In Which Mackenzie Got It From Everybody
I couldn’t hold it against Rowan that he didn’t immediately launch into answering my question, much less answering every mystery of my childhood and life to date. After all, from his point of view, the past day or so had to have been just as mystifying and frightening as it had been for me.
Watching me collapse to the floor and then come back up just as insistent as before but in a completely different direction couldn’t have helped make things any clearer.
That’s the benefit of hindsight, though. At the time, I just wanted to know what the hell was going on… what I was missing, what had been done to me.
“What just happened?” he said.
“I don’t know!” I said. “I think I questioned something I wasn’t supposed to question, and it… broke. Inside me, I mean.”
“Something is broken inside you?”
“Okay, that sounds really dire when you put it like that,” I said. “What I mean is, someone suggested to me earlier today… hold on, bad choice of words. Someone put forth the idea to me earlier today that I might have been acting under a telepathic suggestion that was stopping me from thinking about certain subjects. I didn’t believe this, but… it’s possible I was being prevented from believing it. A minute ago, right before I fell over on the floor, I noticed a discrepancy and thought about it, and… snap.”
“Snap?”
“That’s what it was like,” I said. “Like a dam breaking… only there evidently wasn’t anything in the reservoir behind it. I’ve been told my memory might have been tampered with, but I don’t know anything that I didn’t know when I woke up this morning.”
“Well, that’s a shocking indictment of the academic program here,” he said, putting the end of his sleeve in front of his mouth as he sort of giggled.
“Rowan,” I said. “I’m going to ask you this once. Are you fucking with me? Is this all a joke, this stuff about us knowing each other?”
“No,” he said. “Khersis! No, Mackenzie! It’s not a joke. I make smartass comments when I’m nervous, and as I recall, you do, too, sometimes, but I’m serious.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then so am I. Tell me everything.”
“Where do I even start?”
“How about the beginning?” I said. “No, wait… how about the end? We were friends, I went away. What happened?”
“I told you, nobody knew,” he said. “I thought it had something to do with the… you know…”
“Rowan, I don’t know,” I said.
“The psychic stuff,” he said. “The games we used to play. Your mom had told us it wasn’t a good idea to mess around like that, and you stopped, but stuff kept happening, and then when you both disappeared, I thought… I thought maybe we’d caused it somehow, you know? I know, I know, you don’t know. But I spent years reading up on the subtle arts, ‘psionics’… I Was A Teenage Mindreader and stuff like that, all the coming-of-age stories. There was this one about a pyrokinetic… it made me think of you.”
“Was there a fire?” I asked.
“Some kids said, but I don’t think they knew better than anyone else,” he said. “It was more just the whole… well, the story didn’t have a happy ending, okay? I was looking around for the answer to a mystery, and the only thing I knew about you that was different from anyone else was that you maybe might have been a bit psychic…”
“Tell me about that,” I said. “You seemed pretty sure I should have been able to read your mind, when we bumped into each other in Gilcrease. We did bump into each other, right?”
“Are your recent memories of me shaky, too?”
“No, nothing’s shaky… whatever you think I should remember isn’t there,” I said. “What I meant was, that was a coincidence, right? You weren’t looking for me, or lurking around there specifically so I’d run into you?”
“I came to Magisterius University because I knew you were here,” he said. “But I had no idea we were in the same dorm. They keep that kind of thing on a need-to-know basis, and… well, I don’t exactly have a lot of basis for comparison, but the towers don’t seem like the kind of dorm where everyone knows each other.”
“No, they’re really not,” I said. “Within a floor you get little communities and stuff, but… there’s just too many people to have something like a social night for the whole hall or anything like that. Not that that kind of thing is exactly my scene. Anyway, you were going to tell me about me reading your mind.”
“It was like a game we played,” he said. “You know? Trying to guess what the other one is thinking… I don’t even remember what we were talking about when it started, just that I was going to tell you something and then it popped out of your mouth. When I look back at it from the cold light of almost basically adulthood, it wasn’t anything I’d actually call definitive, but it put the idea in our heads, so we started trying to see if we could make it happen again.”
