“I’d like to retrieve a memory.”

 

Now that the war was over there were many fewer librarians than before. This one glared down at Boris Cornelius from its rickety perch and touched its impassive face with long yellowed fingers as it studied his ragged brown coat and the graying stubble on his chin.

 

“Name of deceased?”

 

“Simonson, Peter.”

 

“Your name?”

 

“Cornelius, Boris.”

 

“And the reason for your request?”

 

Here Boris paused. They said that librarians could smell lies. This one continued to glare at him.

 

“I’ve been a prisoner for a long time. He was a friend before. I want to know what happened to him.”

 

The librarian did not seem impressed. Nevertheless, it passed a document under the glass partition.

 

“Date and time of the memory.”

 

Boris filled it out, using the information the old woman in the camp had given him.

 

The librarians controlled the process strictly: Boris retired into an adjoining Memorial Carrel and leaned back into the dark wood of the narrow pew. The lights began to dim, giving the visitor time to pray before the memories were projected in, but Boris refused to bow his head.

 

In the darkness, the walls suddenly glowed with images: fragments of faces, moving groups of people, destruction.

 

He made the memory for you, the old woman had said. He wanted you to know.

 

Suddenly the view of desolation that inspired the recording shifted, collapsed, as if the viewer had fallen. Now Boris saw a gray sky and then, leaning forward slightly in his pew, he saw her, not blurry, not incomplete but intact and clear and real the way he believed he remembered her himself. Her face was looking down on Peter’s with no emotion as he died and the preserved memory ended.

 

The lights in the carrel came back up — memories could be accessed only once per request. Boris closed his eyes and willed himself to blot out everything but the memory of the woman’s face. When the war began he had told himself that he would recognize her anywhere, anytime. He and Janis and Peter had clasped hands and sworn an oath: Find one another. Even then he could see the way the other two looked at one another and knew he would never be either’s first priority. And somehow in the years of rubble and the misery they had indeed found one another while the Coalition triumphed and he was sent to the camp.

 

He wanted you to know, the old woman had told him.

 

Standing in his tiny pew, Boris tried to feel liberated from the desire to remember. There were other times, better times — perhaps he could return tomorrow and a different librarian would be there to grant him a different memory. Perhaps the right random day would show Janis’s face gazing at Peter in some private moment that Boris could never have shared. Perhaps he could pretend that she was looking at him instead.

 

There was a commotion outside his carrel: shouting and something breaking and the strange gutteral whine of a librarian protesting. Boris began to move toward the door but it burst in toward him with the weight of four Coalition soldiers who immediately fanned out through the room and whose guns urged Boris to move no further. He felt a spasm of recognition, the claustrophobia of the camp, and then a tall woman wearing the red cape of the Coalition entered the room.

 

“Boris Cornelius. We have found you and you have located a memory. We thank you for that. Now we will destroy it.”

 

He felt a cloud of regret and shame drop down around him.

 

He said only “Janis.”

 

Her youth had grown into power since the last time he had seen her. Instinctively he was aware of his threadbare coat and gaunt, grimy face, and he raised a hand as if he might somehow make himself attractive.

 

Instead he only said “It’s been a long time. I didn’t know where you were.”

 

Her eyes, once the image of his stupid daydreams, were motionless.

 

“I was nowhere. You only need to know where I am now.” She took a step further into the small room and Boris saw more soldiers behind her, and beyond them the open door to Fifth Street and the cold smell of plastic burning in the winter.

 

“We are the now and the everlasting. We are the one and the all. There was nothing before.” She came even closer so that the medicinal warmth of her uniform was in his nose. “Do you understand, Boris Cornelius? There was nothing before.”

 

He shrank under the chill of her gaze.

 

“Tell me,” she said, more softly and with her cheek almost brushing his. “What did you come here to see?”

 

“Peter,” he whispered. “Peter’s death. A woman in the camp told me that you were with him. I only wanted to see you again. I wanted to see both of you. I wanted to see all of us, but Peter died and the old woman told me I could find you in his memory.”

 

The woman in the cape lowered her voice to match his. “There was nothing before.”

 

She straightened up, adjusted her red cloak, and gestured to the dark boundary of the circle around them. “Destroy this place,” she said loudly, and the soldiers moved to violently dismantle the circuitry in the walls.

 

“We are the now and the everlasting,” she intoned, and swept from the room.

 

In unison, the soldiers chanted in response “There was nothing before!”

 

As the glass around him shattered and the archived memories of his generation faded back into the limits of their own imagination, Boris Cornelius remembered the haggard face of the old woman, warming her hands over a makeshift fire, when she heard that he had known Peter and a girl named Janis.

 

He made the memory for you. He wanted you to know.