The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  “Memorize it,” he says.

  I frown. “You want to leave it in here?”

  “Why do you think your house was searched? And Anson’s?”

  I hadn’t thought of this yet.

  “Just do it, Nadia. Please. No questions. Not yet.”

  Maybe he’s right. Somehow, all of this has to do with me, with my family, and I don’t know why. And until I do, this room is the safest place I can imagine for the code besides my own head. Gray has turned away now, arms crossed, deliberately not looking at the numbers. I visualize them, make sure I can see them in my mind before I lay the bracelet on the table.

  Then without another word Gray leaves the white room, letting me follow. The door shuts behind us. I imagine the lights blowing out, dying inside as we walk down the rock passage, the tubes overhead igniting just as we need them to. There’s a sense of wrong here, of something impending, and right now I am more afraid than the first time we entered this passage.

  At the door Gray says, “Say the numbers in your head.” I have them, but I do as he asks. Then he pushes down on the round red glass with his foot, the door unlatches, and we leave the inside of the mountain, step over the rocks and out into the patch of young ferns.

  The dark day flowers are blooming, a pungent, tickling spice that permeates the air like the roar of the waterfall and the mist of the pool. My mountain is glittering, the moons casting silver light. But I don’t belong here. Humans don’t belong here. We belong on a place called Earth. I wonder if Gray is thinking the same thing. Or if he’s thinking of our jump. Of me. He told me in the white room that he didn’t want me to be sorry. Like I might be sorry. I hear the door shut without our help.

  We walk around the pool, up the gorge in the canyon to the grassy slope, around the foot of the mountain. Gray doesn’t talk, and I don’t ask questions, not because he asked me not to, but because right now, I don’t want to know the answers. I see my ladder hanging down from the wall, like a posted sign. If that really was Janis at the pool, if she ever comes this way, she’ll know someone has been outside. Maybe it’s like Gray said. Maybe she’s always known, maybe she’s just deciding what day is my day to be caught. Maybe all of this is one enormous game.

  Gray lifts me as I jump for the bottom rung. While I wait for him on top of the wall I can see the festival, all the torches glinting, hear a soft background of music and noise. The streets are empty, and when I land in Jin’s garden it feels like we’ve run the images on the wall of the white room in reverse. Like I’ve gone backward in time.

  I stand still, waiting. Gray pushes the ladder over the wall and hides the pole. Guilt, as I remember, is a bitter taste. Dread, however, is foul. He sits on the wall edge, leans over, elbows on knees, fingers tented over his face. He doesn’t start speaking for a long time.

  “All that time we played our game,” he says to the dead grasses, “and you never asked me the right question: Why was I in Jin’s garden that day?”

  I had thought the question. I’d thought I had the answer.

  “On the twenty-fifth day of the sunlight, Reese came to the workshop when I was alone, and said I was wanted at the Council House. I didn’t know what I’d done. I assumed it was Jonathan who wanted me, but when I got there it was Janis, sitting in a cloth-covered chair. She offered me food, asked me about glass. Said nice things to me. And then she said she was concerned about your family. That the Forgetting might have made your mother’s mind malfunction, as if your mother might hurt someone else. She wanted information, but she wanted to get it discreetly. No worrying the neighbors, she said. And she wanted me to get it from you.”

  I can make guesses now, where he’s going with this. The dread is becoming certainty, the certainty a deep ache in my middle.

  “I told her no,” Gray goes on. “That it couldn’t be done. You wouldn’t talk to me or anyone else, that it had nothing to do with me. And she just smiled and said she understood, and then she asked me about how I coped with the Forgetting, whether I ever went to the Archives or not, if I read my old books.”

  Gray looks up for the first time. “I’ve never looked at my old books in the Archives. I didn’t think they were mine. I thought they belonged to the glassblower’s real son, the one who died, or was Lost. And all I could think was what if there was something in there, something that didn’t match? There was so much chaos after the Forgetting. I was young and dirty and burned. It was Arthur of the Metals who found me on that rooftop, but there were others, and even the Council members were confused, relearning faces. Rose cut off almost all my hair before I left, and I’ve always worn sleeves over my scars and avoided Arthur like poison. But what if I’d gotten careless? If he’d finally recognized me, after all this time? Me, my parents … ”

  He doesn’t need to go on. I know what would have happened to them.

