MNEMOSYNE, Chapter 10
MNEMOSYNE
Chapter 10
The firm floor of my home eases the tension in my back. I close my eyes. I let my mind go free—but it’s in chaos, just ike my life.
So be it. I have to try. I’ll let my mind do what it will do.
And it keeps going back to those two letters on the invitation. There’s something to them, especially the first letter, an N. What does it stand for? For need? For new? For name? N for name? My mind fills with an image of a blurry piece of paper. My handwriting, but I can’t make it out. It’s a letter I wrote. Not the request for the trees, not the invitation sent to the nameless man, but a letter I wrote before all of that. Before the Fit for Life facility. I don’t remember the words or the content, just a sense of it having to do with... memories. But maybe that’s merely because I’m trying to remember.
And I do remember some of it... The letter started with Dear. No that that’s helpful. Don’t all letters start like that? No. I wouldn’t usually start a letter like that. It started with Dear… Was it, Dear... Tiffany? No. I feel like it was was from before Tiffany. Maybe it was that other name, Jenna. Someone more dear?
Dearest Jenna.
Love, Alex.
No. I see it more clearly now, those letters that were on the invitation, but now on something else, not marker on glossy paper, but pen on plain, white paper. Paper the same color as the monolith. The N and the H. Love, N.H…
So it’s a name, and it begins with N. The homeless man, he kept saying some name, shouting it, throwing it at me, mocking me with it, two syllables, over and over, beginning with the letter N...
Nathan! He kept saying Nathan!
But who is Nathan? Why would that bum call me that? And I see a letter, but whose memory is it? Who wrote some letter to some woman named Jenna? And the letter itself, is it about memories? Or am I simply obsessed with memories? Or both?
And why do I ask, whose and who? It would be my memory, it would be me, wouldn’t it?
Let it go. Meditate. Try the mantra.
Fit for Life is the… The new addition will… Today is a…
No luck. The mantra has malfunctioned. Or I’ve malfunctioned. Maybe I’m starting on the wrong premise, maybe it’s that fit for Fit for Life is the wrong starting point? Maybe something else is my center...
Then again, maybe I should be medicated. That’s what they want, right? To get me to a doctor and get me medicated. But I don’t want that. I want to be memorated—no, that’s not a word. I want to... master memories. The bum thought I was a master of memories, didn’t he? But didn’t he also laugh at the idea? Perhaps memories are my center. How could I master memories?
I should have memorized more. That might have helped. Instead of mastering memories, I’m mesmerized by them. Mesmerized… by memories and memos and monoliths. Mesmerized by memories of misremembered memos to mutinous inmates and impossible monoliths.
Or is it something with an N? That could be a good start. Association. I could master memories through word association. There’s a word for that, isn’t there? What is it? Something like… mnemo…
Yes, that’s right, something like mnemos…
I can hear the sound of it echoing in my skull, the darkness behind my closed eyelids somehow vibrating with each repetition of the word almost stated—mnemos—mnemos— mnemos—as if someone shouted it from far away and the sound is bouncing off of stone walls in my head.
Now it’s as if someone just as far away has lit a lantern, turning everything a sort of hazy-black, barely illuminating what seems like a thin, gray fog surrounding me. But there are no lights on in my deactivated home. I almost open my eyes to see what it is, but I don’t dare risk it. I have to focus this way, in this meditative state, on the cave in my mind. I have to go where the deep recesses of my mind want to take me.
So I watch the vague glow, my eyes still closed. Time goes by and I can make out a source of the glow, a single point of white in the distance. It’s growing. I squeeze my eyelids tighter and the fog begins to fade as the glowing point expands. It grows and grows until it begins to take on a more definite shape, the shape of a dagger or a sword, expanding more and more until—
It hasn’t been expanding at all. I’ve been getting closer to it. I try to back up, but I can’t move, it just gets closer, bigger, and now I’m in front of it. It takes up all of my vision except for the darkness on the peripheral of my sight. And I know what it is, this massive structure, off-white and quartz-like. It’s the monolith.
Then, as if my recognition of the tower flipped a switch, as if the monolith woke the sun, it’s daylight and I’m outside, in the full brightness of day. I crane my neck back to see the entire structure, but I can tell, somehow, that the monolith has changed. Not drastically, it’s fundamentally the same...
But it seems newer… and older… a monolith from a completely different time and—
I hear a woman’s voice from behind me.
“Mnemosyne can’t become this, Nathan,” the woman says. “It just can’t.”
Somehow I know that she’s talking about the monolith. Mnemosyne. That’s its real name, isn’t it? Somehow I always knew that. And that was the word echoing in the cave just now. My mind was giving me the monolith’s real name. I look at the structure before me now. It has that same soft glow, that same opaqueness, that same natural substance shaped into hard lines stabbing upward—but it also has a doorway, I’m standing in a doorway.
