Never Forget

About a year after my appointment, I woke up to a brick lying on the living room floor. Haloed by the shattered glass it had sailed through sometime earlier that morning, it looked like some kind of modern art. I picked up the biggest pieces with the tips of my fingers and laid them gently in the dustpan--it was too early to run the vacuum and risk waking the whole family just for some hipsterish commentary on privacy. 

Everything was tinted purplish-green, and I soon became discouraged with picking little bits out of the carpet like a gorilla grooming its mate so I scooted the loveseat over the area with the highest concentration of debris.  The brick came to the garage with me when I went for a tarp to hang over the hole in the window.  No evidence. Afterward I cordoned off the living room with the dining room chairs. 

I scribbled out a note for Linda—“Getting new glass, don’t move loveseat”, with a lopsided heart serving as my signature—and breezed down to the station to report for work.  Even if it meant sitting around waiting for something to catch on fire, it meant I could at least feel useful.

Immediately inside the doors I ran into Chief Gutierrez, whose perpetual goofy grin was strangely slackened by the sight of me.  Even his mustache wilted. Behind him, I could see Perez and Donnelly washing the number 3 engine, its normally audacious red muted in the early morning light.

“Pete,” Chief said, suspicious. “You’re here.”

“I was already up,” I replied. “Figured I’d come lend a hand.”

Donnelly and Perez dropped their hoses and watched with their hands on their hips. They looked ominous, too.

“Didn’t Trina email you?”

“‘Fraid I don’t check email after dinnertime, Chief. When did she send it?”

A crease formed in his brow that I mirrored unconsciously. “You’re off the hook today, Pete.”

I didn’t like the feel in the room all of a sudden. Hostility sloughing off all three men in droves--even Number 3 seemed to loom and snarl from its parking space.

“Well, okay, I guess. You could put me on call if you—”

“Go home, Peter. We don’t need you here today.”

“Yeah, fuck off!” Perez literally spat on the ground at his feet, then turned on his heel and stalked off.

“Tell him to cool it!” Chief whirled on Donnelly, mustache bristling. “Finish the fuckin’ engine and mind your business.”

I didn’t really feel the need to stick around and figure out exactly why they were all so upset with me, so I turned on my heel and headed over to a glass store Linda and I had used before when one of the kids let the back door slam too hard. The woman behind the counter took my information rather coldly, actually cracking her pencil in two when I explained about the brick.

“Wonder who would do such a thing,” she muttered, then: “The pane’ll be ready in a week. We’ll call you.”

My truck rattled and bounced over the uneven pavement leading back out of town.  It was still early, kind of a dozy day, getting muggier while big puffy clouds scooted across the sky like giant shuffleboard pucks.  A textbook September day.  The radio was saying something about a memorial event downtown, but I had the windows down and couldn’t really hear it.

Our house lay at the end of a long stretch of mostly straight road leading in and out of town, sort of in the dwindling space between country and civilization.  There were a couple stoplights where other roads intersected, but typically if you were out at this hour it was green all the way.  Point being I didn’t have to use my brakes until I was pulling into my driveway, which has a slight decline leading to the garage.  By the time I realized I actually had no brakes, it was too late—I barreled into the structure at close to 30 miles an hour, busting straight through the back end.  I could feel the various yard equipment underneath my feet, heard my shovel pop a tire as I rolled over it.  In the rearview I saw the brick sitting where I’d left it on my workbench, utterly pristine.

Linda and the kids came running out, bedheaded, wild-eyed.  Toby and Georgia, his twin, gaped at the scene.

“I’m alright, I’m alright,” I said, exiting the truck with my hands up as if there were a gun leveled at me.

Linda was beside herself. “First the window, now this?" With hair frizzing every which way, bags hanging under her eyes like pendulums, I wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t slept last night and had just pretended to humor me. "We moved out here to avoid trouble, Peter.”

I glanced over at the picture window, the hole in it made obvious with the blue tarp billowing behind it.  It looked like some cruel flag.  And then in front of me, my beast of a truck holding up the remainder of the garage, tools and splintered wood sprayed out around it.

“Daddy?” Georgia said. “You look scared.”

