The Great Forgetting Page 9

  He opened his hand. It was George Washington. “A quarter?” he asked. It was dated 1957.

  “Turn it over.”

  On the reverse, where a bald eagle should have been, was a swastika. In place of E pluribus unum were the words Arbeit macht frei.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  “I have no idea, Jack. But I found it tucked into the pocket of my dead husband’s favorite suit.”

  THREE

  COME WANDER WITH ME

  1 Cole smiled. “You look good, Jack,” he said. “Less suggestible.”

  The boy sat on his bed in his room at Haven. He was dressed in pale pajamas. There were deep dark circles below his eyes and thick black wires trailed from under his shirt to a heart monitor beside the bed. The white machine beeped softly in the corner.

  Cole’s bedroom resembled a boarding school unit. The walls were painted a bright, textured blue. There were posters everywhere. Broadway shows, mostly, with a one-sheet for Wicked by the window. A wide desk from IKEA was covered in magazines—Wired, Entertainment Weekly—its shelves stuffed with dog-eared paperbacks about government conspiracies. A wide-screen TV hung from the ceiling, connected to three different gaming systems, including a vintage Nintendo 64.

  Jack sat in a leather recliner beside the bed. It was Monday, eleven days after Imogen had showed him that incongruous quarter, a week since he’d begun to boil his own drinking water, a habit both Jean and Sam monitored with growing concern.

  “You met my mother, I guess.”

  “Yes,” said Jack. “She’s … persistent.”

  Cole laughed. “She gets what she wants.”

  “What was your father like?”

  “Not yet,” said Cole.

  “Then what do you want to talk about?”

  “Gradients.”

  “Gradients?”

  “Do you know what a gradient is?”

  “Like when a road goes up a hill?”

  “Sort of. But I mean gradients for the mind. It’s a common psychological tool. It’s actually a big part of Scientology.”

  “Are you a Scientologist?”

  “I’m not crazy, Jack. But I read about them. Scientologists have this thing called ‘auditing,’ where you relive the traumatic events of your life over and over and over. What they’re really doing is molesting memory. Raping your brain. But we can use some of their methods. I’m going to teach you to safeguard your memories, the memories the government wants to take away. To do that, we’ll use a gradient.”

  Jack nodded to let Cole know he was listening. His fingers tingled. It was hard to listen to the boy’s voice. He sounded so confident.

  “A gradient,” Cole continued, “is a system of baby steps toward something bigger. Little truths that prepare you for some ultimate understanding. In Scientology, right, those kooks believe that seventy-five million years ago this alien Xenu flew to Earth in a DC-8 jumbo jet with his enemies’ souls in the cargo hold. If you told someone that story when you introduced them to Scientology, they’d think you were batshit crazy. So what they do instead is use a gradient of smaller ideas to slowly prepare a person for this big mind-fuck at the end. When you first join Scientology you learn simple stuff like how L. Ron Hubbard was the shit and how to purify your body and crap.”

  Jack nodded.

  “Or,” said Cole, “think of it like this. You don’t teach a kindergartener calculus, right? If you gave them a triangle and told them to give you the angle of each corner, they’d chuck a block at your head or something. You teach a kid addition and subtraction first. Then multiplication. Division. Algebra. Trig. Then calculus. That’s a gradient. Storytellers do this all the time to gain the reader’s trust. Intro the characters. Intro the mystery. Intro the setting. Then: bam! You gotta ease them into it. If Stephen King had started It by saying, ‘Hey, there’s this alien from another planet that looks like a spider but pretends to be a clown that lives in the sewer and feeds on the fears of children,’ you’d probably not pick it up because fuck that crazy shit.”

  “Okay,” said Jack. “So what’s the gradient for this story?”

  “I came up with it myself,” said Cole, his eyes wide and excited, like a kid about to teach a friend the rules of baseball for the first time. “It’s a seven-step gradient. By the end, you should be able to understand what’s going on. And if you wanted to, you might even be able to see that island I told you about. I call the gradient ‘the Seven Impossibilities.’”

