Her entire body trembled. Fearing she might collapse, I took her in my arms. She sobbed into my chest. “I want my son. I want my baby.” She grabbed my shirt and looked into my eyes. “What happened to him? Why am I here? Oh God . . . please God, help me . . .”
I held her while around us the indifferent crowd passed us by like time.
I understood now what the machine was. Torture . . . for those trapped inside. It made you lose your mind, each horrific memory forever fresh. How could Charlotte heal? The memories never went away. They would always be there, in this memory city, in a particular hotel room, waiting for her. The pain and anguish as immediate as the moment it happened.
Charlotte had put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. But she hadn’t died. She must have lived. She must have survived. And now she was in the machine with me. Sharing time in this space that was neither alive, nor dead. But there was still a chance for Charlotte. She still didn’t know about the hotel room. She suspected, but she didn’t know.
We had both just seen her exit the train with her son. I was sure it was the same day she was going to drown him. What had happened to her that day that could have caused such pain? That could have forced her to do something so terrible? The woman who I saw exit the train was a good person, a good mother. She was not the same woman who I saw sitting on the edge of the bed in the hotel room.
As I continued to hold Charlotte, I studied the crowd. It was a strange feeling to be so unnoticed, not warranting a moment’s attention from the thousands who passed by on the concourse. I was invisible.
And then I wasn’t.
At the far end of the station I saw a police officer staring at me. Not staring in my general direction, but staring at me. Meeting my eyes. As I watched, he slowly began moving through the crowd. He raised his radio to his mouth and spoke into it. Down here, the system’s security took many forms. This was one of them. And it had found us.
I pulled away from Charlotte. “Someone is coming for us.”
I looked quickly around the station. There was another cop in uniform. This one by the bathroom. Like the first, his eyes locked on both of us as he quickly made his way toward our location. Charlotte saw them too. “Who are they?”
“Let’s not find out.”
Together we took off at a run through the crowd, heading toward the subway entrance. I hopped a turnstile and turned and helped Charlotte over the top. Beyond us, the two cops were running hard, equipment jangling on their belts. We ran down another length of stairs onto the subway platform. A train sat waiting, doors open, the car filled with passengers.
I pulled Charlotte onto the train. The train heaved a sigh of hydraulics and the conductor advised everyone to stay clear of the closing doors. From the stairs above, one of the cops appeared. He bounded down, two stairs at a time. He raised a handgun, and without pause, he fired at us. I ducked beneath the open door. A bullet struck the window above me and the glass shattered. The crowd in the subway remained unaware, quietly reading newspapers or listening to headphones. From a crouch in the doorway, I fired back.
The sound of my pistol was incredibly loud in the small subway car, and I saw the cop go down hard. He rolled down the stairs and came to rest on the platform. We could fight back. We weren’t helpless against security. My bullets had worked against the creature in the subway, and they worked again now.
The doors slid closed and the train slowly began to roll out of the station.
I slumped back against the door. Next to me, an old man in a baggy suit turned the page of the Daily News.
“Where’s this train going?” I asked.
“South,” Charlotte said. “I think.”
The train rumbled on the tracks. The lights flickered. I checked the map. We were on the 2, headed south. We made stops. Each time more people boarded and exited and we were on our way once more. The lights flickered again.
“How could those cops see us?” Charlotte said. “I thought we were in a memory. My memory.”
“It’s system security. Like a virus detector. It knows what doesn’t belong. We’re in the memory storage facility now, and the system is trying to kick us out.”
We passed south of Houston Street. The lights flickered again. This time longer. With a shriek of metal, the train lurched on the tracks. I grabbed the rail and held on. The lights went out completely. Through the glass, I could see a whoosh of motion as another train passed us on a nearby track. The train shook violently.
The passengers began to slowly fade out until I saw we were in an empty train.
“What’s happening?” The clatter of the train had become so loud I had to yell.
“I just realized something,” Charlotte said, her knuckles white around the railing. “I never took a subway south of Canal. I won’t have any memory of this. And if there’s no memory, there’s no train.”
Around us the train began to break apart. Seats and fragments of window and advertisements flew away and vanished down the length of the tunnel. Brakes screeched and the car tore away beneath us. The rest of the train gave way and we skidded onto the track bedding.
After we gathered ourselves, we turned our lanterns back on. The beams arced across the curved tunnel wall and exposed a red metal door set into brick.
“Now what?” I asked.
“I guess we can’t keep going south on the tracks,” Charlotte said. She turned the handle on the door. “Might as well see where this goes. We’ll have to go above ground.”
“You sure about that?” I asked, feeling cautious about going through unknown doorways.
“Of course I’m not,” Charlotte said. “But I remember there was a fire on the tracks years ago, and we evacuated through here.”
Charlotte pushed open the door to reveal a narrow chute with a metal rung ladder embedded in the wall. The ladder led up.
