The Great Forgetting Read online

  Rover’s voice continued uninterrupted on the radio. He was ranting about the traffic on I-77 now.

  “What day is it?” Cole asked Jack as he handed the cell phone back.

  “It’s Friday.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Jack flipped open his cell phone and pointed at the display. “Friday, June twenty-sixth,” he said. “See?”

  Cole nodded.

  “I can’t believe you did that to your mother,” said Jack. He had no idea what he would say to Imogen when she called back. Wasn’t he somehow responsible for this kid’s well-being at the moment? Jack looked around for Dr. Quick.

  “She’ll forget I even called her. She always does.”

  Jack started for the double door that led to the dormitory. There was a window there that looked into a nurse’s station. He’d be able to get someone’s attention there. Halfway to the window, Rover’s voice cut off. The sound of a computer modem switched on.

  No, he thought. No. A coincidence. A terrible coincidence.

  “This is a test of the Emergency Alert System…,” the robotic voice said.

  “Jack!” Cole shouted. “Jack, come back!”

  Jack’s tongue felt numb inside his mouth, a strange piece of meat. The room swayed in his vertigo. He stumbled back to the table and sat across from Cole again.

  “This is a coincidence,” he said.

  “No,” said Cole. “I’m sorry. It’s not.”

  A few seconds later the EAS signal cut off and Rover returned without missing a beat in his rant.

  “It was just a test of the Emergency Alert System,” said Jack. “You knew it was programmed for now. Somehow you knew, didn’t you?”

  Cole shook his head, that damned look of pity on his face. And then Duji’s voice, the voice of Rover’s spunky female cohost, came on with a check of the day’s current events. “Good morning,” she said. “This is the shizzy for Thursday, June twenty-fifth, 2015…”

  It’s a joke, he thought. He flipped open his cell phone. It read Thursday, June 25.

  “You reprogrammed it,” he said.

  “The radio, too?”

  Jack ran to the nurse’s station. “Don’t do that, Jack! Not a good idea!”

  A young woman in rainbow scrubs sat at a computer beyond the Plexiglas window. He leaned down to the gap at the bottom and said, “Excuse me, could you tell me the date? What day it is?”

  She looked at the display of her own phone. “It’s Thursday, June twenty-fifth,” she said. “Geesh. It feels like this week will never end, right?”

  He didn’t say anything. Instead, he returned to Cole.

  “This isn’t happening,” he said.

  “That’s one choice,” the boy said. “You could be crazy. You could be crazy if you want. Or you can accept that I’m telling the truth.”

  Either I’m crazy or the world is, he thought. And isn’t that what every patient in this building thinks?

  “How?” he asked. “How can it be happening? You can’t just hit the reset button and wipe everyone’s memory of the last twenty-four hours. I mean, all the little things … some people would be scheduled to work on Fridays but not Thursdays. They’d find themselves at work when they should be at home. How would they explain that stuff?”

  “The signal that goes out from HAARP is an algorithm,” said Cole, “an elegant code designed to motivate each person’s mind to rewrite their own memories. If your memories of that day are inconsequential, your brain just erases it. Like an old episode of Seinfeld on your TiVo, you never know it’s gone. But if you find yourself suddenly at work when you shouldn’t be, your mind will construct a memory of you switching shifts with a coworker or something. We are naturally wired to make sense of changes in our environment. The algorithm sets the parameters, but it’s your own mind that makes the adjustments. It’s really kind of cool.”

  “And paper calendars and physical evidence and stuff like that? Stuff you can’t reprogram.”

  “We see only what we expect to see,” said Cole. “You can hold a desk calendar up to that nurse’s face and all she’ll see is Thursday written on it.”

  Jack thought back to that psych experiment Tony told him about, the one where the gorilla walked through the basketball game and no one noticed. Inattentional blindness, he’d called it.

  “But then why do we remember?” he asked. “You and I.”

  “That’s the Seventh Impossibility,” said Cole. “Whatever happened in that accident didn’t just make it so that I couldn’t forget anything, but either the trauma or this metal plate”—he knocked on the titanium behind his left ear—“made me into a kind of dampener for the signal. Like those things you can buy online that cancel out cell phone signals in movie theaters? As long as the person around me isn’t drinking a lot of fluoride, they won’t forget, either. Just being around me causes people to remember all kinds of things. Not just this signal. But, like, if you misplaced your car keys, if you hang out with me, you’ll remember where you put them. Stupid stuff like that.”

  Jack recalled one of their first meetings. He had searched the house before coming to Haven, looking for Tony’s damn watch, only to remember where he’d left it when he was with Cole. Was that part of this or was it just his mind making sense of a coincidence?

  “This is crazy,” he said again.

  “Yes. It is. But you’re not. Are you?”

  He could feel his mind organizing the facts, trying to come up with a better narrative than Cole’s. “You hypnotized me,” he said.

  “I knew it would take you longer than Tony to accept this,” said Cole. “But now you’re just being stubborn.”

  “This can’t be true.”

