When my wife slunk out of the bathroom in her underwear, damp and rosy from the shower, I let out an exaggerated wolf whistle. wwHHP wheeooo!
The whistle cracked the serious mask of her face into a smile, but something about the peak and valley of the tone didn’t sit right with me.
My bedroom faded from view.
I’m eight or nine and staring into the face of another little boy. It’s Nolan, my best friend. Our mouths are puckered into o’s, and we are both blowing. Who is Nolan? Do I know a Nolan? He is pushing a shrill, reedy sound from high in his throat. My breath is nothing but a rush of soundless air. “Don’t worry, Sam, you’ll get it,” he tells me. My name’s Jacob. Who is Sam?
I blinked and it vanished. Poppy crawled into bed and slotted herself into the slice between my arm and my torso. She ran her finger down my bare chest, a prelude and a promise.
“Pops,” I said, “have I always been able to whistle?”
She frowned at me. “Of course you have. You whistled at me just like that, the day we met.”
“Did I?” I couldn’t remember.
She crept closer, her hair sweeping my skin, but I was trying to grasp that flittering vision. “It’s just that I don’t think I ever learned to whistle.”
Poppy peeled herself up, her eyebrows rigid lines. “Of course you did. You just whistled, so you must have learned sometime. Why are you worried about this?”
She leaned forward to press her lips against mine, as if she meant to silence me. I pulled my head back and said, “I don’t know. I’m just a little freaked out. I’m too young to be losing my memory.”
I meant it lightheartedly, but she didn’t take it that way. Her voice swelled with uncharacteristic anger. “You’re being ridiculous. Stop talking about this,” she demanded.
My wife was one of the most level-headed people I knew. If she told me to drop it, I listened. But the force of her defensiveness unsettled me. I had already ruined the mood, so we went to bed facing opposite directions, our backs rising and falling in syncopated rhythm. When I was sure she was asleep, I rounded my lips and, quietly, whistled.
. . .
If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought Poppy was having an affair.
Ever since I’d brought up that damn whistling – really, the only time I can remember her raising her voice at me during our otherwise idyllic relationship – she’d been acting oddly. Not when we were together. If anything, her sweetness was sicklier, the tips of her fingers always brushing electricity across my arms, her warm body a luxurious comfort on the couch. But we were together less often.
She started working late. She would take calls after hours in the guest bedroom with the door closed. She went in on weekends. One day she arrived home two hours later than expected, with our daughter Hannah in the backseat. Claimed community theater rehearsal ran late. I was reluctant to involve Hannah, but I asked her a few careful questions and she confirmed the story. Using almost the exact same verbiage, as if she were parroting it.
Any of these things would have been isolated blips, but when plotted on the same graph, like seismic spikes that crested with increasing frequency, they were a pattern.
The memory of the little boy who couldn’t whistle twisted inside me and told me it wasn’t a good idea to address her behavior directly. After nearly fifteen years of marriage, twelve of them ensconced in the mania of raising a child, I had seen a sharp edge to Poppy that she had never revealed to me.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. I did the thing that all suspicious lovers do and snooped through her phone.
Normally, Poppy guarded it closely, but the opportunity arose sooner than I’d expected. We were watching television when something crashed in Hannah’s bedroom. Perhaps she’d knocked her laptop off the bed again, perhaps it was something worse. Poppy leapt up and started bounding up the stairs, calling Hannah’s name. I was about to follow when I noticed she had left the phone on the table. I’m not proud. But I needed to know. I picked it up and punched in the passcode I had surreptitiously watched her enter.
There were no unusual text messages, only calls. Regular calls to the same number. 959-544…
959.
I knew that number.
Nine five nine.
I’m sitting in a room of slate grey. The walls are unblemished concrete. There is no dust in the corners. I am on a very, very cold metal chair. I am resting my hands on a table. Something that looks like a hospital bracelet is pinned around my wrist. There are tiny numbers printed on it, a phone number beginning with 959. The room appears to have no door. Then a section of the wall slides open with a hydraulic wssh and I realize that faint lines carve its silhouette. A man steps into the room. “Do you have any questions?”
