The Great Forgetting Read online

  “Tony hated it.”

  “He would.”

  “So, did you find anything interesting?”

  Jack leaned forward in the recliner. “I’ll tell you what interests me,” he began. “This is forced medication of the American public. No argument there. Fluoride is medication in our drinking water. I never really thought about it like that. But the benefits are clear.” He paged through his notes. “Adding fluoride to our water supply costs about ninety-four cents per person per year, and studies have shown a forty percent reduction in cavities since fluoridation became official policy, in 1951. That saves everyone from paying higher insurance premiums. When I was in middle school we used to gargle with a fluoride rinse every Wednesday because so many of us only have wells out here. They brought Dixie cups filled with the stuff to our classrooms. Never had a cavity.”

  Cole nodded. “What did you make of fluoride’s link to the Nazis?”

  “A lot of people think there’s some connection. But there’s nothing really to back it up.”

  “The first time fluoride was put in drinking water was inside Nazi concentration camps,” said Cole. “It made the prisoners more docile.”

  “I mean, I saw that. But I couldn’t find a single supporting document.”

  Cole pulled a black binder from the shelf above his desk and opened it to a page marked with a pink tab. “This is a letter from a research chemist named Charles Perkins to the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, dated October second, 1954: ‘Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual’s power to resist domination, by slowly poisoning and narcotizing a certain area of the brain, thus making him subversive to the will of those who wish to govern him.’”

  “But…”

  Cole held up a finger. “He goes on to say, ‘I was told of this entire scheme by a German chemist who was also prominent in the Nazi movement at the time.’”

  “I saw that, Cole, but I could find no evidence that Perkins really existed.”

  The boy looked back to his folder. “How about this? It’s a quote from Dr. E. H. Bronner, Albert Einstein’s nephew: ‘Fluoridation of our community water systems could well become their most subtle weapon for our sure physical and mental deterioration.’”

  “I found that, too,” said Jack. “Like I said, I’m a research geek. I looked into it. The only documents linking this guy, Bronner, to Einstein appear to be hoaxes. Bronner was not even a real doctor. His biggest claim to fame was a cure-all soap made from olive oil and hemp.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Cole stared at Jack for a while, unreadable. Then he smiled. Jack had the overwhelming sense that whatever he was doing, even as he was discrediting some of the boy’s theories, he was doing exactly what Cole wanted him to do. The boy was manipulating him. And he wasn’t even trying to hide it.

  “Do you know what fluoride is?” Cole asked.

  Jack nodded. “That part is a little … disconcerting. It’s a byproduct of fertilizer manufacturing.”

  “It’s hazardous waste,” said Cole. “And the sources on this issue are a little more credible. Time magazine, 2005: ‘Ingested in high doses, fluoride is indisputably toxic; it was once commonly used in rat poison.’”

  “Yeah. That’s not good.”

  “In 2000, a congressional subcommittee discovered that fluoride had never been subjected to toxicological testing by the FDA.”

  “Is that true?” asked Jack.

  “It is. It was never tested because the FDA knows it’s dangerous. Hydrogen fluoride is considered hazardous waste by the EPA. It’s regulated. You can’t bury the stuff as easily as you can put it in our water. And not just our water, Jack. In regions where they don’t yet have fluoridated water, they put it in their salt.”

  Salt was, Jack knew, a time-tested source of benevolent forced medication; iodized salt, after all, was created to reduce cases of mental retardation in rural communities.

  “Have you looked closely at your tube of toothpaste lately?” Cole asked.

  Jack laughed. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Next time you’re in your bathroom, check it out. There’s a warning label on there, the kind they put on packs of cigarettes. It says if a kid swallows more than a pea-size drop, you’re supposed to call poison control.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Most people don’t. If they did, they’d have to ask why, if your kids can’t swallow a little fluoride, why are we putting it in their drinking water? Why are we bathing in it?”

