The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  My father takes my hand, leads me away from the window, and sits me in my chair, feet dangling, the light of sunrising painting our walls with blotches of pink and gold. Then he picks up our knife and cuts the tether of my book. I see the book leave my body, watch it cross the room without me in my father’s hands.

  “Don’t cry, Nadia,” he says while he cries, “it’s almost time to forget.”

  He is a stranger. My father has become a stranger who did what he said I should never do, who cut off a piece of me and took it away. And so I run. As fast as I can, out the door, losing the sound of his voice as he calls, and it’s as if the pain and confusion inside me have somehow bled into the streets. Everything is noise and stinging smoke, breaking glass and laughter—laughter that is more frightening than my mother’s screams. I don’t know where I am. Ribbons hang from the trees. Nothing looks the same. My book doesn’t bump against my leg. The stone walk is slippery and I fall and someone tries to grab me and then I run and I run more and that is when I see the brown-headed boy in the place where they make the glass.

  The furnace is glowing, and the boy is squirming and kicking. A man has him by the arm, and the man has taken the boy’s book. The glassblower shouts at the man, shakes his head no, and I am angry, so angry that someone else’s book has been cut, and then I see the man throw the boy’s book, watch it land near the bright orange opening of the furnace.

  I run into the workshop and I hit the man. I hit and hit him and then someone hits me and I land hard on the ground, heavy tools clattering down onto my legs. The man and the glassblower are fighting, the heat of the furnace pushing on my face. The cover of the boy’s book has caught fire, flames eating his pages, and the boy reaches through the heat and grabs it. He drops his book to the floor, smothering the fire with his hands and chest, yelling because he is burned. The men hit each other, and when the fire is gone the boy holds his smoking book with red hands, and he looks at me and says, “Don’t forget.”

  I find my feet and run, down the white stone streets, between the white houses. Light is peeking over the edge of the mountains, from beyond the walls, and the sun comes in a sliver of gold. Then the sky bursts. A broken-glass sky like in the boy’s shop—sharp, bright light that pierces the gold with dazzling shards. The trees bloom, just like Father said they would, all the white flowers opening one by one while the ribbons flutter, as far as I can see on either side of the street. The air is sweet. Stone, light, flowers—it’s too bright. I crouch and cover my eyes.

  When I can open them again I see a man leaning against a locked door. His hand falls down to the book at his side, and I watch his face empty, like when Mother pours water from a pitcher. When there is nothing left in the man’s face he wanders away, past a baby lying in its blanket in the middle of the street. I can’t see whether the baby has a book or not, and then I hear a woman cry. And even though I can’t make sense of my world I do understand that this noise is different. The woman isn’t crying because she’s afraid she might die; she cries because she has lost her life. She has forgotten. Everyone has forgotten, and the sound of it hurts my ears.

  I push myself up and go home, slipping on the stones. I don’t know where else to go. I’m bruised and tired and I hurt. I want my mother. My father isn’t there when I open the door, and even this room looks unfamiliar in the cracked white light. The baby has cried herself to sleep in the cradle seat. There are no seedlings in the window, but on the table is a book, open to the first page. It says Nadia the Dyer’s daughter. But that is not my book. I push until I lift the bar across the door to my mother’s resting room.

  “Mother?” I call.

  And there she is, just as she’s always been, my sister huddling in the corner. Mother blinks once, twice, and when her eyes find me she jumps back. Scrambles away.

  “Who are you?” my mother yells. “Get away from me! Get away!”

  I go away and sit on the floor beneath our table. I hug my knees and I rock and rock. And then I know what has made me slip and fall in the streets. I’m sticky with blood.

