Twisting Memories

The tricky thing about shadows is that they’re persistent. Oftentimes physically impossible to escape save for being in some very specific circumstances. The figure in her periphery is one such shadow, flowing in and out of the darkness. ‘And he will not notice any sort of…’ The voice makes her tune back into the conversation. A woman in her forties, neatly dressed in business casual with her hair in an up-do where the humidity is winning it from the hairspray. She waves her hands around, palms up. Lines of tension around her eyes betray her discomfort.

Haelin doesn’t respond straight away, still distracted by the person following her. She knows what the woman tries to say. Has heard it a hundred times before. For all people’s willingness to pay for her service, they sure feel guilty.

‘You know…’ the woman tries again.

This time, she takes pity. ‘He will notice nothing amiss with his memories. Nor will he feel anything when I input the memory.’ Relief drowns out the tension. The woman relaxes, but Haelin can’t help add: ‘Of course he will not much like his day, nor is your marriage likely to survive, which you are aiming for.’ It’s blunt. Too forward for the delicate sensibilities of people within these neighbourhoods. She sees the woman draw back, looking insulted and aghast.

It’s only through careful practice that she keeps herself from smiling.

‘I don’t judge, nor do I gossip. This you know,’ Haelin smiles as she works on smoothing figurative feathers, ‘Discretion is in the job title.’ Her mother made sure to hammer that in her, she thinks. Then she holds out her hand. ‘You may consider this one done.’

The woman looks her straight in the eyes for several long seconds. Trying to decide for herself whether to trust Haelin with this job. But Haelin isn’t worried. She’s one of the best in business. One of the few who managed to stay out of the police’s sight for the two years that she’s been doing this—a feat, for the crackdown from government on Memory Sellers has been severe.

They shake hands. As the woman hurries to exit the alley they ducked into to make the transaction, Haelin herself doesn’t. She wants to meet her shadow. Taking a step to lean against the wall, she kicks away a stray metal tin. The air is rank with the odour of garbage overdue for pickup. The garbage bin in the far-left corner is nearly overflowing, which is strange, as the fancier city districts usually boast about their cleanliness.

‘Haven’t you heard about the strikes?’ A warm male voice asks teasingly. Despite expecting her shadow to make an appearance, she still startles. She hadn’t expected him to reveal himself to her. Not this soon. They’d been playing a game of cat and mouse for a week already, with her trying to flip the script to become the cat instead. Somehow, she felt more pissed about him preliminarily quitting the game, than the wariness she should probably exhibit at the fact that he just did a full-face reveal. That could only mean he feels secure enough in his ability to have the upper hand to do so.

She looks at him impassively, not taking the bait. It is now her time to study him. Her stranger isn’t conventionally attractive. His eyes are just a bit too far apart, and his ears stick out—making him look younger than he likely is. He is long, a good head taller than then she is, and built like a twig. Yet he has a charm around him that draws her in. Not wanting to give up, she steps forward to try flip the script. ‘I don’t think we met’, she says, holding out her hand for him to shake. ‘Name’s Haelin, but you already know that.’

Her stranger smiles. ‘Ifan. And yes, I do.’

Oh, he’s sharp. She grins. He has to be a fellow Seller. ‘Am I correct in assuming we’ll make good partners?’ Ifan doesn’t need to respond.

They baptise their new partnership with drinks in the dive bar five blocks over. The smell inside is that of cheap beer, broken relationships, and vomit. Especially the latter threatens to do Haelin in. They laugh and talk like old friends. And maybe they are. She says ‘cheers’ and clinks their glasses together; Ifan gagging the moment he takes his first swallow. ‘This is truly rancid,’ he says, ‘If it weren’t that places like these make me good money, I’d not enter even under the threat of violence.’

‘Amen to that’, Haelin agrees, feeling curiously loose-limbed in a way that’s not quite like her. At least, not when stone-cold sober. Knowing she’s acting in a way that her mother would’ve warned she get killed or raped or both, she grips onto Ifan’s lower arm and proposes: ‘Let’s do a trial run.’

As expected, Ifan needs no convincing.

They start not inside the dive bar, but in a hospital waiting area. The walls are a greyish white; the fluorescent lamps do nothing to add the much-needed warmth. In halls filled with prayers and occupied by hollow-eyed people living between fear and hope—Haelin comes here rather more often than she’d desire. Ifan stands just left of her shoulder, looking like a consummate professional. He’s the one to first greet the nurse that enters. The first to step inside their client’s room when the nurse walked them over.

‘You are in luck,’ he announces, ‘for there’s two of us, meaning you get the premium service for the price of a normal one.’ Then Ifan walks to the one chair in the room, placed neatly out of the way in the corner. The family isn’t present, which is a small mercy considering that customers like these in rule haven’t been the best family members.

‘I can see you’re an accomplished entrepreneur’, Ifan continues, happily ignoring the man’s attempts to speak, ‘So I’ll wager a guess at what you’ll be requesting.’ He gives such a cheeky smile that Haelin pities the man. Ifan moves the chair so that it sits on the bed’s right side, and takes a seat to pat the man’s shoulder. ‘But you’re in good hands. My dear friend over there specialises in memories like these.’

This is her cue if she ever heard one, for the regret of having chosen work over one’s family is one she’s seen up close with her own mother.

