I stared at him. Me tell him what was going on? I didn’t even know his name.
He snapped his fingers. “Hey, Barn, you there? You’re looking—”
“We need to talk.”
“You bet we do. Does anyone else know about Charlie? I haven’t heard a thing. All anyone knows, far as I’m aware, he’s still on sick leave.”
Was the man stalling? Waiting for backup—the cops?
I glanced about, half expecting to spot an undercover agent whispering into a wrist mike, or a steely eyed assassin watching us from behind a newspaper.
“Walk with me,” I said.
I started toward the zoo entrance. I had already purchased two adult tickets. The man hesitated, then followed. We passed through the gate and continued to the sea lions in the central garden area. I stopped in the middle of a bustling crowd of people, feeling less exposed.
“You still have Charlie’s phone, right?” the man said.
I nodded.
“You gotta get rid of it. Trash it.”
“Why?”
“Because my bloody number’s on it, that’s why!” He shook his head, rubbed his face. “Sorry, Barn. No disrespect—none at all. This is just all too much. I thought it was a done deal… But Charlie dead… Jesus Christ. Heart attack, had to be. He still at the apartment?”
I nodded.
“I guess we can take care of that. Moving him. It’s going to take a goddamn forklift, but we can get it done.” He hesitated, thinking. “Okay, Barn, listen up. We can fix this. We go back to the apartment. We take a cab. I’ll call Skip. He’ll finish the procedure. We’ll get Charlie out of there, make it look like—well, hell, we don’t have to make it look like anything if it was a heart attack. We just got to figure out some place to leave him where he wouldn’t have been discovered for a few days. But don’t worry. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll get it done. Three days you’ll be in Dallas, and none of this will have ever happened.”
None of this will have ever happened? I began walking again, my mind reeling. None of this will have ever happened? It was almost as if I were in some horror movie in which the director was snipping and cutting scenes, gluing them back together however he pleased. I stopped in front a penguin exhibit. Two dozen of the birds stood on the rock surrounding their dipping pool, their wings either tucked against their sides or flapping ineffectively. The man was still next to me, still talking. I barely heard him. My thoughts were too loud. The kids around us were too loud. Everything was too fucking loud.
I closed my eyes, searching for an inner anchor.
“Barn, hey, Barn—”
I snapped my eyes open again and seized the man by the lapels of his tailored suit, yanking him toward me so our faces were inches apart.
“Who the fuck am I?” I said.
“Barn…?” His mouth dropped open, but he didn’t seem to know what to say. “Dammit, let go of me!”
“Why do you keep calling me Barney?”
“Barn, what’s— Oh God no.”
“Answer me!” I shook him for emphasis.
“Listen, Barn,” he said in a low voice, barely more than a whisper. “I get it. I think. What happened. I think I get it now. But Barn, let go, you’re making a scene.”
His sunglasses had slid down the bridge of his nose so I could see his eyes for the first time. They were brown, wide, frightened. I didn’t see anything in them that hinted at deception.
I released him.
“Goddamn, man,” he said, straightening his blazer, then looking about, offering a shit-happens grin to anyone who’d been watching us. He fingered his sunglasses back into place.
“Why do you keep calling me Barney?” I asked again.
“Because that’s your name, Barn,” he said, still using that hush-hush voice. He hooked an arm around my shoulder and led me along the path. “Your real name anyway. Now, look, you have to tell me everything that happened. Everything. Then I’ll explain what I can. But I have to know what’s happened.”
“How can I trust you?”
“Me?” He seemed surprised. “Barn, we’ve known each other for five years…” His face fell. “But you don’t have any memories of me, do you?”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Stan, Barn. My name’s Stan.”
“Let me see your ID.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Now.”
Chuckling to himself, the man slipped his wallet from the inside pocket of his blazer, passed me his driver’s license. Stanley Phillip Williams. The ID looked real enough. I handed it back.
“Now listen, Barn,” he said, tucking the wallet away, “you don’t have any memories of me—of anything about your past. Am I right?”
I nodded.
“You just woke up in a crappy old apartment?”
I nodded again.
“And Charlie?”
“On the floor. Dead.”
Stan shook his head sadly. Then, like a switch flipping, the pity left his voice. He became all business. “Okay, listen up, Barn. This is no big deal.” I could almost see his mind clicking, whirling, searching for solutions. “Like I said,” he went on, “Charlie dying, it’s a shame, a real goddamn shame, but we’ll deal with it. You want to know what’s going on—you’re going to have to trust me. I know I seem like a total stranger to you. But I’m not. You have to trust what I’m going to tell you. It’s going to blow your mind, but every word of it’s true. And afterward, we go back to the apartment, you and me. That’s the deal. You and me. We get this mess fixed up.”
“I’m all ears, Stan,” I said, and suddenly I wished I’d chosen a whiskey bar as our meeting spot instead of the zoo. We passed a grizzly bear enclosure without stopping and continued along the meandering path.
“What it seems like to me, Barn,” the man named Stan said, “what it seems like, it seems like Charlie died before or just after he finished cleaning.”
I frowned. “Cleaning?”
“The…erasing part.”
