“I am sorry, Harry.”
“So you keep saying, and I’m sure every toenail I left behind is grateful for your pity. What are you planning?”
He didn’t meet my eye as he said, “I need you to forget.”
I was so briefly stunned, I didn’t know what to say. He half-shook his head, and for a moment I wondered if he was going to apologise again. The temptation to try and punch him if he did flickered briefly at the back of my mind, not that I could have possibly landed a blow. Instead, he just walked away and refused to look back even when I started screaming again.
They kept me tranquillised for most of my demise, which was a relief. It kept both the pain, and the thoughts of what was next, subdued. I know I dreamed but, for almost the first time, did not remember my dreams, only that they were fast and hot, reality intruding into the stories of my mind as a prickling on my skin that became the claws of insects, a burning in my stomach that became the carrying of my own guts in a shopping bag, the bleeding in my feet which was simply explained by my wandering mind as the slow swallowing of my body whole by a great snake whose body rippled like a harmonic wave with each new gulp of my flesh. By the time its fangs reached my midriff, my feet were already well into the snake’s belly, dissolving a bone at a time in the slow pulsing acid.
They cut things fine. I was on pure oxygen and my stats still falling by the time they were ready for me. They wheeled in a new device, patched together from who-knew-what dregs of a mad scientist’s mind. It needed its own power supply–a mere two hundred and thirty volts were not enough for this baby. There was some bickering about whether the trolley I lay on should be earthed or not, before one doctor with a great bark of “You’re such children!” pointed out that the metal handcuffs which strapped me to its sides would do a perfectly decent task of channelling any current and that everyone was to treat this procedure as being equivalent to a cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, and be it on their own head if they got stung.
I believe I kicked and screamed and begged and fought, but in truth I was probably too tired and too dosed to make more than grunting noises punctuated by the occasional child-like shriek of indignation. They had to use masking tape to attach the electrodes to my skull; getting me to keep the final electrode in my mouth proved more of a challenge until the same doctor who had demonstrated such a sensible attitude to voltage reached the equally sensible decision to administer a paralytic. Sedation, it was judged, would probably not help what they were aiming to achieve, but I was grateful when one of the orderlies leaned over and taped my frozen bone-dry eyes shut. All I was left with was sound. It took them three false starts to get it right, the first charge misfiring as a fuse blew; the second failing to trigger because one of the leads had become detached in the attempt to change the fuse. When they finally got round to the business of sending a few thousand volts through my brain in an attempt to wipe every aspect of who and what I was from my still-thinking mind, it had a slight air of comedic afterthought.
I heard the doctor say, “Can we please get it right this time? Is everyone standing clear? All right, and—”
And that was that.
Chapter 57
I’ve only once attended a Forgetting.
It was 1989, in a private room of St Nicolas’ Hospital, Chicago. I was seventy years old and doing all right for myself, I felt. I had only received the diagnosis of multiple myeloma a few months ago, which was surprisingly late in my life cycle, and my enthusiasm in my mid-sixties for how little I appeared to be dying a slow and inconvenient death had led to me taking better care of my body than I usually did. I was even a member of a tennis club, something I’d never been in all my lives gone before, and I taught mathematics at a school in the mountains of Morocco for three months of every year, perhaps in an attempt to enjoy the company of the children that I could never call my own.
My visit to this eminently polite room in this eminently polite hospital on the edge of a more polite Chicago suburb, where the American flag flew proud and fresh flowers were put at the end of every patient’s bed, every day, without fail, was not on my own account. I had been summoned, and the woman who had summoned me was dying.
Akinleye.
I hadn’t seen her since that night in Hong Kong when her maid danced out across the water and she had fled before the sun rose.