The Best of Elizabeth Bear

Erase, Erase, Erase

I shouldn’t have let it get so far. It seemed so inconsequential at first. Almost a relief to find yourself getting a little misty around the edges. Bits dropping off. Stuff you don’t need anymore.

Erase, erase, erase.

Sorry, historians. I know some of this stuff would be useful to you, but it’s all gone now. All gone.

I burned most of it.

Only I am still here.

And I am falling apart, and I can’t remember who I used to be or how I got here.

Irresponsible of me, I know.

It’s not just the memories, either. There’s bits of me gone that I swear were there before. Fingertips. Some hair. The eyelashes on my right eye.

I’m almost certain I used to have those.

Sometimes I reach for something—coffee mug, keyboard—and realize I can’t seem to find my own hand. I have to go look around the house for it, because I never remember where I had it last. Feet, at least, limbs—I don’t tend to get far when those have gone missing. It’s hard not to notice as soon as you try to stand up.

But I’ve found hands in the bed, under the bed, halfway up the stairs. Once in the fridge, which worried me a lot but actually it went right back on. Just felt a little weird and numb for a few minutes. Found my ear still stuck on an earbud once, and that was pretty awful. When the nose comes off the glasses usually go with it.

I miss cats, but I don’t have a cat anymore. I couldn’t be sure of taking care of one. I’d probably forget to feed her, or not be able to work the can opener, and she’d resort to eating a mislaid finger.

None of it hurts. None of it seems to harm me in any way. Except that I’m falling apart, and a lot of my time is taken up with finding bits of me that have broken away somehow, and sticking them back on again in more or less the spot they came from.

I don’t leave the house the way I used to. I’m glad I live in a time when nearly everything can be delivered.

And sometimes I get misty and confused. I’ll be in the middle of some task and realize three hours later, in another part of the house, that I’ve left it undone. I’ll find my spectacles in the fridge, or my socks on the bookshelf. I’m sure putting them there seemed like a logical idea at the time.

Sometimes also, I’ll find my clothes in a puddle under me on the sofa, and realize that they just kind of drained through me while I was working. I’ll be chopping vegetables and the knife will hit the chopping block and just lie there, and it will be a while before I can manage to pick it up again. My hand will pass through my coffee cup for a while before it solidifies again, and I won’t get to drink it until it’s cold.

At least the pens and notebooks are always solid. Always real. My laptop, too, and I guess that’s logical, because it’s not that different from a notebook in intention. Heck, some people call them notebooks.

Oh, but now. But this time.

I think I did more than get a little misty. I think I forgot something.

I think I forgot something very important. I think I forgot it on purpose, and because I forgot it, something terrible is going to happen. To a lot of people. Not just me.

So I’m falling apart. And I’m losing my mind.

I used to burn my notebooks.

I didn’t want to be connected to the past they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the person they represented. I didn’t want to be connected to the me that was.

I wanted to reinvent myself. Each time I made a terrible mistake, I wanted to put everything aside, walk away, move on. I wanted to erase my errors. I wanted to change the past so the bad things had not happened. So I could not be punished for them. So I would not have to feel, all the time, so wrong.

I erased my thoughts, my feelings. My failed loves. The classes where my grades were only average. The abusive family background. The jobs that didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped for, that had toxic office politics, or abusive bosses. I erased the pain, the pain, the pain.

I wrote it all down in hope, and when it didn’t work out, I burned it in despair.

I was trying to erase my mistakes, I suppose. It was a kind of perfectionism. If something has a flaw, throw it out and get something perfect next time. I was trying to move forward, in the hope that the next adventure would end better.

But not learning from the failures.

And so, little by little, I erased myself.

I threw myself away.

I would have been free and clear if I just hadn’t read the newspaper that day. The day they printed the manifesto. I could have gone on about my life and my business in ignorance.

I could have spared myself a lot of grief. And work. And worry.

Grief and work and worry that would have been transferred to other people in my stead. That might still be served up to them if I can’t prevent it.

And if it happens, I will know that it is my fault, because I failed.

The manifesto was in the paper. All the papers, I imagine, not just my specific one. It purported to be written by the group that had been mailing incendiary bombs to universities. Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago. To their medical colleges.

That niggled at me, and I didn’t think it was just because the University of Chicago was my alma mater. There was something.

Something back there.

Something I had worked very hard to forget.

Not violence, no. But the promise of violence. The expectation of violence.

Is that what people mean when they talk about menace? Something being menacing? That awareness that there is not just the potential for violence, in the abstract, a kind of background radiation that is always there—but that somebody, somewhere, is planning to cause someone harm.

Any long-term relationship is served by a little amnesia. A marriage—and I’m using the term loosely here, but we were together, if you can call it together, for almost eight years—is a country in flux. A series of negotiations and edges and considered silences. And some unconsidered ones, depending on how self-aware the diplomats in question are. Sometimes all the negotiations are carried out by reflex and instinct. Sometimes this results in war. A covert war, or an open one.

