“Fella asking for you!” he shouted.
“Tell him to fuck off,” I said. I didn’t know anyone in Ensenada, not any more, and didn’t wish to start making new acquaintances.
“Seems pretty insistent,” the guy said, and jerked his thumb back towards the bar. I glanced in that direction, but there were far too many people in the way. “Little black fella, he is.”
In those parts this could mean the guy was actually black, or an indigenous Mexican Indian. Didn’t really make much difference, I still didn’t want to talk to him, but it surprised me that my fellow countryman hadn’t felt qualified to tell him to fuck off by himself. The guy with the beard didn’t look the type to run errands for ethnic majorities.
“Well then tell him to fuck off politely,” I snarled into a moment of relative quiet, and turned back to face the mariachi band.
They immediately and noisily embarked on yet another song, which sounded eerily identical to all the others. It couldn’t be, though, because it got an even bigger cheer than usual, and the singing businessman clambered unsteadily onto a chair to give it his all. I took a sip of my beer, wishing the waiter would hurry up and hassle me again, and waited with grim anticipation for the alfalfa king to pitch headlong into the table of girls. That should be worth watching, I felt.
Then I became aware of a sound. It was quiet, and barely audible below the baying of voices and barking of trumpets, but it was getting louder.
“Told him, like you said,” the American behind me boomed. “Didn’t take it very well.”
A beeping sound. Almost like…
I closed my eyes.
“Hap Thompson!” a tinny voice squealed suddenly, cutting effortlessly through the noise in the bar. Then it went back to beeping, getting louder and louder, before sirening my name again. I tried to ignore it, but it wasn’t going to go away. It never does.
Within a minute the beeping was so loud that the mariachi band began turning in my direction. Gradually they stopped playing, the instruments fading out one by one as if their players were being serially dropped off a cliff. I swore viciously and ground my cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. Heads turned, and a silence descended on the bar. The last person to shut up was the singing businessman. He was now standing weaving on the table with his arms outstretched. He would have looked quite like an opera singer in that moment, had his face not been more reminiscent of a super-middleweight boxer who’d thrown too many fights.
Taking a deep breath, I turned round.
A channel had cleared in the crowd behind me, and I could see straight to the bar. There, standing carefully so as to avoid the pools of spilt beer, was my alarm clock.
“Oh, hello,” it said, into the quiet. “Thought you hadn’t heard me.”
“What,” I said, “the
fuck
do you want?”
“It’s time to get up, Hap.”
“I am up,” I said. “I’m in a bar.”
“Oh,” said the clock, looking around. “So you are.” It paused for a moment, before surging on. “But it’s still time to get up. You can snooze me once more if you want, but you really ought to be out and about by half past nine.”
“Look, you little bastard,” I said, “I am up. It’s a quarter past nine in the
evening”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve been through this.”
“I have the time as 9:17 precisely. AM.” The clock angled itself so that I—and everyone else—could read its display clearly.
“You’ve
always
got the time as AM!” I shouted, standing to point at it. “That’s because you’re
broken
you useless piece of shit.”
“Hey, man,” said one of the tourists at my table. “Little guy’s only trying to do his job. No call for language like that.” There was a low rumble of agreement from nearby tables.
“That’s right,” agreed the clock, two square inches of injured innocence on two spindly little legs. “Just trying to do my job, that’s all. Let’s see how you like it if I don’t wake you up, huh? We know what happens
then
, don’t we?”
“What?” asked a woman at the other side of the room, her eyes sorrowful. “Does he mistreat you?” With my jaw clamped firmly shut, I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter off the table and glared at the woman. She stared bravely back at me, and sniffed. “He looks the type.”
“He hits me. He even throws me out the window.” This was greeted by low mutters from some quarters, and I decided it was time to go. “Of moving
cars
…”
The crowd stirred angrily. I considered telling them that having a broken am/pm indicator was the least of this clock’s problems, that it was also prone, on a whim, to wake me up at regular intervals through the small hours and thus lose me a night’s work, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Trust the little bastard to catch up with me in the one bar in the world where people apparently cared about defective appliances. I pulled my jacket on and started shouldering my way through the people around me. A pathway opened up, lined with sullen faces, and I slunk towards the door feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“Wait, Hap! Wait for me!”
At the sound of the clock’s little feet landing on the ground I picked up the pace and hurried out, past the pair of armed policemen moonlighting as guards in the short passageway outside. I clanged through the swing doors at the end, hoping one of the cops would whip back and catapult the machine back over the bar, and stomped out into the road.
It didn’t work. The clock caught up with me, and ran by my side down the street with little puffing sounds of exertion. These were fake, I believed, little sampled lies. If it had managed to track me down from where I’d flung it out the window (for the last time) in San Diego, a quick sprint was hardly going to wind it.
“Thanks,” I snarled. “Now everyone in that fucking bar knows my name.” I swung a kick at it, but it dodged easily, feinting to one side and then scuttling back to face me.
“But that’s
nice,”
the clock said. “Maybe you’ll make some new friends. Not only am I a useful timepiece, but I can help you achieve your socialising goals by bridging the gulf between souls in this topsy-turvy world of ours. Please stop throwing me away. I can help you!”
“No you can’t,” I said, grinding to a halt. The night was dark, the street lit only by stuttering yellow lamps outside Ensenada’s bars, food rooms and rat-hole motels, and I felt suddenly homesick and alone. I was in the wrong part of the wrong town, and I didn’t even know why I was there. Someone else’s guilt, my own paranoia, or just because it was where I always used to run. Maybe all three—and it didn’t really matter. I had to find Laura Reynolds, who might not even be here, before I got shafted for something I hadn’t done, but remembered doing. Try explaining that to a clock.