  I rock now, hugging my shaking knees in the shade of Jin’s garden, beneath his beautiful arches, my book tight against my chest. A book must contain the truth. We are supposed to write the truth, for no one to see but ourselves. But how easily that truth can be twisted. Bend a little here, omit a little there, make yourself into the person you wish you were instead of the person you are. How easy to cut the truth away, to throw it in a fire, open your eyes, and have the whole world remember nothing of who you are. Nothing of what you’ve done. When you will not remember who you are or what you’ve done. My father lives on the other side of Canaan now, with Lydia the Weaver. He has two children, girls, and passes me in the street without a second glance. He got what he wanted and got rid of what he didn’t. What a victimless crime. Like everything before the Forgetting. Guiltless. Forgotten. Unless you can remember.

  Don’t forget, Gray the Glassblower’s son has said to me. Twice.

  And he’s said it to the only person in Canaan who never has.

  Two days ago I went to Arthur of the Metals to have my mother’s knife sharpened, even though we’ll hide it from her as soon as I get home. I didn’t write it down because it wasn’t worth remembering, but while Arthur was talking scythes I looked at his whetstone. It had a smooth, shallow groove where knife blades had been run over and over across the surface. When you sharpen a knife, tiny pieces of metal are filed away to make a new edge, and now I see that tiny bits of the rock go as well.

  Today I walked through Canaan, running my hands over the stone of the old buildings, the ones we’ve forgotten how to make. Sharp corners, no blunted edges. No ruts in the flagstones of the street, where the metal-banded wheels of the harvest carts pass back and forth. Even the leaf edges on the columns and arches are crisp, not worn. Nothing like Arthur’s whetstone.

  There is only one answer I can think of. We have not been in Canaan long enough to wear down the stone. And if we have not been here that long, then we must have come from somewhere else. And somewhere else can only be one place. Outside the walls …

  NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER

  BOOK 11, PAGE 14, 10 YEARS AFTER THE FORGETTING

  I wait for the leaving bell to ring before I go home. Normally I wouldn’t. It’s not far to my house if I cut through the back alleys, hop three small dividing walls, and duck beneath some windows. But today Jonathan of the Council is on the streets. Today I’ve been caught. And I need time to stop shaking. Which means my mother will not be able to pretend I was in my bed when she woke.

  But I’ve also used my time to make a decision. I will not be taking the glassblower’s son over the wall. Gray is used to getting his way: lovestruck girls, trouble-loving boys, irritated teachers, all ready to adore, be exasperated, forgive, and then adore him again. But he made a mistake letting me get away from Jin’s, giving me time to hide my contraband. Now it really will be his word against mine, and my explorations on the other side of the wall do not require his help. Or hindrance. He can do his rebelling or thrill-seeking or boredom-relieving without me.

  I slip down Jin’s stairs and into the street, taking the proper way home, hair mostly neat, tunic where it should be. I have two arms, two legs, one book, and still somehow manage to be the opposite of every person I pass. The people of Canaan move with purpose but without hurry, safe inside their walls, measuring days into even, logical steps. Unquestioning. Unthinking. And even on this back street there are too many of them. I brush walls and bump shoulders, avoiding books and eyes until I round the corner into the noise of Meridian.

  Water flows through the center of this street, glinting as it rushes down a white stone channel that cuts Canaan in half, all the way from the spring at the top end, down the gentle slope through the city, through the fields, and out beneath the lower wall. The thoroughfares on either side of the running channel are choked with comings and goings: children in cloth of reds and purples and yellows running pitchers b
ack and forth to the water, craftsman requesting their supplies, one or two my age loitering beneath the long, slender limbs of the forgetting trees, where the buds are just beginning to show. A reminder of what’s coming. I duck beneath the trees and out onto First Bridge, a delicate arch of the same pale stone that everything is made of, then pause at the highest point and look down the channel.

  Jonathan of the Council is in the amphitheater, at the bottom of a slope of terraced seats, standing on the speaking platform in front of a tall tower of latticed stone, a spike that marks the center of the city. The tower houses our water clock, run perpetually by the channel that cascades down the terraces, passing under the platform and directly beneath it. There are three dials on each side of the clock, high, where everyone can see. The first says it’s the second hour of waking. The next says that today is the fifty-sixth day of sunlight, that tomorrow will begin the seven days of sunsetting, followed by fifty-six dark days and another seven of sunrising. The third dial is for the two seasons of light and two seasons of dark that make a year, and the twelve years between Forgettings.

