I work as an editor for a small publishing company. One of my duties is to review unsolicited manuscripts and either forward them for consideration or route them to the rejection pile. More often than not, I do the latter. It’s a soul-sucking job, killing people’s dreams. A real grind. But something happened recently that has me longing for those old days of drudgery.
It appeared on the doorstep of my home: a package enclosed in a plain manila envelope with no return address or postage. Clearly, someone had dropped it there overnight for me to discover. More angry than freaked out (I’m not listed, and I have no idea how someone could have gotten my address), I tore into the envelope. Inside was a tattered spiral notebook, its pages filled with handwriting in bold block lettering that looked like something from an FBI evidence locker—a rambling manifesto, maybe, or a stalker’s journal.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t brace myself for what I was about to read. In my line of work, it’s not uncommon for writers to take rejection extremely personally, and although I’ve never received any threats, my imagination flew into overdrive picturing some crazed writer detailing all the ways they could disembowel me for failing to recognize their genius. But after reading the first few sentences, I knew this wasn’t the case.
What I found in the notebook, and what I’ve transcribed here in full to share with you, is the seemingly lucid account of an unexplained event captured on paper as it unfolded. For all I know, it’s pure fiction and I’ve lost my objectivity. My hope is that by posting it here, I can get some feedback or idea of what I’m dealing with. Because recent events have led me to suspect there may be some truth behind it—and that thought is terrifying.
In the interest of providing as much information as possible, I’ve added my own notes in bracketed italics to describe additional details I thought might be useful in determining the legitimacy of the notebook’s contents.
………
[The following words appear in thick black marker on the notebook’s cover:]
READ EVERYTHING
KEEP WRITING
[Block-letter handwriting in black ink begins on the first page.]
We formed a circle around Carlos when he began to disappear. It was the only thing we could do. Already one of his legs had gone missing, and one of his hands. But it wasn’t until the whole right side of his face vanished that we knew his end was near. Sister Rose reminded us it was to be expected. We trusted what she said. She’d been with the group the longest and had seen this happen many times.
Carlos was a brave man. Proud. You could read it in the coolness of his eyes and see it in the set of his jaw when he spoke. He wanted to be fearless, to meet this fate head-on. But when the area around his remaining knee began to grow transparent, his courage faltered and he listed sideways, arms flailing, hands snatching for someone or something to hold.
We caught him just in time and lowered him gently to the floor as the whole of his lower half, everything from his hips down, passed from existence. There was a clumsy grace about his final descent that called to mind all those slow-motion demolitions I used to enjoy watching in the days before the world went wrong.
“Maldita!” Carlos cried. “Dios mio…”
Amid the ruckus of voices and the tangle of helping arms, I heard someone ask, “Did you hurt yourself? Are you in pain?”
It was Annalisa. She was a nurse, or had been before coming to the group. Despite everything she’d been through and had stripped from her, that instinctual compassion remained. I wished I’d known her before all of this.
“No,” Carlos said. “No pain. Just…tengo miedo. I am afraid.”
His voice was faint. Already fading. Even his accent seemed to have diminished. I wondered how much of that had to do with the fact he was speaking with only half a mouth.
Carlos was trembling but trying to keep it together. Sweat ran in rivulets from his forehead. He drew a deep, resolute breath and turned a grateful gaze to each of us in turn who’d come to his side to ease his passage. Then his remaining eye clouded over and he shook his head slowly.
“No quiero morir.”
Sister Rose moved close. “You’re not dying,” she said, pressing a gentle hand against his forehead like a mother soothing her sick child, ignoring the half of his face that no longer existed. “You’re fading.” Her voice was soft, centering. “Remember what we talked about. Surrender to it. See the end, and go toward it.”
Carlos’s breath hitched, and he coughed violently. I thought maybe this time the thing had taken one of his internal organs. A lung, perhaps. Even his heart. Then he stopped coughing and gasped, his remaining eye boring into a spot on the low ceiling over our heads.
The end had come for him. It was in the room with us.
