The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  To reach the top, Jean had to transfer elevators twice. It took her seven minutes to reach the 110th floor. There she found herself in an area full of glass cubicles crammed with electronic equipment. Technicians walked about, pushing buttons and speaking into headsets.

  “Get out!” she shouted. “Everyone out! Hey! Listen to me! There’s a bomb in the building! You need to evacuate right the fuck now!”

  People stared, waiting for the punch line of the joke. The older men looked for Allen Funt. The younger ones expected Ashton Kutcher.

  “I’m serious! Everyone outside! Go! Go! Go!”

  “Is this for real?” asked a young woman with a headset.

  “This building is about to come down. You need to get out! Everyone out!”

  The woman threw her headset and ran for the elevators. Four men ran after her. That opened the floodgates and soon everyone in the office was running.

  “No!” Jean shouted as a woman was about to get into the elevator she was holding. “Use the stairs! If the bomb goes off, the elevators won’t work. Down the stairs. Tell everyone you see!”

  Jean stepped back inside and keyed the button for the next floor. Floors 108 and 109 were filled with more electronic equipment. Floor 107 was a bustle of activity, though, a wide expanse of restaurants.

  “Get out!” she screamed. “This building is going down! Everyone evacuate! Right now! Let’s go! Down the stairs!”

  By the time she reached the ninety-ninth floor, word had traveled and people were running out of the offices of some company called Marsh USA. They were lining up at her elevator, pushing against each other.

  “The stairs!” she shouted. “You need to take the stairs!”

  When the doors opened on ninety-four, a crowd of insurance brokers pushed inside like a wave, forcing Jean out. “No, damn it! You have to take the stairs!” But the people inside only stared back, eyes wide with fright, as if they had just remembered they were part of a chaotic world and their bank accounts meant nothing. They looked like children, a box full of children squished together, frightened by a storm.

  The doors closed, so Jean ran through the offices shouting at those who remained. She stooped to speak to a man who had crawled under his desk.

  “We have to leave,” she said, reaching out to him. He took her hand and stood. His eyes moved past her, to the windows, and he screamed.

  Jean turned. The jumbo jet bore down on them, growing in size exponentially. She could see into the cockpit, could see the pilots sitting at the controls.

  There was a deafening sound of crumbling metal and glass and a great pressure upon her chest. And then there was silence and the only sensation was the feeling of weightlessness. No pain. No worries. No notion of which way her body was going or if she were still attached to it. And then Jean knew no more.

  18 Jack grabbed Tony’s face, digging a finger into his good eye. Tony pulled away, landing a kick against Jack’s sternum, sending him falling against a panel of controls. Jack launched himself off the wall and brought his shoulder down, plowing it into Tony’s chest, knocking the wind from his lungs. Tony pulled Jack’s hair as they fell, wrapped his arms around Jack’s back, bringing him down, and they were a pile upon the floor, a folded mass of arms and legs and sweaty torsos hitting and kicking and grabbing.

  “I … fucking … loved you,” said Jack, landing punches between words.

  “You’re ruining it!” Tony screamed at him. “Nobody wants to remember.”

  “What do you get out of this?” Jack asked, grabbing at Tony again, scratching at his face, squeezing his cheeks together in his hand. His eyepatch caught in Jack’s grip and fell away, revealing the torn, twisted, and scarred tissue beneath.

  “Peace,” he said. “I get peace.”

  19 “Here we go,” the Captain said, twisting the yoke to the right and pushing down while he nudged the throttle forward. “Help me.”

  Cole pushed, too, and soon they were picking up speed. He was crying. He couldn’t help it. His chest heaved in great sighs for all the experiences he would never have. But he found he did not hate the universe. He felt an overwhelming sense of grace, for having loved so many people in a short time.

  Suburban homes rushed to meet them. Cole could not yet see any capital landmarks. The Captain seemed to know where they were going, though. Their target was low and only the Captain could hit it at this speed.

