The Great Forgetting (10 page)

Jack took a seat across from the boy, who pulled out his earbuds and regarded him with mild amusement.

“My name is Jack Felter,” he said. “I'm a friend of Dr. Sanders.”

“I know who you are,” the boy said. “He told me you'd come. I just didn't think it would take three goddamn years.”

 

TWO

YOUNG MAN'S FANCY

1
    “Tony told you I'd come here?”

Cole nodded. “It was the last thing he said to me. He said that eventually you'd come visit me and when you did I should tell you where he went.” The boy's voice was hesitantly deep, the way young men talk when they're afraid their voice might slip back into a childhood soprano at the slightest provocation.

“You know where Tony is?”

Cole nodded.

“Where is he?”

“It's not that simple.”

“What do you mean?”

Cole looked out the window, at the cloud shadows moving over the surface of the pond. “You ever heard of Plato's ‘Allegory of the Cave'?”

Jack shivered. “Yes,” he said. “Tony explained it to me.”

“It's sort of like that. You're in the cave and I have to get you out before you can find your friend. I think that's why he left me behind.”

“Why don't you tell me where he is and we'll see how it goes?”

Cole laughed. “This is going to be very difficult.”

“What?”

“Teaching you. You're much more stubborn than Dr. Sanders, I can tell.”

“Cole. Please. Where is he?”

“Your friend is on a large island, roughly the size of the state of Ohio, that sits in the ocean a hundred miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, the main port of Amaknak Island, Alaska.”

It was, he supposed, the last thing he had expected to hear. “What?”

“Haven't you ever seen
Deadliest Catch
? Dutch Harbor is the place they're always unloading the crab.”

“I know the show. My dad watches it.” He rubbed at his neck, where a pinkish bruise reminded him that nothing could be taken for granted. “But why would Tony want to go all the way out there?”

Cole smiled. “To save the world,” he said. He seemed so earnest.

“If I called out to Dutch Harbor. To the newspaper. Or the police. If I called the Dutch Harbor police, Cole, and I asked them about a huge island somewhere north of them in the Bering Sea, what would they tell me?”

“They'd tell you it didn't exist. But that's because they can't see it.”

“But Tony can see it.”

“Yes.”

“And you can see it.”

“Yes.”

“But nobody else?”

Cole thought about this a moment. “I suppose some people might be able to see it.”

Jack shook his head.

“Dr. Sanders called it ‘inattentional blindness,'” said Cole. “I guess our minds have trouble seeing things we don't expect to see. There was this study he told me about. Some Harvard psychological study. Group of scientists showed two hundred students a videotape of a basketball game. During the game, a woman in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court. Afterward they asked the students if they noticed anything strange. Almost half of them did not—or could not—see the gorilla. Because it was so weird, their minds ignored it. Their minds edited it out.”

It was another idea from that psych textbook Tony had carried around. When they were kids, Tony had told Jack about how, when Columbus discovered America, the Indians on shore couldn't see his ships. The natives didn't use sailboats, so they had no frame of reference to draw from. It was too weird. For three days, while the
Santa Maria
was parked in the water, all the Indians could see was a “shimmer” on the water.
Inattentional blindness.

“If nobody can see this island, how do
you
know about it?” Jack asked the boy.

“My dad told me.”

“What's the island called?”

Cole shook his head. “Can't tell you that. Not yet.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, glancing out at the pond again. “I can't trust you. You're still under their influence.”

Jack had misused the word “paranoia” all his life. It was not a light thing. Paranoia is not thinking your coworker might be angling for your job or that your professor is subjectively lowering your grade because he doesn't like you. Paranoia is sickness. Disease. Trying to pull any sense from what Cole was saying was like listening to someone who spoke English but who had hijacked certain words and stuffed them with new meaning. Like someone from the United States trying to have a conversation with a man in Ireland when they were both drunk.

“Help me understand,” said Jack.

“First things first,” said Cole. “Before we speak again, you have to start boiling your water.”

