The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora)

by Angie Smibert

  “Mom,” I cut her off. They’re all sad stories. The animal shelter. The people shelter. Whatever I have to complain about just doesn’t compare. Usually. “When did I get this ID chip behind my ear?”

  “Honey, you know how I feel about those things. But if you want one, I’m not going to stop you.” She’d moved on from compost to feeding the dogs. She doled out the kibble into six dishes and mediated a squabble between two of the puppies.

  Mom is against things. She grudgingly carries a mobile. We have a screen, but she keeps it covered up with a pretty fair-trade cotton cloth from a swap meet. She is in technology denial.

  I tossed the towel onto the dirty laundry pile and then sealed up the compost bucket she’d left open.

  “No,” I said. “I already have one, but I don’t remember getting it.”

  “Oh, thank you, hon.” Mom took the bucket by the handle and wrestled it out into the backyard, placing it next to four other buckets. No doubt it was on her list to get those buckets down to the community garden. Right after she found homes for all the dogs, worked her shift in the food pantry, clothed all the homeless in Hamilton, sent books to all the soldiers in Syria, built a new wing on the Toys‘R’Us children’s cancer ward, and generally solved world peace. “So what did you say? You got an ID chip? Well, you needed one for school, anyway, so it’s fine with me.”

  I gave up. I wasn’t on her list.

  At least it had stopped raining.

  She pecked me on the cheek as she hurried back inside. “I’ve got to get cleaned up for the spouses’ meeting. Mr. Severin found out his wife was killed in Damascus, and his son isn’t coping very well. Can you make your own dinner? I may be back late,” she called through the kitchen window. She didn’t wait for my answer.

  I wish Winter were here.

  The dogs were eating happily when I stepped back into the kitchen. I stared at the contents of the fridge. A wad of lettuce. Two shriveled carrots. A green pepper. Tofu. Four jars of mayo. A loaf of white bread. Half a can of tuna. All were either from the community garden or the food bank, where she volunteered.

  What I wouldn’t give for a cheeseburger.

  While Mom was in the shower, I grabbed the leather-bound notebook Dad had sent me for my last birthday and a pack of smokes, both of which I keep under my mattress, and went out to the backyard. I dried off the old Adirondack chair Mom had found kicked to the curb. She’d repainted it sage green, but the chair still listed to one side. I wedged it between the apple tree and the fence to keep from toppling over.

  Such is my life.

  I played a music ’casts on my mobile and stared at a blank page in my notebook. I could tell it how I felt, but I didn’t know where to begin with this one. I’d started writing some poems and lyrics earlier this year for a school project. Just bits and pieces, but I got into it.

  I flipped through my notebook and read some stuff to get me in the writing mood. I started with my most recent song (unfinished, of course):

  Money doesn’t buy you happiness

  They say.

  But I’d trade my life for yours

  Any day.

  You’ve got the perfect family

  2.3 children and a dog

  All piled into a Bradley

  Safe behind the fog (?)

  Okay, it was crap. Fog didn’t make any sense.

  I turned back a few more pages. There, I’d jotted down a snippet of poetry Meme Girl read late one night:

  … of course there’s something wrong in wanting to silence any song.

  —“A Minor Bird” by Robert Frost

  I flipped back a few more pages and came across the chorus of another unfinished song:

  We’ll remember until

  They make us forget,

  Nora.

  Whoa. Nora? Make us forget? I snapped the notebook closed.

  I did NOT remember writing those words at all.

  Fumbling with a smoke, I listened to the cicadas whir above my head. A whiff of grilled meat wafted over the fence.

  I miss Dad.

  The ’casts reminded me that the Chipster was coming out in July, and it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was unforgettable.

  Hah.

  But. Inexplicably I wanted one. And I even felt the urge to vote. For Mayor Mignon. Weird.

  The ’casts crackled, and the voice of the MemeCast trickled in like rain.

  Make sure the voices in your head are your own, she said.

