A Stage of Memory, Page 2

  Bettide closed the file folder. “Well, our time is up. If you can’t decide now, we’ll just make an appointment for next week.”

  Derek looked up quickly. “I’ll do it! Please. Can we start now?”

  Bettide shrugged. He opened the cardboard box and put about a dozen small bottles into a paper bag.

  “Sign here.” He indicated a release form.

  Derek scribbled his signature and took the bottles. They clinked as he rose to go. “Thanks, Doc. I know you’re trying to help. Maybe if I can just get some peace for a while—get back to Sycamore Street for a rest—I’ll be able to think about things…”

  Bettide nodded reservedly. But, as Derek opened the door to leave, the doctor said, “I saw Realm of Magic on the Late Show last week, Derek. I enjoyed it a great deal. You were very good in that film, even if you were better on the stage.”

  Derek half turned, but couldn’t make himself meet the physician’s eyes. He nodded, clutching the bag, and left quickly without shutting the door behind him.

  4

  The amber-white fluid enticed, and he sought salvation in the past…

  Enola Gay closed before summer. He hadn’t much liked the part, anyway. It made him nervous. Claude Eatherly, the protagonist, was a hard mind to get into.

  No matter. When Peter Tiersjens hired a fresh-faced kid for the road show, that suited Derek fine. He was getting sick of Peter and his damned sanctimony anyway. At the last cast party the elderly director tried to give Derek some “fatherly advice.” Derek fumed in his cups.

  “The Catskills? The fucking Catskills? Jesus, Peter! What kind of shit have you got for brains? What would I do in the friggin’ Catskills over the whole summer? I went there as a kid and all I can remember is being bored enough to kill myself, while my mother and father listened to accordion music and the sound of their arteries hardening!”

  Derek tossed back the last of his drink. He took a cube from the ice chest on his dressing table and dropped it into the glass. His hands shook a little as he poured two jiggers of gin after it, spilling some onto the marble tabletop.

  The sounds of the cast party could be heard through a crack in the door. Old Peter Tiersjens sat back in a folding chair, his feet propped up on a box of costumes. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Derek, I am thinking of you. What will you do now that the show has closed? Do you have any other offers? Do you have savings?”

  Derek shrugged. “My agent says he’s looking over the off-season possibilities. But most of them are out in the sticks, so maybe I’ll just stay in the city this summer. Who knows? I may get a call from the Coast for another movie.” Derek sipped at his drink. Already the evening was shimmering in a fine inebriated gloss—like gauze over a camera lens. He would be grateful for the fog later, when he went out to select a bed partner from the groupies. The Vaseline vagueness would make the stalest teeny-bopper shine like Fay Wray. It was easy to forget Melissa when he was loaded.

  “Derek…” There was a long pause as Tiersjens grew uncharacteristically reticent. Derek experienced the strangest sense of déjà vu, almost as if he knew the director’s very words before they were spoken.

  “Derek, there will be no offers from Hollywood. Your name is mud out there, has been, ever since you walked out on Tunnel in the Sky. Who would hire you after that? To be honest, Derek, your taking the Catskills job wouldn’t be a great favor to me. It’s my way of trying, one last time, to help you.”

  Derek sneered. “Like you helped me by hiring that snot-nosed Todd Chestner to play Eatherly on the road? Dumping me in the process?”

  “Don’t blame that on Todd. The kid idolizes you, Derek. I did it for the good of the show. Todd’s been covering for you half of the time anyway. Anyone but me would have replaced you three months ago.”

  “But Derek, I am willing to give it one more go, for old times’ sake. Take the Catskills job, and get off this cycle of self-destruction while there’s still a chance!”

  For a moment, Derek found himself captured by the man’s intensity. Peter Tiersjens could take a platoon of blase actors and light the fire of Melpomene inside them with a few words. “Derek,” he urged. “You used to say there was nothing more contemptible than the artist who lost himself on the Edge. Now you are sacrificing everything on the altar of Bacchus. ’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god!”

