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Rene is gliding down dreary lanes, his feet barely touching the ground, floating, flying.
The Spy. Chandra, his mind supplies. She’s the same as ever, wrapped in a dark grey cardigan with her hair pushed up by the ever-present hairband.
“Hey,” he says, “it’s uh--it’s been a while.”
“Oh! Haven’t seen you here in awhile.” Chandra gives him a cursory glance and then goes back to fiddling around with the device in her hands. “I hope you’ve been well?”
Rene sighs, “Well enough, I suppose. You?”
“I’ve been fine,” the Spy says, “I’ve just been busy with a project, but it should be finished very soon.”
The words tumble from his mouth before he even knows what he’s saying, in a light manner that he hadn’t thought himself capable of. “Aren’t you always busy with a project or two?”
“Hm yes. At least I can safely say I’ll have finished this one by the end of the night though, especially if you help.” Then Chandra looks up and suddenly it isn’t her infectious grin and cheery eyes he sees but something colder, more calculated, coupled with the blade she has in her hands. Rene stumbles backwards, ducking under the kitchen table as the knife flies and narrowly misses his left eye.
He’s cornered in the kitchen space, there’s no way out, the murderous Spy is standing between him and the doorway, but there’s a window, there’s a window, it’s small and it’s locked but surely--
“Why don’t you just. Stay. Still.” Chandra growls, the wild and uncontrollable grin plastered across her face a mockery of her usual infectious cheer.
Rene glances around furtively; the Spy must keep her fair share of tools somewhere; there’s too many cabinets and not enough time. She closes the distance between them, the knife a quick swipe to the head that he barely manages to avoid, stumbling over the kitchen chair and rolling away on the hardwood to avoid a second slash. He smashes his head on the counter as he makes to get up, but there’s no time to worry about that, not when he’s about to be murdered and she’s standing over him and the knife is seconds from being brought down--
the world collapses inwards.
***
“Bad dreams?” the Consigliere gives him a knowing look, though it sounds like she’s holding back laughter.
“Something like that.” The Amnesiac represses a shudder, trying to ignore the feeling that he’s once again missing a large piece of the puzzle.
“Perhaps we should actually arrange an appointment with the Doctor; sleeping pills might do you some good.”
“I’ve had enough of drugs for a lifetime, thanks.”
“It was a genuine suggestion.” Lucrezia slides away her well-worn pocket agenda with a smile on her face, gesturing at the chair next to her. He wonders what little notes she has down there. Today’s to-do list: mock and ruin my fake husband some more, compile notes on the local doctor, be home in time for dinner.
The Amnesiac is a fool, wanting to believe that it’ll all turn out fine in the end, choosing as he does now not to see the gilded bars of the cage, to ignore the urge to test them once again, try to slip through them. At least with her, there’s some sort of constant, some anchor in the rushing water of the foreign world around him.
Perhaps, he justifies to himself, it couldn’t all be a lie. Lucrezia chooses to make it easy most of the time, playing the part of the dutiful wife. He wonders how long the two of them can go like this before one of them slips up, pretending that they are equals in a happy marriage.
That’s the scariest thing about all of it; how little of it actually changes. Sure, he insists on cooking more often than not now (there’s one particularly memorable occasion where he almost has a breakdown over barely being able to go through the motions of making pasta of all things) and at times his skin crawls despite his best efforts at the Consigliere’s touch, but in all the ways that matter they are still the same, their little games of question and answer because if Rene is as honest with himself as he ought to be there are still so many things he doesn’t know. Surely it couldn’t all be a lie?
Surely, surely.
Even the town graveyard isn’t as comforting anymore. It’s too cold, too wet, too rainy. He knows all their names by now, but the most frightening part of it all are the things he remembers, suddenly, unbidden about them.
There are things he knows that he shouldn’t know.
Little trickles of memories through the cracks. Little flashes. Lucrezia is in some of them too, smiling benevolently down at him. The dead Transporter too, is a hint of faint exasperation, annoyance, grinning from ear to ear. The Lookout sits with him reading an old picture book, dogeared and well-loved with a stick figures and crayon faces drawn in the margins.