“Of my memory.”
“Your episodic memory.”
“Why?”
“I’m not really sure how to tell you this, Barn…”
I squeezed his biceps, yanking him to a halt. “Listen to me, you son of a bitch. Stop dicking me around and tell me what the fuck is going on. I woke up in a chair yesterday morning with no memories of my life. None. I don’t know my mother’s name, or whether she’s alive. I don’t know shit. So you tell me why I was in that chair, and if you’re lying—”
Stan tugged his arm free, almost indignantly. “We were saving your life, Barn.”
I blinked in surprise.
“Saving my life?” I repeated. And a door deep inside me inched open, letting loose the fears of those inoperable diseases I’d imagined earlier. “What’s wrong with me?”
Stan shook his head. “Nothing—not physically, I mean.”
My relief lasted only a moment before the confusion and frustration returned in full force. “Who am I?” I demanded. “Who the hell am I?”
Stan gave me an ironic smile. He tucked his sunglasses into the breast pocket of his blazer and held my eyes, as if seeing me, the real me. He said, “Your name is Barney Hunter, my friend. You’re a drunk and a part-time asshole, and you’re probably the most influential man of the twenty-first century.”
***
I stared at Stan, searching for a sign that what he was saying was a joke. But it wasn’t. I knew that. I felt that. For a moment the world canted. My knees wobbled. Stan slipped his arm around my waist to support my weight and led me to a bench next to a water fountain. I collapsed onto the wooden plank seat. He sat beside me. Across from us a snow leopard padded back and forth anxiously in its artificial environment.
“What are you talking about?” I said, and now I was the one speaking in little more than a whisper.
Stan produced a pack of Marlboros and lit up. He didn’t offer me one. I didn’t want one. I only smoked cigars.
But he would know this, wouldn’t he, if he really was who he said he was?
“I’m still not sure where to begin,” Stan said, turning his head away from me as he blew smoke from his mouth.
“From the beginning,” I said.
“You and Charlie—”
“Dead Charlie?”
“Yeah, dead Charlie.” He glanced at me sadly. “Dead Charlie. That’s all he is to you, isn’t he? Dead Charlie?”
“I don’t know him from fly shit.”
“No, you don’t,” Stan said matter-of-factly, and perhaps with a touch of anger. “Not anymore. But you two were as close as close got. You met at Stanford. Neuroscience students. Geniuses, the both of you. I know how that sounds, but I’m not using the word lightly. Before you finished your degrees, you were publishing research in Nature and other scientific journals.”
“Bullshit” was on the tip of my tongue. But my vanity and curiosity caused me to ask, “What kind of research?”
“The memory kind, to put it simply.” Stan inhaled a final drag, then crushed the cigarette out beneath the toe of his expensive monk-strap loafer. “Look, Barn,” he said. “Given what’s happened, I don’t know how to do this, so I’m just going to talk. You’re just going to listen. Then you decide for yourself if you believe me or not. Okay?”
I nodded.
Stan nodded also, as if satisfied with his decision about how to proceed. He shot another Marlboro from his pack and lit up. He took a long, pensive drag, then continued. “Ever since the beginning of rational thought—the ancient Greeks, whenever—people have been trying to figure out what exactly memories are. Plato compared them to impressions in a wax tablet. A decade ago scientists compared them to a biological hard drive. The metaphors changed over time obviously, but they’ve always had one thing in common: persistence. A memory is a recollection of something that happened, and once that something happened, once that recollection is formed, it stays that way, always. It’s why we trust our memories. They feel like snapshots of the past. At least, this is what we’ve believed for thousands of years—until you and Charlie proved that none of it was true.”
***
“Not true?” I repeated. The craving for a drink was almost all-consuming. My hands, I noticed, were trembling. I clasped them together and pressed them onto my lap.
Stan took a drag, blew the smoke away from me, and said, “Memories feel persistent, Barn, but they’re not. They’re malleable, always changing.” He shook his head. “You’ve won a Nobel Prize, and here I am telling you about… You know, if you did an internet search of yourself—” He cut himself off, looked away again.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. The cigarette had nearly burned to the filter. Stan had it pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve just—I think I’m just starting to realize how hard this is going to be for you to take in.”
There was something about the way he’d cut himself off that didn’t sit right with me. It was almost as if he’d slipped up. But he was talking, I didn’t want him to stop, so I pressed on and said, “So memories change. How?”
Stan waited until a mother pushing a baby carriage continued past us, then he flicked the butt of his smoke across the path. “Because,” he said, “the act of remembering changes the memory itself. Each time you recall an event, the cells in your brain are being triggered and fired. They build new connections and links—literally rewiring the circuitry of your mind. In other words, when you recall and reflect upon memories, you’re physically changing that memory. The entire structure of it is being altered in relation to the present moment, specifically the way you feel and what you’re thinking at that moment.”
“And you’re saying I’m the most influential person of the twenty-first century because of this?” I said skeptically.