With Ifan handling payment, Haelin picks the next on her list. This one is a rare treat. A lady in her eighties wanting to remember when her husband was still alive. She requests to travel down memory lane to the laughter-filled week of their honeymoon when they first danced the tarantella in Napoli, and a nonna gifted them a red rose and cannoli to congratulate their union.

‘This is fun!’ Ifan crows after they exit the apartment of a shut-in gaming addict some six hours later.

‘Fun?’ Haelin looks at him with disbelief clear in her eyes, as with half-amused judgement. She has now learnt Ifan is in a different category. He delights in entering the spaces where dreams have gone to die. Of rooms filled with empty beer bottles and drenched in spilt vodka, places with garbage making it a parkour to even get in. Theirs is an unglamorous profession as so many others. Seeing people brought so low will never cease to pain her, she doesn’t think, making her glad she can offer them short moments of relief.

After all, there’s not much else she can do. With her never having attended any of the correct schools, pursuing ‘proper’ jobs is futile.

She’s made her peace with that.

Haelin enjoys the turn her life has taken. With his dark sense of humour and inexhaustible energy, Ifan made her days brighter. Bearable. He’s a dream that materialised from thin air. A gift she definitely won’t be returning to its sender. Wondrously she even finds that she doesn’t dread the visits to her clients as much as before. So, when she turns in for the day and enters her apartment, she moves through the space with a genuine spring in her step. Routinely she turns on the television. With the unpredictability of the witch hunt on Sellers like her, watching news is a matter of survival. She’s humming under her breath as she makes herself a cup of tea.

That’s when the newscaster opens his mouth.

His words turn her blood into ice. She freezes where she stands, eyes transfixed on photos of the crime scene they show. ‘A sixth Memory Seller has been found dead,’ the newscaster says, tone politely neutral, ‘The police declared it an accident.’ But the scene of the ‘accident’ is that of a crime. The police tape they might’ve gotten away with. Deaths, even accidental, require due investigation.

But an accident doesn’t cause that amount of blood. She mutters under her breath. No way this is a mere accident. All six deaths have followed the same pattern, meaning this can only be the work of a killer. One who’s been stealing and manipulating memories until no-one can distinguish fact from fiction.

The public has a name for him: the Memory Killer.

Looking at the scene gives her an uncomfortable sensation that she knows more of this. Of a memory of her own just out of reach. It makes her stomach knot as a thought comes up unbidden. Is her memory still authentically hers? Her gut tells her no.

She must increase her vigilance.

There’s a body in the alley she snuck into. A crime scene, complete with blood splattered all over and someone who for all intends and purposes looks terrifyingly like Ifan. Her heart is in her throat as she runs to check, hands trembling as she fights to make sure this isn’t her sort-of-friend, sort-of-lover, sort-of-acquaintance. The man is a perfect doppelgänger to Ifan, if he hadn’t been dead for a good two months already. His twin, if she didn’t know he was a single child.

But it isn’t him. For Ifan appears from the shadows, as he always does, yet this time his face is all wrong.

‘So you see me’, he says.

And she’s too much in shock from the wrongness radiating from him that she blurts out: ‘Other people don’t?’ At his shaking head, her world shatters. No, she thinks, impossible. She takes a step back. Her back hits a wall. She’s cornered. All the red flags she’s been ignoring are now explained—she’d been a blind bull surrounded by red capes.

Haelin laughs at the irony of it all. The sound is sharp. Desperate. A knife appears in Ifan’s hand, and she stares at him with burning hatred. She knew her memories were tampered with. Suspected it. Having it confirmed, there’s no denying she’d been living in a memory. What a joke. A Memory Seller sold their own merchandise. The master played at their own game. It’s the perfect, tragic, irony. Her final curtain call. Looking Ifan straight in his eyes, she accepts her fate. Evidently, it’s her time to die as all humans are fated.

Only… she doesn’t.

It is Ifan falling to the ground. His body melting into that of his doppelgänger. Nightmare made flesh.

Haelin is stunned. Ifan had been dead all along. And, looking, at the far stage of decomposition of his body, he never was alive for as long as she knew him. If she hadn’t had the proof already, she now knows for sure her mind is touched by the Memory Killer. What she can’t work out is just why she, herself, hadn’t suffered the same fate as all the other Sellers. Did the Killer warp her memories just for the sick fun of it?

Which is when it hits her.

She inherited the knack of this trade from her mother. A woman who always moved with calculated purpose. Nothing she ever did was accidental. Not her husband that mysteriously died. Not even her abandonment of her own daughter. God, it’s so clear! She’d been her mom’s perfect pawn—and only required intervention when the stubbornness she inherited from the woman got in her way.

Ifan was a potential distraction. Like her dad was to her mom. Ifan’s very presence posed a risk to her mother’s campaign. She had manipulated the plot until the knife that’s stuck in Ifan’s side… had been put there by Haelin herself.

Locked memories flood her brain. Of her youth. The precious few memories of her father. She can’t contain her nausea at the sinking realisation. It is she who is the Memory Killer. An obedient marionette dancing to the tune of her mom’s twisted story. A story she feels vindicated to change.

Or was that the plan?

Her mind spins. She feels untethered and full of grief-fuelled rage. No matter if it was her mother’s plan. The next plot twist will be of Haelin’s own making. She owes that to Ifan.

To her father.