The day’s interactions were starting to stack up.  I told everyone to go inside while I tried to clean up a little.  The first thing I did was work my way underneath the truck to see—sure enough—someone had cut my brake line.  Must have happened while I was in ordering the glass. My first thought was Perez or Donnelly had followed me from the station and waited for me to leave the truck alone.  We had never had the best relationship, but it was never violent or dangerous like this.  Once or twice, and always after a few drinks, Perez would try to challenge me to a fistfight, and I always politely refused him.  He was one of those pugnacious men who lounged in adolescence a little too long, the kind of man who blames women for his lack of one. That is something I cannot abide.  I was never rude to him, yet something in the back of my mind told me it had to be him.  Who else would have the motivation?

Inside, I sat down with Linda at the kitchen table while the kids played upstairs.  I told her what I thought about Perez, but she was skeptical.

“He’s never been any fan of yours, but I can’t believe he would do something like that.”

So she said, but she wouldn’t meet my gaze.

After a minute, Toby thudded down the stairs. “Can we watch some TV?”

“I told you no, Tobias,” Linda snapped, “and if you ask me again, I’m going to sell the TV and use the money to get myself a massage.”

He scrambled back up the stairs without another word.

"Jeez," I said.

She steepled her fingers across her forehead and heaved a weary sigh. “You’re off work today?”

I blinked. “Yeah.”

“I think it might be best if you don’t go out again today, P.”

“Well, the truck—”

“The truck can wait, honey.  It’s not going anywhere.”

“What is going on?” I finally asked. “Even the woman at the glass shop acted like I was a boil or something.  Gutierrez actually shouted at me.  I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“I know,” Linda sighed again. “That’s the problem.”

I pressed her, but couldn’t get her to say anything else.  While she went up to take a shower, I peeked in on the kids.  For fraternal twins, they got along remarkably well, and today was no exception.  Georgia directed the action inside the dollhouse Linda’s father had made for her as a child, a stout but architecturally sound Victorian facade with the back sliced open for a child-accessible cross-section.  Toby diligently followed his sister’s orders, moving the father figure from room to room saying things like “We need to revive this living room’s energy” and “If you don’t clean your room I’m going to turn it into a pottery throwing studio”.

“How’s it going in here?” I asked from the doorway.

Georgia, all business in her oversized sweater and paisley leggings, turned to me like a gallery owner being asked about an expensive painting. “We’re doing just fine, Daddy.  What can I do for you?”

“I hope I didn’t scare you too much with the garage.”

“We weren't scared, but you still look scared. Is it because of your appointment you had?”

My heart went cold. “What about my appointment?”

“Mommy said you were having trouble forgetting, so you got some help from a doctor.  They made it so you can’t remember.  She said those were different things, but I don’t get it, really.”

True—but I remember making the appointment.  A year ago, I remember being upset a lot, tormented, inescapably spiraling and lost.  I hadn’t been present with my family.  I hadn’t been present at my job.  I hadn’t even been present with myself—I was living in a traumatized past, the recurrent sensations of which aggrieved me daily.  That feeling is distant now, but I can recall it quite clearly.  What caused the distress in the first place, that's what I forgot.

I have to assume it was something to do with my job.  As a first responder, you see a lot of grisly things that spring out at the most inopportune times.  I was in the grocery store a month ago and picked up a rotten apple that brought up the image of a scorched old woman I’d been too late to retrieve from her blazing apartment nearly a decade prior.  No one forgets the scent of burning flesh or the agonized screams of the being-burnt.  And I have tried.

Bewildered and a little dizzy, I went back downstairs to make some coffee.  Something to distract myself from those words coming out of Georgia’s little mouth, something to give Linda.

“Daddy, you look scared.”

Now I was turning towards terrified.  Someone had definitely tried to kill me this morning, possibly more than once.  Who could say if that brick was meant for my head instead of my window?  Anyone who can discreetly cut a brake line in full view of the public knows what they’re doing.

Linda was still in the shower, so I told the kids to be good and grabbed the keys to Linda’s Passat.  After making sure the brakes worked I drove off.  It felt like there was a chorus of staccato strings urging me along, faster, faster, faster. 