I didn’t look. No one did. As much as we all wanted to know what was happening to Carlos—what was happening to us, and what would eventually be visited upon every person in the room—we didn’t want to see what he was seeing. So we closed our eyes and held him tightly as he faded from existence and our hands closed around the nothingness that remained.
That was three days ago. Although we speak his name at the start of every meeting to remind ourselves, already the memory of Carlos is fading. By this time next week, I’ll probably read these words and recall nothing. But I must try, if only to remind myself of all I have forgotten, and all who have forgotten me.
Before finding Sister Rose and the group, I was living in a state of walking sleep. Convinced I was somehow unique. That what was happening to me was normal. The mere consequence of being me.
Like the time my next-door neighbor forgot my name. An unusual thing for him, perhaps, but certainly not for me. I was always forgetting people’s names. So I shrugged it off, like you do. What did it really matter?
And then a month later, it happened again. Only this time, it wasn’t just my name the guy forgot. As we passed in the hall outside our apartment doors, he smiled and introduced himself like I’d just moved in.
Most people would have said something. Corrected him. I could have done that. Reminded him I’d lived next door for years. But I didn’t. I played along. Smiled and said thanks. Sometimes things are easier that way.
Besides, I had been forgotten before. There were the old friends who never called back. The first dates that became only dates. The Ubers that never showed. The Amazon orders that vanished into the ether. The pharmacy that kept having to enter my name into their system and blamed it on a “computer glitch.” The laundromat that lost my clothes and any record that I’d dropped them off. At some point, you get used to it.
And then one day it took place right before my eyes. I was at the coffee shop when an old acquaintance walked in. An ex-coworker, I think. Or the friend of a friend. I was never good with those things.
She saw me and she smiled. Even called me by my first name. It felt good to be remembered. We spoke for a minute. It was awkward, but it always has been for me. Then just I was getting ready to make my getaway, it happened.
Her lips moved to form a word, and froze. The smile on her face dissolved, and her eyes glazed over as if she’d come unplugged. In that fleeting moment, I felt the sensation of something moving into the space between us, like a transparent curtain being lowered. The excess thread pooling at our feet. And when her eyes regained their focus, the spark of recognition within them had been totally extinguished.
Finally she spoke again, her words halting. “Sorry,” she said. “Were you…were you speaking to me?”
The easy, familiar tone was gone from her voice, and she turned her head to look behind her the way you do when you’re not sure someone is talking to you. Or when you find yourself engaged in a conversation with a complete stranger that you have no memory of starting.
I didn’t reply. What could I have said? I pressed my lips into closed-mouthed smile and walked away. And then I went on with my life. Because that’s just what you do.
It wasn’t until the day my own brother forgot who I was that I realized things had grown more complicated. That something was wrong. Granted, he and I had never been close. But a thing like having a brother isn’t something the average person forgets, even if they wish they could.
His name was James, and even though he was two years younger and one inch shorter, he had always looked down on me. Once a year, I called him on his birthday. It was something I did more out of obligation than anything else. It wasn’t like we were kids anymore and I had to pretend to care. Still, old habits die hard. Even painful ones.
Our conversations were usually perfunctory, and always started out the same: “Hi, James, happy birthday.” Then he would pretend to be glad to hear from me and we’d talk for as long as either of us could stand it.
This time, things were different. This time when I called and wished him a happy birthday, he said, “Who is this?”
So I cleared my throat and spoke again. “It’s me. Your brother.”
But James just chuckled and said, “I don’t have a brother.”
I hung up before he could say any more. I didn’t want to give him any more opportunity to tamp the evidence of my existence under his feet. Instead, I stood at my kitchen window and stared into the street below. A couple was walking along the sidewalk hand in hand, moving with the unmistakable grace of young lovers. I wondered what would happen if one were to turn to the other to find a perfect stranger staring back.
Surely it’s better to forget than be forgotten.
[Here the narrative is interrupted by a line of crudely drawn symbols that resemble stars. I’m unsure of their meaning.]
Sister Rose says it happens in stages. The first is what she calls a “slow, systematic de-existence.” It’s a kind of social excommunication, where the knowledge of your existence is wiped from the lives and minds of everyone you’ve ever known.
