A Stage of Memory Read online

  Derek grinned. “I’ve done that!”

  Bettide frowned. “I’m not certain I understand.”

  “It’s simple, really. I’ve finally started reliving the point, eighteen months ago, when I first started taking the drug.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “And now I’m recalling perfect memories of recalling perfect memories of childhood!”

  Bettide stared at him, blinking first in confusion, then in growing amazement. Derek relished it.

  I must be the first, he realized. The first ever to have done this. Why, that makes me some kind of explorer, doesn’t it? An explorer of inner space?

  “But Derek, you’ll also be reliving some of the worst times of your life—the eviction, for instance, and the lawsuits.”

  Derek shrugged. “Most of that time I was in a Time-Jizz stupor. And it felt like I was in the past six to ten hours for every hour in the present. It was worth it then, it’ll be worth it again.”

  Bettide frowned. “I must think on this, Derek. There may be unforeseen consequences. I’d like to have you come out to the institute for some tests…”

  Derek shook his head. “Uh-uh. You can’t force me. I’m grateful, Doctor. Accidentally you’ve given me the key. But if you stop helping me, I’ll go to the Black Chemists.”

  “Derek…”

  “You think about it, Doc.” Derek got up, knowing he had the advantage. Obviously, the physician wanted to keep him in sight, to observe this new twist.

  “I’ll come back in a week, Doctor Bettide. If you have refills ready for me, I’ll tell you all about it.” He couldn’t help letting a little Vincent Price slip into his voice. “Otherwise…”

  Involuntarily Bettide shivered. Derek laughed and swept out of the office.

  “Darling, don’t go in the water! You’ll get your cast wet!”

  “Aw, Mom!”

  “I mean it!”

  Derek shrugged and kicked a stone along the sandy lake shore. He savored the feeling of being unjustly persecuted, though at the root of it he knew his mother was right. This way, though, he could nurse just a little more mileage out of his broken arm.

  Actually, it had been frightening when it happened. He had fractured it waterskiing early in the summer. But now it seemed like the best thing that ever happened to him. All the girls whose families were summering by the lake competed to fuss over him.

  Tonight that precocious little bundle Jennifer Smythe was going to take him to auditions at the Junior Theater in Big Bear. He hadn’t wanted to go, at first, but when she began making promises about what they would do afterward, he grew more interested.

  Who knows? Derek mused. Maybe they’ll offer me a part in the play. Now, wouldn’t that be something?

  High overhead, a big Boeing 787 growled across the sky. At one time Derek had thought he might want to be a pilot, or an astronaut. Now he watched the plane cynically. That was patsy’s work. There had to be something better—something that would make people want to pay him just to be himself…

  He smiled as he thought of Jennifer. The sunshine was warm on his well-tanned back. He felt, as he often did, on the verge of a great adventure. Anticipation was delicious.

  “Oh, Derek! You were wonderful!”

  “Was I really?”

  “You heard Mrs. Abell. She’s rewriting the male lead so he has a broken arm! And you pretend you aren’t interested.”

  “Oh, sure I am.” He laughed. “Only right now I’m interested in something else even more!”

  Jennifer giggled and took his hand. “Come on. I know a place by the boat sheds.”

  “Mr. Blakeney, you owe four months’ payments on your condominium. If you don’t remit within a week, we’ll be forced to finalize the foreclosure proceedings…”

  Derek slammed the door in the attorney’s face. “I’ll send some money when my next royalty check comes in!” he shouted through the door. Then he turned away and forgot the matter. He had more important problems than some jerk worried about late rent.

  He had run out of Time-Jizz. And Barney, his supplier, had jacked up the prices beyond what he could afford. “It’s the Black Chemists,” the dealer had complained. “They upped the price on me. I gotta pass it on.”

  Derek knew what he had to do. He would go to the new government drug rehab center on Eighth Avenue. They were bragging about how they’d maintain a junkie and give him food, just to keep him “out of the cycle of crime and death.”

  Okay, he told himself. I’ll just go down there and see if they mean it.

  He didn’t even notice that he had crossed the line to calling himself a junkie.

  “Hello. I am Dr. Melniss Bettide. I’ll be supervising your case, Mr…” The small dark man peered at the name on the chart.

  “Good heavens!” he gasped. “You’re Derek Blakeney!” The physician pronounced the name as if he were making a rare and stunning diagnosis.

  Derek forced one of his famous, confident smiles. “Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln…” He shrugged nonchalantly. “Would you like an autograph, Doctor?”

  “Honey! It’s Derek’s agent on the phone! He says Derek has won the part!”

  They thought he was asleep. His father had finally sent him to bed, rather than let him continue pacing, hitting the walls. But that didn’t keep him from waking the instant the telephone rang.

  “Are you sure?” He heard his father’s voice, muffled by his bedroom door. “I don’t want to wake the poor kid with rumors if he’s just going to be let down.”

  “Well, come and talk to the man yourself, then… Just a moment, Mr. Pasternak. My husband is coming to the phone.”

  Derek overheard murmured talk of allowances and percentages, of shooting schedules and tutors to make up for lost schooling… His father was being boorishly insistent about the latter, but Derek didn’t really mind.

