The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  The Captain shouted something, but Jack couldn’t make it out. He looked down the length of the plane, out the windshield. He could see the end of the runway now, a wall of bong trees, their tops chopped off.

  “Hey!” Jack shouted. “There isn’t enough room! Let’s try again!”

  But the Captain didn’t slow. He adjusted a dial and pushed the throttle as far as it could go.

  “Hey! Goddamn it! Stop!”

  The Captain grabbed the wheel and pulled hard. The plane pitched up and everyone tumbled over one another to the back of the cabin, where the compartment narrowed into a cone. There was a bump and then a violent shudder as the wheels touched down again, tilting to the right. The Captain cursed and pulled back hard again. The trees loomed. They were up. Higher. A gnarled tree reached out with white claws, but it was too late; they were in the sky, in the blue, and Mu was shrinking beneath them, that incongruous capital city and its treasury of forgotten stories marking their retreat like a giant eye.

  2 It was Monday morning, September 10, and Paige was late for school. Jean brushed her hair out, teasing out the nappy parts that had formed in the night, a bobby pin in her teeth. “Hold still, dear,” she said.

  Paige stuck her tongue out at the mirror’s reflection of her mother.

  The bus had come five minutes ago. The whine and hiss as it stopped at the end of their drive had awakened her. This was getting to be habit. Jean was finding it difficult to adjust to her new routine—though she had never been happier.

  Jean ran Nostalgia now. Had since late June. It was hard work. Not just the refab of the dressers and curios, but the day-to-day inventory and Internet sales. That first month had been killer, but she felt as though she was getting the hang of it. If September went as well as August, she might get the store back in the black. Anyway, it was nice to have a job again. It felt good to honor Sam’s memory.

  Paige was tying her shoes when the phone rang. Jean almost ignored it. But it was a little too early for a telemarketer. She picked up the receiver on the third ring.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Jean,” said Jack. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

  3 It was late when Sam returned to the motel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a twelve-passenger van she’d snagged from a shady rental company outside Logan, her last task for the day. They’d gotten into Boston at five o’clock, on a commuter plane from Seattle they’d hopped after ditching the Electra in a hangar at a muni airport outside Ariel. Jean and Paige would be arriving at the motel soon. It was all coming together. Too easy, she thought, and shivered. She was only being paranoid.

  In their room, Sam showered with Jack. He washed her hair. He kissed her wet shoulders. After a bit, he sat on the bed, wrapped in his towel. He rang the front desk for a wake-up call and flipped through channels until he found CNN. The screen was locked on a shot of women and children holding candles in a park in Newtown.

  Sam came to him, dripping wet, and pushed him down against the mattress. Her hands found his towel and tugged it off. Her thin fingers slid across his thighs and his body reacted. It was a refined lust, their lovemaking, varying between favorite positions and ending in caresses and laughter. When she finally came, she held him tightly.

  “You okay?” he asked, after.

  “Of course not.” Sam curled an arm behind her head. She looked up, chewing on her bottom lip. “I’m afraid I might fuck it all up.”

  “What? You? You’re probably the best fake pilot on our team,” he said, forcing a laugh.

  “I thought about just shutting the fuck up, because I thought if I said something, it might undo all this. But I’m going to tell you anyway, because you need to know in case something bad happens tomorrow. So you have to promise right now that no matter what, you’re going to do what we came here to do.”

  “Sam, there’s honestly nothing you could say that could change my mind.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  4 “Hey,” said Tony when Jack stepped out of his motel room. Tony was sitting on the stoop, a twelve-pack of Miller Lite between his legs. He handed one to his old friend. Something had changed, Tony thought. Jack suddenly looked five years older.

  “Thanks,” said Jack. He sat on the concrete beside Tony and twisted off the cap, chucked it into the parking lot. “What are you doing?”

  “Organizing,” said Tony. He pulled his suitcase around and unzipped the top. Inside were sixteen boomerang belts, each without its buckle—they’d left the buckles back on Mu. There was one for each of their crew and the hijacked pilots. He had spent the last hour writing names on each with a wax pencil. “So what’s eating you? She throw you out or something?”

  “Nah, just needed some air.”

  “Spill it.”

  “Not tonight.”

  Tony let it drop and looked over to Nils, who leaned against the brick wall under a sodium arc light, talking to his wife on the pay phone. “Poor bastard,” said Tony. “I wonder how you explain disappearing the way he did.”

  “You should know.”

  “Touché.” He stood, stretched his back. “Hey, man, watch these, will ya? I need a smoke. I saw some Swisher Sweets at the gas station. You want one?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Cheer up, Jack. We’re saving the world tomorrow.” He walked away then, leaving Jack alone. A few minutes later, Cole came out of his room and shuffled over.

  “What’s the first thing you’re going to do tomorrow, after we’re done?” the boy asked.

  “I haven’t thought about it,” said Jack. “I might just find a place to take a good, long nap. What about you?”

  “I’m going to ask Constance for a copy of that book.”

  “What book?”

  “The one my dad got rid of. The one with the funny name. I’m going to make a million copies and give one to everybody I meet for the rest of my life.”

