Nova 3 Read online

  I tell myself that Carole and the kids need a tower of strength now. One who can be calm and reassuring and, above all, loving. One who can handle the thousand tedious and aggravating problems that infest every household in this world of diminishing memory. In short, a hero. Because the real heroes, and heroines, are those who deal heroically with the everyday cares of life, though God knows they’ve been multiplied enormously. It’s not the guy who kills a dragon once in his lifetime and then retires that’s a hero. It’s the guy who kills cockroaches and rats every day, day after day, and doesn’t rest on his laurels until he’s an old man, if then.

  What am I talking about? Maybe I could handle the problems if it weren’t for this memory loss. I can’t adjust because I can’t ever get used to it. My whole being, body and mind, must get the same high-voltage jolt every morning.

  The insurance companies have canceled all policies for anybody under twelve. The government’s contemplated taking over these policies but has decided against it. It will, however, pay for the burials, since this service is necessary. I don’t really think that many children are being “accidentally” killed because of the insurance money. Most fatalities are obviously just results of neglect or parents going berserk.

  I’m getting away from Myma, trying to, anyway, because I wish to forget my guilt. I love her, but if I didn’t see her tomorrow, I’d forget her. But I will see her tomorrow. My notes will make sure of that. And each day is, for me, love at first sight. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I wish it could go on forever.

  If I just had the guts to destroy all reference to her tonight. But I won’t. The thought of losing her makes me panic.

  9.

  True date: middle of 1984.

  Subjective date: middle of 1968

  I was surprised that I woke up so early.

  Yesterday, Carole and I had been married at noon. We’d driven up to this classy motel near Lake Geneva. We’d spent most of our time in bed after we got there, naturally, though we did get up for dinner and champagne. We finally fell asleep about four in the morning. That was why I hadn’t expected to wake up at dawn. I reached over to touch Carole, wondering if she would be too sleepy. But she wasn’t there.

  She’s gone to the bathroom, I thought. I’ll catch her on the way back.

  Then I sat up, my heart beating as if it had suddenly discovered it was alive. The edges of the room got fuzzy, and then the fuzziness raced in toward me.

  The dawn light was filtered by the blinds, but I had seen that the furniture was not familiar. I’d never been in this place before.

  I sprang out of bed and did not, of course, notice the note sticking out of my glass case. Why should I? I didn’t wear glasses then.

  Bellowing, “Carole!” I ran down a long and utterly strange hall and past the bathroom door, which was open, and into the room at the other end of the hall. Inside it, I stopped. This was a kids’ bedroom: bunks, pennants, slogans, photographs of two young boys, posters and blowups of faces I’d never seen, except one of Laurel and Hardy, some science fiction and Tolkien and Tarzan books, some school texts, and a large flat piece of equipment hanging on the wall. I would not have known that it was a TV set if its controls had not made its purpose obvious.

  The bunks had not been slept in. The first rays of the sun fell on thick dust on a table.

  I ran back down the hall, looked into the bathroom again, though I knew no one was there, saw dirty towels, underwear and socks heaped in a corner, and ran back to my bedroom. The blinds did not let enough light in, so I looked for a light switch on the wall. There wasn’t any, though there was a small round plate of brass where the switch should have been. I touched it, and the ceiling lights came on.

  Carole’s side of the bed had not been slept in.

  The mirror over the bureau caught me, drew me and held me. Who was this haggard old man staring out from my twenty-three-year-old self? I had gray hair, big bags under my eyes, thickening and sagging features, and a long scar on my right cheek.

  After a while, still dazed and trembling, I picked up a book from the bureau and looked at it. At this close distance, I could just barely make out the title, and, when I opened it, the print was a blur.

  I put the book down, Be Your Own Handyman Around Your House, and proceeded to go through the house from attic to basement. Several times, I whimpered, “Carole! Carole!” Finding no one, I left the house and walked to the house next door and beat on its door. No one answered; no lights came on inside.

