CLEAN

by John Kessel

Two-time Nebula-award-winning-author Kessel co-edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, and The Secret History of Science Fiction with James Patrick Kelly. John’s most recent short story collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, was published by Small Beer Press in 2008. About “Clean” the author says, “This story is a sequel to the first story I ever sold to Asimov’s, ‘Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine,’ which appeared in the October 1983 issue. In some ways this tale represents my attempt to imagine what an episode of a TV series based on that original story’s premise would look like.” Her father taught electrical engineering at the university and had a passion for vacuum tubes. When she was eight, he taught her how to repair old radios. They would sit on high stools in his basement workroom and inspect the blackened interiors of battered old Philcos and Stromburg-Carlsons.

* * * *

“Lee De Forest held the patent on the regenerative circuit,” her father told her, “but that was an act of piracy. It was actually invented by Edwin Armstrong. Tell me what kind of tube this is.”

“It’s a triode,” she would say.

“Smart girl.” Her father took apart the wiring and made her, with a soldering gun, put it back together. Back then his hair was dark, and had not receded. She liked the way the skin at the corners of his eyes wrinkled when he squinted at some wiring diagram.

“This is hard work,” he said after a while. “How about a poem?”

Her father had memorized scores of odd poems and obsolete songs. She blew on the bead of solder at the end of the wire. The pungent, hot smell got up her nose. “Okay.”

“Here’s one of my favorites,” her father said. “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

* * * *

—”There are strange things done in the midnight sun

—By the men who moil for gold.

—The arctic trails—”

* * * *

“Moil?” she said, laughing. “What does that mean?”

“You don’t know what moil means? What are they teaching you in that school?

“Arithmetic.”

“Moil means ‘to toil, to work very hard.’ Like we’re doing right now.”

“So why don’t they just say ‘toil’? It sounds the same.”

“It’s poetry, dear. It doesn’t have to make sense. Hand me that spool of solder.”

She couldn’t remember how many weekend afternoons they spent down there in his workshop. Many. Not enough. She would never forget them.

* * * *

On the mantel over the fireplace that they only used during Christmas sat a framed photograph. It showed Jinny’s mother and father and a little red-haired girl who was Jinny, standing on a beach, squinting into the sun. Her father had one arm around her mother, and his other hand resting on Jinny’s head.

Jinny hated going home for the holidays. Christmas was difficult; they had never been a religious family, and the celebrations seemed to involve increasing amounts of gin and vermouth. Her mother had checked out of the marriage emotionally years ago and her father spent hours in his workshop, but with Jinny there they felt obliged to spend time in the same room, and each of them bounced comments meant for the other off Jinny. As much as Jinny enjoyed seeing her dad again, she did not enjoy being the backboard for their loveless marriage.

She was in her third year of the PhD program in Sociolinguistics at Harvard. The night before she had gone out with some old friends to a club in Santa Monica, and she awoke with a head muzzy from a scotch hangover. She went down to the kitchen to find her father at the breakfast table in his bathrobe, staring at a cup of coffee.

He looked up at her with a dazed expression on his face. “Who are you?” he asked.

Always a joke with her father. “I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past,” she said.

Her father’s face worked with strong emotion. Jinny got worried. Her mother came into the kitchen then. “Dan, what’s the matter?”

Jinny’s father turned to her mother, looking even more puzzled. “Who are you? What is this place?”

“This is our home. I’m your wife, Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth? You’re so old! What happened to you?”

“I got old, Dan. We both got old. It took a while, but it happened.”

Jinny hated the bitterness in her mother’s voice. “Mom, can’t you see something’s wrong?”

Dan raised a hand to point at Jinny. “Who’s that?”

“That’s your daughter, Jinny,” Elizabeth said.

“My daughter? I don’t have a daughter.”

They calmed him, made him lie down, and called the doctor. The doctor said they should bring him to the hospital for some tests. They took him to the emergency room. By the time they had arrived he seemed normal, recognized them both, and was complaining that he wanted his breakfast. The doctor had called ahead and they admitted Dan to a private room, gave him a sedative, and he went to sleep. Once they had gotten him settled, Jinny turned on Elizabeth.

“What’s going on?” Jinny asked her mother. “This doctor expected you to call. This isn’t the first time, is it?”

“Your father has Alzheimer’s. You talk to him on the phone. You haven’t noticed him forgetting things?”

Jinny had. But she had chalked it up to normal aging. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’re the one who is supposed to be so close to him. I just live with him. I’m going to the ladies’ room.” She turned away and walked down the hall.