“What, like, ‘I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10’ type stuff?” I said.
“Little bit of that, little bit of what was basically ‘I Spy…’ without the clues,” he said.
“And that was enough to convince the two of us that I could read your mind?”
“No, actually, you were pretty terrible at it,” he said. “But… stuff kept happening. You kept hearing things, knowing things… odd things at odd moments. Sometimes I’d know what you were thinking, too.”
“So maybe you were the telepath,” I said.
“No, because I only ever picked things up from you,” he said. “You got it from everybody.”
“…that seems like a pretty big deal for someone to have expunged from my memory, if it was happening all the time,” I said. “Though, I have it on good authority that memories are associative rather than linear.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means if someone wanted to root out most of the memories that deal with the same thing, they wouldn’t have to… or be able to… look up and down the timeline of my life to find all the instances of it,” I said. “They’d just have to look for clusters. And even if they didn’t get all of it… memories without context aren’t really… well, I don’t know what they are. The fragmented memory of a person I don’t remember playing a game I don’t remember to verify a suspected power that I don’t remember probably isn’t much more than a weird feeling, if I even managed to trigger it somehow.”
“Do you have a lot of weird feelings, Mackenzie?”
“My life is a weird feeling,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “Nothing’s been quite right for me since you left.”
“We… you weren’t in love with me, were you?”
“Mackenzie, I was eight,” he said. “I was in love with grape juice.”
“You were in love with gr…”
“I was trying to make a point about how young I was and I said the most inane thing ever,” he said. “Can we get past it?”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s just, the way you said that…”
“You were my best friend,” he said. “And probably my only real friend. The world felt wrong without you in it.”
“When I think about my childhood, before… what I remember is that my mother was my world,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Rowan, but… I’m not sure I can believe that I felt the same way about you.”
“Well, to be honest, you were a bit older and a full grade ahead of me, so I kind of have to doubt it myself?” he said. “But… I mean, you loved your mom, Mackenzie. Like, people made fun of you for that.”
“That I remember,” I said.
“But we were friends, good friends,” he said. “I can’t imagine I wasn’t important to you.”
“This is the thing that makes no sense,” I said. “I was… someone told me that they thought maybe my mind had been tampered with so I wouldn’t grow up blaming myself for something that wasn’t my fault. But I don’t understand how or why that leads to erasing all memory of you, and apparently significant parts of my childhood with it. I mean, did I have other friends?”
“Yeah… I mean, the way elementary schoolers do,” he said. “We were the ones who hung out almost every day outside of school, but then there were the people you sat with at lunch, and things like birthday parties. Normal stuff.”
“Normal stuff,” I echoed. It sounded normal. It was the kind of thing I remembered going on around me. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“If the block in your head got broken, why don’t you?” he said. “Not that I’m doubting you or anything, I’m just trying to get a handle on the rules.”
“Okay, well, I am not an expert, but I have sat through a couple impromptu lectures about the way the mind works, and I’m friends with someone who is probably one of the most powerful and skilled telepaths on this patch of the surface of the world, statistically,” I said. “And as far as I can tell, there are two things that might have happened here: one, I might have had a bunch of memories erased and/or altered beyond recognition, and two, I might have had some suggestions laid on me that would keep me from thinking about topics relating to them.”
“Might have?”
“I think once you start talking about mental tampering, you have to firmly embrace the whole ‘true knowledge is knowing you know nothing’ thing,” I said. “I mean, I don’t want to take it this far, but if I can accept that my childhood memories were altered, how can I know that my recent memories weren’t? If it’s possible that someone laid a suggestion on me ten years ago that was stopping me from thinking certain things were possible, it’s just as possible that someone laid a whammy on me tonight in order to make me strongly consider it.”
“That’s… that’s a scary way to live.”
