In the end I said nothing, unwilling to disrupt our comfortable silence even to tell Harvey what my spawning memory had taught me of the world, its fragility and the brief nature of its favor. This knowledge was uniquely mine. It had been extracted with Dolores’s memory of witnessing the death of the first man in Montreal’s history to be killed by an automobile and seeing the shock of his widow, the terror of his small child. The extraction abandoned Dolores to be just as she had been before, unprepared to cope with subsequent traumas, which her father would therefore continue to extract.

Finally, after we had passed several minutes in the study of each other, Harvey Parrish began to smile.

NO. 6

  NO. 6  

Once recalled to the Vault, the study of memory became a pastime for me. In the quiet solitude of my dormitory or during conversations with Ettie or Harvey, I found myself captivated by the way memory enriched over time and its capacity for maintaining a number of different contexts at once. A single event, I realized, was like a spool of thread that might be sewn into a dozen separate tapestries. At times that thread would be a scene’s primary focus, at others simply a decorative background. Memory could weave thousands of those threads together, and in what became my most intriguing discovery, memory often employed the senses to accomplish it. Textures, sounds, smells could all be time machines, sending a person back through life to discover moments that complemented or matched the present. The phenomenon not only captivated my scientific interest, but also restored a measure of my freedom, transporting me outside the facility. When in the courtyard the wind moved my hair, I might find that it was suddenly 1919 again, and instead of the enclosed space, I was on rue Sainte-Catherine, my hair being moved just as gently by an equally pleasant breeze.

A month after my recall, I spent three days in the sitting room of the Vault watching lawyers and executors and Sources flow in and out. There had never been such an influx of real people underground, to my knowledge, yet something about their hustle and bustle felt familiar. The way both men and women rushed in and out of the visiting area, alternating between impatient attempts at composure and agitated but intentionally hushed bickering. I had some idea what had prompted this rash of real people, but the sound of their overlapping conversations and the muted warmth of the fireplace sent my mind back through time, to a tragic day in March 1909. As in the sitting room, there was still a fireplace at my back, only now it was in Windsor Station and I was waiting for Camille to return to the ladies’ waiting room. In a moment she would collect me and we would leave the room to meet the Professor’s train. Minutes later, it would be destroyed.