Free Amnesiascope: A Novel by Steve Erickson Page A

no more reason than the fact that if I lost my job I wouldn’t have anything better to do, I began to think about actually writing another book, one last book I had reconciled myself long ago to never writing. Up out of the sea of my psyche ripped the glacier of my conscience, beneath the sky of memory; and in my mind I began to record the story of that traveler who is always trying to get across that glacier, scale its walls one more time as I had tried to do so many times before, before the exhaustion of passion, faith, energy and courage led me to give up. Lying on my bed in the dark I followed the traveler’s journey in my mind’s eye until he was out of sight. I followed him into my sleep, to the horizon where the white of the ice becomes the white of the sky and he disappears from view: “He disappears from view,” I think I muttered to myself before drifting off. But that doesn’t mean, a dream answered, he isn’t still there.
    Woke up a few days ago with one of my headaches, the first I’ve had in a long time. At first it isn’t so bad but then it comes over my brain like a swarm, for two days, then three, then a week. … I went to see my acupuncturist in Little Tokyo; in a tiny dark room with the shades pulled I lie on a table and she sticks me with pins from the top of my skull to the toes on my feet. Since I always keep my eyes closed I can’t be sure what it is she uses to tap the needles in, but tap them she does, in my legs and my arms, in my shoulders and my face. I picture her with a tiny little hammer pounding the needle into my forehead: tap tap tap. Then she sets all the needles on fire. I hear her lighting them and I feel the heat. She leaves the room and I lie anxiously awaiting her return, my eyes closed tightly, twenty little torches blazing from my body, like an albino porcupine on fire.
    As I anticipated, Abdul has been sacked. Rather, the jihad for whom Abdul works, the other Palestinian terrorists, have been sacked, by whatever bank or lending institution holds the mortgage on the building. Everything is thrown into chaos, which alarms the other tenants. I just go on like a man blithely walking through a battle, bodies and bullets flying all around him. My guess is that financially Abdul ran the Hamblin into the ground with his grand designs. He had big plans for redecorating the hotel entry-way, putting hardwood floors in all the apartments, garbage disposals in all the kitchen sinks. Given enough time he would have installed a swimming pool on the roof, with a tennis court. Of course it also took him six months to get the elevator and the plumbing fixed—but Abdul isn’t the kind of man to waste time on plumbing. What’s plumbing next to hardwood floors? Abdul is a landlord of vision, he can’t be bothered with mere repairs. He actually did lay a new hardwood floor in my old single apartment I just moved out of, which he then rented to a pretty girl from Indiana. Or, more likely, he laid the floor after he rented it to her, just so she wouldn’t have any doubts as to what a smooth character he is. Now Abdul is out as manager, figuratively if not literally out of his palatial apartment where he schemes his inevitable comeback, waiting for the financial and legal problems to be resolved and control of the building once again to be within his grasp. “It’s all bullshit,” he says with a sniff, contemptuously waving away the recent events. “ Tactics .”
    In the months after I left Sally and returned to Los Angeles, I had many unusual dreams. I wrote some of them down. In one I had the distinct and certain sense that the only option left to me in my life was suicide. This sounds more melodramatic than it felt. In my dream I wasn’t conscious of any unbearable pain, just that my identity was irrevocably dead, that my life was over even as my body went on living, out of sync with the reality of my life. Killing myself was the only way to get myself in sync. It wasn’t an emotional