  He remembered the auditions—all those poor kids being dragged around by their crazy stage mothers, and he had won the part!

  Why, Mom didn’t even care if I made it. She just thought it would be fun to try! Dad too had been helpful in his gruff, skeptical way. Derek let them have their moment, fussing over the phone with the agent. His turn would come with the new day.

  “Hollywood,” he sighed in false cynicism. “Oh, well. It’s not Broadway, but it’s a start.” He couldn’t help grinning under the covers… wondering if California girls were all they were supposed to be.

  I’ll find out, he thought. Real soon.

  I’m going to be a star.

  Making friends with a movie dog… learning the ways of the back lot… sailing a catamaran on location in Papeete… fencing lessons in Beverly Hills—and other lessons from a beautiful older actress at night in her apartment…

  His first drag of reefer… two years dodging teenage girls who swooned at the sight of him while he played Dobie in Orbit on TV…

  Singing and dancing up a storm in the Broadway version of Borgia!

  … getting plastered with friends…

  …pulling crazy stunts…

  getting an Academy Award nomination for his role in Another Roadside Attraction.

  Somehow, he managed to find a place in a fleabag hotel where the rent was cheap. The landlady had loved his movies and seen every one of his plays. The people at the condominium complex held his awards and his furniture in bond for payments due.

  They let him take the lavalamps.

  Derek didn’t care. Between the serving of the eviction notice and moving into the dingy little room, he had relived ten of the best years of his life. It wasn’t a bad deal at all.

  He replayed that year when he had led the cast of Potemkin at Midnight … and had begun to hear those muttered complaints—that he was becoming self-indulgent, for instance, and intractable in his interpretations. He spurned the critics and went his own way, of course. If the reviewers groused, let them! The marks were happy. And there was always somebody eager to send out for a little more champag
ne—a little more coke.

  Fagin’s Boys, and Girls closed early, but that was because of bad directing and a flawed script. He never much liked musicals, anyway, except for the chicks in the chorus line, of course.

  That Three Vee pilot for a series based on the cartoon writers of the fifties was an interesting project, but the cretins botched it with endless rewrite. It ran three months. No matter. There would always be something else.

  Two weeks after moving into the fleabag, he met Melissa for the first time, again… not in this life, but in his memory.

  He took her home to the Fifth Avenue condo. Her laughter was sweeter than music. Her wit was sharp and brilliant. He had had many lovers with dancers’ bodies, but hers was special.

  In her he found not just pleasure, but joy.

  “Derek, honey, please wake up.”

  “Hmmmph. What? Liss, what is it?”

  She held the phone to her breast. There were tears in her eyes.

  Derek looked up in a fog. He had had one too many nightcaps.

  “Liss? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Frank Furtess. He was up early and heard it on the radio. He figured we’d want to be told, and not find out in the morning papers.”

  “Derek, the Divine Terror Alignment has struck again… Honey, they’ve nuked Albany.”

  Her voice was stark. Hollow with sadness. It took a moment for the words to soak in.

  Albany?

  “Blown… up? The whole town?”

  “Oh, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  At first all he could think of were buildings—the library, the high school, the drugstore in his neighborhood, all tumbled to the ground and smoking. The park, the capitol, his parents’ house.

  “Mom!” he croaked, sitting up. “Dad!”

  He reached out, but not for the telephone.

  Melissa held him while he sobbed. It had been almost a year since he had seen either of his parents in person. The last time he had been so casual… he had even left without bothering to say good-bye.

  This is no good, Derek thought as he came down from that particular memory trip. I’m reliving the bad stuff, now. I’d better get some advice on how to get control over this drug… learn how to force it to draw out only the memories I want. Maybe I’ll talk to that guy Bettide.

  No. This just won’t do at all.

  He dreamt that night. Real dreams, not memories. He dreamt about smoke and fire and guilt. And he wept because there was nobody there to hold him this time around.

  This is no good, Derek thought as he came down. I’m reliving the bad stuff again. Even down to those awful dreams I had when I first realized the drug was going bad. Maybe Bettide was right after all.

  Oh, hell, what am I going to do now?

  Things perked up a bit when he played Anton Perceveral in The Minimum Man, though the critics gave most of the credit for its success to the writers of the adaptation, and to Peter Tiersjens, who directed. Derek nursed his jealousy but said nothing. For a long time he was listless except when he was on stage.

  The crowds identified with Perceveral, but he just couldn’t.

  Melissa nursed him, teased him, cared for him. He let himself be talked into doing Falstaff over the summer, and hated it.

  Peter got him the role of the decade—playing Claude Eatherly in Enola Gay. If anything could snap him out of his doldrums, that part should have.

  It worked, sort of. He stopped moping and became arrogant. He snapped and lashed out and drank and snorted and smoked. He came home with the scent of other women on his clothes. Derek witnessed himself witnessing it all over again. He writhed within and tried to relive the experience without participating at all.

