These are the hours of death. Time spent staring at clocks or orderlies or loved ones or nothing at all. Time spent wondering when the conscious melts into the unconscious and then, as the soul departs, into the infinite nothingness of the astral unknown. Time spent looking back at what you’ve done with your years—assessing if it was everything you had hoped for, if you were virtuous, if you ever mattered, if you just had a little more time. But what do you do if your final hours on earth separate from the recollections of your lifetime? What if every time you tried to think back to your childhood, your first love, your most embarrassing moments, revealing trips around the world, to the people and homes that defined you, all that greets you is a blank white screen? A Word document that formerly housed the pages of your life until you—rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly—elected to delete it all. Every last word but for the pages detailing the previous year or two. What would you think of yourself then? Would you recognize your voice when you spoke? Would you understand the decisions you made before it all fades away? The face in the mirror? And would you know enough to like yourself anyway?
But, in the end, it won’t matter.
Because the end is near, and it smells like rot. Like dying.
The dying is happening now. Inside of me. The last Lobotomy Pill boils my brain’s hippocampus. Neutralizes its ability to store and control memories. But I’m not granted a hospital bed and caretakers. I’m not dying in a traditional way. I either die inside myself and, in a day or two, come back to consciousness with no understanding of my life, or I die by violence—the killer’s twenty-four-hour countdown clock is already well underway.
Fuji casts a neutral gaze at me as she sits on the far side of her couch, sipping liquid oxygen. A Moleskine journal, spread open, sits atop her lap as she taps a blue pen onto the page. My father sits on the other side of the sofa, lips sealed and cast more toward a frown than a smile. Jeopardy!—that same episode—plays on the TV, but nobody pays attention. Fuji plays therapist and I answer her questions but the trash bag I brought here from the beach distracts me. Chekhov’s gun. Or bomb.
“Have you told him how you feel?” Fuji asks.
“That I’m pissed?”
The blue betta fish follows me from one end of his tank to the other as I pace and get carpet burns on the bottom of my feet, but I don’t give a shit because everything I’ve ever known is about to dissolve into nothing, while the only thing I’ve done right lately—Glitch—has been taken away from me. I turn to my dad. Try to pierce his chest and lungs with my eyes. Because a good part of this mess is his fault. “I’m pissed at you.”
“Tell him why,” she says.
“He knows.”
“Does he?”
Alex Trebek announces the Daily Double. The audience claps only as enthusiastically as Jeopardy! ever allows.
“Do you?” I ask him.
“Yes—of course,” my father says, running his finger across his mustache.
“Why do you suppose it happened the way it did?” Fuji asks. “Why the confrontation with the gun? Why the whole ordeal on the freeway?”
My father fidgets in his seat. Looks in the other direction down the hall.
“Because he was pissed at me, too,” I admit.
“You don’t understand,” my father says.
“Do you understand the mess you created?” I can no longer contain the lava popping off magma blasts within my gut. I tell him about how I thought he was the Coast Killer because of how he sought me out. Why that led to the story in the paper, and how the real killer came back as a result. I scream Enzo’s name at him. The trauma of seeing Enzo laid out in my apartment was too fresh to do anything but scream and hold tears back, and now I’m evoking Emily and Veronica because even though I didn’t know them, they didn’t deserve what happened, and it’s all my fault because it’s all his fault. He won’t make eye contact with me when all I want is to rip him in half with a stare. I smash my fist into the wall above the tank. The betta fish swirls in his tiny enclosure. “Look at me!” My father does and I feel a small victory, but the win is akin to receiving a coupon for a free pizza while a doomsday asteroid is careening toward earth. “Why? Why do it? You needed to capture my attention? Try calling!”
“Let’s hit the pause button.” Fuji waves off the discussion for now.
“Look at him over there,” I say. “Suddenly, nothing to say or do. Tell him to answer!”
Fuji ignores my father. Instead, she motions me to the nook. “You need to sit down. Come.” I give my dad one look and shake my head. I obey Fuji’s command, taking a seat on the edge of her bed. “Resolving this is only so important right at this moment,” she says, plunking down next to me. She flattens a wrinkle out from the shirt I’m wearing. Her dead husband’s shirt.
When I got here a few hours ago, my clothes were still damp. Still speckled with bits of sand that now riddle the carpet within Fuji’s house. The scent from the beach now surfs in her living room. Fuji insisted I put my clothes in the wash and find something from Richard’s old dresser to wear in the meantime. All I could find was a Tommy Bahama button-up short-sleeve shirt—palm tree patterns galore—and beige slacks.
“I’m so sorry, Fuji. I’ve put you at considerable risk.”
“Hush, poor boy. I’m the one that could have saved Glitch if I wasn’t wasting away in dreams.”
“This is all my fault.”
“How do you think that psycho knew you were staying at my house?”
“He must have followed me from my apartment back here. I dropped off your van and met up with Enzo.”
“I knew going back to the apartment was a mistake.”
“Evidently, I’m prone to stupid mistakes.”
“Hush, hush. No need for that now.”
“Do you have anywhere else you could go? It might not be smart to stay here.”
“This is the only place I want to remain. I made that decision a long time ago.”
We sit there, taking stock of the situation. Fuji—the sometimes stoic, sometimes sarcastic, always fiercely supportive woman—rubs my arm.
“Let’s check in on your memory,” she says. “Aside from the farm, how far back can you remember?”
“I wrote it down earlier. Hang on.” I fetch the stack of hot-pink Post-it notes. “It says, Found Dr. Pill. Age: thirty.”
“Only two or three years’ worth of memories, and you seem the same to me.”
Just a few days ago, the notion that I was this close to the end of my memory bank would have excited me. That excitement would have soon turned to relief as the journey nearly reached its conclusion. Maybe I still feel that way.
