The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 57

I’ve only once attended a Forgetting.

It was 1989, in a private room of St Nicolas’ Hospital, Chicago. I was seventy years old and doing all right for myself, I felt. I had only received the diagnosis of multiple myeloma a few months ago, which was surprisingly late in my life cycle, and my enthusiasm in my mid-sixties for how little I appeared to be dying a slow and inconvenient death had led to me taking better care of my body than I usually did. I was even a member of a tennis club, something I’d never been in all my lives gone before, and I taught mathematics at a school in the mountains of Morocco for three months of every year, perhaps in an attempt to enjoy the company of the children that I could never call my own.

My visit to this eminently polite room in this eminently polite hospital on the edge of a more polite Chicago suburb, where the American flag flew proud and fresh flowers were put at the end of every patient’s bed, every day, without fail, was not on my own account. I had been summoned, and the woman who had summoned me was dying.

Akinleye.

I hadn’t seen her since that night in Hong Kong when her maid danced out across the water and she had fled before the sun rose.

They had me put on a sterile robe, and wash my hands in alcohol before going into her room, but the measure was rather half-hearted. The damage had already been done. How a woman with so few white blood cells left in her body was still alive bewildered me, and stepping through the door into the room where she would soon be deceased, I could see how obviously, how clearly, death approached.

Her hair had fallen out, leaving a pocked skull of crude bones protruding up like mismatched tectonic plates. I hadn’t ever seen her without any hair before, but now I realised how egg-shaped her skull truly was. To say her eyes had sunk into her sockets would be a lie, rather it was that every ounce of flesh, every line of softness in her features had been eroded away, leaving no more than a skull thinly coated in muscle and protruding remnants of nose, ear, lip, eye dangling off it like baubles off a withered Christmas tree. She was physically younger than I, but in that place, at that time, I was the sprightly infant, she the ancient one, dying alone.

“Harry,” she wheezed, and it didn’t take a doctor’s training to notice the crackle in her voice, the holes in her breath. “Took your time.” I pulled up the empty chair by her bed, sat down carefully, bones creaking a little despite my exercises. “You look good,” she added. “Old age suits you.”

I grunted in reply, the only sound I felt was really apt. “How are you, Akinleye? They wouldn’t tell me much outside.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “they don’t know what to say. It’s a race as to what will kill me off first. My immune system, you know. And before you tell me that AIDS is a lifestyle disease, I think you should know that you’re an idiot.”

“I wasn’t going to say—”

“The others look at me, you know, as if I was evil. As if having this–” she may have wanted to gesture, but the movement was little more than a twitch at the end of her fingertips “–is somehow a result of being morally bankrupt. Instead of the fucking cheap condom splitting.”

“You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“Am I? Maybe I am. You’re all right, Harry, always have been. Stodgy old fart but all right.”

“How long have you got?” I asked.

“My money’s on the pneumonia getting me–couple of days, maybe? A week if I’m unlucky.”

“I’ll stay. I’m booked into a hotel down the road…”

“Fuck’s sake, Harry, I don’t want your pity. It’s just dying!”

“Then why did you call me?”

She spoke fast and flatly, words that she had already prepared. “I want to forget.”

“Forget? Forget what?”

“All of it. Everything.”

“I don’t—”

“Harry, don’t be obtuse. You do it sometimes to put people at ease, but I find it patronising and annoying. You know exactly what I mean. You try so hard to blend in, I find it frankly intrusive. Why do you do that?”

“Did you ask me here to tell me that?”

“No,” she replied, shuffling her weight a little in the bed. “Although now you’re here, I may as well inform you that this ridiculous notion you have that if people find you pleasant, you’ll have a pleasant time in return is stupid and naïve. For fuck’s sake, Harry, what did the world do to you to make you so… blank?”

“I can go…”

“Stay. I need you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re so obliging,” she replied with a sigh. “Because you’re so blank. I need that now. I need to forget.”

I leaned forward in my seat, fingertips steepling together. “Would you like someone to talk you out of it?” I said at last.

“Absolutely not.”

“Nevertheless, I feel a certain obligation to try.”

“For God’s sake, as if you could say anything to me I haven’t already said to myself.”

