Forget Yourself (32 page)

I looked for the pretty woman again, the crazy ketamine one outside the newsagent, but I couldn’t find her. I was just distracting myself. Truth is, what I’m doing is scary. I never knew anyone who did this, who sold their memories for hollow cash. And the building looks so normal from the outside, so fucking normal. It might have been an accountancy, but for the logo. It’s a different one from the ads online. It has a man, with a floating black ball for a head: like on toilet doors. But his head is glowing, one colour to the next, all the colours that exist, all in turn. Is that a good thing? Do I want my head to glow? It doesn’t seem like the type of thing that’d be good for you, after all, selling your memories. Enough distraction, I have to go inside.

It would be utter madness—and this plan is one of Lamia’s more extravagant lunacies. It cannot be possible, surely? Yet her idea has wound its way about my mind, weaving its way into my thoughts. She is right in saying that my husband has left, and she was correct in her premonition that he would send a letter the very next day. The letter said all the usual things, about how he loves me and cherishes the time we spend with one another, and that I mustn’t be too angry at his absence—he had even bought me a car to cheer my thoughts. Modern barbarism. The letter gave absolutely no clue as to the length of this apparent absence. In truth I have absolutely no idea what I will with myself while he’s away: especially if my two friends and their husbands have left as well. Forget Yourself. That is tempting. The opportunity to live one’s life afresh. Who is to say that there aren’t some invaluable experiences to be obtained? A chance to see oneself from the outside. It is tempting, certainly tempting.

And there he is, my husband, my ever-cleaning husband. I don’t know how he could clean at a time like this, the calm before the storm, the silence before the scream. Will there be screaming? The scream of jets overhead, well we’ve already heard that. Will they come and round us up? Enough questions. Wait and see. I lean over and kiss his salty lips, and in return he’s running his tongue down my neck, to my chest. He giggles, and I giggle, and for one moment there is no war. No shutters, no mobs, no paper from the sky. We collapse to the floor and I pull him on top of me, feeling the weight of his body press me into the ugly pink carpet we’ve never changed. I pull off his shirt, then my blouse, feeling skin on skin, our pulses pounding, firm, hard, rough and a crash. A burst of sound, an explosion. It has begun, but we carry on anyway, just more gently, the light touch of fingertips, the soft nudge of a forehead, soft and quiet, careful not to disturb anything.

YOU SHOULD KNOW I AM
Blondee.. For the last time, I am Blondee.

This is the last time I can talk to you. After this I won’t be Blondee, not any more. Who shall I be?

First I’ll tell you what they did with me. I’m alive, but who I am isn’t consistent, if it ever was. They took me, talked, they lectured me, led me, and left. And here I am, at a different wall, at a place I saw only once before. It’s not too bad. I am in a hole, the ever-rustling blue tarpaulin above, soil below. At times it’s lovely here. At times like this how could I want anything more?

They gave Blondee a new label, one of her very own. I suppose they were trying to give it to me, but like I keep telling you, I’m not a stable entity.

Now there were least, minor, moderate (species extinct), severe—and me. Pilsner had a proud gleam in his eye as he announced it. I’d laughed at him.

Isolation.
This was an elegant word they gifted me. Blondee was to be placed in isolation. That was why they gave me this ramshackle shelter. That’s why they keep leaving me rusted tins of food and mush-sloppy fruit. If I died I wouldn’t be alone, and who knows where I’d be? Or who? They keep me here so I can be by myself. They don’t know anything.

This is the end of my story. But there are so many more. Now I’m by myself I can see them all. See and touch and taste. A million worlds outside our walls, all leading here. I had known each person—my dreadlocked lover and beetroot-scented husband living on a farm; my lost-long friend who cut himself up but who had lived a life behind a screen watching the world die; the man I hated, who only wanted his brother back; even the clumsy husband-gathering woman who lived bored and rich. Different worlds, different stories. All had been brought here, refugee or prisoner, vacation or torment. I saw them all.

Yesterday, for example. Yesterday I was Timon, whose friends had called Tan. Tanned skin and one grey tooth.

And I was scared. It wasn’t just the logo, sprawled all over the walls, a man’s head glowing blue then green then purple. I’d found a cigarette on the floor, a whole unsmoked cigarette, and I took it as a sign. I was doing the right thing, there would be a tomorrow. I smoked it as I watched the colours in the logo-man’s head change. A drag and he went blue. A drag and he went red. A drag and I threw the stub to the floor.

I was scared, and it wasn’t just the receptionist, her face firm as her breasts, her voice clipped short of compassion. I was scared, couldn’t she see that? But she must have seen it every day, a hundred sad and lonely people a week selling all they could possible have left. She was bored and had no empathy. But I couldn’t blame her—she was just trying to make sure she had her own future now. Better her side of the desk than mine. There’s no more money, and we all know it.

“Just a few,” I told her.

I wouldn’t want to lose them all, not all my memories. Nothing on her moved even a millimetre, she was poised and placed, official like a statue. Eventually she handed me forms, a hundred signatures and I went into a little room which smelt of nothing—of nothing at all. It was dark in there. I’d always known clinics to be bright as a headache.

There were two men in the room. One was a lawyer, one was a doctor. I couldn’t tell which was which. They wore near-matching designer suits and they handed me more forms. The medical and the legal ones looked the same. Rows of incomprehensible words. I have a degree but I’d never understand.