The monolith doesn’t have a doorway. How does the monolith have a doorway? I step back and look up again and I notice that its smaller. I look up higher, disbelieving that the monolith has shrunk, and a little antenna atop its peak reflects the sun directly into my eyes.
I jerk away. Before I can even rub my eyes, I hear my voice.
“I can make it work,” I say. “It’s simply a matter of will.”
Am I watching myself? Am I myself? It’s not clear. And who is this woman? Why wont she respond? I’m moved closer to her now, I’m trying to make her out, but her face is so blurry. She has silky blonde hair tied into a ponytail. She’s in a wheelchair, but there’s something imposing and elegant about her despite it. I look harder, and I can see the hint of her eyes, gray like the fog from the cave, but I can’t tell if she’s looking at me or through me.
Is she looking at the monolith? Or at something even farther or further away?
Who is she? She’s not Tiffany. The hair is the same, but her eyes, even with my distorted vision, are like hard steel. Her face is more angular, more beautiful, but severely so. Everything about her is long and severe and unflinching. I notice a feeling in my chest, a pressure, like a magnet pulling me closer to her.
I watch myself lean down.
“Jenna,” I say, a hand on either side of her wheelchair, eyes level with hers. “We don’t have a choice.”
“We’ve always had a choice, Nathan,” she says, her voice cold. “You can’t force me into your false dichotomy.”
I watch him step back from her. Or am I the one stepping back? Or is it both at once? But my curiosity is overridden by a sudden relief from finally seeing her again. Then that’s overridden, too, by a tightness, a sadness, overwhelming my entire body.
I feel like I’m falling. I look down but the ground is still. I look around and nothing is moving, except for the me that’s not me—
I’m in a dream. That’s why it seems like it’s me and like it’s him, both at the same time, that’s how this is happening. But, if I’m in a dream, that falling sensation, that could mean—
I focus on that falling sensation and force it to stop. I refuse to wake up. I have to see what this dream is. Because I can tell it’s more than a dream, much more than the other dreams I’ve been having. This is a memory.
I focus on my other self, the one the woman calls Nathan. He’s turning around. Away from the woman. He’s planting his feet firmly, shoulder-length apart, and I do the same, but I don’t want to. I want to look at her face. I want to get close to her and look into her eyes. I want to beg her to help me remember, because, somehow, I know that, if anything, she could help me remember.
But we begin to speak instead, a barely restrained anger in our voice.
“No, Jenna,” we say. “We don’t have a choice. They’ll shut it down. All of it. Everything we’ve built.”
“Will they?” she asks. “They can only do so much, Nathan. We have rights.”
“If we don’t accept their offer,” we pause, looking over our shoulder, not to Jenna, but to the black cars approaching in the distance. “If we don’t expand the way they want, they’ll get in the way of us doing what we need to do.”
“What they want will be even worse than you not getting what you—“
We spin around to face her, and we struggle not to scream at her.
“Not getting what I want? It’s life or death, Jenna. Your life—or your death. That’s what’s on the line.”
“I knew the risks when we did the experiment,” she says, her voice even calmer in response to our barely muted anger. “We both did. What’s on the line now is something more. Something worse.”
“We almost have the solution,” we say, desperately, unconvincingly. Unconvinced ourselves. “We have to take this chance.”
“Do we?” she asks, a smirk in her eyes. “Is it even a chance? How many more participants can we get at this point?”
“The senator has a solution for the participant issue, Jenna, you know that.”
“The inmates,” she says, shaking her head. “That’s a horrific idea, Nathan. We won’t even have time for pre-screening, most of them won’t be viable candidates, the rest could go mad, or worse—” she says, stressing her point with a gesture at herself and her wheelchair.
We’re pacing. We’re panicked, guilt-ridden, angry—helpless. For the first time in our life, we feel helpless. And we want to scream at the helplessness, to grab it and wrangle it and choke it out of existence. Then we want to scream at her, at Jenna, to tell her that she’s just giving up, that she’s a coward.
But it takes just one stolen glance into her eyes and we know that those things aren’t true. And she’s telling us to come to her. She’s holding out her hands. We go to her and we lean down and she holds our hands in hers.
“We can’t throw it all away,” she says. “We can’t let them use Mnemosyne. That isn’t why we made it. I don’t want to live in a world where they get to use it, not like this, not in any way, not for any reason.”
“Jenna...”
“We’ll find another way. We’ll stop the degeneration.”
“You won’t let me use the senator. You won’t let me use the inmates. And if I use myself—“
“You want us both wasting away?” she says, her voice hinting at anger, then snapping back to her normal calm. “Then where’s the solution? To any of it?”
“I have to do something, Jenna,” we say as we pull our hands away. “And the senator is here now. I don’t have a choice.”
“Nathan,” her voice is strong, intense, yet still cold and precise. I almost feel more afraid of her than I do of her impending death. “Don’t do this. You must tell him no.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I won’t accept the procedures, not even if you find a cure.”
“You’d rather die?”
