The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) (6 page)

WINTER

Mom dragged me around to a few high-end shops at the Hub. I wasn’t into it. I kept asking her about Tokyo. And I kept getting the same robotic responses—until she became irritated and told me to drop it. Then she changed the subject back to me.

She ended up grilling me about all the little details of my life in the last three years. How was I doing in school? Who were my friends? Did I like anybody special? I shrugged a lot.

She wasn’t really asking the right questions.

The next day, Mom suddenly had so much to do at the office. She asked if I minded being left on my own.

“That’s fine,” I said.
More than fine.

But after she left, I realized there wasn’t much to do in our squeaky-clean, all-new house. I could watch ’casts or read. I flicked through a few ’casts on the big screen—news mostly. A rash of car bombings in Philly.
Hamilton’s ID program will save us from Philly’s fate
, some random guy said. Our mayor, Albert Mignon, chided those who hadn’t complied yet.
Your procrastination may jeopardize the safety and security of your community
, he said with an icy smile. The Canadians were protesting the new wall across the border. Same old crap.

I couldn’t sit still. Never could. I needed something to do, but there was zero tinkering material in the house. No tools. No found objects. Nothing interesting to take apart. Sure, I could disassemble the fancy pasta maker or vacuum cleaner that looked like it had never been used. But I like my found objects to be more
found
. As in rescued from the trash, swapped for at meetups, or bartered for on the Hour Exchange.

Micah is a good source. He lives in a salvage yard and helps the owner reclaim old houses. He’d bring me bits of rusted iron, busted clocks, smashed electronics—the stuff that couldn’t be fixed up and resold. It was the perfect shit to bang into sculptures.

Or I’d go down by the railroad tracks to the old transportation museum scrapyard. All the cool stuff that was once in the museum downtown—rockets, trains, satellites, old cars—ended up on the scrap heap after the museum was sold to Security Home Depot, who’d turned the building into expensive, high-security lofts. Someone was always hanging around the yard making something interesting out of old train parts, ancient printers, and the odd solar panel. That’s where Micah and I met, at one of Big Steven’s welding workshops. And that guy, Roger, who taught underground networking, knew his shit so well he went white hat not too long ago.

I needed to get out, but I was restricted to Tamarind Bay for the duration. However long that was. Until I was deemed sane enough, I guess, to be trusted in the outside world.

So I was off to the Hub again. I checked the directory on my mobile as I rode the Sky into the Hub. Nope. There wasn’t a single junk shop or thrift store in all of Tamarind Bay. But I’d seen a craft store and a gadget place that might have something I could work with.

The craft store was a bust. It mostly sold cheap art supplies, party balloons, and gift baskets. I did get some pliers and copper wire from the jewelry-making section, though. So not a total bust.

The gadget store was better. It at least had programmable building blocks and replacement remotes. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but I felt better having something.

I picked up a Bento Box from Ben Maki’s Sushi and sat out in the open-air court near the Sky platform. I shoved shrimp
nigiri
into my mouth as I looked up info on Tokyo on my mobile.

Mom said they’d lived in Shibuya Ward near the Nomura headquarters. Shibuya was not only the home of the IT industry in Tokyo, the guide said, it was also the hip district for young people. Shibuya’s fashion and nightlife were famous. It’s where the Japanese schoolgirl culture started in the 1990s. I saw pictures of big-haired blonde Japanese girls wearing plaid school uniforms—too much like the ones in my closet—and tons of makeup. They almost looked like dolls. Thank goodness the look had nearly died out.

The guide said there were dozens of museums in Tokyo, including the Matori Contemporary Art Museum near Shibuya Station. I flipped through the exhibits. I almost wished I’d gone with my folks. Last year the museum had this exhibition of robotic sculptures that looked extremely cool. Anya Reismuller was the artist. An Austrian engineer-turned-artist. She used to work at Nomura.

From what I could tell, she was doing some fascinating things with self-replicating machines. They’re machines that can build copies of themselves out of raw materials around them. You could send one to Mars, and the machine would build copies out of ore it mined on the planet’s surface. In theory. Reismuller’s sculptures built themselves out of interesting materials, like beer cans and flip-flops. The coolest one built copies of itself—out of itself. The process kept repeating—

“Nice hair,” said a girl with perfectly smooth, exactingly trimmed hair. She was standing in front of my table. A gaggle of equally polished girls stood by the Sky platform. Not a spiked hair or old piece of clothing in the bunch.

