Forget
by Eddie Newton
Labor Day
We stand side by side staring out to sea.
I remember another time, when we were young, when my brother and I stood in this same spot on this same beach, watching the same sun rise on a different day. I remember the scent of salt and sea life wafting off the waves. He sported sunglasses with red-tinted lenses pushed up on his head, making his sun-streaked blonde stick up in a turkey’s tail-feathers. While I wore shorts, he was short on laundry and wore faded jeans rolled up over knobby knees. He whistled a Michael Jackson song softly in a duet with the soughing surf. Sand squished between toes, soft and white and warm.
I cannot recall my brother’s name.
Fifty years, and so much has faded.
It is getting worse. My brother shows more advanced signs than I do, but deterioration is deleterious, indiscriminate of degrees. We will all become a blank slate in due time. The progression of erasure of memories and the subjects lost and retained remains random and unique to the individual. Three months in and some exhibit just subtle effects of onset amnesia, while others have forgotten how to use toilet paper.
I still remembered its beginning. An extraordinary electrical interference, caused by unprecedented solar flares, activated the ambient electromagnetic grid. Radio waves, cosmic waves, neutrinos, microwaves, and radar encompass existence all around the globe at any given time. The solar flare mutated this energy and now
we all slowly forget.
I am lucky. I forgot the name of my brother, but I still remember my wife, Camila. My son, Santiago. Our daughters, Lucía and Julieta. My father blessedly passed from heart disease five years ago and did not suffer from this phenomenon. My mother has forgotten almost everything about him.
“I am going out for a swim,” my brother says.
He is prepared this time. He wears trunks loose and baggy around hips that are rounder and a backside more prodigious than previously. A rash-guard stretched over the figure of an unfit fifty instead of a fifteen-year-old in his prime. Yet he bounds into the surf with a youthful bounce. Maybe he forgot the last four decades, and feels like the boy I remember.
I watch him swim for the sun, the red star dipping down and diving deep. He grows smaller and farther. He does not stop. Even if I wanted to go after him, I forgot how to swim weeks ago. Does he mean to not come back, or did he simply forget to turn around? I will never know. Pretty soon, I won’t even remember he is gone.
Pretty soon, but not today.
I don’t remember my brother’s name, but I cry as day turns to night nonetheless. He is my brother, after all, and for tonight at least, I still remember.
Halloween
I take my family east. Rumor had it there might be a cure. In Kansas. So we trek east on foot. It is too foolish to fly, trains are dangerous, and it is deadly to drive. Pilots started to forget how to fly not long after the event. Planes fell out of the sky here and there before the big birds were finally grounded. Still, occasionally, a jet or a smaller plane will fly overhead. Maybe the pilot dared defy the FAA, or perhaps whoever was flying just forgot it is forbidden. They still fall out of the sky sometimes.
Cars are worst. Desperation trumps caution too often. So many died in those first weeks. Victims in denial of dementia refused to remain off the roads and forgot how to drive, doing sixty miles per hour down a residential street. Hundreds of thousands died in vehicular accidents, as drivers, passengers, or pedestrians become roadkill. The police, before forgetting their duty, barricaded a few safe passages like Interstate 15 out of San Diego so no vehicles could enter.
Now hundreds of thousands of pedestrians clog the highway, moving east. Mass exodus on an unprecedented scale. The forgetfulness affects each differently. Camila is losing pieces of her past with holes in her memory multiplying. She cannot recall how we met, where we went on last year’s vacation, or giving birth to Lucía. But she does remember things like our wedding, our other children’s deliveries, and that I stood her up at the restaurant when I missed our first anniversary. Santiago forgot how to tie his own shoes and resorts to loafers. Julieta can’t remember the names of any food. My mother forgot how to walk. We take turns pushing her across California in a wheelchair.
The desert is dangerous. Some forget to drink, keeling over along the road. The sun bakes the stink out of them, a nauseating stench that extends for miles and miles. Others are like my mother and forget how to walk. Sometimes companions sit with them a spell, but inevitably they move on, leaving behind those that forgot how to use their legs. Maybe the ones that move along truly forgot the person they stopped for, or maybe they simply said so to alleviate leaving a loved one behind to broil. Others misremember direction and walk off the highway into the endless expanse of sand. Death Valley is truly a valley of death.