  “You played this with Tony.”

  Cole rolled his eyes. “It’s not a game, Jack. But, yes. I did.”

  And it’s what drove him crazy, Jack thought. “How does it go?”

  “I explain to you seven truths, each progressively harder to accept than the one before. You don’t have to believe them. At least I don’t think you do. You just have to accept the possibility that what I tell you is real. That it could be real.”

  “What are they?”

  “One at a time, Jack. That’s how it goes.”

  “All right.”

  “The first one is relatively easy to accept. Impossibility One: I cannot forget anything.”

  “I’ve seen Tony’s notes on this. He gave you a piece of paper with a sequence of numbers. Pi, right?”

  Cole looked offended. “No cheating, Jack. Don’t read Dr. Sanders’s notes. If you still have them, put them aside until we’re done. It won’t do you any good to skip ahead. The gradient won’t work if you know what’s coming.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Yes, it was pi to two hundred fifty digits.”

  “So you have a photographic memory?”

  “Kind of. I didn’t always have it. It’s a result of the accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “In 2011, I was … in a car accident in Manhattan. I was in a coma for three weeks. Doctors put a metal plate in my head.” Cole took a round fridge magnet from the stand behind his bed and, with a flourish, flicked it over his left ear in a gentle arc. It changed direction midair and clunked to his skull with a sickening thunk that made Jack cringe.

  “Cool trick,” he said.

  Cole pried the magnet off his head and set it back on the side table. “When I woke up after the accident, I couldn’t forget anything anymore. I still remember the way the hospital room smelled and the names of every nurse and doctor who came in to probe and poke at me.”

  “Must get old quick.”

  Cole nodded. “In a way it’s like all those moments are playing out at the same time as this one. Forgetting allows us to separate time. The more distant a memory, the more faded it is. I don’t have that. Waking up in the hospital after that accident feels like this morning to me. Actually, it feels like right now.”

  “Is that what…” He stopped himself.

  Cole smiled. “Is that what made me crazy? No. The thing is, I’m not crazy. The rest of the world is. And, yes, I know how crazy that sounds.”

  Jack felt himself beginning to like the boy. He had spoken about the big ideas of the universe only with Tony. And this is how it begins, he realized. This is how Cole sets his claws in you.

  “Test me,” said Cole.

  Jack held up his hands. “I concede. You have a photographic memory. No problem.”

  The boy shook his head. “You have to participate.”

  “I don’t know how to test photographic memory. I’m a history teacher, Cole, not a psychologist.”

  “The best tests are visual. Photographs. Do you have any pictures in your wallet that are highly detailed?”

  He did, in fact. Generally he was not a superstitious man, but Jack carried a totem of sorts. Had carried it since he was sixteen. It felt like signing a contract, pulling the picture out of his warped black leather wallet and handing it to the boy, a boy who was the same age as Jack was in the photo. A counselor at Camp Algonkin had taken the picture during summer camp in 1995. It was a picture of Jack and Tony in full Class A uniform standing in front of the log c
abin dining hall.

  Cole looked at it and laughed. “Nice ears. And that’s Dr. Sanders, right?” After three seconds he handed the photograph back. “Quiz me.”

  “What’s in my hands?”

  “A rope tied in a bowline. Was that for a merit badge?”

  “No. It was how you got in to dinner. You had to tie knots to get in to eat. They had a guy checking knots at the door.”

  “Ah.”

  “What’s in Tony’s hands?”

  “Nothing. Did he cheat, Jack? You passed your rope through the windows so he could get in, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  Cole nodded. “I got to know a lot about Dr. Sanders’s character. Not all of it was good.”

  “What … uh … what’s on the cabin, next to the doors?”

  “The Boy Scout emblem, the fleur-de-lis, the lily, a death flower.”

  “Do you say anything that isn’t cryptic?” Jack asked. But he was smiling. “What’s…”

  “Let me speed things up,” said Cole. “There is a young boy with brown hair in line behind you who is wearing mismatched socks. One green, one beige. Behind him is a Life Scout named Nils May or Mason or something—his mother has written his name on the waistband of his pants and I can’t quite read it. The flag on Tony’s sleeve has been sewed on upside down. And the picture was taken at precisely five-twenty-eight p.m., on Friday, July twenty-eighth, 1995.”

