Free Concert of Ghosts by Campbell Armstrong Page A

I was in San Francisco,” he said.
    â€œUntil when?”
    â€œIt must have been … 1968, ’69, I guess.”
    â€œAnd you came here in what?”
    â€œApril 1981. The twenty-second.” Such precision. Such surprising precision.
    â€œThat leaves about twelve years, Harry.”
    Twelve years . Something in his chest flapped and fluttered. He was suddenly frail, a scrap of paper in the night rain, a kite freed from its line and set adrift across the trees.
    â€œWhat do you remember of those years, Harry?”
    â€œLook,” and he was talking quickly now. “I did all that acid, I told you, I dropped hundreds of tabs of the stuff, I lost count, and the last batch was criminal, and it did something to my head, it did something bad to my fucking head.”
    â€œCalm, calm down,” she said. “Relax.”
    Relax, right, relax. He was afraid. He had a sudden memory, sharp as ice, of tripping on particularly vicious acid for days. Day after day of terrors. Volcanic eruptions threatened to burn his eyes out of his skull; disgusting reptilian shapes, disturbed from subterranean slumber, slithered among his bedsheets. Some scratching furry thing lived beneath his floorboards. From the window of a room he watched traffic passing along Schrader Street toward the Panhandle and it created an unbroken sinew of lava. Inside the Conservatory of Flowers—he’d no notion of how he’d reached the place—the humidity had devastated him. He might have been drowning in an ancient swamp. A giant imperial philodendron hung above him, its huge fronds flying at him like prehistoric birds. He’d been drawn into massive, gnarled twines, which suggested tortuous freeway systems leading, in directions too complicated to reckon, to the secret center of the planet itself. And what lived there, in fold after fold of shadow, was too dreadful to contemplate.
    How could he remember the specifics of that trip and yet be unable to place it in time? Nor could he bring the room on Schrader back with any clarity. Had he lived there? Maybe it had been nothing more than a place where he crashed one night; you were always sleeping on somebody’s floor in those days.
    He stepped back from the girl and thought: Twelve years and it’s like I never lived them. The thought might have been a meteorite crashing through the fundaments of his life.
    â€œYou had to be somewhere, Harry. You didn’t just dematerialize. You didn’t go out of existence circa 1969 and reincarnate in 1981. You had to be somewhere, for God’s sake.”
    â€œI don’t know. I don’t know.”
    â€œYou don’t remember the photograph. The people in it. You don’t remember a whole chunk of your life. Think, Harry. Were you in a hospital? Did somebody look after you? Think.”
    A hospital? He had no such recollection. “I don’t know, goddamnit, I don’t know.” Lost, he turned his face away from the porch. The only life he ever really knew lay dead in the woods.
    â€œHarry.” The girl took his hands and drew him back inside the house. She made him sit at the table. She poured him a glass of Jack Daniel’s. He sipped it, but it did nothing to dispel the chill inside him.
    â€œWhy did you never ask yourself about your past, Harry? Why did you never wonder about those years?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t know.” It was as if he’d come into existence in this place in April 1981 and he’d started growing dope in the woods and every now and then he flashed on the old days in the Haight and that was it, that was all. Amnesia—the word was monstrous.
    Alison sighed. “Maybe you don’t want to remember. You know, something you buried, didn’t want to look at. Something that happened in San Francisco.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œI don’t know. If it was me I’d kill to find out. I’d want to know where I’d