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Oubliette Stewart C Baker

oubliette“Change your life,” the poster says. “With one simple surgery, you can live fully in the moment. No stress, no worries, no lies.”

The text is accompanied by the usual images. Smiling adults, laughing children, a couple on a sunset beach walking and holding hands. That’s all, but I pick up a brochure anyway–if nothing else, I want to know what kind of charlatan’s trick they’re passing off as science.

“It’s just as easy as it sounds,” the booth girl tells me. “We install a chip in the hippocampus which triggers whenever stress generates neuropsin in the amygdala. The chip tracks the neural connections used to store the event, and simply blocks the brain when it tries to retrieve the memories.”

“So it doesn’t actually make you happier,” I say.

Her smile is startlingly white against the red of her lipstick. “It absolutely does. You’ll live each moment in the moment, without the past dragging you down. And you’ll build happy memories naturally as a result. As you’ll see in that brochure, trial participants showed a marked increase in seratonin after installation of the chip. Many reported that after a few small blackouts in the first week they didn’t even need the chip, because of how great they felt.”

I shake my head and leave without replying.

Still, I keep the brochure.

#

My taxi’s late to the airport, so I miss my scheduled flight. One red-eye later, I stumble in through the door to find Marjorie just slouched there on the sofa watching T.V. like she was when I left four days ago.

I don’t need to check to see the sink of dirty dishes, the microwave dinner boxes littering the counter. These are all familiar friends. Next to the door there’s a wilted rose and a box of chocolates–my usual pre-conference gift, untouched.

Usually I’d ignore it, go do the dishes, take out the trash. Check up on Kate. But I’m stressed from the flight, I guess, or maybe I’ve just finally had enough. I step in front of the T.V., and the blue-white-blue-black-green-red-blue stops its flickering over Marjorie’s face.

Her pupils dilate a little, she blinks a few times. “Oh,” she says.

“Just ‘Oh’? What happened, Marjorie? Tell me what I’m doing wrong, so we can fix this.”

But she just grunts and waits for me to move, so I do, setting in on the dishes, the trash, the dust, the windows–everything that doesn’t need doing and nothing that does, as usual.

By the time I’m finished it’s late afternoon. I stop outside Kate’s room and knock on the door, but she doesn’t answer even when I say I’m home. Just turns up her music. I jiggle the handle, which is locked, and give up. I sit on the bed in mine and Marjorie’s room until night comes in, holding the brochure on my lap and flicking one corner of it with my thumb. What if I could make us both happy?

The next morning I call to set up an appointment. No charlatan’s trick can be worse than this.

#

Summer at the beach, and the sun warm on the back of my neck. There’s a young woman sitting next to me I’ve never seen before, leaned back in a recliner with a drink in one hand. She laughs at something I’ve just said, but I can’t recall what it is, or where I am, or why.

The woman looks at me expectantly, like she’s waiting for me to continue some story, but I just sit there, mouth open. Where’s Marjorie? Where’s Kate?

“Robert,” she says. “Robert, what’s wrong?”

There’s a sudden pressure where my spine meets the base of my skull, and–

#

Rain out a motel window, and I’m watching the redwoods through it. My face is reflected in the dimness of the glass, older and grayer than I remember. Nobody else’s. When did…

I stop myself, focus on the gentle sounds of rain. Feel the peace, I tell myself. Feel the solitude, and learn to enjoy it.

But Marjorie, and–

#

This time, I have a book in my hands. Without looking at the title, I set it down on the table I find next to me, stand, and focus my mind on the past.

Kate’s birth. My wedding with Marjorie, our first date, way back when. Kate on a set of swings, gap-toothed with laughter. Endless summer vacation days of my own as a child, when the afternoon blended seamlessly into evening, and evening into night into day again, with nothing to do but lie there in the grass and breathe its heady greenness, or go swimming at the lake with friends and girls.

The whole time I’m remembering–reliving my past, re-affirming who I am–my body is acting. I’ve picked up the phone and dialed the number from the brochure. I get hold music for fifteen minutes, and almost panic, but then someone answers and the flood of seratonin is enough to get me through the whole conversation, and by the time the familiar pressure starts in at the base of my skull, I’ve arranged for an expert to come to me and remove the chip.

