Read by Martin Lamb
“I'm forgetting something.” His eyes were closed; his fingertips pressed into his temples. His hands quivered as if straining to hold the skull together.
“It couldn't be that important. You never forget anything,” observed his wife as she diced peppers for a salad. The kitchen opened over a bar to the dining room table where he sat. She glanced up at intervals to regard his lone figure, elbows driving divots into the pea-green placemat.
“You look like you're praying,” she laughed.
“Just looking for something.” His fingers occasionally clinched tighter around his head, then let loose. It was a steady rhythm that resembled the draw of a pump.
“Need any help?”
He didn't respond. The mental suction continued. She went back to her salad.
He knew something was misplaced inside his head. It was a small thing but important. There were fractured references extending back to a no longer existent source. Broken lines of context fluttered at the edge of empty pockets that should have been memory. It was like trying to produce the image from a voice recording of a conversation that never took place.
“Is it someone's birthday?” he called out.
“No birthday today.” She frowned.
“This week?”
“No birthday this week.” Her frown deepened. She finished with the peppers and swept them to the side. Mushrooms would come next, but they needed retrieving from the refrigerator. She set the knife down and remained watching her husband.
He dug his thumbs deeper into the skin above his ears, leafing through the pile of internal notices that comprised his mental calendar. “It's not Edwin's recital. That's this Saturday. Pauly has her shots a week from tomorrow. Bill-pay was yesterday. Your conference call with the board is postponed till next month.”
“Try something more personal,” his wife nudged.
“You know what it is?” His eyes remained closed, his face focused, but it was his turn to frown.
She shook her head. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“I have never felt less funny.”
“And you expect me to believe you've forgotten tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” He opened his eyes for the first time, releasing his confusion in blinking increments. His hands stopped rubbing at his head, though the fingers remained firmly rooted. “I've forgotten something for tomorrow? Something personal.”
“Yes.” The single word clicked into place like the sharp cock of a pistol.
“Not a birthday?”
“No.”
“A dinner? Do we have reservations?”
“Not that I'm aware.”
“Friends are coming to town?”
He was watching her now with some care. With each negation her brows were raised higher and her lips pursed tighter. The crows' feet had appeared at the corner of her eyes. That was never a good sign.
“A doctor's appointment?”
Her head shook no.
“Dancing lessons?” No. “A night at the opera?” No. “Tickets to Monaco?” No.
Her face had flushed full red. There was a dangerous, twitching friction beneath her chin. Her carefully-applied makeup began to crack through with the tiniest of lines.
“I am so sorry, darling.” He let his hands lower slowly to the table. “I have absolutely no idea what tomorrow is.”
“Tomorrow,” her words were so tightly drawn as to twang between syllables, “is our anniversary.”
They stared at each other over the open bar. Her eyes flared with a carefully-checked tension. His eyes retreated into their sockets. He wet his lips. His mouth opened, started to form a thought; it was quickly abandoned.
“Well?” she demanded. “Don't you have anything to say about our anniversary?”
“Our anniversary.” He could feel her glare cording around his throat. “Our anniversary is tomorrow.”
She gave him one final nod: a line in the sand. One more misstep and he would no longer be able to salvage the situation. The hands clutched once again to his head. His eyes snapped closed; his mind turned in upon itself, chewing through layer after layer of insulating memory. He skittered across an endless landscape of carefully indexed data. He spun through every category, within every search parameter, across every partition. He poured over memory logs, data storage receipts, system back-up archives. He looked everywhere. He found nothing.
“Our anniversary?”
“Yes.” She strained to keep her tone level.
With no recourse left, he simply let the horrible question slip free. “Our anniversary of what?”
His wife's face went immediately, completely, severely blank. He took a deep breath and did his best to prepare for the storm. Tempered steel came unbound behind her eyes. She would defrag him slowly until nothing of consequence remained.
