Still, from the twenty-third of August till the thirtieth, I rarely left my flat, trying on each frock, every hat and slipper, choosing only so many as would fit into the Gladstone bag gifted me by the Professor. Knowing that even one dress would be too many, I packed three just the same and, in the end, decided to smuggle a few things more. Memories of my very own. Professor and Camille would appreciate this—that I had brought them. They’d been witness to much of my city life; they would want to see which things I couldn’t stand to leave behind when at last they came to visit.

Now, as I stood just past the receptionist’s desk, my hands gripped the leather handles, darker by several shades than the stout bag attached to them. Safe inside my Gladstone, I felt each memento swell in significance given everything I’d left behind. I hesitated in the hallway, trying to decide whether to steal a glance inside the bag, to see what I had chosen, now that it was everything I owned.

A ticket stub from the movie theater down the line from my flat. I’d seen The Toll of the Sea every night for a week, and I’d saved every stub, afraid I’d forget, afraid that the dream that each night promised—the same dream I’ve had since the day I was extracted—would undo the day I’d lived before. I am a memory, but no expert on how they are born or by what ritual they are preserved. Still, I never tired of that movie, and it made me wonder if real people did. Perhaps my desire to watch it again and again gave me away. The ticket stub was a bookmark inside my favorite issue of The Delineator, a magazine to which I was introduced by Camille. She began a subscription for me as well. Eighteen years of beautiful covers and colors and words, but I always favored the first one she gave me.

Camille carried one issue or another with her everywhere, so that she’d have something to read when she visited her husband at the university, in his department office or else the one he kept in the clinic. I’d been extracted only two months before our meeting, after that horrible accident with the automobile, but even in that short time the staff and the students saw something unique in me. Something the other memories—or Mems, as they call us—did not have. It was why I was first allowed outside of the Vault for brief tours of the clinic or walks on the terrace, though always accompanied. On one such tour, the staff member drifted for more than a moment, and I took a seat next to Camille.