“Okay, Paul, we just had to be sure. He looked like he might have been hustling when you picked him up, so it’s his lucky day. He’s definitely intoxicated, and without any ID or cash, we could have hauled him in for vagrancy. The resemblance is the only reason we know you’re related, otherwise you’d both be at the station.”
“Understood, sir.”
“It’s good you found him. Maybe get him some help.” He switched off his light, we’re finished. “Have a good evening.”
“Thanks. Same to you.”
Back in the car, Steve was a ghost of his former ghost.
“You like whiskey, Steve-only-slower?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll get us a bottle, then. But I’m keeping it in the trunk until we get where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?”
“Wherever it is you sleep.”
FIFTEEN
Steven Edwards led me to an alley that led to a hole in a brick wall that led to another alley that led to a chain link fence peeled back at one corner. At each juncture Steven Edwards asked, You a cop? You gotta tell me if you’re a cop. Steven Edwards was slow.
“No, I’m not a cop.”
Through the fence, we entered the back door of a boarded-up single-story house. No light, no heat, no plumbing, no furniture and from the smell, no ventilation. But no landlord, no rent and, for now, no police raids. I’d expected worse, a dumpster, bus station or freeway underpass.
Steve-only-slower crouched on a foam mat. In the dark, I made out spray paint on the walls, broken glass and puddles on the floor.
“Everybody’s gone,” he said. “They’ll come back late. Do you have my ID card?”
“You need it?”
“It’s mine.”
“Listen, Steve-only-slower, I’d like to buy it from you.”
“No shit? Nothing less than ten bucks. Or else give it back.”
“Tell me what else you have, then we’ll discuss price.”
“No.” He shook his head and the word barked out like a half-sneeze, groove-stuck in the last turning wheel still in his brain. “No. No. No. No. No.” Sputtered over and over, the same snap to his head.
“Ten bucks. Deal. What else do you have?”
“Like what? Why?”
I crouched down in front of him, showed him my empty right hand, made a fist, then fanned out five twenties. He laughed, a stunted child’s crude amusement.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic. That’s a hundred dollars, Steve-only-slower. It’s yours, but only if you show me anything else you’re holding.”
He lifed the foam mat, pulled out a rumpled brown bag.
I dumped it out, tore it in half to make certain I missed nothing and sifted through the contents in a patch of street light with my foot, not wanting to cut myself.
Socks, three. Pants, one. T-shirt, black, one. Comics page from a Sunday paper, one. Plastic bag containing a small bottle of liquid soap and a toothbrush, one each.
Then, jackpot: twenty-three Polaroids of Steve-only-slower as a Hollywood punk posing with tourists. Steven, younger and healthier, with a liberty-spiked mohawk, leather jacket and tartan bondage pants.
A diary, the inside cover inscribed To Steven, to help you on your journey from a Father Riordan at a local rescue mission. Three pages of misspellings and drivel dated with each entry, eight pages of ballpoint pentagrams and band logos—TSOL, Crass, Christian Death, Catholic Discipline, Lords of the New Church. Pentagrams, lightning bolts, swastikas, skulls, knives, amateur ink drawings of female sex organs and a hundred and thirty-nine blank pages. I held the journal upside down, fanned the pages once, twice, nothing fell out. I tucked the pictures inside, kept looking.
Pack of condoms. Wallet-insert card with St. Jude, Patron Saint of Lost Causes. Tucked that into the book. Laminated card with his name and patient number from a methadone clinic. Business cards: One from Father Riordan, another from a cop on a homeless youth task force, one for a shelter. A high-school ID card from Detroit, Michigan—Steven Edwards as red-headed all-American boy. All of the papers, cards, traces of his contact with anyone, not counting the journal, weigh less than seven ounces and will fit in my pocket.
The smell was starting to swell in my stomach. Rapid, frame-splice thought: Godsplitter kicks in while I’m here, I scream my teeth loose for three days, crawling over broken crack pipes, kinked syringes and coagulated afterbirth, I’m stripped clean and left to die. Flask in my pocket, still wrapped from the liquor store. I took it out, snapped the seal and took a long pull. Felt the burn below my eyes and let it grow, fire inside my nose then fade, took another because I wouldn’t want it back once Steve-only-slower put it to his mouth.
