When the door closed, Wendy collapsed forward theatrically, head in hands. “What a fucking joke.”
“I know these tests seem dull, but the answers could be illuminating—”
“Not when you’re asking all the wrong questions.”
It was the first indication Wendy had given of her own curiosity.
“What would be the right question?”
“Can we just take a break for a while?” Wendy stood, looking like a kid asking for a bathroom pass, equal parts impatient and pleading.
“Of course. But—just tell me, what should we be asking?”
“For one thing, you could ask me what it feels like not to remember.”
“What does it feel like?”
Wendy was already at the door. “It feels like nothing. And don’t ask me how you study that.”
* * *
Three hours into a miserable, waking night, Lizzie gave up on sleep. Navigated the small room by feel, cursed as a shadow’s sharp edge attacked her thigh, but cursed quietly, as if someone were there to hear. The institute in the dark: too quiet. Probably haunted. Tonight, Lizzie would be its ghost. Each fellow was required to spend one night per week babysitting the ward. Not that it was a ward, exactly, because these were neither patients nor inmates, but voluntary subjects. Twenty miles away, in a swank high-rise apartment, Lizzie’s best friend since kindergarten was staring glassy-eyed at a Russian novel and nursing her no longer quite newborn, which Lizzie knew because this was what Gwen did every night. She was too tired to entertain company, she told Lizzie, who hadn’t realized she counted as company when it came to Gwen. Thus was Lizzie’s only prospect of a social life foreclosed, and after a week of chasing Gwen and avoiding her mother, she found herself pathetically grateful for the excuse to spend a night at work. Not that there was work to do: the Meadowlark employed security to enforce order, nurses to monitor health. Lizzie need only observe.
Three of the Meadowlark’s residential subjects required full-time care: a woman with late-stage Alzheimer’s, a man whose Korsakoff syndrome had advanced far enough to erode all but the most basic functions, and the intriguing Anderson, whose withered hippocampus could form no new memories. Anterograde amnesia: he lived in an eternal present, his life measured out in four-minute intervals, each erasing the one that came before. He played a piano, which Strauss had given him, day and night. Then there was Wendy Doe, as capable of taking care of herself as she was without material means to do so: no money, no social security card, no ID, no chance of legal employment or government subsidy. Not ill enough to be permanently housed by the state, not well enough to house herself—the kind of liminal existence Strauss’s institute was made for. Strauss gave her a bed, an allowance, supervised liberties, in exchange for her willing participation in the research. Our research, he’d suggested Lizzie make a habit of saying, as if a pronoun could fool Wendy into believing she was studying herself.
The fellows’ bedroom was spare. The bed felt like a board. Lizzie hadn’t yet regained the knack of sleeping alone, even though for nearly thirty years, alone had been her bed and body’s natural state. The body remembered what it wanted to remember. Hers, a traitor, wanted to remember Lucas. Lizzie ventured down the dark hall in pajamas and bare feet. Somewhere, softly, a piano ascended a scale, chased itself back down again. The Meadowlark was an asterisk, wings spoking radially from a central hub. By day, it vibrated with its own self-importance. Rats ran mazes; chimps signed; coders coded; talk therapists talked patients through memory palaces; damaged brains and their owners lay down and held still. A steady stream of outpatient subjects flowed through: the man who remembered every minute of every day since birth. The man who remembered things that had never happened. The woman with continual, overpowering déjà vécu, the conviction that everything she experienced was already a memory. Lizzie empathized. She often felt like she was remembering her life even as it happened.
Nighttime returned the institute to its former self. The Meadowlark Asylum for Women was founded in 1853 as the city’s proud leap into modern psychiatric care, shuttered in 1982 by state edict after a Pulitzer-winning exposé detailed facilities spattered with blood and feces, patients unwashed, unmedicated, assaulted, strapped down, starved half to death. The acreage had been left to rot for nearly a decade before Strauss secured the funding to make his brainchild manifest. House of horrors turned state-of-the-art factory for knowledge production, shiny and humane. It was only a building; it could not remember. But if it could, Lizzie thought. Epileptics and schizophrenics and late-stage syphilitics, alcoholics and children and prostitutes and women too poor to have anywhere else to go. Dissatisfied housewives dunked in ice baths, frontal lobes ice-picked into obedience. Wives returned to husbands, docile and pliant. Or buried in the backwoods, forgotten.
Lizzie didn’t believe in ghosts.
She found a kettle in the staff kitchen and boiled some water. Tea seemed the kind of thing insomniacs were meant to drink. She was still waiting for the tea to cool when Wendy Doe appeared, in a white doily of a nightgown that made her look like a Victorian invalid. Lizzie was wearing Lucas’s boxers and Cal sweatshirt; for their softness, she told herself, not his lingering scent.
“Sorry,” Wendy said. “I saw the light.”
“Do you need something?” Lizzie asked.
“Just couldn’t sleep.”
Lizzie poured more tea, unsure how to make small talk with a subject, especially a subject with no life, past or present, outside these walls. She wasn’t about to offer up her own life for conversational content.
“Seen any ghosts yet?” Wendy asked. “I mean, this place has to be haunted, right?”
Lizzie felt like it was her official duty to pretend she hadn’t just been thinking the same thing. “I think we’re safe.”
“Have you been to that museum thing yet?” Wendy asked. Lizzie shook her head. Strauss had set aside a corridor for relics from the Meadowlark’s earlier iteration. Most of the staff avoided it. “Let’s just say, if you ever need an emergency lobotomy, you’ll know where to find an ice pick.”
Lizzie shuddered. She preferred not to think about the women who’d lived here before.
“I kind of like the thought of it,” Wendy said. “The idea that they’re watching me. The women who used to live here. Like, someone’s got my back, you know?”
“If you say so.”
Wendy grinned. “Be careful, they’ve got their eye on you, too.”
Lizzie stood, excused herself to go back to her room, make a dent in her pile of reading. She had years’ worth of fugue research to catch up on—since starting her doomed dissertation project she’d ignored most new work published on human memory, at least that not published by Benjamin Strauss.
“You really must love this stuff, huh?” Wendy said.
“Why?”
“Doesn’t seem like there could be much money in it, sitting around asking me questions. And you seem like someone who could have been anything. Or at least a lawyer.”
“Thanks? I think?”
“So why this?”
Usually, when asked, Lizzie told people she studied memory because of her grandmother, who’d died of Alzheimer’s. This was a usefully truth-adjacent lie she’d invented in college. The more embarrassing truth: it wasn’t her grandmother’s disease, it was her grandmother’s soap.