Amnesia Nights

By Quinton Skinner

Fast-paced, well-written literary yet commercial psychological thriller for fans of Patricia Highsmith, Nicci French, Paul Auster, early Martin Amis (Money, London Fields, Rachel Papers), Val McDermid, PD James, Denis Johnson, Jo Nesbo. Concise storytelling, filmic. Readable, dynamic, literary style, and troubling. Set in Los Angeles, Malibu, Harvard, Minneapolis. Novels examines search for identity, unreliability of memory, obsession, loneliness, familial relationships - a sideways love story. Unsettling story, but characters inspire affection. Male author and young male protagonist in arena currently dominated by women – psychological crime. Suitable for literary fiction, crime and psychological thriller readers.
Key themes:
• Everyone is lost or looking for something; power and control are ultimate weapons; family relationships hide insidious enemies; novel reveals the fundamental truths of the human condition.
• People are driven to extremity despite efforts to avoid it, wrestling with matters that take a lifetime to unravel, playing out in characters and the stories they inhabit.
• Reinventing one’s identity in relation to status and materialism, then finding that one has lost track of one’s centre, even one’s actions and memories. Money is another way to self-destruction. Amnesia Nights’ sub-plot gives a critique of materialism and the corrupting of identity in the face of greed and acquisition.
• Young person’s story, told with the optimism of wanting to reinvent one’s self in the face of love but finding it difficult to keep to the plot of said reinvention Male and female 17-90; those interested in psychological writing. Most of the current thrillers are by women – this has a male author and male protagonist and explores the interior life of the protagonist – main narrative is his viewpoint - but book is plot driven, has cinematic quality. Complex ideas set in mystery novel; an engaging read. Music comp: Radiohead

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fentum Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781909572157

Quinton Skinner

Quinton Skinner is the author of the novels Amnesia Nights and 14 Degrees Below Zero, as well as the nonfiction books Do I Look Like a Daddy to You? A Survival Guide for First-Time Fathers and VH1 Behind the Music: Casualties of Rock. He has written nationally for publications including Variety, Glamour, American Theatre, and in the Twin Cities for all three of its major newspapers. He is currently the senior editor of Minnesota Monthly magazine.

Book preview

1

MONDAY

1

Minneapolis, Minnesota

TODAY

Several winters ago, young romantics in Japan devised an elegant way of committing suicide. After draining a bottle of liquor, the despondent soul went to a public park in the middle of the night, where he (it was always a he) stripped naked and rubbed snow all over his body. Soon consciousness deserted him, and he closed his eyes in a velvety hypothermic embrace. It was painless, it was beautiful.

I remember walking past Cambridge Commons, across the Charles River from Boston, with cold freezing my fingertips through my gloves and the wind insinuating itself around my exposed neck. I walked the footpath by the shadowy copses and thought about the Japanese.

In Minnesota the cold envelops with an embrace equal parts fearful and seductive. Winter is coming.

Don’t get the impression that I’m an unhappy person. Really, nothing could be further from the truth. If you met me, I’ll bet I could get you to like me. I used to be very good at that.

On one of the rare occasions when she was willing to talk about him, my mother told me that my father was a construction worker. His particular specialty was industrial interiors – drywall, plaster, paint, acoustic ceilings.

Frankly, I have a hard time imagining my father laboring on a construction site, sweat collecting in the wrists of his heavy gloves. From various family members, I gather that my father’s long-completed tenure on this earth comprised an uncompromising run of indolence, cheating, lying, abandonment, womanizing, and neglect. He kept those who loved him on edge with the ever-present threat of his hurricane temper. I suppose it was theoretically possible that he might have put down his beer bottle from time to time and gone to work. Everyone does things out of character.

I barely remember him. One time, when I was about five or six, he came to see me. He was angry, red, not doing much talking even though he was a visitor to my mother’s house. He bickered with her and she left the room before he felt provoked. I was alone with my father, who at first didn’t seem to notice I was there. He shook his head, muttering to himself. Then he turned and fixed me with a pitying look.

‘Some fucking world, huh?’ he said with surprising congeniality. This was the sum total of all the wisdom he had to impart, but he believed in what he was saying.

I sort of knew what he meant.

