The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  “You okay?” asked Jean as he walked to where she waited for him on the porch.

  Jack reached out and pulled his sister to him, tightly. “I love you,” he said, his energy draining out of his body, from his mouth to her shoulder, in a long, aching sigh. “I don’t know how you stay. You’re so much stronger than me.”

  TWO

  PERCHANCE TO DREAM

  1 The dead man’s notes were meticulous. While the Captain listened to Sean Hannity and Jean napped on the sofa, Jack spread the files over the driftwood table in the dining room and read the thin, familiar script of his old friend’s hand. The papers held a hint of his cologne, a leathery smell that transferred by touch onto Jack’s skin, ghostlike.

  Patient is 13 y o. In isolation since being committed 3 wks ago. Exhibits symptoms supportive of diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Believes he is being held at Haven against his will by agents of the government. Refuses medication. Refuses water that is not boiled. Violent tendencies. See attached.

  Jack found the report, typed in block letters under Haven letterhead, signed by one Dr. Samir Patel.

  Incident Report

  June 5, 2012

  On intake, I did witness juvenile patient C. attack Jill Greathouse, on-duty nurse. Juvenile boy was admitted by mother at 10 p.m. this evening. C. was in state of dissociative fugue. Could not provide simple answers such as current date. Said it was July 2123. Claimed his father was part of a conspiracy against the American public. Note: C’s father died in an automobile accident earlier this year; may have been trigger for patient’s break from reality. As Nurse Greathouse called orderlies to sedate the boy, C. did attack her. The incident was severe. Juvenile stabbed at Nurse Greathouse with a pencil. He fell on top of her and pushed the pencil into her ear, causing rupture of her eardrum. All the while, juvenile was shouting: “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you people hear it?” Juvenile sedated and secured in isolation unit.

  Jack formed a mental picture of Tony in a white jacket over a blue shirt and tie, sitting at a desk across from this teenage boy. Jack knew that Tony had always been playacting. He’d figured out the tricks to psychology the same way he’d discovered the tricks behind carny games or, let’s be truthful, the tricks to pretending to be a friend: by reading books and practicing in front of a mirror. He had worn the white jacket, Jack was sure of this. He wore it because his patients expected to see their doctor in a white jacket. It was part of the role. As he read on, he recognized the allure this young patient must have held for Tony. There was so much they had in common.

  Day 5: Teleconference with Cole’s mother. She says Cole’s father killed in car accident in Manhattan in 2011. Cole was with him and survived. Signs of schizophrenia surfaced shortly thereafter. Family moved in with relatives in Oberlin to get Cole out of city, provide healing atmosphere.

  Later in session Cole posed this question: Where are all the people from the 1920s? Showed me pictures of people packed into Times Square after the end of World War I. Wants to know where all those people went. I explained they are old or already dead. I asked where he thinks the people are. Responds: “They were all killed.” By who? Nazis.

  I asked: “Are you afraid of Nazis?” Answer: “No.” Asked what he is afraid of. Cole: “The Hounds of the Catskills.” Would not elaborate. Dogs? Hounds of Baskervilles? Will check.

  Cole believes father collected Nazi artifacts for disposal in NATIONAL PARKS.

  Jack stopped. Tony had capitalized “NATIONAL PARKS.” It called back a memory of the day they’d first talked at the Boy Scout meeting. What had he said about the state park down the road?

  Berlin Reservoir. Doesn’t it look ancient?

  Jack shuddered.

  Day 6: Cole refuses to explain his delusions until I also boil my own water. I cannot feed into his psychosis. To do so would give his paranoia a stronger hold. We sit in silence for forty-five minutes.

  Day 7: Not a word today.

  Day 8: No progress.

  Day 9: I promise Cole I will boil water. I am bored of the silent treatment. What did he mean about national parks?

  Day 10: Begin session, Cole says I am lying about boiling water. Refuses to talk. How did he know?

  Day 11: I have begun boiling water in an attempt to move this therapy along. Maybe I can meet him halfway. No further progress today.

