Change Places with Me (11 page)

“Memory Enhancement.” Rose just sat there. “Cooper—my friend—knew it. He was right. You . . . you tampered with my memories.”

“It’s a bit more complicated, Rose. . . . Okay, where do I begin?” The lady paused, as if Rose could help her out, give her a hint. Swiveling in her chair, she glanced at her watch. “Have you got your phone with you? No? Use mine. You need to call your mother so we can get this all straightened out.”

“She’s my stepmother.”

“Yes, of course; she told me your history. Evelyn referred to you as her daughter, just so you know. And you two do look alike—the blue eyes.”

The lady’s ID pic on her phone showed a yellow parakeet on her shoulder. Rose fastened onto this. “Very cute bird,” she said brightly. “At the animal hospital where I work, they don’t take parakeets. No exotics. Where do you go when she’s sick?”

“It’s a
he
. I have a vet who makes home visits, and—” She swiveled some more. “You weren’t so chatty last week.”

Why am I even talking about birds?
Rose wondered. The chair
seemed to clamp itself down on her as if she might try to escape. She tapped in Evelyn’s number.

“Hello?” Evelyn said tentatively.

“It’s me—Rose,” she said, in case Evelyn got confused by the unfamiliar ID pic.

“Where are you? Are you okay?” Evelyn’s voice shook. “You said you were going out for brunch and coming straight home. Hours went by. You didn’t have your phone. I was worried sick. Where are you?”

“I’m at Forget-Me-Not.”

There was a pause on the other end. “Oh. So this is Dr. Star’s phone? Is she with you?”

Rose looked at the lady. “Are you Dr. Star?”

The lady turned the nameplate around. It said DR.
.

“Yes,” Rose said into the phone.

“Stay right there. I’m on my way.” Evelyn hung up.

“She’s on her way, Dr. Star,” Rose said.

Dr. Star started swiveling again. “You might as well know, it’s not my real name—everyone who works at Forget-Me-Not is Dr. Star. We’re affiliated with the practice at the mall in Spruce Hills, called Memory Lane. Everyone there is Dr. Star, too.”

“Isn’t that kinda awkward? Everyone who comes here meets Dr. Star, so if they tell someone about it later—”

“But that’s the point. People don’t remember coming
here—at least they’re not supposed to.” She gave Rose a wary glance. “And nobody else knows about what’s happened, either, not husbands or wives or children or friends or coworkers. It was different with your stepmother—she had to know because by law you’re a child.”

“So you met her. . . .”

“Last Saturday.”

“While I was at the zoo,” Rose said with some force. “I mean, the Bronx Global Conservation Center.”

Dr. Star was shaking her head. “We should wait for your stepmother, but . . . Rose, you were right here with me. Evelyn was in the hall, reading a book. You said your dad had taken you to the zoo when you were a child, so a visit to the zoo was, shall we say, arranged. We’re very thorough; we give plenty of visual and auditory cues, animal images and videos, and the brain fills in all the rest—the smell of the animals, maybe the silky feel of alpaca hair at the petting zoo, or the taste of an ice-cream sandwich.”

“There was no weather.”

“It was a cool fall day with late-afternoon sun. That should’ve registered.”

“The zoo was all wrong today.”

“Oh, you actually went to the zoo? That’s not good.” She
tsk
ed.

“I don’t understand.” Rose felt dizzy. The chair tightened its grip even more. “What memories were erased? And why would my stepmother force me to do this? I’m happy, finally happy, bursting with happiness.”

“Rose—”

“She’s always dragging me to doctors and therapists and treatments. They don’t work. They’re not for me. This couldn’t have been my idea.”

Dr. Star considered her for a moment. “Well, it was and it wasn’t.”

The intercom buzzed.

“Goodness, Rose, you only called her five minutes ago! What did she do, fly here?” Dr. Star got up to answer the buzzer, leaving the door wide open behind her.