Corpses, like critters once ruined by speeding vehicles, litter the highway. The ones that forget to politely die in the ditch instead drop dead down the middle of the road. We steer Mom’s wheelchair around bodies like traffic pylons denoting a construction zone that stretches from Barstow to Primm. Some sufferers still writhe and moan, but they will forget how to move soon enough and die still like the rest.
Strangers dismiss strangers. There is too much to forget without meeting new people and making new memories. It just means more to lose. Everyone is focused on clinging to remaining memory as long as possible. It is dangerous to even meet another man’s eyes; so many have that confused look of where they left their keys, only it is maybe their own baby they forgot.
“What was the name of the dog, Dad?” Julieta asks.
She alone likes to revisit memories recently departed. The rest of the family ignores the holes in their histories. Not everyone resists the inevitable. Hope is slippery when evidence all around only reinforces futility. Julieta is youngest at sixteen and refuses to renege recollection.
“Snoopy,” I answer.
“Why did we name it Snoopy?” she asks.
“After the cartoon,” I say.
She stared, understanding escaping her. She does not know what I am talking about anymore.
We pass a sign called Halloran Springs. Santiago stares like his cannot remember how to read the words. Juliette glares at an Oreo in her right hand like she is not sure what to do with it. Camila looks at the sky, and I am afraid of what I will see in her eyes if she looks at me instead. Lucía sings “On the Road Again” but hums every third word because she can’t recall any others. None of us are pushing anything. I realize that is wrong, that something is missing, but I cannot recollect what it is for the life of me.
Thanksgiving
Las Vegas. What happens in Vegas stays in... something.
Every avenue is dangerous, but we forget to fear.
There are still businesses open. There will come a time when they will all be closed: the proprietors all dead or disremembered their trade or just forgot to come to work. Sometimes, chefs forget how to make a signature dish, adding hemlock instead of thyme.
For now, a place still serves fried foods, a small cafe at the outskirts of town, right off I-15. I am amazed when the waitress comes back with our food. She would not be the first to take our order and walk off, thinking she still worked at a job from ten years in the past or wandering back to her kindergarten room after losing the last three decades of her memory. Your best friend in the world could become a stranger in the blink of an eye, and you can forget the love of your life in the time it takes to turn around.
I have a burger. Camilla eats a salad because she always has, since she put on baby weight that never came back off. I remember mere months ago that she was a hundred pounds heavier and the weight has disappeared, as if her fat suffered the same fate and couldn’t be bothered to stay on her hips and thighs and middle. Santiago scarfs down a batch of fries. He used to only eat them with ketchup, but today he wolfs them down plain, condiments ignored. Lucía still remembers that chocolate malts are her favorite.
My wife watches a man who couldn’t eat. He is emaciated, yet mastication escapes him. The plate of indiscriminate gruel in front of him is doesn’t require chewing. He stares at it with the contempt of an alcoholic contemplating his first drink in decades. It looks like he has been at this for some time. He takes the spoon and scoops it full, raising the mush to mouth. His hand shakes. It may be palsy or paranoia. He knows what’s coming. It goes in. It does not go down. The man gags, chokes, coughing and wheezing. I stand, but someone closer gets to him first. Heimlich. Porridge spews everywhere.
“How many times have I told you it won’t work, Henry?” asks the man who saved him.
“I don’t remember, Lou,” says Henry. It is a phrase more common than “Hello” these days.
“You need an iv,” suggests Lou. “You’re going to die otherwise.”
“We’re all going to die, Lou.”
Christmas
We’re outside St. George. The world is quieter. Distractions of the electronic sort are shunned, reminders of a life and world that seem like someone else’s. Social media became extinct when society shut down. We are all solitary ships drifting on an endless ocean of incoherent experience. Clusters of people pass in twos or threes, never any group numbering more than five, the fleeting few who still remember one another. Mostly, solitary pilgrims march along toward a common destination. Kansas is the last bastion of hope.
