Corrupted Memory Read online

  “He’s investigating it? Then what are you doing here?”

  Bobby turned away. “I’ve got to go.” He waved to Lucy. “Nice to meet you.”

  I said, “Yeah but …”

  Bobby said, “He’s all yours, Lee.”

  Lieutenant Lee shook my hand and said, “I am sorry for your loss.”

  I said, “This is ridiculous.”

  I broke the handshake and turned to Lucy. “C’mon, let’s go get you a cab.”

  Lee pointed at the body. “Mr. Tucker. I have proof that this man is your brother.”

  “Really? Why should I believe your proof?”

  “Because you wrote it. You need to come with me.”

  Four

  I sat in a conference room, remembering the soft brush of Lucy’s goodnight kiss. That memory plus the buzzing government-issue neon light combined to foment a foul mood that began in my loins and sat in my gut. Lee was pissing me off, and he hadn’t said a word. I looked at my watch. Past midnight. The Sox would have finished off the Orioles by now.

  Lee bustled into the conference room holding a manila folder. He sat in a chair opposite me, scraping it across the linoleum. The pads had broken off and I could hear the metal chair legs gouging the tiles.

  “Mr. Tucker. Your father worked at Global Defense Systems?” asked Lee.

  “Yup.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was an engineer.”

  “Agent Miller tells me that you are an engineer.”

  “Really. How did that come up?”

  “The victim was also an engineer at GDS. Miller noted that your father had produced two of them.”

  “My father did not produce two of them. He only produced me.”

  Lee sighed. “None so blind …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Your father worked on the Paladin missile. Am I correct?”

  How would Lee know that? The Paladin missile was probably the most famous piece of disposable military hardware in history. It was a surface-to-air missile that had been designed to shoot down airplanes, and it would have remained an obscure project if it had been used for its original intention. It got famous when the Army used it to shoot down Iraqi missiles.

  I said, “Dad didn’t talk much about his work.”

  “Very strange,” Lee said, pulling a plastic sheath out of the envelope. “It was probably just so long ago that you don’t remember it.”

  “Don’t remember what?”

  “Your work on the Paladin.”

  “Shit, Lee, I didn’t work on the Paladin. I was like six.”

  “In fact, you did work on the Paladin. It was this work that brought your brother to your door.”

  “I told you, he’s not my brother.”

  “You want me to believe that he just wound up there randomly?”

  “Yes.”

  “With your father’s name and your father’s nose.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then explain this,” Lee said. “John Tucker had it in his hand when he died.”

  Lee slid the plastic sleeve across the table. Inside was a single sheet of paper. The paper had a smear of blood on it, where John must have clutched it after being shot.

  The lower right-hand corner bore the logo GDS—Global Defense Systems. This was an engineering document. Across the top were the words Paladin Air Defense System.

  The rest of the page was taken up by a single drawing that represented the Paladin Air Defense System in action. Bombers streaked across the sky while a cannon fired upon them from the lower left corner. You could tell it was firing because there were slashing lines, in crayon, from the tip of the cannon to the planes. Wherever the lines met a bomber, a flurry of jagged lines obliterated the plane.

  Around the lower left-hand corner, stick figures in baseball caps waved their little stick arms in the air and jumped for joy. They had two dots for eyes, and big smiley faces. Some were in profile, with one dot for an eye and an arc for half a smiley. The cannon itself had an American flag drawn on it in pencil. It was a rectangle with five stars in the upper left corner and lines for stripes.

  The artist’s name was scrawled across the lower right-hand side of the drawing, in the large, double-sized print of someone who had just learned his letters. The A was a big teepee with a line across the middle. The T looked a like a little cross, and the R was a P with another line sticking out of it. The signature said Aloysius Tucker. Grade 1.