  “Tell me the story,” said Jack.

  Cole did. And as he finished, Jean pulled into the lot. Paige waved excitedly from the backseat. They were a long way from Franklin Mills, but they were finally home again.

  5 “Wake up, old man.”

  It was Jack, standing above the Captain’s bed in the unforgiving light of the stale motel room. There was gray in his son’s hair now, but still, whenever he heard his voice, he pictured the child first, the five-year-old who used to sit on his lap watching Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. He could remember how his hair had smelled: like the sunlight and the grass and the wind and the rain.

  With effort, the Captain sat up and glanced at the clock. Five minutes till four. They should leave soon—some of them had connecting flights.

  “It’s oh-dark-hundred,” he grumbled. “What the hell are you so chipper about? Goddamn, I hate morning people.”

  “Dad,” said Jack. “Cole figured something out. I think we can all talk to each other up there.”

  The Captain found his clothes: a Hawaiian shirt and khakis. “Well? Stop chewing cud and tell me.”

  “You said we shouldn’t use the radio to communicate with each other. But Cole, he got to thinking last night. What if we all just called into the same place?”

  “I’m not following, brainiac.”

  “A conference call. We can use disposable cell phones to call into a designated line. Cole already put it together. And he bought four phones to spread around.”

  “Not bad,” he said. “And the other stuff?”

  “What other stuff?”

  “The box cutters?”

  Jack tensed and looked away. “He got those, too.”

  The Captain waited until Jack met his gaze. “You understand what’s at stake, don’t you?”

  “Of course. But nobody has to die.”

  “We can plan all we want and something could still go wrong. The more complicated the plan, the easier it is for something to fuck it up. And this is a damned complicated plan we have here.”

  “I can’t kill anybody,” said Jack.


  “You might have to. And if things go wrong…”

  “Nothing will.”

  “If something happens, you owe it to the rest of us to keep going. If we don’t finish it today, you may have to try again.”

  Jack didn’t say anything. He sat on the bed and watched his father gather his things. “Dad?” he asked after a while.

  “Huh?”

  “After everything you saw in Vietnam, why did you have kids?”

  The Captain laughed. “You and Jean helped me forget Vietnam,” he said. “You were the only way I could put it behind me.”

  6 Becky’s job was relatively easy, but she was still scared. You could tell. She stood in the middle of Jean’s motel room, jumping up and down on her toes a little, watching Cole nervously. Her father was there, too. And Jack. Jack helped her with the belt, making sure both belts were secured tightly around her hips. Only one of the belts was missing a buckle.

  “How many pounds can it carry?” asked D.B.

  “Nils is three-eighty,” said Jack. “It worked on him.”

  “But will it still work so far away?”

  “Of course it will.”

  But of course nobody knew, not for sure. That’s what Becky’s whole job was about. She was the guinea pig, even though they didn’t say so. There were eight pilots, all too important to risk. But her? They could risk her.

  “Let me go,” D.B. said.

  “No,” the Captain barked. “Stop it. It’s too late to change the plan.”

  “It’s okay,” Becky said, nodding her head. “I’m ready.”

  Jack pushed the button where the missing buckle was. Then he removed the remaining buckle on her second belt. He passed it to her father.

  “Back in a sec,” Becky said.

  One … two … three …

  Suddenly she was falling. Down. Up. Slantways. Falling everywhere at once and inside herself. It was dark and cold wherever she was, but Becky had the distinct impression that she wasn’t alone, that there were things in the dark here, in the void of distance, the in-between. The Everywhen. Mindless old monsters floating in the ether …

  And then she was back in the hangar in Mu. It was very dark there, still the middle of the night. Though she wasn’t keen on falling back into that void, Becky did as instructed and unclasped the buckle from the belt and left it revolving in midair with the other ones. Then she pushed the button on her second belt. Already, her head was buzzing the way it sometimes did when she spun around and around on the beach too fast. How many times was a person supposed to use these things? Could it hurt her if she did this more than once a day?

  In a minute she was back in the motel room, the return belt snapping into the buckle her father had placed above the bed. She landed softly atop the mattress and sighed with relief. D.B. went to her and stroked her hair.

  “You okay, darling?” he asked.

  “You bet,” she said.

  They brought Paige in then. Becky held her close and Jack tied the belt that would take them both to Mu tightly around them. Jean kissed her daughter.

  “I’ll see you soon,” she said.

  “Mom!” said Paige, but they were already falling and falling and Becky held the girl still and shushed her so that the things in the void couldn’t hear, and soon they were back on Mu, where they could do nothing but wait for the others to return.

  7 The lights of Boston Logan were grim beacons on the horizon, will-o’-the-wisps by the water. They abandoned the van at long-term parking and took the shuttle to the arrivals entrance for American Airlines. There they separated for a few minutes as D.B., Sam, Nils, Jack, and Tony walked to the United Airlines kiosk.

  Tony knew as soon as he saw the security guard that his carry-on was going to be searched. He tried to lower his heart rate. He thought of his father and a trip they had taken to a carnival when he was very little. “Sir, step over here, please,” said the guard, motioning to a cubicle beyond the metal detector.

