The Great Forgetting Page 12

  Tony shook his head. “I don’t know what happens next. I don’t have a family anymore. Not really.”

  “You have us, Tony,” said Sam.

  He looked up and held her gaze.

  “Come down,” said Jack.

  “It feels like giving up if I come down now.”

  “So jump,” said Jack. “The water’s nice and cool. Jump and I’ll come in after you.”

  “Good fucking idea,” said Tony. He stepped off the boulder and fell ten feet to the water below. Jack was a second behind. He swam underwater to his friend and grabbed him by the shoulders, hugging him closely as they rose to the surface.

  “I can’t feel my legs,” Tony said.

  “It’s okay,” said Jack. “I got you.”

  Jack started laughing. It was a hysterical laugh, full of relief instead of joy. He laughed so hard he struggled to breathe as he pulled Tony to the shallow end. Sam was in the water, too. She’d had time to strip down to her cheap cotton underwear. The water was icy but refreshing. The three of them rested in the shallows, bouncing against the sandy ledge.

  Jack hugged his friend.

  “Get off before you give me an accidental boner,” said Tony.

  Jack backed away and Sam swam to Tony and hugged him. Then she laughed. “Not a moment too soon,” she said.

  Sam looked at Jack. She was seventeen now. A young woman who’d kicked off her fears in the years since the county fair and that scorching August when they were kids. There was a question in her eyes, and they were so close in so many ways she didn’t need to voice it. Jack nodded, smiled, and drifted on his back toward the beach. Sam turned to Tony and slipped her legs around him. She leaned forward and brushed her chest against his.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “Making you feel better,” she said. She took his right hand and placed it on her left breast. Then she moved up his body and placed her mouth on his. His lips were softer than Jack’s. Almost feminine. He broke away to look for Jack, but he was stepping out of the water already, giving them privacy. “It’s okay,” Sam assured him.

  In a moment Tony was tossing his clothes away. And then he was inside her, she was around him, and when he came, he bit her lip and she moaned softly.

  They took Tony back to Jack’s dorm at Miami U and later that night the three of them climbed under the flannel blankets of the narrow bed. Tony kissed Sam as Jack spooned up to her from behind. They made love like that, each in turn. And when they were finished they slept through the morning.

  It became routine. Every week when Sam drove out to visit Jack, Tony rode with her. They’d watch TV, drink beer, and inevitably end up naked in bed together. Jack was never suspicious of their time back in Franklin Mills. He trusted them. But who did Tony have anymore other than Sam?

  Jack didn’t understand when Tony arrived alone one weekend.

  “I didn’t mean to, Jack. I didn’t. It just happened,” Tony told him.

  They were in love. Sam was moving in. There was a ring. Not an engagement ring, but a ring. This was happening.

  “We don’t want to lose you,” said Tony.

  Jack had pointed at his dorm room door and that was the last time he’d seen his old friend.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Jack came back inside Nostalgia. He looked frazzled, manic.

  “Who was that?”

  “Cole,” he said. “I have some more work to do. Meet you back at your place?”

  “Home,” she said, kissing him. “I’ll meet you at home ’round eight.”

  Jack smiled. “See you at home.”

  10 “I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important,” said Cole. “That Hound followed you back to Franklin Mills.”

  Jack paced back and forth in the gravel lot outside Nostalgia, his phone pressed to his ear. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw it drive by Haven in one of those weird cars. It parked outside, looked at my window. I could see its funny hat.”

  “Cole, that man I saw at the park was some surveyor or something. He was mapping the lake or taking a water sample. That’s what he was doing with that GPS or whatever it was in his hands.”

  “I think we need to step up your learning curve,” said Cole. “We can finish the gradient tomorrow, if you’re up to it.”

  “I am,” he said. More than ready to be done with it, he thought.

  “Then look into the Sixth Impossibility tonight, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “Here it is. Our current calendar is not accurate. This is not the year we think it is. That’s the Sixth Impossibility. Our chronology has been altered.”

