How It Was When the Past Went Away

by Robert Silverberg

  “I can’t wait fifty years.”

  “I’m sorry, Nate.”

  “Give me the drug anyway. I’ll take my chances on what I lose.”

  “We’ll talk about that some other time, all right? The drugs are experimental. There’d be months of red tape before I could get authorization to try them on a human subject. You have to realize—”

  Haldersen turned him off. He saw only with his inner eye, saw the tumbling bodies, reliving his bereavement for the billionth time, slipping easily back into his self-assumed role of Job. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree.

  The shrink continued to speak. Haldersen continued not to listen. He poured himself one more glass of water with a shaky hand.

  It was close to midnight on Wednesday before Pierre Gerard, his wife, their two sons, and their daughter had a chance to have dinner. They were the proprietors, chefs, and total staff of the Petit Pois Restaurant on Sansome Street, and business had been extraordinarily, exhaustingly good all evening. Usually they were able to eat about half past five, before the dinner rush began, but today people had begun coming in early—made more expansive by the good weather, no doubt—and there hadn’t been a free moment for anybody since the cocktail hour. The Gerards were accustomed to brisk trade, for theirs was perhaps the most popular family-run bistro in the city, with a passionately devoted clientele. Still, a night like this was too much!

  They dined modestly on the evening’s miscalculations: an overdone rack of lamb, some faintly corky Château Beychevelle ’97, a fallen soufflé, and such. They were thrifty people. Their one extravagance was the Evian water that they imported from France. Pierre Gerard had not set foot in his native Lyons for thirty years, but he preserved many of the customs of the motherland, including the traditional attitude toward water. A Frenchman does not drink much water; but what he does drink comes always from the bottle, never from the tap. To do otherwise is to risk a diseased liver. One must guard one’s liver.

  That night Freddy Munson picked up Helene at her flat on Geary and drove across the bridge to Sausalito for dinner, as usual, at Ondine’s. Ondine’s was one of only four restaurants, all of them famous old ones, at which Munson ate in fixed rotation. He was a man of firm habits. He awakened religiously at six each morning, and was at his desk in the brokerage house by seven, plugging himself into the data channels to learn what had happened in the European finance markets while he slept. At half past seven local time the New York exchanges opened and the real day’s work began. By half past eleven, New York was through for the day, and Munson went around the corner for lunch, always at the Petit Pois, whose proprietor he had helped to make a millionaire by putting him into Consolidated Nucleonics’ several components two and a half years before the big merger. At half past one, Munson was back in the office to transact business for his own account on the Pacific Coast exchange; three days a week he left at three, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays he stayed as late as five in order to catch some deals on the Honolulu and Tokyo exchanges. Afterwards, dinner, a play or concert, always a handsome female companion. He tried to get to sleep, or at least to bed, by midnight.

  A man in Freddy Munson’s position had to be orderly. At any given time, his thefts from his clients ranged from six to nine million dollars, and he kept all the details of his jugglings in his head. He couldn’t trust putting them on paper, because there were scanner eyes everywhere; and he certainly didn’t dare employ the data net, since it was well known that anything you confided to one computer was bound to be accessible to some other computer somewhere, no matter how tight a privacy seal you slapped on it. So Munson had to remember the intricacies of fifty or more illicit transactions, a constantly changing chain of embezzlements, and a man who practices such necessary disciplines of memory soon gets into the habit of extending discipline to every phase of his life.

  Helene snuggled close. Her faintly psychedelic perfume drifted toward his nostrils. He locked the car into the Sausalito circuit and leaned back comfortably as the traffic-control computer took over the steering. Helene said, “At the Bryce place last night I saw two sculptures by your bankrupt friend.”

  “Paul Mueller?”

  “That’s the one. They were very good sculptures. One of them buzzed at me.”

  “What were you doing at the Bryces?”

  “I went to college with Lisa Bryce. She invited me over with Marty.”

  “I didn’t realize you were that old,” Munson said.