Jinny sat by the bedside watching her father sleep. His gnarled hands lay on the blanket. A burn scar ran across the back of his right. His eyelids fluttered and he took an occasional restless breath; he was dreaming. She wondered of what. She remembered how as a girl she had had a recurring nightmare about some witch living in the basement, so that whenever he asked her to go downstairs to fetch something from his workbench she turned on the stairway light and rushed down and up as fast as she could, not looking into the dark corners. She’d grab the shop manual or screwdriver he’d requested and dash up the stairs two at a time. She put her hand out and brushed his thinning hair behind his ear. He needed a haircut.

She tried to understand why her mother was so cold. After a while she heard her voice in the corridor, talking to someone. She moved toward the door and listened.

“You can bring him in anytime after he’s released,” a woman’s voice said. Jinny peeked out of the gap in the door and saw a woman in a nurse’s smock, maybe in her thirties, attractive in a mousy way.

“I’m not sure he’ll want to go through with it,” Elizabeth said

“Have him talk with Phoebe Meredith,” the woman said. “Phoebe will draw him out.”

Jinny pushed the door open. “Hello,” she said.

The woman smiled nervously, “Hello. You must be Jinny.”

“Who are you?”

Elizabeth started to protest, but the woman placed a hand on her arm. “I’m Connie Gray. I work in the trauma center,”

“This isn’t the trauma center.”

The woman seemed determined not to take offense. “Just talking to your mother. We met before.”

“Jinny, please be civil,” Elizabeth said.

“It’s okay,” Connie said. “This is hard on everyone.”

“Is that Jinny?” Her father called sleepily from inside the room. His voice made Jinny’s heart leap. She went back into the room, closing the door on her mother and the nurse. Her father was trying to prop himself up; she helped him get the pillow situated. His belly protruded under the blanket; she had not realized how much weight he had gained in recent years. “Sit down,” he said, breathing heavily. “We’ve got a problem to face.”

She sat in the chair beside the bed. “How do you feel?”

“Like they hit me with a sledgehammer. I didn’t need the drug.”

Jinny didn’t tell him how upset and irrational he had been. She studied his face. He looked tired, but still her father. His smile was grim.

“Did your mother tell you about the plan?”

“What plan?”

He looked away. “There’s a treatment that might help me. They say, if it works, that it can arrest the Alzheimer’s and prevent dementia.”

“That would be wonderful.”

“There’s a cost.”

“We can afford it. Mom and I will find a way.”

He rubbed his stubbly cheeks with his thumb and fingers, then slid them down his throat. “Not that cost. In order to not end up forgetting everything, I would have to forget a lot.”

“I don’t understand. Isn’t loss of memory the problem?”

“It’s the problem and the solution. It’s just a matter of how much, and I don’t know how much. They can’t tell me, they say. But the more I give up, the better my chances.”

Jinny wondered if she should call the doctor. He wasn’t making much sense.

“I don’t want to be useless,” he said. “To be a burden on your mother, and you. I won’t have that.”

“You wouldn’t be a burden.”

“And I won’t be. I won’t be, Jinny. That’s the point.”

* * * *

Elizabeth drove them home from the hospital, Dan fidgeting in the passenger’s seat.

“Calm down, Dan,” she said.

“I should drive,”

“You don’t have to drive all the time.”

“I can still drive,” he said.

Elizabeth looked at him out of the corner of her eye. If only he would say what he felt. Did he even realize how he was withholding it? “I know, Dan,” she said. “You can still drive.”

Jinny was following them in the other car. When they got home Dan insisted he was fine and went down to his workroom. Jinny went down with him. Elizabeth sat in an armchair in the living room to read one of the briefs she had brought back from her office.

Her eyes kept slipping over the words. She had a silly kid’s song in her mind. I went to the animal fair, the birds and the beasts were there. . . . Dan had sung that song to Jinny when she was a child. He’d had a head full of such songs. Long before Jinny had been born he had sung them to Elizabeth in bed, after sex. The sex had been good at the beginning, and Dan’s childlike remoteness, those moments when he seemed to drop out of the human universe into some near-autistic world of abstract thought, had not bothered Elizabeth then.

He had never been warm or demonstrative. He was at his best with ideas and objects. She might have been put off if not for his vulnerability and her understanding that he did not choose the way he was. And there were those songs.

At the university, he was never beloved by students. He had strict rules and he stuck to them. With his colleagues he was just as bad, and had never advanced within the department. Elizabeth ran interference between Dan and the social world he negotiated so poorly. The animal fair.

She gave up on the pile of papers—a sheaf of uncontested divorces, pure boilerplate—and listened for sounds from the basement.

