The Great Forgetting (19 page)

“Booya,” said Marlon. “Bag everything. Bag the box, too.” He moved for the door, and as he did Jean backed against the wall. “Your fault,” he told her, a fat finger in her face. “If you hadn't shacked up with that meth head, nobody would be here today.”

2
    “Where're we going?” asked Cole, his hands gripping the dashboard tightly as Jack flew down country roads.

“I don't know,” he said. “East.”

“Don't speed, goddamn it,” the Captain yelled from the back. “You'll get us pulled over. Jesus God, you drive like a woman. Actually, your mother was a better driver. You drive like a gook. You know what, pull over and I'll drive. I can barely move my legs and I know I'd drive better than you.”

“Dad! Be quiet!”

Life alters course like this, Jack thought, not slowly but all at once, in herky-jerky jumps. His mother's sudden death. Tony's betrayal. Those things had changed him overnight. Giant detours of his personal timeline. Here was another one.

How would today change the course of his life? Who would he become? A fugitive? A conspiracy nut? One of those fanatics you heard about on the news sometimes, the ones who get shot to death driving through some roadblock in D.C.?

He was a kidnapper. He'd kidnapped a seventeen-year-old boy. He'd kidnapped his father from hospice. The staff didn't know the Captain was missing yet. But they would. Soon enough, they would.

Finding Tony was the least of his worries now. Except, wherever Tony was hiding was logically the best place for them to lie low, too. If they could find it.

“We need to get someplace with lots of people,” said Jack. “Somewhere we can hide in plain sight but not be seen. I need time to think.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake, I'll just tell them I did it!” the Captain shouted. “I'm already halfway to my final reward.”

“At least two people saw me deck Mark at the Walmart the day you killed him, Pop. How do I explain that? Bad timing? Shit. How did it happen?”

“He tied to kill me and Tony when we went out to the trailer to get him to leave town. It was him or us.”

“Without Tony to back you up, they'll say you're covering for me.”

“It's not like your prints are on the knife.”

“They could be, though,” said Jack. “You think I didn't go through all your old war stuff when I was a kid? I used to take the knife out into the woods and play Vietnam.”

“That's fucked up.”

“Well, why the hell do you even have it? Why did you keep it all these years?”

“Qi,” he said simply.

“All this trouble for a hooker.”

“Watch your mouth. You have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Get on the interstate,” Cole interjected. “Make for Canada, then we can head west for Alaska.”

Jack laughed. “The police will be looking for this car. Forget Canada—we won't make it to Pennsylvania.”

“Lee Harvey,” the Captain said.

“What?” For a minute, Jack thought his father was regressing, reliving the broadcast of Kennedy's assassination or something.

“Oswald hid in a theater. He needed somewhere to hide in plain sight.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “That's good, Dad. Alliance, then.” The dollar theater in Alliance was an inspired idea for many reasons. For one, it was just beyond the border of Portage County, outside the jurisdiction of Franklin Mills PD. For another, it was attached to a mall, which would be crawling with blue-collar families stocking up on smoke bombs and sparklers for Fourth of July barbecues. Sure enough, the parking lot was nearly full when they arrived twenty minutes later.

“Here,” the Captain said as they helped him out of the car. He slipped a dime into Jack's hand.

“What's this for?”

“Switch out your plates.”

Jack started to protest but quickly saw the logic in this move. He set about the task using the dime to loosen the screws on the plates of a Dodge Caravan parked nearby. In five minutes, it was done. They walked into the mall, acutely aware of the security cameras hanging from the concrete eaves. Jack bought tickets for
Avengers: Age of Ultron
and pushed his father along.

“Popcorn?” the Captain said.

“No. What are you thinking? We're not here to have a good time.”

“I'm hungry, goddamn it. It feels like I haven't eaten in a week.”

Jack handed Cole a twenty and told him to grab a soda, too.

“If they have Jordan almonds…,” the Captain called out, but then Jack wrapped his arm around his father's shoulders and made for cinema 7.

