The Three O'Clock Customer

Normal business hours are almost always dry. Most other places like mine don't bother staying open at all while the sun's out, but apparently I've got nothing better to do than sit in an empty office and read during the weekday. This depressing aspect of my life might be considered reasonable enough cause to try out my own services, but as a rule I don't get high on my own supply.

On weekends it doesn't pick up until nine o'clock at night. There are always a few in the early morning with bad breath and red eyes looking to forget who they woke up with after a night out, but I never open before noon as a rule. I say you always should take at least a few hours to think about whether or not you actually want a memory erased, no matter how sad or dirty or ashamed you feel in the moment, because you don't know the person you'd be without that part.

It's at night that I see real business. I never have lines, people move too quickly in and out for that, not-so-subtly hiding their faces in their hoods and behind their hands, as though they didn't want to be seen around this kind of place. I have regulars, though, and I hate seeing them. You couldn't pay me to ask the gray-haired one why he comes in every month on the same day, or the one in the slick trench coat why he takes off his wedding ring before opening my door each week.

I know it's because at night, memories hurt the most. In the dark, there's nothing between you and your past, and you're free to torment yourself with all the barbed, poisonous questions that will eat at your vulnerableness like acid. Plenty of my customers show up in sweatpants with their hair mussed, and I know they rolled right out of bed to see me after their brains got to be such a bad place they decided they couldn't live there anymore, at least not with their current housemates. Those ones I give priority.

She came in at three o'clock on a Wednesday, dressed normal, with glasses, and asked how much it cost.

"Thirty dollars flat fee," I said. "But the rest depends on how much wear you put on the machine."

"What do you mean?" I couldn't tell if she was interested or just being polite.

"The way this works is, you think about what you want gone from you, and tell me clearly. I give you a pill to prep, then we flash your brain, focusing on the hippocampus, and zoom in on the part you describe, which we can find using how long ago it was, how often you think of it, and what other memories you associate with it. We can blast that part with surgical precision, so your cortex can't retrieve information from those particular nerves, and it's like it never even happened."

With surgical precision. That was what they told me to emphasize, like they tell Best Buy workers to welcome customers, not greet them.

"The machine has to work harder to take out longer stretches of memory, which uses more flash, and that costs extra. If it's something small, like the time you knocked a drink over on your high school crush, it's just fifty cents."

She gives a small smile at that. She doesn't seem especially sad. I want to know more about why she's here, which is unusual. Normally I can guess, and I frequently don't care.

"I don't want to forget everything," she says softly, looking at the counter. "I just want to forget how I feel about something."

Same difference, as far as I'm concerned. Memories are just feelings whose first names you know.

"What feeling?"

"The feelings I get when I look at roses."

I waited. She would tell me more.

"There was someone...who used to bring me roses. He knew the colors and everything, and he'd make little messages out of them for me."

Ah.

"I won't get roses from him anymore. I don't want to forget about him. I'd just like to be able to enjoy roses again, in the parks and things. Without thinking of him too much."

That was complicated. Memory isn't cut-and-dry like a book. It's messy and strange and if people knew half of what we didn't know about it, they probably wouldn't be lining up outside my door to have us meddle in their heads. To do what she wanted, I'd have to be a surgeon, cutting between the act and the feeling, an impossibly fine line. It wasn't a memory she wanted gone, it was a connotation, a personal connotation of real history. For someone like me, that was the trickiest service you could ask for.

"Sure thing, ma'am. I have an opening now, if you'd like."

She signed all the papers and her card was good, so I let her into the back, where it was done. People picture a big helmet with blinking lights, and a thick swivel chair with restraints, but it looks more like a clunky optometrist machine with a big headrest.

I got her settled, then went behind the screen to adjust my dials and switches, isolating the target cells. It took a bit longer than usual, but I felt pretty confident that I had it right when I pushed the last button.

She thanked me very kindly as I unstrapped her, without any of the confusion I sometimes met from exiting customers, and I showed her out like a concierge.

Some impulse prompted me to ask as she teetered on the brink of the bright sunlight outside, "Does it change you?"

She turned.

"I mean," I said, suddenly feeling very self-conscious and unprofessional, "if I could take it out all of you, all your memories, would there be anything left? Or if I left it so you could eat and sleep and breathe, but took everything else, would it be the same?"

A terrible pause. I felt sick.

"It wouldn't," she said quietly. "But I didn't ask for that. If I could make a mistake in the doing, I could make a mistake in the remembering as well. You're just another way of doing that, potentially. But I've got a choice. And it's not my job to make you feel like you've doing the right thing."

She left. The bell above the door clinked pleasantly.

I don't use the shop's services myself, but I've thought about that day from time to time. I've thought about quitting too, but I can't remember doing anything else.