Oubliette

  “And you’ll enjoy your conversation very much.” Antoine turned away, unable to meet her trusting gaze. He fumbled in his satchel and pulled out a book of crosswords. “How about we do a few word exercises?”

  Half an hour later, as he left a contented Rory doodling in the margins of a word search puzzle, Sylvia stopped him at the bottom of the stairs. “You weren’t supposed to do that,” she said.

  Antoine held his breath. Was she going to report him?

  “I tried to tell her something similar, but she wouldn’t listen. She trusts you, though, when it comes to memories.”

  “I just wanted to get her calmed down a little. I’ll make sure she understands the truth next time, when she’s in a better mental state.”

  Sylvia’s eyes widened. “Don’t do that. Please.” She waved a hand toward the upstairs room where they had left Rory “She deserves to be happy. She’ll never know the difference if you keep on telling her that Jimmy will call tomorrow. She has no tomorrow. Every day is today, so why should we make it sad for her?” Sylvia grabbed his hand. ““You’ve given her peace of mind. Thank you.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Antoine finished his round of appointments deep in thought. The rules at Everett Blair were strict when it came to the veracity of memories. Hell, it was even the company motto: Truth Matters. Prompters were not, under any circumstances, to suggest a memory they knew to false. What he had done during today’s session with Rory could easily cost him his job.

  Unbidden, his thoughts returned to the amnesia-seekers he had seen on the news a few weeks earlier, desperate to be contaminated and forget the past. Thanks to Rory, Antoine could now dimly understand how someone whose life had been marred by tragedy and disappointments might come here seeking the comfort of having their personal history wiped out. Forever after, each day would be a blank page on which to write a new reality.

  That afternoon he chanced a visit to the library. As he had hoped, Dymphna was on duty. She gave a carefully professional answer to his cover inquiry about where to find materials on Sam Houston’s presidency of the Republic of Texas, then followed him to a quiet corner table in the Texas Room.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Her eyes asked a different question.

  “You mean did I find what you wanted me to find?” Antoine gave a slight nod, careful to avoid the appearance that they were discussing anything unusual, in case they were being watched. “I saw it. But what does it mean?”

  “I have no idea, but it’s been happening a lot lately. New versions of books and archival materials are turning up. They look like the old ones, but the information is different. It started with little things, like the Lakewood Church having never been a popular concert venue called the Summit, but it’s getting worse. Now Juan Seguin is no longer in most accounts of the Alamo, and the books about Indianola have disappeared altogether.”

  “India-what?”

  “A small port town in south Texas. Wiped out by back-to-back hurricanes in the 1870s. It’s of no consequence whatsoever, which is what I can’t figure out. If someone is trying to rewrite history, there’s no pattern to what is being changed. That’s why I gave you those materials.” She gave an abashed smile. “I was starting to think I had caught the plague. I figured if anyone would be able to tell me if I was imagining things or not, it would be a memory prompter.”

  “You’re not losing your memory or imagining things,” Antoine assured her. “The night you gave me those materials, someone sneaked into my apartment and swapped out the copies with ones that matched the book you gave me.”

  “No!”

  “Luckily I had already compared them and taken notes about the discrepancies. I’m pretty sure someone was counting on my not having had time to examine them. Either that or they were hoping I would wonder the same thing as you, whether I was losing my mind.”

  Forgetting her professional reserve, Dymphna sank into a chair across from him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to get you involved in something.”

  “It’s okay,” he assured her. “I was doing enough of my own research that it probably would’ve turned out the same with or without you. The important thing now is to understand what’s going on. We need to find out who is doing this.”

  Dymphna shook her head. “If I knew who would do that sort of thing, I’d have some kind of clue what to do next. I was hoping you’d have some ideas.”

  Antoine suppressed a sigh of frustration. “Well, it looks like we’re in this, whatever this is, together. How about you copy as many documents as you can still lay hands on and give the copies to me? I’ll find a safe place for them.”

