Arie nodded.
“What’s your names?” she asked. We told her.
She jerked her chin at Arie’s backpack. “Ya like books, huh?”
Arie didn’t answer.
“Guess you was real lucky I come round when I did,” she said. Then she shrugged and waddled off the way she came.
“Hey, wait,” I said. “Who are you?”
She didn’t look back. Over her shoulder she yelled, “Ruby,” and kept going.
*
I hadn’t been to the infirmary since the beginning of the year, and if there had been any way to avoid it, I wouldn’t have gone back. We knew of people who went there for a minor illness or injury but never came back out. A very nice man who’d lived across the street from us was taken into custody for misconduct and then never heard from more. We knew we had to go back at the new year to take the serum, but we’d only do that because we’d been told we would die if we didn’t, and the only reason we believed it was that we had no one else to listen to.
Cuts and bruises we could deal with on our own. But, as always, there was disease to consider. Infection, rabies—and worse. The meat of Arie’s palm was punctured and deeply lacerated. He’d wrapped it with a clean cloth when we got home, and I’d splashed it with iodine, but we couldn’t seem to completely stop the bleeding. It oozed continuously. There were ragged bite marks and a long gash on my calf, already surrounded by purple bruising. The pain radiated up into my hip and waist. Riding my bike to the Agency infirmary was agony.
We stopped the bikes on a wide empty street leading to the massive but spartan cinder block building. I traded a long look with Arie.
He shook his head slowly.
“We have to,” I said, nodding at his arm.
After chaining the bikes to a dilapidated chain link fence, we went on. The entrance lay on the far side of an empty courtyard of crumbling asphalt. Barring the entrance there stood a low wall of concrete Jersey barriers and a squad of uniformed goons. Those we called goons weren’t actual Agency personnel, but they carried batons and wore sidearms on their hips.
When Arie and I were halfway across the courtyard, one of the goons stopped us with his outstretched palm.
“Stop there,” he shouted. “Turn around, put your hands on top of your head, kneel down, and cross your ankles.”
We did so. The pain in my leg made me lightheaded as I knelt, but of course we had to do as they said. My skin went clammy. Arie was breathing rapidly, and his eyes darted frantically.
I turned to him and said, “Take it easy.”
“No talking,” shouted the goon. “Sit tight there. Don’t move.”
My knees throbbed. After what felt like ages, I heard the crunching footsteps of two goons approaching from behind. I could not see them but I knew that one trained a gun on us while the other held an electronic ID chip scanner.
“Don’t move,” one of the goons repeated as he stood over me.
I held my breath. He passed the chip scanner over the back of my neck where my ID chip was embedded, and there was a beep.
“What happened?” said the goon.
“Dogs,” I said. “Dogs attacked us.”
“Get up,” he said.
They ushered us through the courtyard, and we were admitted through a series of air washes and tightly sealed doors. I limped along. Agency personnel eyed us from behind layers of Lexan as we moved through the gauntlet. Our ID chips were scanned a few times more, and at last we were shown to an examination room. There we were joined by a technician in a tight-fitting, plastic-skinned hermetic suit.
He was afraid of us. Through the clear face screen of the h-suit, we could plainly see he was nervous. Perhaps he was new. All that blood. His hands trembled as he swabbed the blood and dirt from Arie’s palm.
Arie winced as the technician turned his hand over to close the cuts with stitches.
“I’m gonna need you to hold really still,” snapped the technician. His voice was buzzy through the mask. “This needle is very sharp.”
Soon the technician was joined by another man in an identical h-suit. He had a pen and clipboard.
“And where did you say you were when this happened?” he buzzed at me.
“By our house,” I answered. “A bunch of dogs came from out of nowhere.”
He turned to Arie. “Is that what happened?”
Arie nodded.
“Please,” the technician pleaded coldly, holding the needle away from Arie’s wound, “quit moving, or I’ll go and get someone to hold you down.” A fog had formed at his mouth on the clear face screen. Only his eyes were visible. He glared at Arie a moment. Arie nodded and was still, and the technician returned to his work.