Poppy’s footsteps begin to descend, snapping the vision in half. Hannah was fine. I placed the phone carefully back on the coffee table, feeling it was crucial that I leave it exactly where I found it.
. . .
I researched the phone number at work. I didn’t want to use my home WiFi.
The number was listed on a webpage. Redevelopment Corp. Infuriatingly generic. The page was a mess of buzzwords and lingo that obfuscated any clue as to the purpose of the business. It had a professional finish, all clean lines and staid blocks of text. There were no images, no links. The contact information consisted only of the phone number and an address, in the state adjacent to mine.
Google Maps told me that it was about a three-hour drive. As I closed the browser and wiped the search history, my eyes fell on the picture frame on my desk. Poppy and I on our wedding day. I had my arm around her, and my expression was bursting with love and trust. I wished I could remember that day. I’d been so happy I blacked out even though I was completely sober, the joy overwhelming my grasp of the details. That happens to everyone, doesn’t it?
. . .
Poppy was extremely suspicious of my claim that I was going on a business trip. I couldn’t blame her. She was always more perceptive than most. She read my moods, told me why I was sad or angry or anxious before I could even put a name to the emotion. She knew, obviously, that I was lying, and to try to convince her otherwise would have been fruitless, so I merely wished her a good few days and kissed her forehead.
As I pulled out of the driveway, I could see her watching me from the living room window. She was on the phone.
The long stretch of highway that I hit about an hour into the trip knocked loose another vision.
I’m in the driver’s seat going seventy-five. It’s too fast – the limit is sixty. But my fiancée seems to enjoy it, it makes her feel alive, so I ease just another notch of pressure on the gas, watching her thrill in the whipping wind. My fiancée is not Poppy. It’s Lauren. The light of my life, the girl I’ve been in love with since I bought a movie ticket from her when she was working the counter at the AMC and she said ‘I heard that’s supposed to be so good’ and I said ‘why don’t I just buy two and you can come see it with me’ and she unclipped her nametag and left her post and she clutched at my shirt in the darkness when the shadows flickered at the corner of the screen.
The images toppled into each other. I tried desperately to catch one, any of them, but they dribbled through my consciousness like a sieve.
I arrived at the facility as the sun sank below the horizon. It looked more like a prison than an innocuous corporation. The building was a solemn cube, nestled amongst farmland, the only large edifice for miles. A chain link fence surrounded its perimeter. Was the barbed wire meant to keep people out, or in?
I lowered the window and heard the crunch of gravel under my tires as I approached the booth. The guard inside was dressed in a nondescript black uniform and he was heavily armed.
“State your business.”
“I need to find out why I can whistle.”
He pulled a lever to open the groaning gate and waved me inside.
. . .
I was back in the room. The immaculate grey walls, the cold chair, the metal table. I had been led here by silent men, who did not touch me but marched beside me with their shoulders boxing me in. I sat there for half an hour, my eyes fixated on the cracks in the wall that outlined the door, when it opened.
I didn’t recognize the man who entered, but he recognized me. “Jacob Sanderson,” he said by way of greeting. “I’ve been expecting you.”
I stood so suddenly I surprised myself, the chair clattering to the ground. “Tell me what the fuck is going on,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “You know my name. You know that my life is not my life. I’m not really married to Poppy, am I? My name isn’t Jake? Is Hannah my real daughter?”
“You have many questions. It will take some time to answer. Sit down.”
He motioned at the chair. He didn’t move, and for a while, neither did I. Finally, I hoisted the chair upright and sat at the table. He sank into the seat opposite from me, tapping his fingers on the surface.
“Mr. Sanderson, feel the skin behind your ear.”
“Why?” But I did as I was told, and rubbed my skull just behind my left ear. There was a bumpy ridge of skin. A scar, like it was sewn together. How had I never noticed it before?
