The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  “I’m not a hunchback, no,” the Maestro said. The strange man watched them eat. Jack noted how pale his skin was, whiter than an albino, he thought. Nearly translucent.

  “So what’s wrong with you?” asked Nils, with open curiosity.

  The Captain shook his head.

  The Maestro laughed. “It’s all right. I like a man who isn’t afraid to ask questions. And it’s a story I rather like telling. But first things first. There’s something I want to show you when you’re done with the pie, an artifact from before the Great Forgetting that might explain a lot.”

  “We have to get Sam,” said Jack, setting his plate in the sink and checking his watch, Tony’s old watch, its tribute to him forever engraved on the back.

  “Sam’s freedom is Sam’s to earn,” the Maestro said with an unnerving finality. “The story of her life has brought her to where she is and it has given her the means of escape. Faith is her lesson. Let’s hope you’ve taught her how to trust people, Jack, because so much depends upon her next move.”

  “I can’t just leave her there,” said Jack.

  “It’s not your choice,” the Maestro replied. “The door to the Underground is shut to you forever.”

  “So we’re prisoners?”

  The Maestro laughed. “You can leave if you want, but not that way. You can leave through the west exit, which will take you to Alaska and the end of your misadventures.”

  “Not without Sam.”

  “Then you must wait here and see how her story plays out.”

  Jack started to say something else, but his father placed a hand on his arm. “Shut up, son,” he said. “We’re in enemy territory. No offense.” The Maestro shrugged. “So take some time and learn a thing or two about your opponent before you start dreaming up ways to rescue your girlfriend.”

  Jack nodded.

  “Follow us,” the Maestro said. He led them down a hall and into a library. Each wall was lined with bookcases that reached to the twelve-foot-high ceiling. A large globe rested on a stand in the corner. Several long leather sofas faced a blank wall. On the ceiling was a cracked fresco depicting some fierce battle amid a cityscape aglow with fire. A general on horseback led a charge against twenty German panzers, waving an American flag beset with sixty stars. The Maestro motioned to the sofas and then walked to the front and pulled down a white screen.

  “Are we watching a movie?” asked Nils.

  “A newsreel, actually,” the Maestro said. He pushed a button on the wall and the room went dark. So dark, Jack couldn’t see his nose. He pictured the Maestro baring hidden fangs and leaping at them in the dark. He felt like the stupid trick-or-treater who accepted the weird man’s invitation to come inside.

  Then the projector clicked on and he could see the Maestro in the glow, looking on.

  Trumpets belted out a patriotic tune. A title card read An Official United States Civil Defense Film. The image jumped out of the frame and then settled as it spun through the sixteen-millimeter projector in the wall behind them. The Great Forgetting. Produced by Aspen Films. Copyright 2043.

  Then: an image of a sweeping plain, blackened to carbon. “This is all that remains of DeCapua, Indiana,” the narrator said in a grave voice, the sound of open wind behind him. “Sand and glass. The dead tree gives no shelter. What was once a capital city is now a handful of dust. Like Cahokia, Miakoda, and St. Pease, they—and all who lived there—are gone, forever.” Grainy pictures of a teeming metropolis where people walked to work under the shadow of a giant glass pyramid. Another cityscape showed granite buildings linked by metal catwalks. “A billion dead. All of humankind suffered. None more so than the Jewish peoples.”

  Black-and-white film of naked, emaciated women standing in front of a long, low building. “At first they called it the Final Solution. An experiment in evil.” A series of pictures: Mengele in SS uniform looking like some gentle math teacher, his bushy black hair combed, slick; Mengele pulling on a plastic glove in front of a gurney where a dead body lay, half covered; Mengele injecting medication into the arm of a man wearing a jacket emblazoned with a star patch and the word Juden. “Our leaders knew what the Nazis were doing. They knew what the concentration camps were for. And they lied to us. They told us made-up stories to keep us from being afraid.”