  “How can you be sure? If someone can sneak into your apartment and you not realize, is anything really safe?”

  She had a good point. He could eschew his own apartment and put the documents in a deposit box at a bank or in a safe, but what if Rafa’s little joke about the CIA was closer to the mark than he realized? If a powerful group with government backing was behind the alteration of Dymphna’s historical documents, no lock would be a hindrance for long. “Can you store them digitally? Maybe save them in the cloud and put backups onto a flash drive or something?”

  “Yes, I’ve done a little of that. But the cloud isn’t secure and there’s always the danger that anything saved on a stored drive won’t be in a usable format later on. Technology changes fast, you know. Digitally stored work from even twenty years ago isn’t always readable anymore and we need to be thinking about the long term. We need something low-tech.”

  “So we’re back to paper.”

  Dymphna nodded. “Sometimes old ways are best. Most historical documents are preserved by accident, you know. Letters, diaries, and even books and newspapers are just left someplace or thrown in a box. Maybe if we did the same thing…”

  “You mean make paper copies and hide them in plain sight?” Antoine considered. “It’s not a bad idea. The only risk is getting them mixed up with the fakes.”

  “I’ll mark them.”

  “Like how? Invisible ink?”

  Antoine was joking but Dymphna wasn’t. “I have a pen for that sort of thing. I’ll put a symbol in the lower right corner of each page and you’ll only be able to see it if you hold the page to the light, sort of like a watermark. That’s how you’ll know it’s a copy of an original.”

  “Okay. And I’ll hide them among my work papers, some at the office and some at home. I’ll jumble them up so it doesn’t look like anything is being hidden at all.”

  “Sounds good, but there’s one small problem,” she said. “We don’t know how long we’re going to have to store these, so we need to use low-acid paper that won’t degrade.”

  “That doesn’t sound difficult. Is it hard to find or something?”

  “No, it’s just expensive. I’m committed to this project, but I still have to eat and pay rent.”

  Antoine gave a little shrug. Money wasn’t a problem for an Everett Blair prompter. “I’ll buy the paper. Just tell me what to order and where to have it delivered.”

  Dymphna smiled and her shoulders relaxed slightly as if she had been wound up tight and could only now allow herself some respite. “I knew I could count on you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  By now it was late afternoon. Antoine was scheduled to accompany Jeb Hendrickson to a black-tie function that evening so he took the opportunity to run a few personal errands and check in with his mother, who had left voice mail two days ago complaining that he never called. There was just enough time left over for a quick workout to clear his mind of the day’s events and calm him for the long night ahead. By the time Jeb’s chauffeured car pulled up, he was showered and shaved, wearing his freshly pressed tux and polished wingtips, and had taken a few minutes to review the information Jeb was likely to need to remember at the event.

  On their way to the Houstonian Hotel, they covered the highlights of Jeb’s career in oil and gas, a few particulars of his current role, and the latest
news about offshore projects, the Middle East, and recent crude price volatility. There was just enough time to fit in a few reminders about Jeb’s family and his college days, in case somebody asked by way of conversation, before they pulled up at the hotel’s low-slung, modern entrance and the valets scurried to open their doors.

  Jeb’s wife Cheryl had arrived separately so as to give her husband time for his prompting session. They found her in the Grande Foyer visiting with some of the other oil executive wives, many in varying degrees of amnesia and a few with prompters at their sides or sitting nearby to assist if needed. Cheryl said a few words to her friends and came over to greet Jeb and Antoine.

  With cool good grace she thanked Antoine for his assistance. “Your service has been very helpful to us.”

  Antoine forced a smile and told her the pleasure was all his, but her aristocratic bearing had always rubbed him the wrong way. Many clients and their families were truly appreciative of the assistance prompters provided, but for Cheryl, whose memory was still crystal clear, a prompter was a shameful reminder that her husband had been stricken and their days as members of Houston’s elite were numbered.