  “And what about the Seventh?”

  “We’ll get to the Seventh together,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

  FOUR

  THE WHOLE TRUTH

  They ended where they began, in the common room of Haven at a table by the window overlooking the pond. Cole was playing checkers with a thin black man when Jack arrived. A transistor radio propped against the window played an old Nirvana song.

  As a friend

  As an old enemy

  “Time’s up, Russell,” said Cole.

  “I gotchoo anyway,” the man said, pushing pieces into a box and winking at Jack. When he got up to leave the man rapped his knuckles on the table three times, scratched the back of his head, then knocked three more times and nodded. “Got the devil in me,” he told Jack.

  “Can you keep him in there?”

  “Keep him in there with threes. Thirty-three steps to my room. Three sheets on my bed. Got to be threes, man. Threes keep him in. Don’t you worry. I got it unner control.”

  “Thanks,” said Jack.

  The man saluted him and then walked away, counting his steps.

  “That man’s crazy,” said Cole.

  Jack sat down.

  Cole looked out the window. On the other side of the lake a man stood against the shore with a fishing rod, his outline gray against a cobalt sky.

  “What did you learn about HAARP?” asked Cole.

  Jack opened his notebook. “High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Located in Gakona, Alaska,” he said. “Found some pictures online. Pretty cool setup. A giant field of radar antennas in the middle of the Yukon wilderness. Looks like the bad guy’s base in some James Bond movie. Construction began in 1993, funded by the air force, navy, and the University of Alaska. The official purpose of HAARP is to study the top layer of Earth’s atmosphere. The ionosphere is kind of a natural force field of charged particles that surrounds the planet. We need the ionosphere to bounce long-distance radio signals over the horizon. Or did, before we had satellites. The government’s current interest in the ionosphere has to do with detecting nuclear missiles launched from Russia.”

  “And…”

  Jack grinned. “And HAARP has become the nexus of nearly all conspiracy theories. The project gets blamed for earthquakes, plane crashes, freak weather phenomena, everything from Gulf War Syndrome to that blackout we had in Cleveland a few years back.” Jack held up a finger. “And yet, and yet … as with all good conspiracies, there is a kernel of truth.”

  “Such as?”

  “HAARP uses technology based on the patents of a physicist from Columbia University named Bernard Eastlund. Now, Eastlund was all about weather manipulation. Made no bones about it. He wanted to kill tornadoes using microwave beams. And Eastlund had a theory about how to beam energy into the atmosphere so that it can be harvested at another location. Essentially he wanted to turn the ionosphere into a giant battery. No need for long pipelines to pull crude out of Alaska. You could convert the fuel to energy, send it into the ionosphere, and pull it down in New York City. But Eastlund’s device could also be used to knock out an entire country’s communication system. It could be turned into a weapon.”

  Cole nodded. “Essentially, HAARP is a giant radio transmitter,” he said. “Perhaps the most powerful transmitter in the world. And yet nobody seems too interest
ed in what message they might be transmitting.”

  Jack held up a hand. “It’s not radio broadcasts like we think of them, not drive-time radio on WMMS.”

  “But it’s the same equipment.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, and if they wanted to broadcast WMMS to the entire Western Hemisphere, they could.”

  “But you don’t think they’re broadcasting Rover’s Morning Glory, do you?”

  Cole shook his head.

  “What do you think they’re broadcasting? What message is HAARP transmitting?”

  “A very simple message,” he said. “Forget, forget, forget.”

  Those words frightened Jack. Frightened him so much that he couldn’t think of anything else for a moment. Where had he heard that before? He tried, but he could not remember.

  After another second, he asked the question: “Forget what?”

  “Forget what year it is.”

  “What year do you think it is?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. I don’t think anyone is anymore. But it’s probably 2123. Give or take a couple years.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the Sixth Impossibility. I’m talking about the idea of an altered historical timeline, Jack. As a history teacher you have to know that such a thing is possible.”