The phenomenon is disease-like in that it doesn’t discriminate. When it hits, mothers forget sons. Daughters forget fathers. Spouses, partners, lovers, and best friends become strangers in an instant. Even the people on the periphery of your life—neighbors, doctors, the baristas you see every day—all forget you ever existed.
At least that’s what Sister Rose says. No one knows how she knows. Only that she does.
On the night Carlos came limping through the door of the rec center with parts of his body gone and the rest on their way, he was a complete stranger to everyone. Everyone but Sister Rose, who introduced him to the group and told us he was our brother in circumstance. That was how she put it.
Who were we to question her? So we greeted Carlos like an old friend. Descended upon him like well-wishers at a wake. Offering words of comfort as best we could. Although he knew he’d already been expunged from our memories, he took the gesture with grace and humility. Because when you find yourself at the threshold of all that exists and all that does not, you take your friends any way you can get them.
After he was gone and the remainders of the group had left for the night, I approached Sister Rose. “What happens to us when you’re no longer around to remind us who we are?” I asked her.
Her lips turned upward in poor imitation of a smile. Like the rest of us, she had long ago forgotten how. She told me, “When you can see yourself in every stranger’s eyes, no one is forgotten. And you’ll never forget who you are.”
[The words enclosed in quotation marks are underlined three times, as if to underscore their importance.]
On the morning I first met Sister Rose, I woke to the sound of someone pounding on my apartment door. It was the landlord, Ray. He had something in his hand. He thrust it at me. I took it from him. It was a bank notice.
“Your check bounced,” he told me.
I apologized, and when I went to write him another, he threw up a hand and asked for cash. I told him I’d have to go to the bank, and he left me alone. But when I went there, the teller told me there was no account under my name. Nor had there ever been.
I stayed away from my apartment all day until the sky turned black, walking the city streets past sleeping shapes curled into balls inside shuttered storefront doorways. When I was certain enough time had passed that Ray wouldn’t be waiting for me, I made my way back.
There was a handwritten note taped to my apartment door. It wasn’t from Ray. It was from someone named Jessica. Underneath my name were the words You are not forgotten. I remember you. Call the number below when you get this.
I walked quietly into my apartment and took out my phone to dial, but the sensor on my lock screen no longer recognized my thumbprint. So I went into the kitchen and pulled open a cupboard and scooped a handful of change from an old coffee can I kept there. Three blocks away, I found a working payphone and dialed the number.
We met an hour later in a park close to the elementary school where I’d gone as a child.
“You don’t remember me,” Jessica said. “But I remember you.”
Her face was an unfamiliar landscape of worry lines and freckles. Pale-blue eyes stared out from below eyelids that were puffy from lack of sleep. Her thin, drawn lips were parted in a manner that suggested they hardly ever closed, and her nose was long and straight and true. She was beautiful. And she was a complete stranger. Yet there was something hazily familiar about her. Something calming. I blamed it on her soft voice and the way the morning sun shone on her hair.
I asked her how we knew each other, and she regarded me with the rueful eyes of someone tasked with delivering a terminal diagnosis. Or maybe she just always looked like that.
“We lived together for three years,” she told me. “Then one day about six months ago, you came home and told me to get out. To never to come back or you’d call the police.”
She was lying. She had to be. Yet the grave sincerity in her voice told me otherwise.
“We were engaged,” she said. “You proposed to me right here, in this park. There, underneath that big willow.”
She raised a hand, pointed. Smiled at the memory. It was a sad smile, resigned. Her hands were making delicate fists, opening and closing and opening again as if she couldn’t decide if she wanted to strike me or touch me.
“But that day. It was like you’d never seen me before. Like I was some complete stranger that broke in or something. I didn’t know what was happening, so I left. I tried calling later. You never answered. I came back the next day when you were gone, but my key…”
Her hand traced an invisible line to her pocket, and her eyes darkened as if seeing something that could not possibly be.
“How… ?” I began, then stopped myself. I wanted to ask her how I could have forgotten any of it. Forgotten her.