  Having exchanged suitable pleasantries and phony smiles, Cheryl linked her arm with Jeb’s, then turned her back on Antoine and led her husband toward the ballroom doors. As was typical at these types of functions, prompters were expected to stay in the foyer, cell phones at the ready, waiting to assist as needed. The only invitees allowed to have a prompter at their table were retired executives whose presence was requested as a courtesy, in recognition of past services. No one expected them to remember anything useful, so they could take their prompters with them if they pleased.

  His duties done for the moment, Antoine accepted a glass of mineral water from one of the circulating wait staff, then joined a few other prompters who had also safely delivered their clients to the event and were now clustering at one end of the foyer. Although some prompters were from rival companies and others were privately employed by the oil firms to provide exclusive services to their executives, they all followed the Everett Blair model, one rule being that there was to be no discussion about clients at public events. The conversations therefore turned to personal matters, local news, and recent public announcements about the ongoing efforts to cure, or at least vaccinate against, the amnesia virus.

  “I read that they’ve found a way to manipulate DNA to make the brain resistant to all forms of amnesia, viral or otherwise,” said a young man from Mnemonic, a memory company founded by a former partner of Everett Blair.

  “But did they do it in humans, or just rats?” asked a striking brown-skinned woman in a shimmering copper-hued gown. “They’ve cured amnesia in rodents a thousand times over and the only humans it’s done anything for is the ones getting grant money to keep sending rats down mazes.”

  “You’re such a cynic, Marie,” said a blonde in pink chiffon.

  Marie gave her a look that suggested they’d had a few run-ins before. “If you were Lakota, you’d be a little more suspicious of the government, too.”

  “Hey, I’m not saying I trust them one hundred percent. I just think you don’t give the researchers enough credit. They’ll come up something soon, I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t share your confidence,” Marie said

  Slade, a prompter from Everett Blair who Antoine knew to be an avid urban explorer, a connoisseur of ruins of all types, interjected that of course the amnesia research was going well. “We have prompters at the medical center, and they’ve said so.” He turned to Antoine. “Rafael Estrada is a friend of yours, right?”

  Put on the spot, Antoine took a minute to find suitable words. Rafa was always talking about what the researchers were doing, but he never seemed to give it much credence, since the information was all second and third-hand, when it wasn’t rumor entirely. Everyone wanted to believe some sort of progress was being made, and if told with the right spin, even the delivery of a new autoclave could be made into a great leap forward. Feeling that some kind of positive response was required, Antoine gave a little shrug. “Rafa says they’re making significant progress on a vaccine, but I don’t remember him mentioning a DNA component in particular.”

  “But what does ‘significant progress’ mean?” Marie asked. “Will they have something to market in six months? Six years? Sixty years?”

  “That sort of thing really isn’t my forte,” Antoine admitted. “Even the researchers probably aren’t sure how long it will take. I have the impression they just write their theories, do their testing, and hope for the best.”

  “They’re trying though, and that’s what counts,” the blonde pointed out. “They’re doing everything they can, and in the meantime we have to trust them and pass that hope along to our clients.”

  The conversation continued in similar vein for a little while before turning toward the more mundane matters of who was supplying the best gotu kola supplements these days and whether there was any improvement in brain functionality to be gained by cryotherapy or by running one’s drinking water through a reverse-osmosis filter.

  After a while Antoine grew bored and wandered away under the pretext of getting another glass of mineral water. Behind the closed doors of the ballroom, a speaker was expounding in a boldly optimistic voice punctuated by occasional applause. The first few times he had attended functions such as this, Antoine would listen near the doors, curious as to what made these types of events so exclusive. Having since discovered that the speakers at a black-tie gala were rarely any better than the ones conducting workshops at Everett Blair, he no longer bothered. He got another glass of water then found a seat away from the other prompters and got out his phone to check for messages and read one of his downloaded books. He had barely opened one of his apps when he felt someone approach.

