Authors: James Renner

The Great Forgetting (44 page)

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 hand.

“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 dangerâ¦”

“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.”

“No.”

“How does it end for you? How does the story ever end for you, Jack? Can you tell me that?”

“I have to do what Cole was going to do,” he said. “I think that's all that's left to be done. See, the forgettings aren't happening anymore. There's no more new forgettings. They've stopped. Now we just need to fight the HAARP signal. And Cole had an idea about how to do that. We need to remind ourselves why it's important to remember in the first place. We have to get that book back into the world.”

“The cookbook?”

“It's not a cookbook.”

“It sounds like a cookbook. Like it's the temperature you bake a pizza or something.”

“
Fahrenheit 451
,” said Jack. “That's the temperature at which books begin to burn. That's what happened in the story. They burned all their books and realized too late that taking away our stories, our histories, strips all the meaning from life.”

“And if you don't bring the book back into the world?”

“We'll go on killing each other until we finally succeed. That book is just a beginning. A spark. If you ever see a copy, you'll know I did what I said I'd do. If you ever see a copy of that book, you'll know I won.”

“Well,” she said. “I'll keep my eye out for it.”

Kim shut off the TV and turned to Mason. “His paranoia is complete,” she said. “But his specific compulsion is the need to bring those around him under the influence of this delusion. He manipulates. He grooms. He pushes you until you begin to question reality, until you begin to wonder if maybe you really should boil your water. He's really quite clever.”

“I understand,” he said.

“You still want to meet him?”

“Yes, please. I just need to clear something up.”

Ten minutes later, Kim escorted Jack from the dormitory. He was dressed in soft hospital sweats. He was secured to a wheelchair by thick leather bindings. She left them alone by the windows that overlooked the pond.

“Hello,” said Jack.

“Mr. Felter, my name's Earl Mason. I'm the coroner out in Somerset County, in Pennsylvania? That's where Flight 93 crashed on 9/11.”

Jack's eyes widened. “What brings you here, Mr. Mason?”

He dug into his pockets and brought out the silver watch. Etched into the back was
RIP, Tony Sanders. 1978â2012.
Jack smiled.

“Where did you find this?”

“In a field.” Mason didn't mention the strange ape hand tattooed with a swastika. He couldn't bring himself to say something so crazy just yet. “Tony was a friend of yours?”

“My best friend.”

Mason nodded. “You know, of course, that Tony was on Flight 93 that day. He was one of the passengers who fought back against the terrorists.”

“Yes.”

“But that happened in 2001.”

“Did it?”

“I was hoping you could explain the engraving.”

Jack ran his thumb along the words, feeling the defects in the metal. “Do you know what a gradient is?” he asked.

“Like an incline in the road?” asked the coroner.

“Sort of. Sort of like that. If you have the time, I can explain what you found. I can tell you a story. But you have to play along a little.”

Mason leaned forward. “I'd be very interested in an explanation. I haven't slept well since I found this thing.”

“So humoring me a little wouldn't be too much to ask?”

“Of course not.”

“I need you to start boiling your water, Mason. Will you do that for me?”

“Yes,” he said, with little hesitation.

“Then come back tomorrow and we'll talk. In the meantime you should do a little research.”

“Research? On what?”

“Fluoride,” said Jack. “Come back tomorrow, and we'll share some stories.”

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Renner
is the author of a previous novel,
The Man from Primrose Lane
, published in 2012. He teaches composition at Kent State University and is a contributor to
BoingBoing
,
Cracked
, and
Cleveland Scene
. You can sign up for email updates
here
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