I held up a finger and took a moment to finish what I was reading on my mobile.

It wasn’t like the scene had never played out before. We had girls in my old school that made themselves feel better by running down anyone different. Velvet had taught me how to play these things. I finished the article and slid my mobile shut.

“I’m sorry. You were saying something?” I looked up. Eye contact and confidence were key, according to Velvet.

“Nice hair,” the girl said again with less certainty.

I stared at her for a few seconds. I really wanted to say something like “my poor blind grandmother worked really hard on it this morning. Then she died.” But master Velvet always said to never give them anything to latch on to. Be smooth, glassy, and hard.
Book of Velvet.
Chapter 23, Verse 3000.

“Thanks,” I said as glossily as I could. “Is there anything else? No? Cool.” I didn’t wait for her reply. I went back to reading about Reismuller’s new exhibition in Singapore.

“Freak,” the girl said as she turned to shoo her crowd toward the fro-yo shop. I could hear more whispering and giggling, but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of looking up. Act like you barely notice them. That’s what they want. Attention.

I should call Velvet.

“Ladies,” I heard someone say, followed by a new round of whispering and giggling.

I snuck a peek to see Aiden passing by the girls. The leader girl stepped toward him as she threw a superior look my way. I heard another one say something to her pal about Aiden inheriting Nomura North America some day.

“You’re looking glossy today.” He flashed a very charming, boarding school smile at the pack leader—and kept on walking toward me. Leader girl threw me an icy look.

I tried hard not to laugh.

Aiden flipped around the chair in front of me and straddled it backward. “Win-chan, did you tell these charming young automatons to go eff themselves?”

I smiled.

“Did you know that there’s a Skywalk in Tokyo, too?” I asked.

“What are you reading?”

“Just a little research about Tokyo. Mom and Dad were there for three years and apparently did absolutely nothing. Work, shop, sleep.”

He scooted his chair closer so he could peer at my mobile screen. I showed him some of the cool things I’d found, like the Reismuller exhibit.

“Have you been to Japan?” I asked him.

“Not since I was maybe five or six. I remember riding a very fast train into this huge station. Mom and I got lost. When we finally emerged outside, we were in a sea of people all trying to cross the street at once.”

“That must have been Shibuya Station.” I showed him a pic of the massive pedestrian crossing out front.

“Yeah. I’d never seen so many people. And there were older kids dressed like old-timey rock stars. Oh, I remember a dog statue.”

I scrolled through another few pics until I got to Hachiko, the dog immortalized outside the station.

“On the train, Mom told me the story about how the dog waited faithfully every day at the station for his master to come home. Except one day, he didn’t get off the train—the master, that is. He died. The dog kept waiting for him—until he died. The dog’s body is in a museum nearby. Mom wouldn’t take me to see the body.”

I had a far better picture of Japan from Aiden’s sketchy six-year-old memory than I’d gotten from two grown people who’d lived in the city for three years. Something didn’t add up.

“How was Switzerland?” I asked. Aiden had been there the same length of time my parents had been in Japan.

“Oh, I worked. I shopped. Didn’t see a thing.”

“Shut up,” I said, laughing.

“School was okay. Bern’s a beautiful place—if you like Gothic cathedrals and medieval castles and snowcapped Alps—but it’s kinda boring compared to Zurich. Not too much to do on the weekends except study and ski and drink.” Aiden described the clock tower, a sculpture he’d seen in Lucerne that reminded him of my garden, plus a few places he’d explored. Underground tunnels. Crypts. Clock towers. The whole hacker, adventurer, rattle-on-doors thing he loves.

Then we talked about Tamarind Bay, the school here, and how I was going to miss my friends and my grandfather. I didn’t mention Jet. She’s the lead tattoo artist at Grandfather’s main shop downtown. I have a crush on her.

“I don’t think I’ll really miss anyone—except my mom. And maybe she’ll come to the States more often now.” Aiden’s voice sounded far away.

“Do you remember when my parents left for Japan?”

“No, not really. I think I was already at Bern Academy by then.”

“I remember that now. It was about a week or so before my parents disapp—went away. Right in the middle of a semester.”