I bought a house in Minneapolis a little more than two years ago. The first thing I did after closing on the property was to follow in my father’s footsteps with some interior work of my own. I tore a hole in my bedroom wall, just above the baseboard. Inside it, I hid a plastic bag of photographs and almost $400,000 in cash. On top of the money, I set down a wooden truncheon bought from a martial-arts store in Los Angeles. It’s a nasty little club, black and hard, with a handle for swinging, like the ones the cops use on rioters.

The club was barely used. Just the one time.

It’s stupid of me to keep it. I’m like an arsonist watching his handiwork from behind the police barricade, reveling in the colors of the blaze, twitching every time a detective spots my sweating face in the crowd. But I can’t bear to get rid of it. I’ve wiped away my fiancée’s dried blood and doused the thing in rubbing alcohol, knowing full well the capabilities of DNA forensics. Still, it’s evidence, and if they ever find Iris Kateran’s body, it might suffice to put me in prison for the remainder of my useful adulthood.

Two years ago, I thought Iris was mocking me behind my back. I was afraid of her. I thought she was going to destroy me. When I went back to her home, Los Angeles, I was poisoned by money – by my desire for it, by my new image as someone who deserved it. When everything went wrong, I was no longer myself. The John Wright I once was would never have bashed his lover’s head in.

The Pertinent Facts, and Unanswered Questions, of John Wright’s Life

  1.  He was born poor, and his childhood could best be characterized as uneventful. He was reared by adults who lived lives of no distinction. He evinced intelligence at an early age, though he also developed a nervous disposition and had difficulty relating to others. This may have been due to the influence of his mother’s chaotic and mercurial personality. Although his occasional interactions with his father couldn’t have helped much, either.

  2.  He never again contacted his family after high school and has not spoken to his mother since shortly after his high-school graduation. Though she was a woman of many faults, John Wright was basically all Sandra Ruth Wright had in this world, and John’s actions doomed her to a unique prison of her own devices. He imagines she must have begun a precipitous personal downturn shortly after his departure for college but generally succeeds in driving this thought from his mind.

  3.  He left his home in Indiana for Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he made his first and only friend. He also lucked into a beautiful and extremely wealthy girlfriend, Iris Kateran, who later became his fiancée.

  4.  During college, John Wright was a mediocre humanities student. His relationship with Iris evolved quickly, and he began calling himself Jack (her idea). Jack and Iris eventually cohabited in a neighboring town called Somerville. Jack’s love for Iris deepened, and he began to embrace the material luxuries she provided.

  5.  Jack, Iris, and Jack’s friend, Frank Lee, decided shortly before graduation to move to Los Angeles. Although daunted by the presence of Iris’s overbearing father, Jack agreed to the move because the three friends planned to set up a small investment company, which they would run and which would enjoy the backing of the Kateran family name.

  6.  Things went all right for a while, but soon after their engagement, Iris and John’s relationship began to deteriorate for reasons too complicated to explain here.

  7.  After a sudden financial and personal reversal, Jack flew into a jealous rage and tried to kill Iris.

  8.  Jack thought he had killed Iris. But the police never found her body. He waits for the police, or private investigators, to find evidence of his crime. But Iris’s disappearance remains unsolved. Jack doesn’t specifically remember killing Iris. He remembers an apartment, her being there, and deadly violence. But the actual killing? No, he doesn’t remember it.

  9.  But, if he didn’t kill her, what became of Iris Kateran?

10.  No, she has to be dead.

11.  Upon seeing that his incarceration was not imminent, Jack moved to a new town.

12.  Jack was involved in some very bad things. He can’t explain to himself what happened.

13.  It’s been two years since all that happened.

I am not a financial wizard; this will eventually become abundantly clear. But I bought my house in Minneapolis just before a boom that exploded real-estate values in my neighbourhood by at least fifty per cent. Nowadays everything is so expensive. I’m old enough now to remember a time when ordinary people could live decently. I don’t know what happened, and I know I didn’t think that American prosperity was going to make it impossible to live a life without competition and strife. I honestly don’t know what I would do with myself if I hadn’t stolen almost $500,000 from Iris Kateran’s father.