  Helene giggled. “Lisa’s a lot younger than her husband, dear. How much does a Paul Mueller sculpture cost?”

  “Fifteen, twenty thousand, generally. More for specials.”

  “And he’s broke, even so?”

  “Paul has a rare talent for self-destruction,” Munson said. “He simply doesn’t comprehend money. But it’s his artistic salvation, in a way. The more desperately in debt he is, the finer his work becomes. He creates out of his despair, so to speak. Though he seems to have overdone the latest crisis. He’s stopped working altogether. It’s a sin against humanity when an artist doesn’t work.”

  “You can be so eloquent, Freddy,” Helene said softly.

  When The Amazing Montini woke Thursday morning, he did not at once realize that anything had changed. His memory, like a good servant, was always there when he needed to call on it, but the array of perfectly fixed facts he carried in his mind remained submerged until required. A librarian might scan shelves and see books missing; Montini could not detect similar vacancies of his synapses. He had been up for half an hour, had stepped under the molecular bath and had punched for his breakfast and had awakened Nadia to tell her to confirm the pod reservations to Vegas, and finally, like a concert pianist running off a few arpeggios to limber his fingers for the day’s chores, Montini reached into his memory bank for a little Shakespeare and no Shakespeare came.

  He stood quite still, gripping the astrolabe that ornamented his picture window, and peered out at the bridge in sudden bewilderment. It had never been necessary for him to make a conscious effort to recover data. He merely looked and it was there; but where was Shakespeare? Where was the left-hand column of page 136, and the right-hand column of page 654, and the right-hand column of page 8o6, sixteen lines down? Gone? He drew blanks. The screen of his mind showed him only empty pages.

  Easy. This is unusual, but it isn’t catastrophic. You must be tense, for some reason, and you’re forcing it, that’s all. Relax, pull something else out of storage— The New York Times, Wednesday, October 3, 1973. Yes, there it was, the front page, beautifully clear, the story on the baseball game down in the lower right-hand corner, the headline about the jet accident big and black, even the photo credit visible. Fine. Now let’s try— The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, April 19, 1987. Montini shivered. He saw the top four inches of the page, nothing else. Wiped clean.

  He ran through the files of other newspapers he had memorized for his act. Some were there. Some were not. Some, like the Post-Dispatch, were obliterated in part. Color rose to his cheeks. Who had tampered with his memory?

  He tried Shakespeare again. Nothing.

  He tried the 1997 Chicago data-net directory. It was there.

  He tried his third-grade geography textbook. It was there, the big red book with smeary print.

  He tried last Friday’s five-o’clock xerofax bulletin. Gone.

  He stumbled and sank down on a divan he had purchased in Istanbul, he recalled, on the nineteenth of May, 1985, for 4,200 Turkish pounds. “Nadia!” he cried. “Nadia!” His voice was little more than a croak. She came running, her eyes only half frosted, her morning face askew.

  “How do I look?” he demanded. “My mouth—is my mouth right? My eyes?”

  “Your face is all flushed.”

  “Aside from that!”

  “I don’t know,” she gasped. “You seem
all upset, but—”

  “Half my mind is gone,” Montini said. “I must have had a stroke. Is there any facial paralysis? That’s a symptom. Call my doctor, Nadia! A stroke, a stroke! It’s the end for Montini!”

  Paul Mueller, awakening at midnight on Wednesday and feeling strangely refreshed, attempted to get his bearings. Why was he fully dressed, and why had he been asleep? A nap, perhaps, that had stretched on too long? He tried to remember what he had been doing earlier in the day, but he was unable to find a clue. He was baffled but not disturbed; mainly he felt a tremendous urge to get to work. The images of five sculptures, fully planned and begging to be constructed, jostled in his mind. Might as well start right now, he thought. Work through till morning. That small twittering silvery one—that’s a good one to start with. I’ll block out the schematics, maybe even do some of the armature— “Carole?” he called. “Carole, are you around?”

