The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) (2 page)

AIDEN

“It was only some freaking car bombs,” my roomie, Chase Loudon, complained. He stepped around the imposing form of Jao, who was standing vigil outside our dorm room. Chase was from Manhattan.

“I know.” I shrugged. I really didn’t feel that nonchalant, but in prep school, you have to act as if shit never touches you—even if you’re covered in it. Otherwise, kids like Chase might think you don’t belong, whether or not your father owns the biggest mobile company in North America and your mom runs an international bank. “I didn’t know Dad had him shadowing me.”

“My father probably had me microchipped at birth.” Chase chuckled, but it was probably true. “No, I meant the school, the Swiss, the world.
Quelle
overreaction.”

The Loudons own Security Home Depot. They live in an über-exclusive vertical compound on the Upper East Side. The tower has its own shops, security, and even schools. Yet the Loudons, who make their billions on home security, didn’t think their precious heir apparent was safe enough there.

At least that’s what Chase told everyone.

I happen to know that ole Chase Evers Loudon III got expelled from Trump Day School for sexually harassing a teacher. (Our headmaster’s administrative assistant really shouldn’t use her cat’s name as a password.)

But it wasn’t just a couple of car bombs. Chase and I spent a mind-numbing hour watching newscasts. BBC World Interactive showed at least one car bomb had gone off in about thirty cities across Europe. Luckily, no one died, and the damage was minimal.

I tried to call Winter a few times but couldn’t get through.

The universe was silent, too.

Mom pushed her way into our room.

“
Mäuschen
, are you okay?” She hugged me.

Chase mouthed the word “MILF” and made an obscene thrusting gesture behind her back.

“Fuck off,” I mouthed to him. Chase can be a sucky human being even at the best of times. And this was not one of them.

He cleared his throat. “I’ll just see if we have any mail.” As Chase let himself out, I could see another man standing by Jao in that same bodyguard, eyes-straight-ahead, don’t-mess-with-me stance.

“Mom, please.” I grappled to retain a little dignity in her clutches. But I was relieved that she was in one piece. “You got here fast.”

“Aiden, I was on my way to talk with you about something else when the whole world went crazy.” Mom smoothed out her impeccable black suit. She called it her work uniform. With her clients, she had to look powerful yet elegant, understated, and discreet.

The world was already crazy, I wanted to say. Instead I said, “You shouldn’t be driving or flying today.”

“I took the bank’s private jet service and brought Gunter.” He’s her favorite driver/bodyguard. She let out a long sigh. “I’m not going to change how I live because of this.”

“Yeah, right.” I crooked my thumb in Gunter’s direction.

Mom waved away my concern and dropped into the only clean chair in the room.

To be fair, Mom’s family had lived with private jets and bodyguards for eons. Not because of the Coalition, but because the family owns the second-largest private bank in Switzerland, a place renowned for its private financial dealings. And my mom, Gretchen Krieger Rausch, runs the mergers and acquisitions division of Banc Rausch.

Chase is damned lucky. Mom might look all Teutonic blonde, but if she’d seen that little move Chase made behind her back, he would’ve walked out of here minus a body part. Even her brothers are scared of her.

Something had brought my mother to Bern, something she didn’t want to tell me over the phone. Maybe she and Dad were getting divorced after all. When they first sent me here, I thought that meant they were splitting up. Three years have gone by, and nothing. Yet.

“What is it?” I pushed some clothes off my bed.

“It’s your cousin Winter. She’s not hurt or anything like that,” she added quickly. “But she is in the hospital.”

I sank down on the mattress.

“Winter hasn’t handled her parents being away as well as we thought. And her grandfather lets her run wild. Your father said it’s possible she wasn’t taking her medication. Now she’s had a psychotic break.”

“A what?” Psychotic? My Winter? I didn’t believe it.

Mom explained that the doctor, a new one Dad found for her, thinks Winter may be schizophrenic. Paranoid schizophrenic, in fact. She’d thrown herself into her “weird” art, wasn’t doing well in school, and was saying some crazy things about Uncle Brian and Aunt Spring’s whereabouts.

“Like what?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“
Mäuschen
,” Mom said in her best Mom-to-five-year-old voice. “Schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness where you lose touch with reality. Paranoid schizophrenics have delusions that everyone is after them or that the government is watching them. In Winter’s case, she said the government took her parents and locked them up in a secret prison.”

“
Scheisse
,” I half-whispered.

Winter and I never really talked about her parents. Her friends—Micah and Velvet, yes. And her grandfather, whom she adores. We even talked about Jet, the woman she has a crush on. Not her parents. She did say once (twice?) that she didn’t want to talk about them—too many people listening. I figured she’d said that because Uncle Brian and Aunt Spring were in Japan working on a super-secret project for the company. That’s what Dad said when he took me skiing that Christmas. He also told me to keep it hush-hush so a competitor wouldn’t pick up the info. And Mom had said not to bring it up because Winter was upset she got left behind. So I never pushed it.

Maybe I should have.

“Did you notice anything?” Mom asked. Sometimes her mom-radar was a little too accurate.

I shook my head. “She seemed fine all the times we’ve chatted.”

Actually, we hadn’t talked much in the last few weeks. But we did that sometimes. One of us would get sidetracked by a new project—hers are far more constructive than mine—and a month or two might go by before we checked in again. I should’ve known something was wrong this time, though.

“I know you two are close. That’s why I wanted to tell you in person. In case you tried to call her.” Mom hesitated, which is so unlike her. She leaned forward. “Aiden, you’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?” She peered at me the way she probably did over the negotiation table, trying to read my tells.