“I don’t plan on living like that,” I said. “I mean, if you think about it, the idea that anything you think you know might be a lie and any idea you think was yours might have been put there by someone else is technically true of everyone at every moment… I’m just kind of acutely aware of it right now? My point is, there are these two things that I will say have probably been done to me. The two things aren’t actually connected… I mean, yeah, probably the same person or entity did them, and for the same reason, but one’s not propping up the other.”
“So the memories you lost…”
“I have a sinking feeling they’re not just buried but gone,” I said. “The suggestion was just to keep me from noticing any holes they left, though I’ve been assured the mind does a pretty good job of papering over the cracks all on its own, which probably helped things. In fact, that might be why the suggestion was broken so soon after something came along to challenge it… it might not have had or needed much force to begin with.”
“But why… why would someone do that to you?”
“Like I said, the theory on the table right now is so I wouldn’t feel bad. I’m not saying I buy it, but… well, it’s my favorite theory.”
“I mean, if this was done to help you, why would they take your memories away forever?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It makes a sick kind of sense, if we work on the assumption that I was never supposed to find out that I was ever tampered with, you know? If the memories were there, buried… they could be uncovered. Like I said, I don’t know the rules for this stuff any more than you do, but I have to imagine there’s a lot more that could go wrong in the long term with hidden memories than destroyed ones.”
“Shit, you are so calm about this.”
“It’s… it’s all abstract to me, Rowan,” I said. “You tell me that I know you, I knew you… and nothing in it resonates with anything inside of me. I can’t imagine why you would be lying, or why you would have all these details, so… I guess I accept you’re telling the truth? And I guess that means my memories are wrong? But I know what I know. I remember what I remember.”
“And you don’t remember what you don’t remember,” he said. “You know… I thought I was prepared for anything. When I found out you were alive, I thought… I hoped… that I’d catch up to you and you’d explain that you had to move away for, safety, I guess, because of the demon thing, but you’d thought about me and wished you could get in touch. But I made myself think about all the years that had passed, and how much I’d changed, and how much you must have changed, even without all the… stuff… just, the passage of time, you know? And I thought that maybe we were different people, maybe you’d grown out of missing me… or maybe you never had. I told myself it would be enough to know that you were alive and okay, enough to know the mystery was solved. I even thought that maybe you wouldn’t remember me, the way, you know, you don’t remember people sometimes. I just never thought…”
“You never thought that every trace of your existence would have been wiped from my head,” I said.
“Can you blame me?”
“No,” I said. “Rowan, I don’t… I don’t want to make any promises about the future, about you and me and… whatever. I don’t think that’s fair or realistic. But I want to get back what was taken away from me, and that means getting to know you all over again. I don’t know if that’s going to be enough to get our friendship going again, and I kind of doubt… I mean, realistically, it’s not ever going to be just like it was, whatever it was like. But there’s at least one thing we have in common.”
“What?”
“We’ve both had something taken away from us,” I said. “This was done to us, to both of us. And I know I said the theory on the table is that it was supposed to help me, but… frankly, I had a lot of things done to me after I turned that were supposed to help me.”
“So what do we do?”
“I kind of want to just sit here and have you tell me the story of my life as you remember, but it is approximately ass in the morning,” I said. “And I think we’re likely to just keep going around in circles of clarifications and questions and treading back over the same stuff, and I don’t think it’s going to get better if turn this into an all-nighter.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Like I said before, I don’t really know where to begin.”
“Okay, well… you think about that, get your thoughts in order, and I’ll… I was going to say ‘check in’ with my friends, but I feel like what I should be doing is apologizing. If I wanted to catch up with you tomorrow…?”
“I’m in room 515,” he said. “I’ll probably be there all afternoon.”
“Okay,” I said. “I might bring someone with me… I mean, I haven’t talked to her about it, but if she’s as interested in unraveling this thing as I think she is, then I imagine she’ll be up for it. The question is, how do you feel about having your mind read?”