Chapter 22 The Prison Visitor

The visitation room at Riverbend Penitentiary was a long rectangle of pale concrete, lit by fluorescent lamps that hummed like trapped insects. Sarah sat on one side of the glass with her hands folded on the metal table, and across from her Dr. Mina Osei sat with her wrists cuffed to the chair, her silver hair pulled back in a severe knot, her face unreadable. "You came," Osei said. Her voice was calm, her tone almost conversational, as if they were meeting for coffee rather than sitting behind a partition in a state prison. "I came to see if you have anything left to say." "I have plenty." Osei smiled, the small sad smile that Sarah had come to recognize. "But you didn't come for my words, Detective. You came for the one thing I can't take from you." "Which is?" "Your curiosity." Osei leaned forward as far as the cuffs allowed. "You held onto Kowalski's memory. Good. You held onto your father's hand and the gulls and the ferry. But you didn't hold onto everything, and I know because I know what I took. You don't know what you don't know, Detective. And that's the hole that's going to follow you for the rest of your life." Sarah held her gaze. "You took pieces of me. Pieces I'll never get back." "I took pieces that were expendable," Osei said. "Birthdays and addresses and faces you haven't thought of in years. I took the noise so you could hear the music. Frank Kowalski taught you that well enough, didn't he? Choose what to hold onto with both hands. Let the rest go." "Or did he teach me that because you'd already taken things from him, and he was trying to survive it the only way he knew how?" Osei's expression didn't change, but something behind her eyes flickered. "You're angry. Good. Anger is a memory. You'll keep that one." Sarah leaned back in her chair. "I didn't come to argue with you. I came because Domingo left something for me. A cylinder. And I listened to it, and in it he said he'd hidden something I'd need. So I've been thinking about what he needed me to need." Osei was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: "He was smarter than he looked. Your informant, that one. He saw more than he ever told you. And you're wondering what he saw that I don't know you're wondering about." "I'm wondering about Project Lattice. The original project. The one before the market, before the barrels, before the buyers in masks. I want to know who the first people were who sat in your chair and let you take their minds apart." Osei looked at her for a long time. The fluorescent lights hummed. Across the glass, the warden stood with his arms crossed, watching. "There was a pilot program," Osei said at last. "Nineteen eighty-nine. Twelve subjects. All volunteers, supposedly. All men and women who had lost something they couldn't bear to carry—the grief of a child, the trauma of war, the memory of an assault that had erased them from their own lives. I was asked to remove those memories. To make them forget the things that made them forgettable." "And did you?" "I did. And it worked. It worked perfectly. The subjects went home and they lived normal lives, and they never spoke of what they had lost, and I wrote a report and the department filed it and no one ever asked me to do it again, because by then Project Lattice had become something else, and the people who funded it had different needs." "What happened to the twelve?" Sarah asked. "Seven of them asked to come back," Osei said. "They wanted their memories returned. They said the forgetting was worse than the remembering. The others—I don't know. They moved away, or they died, or they simply disappeared. I never heard from them again." "Did one of them have a name that sounds familiar? Marsh? Elena Marsh?" Osei's face went very still. "Where did you hear that name?" "A letter from Domingo. He mentioned it. He said you'd know what it meant." For the first time, something cracked in Osei's composure. Her eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward despite the cuffs. "Elena was the worst case," she said quietly. "She asked for the memories to be removed, and they were, and then she asked for them back, and I couldn't. Not fully. Something had gone wrong in the extraction, and when I tried to put them back, the memories came back wrong. She remembered things that hadn't happened to her. She remembered other people's lives. She couldn't tell her own from anyone else's." "Where is she now?" "I don't know. She left the city after the program ended. She sent me a letter once, saying she was going to a place where no one knew her name, and she wanted to try living without the noise." Osei looked down at her hands. "I hope it worked. I really hope it worked." Sarah stood up. "I'm going to find her." "She won't want to be found, Detective." "Then I'll find a reason she wants to be." Sarah turned and walked toward the door, and at the threshold she looked back. "You took pieces of me. But Domingo didn't. His cylinder is mine now, and everything in it is mine to use. That's something you can't take away." Osei watched her go, and for a moment her face looked almost human—tired, old, regretful. Then the mask slid back into place, and she was the Curator again, the woman who had built machines that could drain a person empty and called it preservation. Sarah walked out of Riverbend into the gray afternoon light and got into her car, and she sat in the driver's seat for a long time with her hands on the wheel, thinking about Elena Marsh and the memories that had come back wrong, and wondering what it would mean to carry someone else's past inside her own head. ---