Forget Yourself (7 page)

And the others woke up.

And the others remembered nothing. They remembered some things and they listed them. They knew of Presidents and parks and agriculture. But they didn’t know of any Presidents, or parks, and they didn’t remember any particular farms.

They decided to walk, to find cities or leaders or farms. They walked in one direction, a tap here or there, with little logos of fire uncanny and familiar, brushing past the sway of trees and the crunch of the ground, until they hit a wall. They walked in another direction, over tufts of grass and shrubs, until they hit a wall. They walked again, slewing through sand and hot sun until they hit a wall. One last time they passed scattered bricks and a huge pile of rubbish and one final wall.

And they fought.

They fought a lot, about which of them had placed them there, which was a spy, whose fault it was.

Eventually spats and spots of rain petered down and pelted them until they stopped fighting. They had to make a shelter. They found the pile of debris and collected planks, and supports, and corrugated iron. They spent their first night in a makeshift shack.

There were the four of them, Pilsner and Tie and a woman and someone who could have been man or woman and is now lost in time. They huddled together in the shack they had built together and they cried together. They didn’t know it, but they were doing for the first time what everyone would do when they first arrived, one by one. They cried for the lives they knew they had lost. Happy or sad, rich or shit-poor, they knew they had lost something. It didn’t take them long to realise this was punishment: they had done something wrong and this was punishment. What else could it be, really? Tie had said it, after staring at the wall for hours and hours. Once said it was truth. That was that. This was punishment.

They huddled the night away together, exhausted. They woke up dark and heavy and thirsty, so went to the tap in the centre of the world, to the tap that would give them water. Each had drunk their fill before they noticed the box. It was metal and it was large, taller than each of them, taller than everyone in the world. It had a door and inside, inside they found food and drink and wood and more metal and plastic and tiles and this and that. They ate and drank and laughed. Whatever their crime it can’t have been so bad.

When they were full they talked more. What else was there to do? They talked about punishment. What were their crimes? The woman pointed to Tie and told him his was sexual.

“What makes you say that? Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know, I honestly don’t know, it just feels right.”

So his crime was sexual, though no crime was worse than any other, and they set about the rest of themselves. Pilsner’s was disruptive, the woman’s was violence, and the other’s was theft. Those just felt right, but they could find reasons if they tried. Noses, fingers, eyes. Plenty of reasons. No crime was worse than any other, they were all in the same boat, and no-one need feel ashamed, no more than anyone else.

And so they lived and worked together, eating and shitting and crying and sleeping and building. They added bit-bit-bit to their shack, from the pile of treasure they had found and the rations every so-many-days. That was their world and they would live in it together and perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad.

They’d found the book and the first memory all on the same day. Clearing away bits of homes and furniture from the pile Pilsner found the book, bound and blue and beautiful. It was full of clean white pages. It was fresh and new, the only fresh and new thing in the whole world.

He took it back to the palace they had made for themselves and the woman and the other stared at it. Oooh. Oooooh. It’s so—new. They placed it in the centre of their home and they set about building it a table.

Tie rushed in, full of sweat and panted breath. He had run back. He had run back because he had remembered something. He had a memory, a real memory from the world outside. They listened and they opened a page in the book which felt right, and they wrote the memory down with a shard of pencil.

And every now and then memories would strike them hard about the brain and they would record it in the book. Memories formed around memories and clumped together in sections, written in pen and pencil.

This would help us live our lives. We could live as we did before we slept and forgot everything. We could live properly.

And they tried. That was all you could expect, really, to try.

Rations after rations and rations. Memories here and there, picked out from broken tiles and dirty fabric and plastic and planks of wood. Days were hot and cold, snow and rain fell amongst sun and heat-shivers.

One day there were bodies alongside the rations. They were naked and sleeping.

Why where they there? Six, there were six of them. They lay sweating and sleeping. One was wearing boxers: ‘Frederick’ across the band. He was so young. Another had a broken watch; one had ginger hair. That one had hair all about his shoulders. Straight away they could tell what they had done—violence, theft, theft, disruption, sexual. But that last one—something about him. Something as he awoke, something in his eyes. What he had done was slightly worse. It must have been worse. Probably not too bad, but worse all the same. It was violence, he had hurt someone. Something about the size of his hands.

They all awoke and cried and were shown the world. The hut was too small to fit ten whole people but there was plenty of wood and plastic. Plenty of metal. So they each built their own. The original hut was for the book.

But that one, the one whose crime was worse, who had hurt someone worse than anyone else had. Perhaps he should live on the other side of the courtyard. It wasn’t too far away, after all—they’d still see him every day.