  “Then Janis asked if I wanted to reconsider getting that information. And that’s when I was certain. Janis knew I’d been Lost. Knew what my father had done. She had me. I spilled everything I knew about you and your mother. Anything I could think of.”

  I close my eyes.

  “But she wasn’t happy with my answers. It wasn’t enough, and so she suggested I spend time with you. Ask you questions. She was interested in anything that might set off your mother’s condition—words, numbers. An heirloom.”

  This makes my eyes snap open.

  “So that we can help her, she said. So we can learn more about the Forgetting. But I think we both know now what she was really after. What she still wants. The code to the white room. She told me to come back in three days, tell her what I’d found out, that she wasn’t writing our conversation down. That I wasn’t to write it down, and I was relieved. That meant she was going to forget the whole thing soon. That she was allowing me to forget soon. If I could keep her happy, the situation would go away.

  “So I followed you. Tried to find out what you do, to start a conversation with you, anything. But you were like a rock in a stream. I saw you going to Jin’s, so I went to Jin and offered to help him with his writing, but at the end of three days I had nothing. Janis explained her disappointment until I was sweating. So I spent a resting on Eshan’s roof, watching your house. And what do you think I saw you do? Leave. And what do you think I saw you do next?”

  Climb the wall, I think.

  “I couldn’t believe it. I sat in that corner right over there and waited, and before you came back I’d made a decision. I wasn’t going to tell Janis anything until you took me with you. I’d make you talk to me, tell me things about your family. Maybe I could get enough that she would let me stop. So I went over the wall with you, and you handed me my past like a gift. And I went straight to Janis, told her everything I could, lied about the rest. Which is what I’ve been doing pretty much every day since. Lie to you, lie to her. It’s all a big lie.”

  I had a choice, I think. I made it in Rose’s room, and I knew I would pay. I thought I’d begun the next day, when Mother took the knife to her arm, but now, I realize, is my time. Now I am paying, and I, who thought I knew pain, had not had an inkling of the agony the glassblower’s son could extract from me.

  “I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he says. “I think I know what you’re going to do. But I am going to tell you the rest of the truth first.”

  My chest heaves like I’ve been running. I lean against the archway, turn my head where I can’t see him.

  After a long moment he says, “Maybe I do have memories, at least a little, because the first time we went to the learning room after the Forgetting I didn’t know who you were, but I wanted to. You wouldn’t talk to me, or even look at me, and the more you didn’t the more curious I was. And it stayed that way for years, and when I tried too hard you slapped my face. I probably deserved it. Everyone, all of them, they just assumed you hated us. That you thought you were better than us. But I know Lost when I see it, Nadia, book or no. I wanted to know why.”

  He makes a noise, an exhalation
of air I think is a laugh, but there’s no humor in it.

  “So when Janis forced this situation down my throat there was a part of me that wanted to do exactly what she said. You fascinated me. I wanted to pursue you. And when I saw you go over that wall, I wanted to go with you. I wanted to make you want me. I knew she was playing a dirty game and I knew I had to betray you to it, and I wanted to make you come to me anyway. And I did, didn’t I? What a plan. What a brilliant scheme.”

  I think of Gray floating in the pool, of leaning down to brush his lips with mine. I was much better off being the Nadia of the sunlight. When I was in control. When I protected myself from pain. When I was alone.

  “So now you know the truth, and I’m going to go and let you decide what to do about it. I’m due at Janis’s at the resting bell and I don’t have much time to think up a new stack of lies. She doesn’t know you’ve been over the wall, she doesn’t know you remember, but you can count on her knowing just about everything else. I had to give her some truth. A lot of it, actually. And I don’t think she’s going to forget it, either, do you?”