“Don’t bother trying to remember,” she said, seeming to read my thoughts. “Any of it. It’s all gone. I’m all gone. Just like everything that’s happening to you.”
For the briefest instant there came a flash of recognition. Like a ghostly face appearing on the backs of my eyelids. Then it was gone, replaced by the numb remembrance of a sensation I couldn’t quite place. A slow, drifting disconnectedness. And the more I stared at Jessica and tried to remember her, the more I felt as if there were a hole in my memory where something had been torn out, spackled over, and left to harden.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
She shook her head. “None of us do.”
My ears caught onto that word, us, but before I could form the question, she told me the rest.
“You’re not the only person this is happening to. There are others. Ten of them so far, including me. Well…with you, that makes eleven. We think there must be more, but we don’t know for certain. And nobody’s sure if anything can be done to stop it.”
There was a spinning sensation under my feet, and for a moment I became acutely aware that I was no more than a speck of carbon on a miniscule rock amid the enormity of the universe. Then I was back again, and the crippling weight of the dilemma crashed back onto my shoulders. Only this time, the burden was not quite as heavy. If there were others like me, that meant I wasn’t losing my mind.
“I’ve been watching you,” Jessica said, then rushed to correct herself. “Not spying. Just…following.”
Her words came quickly, sharp syllables spoken with the efficiency of someone to whom time was extremely limited.
“Yesterday,” she continued, “when I saw you come out of the bank, I knew. The look on your face. I knew that it was happening to you, too.”
Ten thousand questions hurled themselves at my tongue, too many to be spoken. Finally, I said, “What is? What is it that’s happening to me?”
The crack in my voice revealed a desperation I hadn’t known I was holding inside. I wanted to run. I wanted to stay. I wanted to know what this thing was.
“The same thing that’s happening to me,” Jessica said. “The same thing that’s happening to us. We’re fading. Disappearing.”
A sudden sigh escaped her lips, a sound like someone forcing air through a plastic hose. I told her how sorry I was; that I didn’t mean to forget her; that something awful must have happened to erase her from my mind.
Her eyes brimmed with tears but still she raised her chin as if to show it was okay, she could take it, she was strong. It was almost enough to make me believe she was.
[The narrative ends in the middle of the page, leaving the lower half blank. It picks back up on the next page.]
My first meeting with the group, and my introduction to Sister Rose, took place that night in a poorly lit basement with one exposed brick wall and wood paneling on the others. It reminded me of an AA meeting space straight out of an eighties movie. Or maybe a Soviet torture room, the kind you see in movies about spies where people lose fingers and bloodstains dry by jaundice-yellow fluorescent light. In reality, it was just a clubhouse for refugees.
We sat, and Jessica introduced me as “a friend.” One who bore the dubious distinction of being just like everyone else in the room—ten in all, just like she’d said. They looked at me with kind yet haggard faces, each of them seeming to see some newly revealed reflection of themselves. How wonderful and terrible to find kindred spirits among strangers you may or may not have ever known.
“We’d love to hear your story,” someone said, and with a start, I realized they were talking to me. I looked into the face of the one who introduced herself as Sister Rose. She wore her graying hair in a somber bun, and in her flannel shirt and blue jeans she looked every bit like a mother superior trying to disguise herself as a run-of-the-mill heathen.
I began to speak and stuttered to a stall. I’d become so unaccustomed to being seen that I struggled to know how to begin, or even where. As the silence fell all around, Jessica cleared her throat and saved me. “Tell them when it started for you. How long has it been happening?”
“Six months,” I said, speaking to the room through her, leaning into her presence for comfort. “I think, anyway. I can’t be sure.”
Then a round guy with a bald head and white beard who introduced himself as Victor pressed his fingers together and leaned forward in his chair so far I thought he would roll off and land in my lap. “Can you tell us if you experienced any strange or traumatic events around that time?” he asked. He sounded like a therapist.
“Other than slowly becoming one of the unseen,” I told him, there had been nothing.
A knowing chuckle went up, and I gradually began to relax.
More questions came.
How many family members and close friends did I have? How many of them had forgotten me? Had I noticed any patterns in the occurrences? Standard stuff.
