He sat on the bed, naked, wondering what it would be like to go out in some wild bacchanalia with a few dozen robot fetishists, fucking his brains out and then dismembering him to take the pieces home as souvenirs. It wouldn’t be hard to organize, and he doubted that any part of his corporate infrastructure would be obliged to have him resurrected from Loadstone’s daily backups. The old man might have been using him to make some dementedly pretentious artistic point, but he would never have been cruel enough to render suicide impossible.
Adam caught sight of a picture of the two men posing hammily beneath the Hollywood sign, and found himself sobbing dryly with, of all things, grief. What he wanted was Carlos beside him—making this bearable, putting it right. He loved the dead man’s dead lover more than he was ever going to love anyone else, but he still couldn’t do anything worthwhile that the dead man could have done.
He pictured Carlos with his arms around him. “Sssh, it’s not as bad as you think—it never is, cariño. We start with what we’ve got, and just fill in the pieces as we go.”
You’re really not helping, Adam replied. Just shut up and fuck me, that’s all I’ve got left. He lay down on the bed and took his penis in his hand. It had seemed wrong before, but he didn’t care now: He didn’t owe either of them anything. And Carlos, at least, would probably have taken pity on him, and not begrudged him the unpaid guest appearance.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feel of stubble against his thighs, but he wasn’t even capable of scripting his own fantasy: Carlos just wanted to talk.
“You’ve got friends,” he insisted. “You’ve got people looking out for you.” Adam had no idea if he was confabulating freely, or if this was a fragment of a real conversation long past, but context was everything. “Not any more, cariño. Either they’re dead, or I’m dead to them.”
Carlos just stared back at him skeptically, as if he’d made a ludicrously hyperbolic claim.
But that skepticism did have some merit. If he knocked on Cynthia’s door she’d probably try to stab him through the heart with a wooden stake, but the amiable stranger who’d sat beside him at the funeral had been far keener to talk than Adam. The fact that he still couldn’t place the man no longer seemed like a good reason to avoid him; if he came from the gaps, he must know something about them.
Carlos was gone. Adam sat up, still feeling gutted, but no amount of self-pity was going to improve his situation.
He found his phone, and checked under “Introductions”; he hadn’t erased the contact details. The man was named Patrick Auster. Adam called the number.
7.
“You go first,” Adam said. “Ask me anything. That’s the only fair trade.” They were sitting in a booth in an old-style diner named Caesar’s, where Auster had suggested they meet. The place wasn’t busy, and the adjacent booths were empty, so there was no need to censor themselves or talk in code.
Auster gestured at the generous serving of chocolate cream pie that Adam had begun demolishing. “Can you really taste that?” “Absolutely.”
“And it’s the same as before?”
Adam wasn’t going to start hedging his answers with quibbles about the ultimate incomparability of qualia and memories. “Exactly the same.” He pointed a thumb toward the diners three booths behind him. “I can tell you without peeking that someone’s eating bacon. And I think it’s apparent that there’s nothing wrong with my hearing or vision, even if my memory for faces isn’t so good.”
“Which leaves …”
“Every hair on the bearskin rug,” Adam assured him.
Auster hesitated. Adam said, “There’s no three-question limit. We can keep going all day if you want to.”
“Do you have much to do with the others?” Auster asked.
“The other side-loads? No. I never knew any of them before, so there’s no reason for them to be in touch with me now.”
Auster was surprised. “I’d have thought you’d all be making common cause. Trying to improve the legal situation.”
“We probably should be. But if there’s some secret cabal of immortals trying to get re-enfranchised, they haven’t invited me into their inner circle yet.”
Adam waited as Auster stirred his coffee meditatively. “That’s it,” he decided.
“Okay. You know, I’m sorry if I was brusque at the funeral,” Adam said. “I was trying to keep a low profile; I was worried about how people would react.”
Forget it.
“So you knew me in New York?” Adam wasn’t going to use the third person; it would make the conversation far too awkward. Besides, if he’d come here to claim the missing memories as his own, the last thing he wanted to do was distance himself from them.
“Yes.”
“Was it business, or were we friends?” All he’d been able to find out online was that Auster had written a couple of independent movies. There was no record of the two of them ever working on the same project; their official Bacon number was three, which put Adam no closer to Auster than he was to Angelina Jolie.
“Both, I hope.” Auster hesitated, then angrily recanted the last part. “No, we were friends. Sorry, it’s hard not to resent being blanked, even if it’s not deliberate.”
Adam tried to judge just how deeply the insult had cut him. “Were we lovers?”
Auster almost choked on his coffee. “God, no! I’ve always been straight, and you were already with Carlos when I met you.” He frowned suddenly. “You didn’t cheat on him, did you?” He sounded more incredulous than
