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Category:
Vision/Metaphysical
Publisher: Sortmind Press
Type: Fiction
Pages: 318
Copyright: Dec. 5, 2024
ISBN-13: 9798302584953
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
An adolescent sent to live with his grandmother finds his memory wiped out. He panics and commits a murder, then becomes a member of a mystical commune beneath the ruined city of Zarreich.
Jim Donne, a recent college graduate, comes to live in a small town after the death of his mother, only to discover that all his memories have been wiped out. Now living with what may or may not be his grandmother, he kills what he thinks is a gang leader invading her home. But he panics, wondering whether he’s overreacted to a harmless student prank, and he cuts up and hides the body.
He then finds himself under a ludicrously botched police investigation. Slipping into hallucinatory fevers, he tries to disappear into a stifling clerical job at a mortgage company in the ruined city of Zarreich. Yet he’s soon drafted into a secret commune of twelve dreamers in an underground university he can only faintly remember.
Excerpt
Most of the land was gray dirt. Except for the prickly pear cactus and mesquite trees, the low hills by the bus terminal were like the surface of the moon. The slanting afternoon sun came down like a blowtorch.
Jim sat on a bench outside the bus terminal. Yellow grass clung to the cracked sidewalks. A terminal attendant sprayed a hose at a few bushes. Stone fountains churned. Silver-gray mountains shimmered far to the west.
Jim looked through his suitcase. Sketchpads, technical pens and pencils, some clothing and a paperback novel about some kid from Georgia joining a mercenary band in Africa. He flipped through the book; he didn’t remember packing it. He couldn’t imagine having bought it.
In fact he didn’t recognize a single item in the suitcase. These were not his sketchpads and technical pens; he’d never seen these button-down shirts. He’d gotten the wrong suitcase. He went back into the bus terminal.
The bus driver sat with a cup of coffee listening to the woman behind the ticket counter.
“Marjorie got that towel set. But I don’t know if I’d want to be spending two hundred dollars on that towel set. Now my towels may be a couple years old, but I like ’em, I figure they’ll last awhile, and who has two hundred dollars anyway? On the other hand, Marjorie’s towels were nice, you could tell that.”
“Yeah, I would think so,” said the bus driver, then turned and said: “How you doing, young man? What can I do for you now?”
“Well,” Jim said, looking from the bus driver to the woman behind the counter, “I think I got the wrong suitcase or something.” The woman, nametag Sandra, and the bus driver, nametag Earl, were the only people in the terminal.
“No, that can’t be,” Earl said. “You were the only passenger into Eicsine from Cuxlacjs. There was only one piece of luggage on board her. And that was the one.”
“What makes you think you got the wrong suitcase, hon?” the woman said. “That’s the one I checked in for you. You were the only one off the bus.”
Jim pointed to the suitcase. “Well, I don’t remember that scratch in the side there.” But now he recalled joking earlier with Sandra about the scratch, how it had been there for years, and Sandra’s little return joke about how Jim didn’t need to worry about getting his suitcase mixed up with anyone else’s because it was the only one in from Cuxlacjs today.
Jim was horrified. How could he have forgotten his conversation with this woman?
“Maybe the scratch came from being bumped around in the bus,” Earl offered.
“No, the scratch has been there for years,” Jim said. “I was just thinking that maybe it got mixed up in Cuxlacjs.”
“Hell no, boy, that bus was empty in Cuxlacjs. I’ve gone five hundred miles today and stopped at four cities, and didn’t have a single passenger until I picked you up in Cuxlacjs.”
Jim remembered the last half hour on the bus journey when he’d finally gotten the nerve up to come up from the rear to sit behind Earl and chat about the heat. “Well, maybe this is my suitcase?”
Sandra stepped from around the counter. Jim had liked her from the first. She might be fifty years old but was still pretty. Her orange blouse wrapped tightly around her large breasts and her thick bra was clearly outlined. Earl, a handsome man in his sixties with bulging muscles, looked on from behind his styrofoam cup. “Now hold on,” Sandra said. “If you’ve got some reason to believe that isn’t your suitcase, we’ll just have to look into it, won’t we, Earl?”
“Sure,” Earl said. “What I can’t figure out is why he thinks it isn’t his suitcase. I mean, it’s the same one he gave me to load. Or isn’t it?”
“Well, of course it’s the same one, then,” Jim said.
“Hold on, Earl,” Sandra said. “Maybe it’s possible you had another suitcase in there. Maybe it just got stuck way back in the luggage compartment, and it happened to look like your suitcase here. Then maybe on the drive the wrong suitcase got knocked forward, and you picked that one out.”
“Well, that would explain the scratch it got,” Earl said, standing. “Guess I’ll check the luggage compartment again. I could’ve sworn it was empty, though.”
“No, I guess I’ll just take this suitcase,” Jim said. “Please don’t go to any trouble.” He remembered how dark and stifling that luggage compartment had been when Earl had opened it. It shouldn’t be revisited for a stupid suitcase. “This one has the scratch, after all.”
“I suppose it’s possible both suitcases had scratches on them,” Sandra said. “Though it’d be a long shot, you can bet.”
“Maybe that kind of suitcase was especially prone to being scratched right there,” Earl offered. “Beats me, though.” He walked to the bus and opened the luggage compartment.
Jim drew back. “No, this is mine. I guess I’ll just be leaving.”
“You’re sure it’s yours?” Sandra said.
“It’s empty, all right,” Earl announced, then slammed the compartment shut.
“Did you check way far back?” Sandra said. “Maybe it got lost way in the back.”
“Naw, there’s no kinda place to lose a whole suitcase back there, Sandra. This here’s the right suitcase, all right.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Jim said, staring blearily at the insect-blasted bus windshield.
“Are you sure?” Sandra said. “Because we don’t want you to be unhappy. We’ll be glad to look around a little more for your suitcase.”
“But it’s right here.”
“Oh--I suppose so.”
Jim edged backward. “Guess I’d better be going?”
Earl drained his coffee and threw the cup into a black can. “That’s right. Your grandmother’s gonna wonder why you’re late.”
“My … grandmother?”
“Grandmother?” Sandra said. “How nice. Who is she?”
“Well …”
“Why, Sandra, didn’t Jim introduce himself?” Earl said. “He’s Emily Donne’s grandson. He’s coming to live with her.”
Jim stared at Earl. “How do you know that?”
“Why, you told me on the bus. Fine woman. She and I were in high school together. You seem a little old to be her grandkid, though.”
“Oh, no, that could easily work,” Sandra grinned. “Emily and her daughter both married real young, you know. But I didn’t know she had a grandson. Please to meet you then, Jim.”
“You are?” Jim said. Earl had talked about this town. Eicsine, what a silly name. Why was he here? Who was this grandmother? What was this Cuxlacjs they’d driven from? All Jim could remember was endless desert highway and bumping his head against the window. Earl and Sandra and the bus terminal seemed real, but they were messing with his mind. Maybe he had no suitcase at all. Maybe he had come here without possessions. Maybe he needed to come here because he had no possessions.
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