It Means to Not Remember

What if you had the power to erase a word from existence? And I mean the entire idea of that word. Which would you choose? Pain? Hate? War? Death? The character in this story gets this power. Read on.

It Means to Not Remember

 

Raised veins and age spotted the paper and the lady. The piece of paper, her product, looked like dried leaves and bark fused together as one brown sheet. Like her loose skin, but stiff. The lady's grip on my wrist held me in place. With her other hand, she pinched the sheet at one corner. Then she said, "Write on this paper a word you want to disappear, and it'll be gone forever. The idea of the word will be gone. The understanding of it, gone. One sheet, one word."

            I said, "How much?"

            "Thirty thousand."

            She was a vendor on the sidewalk of Manhattan without even a milk crate to sit on, with only a naked card table and a full five gallon jug asking for donations in marker directly written on the blue plastic.

            I thought that I could at least use her for a story. I wanted to get her talking. "How much?" I asked again.

            "Thirty thousand."

            Three separate men stopped to stuff dollars in her jug. The lady took her hand from my wrist; her eyes held me in place.

            The lady said, "I have changed the world this morning. You don't even know it. You can't. The word is gone from you forever."

            I suddenly believed her. People were behaving differently. All of New York City. It was like they were being generous. I had my own proof from the sale of my book. Only just this morning I received a sudden phone call and attended an even swifter meeting about my novel. That, along with the constant flow of donations filling the jug, showed me that the world was indeed different.

            I asked, "What word did you write?"

            "It is mine alone. But you can have your own. Thirty thousand."

            "How'd you pick the amount?" I asked. "How'd you know? Did you watch me? You saw the building I came out of. You saw the check."

            A group of teenagers unloaded their change and dollar bills into the jug. Whatever word she had written, it worked for her. It generated money. It freed inhibitions. She'd found a word that, taken away, helped enforce a certain behavior.

            The money was a strong coincidence that helped me consider buying the paper. I had a check for the exact amount in my pocket for the sale of my first novel. The power also helped me decide. If people changed because of a stricken word from our vocabulary, lives, and thoughts, then obtaining the paper meant being a sort of God. It meant having direct influence on others' behavior.

            I stood there. She didn't look for other takers. She wanted me to choose which idea to kill. Like she had her try and wanted someone else to be responsible for the next one. 

            Maybe it was the check in my pocket. Maybe it was the control, or the ability to change the world by writing. It could've been the lady, that I felt she chose me. It could've been that I didn't want anyone else to choose the word that would be gone forever. Whatever it was, I signed the check over to her and bought the veiny paper.

***

Single words crisscrossed the paths in my brain while people brushed passed me, got into cabs, and stood typing on their phones. Neon words scrolled across jumbo screens. In captions, alongside the ticker tape on the bottom, an newscaster explained that the record number of stocks were being traded. Words hit me like images. War. Death. Love. Republicans. Democrats. I had the power to change the world.

            A woman with high boots and dark hair smiled at me. New Yorkers really were acting different. The lady had on florescent pink lipstick that clumped and shined like fish scales. In my mind, the word lipstick zoomed across the paper. I've always hated lipstick. It was part of what broke up me and Kelly.

            I could write the word hate. It'd be gone from the world, trapped on paper like history, and only I would know it. But then people would begin to despise what they had hated instead. Or they would dislike everything. Or detest it.

            Alone. I could write alone.

            Stepping through a crowd of pedestrians, I thought about writing the word divorce. If I did, would it mean me and Kelly would still be married? Would we still live together in misery? Or would we just be separated?

***

Still on the streets of Manhattan, I called Kelly because I knew talking with her would help me choose the word.

            I said, "Can I come see you?"

            "Have you been drinking?"

            "I haven't had a drink since we broke up."

            "Divorced," she said.

            "Kelly."

            I could hear her bell earrings, the ones we fought about, bang into the phone as she switched ears. The bells had a warm jingle. I used to complain that she wore them to announce her presence in a room. Like a prancing cat.

            Vanity.

            Gluttony.

            Sin.

            Kelly said, "What do you want?"

            "I'm trying to figure out what's important."

            "It only took you eight years."

            "Kelly."

            "What?"

            I said, "Something happened today, and you're the first one I thought of." Lie. "I need to see you."

            "No."

            "It's life-changing."

            "No," she said. "It's not my life. Not anymore, thank God."

            I could write the word no on the paper while we were still on the phone. Then I could ask her to remarry me. She'd probably say maybe, or not yes.

            "Please," I said. "I need to see you."

            "Oh my God." She waited, her earrings jingling. God. I could write God. Kill Him with a wave of my wrist. Almost in a whisper, Kelly said, "Are you dying?"

