The first time I saw a poster on the subway promoting the institute that could make you forget things, I thought it was a marketing campaign for some new science fiction movie. And when I saw the headline “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow!” on the cover of a newspaper, I mistook it as something boring, like the cure for some new flu—I didn’t think they were talking about memories.
For anyone familiar with the film, the first lines of this novel are inevitably bound to recall the narrative conceit of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Both that movie and this novel tell speculative science fiction stories about a futuristic advancement in medical technology that allows for unwanted memories to be vanquished forever from one’s mind. The underlying psychological substructure of such procedures are, of course, that what cannot be remember never really happened to the person who cannot recollect it. The philosophical foundation laid over the substructure is that our identity is inextricably tied to our known behavior and actions and this remains true whether we can recall that behavior or not.
“I would do my damn best to be more happy than not.”
Thomas is the boy that changes everything for Aaron. The book is predominantly the story of their star-cross, ill-fated romance that is not to be for one pretty compelling reason. Thomas is a lot of things over the course of the book—or maybe he isn’t completely—but at this point he is simply a philosopher. This quote is not just the title of the book, it is an expression of a philosophical attitude to life. And, frankly, one that makes a whole lot more sense than a lot of others that were expressed in the form of books running to hundreds of pages. As philosophies to live by, it is nearly perfect in it expression: concise, easy to understand, and—best of all—eminently realistic. One actually could put this theoretical proposition into practice if one really wanted to face the consequences. Of course, that’s where it all falls apart, doesn’t it?
The clock reads 4:13 a.m. “What’s anterograde amnesia?” I ask.
Aaron is the victim of a brutal assault that, even more so than meeting Thomas, changes everything for him. One of the effects of the injuries he suffers as a result of the beating is anterograde amnesia. This the medical name for the inability of the brain to form new memories. Medications designed for Alzheimer’s patients have been used to treat it with varying levels of success. The one thing Aaron now really wants to forget is being told that the condition occasionally proves permanently irreversible since there is no current procedure capable of fixing nature does not do on its own. Making such a prognosis even worse is that neurologists do not yet fully understand one of the great mysteries left in science: this whole business of memory creation, storage, and recall. In the worst-case scenario, Aaron could conceivably be left to live the rest of his life with only the memories that were stored before the accident still capable of being recalled. But it turns out that even that potential outcome is more fraught with difficulty than the average person.
“What’s anterograde amnesia?” I ask Evangeline at 4:21 a.m.
All the information provided here is conveyed to Aaron shortly after 4:13 a.m. It is during those few minutes that he learns all about anterograde amnesia, treating it with drugs designed for Alzheimer’s patients, and the possibility of his condition never improving. Less than ten minutes later he has completely forgotten all of it. But the communication of information about his condition was not presented to him for the first time at 4:13 a.m. It is not clearly exactly how many times Aaron has learned all about anterograde amnesia in the early morning hours of that particularly long and exhausting night, but one can well imagine the figure running into the teens or twenties or even having passed fifty. A playwright with equal amounts of guts and malevolence could create quite a striking portrait of one version of hell based on this premise. Imagine attending a performance of play in which the exactly same ten minute conversation is repeated for two hours without intermission.
