MEM Read online

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © 2018 by Bethany C. Morrow

  ISBN: 978-1-944700-56-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931444

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

  To Beth, who knew immediately that Mem was a keepsake

  CONTENTS

  NO. 1

  NO. 2

  NO. 3

  NO. 4

  NO. 5

  NO. 6

  NO. 7

  NO. 8

  NO. 9

  NO. 10

  NO. 11

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NO. 1

  I am a memory. Now I suppose I’ll live like one.

  I received the telegram a week before I approached the receptionist’s desk. A lovely girl was stationed there—a student, no doubt. What they call an undergraduate, which means she’s naive. She might have mistaken me for a student as well, except that I handed her a wide, rectangular slip of paper that read: Dolores Extract No. 1. You are hereby recalled to the Vault. Please return to the premises no later than noon, August 30, 1925.

  If she was shocked then, or intrigued, she made no mention of it. I found it strange, since in the eighteen years I’ve lived out in the city, among real people, they always have been. Anyone who finds out what I am cannot hide their fascination. I’ve learned also that when people are in awe, more often than not, they cannot resist telling you so directly. It becomes the way you distinguish one real person from another, by what stimuli force them to react.

  Professor Toutant’s gentle wife, Camille, was perhaps the first. Together with the Professor, she became something like an adoptive parent: a mother and a friend. Unlike the countless other real people I would meet, Camille’s interest and the affection that soon followed were genuine. I knew by the way she spoke to me, as we exchanged stories about our lives and pasts and passions. While conversations with others quickly devolved into self-satisfying interrogations, Camille, from the beginning, gave something back. More than I could have expected, she sought out a relationship with me, campaigning for me to live outside the Vault and committing to funding my entire existence because my Source was disinclined. I was furnished with an apartment, and without hesitation she and the Professor set about filling it with things; things I never had occasion to use, or else—still being a young woman—I was oblivious when the opportunity arose.

  I left nearly everything there, in my rented flat, when I received the recall. Whatever the reason the Vault wanted me back, I doubted I would ever need those things again. The kettle and the towels. The linens and the china, especially the china. In the underground complex sprawling beneath the university clinic, the Vault was a safe deposit for the clients who did not want their memories returning home with them. If nothing else—if there were no specific reasons for my recall—it simply meant I was returning to my proper role as a belonging again and I should need no more belongings of my own.

  Still, from the twenty-third of August till the thirtieth, I rarely left my flat, trying on each frock, every hat and slipper, choosing only so many as would fit into the Gladstone bag gifted me by the Professor. Knowing that even one dress would be too many, I packed three just the same and, in the end, decided to smuggle a few things more. Memories of my very own. Professor and Camille would appreciate this—that I had brought them. They’d been witness to much of my city life; they would want to see which things I couldn’t stand to leave behind when at last they came to visit.

  Now, as I stood just past the receptionist’s desk, my hands gripped the leather handles, darker by several shades than the stout bag attached to them. Safe inside my Gladstone, I felt each memento swell in significance given everything I’d left behind. I hesitated in the hallway, trying to decide whether to steal a glance inside the bag, to see what I had chosen, now that it was everything I owned.

  A ticket stub from the movie theater down the line from my flat. I’d seen The Toll of the Sea every night for a week, and I’d saved every stub, afraid I’d forget, afraid that the dream that each night promised—the same dream I’ve had since the day I was extracted—would undo the day I’d lived before. I am a memory, but no expert on how they are born or by what ritual they are preserved. Still, I never tired of that movie, and it made me wonder if real people did. Perhaps my desire to watch it again and again gave me away. The ticket stub was a bookmark inside my favorite issue of The Delineator, a magazine to which I was introduced by Camille. She began a subscription for me as well. Eighteen years of beautiful covers and colors and words, but I always favored the first one she gave me.

  Camille carried one issue or another with her everywhere, so that she’d have something to read when she visited her husband at the university, in his department office or else the one he kept in the clinic. I’d been extracted only two months before our meeting, after that horrible accident with the automobile, but even in that short time the staff and the students saw something unique in me. Something the other memories—or Mems, as they call us—did not have. It was why I was first allowed outside of the Vault for brief tours of the clinic or walks on the terrace, though always accompanied. On one such tour, the staff member drifted for more than a moment, and I took a seat next to Camille.

  I remember tilting my head to admire the bright red gown worn by the woman on the cover of the magazine she was reading. The model was composing a letter, one gloved hand holding a postcard and the other lifting a pencil delicately to her chin. I found myself wondering what she was in the midst of writing, and to whom, before making a note of my own to relay that wondering to my Banker. He was always interested to hear such things.

  “It’s a lovely picture, I think.” Camille’s voice drew my gaze away from the magazine and then she lifted it as though to invite me back.

  “Yes, it is. And the dress. I have one like that.”

  “Have you?” She smiled.

  “Not precisely, but yes.”

