Memory Man

I am Amos Decker. I’m forty-two years old and look at least ten years older (on a good day, of which I haven’t had one in four hundred and seventy-nine days), and feel at least a century older than that. I used to be a cop and then a detective but am no longer gainfully employed in either occupation. I have hyperthymesia, which means I never forget anything. I’m not talking about memory techniques where you can teach yourself to remember things better, like the order of a pack of cards using association tricks. No, with me it’s just a turbocharged brain that has somehow unlocked what we all have but never use. There aren’t many hyper-Ts — my shorthand — in the world. But I’m officially one of them.

And it seems my sensory pathways have also crossed streams so that I count in colors and see time as pictures in my head. In fact, colors intrude on my thoughts at the most random times. We’re called synesthetes. So I count in color and I “see” time and sometimes I also associate color with people or objects.

Many people with synesthesia are also autistic or have Asperger’s syndrome. Not me. But I no longer like to be touched. And jokes don’t really register with me anymore. But that may be because I don’t ever intend to laugh again.

I was once normal, or as close as humans get to that state.

And now I’m not.

* * *

His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen. He didn’t recognize the number, but that meant nothing. In drumming up PI work he had left his phone number a lot of places. He didn’t want to focus on work right now, but then again, he couldn’t ignore paying clients either. If he got kicked out of this dump for nonpayment it was back to cardboard. And winter was coming. And while he had a lot of fat on him to keep warm, he would always take a firm roof over paper products.

“Decker,” he answered.

“Mr. Decker, I’m Alexandra Jamison with the News Leader. Can I ask you some questions about the recent development in the case involving your family?”

“How’d you get this number?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“Second time I’ve heard that phrase today. Don’t like it any better this go-round.”

“Mr. Decker, it’s been sixteen months. You must be feeling something knowing that the police have finally made an arrest.”

“How do you know they have?”

“I work the police beat. I have contacts. Solid ones that told me a suspect is in custody. Do you know any more than that? If you do—”

Decker hit the end button and her voice was cut off. The phone immediately rang again, and he turned it off completely.

He hadn’t liked the press when he was a detective, though they could be useful in small measures. However, as a PI he had no use for them at all. And they would get no story or help from him about the case “involving” his family.

He left his room and caught a bus at the corner and rode it to a second bus, which he took all the way downtown. There were a few skyscrapers mixed in with a bunch of other buildings of low and medium height, some in good shape, others not. The streets were well laid out on a tight grid of right angles and straight thoroughfares. He hadn’t spent much time downtown. Crime, the serious crime at least, was either on the north side of town or in the suburbs. But the precinct where he had worked, and where the holding cell was for arrestees, was right here, smack in the center.

He stood on the street and stared across at a building he had walked into every day for a very long time: Precinct Number 2. It was actually Precinct Number 1, because the old number 1 had burned down. But no one had taken the time to redo the numbers. Probably not in the budget.