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A short story about memories and narratives.

4,596 words

“The Rhubarb Forcer”

By Nat O’Connor

My father is a sea lion, sat regally on a fold-out stool, assessing the hunt. Our venue is the sun-bleached fields of Warburton’s farm. The farmer wants to squeeze the last golden drops of earning from the dry, dead land, and my father is trying to teach his daughter that food does not leap fully formed to the supermarket shelves.

The cows are rib-peeking thin, the sheep’s wool is dotted with mange. I choose fresh prey, the orange jewels that bud on an incongruously virile tree.

A cloud of children billows from corner to corner, jaws loose and drooling. They haven’t seen the prize. Nothing could grow here anymore, so the orange tree is almost certainly in a pot, hidden below the soil. Nevertheless, I whoop with delight, tearing off the group of catatonics to claim the brightest fruit from the low branches.

My teeth tear through its sinuous flesh, sharp juice filling my mouth.

My father rumbles. He laughs, doubling over and wheezing. Tears pour from his eyes, the mirth choking him, killing him. The children are shaken from their trance, their guffaws sending them light-headed and reeling to the floor. A murder of laughter.

My lips citrus-coated, shame joins pith in my belly as the laughing continues. What had I done to deserve this chorus of mockery?

I see something in the pulp.

A twitching leg, a violent dance of spasmodic terror. A vast spider, half-buried in the mouldering orange, one dark and hairy appendage torn off by my unyielding teeth.

My father’s laughter grows stronger. His barrel frame lies on the dusty ground in rapture, fist pounding at the ground, the children pointing and shrieking at my error.

I do not know where to look. The embarrassment is too strong; my shame at being the centre of this event is incalculable. It is better to pretend nothing is wrong.

            I lift the orange to my mouth, suppress my gag reflex, and eat the rest of the fruit.

---

---

“We’ll take a break and measure the chemical response to the first implantation,” explained Doctor Shiama. The nurses pulled me out of the apparatus, letting too-bright light sear my retinas as two orderlies rushed about with mops to dispose of any vomit brought on by the vision.

            This is PAST, the go-to provider for Positive Memory Adjustment. Chic and modern, the treatment room had colourful literature behind clear plastic on the walls, emblazoned with the supposed acronym for “Post-Adlerian Suggestion Therapy”. This was a nonsense initialism that anyone with grounding in the field would recognise as bunk, but it wasn’t the important part. Claims of “80% positive lifestyle improvement” and “75% reported an increase in income” were the eye-catching part, these shining, hopeful digits accompanied by photographs of fulfilled, successful people with expensive suits and determined chins.  

Whatever I had to go through, I knew there was a great prize waiting. The chance for me to write my history, rather than read.

            “Is there going to be much of a gap?” I croaked, trying to reach to wipe my mouth, but found that the restraints still hold me in their nylon reassurance.

             “Try not to speak, you need to let the gas do its work.” He nudged a dial, and the icy flow into my nostrils picked up the pace, unpleasantly tinged with the scent of bile.

            “Early memories tend to be more dreamlike anyway, so they make for a splendid test run. Make sure the formula doesn’t cause inflammation. A patch test on your hippocampus, if you will,” Shiama drawled. I had the repulsive image of hair dye being poured into my brain through a funnel and bubbling behind my eyeballs.

“If you react badly to the process, we’ll stop here and, given time, it will seem like an unpleasantly loaded nightmare, and not a jot more. We’re confident that a single early childhood event alone will not impact your psychosocial build. If we proceed, it will form a weave on your recovery tapestry.”

The doctor had the same affliction as a dentist, the unbearable urge to talk and ask questions of their patient while also forbidding them to speak. It’s pathological, and I wanted to tell him such, but knew this would just invite another snide admonishment. I nodded curtly, feeling the nasal cannula tug at my nostrils. Shiama flicked through the Bible-thick pile of consent forms.

            “By externalising the locus of antagonism, and ensuring the persistence of the locus qualities, we can craft a mind setting that enters the strive-state on a regular basis. I can see you’re a scientist yourself, perhaps you work in this field?”

The man was a conversational ideal gas, filling any space available to him with streams of meaningless jargon.

I tried not to listen too hard. They’d briefed me on the importance of not understanding the procedure too well. I had paid half a year’s salary for my “psychosocial build” to be dissected, reassembled, and served back to me in a form that is more useful to my ends and the expectations of the world, and I wasn’t going to risk it by indulging the mind-surgeon’s pontificating.

