Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

And I’d already picked the whole label off my beer.

I tried to make amends, years later. I can’t blame them for not wanting to talk to me.

I could have done without that memory. I had, for years, I now realize.

Accountability. That’s another thing you lose when you erase yourself.

Thank God.

Some ofthe pens start slipping through my hands. At first, the newer ones, or the ones that had been bought as replacements for ones long lost. The older ones fare better, as if every scratch on the barrel, every bit of luster worn by use from the nib, every imperfection, makes the object in my hands more real. Or gives my hands something to stick to, as they become more phantasmal. More of an unreality.

The older ones fare better. At first.

Then those begin to fall through me, too.

There is so much I still can’t remember. I frown at those pristine notebooks with their smooth, friendly paper. I stroke a finger over them, and sometimes I feel the nap of the page, and sometimes my fingertip sinks through.

I know—I can feel —the memories down there, like shipwrecks under clouded water. But I can’t make out the shapes. Can’t describe what I know has to be there.

I start dropping even pens.

But I never drop the broken one. It feels steady and solid in my hand. As if it were more real than the others.

That gives me an idea.

They usedto say, of somebody who made a bad marriage, that they threw themselves away. What happens if you never actually got married, because marriage is a tool of the bourgeousie?

I’m pretty sure you can still throw yourself away. Erase yourself. For somebody else, or because you don’t think you are worth preserving.

I don’thave any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgot.

My stepfatherliked to have excuses to hit. So he could feel good about himself, I guess. One way you get excuses to hit is to expect perfection in every task, and set hard tasks without allowing the person you’re setting them to time to learn how to do them.

Then, when the student isn’t perfect, you have a good reason to punish somebody.

Another thing you can do is change your expectations constantly, so that nobody can predict what is expected and what isn’t. Make them arbitrary and impossibly high. Don’t allow for any human imperfections.

Since Ican touch it, I decide to fix the mystery pen.

I make a new trim ring for it out of polymer clay, to help hold the cap in place. I clean it, and while I handle it my hands stay solid on the tools. As if it is some kind of talisman to my past reality.

I wish I could say my repair job is some kind of professional affair with a loupe and so on, but I have some epoxy and some rubber cement and honestly I kind of fake it. You do what you can with what you have, and that’s all right then.

I takeup my broken pen. The nib is still pretty good, though it doesn’t write like a fine point anymore. More like a medium. And even on smooth paper it scratches a little.

It’s still usable, though. And it makes a nice smooth line.

Except I have faded more, in the interim. I am vanishing. Falling away, like all the memories I hadn’t wanted, and now wish I had been less cavalier with. I can’t manage to open a notebook, let alone write in one. I am able to re-read the old ones I’d kept. But the new ones are as ghostly as the cheese sandwiches have become.

Maybe this is better than living with the pain of remembering. Maybe fading away, fading into nothingness, starving to an immaterial and non-interactive death—maybe that is the happiest ending.

Except the one thing I know —I know with a drowning urgency, though I still cannot remember the specifics—is that people will come to harm if I cannot remember the things I once knew.

A lot of people.

And not just hurt.

People are going to get killed.

More people. A lot more. Exponentially more than had been harmed by three incendiaries sent to medical schools.

If I can just remember the plan I came up with. Before I helped him write this manifesto. Almost twenty years ago.

If I can only remember the rest of his name.

Lack offood and water doesn’t help me think any more clearly. I’ve never been good at handling low blood sugar. So half my time seems to be spent figuring out how to write. How to even get words down on the page.

I can put the pen on the paper—the pen stays solid, even if it is in my hand. And I can use the nib to turn the pages. But do you know how hard it is to write legibly and usefully in a notebook you have no way to smooth flat, or to steady? Especially when your temples ache with hunger, and a sour metallic taste seems to sit in your abdomen.

My laptop has long since stopped being something I could touch. I would have given a lot for that laptop right now.

My laptop. And a banana.

My stepfatherwould hit me with a belt, and he wouldn’t stop until I managed to keep from crying.

“I’m not hurting you that badly, you little wimp. Quit that squalling, or I’ll give you something real to cry about.”

It’s amazing what you can learn to keep inside.

A daylater, lying more or less in the sofa with my head bleary and aching with hunger and my throat scratchy with dehydration, I realize that those blank notebook pages are the answer. I can’t get the burned notebooks back—that was, after all, why I had burned them—but I can fill these leftover pages with memories of what I might have written in them.

I can construct some kind of a record, though it will be one very filtered by the passage of time.

And the important memory might be in there somewhere. If I am lucky.

And brave.

It wouldbe so much easier just to fade away.

Erase, erase.

So much easier to stop pretending my existence matters and let go. Then it will be over. Then I won’t have to keep existing after I do this thing. This thing I don’t even want to do. It’s not the idea of drifting into nothingness afterwards that bothers me. It’s the terrible fear that instead, I might hook myself back into the universe somehow. Re-assert my reality.