AMNESIASCOPE by Steve Erickson

Author:Steve Erickson [Erickson, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“He never said anything,” Jasper answered, disoriented. “He finished and I got up and dressed in the dark, and left him there.”

“So you never saw him at all,” Viv said.

“No. I tried to call the next night, and… no one answered. And then I called the night after that, and the night after that. And I never talked to him again.”

After that, none of us said anything. We all sat in the dark staring out the windows where the flames in the distance had begun to smear in the dark fog that blows in from the sea every night and turns the sky red. The blue light of the room and the pool outside where the abandoned bathysphere now bobbed mixed with the red to turn the night to wine; from the house, sitting in this low chair in the middle of the sunken floor, there was no sense, gazing at the windows and mirrors, of any city out there whatsoever. Closing my eyes I thought of Berlin. I hadn’t thought about Berlin for a long time, and now I was trying to remember exactly how long it had been since I was there: was it right before my father died, or right after my marriage? Was it right after the end with Sally, or right before I went to work for the newspaper? I had lived in a little hotel in Savignyplatz where every night I waited in my room for the ring of the telephone, which had so shocked me the first time, since I didn’t know anyone in the city and no one in the city knew me. Lying on the couch in Jasper’s house now, I was trying to remember why I had gone to Berlin in the first place, and all I could think of was that I had gone for the very thing that happened there, so that the part of me I couldn’t live with anymore could die there, without witnesses. I had gone to Berlin because it was as far east of L.A. as I could get before the millennium came roaring down the autobahn…

Next thing I realized I had drifted off awhile. Maybe it was minutes and maybe it was an hour; but the light in the door at the top of the stairs had gone off, and someone had turned off the light of the pool, where the bathysphere floated like a dark tumor. Looking around I was a little surprised to find myself alone in the living room, and I got up and started wandering around, peering into the unlit room where Jasper had shown off to Viv her mementos of the past. I made my way up the stairs. I passed the dark study where Jasper’s father or stepfather or whoever he was had disappeared, and kept moving up the stairs toward the bedroom at the top, just barely conscious that there was no rail to catch me if I misstepped and tumbled down some random shaft that

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