Harry had had that look for her, at first. She felt that when she spoke to him, he listened with all his substance. It made her want to say only true things—not to be silly or lie. He would laugh at her when she got so serious.
“You act like I might go away,” he would say to her. “I won’t go away.”
Harry worked for Triangle Data Services. Connie had met him when he came in to replace their old computer trading link with the new Triangle system. He seemed unaware of the class difference between a workman like himself and someone like Connie, with a couple of degrees in economics and a triple-A credit rating. He did not seem self-conscious hanging around their terminals watching, asking an occasional question. Strangely, the changeover was made without disrupting their work, and when on his way out of the building on his last day there Harry stopped to ask Connie out for dinner, she had surprised herself by saying yes.
The rain increased from a drizzle to a downpour, and Connie went through the house again, closing windows against the storm. She turned out all the lights and went to bed.
Harry had lied to her more than once. They’d lived together so naturally in that first year that it had amazed her she’d been able to live alone for so long. It was an open marriage, with disclosure, ten years and an option, with penalties for a breach on either side. Three years into it Connie realized that Harry saw other women without telling her. At first she said nothing, out of love, or perhaps fear that facing it would make the truth of his betrayal undeniable. Why should he keep his lovers a secret when she had agreed to accept anything he told her openly? She did not see herself as the jealous spouse, but keeping her knowledge to herself only made her anger and resentment grow. When at last she confronted him, Harry was unsurprised that she knew. He would have felt ashamed to tell her of those affairs even though it was okay to have them, he said. He still loved her, he said. It had nothing to do with her, he said.
Though it took her years more to realize it, it had nothing to do with her. It was not her fault, and whether or not it was Harry’s was beyond her. She tried not to care. She just wanted to be done with trying to understand him when he did not understand her, done with his talk that never went anywhere and his silence that left her out, done with the fighting, his sudden joys and kindnesses, his silly jokes, his casual cruelty, his quiet eyes and calm hands, his lies, the pain of watching him and knowing that she loved and hated him. She might have done better, but it was not her fault.
Why did that sound too easy?
The rain was beating heavily on the roof now, punctuated by thunder and lightning whose flashes brought the darkened room into momentary sharp relief, like sudden memories. Connie realized that the windows in the playroom were probably open. She got her robe and went up the narrow stairs.
The lamp over Harry’s workbench did not come on when she flipped the switch. The curtains of the west window snapped with the force of the strong, cold wind, and the rain blew well into the middle of the cluttered room. Like a person walking a tightrope, Connie stepped carefully between the broken machines with their spoor of dismantled parts. It was all that Harry had left when she’d kicked him out, and she had threatened more than once to throw all his toys away if he did not move them. Her feet were very cold. The window was stuck; the counterweights in the frame scraped and the pulleys squeaked as she leaned heavily on it. The window went down crookedly, one side fighting the other. She beat on the top with her fist, growing angrier and angrier as it inched its stubborn way down. The wind whistled as the gap closed, she became soaked with the rain, and the shadowed forms of Harry’s machines watched impassively as she struggled. There was still a gap when she gave up, two inches at one end and one at the other, uneven, hopelessly jammed, the wind louder as it shot through the narrow slit, the curtains flapping fitfully. She sat on the floor crying. It was Harry’s damned window, and Connie couldn’t close it for him.
She found herself in the lobby of New Life Choices on a day she and Harry picked for the erasing. Connie would have been more comfortable with the dignified conservatism of Associated or Stratford: the walls of the New Life lobby were knotty pine hung with Miro prints; the receptionist had had his irises silvered in the latest nihilist style. Some people might have liked it.
She and Harry sat quietly together until one of the “counselors” came to greet them.
“Harry.” He shook hands. “Good to see you again. I see you’ve persuaded her.” He turned to Connie. “You’ve made the right decision, Constance. I’m John Holland. Call me John.”
He insisted on shaking her hand as well, holding on a moment as if to reassure her of his sincerity. It was all she could do to keep him from putting his arm across her shoulder as he led them to his office.
Behind his desk he was more businesslike. “First of all, are you taking advantage of the special this week?”
Harry looked pained, glanced briefly at Connie, then took the coupon from his pocket. “No jokes about paying in advance, John. Let’s get on with it.”
“We have to do this by the book, Harry. It’s not so unpleasant as all that, is it? You two are about to get a second chance, thanks to the service we’re offering. People throughout history have longed for that chance. They’ve gone to their graves dreaming of it, they’ve killed each other and themselves because they couldn’t get it. Now you can have it; think how blessed you are.”
He drew two contracts from a desk drawer. “I myself have had numerous traumas erased,” he continued. “So completely that the only way I know about them is that I kept records. My mother’s death. The time I struck out with the bases loaded in the college world series. My baptism. I can talk frankly about these things now, without a trace of guilt or anger, because for me those events no longer exist. The people who hurt me no longer exist. Fifty years ago a psychiatrist might treat you for a decade trying to convince you that the past is over and can’t hurt you. By this afternoon the past that hangs over both of you like a cloud—I can see it there now, and it’s keeping you apart—will be gone. All that will be left will be the love you still feel for each other.”
