Escape From Memory

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Mom frowned, making me feel more ignorant than ever.

  “Think about it,” she said. “If you were a military leader, wouldn’t you love to have pilots who needed to be told only once how to operate their planes? Or soldiers who could carry around complicated battle plans in their heads? Or electronics operators who never had to write down secret codes? Or—”

  “Okay” I said. “I get it.”

  Mom shook her head, as if shaking off my impatience. She pulled her hair back from her face, held it tight at the back of her head, released it.

  “I was four years old when they came to Crythe,” she finally said. She had a faraway look in her eye, as if there were a movie playing out on the opposite wall. All I saw was blank cinder blocks. “The Soviet officials came in jeeps—I’d never seen a jeep before,” she said dreamily. “They began testing us, testing us all. And we were all too stupid or too naive or too proud to play dumb. We kids begged our Aunt Memories to train us harder than ever. We were like small-town starlets, dreaming of Hollywood.”

  I couldn’t help dreading whatever she was going to say next.

  “They picked twenty-five people, mostly kids. My sister Toria was the youngest. Just six.”

  “Toria? You mean Victoriana? My my—” I couldn’t say it, couldn’t even get my lips to press together for the “m” in “mother”

  Mom tore her gaze away from the invisible scene on the back wall and focused her eyes on me.

  “Yes,” she said. “Your mother was chosen. So was your father. Alexei was eight.”

  She gave me time to let that sink in. Or maybe she was giving herself time. I glanced down briefly, and when I looked back at her she was staring at the back wall again.

  “I was so jealous,” she said. “Mama said I was too young, but I was the typical little sister—convinced that anything Toria could do, I could do too.

  “Then we found out they were taking the twenty-five away….”

  I shivered. This was scarier than the ghost stories my friends and I told at sleepovers. Mom certainly looked haunted. She sat silent for a long time. I didn’t prompt her to continue. Finally, she gave a little sigh and went on.

  “When they came back, there were only six of them. Toria and Alexei would never tell us what they’d witnessed. They were strong, strong people. They’d lost a decade of their lives—most of their childhoods—to that horrible experiment. I think they were the only ones who returned sane. The other four were older. Men. They’d been in the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, and they still believed they were fighting it. You know the Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome? I think that was what they had, only worse, because they did not know how to forget anything. They could not stop reliving the past even for a moment. And Toria and Alexei were the only ones who could help them at all.”

  I tried to imagine my real mother, sixteen years old, a teenager, like me, helping war veterans instead of gulping down Diet Cokes and crying over stupid movies. She did not seem like a real person, this Toria.

  “And then 1986 came, and it was not just the Soviet officials who came to warn us about the Chernobyl radiation,” Mom continued. “Alexei figured that out, he knew what to say … he wanted to get us away.”

  “Aun—Rona said the Rusians and the Americans cooperated, that they worked together,” I protested.

  Mom laughed.

  “Now, that’s an interesting lie,” she said. “No—we were smuggled out, everyone in our entire village. Alexei said we knew military secrets we were ready to sell, we were each of us secret weapons…. I’m not even sure who he talked to, U.N. officials with American sympathies, maybe. But he was convincing. It’s funny—a few years later the Americans would not have cared, the Cold War was over. But at that time the Americans still thought of the Soviet Union as the evil empire. They lived in fear that the Soviets would develop some all-powerful, secret weapon. So we were treated as highly valuable defectors. They helped us get land to build a new Crythe, an almost exact replica. I am not sure how Alexei strung them along. I can’t imagine him betraying anyone. I think, perhaps, in the end, the Americans were not satisfied. Eventually, they stopped coming, the men in black cars. And then I think they forgot us. We had visas, we got citizenship, but we were just footnotes in the reports that nobody bothered to read anymore because the whole world had changed.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like this in history class,” I protested.

  Mom gave me a scornful look.

