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16. THE TENTH HOUR
The boy led Arthur through the dunes in the tunnel, always staying at least one dune ahead. Soon, he brought Arthur to another portal, this time on the right side. The boy faced Arthur, pointing out toward this new place with his left hand, while holding the lantern in his right. It was clear that he would not be leaving the tunnel this time, but that Arthur must do so.
With much of his memory gone, and therefore his identity also frayed, Arthur stepped into the shimmering metropolis that sprawled before him. For one instant he had an overview from inside the tunnel: rooftops as far as the eye could see; even the horizon was one of rooftops, a skyline etched in thousands of tiny squares of light swimming in a general haze of light. The next moment, stepping from the tunnel, he was little more than a vagrant on the city's streets.
It was a hard, dark place. Homeless people wandered the streets, and vagrants gathered at small fires in back alleys to share a bottle and tell tales while the flames flickered orange on their craggy, unwashed faces. Rain dripped off gleaming stone walls. Even the main streets were narrow, the sidewalks small, the houses tall and looming in a sinister way. Arthur rarely had a far view, because the streets were not straight. There were darkened shop windows on either side, and most of the shops were closed. There was very little sign of commerce or prosperity. Everything was tawdry, from the gray curtains in people's windows to the battered doors that all seemed to need a fresh coat of paint.
Arthur walked on and on in the rain. Was this what he wanted in choosing a new life? The past seemed to close behind him like an unlit road driven at night, and the future lay somewhere ahead without even the first sign of dawn in the sky. For every step he took, he left another batch of memories behind. He realized that, in a way, he was now inside those canvas-covered mirrors he'd seen the previous hour. He encountered only a few souls out in this weather, and they were drably dressed, sheltering under black umbrellas. Their pace was not one of hurrying somewhere but, even on a night like this, marked by lassitude, surrender, a depressed slowness as if nothing really mattered.
Just when Arthur stopped out of breath on a street corner, he heard a sort of ragged hoot at his elbow. He glanced in that direction, and saw that a tiny car had pulled up. It was just a little box with four wheels, very much like one of those ancient East German Trabants with plastic sides and a little motorcycle engine. The driver tooted again, and Arthur leaned down to look inside. Through a raindrop-spattered window, he saw a big man in a gray suit: Cuphandle. The driver gestured for him to get in, and Arthur almost gladly pulled open the flimsy door. The inside of the car smelled of machine oil and industrial cloth-the seat covers being partly rubber and forever giving off the odor of the factory where they had been made. "I think you will need a little direction," Cuphandle said. "We are going to temporarily restore a limited set of your lost memories so that you can lawfully and competently decide on your course of action. How is your journey so far?"
"Nightmarish."
"Still want to go through with it?"
"To get rid of some of the memories I have encountered so far-yes. Very much so. But will the future life be any better?"
"You have to decide that for yourself." Cuphandle drove left and right through all sorts of crazy little streets, and Arthur was glad just to be able to sit down in a dry spot. He was tired from hours of walking, not to mention all the emotional turmoil. Cuphandle spied a rare little bistro open and pulled over. "Let's stop for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat, shall we?"
"I'm thirsty and famished," Arthur said.
They ran hunched through the rain and entered a small establishment with a heavy wooden front door secured by metal bars. Inside it was warm and smoky, with a mix of smells of tobacco, coffee, brandy, and a food special somewhere between cabbage and fried sausage.
"You deserve a break," Cuphandle said as they dug into their sausage, bread, potatoes, and cabbage dinners. They washed it all down with small glasses of green, bitter beer. "Not too much of that," Cuphandle said, eyeing the beer. "You must stay lucid."
Arthur pushed his plate aside, wiped his mouth with a linen napkin that smelled vaguely of last week's grease, and said: "How is it possible for me to see my son Eddie as a little boy, a ghost, when I know he has grown up to be a man. An adult who hates me, but nonetheless a living person."
"Which boy do you mean?"
"Why, the little boy with the lantern."
"That's not Eddie. That's you."
Arthur thought about it. That was the craziest thing he'd ever heard, and yet it made sense. The old man, the dog, the woman-they were his family when he'd been a small boy. He asked: "What about Mary? I met her in a department store with Gretchen. My wife has passed away years ago, yet Mary grew up to be a woman-who also hates me, but that's beside the point."
"Ah!" Cuphandle wiped his mouth and sat back, holding his little beer glass in both hands. "I see your question. Well, it's like this. You were asking earlier what happens to people when they die, and I couldn't give you much of a hint then, but I can talk about it now that we're in this phase of the contract. Understand that you will forget this information-whether you decide to forego your wish and go back to being your old self, or whether you opt for an entirely new life. You've heard the expression that, when someone dies young, they're always young and never age? Well, that's about as close as I can come to explaining it. As people grow older, they evolve. They become someone new. A teenager is no longer the little boy he was. A young woman is no longer the teenage girl she was. Yet they remember themselves as such, if kind of seen through a warped looking glass, filtering out many of the memories. Also, people who loved them, and people who only knew them, remember them as such. In fact, remembering each other is one of the key ways that people understand who they themselves are. The long and the short of it is that we never actually die, but we stay fixed in the world that we lose when we grow older."
