“Well… I was sitting here in my study, listening to some of the new Cashbox hot prospects, going over some ad copy, reading memos… there’s about two mountains of stuff backed up, and I’m looking at roughly a month of twenty-five-hour days. So I had the answering machine turned on, but with the volume turned up so I could intercept the calls I wanted and just let the dimwits talk to the tape. And the reason I let you talk to the tape as long as I did-”
“-was because at first you didn’t have the slightest idea who I was.”
“Jesus, that’s right! How did you know that?”
“Because we’re forgetting again. All of us this time.”
“Mikey, are you sure?”
“What was Stan’s last name?” I asked him.
There was silence on the other end of the line-a long silence. In it, faintly, I could hear a woman talking in Omaha… or maybe she was in Ruthven, Arizona, or Flint, Michigan. I heard her, as faint as a space-traveller leaving the solar system in the nosecone of a burned-out rocket, thank someone for the cookies.
Then Richie said, uncertainly: “I think it was Underwood, but that isn’t Jewish, it it?”
“It was Uris.”
“Uris!” Richie cried, sounding both relieved and shaken. “Jesus, I hate it when I get something right on the tip of my tongue and can’t quite pick it off. Someone brings out a Trivial Pursuit game, I say “Excuse me but I think the diarrhea’s coming back so maybe I’ll just go home, okay?” But you remember, anyhow, Mikey. Like before.”
“No. I looked it up in my address book.”
Another long silence. Then: “You didn’t remember?”
“Nope.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Then this tune it’s really over,” he said, and the relief in his voice was unmistakable.
“Yes, I think so.”
That long-distance silence fell again-all the miles between Maine and California. I believe we were both thinking the same thing: it was over, yes, and in six weeks or six months, we will have forgotten all about each other. It’s over, and all it’s cost us is our friendship and Stan and Eddie’s lives. I’ve almost forgotten them, you know it? Horrible as it may sound, I have almost forgotten Stan and Eddie. Was it asthma Eddie had, or chronic migraine? I’ll be damned if I can remember for sure, although I think it was migraine. I’ll ask Bill. He’ll know.
“Well, you say hi to Bill and that pretty wife of his,” Richie said with a cheeriness that sounded canned.
“I will, Richie,” I said, closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. He remembered Bill’s wife was in Derry… but not her name, or what had happened to her.
“And if you’re ever in LA, you got the number. We’ll get together and mouth some chow.”
“Sure.” I felt hot tears behind my eyes. “And if you get back this way, the
same thing goes.”
“Mikey?”
“Right here.”
“I love you, man.”
“Same here.”
“Okay. Keep your thumb on it.”
“Beep-beep, Richie.”
He laughed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stick it in your ear, Mike. Ah say, in yo ear, boy.”
He hung up and so did I. Then I lay back on my pillows with my eyes shut and didn’t open them for a long time.
June 7th, 1985
Police Chief Andrew Rademacher, who took over from Chief Borton in the late sixties, is dead. It was a bizarre accident, one I can’t help associating with what has been happening in Derry… what has just ended in Derry.
The combination police-station-courthouse stands on the edge of the area that fell into the Canal, and while it didn’t go, the upheaval-or the flood-must have caused structural damage of which no one was aware.
Rademacher was working late in his office last night, the story in the paper says, as he has every night since the storm and the flood. The Police Chiefs office has moved from the third to the fifth floor since the old days, to just below an attic where all sorts of records and useless city artifacts are stored. One of those artifacts was the tramp-chair I have described earlier in these pages. It was made of iron and weighed better than four hundred pounds. The building shipped a quantity of water during the downpour of May 31st, and that must have weakened the attic floor (or so the paper says). Whatever the reason, the tramp-chair fell from the attic directly onto Chief Rademacher as he sat at his desk, reading accident reports. He was killed instantly. Officer Bruce Andeen rushed in and found him lying on the ruins of his shattered desk, his pen still in one hand.
Talked to Bill on the phone again. Audra is taking some solid food, he says, but otherwise there is no change. I asked him if Eddie’s big problem had been asthma or migraine.
“Asthma,” he said promptly. “don’t you remember his aspirator?”
“Sure,” I said, and did. But only when Bill mentioned it.
“Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“What was his last name?”
I looked at my address book lying on the nighttable, but didn’t pick it up. “I don’t quite remember.”
“It was like Kerkorian,” Bill said, sounding distressed, “but that wasn’t quite it. You’ve got everything written down, though. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Thank God for that.”
“Have you had any ideas about Audra?”
“One,” he said, “but it’s so crazy I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“All right.”
“Mike, it’s scary, isn’t it? Forgetting like this?”
“Yes,” I said. And it is.
June 8th, 1985
Raytheon, which had been scheduled to break ground on its Derry plant in July, has decided at the last minute to build in Waterville instead. The editorial on page one of the News expresses dismay… and, if I read correctly between the lines, a little fright.
I think I know what Bill’s idea is. He’ll have to act quickly, before the last of the magic departs this place. If it hasn’t already.
I guess what I thought before wasn’t so paranoid after all. The names and addresses of the others in my little book are fading. The color and quality of the ink combine to make those entries look as if they were written fifty or seventy-five years before the others I’ve jotted in there. This has happened in the last four or five days. I’m convinced that by September their names will be utterly gone.
I suppose I could preserve them; I could just keep copying them. But I’m also convinced that each would fade in its turn, and that very soon it would become an exercise in futility-like writing I will not throw spit-balls in class five hundred times. I would be writing names that meant nothing for a reason I didn’t remember.
Let it go, let it go.
Bill, act quickly… but be careful!
June 9th, 1985
Woke up in the middle of the night from a terrible nightmare I couldn’t remember, got panicky, couldn’t breathe. Reached for the call-button and then couldn’t use it. Had a terrible vision of Mark Lamonica answering the bell with a hypo… or Henry Bowers with his switchblade.
I grabbed my address book and called Ben Hanscom in Nebraska… the address and number have faded still more, but they are still legible. No go, Joe. Got a recorded phone-company voice telling me service to that number has been cancelled.
Was Ben fat, or did he have something like a club foot?
Lay awake until dawn.
June 10th, 1985
They tell me I can go home tomorrow.
I called Bill and told him that-I suppose I wanted to warn him that his time is getting shorter all the time. Bill is the only one I remember clearly and I’m convinced that I’m the only one he remembers clearly. Because we are both still here in Derry, I suppose.
“All right,” he said. “By tomorrow we’ll be out of your hair.”
“You still got your idea?”
“Yeah. Looks like it’s time to try it.”
“Be careful.”
He laughed and said something I both do and don’t understand: “You can’t be c-c-careful on a skuh-hateboard, man.”
“How will I know how it turned out, Bill?”
“You’ll know,” he said, and hung up.
My heart’s with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.
I’m almost done with this diary now-and I suppose a diary is all that it will ever be, and that the story of Derry’s old scandals and eccentricities has no place outside these pages. That’s fine with me; I think that, when they let me out of here tomorrow, it might finally be time to start thinking about some sort of new life… although just what that might be is unclear to me.
I loved you guys, you know.
I loved you so much.