I remember forgetting. That name on the tip of your tongue that flits frustratingly away again and again and again. Camilla asking me to stop on my way home for a gallon of milk and I show up on our doorstep empty-handed. My brother telling a story about when we were kids and I cannot recall it ever happening. I remember that I used to forget some things. Now I forget remembering most things.
“I never had a first kiss,” Santiago sadly confessed as we walk steadily east, the seasons turned cold and harsh.
“Sure you did, son,” I disagree. “You just forgot.”
“No, I remember never having something to remember,” Santiago says. “I might not remember my middle name, but I know I never kissed a girl. And now it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late, Santiago,” I promise. “There is always hope.”
“I don’t even care to bother, Dad,” Santiago declares. “I would just forget it soon enough anyway.”
“Some things are hard to forget, son.”
“But everything is forgotten eventually. Remember Julieta?”
I do not. He nods. Santiago understands. I remember when he was three and...
It’s lost. Nothing comes from my faulty brain.
“You cannot forget that what you never knew in the first place,” I say. “Does the importance of an event only remain important if it is remembered?”
I ask the question to myself as much as my son.
What would I have avoided if I knew they would never be remembered? None. What act was for prosperity? It was life, lived, events occurring because otherwise existence would be wasted. I may forget everything else, but I will never forget that it was all worth it.
Camilla stares into the morning sun as if trying to remember what it is called. Lucía recites the Lord’s Prayer over and over lest she loses the words and misses the meaning. This is my family.
Just the three of us.
I hope I never forget either one of them.
New Year’s
It is night when someone can’t recall how to do it right and does it wrong. The sound is like thunder off in the north. For a moment, I worry that the sun rises in the north. But it is only midnight and this is not dawn. Someone detonated nuclear weapons on American soil.
Someone did not know what they were doing.
The media reports it as an accident. What scant news outlets remain broadcast solely on old am radio frequencies. The internet ended weeks ago; not enough minds remain to know enough to keep it active. Pretty blonde women and handsome mature men known for being telegenic newscasters now trip and stutter on the airwaves on radios from coast to coast, forgetting every fourth word. Facts still filter out, and it seems that human error is the culprit in killing some half million people in a split second.
“They were the lucky ones,” Camilla quips as we listen to the details coming over a portable transistor radio Lucía found by the side of the road a hundred miles back. Whoever had it probably forgot how to change the batteries.
“Dead men harbor no hopes,” I say.
“Neither do most of the live ones,” Camilla replies. “At least it was quick and painless.”
“They didn’t have time to forget to be happy for a merciful end,” Lucía adds.
“Most of them probably didn’t even remember to be scared,” Camilla agrees.
“There is still hope. We have a chance,” I say. “Kansas is getting closer.”
“Your optimism is irritating, Eduardo,” Camilla sneers. “I might have found it endearing at one point, but blessedly such moments have fallen to the effects of this global amnesia. I do not want to remember your sappy treacle in the face of human extinction.”
Before morning, the last lights of human habitation that once peppered along the highway wink away, electricity finally erased like “remember when” and “once upon a time”. Stark darkness is offset only by the scattered white of the starlit sky and the persistent glow along the northern horizon.
The grid failed, according to the radio reporter, either by the nuclear explosion or a culmination of system failures accelerating over the course of recent weeks. The people that could fix it either forgot how, forgot where, forgot to drink and died of dehydration, or are deceased in other myriad of ways.
I refuse to forget my family. I do not know if I ever had a brother or sister. I cannot recall the face of my mother or father. But Camilla and Lucía are my everything. I wear a heavy parka against the January cold and keep a Polaroid picture of them pinned on the inside breast. I remembered how to use the contraption when I found it yesterday but already discarded it this morning when I forgot what button to push and which way to point it. With a black marker, I printed their names at the bottom.
I will never forget my wife and daughter.
Valentine’s Day
Lucía stares at a bottle of Coke. She cannot remember how to open it. I reach over and twist the cap.
“Thanks, Dad,” she says. I know there is usually a response to a “thank you”, but I forget what people say.
