Chapter 1

He wanted a cigarette. He only smoked a few every year, almost always when he was out of town, but he wanted one now. From the first morning she joined him, he could smell the smoke coming off her clothes and it kicked up his longing. It was a habit he’d given up when he realized he was getting sick more often and staying sick longer. That was years ago. The yearning wasn’t always with him, but it came now and then. Maybe when he turned eighty, he’d begin again, if he made it that long.

Eleanor had stopped for a pack of Camels and gas. When she went inside to get her cigarettes, she found herself at the end of a line slowed by a card reader that had forgotten how to shake hands with the internet. What should have taken two minutes took ten. She still hoped to make it to work before eight, but halfway across the Burnside Bridge traffic stopped in both directions. A cyclist had played chicken with a taxi and lost when he slammed into, then slid under a delivery truck.

Matthew would be pleased she was late.

She parked in the cheap lot at the foot of the bridge, even though it meant a five-block walk in the rain, every step reminding her of what the fucker had done to her. The Gnome, oblivious, buzzed her in. He was wearing a pig snout above his beard and a pair of cat ears. The elevator, he told her, had broken down again.

“Fuck. Shit. Piss.”

“Do you know those are three of the oldest words in Indo-European?”

She did, but was not in the mood for a linguistics lesson from a graduate student who couldn’t pass his fucking comprehensives in Comp Lit.

Late as she was, Eleanor decided to have her second cigarette of the morning before climbing the four flights of stairs to the attic room she and he shared. She knew the smell would drive him a crazy. It served him right for being such a prick. She smoked under a little awning at the side door used for deliveries and employees. If she hadn’t been late, she would have crossed the street to her favorite spot, an old wooden bench in the middle of a grassy, tree-lined meridian that ran down the center the Park Blocks – the two narrow one-way streets divided by a meridian of trees, grass, park benches, and the occasional fountain. A few blocks to the south, the downtown Park Blocks – bordered by churches, museums, elegant apartments, and a state university – were the destination of choice for food truck lunches from the day the sun deigned to show its face after months of rain to the arrival of the autumn storms. But where she stood, between downtown and Burnside Avenue, anyone crossing to the meridian for lunch on a spring day, had to compete with alcoholics and addicts for territory. It was the rain, not the neighborhoods down and out residents, that kept her from crossing the street.

For a little over a month, Eleanor had been commuting from her small home on the east side of the Willamette to this place off Burnside that had, since the year before Hitler invaded Poland, sold used books, moldy magazines, tattered maps, old sheet music, abandoned photos, vinyl records, cassette tapes, and similar items. “Benson’s Used Books and Magazines” should have relocated when the neighborhood, always troubled, suffered in the sixties and seventies an even more precipitous decline. Instead it grew old and shabby along with its surroundings.

For those willing to risk its dodgy environs during daylight hours – the store never stayed open past five, and closed at four in the fall and winter – Benson’s had always held within its maze-like premises treasures guaranteed to warm a bibliophile’s heart, from the best collection of northwest fiction, history, travel guides, and maps to the state’s largest assortment of erotica, porn, and gentlemen’s magazines. One of the store’s more reliable sets of clients were solitary men, seldom young, straight and gay, who drove to Portland from small northwest towns on rainy Saturday afternoons to find at Benson’s what was unavailable where they lived. Of course, the internet altered that necessity and business declined, but some old timers and romantics still made the pilgrimage to hover over ancient copies of Playboy, Hustler, and their compatriots. Matthew, the object of Eleanor’s imprecations, had been a patron for years. On one of his visits, he saw on the cork board near the cash register a hand-written note: Full-Time Memory Reader Needed / Pay Commensurate with Experience / Inquire at Register. He inquired and that was it.

It was early enough and wet enough on this last Friday in October that no one asked Eleanor for a cigarette or change as she smoked beneath the awning. She inhaled a final sweet lungful of smoke, then let it out. Tomorrow, on All Saints Day, it would be two years since Olivia died. Halloween marked for the Celts the end of summer, harvest, and life, the beginning of winter, desolation, and death. It did not surprise Eleanor that her partner died in the middle of a metaphor.

As Eleanor tossed her cigarette into the butt can at the base of the awning, a police car flew by so fast she thought the wall of air would knock her down. The cruiser nearly flipped as it rounded the corner and headed toward the river. Before she could open the door, a second cop car followed with a recklessness underwritten by the knowledge that any pedestrian fatality in her neighborhood would be the fault of a crazy, drunken junkie who had no choice but to live in the city’s gut, not to the recklessness of those sworn to serve and protect.

Another body had been found at the water’s edge.

Chapter 2

Eleanor was late, and that made Matthew happy. Whenever he was tardy, even if it was no more than a couple minutes past the hour, she always glanced at the clock on her table and smiled to herself. Today he’d be doing the math. 

They’d been hired to read memories – to choose which to keep and which to throw away. Their decisions were, Matthew conceded, highly subjective, like going to a second-hand store and being pulled toward one object or another. But someone had to choose. . . .

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