            "No. I'm actually very, very alive. Kelly, I really need to see you."

***

I waited on the corner of 47th and 6th like a gunslinger, paper and pen holstered at my side pockets. All I needed to do was draw at the right moment. I only had one chance. One bullet.

            The Diamond District bustled with quiet movement. No hecklers stood in front of their stores yelling for business, but people still moved in and out of the doors. 

            A man softly asked me, "Buying or selling?"

            "Creating," I said.

            "If it's jewelry you need, go to Amiti's." His monotone voice matched his averting eyes.

            I said, "I'm just waiting for someone." Waiting. I could write waiting.

            Kelly came out of the building where she worked. She looked like she had lost weight. At least fifteen pounds. She also looked like she'd been running in her business suit and heels. "We've had record sales today," she said. "You look different."

            "The whole city looks different. The whole world, probably."

            We walked over to a street vendor so she could get a water and a package of mixed nuts. On line, she said, "So? What is it this time?"

            "I sold my novel today. Got paid and everything."

            "Oh, congratulations. So you came to gloat."

            "What? No. Something else happened. Something more important than my 80,000 words. I think it's all connected, though. Kelly," and I actually tapped the outsides of my front pockets, "I have the power to erase a word. Really, an idea. I could write down the word disease and it would disappear from existence."

            She said, "Are you doing some kind of weird character study on me?"

            "No."

            "Why are you telling me this? I mean, what's the point of being weird or cute or ironic or whatever the hell you're being. We're done. It doesn't work anymore. I don't have any feelings left."

            I could write numbness, and then she would have feeling. But then dentist visits and surgery would be painful.

            I said, "Do you think if we had kids we would still be together?"

            Impotent.

            "Oh my God. You are! You're trying to get back together. You know I'm seeing someone, right?" 

            I had the power to write her boyfriend's name.

            I said, "I really need to know what broke us apart."

            "You were a jerk." She said it as if it were a test and she had studied and rehearsed all week to be able to regurgitate the right answer.

            "We had fun too," I said.

            "No we didn't."

            "And I wasn't that much of a jerk."

            "Yes, you were," she said. "You always had to shout the loudest, and you always had to have the last word."

            Words. I could do away with words so that every book in the world, Shakespeare, Emerson, the Bible, Fitzgerald, even my novel, would just be a collection of paper with strange and meaningless little black marks. By writing one word, I could delete every other word in existence so that every conversation would be reduced to emotive grunts. I had that much power, but Kelly had power over me.

            I said, "Thanks for meeting me." I had to get out of there.

            "Yeah," she said. "I have to go back to work. They're probably swamped in there."

***

Meeting with Kelly made me feel unimportant. Meaningless. I had the power of the gods at my thighs, I had secret knowledge of how the world shifted in a day and will shift again, but I couldn't persuade Kelly to be civil, to talk out ideas, to consider me worthwhile. The way she acted, she couldn't have remembered any of the good that happened between us. The trip to Florida. The year of sex without fights. The hysterical laughing at bedtime. She only remembered the unpleasant. The adverse. The unimportant.

            I could write the word unimportant. It could create importance in the world. It could make me important. My hands trembled at my sides. My fingers went into my pockets and touched the paper and pen. I pulled them out. I brought them together. No, there were too many strongly related ideas. I couldn't write unimportant. There was still disconnected, immaterial, insignificant, and trifling. If I wrote unimportant, people and books would still be inconsequential or irrelevant.

            I walked down to 42nd Street. There was nowhere to go. With my fingers pinching the warm veins of the paper, I still didn't know exactly what I was going to write, but I knew I needed change.

            Stagnant.

            Static.

            Same.

***     

I stood there, wanting a single idea to be important enough to eradicate its antonym. At one time in my life, I had known it. I must have. I was happy. Content, at least. But within the last few years, without even knowing it, I had failed to remember. Then I bought a piece of paper and began thinking again.

            I leaned the paper against a tinted storefront window. The pen started moving. I pushed too hard on the first letter and the tip pierced a vein. Warm blood rose up. It smeared across the paper as I wrote.

            One black word marked the gray paper. Palm prints of blood dirtied it.

            The word: forget.

            I think that part of me wanted to forget loving Kelly, but a larger part wanted her to remember everything about me. I wanted to stop having to call her to remind her I existed. I wanted her to remember the good, not just the thrown bottles and spilled ashtrays. After writing, I turned in the direction from which I'd come. I wanted to see Kelly again. I wanted to see a different Kelly.

            A man stopped me. He said, "You didn't hold the door for me six years ago Friday. You were obnoxious."

            "I forgot."

            "You speak English?"

            The man walked away just as quickly.

            I didn't feel any different. I knew what it meant to forget, and there were things that I couldn't remember. There were entire nights. The ones where I woke up alone with an achy brain.