“Look, Barn, I’m not going to get into some molecular explanation. What would it matter anyway? It would make about as much sense to you as how the inside of a computer works. But in a nutshell you and Charlie discovered that the change in memories are facilitated by proteins in the brain. If those proteins don’t exist, neither do the memories. And so you guys developed protein-inhibiting drugs that targeted specific proteins across the brain and, well, literally created the ability to erase specific memories. Still, it was mostly theory, all in the experimental stage. Mice, animals. Practical implications for humans were a ways off. But then the army got interested. They’ve been trying to block negative connections to the brain’s emotional nexus for decades, to help soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress disorders. See, even though PTSD is created by trauma, it’s really a disease of the memory. The problem isn’t the trauma. Often the soldier’s not even hurt. It’s that the trauma can’t be forgotten. Most memories, and the traumas associated with them, fade with time. Spot the family dog gets run over by a car, you cry for a week as a kid, but then you forget, or at least the memory of Spot doesn’t hurt as much. You can thank evolution for that. A coping mechanism. But PTSD has always been different. The memories are too intense to fade.”
“So…what…I work for the army?”
“Hell no,” Stan said. “That was ten years ago or so. You and Charlie were only contracted to them for three years. And with a blank check from the Pentagon, along with a team of the best scientists in the country, you perfected your work. The FDA gave the drugs you created the stamp of approval. And overnight you made PTSD as redundant as the measles.” He paused. “And in the bigger picture, you made the act of remembering a choice.”
***
A long silence followed that statement. My head felt ready to explode. How could this be possible? How could I be this man Stan was talking about? How could I be responsible for all this…this progress…and barely know what a neutron was?
I asked.
“After the success with the army,” Stan said, “you were getting grants up the gazoo from every investment firm imaginable. Charlie was a simple guy, content with the scientific recognition of his peers, academia. He wanted to keep working on PTSD and other mental illnesses. But you were always different. I don’t know how to put it. You were the Jobs to the Wozniak, I guess. You were the visionary. You had this idea of changing the world. And you did.”
“By figuring out how to erase bad memories?”
“Hardly,” Stan said. “You did much more than that. You founded a company which, within a year, was working on ways not only to erase bad memories but enhance them. And then…well…everything snowballed from there. Soon Rewind was developing methods to add new memories all together.”
“Rewind…?”
“First company in history to be valued at more than a trillion dollars, my friend.”
“Rewind,” I said, repeating the name, but it meant nothing. Thinking about wandering around the city without a memory for the last forty-eight hours, the hell it had caused me, I said, “Why? Why would anyone want to erase their memories?”
“Because life’s ugly, brutish, and short. Isn’t that what they used to say? And it’s true. Most people are unhappy. They screw up all the time. Accidents happen. Loved ones die. You do bad stuff. This all causes guilt, regret, pain, unhappiness, suffering. Scientists are convinced that the first person who will live to one thousand years old is already alive today. Imagine one thousand years of unhappiness and suffering.” He hesitated. “Or imagine no suffering at all.” Two young children ran past us, followed by their father. Stan waited until they were out of earshot before adding, “Thanks to you, Barn, the conscious mind is no longer ruled by the unconscious, by memories that cause negative emotions such as fear and, as a byproduct, anxiety.”
I was staring at the pacing snow leopard but not seeing it. A thumping had started behind my eyes. My body felt light, almost as though it didn’t weigh anything. “It’s fake,” I said. “It’s all…fake. These memories, they’re not real…”
“Fake?” Stan seemed amused. “A memory is something that happened in the past, Barn. But the p
ast no longer exists. All memories are fake. I’m going to paraphrase you here. The mind’s greatest magic trick is making us believe memories are real. They’re as insubstantial as thoughts of the future are. All that matters is the present. Rewind not only lets people choose what they want to remember in the present, but it lets them become whoever they want to be in the present. You’ve allowed people to start their lives over.”
I heard the click of his lighter, smelled burning tobacco. I rubbed my forehead where the thumping continued in tune with the beat of my pulse.
“Look, I’m not going to get philosophical on you, Barn,” Stan said, exhaling a jet of smoke. “The ethics of your achievements have been debated for the last several years now. Sure, there are detractors. But the majority of people believe you’ve made life better for the human race.”
For the human race. A laugh bubbled inside my chest, followed by another, and another. Soon I was in fits, wiping my eyes. Tears of pride, confusion, horror—I didn’t know. I rested my elbows on my knees and covered my face with my hands. All the while I was wondering whether I was mad, whether this was all some schizophrenic delusion.
Stan was patting me on the shoulder, buddy-buddy, telling me words of reassurance.
Finally I got myself together and asked, “So how does it work?”
Stan flicked the butt of his cigarette to the same spot as the previous one. He shrugged. “There are more Rewind clinics than Starbucks around the country. You just walk in, you don’t even need an appointment. You want a single memory cleaned—something embarrassing at school or work—no problem. You want an enhancement—turn your deadbeat dad who abandoned you into a man who loved you dearly—no problem either. You want a completely new identity, you got that too. That, however, is a bit more complicated, and only for those who can afford it.”
So here we were, full circle, I thought, recalling how this conversation had started. “That’s what I was undergoing,” I said, more of a statement than a question. “I was getting a new identity.”
Dark Hearts: Four Novellas of Dark Suspense Page 11