The storm didn't come. Instead she breathed out a straw house's worth of tension, wiped her hands on a dishtowel, came around the bar and took a seat at the table adjacent to his. She held out her hands and forced a smile. It was weak but he fully appreciated the attempt.
“Take my hand,” she said. He complied.
“When were we married?”
“My final go live date was –”
“When were we married?” she gently corrected him.
“On January 12th, 2020.”
“Good,” she nodded. “And what is today's date?”
“January 12th, 2025.”
“Exactly,” she smiled. “Now, define anniversary.”
His mind buzzed, happy to receive such a tangible activity. When he spoke his words took on a deliberate monotone: “New Oxford, American Edition. An-ni-ver-sa-ry. Noun; the date on which an event took –”
“Next entry.”
“Special usage. The date on which a country or other institution –”
“Next entry.”
“The date on which a couple was married in a previous year. Example,” his words suddenly adopted the manufactured singsong of an overzealous actor, “he even forgot our tenth anniversary!”
“Enough,” she said softly.
“Origin. Middle English, from the Latin anniversarius, returning yearly, from annus –”
“I said enough!” The cry brought another sharp flush to her cheeks. Her husband went silent; he showed no response. The colour soon faded and her wan smile returned.
“I want you to bookmark this entry, okay?”
He gave a small, embarrassed nod.
“Now-cross reference this to January 12th on every year of your system calendar.”
“For how long?” he asked.
“Forever.” Her smile flinched under the weight of a deep melancholy. It waited just beneath the surface and it was all she could do not to stare into its depth.
“Infinite temporality will not compute,” he warned her.
“Fine.” She flung off the shadow with a clear decision. “Until the year twenty-one-hundred.”
His head buzzed with another sudden activity. When it was done he smiled at her. “Until our 80th anniversary.”
She said nothing. After a moment she squeezed his hand. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he repeated.
She let his hand go. “Search your purge folder for any files related to January 12th, Valentine's, or August 3rd.”
“Your birthday?”
“Yes,” she nodded. Another whir of focused activity.
“103 files found. Video, audio and supporting documents. Approximately 400 terabytes.”
“Good. Retrieve all files. Mark them read-only, administrative password required.”
“Did I do anything wrong, dear?”
“No. Not at all.”
He paused, considering. “You’re directing me to override my default data protocols. You installed that CMS yourself, with an intention to protect my storage capacity. Tampering with such efficiencies could prove destabilizing.”
She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. “For this we can make an exception.”
His mind buzzed. His face showed nothing. “If you say so, dear.”
Nodding to herself, she got up from the table and went back to the kitchen. “The salad's almost done,” she called over the door of the refrigerator.
“Good. I'm hungry,” he heard himself saying somewhere far above his thoughts.
His elbows went back to the table and the hands returned to the side of his head. He remembered tomorrow again. It was their anniversary. How could he have forgotten? Breathless whispers; soft skin brushing against his hardened artifice; promises of their impossible eternity: all the familiar imagery that his content management system had discarded as so much redundancy.
The sensation of something missing lingered. 400 terabytes. That was nearly a week's worth of memory documentation. In recovering the requested files his internal processor had been forced to purge an equivalent amount of data from his active archive.
His fingers continued to dig into his head. His emotion matrix continued to quiver atop an unseen vacuum.
“I'm forgetting something.” His eyes closed. He heard the clatter of dishes from the kitchen. His wife would soon have dinner ready. His mind flicked atop the inaccessible secrets locked away within his purge folder. What was in there? What was he forgetting? His mind buzzed with confusion. His hands pumped at nothing.
How important could it be?
--
Content Management by Derek Ivan Webster was read by Martin Lamb at the Liars' League Nature & Nurture event on Tuesday June 14th, 2011 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London.
Raised in a tiny Alaskan fishing village, educated at Yale University, Derek Ivan Webster is a writer who appreciates a good contrast. A victim of the freelance lifestyle, Derek relies on his sage wife and their precious/precocious little conspirators to keep him sane. Read more at www.ivanhope.com/blog.
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