  In the half-drunken fog, Derek’s belligerent side won a brief, but bitter, struggle.

  “ ‘Cry, Troyans, Cry!’ ” He mocked the older man, quoting from the same play. “Cassandra, you can go to hell.” He stood up and walked unsteadily to the door. On the way he kicked Peter’s chair. His fists clenched in pleasure at the resultant shout and crash, and he left without looking back.

  Later he had the satisfaction of punching Todd Chestner in his fatuous, earnest young face. It would take makeup an extra half hour to get the twerp ready, during the first week of the road show. That was some satisfaction, at least.

  After that, though, even the groupies drew back. And that evening he went home alone.

  “Uh!”

  Derek awakened suddenly from the drug-induced playback. He shuddered, and for a long time just lay there on the unkempt mattress, breathing.

  The new drug certainly did release a charged, totally vivid experience. It also drew out the playbacks more rapidly.

  All he had to do was somehow endure the next three years’ worth of memory recall. That’s all. At this rate it shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, real time. A few more weeks, then, if Bettide was right, it would be back to the golden years!

  Derek had come to believe the drug did more than simply play back chemical memories inscribed in the brain. He was half convinced it actually took one back. Personally. And when the bad times were through he would be free once more to cycle back to childhood… to model airplanes and long summer afternoons… to ice cream and the sweetness of precocious first love… to a time when there were no regrets.

  He got up, stretching to ease a crick in his back, and slipped a Diet-Perf dinner into the rusty old microwave. He barely tasted the meal when he spooned it down.

  Derek got out the log Dr. Bettide had given him. Success depended on the physician’s goodwill, so he wrote down the times and places he had returned to… avoiding mention of the nasty little personal details. They were irrelevant, anyway.

  He watched the Late Show on TV until, at last, sleep arrived. Then came the inevitable struggle with his dreams, trying to make them conform to his will. But they were not pliant, and had their way with him.

  “Blakeney, just who do you think you are? This is the third time you’ve come in late and stoned, and gotten belligerent with the audience! We may be a small-time company, but we’ve got our reputations to consider…”

  “Reputations!” Derek sniffed noisily. He had been doing a lot of coke lately and his sinuses stung. That only made him angrier. “Reputations, my eye! You’re a bunch of diapered juveniles pandering to tourists in a little uptown improv club, calling yourselves actors. Here I am, willing to lend you my name and my services, and you talk to me about reputations?”

  “Why, you conceited windbag!” One of the young men had to be physically restrained. Derek grinned as the others held the fellow back, knowing they would never dare back up their bluster with physical force.

  “Conceit, my young friend, is a matter of interpretation. It’s all relative. Haven’t you learned that yet?” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “I try so hard to pass on what I know, yet the next generation is obdurate!”

  One of the older youths stepped before Derek.

  “Yes, Mr. Blakeney, you have taught us a thing or two.”

  Derek smiled back benignly. But the fellow was not apologizing.

  “You’ve given a bunch of hungry young actors an object lesson in the dangers of success, Mr. Blakeney. You’ve shown us how far the mighty can fall, when arrogance substitutes for
self-respect. For teaching us that, we’ll slice you a percentage of the rest of the shows this month. It won’t be necessary for you to return.”

  Derek snarled. “You can’t do that! We have a contract!”

  “We also have witnesses to your foulmouthed abuse of paying customers, Mr. Blakeney. You can treat us like dirt beneath your feet, but mistreating the marks is something any court in the land will recognize as just cause. Sue us, or send your agent around. But don’t show up in person or we’ll call the cops.”

  “Yeah,” one of the girls said. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll break your arm!”

  Derek stood very still, his breath hissing angrily through clenched teeth. He dragged his memory for an appropriate quotation… something Shakespearean and devastatingly apropos to the ingratitude and treachery of youth.

  He couldn’t come up with anything.

  His mind was blank!

  The blood drained out of his face and he clutched the stair rail. With a titanic effort he straightened his shoulders and turned so the young actors wouldn’t see. He was out on the sidewalk before he trusted himself to breathe again.