But sometimes, there’s a plan.

When a diplomat who’s acting on reflex, instinct, and conditioned response (diplomat A) meets a diplomat who is acting with self-awareness, caution, and a considered agenda of compromises (diplomat B), (diplomat B) is usually going to win the exchange.

I was (diplomat A) in this example.

I was seventeen years old.

I went in without a theory.

A broken heart is like a cracked bath tub. Nobody’s going to make a full-price offer on a property with annoying repair problems like that hanging around. So either you fix it yourself, or you try to hide the cracks and cover up the damage. At least until the mark has signed enough paperwork that it’s inconvenient to back out.

Plastic-covered notebooks give off a terrible smell as they burn.

I wasted a lot of paper.

I was not good at finishing the notebooks. I would reach a point where I was damned sick of who I was, how I had been feeling, how I had been acting. And then I needed to be done with the stained pages I had been writing, because I had written down everything. Everything about my internal landscape, anyway.

I didn’t have friends.

I just had secrets.

And so I wrote them down.

It was actually easier—well, cheaper, anyway—and more efficient—when I was younger. In the three-ring and spiral-bound notebooks, I just ripped out the offending pages and tore them up. Got rid of them. Shredded them and gave them a shove.

But then I graduated to bound books. The cheap fabric-covered ones at first. Then better ones, professional-quality ones, with paper that ink pens did not feather on or bleed through. I liked the hard-covered ones in pretty colors, with ribbon markers and pockets in the back. Graph paper or dot grids. I did not like wide-ruled.

But those were harder to destroy, eventually. When they needed destruction.

Everything needs destruction in the end. And so I learned to burn.

I thought about burning more than notebooks when I was young. I thought of self-immolation, but I never had the courage. I thought of arson, but I never had the cruelty. I remembered those things, vaguely. Like a story that had happened to someone else.

Maybe that was why that manifesto struck me so hard, I tell myself, as my fingers slip through the handle of the coffee pot again. A major American city, it had said. An inferno of flames. The Judgement of a just and terrible God.

Engulfed.

Soon, soon. Soon.

But no. There is more than that. Some part of me that I can’t access knows. Knows which city. Knows who had written those words. Knows enough to stop this terrible thing from happening.

I just can’t remember.

How do you learn to erase yourself?

It’s not something that comes naturally to children. Children seek attention because attention means survival. So to get them to erase themselves, you have to teach them that they don’t exist. And because it is an unnatural, self-destructive thing that you are teaching them—a maladaptive response—the only tactic that works is to make the consequences of noncompliance worse than the consequences of nonexistence.

That takes force. Violence, physical or emotional. If you just try to ignore a kid, they’ll act out, and seek attention through misbehavior.

Any port in a storm.

I bet, given half a chance, I could have been a charming child.

But I didn’t learn to be charming. I learned how not to be real.

I learned to have no vulnerabilities and expect no consideration. I learned I had no intrinsic value and was only marginally worthwhile for what I could provide, if what I provided was beyond reproach.

I learned I was not allowed to be angry. To defend myself. To have needs. I learned to be good at being alone, because if you were alone, nobody could betray you.

I thought I had escaped all that when I went away to college. But like the horror movie phone call, the loathing was coming from inside my head.

I didn’t hold on to things, because holding on to things hurt. If you didn’t hold on, then when you lost something you lost it easy.

But if you don’t hold on, you lose things all the time.

My notebooks and pens are still solid. I can write all the time. Under any conditions. I can write things down.

If I can just remember them.

I can write them down.

I lost a lot of pens.

I couldn’t bear to write in pencil. And it didn’t matter because I was burning the books.

But I couldn’t seem to hang on to the pens.

It’s in the notebooks, isn’t it? The thing I need.

There’s no way to get the notebooks back, of course. Even if I found similar ones, they’d be empty. All the important words—all of the words that have the memories attached that might keep people from being hurt—set on fire, burned up—were, in a particularly distasteful irony, burned up themselves long ago.

Oh. But the pens.

I started collecting pens when I was very young. My mother gave me a fountain pen. Not an expensive one, but she wrote with fountain pens, and she thought I should, too, and I was excited to be like my mother in this way I thought was grownup and cool. One led to two, led to five or six. Student pens.

I loved them.

And the ink! I loved the ink even more. Because you can put the same ink in a cheap pen as in an expensive one, and then you get to write with it.

Finding the right ink, the right pen, is like coming home. Like finding the place you live and that you want to live. The place you want to stay forever. The place where you belong.

On a smaller scale, of course.

But still, it can make you a little bit emotional.

And if you are lucky, you might actually recognize it while it’s right in front of you, while you’re standing there, and not once you walk away, foolishly.

The hardest thing is when you walk away from home knowing that it’s home, because home is changing, or challenging, or making you sad. Or because you screwed up and broke something, and you think you’re too embarrassed to stay, or you’re not welcome there anymore.

