I had forgotten all about it. Not a chance, friend. Erasures don’t forget things—at least, not once they’ve left the Institute. What most Erasures do is spend vast portions of their new lives trying to remember things. Futilely.)

  Well, my memory may have been wiped clean, but my instincts were still in working order, and what they told me was that I was a little more used to being shot at than the average man on the street. Not much to go on, to be sure, but at least it implied that the nature of my sin leaned more toward physical violence than, say, Wall Street tycoonery with an eye toward sophisticated fraud.

  So I went to the main branch of the Public Library, rented a quarter of an hour on the Master Computer, and started popping in the questions.

  LIST ALL CRIMINALS STANDING SIX FEET TWO INCHES WHO WERE APPREHENDED AND CONVICTED IN NEW YORK CITY BETWEEN 2008 A.D. AND 2010 A.D.

  ***CLASSIFIED.

  That wasn’t surprising. It had been classified the last fifty times I had asked. But, undaunted (Erasures are rarely daunted), I continued.

  LIST ALL MURDERS COMMITTED BY PISTOL IN NEW YORK CITY BETWEEN 2008 A.D. AND 2010 A.D.

  The list appeared on the screen, sixty names per second.

  STOP.

  The computer stopped, while I tried to come up with a more limiting question.

  WITHOUT REVEALING THEIR IDENTITIES, TELL ME HOW MANY CRIMINALS WERE CONVICTED OF MULTIPLE PISTOL MURDERS IN NEW YORK CITY BETWEEN 2008 A.D. AND 2010 A.D.

  ***CLASSIFIED. Then it burped and added: NICE TRY, THOUGH.

  THANK YOU. HAS ANY ERASURE EVER DISCOVERED EITHER HIS ORIGINAL IDENTITY OR THE REASON HE WAS ERASED?

  NOT YET.

  DOES THAT IMPLY IT IS POSSIBLE?

  NEGATIVE.

  THEN IT IS IMPOSSIBLE?

  NEGATIVE.

  THEN WHAT THE HELL DID YOU MEAN?

  ONLY THAT NO IMPLICATION WAS INTENDED.

  I checked my wristwatch. Five minutes left.

  I AM AN ERASURE, I began.

  I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED.

  Just what I needed—sarcasm from a computer. They’re making them too damned smart these days.

  RECENTLY I REACTED INSTINCTIVELY TO A SOUND VERY SIMILAR TO THAT MADE BY A PISTOL BEING FIRED, ALTHOUGH I HAD NO CONSCIOUS REASON TO DO SO. WOULD THAT IMPLY THAT GUNFIRE PLAYED AN IMPORTANT PART IN MY LIFE PRIOR TO THE TIME I WAS ERASED?

  ***CLASSIFIED.

  CLASSIFIED, NOT NEGATIVE?

  THAT IS CORRECT.

  I got up with three minutes left on my time.

  My next stop was at Doubleday’s, on Fifth Avenue. The sign in the window boasted half a million microdots per cubic yard, which meant that they had one hell of a collection of literature crammed into their single ten-by-fifty-foot aisle.

  I went straight to the True Crime section, but gave up almost immediately when I saw the sheer volume of True Crime that occurred each and every day in Manhattan.

  I called in sick, then hunted up a shooting gallery in the vidphone directory. I made an appointment, rode the Midtown slidewalk up to the front door, rented a pistol, and went downstairs to the soundproofed target range in the basement.

  It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to insert the ammunition clip, an inauspicious beginning. Then I hefted the gun, first in one hand and then the other, hoping that something I did would feel familiar. No luck. I felt awkward and foolish, and the next couple of minutes didn’t make me feel any better. I took dead aim at the target hanging some fifty feet away and missed it completely. I held the pistol with both hands and missed it again. I missed it right-handed and left-handed. I missed it with my right eye closed, I missed it with my left eye closed, I missed it with both eyes open.

  Well, if the only thing I had going for me was my instinct, I decided to give that instinct a chance. I threw myself to the floor, rolled over twice, and fired off a quick round—and shot out the overhead light.

  So much, I told myself, for instinct. Obviously the man I used to be was more at home ducking bullets than aiming them.

  I left the gallery, hunted up a couple of Erased friends, and asked them if they’d ever experienced anything like my little flash of déjà vu. One of them thought it was hilarious—they may have made him safe, but I have my doubts about whether they made him sane—and the other confessed to certain vague stirrings whenever she heard a John Philip Sousa march, which wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for.

  I stopped off for lunch at a local soya joint, spent another fruitless fifteen minutes in the library with my friend the computer, and went back to my brownstone condo to think things out. The whole time I was riding the slidewalk home I kept shadow-boxing and dancing away from imaginary enemies and reaching for a nonexistent revolver under my left arm, but nothing felt natural or even comfortable. After I got off the slidewalk and walked the final half block to my front door, I decided to see if I could pick the lock, but I gave up after about ten minutes, which was probably just as well since a passing cop was giving me the fish-eye.