And then there’s the things that shouldn’t be there. The previous Blackmailer who sits in the grave before him. An old spat over his habit of speaking at an almost inaudible whisper level, though they’re so much younger, barely even sixteen.
He half recognizes himself at the head of a mob, barely a passing glance in the direction of the accused, then it’s him, sitting in a corner staring down at an empty glass, blank-faced and crying silently.
But they are not him, not this Rene Damien who knows nothing but hushed whispers from the suspicious townspeople and sweet honeyed words from his wife, who can’t remember his own damn name anymore.
Rene’s lived long enough in the darkness that the light scares him, even as much as he’s wanted, ached to know what had been stolen from him, what memories, what life had been snatched from him by his lovely wife and her lies. It’s the unknown, he thinks, the feeling of sitting on the edge. It’s irrational, to be afraid, but he is, he’s already seen what the trials have done to people. Or maybe it’s that fear, that knowing fear that he’ll likely never fully recover those memories even if he spends his entire life waiting, hoping.
He’ll never be able to reclaim whoever that stranger was before he lost everything.
***
Lucrezia drops a stack of papers on his lap. “Your new assignment. Julio died a while ago, but nobody’s bothered to go through all his things. We figured now that you’re to replace him you can start by sorting through all the useless junk he had lying around. I don’t want to remove you from your comfort zone, you see,” her hand finds its way to his shoulder. “I understand if you wouldn’t want to meet the others just yet. In any case, I’ll act as the intermediary between the two parties for now.”
“Wouldn’t it be disrespectful to the dead, just going through his things?”
Lucrezia shrugs. “I’ll take care of it.” They seem to be on different wavelengths as it is.
The Amnesiac is warped, gangly, out of place and out of time. He isn’t an Investigator anymore, comfortable enough in his own abilities and his colleagues and his morals, he’s something else, an amalgamation, twisted by his own torturous desire to know and to cling on to what he knows.
Rene feels like he’s stepped into someone else’s life, a pale imitation of what had once been another living breathing being with hopes and dreams and wants. He’s living through their notes in the margin, the half full paper shredder. It’s the Blackmailer Julio’s voice, his private thoughts, speaking from beyond the grave in a messy and disorganized folder. It’s the unreadable, scowling cursive scrawled on discarded napkins and little ripped off corners of forms, more painfully authentic than anything he has been given since waking up.
He’ll come across the occasional odd little note too. This guy is a nutjob, reads one. Yikes! is boxed and shaded in with black sharpie on the back of another, the ink bleeding through to the front. On the list of potential weak spots for the Arsonist, there’s a stick figure with a little matchstick and fucking kill this guy already in a large and very awkwardly placed thought bubble. Then there are the notes that were most definitely never written for more than the dead man’s eyes, the personal ones about how Norma would find this funny and remind myself to express appreciation for her bullying sometimes, it really helps productivity.
The Amnesiac finds himself laughing along at some points, once he’s finished squinting at a rushed mess of scribbles about the Godfather and his demanding deadlines, or the way the Blackmailer is always catching a cold whenever there’s an ungodly amount of work to be done.
At times he’ll put away another little journal and feel absolutely exhausted, so completely immersed is he in the story of this man, Julio Maria Alvarez; it’s like he knows him, has engaged in conversation before, understands what makes the Blackmailer tick.
(He’s crying. Why is he crying?)
Returning to his own life is diving back into the water, an exhausting never ending push pull game between him and the Consigliere.
“Who is Norma?” He ventures to ask one night, when Lucrezia is on her third cup of jasmine tea, and curiosity gets the better of him.
He’s just finished going through a particularly detailed account of a particularly bad case of pneumonia, consisting entirely of the Blackmailer alternating between complaining about how awful he felt and how nasty the Serial Killer was and did I really have to catch something because I spent too long lurking outside trying to catch some crazy fucker’s sexual exploits on camera? Norma put kale in my soup and I want to cry. Why did I think it was a good idea to date a health nut?
There’s a trace of surprise as she glances over at him, before she smiles at him over the rim of her cup again and Rene feels faintly sick. “She’s our Forger. An efficient enough worker, all things considered, useful enough. She and Julio slept together a few times, before he got lynched.”