“Mom said she wanted me close to her for a while. I thought it meant they were getting divorced or something. The next thing I heard was that you were at Mr. Yamada’s. Mom said not to bring up your folks’ trip if I talked to you, because you were really freaked out about it. And you never brought it up.”

“Why don’t I remember them leaving or ever calling or visiting?”

“My dad hardly ever called me. Do you think your grandfather took you to TFC after they left?”

I shook my head. It sounded plausible, but Grandfather hates TFC. He always says that memories, good or bad, are part of who we are. Besides, I had other memories that didn’t quite fit with that explanation. “I remember being angry and scared about them being gone. But I wasn’t mad at them. And I remember Grandfather hiring lawyers and going to court to get them out of the Big D.” I said the last part quietly.

Aiden’s face looked like there was a tug-of-war going on in his brain.

“Okay, give. What did they tell you about me?”

“Truth? Mom said you were having paranoid delusions about your parents being gone. Crazy shit about the government taking them. That’s why you went to the hospital. That’s why Uncle Brian and Aunt Spring came home.”

And why Aiden came home.

Maybe I was crazy, but the whole Japan thing didn’t add up.

I needed to hear it from Mom and Dad. I needed to hear it from my Sasuke-san, but Mom was still too mad at him to let me talk to him. Or any of my friends, for that matter. Micah would know if I was crazy. Velvet would, too, but this is more the kind of thing I would have told Micah. He does serious better than Velvet. But someone had blocked my calls to anyone who might have been able to back me up. So Mom and Dad would have to do.

Aiden caught my hand as I pushed away from the table. “Winter, why did you send me that book?” he asked in a hushed tone.

That snapped me out my spiraling thoughts.

“What book? I don’t remember sending you anything.”

Aiden glanced at the security cams hanging over the food court. I hadn’t really noticed them before.

“Come to the car with me,” he whispered. “I’ll give you a ride home,” he added more loudly.

The hummingbirds fluttered in my brain.

AIDEN

“You’re as bad as Micah,” Winter said as we walked through the security checkpoint into the parking garage. “Paranoid,” she clarified when I raised my eyebrow Dad-style.

Maybe she was right, but I couldn’t take the chance that the security cams would pick us up.

The universe muttered its agreement as a camera swiveled and followed us to the waiting car.

We slipped into the back of the limo, and I flicked on the privacy screen between us and Jao before taking out the book.

“Nice.” Winter grabbed the book from my hands. It was a book on kinetic sculpture, after all. She flipped through the first few pages, devouring the pictures as if she’d never seen them before.

“I sent you this?” she asked.

“Keep going,” I told her.

She flipped through a few more pages before she gasped. She’d found the secret stash.

“Recognize them?”

She pulled out the
Memento
s and studied them. “No,” she said. She pressed one of the pages to her nose and inhaled. “Uh, I don’t think so, at least.”

But I could see she was scanning that hard-drive brain of hers, looking for some lost bit of data. I could almost hear the clicking.

“The work definitely looks like Micah’s, though,” Winter finally said.

She reminded me that Micah is her homeless skater friend who draws. And who is evidently paranoid. Maybe rightly so.

“He’s good,” I said.

She nodded, flipping through the comics again. “These must be new. I don’t remember them, and he shows me everything. I mean
everything
.”

“But you sent them to me.” I said it slowly so it would sink in.

She shrugged helplessly. “Sorry.” She pulled out her mobile and showed me a pic of a curly-headed kid with glasses and a scruffy goatee. Micah Wallenberg, her contact list said. “His number is blocked on my mobile. Same with Velvet and the rest of my friends.” She sounded angry now. Aunt Spring must have done that in her motherly zeal to keep Winter safe. From what, I don’t know.

“Let me try.” I spoke Micah’s name and number into my mobile. I got a weird message saying this person was unavailable.

Then I tried Velvet. It connected, and I handed my mobile to Winter.

“Velvet? I’m so glad to hear your voice! My mobile’s blocked. Hmm? This is Aiden’s. You know, my cousin. I’m okay. No, I’m restricted to the compound—” They chatted for several minutes at an even higher rate of speed. Then Winter abruptly handed the mobile back to me. “She wants to talk to you.”

It wasn’t much of a two-way conversation. I did a lot of agreeing, including agreeing to come by the store where she worked so I could tell her in person how Winter really was.

That was fine with me. I had some things I wanted to ask her.