Suddenly I knew what this trip was all about. She could have called me about Winter. Mom wanted to reassure herself that me being away from her and Dad for so long hadn’t cracked me, too.

“I know you and your father don’t always get along, but—”

“The universe abides, Mom.” I cut her off because I didn’t want to hear her spiel about my hacking being all about getting Dad’s attention.

She peered at me over her skinny black glasses. Okay, maybe my usual response wasn’t the best one considering she was doubting my sanity.

“I’m fine, Mom.” I smiled. She was still doing the peering thing at me, so I added, “I’m just bummed about Winter.”

“I know,
mäuschen
. Me, too.” She looked down at her hands. “Koji should have seen it coming. Spring is furious at him.”

Koji, Mr. Yamada, is Aunt Spring’s father—and Winter’s grandfather. She’d been living with him for the past three years.

Mom rose to her feet and dusted herself off. “You really do need to clean in here, Aiden.” She glanced around the room in disgust.

“Can I see her?” I hadn’t physically seen Winter in years. I hadn’t been back to Hamilton since I got shipped to Bern Academy. Dad came here for the holidays, and I usually spent summers in Zurich with Mom—or here in summer school.

“She’ll probably be in the hospital for a few weeks, Aiden. We’ll talk after the term is over, but your father still wants you to stay here this summer. Now, I need to fly back to Zurich and do some damage control.”

With that, Mom pecked me on the cheek and made her exit, Gunter in tow.

Psychotic.

I couldn’t wrap my head around that word. Winter was brilliant. Creative. Eccentric. Manic, even. But
psychotic
? She’d made incredible things out of Legos and old cell phones and duct tape when she was eight. At twelve, she’d built the winning design in the national robotics competition, the one where the ’bots had to navigate obstacles or battle each other—the challenge was different every year. I’d helped. Using a script I’d found on a Russian board (I was still a noob then), I hacked the program to shave corners off the course. It was a kludge; it worked but for all the wrong reasons. Winter, however, created the robot completely on her own in that crazy-intense way she had. Not
crazy
crazy. She just had a way of losing herself in what she was creating. I envied that.

Jao opened the door and let Chase in, a couple of opened packages tucked under his arm and a soda from the canteen in the other hand.

“I see we’re down to one doorman again.” Chase dropped a package on his desk. I could hear the clink of jars and the rustle of wrappers. “I cannot believe the school has the audacity to search our packages. The headmaster probably gets a cut. My smoked salmon better be in here.” He flung a loosely rewrapped package on my bed. “All you got was a stupid book.”

The torn paper flopped open to reveal a large book,
Kinetic Sculptures of the Twentieth Century.

Only one person would be even remotely interested in this shit.

Winter.

The universe has impeccable timing.

Sometimes.

WINTER NOMURA

My eyelids were like lead, and the world wouldn’t come into focus. The wings of hummingbirds beat in the gaping chasm between my ears—where my brain should be. In the distance, I could hear the trickle of words seeping into my consciousness.

“You’ve been sick, Ms. Nomura,” a kindly voice told me. “Go back to sleep and it’ll all be better in the morning.”

My eyes fluttered closed. I couldn’t help sleeping.

I didn’t dream. I just listened to the growing chatter of voices droning on inside my skull, filling the emptiness with a torrent of words.

Hospital.

Japan.

Mental breakdown.

Somewhere deep down, though, I knew where I really was.

The hummingbirds told me before they drowned in all the words. Then the words gelled into pudding.

10:03 PM. TWO WEEKS LATER. SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY OF HAMILTON…

Welcome to the MemeCast, citizens. I don’t care what you call me. The MemeCaster. Van girl. Night crawler. Meme Girl. Whatever. You’re gonna forget it someday, anyway.

That’s how we’re built.

We forget. We find out something big, act all shocked and outraged for a day or two as the implications soak into our smooth, little brains. Then something else—something shinier and prettier or bigger and badder—gets dangled in front of us. We move onto glossier things—and, without someone reminding us, we forget.

That’s why I’m here. To remind you. Of what you may have already forgotten and what you may forget in the future.

First, the past.

Last month, three young people stumbled across something dark and dangerous in our city, something that most of us suspected deep down but were unwilling to give voice to. They showed us that a certain three-letter corporation and its minions are behind some of the car bombings in our fair metropolis.

“Hold, on, Meme Girl,” you may be saying right now. “That’s crazy talk. Why would TFC and these other companies blow up cars? Here, at home?”

The why is not too hard to fathom: they make money off our fear. When the real terrorism wasn’t enough anymore to drive us to “buy buy buy,” they created their own terror—but just enough to make us want to cocoon ourselves in a brand-new security blanket of stuff—and forget.

These kids caught a glimpse of the proverbial smoking gun—black van guys setting a bomb—and put it on paper—in the form of an underground comic. As a reward, they were carted off to Detention. The Big D, variety. You know it exists. And those kids were forced to tell their stories, day after day, until the drug—the same one that so many of you pop at the TFCs on every corner—bleached their brains of those events. Now they don’t remember what they did for us. Neither do their friends and families.

And I bet most of you don’t remember, either.

“But Meme Girl,” you say. “I couldn’t forget something like that.”

Well, sometimes the forgetting curve isn’t enough. Sometimes it needs a little help.

Now for your listening pleasure tonight, we’ll start with the eleven-thousandth cover of an old ditty about the ’burbs: “Little Boxes,” coming to you from the Sneetches. You know, even the children “are put in boxes / and they come out all the same.”