  I remembered this drawing. My dad had come home from work one day and I asked him what he was working on. He said they were making a gun that could shoot down enemy airplanes before they could hurt us. That was in 1984, and the threat of nuclear attack permeated life so completely that even a six-year-old knew that we didn’t want enemy planes hurting us. I had taken my angst and driven it into that picture. Not one bomber made it past my gun.

  Dad told me it was a great picture and asked if he could take it into work. I never saw it again, and now I know why. My dad had turned it into part of a secret drawing, a whimsical cover for his documentation.

  I rubbed the plastic sheath between my fingers and looked at a new feature in the document. Someone had written on it in red pen that jumped off the black-and-white page. My name, Aloysius Tucker, had been circled, with an arrow pointing to the circle. The other end of the arrow ended in two words: My Brother.

  I had no idea who this guy was, and I had no idea why he thought he was my brother. But as I looked at the scrawl that defiled my artwork, a question slipped into my mind: Why did he get the good name?

  Five

  Waiting for Lee, I traced my fingers over the black lines that represented the Paladin missiles. Most ended in black, fiery explosions of crayon. One missed and went shooting off the side of the page. Even at six I’d known that perfection was impossible.

  My eye drifted down to the title block in the lower right-hand corner. There was my dad’s signature. It consisted of a gigantic J and an equally large T. The smaller bumps must have been the h and the k. I traced my fingers over the letters, remembering the time he had written that signature on a credit card statement to buy me a fishing rod. We had gone fishing that weekend, driving to a magical pond where I caught twenty bluegills using cut-up hot dogs as bait.

  My dad had saved every bluegill bigger than five inches. We took them home and he showed me how to gut them and scale them and fry them whole with just a little egg and breadcrumbs. Then he showed me how to make tartar …

  “Mr. Tucker.” Lee’s voice broke though my memory. I looked up at him. Acne scars marred his broad nose. “Do you recognize the drawing?”

  I nodded. “I drew it.”

  “Your brother wrote on it as well.”

  I slid the drawing back across the table. “He’s not my brother. He was confused.”

  Lee took the drawing and put it back into the envelope. “Perhaps you are confused.”

  “That’s ridiculous. My mother always talked about how happy she was to have only one kid.”

  “Why would she say that?”

  “She said it whenever she got mad. You know, if I couldn’t find my shoes or didn’t take the garbage out on time.” I mimicked my mother’s voice with a nasal falsetto: “Tucker, you are so much work. Two of you would just kill me.”

  “That is a terrible thing to say to a child.”

  “She didn’t mean it. She’s a drama queen.”

  “So your mother is still alive?”

  “Oh yeah, and I’m telling you, Lee, there is no brother. I begged my parents to have another kid. My mother would say that it would kill her, and my father said he had enough kids.”

  Lee ran his hand through his scraggly black hair, took out a handkerchief, and blew wet snot into it. Then he folded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

&nb
sp; “Mr. Tucker—”

  “Please stop that,” I said. “Just call me Tucker.”

  Another sigh. “Tucker, do you know your Bible?”

  “I’m an apathist, Lee. I don’t care about religion.”

  “In the Bible, God promises Abraham that he will be the father of nations. But Abraham’s wife, Sarah, can’t conceive. So she tells Abraham to sleep with her handmaid, Hagar, and Hagar gave birth to Ishmael.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then Sarah did conceive, as God promised, and she bore Isaac.”

  “Well, good for her.”

  “When I told this story to my children, they called Ishmael, ‘A brother from another mother.’”

  It was late. Fatigue clogged my brain. “What are you saying? That my dad was a man-whore?”

  “Abraham was not a man-whore.”

  “That’s a Bible story, Lee. In the real world, a married guy who gets another woman pregnant is a man-whore. That’s what you’re telling me about my father?”

  The conference room door opened. Somebody peeked in and Lee nodded and stood. “It’s late. Let us give you a ride home.”

  I stood and extended a hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you here.”

  “Thank you, Tucker. We will be in touch.”