My friends and I (Frank Lee, specifically, and, to justify the use of the plural, Iris herself) used to complain about how the baby boomers got in on the ground floor of everything, how they snatched up all the choice places at the table and grabbed all the goodies. But now I have obtained a few things of my own. I have my house, a car, and a comfortable nest egg hidden inside my bedroom wall. I am, by all appearances, a young man who achieved some modest success and then, when times turned lean, sensibly pulled back the throttle in favor of a modest life of relative leisure.

I’m the guy on your block whom you can’t, for the life of you, figure out when it comes to how he makes a living.

Morning. Orange juice and coffee. My house is quiet. I sit here at my table, smoking a cigarette. This is not going to be an important day. I fry up some bacon, eat some, and leave the rest on a paper napkin for Hero, the cat, to find when he finally comes out of his hiding place.

My neighborhood is called Uptown, although the land is flat and we’re actually south of downtown. I don’t try to figure it out. I don’t understand this northern place. This is where I came to hide. I have been issued an exemption from involvement here.

I like to go out. When I’m cooped up for too long I start to feel frightened. I pace a habitrail through my neighborhood with the squinty-eyed familiarity of a hamster in his maze. I have become a virtuoso at killing time. My sustenance is the arm’s-length interaction of commerce and service. I go to movies and bookstores. I like to eat alone in restaurants during off-peak hours. Too much company doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t spend much money, and it will take me at least a decade to run through my reserves.

There’s a squirrel on the sidewalk at my feet, squinting over his nose as if making fun of himself for being a squirrel. I know how it is.

This city is a bastion of quiet civility. It’s built around a chain of lakes, around which I walk until I have reason to hope I might be tired enough to sleep. I hate the thought of returning home to all the dust and entropy. I clean and clean the house, but I can’t keep up. It’s discouraging. Sometimes I wake and think I’m in someone else’s home.

I arrive at the Walker Library before I realize that’s where I’m going. Things like that happen, when you let them. Once I had a dream about buying a book, walked into a bookstore, and there it was – the same book. I bought it, although I haven’t gotten around to reading it.

The library is two stories underground. I push the elevator button, which looks none too clean. I am developing germ phobias. I have nightmares about anthrax spores, dirty bombs, and burning airplanes. I guess this is something to connect me to greater humanity. I would like to find some other grounds for commonality.

The front desk has a washed out, Eastern European look. It’s a big room that reminds me of a scaled-down concert hall, though the acoustics are terrible – from all directions I hear murmuring and echoes. In the periodical section there is a man who may or not be extremely old. He is like an ancient buzzard in a nest of newspapers and magazines on an indeterminate piece of up-holstered furniture.

‘There’s something wrong with that Don Rumsfeld,’ he says in the deepest voice I have ever heard.

I flash him the peace sign. Midday at a city library fails to match the intellectual environs of ancient Alexandria. Mostly we have the usual bums and weirdos, newspaper pawers, magazine chewers, book defilers. A few are sleeping, and one psychotic stares into space. My people. I prefer to huddle in a circular carrel with books on home repair, art, Buddhism. The world comes to me.

The far end is the kids’ kingdom – books, toys, some stuffed bears and rabbits with the distressed look of zoo animals. I see a toddler careening on shaky legs, on the edge of disaster. A couple of older girls, bored by their stay-at-home dad. I meet a young mother’s eyes, then quickly look away. I have drifted too close, in my drifting, and now the father looks up at me. I am burdened with the tacit guilt of a single man in the presence of small children – rogue-male-primate danger mixed with the deep and unthinkable threat of molestation.

But there’s something else. I turn, almost sniffing the air.

Iris wanted to have children with me one day. Her childhood was cold and sterile. Her mother died young, and her father, while devoted to his only child to the point of obsession, was and is a fearful battering ram of a man, difficult at best to deal with. It touched me that Iris considered me a potential father, what with the details of my own upbringing. Iris herself was never an obvious candidate for motherhood; she wasn’t one of those women who bought dogs as baby proxies or whose face would melt with unrequited love at the sight of an infant in the supermarket.

At least, I don’t think she was. I can’t exactly remember. I would like to change the way I think and look at things, but so far I have been unsuccessful.