  “Oh, Kira, would you? Think for a minute about the thousands of lives that have never been written about. Think about the wars that have been fought that are never mentioned in your schools because they don’t involve a single American or a single American interest—”

  “There was a war in Crythe,” I said. “The new Crythe.”

  Mom nodded.

  “Yes. The officials didn’t know about that, either.” She was staring off into the distance again, talking as if in a trance. “We could have had peace. We could have just been those weirdos up in the mountains that nobody knew much about. But in America we broke down into factions. In our old land it was easy to live simply, forgetting nothing. But here—Leonid wanted a TV Marta wanted the kind of kitchen she saw advertised in a magazine…. Then there were the extremists on the other side, those who wanted our village kept ‘pure.’ And both sides resented your parents.”

  “Why?” I asked. For the first time I felt possessive of them—Alexei and Toria—not quite Mom and Dad, but almost Mother and Father. My parents.

  Mom sighed and finally looked back at me.

  “Alexei and Toria were the only two who left the village on a regular basis, because they were going out to earn money for us. They were good with computers—their minds practically were computers. And back then a new idea with computers could make millions overnight, it seemed. You didn’t need a college degree, you just needed to be smart and determined, and they were both. They were supporting the entire village, and people hated them for it.”

  I thought about how I’d felt toward Lynne over the years, the digs disguised as jokes: “Oh, you think you’re so smart!” But Lynne was my friend. I didn’t hate her.

  “They were married by now,” Mom continued. “They had you, but they hadn’t forgotten the veterans of the Afghan war. And they weren’t ignorant of the problems the extremists were causing in the village, expecting everyone to remember everything, punishing children for forgetting anything….” Mom slowed down now, pacing her words as carefully as she’d steer a car alongside a dangerous cliff.

  “They developed something with computers, to help some people remember, to help others forget. They were far ahead of their time. And what they did helped us all. But Crythians weren’t satisfied. They wanted Alexei and Toria to—to sell their ideas. Some of the Crythians were greedy. And they found a buyer. Rona Cummins.”

  I jerked back. Everything so far had seemed like ancient history, from the Romans to my practically mythological parents. But that name—Rona Cummins—brought me back to the present. This wasn’t just long-ago turmoil Mom was describing.

  “Aunt Mem—I mean, this Rona—she said my parents disapproved of using computers in Crythe. She said that was why they were—” I couldn’t finish.

  “Rona Cummins would say anything to get what she wanted,” Mom said disgustedly. “She was just manipulating you.”

  I felt more mixed up than ever.

  “Did she want my parents to die?” I asked weakly. It was less frightening than asking a more current question: Did she want me to die?

  Mom shook her head. “She just wanted your parents’ ideas. She didn’t care how she got them. But she paid some of the more rabid Crythians to try to scare your parents into submitting…. It scared them into sending you away.”

  “With you,” I said. “And that’s what I remembered last Friday night, my real mother carrying me to you.” I was sure of this suddenly. It was such a relief not to have any more doubt
s. “You didn’t kidnap me.”

  “No,” Mom said. “But you don’t remember seeing me that night because you fell asleep in your mother’s arms. She … she couldn’t bear to say good-bye, so your father gave you to me. And then I carried you down the mountainside, and we found the car he’d hidden there….” She seemed lost in memory. I realized suddenly that that was nothing new—every time over the past thirteen years that she’d seemed far away, distant, aloof, she’d really just been remembering.

  “Why didn’t my parents run away too?” I asked. “If they knew they were going to be killed—”

  “They didn’t know for sure,” Mom said. “I think they must have had hope until the very end. I want to believe that.” She grimaced, and I remembered that Toria had been Mom’s sister. And Mom was like those Crythian war veterans, unable to leave the past behind. Mom was still grieving.

