September 20, 1925, had at once come quickly and also seemed to take its time. Recently, CKAC had begun airing an instructional series on playing piano, and part of me had truly believed I’d be released and back at home by the time it began, learning along with scores of listeners on my neighbor’s piano. But that was before I knew of reprinting and that I’d been recalled so that I could be erased. Now I swayed between hoping that my fate would change and despairing that, at least for me, piano lessons would soon be obsolete.

“Today makes three weeks exactly,” I said.

Ettie held the cigarette between her fingers and rubbed her bottom lip for stray paper with the same hand. I tried not to watch too intently so that she wouldn’t see my disapproval. It had nothing to do with her being a woman, of course; rather I was cautious over the safety of a practice whose advertised purpose had changed too many times. Real people, it seemed, were less skeptical. They appeared always too trusting of easy pleasures.

“Three weeks, that’s right,” Ettie said with a nod. “For the both of us. The day you returned was my first night on staff, did you know?” And then she laughed. “You could tell, of course you could.”

She passed her cigarette to me absentmindedly and I pinched it between my fingers as she had.

“What made you come belowground?”

“Nothing complicated or noble, I promise. I’ve always wanted a Mem of my own, and Vault nurse and staff benefits include discounted extractions after six months in Vault employ. Well, on one extraction anyway, and one is all I need.”

“Then there’s something you’d like to forget?” I asked as gently as I could without insulting her. Ettie and I had agreed that when it was just she and I we needn’t coddle each other’s feelings the way men often did.

“No, nothing like that,” she said, but took a moment longer before she continued. “I just wanted to know how it felt to have one. A Mem. But more than that, the experience. What’s it like to know there’s something you’ll never remember?” She scoffed at her own question. “Silly!”

It brought to mind a question the Professor had asked me a number of months before and how—had I responded differently—I would have been able to provide Ettie with an answer to her own.

“Is that so silly?” I asked.

“It is now that I know you. Now that I know the Mem I’d extract might be more. It feels downright selfish to me. Curiosity doesn’t seem reason enough.”

“No,” I said, balancing myself between a memory and the present. “It doesn’t.” I looked at my friend. “But you’re being hard on yourself. It’s more likely your Mem would be a keepsake, like all the others.”