Concert of Ghosts Page 15

  Alison walked to the bed, where she sat down alongside Obe. She indicated Tennant and said, “You took this man’s picture once. A long time ago in the Haight-Ashbury. Do you remember that?”

  The ever-optimistic Alison, Tennant thought. She hopes for sensible answers, memories, details.

  “I tear the papers,” Obe said, rather sadly. He sighed. “I never find what I want.”

  “What exactly do you want, Sammy?”

  “A sign, of course. What else would I be looking for? Are you blind?”

  “What kind of sign?”

  Sammy Obe didn’t hear the question. He was lost in a world of his own making. How had it happened? Tennant wondered. If one day he was allegedly normal, what had occurred to destroy him overnight? People snapped; their wallpaper came unglued. But so abruptly?

  Obe said, “Signs come in all forms, you know. I tear the newspapers when I can’t find them. There’s a knack to it, I think. I haven’t quite learned it yet. But I will. I will. I swear to God I will.” He had his hands clenched tightly. “Newsprint comes off on your fingers. Smudges. I once believed the signs might lie in the smudges, not in the papers themselves, but I was spending too much time looking at my own skin, you see. I got to know my fingerprints pretty well. But not the sign.”

  Dear Christ, Tennant thought. This rambling made him sad. It was clearly pointless to go on with this painful excursion, but Alison was undeterred. She dug like an archaeologist who believes, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that a major discovery lies a few feet under the sand.

  “I wish you could explain what you expect,” she said quietly.

  “It may come in the night, of course. Then I might miss it. It’s dark then, you see. That’s the problem. But there are all kinds of problems.” Obe gazed at her. “Who are you?”

  “Alison Seagrove.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Nobody sent me, Sammy.”

  “Mr. Obe, if you don’t mind. I like respect.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “See that you mean it.”

  Alison looked suitably chastised. She was silent for a time, staring at Tennant as if he might—by virtue of his own troubled history—have some insight into Obe’s wandering.

  “Somebody must have sent you,” Obe said.

  Tennant caught an echo of Bear Sajac in this remark. Okay. I got one question. Who sent you? What corner of Sammy Obe’s brain suggested that Alison must have been sent? Messengers, those who controlled the messengers, dark agencies.

  “I promise, Mr. Obe. I wasn’t sent by anyone.” Alison opened her purse. She took out the newspaper photograph. “Is the sign in this picture?”

  Obe didn’t touch the clipping. He got up and walked around the room in a stiff manner, wall to wall, back again, marching to a music he heard only in his own head. Alison held the paper toward him, a supplicant gesture.

  “Please, Mr. Obe. Take a look.”

  “I look at nothing unless I want to,” he answered. “I despise commands and directives. I’m a free agent, you understand. I do a thing only when I want to. You judge me wrongly, girl. You’re an actress. You think you’re showing me respect, but I recognize a facade when I see one. You’re a facade, girl. You might not exist, for all I know. You might be some illusion they’ve brought in here to trick me. How do I know?”

  “Touch me,” she said.

  “I might. I just might.”

  Alison held out her hand. Obe reached for it, caressed it. “You feel like flesh. But I understand—and so must you—that what I feel might not actually exist. I’ve been fooled before.”

  “Please look at this picture,” she said.

  “Obe agrees,” he said. “Sammy Obe agrees to look. But only for a second. I have pressing matters that demand my attention.” He took the clipping, then let it fall from his fingers. “I don’t recognize the significance of it. You claimed it might be the sign. You lied to me. Obe doesn’t like liars. Hah.”

  “You took the picture, Mr. Obe.”

  “What nonsense.”

  “You took it years ago in San Francisco.”

  “Deny deny deny. Look at the logic. If I took the picture, where is my camera? Search the room, you won’t find it. You see.”

  Alison picked up the clipping and sighed. “You also took a photograph you locked inside a safe-deposit box. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Obe shrugged, turned the palms of his hands up.

