The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(76)

“Did you ask me here to tell me that?”

“No,” she replied, shuffling her weight a little in the bed. “Although now you’re here, I may as well inform you that this ridiculous notion you have that if people find you pleasant, you’ll have a pleasant time in return is stupid and na?ve. For f*ck’s sake, Harry, what did the world do to you to make you so… blank?”

“I can go…”

“Stay. I need you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re so obliging,” she replied with a sigh. “Because you’re so blank. I need that now. I need to forget.”

I leaned forward in my seat, fingertips steepling together. “Would you like someone to talk you out of it?” I said at last.

“Absolutely not.”

“Nevertheless, I feel a certain obligation to try.”

“For God’s sake, as if you could say anything to me I haven’t already said to myself.”

I put my head on one side, flicked at the seam of my hospital robe, ran my nails down either side of the line, tightening it to a ridge along my sleeve. Then, “I told my wife.”

“Which one?”

“My first wife. The first woman I married. Jenny. She was linear and I was not, and I told her, and she left me. And a man came, and he wanted to know the future, and he wasn’t very polite when I said no, and I wanted to die, the true death, the blackness that stops the dark. That’s why, in answer to your question. Why I… go along with things. Because nothing else I’ve done seems to work.”

She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling it beneath her teeth. Then, “Silly man. As if anyone else has got the right idea.”


The Forgetting. It merits, I believe, a definite article in front of the name, for it is a kind of death. I told Akinleye all the things which she already knew in an attempt to dissuade her. A death of the mind, for us, exceeds a death of the body. There would be pain. There would be fear. And even if she did not feel the loss of knowledge, of mind, of soul which the Forgetting brings, even if she did not regret its absence, having no recollection of what was gone, we who knew her, who were her friends, would be bitterly sorrowful to see her go, though her body lived on. I did not add the last part of my argument, that to forget was to run away. To abscond from the responsibility of the things she’d done and who she’d been. I did not think the notion would hold much sway.

To which she said, “Harry, you’re a nice man trying to do your best here, but you and I both know I have seen and done such things as I would not live with any more. I have shut down my heart, cut off what you so charmingly call my soul, because I find that I cannot live with either of them. Do this for me, Harry, and maybe I can have them back again.”

I didn’t push the argument any further. My heart wasn’t in it.

The following morning I went to the Chicago Cronus Club to collect what I needed, and I left a letter to be distributed to the other Clubs informing them that Akinleye would no longer remember who and what we were, and in her new, innocent state, we should watch over her, and only interfere once she had need of our help.

The technology of 1987 was only a little beyond that which Vincent used to wipe my mind. He had the advantage of some foreknowledge; the Cronus Club had the advantage of plenty. We may not tamper much in temporal events, but when it comes to matters of our own survival, the Clubs of the future share their knowledge with the Clubs of the past. I have even heard rumours of a steam-powered device deployed in the 1870s to aid with the Forgetting of its maker, though I have no proof to corroborate this claim, nor probably ever shall have.

Our device was a mixture of chemical and electrical, nodes targeting some very specific portions of the brain. Unlike Vincent’s, our device did not require the mind to be conscious for the moment, and as I administered the final sedative into Akinleye’s bloodstream, it felt like a kind of murder.

“Thank you, Harry,” she said. “In a few lives, when I’ve settled down a bit, come visit me, OK?”

I promised that I would, but she had already closed her eyes.

The process only took a few seconds after that. I stayed with her when it was done, monitoring her vitals, sitting by the bedside. She’d been right–the pneumonia was going to win the battle of diseases trying to kill her off. Under other circumstances, I would have simply let her die, but the Forgetting had one other, vital step, essential to seeing if it was complete. It happened three nights after the initial shock had been delivered, at two thirty in the morning. I woke to the sound of a voice crying out. It took me a while to recognise the language–Ewe, a dialect I hadn’t heard spoken for centuries. My knowledge of Ewe was middling at best, but I had enough to reach out and take Akinleye’s hand and whisper, “Peace. You’re safe.”

If she understood my words, she showed no sign but recoiled at the sight of me and called out again in Ewe for her parents, for her family, for someone to help her. She didn’t understand what was happening, looked down at her body and shuddered with pain. Mother, father, God were all begged for assistance.

“I am Harry,” I said. “Do you know me?”

“I do not know you!” she wheezed. “Help me! What is happening?”

“You’re in hospital. You’re ill.” I wished my knowledge of the language was better than it was, for the only way I could think of to phrase it was “dying”.