I watch a woman with her baby. I hope she makes it all the way to Kansas. I have witnessed adults walk away from infants, abandoning them to perfect strangers. I remember Lucía, although she is hardly a baby. I can never forget my own daughter.
Some do.
It is inherent in human nature to care for the little ones. So strangers by the thousands have assumed temporary adoption of these abandoned infants. When one forgets, another assumes responsibility. It gives me hope. Hope that a large enough number of people will remember enough to get the rest to safety.
The woman with the baby does not forsake her child. Not today. Not right now. She scoops up the fretting infant and moves east, onward, Kansas, Kansas, Kansas.
I still have the Polaroid in my parka. I feel fortunate that I have not needed it yet. So far, I have forgotten Spanish, my encyclopedic knowledge of professional wrestling, my own birthday, and the entire year of my life when I battled and survived prostate cancer. Camilla tells me the things I forgot, and I tell her the things she forgets. Until she forgets me.
It happens just before sunset on Valentine’s Day. She looks at me with love in her eyes as I give her a box of chocolates I looted from an abandoned convenience store three weeks ago. She pulls the ribbon, removes the cover, and seems smitten by the smatter of chocolate morsels. When she looks up again, I am a stranger.
“What’ve you done with Roco?” she snaps, voice higher, accent thicker.
“Roco?” I ask. Is it something I forgot?
“My boyfriend, jerk. He wouldn’t like you giving me candy.”
Roco Ramone. Camilla dated him in high school, before she met me. She was sixteen when they broke up. The last thirty-five years just erased from the mind of my wife.
“You forgot, Camilla. It’s me. Eduardo,” I say, knowing it is pointless. She is gone.
“Mom,” Lucía tries.
Camilla glares at her daughter who looks older than Camilla remembers being herself. “Is that some kind of joke, chica? You dress like a clown.”
Camilla looks all around. A sign says Salt Lake City one way, Denver the other. Neither is the direction she will go. Roco is in California. He died twenty years ago in a motorcycle accident, but Camilla doesn’t know that. She probably sees him yesterday in her mind.
I love her today as much as yesterday, as much as the day we were married, more than the day we met when she was just seventeen, eons ago. She does not even know my name. I am a stranger to her, and she is a stranger wearing my wife’s face.
“Please,” Lucía begs.
“Roco needs me,” Camilla says in a pout perfected by teenage narcissism.
She turns and starts west. We cannot stop her. Many have tried, as loved ones forget their present or their everything and wander off in a different direction. The only hope lies to the east. Only Kansas. We cannot afford to follow her, and even if the two of us can force her for a while, it is impossible to keep her moving against her will. Once lost, it is never re-remembered. The effect is permanent. Camilla is lost.
For the first time in a long time, I realize what I have lost. I cry. A lot. Camilla lost as much as I did, yet she seemed perfectly at peace with leaving our thirty-five years unceremoniously rejected in the middle of Interstate 70.
Maybe it would have been better if I had lost her memory, too.
What did someone say once? ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? That idiot obviously died before memory cast itself into oblivion.
From a brief moment, hope escapes me, and I long for the relief of unremembrance. Then Lucía takes my hand, turns me east, and we start walking again. Onward. There is no other way.
Easter
Lucía forgot her shoes after we set out last week, near Aurora. Forgetfulness is not coming any faster, but neither is it slowing down. The ponderous progression of degeneration continued, and I decided returning for footwear was contradictory to our best interests. I thought that we would come along a corpse or shoe store were we could replenish. Instead, her feet have become bloody and blistered. She leaves a faint scarlet trail behind her like Jesus’s footsteps in the sand.
We stop for lunch and the spring breeze is a bittersweet accompaniment to our meal. Last year for Easter, we were together. Camilla made mountains of mashed potatoes, several servings of lemoned green beans, a turkey big enough to feed five, and cupcake desserts in the shapes of little bodies of water, each named after one of the Great Lakes. Camilla ate Superior, I ate Lake Michigan, and Lucía swallowed Ontario in one bite. What about Huron and Erie? What had I forgotten?