“Mr. Sanderson, you are wearing a different skin. You have been implanted with a device that alters your memories. It’s not perfect, as you have realized. We offer our deepest apologies for the malfunction.”
My vision swam. It couldn’t be possible. I realized that I had been holding out hope that this would turn out to be a figment of my imagination, a wild conspiracy that I’d cooked up entirely within my own head. Somehow it was worse to learn that I wasn’t crazy. “What the fuck did you do to me?”
“You have a new life, Mr. Sanderson. A new identity. It has been this way since you were twenty-three.”
I was gripping the table so hard my knuckles were turning white. “What about Poppy? And Hannah?”
He studied me closely, monitoring my reactions. “Poppy was a volunteer, though I believe she has come to care for you. Hannah is your daughter, and knows nothing about this.”
I slammed my fist down on the table and stood up again, pacing quickly around the room. Hot blood was rushing to my head. I felt like I was about to pass out. “Why did you do this to me?” I shouted. “Why did you take my life away?”
“Because,” he said. “You asked us to.”
I stopped. “What?”
He stood as well, and got very close to me, his voice almost a whisper. “Something terrible happened. Something so awful, you couldn’t bear to continue living. You were referred to this facility after a failed suicide attempt that left your original body deeply disfigured, and you were already planning another. We gave you a choice. We would not stop you if you desired to die by your own hand, but we offered you the chance to forget.”
“What was it?” I asked hoarsely. “I don’t remember. What happened?”
“Well. It was your fault.” He paused. “Do you want to hear the rest?”
I scrambled through my fragmented memories – Sam’s memories, my real memories – and could find nothing that gave me the barest hint. “I don’t know. Do I?”
“I can’t make the decision for you, but I can tell you this,” he said. “You’ve been in this room before. Not just the procedure, but thrice after that. The technology was a prototype – we’ve made advances, but your early model seemed to splutter and fail after a few years. We’ve had this exact conversation several times, you and I. And you have always chosen not to know.”
I screwed my eyes shut as though I could claw my way out of this nightmare. The thought of carrying on knowing that I was incomplete, that I wasn’t truly me, loomed large. But what had I done, back before I’d forgotten? The knowledge had been so horrific that I’d wanted to take my own life, and had chosen to excise it from my memory forever? After a moment, I shook my head. “I suppose I don’t.”
“I think that’s wise.”
Silence blanketed the room. We looked at each other, two men who had orbited around each other for decades, one unaware, one always watching. He said, “You have another choice. We can perform the procedure again, with the upgraded product. We have worked very hard to make it last longer, and preliminary results from other subjects are promising. I must emphasize that I strongly believe we have managed to develop something truly permanent. So the decision is yours, Mr. Sanderson. Do you want to walk away, or do you want to forget?”
I swallowed, my mouth dry. “Can I have a few days?”
“Of course. You have our number.” He cocked his head at me. “You know, it’s funny. The thing that brings you here? It’s always the whistling.”
. . .
Poppy was waiting in the living room when I arrived. She must have heard my car. There was a feline wariness about her. The sight of her on the familiar couch, in the nightgown she wore almost every night, felt like an anchor, tethering me back to reality.
“Jake?” she asked, her voice unsteady.
After a moment, I nodded.
Her body visibly relaxed in a wave of relief. She embraced me, murmuring in my ear, telling me that my favorite pasta dish was warming in the oven. Was it my favorite? Did she love me? I didn’t know. I leaned into her warmth, letting it envelop me and become my world.
It’s been a few days. In its broadest strokes, life is normal. Hannah is bouncing around in excitement because her birthday is soon. She’ll be a teenager. I’m excited too, although it’s dampened by the intrusive thoughts that cage me when I’m alone: What have I done? What happened to Lauren? What unimaginable destruction did I cause that made me want to erase my own existence?
I made the call last night. I have an appointment for next week. And I’ve told them that this time, they’d better make it stick.
Goodbye, Sam. I don’t think I can face you. I suppose in a way, as you wished it to be, I am ending your life.