I put my head on one side, flicked at the seam of my hospital robe, ran my nails down either side of the line, tightening it to a ridge along my sleeve. Then, “I told my wife.”

“Which one?”

“My first wife. The first woman I married. Jenny. She was linear and I was not, and I told her, and she left me. And a man came, and he wanted to know the future, and he wasn’t very polite when I said no, and I wanted to die, the true death, the blackness that stops the dark. That’s why, in answer to your question. Why I… go along with things. Because nothing else I’ve done seems to work.”

She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling it beneath her teeth. Then, “Silly man. As if anyone else has got the right idea.”

The Forgetting. It merits, I believe, a definite article in front of the name, for it is a kind of death. I told Akinleye all the things which she already knew in an attempt to dissuade her. A death of the mind, for us, exceeds a death of the body. There would be pain. There would be fear. And even if she did not feel the loss of knowledge, of mind, of soul which the Forgetting brings, even if she did not regret its absence, having no recollection of what was gone, we who knew her, who were her friends, would be bitterly sorrowful to see her go, though her body lived on. I did not add the last part of my argument, that to forget was to run away. To abscond from the responsibility of the things she’d done and who she’d been. I did not think the notion would hold much sway.

To which she said, “Harry, you’re a nice man trying to do your best here, but you and I both know I have seen and done such things as I would not live with any more. I have shut down my heart, cut off what you so charmingly call my soul, because I find that I cannot live with either of them. Do this for me, Harry, and maybe I can have them back again.”

I didn’t push the argument any further. My heart wasn’t in it.

The following morning I went to the Chicago Cronus Club to collect what I needed, and I left a letter to be distributed to the other Clubs informing them that Akinleye would no longer remember who and what we were, and in her new, innocent state, we should watch over her, and only interfere once she had need of our help.

The technology of 1987 was only a little beyond that which Vincent used to wipe my mind. He had the advantage of some foreknowledge; the Cronus Club had the advantage of plenty. We may not tamper much in temporal events, but when it comes to matters of our own survival, the Clubs of the future share their knowledge with the Clubs of the past. I have even heard rumours of a steam-powered device deployed in the 1870s to aid with the Forgetting of its maker, though I have no proof to corroborate this claim, nor probably ever shall have.

Our device was a mixture of chemical and electrical, nodes targeting some very specific portions of the brain. Unlike Vincent’s, our device did not require the mind to be conscious for the moment, and as I administered the final sedative into Akinleye’s bloodstream, it felt like a kind of murder.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said. “In a few lives, when I’ve settled down a bit, come visit me, OK?”

I promised that I would, but she had already closed her eyes.

The process only took a few seconds after that. I stayed with her when it was done, monitoring her vitals, sitting by the bedside. She’d been right–the pneumonia was going to win the battle of diseases trying to kill her off. Under other circumstances, I would have simply let her die, but the Forgetting had one other, vital step, essential to seeing if it was complete. It happened three nights after the initial shock had been delivered, at two thirty in the morning. I woke to the sound of a voice crying out. It took me a while to recognise the language–Ewe, a dialect I hadn’t heard spoken for centuries. My knowledge of Ewe was middling at best, but I had enough to reach out and take Akinleye’s hand and whisper, “Peace. You’re safe.”

If she understood my words, she showed no sign but recoiled at the sight of me and called out again in Ewe for her parents, for her family, for someone to help her. She didn’t understand what was happening, looked down at her body and shuddered with pain. Mother, father, God were all begged for assistance.

“I am Harry,” I said. “Do you know me?”

“I do not know you!” she wheezed. “Help me! What is happening?”

“You’re in hospital. You’re ill.” I wished my knowledge of the language was better than it was, for the only way I could think of to phrase it was “dying”.

“Who am I?”

“You’ll find out.”

“I’m scared!”

“I know,” I murmured. “That’s how you know it worked.”

I put her back to sleep before she could ask anything more. As a child, born again, she might perhaps remember this encounter, and consider it a dream, but there was no need to give her anything more material than was absolutely necessary. When the nurses came in the next morning to change Akinleye’s sheets, she was dead and I was gone.