  “Try this, Mr. Obe. What does the name Maggie Silver suggest?”

  “Silver. Nothing.”

  “You took pictures of her.”

  “So you say.”

  “This is one of them.”

  “Silver. Maggie Silver.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Silver and gold, my blood runs cold.”

  A riddle, Tennant thought. A crazed man’s sorry riddle.

  “Why does your blood run cold?”

  “I lie.”

  “I thought you were concerned with truth, Mr. Obe.”

  “The truth is in the eating, girl. The pantry is the place where the food is kept. Look in the pantry.”

  Alison shook her head. Tennant hadn’t seen her look quite so frustrated as she did now. What had she expected anyway—coherence, answers to her mystery? You didn’t come to a sad lunatic for answers.

  Tennant was ready to leave. This was going nowhere: A pantry, blood running cold, what did these signify? He was depressed by this room now, and by Sammy Obe’s wretched condition.

  “Mr. Obe,” Alison said, still pushing for sense, “don’t you remember anything about Maggie Silver?”

  Obe stared up at the window, stroked his chin, opened and closed his mouth silently. He resembled for a moment a small desperate fish gasping for oxygen in a murky tank.

  “Chinatown, Mr. Obe. San Francisco. Maggie Silver.”

  “San Francisco,” Obe said. “Chinatown. Don’t talk to me about Chinatown!” He became agitated, enraged, a spasm of anger passed through him quickly before he was calm again.

  Tennant moved toward the door. The room choked him. He needed to get far away from here. Alison wasn’t quite ready yet to yield. Christ, she could be irritatingly persistent.

  “Do you remember anything about it?” she asked.

  “Let’s go, Alison,” Tennant said. “I need air.”

  “Just wait, Harry.”

  Obe, whose calm hadn’t lasted, walked to the wall and smacked his forehead against it. The wall, naturally, was padded. They took no chances about self-inflicted pain in this joint. He continued, rather frighteningly, to smack, back and forward, on and on, his movements those of a man ensnared in a bad dream. When he stopped, his face was red; looking quite exhausted, he lay down on the bed.

  “Mr. Obe, let me ask you again. What do you remember of Chinatown?”

  “Zero.”

  “And Maggie Silver?”

  Some small light of understanding came into Obe’s eyes, a momentary thing, as if a clear memory had come to him out of the general chaos of his mind. “Obe thinks of her as a Haight person. Frozen in time and place.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I refuse to prejudice myself.”

  Tennant opened the door. “Alison, for Christ’s sake.”

  Alison sighed again; any small defeat annoyed her.

  “Okay okay okay,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  She walked to the door. Obe sat up suddenly, banging his forehead with a clenched hand. “It was almost the sign.”

  “Almost?” she asked.

  “Almost.” Obe turned his face to the wall. “Now go away.”

  Paul Lannigan was waiting at the end of the corridor. He looked preoccupied. Tennant wondered if he’d been waiting there all the time.

  “Well? How did it go?”

  “Just like you said,” Alison answered.

  “The poor man.” Lannigan shook his head. “Sometimes I feel like a father. Some of my childr
en come home, some go away forever. Sammy is seemingly one of the lost. We try. I admit we don’t always succeed.”

  Alison asked, “What actually happened to him?”

  Lannigan turned his attention to the girl, the full beam of his smile. “It’s hard to say, my dear. He came here in a fearful condition. Oh, that was years ago now. At least he manages to talk every now and then, which you might say is some small improvement over his original state—”

  “What is all that stuff with the newspapers?”

  “That’s Sammy’s private little mystery, I’m afraid. Looking, he tells me, for a sign. A sign of what? All these years later I’m no wiser.” Lannigan looked somewhat sad, as though the limitations of his professional ability depressed him. “Tell the truth, what I sometimes wish for is a wand. Some nifty little magic thing I might wave and, lo and behold, everybody is sound again.”

  A wand, Tennant thought. Sure, we could all use one of them.