So you go someplace else and think you can live there. But it isn’t home. And then you have to try to get home again.

Sometimes it takes a long time to get home again. Some people never make it back at all.

I thought I had to be perfect. I thought I couldn’t live with my errors. I thought it would be better to run away. Start clean. Throw the ruined page away and keep reaching for a clean one. Burn my notebooks.

Erase my history. Erase my screw-ups.

Erase my self.

Erase, erase, erase.

I start on collector’s websites and then on auction sites, looking for the pens. Most of them were not expensive at the time when I bought them—I never had a lot of money. Some of them have gotten more expensive since.

A funny thing happens as I start looking. I search for one pen to see what it would cost to replace it. And in the related items, I find more that looked familiar. That I suddenly remember having had. And when I chase those links, there are more, still more familiar-looking ones.

I am forty-five years old. I think I am forty-five years old.

I get out my birth certificate and check.

I am forty-five years old.

How many pens have I lost?

How many other things have I forgotten about, before now?

I think of a pen I’d liked, when I was twenty-five or so. I remember putting it in a jacket pocket. I don’t remember ever finding it there again. It had been a blue marbled plastic fountain pen, a kind of bulbous and silly looking thing. A lot of personality, I guess you’d say. It wrote very well.

I find one like it on an auction site. I lose that auction but win another in a few days. $63 plus shipping. I think the pens in a box set with ink were $30 new back in 1995.

Fortunately my books are doing all right, and my needs in general are few. My chief extravagance is a little indulgence in grocery store sushi, once in a while. I use a grocery delivery service. I can’t drive. What if my foot fell off while I was reaching for the brake?

The pen arrives after three days. I get lucky with the mail that day and it doesn’t fall through my hands. I take the pen out of the box, weigh it in my hand. Light, plastic with gold trim. The blue is so intense it seems violet.

I uncap it and look at the point, squinting my middle-aged eyes. Then I laugh at myself and use the zoom function on my phone camera to get a better look at it. The phone, for once, doesn’t slide through my hand.

The mysterious internet stranger I’d bought it from hadn’t cleaned it very well. I get a bulb syringe and wash it at the sink, soaking and rinsing. You’re supposed to use distilled water but the water here at my house is soft, from a surface reservoir. The same reservoir H. P. Lovecraft once wrote about, as the towns that now lie under it were drowning.

Anyway, I’ve never had any problems with it. Even if it is saturated in alien space colors, they don’t seem to cause problems with the nibs, so that’s good news overall.

Once it’s clean, I ink it up from a big square bottle in a color that matches the barrel, and sit down at the table with a notebook, ready to write.

With the pen in my hand, I find suddenly I am full of memories. Strange; I can go through a whole day, usually, without remembering things.

I remember the pen.

And now I’m holding it in my hand, and I start to write, in a lovely red-sheened cobalt blue.

I grew up to be a writer. A novelist. That will not surprise you. You are, after all, reading my words right now.

I write, and write, and the pen stays solid and the notebook stays solid and it writes as well as the one I used to have. But my right hand—I’m left-handed—has a tendency to slide through the table if I’m not paying attention. And twice I fall right through my chair, which is a new and revolting development.

I don’t let it stop me, though. I write, and remember, and write some more. About somebody I can sort of remember. A long, long time ago.

An incident that happened at the University of Chicago. After… after I stopped being a student there?

It’s so damned hard to recall.

“There is no point in being so angry.” His words had the echo that used to come from long distance.

But I wasn’t being angry to make a point.

…which was not something the manipulative son of a bitch could have ever understood. I was angry because I was angry. Because he deserved my anger.

I was angry because anger is a defense mechanism. It’s an emotion that serves to goad you to action, to remove the irritant in your turf or the thing that is causing you pain.

“I’m angry because you’re hurting me,” I said. “I’m angry because you’re hurting a lot of people. Stop it, and I won’t need to be angry with you anymore.”

Therapy gives you a pretty good set of tools to be (diplomat B), it turns out. I was still furious with my mother for forcing me to go.

But it was helping.

It might take me a while to get over my anger. But that didn’t seem salient to the argument we were having, so I kept it to myself.

“You can’t just set things on fire because you don’t like the way the world is going.”

“Oh, I can,” he told me. “And you already helped me. You’re just too much of a coward to own that and be really useful, so you’ll let other people do your dirty work and keep your hands clean.”

“You won’t do it,” I said.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “I probably won’t. Don’t call me again.”

I think about calling. An anonymous tip. Or sending an email.

But I don’t have any evidence. And I don’t have a name.

“I know who wrote the manifesto. But I can’t remember his name. And I helped him come up with the plan. The plan to burn down a city. Except I can’t remember what city, either. Or the details of the plan.”

Yeah. No.