  I scribbled that shit down.

  10.0

  REVENGE OF THE MONEY CATS

  WINTER

  Pink and lime green. And a Money Cat comforter with matching curtains. It was as if my parents had picked up my old bedroom—which we’d decorated when I was, I don’t know, eight—and plopped it here in this new house. Like the last three years hadn’t happened at all. At twelve, I replaced the smiling, waving Money Cats. I’d dyed the curtains and bedspread myself. Black. I was grounded for a week, but the Money Cats stayed gone. Until now.

  The closet was worse. I had school uniforms hanging in there: a navy blazer with the Tamarind Bay Day School crest on the pocket, several plaid skirts, and many, many white shirts, some button up, some golf. I could see several green and navy sweaters neatly folded on the shelf. It was all very Japanese schoolgirl.

  The hummingbirds fluttered.

  The rest of the clothes in the closet were definitely all Mom, though Dad probably picked out the Winnie-the-Pooh sweatshirt. It was never going to touch my body.

  I swiped the darkest T-shirt and plainest jeans (no sparkly pockets) to change into, grabbed the hair wax from my bag, and headed toward the shower. At least I could fix my hair. This slick bowl cut was way too glossy.

  Mom does this thing with her lips when she doesn’t like something. She did it when I walked into the kitchen. She hated the spikes, but I felt more like me.

  “Dad had to go back into work, but I took the day off to get you settled.” She caught herself doing the lip thing and forced a smile.

  Then we stared at each other with this okay-now-what look on our faces. We were strangers thrown into a house together, like some stupid reality ’cast. The house was nice. Very suburban. Everything spotless and carefully neutral. You could even smell how new it was.

  “Okay, then,” Mom said with a fake burst of energy. “Are you hungry? I can heat something up or we can go out.” She said this last part looking at my spikes, as if she hoped I wouldn’t pick that option.

  I was tempted to say yes, let’s go out. Instead, I shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Mom laughed. “My god, you are a teenager. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.”

  “I’ll go easy on you. Today.”

  “Where have the years gone?” she asked without a bit of irony.

  Tell me about it.

  Again the silence. Except the hummingbirds flittered in the distance. I shook my head.

  I slouched onto a bar stool at the kitchen counter. Mom opened a few cupboards and then stared into the depths of the fridge. After a moment, she announced, “I guess we need to go out.” She put on her forced smile again. “And we can do a little shopping.”

  I am not Mall Girl. I can barely stand going to the vintage shops with Velvet. At least the stuff she thrusts at me doesn’t have bears on it, not even to be ironic. Velvet doesn’t get irony. Thankfully.

  I should call her and Micah and let them know I’m out of the loony bin.

  The hummingbirds were closer now.

  Mom was looking at me like I was supposed to say something. Oh yeah. Shopping. Mall.

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to get all teenager on her again. Besides, I haven’t seen her in three years. Not that I remember, at least.

  We took the Skyway to the Hub, the center of the compound, where the schools, shops, and offices are. I tried to call Micah and Velvet on the way, but neither call went through. Blocked.

  Mom’s doing, I’m sure.

/>   The Sky, as most people call it, is a walkway like the one in Hong Kong: a series of multilevel, moving and stationary walkways linking the residential areas of the compound with the Hub. The Sky is actually a genius bit of engineering—marred only by the ads and stock tickers projected along the sides. Green Zone. ExxonMobilShell. TFC. Mega-Gap. Nomura.

  Mom pointed out my school and the exit I needed to take as we passed over it. She prattled on about how this school is better than the one on the other side of the Hub, which is mostly performing arts oriented. My school is more academically rigorous, she said. Translation: mathletes and pre-law. She told me about Tamarind Day’s engineering program, the students who went on to MIT, the five Rhodes Scholars, and so on. She also talked about the Bay’s nonexistent crime rate, the parks, the shopping. She was a regular tour guide.

