"Gravity" ---------------------- Tim Rogers

The truth of the matter was that Toccatin was amnesia in a pill, every hard-hat-wearing construction worker's worst nightmare given little, yellow form. He had heard of panels of statisticians and psychologists, forensics experts and mathematical theorists prescribing it to rape victims, plane crash survivors, and other sufferers of mind and body crippling trauma, though only after determining what good memories remained in the patient's head and if there existed any chance of those good memories eclipsing the bad. When a woman who had witnessed, at her suicidal/homicidal husband's mercy, the murder of her five children and was denied the drug for undisclosed reasons, nationwide controversy ensued. Human rights activists lobbied, politicians sided with them, and soon enough the public's demand that willful, chemically induced tabularasification be available over the counter was honored. The woman's name was never revealed. Then it was a fad. It was romanticized, even. Comedians made vulgar jokes about it on television. It seemed sometimes as if everyone was doing it, and even if not everyone was doing it, it was apparent that it was pretty popular. Soon enough no one had not one friend, acquaintance, or friend of a friend who hadn't tried it, just for the thrill of breaking themselves down to nothing and then building themselves back up again. "It's like, when you come out of the trance, you can just, like, see, everything you've ever known, every gift you ever got for Christmas. And then it just sticks there, until you try to remember specifics, and then, it's like, then, it just vanishes, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet." The thought of gravity sucking him into a pit of his own forgotten consciousness if he couldn't run fast enough didn't seem too romantic, so his other friend tried to reassure him. "Oh, you know, they found this stuff out, like, forever ago. There's such a difference between what you remember and what you know, you know? When I came out, I could still talk, I mean, I still had language. You just forget all the other stuff, memories, not language, and cognitive stuff." What about memories he had wanted to keep? What about memories of happy childhood times and such knowledge as why the stars twinkle? What about such knowledge as how some of the stars in the Milky Way are so unimaginably far off that even beams traveling at the speed of light cannot serve as a timely enough messenger of the star's implosion? The entire notion of "old light," that what he saw before him, when he looked up on a clear night, could in truth not really be there? Was it more or less comforting to him to realize he would have the joy of realizing life's mysteries again, at the cost of forgetting them just this once? "Sometimes, you know, things have to go. I keep business cards in my wallet. I think that I might call that person, who knows. And then I don't. That business card just sits there in my wallet, not doing no-thing. Movie tickets, too. I think it's a good thing, to know what day I saw what movie on, and when I sit down, my wallet so thick it hurts. Sometimes you just got to clean things like that out, you know what I'm saying? Sometimes you just got to let it go, quit making yourself uncomfortable. 'Cuz sometimes there be things you think you wanted to remember, and then you realize that you don't, not really."