by Claire North
The next night I watched him on the blackjack table, trying to count cards. Some basic understanding of the things I had said to him perhaps lingered, even if I was gone. I find extraordinary hope in this thought – no, more than that: I find salvation, divinity in it.
When he lost, I sat beside him and said, “Hi. I’ve been watching you play. You’ll want to try something a little different.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I used to teach math in high school.”
“Hey – that’s what I do.”
“I’m here for a wedding.”
“Me too!”
I smiled and said, “What a coincidence.”
That night, we went to his bedroom, and as he lay in my arms he said, “Jesus, I don’t usually do this, I’m not that kinda guy,” and was asleep within minutes. I snuck out a few hours later, so that he wouldn’t be afraid when he woke to find a stranger in his bed.
Chapter 64
Byron, one day, as we ate breakfast quietly in a room lined with images of warring Indians, proud cowboys, slaughtered buffalo, looked up and said, “Yesterday, walking up the hill, I found myself stopping to look at every woman I saw.”
I shrugged, said nothing.
“It is disconcerting, not trusting your own memory,” she mused, cutlery resting lightly on the edge of her barely touched plate. “It is… more than disconcerting.”
Again, a shrug, a bite of toast.
She watched me, coffee growing cold. Around the walls, the native peoples of America died, and buffalo skeletons lined the dusty fields. Thoughts, to pass the silence: an estimated sixty million buffalo roamed America in the 1400s; by 1890 that number was down to 750.
“You are incredible,” Byron breathed at last, and I looked up, and saw her eyes shining.
“You’ve said that several times.”
“Have I?”
“Yes.”
“That’s… also alarming. Alarming, I mean, that your condition not only prevents me from recalling you, but prevents me from recalling our interactions. If there was only one part of that equation, I could almost bear it, but both… Perhaps we should examine my brain? See if there is some part of me that is altered in your presence? Perhaps… damaged. Do you spend much time with anyone? Have you had a chance to observe the effects?”
Luca Evard, his fingers tangled in mine, a night in Hong Kong.
“No,” I replied. “I haven’t.”
“To someone in my profession, your condition is miraculous. If we could bottle your forgettability and sell it… But no, don’t worry. I am no laissez-faire capitalist, this is not Dr Moreau’s island. Though perhaps you considered the possibility?”
“That you might chop me into bits to see how I ticked? Yes; I considered it.”
A little note with her silver pen, tiny on the paper, as if ticking off a point. “And didn’t run?”
“I took the risk. If I’m so remarkable, why help me?”
“I am interested, fascinated, of course. To make you memorable, we must understand how you are forgotten.”
“It’s irrelevant to Perfection, though?”
“Perhaps. But I am increasingly discovering that cognitive science flourishes on unusual conditions, shall we say. People who have suffered brain injuries are most beloved of neuroscientists, because in their lack of function, meaning may be ascribed to the region of the brain which is damaged. If, for example, we were to find that there was something in your brain which did not work, or worked too much…”
“You think it’d be that easy? A magic switch and boom, everyone can be forgotten or remembered?”
“No,” she mused, slow and gentle. “No, I very much doubt it. But in answer to your first question, your unique condition may be of some interest in terms of unravelling how Filipa’s treatments work. They made your friend memorable…”
“My friend is dead,” I snapped, harder than I’d meant. “Parker died, and only Perfect Parker is left.”
A half nod, an acknowledgement that she didn’t have time to quibble. “But Perfect Parker is memorable, and Filipa’s treatments achieved that. That in itself is interesting. Although you are technically correct: your presence here is a distraction from the main purpose. And yet a distraction that I am utterly absorbed in.”
I waited, and found that I was holding my cutlery hard enough to hurt, bones straining against skin, muscles tight, breath held. I let it all go, all at once, and she saw it, and her eyes brightened and she exclaimed, “Phenomenal. You – yourself. Not just your condition, but you, the mind inside the memory, you are phenomenal. To have lived. To have survived. More – to have flourished! To have become who you are, to have stolen Perfection. You want to be remembered, and I have sworn to help, but you must understand that it could be the most appalling destruction of a beautiful thing, your forgettability has made you into something incredible.”