Arthur interrupted: "But isn't that bad for those who are stuck in something bad. Like me as a boy, in a childhood with an abusive father who is drunk all the time, and beats me, my mother, and the dog on a daily basis?"
Cuphandle made a pained face. "I didn't make the world. I just live in it. I'm just a working djinni like any other stiff-except for the special effects." He brightened. "You did make a bit of a difference back there when you showed the old man what a dreadful fool he was."
"I wanted to kill him."
"But you were restrained about it. How noble of you."
"Don't taunt me about it."
"Easy, Arthur, easy. I'm not taunting you. I'm quite serious. You behaved quite nobly back there. And you were never physically abusive of your family."
"Just emotionally abusive," Arthur said glumly.
"Hmm, yes, you did make a mess of it. At least now you are aware of it. Another thing to consider is that in reality, the boy-you as a small boy-will never experience anything drastically new. Whatever was done to you was done, and that's that. Some good happens to most of us also."
"That's true," Arthur said. "I get misty just thinking about my mother. She put up with that whackjack and loved me all the more. Yes, in that sense I have no regrets about my childhood-mainly, that I miss her. So she's still out there, someplace, loving me." He brightened. "That makes things better, somehow, even though I can't go back to being a little kid again. I wouldn't want that."
"People outgrow who they were," Cuphandle said. "There really isn't any going back." Cuphandle left a stack of brassy looking coins on the table and exchanged adieus with the waiter, a short graying man in a long apron, who responded in a foreign pleasantry. Cuphandle told Arthur: "Come on, let's hustle. I have a thing or two to show you."
They got back into the dreadful little car, and drove for a good twenty minutes while Cuphandle seemed to lose his way a number of times. Arthur was getting antsy, looking at his watch. Sure enough, the watch was giving off that aura again, and it made Arthur's gut ache with the sheer raw energy of its hunger for his time.
"There," Cuphandle said. "I found it." He pulled over onto the curb, European style, and they waited.
"What is this place?" Arthur asked.
They sat parked on a small square with a few trees in planters and a row of bicycle parking hoops. Rain dripped relentlessly from a black, swollen sky. Here and there, yellowish light shone from a window-some rectangular, some more like portholes. Occasionally a little car swished past, or a shadowy figure hurried from one doorway to another. The little square was actually more of a triangle, at the head of a split in the road. A little connecting street crossed between this triangle and the large apartment building adjacent. The building was a vast, bland conglomeration of modern and Art Deco touches. Mostly it consisted of drab gray stucco surfaces, while the windows were framed in reddish sandstone, and the corner edges were offset with a few decorative pavers thrown in at random. Overall, the effect was cheerless, efficient, industrial, unimaginative.
"There," Cuphandle said as the door started to open and a lozenge of light fell onto the wetly glittering sidewalk. A man and a woman backed down the stairs, lowering a baby perambulator. She wore a pink ski parka, the only bright spot in their clothing which otherwise ranged from dark gray to charcoal. "Take a good look, Arthur."
"Who are they?"
"They are-" Cuphandle frowned. "Something is wrong here. That's not you." He whipped out his cell phone and called the home office.
"What are you talking about?" Arthur looked at the mousy woman in her ski parka, and the obedient, bland man in dark clothing who had assisted her. She thanked him, and he responded in kind by raising his hat before hurrying off. She went to great pains to cover the baby with a sort of canvas tent before marching down the street. She looked lonely and unhappy, Arthur thought.
"I get it," Cuphandle said, putting his cell phone away. "That was supposed to be a glimpse of you and your future wife in your new life, Arthur." He punched Arthur lightly on the arm. "She was waiting for you to come home so you could take the baby for a stroll, but you're avoiding her because she's bossy. So you stay at work as late at night as you can, and she has to have a neighbor help lower the perambulator down for a stroll." He looked sphinx-like, saying: "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but those two will end up having an affair."
Arthur blanched, feeling his gut roil. "That happened to me before. Exactly like that." He had stayed with Gretchen for the sake of the kids, but he'd been very cold toward her. Her guilt feelings about her affair with a younger man at the university where she taught had probably added to the stress that had finally taken her from Arthur. "So everything changes, and yet nothing changes."
Cuphandle started the car. "Sometimes it works out like that." He pulled off the curb and out into the street with a rolling bounce. "I'm trying hard to make sure you have all the information you need before you finally decide. We want happy, satisfied customers."
"Can't I just start over with Gretchen?"
Cuphandle shook his head. "Nope. That's absolutely out of the question. That's forbidden. Bringing the dead back to life is our number one taboo, closely followed by sending the living in any manner over to the world of the dead. That's not a permitted wish. Besides, as I said earlier, there isn't any going back. You wouldn't want to."
"I see. Shoot." Arthur sat back. "So my choices are coming here to live unhappily with this woman, or going back to being a lonely old banker."
"Unless you come up with something more imaginative," Cuphandle said.
"I've never been very imaginative, I'm afraid. That's what makes me such a boring old banker." The watch in Arthur's pocket seemed to grow warm as the next hour was about to strike.
"We're running out of time," Cuphandle said. "Listen."
Nearby, in a gloomy church tower with black rain clouds scudding low through it, the bells were tolling slowly. Another hour had passed, and the eleventh hour was about to begin.
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