“Here,” I said. “Keep it.” I held the book up, the front cover bulging with the pictures and papers crammed inside. “We have a deal?”
He nodded, grinning at the money.
“Anything else, Steve-only-slower? You have anything at all on you in paper?”
“I got a number. Guy gave me his number to call if I needed something.”
“Let’s have it.”
He fumbled, found a matchbook, black with a white outline of a gloved fist on the cover, phone number written on the inside. I kept it.
“Another twenty bucks if you answer some questions.”
“Twenty bucks,” he grinned, whisper-shouting the words, barely able to contain himself.
“Yes, another twenty,” then, “Steve-only-slower, you got any tattoos or scars? Cops check out any distinguishing marks on you?”
“Yeah.”
“Show me.”
He pulled up his left sleeve. A sewing-needle A for anarchy, three inches across on the underside of his forearm, black ballpoint ink seeped deep into his skin.
“Anything else?”
He shook his head, took a drink.
“Hold off on that, I’m almost done. Do you know your birthday?”
“March 11, 1962.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“Benjamin.”
“You ever had a job, Steve-only-slower?”
“Yeah. Paper route. And I worked at a hamburger place for a week.”
“So you have a Social Security number then?”
“No. I used my older brother’s.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jeffrey.” Jeff Edwards.
“With a j or a g?”
“A j.”
“Any other brothers or sisters?”
He shook his head, No.
“How much older is your brother?”
“He’s four years older than me. He was my mom and dad’s favorite.”
“Were both you and your brother born in Detroit?”
“Yeah, both of us.”
Birth certificate for Steven Edwards would be a snap. I could track down an SSN for Jeffrey Edwards, born in 1958, maybe late 1957. While Steve-only-slower had a bad post-juvenile record, the lack of an SSN would work in my favor to wipe his name clean.
I coaxed as much from him as I could, which was as much as he could recall through a fog of chemical damage. He’d never driven legally, had never been issued a license, had been sent to a psychiatric hospital at thirteen, had been shocked, drugged and strapped down. Like most any psych patient not completely delirious or catatonic, he had a photographic memory of his string of conflicting diagnoses and battery of forced medications:
Tranquilizers.
MAO inhibitors.
Neuroleptics.
SSRIs and SDRIs.
Haldol.
Prolox.
Thorazine.
Schizophrenia.
Manic-Depressive Disorder.
Disassociative Borderline Personality Disorder.
He was held, indefinitely, against his wishes—he was a minor and his parents wanted to be rid of him—and indefinitely for Steven Edwards came to three and a half years.
I was looking at Steven Edwards there in the dark, my own fa
ce staring back at me. Homeless, half-insane, dying proof, the existence of everything I was afraid of happening to me.
Steve-only-slower continued, “The hospital closed down and I didn’t want to go home, so I ran away. I’ve been out ever since.”
“Anyone looking for you?” I asked.
“You mean my parents? No.”
“Then you’re not a runaway,” I said. I could see his confusion setting in, so I kept pressing. “How many times you been picked up, Steve-only-slower?”
“I dunno. Buncha times.”
“What for?”
“Stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“All kindsa things.”
Figure purchase, possession, possession with intent to distribute, prostitution, evading arrest, loitering, public nuisance, vagrancy, lying to a peace officer, assault, public intoxication. No credit history, no driving record, good. Big jail record, not good.
“You sick, Steve-only-slower?”
“Need to hook up, that’s all.”
“You got money to do that now. What about those bruises and spots? You sick?”
“I get hives.”
“How long you had those hives that you have now?”
“Dunno.”
AIDS, hepatitis, staph, delirium tremens, liver failure.
“Steve-only-slower, listen up.” I crouched down low and looked into his eyes. “You get picked up by the cops, tell ’em whatever you want to. They’ve already got your prints, so it hardly matters.”
I could see my words bouncing off his android glass eyes. I slowed down.