  I ran to the next house and tried to wake up the people in it. But there weren’t any.

  A woman in a house across the street shouted at me. I ran to her, babbling. She was about fifty years old and also hysterical. A moment later, a man her age appeared behind her. Neither listened to me; they kept asking me questions, the same questions I was asking them. Then I saw a black and white police car of a model unknown to me come around the corner half a block away. I ran toward it, then stopped. The car was so silent that I knew even in my panic that it was electrically powered. The two cops wore strange uniforms, charcoal gray with white helmets topped by red panaches. Their aluminum badges were in the shape of a spread eagle.

  I found out later that the police throughout the country had been federalized. These two were on the night shift and so had had enough time to get reorientated. Even so, one had such a case of the shakes that the other told him to get back into the car and take it easy for a while.

  After he got us calmed down, he asked us why we hadn’t listened to our tapes.

  “What tapes?” we said.

  “Where’s your bedroom?” he said to the couple.

  They led him to it, and he turned on a machine on the bedside table.

  “Good morning,” a voice said. I recognized it as the husband’s. “Don’t panic. Stay in bed and listen to me. Listen to everything I say.”

  The rest was a resume, by no means short, of the main events since the first day of memory loss. It ended by directing the two to a notebook that would tell them personal things they needed to know, such as where their jobs were, how they could get to them, where their area central distributing stores were, how to use their I.D. cards and so on.

  The policeman said, “You have the rec set to turn on at 6:30, but you woke up before then. Happens a lot.”

  I went back, reluctantly, to the house I’d fled. It was mine, but I felt as if I were a stranger. I ran off my own recs twice. Then I put my glasses on and started to put together my life. The daily rerun of “Narrative of an Old-Young Man Shipwrecked on the Shoals of Time.”

  I didn’t go any place today. Why should I? I had no job. Who needs a lawyer who isn’t through law school yet? I did have, I found out, an application in for a position on the police force. The police force was getting bigger and bigger but at the same time was having a large turnover. My recs said that I was to appear at the City Hall for an interview tomorrow.

  If I feel tomorrow as I do today, and I will, I probably won’t be able to make myself gc to the interview. I’m too grief-stricken to do anything but sit and stare or, now and then, get up and pace back and forth, like a sick leopard in a cage made by Time. Even the tranquilizers haven’t helped me much.

  I have lost my bride the day after we were married. And I love Carole deeply. We were going to live a long happy life and have two children. We would raise them in a house filled with love.

  But the recs say that the oldest boy escaped from the house and was killed by a car and Carole, in a fit of anguish and despair, killed the youngest boy and then herself.

  They’re buried in Springdale Cemetery.

  I can’t feel a retroactive grief for those strangers called Mike and Tom.

  But Carole, lovely laughing Carole, lives in my mind.

  Oh, God, why don’t I just erase all my recs? Then I’d not have to suffer remorse for all I’ve done or failed to do. I wouldn’t know what a bastard I’d been.

  Why don’t I do it? Take the past and shed its hea
rtbreaks and its guilts as a snake sheds its skin. Or as the legislature cancels old laws. Press a button, fill the wastebasket, and you’re clean and easy again, innocent again. That’s the logical thing to do, and I’m a lawyer, dedicated to logic.

  Why not? Why not?

  But I can’t. Maybe I like to suffer. I’ve liked to inflict suffering, and according to what I understand, those who like to inflict, unconsciously hope to be inflicted upon.

  No, that can’t be it. At least, not all of it. My main reason for hanging on to the recs is that I don’t want to lose my identity. A major part of me, a unique person, is not in the neurons of my mind, where it belongs, but in an electromechanical device or in tracings of lead or ink on paper. The protein, the flesh for which I owe, can’t hang on to me.

  I’m becoming less and less, dwindling away, like the wicked witch on whom Dorothy poured water. I’ll become a puddle, a wailing voice of hopeless despair, and then . . . nothing.

