Mem, p.12
MEM, page 12
Lyman was in the doorway, in the same dark place where I’d first seen Dolores.
“It wasn’t him, I promise,” I said to Harvey before looking back to the porch and wondering how long Dolores’s husband had been standing there. “I would tell you if it had been.”
I explained quickly what had happened inside the house and that there was nothing to do, even as I realized there was a good chance Lyman had seen our kiss. I would never know. Cloaked in the shadow of his Queen Anne estate would be the last time I saw the man. And in it, I witnessed his true age at last. More than just the nineteen years between our first intended meeting, and now it was the heaviness of the balcony and gables of the home sagging above him and all they carried.
“I’m no monster,” Lyman called out, and at first I could think to do nothing but shrug.
“Fine,” I answered him from Harvey’s arms. “But I won’t be back.”
He knew.
A timid breeze swept past me when I opened my mouth next, and of the things left to say, I could not decide between them. Because he did know: I was not the woman he’d married and he would have kept me just the same. There was something else hiding in the shadow across Lyman’s face, and as the sun retreated further and he disappeared from view even though none of us moved, I spoke the last words to pass between us.
“If you love her, Lyman, or ever did, you won’t let it happen again.”
I should have said something more. Before descending the hill—instead of admiring Harvey’s pale eyes and letting him lead me back to the car—I should have told Lyman to let the other woman go as well. She might have heard me, skulking behind some window overhead, tucked behind the curtain so as not to see me again. If I’d spoken, perhaps it would have shamed her into leaving on her own. But I made a choice, for me. I knew my name once and for all, and if I was not a memory—not an Extract No. 1 or otherwise—then their lives were no concern of mine.
“Don’t take me home,” I told Harvey when we were in the car.
“Where should we go?” he asked, and something constricted in my chest.
“I don’t care. Just not back to the Vault. Not yet.”
The Rialto Theatre was exactly as Camille and I had left it. Its wide and extravagant face still commanded such attention that the torch-shaped sign bearing its name was dwarfed by the building it was meant to advertise.
Parked along the sidewalk in front of it, Harvey and I sat in the car as it idled, neither of us having spoken since we left the Shepherd house. A woman and her escort passed on the sidewalk beside me, their laughter drawing my attention before the unexpected feeling of Harvey’s hand brought me back to him.
“At least tell me what it was like,” he said before I’d had time enough to enjoy his skin against mine. “If you won’t tell me everything.”
And though there was plenty to tell him, there almost seemed too much. Not because I suspected him of being too academic, as I had before. But a sea of memory, feeling, and thought could not be reduced to a few words, not well. There seemed no way at first to make it clear—how seeing Dolores and saving her from fracturing completely had solidified my name.
“I can’t,” I said, and he dropped his eyes because he’d expected my refusal. “Harvey, don’t misunderstand. There’s no one I’d rather tell—but it’s too great a thing to translate.”
He looked at me again, this time with relief.
“For now I can tell you of her mind, which we both know you’ll have some use for. I can tell you how she’s damaged, but also so clever! She knows she isn’t whole and she creates logic as she goes, to make up for what’s been erased.”
My chest swelled before I realized that I needed a deep breath, and I was too excited to look at any one thing for very long. On the other side of the windshield a blur of evening coats and stoles mingled with the sight of a surprising Dolores, standing at my defense. She was so different from the fractured Sources I had seen. If Harvey’s father could see her now, his wondering over which of us was special might have renewed itself.
When I didn’t hear Harvey’s voice, I turned to him again. He hadn’t asked yet what I meant, had not begun to murmur or muse, probing me to decode all that I’d observed. He was a Banker, but something kept him quiet. I saw a glimpse of it in the heaviness crowding his eyes.
“She’s trying to make sense of the world, so she draws the cleverest conclusion she can. She made me a younger sister, for instance, to explain to herself our resemblance. In someone with a different, more organic condition, it would mean little—but in a fractured mind where we’re used to seeing voids that can’t be refilled? It’s nothing short of amazing. She is, despite all the bits she’s lost.”
Harvey gave a gentle grunt and a smile. “Who’s the scientist now?”
“Is that so surprising? I’ve been surrounded by your kind my entire life.”
He nodded a concession, after which our quiet allowed the life outside to seep into the car, a trickle of laughter and a snippet of conversation sliding in the space between us.
“Was it what you expected?” he asked.
“No.” I did not hesitate. “I expected her to be properly fractured. To fit within that definition with nothing left over. But why should she when I never have. Or I suppose it’s the other way around.”
“I don’t imagine I can ever make it up to you. After what I said.” Harvey gently squeezed my hand, and despite the warm cocoon of his palm and the recent memory of the kiss I’d given him, my heart shrank back a little.
“You weren’t the first,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Elsie. I am. I know it hurt you dearly because seeing it hurt me back. But I can’t—I couldn’t ignore what I know. That you’re not—that you’re a memory. That I don’t know how long you’ll live or whether I should entertain the thought of children.”
When my eyes widened, his mimicked the gesture in such a helpless way that I couldn’t help but have mercy on him.