They sat in the back. A couple dozen patrons—teenagers, mostly—came in before the previews. As the theater dimmed, Cole returned, carrying popcorn, soda, Jordan almonds, and Milk Duds, and took a seat in front of them. He might have been having the best day of his life.

Jack helped the Captain to some soda and checked a handful of popcorn for stray kernels that might get lodged in his food pipe, and then placed the remainder onto a large napkin in his old man's lap.

“That little snot forgot the butter,” the Captain whispered.

Jack closed his eyes against the loud, unrelenting violence onscreen and tried to think. The most logical thing to do would be to turn himself in, let the courts ferret out the truth. Surely he couldn't really be convicted of murder, right? Not when all he did was punch the guy in the face. If the choice was that simple, that's just what he would have done. But what about Cole, the unexpected miracle sitting beside him? He'd restored the Captain's mind. Cole was affecting the people around him like some kind of living Wi-Fi signal. In the face of such a thing, Jack's own fate seemed a little less important.

Miracles, he knew from studying the Crusades, were dangerous things. Miracles inspired action. Miracles changed the world. Nothing could be taken for granted anymore. Nothing could be taken as fact. Not when a man's mind could be healed simply by sitting next to a boy with a titanium plate in his skull.

There were no known parameters for this new reality. There was no instruction manual to the Great Forgetting. How, exactly, did it work? Who controlled the mechanism? Did Cole have these answers? He didn't think so. The kid knew a lot. But his father surely hadn't told him everything.

Jack needed to understand the stakes. Tony could afford to disappear into Wonderland without asking questions. All Tony cared about was himself. Jack had responsibilities and he needed to know if this misadventure was worth setting those responsibilities aside. If it was worth being a fugutive.

There might be a way to learn more about the Great Forgetting, Jack realized. But that meant continuing east. They would need a new vehicle. Something inconspicuous. A used car would buy them a day or two, but eventually the FBI would snag the transfer from the DMV. He couldn't take Sam's car. Jean's, either, for that matter. It took him a second more before he found the answer and a plan began to take shape. Risky, yes. It meant returning to Franklin Mills. But Franklin Mills was not a small village. It was full of empty roads. It might be possible to slip in and out if they were quick about it.

Slowly, Jack became aware of the sound of his father's ragged, whispered gasps. His first thought was that the Captain was choking on his popcorn. But then he saw that his father was crying. Tears cascaded down the old man's cheeks. He had never seen his father cry and it frightened him. He put a hand on the Captain's back.

“Dad?”

“Ah, Johnny,” he said. “I remember now. I remember how I ended up in the home. I … I can't even apologize for it, it's so bad.”

“Wasn't you.”

“Yes it was.”

“Wasn't you, Dad.”

“But Jack, it was
my
hands.”

3
    When
Avengers
ended, Cole helped Jack walk the Captain into a screening of
Jurassic World
. The Captain explained how this wasn't even really stealing. “Back in my day, squirt, a quarter got you in the door and you could stay as long as you wanted. The admission is for the
theater
, not the movie. People forgot that.” Cole sat with them, since it seemed like they'd had time to talk through family stuff. After
Jurassic World
, they snuck into
Tomorrowland
, and when that was over, it was dark outside and they were hungry again.

They drove to a Wendy's and ate inside the car. The air grew stale and salty with their meaty breath.

“Tell me about this island,” Jack asked, halfway through his buffalo chicken sandwich.

“It's a place where all the people who chose to remember went to live. The people who were against the Great Forgetting. My dad said there weren't many. A few thousand. They didn't want to forget like everybody else. So they were given Mu, the island, and told to never come off again.”

“Wait. Your island, it's the lost continent of Mu?”

“You couldn't have heard of it.”

“I have,” said Jack. “Mu is mentioned frequently in early historical writing. It's an old story. Supposedly Mu was this small continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There was this archaeologist, Augustus Le Plongeon, an expert on Mayan culture. Most of what we know about the Mayans can be attributed to his expeditions to South America in the late nineteenth century. He was sure that the Mayans had come from this island of Mu. Not only that, but Le Plongeon said ancient Egypt was founded by inhabitants of Mu after a mass exodus from the island six thousand years ago. Le Plongeon claimed Mu was where humanity began.”