And that was the start of the world.

IT RAINS.
Thunder over the blue tarpaulin. I’m lying down now, staring at the ripples and waves of the plastic. I have mud in my hair. Water flows down into the hole, over my fingers, over my arms.

My eyes prickle with tears, tears of relief. I enjoy the feeling of them welling in my eyes, flooding over my face.

These are the last sensations I will have.

Tomorrow they will belong to someone else.

I think my last thoughts of Frederick. Secret hours together, sheltered from the world. Long and lazy hours.

The rain is falling heavier, the tarp beats like a dream.

Frederick.

WE EXPLORED TOGETHER
, he and I, we explored the land of the moderates. We retraced every step of their gravel-coated land, sneaking and slipping and stopping outside huts to listen to the conversations within. The conversations were simple—happy or angry or sad.

People talked about rations, people talked about if they were having enough sex, people talked about how hot it was today and how cold yesterday. People talked about how cold it was today and how it looked like it would be wet tomorrow.

As they talked Frederick and I would crouch or squat, fingers clasped together, or an arm over the other’s shoulder.

One hut was made of actual skin—skin from a large and hairy animal, brown fur with grey splotches, sewn to another skin of another large creature, this one grey with brown splotches. Frederick had seen it before. He held out his arm to present it to me.

I asked him what it was made of.

He didn’t know. The skin had been delivered with the rations long ago, but none of the least had wanted it.

“I—I was interested in them, even though I didn’t take them—for myself. It was before I was an artist. I waited for a while, but I didn’t—no-one left with them, that I saw.”

I understood why. It smelled like death. We had enough of that amongst ourselves.

I expected it to be soft, but it was coarse to the touch, bristly, stiff with the weight of age. We heard someone moving inside.

I asked him if it was her. He shook his head.

The next day we found another hut; a pile of soaked, split cushions, furry with mould. It was held up with a series of bars, the large cushions draped over and around them, larger stiffer ones used to form basic walls. No-one lived there, and no-one had wanted the pieces of this failed experiment.

“The—well, you know they—the severes—they would want them, Blondee.” Frederick put his arm around me, pulling me toward the crook of his neck.

Were things so bad for them? That they would want these warped and malformed cushions heavy with damp and crawling with insects? It wasn’t something I wanted to think about.

“They don’t have much, Blondee, they—”

And I kissed him, running my tongue over his lips, clearing away sad thoughts of the worst of us here, those who had committed terrible crimes and now lived terrible lives. I kissed him and he kissed me in return, his tongue meeting mine, dancing, flicking, plunging.

I don’t remember who laughed first but we pulled apart, like every time, wiping our mouths. We couldn’t kiss one another seriously. We had comfort but no passion. I put my arm around him, pulling his waist toward me.

So where did she live?

He knew where she was. He was hoping I would lose interest, that after a few visits I’d no longer have my strange desire to see the home of Ketamine. It wasn’t that he was angry, it really wasn’t: Frederick seemed below anger, as though he couldn’t reach up for it even if he wanted to. Anger requires expectation, and Frederick seemed to have none of that, not for anything—people or rations or even his artist-pieces.

I told him it was simply something I needed to do, and then it would be over.

So he took me there.

He didn’t tell me beforehand. It was evening and we reached a hut made of planks and rubber and he said, in a low-low voice,

“This is it.”

I took some steps backwards, tripping over the heels of my feet. I couldn’t hear her inside.

“Does it—does it help you, Blondee?” He was curious.

I didn’t know.

“It helps,” I said, lying about my certainty. “She’s in a nice enough place.”

She was a voluntary moderate. She had demoted herself, so of course she would be the first on their list, the lesser bad of the moderately bad. She still had less than if she’d remained with me, and I had more than her—but it was no longer my concern.

I wanted to leave her something, something more than a lock of my hair, something powerful, something protective. Something to keep her alive.

I asked Frederick for a moment to myself. He nodded and strolled away, almost beyond sight. I knew he was still watching, but I needed room, not privacy.

I would give her a circle.

Tie had told me that he knew a trick—one that would help me.

I asked if it would help me escape.

He told me it would, in a manner of speaking.

I asked him to show me.

He told me to breathe deeply, evenly, endlessly. He’d taken my hand in his. I’d flinched. He’d waited until my breathing settled into rhythm once more. I’d closed my eyes, the dark patches of colour flickering wildly, then settling, pulsing slowly.

He told me to point my finger.

So I did.

He’d pulled my hand toward the earth, prodding it by proxy, warm and deep. He’d pulled my hand along by the wrist, my finger tearing through the soft ground, on and on, my breathing and heartbeat and mind all steady.