Confabulation

Gerald Fosse, sixty-three, retired elevator mechanic, Cleveland, Ohio, sits in the beige chair with his hands on his knees and describes the color of a foreman's necktie.

"Green. A green like, I don't know. Like the felt on a cheap pool table. The knot was loose."

Marta writes it down. The protocol wants handwritten notes beside the digital record, so she writes with a Pilot G2 07 in blue ink, in the black notebooks the sponsor orders by the carton, and the stack on the shelf behind her has been growing since the trial began in December. The room sits on the fourth floor of the Merian Clinic in Basel. It holds two beige chairs, one desk, and one window over the parking structure. In the afternoons the sun comes across the parking structure's roof and lies flat and warm on Gerald's face, and he squints into it and never asks her to lower the blind. He tips his chin up and takes the whole beam the way he must have taken the air off a box fan at the bottom of a shaft on a July service call.

At the top of the page she has written Pt 07 / Visit 33 / 15:17. Gerald is describing a fire in a city he has never visited, and the fire went out decades before his own mother was born.

"The machines. The sewing machines. They kept going. Even after, even when the whole floor was. You could hear them. That sound, the needles, what do you call it?"

Whirr.

Gerald cannot find the word, and Marta does not give it to him.

"Like a hum. Like a machine room with every motor turning. All of them going at once, hundreds, and nobody sitting at them anymore."

Marta writes:

Pt describes auditory detail consistent with industrial sewing machinery, ca. 1910. Specifies continued operation during crisis event. Detail noted for cross-reference.

What she does not write: the machines on the ninth floor of the Asch Building ran on belts off one motor, and when the fire started nobody cut the motor, and the machines went on stitching shirtwaists that were already burning. One survivor said so on the witness stand in December 1911. Her testimony sits deep in a trial transcript that Cornell scanned and put online and that almost nobody reads to the end.

"The doors. They opened the wrong way. Or they didn't open. One of them didn't open."

"Can you describe the doors?"

"They opened in. You had to pull, with everybody behind you pushing. And one was locked. The one on the. On the Washington Place side. And the car quit coming up, so the girls went down the shaft without it."

Gerald has never been to Washington Place. Gerald has never been to New York. Until the sponsor flew him to Basel he had never owned a passport. He serviced elevators in downtown Cleveland for thirty-one years, Otis and Schindler mostly, and he carries a crushed left thumbnail from a counterweight guide rail in 2003, and he can name every building on his old route by the grease smell of its cables, the pitch of its motor, and the car that stops proud of the sill and catches your toe. Ask him about the Hanna Building on Playhouse Square and his hands start moving. The number 3 car has a governor that sticks in cold weather. The pit floods every spring. The sump pump got swapped in '07 for a cheaper model that cycles so loud the tenants on two can hear it through the wall. Every pit he ever cleaned out gave up the same harvest of keys, hearing aids, baby shoes, and wedding rings nobody came down to claim. Ask him about a cable and he cocks his head for the singing note of a fraying strand, which his fingertips pick up off the rail before his ears do.

He should not remember a locked door in a building that burned in Lower Manhattan on an afternoon in March of 1911.

The drug is called Anamnex. A branding agency in Munich billed the sponsor nine hundred thousand euros to build the name out of the Greek word for remembering. It tested well in focus groups of women between forty-five and sixty-five who were shopping for care homes for a parent. It sounds like a thing you pick up at the pharmacy between the cough drops and the denture cream.

What the drug does: every time you call up a memory, your brain takes it apart and builds it again, and every rebuild comes out a little worse. Over decades your mother's face wears down to the word Mother. The mole under her left eye goes. The way she held her cigarette goes. You keep the label.

Anamnex locks the rebuild, and the copy comes out exact every time.

By week six, Anamnex had restored memory function in eleven of the fourteen Alzheimer's patients enrolled. Geneviève Constant, Patient 3, got back her wedding dress from September 1966: the duchess satin, the Alençon lace, the pull near the left shoulder that the seamstress promised to fix. It came back to her in the middle of an afternoon interview. She held a glass of water and did not drink from it. The water in it shook. She said "Rue de Rivoli" with her mouth shaped for the name of somebody dead. She also got back every lie her husband told her between 1968 and 2003. She filed for divorce after fifty-nine years of marriage.

"I forgave him as I went," she told the trial nurse. "Now I have to do it all again, every day, from the beginning."

The trial team celebrated with champagne in plastic cups in the break room on four. The ceiling panels in there turn everybody the color of grocery-store chicken. Somebody thumbed the cork out of a bottle of Moët, pok, and somebody else brought a sheet cake with buttercream roses. The heat off the baseboard heater slumped the roses until their petals sagged into the frosting like wet laundry. Marta held her cup. The bubbles climbed the plastic and broke, climbed and broke.

Gerald is Patient 7. At sixty-one he drove to a service call at the Hanna Building and could not find Playhouse Square. A neurologist in Cleveland diagnosed him that spring, and he turned in his tools that summer. The sponsor recruited him through the same neurologist and put him in a furnished flat in St. Johann. The protocol sheet taped inside Marta's notebook gives his arm of the trial: 400 micrograms, twice daily, ninety days, the top dose.

The first six weeks were unremarkable. Gerald got back what belonged to him. His mother's kitchen in Parma, Ohio. Her Virginia Slims, menthol. The radio on the windowsill tuned to WIXY 1260, and the window that stuck in summer, so she propped it with a phone book, the Yellow Pages, Cuyahoga County, 1974, which swelled so fat in the humidity it could never close again, and the phone book smelled of wet paper and her cigarettes, and every day at noon the radio played "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," every single day, and Gerald was eleven years old and believed noon existed so that song could play.

His sister in Parma confirmed each one by phone: the window, the phone book, and the song, which she says she still can't stand. In week seven Gerald got back a memory nobody alive could confirm.

"I can smell it."

He has opened every session with it since. The room smells of recycled air, of his Speed Stick in Ocean Surf, and of the vinyl on the chairs. Gerald turns his head toward the window and sniffs, then toward the door and sniffs again.

He says it now before he says hello, and on bad days he says it before he reaches the chair. The alar cartilage of his nose lifts, and the little dilator muscles pull at air that carries nothing. The room smells of recycled air, of Gerald's Speed Stick in Ocean Surf, and of the vinyl on the beige chairs. He grips his kneecaps like a man riding an elevator with a bad governor.

"The cloth. The burning cloth. Cotton, linen, and a chemical on top. They put it on the shirtwaists to make them keep their shape, and when that stuff burns it smells."

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Sweet. Your mouth waters and your stomach heaves, and they're both right."

Marta writes it down. Her handwriting, a tight Swiss-school cursive since she was seven, has been loosening for weeks. The letters lean. The loops open.