  God, haven’t I suffered enough! I said I owe for the flesh and I’m down in Your books. Why do I have to struggle each day against becoming a dumb brute, a thing without memory? Why not rid myself of the struggle? Press the button, fill the wastebasket, discharge my grief in a chaos of magnetic lines and pulped paper?

  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

  I didn’t realize, Lord, what that really meant.

  10.

  I will marry Carole in three days. No, I would have. No, I did.

  I remember reading a collection of Krazy Kat comic strips when I was twenty-one. One was captioned: COMA REIGNS. Coconing County was in the doldrums, comatose. Nobody, Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, Officer Pupp, nobody had the energy to do anything. Mouse was too lazy even to think about hurling his brickbat. Strange how that sticks in my mind. Strange to think that it won’t be long before it becomes forever unstuck.

  Coma reigns today over the world.

  Except for Project Toro, the TV says. And that is behind schedule. But the Earth, Ignatz Mouse, will not allow itself to forget that it must hurl the brickbat, the asteroid. But where Ignatz expressed his love, in a queer perverted fashion, by banging Kat in the back of the head with his brick, the world is expressing its hatred, and its desperation, by throwing Toro at The Ball.

  I did manage today to go downtown to my appointment. I did it only to keep from going mad with grief. I was late, but Chief Moberly seemed to expect that I would be. Almost everybody is, he said. One reason for my tardiness was that I got lost. This residential area was nothing in 1968 but a forest out past the edge of town. I don’t have a car, and the house is in the middle of the area, which has many winding streets. I do have a map of the area, which I forgot about. I kept going eastward and finally came to a main thoroughfare. This was Route 98, over which I’ve traveled many times since I was a child. But the road itself, and the houses along it, were strange. The private airport which should have been across the road was gone, replaced by a number of large industrial buildings.

  A big sign near a roofed bench told me to wait there for the RTS bus. One would be along every ten minutes, the sign stated.

  I waited an hour. The bus, when it came, was not the fully automated vehicle promised by the sign. It held a sleepy-looking driver and ten nervous passengers. The driver didn’t ask me for money, so I didn’t offer any. I sat down and watched him with an occasional look out of the window. He didn’t have a steering wheel. When he wanted the bus to slow down or stop he pushed a lever forward. To speed it up, he pulled back on the lever. The bus was apparently following a single aluminum rail in the middle of the right-hand lane. My recs told me later that the automatic pilot and door-opening equipment had never been delivered and probably wouldn’t be for some years—if ever. The grand plan of cybemating everything possible had failed. There aren’t enough people who can provide the know-how or the man-hours. In fact, everything is going to hell.

  The police chief, Adam Moberly, is fifty years old and looks as if he’s sixty-five. He talked to me for about fifteen minutes and then had me put through a short physical and intelligence test. Three hours after I had walked into the station, I was sworn in. He suggested that I room with two other officers, one of whom was a sixty-year-old veteran, in the hotel across the street from the station. If I had company, I’d get over the morning disorientation more quickly. Besides, the policemen who lived in the central area of the city got preferential treatment in many things, including the rationed supplies.

  I refused to move. I couldn’t claim that my house was a home to me, but I feel that it’s a link to the past, I mean the future, no, I mean the past. Leaving it would be cutting out one more part of me.

  True date: late 1984. Subjective date: early 1967

  My mother died today. That is, as far as I’m concerned, she did. The days ahead of me are going to be full of anxiety and grief. She took a long time to die. She found out she had cancer two weeks after my father died. So I’ll be voyaging backward in sorrow through my mother and then through my father, who was also sick for a long time.

  Thank God I won’t have to go through every day of that, though. Only a third of them. And these are the last words I’m going to record about their illnesses.

  But how can I not record them unless I make a recording reminding me not to do so?