  Finally I said, “Mom, I need coffee.” I steered her toward a Starbucks on the mezzanine level of the mall. I ordered a double espresso.

  “How long have you been drinking coffee?” she asked as we sat down at a table overlooking the Sky.

  “Years.” I took a long sip. I could feel the warm sugary goodness beginning to flow through my veins. Mom watched me closely, as if searching for something familiar to hold on to. “Tell me about Japan,” I said, trying to get a conversation going. “What was Tokyo like?”

  “Oh, it was very clean. Crowded, of course. Great shopping.” She took a sip of her tea. “We spent most of our time working, though. Developing the new product line. Testing new components. Usual stuff.”

  Could her answer be any more generic? The hummingbirds buzzed in my ear.

  “Did you do anything fun? Did you go to the museums? Mount Fuji? Sing karaoke?” I wasn’t sure why I needed to know this. I guess I wanted to be able to picture what she’d been doing for the last three years, what was more important than being here with me.

  Mom blinked at me. “I’m sure we did, but that doesn’t matter now. We’re home. Everything is okay. We can get on with our lives. Forget about the past. You need to work hard. Go to school. A good school. Work for the company.”

  It was my turn to blink at her. The hummingbirds fluttered in my head, but that little voice, the one that had told me about the hospital and Japan, was quiet.

  And it was now inside my mother’s head.

  11.0

  NOT THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

  WINTER

  Mom dragged me around to a few high-end shops at the Hub. I wasn’t into it. I kept asking her about Tokyo. And I kept getting the same robotic responses—until she became irritated and told me to drop it. Then she changed the subject back to me.

  She ended up grilling me about all the little details of my life in the last three years. How was I doing in school? Who were my friends? Did I like anybody special? I shrugged a lot.

  She wasn’t really asking the right questions.

  The next day, Mom suddenly had so much to do at the office. She asked if I minded being left on my own.

  “That’s fine,” I said. More than fine.

  But after she left, I realized there wasn’t much to do in our squeaky-clean, all-new house. I could watch ’casts or read. I flicked through a few ’casts on the big screen—news mostly. A rash of car bombings in Philly. Hamilton’s ID program will save us from Philly’s fate, some random guy said. Our mayor, Albert Mignon, chided those who hadn’t complied yet. Your procrastination may jeopardize the safety and security of your community, he said with an icy smile. The Canadians were protesting the new wall across the border. Same old crap.

  I couldn’t sit still. Never could. I needed something to do, but there was zero tinkering material in the house. No tools. No found objects. Nothing interesting to take apart. Sure, I could disassemble the fancy pasta maker or vacuum cleaner that looked like it had never been used. But I like my found objects to be more found. As in rescued from the trash, swapped for at meetups, or bartered for on the Hour Exchange.

  Micah is a good source. He lives in a salvage yard and helps the owner reclaim old houses. He’d bring me bits of rusted iron, busted clocks, smashed electronics—the stuff that couldn’t be fixed up and resold. It was the perfect shit to bang into sculptures.

  Or I’d go down by the railroad tracks to the old transportation museum scrapyard. All the cool stuff that was once in the museum downtown—rockets, trains, satellites, old cars—ended up on the scrap heap after the museum was sold to Security Home Depot, who’d turned the building into expensive, high-security lofts. Someone was always hanging around the yard making something interesting out of old train parts, ancient printers, and the odd solar panel. That’s where Micah and I met, at one of Big Steven’s welding workshops. And that guy, Roger, who taught underground networking, knew his shit so well he went white hat not too long ago.

  I needed to get out, but I was restricted to Tamarind Bay for the duration. However long that was. Until I was deemed sane enough, I guess, to be trusted in the outside world.

  So I was off to the Hub again. I checked the directory on my mobile as I rode the Sky into the Hub. Nope. There wasn’t a single junk shop or thrift store in all of Tamarind Bay. But I’d seen a craft store and a gadget place that might have something I could work with.