I blinked and found myself in the town plaza, near a war memorial depicting several stony soldiers with their hands held high in patriotic salutes.  It was surprisingly populated, the plaza, but nobody looked terribly excited to be there.  No one held bulging shopping bags.  Those pushing babies in strollers did so quickly and quietly.  Though there were pretty near a hundred and fifty people milling around, the atmosphere was stoic as a library.  I wondered if there might have been an accident nearby, or a demonstration.  There were a lot of those these days, but it wasn’t always clear for what cause.

I saw a few black armbands high on biceps.  Somber faces.  The kind of hush you don’t want to ruin for fear of offending someone.

Then someone spotted me.

“He showed his face!” came the shout.

“Bastard!”

“Asshole!”

“Motherfucker!”

The crowd, no longer disparate and tepid, ignited angrily like a lit match.  Every face turned to me with a unison scowl, even the babies, who seemed to sense the sudden atmospheric shift.  The voices became indistinct very quickly, although a snippet made it through now and again.

“How dare you!”

“Piece of shit!”

“He should be in jail!”

“A national disgrace!”

Their fury resurrected that spiraling feeling from more than a year ago, before the appointment.  My stomach plummeted into my shoes.  I was off-kilter, totally nauseous, more than a little desperate.  Nobody advanced towards me further than a few paces, but still I felt enclosed and squeezed tight.

My cell phone rang and I flipped it open.  Linda’s voice trickled out, almost drowned by the snarls of the mob.

“I told you not to go out!” she cried, hysterical. “It’s not safe!”

“Why?” I asked. “Why isn’t it safe?”

The first blow came then, from my right, someone who looked suspiciously like Perez, knocking the phone out of my hand.  I watched the battered plastic device skitter away to be stomped by an older man whose beet-red face was tearstained.  There were more of these scattered throughout, people so angry they were actually weeping, or else so full of sorrow they became furious, their expressions horrific mixtures of internal psychic pain and external disgust.

I angled out of the way of another punch, only to be caught in the kidney by another.  When I went down a few more descended, haphazardly lobbing fists or knees into any open area of flesh they could find.  Fully collapsed on the ground, face-up, watching helplessly as more attackers joined in when others tired or were shoved out of the way.  There were no longer individual clouds floating by but instead one looming gray one which compressed the sky into a container of my undoing.

“Why?” I shouted as many times as I was able. “Why?” 

Men and women alike assaulted my head, neck, chest, and ribs, sobbing and furious.  I felt a tooth get knocked free by a particularly well-placed kick.  I gasped for air when a fist nearly sent my Adam’s apple right down my throat.

“Why? Why? Why?”

“NEVER FORGET!” they started to scream, their inclement voices pitched high. “NEVER FORGET!”

The phrase was like a hypnotic trigger.  I looked up past the heads of the crowd and saw the statue of the soldiers more clearly.  There were three of them, all saluting something invisible to the east, two men and a woman dressed in military fatigues much more modern than I’d originally believed.  Through the porous mass of legs I worked out the inscription below.

September 11, 2001

2,977 Lives Lost

Never Forget

I had been there, hadn’t I?  The absolute desperation suddenly made sense.  Perez made sense.  And the appointment—I’d gone to have the whole thing wiped.  The sounds of bodies hitting the street.  The ash cloud.  The flames.  The screams and cries and whimpers of nearly three thousand lives ending.  That first boom, the last gasp.  All of it I’d asked to have erased.  Perhaps selfishly, perhaps not.  One can never put a price on personal peace, but even so, this was a stretch.  

Linda knew about the treatment because her father had used it to forget his brief and unhappy second marriage, the fighting and the money trouble and bitter, drawn-out divorce.  If it could absolve someone his age of four whole years of emotional turmoil, surely it could take care of two or three months of unimaginable mental and physical anguish.  

It’s not like they were taking a formative memory from my childhood.  They weren’t erasing my parents or my first love or the time in college I let a friend drink themselves to death.  It was really just that first day, that horrible, unforgettable day.

They told me this might happen, that I might remember.  The brain doesn’t like to be tampered with, and the science wasn’t perfected yet.  The neurons were burned, but the body heals.  The brain is mysterious and unpredictable sometimes.  Surprising, even.

Who’s to say I couldn’t just go and have this erased, too?