Desks circled like wagons protect free Internet stations, the outposts of job seekers, local crazies, young students. There’s been a lot of trouble with antisocial types loading up the most outrageous porn they can find – they’re determined to find varieties capable of shocking the most jaded libertine – then leaving it on-screen for children to come across. It makes me glad not to have offspring, because I would go insane trying to protect them.

I have experienced a problem recently that is embarrassing to mention. Perhaps because my world has shrunk so, on several recent occasions I have seen people in public whom I thought I knew. In each case, the seemingly familiar person seemed to have changed his or her look – a new haircut, a radically different style of dress. One time I saw someone I took to be an old college professor of mine, another time I saw an acquaintance from my days in Los Angeles. I was wrong in both cases, and the individuals in question regarded my stares with wary apprehension. I was unable to shake the eerie impression that I had encountered an alternate-universe doppelgänger of someone I once knew. At times I think I’m not well, mentally. I have headaches. My memory comes and goes.

So now I am in a very strange position. Because I think I see her. The most important person in my life, the one who is lost to me. But it’s an ordinary Monday.

She’s dead because of me.

Time telescopes. She is the same age as me, stranded directly between twenty and thirty. But I am no longer here, and this can’t be happening. I cannot think of a single thing, but I am aware of everything. The only answer for what I am seeing is that I have lost my mind.

I killed her; didn’t I?

She looks like a homeless person. She’s dressed in a thick coat buttoned to the neck. I flash on Nixon’s honest Republican cloth coat, but the young woman before me is no coiffed and shrink-wrapped Pat. She stares hard at the computer screen, her lips moving slightly. Her black hair is knotted and uncombed, and her eyes are ringed with purple. She looks like a woman for whom time and reality have eroded, and her lapsed hygiene and air of disorder are that of the vanquished. Her antennae have been bent. I doubt whether someone who didn’t know her as well as I do would recognize her. Certainly no one who knew her as she was, as a beautiful young woman full of self-assurance and promise.

But it is her. There’s no doubt about it. It’s Iris.

I see her little nose, slightly upturned (she always thought it looked like a child’s). Her hairline with the eccentric asymmetric widow’s peak over her high forehead. I see her familiar slender fingers resting on the keyboard, motionless.

Of course, she isn’t really here. So many strange things have been happening. This is just the latest, and the most vivid. Now I am going to be haunted by her ghost.

I make myself stop drifting. I’m afraid that she will look up and notice me, and then I will have to do something.

My Iris was always radiant and poised, even when she thought she was disheveled. I had fought to cast aside the hangdog slouch that was my birthright, but for Iris there was never such a struggle. She moved like an athlete, graceful and lithe, and the eyes of both genders naturally gravitated to her. Her consent to being with me, to wish to marry me, was my stunning accomplishment.

This woman at the computer, in the library, in Minneapolis, is a mockery of the Iris I remember. It can’t be her.

Her shoulders are rounded and slumped under her Salvation Army coat – a garment the old Iris would have used to clean off a muddy pair of shoes. She blinks at the computer screen. Something is obviously wrong with her. But then, how is a ghost supposed to behave?

You’re seeing things. Walk away.

It’s hard for me to breathe. I look over at the young mother and remember the train of earlier thoughts – the sight of a mother and child evoking a memory of Iris, then the sight of this woman who looks like Iris. It’s a conjuring trick.

She looks up. Her eyes focus in the middle distance, then widen. She hasn’t seen me yet, but she senses something. A disturbance in the force, Iris used to say.

I have been waiting for word that someone finally discovered her body. Then I would finally know. I’ve pictured the police car, the handcuffs, the headlines about the murdered heiress.

Her head turns. Her eyes are as arctic blue as I remember them, and they reflect the fluorescence that fills this room like cosmic background radiation. Her lips are chipped and cracked. Her expression verges on stupid. Her mouth looks like the mouth I kissed so many times, the mouth that touched my body and which now comes to me in dreams and begs forgiveness for whatever she did to make me want to kill her.

She looks at me. Her face comes to life very slowly, and the corners of her mouth turn up in an unfamiliar smile. It’s someone else’s smile. She mouths my name without making a sound.

Jack.