  “I know a little about the notion of ‘phantom time,’” said Jack, thinking back to his senior year at Miami U. After he lost Sam, he buried himself in classwork. He escaped into his mind, researching everything from the birth of Christianity to the postwar United States. He’d discovered the idea of phantom time that spring and had written his thesis on the emerging theory. “In 1991,” Jack explained, “a German art historian named Heribert Illig presented evidence suggesting the Dark Ages, specifically the years 614 to 911 A.D., never occurred. Illig believed someone had inflated our modern calendar, that the calendar makers skipped over those years. He called this missing three hundred years ‘phantom time.’ There are scholars who believe that Pope Sylvester the Second may have altered our calendar by as much as six hundred years just so that he could be pope for the turn of the first millennium. A famous Russian mathematician, Anatoly Fomenko, claims the ancient Roman Empire existed only seven hundred years ago.”

  “Yes,” said Cole. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “However,” Jack continued, “the more you look into these theories, the more flimsy they become. We have plenty of evidence that the ancient Romans were, in fact, ancient. But, okay, yes, history is constantly being rewritten and edited. Russian history books refer to Stalin as ‘the most successful’ leader ever. We do it, too. Our history books sometimes skip over the Civil War because they’re printed in the South. You want to be careful, though. We’re stepping into the realm of revisionism. Alternative history is the cornerstone of the neo-Nazi movement. They deny the Holocaust ever happened.”

  Cole watched him silently from across the table.

  “But could someone turn our calendar back like they were resetting their watch to daylight saving time? Make us believe it’s 2015 instead of 2123 or whatever? No. Not possible,” said Jack. “What would you do with all the stuff that was made during those forgotten years? All that evidence?”

  “You collect it,” said Cole. “And you bury it. The only thing easier than rewriting history is deleting history.”

  Cole pushed a crumpled picture across the table to Jack. It was a black-and-white newspaper photograph. A city. Cleveland, he saw—there was the Terminal Tower in the background. Downtown, Public Square. The photograph was full of people, packed to the corners of the frame. People dressed in dark suits and hats, people hanging off the backs of streetcars. He’d never seen so many people in one place in all his life.

  “When was this taken?” asked Jack.

  “In 1929,” said Cole. “You tell me, Jack. Where did all those people go?”

  He shrugged. “It’s Cleveland. They moved away like everyone else.”

  “I have pictures like this, pictures from before World War Two, in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, every major city in the country. The United States was full of people back then. Brimming with people. So where did they all go?”

  Jack sighed. “Cole, why don’t you just tell me what you think happened? Can you give me the big picture now? Because, frankly, I don’t see how it all fits together. Fluoride, chemtrails, TacMars. What does all that have to do with these pictures? Help me out.”

  Cole’s eyes scanned the room. Two middle-aged women with tired faces sat on a couch and stared at a TV on wheels, watching Dr. Phil. Otherwise, they were alone.

  “My dad didn’t tell me everything, but he told me enough,” Cole whispered. “So here it is. World War Two was much bigger than we were told. It went on through the fifties, escalating to all-out nuclear war. A billion people died before the Allies finally defeated the Axis in 1964. But before this victory, a most horrific and unforgettable thing happened. A nearly complete genocide. And the blood was on our hands.”

  Jack blinked. And listened.

  Cole cleared his throat and continued. “When it was all over, we wanted to forget what we let happen. That’s what this is all about. Forgetting. We built HAARP to transmit a code that fucks with our minds and makes us forget. We put fluoride in our water and chemicals in the sky to make our minds more suggestive to this broadcast. We filled our heads with an alternate version of history, a history where we never allowed this genocide to occur. It took us a hundred years to build the infrastructure to make this deception possible. Then we flipped the switch and suddenly everyone thought it was 1964 again. A hundred years, gone. Poof! Never happened.”