  We know all this because there’s a chiseled plaque on the tower, helpfully marked “Water Clock of Canaan,” complete with instructions. So we can’t forget. There’s also another plaque, more simply carved, that says “I Am Made of My Memories.” That’s where Jonathan of the Council tied Hedda for taking more than her share at the granary, when her family had increased by two sets of twins and her ration had not. I won’t forget that, either.

  My glance at the Water Clock of Canaan has told me three things I knew already. That it will be mid-sunset when I break my promise to take Gray over the wall, that in exactly seventy days this entire city will descend into chaos, and, most important for the moment, that my mother is probably very upset right now.

  “Mother is upset,” a voice says near my waist. Genivee, my younger sister, stands beside me on the bridge, book strapped to her back, in an orange dress and with two yellow flowers in her hair. She’s one of the only people in the world who can coax my smile. So I smile.

  “What kind of upset?”

  “Scared upset.”

  My smile goes away. My sisters know I tend to ramble during the resting, just not that my ramblings take me over the wall. Until an hour ago, I would have said nobody did. Liliya, the oldest, never bothers with my activities, resting or waking, mostly because she can’t stand the sight of me. Genivee, the youngest, always does, because she loves me. But what our mother needs is lies, and the three of us have an unspoken agreement to give them to her. Today, I haven’t held up my end of the bargain.

  Genivee says, “I’ll run home and tell Mother that I saw you at the channel, that you left for the baths just before the bell and that you were very, very sorry you didn’t wake her before you went.” She stares up at me. “And then I’ll tell her you offered to stay home and do the rest of the baking so Liliya can take her to the dye house.”

  I look down at my little sister, her big eyes dark and innocent. She’s saving me from Mother and laying down my punishment at the same time. “Cruel,” I say.

  She can’t quite hide her grin. Then we both turn at a rattling noise. The harvest carts are coming down Equator Street from the fields, crossing Meridian to the granary, a group of Lost women and children working together to pull them over the flagstones. Genivee pushes out her lower lip. She thinks it isn’t fair that the Lost should get undyed cloth and the worst of the work just because they didn’t have a book after the Forgetting. Just because they don’t know who they are. I think it’s more than unfair. If you didn’t have a book and became one of the Lost, you are twice a victim.

  A supervisor walks with them, urging them on faster, and behind the carts comes a group of growers and planters, overseeing the last of the harvest and the preparation of the fields for sunsetting. One head is easy to spot above the others, tall, fair hair fading with some gray. It’s Anson the Planter. Our father. I pretend I’m not Nadia, that I’m someone else, someone who would have the courage to speak to him.

  Hello, Anson. You don’t remember me, and when I knew you, your name wasn’t Anson at all. It was Raynor. I just called you Father. But you don’t remember that, either. You took my book, and if I had forgotten, then I wouldn’t have found my way home to the false one you wrote for me, would I? I would’ve been wandering the streets without a book at all, and one of those Lost girls you’re walking behind today would have been me. With no name, no age, no family, kept penned behind the fences until it’s time to burn the dead or dig out the latrines. Or pull your harvest carts. But you wouldn’t know the difference, would you? And neither would I …

  I hear my father laugh over the racket of the carts, the sound still familiar after all this time. If I could make them believe what I know, then the man they now call Anson would be condemned. His book would be taken, destroyed, and not only would he be living with the Lost, removed from his current wife and children, he’d be living with the knowledge that when the Forgetting came, he’d lose even the memories he had left. So I keep my secret, and it makes me angry that I do. And frightened that I won’t.

  “Nadia,” Genivee whispers. “You’re doing it again.”

