“He had an aneurysm from that car crash on 32nd Street.”
“I heard a fair few people did.”
If you decided to connect yourself to the city, you had a rough time when there were accidents.
“It got Jolene.”
Shit. The family would be hard-put. Jolene was indispensable. And Ottla would be devastated.
“Sending plenty of in-the-loops.” I’d do a proper card later.
“She’ll appreciate it, when she wakes up.”
If she wakes up, I thought. Certainly the message would be ready before Jolene was. Axon Post were pretty fast these days.
“But forget about that for now. Something strange is going on around here…”
The real reason Ulyana had come to my office, in this run-down old part of Time.
“The End of Time Detective Agency is always open. What’s happened?”
“Recently, haven’t you found your memory only functions properly when you’re thinking about places far away?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I remember Greece and London as though I were there yesterday. But I can’t remember anything about this place. In fact,” Ulyana shivered, “I barely recall how I got here.”
“Interesting.” I rubbed my bare skull, shiny under a halogen electron. The one dim electron the Brainland City Council afforded the whole building. I was lucky I could use it most of the time – the only other tenant being…
Being who?
Wait.
I couldn’t recall who the tenant was. Who my landlord was. How I got here, became a detective. “Yes. I, too…I’ve forgotten things close to me.” But my childhood distant in time was clear and my visits to other places.
“You understand my case then. What do you think? Can you solve it?”
“I’d have to leave Brainland for a while.”
“And?”
“That presents a problem because I’m too close to this place to remember if I need to be here.”
I’ll watch the office for you.”
Always the drive to be elsewhere.
My dash past the Decagon House. I always remembered it for some reason.
This was a well-trod road…
Outskirts of town. Brainland was pink with sunset and pulsed behind me in the heat.
Now I remembered more than the family. More than Jolene, Ottla and the others.
The Decagon House’s cruel story I remembered too, though I won’t explain it now.
Of course you can’t inspect yourself in Brainland. You need to be outside this place. Then you’ll remember. That’s its function.
Nerve farms stretched about me, fields of stringy red beans. I heard a distant cry. A young boy. I ignored him.
There was one more question: this place’s relationship with time. I lived and worked at the End of Time. That was the only reason, it seemed, I had become a detective: I alone had all history behind me, I felt the anxiety of influence, had capacity to reflect, things the rest of Brainland consciously denied itself.
I meditated; I moved closer to myself. In doing so, I fractured, I was exposed. When I returned home, I’d forget again.
verso folio 