  I poured myself a stiff drink—Erasures’ homes differ in locale and decor and many other respects, but you’ll find liquor in all of them, as well as cheap memory courses and the Collected Who’s Who in Organized Crime tapes—and tried, for the quadrillionth time, to dredge up some image from my past. The carnage of war, the screams and supplications of rape victims, the moans of old men and children lying sliced and bleeding in Central Park, all were grist for my mental mill—and all felt unfamiliar.

  So I couldn’t shoot and I couldn’t pick locks and I couldn’t remember. All that was one the one hand.

  On the other hand was just one single solitary fact: I had ducked.

  But somewhere deep down in my gut (certainly not in my brain) I knew, I knew, that the man I used to be had screamed wordlessly in my ear (or somewhere) to hit the deck before I got my/his/our damned fool head blown off.

  This was contrary to everything they had told me at the Institute. I wasn’t even supposed to be in communication with my former self. Even emergency conferences while bullets flew through the air were supposed to be impossible.

  The more I thought about it, the more I decided that this definitely qualified as a bona fide Institute-visiting emergency. So I put on my jacket and left the condo and started off for the Institute. I didn’t have any luck flagging down a cab—like frightened herbivores, New York cabbies all hide at the first hint of nightfall—so I started walking over to the East River slidewalk.

  I had gone about two blocks when a grungy little man with watery eyes, a pockmarked face, and a very crooked nose jumped out at me from between two buildings, a wicked-looking knife in his hand.

  Well, three years without being robbed in Manhattan is like flying 200 missions over Iraq or Paraguay or whoever we’re mad at this month. You figure your number is up and you stoically take what’s coming to you.

  So I handed him my wallet, but there was only a single small bill in it, plus a bunch of credit cards geared to my voiceprint, and he suddenly threw the wallet on the ground and went berserk, ranting and raving about how I had cheated him.

  I started backing away, which seemed to enrage him further, because he screamed something obscene and raced toward me with his knife raised above his head, obviously planning to plunge it into my neck or chest.

  I remember thinking that of all the places to die, Second Avenue between 35th and 36th Streets was perhaps the very last one I’d have chosen. I remember wanting to yell for help but being too scared to force a sound out. I remember seeing the knife plunge down at me as if in slow motion.

  And then, the next thing I knew, he was lying on his back, both his arms broken and his nose spouting blood like a fountain, and I was kneeling down next to him, just about to press the point of the knife into his throat.

  I froze, trying to figure out what had happened, while deep inside me a voi
ce—not angry, not bloodthirsty, but soft and seductive—crooned: Do it, do it.

  “Don’t kill me!” moaned the man, writhing beneath my hands. “Please don’t kill me!”

  You’ll enjoy it, murmured the voice. You’ll see.

  I remained motionless for another moment, then dropped the knife and ran north, paying no attention to the traffic signals and not slowing down until I practically barreled into a bus that was blocking the intersection at 42nd Street.

  Fool! whispered the voice. Didn’t I save your life? Trust me.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the voice at all. Maybe I was just imagining what it would say if it were there.

  At any rate, I decided not to go to the Institute at all. I had a feeling that if I walked in looking breathless and filthy and with the mugger’s blood all over me, they’d just Erase me again before I could tell them what had happened.

  So I went back home, took a quick Dryshower, hunted up Dr. Brozgold’s number in the book, and called him.

  “Yes?” he said after the phone had chimed twice. He looked just as I remembered him: tall and cadaverous, with a black mustache and bushy eyebrows, the kind of man who could put on a freshly-pressed suit and somehow managed to look rumpled.

  “I’m an Erasure,” I said, coming right to the point. “You worked on me.”

  “I’m afraid we have a faulty connection here,” he said, squinting at his monitor. “I’m not receiving a video transmission.”

  “That’s because I put a towel over my camera,” I told him.

  “I assume that this is an emergency?” he asked dryly, cocking one of those large, thick, disheveled eyebrows.

  “It is,” I said.

  “Well, Mr. X—I hope you don’t mind if I call you that—what seems to be the problem?”

  “I almost killed a man tonight.”

  “Really?” he said.

  “Doesn’t that surprise you?”

  “Not yet,” he replied, placing his hands before him and juxtaposing his fingers. “I’ll need some details first. Were you driving a car or robbing a bank or what?”

  “I almost killed this man with my bare hands.”

  “Well, whoever you are, Mr. X, and whoever you were,” he said, stroking his ragged mustache thoughtfully, “I think I can assure you that almost killing people probably wasn’t your specialty.”