“How can I make a conscious effort to forget something? Tim, Tim, isn’t there some drug I can take, something to wash away a memory that’s killing me?”
“Nothing effective.”
“You’re lying,” Haldersen murmured. “I’ve read about the amnesifacients. The enzymes that eat memory- RNA. The experiments with di-isopropyl fluorophosphate. Puromycin. The—”
Dr. Bryce said, “We have no control over their operations. We can’t simply go after a single block of traumatic memories while leaving the rest of your mind unharmed. We’d have to bash about at random, hoping we got the trouble spot, but never knowing what else we were blotting out. You’d wake up without your trauma, but maybe without remembering anything else that happened to you between, say, the ages of 4 and 40. Maybe in fifty years we’ll know enough to be able to direct the dosage at a specific—”
“I can’t wait fifty years.”
“I’m sorry, Nate.”
“Give me the drug anyway. I’ll take my chances on what I lose.”
“We’ll talk about that some other time, all right? The drugs are experimental. There’d be months of red tape before I could get authorization to try them on a human subject. You have to realize—”
Haldersen turned him off. He saw only with his inner eye, saw the tumbling bodies, reliving his bereavement for the billionth time, slipping easily back into his self-assumed role of Job. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree.
The shrink continued to speak. Haldersen continued not to listen. He poured himself one more glass of water with a shaky hand.
It was close to midnight on Wednesday before Pierre Gerard, his wife, their two sons, and their daughter had a chance to have dinner. They were the proprietors, chefs, and total staff of the Petit Pois Restaurant on Sansome Street, and business had been extraordinarily, exhaustingly good all evening. Usually they were able to eat about half past five, before the dinner rush began, but today people had begun coming in early—made more expansive by the good weather, no doubt—and there hadn’t been a free moment for anybody since the cocktail hour. The Gerards were accustomed to brisk trade, for theirs was perhaps the most popular family-run bistro in the city, with a passionately devoted clientele. Still, a night like this was too much!
They dined modestly on the evening’s miscalculations: an overdone rack of lamb, some faintly corky Chateau Beychevelle ’97, a fallen souffle, and such. They were thrifty people. Their one extravagance was the Evian water that they imported from France. Pierre Gerard had not set foot in his native Lyons for thirty years, but he preserved many of the customs of the motherland, including the traditional attitude toward water. A Frenchman does not drink much water; but what he does drink comes always from the bottle, never from the tap. To do otherwise is to risk a diseased liver. One must guard one’s liver.
That night Freddy Munson picked up Helene at her flat on Geary and drove across the bridge to Sausalito for dinner, as usual, at Ondine’s. Ondine’s was one of only four restaurants, all of them famous old ones, at which Munson ate in fixed rotation. He was a man of firm habits. He awakened religiously at six each morning, and was at his desk in the brokerage house by seven, plugging himself into the data channels to learn what had happened in the European finance markets while he slept. At half past seven local time the New York exchanges opened and the real day’s work began. By half past eleven, New York was through for the day, and Munson went around the corner for lunch, always at the Petit Pois, whose proprietor he had helped to make a millionaire by putting him into Consolidated Nucleonics’ several components two and a half years before the big merger. At half past one, Munson was back in the office to transact business for his own account on the Pacific Coast exchange; three days a week he left at three, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays he stayed as late as five in order to catch some deals on the Honolulu and Tokyo exchanges. Afterwards, dinner, a play or concert, always a handsome female companion. He tried to get to sleep, or at least to bed, by midnight.
A man in Freddy Munson’s position
Helene snuggled close. Her faintly psychedelic perfume drifted toward his nostrils. He locked the car into the Sausalito circuit and leaned back comfortably as the traffic-control computer took over the steering. Helene said, “At the Bryce place last night I saw two sculptures by your bankrupt friend.”
“Paul Mueller?”
“That’s the one. They were very good sculptures. One of them buzzed at me.”
“What were you doing at the Bryces?”
“I went to college with Lisa Bryce. She invited me over with Marty.”
“I didn’t realize you were that old,” Munson said.
Helene giggled. “Lisa’s a lot younger than her husband, dear. How much does a Paul Mueller sculpture cost?”
“Fifteen, twenty thousand, generally. More for specials.”
“And he’s broke, even so?”
“Paul has a rare talent for self-destruction,” Munson said. “He simply doesn’t comprehend money. But it’s his artistic salvation, in a way. The more desperately in debt he is, the finer his work becomes. He creates out of his despair, so to speak. Though he seems to have overdone the latest crisis. He’s stopped working altogether. It’s a sin against humanity when an artist doesn’t work.”
“You can be so eloquent, Freddy,” Helene said softly.
When The Amazing Montini woke Thursday morning, he did not at once realize that anything had changed. His memory, like a good servant, was always there when he needed to call on it, but the array of perfectly fixed facts he carried in his mind remained submerged until required. A librarian might scan shelves and see books missing; Montini could not detect similar vacancies of his synapses. He had been up for half an hour, had stepped under the molecular bath and had punched for his breakfast and had awakened Nadia to tell her to confirm the pod reservations to Vegas, and finally, like a concert pianist running off a few arpeggios to limber his fingers for the day’s chores, Montini reached into his memory bank for a little Shakespeare and no Shakespeare came.
He stood quite still, gripping the astrolabe that ornamented his picture window, and peered out at the bridge in sudden bewilderment. It had never been necessary for him to make a conscious effort to recover data. He merely looked and it was there; but where was Shakespeare? Where was the left-hand column of page 136, and the right-hand column of page 654, and the right-hand column of page 8o6, sixteen lines down? Gone? He drew blanks. The screen of his mind showed him only empty pages.
Easy. This is unusual, but it isn’t catastrophic. You must be tense, for some reason, and you’re forcing it, that’s all. Relax, pull something else out of storage— The New York
He ran through the files of other newspapers he had memorized for his act. Some were there. Some were not. Some, like the
He tried Shakespeare again. Nothing.
He tried the 1997 Chicago data-net directory. It was there.
He tried his third-grade geography textbook. It was there, the big red book with smeary print.
He tried last Friday’s five-o’clock xerofax bulletin. Gone.