  He waits, but I don’t say anything.

  “If you want me to help you steal that book this waking I will. I’ll be on this roof right after the leaving bell, before you have to be at the Archives. And if you don’t … if you’re not here, I’ll know to leave you alone.”

  The music of the festival ends. The people clap, and the noise in the air is like a hint of thunder. My neck is wet, water running down from my cheeks. “Don’t come tomorrow,” I say. “I won’t be here.”

  I hear Gray get up from the garden wall, move across the dry grass, pause at the top of the stairs. “And one more thing I should probably tell you,” he says. “I think I love you.”

  I walk home in a daze, among people who don’t want to be going home at all, who don’t know they are thirty-nine trillion kilometers away from it. I’m vaguely aware that I need to be in my bed by the resting bell so Mother can check, that I will need to talk to Genivee, who sent me out to stop thinking about tomorrow. That I don’t ever want to think about tomorrow again. That I can’t actually tell Genivee anything. I can’t think anymore at all.

  Maybe that really was thunder on Jin’s roof. A soft boom rumbles in the distance, clouds slowly blotting out the stars above the mountains. The dark day rains are coming, maybe by the next waking. I wander into the alley between the houses, making for my front door, and when I look over my shoulder Eshan is going into his. His eyes meet mine. He takes a step, as if he’s starting across the street. I fumble with the latch and get inside, dropping the bar as soon as I’m in.

  The house is dark and quiet, stifling after my hours in the brisk air. There are no lamps lit in the sitting room, though from the dark hall I can hear Liliya talking to Mother. When I slip into my room Genivee is asleep sitting up, her book in her lap. I take her pen from her hand, set her book aside, and adjust her blankets. Now that I’m in the light I can see just how dingy and wrinkled the white tunic dress is, how bedraggled my hair. I’m grateful that Mother has exhausted Genivee today. My little sister will take one look at me and know that the Nadia of the sunlight is back. I don’t want to see her disappointment. It will go away soon enough. When she forgets.

  The resting bell rings and Mother sticks her head in the door. She counts bodies, smiles once, then leaves without noticing the state of me. I pull off the dirty tunic and leggings, hide them under the mattress until I can take them to be cleaned, put on a sleeping dress. Then I lift the string with the piece of blue glass over my head and set it on my shelf. My neck feels light, empty without it. I’d already grown used to the weight. The glassblower’s son is good, so very good at making everyone love him. I blow out the lamp, lie on my bed counting the bells until Genivee wakes up for the Learning Center. I pretend to sleep until she’s gone, until I hear Liliya take Mother to the dye house.

  I don’t go to the Archives. I really don’t see the point. I don’t go for four days. It rains and it rains. Gretchen sends a note and I don’t answer it. I don’t speak. I write, though, in my secret book beneath the floor, anything my mother and sisters might need to know if their books were to get lost. I see Genivee’s disappointment. And her worry.

  On the fifth day I put on an old tunic and see if Karl has my new requested book ready. He does not, and his shop is a mass of bodies, angry people, panicking to get new books, to write down everything before the Forgetting. I hear the potter accuse Karl of not making books for the people he doesn’t like on purpose. So they’ll become Lost.

  I stop listening, wander down Meridian beneath the fat buds of the forgetting trees, dripping with rain, drop off my dirty clothes at the baths and sign in to run. I’m behind on my exercise, and prefer to do it in the dark days, anyway, in the wet, and when the wind is sharp.

  I run the path around the walls twice, cold rain stinging my face, and the second time I pass the Archives I glance up, I can’t help it, all the way to the roof garden of Jin’s house. There’s someone standing up there, in the rain, arms crossed, the clouds ragged across the moons. It’s not Jin. Has he been up there every day?