Maybe he was right. Maybe I am too much of a coward to take responsibility for something I believe in. For something I had once believed in, until I forgot?

Maybe I forgot because I knew it would feel like my fault if I remembered.

My mother gave me an expensive fountain pen when I graduated high school. It was a burgundy one, small and slim. Wrote beautifully. I didn’t know enough to appreciate it at the time.

I don’t think the new ones are as nice anymore.

I lost that one when I got thrown by a horse one time in college. It was in my pocket, and when I got up, bruised and hip aching, it was gone. And no amount of searching turned it up.

There are a lot of them on the internet.

But the damned things ain’t cheap. And how do you tell which ones are counterfeit?

But maybe the pen I was using at the time…

At the time it happened? At the time I learned the thing I can’t remember? At the time I did the thing I don’t want to remember?

But I didn’t have the pen long. Did I?

In any case, maybe that pen would help me remember.

I spend way too much money on it. And it comes.

I hold it in my hand. It feels… itchy. But it doesn’t fill me up with memories the way the other one had.

I remember the unused pages at the back of my old notebooks. There were always a few.

I find myself taking the books down off the shelf, thumbing through them. The unburned ones, of course. Thumbing through the burned ones would have been unfeasible, and even if it weren’t, it wouldn’t accomplish much of anything beyond getting my fingers ashy.

I find myself looking at ink colors, organizational choices. How my handwriting has evolved.

We lose all the best things to time.

But time brings a lot of benefits, also. Freedom from old wounds, for example.

Perspective.

Grace.

The wisdom to identify the heads that need to be busted, and the courage of your convictions to go out and bust some heads.

I have a couple of dozen old notebooks. And at the end of almost every one of them is a swath of pristine pages. Somewhere between twenty and fifty, a full signature at least and maybe two or three—just sitting there wordless and ignored.

Even after I stopped burning them, I guess I never really finished a notebook before I moved on. The lure of the next book was already there, like a pressure inside me urging me to set this one aside and pick up the perfect one that would be waiting. Untrammeled. Pure.

Without any mistakes in it.

Yes, I hate using broken things. Dirty things. I hate things that are cracked or warped or seem old and in disrepair.

So I would get to the point where I could conceivably justify getting rid of the old book with its scuffed cover and frayed page edges and all the mistakes inside it. And I would switch to a new one, clean and unscribbled in. And out the old one would go. Into the flames, at first. Later, onto a shelf with its sisters.

I can touch the notebooks. I can always touch the notebooks.

But they don’t go back far enough. They don’t have the thing that mattered in them. That had happened before. The thing that I can’t remember.

The thing that had happened and been burned.

The thing I use my new old echo of a pen now to write about.

With the one before him, I never argued. We never made enough demands on each other to have anything to fight about.

With him, I think I fought all the time. I remember… screaming matches. I remember arguments that made me doubt my sanity. I remember him telling me I said things I couldn’t remember saying. I remember letting him win because I couldn’t keep track of where the goalposts were, and because I never learned to argue to win.

I never learned to take up space in other people’s lives.

I wish I had known to be wary of the urge to crystallize my identity, to declare myself a thing—one thing, or another—and not accept that I was a continuity of things that would always be changing.

I might have been less eager to discard the thing I had been to become something new if I hadn’t been so afraid that acknowledging the old thing meant being trapped for all time. If I hadn’t been so afraid the people who knew me would never let me change, I might have held on to more of them, instead of shedding whole lives like a snake sheds skins.

Of course, sometimes people won’t let you change. Because their self-image is bound up with yours, and they’re afraid of challenging themselves too. Or because they want to keep you weak so they can own you. Or because their own identity gets stuck on you being and behaving a certain way. It’s a cliché to say that alcoholics and addicts often find they need a whole new suite of friends of when they get clean, and their lives no longer revolve around getting altered anymore.

But the thing is, over time, changes just become part of the status quo. Tattoos that marked a milestone or a rebellion to our younger selves soften into our skin, become unremarked. They become a part of us, a part of our image and who we are.

What is mine, and what is not mine—our conception of these things changes as we grow.

I moved around a lot. As an adult, and as a child. I didn’t have any place that felt like mine.

Until I met him. Until I met Joshua.

I write the name, and look at it, and know that it is right. I should be giddy with triumph. Blazing with the endorphins of having figured something out.

I feel hungry, and dizzy. And tired.

I was sitting in a booth at the airport, crying on the phone. “I wish you had just shot me,” I said.

At the time when I said it, it was true.

Joshua was telling me about the girl he’d met. The girl who was helping with his plans. The girl who would be taking over for me, he said, so that I could get some rest. Get my head together.

Get back to being right with the revolution.

I asked her name. He told me. She was somebody I knew. I asked if I could come back after Thanksgiving with my mom. He said if I got right, I could. He said that my leaving to see my family had been a mistake, and I would have to make amends for it.

“You can’t do this to her,” I said. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know she’s giving up her whole life.”

