The last thing I remember

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A Voice in the Crowd The granite-faced deputy came and took me back to my cell. He brought me a breakfast of hash and coffee. I was hungry enough to eat it. It lay on my stomach like lead.

When I was done, I sat on the edge of the cot. I stared down at the cell’s stone floor.

It’s a funny thing when despair gets to you. It doesn’t even feel like despair. You don’t think to yourself: Oh, I have no hope. Oh, I give up. Oh, there’s nothing I can do. That’s just everyday complaining. That’s just feeling sorry for yourself.

Real despair is different. It creeps up on you in disguise. It comes as a kind of sleepiness, a kind of heavy sadness that weighs you down. It makes you lazy. It makes you just want to go along, drift with the current of events, drift and drift as if you were lying on a raft floating down a river on a sweet summer day. Whatever happens, you don’t fight it. You just go where events take you and then sit and wait for the next event to take you on.

That’s what I did. I sat and waited. I didn’t say to myself: Don’t give up. I didn’t say: Remember the Churchill Card. Never give in. I didn’t really say much of anything to myself anymore. I was just too tired. I was just waiting for the next thing. They were coming to take me to prison. I was going to be behind bars for the next twenty-five years, maybe more. What was the use in fighting it? No one would believe me. No one would help me. Nothing to do but just drift along.

After a while, I lay back on the cot and dozed.

I don’t know if I had another nightmare. Maybe I did. All I’m sure of is that suddenly my eyes were wide open and my heart was hammering in my chest and there was a clammy sweat on my face. I swallowed hard, staring up at the stone ceiling. A weird and terrible thought began to work its way into my mind.

Everything you say is made up. Your whole life is a lie.

The thought was kind of like a whisper, as if someone invisible were crouching next to me with his lips to my ear, whispering very low. The whisper was so low I didn’t really even hear the words at first. Slowly, they just sort of worked their way into my consciousness until I was aware of them.

Your whole life is a lie. That’s what Detective Rose had said to me.

And now the whisper was saying to me, What if he’s right? What if it’s true?

It was a good question, wasn’t it? What if Detective Rose was right? What if everything I thought was true was a lie and everything I thought was a lie was really true? I mean, what if I did kill Alex? What if I was a phony, just pretending to be a good guy when really I was the worst, the lowest, a killer? What if everything I believed about myself, everything I remembered about my life, was false? It was possible, wasn’t it? I mean, I couldn’t remember a whole year. How could I tell whether the things I did remember had actually happened?

Everything you say is made up. Your whole life…

I rolled up into a sitting position. I held my head in my hands and groaned.

It was then that the despair rose up inside me with its true face. That laziness, that heavy sadness, that sleepy passivity, waiting for the next thing to happen: the hopelessness had crept up on me like that-had worked its way inside me like a spy, like one of those spies that gets into a city and opens the gates for the enemy army to come charging in.

And now it was here in full force-a horrible feeling, a twisting, hollow anguish of despair.

I took my hands off my head. I clasped them in front of my mouth. I wanted to pray. I tried. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even do that because I was too afraid. That accusing whisper spoke to me:

What if it’s true? What if your whole life is a lie?

And I was afraid because I realized I might be a murderer. I might deserve everything that was happening to me. I might deserve to go to prison until I was old. What if I prayed to God and God condemned me? Like the sheriff did. Like Detective Rose did. Like everyone.

I was afraid to pray, but I had to do something and that was all I could think of. I pressed my clasped hands hard against my mouth. I bit into them. I forced the words into my mind.

Please. God. Help me. I’m beaten. I admit it. I’m lost. I’ve got nothing left. Please. Help.

But no help came.

Instead, a moment later, the Plexiglas door of the cell opened again. I looked up and there was the deputy filling the entrance, his granite face set hard and unsmiling. He had a large plastic bag in his hand. He tossed it at me. My clothes-the clothes Mrs. Simmons had given me-were inside.

“Get dressed, kid,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

Now the river of events started up again, and I was drifting along on it helplessly. I changed back into my street clothes while the deputy stood over me, watching. Then he turned me around and pulled my hands behind my back. I felt the handcuffs snap over my wrists again.

