The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  The grains of sand on the table vibrated and then arranged into a geometric shape: a perfect circle. The Maestro dialed back another knob and the tone changed to a higher pitch, and suddenly the grains of sand scooted around to form more complex shapes: a damask pattern, the kind with shapes that look like the faces of fat dragons.

  “Would you like to see the algorithm?”

  “Is it safe?” asked Jack.

  “I’ll just play a portion,” he said. The Maestro turned another key. What came out of the speaker sounded to Jack, at first, like one of those aboriginal music pipes, a didgeridoo, but then it morphed into a song that reminded him of the sound humpback whales make when calling to their calves. A new shape formed on the table, a strangely familiar and specific shape.

  “It’s a leaf,” said Nils.

  “An aspen leaf,” Cole corrected.

  The Maestro smiled. “Yes. The physical representation of the algorithm’s wave.” After another second he turned the speaker off. Jack was glad. The tones had started to make his fillings hurt.

  “We don’t compose much anymore,” he said. “Mostly we just write new deletion commands so that the calendar resets a day or two. There hasn’t been any significant composition since the Great Forgetting. In the beginning, we had to write a complete alternate history, a shared history where America joined the war and defeated the Nazis before the Jews died. We composed an algorithm in harmony with every human mind. It was … elegant.”

  The Maestro’s eyes wandered to some distant memory, then refocused on his guests, who looked back with a mixture of vague comprehension and distrust. He fiddled with a fader on the soundboard. “There was this family, once, went camping at Yosemite. The teen boy crawled into a cave and discovered a buried skyscraper from the old city of Miakoda. We buried these dead cities under mountains and built parks around them so that no one could ever dig them up. This kid went in the cave and found a forgotten metropolis. Part of an office building, empty cubicles preserved under a hundred feet of clay. He brought his dad back inside. They took pictures. How do you explain that? I had to make all those people forget again.”

  “What about the new forgettings? Who’s resetting the calendar now?” asked Jack.

  The Maestro pointed at a black rotary phone resting on the desk. “That phone was put here in the beginning and I was instructed to obey the person on the other end,” the Maestro said. “If anyone ever called and they had the password, I was obligated to do what they told me to do. It started ringing again about seven years ago. It rings all the time now. They tell us what to change. Sometimes the change is big. Other times, it’s silly little stuff.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Two capitalists from Wichita,” he said. “Brothers. Their father made some money off oil. Filthy rich. The one percent of the one-percenters, you know. They got involved in politics. Wanted to change things, manipulate law with their money.”

  “Who gave them the password?”

  The Maestro shrugged. “One of the Hounds, most likely.”

  “But why do you do it?” asked Jack. “What power do they have over you?”

  “I checked the law, the law that was passed by the people of the world. There’s nothing in there about a time frame. Nothing in the language says when I must stop taking instructions after the Great Forgetting. We were made to serve man. It’s our job to obey the man on the other end of that line.”

  “Goddamn your job,” the Captain said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But it’s not like we haven’t tried to stop it.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Jack.

  “We…”

  The phone rang, a shrill clatter of heavy plastic and metal bells shaking. Everyone stared at the phone as if it was some poisonous thing, a snake with fangs, coiled and poised to strike.

  “It’s that thing in the Gulf, the oil rig,” the Maestro said. “We were expecting this.”

  “Don’t answer it,” the Captain said.

  The Maestro ignored him and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” He listened for a moment and then a wave of relief washed over his face. He smiled. “No thanks,” he said. “I’m happy with my current long-distance plan. Please take us off your list.”

  7 For a long time, nobody spoke. What more was there to say?

  “Who needs a drink?” the Maestro asked, leading the march. “I have spirits in the living room.”

  “Ghosts?” asked Nils, looking excited.

  “He means liquor,” said Jack.

  “Oh,” Nils whispered, unable to hide his disappointment.

  They followed the Maestro to the large cherrywood room and sank into leather sofas. Jack felt his body relax, imploring him to lean back his head and doze. He couldn’t, though, not yet. Not when Sam was still with the Hounds.

