The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

His name had been Leonard Futterman; he had changed it to Len Future when he was a college freshman. He had wanted a life without past entanglements, nothing to render unclear the loyalty he felt for the group he was joining, a revolutionary group that wanted a new world. His parents had marveled at his energy. They did not know how far it had gone until his arrest. The jittery movements of the Spirit had reminded him slightly of his parents’ terror as they faced him in jail and heard his arguments and the fury he brought to the positions he took. By then he had come to despise their timidity and weakness. Memory. Incident. Choose.

Grandfather Herrman had left a small glass factory in Germany to emigrate to South America in 1932, a year after his father’s birth. Leonard remembered his grandparents as nervous and furtive, eternal strangers. He had sometimes marveled as he thought of the old people, how pale and frightened they must have been among the colorful, loud inhabitants of Brazil. They had spent three years there and had come to the United States and were foreign here as well. They had been shamed, Leonard learned, in some mysterious way. Memory: Grandfather on porch, Brooklyn, 1963, crying for his dead wife. It had made Leonard embarrassed even then because it seemed so babyish. That memory was well let go. He wondered if he could recreate it fully enough. He put himself on the porch. He remembered how its gray painted railing was chipped here and there and in the chips showed its hundred undercoats in thirty colors. He heard the sound of the old man’s sobs—“Oh, God, oh, God, what will I do?”—shrill as a woman’s in the hot, still afternoon. In the bunk beneath him, Milburn Waycross, huge and angry, muttered hate in his evening routine, shot his urges across the back wall of the cell, and withdrew into sleep. Tomorrow, Milburn Waycross and Ringnose and the food and the waiting and the stink and the noise would be gone. If the memory was complete enough, all he needed to do was evoke it and she—they could have it and give it to the fire that sent them burning away on its wind. Remember.

He woke as usual before the buzz-clang wake-up. For the first time since his imprisonment, he felt expectation, even excitement. Would she come walking through the walls? As he lay waiting, her urgent voice whispered in his head, “Memory! Memory!” and then Leonard let her have what he had prepared, the porch, the look of his grandfather in detail, the sense of shame and anger, the time of the year, the smell of the painted wood, oily in the heat of his hand. He seemed to slip back into a doze and again the voice cried, “Memory! Memory!” Mrs. Farney, his third-grade teacher—Fly-Face Farney, who pulled and pulled him to the principal’s office, who never let any of them walk but always pulled, pushed, tugged at them, and whose rasping “children” was the stuff of nightmare. The essence of her bloomed in his mind and he gave the days, two separate ones, and dozed again and woke, and again, and again.

It occurred to Leonard that he might be being cheated. He felt he had awakened, given a memory, and slipped back to sleep for a moment, and then given another. When the voice came again, he said, “How can I be sure days are passing?”

She said, “You yourself will leave proof.” Every time he woke thereafter, a different color rubber band was around his wrist, or a thread or a shoelace. Then he turned, stretched, sought memory, found it, gave it, and again, and again. Sometimes the memory was fragmentary and her voice, or another voice, would scream out of the place in fire, “Give it, remember!” and he would try harder or give another. On the sabbath, the voices were still, and Leonard used his rest to dream away the time in fantasy while his body went to his work and served his sentence.