The dryer’s buzzer goes off from down the hall. I start to get up, but Fuji taps my arm.
“No, little one. Let me.”
She ignores my father once again as she passes him down the hall. Come to think of it, she barely looks his way ever. Maybe Fuji has taken my side over his, and this is how she shows it. She comes back a few minutes later with my clothes wadded up in the basket mounted to the front of her walker. “Fresh, clean, and piping hot.”
I change in the bathroom. Black hoodie and jeans back on. Tommy Bahama spring ’96 collection off. I fold Richard’s clothes up and take them down the hall and into the salon’s old backroom office. It’s as messy as it always is—Fuji’s hoarding of Richard’s belongings left untouched by everything but dust. My father now sits on one of the salon’s swivel chairs. His head is lowered. Staring at his folded hands. Neither of us says anything. Fuji’s tired eyes narrow as I sit next to her.
“Why do you think the memory of the farm breaks apart at the end?”
“When you’ve done so many weird things to yourself just to forget a specific moment, one of them is bound to work.”
“It seems like those pills are working. But you told me earlier that your daddy—not you—unlocked the memories at the farm, right?”
“A trip to Disneyland as well.”
“And how’d he do that?” she asks like a prosecutor leading a witness.
“He referenced a chess move on my board.”
“It’s a pretty important chessboard, wouldn’t you say?”
“What are you getting at?”
She shrugs. Flips her attention back to Jeopardy! “What is Grambling State University?”
The answer, of course, is “What is Grambling State University?” Fuji answers a few more. I watch along and recite the answers in my head as she says them. Who is Teddy Roosevelt? What is calcium nitrate? Who is Camus?
Finally, she returns her attention to me, her jaw hanging loose in a way that reminds me how old she is. How sick.
“As they say,” Fuji says. “The clock is ticking.”
She’s talking about Glitch. How I failed Enzo, but I can still save the innocent creature that did nothing but love me. With sunrise soon here, the twenty-four-hour ransom window is probably closer to fifteen or sixteen by now.
“What are you going to do?”
My chin sags down to my chest. What’s the right answer here? The one that saves face or the one that tells her I’ve already given up?
“I have no idea.”
“How can that be your answer?” She pulls away, her disgust in me matching my own.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Cops?”
“I’m going to call them but if I do it now, they’ll waste the next week thoroughly investigating me instead of finding the real guy—the one they’ve failed to catch all these years—and meanwhile, the clock will run out on Glitch.”
“Then take control.”
“No idea how.”
“Aren’t you a journalist? You know how to investigate. So go do it.”
“I don’t remember my training or very many experiences.”
Fuji leans in and I can smell the metallic aftertaste on her breath brought on by the liquid oxygen. “It’s in you, young fellow. Whether you remember it or not. Find it.”
“Everything I do only gets more people hurt.”
“A good person keeps trying.”
Fuji holds the translucent oxygen mask to her mouth and nose as we finish the episode of Jeopardy! I get up and make a pot of coffee in the kitchen, look at the space on the floor where Glitch would be if he were here—if he had followed me from the bed to the kitchen to wherever else I went because he wasn’t going to give up on me. Fuji wants me to take control—the very element that eludes and eludes and eludes my grasp because my grasp on myself is so fragile and getting weaker by the second but that’s all Glitch has left. Seconds. Fewer of them with each one that passes. So she’s right. This isn’t over and Glitch is still out there and I was a journalist—am a journalist as long as this heart beats and as long as this head still holds a synaptic lightning strike worth of memories—so control is something I now own. Control of the moment and control of what to do and who I am, at least for the here and now. “You’re a journalist,” I mumble. “You start with what you know. And if you don’t have the full picture, you find the person that might know more than you.”
I return to Fuji, handing her a mug as we both test the temperature of the coffee with our lips.
“I know where to start.” I tell Fuji about Laura Poole. How she’s the only survivor and person with knowledge about the killer. “But she’s not exactly a fan of mine.”
“You do what you need to do.”
Take a deep breath in. Let it out.
Decide what you are and what you’ll become.
“I’ll need your cell phone and van.”
“Not a problem,” she says.
My father remains seated. Fuji never seems to look his way. Doesn’t even acknowledge his presence. I start to wonder if her therapy session was for the both of us or just for me. Like the two elders in the room know better than to provoke one another, instead focusing the energy on their mutual connection. Lucky me.
“Should I leave him here?”
“Who?”
“My dad.”
“Oh,” Fuji smiles. “That’s totally up to you.”
“Is there a reason you didn’t ask him any questions?”
“I really do think it’s best to keep the focus on you,” she says. “If we do that, I’m guessing we’ll make your mind right, and the rest will work itself out.”
I start getting as ready as I can—as prepared as anyone who doesn’t know precisely what the next steps are but the venture’s risk-reward is as simple as die versus don’t die.
“I’m coming,” my dad says. “I’ll meet you outside.”
I check Fuji’s oxygen tanks to make sure she’ll be okay. Flick each of the three gauges on the tanks resting against the entertainment center. They all read full or mostly full.
“Will I see you again?” Fuji asks.
I lean forward and kiss her on the forehead. “No promises.”
She laughs. Then coughs. Drinks the coffee once her esophagus calms down. “Let me ask you one more question.”
“What’s that?”
“Why do you think your father was pissed at you?”
I grind my teeth. Question whether I want to say the words out loud. But I owe her this much. “Because I went against his wishes.”
Fuji’s face pinches in on itself—cinching eyebrows. Mouth pursed.
“What is it?”
She looks up at me. Her eyes soften—those caring, tired, brown eyes—and she opens her mouth. “But he was dying, right?”
The Next Chapter Begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .