Adam’s visceral sense of outrage was undiminished, but on any sober assessment this outcome was pretty much what he would have expected.
“Of course, my faith in karma was restored, eventually,” Auster added enigmatically.
“You’ve lost me again.” The old man’s success, once he cut out all the middlemen and plagiarists, must have been balm to his wounds—but Auster’s online footprint suggested that his own third act had been less lucrative.
“Before they’d finished shooting the second season, a burglar broke into Colman’s house and cracked open his skull with a statuette.”
“An Emmy?”
“No, just a BAFTA.”
Adam tried hard not to smile. “And once Sadlands fell through, did we stay in touch?”
“Not really,” Auster replied. “I moved here a long time after you did; I wasted five years trying to get something up on Broadway before I swallowed my pride and settled for playing script doctor. And by then you’d done so well that I was embarrassed to turn up asking you for work.”
Adam was genuinely ashamed now. “You should have. I owed it to you.”
Auster shook his head. “I wasn’t living on the streets. I’ve done all right here. I can’t afford what you’ve got …” He gestured at Adam’s imperishable chassis. “But then, I’m not sure I could handle the lacunae.”
Adam called for a car. Auster insisted on splitting the bill.
The service cart rattled over and began clearing the table. Auster said, “I’m glad I could help you fill in the blanks, but maybe those answers should have come with a warning.”
“Now a warning?”
“The Colman thing. Don’t let it get to you.”
Adam was baffled. “Why would I? I’m not going to sue his family for whatever pittance is still trickling down to them.” In fact, he couldn’t sue anyone for anything, but it was the thought that counted.
“Okay.” Auster was ready to drop it, but now Adam needed to be clear.
“How badly did I take it the first time?”
Auster gestured with one finger, drilling into his temple. “Like a fucking parasitic worm in your brain. He’d stolen your precious novel and murdered your lover’s sister. He’d kicked you to the ground when you had nothing, and taken your only hope away.”
Adam could understand now why they hadn’t stayed in touch. Solidarity in hard times was one thing, but an obsessive grievance like that would soon get old. Auster had taken his own kicks and decided to move on.
“That was more than thirty years ago,” Adam replied. “I’m a different person now.”
“Aren’t we all?”
Auster’s ride came first. Adam stood outside the diner and watched him depart: sitting confidently behind the wheel, even if he didn’t need to lay a finger on it.
8.
Adam changed his car’s destination to downtown Gardena. He disembarked beside a row of fast-food outlets and went looking for a public web kiosk. He’d been fretting about the best way of paying without leaving too obvious a trail, but then he discovered that in this municipality the things were as free as public water fountains.
There was no speck of entertainment industry trivia that the net had failed to immortalize. Colman had moved from London to Los Angeles to shoot the series, and he’d been living just a few miles south of Adam’s current home when the break-in happened. But the old man had still been in New York at the time; he hadn’t even set foot in California until the following year, as far as Adam recalled. The laptop that he’d started excavating had files on it dating back to the ’90s, but they would have been copied from machine to machine; there was no chance that the computer itself was old enough to be carrying deleted emails for flights booked three decades ago, even if the old man had been foolish enough to make his journey so easy to trace.
Adam turned away from the kiosk’s chipped projection screen, wondering if any passers-by had been staring over his shoulder. He was losing his grip on reality. The occlusions might easily have been targeted at nothing more than the old man’s lingering resentment: If he couldn’t let go of what had happened—even after Colman’s death, even after his own career had blossomed—he might have wished to spare Adam all that pointless, fermented rage.
That was the simplest explanation. Unless Auster had been holding back, the thought of the old man murdering Colman didn’t seem to have crossed his mind, and if the police had come knocking he would surely have mentioned that. If nobody else thought the old man was guilty, who was Adam to start accusing him—on the basis of nothing but the shape and location of one dark pit of missing memories, among the thirty percent of everything that he didn’t recall?
He turned to the screen again, trying to think of a more discriminating test of his hypothesis. Though the flow into the side-load itself would have been protected by a massive firewall of privacy laws, Adam doubted that any instructions to the technicians at Loadstone were subject to privilege. Which meant that, even if he found them on the laptop, they were unlikely to be incriminatory. The only way the old man could have phrased a request to forget that he’d bashed Colman’s brains out would have been to excise all of the more innocent events that were connected to it in any way, like a cancer surgeon choosing the widest possible sacrificial margin. But he might also have issued the same instructions merely in order to forget as much as possible of that whole bleak decade—when Hollywood had fucked him over, Carlos had been grieving for the woman who raised him,