  The Maestro stepped to a cabinet in a wall, a part of the bookshelf that pulled away to reveal an icebox. He gave Cole a Yuengling. Jack, too. Then he handed a strangely shaped bottle to Nils. “Mead,” the Maestro said. “Sweet,” said Nils. Finally, he walked over to the Captain with two tumblers.

  The Captain read the label: “Jameson, 2047?”

  “It’s sixty years old,” the Maestro said. “Evidence, technically. But nobody said we couldn’t drink it.”

  The Captain poured two fingers each. “To the end of the world as we knew it,” he said, clinking his drink against the Maestro’s.

  At the moment their glasses touched, a red light suspended in a corner began to strobe on and off.

  “What’s that?” asked Cole.

  “Company,” said the Maestro.

  From the other side of the door they heard a familiar voice shout, “Open sesame!” then the wall was sliding open. Jack nearly collided with her as she ran inside. It was so unexpected, this reunion, that for a second his brain would not make sense of it. His eyes protested and it was like he almost couldn’t see her. Sam was here, in his arms, but he knew it could not be true.

  “Jack!” she screamed into his ear.

  It was the smell of her that brought him back to reality, that simply Sam smell. Sweat and sawdust and linseed oil. Her blouse was covered in blood, but it didn’t appear to be hers. He gripped her tightly and laughed.

  “Close the door!” the Captain shouted. The Maestro pressed a button on the wall and the door retracted. As it did, Jack caught sight of five Hounds racing down the hallway, guns raised. The Hounds fired a few shots, but their projectiles went wild. The door closed with a shudder and sealed them away.

  Sam looked around the room. When she saw Nils, she gave a little shout. “They told me you were dead!” she screamed. Nils hugged her, but winced as if his arm was sore. She hugged everyone. Home. In the strangest of places, an apartment inside a mountain.

  When the conversation finally died down the Maestro showed them to their rooms. There would be rest before they continued. Just a few z’s and then out the back exit. That was the plan. All told, there were a dozen apartments in the Maestro’s house, decorated like posh hotels from the sixties: robin’s-egg-blue walls, avocado-green bathroom fixtures, shag carpeting, silk bedding.

  “Looks like the goddamn honeymoon suite at the Tropicana,” the Captain remarked.

  They all enjoyed hot showers that night. Sam threw her bloody clothes away and put on a gray T-shirt from the supplies Jack had brought along. And after they were in bed Jack tried to get Sam to tell him what had happened on her journey through the Underground, but she grew quiet the way she used to when they were kids, and he let it drop. It didn’t matter. Not anymore.

  SIX

  PASSAGE ON THE LADY ANNE

  1 At first Nils thought it was just a piece of concrete shrapnel that had ricocheted off the wall and hit his shoulder. It happened in that moment when Sam had come through the door. Felt like being stung by a yellow jacket, and now he could feel something under his skin. While the others slept, Nils went to the bathroom mirror and pulled up the sleeve of his Star Wars T-shirt and had a look.


  He could see a little cut, a quarter-inch long. He felt around but couldn’t locate the foreign object. It was kind of cool, actually. He’d been wounded in battle by otherworldly creatures.

  But he felt cold suddenly, shivering cold, even though he’d gotten the pale blue comforter out of the linen closet in the hall and cranked the thermostat in his room to 85. His forehead was hot and clammy and there were dark bags under his eyes that had not been there before. Quietly, he went in search of some aspirin.

  The lights in the hall had dimmed. He could hear the Captain snoring, a deep resonant growl that made the place seem more like home. Nils started for the kitchen but stopped short when he noticed light under the Maestro’s bedroom door. He heard soft music playing on the other side. A ballad, but not one he knew.

  Nils knocked lightly.

  The door opened a crack. The Maestro’s face appeared, colorless and tired. “Yes, Nils May? Is everything all right?”

  “I don’t feel so hot,” he said.