“I can’t be angry with you for having the same questions I did,” I confessed. “I thought the man who loved me would know the truth about me—but it was Lyman who understood.”
The name still ruffled him.
“I hadn’t wanted to fool myself before I knew for sure, so I took you at your word. You are, after all, a learned man,” I said, letting us both smile a moment without saying how he’d almost convinced me that my entire being was a matter of science. “But we were wrong. That isn’t what I am. I am something new, and it makes sense that Lyman could tell, having lived with Dolores for so long. Of course he would know that I’m not a reflection of something passed.”
“I would do anything to take back what I said, to be the one who really saw you.” When he raked his fingers through his hair, he only managed to pull it out of place. “I knew you were something more, I swear I always did.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I do. But inside the Vault, your imagination could only go so far. And being at a loss for explanation just couldn’t sit well with you.”
“We’re not in the Vault anymore, Elsie.” I’d never heard him so insistent, his voice so full of emotion. “If you’d only tell me now...”
Whatever he was going to promise, whatever he hoped to convey could be different now, he must have lost his nerve. Or perhaps he couldn’t forgive his previous failings, so could not imagine that I would either. Whatever the case, Harvey was quiet when the last bit of sunlight slid below the skyline as evening fell.
“I’m more than a memory,” I said, and my skin tingled as though being embroidered with the evening. As though my name would appear on it, as on my cherished robe. “I am Elsie, Harvey Parrish, not Dolores. And I am an epiphany.”
Neon lights flickered against the windshield before steadying into a brightness so strong that it seemed to shine from everywhere. Pouring through the windows, the automobile grew warm inside this light and, beneath the beaming sign, so did I.
“I began as one epiphany and I never stopped having them; I’ve been having them all along, growing brighter every time while other Mems fade and expire. Real people have glimpses of me, realizations they then digest—the moments fade or time erodes them. But I am a realization, separated from Dolores before I could be changed.” I thought of her then, of the dim lights in her kitchen and of the things that Lyman said. “No matter what her father hoped, extraction means I cannot be forgotten.”
While I reintroduced myself to him, Harvey’s face had flushed and, though they managed to hold the tears back, his eyes focused on me like they expected to see nothing after.
“You’re afraid because you’re not sure how long I’ll last,” I said while he pressed my hair behind my ear. “Neither am I. For all we know, I might never expire.”
It was true. I hadn’t thought it before as I waited on the Shepherds’ porch, but now the thought terrified me. The world outside us reappeared and the glow became too bright.
His reply was perfect, the way he looked like he could easily laugh or cry and he found new ways to admire my face with his hands. But there seemed little consolation in his accepting my true identity and in taking me at my word if it didn’t mean we were the same. And now I knew for sure that we would never be. Even the nearness in our age would soon change. I was nineteen, as I always would be. He was aging by the day, by the second. No matter how I imagined it, in how many ways—from whatever angle it was studied—there was no future for Harvey Parrish and me.
I didn’t recall taking back my hand but found them both upon my chest, rising and falling in a deceptively steady rhythm. I was trapped in a web I’d thought could free me. Reviewing the conclusions I’d stumbled into, my mind reversed only to be cornered again. Because if anyone could think his way out of this, Harvey would have done so by now.
“I don’t know why I came here,” he was saying then, as though to the steering wheel. His nose crinkled when he strained to look up through the windshield at the torch of the Rialto. “I guess because I’ve never been. I never had anyone to bring.”
My thoughts were halfway back to the Vault by then, somewhere between despising and envying the Mems who roamed its halls and had never wanted something they could not have. There was only one chance of being more like them.
“I thought perhaps before I took you home, we might take in a show.”
I kept imagining that Dolores might still be escorted into the clinic and I into the lab with her. I could share this evening with Harvey, this final occasion of being Elsie, before a new memory was laid over me, shattering the resilience of an epiphany that had given me nineteen years and then—in one day—taking everything away.
“You must have been here a dozen times,” he was saying. “Your social life has always been so much livelier than mine.”
“I came here once, with a friend,” I said while I could still remember, and then I forced my voice above a whisper. “And I learned that they don’t forget it all. Part of the extracted memory stays behind, or at least the feeling that went with it. Even when they extract us, they’re never really free.”
If we were at the Vault, he might have written it down in his breast pocket notepad, flipping through the pages while he idled in my dorm. Maybe when he saw her and while preparing us for reprinting he would think that was all I’d seen in Dolores and I wouldn’t be able to explain.
“None of us will be free of you,” he said. “Even when we’re gone.”
The smile set a glimmer in his eyes and I was sure. We had traded sides completely. The truth had given him hope and had stolen it away from me.
“We can leave, Elsie. Together. Tonight.”
“Harvey.”
“You never have to go back inside the Vault—there’s no reason to take the chance.”
“You’d lose everything. I’m too important not to be missed, remember?” I said, trying to smile.
“You’re too important not to last,” he insisted. “Whatever happens to me, at least I’ll know these memories will last forever in you.”
“Nothing has to last forever,” I said, my heart still breaking that he could not.