  Day 12: Cole says I have begun to remember. Can see it in my face. Says watch out for the hounds. What hounds?

  Day 13: Cole wants to play a game. It’s called the “7 Impossibilities.” There are 7 strange truths he wants me to accept. 1st: I must believe that Cole has a photographic memory. He claims he can no longer forget anything.

  Day 14: I show Cole a series of numbers. Pi. He recites pi to 250 characters. Mother made no mention of photographic memory on intake. Is this a symptom?

  Day 15: Impossibility 2: Water is contaminated by government with brainwashing chemicals. Will research.

  Jack looked across the table at the remaining folders. Each was labeled with an orange tab. “1: Photographic Memory” contained a photocopy of the pi sequence along with articles on photographic memory and links to autism. What Jack found inside “2: Fluoride” was unsettling.

  These reports were not clipped articles from peer-reviewed magazines, no Psychology Today or Gestalt Critique. These were posts from a fringe website forum printed on a home computer. One was titled “Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid: How the Government Keeps the Peace by Brainwashing Americans.” It was full of grammatical errors. Tony had corrected the text in red pen and written excited notes in the margins. Things like: Of course! and Motherfucker and Boil Sam’s water.

  By day 21, Tony’s handwriting was stretched and messy, his grammar and spelling muddled and erratic.

  Emergency broadcast test on radio today. It came on in the car, on my way to werk. I can hear them in my brain, taking out mine memories. Cole says he can help and I do rememember better now. But we forgot an entire day this time. Cole says entrance is in state parks. Will begim looking.

  Then, one final entry: Day 26: Claytor Lake. I will leave Sam behind. Safer that way. I dont want to hear the voices anymore.

  Cole had brought back the very worst of Tony. Their madness was recursive. How terrible that must have been for Tony, feeling his mental defenses crumble, feeling his mind come undone, a building energy, an amp pointed at a microphone, primed to explode.

  Escaping into the cool waters of Claytor Lake must have been a kind embrace. Jack felt sorry for his old friend. Even though, on some level, he still hated him and always would.

  2 “Hey, Johnny?” The Captain stared at his son curiously from the hospital bed in the living room.

  “What’s up, Pop? Need something to drink?”

  The Captain shook his head and motioned for him to come. Jack walked over and took a seat next to his sister, who was napping on the sofa. She stirred lightly.

  “What are you doing here, Johnny?” his father whispered. His eyes were fixed on Jack, focused. His father’s eyes had become grayish lately. But they shone now with such a brilliant golden hue.

  “I’m helping Jean with some things,” said Jack.

  “Don’t you have classes?”

  “School year’s over.”

  “Okay. That’s thing one. Now about thing two: How long have I been in this bed?”

  Jean sat up and put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Dad? You feeling all right?” she asked groggily.

  “I feel great,” he said.

  Jean sighed. She stood, walked to her father. She pushed his white bangs from his eyes and rubbed his neck. “You’re having a good day, apparently. The first in a very long while.”

  “Well,” he sighed. “It’s good to be back, if only for a bit.”

  “Can I get you anything?” asked Jean.

  After a moment, the Captain held up two fingers. “The good stuff above the fridge.”

  “Daddy! You can’t drink on your meds.”

  “Jean, the last
thing I remember, it was fall 2014. The look of those trees outside makes me think it’s, what? April?”

  “It’s June first, Dad,” said Jack.

  “Christ. Make it a double. I think we’re past worrying about my liver.”

  Jean kissed him on the cheek and then went to the kitchen and poured him a tumbler of Red Label.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, the Captain turned back to his son. “Why am I still in this house?” he said. “Why didn’t you guys put me in St. Mary’s? I don’t want your sister changing my diapers.”

  “She wants you here,” he said.

  “Talk her out of it,” he said flatly. He grabbed Jack’s wrist and tugged him closer. “Mark,” he said. “What happened to Mark?”