  Film of an unfamiliar man in a sharp suit standing before the houses of Congress as the narrator continued: “President Bertram Huckley explained that the war was an Old World war, that Hitler had no desire to attack America. We were told our Jewish friends were only being temporarily relocated. Only later did we learn that President Huckley had negotiated a secret truce with the Führer. We would not assist Great Britain. In exchange, Hitler would not invade the United States.”

  Here, footage of mass protests on the mall in Washington, D.C. Women in full-length dresses, hair done up in buns, and men in three-piece suits and dark hats waved homemade signs with slogans such as THE FINAL SOLUTION IS A JEWISH MYTH and PROTECT AMERICA FIRST! The narrator returned: “When we finally learned the horrific details of the concentration camps, conservatives assured us it was a twisted exaggeration of the truth. The Jews were lying. They only wanted to pull us into their war. But the war was Europe’s problem. Not ours.” Photographs of a fleet of U-boats approaching the Santa Monica pier, great zeppelins hovering over downtown Los Angeles. “We ignored the war as long as we could. But the war did not ignore us.”

  The first color footage was presented as the music swelled. In it, President Huckley walked back to his car through a mob of people. He had a team of Secret Service, but they were overpowered. The mob ripped the president from the arms of his protectors. He was strung up from a light pole on Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol dome rising behind his swinging feet. “By the time we mustered an army, Hitler had taken the West Coast and the Wehrmacht were pushing into the Rockies.” Video now, shaky handheld color images of great metal tanks the size of semi trucks pushing over a hill, bison stampeding before them, a phalanx of Indians on horseback riding to meet them. “The Seven Nations were no match for such weaponry. California fell in 1955, decimating the Cree and Chippewa nations.” An Indian stood by the roadside overlooking a valley of fire, a single tear streaking down his wrinkled cheek.

  More trumpets. A photograph of a handsome man in uniform atop a black steed, holding a flag that flapped in the gale-force wind of a nuclear explosion. “On July ninth, 1959, after a battle that claimed the lives of eight hundred thousand American souls, General John Francis Halloran, a former schoolteacher, led a contingency of National Guardsmen to victory over Nazi storm troopers in Cleveland, pushing Hitler’s army into Canada. Halloran had a secret weapon, a device of mystery created by the scientist Nikola Tesla. This ‘atom bomb’ could harness the elemental properties of the sun. ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,’ Tesla remarked upon seeing the devastation unleashed by his creation.”

  More footage of Halloran’s troops chasing graysuits through city streets, Nazis crucified on the sides of midwestern dairy barns. “Following the repatriation of Decatur, the Nazis retreated from America, running back toward the fatherland. We followed.”

  Halloran and a hundred men pulled at thick rope attached to a tall statue of Adolf Hitler. It fell to the street with a crash of stone and dust to the hails of many men. “On June nineteeth, 1964, Berlin fell. On General Halloran’s command, Hitler was stoned to death outside the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg.” A small girl with curly blond hair chucked the first rock at the Führer. It hit him high on his cheek and he began to bleed.

  Footage of giant cranes in the streets of New York, lifting the steel girders of the Chrysler Building. “We tried to move on. We tried to rebuild. We buried our dead cities and drowned them beneath man-made lakes, wiping them from our minds, our memories.”

  Photographs of a giant pile of bodies beneath a bridge in Pittsburgh. “But our resolve was broken. Why did we deserve freedom? Why did we deserve to go on when we had turned our backs on a n
early complete genocide? The world fell into a Great Depression, a period of four years when the suicide rate climbed as we came to terms with the consequences of our ignorance and apathy.

  “It was at the second council of the United Nations that a young scientist named Stephen Hawking came forward with a plan.” Video here of a wiry man in a dark suit walking to a podium in front of a collection of world leaders. He looked about nineteen, his cowlicky hair sticking up in back, nervous but determined. “We can forget,” he said, his voice echoing inside the great hall. “If you want to, we can forget.”

  Hawking stood before Congress as they rose in ovation. “Dr. Hawking had developed a machine that could rewrite our memories. He knew ways to bring back the Jewish people. The support for Hawking’s Great Forgetting was nearly unanimous.”