“I’m here for my daughter,” Evelyn said over the intercom, breathlessly.

Rose got up, took a couple of steps, and caught a glimpse of Evelyn out in the hall. Evelyn didn’t look well. Her skin was splotchy and raw; her hair, unbelievably, unkempt. And she’d forgotten a book.

Rose, with all her compassion, should’ve hurried to her stepmother and said a few words, but she couldn’t move any closer. Evelyn knew about Forget-Me-Not, about the obliteration of memories. How could Evelyn have done this to her, something so sweeping, so invasive, so . . . what was the word her dad had used about Evelyn?

Everlasting.

Dr. Star came back and closed the door, leaving Evelyn in the hall. “Please sit, Rose. We need to sort you out, help you remember everything. Company policy, should someone find his or her way back to the facility.”

Rose still stood there. “Can I sit somewhere else?”

“Everyone loves that chair!” Dr. Star said, sitting in her swivel chair and swiveling. “They want to order one and get frustrated when I tell them they’ll never remember even sitting in it.”

Rose sank into the chair, which molded itself to her body like a marshmallow with muscle.

“First,” Dr. Star said, “you need to be reminded . . . that is, you need to be
told
what it is we do and don’t do here. ME—that’s what we call Memory Enhancement—is not memory alteration, or erasure, or anything like that. All of your memories, every single one of them, have been and always will be yours.”

But that didn’t make sense. It did nothing to explain why Rose was so overwhelmingly confused. She did her best to listen carefully, follow every word.

“Memory erasure is, frankly, barbaric. The consequences can be disastrous, with devastating side effects that can be worse than the original memories themselves. Remember Hypno-Friends? Don’t get me started on that fiasco. The only memory we actually manipulate is the memory of your visit—three hours, give or take, the trivial amount of time you spend here with us. It’s crucial that you don’t remember going through the ME procedure. This is because your conscious mind simply wouldn’t accept the fact that we can accomplish in hours what usually requires months, if not years, of psychological treatment. No matter the problem, it can be solved as easily as popping a balloon. We can’t have you recalling that, can we?
But, once again, all your memories are right where they should be, perfectly preserved. Aside from your memory of last Saturday, that is.” She turned her computer screen to face Rose and clicked it on. “Here, this will explain it.”

An ad started, in highest res and surround-stereo. It featured a young woman in a red convertible. “I got hit by a car last year and had to get seventeen stitches in my leg,” the young woman said cheerfully. “But it was more than a scar. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t even cross the street. I just stayed inside my house, a prisoner of fear. Until I went for Memory Enhancement!”

We erase only the pain
, flashed across the bottom of the screen.
You’ll still be you, with your memories intact . . . a happier you.

“All it took was one session to give me a whole new outlook. Memory Enhancement doesn’t erase or alter the memory of the accident. Imagine the complications! What about my family, my friends, everyone who had seen me in the hospital and in rehab? No, I remember the accident perfectly—Memory Enhancement simply dissociates the emotions I have from the memory itself, and replaces them with serenity and understanding. My new attitude? Accidents happen! No biggie! Of course, I don’t remember getting my memory enhanced. I thought I’d spent the day at the gym. Just look at me now,” she said, turning the corner, hair streaming in the wind. “Accidents happen!” she called out again with a big smile. “No biggie!”

There were words on a crawl below the woman as she spoke:
Actress portrayal. Based on composite events. Results may vary.

She had seen this ad before. She’d woken from a nightmare,
gone to the living room, sat in the blue chair, opened her phone, and watched videos for the rest of that night, until it got light outside.

But she hadn’t been Rose, then.

“Did I do this?” she said quietly, almost to herself.

“No,” answered Dr. Star. “You, Rose, did not.”

“So, I mean . . .” God, she was really starting to freak out here. Panic filled her throat, and waves of sadness washed over her, and there was anger, too, coursing through her veins. These feelings so clearly didn’t belong to Rose—they had to be connected to something she couldn’t remember, despite Dr. Star’s insistence. “I had something erased. I must have. Something’s missing. Something with . . . my dad?”