  His voice echoed through the oddly empty apartment.

  For the first time Mueller noticed how little furniture there was. A bed—a cot, really, not their double bed—and a table, and a tiny insulator unit for food, and a few dishes. No carpeting. Where were his sculptures, his private collection of his own best work? He walked into his studio and found it bare from wall to wall, all of his tools mysteriously swept away, just a few discarded sketches on the floor. And his wife? “Carole? Carole?”

  He could not understand any of this. While he dozed, it seemed, someone had cleaned the place out, stolen his furniture, his sculptures, even the carpet. Mueller had heard of such thefts. They came with a van, brazenly, posing as moving men. Perhaps they had given him some sort of drug while they worked. He could not bear the thought that they had taken his sculptures; the rest didn’t matter, but he had cherished those dozen pieces dearly. I’d better call the police, he decided, and rushed toward the handset of the data unit, but it wasn’t there either. Would burglars take that too?

  Searching for some answers, he scurried from wall to wall, and saw a note in his own handwriting. Call Freddy Munson in morning and borrow three bigs. Buy ticket to Caracas. Buy sculpting stuff.

  Caracas? A vacation, maybe? And why buy sculpting stuff? Obviously the tools had been gone before he fell asleep, then. Why? And where was his wife? What was going on? He wondered if he ought to call Freddy right now, instead of waiting until morning. Freddy might know. Freddy was always home by midnight, too. He’d have one of his damned girls with him and wouldn’t want to be interrupted, but to hell with that; what good was having friends if you couldn’t bother them in a time of crisis?

  Heading for the nearest public communicator booth, he rushed out of his apartment and nearly collided with a sleek dunning robot in the hallway. The things show no mercy, Mueller thought. They plague you at all hours. No doubt this one was on its way to bother the deadbeat Nicholson family down the hall.

  The robot said, “Mr. Paul Mueller? I am a properly qualified representative of International Fabrication Cartel, Amalgamated. I am here to serve notice that there is an unpaid balance in your account to the extent of $9,150.55, which as of o~oo hours tomorrow morning will accrue compounded penalty interest at the rate of ~ percent per month, since you have not responded to our three previous requests for payment. I must further inform you—”

  “You’re off your neutrinos,” Mueller snapped. “I don’t owe a dime to I.F.C.! For once in my life I’m in the black, and don’t try to make me believe otherwise.”

  The robot replied patiently, “Shall I give you a printout of the transactions? On the fifth of January, 2003, you ordered the following metal products from us: three 4-meter tubes of antiqued iridium, six io-centimeter spheres of—”

  “The fifth of January, 2003, happens to be three months from now,” Mueller said, “and I don’t have time to listen to crazy robots. I’ve got an important call to make. Can I trust you to patch me into the data net without garbling things?”

  “I am not authorized to permit you to make use of my facilities.”

  “Emergency override,” said Mueller. “Human being in trouble. Go argue with that one!”

  The robot’s conditioning was sound. It yielded at once to his assertion of an emergency and set up a relay to the main communications net. Mueller supplied Freddy Munson’s number. “I can provide audio only,” the robot said, putting the call through. Nearly a minute passed. Then Freddy Munson’s familiar deep voice snarled from the speaker grille in the robot’s chest, “Who is it and what do you want?”

  “It’s Paul. I’m sorry to bust in on you, Freddy, but I’m in big trouble. I think I’m losing my mind, or else everybody else is.”

  “Maybe everybody else is. What’s the problem?”

  “All my furniture’s gone. A dunning robot is trying to shake me down for nine bigs. I don’t know where Carole is. I can’t remember what I was doing earlier today. I’ve got a note here about getting tickets to Caracas that I wrote myself, and I don’t know why. And—”

  “Skip the rest,” Munson said. “I can’t do anything for you. I’ve got problems of my own.”

  “Can I come over, at least, and talk?”

