A little note with her silver pen, tiny on the paper, as if ticking off a point. “And didn’t run?”
“I took the risk. If I’m so remarkable, why help me?”
“I am interested, fascinated, of course. To make you memorable, we must understand how you are forgotten.”
“It’s irrelevant to Perfection, though?”
“Perhaps. But I am increasingly discovering that cognitive science flourishes on unusual conditions, shall we say. People who have suffered brain injuries are most beloved of neuroscientists, because in their lack of function, meaning may be ascribed to the region of the brain which is damaged. If, for example, we were to find that there was something in your brain which did not work, or worked too much…”
“You think it’d be that easy? A magic switch and boom, everyone can be forgotten or remembered?”
“No,” she mused, slow and gentle. “No, I very much doubt it. But in answer to your first question, your unique condition may be of some interest in terms of unravelling how Filipa’s treatments work. They made your friend memorable…”
“My friend is dead,” I snapped, harder than I’d meant. “Parker died, and only Perfect Parker is left.”
A half nod, an acknowledgement that she didn’t have time to quibble. “But Perfect Parker is memorable, and Filipa’s treatments achieved that. That in itself is interesting. Although you are technically correct: your presence here is a distraction from the main purpose. And yet a distraction that I am utterly absorbed in.”
I waited, and found that I was holding my cutlery hard enough to hurt, bones straining against skin, muscles tight, breath held. I let it all go, all at once, and she saw it, and her eyes brightened and she exclaimed, “Phenomenal. You — yourself. Not just your condition, but you, the mind inside the memory, you are phenomenal. To have lived. To have survived. More — to have flourished! To have become who you are, to have stolen Perfection. You want to be remembered, and I have sworn to help, but you must understand that it could be the most appalling destruction of a beautiful thing, your forgettability has made you into something incredible.”
“The treatments…”
“We’ll find a way,” she added, fast, a half nod of her head at nothing much. “All this, the tests, the scans, we’ll find the part of you that is different, the part that makes people forget, and if we can de-activate it, I give you my word that we shall. That’s what you want, ultimately, isn’t it?”
“And in finding it…?”
“Yes. Of course. Yes,” she replied with a twist of her fingers through empty air. “If we can de-activate it, we can also activate it in others.”
A moment, a pause as I tried to understand. An idea, almost too terrible to name. “You… want to be forgotten?” I stammered.
She didn’t answer.
“It’s a curse,” I snapped, pushing against her silence. “It’s a fucking death sentence.”
Silence.
“If you tell me that you want what I have, then I’ll walk away tonight.”
Silence. Her fingers ran along the edge of the table, then folded, a deliberate act, into her lap. She looked up, met my eye, her lower lip uncurling from inside her mouth, a false smile. “I live alone in a place where no one ever comes. I work alone. I walk by the sea, I go to the shops and hide my face. I dodge cameras, travel by false passport, make no friends, have no need of company. My work is all that matters. I would give my life to see it done.”
“And what is your work?”
“Freedom. I think it is freedom.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, unable to meet her eyes, head aching from tequila, a night I could barely recall. “What does it mean?”
She shrugged. “I think… it is a crusade. A jihad. To struggle—”
“I know the meaning of jihad.”
“Well then. To struggle in the cause of freedom of thought. The first battle being, of course, to show that thought, in this world, at this time, is not free.”
“Is that why you’re going after Perfection?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you keep me around? Because you think… I’m free?”
Silence, a while. Then, “Yes. I think you are the only free woman I have ever met.”
I sat, shaking, and didn’t have any words.
Like a child, all I could do was get up, and walk away.
Chapter 65
Tests.
More tests.
Three weeks in and out of labs and hospitals in California.
Scans, chemicals, swabs, injections.
I tried talking to Byron, but couldn’t get anything from her. She couldn’t remember building a relationship with me, and so she couldn’t trust. So we idled along in quiet, business-like efficiency, ticking points off her list while she watched and re-watched recordings of our talks, annotated and updated observations and thoughts. Some thin impressions began to form in her mind, but they were, as she said, like memories of watching a play. She saw Romeo die and Juliet swoon, but it was not her lips the poison kissed, her heart that broke. She was a witness to events that contained her, not party.
On the fourth week we spent together, she slipped away for a few hours to have an fMRI on her own brain, looking for long-term damage caused by my presence. I didn’t think she’d find any, and the next day she was back at the breakfast table, as calm and composed as anything. Science, I suspected, wasn’t giving her the answers she was looking for.
On the fifth week, the doctors gave me LSD.
It wasn’t called LSD, but the effects were roughly the same. They plugged me into a dozen electrodes and sat me back in a comfortable chair, and for the first time in my life, I tasted blue, and smelt the sound of Byron’s voice, and dreamed while waking of what dreams would come, and swallowed time, swallowed the past and the future both, swallowed all the oxygen from the air and was absolutely fine until I found that I was having a panic attack and couldn’t breathe, sobbing for breath, unable to stop crying, gasping, heaving, a pain in my chest which I knew was going to kill me, going to die for this, for Byron, for Perfection, until the doctor gave me something to calm me down and when I woke, Byron simply said, “We still couldn’t remember you, I’m afraid.”
I watched footage recorded of the event later. The trip had lasted, for my money, less than ten minutes, but on the tape three hours go by in which doctors, nurses and students at the clinic all enter and leave, enter and leave, and each time Byron asks, “Have you seen this patient before?” and they all shake their heads, every one of them, and exit with an apologetic smile.
“Maybe a different mechanism,” suggested Byron as she drove us back to the hotel. “Maybe something electrical.”
She snuck out early that night, while she thought I was sleeping off the day’s medicine, for another one of her backstreet meetings with contacts and servants. I wondered where she got her money from, if she was worth robbing, thought about following her, decided against it.
“Perhaps something else?” she said, the day a doctor suggested electroconvulsive therapy, but she was watching me from the corner of her eye, waiting to see how far I’d go.
Misnomers: electroshock therapy. Made famous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as punishment, patients reduced to drooling slabs. Some risk; not much. Commonly administered bilaterally, with currents somewhere in the 800 milliamp range, an ECT machine pulls less electrical juice than a PC, and carries roughly the same risks to a patient as a general anaesthetic. However, relapses occur frequently, often six months or so after initial treatment, and there are concerns as to long-term memory loss and damage to cognition that may result from what is essentially an unknown mechanism for inducing a grand mal seizure.