  I found out from my recs how I’d gotten this big scar on my face. Myma’s ex-husband slashed me before I laid him out with a big ashtray. He was shipped off this time to a hospital for the criminally insane where he died a few months later in the fire that burned every prisoner in his building. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to Myma after that. Apparently I decided not to record it.

  I feel dead tired tonight, and, according to my recs, every night. It’s no wonder, if every day is like today. Fires, murders, suicides, accidents and insane people. Babies up to fourteen years old abandoned. And a police department which is ninety percent composed, in effect, of raw rookies. The victims are taken to hospitals where the nurses are only halftrained, if that, and the doctors are mostly old geezers hauled out of retirement.

  I’m going to bed soon even if it’s only nine o’clock. I’m so exhausted that even Jayne Mansfield couldn’t keep me awake. And I dread tomorrow. Besides the usual reasons for loathing it, I have one which I can hardly stand thinking about.

  Tomorrow my memory will have slid past the day I met Carole. I won’t remember her at all.

  Why do I cry because I’ll be relieved of a great sorrow?

  11.

  True date: 1986.

  Subjective date: 1962

  I’m nuts about Jean, and I’m way down because I can’t find her. According to my recs, she went to Canada in 1965. Why? We surely didn’t fall in and then out of love? Our love would never die. Her parents must’ve moved to Canada. And so here we both are in 1962, in effect. Halfway in 1962, anyway. Amphibians of time. Is she thinking about me now? Is she unable to think about me, about anything, because she’s dead or crazy? Tomorrow I’ll start the official wheels grinding. The Canadian government should be able to find her through the International Information Computer Network, according to the recs. Meanwhile, I bum, though with a low flame. I’m so goddamn tired.

  Even Marilyn Monroe couldn’t get a rise out of me tonight. But Jean. Yeah, Jean. I see her as seventeen years old, tall, slim but full-busted, with creamy white skin and a high forehead and huge blue eyes and glossy black hair and the most kissable lips ever. And broadcasting sex waves so thick you can see them, like heat waves. Wow!

  And so tired old Wow goes to bed.

  February 6, 1987

  While I was watching TV to get orientated this morning, a news flash interrupted the program. The president of the United States had died of a heart attack a few minutes before.

  “My God!” I said. “Old Eisenhower is dead!”

  But the picture of the president certainly wasn’t that of Eisenhower. And the name was one I never heard, of course.

  I can’t feel bad f
or a guy I never knew.

  I got to thinking about him, though. Was he as confused every morning as I was? Imagine a guy waking up, thinking he’s a senator in Washington and then he finds he’s the president? At least, he knows something about running the country. But it’s no wonder the old pump conked out. The TV says we’ve had five prexies, mostly real old guys, in the last seven years. One was shot; one dived out of the White House window onto his head; two had heart attacks; one went crazy and almost caused a war, as if we didn’t have grief enough, for crying out loud.

  Even after the orientation, I really didn’t get it. I guess I’m too dumb for anything to percolate through my dome.

  A policeman called and told me I’d better get my ass down to work. I said I didn’t feel up to it, besides, why would I want to be a cop? He said that if I didn’t show, I might go to jail. So I showed.

  True date: late 1988.

  Subjective date: 1956

  Here I am, eleven years old, going on ten.

  In one way, that is. The other way, here I am forty-three and going on about sixty. At least, that’s what my face looks like to me. Sixty.

  This place is just like a prison except some of us get treated like trusties. According to the work chart, I leave through the big iron gates every day at twelve noon with a demolition crew. We tore down five partly burned houses today. The gang chief, old Rogers, says it’s just WPA work, whatever that is. Anyway, one of the guys I work with kept looking more and more familiar. Suddenly, I felt like I was going to pass out. I put down my sledgehammer and walked over to him, and I said, “Aren’t you Stinky Davis?”

  He looked funny and then he said, “Jesus! You’re Gabby! Gabby Franham!”

  I didn’t like his using the Lord’s name in vain, but I guess he can be excused.