Elizabeth wished that Jinny had not been home to witness Dan’s latest episode. She supposed she should have told Jinny about Dan’s deterioration, but she had dreaded Jinny’s reaction. Jinny assumed that Elizabeth was jealous of her closeness to Dan, but that was not true. Rather, Elizabeth resented the fact that Jinny saw only Dan’s good side whereas she had to deal with his depressions, his temper, his increasing distance. For Jinny he had infinite amounts of time and attention. For her he had nothing.

After a half hour Jinny came back upstairs and paced around the room like a nervous cat. She had grown more angular since she had gone away, and Elizabeth wondered how her life was going. Like her father, she seldom confided in Elizabeth.

Finally, Elizabeth spoke. “For pity’s sake, Jinny, please stop pacing.”

Jinny abruptly sat down on the sofa and waited until Elizabeth looked her in the eye.

“New Life Choices, mom? It sounds like some online dating service. How did you even hear about them?”

“That nurse, Connie Gray.”

“Dad told me what you’re planning.”

“I’m not planning anything.”

“How could you consider having him erase his memory? Do you want him to forget you were ever married? That he ever had a daughter?”

“You saw him this morning. Did he know he had a daughter then?”

“But that’s an illness. This is deliberate! You want to take away his life?”

“His life is coming apart. You don’t have to live with it. You call on the phone every couple of months, come flying here like a princess once a year, and you think you know him? I know him. I’ve known him for thirty-five years. I sleep in the same bed with him. I cook his meals. I take care of him when he’s sick. I wash his clothes. I make sure his socks match.”

“That was your choice, you—”

Elizabeth felt tears coming to her eyes. “I watch him across the dinner table and

I can see that he’s not exactly sure what I just said. I go to find him when he calls because he’s forgotten the way home. When he forgets the first time we met.”

“Mother—”

“It’s too hard, Jinny. I’d rather see him lose it all in one clean sweep than lose it bit by bit.”

She seemed to have gotten Jinny’s attention. “I don’t want him to forget me,” Jinny said.

“He’s going to, regardless. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. What did he tell you?”

“He said—he said what you’re saying. That he’d rather forget everything all at once.”

“And the erasure people say that if his memory is cleaned far back enough, he won’t suffer from dementia. He won’t feel afraid, or lost, or paranoid. Do you want to see him raving, strapped to a bed, or medicated just to keep him from hurting himself? And he’s going to need caretakers. I can’t do it alone.”

“If he gets erased, you won’t have to do it at all! You’ll just move on. Like you’ve wanted to do for ten years.”

Elizabeth looked at her daughter. She could recall looking into the mirror thirty years ago and seeing in her own reflection that same certitude. “You may think that I don’t care about him anymore, but you don’t have the right to say that.”

“You made a promise. You’re supposed to catch him if he falls. You’re his wife.”

“And who will catch me? Are you going to catch me, Jinny? Your father won’t. I’ll be alone. I’ve been alone for fifteen years.”

Jinny launched herself from the sofa, her voice rising. “My god, you thought this up. You want to get rid of him. This is going to happen, and I won’t be able to stop you.”

“That’s not fair.”

Jinny turned and stomped out of the room.

Elizabeth listened to the sound of her steps climbing the stairs to her old room. From the basement she heard nothing. She wondered if Dan had heard any of this, and if he did, why wasn’t he there to explain, to take responsibility for his own actions?

Why wasn’t he there to tell Elizabeth what he thought about erasing her from his memory?

* * * *

There was no such thing as a soul. There were only the brain and its structures: the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the limbic system, the brain stem. And the sub structures: the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. The thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus. That was all: the soul was a bunch of neurons firing. Or not firing.

Reuben read souls for a living. He knew where love hid in the brain. Lust, fear, confusion, faith, embarrassment, guilt. He saw them on his screen. He mapped them, in preparation of wiping them out.

But today Reuben was having trouble concentrating. Last night he had failed to ask Maria Sousa Gonsalves to marry him.

He glanced at the monitor showing the interview room where Phoebe was talking to the prospective client, an older man with thinning red hair. The guy—the tag on the screen read “Daniel McClendon”—was, according to the file, sixty-one years old. The pressure and temperature sensors of the chair in which he sat revealed a calm man, not anxious the way most of their clients were. The physiognomic software reading his face also raised no red flags.

Last night Reuben had meant to ask her at the restaurant, but in the presence of the other diners he lost his nerve. What if she said no? But when they went back to her apartment and made love, Reuben realized he could never be with another woman. The glint of her brown eyes in the faint light. The smell of her sweat beneath the perfume. As vivid in his memory as if it had happened a second ago.