“The treatments…”
“We’ll find a way,” she added, fast, a half nod of her head at nothing much. “All this, the tests, the scans, we’ll find the part of you that is different, the part that makes people forget, and if we can de-activate it, I give you my word that we shall. That’s what you want, ultimately, isn’t it?”
“And in finding it…?”
“Yes. Of course. Yes,” she replied with a twist of her fingers through empty air. “If we can de-activate it, we can also activate it in others.”
A moment, a pause as I tried to understand. An idea, almost too terrible to name. “You… want to be forgotten?” I stammered.
She didn’t answer.
“It’s a curse,” I snapped, pushing against her silence. “It’s a fucking death sentence.”
Silence.
“If you tell me that you want what I have, then I’ll walk away tonight.”
Silence. Her fingers ran along the edge of the table, then folded, a deliberate act, into her lap. She looked up, met my eye, her lower lip uncurling from inside her mouth, a false smile. “I live alone in a place where no one ever comes. I work alone. I walk by the sea, I go to the shops and hide my face. I dodge cameras, travel by false passport, make no friends, have no need of company. My work is all that matters. I would give my life to see it done.”
“And what is your work?”
“Freedom. I think it is freedom.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, unable to meet her eyes, head aching from tequila, a night I could barely recall. “What does it mean?”
She shrugged. “I think… it is a crusade. A jihad. To struggle—”
“I know the meaning of jihad.”
“Well then. To struggle in the cause of freedom of thought. The first battle being, of course, to show that thought, in this world, at this time, is not free.”
“Is that why you’re going after Perfection?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you keep me around? Because you think… I’m free?”
Silence, a while. Then, “Yes. I think you are the only free woman I have ever met.”
I sat, shaking, and didn’t have any words.
Like a child, all I could do was get up, and walk away.
Chapter 65
Tests.
More tests.
Three weeks in and out of labs and hospitals in California.
Scans, chemicals, swabs, injections.
I tried talking to Byron, but couldn’t get anything from her. She couldn’t remember building a relationship with me, and so she couldn’t trust. So we idled along in quiet, business-like efficiency, ticking points off her list while she watched and re-watched recordings of our talks, annotated and updated observations and thoughts. Some thin impressions began to form in her mind, but they were, as she said, like memories of watching a play. She saw Romeo die and Juliet swoon, but it was not her lips the poison kissed, her heart that broke. She was a witness to events that contained her, not party.
On the fourth week we spent together, she slipped away for a few hours to
have an fMRI on her own brain, looking for long-term damage caused by my presence. I didn’t think she’d find any, and the next day she was back at the breakfast table, as calm and composed as anything. Science, I suspected, wasn’t giving her the answers she was looking for.
On the fifth week, the doctors gave me LSD.
It wasn’t called LSD, but the effects were roughly the same. They plugged me into a dozen electrodes and sat me back in a comfortable chair, and for the first time in my life, I tasted blue, and smelt the sound of Byron’s voice, and dreamed while waking of what dreams would come, and swallowed time, swallowed the past and the future both, swallowed all the oxygen from the air and was absolutely fine until I found that I was having a panic attack and couldn’t breathe, sobbing for breath, unable to stop crying, gasping, heaving, a pain in my chest which I knew was going to kill me, going to die for this, for Byron, for Perfection, until the doctor gave me something to calm me down and when I woke, Byron simply said, “We still couldn’t remember you, I’m afraid.”
I watched footage recorded of the event later. The trip had lasted, for my money, less than ten minutes, but on the tape three hours go by in which doctors, nurses and students at the clinic all enter and leave, enter and leave, and each time Byron asks, “Have you seen this patient before?” and they all shake their heads, every one of them, and exit with an apologetic smile.