  He led me out the door, and we started down the hallway. Another couple was coming the other way. It was a cop with a small woman with red-rimmed eyes. She wore a gray UMass sweatshirt, black sweatpants, and no makeup. There wasn’t room in the hallway for all of us. I muttered, “Excuse me,” and flattened myself against a wall.

  The woman said thank you reflexively and looked into my face. Her unfocused gaze coalesced momentarily into recognition. She raised her hand as if to touch my face and took a small breath, about to speak. Then she changed her mind. Her face closed, and she continued down the hallway into a conference room with the other cop.

  I asked Lee, “Who was that?”

  “That was John Tucker’s mother.”

  I breathed in her perfume, still floating in the hallway. It evoked dim memories of a bedtime story: Where the Wild Things Are. Lee blew his nose, and the spell was broken.

  Six

  I awoke in the dark and glanced at my clock. A ghostly 5:02 told me that I had slept less than four hours. I burrowed my head into my pillow, willing myself to go back to sleep. It wasn’t going to happen. The thinking had started. My debugger brain had been given a problem and had started sifting through it as if it were looking for a lost watch in a pile of leaves. Once my brain started churning like this, sleep was not an option.

  Still, I tried for another hour, lying in my bed, suppressing the images and memories that boiled out of my subconscious, trying to connect to each other. I thought about Dad’s absences. His business trips. I thought about the strange chill that had wormed its way through our house. Our occasionally tense family dinners. Despite my need to sleep, I kept digging further back into my memory, looking for answers.

  It was the perfume. That was the trigger. I knew that perfume; not in an erotic way, but in a comforting way. The perfume smelled like a kiss on a skinned knee, a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off, money for the ice cream truck. It smelled like love. It wasn’t my mother’s perfume.

  I gave up on sleep when I saw predawn light around my window shades. I rolled out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom, then moved to the kitchenette and turned on the lights over the breakfast bar.

  My little shotgun apartment was silent. It was an engineer’s dream: a line segment, with one point in my living room at the front of the house and the other point in my bedroom. The kitchenette tucked into the side halfway down, with my office across from it. If my mother had lived here, the place would have been full of crap. Perhaps because of that, my apartment was perfectly neat.

  I fired up the coffee grinder and started the coffee. Then I made myself an omelet, cleaning as I went, and sat down at the kitchen counter with my roommates. Click and Clack, my hermit crabs, had also started their day. Click scuttled across the pink sand, heading for the feeding sponge, whereas Clack clung to a chunk of driftwood I had picked for him at Revere Beach. I had also gotten them an assortment of shells that hadn’t been festooned with paint and sprinkles.

  I said, “Sorry to get you up so early, boys. This thing about a brother has got me all agitated.”

  Clack waved a claw.

  “I don’t know why it bothers me. It shouldn’t. My father was a grown man and he’s dead now, so what good can come of stirring the pot?”

  Click moved a fraction of an inch on his log.

  “You’re right. John Tucker should have thought of that too. Even if he was my brother. Can you imagine that? Opening the door to him and having him say, ‘Dude, I’m your brother.’ It would have been freaky.”

  Clack stared at me.

  “Yeah, I mean it would have been kind of cool. It would beat going to baseball games alone.”

  Clack had mounted the top of the sponge and was shoveling fish flakes into his mouth.

  “Sure I miss going to games with my dad,” I said. “It was the only time we talked. You’d think that if I had a brother, he would have mentioned it at a game. What’s that, Clack? He wouldn’t have mentioned it to me?”

  Of course, the hermit crab was right. No generation wants to think about another generation having sex, much less talk about it. The night I lost my virginity, I got home late from a party and Dad had waited up for me so he could tell me how irresponsible I was and how much I had worried my mother. While I countered that Ma couldn’t be that worried, because she was asleep, I never told him the real news: Dad, I got laid! He wouldn’t have wanted to hear that. Instead, I told my best friend, Timmy. He slapped me on the back and gave me a high-five.