I answered their questions. Conversation moved in abrupt stops and starts throughout the room. Sister Rose was the one in charge. She owned the building and lived in a small apartment just above. But the group was still too new to have formulated any sort of structure, so people just talked. Shared their experiences. Some probably for the fifth or sixth time, and after a while I got the impression they were retelling them for my sake. Maybe they thought my hearing them would make me feel less alone. I wished that it would.
There was Margaret, a vacationing widow from the UK who’d become stranded stateside when she tried to board her plane back home and had her ID and passport rejected as phonies. Airport security eventually let her go when nobody could remember who she was or why they had detained her in the first place.
Felix, who held a job as a mortuary assistant until the day he showed up to work to find his badge no longer worked and nobody there knew him anymore, said he recalled instances of bodies periodically going missing from the morgue. “Like they’d up and vanished,” he said.
Their stories spun before me like a carousel. And when it seemed it would slow to a stop, it began again. Then a guy called Slim started talking about government conspiracies. Tests performed on unknowing citizens, everything from LSD to VD to atomic radiation. I listened, all the while expecting someone to burst through the door and stick a camera in my face and tell me this had all been an elaborate joke.
Eventually, the conversation turned to topics I’d never heard of. Something called the Isdal Woman, and the Somerton Man. Unexplained cases of people whose bodies had been found under mysterious circumstances but were never identified. I wanted to say there were probably thousands of unidentified bodies found every year and ask what made these two cases so special, but I kept my mouth closed.
They passed around a box of donuts and made coffee in a pot that looked like it came out of a Cold War bomb shelter, but the coffee was good and warmed my body and kept me in place long enough to resist the urge to flee the madness all around me.
“If you want something stronger, I can help with that.” It was Sister Rose. She stood before me with the carafe in one hand and a flask in the other. I let her fill my half-empty paper cup with a blend of both and thanked her. Her eyes were warm, maternal. I wondered who had forgotten her. A brother, probably. A niece or nephew. Maybe even her very god.
I tried to meet her gaze but failed, casting my eyes to the floor. This thing, whatever it was, had taken its toll. It seemed I could no longer allow myself to look a stranger in the eye. How could I, if at any moment they might forget I’d ever existed?
The meeting ended at eleven o’clock. Sister Rose invited me to come back again, and I promised I would. Everyone migrated to the small parking lot outside and went their separate ways. Some to homes they still could live in, others to motel rooms where they’d been forced after the people in their lives had become strangers.
Jessica asked if she could come to my apartment. I said yes but mentioned nothing about how I wasn’t sure I had a place to return to at all.
Ray wasn’t around when we got there, but I led Jessica inside quietly anyway. It occurred to me that this was her first time been back since being taken away from me.
She walked into the apartment reticently, as if doing so might set off an alarm. We stood together silently as she looked around.
“What did you do with all of my stuff?”
I pretended to think about it. “I can’t remember. Did you have many things of your own?”
It was an honest question. I felt terrible asking. The part of me that still didn’t believe a word Jessica had said about our shared past warred with the part of me that wanted desperately to believe.
“Yes,” was all she said, and I felt that somewhere just beyond her cold, detached demeanor she was experiencing it all over again.
All I could say was how sorry I was. Sorry I had treated her like a stranger. Sorry I’d done to her what had been done to me more times than I could count.
She cried, and I held her. She kissed me, and I kissed her back. We made love right there on the floor of that cold, half-empty apartment, me exploring her like a stranger, she somehow knowing just where to touch me and how. Through it all, I felt no sense of déjà vu or flicker of remembrance. Only her warmth, and the dull, distant familiarity of her presence.
I woke in the early morning to a ray of light peering in from the edge of the drawn curtains and Jessica standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at me like I was a coiled snake.
She was pulling her t-shirt on and eyeing me warily. When I sat upright, she stumbled backward into the wall and bit back a scream.
She asked me where she was and who I was, but all I could do was sit there mutely. Before I could say anything she was gone, throwing open the apartment door we had forgotten we’d once shared and racing down the stairway into the light of a dawning day with no memory of me at all.
