Oubliette

  “You’ve got a good kick,” Civ observed, panting slightly. “You ran a little track in school.”

  Antoine sucked in a deep breath, willing himself not to let on that he was winded, too. “Is there anything you don’t know about me?”

  “Actually, I was just guessing at that one. You run like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Some of the time I do.” Antoine looked out across the broad expanse of gardens and felt his heart rate slow, his body quickly recovering from his sprint. He had been told that these gardens were a relatively recent addition, replacing previous ones that had been in place since the 1930s. How long anyone would remember this little fact was anyone’s guess. A year from now, Houstonians would probably believe the gardens had always looked like this.

  “The last time we spoke, you walked away before I could give you the details of our offer.”

  “I didn’t want to waste your time,” Antoine said in tones so polite as to border sarcasm. “Nothing you can say will change my mind.”

  “Really? What a shame.” Civ pretended to join him in looking out over the landscape. “You have a fine memory, Antoine. You put it at risk every day.”

  “All of us do. It isn’t as if any of us can live alone in a cave.”

  “Agreed. You like your down time, but I doubt such a lifestyle would suit you as a permanent arrangement, even though the amount of money you’re putting away between Everett Blair and the Tennenbaums would enable you to make a hermit lifestyle very comfortable.” Civ leaned against the low concrete wall and looked at him. “That’s why we’re not offering money. You’ve shown yourself to be quite capable of earning your own…as long as your mind holds out. Doesn’t that worry you—amnesia, the loss of income, the loss of self, the loss of everything you have worked so hard for?”

  Did it worry him? Luckily Everett Blair had regular workshops on stress management, otherwise Antoine wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. “When the time comes, I’ll probably forget to care.”

  Civ chuckled softly. “I know you don’t really believe that. You prize the past more than almost any other prompter my organization has followed, and that’s saying something. If there were a way you could guarantee the safety of your memory, a little daily pill perhaps, you would consider it worth almost any price.”

  “It’s a nice fantasy,” Antoine said. “But nothing like that exists.”

  “Are you sure?” Civ asked with a smile so smug that Antoine was tempted to push him off the mount. “Ask some of your prompter friends, especially those of your close acquaintance, if they’ve ever heard of Mnemosyne. Then let’s talk again and see if we can come to an understanding.”

  Antoine watched in silence as Civ started down the mount, listening as the man’s footsteps paced slowly down the circuitous path. Then he turned his attention once again to the gardens, the ever-renewing perennials, uprooted here and transplanted there against all the natural inclinations of plants, in order to fulfill someone’s grand vision. When he was finally certain that he was alone, he wound his way back down to the garden path and headed home under a shimmering dawn sky.

  * * * *

  Of course he couldn’t let Civ’s words go. For the rest of the morning and deep into afternoon he brooded, trying to parse their meaning. It went without saying that the man was going to say anything necessary to get Antoine to buy into their game, so he wasn’t quick to believe that there was actually a memory pill and that some of his fellow prompters had it. The idea that something like that had been going on right under his nose was simply too ridiculous.

  Or was it? There were many people he worked with who didn’t seem particularly altruistic yet braved the most decrepit and potentially contagious clients with no apparent ill effects. And then there were prompters like Haley, strong and athletic, who did everything she was supposed to but now could no longer work, thanks to advancing amnesia. Previously the statistics of who became symptomatic and who did not had seemed purely random, but now a doubt had been planted in Antoine’s mind.

  His thoughts returned to Rafa. Here was a man who spent every day in the Texas Medical Center, surrounded by amnesiacs of every stripe, but he remained sharp after a year and a half of daily contact with the infected, his lapses with alcohol and sugary cereals be damned. Was Rafa a recipient of Mnemosyne? Had he sold out to save himself? And if so, was he selling out Antoine and Dymphna too?