Reuben checked the brain scan. Normal activity in McClendon’s audio and visual centers. Though Reuben had the volume on the speakers turned down, he could hear the man’s voice as he answered Phoebe’s questions. Phoebe was good at putting clients at ease. That was one of her gifts.

Phoebe handed McClendon the pad and said, “On the screen you are going to see a number of perception and recognition tests. For example, you might see a page of the letter ‘O’, and among them one letter ‘C.’ As soon as you spot the C among the O’s, touch the indicator to move to the next image.”

“I did these tests already, at the neurologist’s,” McLendon protested.

“I know,” Phoebe said. “Just humor me on this.”

As McLendon moved through the tests, Reuben noted his response. The man took a minute and a half to pick out the N in the field of M’s. A normal response was ten seconds.

Phoebe thanked him and took the pad from his lap. “Okay then,” she said. “Let me ask a few questions. What did you have for breakfast today?”

“A bowl of oatmeal. With bananas. Black coffee.”

“Who is the president of the United States?”

“Please. Don’t remind me.”

“Do I need to remind you?”

Reuben noted his cerebral function. “No, you don’t. Next question.”

“What is Ohm’s Law?”

“I’m not an idiot,” McClendon said. A surge of activity in the amygdala. Anger, irritation—fear?

“Of course you aren’t,” Phoebe said. “You are a grown man, and an electrical engineer. Can you tell me Ohm’s Law?”

“The current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to . . . to the proportional . . . to the potential difference . . . to the voltage across the two points . . . and inversely proportional to the resistance between them.”

Phoebe looked at her notes. “Can you tell me about the time you won the Draper Prize?”

McClendon answered. Reuben’s mind drifted. He wished he could bring Maria in and put her under the scanner. He could ask her questions, watch the activity in her brain, and know for sure how she felt. Then he could take out the ring and give it to her and then she would say yes. They would marry and be together as long as they lived.

“Tell me about the first time you met your wife,” Phoebe said.

“It was thirty years ago. I don’t remember the details.”

“Do you remember where it happened?”

“Her boyfriend—her boyfriend was another student in the EE program with me at Michigan State. We met at a party, or a restaurant, something like that.”

“What did she look like?”

“She looked . . . she looked beautiful.”

Phoebe continued through her inventory of questions. At the end, she asked, “Are there things that you don’t want to forget?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Choice, Reuben thought. Choice was a function of the frontal lobe, the site of reason and analysis. Of course that was layered over activity all the way down to the lizard brain.

“Mr. McClendon, what you have erased, and the amount, is your choice. In order to give yourself the best chance at recovery, you will have to make some tough decisions.”

“I know.”

Phoebe waited, letting silence stretch. Reuben observed the flare of firing neurons in McClendon’s cortex. McClendon leaned forward, his hands clasped together, looking at the carpet instead of at Phoebe. “Ms. Meredith, I’m a man who could recite you the twelve major sections, with the subheads, of the Electrical Engineering Handbook. That’s who I am. And now it’s going.”

“Yes. It’s going.”

“I don’t like it. The more I’m willing to erase, the better my chance to beat the Alzheimer’s?”

“That seems to be the case. This is a radical treatment. Treating Alzheimer’s is not something we normally do.”

McClendon sat silent.

“We can peel your memory back as far as you will accept. How do you feel about losing your memories of your wife, your daughter?”

The temporal lobe activity flared higher, and there was a spike—probably some sharp image brought to mind—in McClendon’s visual memory.

“Jinny was a surprise,” he said. “We didn’t plan to have children.” McClendon picked at the knee of his trousers. “I didn’t want to be a father. But when she was born—” he paused. “She was like a little animal in the house. I was intrigued by her. I watched her change. I taught her things.”

He looked up at her. “It was very interesting.”

“What will you miss the most?”

In McClendon’s mind: fireworks. Electrical impulses spilled across his brain. Broca’s region, the temporal and occipital lobes, cerebrum, and deep down, in the hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus. Something big, something emotional.

McClendon leaned back in the chair. He said nothing.

Reuben recorded it all, but it was useless unless McClendon gave them some outside reference. McClendon crossed his legs, rubbed the palm of his hand back over the top of his skull, flattening his hair. It would help if Phoebe got some verbal correlative out of him.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“How can I say what I’ll miss the most? How can you say what’s the most important thing in your life? It’s—it’s really none of your business.”

Reuben snorted. It was their business. He would be responsible for navigating precisely these minute regions when the time came to clean his memories. Locate the mysteries. Wipe them out.