  “I’ll see you both out,” Lannigan said.

  They followed Lannigan back along the corridor. They passed the window that overlooked the dining room, which was occupied now. Here and there people sat at tables in the big, pale green room. Trays of food, paper cups, plastic spoons; a few attendants, dressed in pale blue smocks, moved between the tables. The diners, for the most part, seemed indifferent to their surroundings and to one another. Tennant thought: They must sob in the lonely nights of madness, some shuffling and mumbling pointlessly to themselves, others holding conversations with imaginary companions or with devils, angels, gods. Frightened people too mad to understand why they felt as they did. Clinics like this, no matter how brightly painted, no matter how well endowed with rustic prints, no matter how much “creative therapy” went on, invariably failed to hide their true function—to keep the insane off the streets. If families could afford it, they shipped their unwanted, their schizophrenics, their depressives, their basket cases, to such facilities—not to be cured but to be forgotten.

  Tennant felt clammy, his shirt adhering to his skin. The place was not only a clinic but a kind of prison. Even the pastoral prints of hayricks and peasants and women riding in horse-drawn buggies were unconvincing, stilted, bringing, not the sense of calm for which they were intended, but a cruel reminder of the freedom that lay beyond the walls, if only you could make your way out, if you could find a compass to sanity.

  Sammy Obe had lost his compass. Where is yours, Harry?

  He had to get away from this place. He didn’t need to be here.

  Down the stairs, another hallway, then the reception area. The receptionist was behind the desk, flicking through papers. She raised her face, looked at Tennant and the girl absently. Lannigan walked to the front door, which he opened. Rain was still falling, the sky still gloomy.

  “A hell of a day,” Lannigan said. “The forecast is for more of the bloody same.” He shook Alison’s hand. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” He gazed at Tennant and added, “Both of you.” And then he grasped Harry’s hand; his grip was warm, firm.

  Tennant and the girl stepped out into the rain, which swept toward them, windblown and ragged now, changing direction whimsically.

  From the doorway Lannigan called out, “Drive carefully, boyo.”

  13

  When they got inside the car, Tennant said urgently, “Drive. Just drive. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter.” He turned and looked back at the clinic in the rain. Boyo. The voice in his head, the whispers that had come persistently surging up through consciousness: boyo. Seek the calm center, boyo. Cope, boyo. Yes yes Lannigan. You know me, don’t you. You know me from another time. He stared out into the rainy landscape, feeling waterlogged himself, a soul rooted in swampland and struggling toward the light. Only the light was so goddamn far overhead, dimmed to little more than a slit.

  “Speak to me, Harry,” the girl said.

  What was there to say? He shut his eyes. His breathing was strange, fast. “I met Lannigan before. Don’t ask me when or in what circumstances. At the clinic. I’m sure of that.”

  “Why are you sure?”

  “Because I am.”

  “Were you a patient?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Try harder.”

  “Goddamn I’m trying.”

  “Take it nice and slow. Why do you think you were there as a patient?”

  Nice and slow. “Drug abuse treatment. I don’t know. What else could it be?”

  “You want me to turn the car around and go back and talk to the guy?” she asked.

  “No. I’m not going back there.” That place. Lannigan’s handshake. The faces in the dining room. The confinement of small white rooms. No way.

  “If you’ve met him before, why didn’t he say so? Why didn’t he come right out and say it? If you’d been in that place as a patient, it would make perfect sense for him to say ‘How are you now, Harry?’ or ‘How do you feel being back here?’—anything like that. But he didn’t. He acted like he’d never seen you before in his life. Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know his reasons. Maybe he’s simply forgotten. Either that or he doesn’t want to recognize me.”

  “Or the other way around. He doesn’t want you to recognize him. Which is weird. Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “He thinks you’ve forgotten. You’re not supposed to recognize him because because—” She peered through the windshield at the rain. “Because that’s the way it was supposed to be. Maybe he thinks your memory’s been suitably edited.”