 The exact memories of the nightmare were starting to become indistinct, leaving only a recollection of disgust and shame. Soon, it will have corrupted one of the earliest psychosocial stages – Trust and Distrust. The image of my father laughing at my misfortune, rather than helping, would sow distrust and resentment that would, ultimately, drive me to reach dizzying new heights in my career. All this, and all I had to do was experience an ethereal spider leg on my tongue. Closing my eyes, I tried to concentrate on keeping the remains of my lunch inside.

            “While previously the vagaries of individual experience meant that psychosocial development was largely random, we – oh!” He jerked to attention, suddenly peering at his console screen with intent. A few hurried clicks of his mouse were the most animated I’d seen him while awake.

“We still have a few minutes before we can safely move on. I see you work for the courts. Do you enjoy it?” He mumbled, eyes fixed on the screen. The attempt to distract me from wondering what was wrong didn’t work, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. I tried to steal a look at his console screen, but the dancing lines and figures meant little to me, forcing me to try to put it out of mind.

            “You must get an awful lot of people there who could have done with our services,” he drawled, jabbing at his keyboard like a woodpecker. “It’s truly criminal that we aren’t available on the health service. So many people with stunted development, that need only a suggestion or two.”

The narratives that were to be implanted in me were not suggestions. The specialised chemical cocktail, administered through gas and into my veins, had been described as giving the operator administrative access to my long-term memory. I would live through new memories and, as I woke up, these would usurp what had come before. I would not be able to distinguish what was real with what was fabulised.

            “You’re fortunate to have lost your father,” Shaiama relaxed, whatever small emergency had piqued his interest apparently passing. He gestured to the personal history I’d had to fill in. A flush of anger made it to my clammy face at the crass description of Dad’s death; if my limbs hadn’t felt like lead, I’d have had difficulty stopping myself from punching his cheery face. “This provides fertile ground for new memories in the Autonomy and Shame radii, two of the most fundamental areas we look to build on.”

I lurched forward against the restraints, heaving. The taste of oranges still lingered around my mouth, a reminder of the dreamscape.

“You’re going to feel more dizzy before we’re done, Miss. Don’t try to remember whether what happened was real or not, you’ll only vomit again.” He looked at the floor, managing to grimace using only his nose. It looked clean now, but the scent remained. “You’ll have been told this, but to reiterate, don’t try to work out what we created, once the treatment is over. You can undo all of the good if you over-process.”

The nurses finished taking my vitals and hit a switch to raise me back into the embrace of the device. My head was encased in a doughnut of plastic and steel, as though undergoing a CT scan. Which, I was assured, was a part of it. “To check you don’t have a stroke” was the breezy explanation. It was less funny after I was told the treatment would focus on Dad.

“We like to imagine that we’ve always understood how our pasts sculpt us, but at best it’s been 150 years. You should be very proud to be a pioneer of the new sciences.”

Warmth spread through my body as the machine flushed iodine into a cannula on my right arm. This was the only pleasant part. Unlike a CT scan, this chamber would be hermetically sealed, a clattering tomb under which I could safely be pushed into a state of altered consciousness under safe, machine guidance. I’ve never been claustrophobic, and yet I found myself trying to catch a glimpse of something beautiful before the seal closed, so that if the oxygen supply failed, I could at least have that as my last sight.

At first, we had thought that the best thing that could be done to a person’s memories would be to remove the negative, to better preserve the positive. The results were a disaster, the first human triallists coming out with permanent maladjustment. Worldwide, columnists wrote chin-stroking thinkpieces on the necessity of hardship for a well-rounded psychological makeup. Memory manipulation was thought inferior to simply talking through one’s issues with a trained professional, much to the relief of that industry.

However, seeing a therapist is dull and time-consuming and the prospect of a quick fix was appealing. So, it wasn’t long before some go-getters revived the technology, giving it a new spin.

The concept was simple – if your past did not give you the most useful memories, trauma, and damage, why not simply create it? PAST advertised that a few unpleasant experiences with authority figures in a user’s youth could turn even the most snivelling of worms into a Type-A personality in just one easy treatment and an overnight stay.

That’s what I had wanted. The opportunity to become something else, or at least to have a reason why I haven’t lived up to expectations. Nobody talked about “Positive” Memory Adjustment’s capacity to give users an excuse for their shortcomings.