  Jack’s mind buzzed. As crazy as it sounded, he could see it. He could understand the intention. That frightened him the most. If someone could create a forgetting machine, wouldn’t our leaders be stupid enough to use it? Of course they would.

  Cole went on. “But there had to be a handful of people who could remember the real history, right? In order to keep the machine running and to get rid of the evidence of that forgotten century. That’s the Twelve Angry Men, the Collectors. They were given the Hounds as a security detail, mindless soldiers.”

  Cole was more like Tony than Jack had feared. His old friend had undoubtedly stepped inside this delusion enthusiastically, shirking off stone-cold reality with some relief. Jack knew now that Tony would have gone anywhere that Cole told him to go, done anything the boy suggested he do, because, in a world that didn’t understand them, they spoke the same language.

  And then he remembered.

  Forget, forget, forget.

  That had been what the voices inside Tony’s father’s head had told him. “Where did you tell Tony to go?” he asked.

  “The only place that’s safe for people who know about the Great Forgetting. The island. He used the Underground to get there.”

  “Pymatuning? The Gate House?”

  “It’s the closest way down.”

  Finally, a place to start.

  “You look like you’ve figured something out,” said Cole, with a smile.

  “Yes. I think so,” said Jack. “Thanks for sharing your story. I know it couldn’t have been easy for you.”

  The boy laughed. “Ah, condescension! I shouldn’t have expected anything more.”

  “I’m not trying to be condescending.”

  “It’s all right. It’s a crazy story, I know.”

  “It’s too much to take on faith,” Jack said. He was anxious to leave, anxious to start the real search for his old friend. “But I believe you believe it. I believe your father believed it, too. I don’t think you’re intentionally lying to me.” He stood up and went to shake the boy’s hand.

  “Sit, Jack,” Cole said with some force.

  “I really have to go. There’s a lot…”

  “I’m not quite done. Give me one more minute.”

  Jack sat back in the chair with not a little trepidation.

  “I know it’s too much to take on fait
h,” said Cole, turning the volume on the transistor radio up a bit. “Don’t you think I know that?” He swept the dial to 100.7 FM, WMMS. Rover’s Morning Glory was on; Rover’s nasal baritone was egging on a female contestant who’d come on his dating segment.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to just trust me, so I’m going to show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  The look on Cole’s face alarmed Jack. It looked like pity. Like he pitied him for some reason. What on earth was the kid about to do? Jack readied himself for a quick escape. What if Cole had a knife?

  “In a moment, you’re going to be presented with a choice,” said Cole. “You can either accept the story I’ve just told you is true, which is crazy, right? Fucking crazytown. Or you must choose to believe that you have suffered a mental breakdown. Not really a nice choice, I admit. But we’re running out of time and you have to be pushed one way or another. I saw a Hound yesterday. It’s not safe here.”

  “I’m going to go.”

  “If you leave now you’ll never see Tony again. If you give me one more minute we’ll find him together.”

  Jack paused. Waited.

  “Give me your cell phone.”

  “This is fucking crazy.”

  “What could I possibly do with your cell phone that would change your mind? Or have you already started to doubt yourself?”

  Jack slammed his cell phone on the table. Cole snatched it up in an instant.

  “The forgetting machine monitors all electronic communication,” he said. “It listens for certain key words in conversations. In the event anyone accidentally discovers the truth, the system is programmed to automatically reset a day and wipe everyone’s memory. I know how to trigger it.” He dialed a number before Jack could say anything, as if there was anything to say.

  “Mom?” said Cole a moment later. “Mom, it’s me. No, this is Jack’s phone. No. Listen, I have something to tell you. I learned something today. I learned that history has been pushed back a hundred years. The government rewrote people’s memories and reset the calendar. It was called the Great Forgetting. Okay, bye.”

  Jack could imagine Imogen sitting in her office in New York, eyes wide with shock, sure her son was having a psychotic break two states away. It was cruel.