by James Renner
They drove to a Wendy’s and ate inside the car. The air grew stale and salty with their meaty breath.
“Tell me about this island,” Jack asked, halfway through his buffalo chicken sandwich.
“It’s a place where all the people who chose to remember went to live. The people who were against the Great Forgetting. My dad said there weren’t many. A few thousand. They didn’t want to forget like everybody else. So they were given Mu, the island, and told to never come off again.”
“Wait. Your island, it’s the lost continent of Mu?”
“You couldn’t have heard of it.”
“I have,” said Jack. “Mu is mentioned frequently in early historical writing. It’s an old story. Supposedly Mu was this small continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There was this archaeologist, Augustus Le Plongeon, an expert on Mayan culture. Most of what we know about the Mayans can be attributed to his expeditions to South America in the late nineteenth century. He was sure that the Mayans had come from this island of Mu. Not only that, but Le Plongeon said ancient Egypt was founded by inhabitants of Mu after a mass exodus from the island six thousand years ago. Le Plongeon claimed Mu was where humanity began.”
“Well, you’ll get to see it, Jack. How about that?”
“Why is it so important we go there?”
Cole combed his fingers through his hair. He liked Jack, he did. He reminded him of his favorite teacher at Pencey. But they should be three hundred miles from here by now. They were wasting time. “Because,” said Cole, “the people on Mu don’t know that someone has hacked into the machine we used for the Great Forgetting.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Around the time I was checked into Haven, someone began resetting the calendar again. A day here, a month there. Deleted. Gone. It always happened after national tragedies. The bombings in Decatur. Sarin gas in the D.C. subway. Everything was reset by the EAS broadcasts and the attacks were deleted from memory, forgotten. Someone has been altering the history of current events. The people on Mu need to know someone is playing with the old equipment. The machine was only supposed to be used once. Used once and then maintained until all the artifacts were collected. Tony went there to tell them. To get them to help him take down HAARP maybe. Stop whoever is resetting the calendar all the time.”
“Who is it? Who’s hitting the reset button?”
“I don’t know,” said Cole. “It’s fucking scary when you think about it. I mean, what’s their motivation? What’s their agenda?”
“This is what I’m getting at,” said Jack. “We don’t really know what’s going on, so how could we know we’re even on the right side? Before I go running into some situation on Mu, if such a place exists, I want to know what we’re dealing with. I want to know what the hell this is all about. Your dad must have known.”
“I’m sure he did,” said Cole. And that’s why he’s dead, he thought.
“And the other Collectors know, too.”
“Yes. Probably. Sure.”
“And you can take me to their office?”
“Bad idea,” said Cole. “There’s Hounds there, too, man, not just Collectors.”
“But the Collectors have to come in and out like everyone else.”
Cole sighed. “You want to go to Manhattan,” he said. “Walk right into their headquarters?”
“I want to kidnap one of the Twelve Angry Men.”
For a moment nobody said anything. Then the Captain leaned forward, the leather seat snapping loudly beneath him. “Can someone please explain to me what the Christ is going on?” he said. “For a while I thought you guys were talking about some Star Trek episode or some nerd bullshit. What the fuck is the Great Forgetting?”
As Jack began the delicate process of explaining everything, Cole curled up in the passenger seat, his head humming with a blood-sugar doziness. Sometimes the boy felt like he was a hundred years old when he considered everything that had happened to him since the day he’d learned what his father really did for a living. That memory felt so old, Manhattan so far away, like it had happened in some book he’d read in grammar school.
* * *
It was supposed to be a nice surprise.
Instead of staying the last night at Pencey before Christmas break, Cole had folded his clothes into his Nike duffel bag and taken the 11:00 a.m. train into the city. He’d gotten the idea to show up at his father’s office. Then they could go to that theater in Battery Park and have lunch at Suspenders. They could talk about what books they were reading and where they would go on vacation.
When Cole arrived at Penn Station he hopped the C to Church Street, stepping into the brutal cold whipping through the skyscraper canyons just before three-thirty. Dressed in jeans and a Pencey sweatshirt, Cole hurried to his father’s office.
New York in winter always left Cole feeling uneasy. The city was too sterile, all those wonderful and brutal summer smells lost in the chill air. And every sound sounded strange, metallic. A voice could carry for blocks if the wind was right. It felt like a dying metropolis, like a great capital about to fall, its citizens fleeing to better places, forgetting to take him along.
A hurricane of hot air ruffled his long bangs as he pushed through the revolving glass doors of the skyscraper where his father worked. The grand lobby was granite-tiled and reflected the bright sun that fell through thin cathedral windows. He followed a bronze path toward a polished directory beside a bank of elevators. There were so many floors that you had to take three elevators to reach the top. His dad worked for a company called Nu-Day Trading, that company with the aspen leaf logo. He searched the directory, over a hundred businesses listed alphabetically, but there was no “Nu-Day Trading.” It was possible Nu-Day was one of those “subsidiaries,” a company within a larger company, like those nesting dolls Cole’s nanny, Tish, had given his mother.