She was the same age I had been, eight years before. I was a wizened old woman of twenty-seven.

“Come back,” he said. “Forget about your mother. We can talk. That other girl doesn’t have to be involved.”

My mom, who I had not seen in four years because of Joshua, was dying. I reminded him of that. He reminded me that if I were a good revolutionary, that wouldn’t matter. “Anyway, remember what her husband did to you.”

How could I forget?

I have since, largely, forgotten.

He hung up. I remember thinking, very clearly, he’ll use her up the same way he used up me.

I wish I could say that thought is the thing that motivated me. I wish I could say that was the last time I ever talked to him.

I sat there and cried for another hour, until I had to get up to make my connection. Nobody bothered me. People cry in airports so often, it’s not much of a spectacle. These days they cry and shout into their cellphones just about anywhere. Back then, the crying and shouting were more localized.

Halfway to the gate, I stopped. I walked back to the phones. The young woman he’d replaced me with was a sophomore. Nineteen years old. I knew her name and where she came from.

I called her family.

“You daughter joined a cult in college,” I told them. “You need to get her home.”

I hung up. I ran for my gate.

I just barely made my plane.

We have this idea that healing comes as an epiphany.

We have it in part because epiphanies are narratively convenient. They’re tidy for a storyteller; there’s a break point, a moment when everything changes. An identifiable narrative beat. A point at which everything before is one way, and everything after is different. They’re satisfying. They provide catharsis and closure.

Frustratingly, in real life, you often have to go back and have the same epiphany over and over again, incrementally, improving a tiny bit each time. Frustrating for you. Frustrating for your loved ones.

It would be nicer if you could just have that single crystallizing incident, live through it, and get on with being a better human being who was better at humaning.

It’s comforting to the afflicted to think we only have to make one change, and we can better. Boom, all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice if roleplaying or primal scream therapy or rebirthing therapy or a hot uninhibited fuck or a midnight confession or a juice cleanse or a confessional essay or a cathartic piece of fiction really could heal all the old damage just like that? In one swoop? Wouldn’t it be nice?

Sure.

Of course it’s nonsense, like so many other narratively convenient things we learn about from stories. But like so many of the things we learn about from stories, it’s useful nonsense.

And epiphany isn’t going to fix us. Maybe nothing is going to fix us. But recognizing the damage might help us route around it. Which isn’t nothing, you know?

The truth is that you never get to stop dealing with the damage. You might get better at it. You might find a lot of workarounds and you might be happier—or even happy, inasmuch as happiness is a state and not a process!—but happiness doesn’t just happen. And it doesn’t happen instantly. But incrementally, with a lot of constant effort and focus.

I was small, and the people who should have taken care of me didn’t. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they were awful people. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they had their own shit going on.

I get that. I have spent most of my life with my own shit going on, after all.

One of the things with having your own shit going on is that, first, it blinds you to other people’s problems. It’s hard to have empathy and remember that, as the saying goes, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle when your attention is all taken up by being on fire right now. It’s hard to find the energy to be calm and kind and to consider the divergence of experience of others when you’re exhausted and trying to keep your own head above the waves and you’re swallowing salt water and you have no idea where you are going to find the energy to keep kicking.

Another thing about having your own shit going on is that until you get some perspective on it, that shit feels enormous. Like the center of the universe. And it kind of is, in that nobody who is excavating a pile of trauma like that has the energy for anything else except shoveling. But it becomes so all-consuming that it’s easy to forget that you—and your trauma—are not the only thing on anybody else’s mind, or even the most important one, because they’re all really busy thinking about their own shovels.

They have their own shit, their own trauma and crisesdeadlines-taxeshealthproblemssoreteethfamilydramatoxicneighbors you name it eating up the lion’s share of their own attention. And that’s fine, is the thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. Your problems are your problems, and their problems are their problems, and that’s the way it’s actually supposed to be.

But when you’re dealing with that much trauma, and it’s that raw, boundaries are another thing you wind up sucking at.

Recovery, I guess I’m trying to say, makes narcissists of us all.

So when I’m freaking out now about what people think about me or what they think is going on with me I remind myself… I don’t merit more than a passing consideration in most people I encounter’s day. They just don’t think that hard about me.

Thank God.

People got their own problems.

I certainly got more than enough of mine.

I saw her once more, even though I never planned to go back to Chicago. She came out to see me after her parents let her out of the treatment program they’d had her committed to.

She came to my mother’s house, where I was living. Working temp jobs. Never staying longer than a week because after a week, people start to loop you into the politics and then they expect you to get involved. I was in therapy, because my dying mother made me.

Biggest favor she ever did me, in hindsight.

She stood in the doorway looking at me when I answered, framed in the greens of the yard. She studied my face. We were both a little better-fed than we had been.

And then she said to me, “I don’t think you can fully appreciate how much I hate you.”

