Free Amnesiascope: A Novel by Steve Erickson

take an especially nasty tone with fact-checkers. “Our reference book says he was twenty-four.”
    “Who?”
    “Adolphe Sarre.”
    “Reference book. …”
    “He was twenty-four when he made The Death of Marat .”
    At first I went blank. Then suddenly I understood: “Sure,” I answered, laughing, “twenty-four, huh? I don’t know how I missed that one. Anything else?”
    “Uh, no, everything else checks out. …”
    “Oh good. That’s fine. I like it when everything checks out,” I went on, congratulating the hell out of him.
    “OK,” he hung up, baffled. For half an hour I laughed about it, and then an hour later the art department called to ask if I had a still shot from the film they could run with the piece, and now I knew it was a joke; Shale even had the fact-checker and art director in on it. “Twenty-four in the reference book”—very funny. “A still shot to run with the piece”—hilarious. But after I was through laughing I started steeling myself again for the inevitable; sooner or later, once I had my fun and he had his fun, Shale would insist on a serious life-questioning discussion about whatever corroding inner rot was driving me to write about spiritual strip joints and non-existent movies. It wasn’t that he’d fire me, of course; like I’ve said before, Shale’s the kind of boss who gives you every chance before it comes to that. And in a way that made me feel all the more sheepish, because I’d taken advantage of his reasonableness, the way I always thought other people took advantage of it. I had indulged my boredom at his expense and the newspaper’s, and felt infantile about it; and over the next few days I kept meaning to telephone him and beg forgiveness, like a school kid whose teacher is waiting for him to own up to his transgression. For a week I dialed his number and hung up before he answered, increasingly tortured right up to the morning I picked up the new issue of the paper on the street and there it was on page thirteen, no photo but otherwise big as life: ADOLPHE SARRE’S HEROIC RESURRECTION was the headline.
    I just stood there on the sidewalk staring at it in horror and disbelief. Shale would never have taken it this far; his editorial integrity was such that he might make a joke out of me or himself, but not the newspaper. That stupid “fact-checker” obviously looked up the wrong entry. He got my made-up movie completely mixed up with some other movie, and now the thing was in black-and-white in a hundred thousand newspapers. Before the day was out studios and theaters would be screaming, maybe threatening lawsuits; now it was entirely possible I could lose my job or, worse, Freud N. Johnson would demand it and Shale would once again throw his body in front of me like he’s done for half the other people at the newspaper, knowing it could lose him his job. I had precipitated a spectacularly foolish crisis, and I rushed back to the Hamblin and down the hall to Ventura’s apartment where I rapped desperately on the door. But he wasn’t there, so I went back to my suite and called Dr. Billy, but he didn’t answer either.
    The hours passed. The phone didn’t ring, Dr. Billy didn’t answer, Ventura wasn’t home. Evening came, darkness fell, and still nothing happened; and then the night passed and the dawn came and the day passed again, and still nothing. And then the weekend passed and the beginning of the new week arrived and there was still only silence, except that at one point I could hear Ventura back in his apartment playing bebop on his stereo. But now I didn’t know what to say to him, since four days had passed without a word from anyone; I felt too stupid about the whole thing to even tell Viv. So I said nothing. …
    But that first night after the Marat review hit the streets, as I was still waiting for the angry telephone to ring and my fraud to catch up with me, I had a thought I hadn’t had in years. For some reason or another, perhaps for