By the time I saw her again that night at the rec center meeting, Jessica had figured it out on her own. It was something everyone in the room had grown familiar with. Being forgotten. Forgetting completely. Two sides of a hideous coin.
We sat uncomfortably on opposite ends of the room. Now it was my turn to cast a familiar gaze upon her, and her turn to avert her eyes every time she caught me staring. I turned away and scanned the faces in the room to keep my eyes from gravitating back to her. That was when I noticed the single empty chair planted three spaces to my left.
I held up a tentative hand, interrupting the start of another of Slim’s tinfoil hat digressions. “Is someone missing?” I asked.
We all stared at the chair. Nobody could remember who had sat in it the night before.
“There are only ten of us, right?” a guy named Chuck asked. He looked like a burned-out ex-wrestler and spoke as if he didn’t trust himself to know for certain.
We all agreed. There were only nine. No one could recall an eleventh person. Nor could anyone recall there having been an extra empty chair at the last meeting.
All eyes fell upon Sister Rose. Provider of answers. Her eyes told us everything. Even she was at a loss. It took only a moment for someone to state aloud what everyone was thinking but were too terrified to verbalize. “Could we all have forgotten them?”
The question came from a short, mousy girl who seemed to always take the seat closest to the door so she could be the first to leave. Her name was Gadget, or Gidget, or something. For some reason, the name wouldn’t stick, and I wondered fleetingly if I’d already embarked upon the road to forgetting her, too.
A cold, eerie silence descended. It pooled at our feet and stayed there so long that I feared one small push would send me spiraling. I took a breath and stilled my mind and didn’t speak my thoughts. What good would it do? What purpose would it serve to point out the fact that if we had all forgotten who the empty tenth chair had been for, that person would probably have shown up at the meeting—unless they, too, had forgotten us. Or ceased to exist altogether.
A twentysomething guy with frayed nailbeds named Jason suggested we begin to document our meetings. Starting with a roll call of names. “That way,” he said, “if someone goes missing, we’ll know who it was.” His eyes swept the room as a look of concern colored his face. “I wonder how many times this has happened already, and we just never noticed?”
He pointed to a corner of the room where at least six other folding chairs were stacked against the wall. They stared at us in unspeaking accusation, sobering in their implication. There was no telling how many extra chairs might have been put away over the course of time without anyone noticing.
Sister Rose took out her flask and poured a splash into her coffee. Then she passed it to the person next to her, and everyone did the same. By the time we called the meeting, we had all got drunk and sobered up again. We had also made a list of the names of every group member.
I suggested we each makes copies for ourselves. That way there was less likelihood of the roll call sheet going missing, and a greater opportunity for us to observe the effect this thing was having on the physical world around us.
If someone were to disappear (or de-exist, or whatever it was that was going on) would their names also disappear from the list? Having ten separate copies seemed something of an insurance policy. No one knew if it would work, but we didn’t want to leave anything off the table.
“I saw a movie about this once,” someone said.
It was Gadget again, or Gidget, or something. She had her hand in front of her face and was staring at a cut on her finger as if she were trying to draw out some forgotten clue.
“A true story. Documentary. About a woman who lived alone and died in her apartment, and nobody noticed. Not a single soul. Not her friends. Not her family. Not her neighbors. They only found her when they came to evict her. By then, she’d been dead for two years.”
Everyone knew the story, but none could recall the woman’s name. It became very important to us that we know it. That we remember it. Forgotten people hate to forget. So someone looked it up on their phone, and the woman’s name was spoken, and every single one of us repeated it aloud and vowed always to remember.
Within five minutes, I had forgotten it.
[The movie referenced here is Dreams of a Life*, which tells the true story of Joyce Carol Vincent, whose death in her London apartment went unnoticed by friends and neighbors for over two years. The narrative picks up again after three blank lines.*]
The second stage of the phenomenon is what Sister Rose calls the Unfettering. It’s the wall you hit when you realize everything you are and ever have been, all you’ve worked for and invested in, is lost. Few people push on past this stage. Those who do usually find themselves forced to the fringes of society. Living on the streets. Taking shelter wherever it can be found after finding their homes occupied by people who no longer know them.