  “Absolutely not!” In a softer voice Munson said, “Listen, Paul, I didn’t mean to yell, but something’s come up here, something very distressing—”

  “You don’t need to pretend. You’ve got Helene with you and you wish I’d leave you alone. Okay.”

  “No. Honestly,” Munson said. “I’ve got problems, suddenly. I’m in a totally ungood position to give you any help at all. I need help myself.”

  “What sort? Anything I can do for you?”

  “I’m afraid not. And if you’ll excuse me, Paul—”

  “Just tell me one thing, at least. Where am I likely to find Carole? Do you have any idea?”

  “At her husband’s place, I’d say.”

  “I’m her husband.”

  There was a long pause. Munson said finally, “Paul, she divorced you last January and married Pete Castine in April.”

  “No,” Mueller said.

  “What, no?”

  “No, it isn’t possible.”

  “Have you been popping pills, Paul? Sniffing something? Smoking weed? Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t take time now to—”

  “At least tell me what day today is.”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Which Wednesday?”

  “Wednesday the eighth of May. Thursday the ninth, actually, by this time of night.”

  “And the year?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Paul—”

  “The year?”

  “2003.”

  Mueller sagged. “Freddy, I’ve lost half a year somewhere! For me it’s last October. 2002. I’ve got some weird kind of amnesia. It’s the only explanation.”

  “Amnesia,” Munson said. The edge of tension left his voice. “Is that what you’ve got? Amnesia? Can there be such a thing as an epidemic of amnesia? Is it contagious? Maybe you better come over here after all. Because amnesia’s my problem too.”

  Thursday, May 9, promised to be as beautiful as the previous day had been. The sun once again beamed on San Francisco; the sky was clear, the air warm and tender. Commander Braskett awoke early as always, punched for his usual spartan breakfast, studied the morning xerofax news, spent an hour dictating his memoirs, and, about nine, went out for a walk. The streets were strangely crowded, he found, when he got down to the shopping district along Haight Street. People were wandering about aimlessly, dazedly, as though they were sleepwalkers. Were they drunk? Drugged? Three times in five minutes Commander Braskett was stopped by young men who wanted to know the date. Not the time, the date. He told them, crisply, disdainfully; he tried to be tolerant, but it was difficult for him not to despise people who were so weak that they were unable to refrain from poisoning their minds with stimulants and narcotics and psychedelics and similar trash. At the corner of Haight and Masonic a forlorn-looking pretty girl of about seventeen, with wide blank blue eyes, halted him and sai
d, “Sir, this city is San Francisco, isn’t it? I mean, I was supposed to move here from Pittsburgh in May, and if this is May, this is San Francisco, right?” Commander Braskett nodded brusquely and turned away, pained. He was relieved to see an old friend, Lou Sandier, the manager of the Bank of America office across the way. Sandier was standing outside the bank door. Commander Braskett crossed to him and said, “Isn’t it a disgrace, Lou, the way this whole street is filled with addicts this morning? “What is it, some historical pageant of the 1960’s?” And Sandier gave him an empty smile and said, “Is that my name? Lou? You wouldn’t happen to know the last name too, would you? Somehow it’s slipped my mind.” In that moment Commander Braskett realized that something terrible had happened to his city and perhaps to his country, and that the leftist takeover he had long dreaded must now be at hand, and that it was time for him to don his old uniform again and do what he could to strike back at the enemy.

  In joy and in confusion, Nate Haldersen awoke that morning realizing that he had been transformed in some strange and wonderful way. His head was throbbing, but not painfully. It seemed to him that a terrible weight had been lifted from his shoulders, that the fierce dead hand about his throat had at last relinquished its grip.

  He sprang from bed, full of questions.

  Where am I? What kind of place is this? Why am I not at home? Where are my books? Why do I feel so happy?

  This seemed to be a hospital room.

  There was a veil across his mind. He pierced its filmy folds and realized that he had committed himself to—to Fletcher Memorial —last—August—no, the August before last—suffering with a severe emotional disturbance brought on by—brought on by— He had never felt happier than at this moment.