  And then I caught sight of the plain frock I’d been issued. There was no corset, the entire dress seemingly made from one length of material, though the sleeves might have been an exception. The year was 1906 and even a memory knew that all of North America was watching the Northeast for the standard of city style.

  “It was much nicer than what I’m wearing now,” I said, without blushing. At the time, I wouldn’t have known how, not organically. So recently extracted, no one would have begrudged a reliance on my Source’s past and tendencies to sustain me in casual conversation. Instead, while I considered us equal proprietors over her memories, it seemed the present and the future should be entirely mine, and I took care to ensure that from now on my voice and mannerisms would be, too. As for Camille, a flicker of recognition crossed her face and she laid the magazine in her lap, a gloved forefinger keeping her place between the pages.

  “I see. Then this is strange.” She said the second phrase more quietly than the first. When she squinted, her plump cheeks overwhelmed her hazel eyes so that they seemed to vanish into the rosy pink of her face. “Where are you from?”

  Like all Mems, the question prompted me to recount the memory that spawned me, and when she’d heard
it, she said she thought her husband and I should meet.

  Packed along with the ticket stub and my first issue of The Delineator—the model’s long, slender pencil still lightly tapping her chin all these years later—was a robe. The robe was entirely special. Across the left breast was embroidered the name I’d given myself in thick-threaded cursive, red against ivory silk. To the rest of the world, I might always be Dolores Extract No. 1, named for my Source and the sequence in which I’d been extracted. But during the course of the week I’d spent in the darkened movie theater, watching The Toll of the Sea, I had become Elsie. Not because I so adored the film’s character and certainly not because I resembled her in any way, but because there was so much about her left to know. And perhaps because, even with so much unsaid, her entitlement was assumed. Her place was never questioned.

  The robe had been a present to myself, a reminder of who I really was. It had been a secret, even from Camille, but now it would tell everyone, Bankers and visitors alike, that recall or not I was not just any Mem.

  “Do you need a guide?” the receptionist asked when she realized I was still there.

  My hands twisted around the leather handles, massaging the oils from my palms into the already aged material.

  “Not at all.” My mouth closed, and I drew in a breath of air to steady myself. “I know the way.”

  It was down the far stairwell, where my heels clicked against the metal steps, lonely echoes failing to fill the space. My mind refused to relinquish my flat, the echo beginning to resemble the porcelain landscape of my en suite washroom. Every night, the violent sounds of my nightly dream had been washed away one teardrop at a time by the leaking faucet and the water pooling in the basin.

  Click, click, click. Until despite the lack of windows, I knew I was underground. When I reached the bottom there was just one door, and I held the knob only to find myself drawn back to my own apartment’s door and the hall outside of it. I should have forgotten to return the keys so that now I could hustle back and laugh with the nosy super over my absentmindedness. She would tease me for the time I’d been so excited to catch the trolley to a matinee that I’d left the door wide open. She would ask a thousand questions and, out of politeness, I’d be obliged to answer them all.

  But I had not forgotten. The keys had been returned, the woman so uncharacteristically reserved that I wondered whether she knew what it meant to be recalled—that I was not a simple, starstruck girl after all. I withdrew my hand from the knob, parting my lips so that my breath could escape gently, and finally pressed one hand against either side of my head, as if the bell-shaped hat could fit any more snugly. The reprieve was over. On the other side was the Vault, or rather the great circular gate that secured it. I hadn’t thought so before, but now it looked like an immovable stone securing a tomb. Of course, the last time I saw it, I was looking over my shoulder as it closed behind me. I had no reason to think it imposing then.

  In the Vault, Banker is a title given to scientists. My first was an older gentleman with kind eyes and coal-black hair that parted down the center and seemed to swim away in glossy waves. There were lines around his mouth, I thought because he talked so much. Whenever he was in my dormitory, he spoke softly—to a gathering of students, to another Banker. Never to me, not at first. Not until we ventured aboveground together at the behest of the family. Once outside the Vault he seemed more able to see me. Underground, he always had the glint in his pale eyes—kind and expressive even when he was quiet, never cold—and the stern pressure above his eyebrows. There was also the slight turn of his head; then I knew he was uncomfortable with my looking at him. Uncomfortable with the fact that I could see him at all. That I, unlike his other wards, was aware of his presence. By the time more Dolores extracts had accumulated in the Vault, it had become clear that not only was I an anomaly, but also that my Banker was unsure how to respond to that fact.

  From the outside, there was no question that I belonged belowground with the rest of them. The other Dolores Mems and I shared the same face and body, virtually an identical appearance altogether. Our Source aged well back then, and the three of us who were there before I left—myself, along with Dolores Nos. 2 and 3—were nearly the same age. Nineteen, nineteen, and twenty, there was nothing to distinguish us but an almost imperceptible difference in my skin and the chevron-shaped scar on No. 3’s right index finger where she’d cut herself on the can opener. She hadn’t done anything, of course; the real Dolores had, before extracting her.