His hand slipped behind my neck, his fingers sliding into my hair while he pulled closer to me. He pressed my copper waves away from my cheek again and admired the color of my skin, his pale eyes studying me as though his memory was not the one he could rely on. Finally he kissed me, closing his eyes before I closed mine. His palms were dry, his breath steadfast. It was not the dramatic kiss of new love, when the eyelashes flutter and hands roam adventurously. The last kiss Harvey and I shared—the one he gave me back—was certain. It was a kiss for which there was no comparison, even on my beloved silver screen.
NO. 10
When a day had passed without word from Lyman Shepherd and I could not spend another hour in my quiet dormitory, I sought out the Professor and the distraction of his work. In the Vault, the most intriguing development was often bittersweet, and the Keepsakes were no exception. The trio had indeed been a creative inheritance, but they did not last.
We learned that the dowager lived in a vault of her own now, overtaken so rapidly by dementia that she’d been placed in a convalescent home. Not only was she not deceased, but her executor had barely been made aware of her decline before one of her children was requesting that the Mem bequeathed to him be made available for reprinting.
“I assured the Bankers it was nearly hopeless,” the Professor explained. “But they were intrigued by the unusual nature of the Mems and couldn’t be dissuaded.”
“You see, you’re not the only one who laughs in the face of reason.”
“I’ll admit,” he said. “It’s a relief to have company in that. And more than a relief to have my concerns settled.”
He must have meant that his suit against Dolores had been resolved, even if neither it nor the matter of what to do with Mems like Walter No. 17 had gone the Professor’s way. He said he wouldn’t be in court again, that the proceedings had stopped for good and there was nothing more to do. Perhaps that warranted relief, no matter the outcome. An equally disappointing judgment had quickly followed with regard to the Dowager Keepsakes. Though the Bankers had hoped to continue studying the three together, investigating whether their trio would continue to defy Mem expectancy because of their proximity to one another and in extraction, the court had not ruled in their favor. The Keepsakes were property, individual inheritances to the dowager’s three children, each of whom could do with their Mem as they pleased.
“It seems no one outside the Vault is prepared to call into question what a Mem can be. There is no judge in this city prepared to set a precedent by distinguishing one Mem from another, as I’d hoped they would have done with you.”
“You mean with Walter’s Mem.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t something I could have spoken of until now. Even the night I asked you, my hope was too fragile to say aloud why I wanted you to extract a Mem of your own.”
I wanted to ask what had changed between that night and now; his spirits seemed unreasonably high for all the refusals he had faced.
“But you were right, after all. Or anyway, it wouldn’t have been as simple as I imagined to separate you from this place and from the others, in the eyes of the law.”
“We cannot be real people while we have a Source,” I told him gently, wishing I’d put the words in that order sooner and had told the same to Harvey. To my confusion, he’d been away all day, another Banker taking over his rounds, and by the time he returned, it would likely be too late. “And there is no escaping that Mems belong to their Sources and no one else.”
So there was nothing to be done when almost immediately the dowager’s son scheduled to reprint his Keepsake with a memory of his own. The Mem would no longer be a living tribute to the delicate start of his parents’ love story, capturing when a young man first declared his intentions on the stoop of her father’s house. When the procedure was done, she would no longer be a girl at all. Though her shell would remain the same, her spawning memory would be replaced, reprinted so that the dowager’s son needn’t worry over the unfortunate consequences of overextraction. I imagined Harvey’s intrigue at the potential for research in a Mem whose reflection would not match its memory—if the phenomena didn’t expedite the poor creature’s expiration so severely that no research could be done. But research was not the law’s priority, and the wish of the dowager’s son was granted before the ink on the ruling could dry.
His was the first of the Keepsakes to expire, while Bankers and nurses hovered about the Mem, feverishly documenting its every confused lurch and shudder, the way it writhed and frothed at the mouth, its face pained by a congestion that could not be relieved. Its raven braid lightened and the color in its skin dried out. It happened so quickly that we could not afford to look away. The sight was remarkable, even to the now-twin clones, and they gathered around the third, drawn outside of themselves by the draining of life from their companion. It was as if they came to life long enough to see why they would die. Clinging together in the center of the crowd, the three reminded me of a tiny bouquet clutched in a hand. Only the first was reprinted, but inexplicably, one and then the other expired, losing color and wilting side by side, until a bright spot was gone from the Vault. Contemplating an endless life without their uncharacteristic whimsy, on top of everything else I couldn’t have, I was all the more certain that my sanest option was to save Dolores once again.
In my dormitory, I sat at the edge of my bed with the notebook Nurse Ettie had given me, recording my memories, experiments, and observations, so that they would not be lost with me. So that when I was no longer myself, when another memory had taken my place, someone would know I’d once had a mind of my own. My sweet friend Ettie, perhaps. The Professor and Harvey might return to these pages and remember me. And as I devoted myself to their record, my epiphanies continued, as though they would to the very end. Even while watching the Keepsakes defy every established fact about the limits and uniformity of all Mems aside from me, I had another.
