The afternoon was full of light when we walked out onto a promenade covered by an arch that seemed to be made of millions of small lights hung from a lattice. The day was like a kiln. I deduced we must be in the desert. “Stewart, where are we?”
His face very still, he said, “Fremont Street.”
“Fremont Street? Isn’t that in Tombstone? Where the Earps shot up the Clantons. Familiarly called the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as misrepresented in a
“All right,” Stewart said. “You’re still Jackie. And we have seriously got to get this fixed.”
I should probably have been scared, standing on a strange street corner in a strange town with a strange man, unable to remember my own name. Had I ever known my name? But Stewart was a soothing presence, for all his twisted lips and wrinkled forehead.
“I don’t think this would bother me so much if you weren’t a walking encyclopedia of forgotten Las Vegas.”
“We’re in Las Vegas? Oh. Then this will all get pulled down in a couple of years anyway, won’t it? I don’t know why they even bother naming things.”
His hand was hard on my shoulder as he pulled me along. “Come on. I’m not sure how to handle this, Jackie. As long as I’ve known you—”
“—As long as you’ve
“—Whatever happens in this place, whatever falls down or gets buried or goes forgotten, you always seem to remember that it’s here, or that it was here.” He led me through crowds deftly, and I let him. He seemed to know where he was going, and I had no idea. “All that dead history never dies, in you. And now…” He shrugged.
I put my hand over his fingers on my arm, because it seemed like the thing to do, and he smiled at me, very briefly. My heart jumped. Huh. Was he my
I thought that over. It seemed appealing.
“Do you remember me?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “A little. Are we together?”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, only for the last hundred years. But what I was trying to say was, all that time, I’ve had this idea that you were, I dunno, the
“Do you think I’m going senile?”
“Cities don’t go senile,” he said. We ducked between an arguing couple.
“You talk like I’m somehow linked to the city—”
“Jackie, you
And you know, that sounded right. Completely bizarre, mind you, but right. “So if I’m the city’s memory,” I said, “and I can’t remember anything.…”
“Yeah,” he said. “You see why I’m a little worried now.”
“Well then,” I said—and there was no excuse for my tone, because I’m sure he would have seen it if he wasn’t too worried to think straight—“it’s obvious what’s going on. Either somebody is using the city to get to me, or me to get to the city.”
The first thing I noticed about the battered old block house on the neglected ranch estate was a glorious bottle tree in the side yard, moaning softly in the breeze. It caught the sunlight in all colors, cobalt and ruby and amber and emerald, commonplace and lovely.
I imagine most of us never really look at glass. But there it was, sun stained through it. I felt the whimpers of the ghosts trapped inside. Felt, yes. It wasn’t exactly hearing.
I stepped away from the still-open door of the parked car, and the blond man caught my arm. “Jackie,” he said. “Don’t go too close to that.”
“It’s pretty.”
“I know,” he said, and gentled me with a hand on my hair. “Come away. We need to talk to Ms. Bukvajova.”
“You know,” I said, “I swear I’ve heard that name.”
“I know.” His voice did something funny. “I’ve heard it too.”
He lead me under the porch roof, in out of the sun—we must be somewhere in the South for there to be bottle trees, and the sun sure felt like it—and thumped on the security door because the doorbell was busted. Or if it wasn’t busted, anyway, you couldn’t hear it chime from the outside, so he knocked to be sure.
A moment later, the inside door swung open a crack, and bright cloudy eyes peered through the crevice, half obscured by strings of yellowed hair. “Boys!” the old woman said. “Stewart! Jackie! Come in. Come in. Would you like an iced tea?”
“Yes, please, Ms. Bukvajova,” the blond man said, and I gaped. But Miss Bukvajova was suddenly young, all auburn hair and sparkle and aerialist muscles, power and grace.…
The person overwhelmed by that memory was not me.
But for a moment I saw her as she had been, a short, hourglass-shaped, broad-shouldered woman with a ballerina waddle, and someone else’s grief filled up my throat. She lead us through a cluttered red-flannel living room, fussy and terrible, every surface cluttered with dusty photographs, and I could not hold her steady in my sight.
“Drink.”
My elbows propped rudely on her kitchen table, I sat in a creaking ladder-back chair with my hands cupped loosely around a cold empty glass.
“Drink,” she said, and poured more tea.
Though it tasted of cement dust and brackish water, I drank. I saw her again, and this time she swung with perfect grace on a flying trapeze, as if she were dancing there. She somersaulted through the air, and a strong man caught her. I stung my throat shouting, stung my palms clapping, felt fingers close on my wrists and pull my hands apart. Stewart—and my blood was dripping over his nails. “You idiot,” he said. “You broke the glass.”
“Stewart?”
He met my eyes, and his mouth went thin. “Jackie?”
“Sort of,” I said. I felt thin as a watercolor of myself, but I was there. He looked down quickly. Holding my hand still, he began to pick the slivers of broken glass out of the palm, leaving the ice melting on the table. “Miss Bukvajova?”
“You remember me?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We do.” Because it wasn’t just me remembering her. “That was Jeff Soble,” I said, and winced as Stewart picked another shard of glass from my palm. I turned away, so I wouldn’t have to watch him, and watched the sun glint off the bottle tree on the other side of the slatted blinds. “In the tea.”
“It works,” she said, and made a moue like a much-younger woman. “He was a friend of mine. He worked on the dam.”
“But you married Powers.”
She rose from the table, fetched another blocky Anchor Hocking glass from the cabinet, and plunked it to one side of the puddle of ice and broken glass. She added ice with her fingers and poured the tea from a scarred yellow Rubbermaid pitcher with a push-button top. She said, “It’s like getting dehydrated. You need more to catch up than you think you will. Keep drinking. I’ll get a towel.”
“You married Powers,” I said again, and drank the tea with my left hand, which was only cut a little. The cold glass stung the scrapes on my palm. “Not Jeff.”
I couldn’t call him Soble when I was drinking his memory.
“Wouldn’t you?” She poured herself a glass too, and drank. “Not that Eli was anything special then. He owned a gambling hall downtown, on Fremont Street. And you all know where that led.”
“Empire,” Stewart said, laying another piece of bloody glass in his pile. “I think that’s all of it, Jackie.”