“I only want to sell a few,” I told them.

I wasn’t wearing a suit. I was wearing the same t-shirt I’d been wearing since yesterday. I could feel the little damp circles under my armpits. They nodded and talked about procedure. There wasn’t much for me to do. The doctor/lawyer told me they could do it the same day, and it was a statement, it wasn’t a question. I just nodded, nodded and nodded and hoped they didn’t notice the sweat-marks on my clothes.

There were more rooms, dark and hot, and there were a few more people, all in suits.

This was it, the very core of me. This was all I had, and now I had surrendered it to them. Once I had sold my body, and that was nothing. Now I sold my past, so that I could gain a future. Was that possible? He who controls the past controls the future, that’s what they say. Oh gods I hoped they were wrong.

“Leave my mother,” I told someone. Leave her. She was gone and if they took her I’d never get her back. Leave my mother.

They weren’t even listening by then, milling about, pills and wavelengths and sterile beds. The forms were signed and they had no further need of niceties. I belonged to them—most people are law-illiterate, they can’t speak or read what they lawyers write, and I was one of them.

Banks and lawyers and politicians—they need us, you see. They need every part of us, so that they can grow fat. Without us they are one of us, and that’s worse than death for them—for we have no future. They jabbed at my arms and pinned me down.

And so they took everything. They took the very core of me. I couldn’t scream.

I slept. I went to sleep and I woke up somewhere else.

I woke up here. Naked to the world. A new world, one I didn’t recognise, and I couldn’t recognise anything, especially myself. People were gathered around, ready to name me.

How could I have been Timon if I wasn’t by myself? Without the luxury of isolation? With someone there, watching my performance. They’d grab on to me, hold on and not let go. Preconceptions and expectations would weigh me down, and I’d be trapped, Blondee, Blondee forever.

I am Timon, known as Tan, and I sold my memories for rent.

Is there a better reason? Of course I didn’t get to use the money myself. Read the small print, always read the small print. Bring a lawyer to help you wade through the endless meaningless syllables uttered by sharp-suited men. My family would get the money, but I would never remember who they were. Leave my mother, I’d said. For all I remember I could have been born in a tube, surrounded by goggle-eyed scientists. And someone somewhere has Timon’s real-live memories, which can never be copied, never duplicated, only moved to some squishy new organic home. Memories of beaches, of winter presents, memories of kisses and crosses and first cars. Did the rich read the small print? All the money in the world can’t buy a lifetime. Did they know how they got them? They’d be able to afford the lawyers.

This place isn’t so bad. Here in my hole I have space. Not too long ago there would have been people scattered about, with questions and statements and thoughts. Now all I can see are one or two empty huts. Sometimes even, when the wind is blowing the right way, I can barely even smell death at all. But the distant dizzy hum of flies is always there unless it rains.

A day after I was brought here I heard someone. I could hear the panting. They wanted to come and see Blondee. Their footsteps were all around me, I could hear them above the rain.

I hid away until they left. They had been watching me. I knew who it was.

I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see anyone.

Can I hold you?

You might not be real but that doesn’t matter. I will still hold you.

Will you think of me, holding you? I have blonde hair that reaches my shoulders and I am of an average stature—though of course my definition of average will be misleading. I have the long fingers of a thief.

These will not change, even when I’m born anew.

And I was Loke. Years of watching women on a flicker-happy screen had given me thick glasses and a gut. But I always dressed smartly, I always wore a tie. I had watched the world die, a plague like in a bad film. I watched my neighbours panic and collapse, one by one. They ran constant broadcasts, and I saw more than one presenter die right on air. Sometimes the cameramen were dead too, so the image was frozen on the body, and then I’d change the channel.

There was nothing good on. The radio was the same, they’d be sick on air, all would turn to static, aside from the emergency broadcasts. It’s surprising how much they mentioned god. I thought we were a secular society. They’re cowards, turning to a tyrant as a last resort.

There were thousands of videos online they had made, their last films, all of them dying like they thought they were original. They didn’t need gods, the young ones, they had the videos of one another passing on. They all died together and that was all they needed. It soothed them.

Why would we care? We were still alive.

There was only her left, and so I watched her, like I’d always watched women. It’s not like I was proud of the fact, and I know how creepy they found it (one of them even sent me a virus which somehow scorched circuits deep within the hum of the box). I enjoyed it though and the only thing which would have stopped me was the death of every woman on Earth.

But she didn’t mind, not this one. She’d gone a bit mental, pretending to watch her neighbours, pretending their bloated boils of corpses were walking and talking and making tea, but she was company. She would win and I would lose. That was companionship, she said so. She could make up any game she wanted and I didn’t mind, so long as I could watch her. I loved her.

She didn’t know much about me, and she wasn’t even surprised when I told her how to prepare the K. She thought I was a woman as well. But that was our romance. A crazy woman and a mask, the last two humans on Earth.

We weren’t the last two of course. It might have been poetic—fucked up and poetic—but it wasn’t true.

Some people had survived, hidden at home like us, hiding behind net curtains or Venetian blinds, listening to radio static and wondering why the internet still worked. Dotted up and down the land, we were immune, protected by the god of genetic predisposition.

So few of us left to watch the bodies turn black and blue.