“Well, you'll get to see it, Jack. How about that?”

“Why is it so important we go there?”

Cole combed his fingers through his hair. He liked Jack, he did. He reminded him of his favorite teacher at Pencey. But they should be three hundred miles from here by now. They were wasting time. “Because,” said Cole, “the people on Mu don't know that someone has hacked into the machine we used for the Great Forgetting.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Around the time I was checked into Haven, someone began resetting the calendar again. A day here, a month there. Deleted. Gone. It always happened after national tragedies. The bombings in Decatur. Sarin gas in the D.C. subway. Everything was reset by the EAS broadcasts and the attacks were deleted from memory, forgotten. Someone has been altering the history of current events. The people on Mu need to know someone is playing with the old equipment. The machine was only supposed to be used once. Used once and then maintained until all the artifacts were collected. Tony went there to tell them. To get them to help him take down HAARP maybe. Stop whoever is resetting the calendar all the time.”

“Who is it? Who's hitting the reset button?”

“I don't know,” said Cole. “It's fucking scary when you think about it. I mean, what's their motivation? What's their agenda?”

“This is what I'm getting at,” said Jack. “We don't really know what's going on, so how could we know we're even on the right side? Before I go running into some situation on Mu, if such a place exists, I want to know what we're dealing with. I want to know what the hell this is all about. Your dad must have known.”

“I'm sure he did,” said Cole.
And that's why he's dead
, he thought.

“And the other Collectors know, too.”

“Yes. Probably. Sure.”

“And you can take me to their office?”

“Bad idea,” said Cole. “There's Hounds there, too, man, not just Collectors.”

“But the Collectors have to come in and out like everyone else.”

Cole sighed. “You want to go to Manhattan,” he said. “Walk right into their headquarters?”

“I want to kidnap one of the Twelve Angry Men.”

For a moment nobody said anything. Then the Captain leaned forward, the leather seat snapping loudly beneath him. “Can someone please explain to me what the Christ is going on?” he said. “For a while I thought you guys were talking about some
Star Trek
episode or some nerd bullshit. What the fuck is the Great Forgetting?”

As Jack began the delicate process of explaining everything, Cole curled up in the passenger seat, his head humming with a blood-sugar doziness. Sometimes the boy felt like he was a hundred years old when he considered everything that had happened to him since the day he'd learned what his father really did for a living. That memory felt so old, Manhattan so far away, like it had happened in some book he'd read in grammar school.

*   *   *

It was supposed to be a nice surprise.

Instead of staying the last night at Pencey before Christmas break, Cole had folded his clothes into his Nike duffel bag and taken the 11:00 a.m. train into the city. He'd gotten the idea to show up at his father's office. Then they could go to that theater in Battery Park and have lunch at Suspenders. They could talk about what books they were reading and where they would go on vacation.

When Cole arrived at Penn Station he hopped the C to Church Street, stepping into the brutal cold whipping through the skyscraper canyons just before three-thirty. Dressed in jeans and a Pencey sweatshirt, Cole hurried to his father's office.

New York in winter always left Cole feeling uneasy. The city was too sterile, all those wonderful and brutal summer smells lost in the chill air. And every sound sounded strange, metallic. A voice could carry for blocks if the wind was right. It felt like a dying metropolis, like a great capital about to fall, its citizens fleeing to better places, forgetting to take him along.

A hurricane of hot air ruffled his long bangs as he pushed through the revolving glass doors of the skyscraper where his father worked. The grand lobby was granite-tiled and reflected the bright sun that fell through thin cathedral windows. He followed a bronze path toward a polished directory beside a bank of elevators. There were so many floors that you had to take three elevators to reach the top. His dad worked for a company called Nu-Day Trading, that company with the aspen leaf logo. He searched the directory, over a hundred businesses listed alphabetically, but there was no “Nu-Day Trading.” It was possible Nu-Day was one of those “subsidiaries,” a company within a larger company, like those nesting dolls Cole's nanny, Tish, had given his mother.