Chapter 1(We Remember So You Forget)

June Pal wears black and smells of bitter almonds on the day she is to Erase a man’s memory for the first time.

She tiptoes across the grassy, green fields on the slow, sunny afternoon, careful not to let the pollen cling to the ends of her oversized black jeans. Her posture is slightly skewed to the right, almost drooping, under the weight of a heavy rucksack that has only a sloppy sandwich and an unnecessarily large tablet. Her fingers are intertwined, fidgeting with rings she never forgets to wear, though the memory of who’s given them is no longer hers to mull over. As she glances at her watch, loosely clinging to her wrist, her shoulders relax slightly to the beat of a hefty exhale.

She slicks back her wet curls into a ponytail as the door to a dull, brutalist display of red mortar hammered into the shape of a three-storied building grudgingly opens. “Bags and ID,” one of the guards at the security check calls out as she steps in, though he probably already knows her, for she is certain that she is one of the only few brown people in this entire building. June summons her ID – one of the rare ones without a chip. The guard corks his eyebrow and briefly glances into the contents of her rucksack before tipping the edge of his cap in a contrived salute. June curtly nods at him, walking past into a swarming crowd of people whizzing by her, their gazes are buried in heavy, grey folders.

The words ‘Department of Memories’ shimmer in rainbow colors on a flickering screen behind the front desk in the middle of the large reception. Large brown staircases emerge from the second floor and bend back down to the front desk from either side of the large screen, right in the center of the oval-shaped ground floor. Behind the front desk, small circular entrances lead into narrower tunnels that sprawl away like spider webs into the different divisions operating at the Department. Distant elevator rings and the scratchy squeaking of boots stitch their din onto the echoes of hushed whispers and angry outbursts as some of the more confused clients are escorted out of one tunnel and into another by hefty guards in blue suits.

“Morning, June,” one of her colleagues absentmindedly greets her, still busy rummaging through the heavy pages of his folder with a coffee cup in his other hand. She quickly looks at her watch again and, realizing she still has fifteen more minutes to spare, scurries hurriedly behind her colleague. 

“Ari, hold on,” she says, catching up to him. “It’s my first Erasure today.”

Ari smiles broadly, turning towards one of the tunnels and gesturing for her to follow. Slightly taller and dressed in a bright yellow suit that was too big for his scrawny body, Ari has the air and verve of a very old, and perhaps wise, coffee bean. His skin is wrinkled, and his head is shaved spotless, an ode to him being one of the oldest members at sixty-three to be an Eraser for the Department of Memories. “You nervous?” he asks in his raspy voice, the skin around his dry, brown lips fissuring.

“A little bit,” June says, nodding.

“And you’re asking me for advice?” Ari laughs. “The Department has been trying to nudge me out for five years now.”

“Yes, but you also have the most experience amongst us Erasers,” June says, shrugging and pursing her lips. “What if something goes wrong? What if my client wakes up in the middle of the procedure, and I…what am I even supposed to do if something like that happens?”

“I’ve been here thirty-seven years, and no one wakes up in the middle of an Erasure, June. You know that, so cut the act and tell me what you are really nervous about.”

June hesitates, looking around and making sure no one hears her as she whispers, “The memories are not mine. It feels wrong to look into someone else’s mind. I’ve seen those Archive displays during training, and they are just so vivid. You can see every memory almost, like it’s a photograph. It just feels very-”

“-Dirty?” Ari cuts her off. “I get what you mean. When I did my first Erasure, I was in the same boat as you. Heck, I even showed up fifteen minutes late, and when I saw my client, I felt like someone was going to butcher me open. My client was this short, Hispanic mother, and she was pregnant. A scar running down her right eyebrow, a bruise above the lips that she thought I wouldn’t notice…reminded me of my own mother. I had a friend back then who believed that our scars and memories of these dangerous relationships are meant to be lessons. Called them the ‘hidden lessons of our scars.’ Nonsense, I think. You are not meant to learn anything from scars. You are supposed to heal them. We do that. We heal,” Ari said, nearing the elevators at the end of the tunnel. “Kid, these are moments we are trained for, you know? What we do is hard, and it might seem intrusive and dirty, but it is absolutely necessary. What’s the Department motto, June?”

“We remember so you forget,” June says, as rehearsed.

“And what do we offer?”

“Mercy.”