“But you talk to anyone else, if you go to a rescue mission or a hospice, you’re Steve Carpenter. You’re taking my money, so I’m Steve Edwards from now on. Your name’s Carpenter. Say Steve Carpenter.”
“Steve Carpenter.”
“Steve Carpenter’s a good guy,” I lowered my voice, “Steve Carpenter was a straight-A student, trained for the Olympics before he got into an accident. He couldn’t compete and he couldn’t work. It’s not his fault.”
His glass eyes gave way to a weak smile. I needed him to erase everything and a good story would help him do that. I was being thorough. He wouldn’t last a year.
“You’re not from Detroit,” I said. “You do not have a brother. And you cannot carry anything, ever, that says Steven Edwards. And when you feel really sick, you go to a hospice and tell them that you’re Steve Carpenter.”
They’d be too inefficient or under-resourced to check his records. He’d die as a quasi John Doe, and Steve Edwards would stay off the Social Security Death Index. I stood up to leave.
“Hey,” he said, still smiling. “Could we be brothers? You related to me? I mean…” He trailed off, but the light stayed in his eyes.
“Steve Carpenter,” I said. He missed it. “Steve Carpenter.” Louder.
“Yeah,” then animated again, rapid-fire speech kicking back in. “I think I was abducted. I know I was. They took blood from me, and I’m missing all of this time that I can’t remember, and I think they used my blood to make a baby. I’ve got a half-alien baby. Fight that in court,” and he let out a blast of laughter, then blank, then alert and calm again, all in the span of three seconds. “I was wrong. They cloned me. You…”
“Steve.”
He stopped.
“Can you count backwards from one hundred—” he cut me off, started with ninety-nine, ninety-eight.
“Steve,” I said, stopping him, “can you count backwards from one hundred by groups of seven. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.” Pause, one, two, “One hundred,” pause, “seventy…”
“Steve, we’re not related.”
Paying off street kids with cash, smokes and cheap whiskey, risking jail, walking into a squathole to inhale piss, bribing some kid who happens to look like me into handing over a name buried in criminal charges I wanted nowhere near me. Thinking it over, the physical similarity seemed minor next to the risks. I wrote for his birth certificate anyhow. I’m thorough.
———
For nine months, there was no one. I remained Paul Macintyre until a godsplitter warning tapped me on the shoulder, halfway into my second round at the Formosa. Counting the minutes in my car—twenty to get home, ten to leave a message at work, unplug the phone and tape heavy-duty garbage bags onto the windows to seal out the coming light.
Godsplitter panic cut up my memory and made me careless. I fished through my glove box for the film canister of painkillers and knocked them all back in two swallows from a cup of day-old coffee still in my car.
Empty stomach after two drinks, the dosage hit fast. Halfway through Hancock Park, my right rim scraped against a residential curb when my wheel became too heavy to steer and I felt the top of my skull trapped beneath a rain of invisible welding sparks, fifty minutes ahead of schedule. The Demerol wire-clipped my nerves, my arms and legs inert like the dreams where you can’t run from the thing chasing you.
Tapping on my window. Flickering cherry light rebounding off trees and regal Hancock Park houses. Curtains slit, eyes suspicious, curious and afraid all at once. My last lucid thought: Pull my keys from the ignition so they couldn’t nail me with a 502.
Paramedics peeling my eyes open and strapping a mask to my face.
My name is Paul Macintyre.
The hospital didn’t detain me, but the cops were waiting when I was discharged. Along with a fine and community service, the judge sent me to counseling, a ten-week course with fourteen other drug-related offenders. We met Thursdays to share our feelings with a court-appointed Evaluator. Sharing our feelings included watching documentary films and listening to guest speakers—recovered addicts who came to share their feelings. We wrote lists—three things we’d rescue from our burning house, the three most important people to us, five things that triggered us to drink or smoke or snort or shoot, three happy and sober memories. And we took turns in the circle, sharing our feelings.