  I loved that can opener with the thick yellow handle and grip. It reminded me of our mother teaching us to cook. She’d taught us to be quite careful with it, and I wondered if Dolores’s scar was at all related to why a third Mem existed, though I made certain never to ask. A part of me worried what I might hear about our mother and father if I ever questioned the origin of the third Mem. I worried I might learn that something horrible had happened to them, or to a dear friend, or to my kitten, Petunia, and I wanted to remember them all exactly as I did—though my Banker fixated on how I could. How did I recall so much? How did I recall anything besides the reason for my extraction? he would ask sometimes. Never mind that I shouldn’t have been capable of replying; he seemed truly desperate to hear my answer, though it was never satisfactory. I could no more explain the existence of my memories and affections than my Banker could have explained his, but of course he would never be required to.

  When I first entered the Dolores room, I had no time to acknowledge the three beds that remained in the same place as when I had left or the new source of light and color that seemed to emanate from somewhere overhead. My attention immediately fell to the one other Dolores in our dormitory. She lay on her bed with her whole body drawn into a ball and looked like she’d been recently crying. Or rather, she was depicting a time when our Source had been crying, since the tears didn’t really belong to her.

  After being away from the Vault for the better part of two decades, I had no idea how many Dolores extractions had come and gone, or why. Of course, I was still nineteen, as I always will be, but I knew that the real Dolores must be nearly thirty-nine now. To be quite honest, it hadn’t occurred to me until my recall, until another Dolores was there in front of me. In all my years thinking about my Source, in the innumerable nights I’d dreamed of our last moments as one mind or of our solitary moment standing side by side, I never altered her. A real person might have envisioned herself progressing through age, imagining the changes her style and wardrobe and even her physique would undergo. But frozen in my own age, I kept her there with me. Just as a film preserved a romance while in real life the actors moved on, in my mind, Dolores was ever young because I was. I never considered how she would look at twenty-one or twenty-five or her late thirties. And while I presumed that the Dolores on the bed was a recent extraction, I couldn’t say if she’d been lying there a year or a day. After all, I wasn’t entirely sure what thirty-eight looked like, not to the point of accurately assigning it to anyone. The huddled extract may have been thirty-eight or thirty-one, if she wasn’t younger still. What I did know for sure was that she would not last much longer.

  The Mem’s skin was dim. Especially where her elbows bent, curving around the legs drawn to her breast, it had already faded from my deep brown to a hollow gray and then cracked. Her eyes were pools of black into which her lashes and eyebrows seemed to be sinking, and the blackness seemed almost to bleed into her once dark skin. Her hair should have been a bright copper, like our mother’s. Instead it was a sour shade of yellow, and while I and the Dolores I’d known wore our hair shiny and pressed, this fading extract had a short bob of wispy frizz. I rather liked the hairstyle itself, preferring it to the long, tiresome styles of my own, bygone year when a woman’s hair was her crowning glory and achievement. What I could not imagine was that my Source would want to be seen with her stylishly short hair in such a state, even if only by Bankers and staff. I couldn’t imagine that her father would be pleased either.

&nb
sp; I didn’t speak to the Mem, only proceeded to the farthest bed and deposited my bag. After that I couldn’t decide what to do. If she were anyone else, at least if she were a real person, I could have tried to console her. Even if she’d been a stranger, I would have drawn a handkerchief from the purse I usually carried and offered it without question. I’d insist that she keep it, petting her arm and cooing any number of comforting phrases, whether she kept her burdens to herself or fell into my consoling arms.

  But she was a Mem. She would not answer me, or else when she did her words would be noticeably out of context. She was trapped in a single moment, whichever had been too unpleasant for the real Dolores to bear. She and every other memory were, quite literally, single-minded, replaying themselves every minute of every hour of the day and then watching their origins at night.

  A coldness pricked me in my midsection then and I tried to ignore it. If I succumbed—if I listened to the small voice inside my head reminding me that the latter of those conditions applied to me as well—I may have slipped headlong into an anxiety from which I feared I could not escape, now that I was back. So I tried also not to notice that the armoire into which I began hanging my clothes had been empty. There was no need for running a warm cloth around the interior, as Camille had done when moving me into my own place in the city. Running my hand along the bottom before setting my bag inside, I felt no mothballs, no wayward string or button. This Dolores would leave nothing, as the ones before had not. It would be as though no one had been here. Only Mems. Only us.

  From the doorway, I looked up and down the hall, relieved that I couldn’t see the Vault gate from our dormitory. At either end was another hallway, and for a long time, no one passed to my left or right, not even in the distance. There was little sound, unless I closed my eyes and strained to hear something, and even then the clearest sign of life was Dolores’s abbreviated breathing.

  Back at my bed, I first sat leaning against the headboard, facing the open door, until I realized how alike we looked, my knees bent, my legs drawn into my chest, and my arms wrapped around them. The coldness pricked me again and I felt my resolve weaken. This was reality. I was not an honorary Banker, as the joke had gone, or the Professor’s beloved assistant. I was, and had always been, their subject. The Vault was where their subjects lived and expired.