  “Okay, it’s creepy. I don’t know about Nazi scientists being behind it, but it does make me wonder.”

  “Did you look into how it all started?” asked Cole.

  Jack referred to his notes, flipping to the beginning. “Guy named H. Trendley Dean is credited for first fluoridating drinking water. He conducted an experiment in 1945, put fluoride in the water system in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was so successful it caught on with the rest of the country by the early sixties.”

  “How much did you learn about Dean?”

  “Let’s see … um … he was the first director of the National Institute of Dental Research, in 1948.”

  “What did he do before moving to Grand Rapids?”

  “He was the director of epidemiological studies for the United States Army.”

  “Care to guess where Dean was stationed during the war?”

  Jack blinked. “Germany?”

  “That’s right. That’s exactly right.”

  “So you think our own government is putting fluoride in our water because we learned from the Nazis that it makes us easier to control?”

  “Something like that,” said Cole. “But let’s not worry about the whys just yet. These Impossibilities I want you to think about are the hows. This is how the government is executing the biggest con in history. Once you see how their machine is set up, you’ll be able to see what they’re up to. Don’t worry. We’ll get there.”

  “So what’s next?” asked Jack.

  “Chemtrails.”

  “Chemtrails? What are chemtrails?”

  “Those lines in the sky,” said Cole. “You see them every day. Exhaust from jet planes. Dangerous chemicals raining down on us. Mind-control drugs mixed in with jet fuel.”

  “Looks like I have some light reading.”

  Cole laughed. “Want to play Mario Kart before you go?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Jack. “I never lose.”

  4 Just outside Franklin Mills, Tallmadge Road becomes SR 14, a two-lane highway that weaves through allotments and over mud-colored lakes before intersecting with SR 88 in Ravenna. Jean took a right onto 88 and drove toward Mantua, a sleepy town on the top of a hill. She drove through the brick-fronted downtown, a scene from a cheap Western, and on through a neighborhood of wide lawns and antebellum houses draped with bunting for the Fourth of July. Down a side street, beyond a train car that had been converted into an apothecary, Jean pulled into the parking lot of a low brick building: St. Mary’s, home to sixty patients suffering from various forms of dementia, primarily Alzheimer’s.

  Jean wished she could erase her own memories. She welcomed any disease that might eat away at the neural connections inside her that housed remembrances of Mark Brooks. He’d introduced her to meth and that had been like heaven for a while. She craved that corruption even now. Could feel that pull, that tug toward welcome oblivion.

  God grant me the serenity …

  Jean didn’t remember the night Paige was conceived. Had it been consensual? Mark never explained it. Jean pretended that she remembered, and never asked. As much as she had reason to be repulsed by him, all reason exhausted itself after a snort of his stuff. That drug. That poison. Well. There was a reason it was an epidemic in Franklin Mills. It woke you up to the beauty of being. It lifted you out of the squalor. It made you want to live and live and live. Jean knew they had sex sometimes, in the exaltation, when everything was on fir
e. But Mark couldn’t keep it up for long. A small price. Let him do his thing. She had been lost. And in the end it brought salvation of a kind, didn’t it? Paige kept her anchored. Paige brought her back.

  And now, Jack. Having Jack back was good. She owed it to him to find out exactly what the Captain knew about Mark’s murder. Because he had to know something. The Captain had been with both Mark and Tony the day Tony had disappeared. She wiped away the tears with the back of her sleeve and got out of the car.

  The lobby was modern and clean, all heavy carpet and high-backed chairs, end tables full of magazines. The wings were dimly lit. The halls smelled of sweat and shit and a damp hotness masked by Lysol. She found the Captain in room 16.

  “Mr. Felter?” said the orderly who had accompanied Jean, a large black man with vacant eyes.

  The Captain sat in a pleather recliner, facing a watercolor painting of cattails and lily pads that hung on the wall. He didn’t respond.

  “Your father is not well,” said the orderly.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Jean.