Reuben didn’t need any mysteries. In his pocket his hand played with the case containing the engagement ring. He knew what he wanted. He would ask her tonight. He would not hesitate, he would ask, and Maria would say yes, and they would be together.

* * * *

Dan McClendon was willing to take an aggressive stance. Phoebe needed that.

Most of the people who came to New Life Choices were looking to get rid of some specific memory and go on with their lives. Some of them were frivolous. McClendon was different. He didn’t need to forget anything for emotional reasons—he was dealing with a physiological condition. Alzheimer’s was going to empty his mind like a jug with a dozen leaks, and in the process break him. He was here to empty himself prematurely, with the hope that it would leave him unbroken.

But the volume of memories he needed to clear in order to do that was without precedent. He would not, in some ways, be the same man. It was unknown territory.

In the beginning, Phoebe had considered cleaning to be a great boon to their clients. Deeply scarred individuals walked out of the clinic with a new ability to face the world, no longer with some debilitating cloud hovering over their heads. But years of observing people—and helping them—use cleaning for trivial purposes had increased her doubts. What kind of world would exist when everyone, instead of dealing with their problems, simply had them expunged? Her boss Derek seemed blissfully unaware of any drawbacks; he wanted her to take on more clients, but Phoebe was determined not to make cleaning become cosmetic brain surgery for people who got dumped by their girlfriends.

She needed to get a look at the scans Reuben had made during the screening. McClendon had not been forthcoming about his emotional investment in various elements of his past. Phoebe needed to know where the power memories lay.

She was packing up her briefcase when a young woman pushed into the office. She had flaming red hair and a distraught expression on her face. “Yes?” Phoebe asked.

“I’m Jinny McClendon.”

“Come in. Sit down.”

Jinny sat in the chair opposite her desk.

“How may I help you?”

“Right. I’ll get to the point. I want you not to erase my father. I don’t think you understand the situation. My mother is behind this. She’s wanted to leave Dad for years, but she couldn’t without feeling like the villain. This way she gets him to forget her, stashes him in some institution, and walks away with a clean conscience. And the house, and his investments, and everything else.”

Jinny McClendon’s face was pale, eyes red. Phoebe tried to assess how seriously to take this.

She could understand Jinny’s reaction—she had seen variations on it dozens of times before—but that did not make it the best one for either her father or herself. If she talked to her father, he might just change his mind and call off the procedure. For the sake of his daughter’s feelings he might sacrifice himself.

“Your father won’t be in an institution. I’ve spoken with both of your parents, independently and together. Your mother said that she doesn’t want the house. She wants your father to still live there, so he can have some familiar things around him.”

“Familiar things? How will he even remember them?”

“Many of them he won’t. Understand, it’s not easy for him. Cleaning gives him at least a chance of remaining a functioning human being. Maybe even better than just functioning.”

“But he’ll be alone, abandoned! Who will take care of him?” Jinny stood up. “I can’t take this any more.” She opened the office door, but Phoebe called her back. “Miss McClendon. Jinny.”

She hesitated, came back, sat down.

“He must choose what he is going to clean from his memory,” Phoebe said. “Yes, he will be alone, but he will have most of his rational capacities intact. He’ll be able to make a new life.”

“He has a life already!”

“You know him better than I. But in order to save himself, he will have to erase the events that he would find it most painful to forget. He’s going to forget you, and your mother, and most of the other people he’s come to know in the last thirty years.”

“The only things he keeps are the things that don’t matter?”

“Or the oldest. Alzheimer’s patients often can vividly recall things that happened forty or fifty years earlier, but not remember what they had for breakfast.” Phoebe took a deep breath. Sometimes the best way to deal with reactions like this was to come at them sideways. “Could it be, Jinny, that the reason your father’s erasing you bothers you so much is because of your own needs? That wouldn’t be an unnatural thing—for a daughter to fear the loss of her father’s affections so much that she forgot the cost to him if he didn’t go through with this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that maybe it’s what you want that’s in your mind, not what your father wants.”

Jinny’s face colored. Quietly, she said, “You’re saying I’m being selfish?”

“That’s not the best way to put it.”

Jinny stood silent for a moment. “So I’m selfish. But what about you? Why are you so interested in doing this? I’ve heard Mom say that you’re excited about the chance to use your erasing process to attack Alzheimer’s. There’s big money in this.”

“I’m not interested in making money.”

Jinny snorted. “But if it works, your boss will make a lot of money. And you’ll be famous. All because you cleared away half of a man’s life. Aren’t you just a little bothered by that?”