  “Oh, dear,” said the Maestro. He opened the door and ushered Nils inside. “Sometimes the Underground does not agree with one’s consitution. A lack of vitamin D can leave a person feeling quite crummy, I’m afraid.”

  The Maestro’s bedroom was spacious, by far the largest room in the complex, a wide suite that would have made Liberace blush. Modern art in expensive frames leaned against the walls. Objets d’art were displayed in shallow lighted alcoves. Volumes of books waited in cherry cases. A king-size bed was made up with thin-weave blankets below a fresco of a wide glen.

  The Maestro was dressed in a long nightgown and Nils gasped involuntarily as the man turned. Through the sheer fabric of the gown, two eyes stared back at him. The Maestro’s hump was a second head.

  “‘Zwillinge!’ he yelled when he saw us,” the Maestro said as he fiddled in a cabinet beside his bed. “That’s German for ‘twins.’ He was so excited, you have no idea.” The Maestro turned to Nils and handed him a white-labeled generic bottle of cold medicine.

  “Wha…,” Nils whispered.

  The Maestro smiled. “Mengele,” he said. “Josef Mengele. The Nazi scientist who created the Hounds. This was years before the Great Forgetting. During the war. My brother and I, we were lieutenants in General Halloran’s army. Led an incursion into Denver. We were both captured. And when the Nazis noticed we were identical twins, they brought us to Mengele. He had a thing for twins.”

  Nils looked at the bottle in his hands. It was something called Zyklon F. “What did he do?”

  “He experimented on us,” the Maestro continued. “Identical twins make the best transplant patients. No organ rejection. By the time he met us, Mengele had successfully grafted the head of a dalmatian onto the back of a German shepherd. He wanted to try it on a human.”

  He led Nils to the door and patted him on the back as he stepped out.

  “And that’s what became of Isaac and Ismael Schmidt,” said the Maestro at the door. “It was a blessing, in a way. After all, we’re the only person in the world with the brainpower to code the algorithm that makes the Great Forgetting possible. Someone had to do it.”

  Nils did not sleep that night.

  2 At breakfast the next morning Jack posed an important question. “So, there’s this chunk of a hundred years missing from history,” he said to the Maestro. “A hundred years we forgot. What happened to all the music and movies and books and art that people created in those hundred years? Wasn’t there anything we would have wanted to remember?”

  “That was our favorite part of the job, actually,” the Maestro said. They were in the kitchen, seated around the island, eating scrambled eggs and toast. “We had a Department of Artistic Preservation, a committee of artists and writers who decided what would be kept and what could be forgotten. In the end, they came to us with a list of songs, books, artwork, and films that they wished to preserve. We were the curator of these things. What we had to do was hold on to these treasures and then reintroduce them back into the world after the Great Forgetting. We became a muse. We searched for creative individuals to whom we could impart the stories over the ether. Whole novels sent by radio waves into the minds of authors who believed they had come up with the idea themselves. How often have you heard some writer say, ‘This book wrote itself’? Well, in some cases, that’s exactly what happened. We gave Stephen King The Shining. We liked The Corrections so much we gave Freedom to Jonathan Franzen even though it was really written by a guy named Joshua Price, seventy years ago. The entire library of Beatles music was written by a black man who climbed the charts a decade before the Great Forgetting. I still have a thousand works to filter back into the world.”

  Later, Jack visited the room at the very end of the long hall, where the Maestro had assembled artifacts from before the Great Forgetting in a kind of small museum. The room was filled with incongruous artifacts: a copy of A Man in Full written by some guy named Ron Sweed; a framed copy of the Times, dated March 30, 2021, headline: “Browns Win the Super Bowl!” There was a soda machine standing in a corner that accepted the Nazi-American quarter Cole’s mother had given him and spit out a bottle of something called Umami Pepsi that tasted like beef broth and stung the top of his tongue.

  The declaration came just before noon. Cole had just stepped out of the shower, when everyone heard an odd percussive FOOOOMP!, and then a message landed in a tube beside the front door.