It happened to me the night I returned to my apartment building to find Ray waiting in the lobby by the mailboxes. There was no telling how long he’d been there. He looked upset. He always looked upset.
I came in through the double glass doors and took a breath and started fumbling for the right words to say and Ray looked me up and down and said, “Can I help you with something?”
I shrugged and told him I had the wrong building. Then I went back outside and around the corner, down the block. There was no sense in wondering if I still had a home. It was gone.
There was a cheap motel on the east side of town that I knew took cash. I emptied my pockets to pay for a single night then spent most of the next morning in a dirty diner booth taking refill after refill of black coffee until I was asked to leave.
When nightfall came, I walked to the rec center and found the door locked and the lights out. Even before Sister Rose’s voice dropped down from the overhead apartment window, telling me the center had been permanently closed and there were no more meetings to attend, I knew the inevitable had taken place.
Overnight, she had forgotten it all. Everything that had happened to her, to us—and in the process, ripping away the tether that had held the group together. For one brief moment I thought about trying to get through to her but stopped myself. It would do no good. I felt like the survivor of a torpedoed ship, clinging to an overturned raft and wondering what had become of the rest of the passengers.
Moving away, I spied movement out of the corner of my eye. I stared into the dark. It was Slim. He was standing in the shadows by a long row of trash cans, eyeballing me cautiously.
“Do you remember me, Slim?” I asked, repeating the line we had all settled on and practiced as a way of approaching one another when not inside the meeting space. That idea had been Jessica’s, one of the few contributions she’d made to the group since waking up beside me with no memory of who I was. She had continued to come to the meetings but mostly sat silent and never looked at me. Now she was gone, along with everyone else. Everyone but me and Slim.
“I remember you,” Slim said. He gestured back in the direction of Sister Rose’s, who stood at her open window eyeing us cautiously before sliding it closed and drawing the curtain. “It’s taken her, too.”
I nodded, and we stood side by side in the dark until the stench of garbage cans filled my nose and I decided I’d had enough.
“We’ll have to start meeting somewhere else,” I said, but Slim’s brow, which had only ever been a constant crease of worry, was flat. The defeated slouch of his stance told me everything.
“You’re the only one besides me who even came,” he said. “That means it’s taken them, too.” He told me he was finished. Asked me how much longer I thought we had. I said I didn’t know. After a few moments, we went our separate ways.
I felt a surge engulf my stomach and my chest and knew that soon, I would be swept under.
[Another series of unintelligible symbols, probably meaningless doodles, decorate the borders of the page and separate the text.]
The third and final stage is de-existence. It’s what happens to the physical body when the universe has wiped clean all traces that it was ever here at all. Not invisibility in the traditional understanding. More of an accelerated fragmentation of existence. Like what happened to Carlos.
Sister Rose said there was a beautiful simplicity to it, like the final sweep of a cosmos-sized broom bringing order to chaos. I don’t see it in quite the same way. Where she saw things coming into alignment, falling into lockstep with some faultless universal plan, I see only the ruthlessness and impartiality of nature.
At last, I understood Rose. Saw her for who she’d been: someone whose search for answers had taken her from the world of science to the world of God and back again in circles. Realizing in the end that there was nothing to be found. Only existence. Beyond that, nothing.
[Here a number of pages have been ripped out, as indicated by the torn paper scraps still caught in the notebook’s spiral.]
I found Jessica standing in the rain under the willow in the park supposedly I’d proposed to her in a life neither of us remembered. She was staring out onto a rectangle of green where during summer people gathered. This time of year, it was just a pond of ankle-deep wet grass.
I wondered what she was doing here. Could some ghost of a memory have remained, drawing her to this place like an inaudible command?
Her face was a pale circle with dots for eyes and a mouth that hung halfway open. She stood with shoulders limp and hands in the pockets of her hoodie, and all about her was the sadness of someone who’d lost something and was struggling to remember what it was.