I went first, and together we climbed until we reached a metal sewer cover. I pushed, the cover bumped up, and I slid it off. I climbed out of the opening and onto the street. I helped Charlotte out of the hole and we found ourselves standing in the middle of the avenue on a crowded New York City summer day. Traffic blurred by us. A bus passed inches from my face without stopping. We dodged taxis and cars and reached a sidewalk packed with late afternoon shoppers. I saw a smudge of blue in the crowd, and there again, was the other Charlotte. We were in her memory. No matter where we went, she would always be there.
“We’re almost there,” I said. “Can you make it?”
Charlotte nodded. “Let’s go.”
We started walking, always in the shadow of the other Charlotte, headed for the travel agency where I hoped we would have a way out. As we walked, Charlotte reached and took my hand. She kept her eyes down on the sidewalk. It was too painful to see her old self and her son. I walked for both of us, guiding us south down the sidewalk. The day was sunny. The sky, brilliant blue above us. I had forgotten how blue the sky could get. How the sun could feel on the skin. I was forgetting what it was like to live.
I wondered why my memories were so desiccated compared to those of Charlotte. I seemed to remember the places, the details and the feel of buildings, but not the surrounding humanity. I could only remember certain specific events, but not the general flood of people and moments that had filled my life.
Wanting to take her mind off the events around us, I said, “Your memories are amazing.”
“I’ve always had a good memory,” Charlotte said. “I have all this information, I don’t know, hermetically sealed in my brain. Still crisp and new.”
I looked around the world that she remembered. So filled with detail. So filled with life. I could even smell the world around me. The acrid tang of car exhaust. The metallic odor that drifted up from sewer grates. Everything that was real existed here.
One could live an entire life in this memory and never know the difference.
To stay in the memory, we followed the paths that the other Charlotte had followed in life. We could only go wher
e she had been. And as I walked with her, I noticed the world around us changed dramatically.
We crossed the street and the sky darkened suddenly. We kept walking and the trees turned to brilliant reds and oranges. Then the air grew cold and snow gathered on the ground. People around us changed. The fashion of their clothes changed. I realized that we were passing through levels of time. We would skip years, then fall back years. Pass through seasons as easily as turning pages in a book.
This was a scrapbook of memories all pieced together from the beginning of Charlotte’s life. And as we walked, we followed Charlotte. I could see her change through time. Lines appeared on her face, then vanished. Her hair grew long, then short, then long again. For a time she was pregnant. And then she wasn’t. Every so often she would appear holding hands with a man. In the moments he was there, her face was illuminated and when he was gone, there was sadness.
“Muninn Travel Agency,” Charlotte said. “That’s where we’re headed?”
“Yes.”
“Muninn and Huginn were two ravens that belonged to the Norse god Odin. Every day at dawn they would leave their god and fly all around the world, seeing everything, and then return at dinnertime bringing him all sorts of information about what was happening everywhere. Huginn was the Old Norse word for ‘thought’ and Muninn came from the word for ‘memory.’ So Muninn Travel Agency literally translates into Memory Travel Agency.”
I smiled at this unexpected information. “How much do you remember about your previous life?”
“Just what you’ve seen,” she said. “And there are certain things, feelings I guess, that I have. Deep feelings. Love.”
“That’s good.”
“Hate. Fear.”
“Oh.”
“There are memories I’ve blocked. I’ve worked to forget. Sometimes I feel terrified. And I don’t know why. It’s like I’ve just woken up from some horrible nightmare. And I can’t remember any of the details. But I’m sitting in bed in the dark still feeling terrified. And filled with this . . . I don’t know . . . deep sadness. Like something happened to me, or was going to happen. And it made me afraid and sad at the same time.”
“Could you find out what it was?” I indicated the city around us. “It looks like you lived in New York too. It must be out here somewhere.”
She looked up at the buildings along Canal Street. “Maybe. But I don’t know if I would want to find out. I think eventually the feelings will go away. I’ll forget the sadness in this world. But if I knew what caused it, I would never be able to forget that. The feelings will melt away eventually, like spring snow, but the memory of the events that caused them . . . that will be up here.” She tapped the side of her head. “For life. And maybe I don’t want that.”
“So I guess for now we’re just a couple of New Yorkers, wandering around our old haunts together.”
She smiled. “I’m sure between the two of us, there must be a few happy memories here. It can’t be all the sad stuff. We’ve both loved very deeply. And you need a lot of happy memories to fall in love. That’s the way it works. Might be we’ll run into one of the happy times. Friends. Laughter. Something normal for a change.”
“I’d like that.”
We reached the intersection of Canal Street and started heading east. When we reached Broadway we encountered the wall, an old brick barrier about fifteen feet high and topped with barbed wire. It stretched from building to building, cutting off Canal Street completely. Set in the middle of the wall was an iron door.
“I guess we ran out of memory,” I said.
“Yeah . . .” Charlotte said, running her hand over the hard surface. “I guess so. I never made it down here. Did you?”
“I don’t remember,” I said, then realizing how stupid that sounded. We both laughed. “I guess we’ll find out.” I reached out to her. “Here, take my hand.”
