Manifest Recall
by Alan Baxter
“The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow’d:
In Lethe’s lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.”
The Aeneid (Book VI), Virgil, 19 BCE
1
I bought a used car off a woman as thin as her hand-rolled cigarettes. “It’s a good price,” I told her. “Why are you selling?”
“Last year,” she said, beginning to tremble, “I had a business and a husband. Now I have neither. I can’t wake up in the middle of the night any more, unable to breathe, panicking about debt.”
I remember that clearly. Her wide, bloodshot eyes, her stained teeth and rat-tail hair. I feel it like a weight on me, my sympathy for that terrible, mundane predicament. It’s indelible that memory. So I know exactly who I got this car from, even if I have no idea where it happened. Or when. Or where I am now.
Or who the hell this shivering girl beside me might be.
Her knees are pulled up to her chest, dirty bare feet on the seat, arms wrapped around her shins. She’s wearing her seat belt, and her hands are secured together at the wrists with a black plastic cable tie. All that I see from the corner of my eye. I dare not turn to look directly at her. Not yet. She stares ahead through the windshield, unmoving. Her face is almost as dirty as her feet and she’s wearing an oversized T-shirt. Whether she has on shorts or only underwear underneath, or even nothing at all, I can’t tell.
The road ahead is dark, no streetlights, only the car’s headlights spiking onto the grey, dirty asphalt. Trees flicker by on either side, occasionally a glimpse of stars in the night sky when the canopy over the road briefly breaks.
Where the hell am I?
I feel as though I’ve just been switched on, like a light in an old house, flooding a room with illumination for the first time in years. Or ever. A flicker of story from Greek mythology comes to me. Lethe. One of five rivers in the underworld of Hades, the river of unmindfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink its waters in order to forget their earthly life. Maybe I’ve died and drunk a gutful of Lethe and this is some strange Hell.
I need to take it back a bit. Instead of trying to figure out why I can’t remember all this stuff, let’s see what I can remember. Can I remember anything?
My name is Eli Carver.
I’m twenty-eight years old.
I killed a man in New Orleans and it made me vomit.
Jesus fuck, I put that gun against his ear and pulled the trigger and his head exploded like a fucking watermelon. I can still see my hand trembling as I did it, recall the wash of terror and disgust. I didn’t want to do it, but something made me. Someone made me. It was a hot night, a warm breeze blowing gently across that balcony overlooking Bourbon Street, carrying the aromas of fried food and cigar smoke. My knees were knocking like saplings in a gale. But I did it. I killed him.
“You back, you fucking weirdo?”
Her voice startles me out of my thoughts and the car weaves slightly left and right.
“Don’t drive off the fucking road and kill us now, you dick.”
She’s still staring straight ahead, still clutching her knees. Her voice is hard, hateful.
I glance across at her, she can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen. “Back?”
“You’ve been a robot since Vernon’s, man. You gotta pull it together.”
She clearly knows more than I do, but I can hardly ask her to fill me in. Can I? She’s the one tied up and filthy. I’m driving. Have I kidnapped her? I suck a long breath in through my nose and try to stay calm, act like I’m not a blank page in an empty notebook. Vernon’s, she said. Do I know any Vernons?
“Can you at least turn the damn heater on?”
It is cold in the car and I’m wearing jeans and boots and a short denim jacket over a black T-shirt. No wonder she’s shivering. I crank up the heat and it blasts from the vents in an instant, warm and musty, stinking of burned oil. Maybe this car isn’t what it used to be. In the memory of buying it, the thing was almost new, smelled of air freshener and the seats were clean. That must have been a long time ago and I obviously had some money back then. I’m not sure what’s in my pocket now.
And it’s cold, but the night I shot that guy was warm. How much time has passed? He was the first, I realize, long ago. But not the last. He was the catalyst, the one who changed me. Here and now, this night, this dark road, was kick-started that night as I turned and vomited into a potted palm on that sweaty balcony. Someone laughing, saying, “Damn, kid, I didn’t think you had it in you. Thought we’d be burying two bodies tonight.”
And through the haze of my vomit tears I see the broad back of a man with a bald head, trailing acrid cigar smoke, walking back through double leadlight doors into the house. His shoulders move as he’s still laughing to himself. Vernon. Vernon Sykes, mobster extraordinaire. Of course. That’s him, but I can’t see his face. Still can’t remember that. Two burly guys clap me on the back, one says, “That puking will stop. You’ll get used to it.”
It’s not something I ever want to get used to.
“We got this,” the other says. “You’re done for tonight. Go and get drunk, get laid. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
The first one leans in, dark skin glittering with a sheen of sweat. “But this is your virgin special. After this you take care of your own stiffs, you get me?”
I just nod, catch a glimpse of the dead guy’s head smeared up the wall, his neck leaking ichor onto the white deck, half his face staring back at me with a blank eye, and I turn and puke again.
Michael. His name was Michael Privedi, he was a rat, and Vernon had me take care of it, because he thought I was a rat too. But I wasn’t.
“We need to stop before I piss my pants,” the girl says.
So she’s wearing pants then. “You just want to run away.”
“Fucking right I do!” she spits. “You’re gonna get us both wasted! But out here in nothing but a T-shirt and panties? I’d be dead before morning. How about you stand beside me and hold my fucking hair while I squat? That work for you? I just need to piss.”
She is so angry, and I can’t blame her. But she’s clearly terrified too. Not even twenty years old. Something jolts through me. Twenty years old. That’s how old I was when I shot Michael in New Orleans. I don’t know how, but I know I’m twenty-eight now. Why do I remember that and so little else? Eight years ago. No wonder the car looks crappy. I pull over to the shoulder and get out, go around to her side and open the door. She looks at me and then tips her head towards my hands.
“I don’t want to hold your hair. Just stay nearby.”
She makes a hissing sound of disgust and moves a yard away to the edge of the trees. It’s awkward for her to pull her underwear down with her hands bound up in front, but she does it, sits, and a stream of steaming piss hits the dirt. She really did need to go. It makes me want to go too, so I move away and piss into the trees with my back to her.
“You really know how to take a girl on a date, Eli,” she says, and there’s a tone of amusement in her voice, the anger a little dissipated.
I can’t help laughing a little. “I bring all my girls to this stretch of highway for a piss.”
She huffs, half a laugh, and I hear her scuffling around as I zip up. I expect her to be hightailing it into the woods as I turn back, but she’s already back in her seat, pulling the car door closed. I get back into the driver’s seat, start the engine, pull away again, the dark highway sliding by. As dark as my still empty mind.
“Where do you think we’re going?” she says.
I don’t even know her name. “North.”
“North? How much further north can we go? There’s nowhere you can go and outrun Vernon.”
Michael leans through the gap between the front seats, one side of his head and half his face a ragged, bloody mess. “She’s right, man. You know she’s right.”
I scream and the car swerves, gravel sprays from the tires. The girl slams her hands to the dashboard to brace herself. “What the fuck, Eli?”
My heart is hammering, my throat feels swollen with it. In the rearview mirror, the back seat is empty. I twist around to see and there’s no one there.
***
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