It felt odd to be considered a threat, but I understood. Because we’d almost died. I don’t mean me and Arie in the neighborhoods, attacked by dogs. I mean all of us. The entire human race, so they said. It was hard to wrap my mind around it, to even consider that humans almost didn’t exist anymore. But that’s what we were told—that it was a pandemic, that the world’s population shrank by an unthinkable eighty percent.
Of course, I didn’t remember any of that. No one did. Because the serum that saved us also wiped away our memories.
Everyone had received the first dose. Everyone still alive when the Agency released the serum, I mean. Infected or uninfected—everyone got the shot and everyone forgot.
That was Year One.
This was all explained to us at an orientation the day after we awoke from the serum treatment, about nine months previously. I was there with a class of sixty or so others. We were all dazed, and some didn’t seem to be paying attention at all, but I wasn’t alone in finding it all impossible to believe. An entire civilization with no memories. How did we survive?
I raised my hand and asked that question.
“There are few records from that period,” answered the Agency woman from behind the face screen of her suit. “We can only imagine that it was very difficult,” she added mechanically. “We are very fortunate.”
After Year One, only those who were infected got the shot each year, and that included Arie and me. The shot saved us, supposedly kept the virus down. But we forgot everything with every shot, and every year we got the shot again. The Agency was there to remind us who we were, who we had been.
I shouldn’t say we forgot everything. Some memories stayed no matter what. I knew how to talk and walk and eat. And there weren’t many cars around, but I knew I could drive one if I ever had the chance—I even knew somehow that I could drive a manual transmission.
“Procedural memory” it’s called, the things you can do without thinking about them. I could read and write just fine. Do math.
We retained what are termed “implicit memories,” too. I knew what roses, elephants, and ice cream cones were, even if I didn’t remember ever having seen one. And that’s the main thing we were missing: explicit memories. Context, events, identities. I knew what an amusement park was, but could not place myself ever visiting one. And our identities—all gone. The Agency had to tell us each year who we were and where we belonged. Worse than that, we started over every year, and we depended on them and had to trust them. It was like waking up in a different place than where you went to bed, only to be told by some stranger that the person who fell asleep no longer existed, and that it was your job to take her place.
“Maybe we’ll remember next year.”
That’s what we said. We sometimes said it as often as “God bless you” or even “hello.” Maybe we’ll remember next year. Agency scientists, it was said, were constantly working on the serum’s formula—desperate to remove the side effect—but how could they be expected to work in our best interest? They didn’t know us. No one knew anyone. How could they possibly be more worried about us than themselves? Who could blame them for staying behind their glass walls and hermetic suits? We had nothing to offer them, nothing to offer anyone, and only a dim and blunted hope that we might survive to s
ee some kind of improvement.
We had become a race of phantoms.
CHAPTER 3
The man at the turnstile held out his hand.
He didn’t smile or nod. He just put out his open hand as though I might or might not give him something, but he didn’t really care either way. In my hand there was a ticket of some kind, so I stepped forward and gave him that. He took it and then retrieved a strip of brightly colored plastic from somewhere. He held it up. I stood looking at him.
“Wanna gimme your wrist?” he asked.
I raised my arm and with a quick motion he wrapped the band around my wrist and fastened it.
“Have fun,” he said.
The turnstile clunked as I pushed it and then I was through. The sun was going down but there were hundreds of electric bulbs strobing in the late-summer auburn light. Somewhere a calliope played a marching tune, and there was an aroma of popcorn.
I saw a ride with arms like an octopus which rotated slowly at first and then faster and then inclined until it was almost upright. There was another ride with a long fiberglass pirate ship that swung like a woozy pendulum, higher and higher, until the passengers began to squeal.
People milled in every direction beneath the galaxy of winking lights. Some of the people wandered unhurried, and others ran from place to place. I saw a young couple in a strolling embrace. Mothers with children in tow. I came to the tilt-o-whirl and in the gaps between the spinning riders I saw the blur of the faces on the opposite side, rushing past like memories of people I once knew.