I could have approached her. Just the way she’d done to me. Said, “Jessica, I remember you. Do you remember me?” But no sooner had the thought entered my mind than I pushed it straight back down. Maybe she was better off forgetting me.
Leaving the park, I walked into the city center and sat atop a concrete perch and watched the people hurry by on their small tasks, caught in loops of their own making. Rats in a maze. How I longed to return to a life so simple, where happiness was only a memory away.
I wondered how many of them were like me. Forgetting and being forgotten. Powerless to change it. Forever tethered to the pull and push of the tide.
Some days you no longer have it in you to tread water. Some days, you long for the ocean floor.
[Below this is a pencil sketch of a woman’s face. The remainder of the text is written using the same pencil and appears to have been scribbled quickly and sloppily.]
Crossing a busy street at noon, a car blasted around the corner and buzzed my heels as I dove for the goal line at the crosswalk’s edge. No one saw a thing or said a word. The car never slowed but continued on its way, charging to its destination while I scooped myself up and tried to steady my breathing.
A man moving down the sidewalk in my direction started when he saw me, and as our eyes met I felt the urge to shout, “Am I invisible? Am I really here?” but missed the opportunity. In an instant, his eyes had glazed over and he looked straight through me. I was no more visible to him than the dead.
All of that was yesterday. A lifetime ago. I walked all night, hugging the corners of the sidewalk and clinging to the shadows. Come the dawn, I lay on a bench in the park and used my jacket for a pillow.
When I woke, I found a tattered spiral notebook rolled up in my inside jacket pocket. I had no idea how long it had been there or why I hadn’t noticed it before.
I opened it. Its pages were filled with my own handwriting. I read it from beginning to end, a disconnected fever dream I knew was my own but did not remember having lived. There was a message printed in thick marker on the cover.
READ EVERYTHING. KEEP WRITING.
So I do. And when I’m not writing, I exist. One breath in and one breath out. Food when I can get it; sleep when I have no more energy to keep moving.
Last night, I slept in the recessed entrance of an art gallery in view of dreamy turquoise landscapes and specters of oil-rendered woodland monsters. Woke up halfway through the night and sat upright as the world spun rings around my ears.
Stumbled to my feet.
Gazed at my reflection in the glass door.
Seeing things I’d never seen.
The hollow eyes staring back.
The slack jaw of one who’s seen much but forgotten more.
An expression of terror.
The face of a stranger.
I turned away into the encroaching dark.
Becoming less.
Falling onto my hands when first my left leg went, and then my right.
Now, from somewhere above and behind, I sense its arrival. That horrible presence I first felt the day it came for Carlos. At last, it’s come for me.
Its weight spills all around and I remember Sister Rose’s words: “Surrender to it. See the end, and go toward it.”
Only seconds remain. Time enough for one final entry—an epitaph of sorts, perhaps one day to be discovered in a gutter beneath a pile of autumn’s fallen leaves and read by disbelieving eyes. I pray those eyes are kind.
I am.
I was.
Do not forget.
………
That’s where it ends. The remaining pages are blank, leaving the impression that the writer and his notebook have parted ways, either by choice or force. As for my own conclusions about the nature of the manuscript…let me just say this. If it’s a piece of fiction intended to get my attention, it worked. Yet as much as I want to believe that’s the case, I’m having doubts.
Three days ago, the lady at the Indian restaurant I’ve visited every week for six years gave me a blank stare when I asked her for “my usual.” Then just yesterday, I was looking through an old photo album when I came across a group shot of me and my high school friends. There were five of us in the picture, but I distinctly remember there being six of us. Something about a “dirty half-dozen.” But for the life of me, I can’t remember who the missing sixth person is.
Of course, everything has an explanation. People forget things all the time. And high school was a thousand years ago. Still, I can’t fight the thought that maybe it’s happening to me, too. If this thing is real, could it somehow be contagious? Could the simple act of reading the notebook have been the catalyst?
I know I’m probably just freaking myself out. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t do with some assurance, which is why I’m here. I don’t know where to go with this. I don’t know what to do. Has anyone ever heard of anything like this happening before? If so, please let me know.