  “It’ll be too quick to notice,” the Captain said. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  20 “Stay calm,” Sam said into her microphone. She was speaking to the sixty passengers and crew in the cabin beyond the locked door. “We have some bombs. They are meeting our demands so we are returning to the airport. Please remain in your seats.”

  “Why’d you tell them that?” asked Nils.

  “Let them have a little hope.”

  “There!” Nils pointed out the windshield as the New Jersey foothills fell away, revealing the island of Manhattan. Black smoke boiled up from the North Tower, darkening the city.

  “They did it,” said Sam.

  “Help me,” said Nils.

  Sam took the yoke and pulled the plane to the right and nosed her down, gently, just like the Captain had taught them. Then Nils pushed the throttle forward. The airplane picked up speed in a hurry and soon the landscape became a green and gold blur. The engines protested, whining loudly. Someone pounded on the cockpit door.

  “Go,” said Nils. “Go now.”

  She pushed the belt’s button, picturing the baby inside her, hoping it was a girl and not a boy.

  “Jack!” she cried.

  “I’m here!” he shouted.

  “I love you. I love you. I love…”

  And then she was being pulled as if by an invisible hand, out of the airplane, out of the sky, out of the world, through that dark void, back to the hangar on Mu.

  21 “How you doing, Jack?” the Captain asked, nosing down, increasing their pitch and speed as they approached D.C.

  Through the cell phone’s speaker came the sound of a fist smacking its target. “I’ve got it under control.”

  “Good boy,” he said. He looked at Cole and nodded. The kid put his weight into the throttle, kicking it up a notch. The engines were angry banshees. “I probably never told you this, but I was scared as shit the day you were born.”

  Jack didn’t answer. The sounds of his struggle came clearly through the phone.

  “I was so worried that something might go wrong. That something might be wrong with you. The world is so hard, you know? I didn’t want you to have some extra handicap or something to make it harder. Never been so scared in all my life. But then the doctor pulled you out and you were this big, fat baby, this healthy baby lying on the cart. And you started crying. Crying so loud you hurt my ears. But you were so big I knew you were fine. That you would be fine. And I’ve never had to worry again. You were a good kid. A good goddamn kid and I never told you that enough. I was only hard because the world is hard.”

  Over a patch of trees, the Pentagon appeared.

  “This is it!” said Cole.

  The Captain adjusted the yoke slightly and nosed it down so that they were pointed at the center of a long gray wall.

  “God is great,” the Captain whispered.

  In the second before impact, the Captain was filled with such a sense of calm, of rightness, that he couldn’t help but smile. The plane was traveling so fast he did not perceive the exact moment when the cockpit crumpled and the velocity and the physics of it all turned his mortal body into particles that merged with the wreckage and the building until he was no more.

  22 Jack, bloodied, a tooth broken, nose busted, picked himself off the floor and came for Tony. But Tony was done fighting. He pulled the box cutter from his pocket and stuck it into Jack’s side. Jack cried out and fell against the console. The plane tilted wildly and seven indicator buttons flashed bright red. Alarms went off. The engines protested. The plane banked. Jack fell to the floor, the kni
fe tumbling away.

  Tony went to the controls and stabilized the airplane. Then he stood over Jack, watching him, shaking his head. “All I ever wanted was a little peace.”

  “It wouldn’t be real,” said Jack. “It would be meaningless. And it wouldn’t be earned.”

  “Earned,” said Tony. “What do you know about it? You always had happiness.”

  “No, Tony. You took that from me, remember?”

  Alarms sounded again and the aircraft shook violently. Tony pulled back on the yoke, but it tore free from his hands. He tried the throttle, but it wouldn’t budge. “Fuck me,” he said. “I think you broke it.” Tony looked out the cockpit window. They were somewhere over Cleveland, heading east, the plane moving swiftly along, angled low on the horizon.

