FICTION
Coming to Terms with the Great Plague
by Brian Stableford
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By the time I got home I'd decided to make a clean breast of things, but I had to wait for the right moment — you can't just blurt these things out as you cross the threshold when you know perfectly well that you've both had an absolutely bloody day at the office. Jill was as whacked as I was. If it hadn't been for a strong desire to keep things as normal as possible I'd have volunteered to cook, even though it was her turn. By the time we were fed and suitably relaxed the weary temptation stole upon me to leave it for another day, but I knew it wasn't a good idea. The bullet had to be bitten, and if she hadn't noticed already that something was amiss she soon would. "I had to pop in to see the doctor on my way to work this morning," I told her, tentatively, while we'd both collapsed on the couch in front of the TV. It was showing a soap opera, one of whose chief characters was just beginning to get to grips with the legacy of his intense imaginary involvement with an entirely fictitious Veronica. I steeled myself against the anticipated look of alarm. She did turn her gray-green eyes full on me, but there was more reproach in the gaze than alarm. "I thought something was up," she murmured, sadly. "I suppose it had to come." "It's not serious," I hastened to tell her. "Dr. Vernon confirmed that. Distant past, short duration. Hardly anything, really." "But it could get worse, couldn't it?" she said. "There's no knowing how far it will go. You hear stories about people reconstructing their entire pasts from day one, losing themselves entirely." "That's very rare," I told her. "The tabloids exaggerate. One in ten Britons are suffering from the syndrome, but life goes on. The country hasn't ground to a halt. Personally, I think the epidemic's losing its force. They do, you know. Even the most devastating diseases weaken over time. We may not have an effective treatment yet but the simple fact that we know about it and are on our guard makes a big difference. It's much harder for the false memories to take hold and spread now we can recognize them for what they are. I'm keeping proper records, and I'll do the checks every day. I'm fighting it, Jill, and if determination is enough to win, I'll beat it." I had begun to babble, and would have rambled on, but she cut me short. "It's a girl, isn't it," she said. She was trying to keep her voice level, but I could hear the sense of injury, the dark fear that she was being crowded out of my past by someone younger and more beautiful. "It's just the form the disease usually takes," I told her, taking her hand in mine and caressing it with all the reassurance I could muster. "It doesn't mean anything." She didn't pull her hand away but I could feel the tension in the muscles. "That's what they all say," she said. "It doesn't mean anything. I can't help it. It's just a stray virus. It could happen to anyone. All very convenient, isn't it? You don't have to do anything, except lie back and enjoy it. You don't have to take responsibility for the fact that your innermost soul is being colonized by some little whore who's doing the same for ten per cent of the fucking population." She wasn't babbling, and she wasn't angry. Indeed, she was frighteningly articulate. Actually, less than five per cent of the population had the form of FMS involving female lovers and less than five per cent of that five per cent had the form involving Marilyn, but it was no time to be pedantic. "It is a disease," I said, feebly. "It really is." There were, of course, some people who argued that it wasn't, that the spread of the syndrome was due to the power of auto-suggestion aided and abetted by the media — the modern day equivalent of absent-mindedly scanning a few pages of a medical encyclopedia and convincing yourself that you have everything from asthma to bilharzia. They even had a jargon for it, borrowed from the sociobiologists. According to them, Marilyn and all her sisters were just memes: infectious ideas designed by natural selection to survive and thrive. If they were right, the soap opera whose signature tune was filling the living-room was taking a big risk. The fictitious Veronica might suddenly start cropping up in the memories of millions of couch potatoes. Maybe the plot-line was an experiment, designed to discover whether such a thing could happen. Wouldn't that add some spice to the tired old debates about the psychological effects of media sex and violence? "I know," Jill said, trying hard to make it sound sincere, although her fist was still half-clenched. "I know it's just a disease really. I'm sorry." "It hasn't affected you, love," I told her. "The fake memories have only colonized the time before I met you. They won't displace you. They can't. You're far too important to me." The promises were reckless — no matter how much confidence I had in my own hard-headedness and self-possession I really wasn't in a position to offer any guarantees — but I had to make them anyway. "Why not?" she countered, dispiritedly. "You and I live in the real world, and always have done. We always had to cope with the bloody-mindedness of chance and change. The narrative of our relationship couldn't skip the boring bits and all our conversations had to be ad libbed. Your new old relationship doesn't labor under those handicaps, does it? It has all the advantages of unreality." It would hardly have been diplomatic to assure her that it really didn't seem that way — that my memories of Marilyn were just as full of awkwardness and mischance as any real relationship could and would have been — so I cast about for a safer line of thought. "I'm afraid you'll have to show a little extra vigilance from now on," I said, stroking her wrist and forearm with assiduous gentleness. "If this thing is contagious you're bound to be in danger of picking it up from me." "I suppose you'd like that," she said, bitterly. "It would let you off the hook, wouldn't it? And it wouldn't bother you the way it bothers me, because I probably wouldn't be remembering some muscular super-stud hung like a horse — it's odds-on that I'd just be remembering a baby I never had. Well, that wouldn't be so bad for me, either, given that I never did have any babies because of your green conscience. Unfortunately, like everything else in life, the syndrome seems by all accounts to be utterly perverse. It's mostly slags who've already had two or three kids in defiance of all the propaganda who are remembering extra ones, while the barren heroines like me are stubbornly immune." That wasn't fair. The issue of children had been fully discussed. It had been a mutual decision. Anyway, rumor had it that the female version of FMS could be just as discomfiting as the male version often was, if not more so. Some of the remembered death scenes were said to be harrowing enough to drive their victims into deep melancholia. At least the phantom women mostly contented themselves with Dear John faxes or phone calls. No one knew how many lives the plague had so far claimed, but female suicides encouraged by ersatz grief probably outnumbered male murders instigated by unreasoning jealous rages. While I was still contemplating the unfairness of her latest argumentative move, Jill seized the conversational initiative. "Which one is she?" she asked. I wanted to say that it didn't matter — because, of course, it really didn't — but I daren't. She would have been deeply suspicious of my motives; it would only have increased her anxiety. "Marilyn," I said, baldly. "The stringy blonde with the snub nose? Christ, Jack, I didn't know you liked the gamine type." "I didn't choose her, Jill." "No, but you're collaborating with it, aren't you? Subconsciously if not consciously. You have to be. What else could determine the multiple forms the syndrome takes?" "There's no way out of that, is there?" I said, miserably. "My subconscious has to carry the can for whatever my consciousness denies. It's Catch-22 all over again. Nobody knows, love. Nobody knows why the syndrome takes the forms it does — and nobody really knows how many forms it can take. The girls are easy enough to identify, and the extra babies, but how can we tell how many fakes there are that just slip unobtrusively into the patterns of people's pasts, creating no anomalies and arousing no suspicions? There might be millions of people who think they're clear purely and simply because they haven't any way of identifying the lies that have crept into their lives." I didn't intend that the remarks should be taken personally — but that, inevitably, was the way she took them. "I suppose you think I don't even have the imagination to dream up a dead baby," she said. "After all, you're the big shot software engineer working at the cutting edge of masturbation technology at good old VirtIconics, and I'm just a common-or-garden office hack working for a bunch of shysters. You breathe, eat and dream virtual realities while I itemize grounds for divorce and type up wills. I've never once been sexually abused by my father or taken aboard a flying saucer for a smear test. All I can remember is school and college and you. Maybe you're the fake. Maybe you always have been. How could I tell?" She didn't mean any of it, and in the end it got on top of her. By the time she was half way through the speech she was punctuating the sentences with choked sobs, and by the time she reached the last full stop she was weeping. I let go of her wrist and put my arms around her, nestling her head on my shoulder and hugging her tight. Actions speak louder than words, and she took far more comfort from my silence than she'd been able to wring out of my awkward, stumbling words. I took comfort from it too; she was warm and damp and vulnerable, and I felt that I wanted to hold her forever Nothing lasts, I thought. Nothing endures. It isn't just our names that are writ in water, Mr. Keats. [next] |
This story copyright © 1997 by Brian Stableford. Used by permission. All rights reserved.