  The craft store was a bust. It mostly sold cheap art supplies, party balloons, and gift baskets. I did get some pliers and copper wire from the jewelry-making section, though. So not a total bust.

  The gadget store was better. It at least had programmable building blocks and replacement remotes. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but I felt better having something.

  I picked up a Bento Box from Ben Maki’s Sushi and sat out in the open-air court near the Sky platform. I shoved shrimp nigiri into my mouth as I looked up info on Tokyo on my mobile.

  Mom said they’d lived in Shibuya Ward near the Nomura headquarters. Shibuya was not only the home of the IT industry in Tokyo, the guide said, it was also the hip district for young people. Shibuya’s fashion and nightlife were famous. It’s where the Japanese schoolgirl culture started in the 1990s. I saw pictures of big-haired blonde Japanese girls wearing plaid school uniforms—too much like the ones in my closet—and tons of makeup. They almost looked like dolls. Thank goodness the look had nearly died out.

  The guide said there were dozens of museums in Tokyo, including the Matori Contemporary Art Museum near Shibuya Station. I flipped through the exhibits. I almost wished I’d gone with my folks. Last year the museum had this exhibition of robotic sculptures that looked extremely cool. Anya Reismuller was the artist. An Austrian engineer-turned-artist. She used to work at Nomura.

  From what I could tell, she was doing some fascinating things with self-replicating machines. They’re machines that can build copies of themselves out of raw materials around them. You could send one to Mars, and the machine would build copies out of ore it mined on the planet’s surface. In theory. Reismuller’s sculptures built themselves out of interesting materials, like beer cans and flip-flops. The coolest one built copies of itself—out of itself. The process kept repeating—

  “Nice hair,” said a girl with perfectly smooth, exactingly trimmed hair. She was standing in front of my table. A gaggle of equally polished girls stood by the Sky platform. Not a spiked hair or old piece of clothing in the bunch.

  I held up a finger and took a moment to finish what I was reading on my mobile.

  It wasn’t like the scene had never played out before. We had girls in my old school that made themselves feel better by running down anyone different. Velvet had taught me how to play these things. I finished the article and slid my mobile shut.

  “I’m sorry. You were saying something?” I looked up. Eye contact and confidence were key, according to Velvet.

  “Nice hair,” the girl said again with less certainty.

  I stared at her for a few seconds. I really wanted to say something like “my poor blind grandmother worked really hard on it this morning. Then she died.” But master Velvet always
said to never give them anything to latch on to. Be smooth, glassy, and hard. Book of Velvet. Chapter 23, Verse 3000.

  “Thanks,” I said as glossily as I could. “Is there anything else? No? Cool.” I didn’t wait for her reply. I went back to reading about Reismuller’s new exhibition in Singapore.

  “Freak,” the girl said as she turned to shoo her crowd toward the fro-yo shop. I could hear more whispering and giggling, but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of looking up. Act like you barely notice them. That’s what they want. Attention.

  I should call Velvet.

  “Ladies,” I heard someone say, followed by a new round of whispering and giggling.

  I snuck a peek to see Aiden passing by the girls. The leader girl stepped toward him as she threw a superior look my way. I heard another one say something to her pal about Aiden inheriting Nomura North America some day.

  “You’re looking glossy today.” He flashed a very charming, boarding school smile at the pack leader—and kept on walking toward me. Leader girl threw me an icy look.

  I tried hard not to laugh.

  Aiden flipped around the chair in front of me and straddled it backward. “Win-chan, did you tell these charming young automatons to go eff themselves?”

  I smiled.

  “Did you know that there’s a Skywalk in Tokyo, too?” I asked.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Just a little research about Tokyo. Mom and Dad were there for three years and apparently did absolutely nothing. Work, shop, sleep.”

  He scooted his chair closer so he could peer at my mobile screen. I showed him some of the cool things I’d found, like the Reismuller exhibit.