“Maybe a different mechanism,” suggested Byron as she drove us back to the hotel. “Maybe something electrical.”
She snuck out early that night, while she thought I was sleeping off the day’s medicine, for another one of her backstreet meetings with contacts and servants. I wondered where she got her money from, if she was worth robbing, thought about following her, decided against it.
“Perhaps something else?” she said, the day a doctor suggested electroconvulsive therapy, but she was watching me from the corner of her eye, waiting to see how far I’d go.
Misnomers: electroshock therapy. Made famous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as punishment, patients reduced to drooling slabs. Some risk; not much. Commonly administered bilaterally, with currents somewhere in the 800 milliamp range, an ECT machine pulls less electrical juice than a PC, and carries roughly the same risks to a patient as a general anaesthetic. However, relapses occur frequently, often six months or so after initial treatment, and there are concerns as to long-term memory loss and damage to cognition that may result from what is essentially an unknown mechanism for inducing a grand mal seizure.
“Unless you want to try…?” Byron continued, softly, watching me, waiting to see where my thoughts fell.
Was it worth it? Six months of being remembered, maybe more, for the price of a bit of my memory, the ability to use a spoon? Six months of strangers being friends, of acquaintances knowing my name, six months of being loved, of being held, of being known?
It was worth it, of course, but when they showed me the room where it would happen, little more than a dentist’s studio, a chair, oxygen mask, needles, a machine, and told me the statistics – 100,000 people in the USA have this every year, nothing to be afraid of – I remembered Gracie, my baby sister, measles aged four, the seizures when her fever hit 42°, holding my hand, Force be with you always – and I ran from the room and had to stand outside in the corridor, counting the dots on the green and white speckled tiles beneath my feet, while Byron stood with one hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s okay. We’ll find another way.”
On the sixth week, they tried transcranial magnetic stimulation. The two researchers who administered it said, “Count up to ten.”
One, two, four, five, seven, eight…
“I can’t seem to say…” I said, and couldn’t find what it was I was missing.
They chuckled. “Yeah,” they exclaimed. “We know!”
There seemed no medical purpose in electromagnetically altering the part of my brain that could count to ten, but they enjoyed the exercise and I felt no pain as they ran their wand across the top of my skull, variously triggering the taste of fizzy orange juice, the memory of a concert I’d attended in Rome, the sound of the sea, the inability to recite the alphabet and at one point, a mild giggling fit that continued for a minute after they’d turned the wand off.
What they couldn’t do, it appeared, was make me memorable, and the next day when we went back they held the wand over my skull again and said, “Count up to ten!” and found it exactly as funny as it had been the day before.
At night, Byron said, “Have you considered electroconvulsive shock therapy?”
We were eating barbecued ribs, pulling meat off bone, discarding the sucked grey remnants into a big bowl between us, like Vikings at a feast.
“You asked me that yesterday,” I said.
“I’m sorry – I didn’t realise.”
“We went to the hospital.”
“No, I was meeting a— Ah, but you were there too, of course. Apologies.”
The next morning she said, “Have you considered electroconvulsive shock therapy?”
I said, “I’ve gotta pee,” and when I came back she said, “Have you considered electroconvulsive shock therapy?” and I looked first at her, then at her phone recording our conversation, and said, “Yes. But no.”
She made a note, and didn’t ask again.
The day they sat me down to discuss deep brain simulation, I realised that I had stopped listening within a matter of minutes. I smiled and nodded and stared at nothing much, and when Byron said, “Do you want to have this conversation another time?” I smiled, stood up from my chair and walked away without a word.
One day I fell asleep in the MRI chamber. Didn’t think it was possible, but it happened.
And three days after that, I dozed off while they were trying more transcranial stimulation, but that was normal, they said.
And when I woke, I had a splitting headache, which ibuprofen didn’t even dent.
Chapter 66
On the sixty-second day, she said, “I have something exciting to show you.”