  Jack’s mind flashed to that day in the Walmart parking lot, three years ago, the day the Captain had called him down from Lakewood for Jean’s intervention. He’d done his very best to forget Mark Brooks and what he’d done. But, remembering it now, Jack couldn’t help but smile. It had felt so good to punch him in the face.

  “Mark moved back to Warren,” said Jack. “Don’t worry. Jean’s fine. Still sober. And Mark’s never even been back to see Paige. He doesn’t even call.”

  For a second, the Captain looked at Jack as if he was pulling his leg. Then he laughed lightly. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  Jean returned with the Scotch. The Captain gripped it tight. He closed his eyes and sniffed at the brim of the glass. “To the past,” he said. “Let us forget the bad parts first.” He tipped it to his lips and drank it like water. Then he winked at Jean and handed her the empty. “Thanks, kiddo,” he said. “You good?”

  “I’m good, Daddy.”

  “Paige good?”

  “She’s great.”

  “Good.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again, they were already a little more gray. “I think I’ll have a hot bath,” he said. “And when I’m done, let’s get Chinese. And some pizza.”

  3 While the Captain soaked, a dry Montecristo smoldering in a chipped ashtray the color of an avocado beside the tub, Jack went outside and walked the narrow path through the trees behind the house. The nippy wind held an incongruous coolness for early June.

  His little feet had worn down this path. And Jean’s. Their friends. A thousand trips to the lake and back, towels slung over shoulders. It had been years since he’d walked it, and still here it was, holding back the heather and ferns, the blackberry bushes. The last time he’d been to the lake was the night Tony’s father was arrested.

  Much of the trucked-in sand beach had eroded away. The northern edge was hard clay peppered with mulberry pods that crunched delightfully underfoot. Jack sat at the lip of the lake and thought about the problem at hand.

  He was inclined to help Sam figure out a way to pull up Tony’s body. This wasn’t because he felt he owed it to his old friend, but he knew Sam well enough to know that if he couldn’t help her, she would ask Jean. And Jean would find a way to do it, because Jean was a sucker for people in need. And if Jean couldn’t find an easy solution, she would throw money at it. Money she didn’t have.

  How deep was the bottom? Nobody knew. You couldn’t hold your breath and dive down to find it. He’d tried. They all had.

  Shadows cast by tall oaks danced on the lake’s surface like some shifting Rorschach test.

  * * *

  “So all they can see are the shadows, right?” Tony said as they hiked along the deer trail that led around Minnehaha Falls, frozen now because it was winter at Camp Manatoc. “They’re prisoners or something. Somebody tied them to chairs so they can’t move. So they can only look forward at this cave wall. And then someone turns on a light behind them and so all they see, all their life, is shadows on the wall of the cave.”

  “Okay,” said Jack, trying to keep up. The trail was steep and the footing precarious, the path slick with fallen leaves.

  “The question is, do you save these people if you have the chance?” asked Tony. “I mean, think about it. These people think reality is just these shadows on the wall. If you could set them free, their minds would have no concept of our three-dimensional world. You show them a flower, they wouldn’t know what the hell it is. You’d have to show them the shadow of a flower for it to have any meaning. If you showed them the trees and the sky, they’d freak the shit out. They’d be terrified. Isn’t it better to just keep them chained up?”

  Jack thought it over. It was another one of Tony’s nightmarish Twilight Zoney brain-stumpers. “I’d still rescue them, set them free,” he said, finally, sniffing away the cold.

  “Why?”

  “I think because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to help them.”

  “Yeah. I guess. Me, too.”

  “It’s creepy, though.”

  “Guy named Plato came up with that crap like three thousand years ago or something.”

  “Cool.”

  Somewhere nearby, a crispy twig cracked loudly.

  “Who’s there?” called Tony.

  A fat head poked out from behind a white pine. The boy had a mess of tangly red hair. “Hey, guys,” said Nils.

  “Were you following us?” asked Tony.

  The fat ginger trundled out from his hiding place and joined them on the path. He was huffing from the exercise. But he was smiling. A big, wonderful kid smile. “You’re going out to the Indian mounds on the edge of camp, right? Can I come?”