“That’s right. This job is a responsibility. It’s a cost us, Erasers, must bear. Today, it’s your turn to step up,” Ari said, smiling. “I know you’ve done your research. You are going to nail it, and I am proud of you.” He nudges her into the elevator, pressing the button to the third floor for her, and giving her a pat on the shoulder as the elevator doors shut.

“Thanks, Ari,” June whispers in the empty elevator.

She heads towards room 264 in the Archives, where she finds one of the Archive engineers, Vik, stacking up the profile’s memory files for her. The Eraser’s room in the Archive is nothing but a tiny closet with a single, dim yellow bulb, a control panel to access and navigate the client’s memories, a giant screen on the top-right corner of the room, a green, foamy couch, and a giant one-sided glass pane to look into the other side of the Archive, where clients are usually strapped onto a chair.  June looks at the screen in the room. One of her client’s memories is already set up on the display in the Eraser’s room. 

In the memory, the orange hue of the setting Sun cascades through the silts of thin, wispy clouds and drools onto the verdant hills behind her client, its shades glimmering on a red-clad, rusty bridge in front of the hills. June sees a woman next to her client in this memory. The woman’s hair was a series of gold deadlocks, neatly tied into a bun, poised like a ball of yarn on top of her head, with two free strands gently swaying down her tanned face. Her hands covered her wide small; the blue on her nails complemented the green in her eyes.

“He’s your man now,” Vik says, tapping the control panel.

“Thank you for setting him up. I owe you one.”

“Yes, you do,” Vik chides, summoning a single thin sheet of paper. “I’ll take your signature here…and here. That’s perfect.” 

“Was the subject stable?” June asks, handing back the pen to Vik.

“None of them ever are. It’s why what we do is important, you know.”

“Right,” June says. “What about the other woman?” She pointed to the woman in the memory.

“Different cities. Different jurisdiction,” Vik says. “Don’t worry, June. You’ll do great.” Vik smiles and hurries out of the room.

With Vik gone, June opens her client’s file and runs her fingers past his name. She adjusts her glasses and squints to read the small print in the dimly lit room: Orion Fields. She looks back at Orion on the other side of the glass pane in his part of the Archive that is roughly the same size as her own. He is an Asian man, probably in his early twenties. His hands are strapped to a rickety chair, and his eyes are closed. A bowl-shaped helmet bubbling with blue vials is affixed on top of his head, and a gamut of wires writhed out of it, scrawling into the ground beneath him, and seething directly into June’s whirring control panel in the Eraser’s room.

The Archive feels like it was built to be forgotten, as if the very memories it erases sprawl like stained cobwebs on the damp walls and the grouted floors. The giant screen in her room beeps, riveting June’s attention back to it. In the memory, she now notices Orion. His hair was dark, dry, and messy. He wore a loose black T-shirt with a brown undershirt beneath, adding bulk to his otherwise scrawny figure. She notices his smile. It felt wrinkly. It seems genuine, but June knows it is anything but genuine. Why else would the Department warrant erasing Orion’s memories? Something about the relationship between Orion Fields and the woman in his memory is dangerous.

“But it does look poetic,” June admits. Poetic memories are precisely the kind of things that led to the creation of the Department. She turns back to her console, watching the Department’s motto flash brightly at her: ‘We Remember So You Forget.’ A reassurance, June reminds herself. 

The Department of Memories was the most successful peacekeeping initiative in human history, established in 2047 after the world came close to nuclear war over two heirs from different nations falling in love with the same princess. The Department was created to regulate emotions, specifically affection and love. Love must not be free, the Department’s 3805-page handbook proclaimed, because love deceives humans into believing they are more than humans. It inspires people to climb dangerous towers to fight dragons, defy international treaties to exchange roses, and invent weapons that should never have been invented. Unregulated affection is an act of rebellion, a tool to let morons believe that they have the right to suffer for another. And so, June believes in the Department’s purpose: love and affection must be rationed.

Since its inception in 2047, the Department has offered three hundred days to experience affection before making a bureaucratic decision on whether the affection is safe enough for the individuals involved to keep or not. 

Orion’s affection, as it turns out, is highly unsafe. June looks at Orion again and decides that her job as an Eraser is almost like the sunset in his memory. Sunsets are poetic because they forget the sharpness of the day so elegantly, like the mercy that Erasers offer. June cracks her knuckles and presses the button. The screen hums like a swarm of bees. Orion’s memories begin to pixelate. And the next memory loads up onto the screen.