It could all be his fault. The best part was that I would truly believe it.

The last session of the therapy is the replacement of all memories of it, replacing it with a single recollection that they were unsuitable for the procedure. About one-third of potential users were genuinely unable to undergo the treatment, so this provided a useful fiction to cap off the process.

It was all terribly neat.

---

My father is a walrus, vast and blubber-covered on a creaking lawn chair. He snorts and spits smoke-flavoured globules to the soil, glaring at the crop of rhubarb, and beckons me over with a nicotine-stained hand.

The same as always. The familiar terror as my tiny body takes hesitant steps over stained flagstones. Disobeying would be worse, however, and compliance means that I can sooner return to hiding and pretending not to be.

No. This is different. I’m not the intruding spectator, watching the film back through a dark lens. I am here, in this place.

Lucid.

Details begin to fill in, far richer than anything Shiama could have written. The odour of dirt and the church bells. A blackbird hopping between leaves, eyeing the occupants of an ants’ nest. The boys next door, screaming over their football game. In the garden’s corner, a porcelain Madonna holds praying hands over long-dead basil and sage, her surface soiled by birds and compost for years now.

Erikson stage 4. Competence, industry, and inferiority. The now-conscious part of my mind knows too much about the process, muddying the waters. It’s awake and knows that it is being led on a journey of deception.

This is not the father that Shiama is creating. It is something more familiar.

Dad is trying his best with the rhubarb. The crop was always Mum’s favourite. He’s not in his chair, but on his knees. These were his painting trousers, and it doesn’t matter if they’re ruined by their new task. His hands are stained with dirt, not nicotine. He’s been trying to quit smoking for years. His hands tremble as he tries to check if the shoots are long enough yet.

He sets aside the forcer with both hands, a terracotta bell jar with a flap above it. He’d explained it to me years prior, relishing my discomfort at the rhubarb’s predicament.

The rhubarb grows in choking darkness under the clay, its first sprouts rising to find nothing but black above the ground. A flap built into the jar allows for a fixed column of light to shine down, forcing the crop to stretch up towards it. In this way, it’s forced to suffer so that it grows into the shape appropriate for consumption.

I hated rhubarb even while Mum was still here.

He knows that it isn’t the same. That he will ruin what was once so deftly built. And he knows that his child is witness to his failure. This only makes his hands shake more. He can’t send me away without becoming a monster, but his disposition is too weak to handle even the eyes of a child on his efforts. His shame too great. He can’t allow his daughter to see him cry.

Soon I will walk over to him and trip, my hands reaching out to break my fall, descending on the tiny shoots with a slow inevitability.  My legs buckle, my face shooting towards the stones. The floor parts beneath me, my stomach lurching through my chest as I fall.

For a flash, I am in the clinic. Alarm tones sound and a nurse runs in carrying a cart. Shiama has tossed the consent forms to one side and now stands, looking far taller than before, barking urgent commands at his assistants.

I’m falling again, clutch on to anything but the tiny, precious plants. Butt I’ve inherited the walrus-man’s inept hands, and only ensure the shoot’s deaths.

Dad is gone. My father is here.

He asks me if I know what I’ve done. Rough, filthy hands pull at the sprouts of matted hair that back my head and press my nose against the soil, eye-to-eye with the dead, ruined plant I’ve fallen on.

I know it was my mother’s favourite, I say. I know he worked so hard to keep it so. I say. My begging is an animal keening, and I remember the taste of soil on the tip of my tongue.

He takes up the rhubarb forcer – her favourite, its sides covered in pastoral animal scenes, holding it aloft above the concrete paving.

Somehow, I see both at once. The forsaken version of my history, and that which was being imposed. I remember killing the plant and Dad breaking the forcer in his anger. His was angry, but in later life I found his raging pathetic and sad. A broken man trying to blame his sorrow on a clumsy child.

I am still afraid of him in that version. The fear was real. Nothing in this process creates the fear – of Dad, of men, of people in general. No, if those feelings weren’t real in the waking world, I would never have allowed Shaiama to take a needle and thread to my mind. The process weaves the story that explains those feelings and makes them useful. What is the expense of the memory of a dead man?

I am not meant to be so aware of this happening. I try to tell myself that this was what I wanted. That all is going according to plan.