  The orderly walked back down the hall after a load of linen.

  Jean went to her father and was startled by what she found. The Captain had wasted away in the two weeks since she’d had him committed. He was a skeleton wearing a skin suit. How much weight had he lost? Could it be twenty pounds already? That seemed impossible. But she could see the tracks of his ribs under his white cotton shirt, the radar dish of his hips against his corduroy slacks. His arms were limp sausages upon the armrests. The Captain’s eyes were gray and unfocused. He was adrift in his broken memories.

  “Dad?” she said. “Captain Felter?”

  His right iris tugged south, then floated back.

  “Captain Felter,” she said again, sternly.

  He looked at her, through her. His mouth opened; a rivulet of drool cascaded over his bottom lip and fell onto his shirt.

  This man was so strong, she thought. He used to carry me on his shoulders. He lifted rocks out of the ground for our fireplace.

  “Tell me about Mark,” she said.

  The Captain licked his lips.

  “Captain, what happened to Mark Brooks? Did Tony kill him, Dad? Or was it you?”

  His mouth opened and closed like a fish fighting for air. And it seemed like something was coming out, some kind of sound. He was trying to say something.

  Jean leaned closer. She brought her ear almost to his lips and listened.

  “What box, Dad?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

  He opened his mouth again and what came out this time was much louder and more defined: “Where is she, Duong? Where is Qi?”

  Jean put a hand on his arm and it silenced him. His eyes returned to the painting on the wall. He said nothing more. She could bear to sit with him only another five minutes. Then she left.

  5 Jack brought a gift for the boy the next morning, something he’d found in a box of Tony’s old things. “I got something for you,” he said, tossing a gray cartridge at Cole, who snagged it in midair.

  “GoldenEye?”

  “The best multiplayer shooter ever created. You might be able to beat me in Mushroomville, but I clean house with grenade launchers in the Temple.”

  “Cool.” The boy smiled, clearly touched. It had been a while since he’d been given a gift by anyone other than his mother, Jack could tell. Video games, to be more specific, were the kind of presents that came from fathers.

  Jack took a seat and folded his hands over his notebook. “So, chemtrails.”

  “Chemtrails,” said Cole, setting the cartridge down. “What did you find?”

  “Enough for another X-Files movie,” said Jack.

  “I wish this was fiction.”

  “A conspiracy to mix mind-altering drugs into jet fuel? It’s pretty fringe stuff. Not much in the way of credible sourcing, either. And nobody can agree on motive. I mean, some think the government is trying to combat global warming by putting chemicals into the air to deflect sunlight. Others say they’re making it rain vaccines so that sick people don’t drive up the cost of health care. You think, what? The feds are mixing fluoride with the fuel?”

  “Fluoride or something else that makes us suggestible.”

  “What do you have to back it up?”

  “What about the simple fact that there is something going on?” said Cole. “You talk to old people, know what they say? They say jet trails used to dissipate. They called them contrails back then. That’s short for condensation trail. Contrails form when jet fuel creates water vapor behind an aircraft. Only now the trails don’t disappear. So their chemical makeup must be different.”

  “How are we supposed to know our parents aren’t remembering wrong?” he posed.

  Cole smiled. “Good point, Jack. Good point. But you’re getting ahead of yourself. What about this? In 2001, a United States congressman introduced a law to ban chemtrails. Now if chemtrails don’t exist, why did he have to ban them?”

  “First of all, that congressman was Dennis Kucinich, the guy who says he saw a UFO at Shirley MacLaine’s house.”

  “But what about—”

  Jack held up a hand. “I’ll give you this much,” he said. “It’s not without precedent. Some governments have sprayed deadly chemicals on cities in the past. Britain’s Ministry of Defense experimented on civilians after World War Two.” He opened his notebook and withdrew an article he had printed at Sam’s house. Cole read along while Jack paraphrased.