  Footage of a large tribe of Indians taking down teepees on a vast plain overlooking a wintry river. “The Seven Nations resisted. Chief Crooked River warned the UN that forgetting would allow the evil to return—an ignorant, pessimistic view we now know to be without any basis in fact. Concessions were made to the savages so that the Great Forgetting could go forward: we could not destroy artifacts of culture and the Seven Nations would be given a continent of their own, the semihabitable island of Mu. Residents of Mu would be exempt from the Great Forgetting, but they could never leave. They chose to remember, alone.”

  Hawking stood before a line of bulldozers as the machines leveled a forest of pine trees—Jack thought it looked like the Alaskan frontier. Further photographs showed an array of radio telescopes—HAARP. “It will take a hundred years to build the infrastructure for the Great Forgetting and it will be the most expensive public-works project in history—a small price to pay for a better future. But we are getting close. Our top scientists, led by Dr. Hawking, along with the most brilliant minds captured from the Nazis”—here, a couple of photographs of Mengele, smiling into the camera in front of a chimpanzee cage—“are hard at work readying the custodial team that will ensure we never remember what we choose to forget.”

  Color video of schoolchildren gathering history textbooks, placing them into boxes. The boxes are loaded into trucks and carted away. “Everyone must do their part. Evidence remains that should be collected. Please comb through your attic, your basement, your closets. Collect anything that reveals the world as it was during those terrible years. Pay special attention to anything with an exact date as well as photographs taken in cities that no longer exist.”

  A man dressed as Uncle Sam takes a box of books from a young boy and places it into the back of a truck. Uncle Sam drives away. The boy waves as the truck disappears into the sunset. “Only together can we truly forget.”

  The film reel ended with a clicking of crumpled film stock snaking through the projector, and then the Maestro turned the lights back on.

  For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Nils clapped enthusiastically. “Far out, man! Far fucking out!”

  5 “You can be anyone you like,” said Snowden, handing Sam a binder of personality templates arranged like a book of haircuts in some high-end salon. She flipped past pictures of women in uniform, women in expensive dresses walking red carpets, women sunning on the decks of luxury liners in the Mediterranean.

  There was a time when this was exactly the fantasy she’d needed, the ability to forget her troubles, to become someone new. Someone clean. Where had these secret government agents been when she was thirteen and needed a new family?

  Snowden handed her a tissue. “Shh,” he said. “This doesn’t need to be sad. Think of it as a gift. Everyone wishes they could have a better life.”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I haven’t even decided if I’m keeping it. But … Will it…”

  “Your child will be just fine. It doesn’t have any memories to adjust.”

  She felt herself giving in. What choice did she have? The Hound stared at her with disregard. There was so much hatred in those close-set eyes. Why not take what this nice man was offering? Wouldn’t forgetting be nice, after all? Wouldn’t it be sublime to wake up as somebody new?

  “I want a safe place to raise a family,” she said. “A safe place away from people.”

  Snowden nodded and swiveled on his stool. He scooted to the Apple II and punched a few keys. “Good,” he said. “Most people, all they want is ten million dollars and a mansion on the ocean.”

  “I want to live in a cottage. Not Ohio. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere so I can get lost and never be found by anyone I ever knew.”

  “That’s the spirit, Sam,” said Snowden, typing quickly.

  “Will I forget everyone I know?”

  “Is there anyone you wish to remember?”

  She thought about it for only a moment. “No,” she said. “I’ll forget them all. All the men who’ve ever hurt me…”

  “Yes.”

  “All the men who’ve ever left me…”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And everything about that boy who told my husband about the Great Forgetting and then stole Jack away from me.”

  Snowden stopped typing. “What boy?” he asked.

  “Cole,” she said, waving a hand at the name as if she were dismissing him. “The kid who convinced Jack to run away with him to some secret island.”

  Snowden turned to her and for a moment said nothing. He looked at the Hound and then back to her. “This boy,” he said at last, “was he from New York?”