  Well, there was an easy way to find out. Rafa was hosting a prompter get-together at his place. Naomi was going to be there and since Antoine still had feelings for her he had begged off, citing other commitments, but now it looked like he was going to need to go, after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  From the hallway, he could hear the thumping bass of a recent reggaeton hit, and Antoine wondered how long it would be before one of Rafa’s tony neighbors called to complain. Hopefully Antoine could do what he needed to do quickly and get out before things got awkward. He knocked, then rang the bell and knocked again before finally texting in frustration.

  Rafa opened the door and the rumba-hip-hop sounds of a popular Cuban singer hit Antoine like a wave.

  “What the hell are you knocking for, bro? Come on in!”

  “Lucky for you it’s me and not security. Music’s a little loud, don’t you think?”

  Rafa shrugged. “Gotta live a little. Help yourself to a beer. I’ve got the ginkgo variety or the good stuff with hops, pick your poison.”

  Antoine stepped inside the hubbub of noise and bodies, recognizing a few prompters from Everett Blair, but also from other firms and even a private prompter who had forsaken corporate life for the risks and rewards of working as a free agent. Some huddled in front of the TV playing a drinking game to the classic 1990 version of Total Recall, a perennial prompter favorite. Others clustered at the bar sharing war stories and hogging the guacamole. In a far corner, a dark-haired girl Antoine didn’t recognize giggled and leaned on Sergey for support, and from this vantage point it looked like there were other people out on the balcony. A bespectacled young man who Antoine recognized from Mnemonic thrust a Shiner Bock into his hands. “Enjoy, friend. The night is young.”

  He took the beer and made the rounds, sampling the tostada chips, making small talk about quarantines and amnesia tourists, and waiting for his opportunity. It wouldn’t do to go straight to Rafa’s bathroom and start looking for suspicious pill bottles, so Antoine was stuck having to smile and pretend to be enjoying himself.

  There had been a time when he liked these sorts of get-togethers, opportunities to mingle with people who operated on his wavelength. Prompters were a rarified breed, not just because they had retained their personal histories while others were losing theirs, but because they mingled daily with the hoi polloi, while their own personal tastes and origins were for the most part humble. Neither fish nor fowl, they lived in two worlds while fitting in neither, and it was comforting to spend time with others who were trying to navigate these confusing waters. This was his tribe.

  But as with all tribes, the fracture lines of dysfunction had become apparent early on: the ego trips, the petty squabbles, the delusions. Persons who spent their days whispering truth in other ears were masters at self-deception. Too often they considered themselves immune from the virus, too clever, too well-versed in the tricks of their trade to be vulnerable like the unwashed masses who lacked their understanding.

  Antoine was made of less hubristic stock and saw no reason to think his mastery of memory aids and herbal concoctions made him any more resistant than the rest of humanity. And so the laughter over amnesiac antics and the contempt for public plague fears felt to him like a dangerous enticement to the mnemonic gods who surely had three new tricks up their sleeves for every one discovered by a mere mortal.

  After giving his due to the crowd playing their drinking game while Schwarzenegger struggled with his implanted memories, Antoine made his way to the balcony. As he had expected, this was a quieter group, engaged for
the moment in listening to a Cambodian pharmacy student explaining why there was no way a memory cure could come to market in anything under five years, given all the testing and red tape required by the FDA.

  While she was expounding on her topic, Antoine looked for a place to sit. In a far corner, looking faintly sallow under the glow of festive red and yellow lights, Naomi caught his eye and patted the empty seat next to hers. With mixed feelings, he stepped around a guy from Mnemonic who looked about ready to start an argument with the pharmacy student, and settled in at Naomi’s side.

  “I was wondering if you were coming to this shindig,” she said.

  “Had to take a call from a client,” he lied.

  Naomi nodded in sympathy. “I almost got roped into having to accompany the prez to the homecoming game, but I stabilized her in time, thank god.”