  She means I’m staring at people as if I want to fertilize the fields with their insides. I study Jonathan of the Council instead, in the long black robes that mark him as Council, brown hair neatly clipped, surveying the gathering people from his little place of power. This Forgetting will not be like the last one. I won’t let it. No one is going to take my book, or Mother’s, or my sisters’. No one will separate us. I’ve made sure of that. I’m careful not to look as our father passes, taking the gentle turn around the edge of the amphitheater behind the carts.

  “You should go down to the baths so that what I tell Mother will turn out to be true,” Genivee says. She pats my hand once, another of her privileges. “And don’t forget the bread!”

  I watch the yellow flowers in Genivee’s hair bounce as she skips away. Somehow I don’t mind the irony of being told not to forget when it comes from Genivee. She’s too young to remember what that means. And it won’t be long before she doesn’t know me at all.

  I look around and realize that the people of Canaan have been moving in a slow but steady stream, working their way down to the shaded side of the amphitheater. Janis, Head of Council for as long as anyone can remember, is now in her chair on the platform, back straight, white hair elegant against black robes, her expression kind. A mother with her children. Reese and Li, Council members chosen very obviously for their size, stand just behind her. The impression is subtle but clear. Janis is going to talk, but it’s Jonathan, not his grandmother, who is really in control of the city.

  I turn to go, pushing myself the wrong way through the line trying to cross the bridge. In seventy days Jonathan of the Council will forget; Janis, Head of Council, will forget; and these people are going to turn on one another.

  I enter the baths on the women’s side. This is one of the old buildings, a circle of white columns with arches carved to look like blowing wheat on the edge of the harvested fields, vines of green and blue twining down from the roof’s flower garden. A Lost girl waits in the changing rooms, with smooth olive skin and a mask of an expression. I know her, though not by name. I’ve never asked. Every now and then the Lost don’t give themselves a new name, and anyway, people, Lost or otherwise, are safer kept at a distance.

  I set my pack on the ground and untie my tether. The Lost girl takes my dirty tunic, leggings, belt, and sandals, exchanging them for a drying cloth large enough to wrap around my body, her face unchanging. I wonder if she’s lonely. My mother told me once that the Lost will always be lonely, because who could form an understanding with one of them? They could be anyone. Cousins, sisters, brothers. So many go missing after the Forgettings. The Lost are removed from our gene pool. Or they’re supposed to be. This girl, I notice, is filling out her tunic rather well.

  “No,” I say abruptl
y when she tries to take my pack, then, more softly, “No. Thank you.” There are small cupboards here, with a numbered key on a string that can be worn around the neck after a book is locked inside. I’ll risk the damp and keep my book with me. My pack is full of contraband anyway. “A private room?” I ask. “Warm?”

  She nods, my dirty clothes over one arm, and I follow her into the cool room, past an enormous pool that takes up most of the floor space, fed by a waterfall diverted from the main channel. Since it is the last, hot day of sunlight, the room is loud with women and girls, many of them just a year or two younger than me, unlucky enough to have finished their learning too close to a Forgetting, when it’s impossible to apprentice long enough to retain any of your skills. The hum of chat echoes weirdly as we pass into the quiet of the warm side. This pool is empty, bubbling from beneath, the air here thick and wet.

  The girl with the olive skin hands me off to another Lost woman, small and round, as wrinkled and familiar as my dirty tunic. I walk with her to a row of doors across the back of the room. The wrinkled Lost woman opens one, stepping back to let me go in first. A deep basin is sunk into the floor stones, lined with glazed tiles the same green as our dishes, set against a curving back wall in a bluish light shining through a vine-covered window in the ceiling. The Lost woman closes the door, opens a sluice gate in the wall, and a stream of water, cloudy with steam, arcs out into the basin.

  I drop the drying cloth and step down, shivering once at the first touch of heat. The bathhouse was built over a hot spring, “hot” being the all-important adjective. I settle onto the little bench built inside the basin, enveloped in a vapor cloud, waiting for the water to inch up deliciously and cover me.