  “The city,” she said. “He went crazy after his dad died and so his mother shipped him to a mental hospital in Ohio. It was my husband’s bad luck that…”

  Suddenly a scalpel was in Snowden’s hand. He looked at the Hound and motioned for the guard to come to him. “Hold her down,” he said.

  “Wait,” Sam screamed. “Wait! Isn’t there novocaine or something?” She crawled up the chair as the Hound drew near. His long hairy arms reached out for her. And that’s when the scalpel slid under the Hound’s flabby chin and Snowden opened a large gash there. Pints of warm blood poured from the Hound’s neck onto Sam’s blouse.

  Snowden looked at the scalpel in his hand as if it had acted of its own accord. There was fear in the man’s eyes. A growing, dawning fear.

  The Hound collapsed on the floor, expelling a final breath through thick gurgles. Sam screamed.

  “You have to get out of here,” said Snowden, unstrapping her from the chair.

  “What did you do?” asked Sam. Her mind was a whir of confusion.

  “I killed him,” said Snowden, as if explaining it to himself. He opened the steel door and checked outside for more Hounds. There were none. For the moment. “I knew Cole’s dad. Stephen Monroe. We worked together a couple times. He didn’t know it, but I’d been helping the Maestro push him toward action for years. Editing his memory. Something had to change. I … I thought Cole had forgotten like everyone else.” He held Sam in place with one hand, gripping tightly with fear and something else. Hope? Earnest, terrifying hope? “But if Cole remembers, he can get your friends to Mu. You have to help him. You have to get him there before the Hounds stop him! Go!” He dropped his hand and held the door wide for her. Just then an alarm sounded, blaring from overheard speakers.

  What was this now, at the eleventh hour? Another man to blindly trust. And what had her life taught her? That a man could never be trusted, not even those you know the most. She had been taught that men are animals who run on insinct and fear and you can never ever trust anybody. But that wasn’t exactly right, was it? That wasn’t all of it. There were good men. She’d met a few. There had been a man named Stan Polk who had loved her like a daughter, like a father should love a daughter. And Jack. Jack, whom she had not trusted to love her forever and so she’d let Tony lead her away. Those men were better than instinct. They battled it. For her. And for the first time Sam sensed something greater than the nature of men. A twinkling on the edge of things, a promise that things might be fine, that all manner of things might be fine. That things could b
e right again, that it wasn’t ever too late. It was a word she had never used because it made no sense to her, and it swam up from the deep recesses of her mind and announced itself, a shadow on the wall: grace.

  “I almost forgot,” said Snowden. “You’ll need the password.”

  Sam listened. And then Sam ran.

  6 “The tour continues,” said the Maestro, leading them down the hall toward another doorway, outlined in a pale blue glow. “My office,” he said.

  It was a rich music mogul’s private editing suite, lined with red carpet and black sound panels. Jack counted fifteen wide-screen monitors. A leather chair faced the largest screen, on which computer-generated wave patterns trailed along like the readout of a heart monitor. Below this was a soundboard full of dials and knobs and faders. There was also a keyboard and a metal box with a toggle that looked like something from a 1950s sci-fi flick.

  “This is Clementine,” the Maestro said, nodding at the computer.

  “Can you play Warcraft on that thing?” asked Nils.

  “What the hell is all this junk?” the Captain asked.

  “This is where we compose the code for the algorithm, the message that’s broadcast from HAARP. It’s really just one long strand of code on a repeating loop.”

  “Broadcasted like music on the radio?” the Captain said. “Bullshit. There’s got to be more to it.”

  The Maestro smiled. “Sound can be very powerful. The Nazis were fascinated by the properties of sound. They had weapons in the war that used only sound, weapons that could tear a man apart.” He walked to a flimsy card table in the corner. A large speaker had been placed beneath it. Next to the table was a box of blue sand. The Maestro scooped out a handful and let it fall from his fingers onto the shiny laminated surface of the table. Then he walked to the soundboard and turned a key. The speaker began to emit a tone. The Maestro slowly increased the volume.