  The man was brown-haired, clean-shaven, and nondescript, but even though he was dressed in the requisite black coat and tie, Antoine got the sense that he was neither a prompter nor a late-arriving guest. In spite of his pleasant smile, there was something about him that Antoine didn’t like.

  “Kind of boring waiting around at these things,” the stranger said.

  Antoine stiffened at the man’s false air of camaraderie. “One gets used to it. You new to prompting?”

  “Oh, yes. I was a little nervous about coming to Houston, but the work is very intriguing – working with memories and all that.”

  A tidy answer, but Antoine knew a script when he heard one. “What do you like best about it?”

  “The satisfaction of doing good for others,” the man said as readily as if he had been rehearsing. “I like knowing I’ve filled in the blanks in someone’s past and given them peace of mind.” He leaned forward. “Isn’t that what you like, too?”

  Antoine didn’t know which irritated him more, the man’s phony smile or his obviously canned speech. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m just in it for the money.”

  The man chuckled softly. “No you aren’t. You aren’t the type. I mean, you don’t look like some of the other mercenaries around here. I’m sure you genuinely care about people and want to see them happy.”

  Antoine got to his feet. “Look, Mr…”

  “Vandemark.” He stuck out his hand. “Justin Vandemark.”

  “You don’t know me or my motives. I don’t know what your game is, but you need to take it somewhere else.” He put his phone in his pocket but refused to shake Vandemark’s hand. “Have a nice evening.” Antoine headed back toward the cluster of other prompters without looking to see if Vandemark would follow. He rejoined his colleagues’ conversation, forcing himself to feign great interest in a discussion about the merits of a new midtown taqueria. When he finally dared to check over his shoulder to see if he was being watched, Vandemark was gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the time he got home it was too late to visit Rafa, who had met a pretty girl at the pub and was otherwise engaged for the rest
of the evening, so he called the next morning after an early run at Hermann Park.

  Rafa answered sleepily. “Whatever it is you want, it’s too damn early.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s almost eight o’clock.”

  “And my first appointment is a lunch date at Shiva with an oncologist who’s so far gone he doesn’t even remember that he hates Indian food. I can sleep until at least eleven.”

  “No you can’t. Start some coffee. I’ll be up in a few.”

  Rafa let Antoine into his apartment a little while later, his eyes as dark and grim as the espresso whose aroma saturated the air. “This had better be good.”

  “It is.” Antoine accepted a cup of coffee and settled himself on a bar stool. “You sit down, too.” Once Rafa was sitting across from him gazing drowsily into his demitasse, Antoine proceeded to tell him about the disappearing archives at the public library. Ignoring Rafa’s eye-rolling assertion that he was acting crazier than a conspiracy theorist on crystal meth, Antoine went on to tell him about Vandemark. “And in case you think this is just more paranoia, the guy vanished after I walked away. He didn’t come hang out with us, and when I asked around, no one knew who he was. If he was really a prompter, where did he go?”

  “Maybe he was employed by the hotel.”

  “No, he was specifically there to talk to me.”

  “About how well you like your job. Real scary, bro.” Rafa slammed back the rest of his coffee and got up to make another one. “He’s probably a spy for Mnemonic. They steal Everett Blair prompters every chance they get.”

  Antoine sighed. “You’re not listening.”

  “Sure I am. Your archivist friend says the records no longer match her memory and a stranger asked you how you like your job.” His sweet espresso ready for consumption, he sat back down. “This may be hard for you to accept, but Dymphna could be in early stage amnesia.”

  “That wouldn’t explain the discrepancy I saw with my own eyes a few weeks ago. The one someone thought worth stealing from my apartment.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you really saw, though? Maybe you were just tired that night. And remember, we never could find any evidence that someone had been in your apartment. When I said maybe someone important like the Feds were involved, you were like, no way.”