  “You can say it a thousand times and it won’t change. You think I want this to be true? You think I don’t know how crazy this sounds? Look around, man. I’m in a mental ward. This sounds so crazy they locked me away. You think I don’t want to be back in Manhattan, having breakfast at Balthazar and spending the day on a fucking schooner getting hand jobs?” Cole was getting agitated. Little bubbles of spit gathered at the corners of his mouth. The nurse looked over and made a note on a clipboard. He lowered his voice. “The only reason I let them keep me here—for three goddamn years—was because Tony told me before he left that you would come looking for him and that you would find me and that when you did you would get me out of here.”

  “Get you out of here?”

  “You have to take me to the island. We have to go together.”

  “What? I’m not going to Alaska. I can’t. And I’m definitely not taking you. That’s called kidnapping.”

  “You can’t just go home, Jack. How can you just go home after this?”

  “Look. I don’t know what’s going on,” he heard himself say. “Obviously, something has happened. Yes. I admit that. But I’m a long way from believing the government deleted a hundred years of human history. I don’t know what the next step is, but I’m damn sure it’s not taking you on a cross-country adventure.”

  “So, what then?”

  “Give me some time to track down Tony. I think maybe I can now. We need to find him to explain the murder he committed.”

  “Whoa. He killed someone?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Who?”

  “Sam’s brother. He may have used the body in a weird attempt to trick everyone into thinking he was really dead.”

  “Jesus,” said Cole. He seemed less confident all of sudden. “Did this guy, Sam’s brother, did he need a little killing?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Tony must have had a reason.” The boy was quiet for a moment. Then he shook his head. “You won’t find him. It’s a waste of time. If he made it to the Gate House, he made it to the island. If you go looking for him alone and they reset again, you’ll forget everything we’ve talked about today. If I’m not near you when that broadcast goes out, I can’t keep your memories safe.”

  “I won’t
take you with me,” said Jack. “Not without more proof.”

  “What more proof do you need?”

  “How do I know this last Impossibility isn’t some clever trick to get me to bust you out here?”

  Cole didn’t say anything. He looked hurt.

  “I mean, you’re a ‘dampener’? Really? Bundle that up in all the other stuff and why wouldn’t I believe it? But it’s unprovable. I mean, how could someone possibly prove you…”

  Jack stopped talking. A dangerous idea was forming. There was a way he could prove if Cole’s strange power existed and whether he really needed the kid to keep his memories safe.

  “All right,” he said, finally. “I’ll get you out of here. For a day. And if you’re telling the truth we’ll decide, together, what to do next. But if you’re lying, I’m driving you back here and going after Tony alone.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Cole.

  “I’m taking you to meet my father.”

  PART THREE

  THE FUGITIVE

  If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.

  —ROD SERLING

  ONE

  PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN

  1 “You wanted to see me?” asked Kimberly Quick. She had just finished morning rounds and appeared a bit frazzled, her blouse spotted with butterscotch pudding. She maintained a certain stern beauty, though, like a young lieutenant on first watch.

  “I’d like to take Cole on a day trip tomorrow,” said Jack, walking with her.

  Quick stopped for a moment. “You want to take him outside?”

  “I think it would do him some good to get out again,” said Jack. “Not far. There’s a gaming convention in Akron this weekend. Corn on the Con. Lots of nerdy stuff. I think he’d dig it.”

  “I’d have to ask his mother.”

  “Of course.”

  “And he’d require constant supervision. He can be violent.”

  “I won’t turn my back on him.”

  She loosened, smiled. “It would do him good. Some other kids his age. Let me see what I can do.”

  2 It had been a month since he’d had a good workout. In Lakewood, Jack ran four days a week. He preferred the last hour of the day, so he could watch the light slip off the planet and feel the cool wind cut off Lake Erie. He’d arrive back at his apartment an hour later with the streetlights on, soaked in briny sweat, his mind clear.

  Jack wanted a clear mind, hoped such a thing was still possible. And so when he returned to Sam’s empty house on the day Cole told him about the Great Forgetting, he rummaged through Tony’s clothes until he found some sweats, then set off down Giddings not knowing how far he intended to run.

  It was the end of June and the air was warm and fragrant with cow dung. His feet slapped the soft blacktop and his eyes ate up the quiet grandeur of the country. Beyond Sam’s house a field of soy stretched below a farmstead, a rotting Amish-built thing, tired and weatherworn. Heifers in a pasture encouraged his adventure with eager grunting.

  The roads of Franklin Mills were single-lane affairs with no edge lines. He had forgotten how much fun it was to jog down the middle of a road. No need to worry about crosswalks or commuters speeding to work. If a car did come, he’d hear it a quarter mile away, tires peeling the pavement, the sound of Saran wrap pulled off a chilled ceramic dish.

  Jack decided on a long circuit down Alliance to Calvin, onto Porter, and back toward Giddings. A half mile from Sam’s place, he spotted the weird car parked on the side of the road.

  The car was the color of fresh leather, somewhere between red and brown, and shaped like something out a 1950s sci-fi movie: sleek, angular, more like a jet than a car. Its windows were tinted beyond the legal limit, outlined in chrome that sparkled the sun in a way that suggested illusion, glamour. The vehicle was pointed at him, resting on the shoulder. The driver’s-side window was rolled down. A man in a charcoal suit and a Panama hat sat behind the wheel, watching him.