  Yet a glimmer of his present self remained awake to notice things… things he had not seen the first time around. A piece of mail tossed in a corner. A misplaced phone message. A promise forgotten the initial time through, but noted on this passage…

  It didn’t seem to make any difference, though. The past was fixed. The mistakes and casual cruelties repeated inerrantly. Derek struggled not to watch, but started taking larger and larger doses of the drug.

  On the wall of his little room the legs of the runner approached the finish line…

  Derek thought about Sycamore Street, Albany, New York… where his mother would be cooking a Sunday supper, his father would be reading the paper, and his room was a clutter of plastic models, filling the air with the heady scent of glue. He willed himself back to age twelve… back to a place in the warehouse of his cortex where a familiar female voice was about to call out…

  “Supper’s ready!”

  Derek smiled (foolish smile, the latest Derek thought). It had worked! Those were exactly the words he had willed his mother…

  “Come on, Lothario…” Melissa slid the door open and Derek witnessed a former self being surprised, and a still earlier self snarl and curse. As the woman made her decision, and turned to leave, he felt, simultanously:

  “Good riddance!”

  “Melissa, don’t go!”

  And this time added, “Oh, shut up, you fool, can’t you see she’s gone for good?”

  “Drink.” Bettide gestured without looking up.

  Derek grimaced but drank the supplement. “Have they found any more cases like me, doc?”

  Bettide licked his pencil. “A few.”

  “As to your problem of sequential memory access,” he went on. “I think we might have a possible solution.”

  Derek edged forward to listen.

  Derek awoke in a sweat. He shivered as he realized what was happening. The sequential memories were rapidly approaching the present. Soon he would begin recalling memories of recalling memories of recalling memories!

  Where would it end?

  He lay in the damp bed and wondered for the first time about the nature of his present existence.

  He checked his own reality by every test he could devise—from pinching himself to reciting Shaw backward—but none of them proved for certain that he had never been this way before… that he had free will and was not merely reliving another memory at this very moment, in some future self’s Temporin-induced trip.

  “I expected something like this might happen, Derek. But you must be stalwart. Remember Anton Perceveral? Stick with it and I think we can get out the other side.”

  Derek’s hand shook as he drank the required supplement. He put down the beaker and looked from Bettide to the little black notebook and back. “I’m just an experiment to you,” he accused.

  Bettide shrugged. “Partly, perhaps. You are also my patient. And an artist who I would dearly like to return to society. Fortunately all three imperatives make for a common goal. Now, will you agree to coming to the clinic so I can keep you under observation?”

  Derek lowered his head into his hands. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’m lost in Time, Doctor. My thoughts and memories are a whirlwind. Nothing stands still anymore!”

  For a long moment there was silence in the cubicle, broken only by the muttering of the ventilation system. Then Bettide spoke softly.

  “But thoughts, the slaves of Life,

  and Life, Time’s fool,

  And time, that takes a survey of all the world,

  Must have a stop.”

  Derek looked up and blinked. For a clear moment the shabby office seemed built wholly of crystal—the clocks all halted—and the breath of the Universe held in expectant quiet. Light refracted through the diamond walls.

  He knew, right then, that this moment was a new one, whether remembered a thousand times or not… even if witnessed by a hundred thousand versions of himself.

  Each instant is itself, and nothing more. Each a heartbeat of Cod.

  The epiphany passed with another blink of his eyes. Bettide wiped his glasses and looked at Derek myopically, awaiting an answer.

  “I’ll let you know, Doctor,” Derek said quietly as he stood up. “I will be back tomorrow. I promise.”

  “AH
right, Derek. I’ll tell the receptionist to let you in at any time.”

  Derek paused at the door.

  “Thank you,” he said softly. Then he went out into the wintry afternoon.

  The park was nearly empty. Derek climbed the steps to the Summer Theater. He stood on the stage and looked up at the city for over an hour, not moving or speaking, but nevertheless playing a part.

  The ampule gleamed in the light from the torn windowshade. Derek looked at the little glass vial and decided he at last understood Anton Perceveral.

  What else have we, he thought, when we have mined ourselves a tunnel all the way to Hell, than the option of digging further and hoping for a world that’s round?

  “I saw Realm of Magic on the Late Show last week, Derek. You were very good…”

  …the runner on the wall lengthened his stride.

  Enola Gay closed before summer…

  “The Catskills? Jeeze, Peter, what would I do in the friggin’ Catskills?”

  …He had the satisfaction of punching Todd Chestner… but even the groupies drew back after that… He went home alone…

  “Mr. Blakeney, you’ve given some young actors an object lesson in the dangers of success…”

  “It’s called Time-Jizz… The latest thing from th’ Black Chemists…”

  He came home to his fleabag to find a pile of bills… He broke the seal and held the ampule over his vein…

  …mixed the powder and drank, thinking about glue and plastic and little sticky decals…

  …and found himself laughing… high, clear childish laughter.

  Derek relived Derek reliving Derek reliving… The boys laughed together and Derek laughed along. But this time he struggled not to lose consciousness. He was ten again. But ten was no longer a goal. It was a way station. He lived as the child again, but this time he watched.

  “Darling, don’t go into the water!”

  “Aw, Mom!”