“I figured as much,” he presses on, “How did she deal with it? Is she alright?”
Lucrezia shrugs. “It was almost a year ago. Norma is coping fine; her work is as high quality as ever as far as I can tell.”
“Oh,” he says, suddenly feeling rather stupid. What had he been expecting, coming in? A different answer. Why had he asked? Was he so desperate for company, so desperate to know what had happened to these people he’d barely known that he was willing to believe that things could’ve all been different? Is that what it was?
“Oh,” she says abruptly, as if she’s just remembered something important, “You knew him too, before...things changed...it was how he was hung so quickly.”
“Was he a close friend?”
“You were so incredibly distraught after he died,” Lucrezia sighs, setting her cup down on the table. “It was a pity really; I don’t think either party benefited much from him dying.”
“I killed him?” He asks, the words strangely surreal on his tongue. Rene has the uncontrollable urge to laugh, at the bitter fucking irony that must’ve gone into making that, the particular punchline to the massive joke of his own identity.
“No, no, you misunderstand me. You weren’t the one who accused him, nor the one who encouraged the guilty votes. But you gave the Jailor enough information that Julio had let slip to you that his guilt was obvious.”
Rene hears himself take a sharp intake of breath, and there’s a wetness in his eyes that wasn’t there before and the massive crushing guilt is all encompassing. He stands up too quickly, moves towards the door in a half run half walk.
“I’ll be right back,” he says as he turns the doorknob in a strange sense of deja vu. Lucrezia starts, looking like she wants to go after him, but he steps out and slams the door before he can see if she does.
He breaks into a run at first as he stumbles past the sycamore, wincing as the faded colors of autumn crunch loudly under his shoes. When it becomes clear that there is nobody following him, however, he lets himself stop.
Rene wanders down the old roads of Salem, periodically glancing over his shoulder. The streets aren’t particularly well-lit either, and the long stretches of shadows make the Amnesiac wonder what else lurks in the dark outside of the Mafia’s control. There are houses, empty and silent. Mail stuffed in overflowing mailboxes, tossed on the ground carelessly, never to be read or opened. Destined to be nothing but meaningless drivel. There are flowers, crawling over a brightly painted fence in another house, wilting and losing color on the onset of winter.
A crooked sign post. For sale it reads, outside a picture perfect lawn and white house. It creaks idly in the wind, and the Amnesiac pretends it doesn’t make him glance around nervously once more.
It strikes him, not for the first time, that he has nowhere to go. Perhaps the Doctor would let him sleep for the night, or the Vigilante, but Rene realizes with slow, dawning dread that he really doesn’t know any of them that well, and who in their right mind would let a stranger sleep in their home?
The sound of trickling water interrupts his thoughts. The river running through the town is swollen, half frozen over and glistening under the half light of the street lamps. The wind picks up abruptly, blasting him in the face, and the Amnesiac shivers again.
Rene has the sudden urge to tear away at the stupidly thin jacket he’s wearing, at the loose threads on the sleeves and the missing button. Is it even real, or is this something else too, another item lifted from a dead man pieced together to help fit the part he’s meant to play now? The Amnesiac lifts the wedding ring up to the night, where it gleams mockingly down at him. This piece, this loathsome, loathsome piece, is, at least from what he can tell, new, if not just as shudderingly false as the other.
Do the houses belong to somebody he knew too? Had he lived in one of those empty rooms long ago (he says long ago, but really, it can’t have been that long ago now can it?)?
With another shudder, this time from the cold as much as anything else, he lets the ring slip from his numb fingers into the river. It clicks against one stone, once, twice, then it vanishes below murky depths and half formed ice, and Rene lets out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding in.
For a moment he stands there, letting the sound of the river wash over him, before the quiet tread of footsteps snaps him back to reality.
“Come back home, love,” Lucrezia says tenderly, her warm hands wrapped around his cold ones. “It’s far too cold outside now to be wandering at this hour.”