I turned a corner as though I knew where I was headed and saw the ring-toss and milk-can games with their candy-striped awnings. The carnies leaned into the midway, cajoling. I ignored them and came to an open place where the tallest ride of them all rose shimmering like an immense and gaudy clock against the blushing sky.
The Ferris wheel.
Along the concrete entrance platform the line of waiting revelers extended and folded back on itself and then folded again. I stood in the line shuffling forward and watching the wheel turn. There were arrays of incandescent lights and tubes of neon along its great spokes and their sequenced flashing created patterns like spirals and the waves made by a pebble dropped in a pool.
I reached the head of the line. A girl wearing cargo shorts and a visor waved me forward and I was seated in the gondola hanging from the bottom of the ride. The girl clamped the safety bar across the bench and then stepped on a pedal in the concrete floor of the platform.
“Keep your hands inside the ride at all times,” she said without inflection. “Have fun.”
The gondola surged backward and up so that another gondola could be emptied of its passengers and reloaded. I moved backward and up. Each time the gondola swayed gently. Backward and up.
Soon I was at the top of the wheel and I could see the park glistening like an electric birthday cake. I saw the town beyond, too. There were street lamps and window lights and the headlamps of cars moving in the streets, sights not seen in the dead and dark streets of the Zones.
There were those who believed we still had memories, that they hadn’t been erased but were locked in the recesses of our minds, the key hidden but waiting, maybe even hoping to be found. That’s what Arie believed. And me, too. So, it’s no wonder we were fascinated by our own dreams. We wondered constantly whether the places and people we dreamed of were somehow significant.
Or real.
The gondola came over the top of the wheel, plunged down into the noisy park, swept backward over the platform, and ascended again. The girl in the visor worked some lever on a control board and the ride went a little faster.
As I came over the top again I turned my head, and seated with me in the gondola there was a boy of eight or nine years old.
Did our night minds awaken at sundown and go to work in the dark, reordering puzzle pieces in hopes of someday re-assembling our lives? That was the question: whether our dreams were encoded messages to decipher. Or were they only random images—the arbitrary firing of synapses without meaning?
In some ways, it didn’t matter. Because in either case, the dreams at least revealed places and faces we couldn’t recall before, and there was hope in that. And so we longed for dreams, for the hope of them. Hope was precious.
That’s why I watched the boy as the ride spun faster. He knew who I was. He grinned at me. Then he gripped the safety bar and we both watched the ground rush up at us as we fell to earth. Then backward and up again.
The wheel spun faster. Like a bicycle tire, like a fan. Everything was a blur, sickening. The carnival lights glared hotly. As the gondola arced over the top again and again, the ground rose and fell around me like the distressed breathing of a puppy or a baby.
And when I looked across the bench of the gondola again, the boy was gone. In his place sat a man who laughed as he looked at me with the lights reflected dazzlingly in his eyes
I always tried to write my dreams down. Always. But it was difficult. In that hazy space where the twin hemispheres of dream world and real world melted together, I often couldn’t tell fantasy from reality. Like the boy in the gondola. I knew who he was. Who he must be. Of course I knew. But holding on to the images in the dreams, especially the people, was like clutching handfuls of sand. The more tightly I held it, the quicker it leaked from my fingers. In the dreams I could see them clearly. The boy, the man. The lines and contours of their faces were familiar. But sometimes, before I could awake and find my journal and pen, the only thing that remained in my mind was the certainty that I’d dreamed something, somebody. Even now, as I wondered what it might take to rise and light a candle and grope around for my writing supplies, there was a blaze of light and thundering of footsteps in the hallway that wrenched me from my sleep.
*
“Power’s on! Power’s on!” Arie shouted, pounding on the wall as he stamped down the hallway.