Charlotte’s hand in mine, I reached for the door. The knob turned in my hand and pushed forward. We passed through the doorway to the other side. We were now back in my memory, but it must have been old memories. In contrast to Charlotte’s city, teeming with details and life, my city looked abandoned. Doors falling open. Windows broken. Sometimes entire facades of buildings were gone, leaving just bombed out ruined shells. The streets became more and more uneven until finally we reached a roadblock. An entire side of a building had collapsed. Brick rubble and twisted metal blocked the entire street.
“We could try and climb over it,” Charlotte said.
I shook my head. “No. I think the memory ends here. We better find another way around. I’ve been down here before, it’s just all faded.”
“Erased or faded?”
“I don’t think we can blame the system for this one. I think these are just old memories. I forgot about these neighborhoods.”
We backtracked up Canal and found an opening onto Centre. Most of the buildings were still wrecks, but the street remained passable. We picked our way over rubble-strewn avenues until we reached Bowery. We passed a massive apartment building complex, all faded brick and overgrown with weeds, like photographs of the abandoned city around Chernobyl. The street beneath us was getting increasingly broken and rutted. I imagined that I must have passed through this way only a handful of times, maybe looked out the window of a speeding taxi, retaining only fragments of the surroundings in memory.
We reached the edge of Chinatown and witnessed a maze of narrow, winding streets and red awnings covered in Chinese lettering over hole-in-the-wall restaurants, massage parlors, and beauty salons. The buildings crowded over us, almost blocking the light above.
The entrance to Doyers Street was so narrow we almost walked past it in the warren of Chinatown. Doyers was a narrow road that wound its way out of view, surrounded by old curiosity shops and empty windows with placards. A small green sign on the corner advertised the street name. For an area I had rarely visited, the minutiae of the scene were quite sharp, and I had the sense that someone had spliced this street into the fabric of my existing memories.
The street itself was far more detailed than the rest of my Chinatown. The building looked shining and new compared to the collapsing, abandoned structures that lined the rest of the area. Even the lighting felt different. Brighter somehow.
“Something is different here,” I said. “This isn’t natural.”
“I see what you mean,” Charlotte said. “The street looks like someone just unwrapped it.”
“I don’t think this is my memory,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been down this street in my life. The only way this would be in my brain is if someone put it there.”
Cautiously, we walked between the buildings, the pavement beneath our feet smooth and unblemished. There was something welcoming about this section of the city. It felt very lived-in, different from the large, abandoned commercial blocks near Central Park. The structures here were more human in scale, with their multitude of oddly shaped doors and windows. Doyers curved sharply, and among a restaurant, marinated ducks hanging from a window, and a beauty salon lined with mirrors and barber’s chairs, a dented metal door had the words Muninn Travel Agency stenciled in red lettering across the front.
The neglected door was set back from the street and seemed to connect to an office. I peered through the dusty glass, but a tattered green velvet curtain had been drawn over the window. I surveyed the street behind me. Empty, but without the overlay of memory that seemed to haunt the rest of the streets we had passed. There was nothing for me here. It felt liberating to be in a place with no attachments. I could float free from my past and perhaps, through one of these doors, find an alternate ending to my story. A rewritten history where my wife might be waiting for me with her usual smile. The warmth of her hug. The smell of her hair. And maybe I could forget what had happened to her.
“What do we do now?” Charlotte asked.
I took a last look around. Then with one hand holding Charlotte, I reached with my other and turned the knob on the
Muninn Travel Agency door.
“Wait,” Charlotte said. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. “For luck.”
I stood surprised, unable to say anything. She smiled, and squeezed my hand. “Whatever happens, promise you won’t forget me.”
“What are you talking about?”
She let go of my hand. “I’m not going with you. I’m staying here. There’s nothing left for me out there. Here, I have my son. My memories. Maybe someday I’ll come find you. But for now, I’m staying.”
“But this isn’t real,” I said. “None of this. You’re in a machine.”
“I don’t care. Most of life out there isn’t real. It exists in memory. Everything after the moment is just memory. Gone forever. We spend most of our lives in memory. Now that’s all I have left.”
“No, no . . .” I shook my head. “I can’t accept that. Out there is real life. We can leave together. We can live.”
“Without hope, there is no life. You have your wife. You can find her. You can live. Everything that gave me hope is in here now. Once I leave this place, it will slowly fade away until I’m left with nothing. My memories are stored here.”
I felt a desperate energy inside me. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time. “I need you.”
“You know where to find me. I’m in your memory now.”
Somewhere out there, I might find my wife. Or I might not. But in here, I would always have the memories of her. Perfectly captured. Just like Charlotte and her son. And maybe that might be enough for me. If I left this place, I might find nothing.
“You have to try,” Charlotte said. “Your wife is in prison. As long as she’s in that place, she can’t know you. You need to find her and set her free. My son is dead. If he was alive and out there someplace, I would leave this city and find him.” She reached forward and hugged me. Her lips close to my ear, she said, “Good luck. And don’t forget me.” I looked at her and she was crying. “That’s a joke. Lighten the mood.”
The Memory Agent Page 29