She even has a Polaroid to prove it. Given to her later by Dr. Holliday. Which is helpful, because Eleanor remembers none of this.
Her father was thin and feeble, and he wore shorts and no shirt and his chest was sallow and seemed to cave in on itself, and on one ankle he wore an electronic monitor, and he had an oxygen tube entwined around his face and in his nose, and next to him, like a loyal pet, sat an oxygen tank on a stand on wheels.
She doesn’t remember any of that, either.
The room was dark and smelled stale. There was a half-completed card game laid out on a small rattan table. Her father offered her a seat on a tattered wicker chair. He was dying, he explained. He coughed a lot.
She doesn’t remember that, either.
His story, insofar as it concerned Eleanor, was not that surprising, in the end. An hour turned out to be a generous estimate as to the length of her parents’ relationship. It was a drunken collision between strangers that yielded a child. As for the rest of his life, or at least the parts he was willing to hint at, it all seemed compelling in a sordid way, though he purposefully avoided going into details. He claimed he didn’t remember much, including anything at all about her mother. About his own childhood, his own origins, the reasons for his current circumstance, he revealed nothing. It’s better forgotten, he told her.
She doesn’t remember any of this because, after she returned from the trip, Dr. Holliday arranged to have her memory of the trip erased. Fell’s technique, so crude at its inception, had been honed by Holliday to the point that specific memories could be targeted and nullified, especially very recent ones. They are the easiest to eliminate, Holliday explained to her later. Johann, she said, was concerned mainly with victims of unspeakable atrocities and had developed a way to erase whole decades from people’s memories. But Holliday had perfected the method such that it could erase a week, a day, even an hour.
And it was Dr. Holliday who explained to Eleanor, in that same enormous boardroom on Stanford’s sun-slanted campus where they’d first met, that her trip to Hawaii had even happened at all. Eleanor had no memory of it. She sat there, befuddled, her mind feeling muddied and scrubbed. And it was Dr. Holliday who gave her the Polaroid of her and her father, as proof. Who explained to Eleanor that her father had requested to meet his daughter, just once, before he died, so he could give her a message to deliver—a message for a man named William Wayne. Dr. Holliday also explained that it was her father who had insisted, to both Dr. Holliday and Eleanor, on the lone condition of this meeting: That afterward, Eleanor would have all memory of the meeting erased. And that Eleanor had agreed to this beforehand. There was a signature sheet to prove it. Holliday slid it across the table. Eleanor looked it over. Sure enough.
She looked up at Dr. Holliday. “But why did he want to do that?” she asked, feeling, in that shadowed boardroom, confused, disoriented, and betrayed, and suddenly aware of a dark and malignant blot in her mind, this absence, like an ink drop spreading in water.
“Because your father did not want your only memory of him to be of an old, feeble man trapped in a shack,” Dr. Holliday said. “You have to understand—in his time, before his incarceration, John Sung was a very robust man. If you’re going to remember him, he wants you to remember him that way. As the man he once was. As the man William Wayne knew.”
“But how can I possibly do that?”
“By finding William Wayne. And delivering your father’s message to him.”
“And what’s the message?” Eleanor asked.
“That your father is dead.”
“Is he?” Eleanor asked.
“He is now,” Dr. Holliday said. “He was very sick. He knew what was coming. He died just a few days after your visit.”
After that, Dr. Holliday arranged for Eleanor to visit Caesura, under the guise of a new arrival. She would have to pretend that she, like the other residents, had no memory of who she’d previously been. The employees in the town, the sheriff and his deputies, wouldn’t be informed that Eleanor—or Bette Burr—was any different from anyone else. Once inside the town, her job was to find Wayne, deliver her father’s message, and, in return, find out what, if anything, Wayne remembered about her father, John Sung. Then, after three days, the Institute would extract her. That was the arrangement.
Eleanor had two more questions in that boardroom for Dr. Holliday, sitting at that long table, after Holliday had laid this all out to her.
The first question: “Why me? Why not just deliver this news to Wayne yourselves?”
“Because Wayne won’t believe it coming from anyone else. But he’ll believe you.”
The second question: “Why would I do this?”
“Because it’s your only chance to know who your father really was.”
Her only chance to know—yet here she is, thinks Bette Burr, four days in with no progress. And no desire, really, to stick it out for any longer, here in the middle of nowhere, struggling to deliver a message to a man she’s never met from a father she never knew.
So, when Bette saw the two black SUVs roll into town this morning, while everyone else in the town chattered and wondered who these people were and what they were doing here, she figured, Okay, this must be my ticket out of here. I gave it my shot. I knocked. I knocked again. Now I just want to go home.
As she looks now at the empty suitcase again, the one she toted in just for show, she thinks, Fuck it, forget the second suitcase, forget the whole masquerade, and she zippers the first one shut, with her few pieces of clothing in it, and her manila envelope, and her Polaroid, and she hefts that suitcase and heads over to where the agents seem to have gathered, across town, at the intake trailer.
There’s a big one in a black suit standing guard at the door. She marches up to him, suitcase in hand.
“Okay, I’m ready to go,” she says.
“I’m sorry?” says the agent.
“My name’s Bette Burr. I mean, Eleanor Sung. You’re here to take me home, right?”
The agent resumes his disinterested stance. “No one in, no one out.”
“I’m sorry—what’s your name?”
“Agent Burly.”
“Agent Burly, I understand you’ve got some other business in the town, but I’d like to go. Now. Maybe one of you can drive me out of here?”
“I think you misunderstood me,” he says.
Bette sighs. “Contact Dr. Holliday. She knows all about this.”
“No one in, no one out. That’s all I know.”
“Okay, yes, but when are we leaving?”
“I suggest you return to your home.”
She stares at the agent. She stares at the closed trailer door. Neither is budging. Maybe someone inside—someone official—“Can I at least talk to whoever’s in charge?”