DAY FIFTY-ONE

Your name is Jerry Grey and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with you except for the fact you can’t remember spraying a word you shouldn’t mention across the house of your neighbor. Here’s the thing. The shake. The rub. The lowdown. Future Jerry, you don’t know for a fact you did what they think you did. Just because you hid a can of spray-paint in your office doesn’t mean you used a can of spray-paint on your neighbor’s house. After all, there are kitchen knives in the kitchen, does that mean anybody stabbed over the last twenty years was stabbed by you? The can is a holdover from days of Renovation Past, just as there are other paints stored in the garage. The plan after finding the spray-paint in the hiding spot had been to dump it. That much you remember. Toss it into a dumpster in town somewhere. The problem with that scenario is Sandra took the keys off you so you can’t drive anymore. She took them last night. She said you may not realize it, but sadly you’re starting to slip a little. She said she’s taking them off you for your own safety, and for the safety of others on the roads. It hurt. But you know the truth, you know why she’s really taking them. It’s to control you. Don’t do this, Jerry. Don’t do that. It’s all you hear these days.

The police never came back yesterday, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. You had to get rid of it, or face life without parole, spending your days breaking rocks in the sun. If you couldn’t drive, you could at least walk. Nothing illegal about that. Neighbors weren’t going to look out the window and go Oh, there’s Jerry, off to dump incriminating evidence.

So that’s what you did.

At least started to do. Until Captain A became involved.

There’s a park three blocks from here, which you thought was far enough away to dump the spray can because the police, after all, weren’t looking for a murder weapon, and any radius they searched would probably be within twenty feet of the house. Now, looking back, the whole thing seems silly and there never was any real need to dump the can in the first place. The police were never going to get a search warrant—the crime hadn’t made the news and nobody had been hurt. It was, for all intents and purposes, not a big deal.

You left the house with your small gym bag that holds a towel and a water bottle and nothing else, but on that day (that day is still this day) it held nothing but the facts, ma’am, and they were facts you needed to dispose of. Across the road you could see Mrs. Smith’s house baking in the sun, the letters being burned deeper into the wood, the temporary undercoat to mask the letters thin enough for them to already be bleeding back through.

You reached the park. Often there’d be kids playing there, but not then because it was school hours. You sat on a bench (and do you remember that time you were meeting Sandra and Eva here years ago? It was ninety-something degrees and sweat was pouring off you, you had big sweat rings on your shirt and your forehead was gleaming, and you got here first and while you waited one of the mothers came up to you and asked you to leave, that your type could all rot in hell—and then you said, What, struggling authors? She said No, kiddie fiddlers, and before you could answer, Sandra showed up). You were feeling exhausted. You’d been awake most of the night, your mind racing with what you may or may not have done. There was a trash bin a few feet away, and you had come here thinking it was a good place to dump the spray can, you were a little sleepy, then you were thinking what if somebody found it, and then . . .

Then you weren’t thinking anything. At least not the Jerry Grey you me us we used to be. There had to have been some awareness, though, because you weren’t hit by any busses, you didn’t take all your clothes off, you still had your wallet and hadn’t tried to shoplift bags and bags of cat food, so you were still functioning, just at a different level, at a Jerry isn’t home at the moment so please leave a message level. A sleepwalking level. Captain A steered you to your parents’ old house. You even went as far as trying to open the door before knocking on it. That’s what you were told by the woman who now lives there—a woman who wasn’t your mother.

You can’t remember the conversation, but Henry, the man whose name doesn’t appear on the phone bill but does on all the books, can take a pretty good stab at it. Henry?

Jerry was confused. Jerry fucked up. Jerry is as mad as a hatter.

Thanks, Henry.

So there you have it. Thankfully (and ain’t that going to be a word we’re going to look out for in the future? Thankfully it all worked out okay, thankfully you didn’t really have dementia) the woman who now rents that house you showed up at was a nurse at the Christchurch hospital, and she recognized that you were confused, you were scared, she could see who was really driving, and she took you inside and told you everything was going to be okay, she sat you down and made you a cup of tea. You asked why she was living in your house. She asked who you were, and you were . . . a little unsure, but you had your wallet, it had your driver’s license (Sandra in all her Let’s control Jerry wisdom at least didn’t take that off you), and once your name was out in the open you became Functioning Jerry, at least a little, and you told her where you lived. She asked if you had your cell phone, and it turned out you did. She called Sandra at work. Sandra said she was on her way. In that time you were plied with biscuits to go along with the tea and a story of the neighborhood, including a murder that happened there a long time ago. Did you remember that? No, what murder? It had happened twenty years ago, maybe even thirty, well before Mae (that was the nurse’s name—Nurse Mae) had moved onto the street. In fact Mae had only been living in that house for six months. She was around your age, and you envied how sharp she was.

It’s strange that’s the house you went to. It’s not where you grew up. You lived a few miles away in a similar looking house on a similar street, a different neighborhood, even a different school district. You lived there from the age of three (which you can’t remember) to the age of twenty-one (which you can remember), and your parents both lived out their lives in that house. But when you were nineteen a young permit driver was showing off his fast new car to his fast new-car buddy, lost control, and drove that thing through your front yard and into the side of your house. The guy driving the car broke his back, and his friend was on life support for a week before they turned off the machine. Your family was unharmed, but did have to find somewhere else to live while the insurance company searched for a loophole (the house wasn’t covered for automobile accidents) before admitting they had to pay, and then the builders . . . well, you know what builders are like. So your family rented this other house for three months that turned into six while the family house was rebuilt, and why you returned to that particular house and not where you grew up is a mystery, but Captain A deals in mysteries, doesn’t he?

When Sandra showed up, she thanked Nurse Mae for her time, including a hug, and for a moment you thought Sandra was going to clutch herself to Mae and tell her all that was wrong. Then she thanked God you had wandered into the house of a nurse and not some gang member tweaked on meth.

An hour later you were in your office using work emails to distract you from the fact you’d completely lost time when Sandra came in. She was holding your bag in one hand, which you had left in the car. In the other hand she was holding the can of spray-paint, which you had left in the bag.