“How did you find me?” He asks blankly, even as he follows her back, wrapping the coat she hands him around himself tightly. Home. It sounds nice. Even surreal. Why had he ever wanted to leave that warm place on the couch, where Lucrezia would lay next to him with her book and her tea and--
She hesitates briefly, before giving him a rueful smile. “You liked coming here, before, when you had a particular difficult case to crack. I remember watching you spend hours skipping stones trying to bust a drugs smuggling ring."
“Ah,” he trails off.
“What were you thinking? You’ll catch your death in this weather, and I’m pretty sure the Doctor’s seen enough of you already.”
“I-I needed some air.”
Lucrezia doesn’t say anything, just gives him a long and measured look before nodding and picking up the pace.
***
Putting those glossy black and white photos in a nondescript envelope, cutting the letters out from old newspapers, scrawling a little note of his own, that’s all fine. Sneaking into the Mayor’s house down the street, sliding it down under the door, casting quick furtive glances over his shoulder—that’s what makes it real. What hammers home that he’s not just an unaligned neutral party anymore, not just an informant; sure it’s Julio’s old work, but he’s the one putting it into action.
His hands, they’re trembling in excitement, there’s a fire in the landscape of his mind, scalding hot, burning, burning.
He remembers, remembers with each stroke of the pen. Yes, the Mayor had had an affair, the Vigilante with all manner of nasty skeletons and anger management issues--
He remembers.
Rene stands up giddily, grasping at that figment greedily, before it takes flight and suddenly he finds that it’s hazy now, he can’t recall the exact words anymore.
***
Rene is a fool. He is a fool for forgetting the outside world, a fool for forgetting that there are events going on outside of the limited space he knows, truly knows.
There are whispers on the street. The old farmer who sells his crops in the east end of the town refuses to engage even in polite small talk anymore.The Sheriff pats him on the shoulder awkwardly when he sees him, half wandering around in a sort of daze but that’s all. He’s so alone, isolated; he catches the Mafioso giving him a sharp nod across the square once and feels an intense bout of something, something that’s sharp loathing and disgust and shudderingly cold.
“Suspicious,” muses one, “there’s something fishy going on.”
The townspeople are growing discontent again. They want blood. They want his blood. They’re going to kill him.
“I’m innocent,” he protests feebly, taking a step back from the simmering discontent of the mob. It’s as if the world is collapsing in on itself, steadily closing inwards as hungry eyes turn towards him. The Sheriff frowns up at him quizzically but does nothing to otherwise calm the angry storm that’s building, whispering in the Mayor’s ear.
“He’s fine.” Lucrezia’s voice rises above the crowd
“He’s fine,” the Consigliere repeats. She sends him a reassuring smile and turns to face the town. “I said he’s fine; I can vouch for him and his innocence.” At the crowd’s quiet murmurs she raises her voice again. “And who are we going to listen to, the confirmed Investigator or a few disgruntled rabble rousers?”
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says, afterwards, probing. “You’re jeopardizing your own status amongst the town as a trustworthy investigative.”
“I love you, I truly do. No--” she stops him before he can even open his mouth, “I know what you’re going to say. But I won’t see you hang.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t you see?” she says, growing desperate, “you need me. I’m the only one who will never leave. Anybody else would’ve let you hang as a convenient scapegoat.”
“But not you, I suppose,” he says.
“Stop doubting so much,” the Consigliere sighs, “it’s what hindered your investigative work before, and it’s hindering your emotions now. Let go.”
***
When he wakes up with his own treacherous arm wrapped loosely around Lucrezia, her head buried in the crook of his neck for the third time this week, Rene decides it’s time to stop ignoring the elephant in the room.
“Lucrezia, I think we should talk--have a discussion--we should work out an arrangement. Now that we’re not. Well--This isn’t really real. We’re not really some young happy couple coming here looking to settle down or some bull like that.”
“I’m listening,” the Consigliere says, though he gets the feeling she’s only humoring him.
“I mean--I think we should discuss boundaries and stuff. What kind of things are expected of my position as an informant, the two of us--”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt but--you lost your wedding ring.” It’s a question, phrased as a statement, though from the look in Lucrezia’s eyes it looks like she already knows half the answer.