  Jack pretended not to notice as he put his new phone into a doggie dish.

  “May I have permission to search your luggage?”

  “Sure,” said Tony.

  The guard unzipped his suitcase. Secured to the inside lining were sixteen boomerang belts and four box cutters. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “I’m a contractor,” he said. “The belts are presents for my crew.”

  She touched a belt, fingering the place where the buckle snapped into the front. “Oh, these are nice,” she said. Then she zipped the suitcase closed and passed it back to Tony. “Have a safe trip.”

  Five minutes later they met in the food court and had a light breakfast. The mood was oddly upbeat, teammates before a big game. There were no tears shed. Tears came later.

  8 “We gotta do something about Newtown,” the man said to Scopes over the phone. “I can’t get the Maestro on the phone. Why isn’t he answering his phone?”

  Scopes sighed. He was back in his office at Area 51, recoding the algorithm as best he could. It was slow going.

  “The Maestro is dead,” said Scopes. “But I can patch it up. Just give me a couple days.”

  “While you’re dicking around, our stock is tanking. It had to be a Halliburton guy, didn’t it? Fuckin’ contractor shooting up kids because of all that PTSD he brought back from Iraq. It’s all the news cares about. That it’s Halliburton. Oil futures all skittish now. What we need is a story about some nut kid went crazy. That’s what you need to write into their memories. Make the debate about gun control. That’ll get the right fired up again, make the NRA stronger, fill out their rosters for the year. Do that. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” said Scopes. These guys. They had a way of finding the evil before he could even walk them over to it. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Finish the Deepwater story while you’re at it.”

  Scopes hung up. Not a moment later, his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen. It was Nikko, a lieutenant Hound back east.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Tony Sanders’s passport just popped up at Boston Logan,” the Hound said. “Thought you should know.”

  He clicked on the television he kept in the corner and found CNN. It was happening. Just like he’d been told.

  9 D.B. and Zaharie handed their tickets to the attendant and walked to the waiting 767 jumbo jet at precisely 7:26 a.m. They placed their bags in the overhead bins and sat in seats 2A and 2B, in first class. The air inside was cold and stale and made D.B.’s nose run. He wiped it on the sleeve of his shirt and looked out his window into the lightening morning. The last time he’d hijacked a plane, it was a morning just like this.

  “Empty plane,” Zaharie whispered as a flight attendant closed and locked the door.

  D.B. peered down the aisles. About half the seats were vacant.

  At 7:59, American Airlines Flight 11 pushed away from the gate and rolled toward runway 4R.

  “It’s time,” Zaharie said.

  D.B. nodded and pulled the box cutter from his pocket.

  “On three. One, two…”

  10 “Mimosa?” the flight attendant asked, leaning over Tony.

  “Yes, please,” he said, taking a flute from her tray.

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t think we should be drinking,” he whispered when she left. They had barely made it to Gate A17 after their connecting flight landed at Newark International twenty minutes late. They needed to focus.

  “This is a hopeless fucking plan, man,” said Tony. “We’re going to end up in Guantánamo by the end of the day. Have a drink.”

  The attendant appeared again, crossing the cabin to secure the door.

  “Where’s everyone else?” asked Jack.

  Tony followed his gaze and looked down the aisle. He estimated the 757 had about 180 seats, but he counted only forty passengers.

  “It’s weird, right?” said Jack.

  “I read an article once,” Tony said. “Some statistician looked at a bunch of plane crashe
s, found out how many people were on them compared to planes that didn’t crash. Turns out, full airplanes crash less often. It’s like people feel an accident coming and for one reason or another find an excuse to skip the flight.”

  Their seats rocked a bit as United Airlines Flight 93 pulled away from the gate. Tony reached under his seat and pulled out a box cutter.

  “I don’t want one,” said Jack.

  “Suit yourself,” said Tony. He downed the rest of his drink and wiped his mouth. “Let’s roll.”

  11 The Captain and Cole jogged toward Gate D26 at Washington Dulles International as the attendant announced final boarding.

  “Wait!” yelled Cole.

  The attendant took their tickets. “Just made it,” she said.

  They were the last two passengers on American Airlines Flight 77 that morning. The stewardess closed the door behind them as they entered.

  “Creepy,” said Cole, pointing at the empty seats. Less than half of them were filled. He sat in 12A and the Captain slid into 12B after him.

  “Ready for this?” the Captain asked as the plane pulled away from the gate with a rough jerk.

  Cole nodded, but his stomach was a tight knot and he felt lightheaded, as if he wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

  “Stay with me.”

  12 Sam and Nils were seated in the second row of the first-class compartment on United Airlines Flight 175, which was also mostly empty that morning. When the airplane pulled away from Gate 19 at Logan International at 8:00 a.m., Sam’s mind was on the baby inside her womb. Was it a girl? She hoped it was.

  “Samantha,” said Nils. “We gotta do this right now.”

  She nodded and gripped the box cutter tightly.