2
    Paige was eating Pringles, watching TV, and Jean was sipping coffee at the table when Jack came downstairs the next morning.

“Have you seen my watch?” he asked.

“You have a watch? Who wears watches anymore?”

“Tony's watch. Sam gave it to me. I had it yesterday. But I can't remember where I put it.”

“Where'd ya go last night, Uncle Jack?” the girl asked between mouthfuls.

“Out with Aunt Sam. She was feeling sad, so I took her to a movie.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“Nope. Just a friend.”

“Did you kiss her?”

“No.”

“You wanted to kiss her, I bet.”

“I don't think so.”

“You think she's pretty.”

“Sure.”

“Then you wanted to kiss her.”

“You think so?”

Paige nodded emphatically. “Like Tauriel wanted to kiss that dwarf, Kili. She pretends she doesn't. But she does.”

“Oh, honey, that's not exactly
Hobbit
canon…”

“Mommy said you used to kiss Sam in school.”

He gave Jean a sharp look. “We kissed a lot of people in school,” he said.

“There's this one boy. Dusty Miller. He kissed me on the playground. Then he punched me in the stomach and ran away.”

“Stay away from Dusty.”

The girl shrugged. “He wasn't a bad kisser,” she explained, tossing her bangs aside insouciantly. “But he smelled like whole milk. I don't think he brushes his teeth.”

“Paige,” said Jean, hiding her smile with coffee mug. “Why don't you play outside or something?”

“'Kay,” she said. She took the Pringles can with her.

“Watch that one,” he said.

Jean gave his suit a once-over. “Back to Haven today?” she asked.

“Yep. And tomorrow, probably. It's like trying to solve a riddle talking to that boy.”

“We have to talk about the Captain soon,” she said, holding his eyes with her own. “Executor stuff. Living will…”

“Later.”

“Soon, Jack.”

He blinked. “Okay.”

3
    On the way to Haven, a ten-minute drive that took him past John F. Kennedy High School, its sports fields silent for June, the radio began to buzz like an old dial-up modem. One second Jethro Tull was singing about a homeless man named Aqualung and the next the car's speakers blared the sound of an ancient computer booting up and slipping into the white-noise crash of connectivity.

“This has been a test of the Emergency Alert System,” a robotic voice informed him. “Had this been an actual emergency…”

Jack clicked off the radio. He felt ill at ease suddenly. Nauseated. He hated those EAS broadcasts. Always had. They were harbingers. Every time he'd heard that noise as a kid, he'd looked to the horizon for funnel clouds. Or worse: the telltale white flash of a nuclear blast.

He checked himself in the rearview mirror. What a job he'd done with the razor this morning! It looked like he hadn't shaved at all.

4
    “You're a teacher?” asked Cole. “What do you teach?” They were in the common room, again, looking out at the cattails.

“I teach history.”

Cole's eyes widened. Then he laughed loudly.

“What's funny?”

“Nothing,” said Cole. “That's perfect.”

Suddenly, Jack remembered where he'd left the watch. He'd placed it on the windowsill beside his bed as he was undressing. He could see it resting there in his mind.

“What?” asked Cole.

“Nothing.”

“C'mon. What?”

“It's stupid,” said Jack. “I just remembered where I left my watch.”

The boy nodded but didn't say anything more. His eyelids seemed to want to close.

“Can you tell me more about your conversations with Tony? Dr. Sanders, I mean? Do you know how he got out of Franklin Mills without his car?”

“No. I can't do that. Sorry, man.”

“Why not?”

“You won't boil your water.”

“I did. I started last night.”

Cole smiled a thin smile but didn't look him in the eyes. “Jack, you don't know enough about what's going on to be able to lie to me. You don't even know what day it is.”

“It's Tuesday. June sixteenth.”

Cole shook his head.

“What day do you think it is?” asked Jack.

“It's Wednesday.”

“Cole, I'm sure it's Tuesday.”