  “We did it,” said Jack. “We did what you set out to do when you left Franklin Mills. Help me finish it. It’s not too late. We turn this bird around and head for D.C. The Washington Monument is the last piece. If it falls, millions of people will remember everything they’ve forgotten. Don’t you want that? Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Nobody out there cares. So why should I?”

  “You could have made a perfect life with Sam.”

  Another alarm sounded. A low whoop, whoop, whoop. The lights in the cockpit went off. The console buttons blinked. Jack smelled burning plastic.

  “How?” Tony asked him.

  “You could have had kids, you stupid idiot. Didn’t you ever think about that? You could have made a family with her. You could have given those kids what you never had. And you could have seen the world through their eyes. That’s what it’s about. Making the world just a little better for the next generation. Make their story a little better than your own. Eventually we’ll get it right.”

  “You don’t know, Jack. You don’t fucking know.”

  “Sam’s pregnant,” said Jack. “You’re right. I don’t know. But I want to.”

  “You’re lying. You’re fucking lying!”

  “You know me well enough to know when I’m lying. Am I lying?”

  The alarms went silent and the aircraft sputtered. Then the two engines on the port side failed and suddenly the plane was rolling. Jack fell onto the ceiling, hard, his cheek smashing against a panel of lights.

  Tony picked himself up again.

  “You’d kill yourself knowing you had a child in this world?”

  “I’d sacrifice myself if I knew it meant freedom for my children,” said Jack. “Yes.”

  “I was so happy,” said Tony. “Why was that taken away when I was still a kid?”

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t know. But you had us. And that’s more than some people ever get.”

  “Goddamn. Goddamn it, Jack.” Tony reached into his bag and came out with a shiny buckle. He tossed it near the door to the cabin, where it hung in the air and rotated slowly. The red light began to blink at once, speeding up, merging into a steady light.

  “What are you doing?” mumbled Jack. He was beginning to lose consciousness.

  Tony picked up the box cutter and pointed it at a space about a foot above the buckle. When Scopes appeared a second later, Tony drove the knife into the flesh of its neck and across its throat, opening a wide gash. The Hound tried to talk, tried to reach out for Tony with his paws, but only managed to grab Tony’s watch. The timepiece ripped from Tony’s wrist as the Hound fell to the ground, dead.

  An explosion rocked the aircraft. There would be no fixing it. Jack felt his body rise, weightless, off the floor as they fell, with the aircraft, back to earth.

  Tony pushed off a wall, sending his body floating after the Hound’s body. He rammed into it and held tightly, spinning against it in the air. He undid the Hound’s second belt, the one it kept for a return journey, and brought it over to Jack.

  Tony wrapped it around his old friend as they twisted around each other like dancers. “I don’t know where this takes you. Probably the Underground. But the Underground is better than dead, right?”

  “Can you come with me?”

  “Not this time.”

  Once he had it around Jack’s waist, Tony pushed away.

  “Be a good dad,” he said, grinning.

  Through the cockpit window, Jack saw the ground rushing to meet them, a patch of hillside in the country, a gravel pit in the distance. Just before the aircraft collided with the earth, Jack’s body was pulled from the plane.

  FOUR

  PEOPLE ARE ALIKE ALL OVER

  “Huh,” said the Maestro. He pushed back from Clementine’s monitor and rubbed his chin.

  Jack and his team had done well. He had expected them to take down one relay. They’d gotten three. That was real progress.

  The Maestro sat at the controls and considered the basic irony of war: What is it that each side fights for? Peace. They fight to end fighting. Like drinking to get sober.

  What came next was the part the Maestro enjoyed the most. Rewriting Scopes’s memory to make the Hound believe he’d killed him had been easy. A little song. What came next was a symphony.

  The Maestro wrote the final forgetting in three acts.

