Forget Yourself Read Online Free Page B

arms and brought myself to my knees, eyes stuffed with sleep.
    “So. Did you sleep here?” Pilsner asked.
    “No.” Pause. “I suppose I did.”
    I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or tutting in response. Either way it was better to keep my lips pressed shut. They were dry and kept sticking together.
    “Have some of this,” he’d offered, thrusting a cup with a mouthful of water to me.
    “Thank you,” I waited for him to ask what I had been doing there.
    “It’s your turn with the book today.”
    “Right, there’s actually something—”
    “Why were you sleeping here, then?”
    Words caught in my throat. I wasn’t sure I had an explanation. I just had the floating-fuzzed image of the woman, which perhaps I’d never even seen.
    “I had a memory.”
    “Really.”
    “I did, I saw this—”
    “Are you sure you had a memory?”
    I examined him through narrow eyes.
    “It’s just,” Pilsner spoke to me slowly, “well, she who lived with you only just had a memory herself and—”
    “No, not—”
    “If you’ll let me speak,” his still voice hardened. “It’s natural you would want a memory of your own. It doesn’t make it real.”
    Real. The least decided what was real from our old lives, though why they’d have better memories or a better sense of judgement than anyone else was unclear.

    Tiny scraps of dust danced around the book. Pilsner had searched me, making sure I had no hidden, secret pen, or pencil, or crayon. I knew he was there, outside the door, old ears straining for the sound of ink scratching paper.
    I flipped each page over, delicately, as though they were made of crystal. I wanted to see if anything had changed since I had last been there. Ketamine’s memory would be in there, I just had to find it.
    New words were written in red pen, squatting at the end of Love:
     
    You should get back on your feet at soon as possible.
     
    It was Tanned’s. Page 16. The letters were neat, carefully looped at the tips. He had taken his time. Underneath were bullet points, less neat, written by someone else. ‘Don’t mourn a break-up for too long’, ‘It shouldn’t take longer than the next ration’, ‘You leave your house the next day’. Next ration had come, next ration had gone. Fine, I told myself. I would smile and move my lips in sync with words on how everything was fine. Changes weren’t unusual. Eventually it would all be perfect. Eventually we would live as we had before.
    I closed the book and opened it to a random page.
     
    Criminals go to prison. They’re told how long by a judge. Sometimes they’re put to death.
     
    Page 137. One of the more informative passages, actually telling us something about the outside world, though the information was useless in ours, where no-one ever committed a crime other than what they started with. But these were popular, the ones that didn’t mean everyone had to change the way they did something. But what had we done that was so wrong we had to lose our minds? Our old lives, ourselves. If this was a prison it wasn’t like the flat image I had been left with.
    I flicked through the next pages with less care, watching the cascade of coloured words crash about one another. Large blue letters called my attention. ‘Entertainment’. A few more pages and a smaller heading, again in blue. Songs.
     
    Songs are a melody, with more than one instrument. Bands play together and make songs.
     
    I always said songs were more than that: they had words. Another false memory. Really, really I thought they just didn’t want their notes sullied by voices. That was understandable.
    More sections. ‘Bodies’, ‘Disputes’ and ‘Food’. Food. I flipped the pages more slowly.
     
    Food is grown in farms, covered by plastic sheeting, lit by bright bulbs.
     
    To be healthy you need protein.
     
    MSG and large quantities of caffeine are illegal.
     
    And there it was. I had never seen her handwriting before.
     
    Recipes are invented by