  “Hmm,” said the Maestro. It was one of those pneumatic tubes some banks still use to make transactions from your car. The Maestro walked to it and withdrew the rolled-up parchment from the container. It was a single page. From where he stood, Jack could see it was notarized.

  “Clever,” said the Maestro as he finished reading.

  “What?” asked Jack.

  “Scopes found a loophole. My chambers are sovereign. A place the Hounds cannot trespass without invitation. But it seems every twenty years the Hounds may audit me.”

  “Audit you?”

  “Yes. Well. You know. Inventory my computers, tally my expenditures, subtract any contraband. Oh, dear, they’ll probably take my whiskey.”

  “What does this mean for us?” asked Sam.

  The Maestro coughed nervously. “I’m afraid it means the Hounds are on their way with instruments they will use to lobotomize you. Come with me, I expect we have only a few minutes before they blast the door down.”

  3 As quickly as they could, everyone returned to their rooms for their belongings, what little there were. They regrouped in the hall and followed the Maestro into the museum. The Maestro went directly to the Umami Pepsi machine and pushed it aside with some effort. Behind it was a thin metal door and another keypad full of buttons and arrows. Jack watched as the Maestro typed in the code: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter.

  “You’re kidding,” said Jack. “That’s the code I used to get extra lives in Contra on my Nintendo. It’s the Konami code.”

  “It’s my code,” said the Maestro, opening the hatch. “There were video games that needed to be reintroduced after the Great Forgetting, too. Pac-Man, Skyrim, Polybius…”

  The door opened onto a concrete tunnel. Jack took the rear, listening for the sound of the front door collapsing and hoping they were not too late.

  Another fifty yards and they entered a great chamber decorated with ornate sculptures. A statue of General Halloran upon his horse, shotgun raised, sat on a shelf above the door. The air inside this empty space tingled with ozone, as if thunder and lightning were planning another war.

  “Whoa,” said Cole, eyeing the contraption resting on tracks in the middle of the room. Jack pulled Sam close.

  It was a simple rectangle of glass, ten feet tall and sixty feet long. Most of its surface was transparent and they saw plush seats arranged inside. To Jack, it looked like a piece of modern art, some minimalist’s idea of the form of something.

  “Is it a train?” asked Jack.

  “It’s more like an elevator,” th
e Maestro said.

  Nils smiled. “A great glass elevator.”

  “The Lady Anne was created to serve as an escape capsule in the event that we ever had to flee the Underground. This track leads all the way to Washington State, just south of Seattle. It’s a long journey but it’s quite comfortable inside.”

  “Wait,” the Captain said. “We’re supposed to ride this thing across the entire country? Underground? How do you know the track isn’t crushed somewhere down the line by a cave-in?”

  “The tunnels were built to last millennia,” the Maestro said. “Your only other choice is to surrender to the Hounds.”

  “The Great Glass Elevator it is,” said Jack.

  The Maestro pushed a button on the side of the craft. The interior of the cabin filled with a warm purple glow. Above the door, a liquid crystal display clicked on, flashing green letters: Ariel Express. A door slid open with a gentle WHOOOSH!

  Nils was first to enter. Then Sam and the Captain and Cole.

  “Here,” said the Maestro, handing Jack a round tin. “Some cookies for your trip.”

  “Aren’t you coming?” asked Jack.

  The Maestro shook his head. “We have to maintain the algorithm,” he said. “Nobody else can. The Hounds won’t kill me. They can’t.”

  “Thank you,” said Jack. He turned to join the others already inside, but the Maestro grabbed his arm.

  “Jack, over the last century we’ve come to know what a man is capable of. We are constructs of our past experiences, of the stories we remember. And we know each of you and your memories so well, we have a sense of how your stories will conclude. It’s not seeing into the future. It’s a calculation of your probable outcome.”

  “You know what’s going to happen to us?”

  “We know what will probably happen,” the Maestro corrected. He dropped his voice low so that only Jack could hear. “There are many ways your story could end. In most of these endings, all but one of your group dies. But there is the possibility that you can save somebody else. A small chance. It requires you to recognize the lessons of your life. You must learn.”