“Zombies,” she says, more accusing than observation.
The grazing herd that Lucía dubbed “zombies” numbers in the thousands along Interstate 70. Worldwide, million must certainly be so afflicted. These are the ones that forgot their own humanity. They do not remember being a person. Memory of life, speech, purpose, promise: all erased. They felt no physical effects of forgetfulness, just the mental erasure that left those affected less cognitive than an incurious cat or a purposeless gnat.
Lucía has expressed often after Camilla left us that she will not devolve into the obtuse automatons lurching directionless along the freeway. These are the dredges of humanity, the ones that have forgotten how to even think. More and more each passing day join the ranks of mindless meanderers. Harmless, pointless, the herd of zombies shuffles aimlessly, waiting to die from thirst or starvation.
The picture stays in my parka. I look at Camilla every day. She is forever frozen in that moment. Yet I know she is no longer that woman. But people are never as we remember them anyway, always something other than recollected. We shape what had been to fit with what is now. Excuses, editing, revisions, something other than what really was. The only truth is in the moment. Right now. I believe in my darkest minute that this global amnesia is a blessing rather than a curse.
“I am going to pee before we go again,” Lucía informs, limping off to make latrine off in the woods.
I watch where she enters the copse of evergreens in case she forgets to come back or loses which way is which.
Kansas is getting closer. It is the singular thought that moves me forward. The zombies stumble directionless in ditches and along asphalt, but the people that still remember move purposefully east. Just a few weeks away. I am at the precipice of promise. All is not yet lost. If I can just make it to Kansas, I can quit losing the special pieces of my life.
Camilla left me.
She left me all alone.
But spring is here, turning seasons, a warmer future. I leave the parka behind as it symbolizes winter and coldness and the frigid memory of Camilla tuning away and walking the wrong direction. I don’t need it to keep me warn anymore.
On the highway, intermittently visible amongst the hordes of aimless zombies, are faint bloody footprints. I feel sorry for that sad soul who has to make the last leg of this trek to the promised land in bare feet.
Memorial Day
Kansas.
Nothing.
Someone sits at the border along Interstate 70 where the highway crosses into Kansas. She looks wise, but wisdom lately is just one person remembering what everyone else forgot. Her eyes are kind, as if she feels terrible imparting truth to feeble minds too brittle to handle harsh reality.
“I am sorry,” she says, again and again as we walk by. “There is nothing to remember here.”
It turns out we were thinking about a movie, those of us that started this expedition east. Word spread from a few delusional amnesiacs who remembered hope from somewhere, but forgot the source. I was thinking of a movie. The Wizard of Oz. There’s no place like home. But we are not going to wake up from this. It isn’t a dream.
I remembered hope, but I forgot it was fiction.
This is the end. If there is still hope, from some other source, I am too far gone to find it. I do not remember where I came from or who I came with or even my own name. I forgot how to read a few days ago. Pretty soon, I will forget how to walk, or how to eat, or how to form words. Maybe I will be a zombie walking the byways of America. Maybe I will starve to death in a ditch. Maybe I will remember to walk off a bridge before it gets that bad.
I walk because there is nothing else. I eat because I am not ready to die. I sleep but there are no dreams, because my mind forgot how to. Something bright rises in the sky, but I do not know what it is called. I eat something from a bag that crunches and tastes good, but I cannot remember what they are called. My shirt is unbuttoned because I forgot how to fix it. A pain stabs under my belly from the insides, but I do not remember how to take care of it. An animal watches me from the side of the road, but I do not know if I should be afraid. I do not remember what fear is.
A sign along the road points in another direction.
“Can read?” I ask a stranger.
I forgot the rest of the words to make a complete sentence.
He nods. “It says, ‘Now’,” he translates.
“Now?” I ask.
“It’s all we have left,” the stranger answers.
He turns and follows the arrow. I stand in one place a moment. Maybe I should stay a while. There is a long road behind me. I have been moving east for a very long time. But hope fades. Promise is a lie. Kansas is just a movie.
I take the exit. Might as well live in the present. Before I forget that, too.
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