  “They thought it was not honorable to abandon their people,” Mom said. “They thought they could convince them. … Oh, Kira, there was already fighting when you and I escaped. I—I’ve read about wars, and they always seem so cut-and-dried in retrospect, so many troops lost, so much land taken, so many causes won. So neat and clean. But this war … this was people who’d known one another all their lives, shooting each other, point-blank. This was a man strangling his brother, bare-handed. This was a woman stabbing her neighbor in the back while she hung out her laundry.” Mom spoke as if she were watching it all over again, as if everything were replaying before her eyes.

  “Why?” I asked in horrified fascination.

  “Like everything else in Crythe,” Mom said, “because of memory.”

  For a second I almost felt Crythian. I knew I would never be able to forget the sight of Mom’s face just then: the pale cheeks, the flowing tears, the anguish. She was weeping now. I’d never seen her weep before. I didn’t want that image burned into my mind. I stood up stiffly and began pacing the floor, as if it might be possible to run away from everything Mom had told me. But the room was so small that I could take only five steps before I had to turn around. It was the same between the other walls—the room was practically a perfect square. I tapped on some of the cinder blocks, dug my fingernails into the mortar that held them together. But there were no weak spots.

  “It’s no use,” Mom said, looking up at me through the tears. “The walls are solid. So is the floor. And the ceiling. I already tried. We can’t escape.”

  I felt like the walls were closing in on me.

  “What do they want from us?” I asked.

  “Your parents’ secrets,” Mom said.

  “But we don’t have them” I protested. “Do we?”

  Mom just kept looking at me. Strangely.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  Mom gave her head such a slight shake, it was barely perceptible. She kept watching me. She reminded me of those few teachers I’d had over the years who didn’t keep talking when kids didn’t understand, but just waited and waited.

  I thought of drug smugglers who hid bags of cocaine in baby’s diapers, I thought of Holocaust victims who swallowed valuable jewels to keep them from the Nazis. But Mom had spirited me out of Crythe thirteen years ago. Any diapers I’d worn then were long gone; anything I’d swallowed had passed through my system within days.

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t have any secrets that came from my parents,” I said, trying to sound certain. “Can’t we just tell them that?”

  Mom’s steady gaze was driving me crazy.

  “Oh,” she said slowly, “but that’s where you’re wrong. You see, you do have the secrets. You know them.”

  Twenty-Three

  I FELT LIKE I’D BEEN ON ONE OF THOSE AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES THAT batter you from side to side, up and down, until you’re so dizzy, you can’t walk straight when it stops. Mom was supposed to be telling me the truth, correcting Rona Cummins’s lies—like plain old, reliable gravity after a wild roller coaster. But now it was Mom’s story that I couldn’t believe, Mom who sounded crazy.

  “Right,” I said, hiding behind sarcasm. “How silly of me to forget.”

  Mom didn’t answer.

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “If I knew these secrets, wouldn’t I know that I knew them?”

  Finally, Mom looked away from me. She peered down at her hands and spoke so softly that I had to move close to hear.

  “What your parents did was like building a system to replicate memory on a computer. But it was human memory they could copy, not digital. I—I didn’t understand it. I was just the stupid younger sister, tagging along, asking dumb questions.” Mom sounded like she was going to cry again, but she swallowed hard and got her voice under control. “Once they linked a computer system and a human mind, they could pick and choose, enhance some memories, delete others. But Toria said they would never permanently delete a memory. They would just store it on a computer and block it out of the mind.”

  “So the war veterans didn’t remember the war” I said.

  “Not on an everyday basis,” Mom said. “If they wanted to recall it, they’d have to go to the computer.”

  Mom’s spooky voice was scaring me more than I wanted to admit. And what she was telling me was just too freaky.

  “Toria and Alexei had lots of ethical concerns about their inventions. They wondered if it was right to give some people virtually unlimited capacities for memory. And they worried about people being forced to forget memories they wanted to keep,” Mom said. “They were terrified of what Rona Cummins kept calling ‘commercial applications.’”

  “What does she want to do? Sell this stuff at the grocery?”