The other version re-asserts itself. My father lifts the rhubarb forcer high above his head and throws it to the ground. The moulded rabbits in their fancy waistcoats shatter, and he erupts in a cacophony of bitter triumph.

There follows only uncomplicated pain.

---

            The tubes in my nostrils had been replaced by an oxygen mask when I wake. I stupidly tried to picture Dad, sending a rush of nausea up to the top of my throat as two figures tried to reconcile into one.

            No, we weren’t finished. There was still complication.

            “We had a spot of lucidity there,” Shiama mumbled, raising a hand to click two fingers, summoning a nurse to his side to collect the new instructions. “I need you to not think so hard while you’re under, yes?”

            This was one thing they briefed me on, and the reason I’d had to go through a session of meditation before treatment. The clinic supplied this at my expense, but I’d never had much luck in mindfulness. I’d sat cross-legged in the middle of an institutionally-painted room, listening to a short recording of sea surf. As soon as the leg cramp set in it was clear the session would be a wash.

            Some people just aren’t good liars, even when they were both perpetrator and victim.

            My heart began to dance in my chest. I couldn’t speak at all this time, the sedatives pushing me back against the bed. These original memories were not pleasant, no. I had spent my early growth terrified of my father. But was this new image better? Would this really make me a better person?

“…had to perform an adenosine push, you were badly tachycardic. That, ah, means your heart was going too fast. Had to turn it off and on again. It’s perfectly fine,” the doctor continued, but I stopped listening. The ringing in my ears occluded all else.

What had I been afraid of, really? Already the answer was becoming vague.

It was not the fear of a violent brute, or some cartoon villain. Dad was a man who sat atop the stairs and wept freely while his children hid in their rooms. His lips wobbled; his eyes leaked. He struggled through a life he didn’t choose, drifting from salvation to salvation, in search of something true.

            That was who I was afraid of. Not that he would strike me, but that some minor act would upset the balance and would fill our house with his howls once again.

            This was an untidy version. Pity did not fit neatly into an Erikson stage, and so the treatment aimed to flatten it. Far more useful to have a flat image, a character in a piece of yellow fiction with which to guide my life.

            “Just try to relax,” Shiama wrote figures on a titration sheet, passing them to a nurse. The bleeping of the ECG was quickening, and I knew distantly that more nurses had entered the treatment room.

            Why had I wanted this treatment? To be more useful. To give myself purpose. The case studies showed that this kind of narrative could lead to greater professional performance, as subconsciously I would try to strive against all the senior managers I would see as stand-ins for my hated father.

The memory began to fade. I tried to focus on the image of Dad in the garden. A kind but tired man, not possessed of the skills required to raise his children alone. Uncertain, clumsy, pottering around his garden.

A much-improved romantic life also, to take revenge on the dead, fabricated man. That would make it worth the cost.

This image – was this real? I remembered fear. Shame. I remembered the crack in the side of the rhubarb forcer, the sharp clay lacerating my hand. I remembered him bellowing with concern as he dashed to my side. No, not concern. That image faded, and I remembered his hacking laugh as I begged for salvation.

If I ever built a family, I would have something to compare myself to. I would try to be a better guardian than he was.

It was far, far easier to ride the narrative. To reject lucidity, and to grow into the shape the simple stories provide. I groped weakly for one of the staff, my pulling at the restraint going unnoticed.

“She’s stable again? Good,” Shiama mopped his brow, glancing down at me. My eyes were open, but he didn’t recognise consciousness. He couldn’t see any of my doubt. There was no way I could withdraw my agreement now. They warned me – over and over they warned me of the permanency of the procedure, about how once I was put under there would be no opportunity to take back my consent.

 Geared whirred as the bed slid back into the device, Shiama’s voice curt and clipped now he believed only his colleagues could hear.

“That was a mess, but let’s keep going. Load the Stage 6, Isolation variant.” The cylindrical chamber sealed, hypnotic gas filling the surrounding space. Outside, the craftsman readied himself to tell a story once again.

---

My father lies on his hospital bed. The antiseptic miasma is a sharp, orangey tang in the back of my throat

Once again it is different. I am lucid, for now.

My concentration holds the implanted narrative at bay. For now, I have a moment to myself.

“I’m sorry.”

Dad opens his eyes, rheum cracking at the corners and falling to a crusty pile on the sheets. A phalanx of distracted nurses shuffle between the beds, trying to tug at his cannula and chattering away about who had died in the ward that day. Nightmarish details of lost lives are barely audible, Dad’s eyes widening in incomprehension at the terrifying scraps of gossip.