She’d hired a car, an apartment too, got herself a US driver’s licence – good forgery, nice photo, adapted from a dead woman in Baltimore – and she took me to a clinic in Daly City. Straight bright streets surrounded by matching straight pastel-coloured homes. Two floors high, sloped grey roofs, same cars, same flags, same bins, same plants, same shops, a suburb built at a time when suburbs seemed like a good idea, a place for the comfortably old who couldn’t do better and the up-and-coming young who hoped to achieve more. It was an incongruous place for Byron to have set up shop, but there, between a nursery school and a motorbike-repair shop, was an unmarked single-storey white building which had once been a dentist’s clinic, and which was now the property of Hydroponic Fertilizers Ltd., Water Is Our Future, a shell company whose shell was so fragile a sea anemone could have brushed it away.
“I used to love creating companies,” mused Byron as we tramped up the path to the locked and bolted front door. “My proudest achievement was a pumpkin-pie company in Israel. Did so well I often thought I’d retire and do it for real.”
The office was shuttered, almost entirely empty, the furniture of its previous owner moved out and never replaced. A coffee-coloured stain on one wall had been crudely covered over with an ancient picture of Ronald Reagan. A burn in the carpet had been less effectively protected with a three-legged wooden chair laid casually, yet eye-drawingly, over it. If Byron cared about these cosmetic difficulties, she didn’t show it, but led me on past a pile of empty cardboard and plastic boxes, into a back room where a dentist’s chair had been set up and converted to a newer, not-at-all hydroponic purpose.
I looked at it, she looked at me, and I counted backwards from ten before saying, “Where did you get it?”
“A broker in Mexico. It works; I’m sure of that.”
A dentist’s chair, for sure, but the apparatus around it was not for pulling teeth. I circled it once, twice, three times, and concluded that it was in
every way which counted the same set-up as I had seen in Tokyo. The same machines for tinkering with your brain, the same devices for altering the way your mind worked, a mask for eyes, a sensor to lay on your tongue, earbuds and microphones, monitors and needles. In a back room in Daly City, Byron had set up her own treatments for Perfection.
I counted backwards from ten again, then stopped and said, “Isn’t stealing it a risk?”
“Huge. Potentially catastrophic.”
“You took precautions?”
“Numerous. Gauguin will be scouring North Carolina for me as we speak.”
“Will it work?”
“I have every reason to think so. The mechanical parts aren’t so complicated; the data you stole was the difficult part.”
Calm in her voice, pride as well, curiosity, waiting to see what I’d do. “Can I use it?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“We’re still at the early stages of unpicking Filipa’s programming. At this stage, the treatments we give you, even modified, risk re-writing your brain.”
“You make it sound simple.”
Her left hand rested lightly on the back of the chair; with her right she picked up the goggles hanging loose by its side, turned them over in her fingers. “Visual stimulation. Auditory. An electrode on the tongue; another in the back of your neck. Sedatives and stimulants pumped in roughly equal measure into your blood. Preliminary treatments are little more than medically enhanced hypnosis. Images of the perfect you, flashed up while pleasurable sensations are stimulated. Images of imperfection, correlated with the taste of bile; that sort of thing. Nothing extraordinary. Only on your eighth or ninth treatment do they drill a needle-sized hole in the back of your skull, and insert the electrodes. They don’t leave them in for very long; a few hours at most, and you are only conscious for part of the procedure. Deep brain stimulation; a brain pacemaker, it used to be used for Parkinson’s, chronic pain, but Filipa is more sophisticated than that. Perfection helps them map your mind, you see. Every time you use it, every purchase you make, every decision, every reward claimed and action performed, gives them a little more data for when the time comes for your treatments, so they know which part of your brain to keep, and which to burn. That is the other purpose of Perfection; that is why you need a million points before they give you treatments. Data gathering, for both marketing, and to target the results.” Her head tilted to one side, watching me for a reaction, finding none. “We only know this because of you,” she added gently. “Before you, we were guessing.”
