And there was the rub. Joining Civ meant keeping his own mind intact while allowing those around him to lose theirs to what he now realized was the beginning of a great social brainwashing. Yes, it might make them happy, but wasn’t pain part of what it meant to be human? He sipped his coffee and indulged Dymphna’s misremembered rambles, trying not to think of who she used to be. What else could he do?
At noon he attended an office brown bag on the latest memory-preserving nutritional guidelines, enduring questions about Rafa from his fellow prompters. No, there were no new developments. It appeared he had been hit by an amnesiac driver. Yes, it sure is a surprise that sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.
Naomi seemed particularly worried and asked if anything could be done, but of course there was nothing she could do to help and Antoine wondered about her sincerity. If she was part of Civ’s crew, how much did she really know about the accident? Did she realize Rafa was a transgressive? Was her show of concern just crocodile tears or did she finally see this dangerous game for what it was? He longed to take her in his arms and bare his soul to her as the only person left who might help him stop the tide of historical revision, but if he tempted her down Rafa’s path, a similarly gruesome fate might await her as well. And so the words lingered on his lips, unspoken.
That afternoon at the Tennenbaum’s, he helped David with a crossword and then settled into a game of chess. David still played well since he was only in the early stages of the disease, and Antoine was making mental notes about his client’s abilities when David received a call from the office.
“I’m sorry, but this will take a few minutes,” he said.
Antoine had been waiting for just such an opportunity. “How about I go check on Rory?”
Upstairs, he made a detour into Jimmy’s room. It took a few minutes of fumbling, but he eventually found what he was looking for – the record of Texas state legislative elections going back to when Texas first joined the Union. He skimmed through the document, holding his breath until he found 1876. The winner was Griffith.
Antoine sat back stunned. He had felt so certain that Hogg had won, but if the archive copies matched everything else he could lay hands on, then the problem was with him and his own memory. Now the need for Mnemosyne was more than just an abstraction. If his mind was failing, he needed to act quickly and Civ was his only hope.
But then he remembered something. He took the document to the window and held it up to the light, looking for Dymphna’s watermark. It wasn’t there. Frowning, he took out his phone and turned the flashlight app on its highest setting, then ran it underneath the paper, scanning slowly, looking for any sign that the identifying markings were there. Nothing. He shut off the flashlight. These weren’t the right papers. Someone had switched them for fakes, and in all likelihood it was Antoine’s memory that was correct. But if he was the only one who remembered something happening a certain way, history might as well be over.
As he was heading toward the stairs he ran into Rory.
“Oh.” She stopped and stared.
“I’m Antoine Gavin,” he reminded her. “I come here every few days to help you with your memory.”
“I see.” She still gazed at him with suspicion. “You’ve been prompting me for a while?”
“Yes. I was playing chess with your husband but he had to take a call. I came up here to see how you were doing.”
Rory nodded. “I was downstairs making sure Sylvia knew what I wanted for lunch.”
“Don’t you usually have lunch with your friends on Wednesdays?”
“That’s what Sylvia said, but today isn’t Wednesday.”
Antoine smiled patiently. “Are you sure? My phone says Wednesday.” He pulled it out and showed it to her. “What does your phone say?”
“I…don’t know.” Rory frowned.
“Let’s sit down and talk for a few minutes.”
Antoine led her into the craft room where they usually met and took her through a few memory exercises, comparing her results to the data stored in his client app. She seemed to sense that the test results weren’t good and started showing signs of agitation, clasping her hands and darting her eyes around the room as if looking for something solid she could hold on to.
“It’s going to be okay,” he reassured her, even though realistically she had only months before she would require around-the-clock supervision.
“But I’m losing everything,” she said. “I’m losing me.”
“We won’t quit fighting though, will we? Do you listen to your Whoami app every day?”
“I’m not sure.”
Antoine picked up her phone and checked the app’s settings. “It’s scheduled to wake you up every day with facts about yourself. Plus you can listen to it any time you like just by tapping here.” He showed her.
Rory shook her head. “I’ve seen that before. It lies.”
“Really?”
“It says my son is dead, but he’s alive.”
Antoine felt himself flinch. His little fiction had given her peace of mind, but was that just one step on the path that would end with him feeding lies to all and sundry? “How do you know he’s alive? You’re forgetting a lot. I know that’s painful for you to hear.”
“I wouldn’t forget something about Jimmy, though. Someone told me he had gone to college, gotten married and was traveling overseas, getting ready to send me some pictures. I knew it was very important not to forget, so I’ve practiced hard.” She smiled. “You see? I can still remember some things.”
“Indeed you can.” Antoine got to his feet. “I’d love to visit with you some more, Ms. Tennenbaum, but I should check if your husband has finished his call.”
Rory nodded. “Come back soon. I need you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
That evening he returned to the hospital. Thankfully Mrs. Estrada was away having dinner and Antoine could have a few minutes alone with his friend. He pulled a chair up to Rafa’s side, ignoring the tubes and catheters. All that mattered now was that this bruised and broken body housed what he hoped was a mind that could still think, still remember.
