[Wk24] Fog
Catryn had her first dose of amnesite when she was seven and Billy told her she looked like a walking mushroom in clothes. Catryn had held it together for the entire school day, only to burst into tears on the school bus when Billy got his friends to stuff their backpacks into their shirts and mimic her asking the teacher if she could use the restroom.
“Even fungus has to pee!” Billy screamed, wriggling in his near-to-ripping polo.
Her mother was not one for easy amnesite; despite it being standard issue for emotional pain relief, Catryn was the only one in her group of friends to have missed it as aid for her suffering. The bus deposited her in front of her house, puffy eyed and wailing about being a mushroom forever even if she never wore that shirt again. The school had been called, but Billy’s behavior was brushed off and Catryn was told everything would be fine the next day.
“It will be fine because I won’t be going to school.” Catryn had replied, her face glass behind her cool words.
She had stayed home for the next two days, and then her mother had given her amnesite.
The drug was a matte brown liquid that had been cold going down, and hot in her belly. It tasted the way fall smelled; crisp and earthy and like it might rain. That night, she slid into bed as her mortification slid from her memory.
When Billy got in her path and cackled about mushrooms the next day, Catryn barely heard or saw him. By the end of the school day, she couldn’t even remember his name.
Catryn stood in line at the pharmacy, gnawing ache biting more sharply into her well-broken heart with each passing second as she waited for her refill. Work started in an hour. Her skin had started crawling last night.
“I couldn’t remember if you were the narcoleptic or the diabetic.”
The words thudded stubbornly behind her forehead. Nate had said them weeks ago. Catryn had immediately dosed herself well and thoroughly with amnesite, and although she’d immediately forgotten everything, she’d awoken the next morning with that sentence ticking at her temples, itchy like bad stitching on a rotting wound. She’d thought the sentence would fade; she’d only ever needed one dose per incident. But the sentence clamored louder as the days snaked into weeks, and Nate reappeared in patches of pulsing slyness across her thoughts. Things she didn’t realize she needed to forget would show up next to that sentence, loud and unforgiving like her humiliation.
“I didn’t think you needed to be coddled.”
Nate, standing in the alley next to the restaurant where she waitressed, genuinely surprised that she would ask why he hadn’t congratulated her on finishing her degree.
“We never said we were monogamous.”
Nate, after dating her exclusively for eight months.
“If you loved me enough, you’d forgive me. Actually, if you loved me enough, this wouldn’t even bother you.”
Nate, after lying.
“I couldn’t remember if you were the narcoleptic or the diabetic.”
Nate, pretending (or was he) that he couldn’t remember who she was a day after sex because he’d also been sleeping with someone else.
Every time that sentence stroked her eardrums with its syrupy confidence, she found ten other moments of her year with Nate that needed to be expunged. Her amnesite requirements increased. She was up to a bottle a day now, but little leaking bits of agony still floated to her increasingly fuzzy surface. The levels of amnesite were starting to tweak her other memories. The other day, she couldn’t remember her mother’s name. She forgot where her apartment was, and then, after finding a piece of old mail, and tracking down her home, she didn’t remember where the elevator in her building was.
She stood in this line, though, and remembered things about Nate that shouldn’t have existed past her first sip, all those months ago. She reached the head of the line with tears streaming down her cheeks, pooling in the cowl of her sweater. She shoved her prescription at the guy, and waited for him to hand her silky liquid autumn, her respite in a bottle.
He unfolded the prescription, surveyed it, looked at her, and shook his head sadly.
“Sorry, ma’am, they recalled amnesite last week. No more amnesite.”
“They what?” Catryn choked. “What do you mean, ‘recalled’?”
narcoleptic or diabetic
“It was all over the news,” He said, handing back her prescription. “Some big lawsuit about tampering with the wrong memories. Lost its funding and FDA approval. Buncha people went to jail.”
couldn’t remember couldn’t remember if
“Okay. Okay.” Catryn tried to breathe through nostrils that streamed and spluttered. “So what is the replacement then? Can I just get the replacement?”
“Ma’am.”
I couldn’t remember diabetic
“Ma’am, there is no replacement. I’m sorry.”
Catryn stumbled onto the sidewalk, the afternoon sun over-bright the way it always is when it’s better to be buried beneath twelve comforters and a lobotomy. She shuffled slowly to the corner. A dude with hollow sockets for eyes, a sweet smile, and thin yellow wisps across his barely hidden skull, appeared at her elbow and whispered in a gravelly voice coarse with necessity,
“Hey, I have something here that’s better than amnesite. Works every time.”
A lady in a pencil skirt and stilettos shoved between them, muttering about pathetic laziness. She handed Catryn a disappointed glare as she trotted across the street.
you were the narcoleptic remember remember
Catryn reached for her wallet.