“Rose, I promise you. Your father is still there.”

She thought about Evelyn in the hall, beneath a low-hanging spider plant. “This had to be my stepmother’s idea—so she could take something away from me. It’s the only explanation.”

“Actually, Rose, your stepmother was concerned and asked me, privately, about side effects and risks. There are none that are statistically significant, as I told her. I don’t know how much it helped. She gave her permission, but it was difficult for her—I could see that.”

“No, that can’t be right.” Rose wrapped her arms around herself.

Dr. Star called up another video. “We require proof of consent, in case we need to demonstrate the procedure was done voluntarily.”

The video played.

And Rose saw a crystal clear image on the screen, a girl in a flannel shirt and denim overalls; she had limp brown hair with bangs so long you couldn’t see her eyes. But you could hear her voice clearly. “I fully understand what’s going to happen to me,” she said. “I just want to say that I want Memory Enhancement. I want it more than anything. I want it with every cell in my body.”

“Do you see now?” Dr. Star said.

I didn’t do this,
Rose thought, reeling as she recalled what she had known all along.
Clara did.

Yes. Clara had wanted this, unquestioningly. She’d shaken Evil Lynn awake at dawn, told her to call the nearest Memory Enhancement clinic. A recording said they opened at nine. She’d sat and waited. Evil Lynn had never heard of Memory Enhancement and talked to her, greatly troubled after an hour of researching it online. There were some problems, Evil Lynn had said; it was too new and untested; it was something to think about for a few days and not leap into. But she’d said
Please
, over and over, and when Evil Lynn then said yes, she said
Thank you.
Finally, the office opened. What luck—she could go that afternoon; they’d had a cancellation. Why would anyone cancel anything so miraculous? Don’t plan to do anything afterward, she was told—you’ll just sleep and sleep. Evil Lynn tried to get her to eat breakfast. She wasn’t a bit hungry. Evil Lynn asked if she wanted to sleep a few hours. She couldn’t lie still. She carefully went over the route there on her phone, again and again,
memorizing the names of streets, even visualizing all the turns. On the walk over, she didn’t have to refer to the phone once; she could’ve made the trip in her sleep. Evil Lynn kept asking if she was absolutely sure about this.

Yes, Clara was absolutely sure. Because the woman in the red convertible had actually done it.

She had changed places with herself.

“You were given a shot of Alitrol,” Dr. Star said.

“Yes, on my jaw.” She pointed to the spot. “It’s been hurting all week.”

“Unrelated. The needle we use is tiny and doesn’t even leave a mark.”

“Maybe you hit a nerve.”

Dr. Star tightened her lips.

Had Rose just hit a nerve here, too? “If I was a frog, that spot would be my tympanum.”

Dr. Star shrugged at that and turned her screen back to face her. “Last week, the special light we use plus the Alitrol put you into a state we call IT—Irresistible Trance.”

“A trance,” Rose said. Clara’s life in the glass coffin had been a kind of trance. Had she traded in that trance for a new one?

“It is most certainly not a parlor trick. Just like the woman in the ad said, Memory Enhancement is a proven technology that
works with a person’s own memories and realigns the emotions attached to those memories. That’s all.” Dr. Star peered at her computer. “I’ve never dealt with a case like this before, though it’s part of the training, of course. Here we are, breakthrough, blue light . . .” She took a few moments to read, and then she gestured toward the tall standing lamp. “We use the red light during ME, which gives the room a lovely glow.”

“Red light—I see it when I wake up.”

“That has been reported in extremely rare cases, as well. Harmless and temporary,” she added with emphasis. “Now, the blue light; that’s what we need to use in case of breakthrough.” She got up, fiddled with the lamp. “Wait, I have to change the setting—it’s stuck. My first time doing this— There!” She clicked it on.