“You’ve barely explored my organiser functions,” the clock chimed, oblivious.
“I’ve already got an organiser.”
“But I’m better! Just tell me your appointments, and I’ll remind you with any one of twenty-five charming alarm sounds. Never forget an anniversary! Never be late for that important meeting! Never—”
This time the kick connected. With a fading yelp the clock sailed clean over a line of stores selling identical rows of cheap rugs and plaster busts of ET. By the time I was fifty yards down the street the mariachi band was at full tilt again behind me, the businessman’s voice soaring clear and true above it, the voice of a man who knew who he was and where he lived and what he was going home to.
I’d arrived in Mexico late the previous evening. That, at least, was when I’d woken to find myself in a car I didn’t recognise, stationary but with the engine still running, by the side of a patchy road. I switched the ignition off and got out gingerly, my head feeling as if someone had hammered a number of very cold nails into my left temple in an intriguing pattern. Then I peered around into the darkness, trying to work out where I was.
The answer soon presented itself, in the shape of the sharply defined geography surrounding me. A steep rock face rose behind the car, and on the other side of the road the hill disappeared abruptly—the only vegetation was bushes and gnarled grey trees that seemed to be making a big point of just what a hard time they were having. The warm air smelt of dust, and with no city glow the stars were bright in the blackness above.
I was on the old interior road that leads down the Baja from Tijuana to Ensenada, twisting through the dark country up along the hills. There was a time when it was the only road in those parts, but now it’s not lit, in bad repair, and nobody with any sense drives this way any more.
Now that I was out of the car I was able to recognise it as mine, and to dimly remember climbing into it in LA much earlier in the day. But this realisation faded in and out like a signal from a television station where the power is unreliable. Other memories were trying to shoulder it aside, clamouring for their time in the sun. They were artificially sharp and distinct, and trying to hide this by melding with my own recollections; but they couldn’t because the memories weren’t mine and they had no real home to go to. All they could do was overlay what was already there, like a double exposure, sometimes at the front, sometimes merely tickling like a word on the tip of your tongue.
I walked back to the car and fumbled in the glove compartment, hoping to find something else I could recognise as mine. I immediately discovered a lot of cigarettes, including an opened pack, but they weren’t my brand. I smoke Camel Lights, always have: these were Kim. Nonetheless it was likely that I’d bought them, because the opened pack still had the cellophane round the bottom half. It’s a habit of mine to leave it there, which has given my best friend Deck hours of fun taking it off and sneaking it onto the top half of the pack when I’m in the John. The memory of Deck’s trademark cackle as I yanked and snarled at a pack after such an incident suddenly bloomed in my mind, grounding me for a moment in who I was.
I screwed up my eyes tightly for a moment, and when I opened them again, I felt a little better.
The passenger seat was strewn with twists of foil and a number of cracked vials, and it didn’t take me long to work out why. A long time ago, in a past life, I used to deal a drug called Fresh. Fresh removes the ennui which comes from custom and acquaintance, and presents everything to you—every sight, emotion and experience—as if it’s happening for the first time. Part of how Fresh does this is by masking your memories, to stop them grabbing new experience and turning it into just the same old thing. Evidently I’d been trying to replicate this effect with a cocktail of other recreational pharmaceuticals, and had ended up blacking out. On an unlit mountain road, in Mexico, at night.
Great going.
But it had evidently worked, because for the time being I was back. I started the car and pulled carefully back onto the road, after a quick mental check to make sure I was pointing in the right direction. Then I tore the filter off a Kim, lit her up, and headed South.
I only passed one other car along the way, which was good, because it meant I could drive down the middle of the road and stay as far as possible from the precipitous drops which line half the route. This left me free to do a kind of internal inventory, and to start panicking about that instead. Most of the last six hours were missing, along with a number of words and facts. I could recall where I lived, for example—on the tenth floor of The Falkland, one of Griffith’s livelier apartment blocks—but not the room number. It simply wasn’t available to me. Presumably I’d remember by sight: I hoped so, because all my stuff was in there and otherwise I’d have nothing to wear.
I could remember Laura Reynolds’ name, and what she’d done to me. She’d evidently been with me for some of the journey down, in spirit at least: it must have been her who bought the cigarettes, though me who opened the pack. I didn’t really know what Laura Reynolds looked like, only how she appeared to herself, and I had no idea where she was. I’d probably had a good reason for heading for Ensenada, or at least a reason of some kind—assuming, of course, that it had been me who made the decision. Either way, now that I was here it seemed I might as well go on.
I made good time, only having to stop once, while a herd of coffee machines crossed the road in front of me. I read somewhere that they often make their way down to Mexico. I can’t see why that would be so, but there was certainly a hell of a lot of them. They came down off the hill-in silence, trooped across the road in a protective huddle, and then waddled off down the slope in an orderly line, searching for a home, or food, or maybe even some coffee beans, for all I knew.
I reached Ensenada just after midnight, and slept in the car on the outskirts of town. I dreamed of a silver sedan and men with lights behind their heads, but the message was confused and frantic, fear dancing through an internal landscape lined with doors that wouldn’t open.
When I woke up, more of my head was back in place, and I got it together to contact Stratten, patching the call through my hacker’s network so it looked like it came from LA. I said I had a migraine and wouldn’t be able to work for a couple of days. I don’t think Stratten believed me, but he didn’t call me on it. I spent the rest of the day fruitlessly searching taco stands and crumbling hotels, or driving aimlessly down rotting streets. By the evening this had led me to an inescapable conclusion.