Connie wondered whether they would erase this meeting for no extra charge. Harry looked as if he wanted to die. Connie could almost believe Holland was taking some perverse pleasure in Harry’s discomfort. Or perhaps this was part of the treatment: make the patient realize the significance of the step he was taking, magnify the pain of the events he wanted to have erased so that he would leap at the opportunity to have them expunged. If so, then Holland ought to be able to afford a better wardrobe.
Holland placed one contract before each of them and they talked for awhile about what memories they wanted to have erased, and longer about exactly what they wanted to remember of their time together. He assured Connie, as had the brochure, that she would lose no memories vital to her job. She would remember the difference between short covering and profit taking. If she had been a champion skiier, then she would remain one.
They signed the contracts. Harry took her hand and they were led to the preparation rooms for pre-testing of memory. His palm was sweaty. In another room they were greeted by attendants whom Holland briefed, though they had all the relevant facts in their computer. Harry embraced her and they were taken to separate rooms. Once alone she began to panic. The machine they hooked her up to smelled of the hundreds of others who had come before her to have their pasts negated. The headset that let them map her cortex was cold and hard. The technicians did not know her; they did not care who she was and it would not matter to them if by some mischance they wiped out her personality entirely. It was all the same. Harry had no right to do this to her. She couldn’t remember anything about him that would make her want to go back. She started to speak, she started to sit up and take the headset off. Or did she just think that? Harry had no right to take away her memories. She felt sleepy; the room did not look so threatening. The clean smell of disinfectant reminded her of the hospital emergency room where she’d taken Harry after
he’d cut his hand so badly carrying a video display across the playroom. That was a piece of junk. It was still up there. He simply had no right.
Connie got a call at work the next day. She asked Mary to keep an eye on forex trading and went to her office to use the view-phone.
“Constance, this is Harry,” the man on the screen said, as if she could not see him. When she didn’t answer immediately, he added, “Harry Gray.”
Her pulse quickened. “Yes, I remember you.”
He closed his eyes for a beat, opened them again. His hair was light brown, worn longer than the general style. He seemed to be trying to smile, but uncertain how she would take it. This was her husband, she thought. They stared at each other, uncomfortably.
“Long time no see,” Harry said.
She laughed. He looked so timid, yet aware of the absurdity.
“I feel funny talking to you,” he said. “You look vaguely familiar …” She repressed another laugh. “ … but I feel like I’m imposing where I don’t know what to say. Maybe we ought to wait awhile.”
“No,” she said suddenly, surprising herself. “I think we need to get to know each other. Why don’t we meet for lunch? Do you know where Mario’s is on 12th Street?”
He looked momentarily dazed, and then the smile came. “It’s one of my favorites.”
She liked his voice, his tentativeness. “Mine too,” she said. She realized then that her memories of Mario’s were in some particulars rather vague. She could remember the maitre d’s name, and that the veal was the best thing on the menu, but she could not recall many specific visits to the restaurant.
The maitre d’ knew them both: he gave them a secluded table. The conversation started tentatively. Connie hesitated to ask Harry if he remembered anything, while at the same time she was probing her own memory. She could recall no event that they had experienced together. The closest she came were curious half-memories of things she had done herself that did not seem complete, undoubtedly because Harry had been involved in some way. Holland had told her, in the post-testing, that she might lose memory or persons and things she strongly associated with Harry. Connie wasn’t sure she wanted to speculate about their marriage. That was what they had gone to the clinic to forget. But listening to Harry Gray’s self-deprecating little jokes, his warm voice, she could not help but realize that she had had some reason to have this man erased from her memory, and she wondered what that reason was.
Harry told her he worked for a communications firm; she recognized it as the company that leased the trading machines to her brokerage. She told him about commission trading in the foreign exchange markets. He seemed legitimately interested. He was not a good talker—he would lose the train of his thoughts in midsentence—but his attention to her seemed complete. He told her about his own family and upbringing. In the back of her mind she knew she had to have known all of this as recently as a day ago, but it was all new to her now. It was queer that they could say how they’d been employed for the last five years, who their friends were, discuss recent politics and films, discover they both had a passion for weightless vacations, and yet not know how long they had lived together.
They sat at the table long after the meal, ordered wine and talked. Harry’s eyes were shy, and kind. He put his hand out to touch hers. They leaned forward in the light of the candle wrapped in plastic netting at the center of their table. He offered her some Lift; she declined, and he added a few drops to his own glass. Connie did not approve, but he did not seem to lose interest and his eyes remained bright and alert. She wondered how often they’d slept together.