There is nothing false about this memory. This was how it had been.

The once-strong body, now decaying on a filthy bed, terrified, not comprehending, eyes begging me to take him home. The uncaring medical apparatus, waiting for him to die, scolding him for committing the quiet indignities that come with an aged death in a broken, haggard body.

He died embarrassed and heartbroken, aware of every atom of his failures. There was fear, yes – but only fear for what I could have become. What I might still become, but for fate.

“It’s for the best,” I mumble. I’m no fool. I know this is the random images of a mind under medical sedative. Dad is long gone, and there is nothing I can say to change that.

Even so – this might be the last lucid treatment I have. Somewhere deep in the hospital, a phantasmagorical Shiama is a vicious bull, tossing aside ragdoll nurses to find me and compel me to shut out the old truth. I tell myself that is what I want, after all.

“This was where I decided. I thought that if I didn’t change something, I’d become you.”

Dad’s mouth gaped like a fish, drool leaking to the rough pillow. He hadn’t understood then, either. This is just a memory. I can’t make him understand now.

“I needed a reason I’m broken. Some root cause of why I’m like this. What shouldn’t it be you?” My voice grows louder as the terror grew in his eyes. It wasn’t hard to understand, why couldn’t I make him understand?

The chattering nurses got louder, the lights flickering in the hospital ward. Shiama was getting closer, ready to overwrite this memory.

“Nobody else remembers you. You made no impact on the world. Why shouldn’t I?”

 I try to hang on to the lucidity in the growing sea of noise. If I looked hard at his face, I could see every wrinkle and complexity, and force away the encroaching image of a simple, limited character, sneering.

That would be simpler to remember. To recall my father, providing the stock deathbed admonishment. Chewing out my failures, telling me that I would never be enough. Lines straight out of a soap opera, forged as true recollections.

It would be easy to tell people that was true, even without the technology. The detractors said that it just made it easier to lie. But PAST never made memories that could be easily contradicted.

Shiama had told me that it was fortunate that my father had died. But he hadn’t died – he was being created. My Dad, the awkward, insecure garden. He had died. The man who didn’t know how to love and was thrust into his responsibilities too soon. The man who tried so hard that it broke him. The man who couldn’t help but hurt.

He’d died with nobody to remember him but me. Which meant there would be nobody to defend him from this end.

“This way I might actually make something of myself. I can be better than you.”

I grab Dad’s arm, trying to elicit some sort of reaction. As he had done then, he doesn’t move. There’s none of the old strength left in him now.

If I could just keep a small part of him alive, then perhaps I could nurture that, and let it blossom after the treatment was complete, obtain both the benefits and the memory. Was that what I wanted?  

The lights change, a thick, soup glow setting over the bedside. Now he is sat upright, tall and strong, ready to list my failures and to spur me onwards towards glory. His death would be the catalyst for my ascension, I am sure of it. This time – after so many false starts, frustration, and anger. All I need is a scapegoat.

There is no space for sympathy in the most useful narratives. Those who pick and choose what creates them have no space for shades of grey. I sit and watch as my father changes. From a man who was neither a hero nor villain, to a hastily written picture on a screen. The endless complexities are smoothed and fettered away to something palatable.

Now, when I speak of my tragic past, it will be with all the sincerity and righteousness of one who thinks their words are true. Gone will be the awkward pity, wiped clean will be the untidy peaks and ill-fitting valleys. A uniform memory of a uniform man.

This is good. I can rise to new heights, unfettered by the unworthy truth. Spurred on by the wickedness incarnate that so clearly dogged the child I was, I will strive and strike down all challengers. I know now that I have made the right choice. Even my past failures can be the fault of a single, evil man who shaped me this way.

A great calm takes me as I let the composed memory take hold.

            The room was calmer when I woke. Shiama is readying some aftercare literature. I didn’t have to think about anything at all, the battle for my history being won by the implantation. Nurses arrived to wheel me to my room to rest.

The image of a whimpering, pudgy man began to fade. The next time I had to explain to somebody about my misfortune, all I would need to do is point to his replacement. They would nod kindly and make a note in their files. All would be regimented; all would be understood.

 I might regret it. I might well regret it, yes. If I allowed myself to remember.