  Jack looked at the photograph carefully. “How the hell do you know that? I don’t even remember when it was taken.”

  “There’s a calendar on the wall inside. You can see it through the second window on your right. Class A uniforms mean end-of-the-week dinner; I was a scout, too, Jack. That’s a Christmas tree hanging upside down from the rafters. I assume it’s the traditional Christmas-in-July theme week. Ergo…”

  “And the time?”

  “I have no idea about the time. That part I made up.”

  “Nice.”

  Cole shrugged.

  “Okay. I believe you.”

  “Good. So tomorrow we can talk about Impossibility Number Two: how the government uses fluoride to brainwash society.”

  He was letting the boy control everything: their environment, their progress. Not wise. But what choice did he have? I’m tethered to reality, Jack told himself. I can chase this a little further. I’ll find my way back.

  As he stood he thought of the question that had troubled him since the day Cole had OD’d. “Last week, you said we’d forgotten a day. That it was really Wednesday and not Tuesday, remember? You thought that we were reliving Tuesday for a second time.”

  “I remember.”

  “If we had already lived that day before, if we had repeated it somehow, what did we talk about the first time around? What did we talk about on the day I can’t remember?”

  “You told me about that day at the fair,” said Cole. “The time Tony conned the man in the striped top hat.”

  2 Later that day, Sam found Jack in her kitchen nook, hunched over her outdated Dell desktop. He had the spare key. He slept here now. Theirs was a fast regression. Until a time came when one of them bothered to notice, she thought.

  “What’s doing?” Sam asked, planting a kiss on the side of his mouth.

  Jack smiled, but she could tell he was distracted. “Research,” he said. “This kid. Cole.”

  “Is this the crazy stuff?”

  “Fluoride mind control? Yeah, it’s out there.”

  “This is what broke Tony,” she said, pointing at the screen. “He started boiling his water just like you’re doing. And then he’d sit at the computer for hours. He used to sit right there.”

  “Tony was predisposed,” said Jack. “Don’t worry. I don’t believe in this junk. But if I can get Cole to open up, maybe we can figure out how Tony left town. Maybe even find out where he is.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we find out why he killed your brother and how much trouble he’s in.”

  “I meant what happens with us if you find him?”

  “Oh,” he said. “You want closure, right? I know I do. I need closure.”

  She stoked his hair. “Silly boy. There’s no such thing as closure,” she said. “I’m going to run a bath. I’m going to soak and smoke some pot. Come up with me.”

  “Soon as I’m done. Promise.”

  * * *

  “It’s Samantha, right?”

  “Sam,” she said. She was sitting in a squat room that was nothing but walls of glass separating the middle school guidance office from the rest of the administration wing. She watched Mrs. Brown, her science teacher, copy papers on a mimeograph machine twenty feet away. Across from Sam was Ms. Rissert, all hips under a purple mumu. She wore black cat-eye glasses that were all the rage.

  “Is everything all right, dear?”

  And here was the ledge she was supposed to step off. What Jack had convinced her to do. Where does this take me? she wondered.

  Sam tried to start the waterworks but found no tears. Maybe every person has only so many.

  “Hon, I know about your … situation. I know why you moved to Franklin Mills. I am so sorry. Unfortunately it’s something I see a lot. A lot. Hard thing for families to work through. Is that what’s troubling you?”

  “That my brother makes me give him hand jobs?”

  Ms. Rissert blushed and let go a nervous laugh. “Ah. Uh. Well. My. Yes. He’s gone, right? In the navy? That’s the arrangement, right?”

  “He’s home on leave.”

  She wrote something on a notepad. “He should have separate lodging. No good.” She looked up at the girl, the eighth-grader. “Has your brother done anything … untoward?”

  “Untoward? I don’t know what that means. But he didn’t make me give him any hand jobs.”