I propped myself on my elbows and squinted at the electric light. We always left all the light switches on so that we’d know. The power might come on every day for a week, or it might not come on at all for a month. And it might stay on for a couple hours, or a whole day, or it might be just a few minutes. I rolled out of bed and followed Arie. By the time I reached him, he was tapping the side of the television impatiently, waiting for his devices to start up.
The television blinked on and displayed the input menu. Arie had cobbled together an assortment of video players and computers—devices to read virtually any data storage media in existence. He even had a VCR for the old tapes we sometimes found. Everything was connected by a tangle of cables and adapters decipherable only to Arie. He checked the connections, pressed a few buttons, and loaded a disc.
On the screen, a roomful of children with party hats appeared. I stared at the scene, at the children. The image bobbed and panned. The children laughed. A parent waved at the camera. Zoom in on the gifts stacked in front of a grinning, dark-eyed boy. He looked so happy. He had waited all year for this. Zoom out.
Arie shook his head and pressed the fast-forward button. The party continued in fast motion. Wrapping paper vanished from the gifts to reveal toys, a sweater, a basketball. A cake appeared, its candles pulsing manically. Arie pressed the button again and it went faster. The camera panned crazily as the children sang. Then the candles were extinguished and the cake was obliterated in an eye blink. A party game commenced and was concluded in a few seconds. A few seconds more and the room was empty but for a few adults, and the video was over.
Arie pressed eject button, grabbed the disc, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“Mom!” he shouted. “Get the scanners going!” He grabbed another disc from the side table, where there was a foot-high stack of discs and a litter of memory cards from cameras and phones. He set the new disc on the ejected tray, which whined in protest as he crammed it back in.
I shuffled to the stack of police scanners which sat atop the unused refrigerator, turned them on, and set each to scan. Th
e scanners beeped a few times and then the lights began to strobe in sequence, cycling from frequency to frequency, searching. One had green lights and another amber and on the top unit they were red. When they were all blinking, the effect was that of a tiny amusement park.
Next I switched on a portable multi-band radio and held the speaker to my ear. I turned the tuning dial, drifting slowly through all the FM stations, listening. When the green plastic indicator needle slid to the end of the band, I switched to AM and rotated the dial in the opposite direction. Next was UHF, then the weather band, and there were others. The radio was probably manufactured in the 1960s, but Arie said it had a very high-quality amplifier and could pick up the full spectrum of commercial broadcasts—had there been any. There were terminals on the back of the radio and to these Arie had attached a length of flat wire that ran to antennas on the roof. With my ear touching the speaker, I moved the dial as slowly as I could, like a safe-cracker, backing up if I thought I heard even the whisper of signal. It was a tedious exercise, and so far I’d never found anything apart from the signal broadcast by the Agency, which played nothing but a five-minute message about where and how to receive medical care, rations, and the life-saving serum. It looped endlessly. I could recite it by heart.
I closed my eyes, listening to the static hiss and woof in my ear.
A chorus of “Surprise!” rang out from the television.
Arie cut it off by jabbing the fast-forward button.
“Another one,” said Arie. “Did anyone care about anything besides birthdays back before?”
I felt it almost the instant he said it. Another thing that was taken from us, but something we didn’t remember. We knew what birthdays were. We knew what typically happened at birthday parties, but nobody celebrated them anymore. Our records didn’t show birthdays—only ages. The day we got our serum injections—that was everyone’s collective birthday.
I saw the muscle in Arie’s jaw tense, and I understood that he felt it, too. Longing, maybe anger, but mostly the strange sense of losing something you couldn’t remember—a feeling that any day could be your birthday and you wouldn’t even know it. Nothing distinguished one day from the next. There was nothing special, nothing to look forward to. And maybe that would be fine if you didn’t know what you were missing, but we did. We knew such things in a general sense, the same way someone can know the rules of baseball without ever playing it. We saw the people in the home movies unwrapping presents and having cake, and that made us feel like no one wanted to throw us any parties, and no one ever would. We all carried it—a longing for things and people forgotten but nevertheless missed.
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