  Antoine suppressed a smile. Of all the prompters who might have been given the University of Houston president’s account, didn’t it just figure it was someone who hated football? He had always thought it an odd lapse in Naomi’s otherwise fun-loving personality that she had no interest in sports. She was certainly up for almost anything else. Her enthusiasm for everything from arboretum walks to zydeco dancing was one of the qualities Antoine liked most in her and missed about their months together. If you were bored in Naomi’s presence, you had no one but yourself to blame.

  “It’s been a while since Rafa’s last party,” she went on. “Is it true that management around here complained to the boss about the last one?”

  He nodded but refrained from offering details. Rafa’s parties in his early days at Everett Blair were legendary. Neighbors finally made a fuss, though, and since all prompters lived in company-paid apartments, Rafa was put on notice to stop the shenanigans, or else. “I’m just hoping no one calls downstairs about the noise.”

  Naomi gave a little shrug. “This is pretty tame for Rafa. I had expected there would at least be some dancing, though.”

  Antoine thought he detected an invitation in her remark and wondered what to make of it. He missed her sometimes, the feel of her mouth on his, her gusto for everything from quiet conversation to bedroom sports, which were the only kind she gave herself to with abandon. There was such a thing as too much remembrance in a partner, though. They had both felt it, the inability to let go of tiny grudges, the reluctance to let the other person assert their version of their shared past. Before he could compose a suitably vague response to her mention of dancing, the young man who had been glaring skeptically at the pharmacy student spoke up.

  “You keep talking about FDA timelines, but those are for non-essential things like fat blockers and new types of anxiety meds. They’re totally committed to fast-tracking any new memory products that can be developed.”

  “Five years is a fast track for them,” the girl pointed out. “That’s why if anything is discovered, you can expect it to go straight to the black market.”

  “It’ll go to the black market regardless, just like everything else.”

  “Yes, but at least there’s a way to get real Oxycodone, Vicodin, or whatever. The memory cure—”

  “Which doesn’t exist.”

  “But which will one day—”

  Naomi rolled her eyes. “There’s legitimate memory stuff being traded on the black market already,” she murmured to no one in particular.

  Antoine started. She wasn’t referring to Mnemosyne, was she? Hoping she’d say more, he remarked that there were gullible people everywhere.

  To his disappointment, she merely agreed, then stood and announced she was going inside for another glass of wine. “Come find me if there’s dancing later,” she told him.

  He assured her he would, then turned his attention back to the heated discussion of corporate-patented medicines and the illegal manufacture and distribution of duplicates. After feigning interest for half an hour and even joining in as if he really believed a cure was on the brink of discovery, he excused himself and went inside. He wove through the clusters of conversations, pushed his way past Sergey and his brunette, who was now hanging off him in the sloppy, boneless fashion of one who had long ago crossed the line into drunken insensibility, and slipped into Rafa’s dimly lit bedroom.

  A shadow moved on the bed and sat up. “You really should knock once in a while, bro.”

  Antoine looked from Rafa to girl on the bed, who was fully clothed, but fumbling to button her blouse.

  Naomi.

  The three shared an awkward moment, broken finally by Antoine’s clipped words. “If you don’t want to be walked in on, you should lock the door. I just want to use the bathroom. Someone’s in the other one.”

  Rafa made a little motion indicating he should go on, and Antoine went into the bathroom and shut the door. He could faintly hear Naomi saying something, then the door to the bedroom opened and closed.

  Antoine now had to move quickly. Forcing his thoughts away from the scene he had interrupted, he turned on the water to cover any sounds he might make and began opening drawers and cabinets, finding shaving cream, toothpaste, three kinds of floss and a dizzying array of vitamins and herbals that Antoine was familiar with because they were all on the Everett Blair recommended list and he had many of these same supplements in his own medicine cabinet. He was almost at the limit of the amount of time a man could reasonably be expected to spend in a bathroom just to use the toilet, when he discovered a brown prescription bottle with a label that looked more like something made on an office computer than what one would see on something from the pharmacy. He picked it up so he could have a closer look.