Cole parked himself on a bench by a wall of windows and considered what to do next. They didn’t allow cell phones at Pencey, so he had no means to call his father and didn’t know his office number anyway. He supposed he could use a pay phone to call Tish. She would have his father’s work number. But that would ruin the surprise. As he thought over this conundrum, he spotted his father’s hat over a stream of people making for the elevators. His dad wore one of those old reporter’s hats in the winter, a gray one that looked like something from a Turner Classic Movies movie. Cole scrambled after him, folding himself into the lift. There were at least twenty people packed into their car. The elevator rose smoothly. They were in the one that terminated at the forty-fourth floor.
Peeking over the shoulder of a bearded man who smelled like burned chicken, Cole spied his father up front, by the buttons, the brim of his hat tilted down as he read over a quarter-fold newspaper. Cole slipped into the opposite corner. He hoped his dad would squeeze out somewhere and he could follow, unseen. It was a great hunt and he would follow his quarry to its den before springing the surprise! He watched the lights slowly dim on the great board of buttons and noted, with some curiosity, that there was no button for the thirteenth floor. Just an empty space on the stainless steel there.
People—some people, anyway—said he looked like his father, and Cole thought that was just fine. His dad had this chiseled look, like one of those big goddamn faces from a spaghetti western. The kind of face they don’t make anymore.
There were still seven other people in the elevator when they reached the forty-fourth floor. When the doors opened, everyone stepped off. Everyone except for his father. Cole froze at the back of the elevator. Something in the hardness of his father’s shoulders told him this had not been a welcome surprise. He was suddenly afraid. The doors closed.
His father pushed the red button that held the elevator in place. Then he turned his head and looked at his son. “What are you doing here, Cole?” he asked.
“It was a surprise,” he whispered.
His father’s eyes moved, scanning the elevator, thinking. He look
ed to the camera in the corner of the car, then back at the boy. He stepped closer to his son. “I have something to do,” he whispered. “It’s going to take some time. You can wait in my office, but you can’t make a sound. Okay? Not a peep. Then we can go.”
Cole nodded.
His father grimaced as if he’d tasted something sour and then turned back to the panel of buttons. He pulled the STOP knob and Cole watched as he reached into his pocket and brought out a small round object. It was a button! The thirteen button. His father placed it in the empty space where it belonged and then he pushed it. The button lit up from within.
“What…,” he started to ask.
“Shh,” his father said. “Pretend you didn’t see that. I’ll explain later.”
The elevator shuddered and then began to drift down again. It stopped at the thirteenth floor, and when the doors opened Cole’s father collected the button and disappeared it back in his pocket. Then he put a hand on his son’s back and ushered him out of the elevator.
The thirteenth floor was dark. The overheads were turned off and the only light was the copper sun through the narrow windows along the perimeter. Rows of empty cubicles, chairs stacked on top of desks, wrapped in plastic. Long forests of servers along the back wall.
“Over here,” his father said, pushing Cole to the right, down a short hall and into an office that looked uptown at the Chrysler Building. The decor was sparse, but he could tell it was his father’s—there was a picture of his mother on the windowsill. Cole threw his duffel bag on the leather couch against the back wall.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” he said.
His father brought a finger to his lips. “No more talking. Sit quietly. No games. Don’t use the phone. Read something. I mean it. Not a sound.”
“What is this place?” Cole asked.
“Give me twenty minutes,” he said. Then his father was leaving. He locked the door from the inside on his way out.
For the first twenty minutes, Cole paced around the room, which was not really that large. He picked over the knickknacks on the bookshelves. For a while, he regarded a strange postcard from a city he’d never heard of. Cahokia. Wherever that was. On one of the bookshelves he found a misprinted novel. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Edgar Allan Poe. He’d heard once that mislabeled books were collectors’ items.
After an hour, he went in search of his father.
When he opened the door, he heard voices, muffled, coming from the other end of the floor, beyond the expanse of empty cubicles. He walked that way, quieting his footfalls. Beyond a kitchenette, he came upon a carpeted passage. Cole felt uneasy, like he was trespassing.
Around a corner he found a bright glass room. On the other side of the glass was a large desk. A bald, dark-skinned man in a Hawaiian shirt sat there, looking like death. Standing behind him was a man in a charcoal suit and a Panama hat, and beside this man was Cole’s father, who had taken off his fedora and hung it on a hook on the wall. His father had something in his hands. It looked like a small radar dish attached to a TV remote. Wires snaked from this device and attached to electrodes on his father’s forehead.
“You’re a long way from Mu, amigo,” said the man in the Panama hat, his voice an octave too high and rough, like his windpipe had been stepped on. “Why are you in New York?”
The man in the Hawaiian shirt was crying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he said. “You have the wrong man. I don’t know anything about this ‘Moo.’”
His father pointed the dish at the man in the chair. He adjusted a dial, then looked up at the man in the Panama hat. “He’s lying,” his father said. Cole had never heard him sound so stern. “He’s thinking about the beaches on Mu. And those birds that live there. He’s been to the island.”
The man in the Hawaiian shirt sobbed loudly. Then the man in the Panama hat slapped him right in this mouth. Smack! The man screamed. Cole cringed and pushed up against a wall in the shadowed hallway.