  I couldn’t improvise a comeback to devastate those cretins! What’s the matter with me?

  For an instant an unwelcome idea penetrated… the possibility that Peter had been right, that these punks were right.

  The thought seared. It was too hot to be allowed to settle in. He drove it out by thinking about…

  About getting high.

  Yeah. Somewhere there must be a drug to help. Uppers did the trick when there was work to do. Downers helped him sleep. Somewhere there had to be a drug that’d bring back happiness.

  All I need is a little peace. Then I could get my thoughts together. Make a plan. There oughta be a jizz to help me get through the summer. I’ll straighten out this fall.

  Melissa won’t approve, of course. She’ll want me to clean up my act overnight—

  What am I saying? Melissa’s been gone almost a year!

  He felt very odd, like a man standing at a crossroads, undecided over which way to go and afraid that it was already too late to turn back. That sense of déjà vu returned again, filling him with a dreadful feeling that he had been this way before, and was doomed to choose wrong again. And again.

  Unsteadily, he walked down Forty-seventh street, past the shops and the pedicabs, and the occasional licensed automobile. Flywheel jitneys hummed by, picking up tourists on their way to the Village or downtown.

  Slowly, the unease began to dissipate. It was summer in New York. Hardly a time and place for heavy thinking.

  I’ll go see Barney, he decided. Maybe he’s heard of something on the street. Something to get me up.

  “They call it Time-Jizz.” Barney handed Derek a packet of white powder. “It’s the latest thing out o’ the Black Chemists. Man, this time they’ve really stolen a march on the guv’mint. Time-Jizz is the biggest thing there is now.”

  “What it is, man? What’s it do, bro?” Derek unconsciously adopted the dialect of his supplier, mimicking the street tempo perfectly.

  “Mooch-hooch, baby. With this stuff you can go back to any limber scene you ever had, and relive it. I mean, I tried it an’ it works! I went back to the best lay I ever had, and man, I found out my memory weren’t exaggeratin’ one bit. Mmm-mmm.”

  Derek fingered the packet. “I dunno, Barney. A new blam-scam from the Black Chemists… I don’t want no junkie-monkey, now.”

  “Aw, the shrinks have had this stuff f’years!” the dealer soothed. “Word is it’s safe. No monkey, for sure, babe. And you get to choose the time and place you go back and visit! Shoot. A deal like that makes you think them Black Chemists were really brothers after all, and not a bunch of old white syndicate clowns with Pee aitch Dees.”

  The powder glistened in the light from a bare bulb. Derek stared at it.

  “Anywhere or anytime I wanted…” he murmured.

  “Yeah, man, you could go back to when you were suckin’ Baby Ruths and peekin’ up girls’ dresses.”

  “My childhood was a boring crock.” Derek snickered. “Still,” he added thoughtfully. “It had its moments. Anyway, as the serpent used to say, why not?”

  He looked up and saw the dealer was staring at him. “George Bernard Shaw,” he explained. “From Back to Methuselah.”

  “Sure, man.” Barney shrugged. “Anything you say. Now about the price. Startin’ out I can offer you a real sweet deal…”

  Derek came home to his cheap studio to find the mail slot filled with bills. He shut the door with his foot and let the envelopes slip to the floor. He poured a can of soup into a pan and stirred it over a hotplate. He contemplated a small vial of amber fluid, one of Bettide’s ampules, on the counter in front of him.

  Derek felt trapped. He had been accessing increasingly recent memories, more and more painful to face. He wasn’t sure he could go through the final two years’ worth of total recall.

  He would be gambling the pain of recent memories against Dr. Bettide’s hypothetical “breakthrough”… when all the storage in his mind would supposedly be his again, reachable at will.

  Reliving that episode with the kids at the improv—and then his first purchase of Time-Jizz from dealer Barney—had driven him away from the drug for a few days. He had walked around in a depressed haze, getting stoned on older, less terrifying highs.

  He hung around a few theaters, milking a few tourists who recognized him. He ignored their whispers to each other after he finished signing autographs.