“Of course I’m bothered. It’s not something I’d do easily. I’ve worried about cleaning. I don’t think it’s a panacea. Far from it, in fact. Too many people treat it as one.”

“Because you advertise it that way.”

“I don’t write the ad copy. I deal with the clients. I get to know them, I worry about them, I understand their motives.”

“What, you’re some kind of goddess? You have no self-interest? You’re getting paid!”

“Believe me, I could find other ways to make a living.”

Jinny’s eyes narrowed. “Your conscience is bothering you.”

Phoebe didn’t know what to say. She sat there.

“You don’t think this is the right thing to do!” Jinny said. “You don’t care about my father—you’re trying to prove something.”

Phoebe stood up. “I’ve got nothing to prove. You’re the one who is putting her self-interest above her father’s welfare.”

“It’s not about helping him, it’s about helping you.”

“Ms. McClendon, I think we’ve gotten as far as we are going to get. Your father signed the papers. Your mother has power of attorney. If you have issues, you need to take it up with them.”

Jinny McClendon got up to leave. She stopped at the door and looked back at Phoebe. Phoebe tried not to shrink under her gaze. She was not sure if she succeeded.

* * * *

the assistant’s hands were warm as she touched his forehead and throat peeled the paper off adhesive sensor pads stuck them on his temples brow base of his neck right and left connected them to heavy wires that tugged on his skin laid him down on the bed he didn’t like lying on his back it left him stiff but the drug calmed him close your eyes she said breathe deeply think about a pleasant place a place you feel safe and secure the basement the workbench the old radios blow the dust away how many years had this one sat in a barn pigeon shit on the cabinet but when he hooked it up the dial still glowed green it took a while no sound instantly you had to let it warm up the tubes giving off heat glowing in the dusky interior wooden bench top covered with black scars from the soldering iron and a voice came out of the speakers

her hands on his chest in his hair touching his face you have freckles all over your shoulders she said and he laughed and covered her mouth with his pressed her down onto the motel bed is this a freckle he said touching her with his index finger and she shivered eyes closed eyelashes fluttering sunset light slanting through the Venetian blinds in bars showing the contour of her breasts and the rumpled sheets outside the sound of the surf and someone playing a radio

the doctor lifted his daughter’s hand on the tips of his fingers and drew him closer and pointed to the newborn’s pinky so tiny so perfect the fingernail so minuscule you needed a magnifying glass to see it but perfect nonetheless and he said see this finger Dad and Dan worried said yes what is it and the doctor said that’s the finger she is going to have you wrapped around and later he would put his own finger into his baby daughter’s hand small pink soft and the hand gripped his fingertip so hard that strength of instinct holding on the way we held onto life don’t let go Dad Jinny said her voice quavering I won’t he said she was wobbling down the street on the bike he was jogging alongside holding the seat don’t let go she said and he let go and she sped off on her own away from him down the slope faster than he could run pedaling now and at the end of the street she stopped awkwardly gripping the handlebars and shouted back her face glowing with triumph I did it

on the third move his hand slipped and his left foot lost purchase and he fell not so far ten feet maybe but he missed the pad and came down wrong and the snap in his ankle the sound more than the pain told him this would be it for rock climbing and in some way he was relieved Dan are you all right Mickey his partner said everyone in the gym stopping and coming over looking up into their faces that pretty girl he always watched her when she climbed and it wasn’t just the shape of her ass though that had something to do with it couldn’t remember her name that was spring of ‘98 or was it ‘99 he couldn’t remember smell of sweat in the air the throbbing pain now they helped him up awkwardly icepack and over the PA some song heavy fuzz bass and organ that reminded him of a sixties song he’d heard on his brother’s transistor radio in the back of the pickup on the way to Green Lake

his brother’s hands on the sides of the cargo deck what was his name he had two brothers and one of them started with an L or was it W how could he forget something like that but he didn’t feel bad about it right now he felt calm it was okay they were going to take care of him it was easier to forget forget because trying to remember only made him anxious and now he wouldn’t have to be anxious anymore and the person beside the bed holding his hand let it go

* * * *

Sly was scouting eBay to see what the latest bids were on his merchandise when he got the call.

“Hello,” she said. “Is this Sylvester Wesley?”

“Who wants to know?”

“New Life Choices gave me this number,” the woman said. She sounded tired. “You did some work for them concerning my husband, Daniel McClendon. You cleaned the house for us.”

Sly remembered McClendon. The item he was checking bids on was one of McClendon’s radios. That was more than a month ago. “Yes, I did. Did I miss something?”

“No, that’s not it at all. Actually, I need you to—to bring some things back.”