  Ms. Rissert sighed.

  “He made me use my feet this time.”

  Ms. Rissert shook her head. “I’m going to do something about this. He should not be in the house. I’ll have to talk with your father, of course.”

  “Okay,” said Sam. “You should do that. Also, when you speak to my father, please ask him to stop making me take showers with him. He says he’s trying to conserve water, but I don’t know what that has to do with the hard-on he rubs on my ass when we’re in there.”

  Sam watched Mrs. Brown fighting the mimeograph machine. Pink ink dripped down her flabby forearm. Sam drummed her fingers on the chair and then gave a challenging look to her guidance counselor. “So, what happens now?”

  “Well, Samantha,” said Ms. Rissert, “a lot happens now. But when it’s over, you’re going to be safe.”

  It was a long time before she saw Jack again.

  Sam’s first set of foster parents, to whom she was introduced that very night, lived in Boardman and had three sons. Sam wondered how the court matched kids with prospective guardians. There was no inherent intelligence behind the system. She pictured an upside-down top hat filled with the names of all the abandoned kids. Foster parents must come in and draw names at random. Within the space of a week Sam had given the oldest boy, a sixteen-year-old named Tad, a blow job and taught the youngest, a ten-year-old named Calvin, how to roll a joint. In hindsight, she had probably sabotaged that one on purpose to see if she could.

  The second set of fosters was a tubby woman and her tubby husband, an accountant from Youngstown. They had no children. The man watched Sam shower through the bathroom window. Sam caught him the third night, and by the next day she was in the home of Stan and Melissa Polk.

  The Polks had two kids: a daughter, Sarah, a year older than Sam, and Ben, age four. They lived in a duplex in Ravenna not far from the high school. They gave Sam her own room. The first night Sam pilfered a couple of Morleys from Melissa’s purse. She tried to get Sarah to smoke with her on the back porch. No doing. Sarah wouldn’t touch it. The girl just watched. After a few puffs Sam got bored and pitched the cigarettes into the bushes. The second night she left the bathroom door
open a crack while she showered, to see if Stan was a creeper. But when she stepped out, the door was closed. On the third night Sam snuck out of her bedroom window with a change of clothes in her backpack and set off toward town. She was running away. Running to nowhere. Just running to run. She was at the corner under a humming halogen light when someone said her name. It was Stan Polk. He stood behind her, hands in his pockets. “Where you off to?” “Arizona,” she said. “Arizona’s pretty far. You’ll need money for the bus.” He handed her seventy dollars, folded neatly. Her hands looked so wrinkled and orange in the light. Look how old those hands looked. No one else could possibly understand how old she felt, how old and low. No one could survive feeling this way. She started to cry. “Not your fault,” said Stan. “You just forgot how to trust people. In the morning, if you still want to go, I’ll drive you to the Greyhound station in Akron. I’ll pack you twenty sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly.” Sam walked back home with him. She was still there three months later when Jack pulled into the driveway in his first car, that rusty black Volkswagen Rabbit. It was Sam’s birthday. She was fourteen.

  * * *

  Sam was still alone when the tub water turned tepid, the joint nothing but ash in the tumbler on the floor. Jack never made it upstairs that night.

  3 The next day, Cole was off the heart monitor. Jack found the boy inside his room, standing on a chair, looking out the window at Fisher Road, arms swinging as if he were conducting a pit orchestra. The boy wore earbuds hooked to an iPod on his belt.

  Jack knocked loudly on the doorframe. Cole tugged the earbuds out and tossed the iPod onto his desk. “Hello,” he said, looking at Jack and then at the folder in his hands. “You brought notes.”

  “I did some research,” Jack explained. “I told you, I’m in this.”

  Cole sat in the chair beside his desk and motioned for Jack to sit in the recliner. The boy was sweaty, out of breath from his conducting. He wiped at his forehead with the bottom of his shirt, revealing a pink, hairless belly.

  “I’m a research geek,” said Jack. “It’s the by-product of loving history. There’s a ton of research in college. You either love it or you drop out.”