The deputy took me down the hall and back into the big room with the gunmetal desks. There was Detective Rose, waiting for me, his face hard and unsmiling like the deputy’s. Behind him were four state police troopers. Their faces were hard and unsmiling too.

The granite-faced deputy handed me over to Detective Rose. He let go of my elbow and Detective Rose took hold of it. It was as if they were passing a package, one to the other.

Now Detective Rose led me to the door. Two of the state troopers went ahead of us. Two more went behind. There was nothing I could do but go with them, carried along on the river of events, my hands locked behind my back by the handcuffs.

We went quickly down another corridor, then out into an anteroom. There were two big wooden doors ahead of us. The leading troopers pushed the doors open. Detective Rose led me through them. We stepped out of the building, into the outdoors.

Everything then was whirling confusion, sensations bombarding me so fast I couldn’t make sense of them. People were shouting. There were faces all around me. There were reporters and cameramen jostling one another, trying to get a picture of me, trying to get me to turn their way.

“Charlie!”

“Charlie, look here!”

“Charlie, how did you stay free so long?”

“Charlie-hey, where did you hide out?”

My gaze went from voice to voice, catching glimpses of the scene around me. I saw a shouting woman with a microphone. I saw my own face reflected in the lens of a camera. I saw a crowd-a crowd of frowning faces-00-watching me. They were people from the town, people who’d gathered to see the bad guy taken away to jail. The troopers ahead of me pushed the people back, forcing a way for me across the sidewalk.

All of this was mixed up with the brightness of the morning sun as it touched the tops of stores along the street and glared in their storefront windows. It was mixed up with the sweetness of the open air and the terrible frantic desire inside me to drink in this single moment of being in the world because I knew I would never be in the world again. Not for twenty-five years or more. In all that time, I would never see the sun as a free man, never take a walk in the park or go fishing or take a girl to the movies. Twenty-five years to life in prison. My eyes sought out the sun. My lungs sucked in the air.

There was a patrol car in front of me, I saw now. It was parked right in front of me at the curb. A trooper was pulling the rear door open. Now he was holding it open, waiting for me.

Hungrily my eyes went over the scene again, trying to drink it in, make it last, my final moments in the free world. Faces, cameras, microphones, the sun, the street, the sky.

“Charlie-look over here!”

“What tripped you up in the end, Charlie?”

“How do you feel about going back to prison?”

Then two things happened, very quickly, one right after the other.

As I turned my confused gaze this way and that over the scene, I saw a face go past, one of the faces in the crowd. I just caught a glimpse of it. It was the face of a good-looking young man with thick blond hair that flopped down on his forehead. My eyes passed over him and I felt a kind of jolt inside me. It was a jolt of recognition. I didn’t remember ever seeing that young man before, and yet all the same I thought to myself: I know him!

My eyes went back to find his face in the crowd again. But he was gone. Or at least I couldn’t find him among all the other faces, and the cameras and the microphones and the shouting voices.

We were almost at the cruiser now, almost at the open door. The lead troopers were clearing the last couple of yards, pushing the people back to make a way. There wasn’t much time. I scanned the faces desperately, but the face I’d recognized was gone.

Then it was too late. We had reached the car. The troopers were gathered around me, keeping back the crowds. Someone was putting his hand on the back of my head to guide it in through the door.

That’s when the second thing happened.

Someone-I didn’t see who-pressed in very close behind me. I felt a quick, painful pinch on my handcuffed wrists. At the exact same moment, I heard a man’s voice, very low, whisper right into my ear.

It said: “You’re a better man than you know. Find Waterman.”

I tried to turn, to see who had spoken, but the next moment, I was pushed down into the backseat of the car. The door slammed shut. I looked out the window, but I couldn’t see anything except a wall of khaki uniforms as the troopers crowded against the car. When I turned to face forward, I was staring at a security grate between me and the front seat. Through the grate, I could see the driver at the wheel, another state trooper. Then the front passenger door of the cruiser opened, and Detective Rose got in and sat down next to the driver.

“Let’s move,” he said.

The cruiser’s siren let out a quick blooping noise and the car started forward.

As it did, I felt my hands shift strangely behind me and I realized: my handcuffs were sliding open.

Somehow, someone had broken the lock.