I smiled as if she had accepted my offer of tea. “Oh,” I said, feeling the swell of self-loathing in me like a rising magma dome, “I think I can, most likely.”

Before I digressed, what I was pointing out was that it doesn’t happen fast, the changes. It happens slow. It’s an unpicking. The Gordian knot is more of a problem when you’re in a hurry and you don’t have any tools—assuming you want the string to be useful for something when you’re done unpicking it, which I’ve always thought was the problem with the Alexandrian solution.

Well, I had assembled my tools. With as much haste as possible, and it hadn’t been fast, honestly, despite feeling that amorphous sense of formless dread, the pressure pushing on my awareness constantly without any knowledge of where it was going to happen, or when.

Now I have them. Pens, inks. A selection of flawless new notebooks.

The first line in a pristine notebook is always a little fraught. That paper, so innocent. And here I am, intending to put a mark down that would scar it forever.

Maybe the real reason I burned my notebooks was that I didn’t want the responsibility.

Maybe that’s also why I never had children. Just stories.

Nobody really remembers if you screwed up any given story, five years after the fact.

Erase, erase, erase.

There’s freedom in not being important. In not being seen.

I can’t touch food for three days. Unfortunately, not being able to touch the food does nothing to keep me from getting hungry.

There’s so much to forgive yourself when it comes down to it. So many little cysts of self-hate and personal despair.

“I need you to keep your promises,” I said. And that was the beginning of the end.

He promised easily. Fluidly.

Meaninglessly.

And I kept on believing him. Forgiving him.

Making excuses.

I was so good at excuses.

Not for myself. I was always culpable. And I always found ways to punish myself. I believed it when he told me I was wrong. My perceptions, my understanding of events. When he told me I must be crazy, because what I remembered hadn’t happened that way at all.

I was unforgiveable. I was sure.

But then I asked him to keep his promises.

And I started writing his promises down. In my notebook. With my pen.

I find the damaged pen in a box I didn’t know had any pens in it, at the back of a deep cabinet shelf. I rattle it reflexively, not expecting a sound. But there is weight inside it, and something shifts.

I open it and find a narrow, black, beat-up old fountain pen I cannot identify.

I mean, I know what pen it is. It’s one I must have been given by a family member but I can’t remember what the occasion was, or who had given me it. I had used it all through college after I lost my graduation pen. But I don’t know what kind it is.

It’s missing the gold trim band on the cap, and the cap doesn’t close and lock. I remember it having a satisfying click when I shut it. It’s so slender I used to tuck it inside the spiral rings of my notebooks. It lived there. It was a good pen.

It is full of dried ink, because I am a terrible pen custodian.

I check the collector websites and can’t find anything like it.

There was a time I was a bad friend. I was in love with somebody, and they were in love with somebody else, and I was in love with that person too. Looking back, I don’t think either of them loved me.

I didn’t handle it well.

I remember sitting in a bar in a bad chain restaurant breaking up tortilla chips into crumbs with my fingers because I needed something to do while my friend broke up with me, and I didn’t have the will to eat them.

And I’d already picked the whole label off my beer.

I tried to make amends, years later. I can’t blame them for not wanting to talk to me.

I could have done without that memory. I had, for years, I now realize.

Accountability. That’s another thing you lose when you erase yourself.

Thank God.

Some of the pens start slipping through my hands. At first, the newer ones, or the ones that had been bought as replacements for ones long lost. The older ones fare better, as if every scratch on the barrel, every bit of luster worn by use from the nib, every imperfection, makes the object in my hands more real. Or gives my hands something to stick to, as they become more phantasmal. More of an unreality.

The older ones fare better. At first.

Then those begin to fall through me, too.

There is so much I still can’t remember. I frown at those pristine notebooks with their smooth, friendly paper. I stroke a finger over them, and sometimes I feel the nap of the page, and sometimes my fingertip sinks through.

I know—I can feel—the memories down there, like shipwrecks under clouded water. But I can’t make out the shapes. Can’t describe what I know has to be there.

I start dropping even pens.

But I never drop the broken one. It feels steady and solid in my hand. As if it were more real than the others.

That gives me an idea.

They used to say, of somebody who made a bad marriage, that they threw themselves away. What happens if you never actually got married, because marriage is a tool of the bourgeousie?

I’m pretty sure you can still throw yourself away. Erase yourself. For somebody else, or because you don’t think you are worth preserving.

I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgot.

My stepfather liked to have excuses to hit. So he could feel good about himself, I guess. One way you get excuses to hit is to expect perfection in every task, and set hard tasks without allowing the person you’re setting them to time to learn how to do them.

Then, when the student isn’t perfect, you have a good reason to punish somebody.

Another thing you can do is change your expectations constantly, so that nobody can predict what is expected and what isn’t. Make them arbitrary and impossibly high. Don’t allow for any human imperfections.

Since I can touch it, I decide to fix the mystery pen.