“Bring things back? That’s not what I do, Mrs. McClendon.”

“Nonetheless, I need you to bring them back.”

Sly’s job was making things disappear, and he was good at it. He was a contract employee at New Life, erasing files, destroying records, pulling government documents, and sweeping clients’ homes of objects that would remind them of things they had paid large sums to have erased from their memories. It was a lucrative sideline, but not his day job. Normally, he was a software engineer.

When they had called him and told him his next assignment was Daniel McClendon, the name seemed vaguely familiar. Then, when they sent him the files, he realized that he had taken a computer engineering class from McClendon a decade before.

Professor McClendon had been the strangest prof Sly had ever seen. Middle aged, a little slow moving, he conveyed the sense that the math he was so good at was just an elaborate game. In the middle of an explanation he would recite limericks about DRAM, or tell a funny story about the real reason the cell phone was invented, or sing some silly song. He had little patience for the slow witted. He did complex calculations in his head, barely giving the students time to keep up.

Once a student had asked him to repeat an explanation, and he replied, “Look, I’m not going to repeat it. It’s as simple as two plus two equals four.”

“Can’t you at least write it on the board?”

“Sure,” McClendon said. He picked up his marker, turned to the white board and wrote:

* * * *

2 + 2 = 4

* * * *

Sly thought McClendon was a hoot. His attendance was not faithful, but he was good on the tests. As he listened to Mrs. McClendon’s request, he realized it probably wasn’t any treat to be married to him.

“They told me he would be an Alpha Package cleaning,” Sly said. “That he’d wake up in the hospital and be told he had been in a car accident and suffered a concussion. That you wanted everything related to the family removed from the premises.”

“Whoever told you that was wrong,” she said. “He knows some things are missing, and he wants them back.”

Sly was going to have trouble recovering everything. He was supposed to destroy it all, so it could not ever turn up again, but he had been supplementing his income by selling the more valuable items. “What things?”

“He wants his books. His Draper Prize trophy. The stuff from his workroom: his tools, his radios. His teaching notes.”

“He’s still teaching?” Reuben had told Sly that the guy was having more erased than anyone in his experience.

A bitter irony crept into her voice. “He can’t remember my name, but he’s back teaching at the university.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Sly had to get onto retrieving the radios right away. Those vacuum tubes, some of them eighty years old, were irreplaceable. The only source for them nowadays was when someone occasionally discovered a cache in some decaying Soviet warehouse.

A week later he showed up at the McClendon house with the back of his Jeep packed with junk. He’d gotten the tools and some of the old radios and the framed photos. He parked in the drive of the old craftsman bungalow and sat smoking a cigarette. Mrs. McClendon had told him to wait; she didn’t live there anymore.

As he waited outside, the front door of the house opened and McClendon came out onto the porch. He looked a lot like the way he did back when Sly was in school, maybe a little heavier, less hair. He squinted at Sly, then waved him over. Sly got out of the jeep.

“Got my stuff?”

“Yes sir.”

McClendon stared at him a little longer than was comfortable. “You’re Sylvestre Wesley. ECE 530, Physical Electronics. You missed too many classes.”

“Yes sir.”

“And see—see what you ended up doing? Bring my things in.”

While he was ferrying boxes, Mrs. McClendon drove up in her Beamer. She saw that he was already almost done. Her husband, sitting in a wicker chair on the porch, was fiddling with an ancient 8-track tape player. He looked up, noticed her, and went back to the tape player.

Mrs. McClendon hesitated, standing by her car. There was a hurt expression on her face.

Sly didn’t want to see them together. He interrupted McClendon. “Where do you want this one?”

McClendon put down the tape player. “Follow me.” He took Sly into the house, down the steps to his workroom, and had him heft the unwieldy box full of coils and transformers onto the bench. McClendon sat on a stool and began unloading the items, slowly, examining each as he took it out. Sly went back upstairs.

Mrs. McClendon was in the living room looking over the only box of personal items that Sly had retrieved. “You needn’t have bothered with these,” she said. “He doesn’t remember us at all. I don’t know if what they did to him has changed him, or only wiped the fog off the glass so we can see clearly what’s inside him. What’s inside him is nothing.”

Sly didn’t need this. “He’s had his memory wiped. You can’t blame him.”

“I can’t?” Mrs. McClendon picked up a framed photograph from the box. It showed her husband and her and a little red-haired girl standing on a beach, squinting into the sun. Her husband had one arm around her, his other hand resting on the little girl’s head.

“In that picture you look happy,” Sly said awkwardly.

She put it on the mantle over the fireplace. “Let him try to figure out what it means.” And she walked out.