  Finally, he found himself at the office of Frank Furtess, his old agent. Old Frankfurter had looked genuinely surprised to see him. Then Derek remembered. He had fired Furtess more than a year ago, using nearly every piece of invective in the book.

  Derek realized that he had adopted a frame of reference twenty months old, and momentarily forgotten the incident! By then he had already shaken the agent’s hand; he had to play the scene to its end.

  The meeting was chilly. Furtess promised to look into a few possibilities. Derek left his landlady’s phone number, but he figured the man would throw it away the moment he left.

  Now, to come home and find all these bills, and royalties so scant these days…

  It was late afternoon, and once again the ripped windowshade cast the legs of a runner on the wall. The jogger’s slow, mute progress was a tale of perseverance.

  Derek plucked up the ampule and moved over to the mattress on the dusty floor. He broke the seal and held the needle to his arm… He…

  …mixed the powder carefully in his Fifth Avenue apartment. In the light from the lavalamp he poured the mixture into a glass and drank it, as Barney had told him to do.

  He sat back in the relaxing hum of his vibrochair and avoided dunking about how he was going to keep up the rent on this expensive flat. Instead, he tried to focus on some event in his childhood. Almost anything would do for a test of the new drug.

  Ah, he thought. Model-making with Douglas Kee, the gardener’s boy! We did have fun, didn’t we? We were pals. What age was I then, ten years old?

  He closed his eyes as a pleasant numbness washed over him. He thought about glue, and plastic, and little sticky decals…

  …and found himself laughing!

  The laughter was high and clear. It startled him, but he couldn’t stop! He was no longer in control of his body. Someone else was in command.

  In a sudden flow of visual images, he saw that he was no longer in his apartment. Sunlight streamed in to fall on a cracked linoleum floor. Dust gathered in clumps under worn furniture and stacks of old newspapers. In one corner of the room a calico kitten played with a ball of string. Through a half-opened door came a steady breeze of sunwarmed fresh air.

  But he caught all of this out of a corner of his field of vision. At the moment he could not make his eyes shift from a pile of plastic odds and ends on the floor in front of him. He caught a glimpse of his own hands and was momentarily shaken by how small they were.
They moved nimbly among the plastic bits, fitting them together experimentally.

  “Maybe we could glue that extra piece of the ol’ Cutty Sark onto here and make a radar antenna out of it!”

  Derek’s gaze shifted to his left. Next to him was a small boy with Oriental features.

  And yet he didn’t look so very small right now. In fact the boy was larger than himself!

  Once again Derek found himself laughing, high and uninhibited. “Sure, stick a mast of a sailing ship on an intergalactic warp vessel. Why not?”

  The voice was unmistakably his own. He felt his own mouth and larynx form the words. But it was a smaller voice, and a younger, more intense volition that shaped it. The adult part of himself began to understand.

  I’m back to when I was ten. It worked. The drug worked!

  Now he was getting more than physical sensations. The thoughts of that happy ten-year-old come rushing in, threatening to wash all sense of adulthood aside.

  He tried to make the flow two-way… to communicate with the boy. But it was hopeless. The child was only a memory, playing back now in vivid detail. It could not be changed.

  Gradually, all awareness of being anything but the boy fell away, as he learned to let go and just observe.

  “Hey! Hey! I got it!” Derek-the-child shouted. “Let’s put a glob of glue over this guy’s head and call it a space helmet!”

  “Naw. That’s a Civil War Union guy. What’d he be doing with a space helmet?”

  “Well, with the glue on his head who could tell?” Derek giggled. “And he wouldn’t care. Not with a ton of glue to sniff!”

  The boys laughed together. Derek laughed along.

  “I want to go back to the old drug, now. I want to slow down again.”

  Dr. Bettide jotted a comment in his little black notebook.

  “Have you finished reviewing your memories up to the present?”

  “No. I don’t want to do that now.”

  “Why? I thought your objective was to make available, once more, the memories of childhood.”