  The first act he wrote that afternoon, moving his hands across the dials and sensors in a whir of motion. He told a story of fundamentalists from the Middle East hijacking planes and targeting the centers of American capitalism and military might on 9/11. He borrowed characters and motifs from the real world and built upon them, for that is what the best storytellers do. There is nothing new under the sun after all, and too much invention makes a story feel untrue. The Maestro borrowed the names of the hijackers and victims from the cruise ship tragedy and inserted them into this new narrative. And the world forgot again.

  After the debris from the towers was cleared away, the Maestro wrote the second act. In this one, the attacks of September 11 were rewritten to have happened in 2001. It needed to be deeper in the past in order for people to parse any meaning from it.

  For the third act, the Maestro wiped the minds of the Hounds and the twelve Collectors.

  The signal around New York was weaker now. In fact, there was a four-block section in lower Manhattan that was completely clear of the signal coming out of HAARP. As it happened, those blocks around Union Square were the headquarters of the great publishing companies. Outside the broadcast range, the editors there were free to consider stories that challenged the accepted history. Soon there would be novels that hinted at the truth, as strange as it was. There would be books that allowed people to question reality, just a little at a time. Peeks at the world beyond the cave. Those stories were the gradient they could follow into the light. A fire had started. And it was about to catch.

  And what of Jack?

  The Maestro directed the algorithm to exclude Jack’s mind as he had done for Cole so many years before. Let Jack remember.

  And then there was nothing left for the Maestro to do.

  He considered traveling to Mu as well. The Maestro watched the monitors that showed various parts of the island when he was feeling blue. Sometimes, at night, Sam nursed her baby girl by the eastern shore and looked out toward Alaska, waiting. Sometimes Paige waited with her.

  But there was more work to be done, the Maestro came to realize. He was immortal, or near enough, and so he was best suited for this new quest. It would take too many years to count, he expected.

  Humanity had lost the point of their story. But it was out there, somewhere, in the narratives of forgotten civilizations, in the half-remembered tales of ancient tribes, the mistranslated fables of dead languages. The Maestro would search the world, slowly. Secretly. He would search out this lost theme, the answer to the question: Why are we here? It was out there somewhere. We had only forgotten.

  A PROLOGUE

  Kimberly Quick was waiting under the portico in front of Haven when Earl Mason arrived in his brown sedan. He parked in the visitor’s space and then went to meet the young director.

  “Ms. Quick,” he said, shaking her h
and.

  “Hello, Earl,” she said. “And call me Kim.” She led the coroner into a common room with tall windows. Her heels clacked on the polished linoleum. He followed her through a set of double doors and into her office. “Sit, please.” She pointed to a chair facing a television.

  “You came to see Jack Felter,” she said. “And I’ve got no problem with that. But I want you to understand a little more about his peculiar psychosis before I bring you to him.” She pushed a button on the TV and a recording began to play. On-screen, Jack looked haggard and worn, but his words were earnest and full of energy.

  The version of Kim on the television leaned forward over her notes.

  “Tell me again why you won’t drink the water we give you.”

  “Because it’s poison. I keep telling you. The government puts poison in it that makes us forget.”

  “Makes us forget what?”

  “That we lost a hundred years, that 9/11 wasn’t about the Middle East. I won’t drink the water. And I can’t tell you more until you start boiling your own water.”

  On-screen, Kim shook her head. “Mr. Felter, you are suffering from a delusion.”

  “That’s what you tried to tell Cole, too.”

  “As I’ve told you before, I do not know this person.”

  “You do! You just forgot.”

  “There is no record of him.”

  “The signal makes it so you can’t see the records,” said Jack.

  “The government could not perpetuate a conspiracy of that magnitude. They just couldn’t.”

  “Fine.” He sat back in his seat. “How long do I have to stay? Can I leave? Can I please leave?”

  “You have to stay until you are no longer a danger to yourself and others.”

  “I’m not a danger…”

  “You tried to hijack an Alaskan crab boat. At gunpoint.”

  “I was trying to get back to Mu.”

  “Mu doesn’t exist. It’s a story you made up when you suffered a mental breakdown after your friend Tony died on 9/11.”