“I know you're sure it's Tuesday. That's the problem.” The boy was getting agitated. He blinked like a soldier tapping Morse code. “It's the fluoride. They put it in the water to make you suggestible. Then they plant ideas in your mind through radio waves. Ideas like what day they want it be. Tell me, Jack, did you hear an emergency broadcast on the radio this morning?”

For a second he was too weirded out to answer. Then logic set in. Cole must have been listening to the radio in his room before their interview. He was hijacking that little fact for his delusion, using it to pull Jack in.

“That's how they plant their ideas in your brain, like what day it is,” said Cole. The boy's body pitched forward, as if sleep were trying to take him, but Cole brought his head up again.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” he said. “It's okay, Jack. Maybe it's better for you to live in your cave. I wish I could sometimes. I really do.”

The boy's eyes closed.

“Cole?”

Jack reached across the table and nudged the boy's shoulder with his hand. He opened his eyes a bit.

“Why are you so tired?” asked Jack.

Cole smiled but his eyes didn't. “It's probably the bottle of pills I swallowed.”

“What?”

“I swiped a bottle from Quick's cabinet before they reset the calendar and planted the idea in your head that it was still Tuesday.” Cole's eyes closed and the boy's head fell against the table.

“Nurse!” Jack screamed. “Nurse! Hey! Hey, goddamn it! Somebody! Somebody!”

The nurses came. Within moments they had the boy on a gurney and were running down the corridor toward the clinic. Jack was ushered quickly out of the building.

5
    Jack rang the doorbell three times before realizing it didn't work. He knocked loudly on the porthole with his fist and then Sam was at the door. She was dressed in a Johnny Maziel jersey that reached below her knees.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“This town is bullshit,” he said. “Is it always like this? Or is it me? Am I some kind of curse?”

“What happened?”

He shook his head. “I'm just tired, Sam. I'm tired of all the sadness. And I'm tired of hating you.”

She squinted her eyes and lifted a hand to block the sunlight playing through the giant oak in her front yard. “You don't hate me,” she said.

“That's not true,” said Jack, but he couldn't help smiling.

“You're not cursed, Jack. You just trust people too much. You were always kind of stupid that way. Now did you come here to feel sorry for yourself or did you come to kiss me?”

“I would like to kiss you.”

“Okay, then.”

He stepped inside and closed the door with the heel of his shoe. Sam twisted up to him on her tiptoes. Kissing her was like kissing a memory.

6
    She slept beside him, her downy arm raked over his chest, but Jack did not sleep.

It was early afternoon. The sun through the half-open window gave her bedroom a honey light and a breeze rolled the curtains in a way that mimicked their breathing. The only noise was the hum of early cicadas in the trees surrounding the house and the occasional car crackling gravel on Giddings. Sam snored softy.

Jack couldn't sleep. Tony was all over this room: in that framed photograph from their honeymoon (arms around her in front of some Boston lobster shack), in the slender sports jackets hanging neatly in the closet, in the stack of yellow-spined
National Geographic
s gathering dust on the nightstand …

*   *   *

“Mister Jack?” It was Virginia, home from bus garage. It was the afternoon of the first day of his junior year of high school and Jack was in the living room playing
Zelda
, trying not to think about Sam. Sam was all he could think about anymore. She was his consuming secret. He found himself lost during the day, imagining their rushed moments together, the nights they would sneak away and meet up on the shore of Claytor Lake. He flinched at the sound of his mother's voice. When Virginia called him “Mister Jack,” it meant he was in for one of her legendary tirades, one likely to end with a call to the Captain and a promise of three smacks with his belt when he returned.

Jack should have expected this. When school was in and Virginia was at the bus garage with twenty men who loved gossip more than a quilting club, the rumor mill was lightning quick.

He set the controller down. She still had her keys in her hand. “In the car,” she said through clenched teeth. Then, to Jean, watching from the couch: “We'll be back soon. Get some supper going.”