Had Rafa realized the risks he was taking in trying to duplicate the Mnemosyne pills? He had to have known that an organization powerful enough to develop such a drug and withhold it from the public was also powerful enough to do him harm. But he risked it anyway, just as he had tried to help Antoine and Dymphna rescue the archives so future generations would know the truth, no matter how inconsequential any one fact may seem. Rafa understood that it was from small lies that bigger lies began. Antoine had once thought him too frivolous to appreciate the urgency of the archive project but now he saw that Rafa realized the seriousness of the game better than any of them.
Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. What kind of idiot was he to even consider Civ’s offer? Every person drawn into the Mnemosyne game was a pawn to be used and discarded. If he agreed to spread misinformation on someone else’s agenda, where would it end? Not with Antoine seeing his own dreams fulfilled, that much was clear.
“You saw through it from the beginning,” Antoine said.
Rafa, of course, did not respond.
How many other Rafas were out there, Antoine wondered, men and women brave enough to try to turn this insidious game around and restore mankind’s memory, no matter what the personal cost? His thoughts turned to the people outside the hospital windows, that city full of amnesiacs who were for the most part content with their lot. They tore down their historic homes, paved over beloved hotels and took wrecking balls to the scenes of concerts and events that even now had slipped from most people’s memories. All of this went on with no real distress to the forgetful citizens who had learned to accept roads that were always worked on but never mended and pre-fab strip centers that lacked the charm and durability of what they replaced. People had come to expect a steady diet of new, and the surfeit was changing what it meant to be human.
Rafa had been fighting the tide. He
never had a prayer of success, any more than Dymphna had with her feverish attempts to preserve original documents. It had always been a naïve effort, an unwinnable game. “I know it doesn’t seem like it,” Antoine told him, “But you’ve done well.” He paused and considered. “You’re a sort of hero, I guess.”
“A needless martyr, more like,” said a voice from the doorway.
Antoine turned around. Somehow he wasn’t surprised that Civ had access to Rafa’s room. “Come to bring him flowers?” he asked coldly.
“He’s allergic,” Civ said, responding in kind. “Let’s you and me talk.”
Reluctantly, Antoine followed him out of the ward and into lounge, where they found seats near a window. The area was empty, with only the occasional sound of rubber-soled feet on linoleum in the hallway. “Can’t you let a guy visit his friend in the hospital without having to drop in like this?” Antoine said.
“Some things are too important to wait. Besides,” Civ said, “It’s not like Mr. Estrada knows who is here and who isn’t. Most likely he’ll go on dreaming for a bit and then his mother will be asked if she’d like to pull the plug or keep him that way permanently. Whatever she decides, it won’t matter for long.” Civ gave a little shrug. “She’s symptomatic, you know.”
“Do you have any heart at all?”
“Don’t be so sentimental, Mr. Gavin. It’s the realists who will inherit the earth.” He smiled. “Are you ready to accept our offer and be safe forever from the plague?”
“No.”
Civ’s eyes widened as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had just heard. “You haven’t forgotten what we talked about the other day, have you? We’re changing history for the good of all mankind.”
“It’s a nice dream.”
“It’s not just a dream. My agency is subsidized by twelve national governments, including the United States’, and we will revolutionize humanity. We’re offering you the opportunity to end the abuses and suspicions that have haunted your people’s history from the day they set foot in this country,” Civ reminded him. “We’re offering paradise.”
Antoine shook his head. It may sound like a fantasy come true, but if he took this bait it would be a heaven created by fallible man, who might very well teach everyone tomorrow that this or that group had always been the source of the world’s troubles. Amnesia could be just as easily made a tool of hate as a tool of love. “You’re right that I’d like to see world harmony,” Antoine said. “But not like this.”
“You’ll regret it,” Civ said, as Antoine stood to leave. “You have no idea what you’re throwing away.”
Antoine paused and gazed at him at him with eyes unclouded by futile wishes. “Yes I do,” he said. “I’m throwing away the lie.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
He went back to Rafa’s bedside only briefly. The bruised shell being breathed by a ventilator and sustained with drips and drainage tubes wasn’t the friend he knew or likely ever would again. “I told him no,” he said softly. “I have a feeling it won’t end well, but what does?”
He left the ward, alert to the possibility that Civ might still be around, but the agent was no longer in the lounge or any of the nearby hallways. As Antoine crossed the lobby at the sky bridge level, thinking himself in the clear, he heard the unmistakable sound of Civ’s voice and stopped cold. The man was standing near a window, speaking calmly to Dale from Everett Blair, not in the wheedling tone of a man making an offer, but in the manner of an old friend. As if sensing they were being watched, both men turned. For a long moment their eyes locked and Dale’s cold, dead stare chilled Antoine through. Then Antoine looked away and continued to the glassed-in walkway that would take him to the garage, all the while feeling both men’s eyes on his back and knowing now that although he would not be followed, his days at Everett Blair were numbered.