I make a new trim ring for it out of polymer clay, to help hold the cap in place. I clean it, and while I handle it my hands stay solid on the tools. As if it is some kind of talisman to my past reality.

I wish I could say my repair job is some kind of professional affair with a loupe and so on, but I have some epoxy and some rubber cement and honestly I kind of fake it. You do what you can with what you have, and that’s all right then.

I take up my broken pen. The nib is still pretty good, though it doesn’t write like a fine point anymore. More like a medium. And even on smooth paper it scratches a little.

It’s still usable, though. And it makes a nice smooth line.

Except I have faded more, in the interim. I am vanishing. Falling away, like all the memories I hadn’t wanted, and now wish I had been less cavalier with. I can’t manage to open a notebook, let alone write in one. I am able to re-read the old ones I’d kept. But the new ones are as ghostly as the cheese sandwiches have become.

Maybe this is better than living with the pain of remembering. Maybe fading away, fading into nothingness, starving to an immaterial and non-interactive death—maybe that is the happiest ending.

Except the one thing I know—I know with a drowning urgency, though I still cannot remember the specifics—is that people will come to harm if I cannot remember the things I once knew.

A lot of people.

And not just hurt.

People are going to get killed.

More people. A lot more. Exponentially more than had been harmed by three incendiaries sent to medical schools.

If I can just remember the plan I came up with. Before I helped him write this manifesto. Almost twenty years ago.

If I can only remember the rest of his name.

Lack of food and water doesn’t help me think any more clearly. I’ve never been good at handling low blood sugar. So half my time seems to be spent figuring out how to write. How to even get words down on the page.

I can put the pen on the paper—the pen stays solid, even if it is in my hand. And I can use the nib to turn the pages. But do you know how hard it is to write legibly and usefully in a notebook you have no way to smooth flat, or to steady? Especially when your temples ache with hunger, and a sour metallic taste seems to sit in your abdomen.

My laptop has long since stopped being something I could touch. I would have given a lot for that laptop right now.

My laptop. And a banana.

My stepfather would hit me with a belt, and he wouldn’t stop until I managed to keep from crying.

“I’m not hurting you that badly, you little wimp. Quit that squalling, or I’ll give you something real to cry about.”

It’s amazing what you can learn to keep inside.

A day later, lying more or less in the sofa with my head bleary and aching with hunger and my throat scratchy with dehydration, I realize that those blank notebook pages are the answer. I can’t get the burned notebooks back—that was, after all, why I had burned them—but I can fill these leftover pages with memories of what I might have written in them.

I can construct some kind of a record, though it will be one very filtered by the passage of time.

And the important memory might be in there somewhere. If I am lucky.

And brave.

It would be so much easier just to fade away.

Erase, erase.

So much easier to stop pretending my existence matters and let go. Then it will be over. Then I won’t have to keep existing after I do this thing. This thing I don’t even want to do. It’s not the idea of drifting into nothingness afterwards that bothers me. It’s the terrible fear that instead, I might hook myself back into the universe somehow. Re-assert my reality.

Get stuck being real.

I joined a cult in college. That much, I know. Like a story told sketchily over a cup of coffee, but without the context or detail because it’s an embarrassing story and nobody wants to think about it too hard. The person telling it is embarrassed to have been there, and the person hearing it is reflecting embarrassment as well.

I joined a cult in college. I really craved the love-bombing, because I had never in my life felt really loved. I didn’t know how to receive attention in smaller doses, at lower proof. I had so much armor on it took weaponized love to get through.

I joined a cult in college. It was a dumb idea and it was weird while it lasted—it lasted long past college, it lasted eight whole years—and I was in love with one of the guys that ran it.

I joined a cult in college. One of the guys who ran it… I thought he was my boyfriend. He wasn’t, though. He was preying on me. Grooming me.

I did not have a lot of agency in the relationship.

He’s one of the cult’s leaders now.

The pen ran out of ink, and then I had to figure out how to fill it when I also couldn’t touch most of my ink bottles. My hand just swiped through them, all the gorgeous little art objects full of brilliant colors. I groped back in the shelf, waving blindly…

My fingers brushed something squat and cool. I pulled it out, and the bottles that had been in front of it slid out of the way, clattering. Not of my unreal hand. But of the ink, the thing that was real. The thing that mattered.

One or two fell to the floor. Ink bottles are sturdy, though, and the carpet kept them from breaking.

The bottle I could touch was a bottle of Parker Quink, blue-black. It was two-thirds empty. The label stained.

An old and trusty friend.

I filled my pen.

He threw me down the stairs by my hair one time.

My stepfather, I mean.

Not Joshua.

I’d forgotten that. Erased it. And now I can’t unremember it again.

A funny thing happens as I write.

I feel myself getting more real. I figure it out when I realize that I can lean an elbow on the table I am resting the current mostly-finished notebook on. That’s a relief; you have no idea how hard writing is when you can manage to hold a pen but not rest your hand on anything.