Rose had to adjust to the light, the color of the ocean when a storm approaches. At first she thought maybe she was seeing things behind her eyelids, but she was blinking, which meant her eyes must be open. She felt she was half awake, half asleep, and half something else . . . but that was too many halves. . . . Would she be waking up to blue light from now on?

“Does the light affect you, too?” she asked.

“I wear special contacts,” Dr. Star replied.

“So your eyes aren’t really green?”

“They are not.” Dr. Star sounded a little disappointed. “Now, I’ll walk you through it. You will remember things as I tell them to you. We began by talking about memory, which we hold sacred here at Forget-Me-Not; we honor and cherish
it. Without memory, one philosopher said, we’d be no better than a looking glass, constantly receiving images and reflecting them back, never the better or worse for it.”

“You mean mirror.”

“It was a quote, Rose; no one says ‘looking glass’ anymore. Memory molds our personalities, shapes our possibilities, lends depth to our consciousness, depth like the buried cities near Mount Vesuvius, one on top of the other, the present cities on top of increasingly long-ago ruins of cities.”

“I tried talking to Mr. Slocum about Mount Vesuvius. He didn’t want to hear it.”

Dr. Star ignored this and adjusted the lamp.

The blue light seemed to intensify, as if the ocean was darkening, or maybe her eyes were playing tricks on her.

Dr. Star’s teeth looked like smooth glowing stones. “When a person suffers a terrible experience, the memory is seared into the brain. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is beneficial. Next time there’s a challenge to be faced, she’ll remember what happened, remain alert, and handle things better. But in some cases the memory is as fresh as the trauma itself and doesn’t diminish over time. It’s like a dog that keeps bringing the pain back to you, wagging its tail. The young woman in the car? She put it all behind her. Accidents happen! In your case—your father died seven years ago, and you weren’t, shall we say, moving on?” Dr. Star smiled briefly; was that kindness shining through? “Here is the beauty, the art of Memory Enhancement. While the red light is on and Alitrol is in your system, we come
up with new perspectives, new feelings to attach to your memories, to your sense of yourself. Think of it as a salad bar. You pick and choose. A slice of cucumber, a tomato wedge, a radish flower.”

Yes. Clara had wanted so much. She was starving.

“Best to narrow it down, I told you. You can’t take everything; your plate would be overfull and you would never finish. We chose happiness, of course. Every day was like a gift you didn’t need to unwrap. If sadness reared its ugly head, I told you there’s no sadness, no need for it; if anger flared up, it could be banished like a bad king, never to return. You said you had no friends, that you had one long ago but she was lost to you now. I said that once you became happy, bursting with happiness, you would find yourself with lots of friends, the old one and many new ones, and do all kinds of fun things together, and have a boyfriend, too, why not? Most of all, you wanted to live your life fully, not sit at the bus stop and miss the bus or some such thing. I told you that you were at the center of your life, not the edge. Oh, and you had to love animals.”

“Because the girl in the jean jacket had a dog. She’d put a sweater on the dog.”

Dr. Star shook her head. “You kept saying, ‘Make me like her’—even though she was a stranger.”

But to Clara the girl in the jean jacket wasn’t a stranger. Clara knew her through and through, inside and out.

“I asked you to come up with a new name or nickname for yourself; that often helps the enhanced person seal the deal.
You latched onto Rose immediately. ‘My name is Rose,’ you said. ‘I am Rose Hartel.’”

Of course she was Rose. On the back of the jean jacket, for all the world to see, there was an embroidered rose, lovingly sewn by the girl’s mother.

“Then you took a virtual visit to the zoo. It was Rose who saw the animals; Rose had a perfectly wonderful time. You were so eager to have people call you by your new name. I specifically told your stepmother it would help things along if she called you Rose. I wonder if she decided not to—?”

“She called me Rose.”

Dr. Star snapped off the blue light.

“You were happy, Rose, weren’t you?”

“I still am,” she said, in her despair.