  For a long moment he didn’t react. In spite of his recent suspicions, Antoine had hoped, and at some deeper level secretly believed, that Rafa’s only involvement in this mess was his participation in the archive project with Dymphna. But if Rafa wasn’t collaborating with the misinformers, how had he come to have a bottle of Mnemosyne?

  Quickly, he shoved the bottle into his pocket, used the toilet and flushed. When he went back into the bedroom, it was empty and he was able to rejoin the party unobserved. He mingled for a few unbearable minutes, making the required remarks about the weather, the guacamole, and the antics of amnesiac drivers, and then, not seeing Rafa or Naomi anywhere, he slipped out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Antoine got little sleep that night. Discovering the Mnemosyne in Rafa’s apartment was bad enough, but he was surprised to find himself jealous of his friend’s dalliance with Naomi. It wasn’t right, of course. A man didn’t own a woman just because he slept with her a few times. But even though the relationship was one he wouldn’t necessarily take up again, it bothered him more than he had thought it would to see her with someone else. Especially a dog like Rafa, who went through women more quickly than some men went through clean underwear.

  He was brewing a pot of coffee and lining up his Everett Blair-approved supplements on the counter in accordance with his morning memory preservation ritual, when his phone buzzed with a text. He stared at the message for a long moment before responding. “Whatever.”

  A few minutes later Rafa knocked on his door, looking both abashed and thoroughly hung over. For once he made no remark about the insipid qualities of Antoine’s “café americano” and politely accepted a cup.

  “I feel like I owe you an apology for last night.”

  Antoine waved him off and pretended to need all his attention to pour his own cup of coffee. “Me and Naomi broke up months ago. I’ve got no claim on her.”

  “But you still have feelings for her. What I did wasn’t cool.”

  “I just wish you’d told me you two were going out or something.” Antoine blew on his coffee. “I don’t like surprises.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it going out. She just gets lonely sometimes.” Rafa looked away. “She still misses you, you know.”

  “So she fucks you, instead? That’s a funny way of showing it.” Antoine walked into the living room, dropped onto the sof
a and turned on the TV, where a concerned-looking reporter stood in front of an airport terminal talking about quarantines while words crawled across the bottom of the screen listing cities with travel restrictions on amnesiacs.

  Rafa approached the sofa cautiously, as if not quite sure whether his presence was truly welcome. “She says every time she tries to talk to you, you’re all weird and distant and shit.”

  Antoine shrugged. “What does she expect? We’re broken up.”

  “Okay.”

  Seeing that he was still standing there, he added, “I’m over it, all right? Do whatever the hell you want.”

  Gingerly, Rafa sat on the edge of the sofa and sipped his coffee. They watched the news report in silence for several minutes before finally he said, “Why do I feel like you’re mad at me, even though you say you’re not?”

  For a long moment, Antoine held his breath, considering. Should he mention the Mnemosyne? Surely Rafa had noticed its absence by now, but did he suspect Antoine in particular? There were probably plenty of other guests who had used that bathroom the previous night.

  “You’re really not going to let me live this down, are you?”

  Antoine got to his feet. “Wait here.” With grim determination he went into his bedroom, then returned with the small brown bottle of Mnemosyne. “If I’m pissed, it’s more about this than the other. How long have you been lying to your clients to get these?”

  Rafa’s eyes widened. “How did you—?” He snatched the bottle out of Antoine’s hands. “You’ve got no business snooping through my things.”

  “And you’ve got no business replacing people’s memories with lies just so you can keep your own brain intact.”

  “That’s not how it is.”

  “So you just found that bottle on a shelf at the grocery store, next to the band-aids? Nice try. Why don’t you admit it – you’re one of them. You don’t really care about the past, only yourself. You’re probably contaminating the archive project, too. I can’t believe I trusted you!”