  I run harder, pretend my tears are rain, are sweat, and then I pretend the same thing in the baths, which are dim and flickering with the hanging oil lamps in the steam. I stay in until I’m almost too hot again, until Rose comes. She doesn’t have my clothes this time; they’ll take some time to dry now that the sun’s gone. I put on the clean ones from my pack, and then she just sits behind me, squeezing the water out and braiding up my hair. I wonder why she comes in to take care of me. I close my eyes, think of Rose’s wrinkled face and deft fingers, her soft voice. She was not born on this planet. She was chosen. Rose was inside a machine that carried her through the stars. I wish I could make her remember.

  While her fingers fly through my hair, she says quietly, “I don’t have the news you asked for about your mother, but I thought you might like to know that Chandi the Builder has come to the houses of the Lost, patching the holes and the fences. And we have new doors. Strong ones.”

  Her tone makes me uneasy. I can’t tell if she thinks this is a good thing, or a bad. It is strange, to have work done, and done well, right before a Forgetting. Now that I listen, Rose speaks with just a touch of the accent I heard in the white room. Just a bit like Janis.

  “Will you tell Gray?” she asks. “It won’t be as easy to get in from now on.” I nod as she finishes, start sliding into my sandals. She folds her hands in her lap. “It’s only a short time until the Forgetting, Nadia the Dyer’s daughter. Best not to waste it.”

  When I walk home I see a divide in the streets. Some laughing, drinking like it’s still the festival, others with their faces pinched, hurrying with their supplies clutched to their chests. I take note of which is which. The ones who run to their holes are probably not the ones to be feared. Michael and Chi and Veronika have their heads together on Meridian, beneath the shelter of the trees. “Outside the walls … ” I hear Veronika say. Thunder rolls.

  When I close the front door there’s a yellow glow in our storeroom, such a soft, comforting light compared to the glare of the white room in the mountain. Mother is inside, fiddling with the jam pots, tearing bread from a loaf. The knife must be in the potatoes. I ought to leave Mother alone. I tend to irritate her, but suddenly I’m starving. I think I’ve forgotten to eat. For a day. That must be why my hands are shaking.

  “Liliya’s here,” Mother says, watching as I take the jam pot from her hands. “We’re not working.” I wonder if this means Mother didn’t do well at the dye house today. When given a task she’s used to, she’s usually fine. I use a spoon to spread some jam on a piece of bread for her, then do the same for myself. She watches me, wary.

  “You have the bracelet,” she states.

  I think of Gray unhooking it from my necklace. “I don’t have it anymore, Mother.”

  “Don’t write it down.”

  And then a tiny bit of breeze begins
to blow through my mental fog. How does Mother recognize that bracelet? When could she have seen it? My book was gone when I let her out of her room after the Forgetting. Nadia’s book is wrong. That’s what she always says, but is she saying it because I did, or for another reason? “Where did the bracelet come from, Mother?”

  “Potomu chto ya smeyoo,” she replies immediately, the strange, harsh sounds I had taken to be nonsense the first time I heard them, when Arthur and Anson were searching her room. “Potomu chto ya smeyoo,” she says again, and then, very soft, “Because I dare.”

  She eats her bread, a little jam getting on the book around her neck, and I’m seeing the moving images on the wall of the white room, hearing the booming voice. We will build a new civilization. Because we dare …

  And right here, in the storeroom, holding bread with jam, for the first time I truly understand my mother. She remembers. Not like me, the way I remember everything, or like Liliya, who has only a specific image, as far as I know. Mother’s head must be full of vague bits and pieces, a confusion of people, places, half memories, the memory of memories, from what has to be at least four Forgettings. And they are driving her mad.

  “Because I dare,” I repeat. “What’s the other way to say it, Mother?”

  “Potomu chto ya smeyoo.”

  She smiles, and I’m thinking about those symbols on the bracelet, and how the chosen members of the Canaan Project had to be taught to speak the same words. My grandparents, or my great-grandparents, would have been born on Earth. Is that how they talked? It’s bizarre to imagine. I look at Mother, curious. I’ve tried this before, but she was full of sleeping tonic then. I look at the bread in my hand, say very carefully, “Mother, who is Anna?”

  I can almost see the struggle inside her head. Mother must have been so pretty once. Like Liliya. She whispers, “Anna was the first.”