When they were about to leave he offered to take her home. She thought that meant he had his own vehicle, but all he meant was that he’d ride the streetcar back with her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go that fast, knowing he would want to spend the night. Connie hesitated while the waiter took her credit matrix. Harry said nothing. Looking into her purse to avoid his expectant gaze, she found a small card tucked into one of the pockets. She pulled it out far enough to read, in handwriting not her own: “No matter what you decide, I will never lie to you again.”
She slid it back into her purse.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s a cool evening. It’ll be a nice ride.”
Connie grew to know and like him. Soon he moved in with her; in the evenings he took to tinkering with his machines in the playroom. Connie found herself with new energy in her work. She had her mind right on the edge of trading, was able to get in and out of market positions before others in the electronic network even knew they had been established or were crumbling. She began trading for her own account in spare moments and made a killing when the Philippines exploded its first nuclear device and the yen dropped the limit. Harry and Connie talked about how to spend the windfall. They decided on an orbital vacation on Habitat Three.
In the weeks before they left, some things about Harry began to pluck at the edges of Connie’s contentment. At times he seemed too happy; too desperately happy. He would take her hands in his and tell her how much he loved her, and the next day would return late from work and Lifted almost out of sight. He would never criticize her and he always seemed more than contented, but sometimes she wondered if Harry was actually seeing her, or only some projection of his own desire. When he became aware of her moments of silence in the midst of their new happiness, he begged her not to dwell on the past. How could she dwell on a past she couldn’t remember?
On a hot July day one of Harry’s friends came by in a company electric van and took them to the tube station where they boarded the magnetic train for the Cape. They spent three days in the hotel on the beach, swimming and sailing and eating seafood, a luxury they seldom saw in the Midwest. After that they took the shuttle up to the resort.
They went to the free fall ballet and did some dancing of their own. They spent hours in the transparent centrifugal pool, watching the universe wheel in lazy circles below them as they swam low-G arabesques in the water. Beneath the observation dome Connie got a very nice tan despite the ultraviolet screen that protected them from the hard sunlight of the vacuum. They ate in the many restaurants and watched the intricate exchange of partners, the formation and deformation of couples and groups that took place in the bar every night. Few of the guests were paired as strongly as Connie and Harry, and soon the propositions ended. Making love in free fall was familiar to Connie, but one of those experiences of which her memory would yield no details. Somehow this comforted her. She knew the reason for this was the forgotten knowledge that Harry had been her partner.
At the end of the first week, Connie met a woman in the lounge who was vaguely familiar. She wore the uniform of one of the staff.
“Hello! I saw Harry this afternoon in the sauna. He told me you were back again. I’m so glad to see you.”
Connie could not place her. The woman had obviously spent considerable time with both of them on a previous trip. The name “Alie” presented itself to her, unbidden.
“Alice. How are you?” she said uncertainly.
Alice smiled. “Oh, I can see you must have been Lifted pretty high last night. A little hung over?”
“Not really. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”
Alice would not accept that and continued probing until Connie admitted she’d been erased.
“Erased! How interesting! I wonder why Harry didn’t tell me.”
Given Alice’s apparent nose for news it was not something Connie would have told her either. “Maybe it just didn’t occur to him.”
“But I asked him all about you. We rehashed old times. You look like you’re doing better on the sunburn front now. Harry said you’d learned your lesson after that horrible burn you picked up last time when you fell asleep.”
Connie remembered the sunburn. But as Alice rambled on, the thought nagged at her.
“Harry talked with you about my sunburn? From the last trip?”
“Just in passing. He said you’d vowed never t
o let anything like that put you in the hospital again.”
“You talked about our last trip?”
Alice looked puzzled. “Dear heart, you must be a little strung out. You’re sure you didn’t do a little too much last night?”
Alice kept the puzzled expression as Connie made her excuses and quickly left. She found Harry in their suite, adjusting his jewelry in the mirror. “Hi,” he said. “Am I late? I was just about to come down to the lounge.”
She watched his eyes in the mirror. “I ran into Alice,” she said.
His glance caught hers, then shifted away. He brushed his hair back from his earring. “I saw her today, too. I’m surprised we didn’t run into her sooner; you know how nosey she is. She just lives to know what’s going on among the guests.”
“I didn’t remember her.”
“Oh.” He turned from the mirror. “You must have associated her with me more than I connected her with you, so the erasing wiped her out of your memory. John told me this might happen.”
“You and John are pretty friendly.”
He came over to her, embraced her, ran his hand lightly down her spine.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
He sounded perfectly sincere. He did not seem to be afraid to look at her. She ought to just let it go at that. She remembered the card she still carried in her purse. “I will never lie to you again” meant that, although she could not remember, he had lied to her before.
“Alice said you talked about my sunburn.”
“She brought it up, yes.” Harry sounded as if he didn’t understand what she was driving at.
“You remembered?”
A light seemed to dawn on him. “No. No, I didn’t remember anything about it. When she brought that up it was all I could do to figure out what she was talking about.”
Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984 Page 61