  Mom shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure. But in the wrong hands … What if the British forced the Irish to forget their years of strife? What if the Israelis made the Palestinians forget that they have any claim to the Holy Land? Or, conversely, what if the Palestinians gave the Israelis the same kind of amnesia?”

  “Hey, maybe everyone would stop fighting,” I said.

  “It’s not that easy,” Mom said. “All those people would lose their identity. I think they’d fight more.”

  I frowned, my head spinning. I didn’t want to think about all the problems my parents’ inventions could unleash on the world.

  “Mom, honest,” I said, “I don’t know anything about this stuff. Remember? I barely squeaked by with a B minus in computer class last year. And that was because Lynne helped me.”

  Mom was back to giving me her earnest gaze. She’d looked me straight in the eye more in the past fifteen minutes than she had in the previous thirteen years.

  “Before I took you from Crythe,” she said slowly “your parents implanted what they called a ‘memory chip’ in your brain. It held copies of both of their memories. They wanted you to be able to understand, when you were older…. They hypnotized you so you’d have no access to the memories until then. You only need to be hypnotized and told to seek out those memories, and then you’ll know everything.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to accept what she was telling me. Automatically, I reached up and touched my scalp, my fingers searching through my hair. I didn’t know what I was looking for. A scar? A USB port?

  Mom put her hand over mine, stopping me.

  “You can’t feel it now,” she said. “It’s all inside, embedded in your brain. Everything external healed over a long time ago.”

  Mom was looking at me kindly—even lovingly—but she made me feel like a freak, some sort of cyber-monster my parents had cobbled together.

  “When were you planning on telling me all this?” I asked angrily.

  “In the beginning I wasn’t sure. When you were a toddler, I thought fifteen, sixteen, seventeen was old enough. I thought I’d recognize the right time when it came. I didn’t want to keep the secret all by myself forever. I wanted … company. But then we put down roots in Willistown. We weren’t Crythian anymore. You were like all the other kids. These last few years I was beginning to think … never. You didn’t ever nee
d to know anything. What good would those memories do you?”

  I was torn between fury and relief. Mom was right. I hadn’t even known those memories were in my head, and already they’d caused me a world of trouble. And yet—I had longed to know more about my father, about where I’d come from. A lot about Mom and me that I’d never understood was beginning to make sense now. I wanted everything to make sense.

  “No wonder you were so upset about my friends hypnotizing me,” I muttered. I remembered my mother’s words on Saturday: “So it will happen.” She’d meant that I would remember everything after all. I had to tell her how wrong she was. “But they didn’t make me remember any of my parents’ memories. Just my own.”

  Already I was racking my brain, searching the dark recesses of my mind for some hint of a memory that wasn’t entirely mine. But there was nothing there, nothing I hadn’t experienced or seen or heard or read or dreamed up all by myself.

  Mom could tell what I was doing.

  “Don’t try to remember,” she said. “You can’t unless you’re hypnotized. And it’s too dangerous. If they even suspect you have the secrets—”

  “The Crythians don’t know?” I said. “Rona doesn’t?”

  Mom shook her head.

  “No, thank God,” she said. “They never would have even known where we were if I hadn’t tried to find out about them. After you were asking me all those questions, I got curious. I was afraid all your memories might, um, surface, and I wanted to know how things stood back in Crythe. Just in case. I took a leave of absence from the library. I was going to be Sophia Landon, ace detective.”

  “You were going to come back here?” I asked. “To spy?”

  “Nooo, probably not,” Mom said slowly. “I didn’t want to go anywhere unless I had to. I just wanted … time to think.”

  Yep, that’s Mom. She’d take a month off work just for time to think.

  She kept talking.

  “I did a few computer searches at the library. I thought I was discreet, but I guess I’m too much of an amateur,” She looked around wildly, as if remembering all over again that her mistakes had led us to this horrible concrete cell. “I might as well have sent out flares,” she said bitterly.