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DEDICATION

To Beth, who knew immediately that Mem was a keepsake

NO. 1

  NO. 1  

I am a memory. Now I suppose I’ll live like one.

I received the telegram a week before I approached the receptionist’s desk. A lovely girl was stationed there—a student, no doubt. What they call an undergraduate, which means she’s naive. She might have mistaken me for a student as well, except that I handed her a wide, rectangular slip of paper that read: Dolores Extract No. 1. You are hereby recalled to the Vault. Please return to the premises no later than noon, August 30, 1925.

If she was shocked then, or intrigued, she made no mention of it. I found it strange, since in the eighteen years I’ve lived out in the city, among real people, they always have been. Anyone who finds out what I am cannot hide their fascination. I’ve learned also that when people are in awe, more often than not, they cannot resist telling you so directly. It becomes the way you distinguish one real person from another, by what stimuli force them to react.

Professor Toutant’s gentle wife, Camille, was perhaps the first. Together with the Professor, she became something like an adoptive parent: a mother and a friend. Unlike the countless other real people I would meet, Camille’s interest and the affection that soon followed were genuine. I knew by the way she spoke to me, as we exchanged stories about our lives and pasts and passions. While conversations with others quickly devolved into self-satisfying interrogations, Camille, from the beginning, gave something back. More than I could have expected, she sought out a relationship with me, campaigning for me to live outside the Vault and committing to funding my entire existence because my Source was disinclined. I was furnished with an apartment, and without hesitation she and the Professor set about filling it with things; things I never had occasion to use, or else—still being a young woman—I was oblivious when the opportunity arose.

I left nearly everything there, in my rented flat, when I received the recall. Whatever the reason the Vault wanted me back, I doubted I would ever need those things again. The kettle and the towels. The linens and the china, especially the china. In the underground complex sprawling beneath the university clinic, the Vault was a safe deposit for the clients who did not want their memories returning home with them. If nothing else—if there were no specific reasons for my recall—it simply meant I was returning to my proper role as a belonging again and I should need no more belongings of my own.