Antoine hadn’t felt more completely alone since the day his plane touched down on the tarmac of Houston’s vast airport in the northern reaches of the city. Somewhere there was likely a plan in place to make sure Rafa was never restored to health, if he even woke up at all, and no amount of bargaining with the devil was going to change that. And his friendship with Dymphna, troubled though it had been, was now marred by her amnesia, which would progress as with all the other cases. Having lost her memory of Houston’s past, she had already lost much of what had made her who she was. Once the amnesia rotted the soul, the body soon followed.
Discouraged, he got in his car and began driving the city. The traffic was light at this time of day, and as he made his way along the oak-shaded streets of Rice Village and the Museum District he found that although he hadn’t been here long, memories had already attached themselves to certain buildings, vistas and street corners. He turned onto Montrose and then picked a few side streets at random, tracking through gentrified neighborhoods of bungalows and Victorians rapidly being replaced by townhomes whose price tags belied their cheap materials and shoddy construction. Few residents could still remember that this area had once been a home to artists and outcasts, and before that, the working poor who had snatched up bungalows as the first privileged suburbanites fled outward, ever outward, leaving each generation’s childhood memories in the hands of new owners who had no thought of the past, only their immediate needs and their own children’s future.
The people Antoine saw, whether driving aimlessly or wandering the streets in confusion, had staked everything on Houston not remembering who or what they once were. Here they roamed in their multitudes, their minds wiped clean of the pesky burden of the past. There was only today and the dream of a future that would itself be forgotten in a never-ending cycle of renewal.
This would always be a place of reinvention, of no regrets, because you can’t regret what you can’t remember, so why not let each day be as the day you first opened your eyes and saw only the possibilities of tomorrow?
The ability to forget was both the city’s strength and its curse, its charm and its painful ugliness. What more would amnesia make of it? Only time would tell, and Antoine wondered how much longer he would have to make some kind of record of it so that unlike Dymphna’s pilfered archives, someone might someday discover the past. Discover the truth. Remember.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was exactly two weeks later that Antoine heard the first inaccuracy in his Whoami app. It was so subtle, such a minor thing, that he almost didn’t notice and then wondered if it was he who had erred. Now that he understood the power and reach of Civ Mechant’s organization, who was to say Whoami wasn’t being tampered with? There was no way to be sure whether his own memory was at fault or whether they were beginning to reprogram him.
He went about his appointments with the uneasy sense that his own personal recollections were under threat, but that seemed a petty thing to worry about when all around him the past was slipping away. There was no way he could stop it all on his own, and he had no more allies. He was just one man fighting the tide of history.
A few days later Antoine sat alone in one of Everett Blair’s temporary cubicles puzzling over a case that he thought was new but had an odd ring of familiarity about it. Suddenly he heard soft footsteps and then Naomi slid quietly into the chair opposite his.
“We need to talk,” she said.
Antoine looked up from his computer screen.
“You’re fooling some of the others, but you’re not fooling me.” She took something out of her purse and set it on the desk in front of him. Mnemosyne. “Please reconsider. I’ve talked to Civ. And to Dale and some of the others. They like you and are willing to take you on, even though you turned them down before.”
He picked up the bottle gingerly. Salvation, but with a price. He set the bottle back down. “What about you? I don’t really care if they like me. How do you feel, Naomi?”
She sat back, startled. “I think it goes without saying.”
“Is that why don’t you ever say it?”
“I’m saying it now. I like you e
nough that I went to bat for you, asking them to give you another chance.” She leaned forward and reached for his hand. “Don’t let this happen to you. It’s not irreversible yet, but it will be soon.”
Antoine searched her eyes but saw nothing that inspired confidence. She had given her mind to the agency to keep it whole and given her body to Rafa when it suited her purposes. What did she hope to gain this time? He pulled his hand away. “I haven’t forgotten what I would have to do to be allowed to retain my memories.” He handed back the bottle. “Given the choice, I prefer to hold onto my ethics. But thank you for trying.”
Later that evening he went for a quiet walk near his apartment, a home he would not be allowed to live in much longer. He had enough money that he wouldn’t have to be homeless, but where should he go? Back to Charleston, where he might infect his family? If Civ and his ilk had their way, his family wouldn’t be safe much longer, no matter what he did or didn’t do. Going home wouldn’t expose them to anything they weren’t vulnerable to already. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to be the agent of their destruction.
He would stay in Houston. It was the only right thing to do.
A few miles from where he stood, the city’s skyline beckoned, a great shining temple of forgetting. Here was oblivion in all its pristine purity, an amnesty of sorts. Freedom. Houston didn’t care who he was or where he came from. Here, a man could shed his anchor to the past and become anything, because in the end, there would be no damnatio memoriae, but a slow fade, erasement, until everything would be wiped clean, as empty as the place where something treasured once used to be.
About the Author
The author has lived in Houston since 1978 and is married to a native Houstonian.
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