He shrugs. “It must have slipped off somewhere. Now about--”
“Is that all? Slipped off somewhere hm? Is that really how little our relationship matters to you?”
“Stop acting like I’m the one who’s wrong here. It’s absurd and it won’t work. It’s not as if we actually ever got married, so there’s no point in wearing something so ridiculously fake.”
“Answer me this then,” Lucrezia cocks her head, “if I am so hateful, so physically repulsive to you, then why do you stay?
“I--”
“See? Even you don’t understand what’s here.” She places one hand lightly over his heart, quick and erratic as it is. “What do you really want? You say that you hate me for what I’ve done to you, for robbing you of your identity, yet you’ve stayed, you’ve done everything I ask even.”
“There was nothing I could do,” he says, but whether it’s for her or for his own benefit he can’t tell. “There is nothing I could do.” The Amnesiac has no meaningful connections to any of the townspeople, no assets to his name, no established credibility with the Mayor; much as he hates to admit it, his life with Lucrezia has been the dominant and (if he’s honest) the only one he’s known that isn’t a ridiculous haze of fragments of memories that might not even be real.
The Consigliere laughs. “Is that what people tell themselves? That there’s nothing that you can do. My dear husband, there’s always something you can do. So. Why haven’t you done anything hm? I’m sure there’s all sorts of incriminating evidence lying around, a little bit of maneuvering and you’d have a good enough case against me. Even then, I'm the monster that exploited your weakest moments and completely destroyed your entire identity and sense of self worth. For all intents and purposes, surely, you ought to do something to see me hang.”
“I--I--” He isn’t quite sure how to respond, and Lucrezia presses onwards before he can manage to reign his thoughts into a coherent sentence.
“You think you have to keep fighting, because that’s what you’ve convinced yourself to do. You tell yourself that if you give up so easily, if you don’t stop trying to oppose me every step of the way you’ll feel better about yourself, as someone who doesn’t just give in to someone you see as the enemy. It’s how you live with the fact that it’s been almost months now and you haven’t done anything. I understand, love, truly I do. More than anything I understand how loathsome inaction is.”
He’s made his decisions yes, poor as they may be, but when Lucrezia phrases it that way...well. It’s about agency. It feels like he has some measure of control over his own destiny this way, even if reality is starkly different. Rene wants to feel like he knows what’s going on, that he’s in the loop.
“I’m not the enemy here,” she says quietly, all the derisiveness in her tirade gone out like a light. “You can choose not to believe me here, but it’s the truth. I never meant you any harm. Just let go for a moment will you?”
And then he finds his voice again, even though he’s reeling, reeling from the raw, undeniable truth of her statements. “Let go?” He doesn’t mean to raise his voice, but in that instance he finds himself reclaiming an old anger, and how it sings in his blood. “Lucrezia, how many things do you think I have left to even let go of? You’ve taken everything--”
“But can’t you see?” She takes his hand in hers, grasping it tightly, almost as if it’s a lifeline. “I’m trying to help you move on here. You don’t know--Julio’s lynching destroyed you, the guilt got so bad, even though it wasn’t even you who made the public accusation. I watched you go from a competent investigative to an emotional wreck in the span of a few days! Then you were injured and I thought I could help.”
“Help? By erasing my entire memory? Does my clueless dancing around give you particular satisfaction? Is that what I am, a dancing monkey that you can lead around on a leash? Am I even really an asset to your Mafia at all, or am I just here for your own amusement at this point?”
“I love you.” For a brief moment Lucrezia looks so exhausted, so genuinely pained that it almost feels real again. “That’s all there is to it.”
Rene feels himself sag into the couch, his arm shaking slightly as he grabs the cushion next to him for some feeble form of support. The sun’s moved so that the light from the window behind them is now a bright glare; it’s already mid morning and they’ve gotten nowhere. “I’m sorry,” he says wearily, “perhaps we got off to a bad start—I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Lucrezia’s face softens, then she’s embracing him and her arms engulf him, and suddenly Rene aches and hurts and regrets and feels so tired. “I’m sorry too,” she says, “let me make it up to you.”