#

After the second surgery, everything changes. I’m still who I was, I think, all those years ago, but at the same time I’m not. I’m the old me, made new.

I call Marjorie, but a stranger answers the phone. Nobody by that name lives there, she says. Eventually I track down Kate. She’s married now, to a woman she introduces as Sarah when we meet by Marjorie’s grave. There are lines along her eyes deeper than any I remember on her mother’s.

“So you’re back,” she says.

“Yeah.” I say. “I’m sorry, Kate. God, I’m so–“

“It’s okay, dad,” she says, placing a hand on my arm. “We can make it okay.”

I nod, unable to speak, and we turn and walk from the grave, from the past, together.

 

 

© Stewart C Baker

Meet the Author

Stewart C Baker

Stewart C Baker

Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian, speculative fiction writer and poet, and the editor-in-chief of sub-Q Magazine. His fiction has appeared in Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, and Flash Fiction Online, among other places. Stewart was born in England, has lived in South Carolina, Japan, and California (in that order), and currently resides in Oregon with his family­­—although if anyone asks, he’ll usually say he’s from the Internet, where you can find him at http://www.infomancy.net/.

14 Comments

  1. crustyjuggler
    May 19, 2014 @ 8:32 pm

    I enjoyed that. Makes you think what living in the moment really means. You can sit there and watch TV, listen to music and ignore things. Or you could experience what life has to offer. Although from this story, a bleaker message comes than what you’d expect. It says to me at least that life is quick, over in a flash and you can spend it doing the same things over and over or experience new things but either way it’s over very quickly.

    Reply

  2. ElinaPatriciaDiLeo
    May 10, 2014 @ 3:34 pm

    Resonances of “Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind”
    http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174158

    Reply

  3. Stewart C Baker
    April 25, 2014 @ 1:04 pm

    Bogdan D Thanks for the read and comment. 🙂

    Reply

  4. Stewart C Baker
    April 25, 2014 @ 1:03 pm

    Thanks, Pete!

    Reply

  5. Stewart C Baker
    April 25, 2014 @ 1:03 pm

    Jauffrey The Scribe Thanks!

    Reply

  6. Jauffrey The Scribe
    April 25, 2014 @ 8:24 am

    DANG! That, may I say, whole heartedly and without reserve, is some masterful prose! 😀
    I thought we were gonna go dystopian (My favorite) for a minute, but I like where this went, where this took me to 🙂

    Reply

  7. Bogdan D
    April 17, 2014 @ 1:22 am

    Gave me a feeling of lost chance, fragmented past and a sort of nostalgic fragrance.

    Reply

  8. Pete Wood
    April 14, 2014 @ 5:32 pm

    Nice Job.
    Looking forward to seeing more of your work.

    Reply

  9. Stewart C Baker
    April 9, 2014 @ 11:23 pm

    MereMorckel Thanks!  I think that’s how it should make the reader feel. 🙂

    Reply

  10. MereMorckel
    April 7, 2014 @ 4:38 pm

    Intense

    Reply

  11. Stewart C Baker
    April 4, 2014 @ 3:50 pm

    Thanks @dennis, glad you enjoyed.

    Reply

  12. Stewart C Baker
    April 4, 2014 @ 3:49 pm

    Leximize Interesting!  I’ve never even heard of that particular Sandler movie, let alone seen it.  This isn’t really that unusual of an idea though, I suspect, so I’m not too surprised to see overlap with existing works. 🙂  Thanks for the read!

    Reply

  13. Leximize
    April 1, 2014 @ 8:51 pm

    “Click” with Adam Sandler, or nearly so. Still, written in a way that gets across that whole movie in just a few minutes of reading.

    Reply

  14. dennis
    April 1, 2014 @ 12:24 pm

    a very nice spin on the often stale admonition to savor the mundane. it makes me wish we still had rod serling with us to put this on film.

    Reply

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