I compared the other stories, watched their eyes and hands while they spoke, tagged and numbered tics, fidgets, squirms, scratches and pauses. I clocked how the Evaluator reacted and when, snapped his notes with my eyes when I could. My turn came, I told the truth, that I’d mistaken the dosage. Then confessed that I shouldn’t have had them at all, my eyes downcast and my fists clenched. I did Contrite. The Evaluator signed me out two weeks early.
I quit my job and moved after I burned Paul Macintyre’s papers in my sink. License, birth certificate, Social Security card, diploma, rental agreement, credit card, pay stubs, bank statements and utility records. I bought baby name books and salvaged old phone directories, sources of infinite name combinations. I scoured library microfilm archives for news of defunct hospitals or civic record halls destroyed by electrical fires or ruptured water mains. I used two hundred sheets of blank paper, practicing new upstrokes and downstrokes, serifs and crossbars. I had five new names and histories in different stages of completion lined up for when it came time to use them. I owned thirty-five mail drops, twice as many ghost addresses and a tangle of double-intersecting mail forwards for all of them without a single written record for anything. I have a good memory.
The headaches kept coming. Raymond O’Donnell almost died, so did Barry Miller.
Do you know why you’re here?
How are you feeling now?
Can we talk about your mother and father?
Is there a history of drug use in your family?
Dog. Rain. Trash.
Baby. Door. Lock.
With each interview I got better.
———
I used a San Francisco mail drop as a return address so I could put some distance between the old Steven Edwards and the new. After three months, I had a birth certificate, a Social Security number, and a California driver’s license with a San Francisco address, all for a Steven Edward. I dropped the final s.
I made a replica of his birth certificate, down to the last detail, except for the spelling alteration. I
f anyone bothered to back-trace it, it would prove legitimate and the misspelling would look like a clerical error. The kind I depend on.
All said and done, including the Northern California address and minor spelling change, I was still left with papers for a repeat-felon-junkie-runaway-prostitute-street-hustler picking the lock to death’s door.
But I’d do it all again, even if I knew the risks would be two or three times worse. Because when I came back from my last drive north, I stopped for a drink in a place I’d never been to. And that’s when I met Keara.
SIXTEEN
They used a bag of cat litter to track me down. Sealed inside a 12x12x12-inch cardboard box, ten pounds four ounces, they shipped a dozen of them in a slow ricochet among their offices, knowing that eventually one of the couriers making the drop would be me.
Hazard flashers blinking in a Century City loading zone, I jogged inside to the lobby desk of the glass tower. The guard has seen me before. Not me, but a hundred other names just like me, guys with boxes and parcels and letters and fat envelopes in uniformed trucks and bicycles with nylon bags over their shoulders. All one and the same. It’s why I liked the work. Always moving, never remembered.
“Need a signature from Suite 1154,” I told him, and he waved me to the elevators with barely a glance up from the sports page.
Out the elevator, down the hall, and two raps on the door with no name—just 1154—opened and went inside, and it took me a second to get a read on what was wrong.
“Help you with somethin’?” Guy on a couch in the front room, big guy, in a black sweatshirt and work pants, buzz cut, watching a game on a black-and-white pinhole television, he dug at his nails with a toothpick.
“Need a signature,” I said, set the box on the desk.
He said nothing, just heaved the bulk of himself from the couch and walked through a door into the deeper office.
My scanning reflex kicked in, I measured the room with my eyes, counted the tables and chairs and wastebaskets and phones and which lights were about to die. Got a feel for the air, where it circulated and where it didn’t.
Like some people keep glancing at a television when you talk to them, the way a certain flutter of movement pulls at the corner of their vision and they have to follow it or it won’t stop pulling. Passing reflections in a peripheral window or the breeze rustling a newspaper on the edge of their sight. Same with me. Gotta know where I’m standing. Just have to. Count the flights up in the elevator, feel the speed of the cables and the gentle slowdown, keep my clipboard in my left hand, fingers hidden, package in my right. Eyes to my shoes so I won’t see someone else’s foyer when the doors open and not know the dimensions. I can’t let that happen because if I see it and don’t measure it then it’s like someone flicking the back of my skull with their fingernails for the rest of the day. I’ll have to go back and look.