            A woman with high heels walked passed me and snarled. She may've looked familiar. I'm not sure.

            I took a few steps, stopped. Crusted blood covered my hands.

            A crowd gathered around me, a mob, each shouting ways they'd been wronged, some of them complaining about things they'd only seen me do. "You yelled at a waiter when I brought my wife out to dinner," a man yelled. I pushed passed them, cutting through stopped traffic to get away.

            "You've done this before," a man yelled out his window.

            I kept my head down.

            An adolescent girl stopped me. She said, "I sold you a jelly donut eleven months ago. Was it good?"

            "I don't know."

            "Huh? Well, you left powdered sugar all over the table. I was surprised that you didn't lick it clean with your slimy tongue."

            I scrunched my eyes and looked around. All over the city people were stopping to relate whatever trivial events they remembered from whatever slight connections they had made. One woman holding a pocketbook with a dog in it talked into her phone. She said, "The year I turned three I wet the sheets thirty-one times so that my mother would come in to get me."

            I finally made it to the Diamond District. Kelly was outside, and a street vendor stood with her listing all the dates she had bought something from him. He walked away mid thought when he saw me.

            I said, "I have to talk to you."

            She said, "We talked forty-eight minutes ago."

            "Things are really weird in the city," I said.

            "You're telling me. We went from our busiest day to straight dead. Your hand is bleeding. The other one bled the day after we got married and you broke the window to get in through the fire escape."

            I said, "So I saved the day that time."

            "By losing the key?"

            "Do you remember anything good about me?"

            She said, "I remember you making dinner once and saying it was for us. Your favorite: peanut chicken. The rice was hard. Cheap wine."

            "What about Florida? Tell me everything."

            "You talked about money the whole way down. The inside of the car smelled like wet cigarettes. We stayed in a musty hotel. I had sex with you four times in four nights because I thought you were going to propose, but you didn't, not until I asked you to. The food made my stomach feel bloated. You wore some ridiculous Hawaiian shorts."

            I said, "What about our wedding day?"

            "I had such a headache by the end of it."

            As an impulse, to stop her, I took out the veiny paper and held it up close to her face.

            She said, "Is that the name of your new fantasy world?"

            "This is the word forget. It means to not remember."

            "That doesn't make sense, like the time you passed out in the bathroom with the door locked even though the lock was broken."

            "It's a real thing. Or it used to be. It means to not remember."

            "That's like saying 'Not time.' Is this your science-fiction crap again? Oh, I hated reading all those stories and having to tell you they were good."

            "I burned those up."

            She said, "I wish I could burn up the memory of them in my brain."

            "You can. It's called forgetting."

            "Excuse you," she said. "There's so much in your past that makes you grotesque. It's overpowering, all the unfulfilling parts from our time together." She shivered. "You overflowed the toilet eight times during our marriage. You threw up in your sleep four times. You complained about all the jobs you had eleven hundred and twenty-one different days. We fought..."

            I ran. People tried to stop me. Hands grabbed my jacket and I had to yank myself free. A little boy chased after me yelling,"Mommy! That's the man! That's him!"

            I had no idea who the boy was. I ran.

            Hailing livery cabs didn't work. They were all stopped, the drivers telling bystanders about their miserably monotonous workdays. I couldn't escape the New York City streets. People clogged every sidewalk, relaying the most random, unimportant happenings, trying to somehow dispel them from their brains. But there were too many. Too many. Too many.

            

Reviews

[TerryMcD]

Hey Chris. I quite enjoyed this piece. It's right up my alley. Experimental. Bizarre. A new reality built from the humdrum reality. What can I say. You're writing is sharp but your story kind bounces a bit or wanders in a way that I don't know is needed. Perhaps that means you need keep it more to the main idea of one word that would be expunged from the world (a truly interesting idea) - maybe that means shorter. Or give yourself more time to flesh out other ideas, such as the novel and writer idea. Also I think like many of us - many being me - your story starts about a paragraph in. Say it begins with people inexplicably donating money. I guess the paper and skin kind of throws me.

Still I really enjoyed - thought-provoking, imaginative, strange in a positive way. I'll post some things that you might enjoy. Thanks for this.

[Chris Orza]

Great advice. I loved that first line too much. I should've known it needed to be cut.

[Ania L]

So much I like about this piece. Your writing is sublime at times:

One black word marked the gray paper. Palm prints of blood dirtied it.

Almost poetic, but easy to read, which is tough to do. X

[Nusquam Esse]

This is superb, a very original idea put down masterfully. This is one of the best short stories I have seen on here. It made me think, and that is a VERY good thing. Thanks a ton for an amazing share!

[maissa]

it's great you are really talented :)