“What are you doing in New York?” the man in the Panama hat shouted.
“I’m sorry!” the man in the chair yelped. “I just wanted to see the city again. A vacation. That’s all!”
Cole’s father shook his head. “Lying,” he said. “He’s thinking about wires and a pipe. He’s thinking about a car bomb. But he couldn’t get the fertilizer.”
“Don’t! Do not … don’t make me forget. Please! I have a family.”
“Zaharie Shah, you have been found guilty of treason and sentenced to personality modification,” said his father.
“Please,” the man cried. “Don’t change my memories! Don’t make me a pedophile. Don’t make me a bad man. I was only trying to do what was right.”
“Stop crying,” Cole’s father said. “All we want are your memories of Mu. You can still be a pilot. We’ll put you someplace nice.”
The man in the Panama hat stepped into an alcove in the corner. It sounded like he was pouring a glass of water. In fact, that’s exactly what he was doing. Cole saw it now. A tall glass of water. He set it in front of the man in the funny shirt.
“Drink,” said the man in the Panama hat.
With shaking hands, the man in the chair took the glass and brought it to his lips. The worst seemed to be over, because his father relaxed and leaned against the wall. When he did, his hands swiveled in such a way that the little radar dish pointed down the hall, where Cole cowered, thinking, Dad, what the fuck? What the fuck is this? Who are you? I don’t know you. Who are you?
His father’s eyes snapped to him. He looked through the glass right at his son, then pretended to focus on the man in the chair, who was, by now, halfway through his glass of water. “Scopes,” his father said to the man in the Panama hat, “I have to step outside.”
Cole’s father pulled the electrodes off his forehead, set the instrument on the desk, grabbed his hat, and stepped out of the glass room.
Cole thought about running. He knew he was in trouble. But he was frozen to the floor; his feet refused to budge.
His father snatched him by the collar and dragged him around a corner. “Cole,” he whispered. “Goddamn it. I told you to stay put.”
And he couldn’t help it. He was in the seventh grade now, and far enough into Pencey’s military regimen that he had backbone, real backbone, but he couldn’t help it. The tears came. His chest heaved in hitches.
But his father was not mad. He pulled Cole’s head against his suit jacket. Cole could smell his cologne, leather and clove. “Shh,” he said. “Shh. Hey. Not your fault. Not your fault.” His father pushed him toward the elevator.
Cole sniffed away the tears and watched his father dig into a pocket and come out with a rectangular fob that he stuck into a catch on the wall. The elevator doors opened and they stepped inside. The doors closed and the elevator started down.
His father scratched his forehead where the electrodes had left little red sucker marks. He was thinking. Thinking hard. “Man oh man, buddy.”
“What … was that?” Cole asked.
“Shh. Not here. Let’s get across the street.”
Putting a hand on Cole’s back, his father led him through the lobby, out the revolving doors, and across the windy street to the hotel on the other side, a plush red-carpeted hideaway for visiting venture capitalists. With a nod to the doorman, his father ushered Cole inside and then to the left, down a hall to a men’s room. His father checked beneath the stalls for feet and, finding none, returned to the door and turned the latch. He leaned against the sink and brought his hands to his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” said Cole.
His father shook his head. “I should have sent you out. I was trying to hurry. My fault. It’s my fault.”
Cole stared at him, not sure what to say.
“Shit, kid. Where do I begin?” He reached into his suit pocket and brought out a toothpick, which he placed in his mouth. It had been this way since he’d given up smoking.
“You read my mind in there, didn
’t you?”
His teased the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “Cole, even your mother doesn’t know what I do. It’s safer that way.”
“What do you do?”
“Well, I’m thinking of telling you. The truth. I got no one to talk to about it. No one. And that does things to a man. Having a big part of him he can’t share with anyone, you know?”
Cole nodded, but he wasn’t sure he did know.
“But listen, kiddo. And I’m dead serious. You cannot tell what I’m about to tell you to anyone. A grown-up secret, right? You’ve got your kid secrets where some friend tells you what girl he likes and that’s a secret you can tell to a couple other friends because it’s not such a big-deal secret, okay? But this is a serious secret. There are times you can’t even think about this secret, that’s how secret it is. Understand?”
“Yes,” said Cole.
“Cole, everything in your history books is a lie.”
* * *
Jack’s old man didn’t need the seven-point gradient to accept the general idea of the Great Forgetting. Such revelations can be accepted quickly when there is a significant degree of trust between the storyteller and his audience, when it’s, say, between a father and son.
“You understand what this means?” said the Captain. “Everyone in Congress, the Supreme Court, the president. It’s a puppet government. The only person with any power is whoever’s resetting people’s memories. If you ask me, it’s a Democrat. Only a liberal would have the gall to rewrite history and pretend he’s doing everyone a favor.”
Just before they crossed into Franklin Mills, Jack made a brief call, speaking in whispers. “You think they’re tracking our cell phones?” he asked Cole when he finished.
“Maybe not the police, but the Hounds could be,” he said. “Get rid of it.”
Jack tossed the phone outside and Cole turned to watch it shatter on the highway like a small red bomb.
“So where are we going?” he asked.
“Claytor Lake,” said Jack.