  “According to an article published in The Observer in April 2002, the MOD used airplanes to disperse large amounts of zinc cadmium sulfide over residential neighborhoods in an experiment that lasted from 1955 to 1963. They wanted to know how biological weapons would spread if the Soviets ever bombed them. It was an epidemiological study, like the fluoride experiments in America. Of course, we now know that cadmium causes lung cancer.”

  Cole scribbled notes in the margins of the printout.

  “It gets worse,” said Jack. “From 1961 to 1968, the MOD sprayed an aerosolized form of E. coli above an English village from a ship off the Dorset coast, exposing a million people to the bacteria. To this day, people in Dorset suffer higher rates of birth defects and miscarriages.”

  He paused and Cole looked at him with an expression Jack thought might be relief. “If they could spray E. coli from a ship,” said Cole, “they could rig something to spray from a jet. And if the U.K. is doing it, don’t you think we are, too?”

  “In fact,” said Jack, “the CIA has admitted to using civilians as guinea pigs for chemical and psychological warfare experiments in the past. In the sixties and seventies they dropped acid in the drinks of strangers in bars to test the effects of LSD. From 1959 to 1962, the CIA funded a ‘stress’ experiment using live, unwitting subjects at Harvard, under the direction of Dr. Henry Murray. To test levels of psychological stress, Murray and his group isolated certain students and then belittled and berated them until they thought they were worthless. They broke those poor kids. One particular subject, dubbed ‘Lawful,’ did not take well to the test and began writing threatening letters and then a rambling manifesto. You probably know Lawful’s other nickname better, the Unabomber. The CIA created Ted Kaczynski.” Jack set his notebook down. “But secret chemicals mixed in with commercial jet fuel? Too many people would have to know.”

  “So maybe what you do is you get them to forget,” said Cole.

  “What do you mean?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “So what’s next?” asked Jack.

  “Impossibility Number Three is something I can actually prove,” said Cole. “I can show you.”

  “Something here at Haven?”

  “No. But close by.”

  “Wait. You want me to drive you somewhere?”

  “I wish,” said Cole. He pulled something out of his pocket. It looked like a modified Bluetooth. He tossed it to Jack.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a Looxcie,” the boy s
aid. “I ordered it off Amazon. It’s a camera. You put it around your ear. Streams live video to a secure URL I can access on my laptop. I’ll give you directions over the phone. Cool, huh?”

  Jack considered this, weighing the risk. “All right,” he said. “But I want you to show me exactly what Tony saw. I want to go where he went.”

  “Deal.”

  They shook hands. The boy’s was clammy and Jack wondered, again, if Cole was trying to pass delusion to him like some communicable sickness, like something an epidemiologist might study.

  “Grenade launchers in the Temple, then?” asked Cole.

  “Let’s roll,” said Jack.

  6 Later, Jack sat on Sam’s porch sipping a Diet Coke, watching jets paint a crisscross grid over the sky. It was beautiful, in a way. Humanity’s mark on the heavens. Cole was right; the contrails, chemtrails, or whatever, didn’t dissipate. It was like they’d been drawn in permanent marker.

  He wasn’t crazy. He’d seen crazy. He knew crazy.

  Jack wasn’t crazy.

  I’m not crazy.

  No, he wasn’t.

  Sam joined him on the porch. By then the chemtrails were tinged a warm rose as the sun played with the tops of the trees.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

  “Nothing,” he lied. “Just thinking.”

  “I thought I smelled some old engine trying to turn out here.”

  “Funny.”

  She sat next to him and twisted the hairs at the back of his head with her fingers.

  He smiled. “Everything you do makes me feel nineteen again.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Where’d you go today?” he asked.

  “Into town. Started the paperwork.”

  “Paperwork for what?”

  “Divorce, Jack. If Tony’s still alive, I have to make it official.”

  Above the horizon the first star appeared, a dim beacon on the red. Its light was millions of years old and only just arriving.

  “I like it here,” he said.