She opens her mouth. There are tears in her gray eyes—then she smiles, turning her teary eyes into glistening steel. She looks down for a moment, damps her eyes, then looks back up at us resolutely:
“Yes, Nathan,” she says, her voice decisive and emotionless, like a judge making an obvious ruling. “I’d rather die than live in the world they’ll create with our creation.”
“You can’t say that,” we say shakily. “It’s just a minor expansion, it’s not something to die over, I don’t believe you, I won’t believe you.”
“However minor you tell yourself it is, it won’t end there. And you know it.”
“I don’t agree,” we mutter, almost to ourselves. “I’ve looked at it all, all the details and contracts, and it can only go so far.”
“You’re missing one piece of the puzzle, Nathan, something bigger than the details and the contracts. You can’t see it. Your desperation and fear have blinded you to—“
“I’m blinded?” we shout, unable to stop the anger from bubbling over. We indulge in it. We’ve bottled it up too long.
“I’m blinded, she says! You’re going to die and you refuse to try to survive and I’m the one blinded? Because I refuse to give up? Because I’m willing to give them their pound of flesh? So what? We did cause some trouble like they say, for one. We disrupted things. So maybe they’re not entirely wrong, maybe we do owe them something, owe the country something. What’s wrong with a sign of good will? Don’t look at me like that, I know those words are meaningless. None of their platitudes, posturing, or moralizing matters at all—I know that, that’s the point. Their gibberish means nothing because I can fix this. Because I know I can fix it. Maybe you’re so opposed to my plan because you can’t see what I can see. You’re not an expert in this field, so you don’t know for certain. But I don’t have those doubts. I really don’t. Because it’s really very simple, Jenna. It comes down to time. All I need is a little more time. And that’s what I can get from them. Yes, he’s a filthy politician and all of that. But politics are politics, Jenna. That’s not your field, that’s not my field, we always said we’d never do politics—but that’s what’s been tripping us up, isn’t it? There’s politics all around us and we need to play ball. That’s why we need his help. That’s his field. That’s what a senator is for. To smooth out the politics. So we leave that to him, leave the healing to you, leave the inventing to me. It’s that simple, Jenna. Just one new addition to the team, however onerous it may be—because it’s the only way to fix this. And that’s that. It has to be that simple. There’s no other choice. I made Mnemosyne, I made all of this, and I can make you better.”
“And if you can’t?” she asks. “How will you turn back? How will you unravel yourself from their games? And how will you stop them when they demonize you even more than ever? What will you do about their platitudes, posturing, or moralizing when I’m dead? How much will they damn you and how little will it matter—when I’m dead? When they say that the monolithic Nathan Hanover promised to help the government—but merely killed his wife? Because that’s what they’ll say. And when they do, what will you give them a pound of then?”
“The monolith,” we say, dumbfounded. We can’t even think about the rest of her words. Just the monolith. Why did she call us that? She always hated it when they called us that. We feel close to breaking down and bursting into tears. We’re about to drop to our knees before her and plead with her not to die.
Kneel. Plead. Beg. That’s what we’re going to do? Like a foolish little boy?
No. That’s not how this is going to go. We have to fight this. The senator is waiting for us. We affect a grin of confidence and look her in the eyes—but we can’t hold her gaze. That’s all right. We can do what we need to do.
“They can call me the monolithic Nathan Hanover all they want, Jenna,” we say. “I’m the monolithic Nathan Hanover and that means I’ll fix this. Same as always. I’ll get the job done. To hell with what anyone says. I will fix this. You know that, Jenna. It’s what I do.”
“Not like this, it isn’t, Nathan,” she says. “A building can’t stand on a compromised foundation. Not even a monolith can.”
“Jenna,” we’re still trying to smirk at her, still trying to believe that she’ll believe. “Please, Jenna, come with me—”
She’s already turning away, saying she can’t watch this, can’t be party to it. She’s crying quietly, but not quietly enough. We want to, but we can’t go after her. It’s now or never for the senator. We watch her a moment longer as she rolls away. We think about how she’s using her mind to manipulate the wheelchair, just as we designed it, and how, soon, she won’t have enough left of her mind to do even that.
Then she’s going to die.
Mere months later, she goes into a coma, then dies.
The handshake we’re about to have with the senator right now, then the following agreement and another handshake, then the experiments on the inmates and on ourself—none of it saves her.
I remember now. Jenna is a dead woman.
I try to run to her. I try to scream at her to stop. Then I try to scream at myself, the me over there, to stop. To go back to her. To listen to her. To spend her last days with her still loving us.
But he just walks away from her and towards the senator.
I wake up. I bolt upright. I’m sitting on the floor of my house, of Alex’s house, and I’m sobbing silently, covered in sweat.
I need to go to the monolith.
No. Not the monolith. I need to put false words and this false life behind me. I need to go forward. Something has gone horrible wrong and only one thing can fix it.
The tower by the bridge.
Mnemosyne.