  Tony looked to Jack, who shrugged.

  “Okay, but you have to carry our canteens,” said Tony. He handed a metal army-surplus canteen to Nils, who slung it around his shoulder dutifully. A trio now, they walked together through the empty forest and spoke of scary things.

  That night Jack pulled his sleeping bag close to Tony’s on the floor of Concord Lodge. Close enough so that he could feel his friend’s breath on his face, and like that he drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  Jack’s breath caught in his throat. He was surprised to find he missed his friend.

  He picked himself up off the hard clay and dusted off his jeans.

  He couldn’t get Tony’s bones out of the lake.

  But he knew who could.

  4 Sam was there when Jack got back. She was in the kitchen, talking to his sister, a glass of red wine in her hand. She still wore her work bibs, splattered with white paint.

  “I heard the Captain’s back,” Sam said to Jack as he walked through the door. “I had to come over and say hi.”

  He nodded and looked to Jean. “What did Dr. Palmstrum say?” Palmstrum had been their family doctor for a quarter of a century, a wizard of a man who worked out of a ranch home in Ravenna.

  “Says it’s probably not good. He’s seen this happen before and it’s always near the end. Like the mind’s last rally. It could be a sign of another stroke, actually.”

  “Great,” Jack mumbled. “Where’s he at?”

  “Getting dressed,” said Jean.

  He nodded and then helped himself to a bottle of Yuengling from the fridge. He shot a hot glare at his sister that Sam couldn’t see. She rolled her eyes at him.

  “What were you doing out at the lake?” asked Sam.

  “I have an idea. Want to see if it pans out before I talk about it.”

  “I knew you’d figure something out.”

  “Might not pan out.”

  “Oh, holy hell!” shouted the Captain, ambling down the stairs, eyes on the woman with the copper hair. His face was one big, wrinkly smile. “Sam Sanders. Get your little ass over here and give us a hug.”

  She moved to his side and gave him a soft squeeze. “It’s back to Sam Brooks,” she said.

  “What the fuck did Tony do? I go away a while and everyone thinks they have a free pass to be assholes?”

  “Daddy, Tony’s been gone three years now,” said Jean.

  The Captain’s face drained of color. He looked at Sam for confirmation.

  “He walked into the lake,” said
Sam. “He committed suicide, Walter.” Walter. Sam was the only one who’d ever been allowed to call the Captain by his given name.

  The Captain pulled Sam close again and kissed the top of her head. “What a pisser. What a fucking pisser. That’s just … terrible, Sammy. I’m so sorry. And my stupid mind is all muddy and you’ve probably told me all this before.”

  “It’s been long enough that I don’t think about it all the time,” Sam offered.

  “I should pay my respects before the lights go dim again. He up in St. Joe’s?”

  “No plot, Dad,” said Jack. “His body’s still at the bottom of the lake.”

  “Jack has an idea, though,” said Sam.

  The Captain looked over to his son, alarmed. “No, buddy. No. I don’t want you going down there.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Can we just fucking please talk about something else? It’s so goddamn depressing.”

  “Let’s order food,” said Jean.

  “Now you’re talking,” the Captain said. Only Jack saw his face as everyone else turned toward the dining room. And so only Jack saw the look of fear in the old man’s eyes. Stark, overwhelming fear. And then it was gone.

  5 The closest Chinese restaurant was Chen’s Green Dragon in Kent, a forty-minute round trip. The Captain wanted something called yum cha. “Just ask for dim sum, dummy,” he barked. Paige, who had just been deposited by the school bus, requested “those crab cheesy hot pockets,” and Sam was in for an order of chicken and snow peas.

  “I’ll pick it up,” said Jack, grabbing his wallet.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Sam.

  Before he could protest she flitted out the door. He looked up at Jean.

  “Life’s short,” she said.

  He nodded, but it wasn’t true. Life is long. Longer than we allow ourselves to remember. “Is he going to be all right until we get back?”