  The same must have been true for Dad. He wouldn’t tell me if I had a brother, and certainly he’d never tell my mother, but he’d probably tell his best friend. It was time to visit Uncle Walt.

  Seven

  The next morning saw me tooling west on a highway that the rest of the country calls Route 90, but that we call the Mass Pike. The Pike runs the 120-mile length of the state connecting Boston to Worcester, Springfield, and, eventually, Pittsfield. Beyond that, you’re in New York, heading for Albany.

  While John Tucker had worked at the western Global Defense Systems plant in Pittsfield, my father had mostly worked in the eastern plant in the town of Wayland. Wayland, Sudbury, and Framingham made up the northern edge of a region called

  MetroWest, which lay twenty miles west of Boston.

  The three towns had all been centers of Revolutionary fervor back in the day. At that time Wayland was part of Sudbury and had contributed seventy-five troops to the effort of breaking away from England because of taxes. Then, right in the middle of the war, Wayland broke away from Sudbury because of taxes. The people out here really hated taxes—an incongruous fact given that tax money funded Wayland’s biggest employer, Global Defense Systems.

  Wayland’s GDS plant sat on the town’s only “main road,” Route 20, an old Indian path that had become a mail route (still called Boston Post Road) and had eventually morphed into a two-lane highway.

  I arrived at GDS at eleven o’clock, which meant that the parking lot was full. I parked a quarter mile from the entrance, peered into the distance to find the lobby, then walked for five minutes through a vast asphalt desert.

  Uncle Walt’s car, on the other hand, sat next to the front door. GDS employees who had been with the company for forty years got a parking row right up front. It was a perk of longevity, and perhaps an admission from GDS that their forty-year employees might not survive the trek from the back row. My dad would have had one of these spots if he had lived long enough.

  Dad had met Uncle Walt in this very parking lot. Neither believed in rising early enough to get good parking. Both believed a
morning walk would make them stronger. So, every morning, they’d arrive in the back row at the same time and hike to the lobby together. My father, the engineer, and Walt, the janitor, had formed an unlikely friendship out of their daily battle against the New England elements.

  Uncle Walt was not really my uncle. He was a pseudo-uncle, and we were connected by pseudo-blood. His uncleness derived from my parents’ discomfort with me calling him either “Walt” (too informal) or “Mr. Adams” (too formal). Thus my dad’s best friend, Walter Adams, became “Uncle Walt.”

  Uncle Walt leaned against his pickup truck waiting for me, his ropy arms crossed in front of his small runner’s body, his bald head acting as a navigational beacon in the sunlight. He watched me navigate the last few rows of cars. We shook hands and hugged, Walt’s strong, bony frame jabbing me in the shoulders. I gripped his bicep.

  “Jesus, Uncle Walt, you are in great shape,” I said. “Life’s good?”

  “Hell, Tucker, I got a truck, a motorcycle, and a mobile home. Couldn’t be better! Let’s go inside and get a cup of coffee.”

  We approached the security desk. A plump woman with black hair and crow’s feet smiled up at us. “Walt, who is this young man?”

  Walt clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Agnes, this is my buddy, Tucker. He’s John Tucker’s boy.”

  Agnes’s smile dimmed, then brightened. “Oh, you mean our John Tucker.” She patted my hand. “Your father was a wonderful man.”

  I said, “Thank you. What do you mean, your John Tucker?”

  “We had a security briefing this morning and—well. I really can’t get into it.”

  Uncle Walt said, “I’d like to sign Tucker in and get him some coffee.”

  “Certainly,” said Agnes. “Sign in here. Do you have a phone with a camera on it?”

  I said, “Who doesn’t have a phone with a camera on it?”

  “I know, it’s just terrible. You’ll need to leave your phone here with me.”

  GDS, like all defense companies and some commercial ones, staged elaborate scenes of security theater. These little dramas demonstrated that the security department had done all it could to prevent bad guys from stealing information, though they rarely did anything that would actually keep a bad guy from stealing information.