After she left, he finished moving the things in. He hesitated, then went down to tell McClendon he was done. The professor was still hunched over the tubes and wires, old resistors and condensers looking like foil-wrapped candies, wirewound pots, rheostats, worn schematics telling how it all fit together so it might work again, on fragile paper turned brown around the edges. “I’m finished,” Sly said.

“That’s good,” McClendon said softly.

Sly couldn’t just leave. “You know I wasn’t the best student, but I liked your class. I liked all those stories you would tell.’

McClendon turned and looked at him. “Stories? I don’t—I don’t know any stories.”

* * * *

Three months in Cambridge had not helped Jinny to deal with the aftermath of her father’s erasure. She had avoided calling home, had refused any attempts her mother made to contact her, erased her e-mails unread, refused the phone calls, wiped out any voicemails without listening to them. Then, in a casual conversation with her cousin Brittany, she heard that her father was back teaching at the university.

“What? How can that be?”

“Apparently he was able to keep all his intellectual abilities.”

Jinny called her mother. “No, he doesn’t remember,” her mother told her. “He’s as awkward as a grad student with Asperger’s, can hardly carry on a conversation.”

“But he can still do his work?”

“He made a bet that he could keep the electrical engineering and still beat the Alzheimer’s,” her mother said. “Looks like he won.” She sounded remarkably philosophical about the whole thing, not the bitter woman she had been when they lived together. “But everything else is gone. He peeled his memory back to before you were born, to before he ever met me. He reminds me of what he was like when we first met. He acts like a young, poorly socialized man.”

“I’m coming to see him.”

The line was silent for a moment. “If you have to. But honey, I don’t know if it’s going to make you feel any better.”

“I have to.”

Jinny talked to her mother for an hour. Elizabeth tried to alert her about what to expect. Then Jinny booked a flight for that weekend; the plane touched down at four in the afternoon on Friday, and she rented a car and drove straight to the house.

She hesitated on the porch, considered knocking, and rang the doorbell. She heard sounds from inside, and through the glass in the door saw him come toward her. He opened the door wide and spoke to her through the screen door. “What do you want?”

Physically, he looked good. He had lost some weight. He was clean shaven, his hair brushed back from his high forehead. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and a pair of needle-nosed pliers in his left hand.

“May I come in?”

“You’re my daughter, are you?”

“Yes.” Her voice caught in her throat. “You remember me?”

He opened the door and let her in. “They told me I had a wife and daughter. The woman comes around sometimes. I’m working. If you want to talk you have to come down with me.”

They went downstairs. He had a big RCA cabinet radio half taken apart on the floor. The thing must date back to the 1940s; it was an elaborate set, with AM and shortwave reception and a built-in record player with a 78-rpm turntable. The cabinetry was beautiful, inlaid chevrons of dark and light wood. The turntable was dismounted, exposing the wiring.

She sat on a stool next to him, held a light so he could see as he worked his narrow hands into the interior of the cabinet. She could not think of much to say, over-whelmed by his physical presence, the smell of the solder in the hot, musty basement. His sinewy arms and intent, old man’s face. He made no attempt to put her at ease.

She asked him questions about the radio set. When he realized that she could tell a capacitor from a resistor, he let her help him. She took off her sweater and got down on her knees to be closer.

“Why do you like these old radios?” she asked him. “It’s hard to get parts. They can’t even pick up FM, let alone satellite. Nothing but political rants and holy rollers.”

He did not look at her, concentrating on the work. “They’re simple,” he said. “I can understand every piece of them. I can take them completely apart and put them completely back together again. A modern circuit, you can’t see without a micro-scope. I know how that works, too, but I can’t put my hands on it. If it breaks, you can’t fix it—you just throw it away. This light isn’t getting in there. We have to turn this cabinet around. Help me.”

He started to get up. His legs failed him, and he had to make a second attempt before he got to his feet. “I’m old,” he said. “I keep forgetting.”

Together they wrestled the bulky radio around so that the bench light was more useful. Her father exhaled sharply and drew his forearm across his forehead. “Do you want a Coke?”

“Sure.”

He got two old-fashioned glass bottles from the basement refrigerator and popped the caps, handed one to her. Jinny took a drink. She watched him lean down into the cabinet again, squinting.

“Would you like to hear a poem?” she asked.

“A—a poem?” Her father lifted his head and looked at her, eyebrows arched.

“It starts like this: ‘There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold—’ “

“Moil? What does that mean?” he asked. He looked so trusting, like a child of eight.

Jinny moved in closer so she could see into the cabinet. “It means to work hard. Like we’re doing now.”