  “Edited? Meaning what?”

  Alison said, “What you call the black holes in your life, Harry. The great goddamn chunks of time gone just like that. You can’t put all that down to drug abuse. I can’t accept that. If you were his patient, and you were already blitzed by way too many narcotics when you came to him, hey, you’d be an easy target for the guy. You’re practically a zombie to begin with. The rest of the trip is dead simple. More drugs, say. Some real extensive hypnosis. Manipulation. Who knows the techniques the Irishman has up his sleeve. Exit Harry Tennant, hippie. Enter Harry Tennant, dope farmer.”

  Your memory’s been suitably edited. Tennant saw a distress signal go off inside his head, a flare that rose and fell in bright red disarray. The editing of memory. Snip snip. A recollection here. An image there. In with the whiteout, excise this, get rid of that: wholesale laceration, a larceny of sorts.

  He had a maddening pain in his head. He imagined Lannigan going down into his skull, as if the man held in his hand a surgical probe, a fine sharp instrument, something that pierced bone and scraped the mind. He was nauseated by the idea that Lannigan might have achieved a kind of amputation inside him.

  “I don’t think it happened like that,” he said. He was defensive, and yet what was he defending? His own state of mind? Lannigan? Both? “I don’t think it could have happened like that—”

  “Why not? Because you can’t remember specifics? Is that why? Harry, think—you’ve been fucked over and stripped down and rebuilt, you’ve been distilled and refined and distilled again. You see the bind? You refuse to believe Lannigan did a number on you because he really did a number on you. Oh boy. It’s perfect.”

  “No—”

  “It’s tragic and it’s terrific,” she said. “For some reason the guy wants to blank you out, which he does, only he’s smart enough to build your denial into his creation.”

  “Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Why is what we’re looking for.”

  “It doesn’t make sense—”

  “Sense, Harry? Try this one. Try this nice little coincidence. You and Sammy Obe, known to each other in the dim and distant past, patients in the same place? That’s pulling the string a little too tight for my liking, kid.”

  Alison took her eyes from the road, and the Buick slithered along the rim of a drainage ditch a moment before she corrected her steering. “Oops.”

  Tennant slumped back in his seat. What to say, what to
think. Alison stopped the car. Rain gleamed on the paintwork, slid across the windshield. She reached out and took his hand and pressed it between her own, a simple little touch, but it had an element of grace to it, an attempt to bestow peace on a troubled man.

  “Harry, consider the connections between you and Obe. This clinic. Lannigan. The photograph. The fact that neither of you is capable of remembering much of anything. Both of you—wiped out. You at least have the benefit of sanity. Obe doesn’t even have that.”

  “I wouldn’t go as far as sanity,” he said dryly.

  “Okay. You’re coherent. You lived on certain acceptable terms with the world. You got along day to day growing your plants. Obe, on the other hand, the guy’s in orbit. He’s not of this planet.” She rubbed his skin in tiny circles with her fingertips. “The reason lies in Chinatown, Harry. It goes all the way back to whatever it was you saw outside St. Mary’s Church.”

  Whatever it was, it devastated him. His headache raged as he stared out into the rain. He felt drained. Foundering, he listened to the jackhammers in his head. They had a pounding, crippling familiarity.

  Nobody was following them, or so it seemed to Tennant. But there was always uncertainty. They drove through a series of more small towns, each of which was depressing.

  “Get off the main road,” he said. “Find a motel. Some backwater place. The more obscure the better.”

  The windshield wipers swept back and forth like two metronomes measuring the beat of the weather. Alison drove narrow highways for miles until she found a broken-down motel called The Crimson Motor Lodge, a group of small chalets that would have looked uninviting even in bright sunshine. The man at the reception desk had a walleye and smoky bad breath and wore a threadbare cardigan that had been darned at the elbows.

  “Take your pick,” he said. “Ain’t nobody else staying here, that’s for sure.”