The Sudden Appearance of Hope

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.