My head has dropped, and my face is thrust forward. I am a big, clumsy pelican. I can’t look away. I wonder if anyone else can see her or if she is a vision brought to life by my memories and my guilt.

She gets up; the chair creaks under her. She’s unsteady, she has to grab the table to keep her balance. I instinctively try to help, but I pull my hand back before I touch her.

Up close, it’s even worse than I thought. The rings under her eyes are actually deep violet blotches, and her skin is mottled and close to cracking. Her once smooth cheeks are traced by shadowy patches. I can smell her unclean stale odor, like something left too long in a dusty attic. I do a mental trick and see the younger Iris, the healthy Iris, but it doesn’t last.

‘Jack,’ she whispers. It’s her voice. She knows me.

I say her name, and she holds out her hand and gently traces my chin. Her expression is fond but unfocused, as though she has come upon an unfamiliar object that she cannot catalog. Her fingers are rough, and her knuckles are callused.

‘You’re … really here?’ she asks me. I see a flash of the Iris I used to know, the way her soul’s deep ebullience would surface like a globe of light emerging from the bottom of a pool of dark water. Now I know I’ve found her, whatever she is now.

‘Of course I’m here,’ I tell her.

I’m fighting back tears. A librarian is looking at us. Iris takes on a strange expression that reminds me of a Botticelli angel’s. How can she be happy like this? She cups the side of my face in her cracked palm.

‘You worried about me, Jack,’ she says. ‘I’ve been thinking of you.’

This is Iris. This isn’t Iris.

2

Cambridge, Massachusetts

THE PAST

I met Iris at Harvard. I went there from Indiana, a place I never wanted to be (childhood, for me, was one long involuntary experience). I was ill at ease on campus, and I spent my first months cataloging and nursing imagined slights and insults from the students and faculty. My scholarship – a free ride – was my vehicle for transcending my roots. No one in my family had gone to college. By the time I was done with Harvard, I hoped, I would be permanently extricated in body and spirit from what remained of the Wright family.

The last time I spoke to my mother was the day I boarded an Amtrak train to Boston. By then she had succumbed to the bottle; even on her good days, conversing with her was like talking to a prisoner on the other side of a Lucite wall. If I wanted to, I could press my hand to the glass and yearn for contact. I could curse with anger, I could shed tears. I didn’t do those things. I took all my things with me to college, and when my mother watched me pack, she surely understood my intentions.

It’s commonly assumed that the Ivy League is an impenetrable bastion of the upper class and that a redneck kid like me would find himself hopelessly out of place. There were plenty of rich kids there, and it was indeed the first step in training to be a master of the universe. But scholarships were available, and ingrained liberalism fostered guilt money in the form of generous financial aid for a minority of poor students. My S.A.T.s earned me a shot at the McElroy Fulton Memorial Scholarship: a full pass to Harvard for an Indianapolis-area student with outstanding grades, an aptitude for standardized tests, and an ability to charm Natalie Coleman, the Fulton family trustee in charge of doling out a fresh scholarship once the previous recipient had graduated. I put on a suit borrowed from a neighbor and, to my surprise, instinctively assumed an aw-shucks persona that endeared me to the beneficent sensibilities of the magnanimous Ms Coleman.

Natalie Coleman perked up considerably when I mentioned my long-term career interest in the administration of public broadcasting, and from that moment she decided that I was just the sort of promising young man who deserved the McElroy Fulton Memorial Scholarship. She was unaware that a few phone calls and a little library research had yielded the pertinent fact that she served on the board of Indianapolis’s public radio and T.V. stations and that she hosted a Sunday-morning radio show on issues in public communications. I charmed Natalie Coleman by making no pretense of my ambition; by playing the would-be sharpie, I made her feel superior and secure in her own assessment of the world.

This lesson in how to charm was one that I forgot as soon as I arrived in Cambridge. It was as though I had exhausted my ability to connect with the outside world and required a long period of dormancy in which to recuperate. I exhibited anticharm in the dormitory and in the classroom. These were early days, in which I shed the first eighteen years of my life. I had nothing to replace my erased memories and patterns. I felt like a single throbbing nerve ending being constantly, painfully, stimulated. But I was in. I worked hard. If I wasn’t going to become a master of the universe – I knew how much ground remained for me to make up – then I might at