  When Jack was within earshot, the man waved for him to stop.

  Heart racing so fast he could feel it in his temples, Jack stood across from the car and waited to see if this …

  Hound

  … man meant him harm. There were no witnesses out here.

  The man pushed back the brim of his hat. For a second Jack thought he was looking at the victim of some industrial accident, someone who had suffered third-degree burns to his face. But then he saw that the deep creases in this man’s skin were merely well-worn wrinkles. There was, however, something definitely wrong with the man’s nose. It was too short, too flat. A birth defect of some kind. The man’s ears stuck out below his hat and his eyes were oddly small and too close together.

  “Howdy,” said the man in the Panama hat. His voice was shrill, as if it were being forced through a thin pipe.

  Jack nodded.

  “I’m afraid I’m lost,” the man said. “Must have taken a wrong turn back in Albuquerque.” The man laughed at himself. “Could you help me get back to the main road?”

  “You mean SR 14?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, partner. Whichever will get me back to Akron, I guess.”

  “You’ll want 14 to the expressway,” said Jack. He pointed back the way the car had traveled. “Three roads up and to the right.”

  The man in the Panama hat reached into the darkness of the passenger seat and for a moment Jack thought he was going for a gun (or maybe one of those satellite dishes so he can listen to my thoughts). But then the man pulled out a comically large map, the kind that folds into an accordion you can never quite put back together again. The man’s fingers were long and narrow, the backs of his hands covered in a mat of coarse, dark hair.

  “Would you please point out the designated route? I’m afraid I’m not very good at directions.”

  “I really have to be going,” Jack heard himself say.

  “Well. You’re a busy man, I’m sure. Lots of people to talk to.”

  “Just back the way you came. Three streets. Take care.” Jack started jogging back toward Sam’s house.

  “Toodles,” he heard the man in the Panama hat say as he fled.

  When he turned around, the strange car was gone.

  3 Walking into Nostalgia later that afternoon felt like reading a story for the second time. Sam had queued up Gordon Lightfoot on the iPod dock. She was even in the same position as she was the day before, leaning behind the register, reading that book. Like the rest of the world, Sam didn’t know that she was reliving Thursday all over again.

  “Empty house,” said Jack, testing it, feeling numb, feeling crazy. He felt sick. Hollow. He didn’t want to play this game. His mind filled with the vertigo of that feeling you can say only in French. That déjà vu.

  “Hey, buddy, you okay?” she asked.

  He sat down and pushed the crazies out of his mind the best he could. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m kind of in my head today.”

  “You want a beer? I got some in a cooler.”

  He nodded and she disappeared behind the curtain. He could hear her rummaging in the icebox back there.

  “Are you going to start making hats out of aluminum foil?” she yelled.

  “No.” But, he wondered, if Cole asked him to, would he? If one of those creepy men in the Panama hats was standing outside this shop and he had to make a hat out of aluminum foil and wear it on his head to keep the thing from reading his mind, would he even hesitate?

  “Earth to Jack.” She set the beer down in front of him.

  It was unfair that this was happening now, when they were finally together again. “Should I really be trying to find Tony?” he asked finally.

  Sam tucked a stray strand of hair behind her left ear and sighed. “The divorce, Jack. Mark’s murder? All these things are chasing us. I feel like I’m drowning in it. If you can find him, we can move on.” After a second, she added, “And he should answer for what he did, goddamn it.”

  “If
I bring him back, they’ll arrest him. For the ten grand that disappeared from Haven at least. And maybe Mark’s murder.”

  “Probably. But he won’t stay long. They’ll have to send him to a mental hospital. And living out the rest of his life in a psych ward sure beats living in whatever homeless shelter he’s hiding in now, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You really think you can find him?”

  “I think I’m very close.”

  “Good,” she said. “But if it comes down to a choice … like, if it’s between you going crazy, too, or us never finding Tony again, it’s okay that we never find him.”

  Too late, he thought, but he reached out and touched her hand.

  4 The next morning, which, as much as he could figure, was the second Friday of that week, Jack drove to Haven to pick up the boy.

  Cole was waiting under the portico with Dr. Quick. He had a denim backpack slung over his shoulder and he was dressed in new khakis and a polo. He looked out of place this far from any city, a prep school kid lighting out for the territories. Imogen loved the idea of her son venturing out of the hospital, she’d told Jack on the phone. She had absolutely no memory of the bizarre conversation she’d had with Cole the day before.

  “Three o’clock?” said Quick, leaning into the passenger window after Cole climbed in.

  Jack nodded. “Earlier, maybe,” he said.

  She waved as they pulled away. Cole reached over and turned off the radio.

  “Worried about a test of the Emergency Alert System?” asked Jack.

  He shook his head. “Nah. Besides, the EAS works whether you have your radio tuned to a station or not. Radio waves go through the air, you know. There’s no escaping it. I just don’t like Nickelback.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “Clothes. Hair gel. Toothbrush. Flashlight. Some other shit.”

  “Why? We’re just going to Mantua and back.”