When I realize that I could touch things, I stopped writing and ran into the kitchen, terrified of missing my window.

I still can’t lift a glass, but I manage to elbow the faucet on after a few minutes of trying. I bend my head sideways and drink from the thin cold trickle of stale-tasting water. Nothing ever felt better flowing down my throat. I gulp, gulp again. Manage to get it to pool in my hands and drink in that slightly more civilized fashion.

I drink until my stomach hurts, and then go to make sure the toilet seat is up, just in case I turn immaterial again before the stuff works its way through my system. Dehydrated as I had been that might take a while, but I have learned to plan ahead. Such are the important life concerns of the terminally ghostly.

I sit on the bathroom floor and rest the back of my head against the sliding glass door of the shower. At least I am not falling through walls or floors. Yet?

I can stop. I don’t have to do this anymore. I can stop, and it will be miserable… but I will die of thirst in a few days. If I stop clutching at making myself real. If I just accept that I am not important, and let my ridiculous scribblings go.

It sounds so appealing. A final erasure.

And I won’t have to remember…

I won’t have to remember the horrible person I had been. The horrible things I had done. The horrible things that had happened to me. I could forget them all.

Who knows? Maybe if I forget them thoroughly enough—if I encourage myself to forget them thoroughly enough—I won’t even die. I’ll just fade.

Maybe if I fade enough I won’t have material needs like food, water, air anymore. I’ll be a ghost for real.

I’ll be free. Free of myself. Free of pain.

I have these notebooks here.

I’m probably real enough to burn them now. Right now.

It will just cost the lives of some people I have never heard of to get there.

How many people?

I don’t know. One. A hundred. Three thousand.

Too many.

The glass shower door is cool. I relish its solidity.

When I put my hand up onto the sink to help myself stand, sometime later, my hand goes right through.

I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to exist.

I can just let myself be perfect, and be gone.

So much easier.

So much easier.

Except I remember about the fires now. And if I write it all down… I think I might make myself real again.

Then how do I get away from what I did? From what was done?

Oh god, do I have to live with myself now? Do I have to live with being flawed, and do things I’m not very good at?

People will know.

People will see me.

People will punish me.

I write it all down.

Of course the manifesto was familiar.

I was the one who had written it.

What was published wasn’t my words exactly. It had been decades; what I wrote hadn’t survived the intervening twenty-odd years with Joshua unscathed. Unedited. It had passed through other pens than mine along the way.

But somewhere in the ashes of forgotten notebooks had been written a draft of that statement. Its structures, its rhetoric, even its handwriting had once been mine.

I don’t bother calling the local police. I call the local field office of the FBI.

“I know who wrote the manifesto,” I say into the phone. “His name is Joshua Bright. Or it was, he might have changed it. And that probably wasn’t his real name. Because who calls their kid Joshua Bright if they can help it? And he’s got a plan to use incendiary devices to burn down a big chunk of Chicago if you don’t stop him.”

“Ma’am?” the tinny voice at the end of the phone says. “We’ll be sending a couple of agents over right away to talk to you. Please stay where you are until they arrive.”

I make myself a peanut butter sandwich while I wait.

That story about the airport and the aftermath. I don’t think it really happened that way.

I think it’s a pretty story I’m telling myself. I don’t know if I ever stood up for that girl, really. If I ever stood up for myself.

I remember doing it. I wrote it down. Does that mean it happened?

Or did I just figure out that Joshua was cheating on me and split not too much later? I tried to forget. I was, needless to say, pretty successful.

The plan to put incendiaries in basements and start a huge firestorm in Chicago had been mine to begin with. I came up with it. I gave it to Joshua as if it were just the plot for one of my thrillers. The ones I make my living writing now.

I wonder if he’ll try to blame it on me. Or if he’ll want to take credit.

He’ll want to take credit.

I never really thought he would do it. It was a thought experiment, that was all.

Just a thought experiment.

I joined a cult in college. It turned out about as well as you’d expect.

If you join a cult in college, I hope you get well soon.

You don’t have to be perfect.

Sometimes it’s okay for a thing to be a little bit broken.

Sometimes it’s okay to make do with what you have, and what you are.

I imagine meeting him in court. Of course I will have to testify. I’d better make sure of my solidity before then. I’d better commit.

My fingers leave peanut butter stains on the paper. I hope the food delivery comes soon. I’d like some milk.

I can’t know what it will be like, but I rehearse it in my head anyway. I write it down to make it real, so I can act on it when the time comes.

The FBI are on their way.

Me, strong, implacable. Joshua saying, “I didn’t think you had the balls to turn me in.”

Me meeting his gaze. “You never did know me.”

I wait for the doorbell. For the food. For the authorities.

I get to the bottom of the last page. I reach blindly for the next book, find the blanks at the end, and keep writing.

You don’t have to be perfect.

This story isn’t done yet with me.