[memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing Warning, this memory contains: A dead body, in passing.
The memory is twisted. It’s perceived from the end rather than the beginning, which means it has fault-lines and broken edges, cracked glass to view through.
You’re dredging upward. Clawing through what feels like syrup.
You’re in Paris. Why are you in Paris? The memory supplies a little context. A cup of coffee, with milk on a small table. A carpet in an expensive hotel room with views of the Seine and a man, very dead with a neat bullet hole in his forehead and the back of his head not neat at all. Money. There’s an acquisitive feeling associated with it. Need, twisted around with fear and exhilaration until it is difficult to parse the feelings separately. They can only be experienced together. It’s a lot of money.
You’re in Paris. The jacket you’re wearing is nylon. The wind whips it against your ribs, glues it to your shoulders. Your head is bare, the hair clipped down so close to the skin that you can feel the direction of the wind shift. The man sat opposite you at the table is wearing a suit. You can’t see his face distinctly. The memory is blurred, possibly because you’ve thought about it many, many times and deliberately. You can’t see his face. You know in that moment he’s a stranger.
You’re slouching against the brickwork of a wall, cigarette in your fingers. Everyone smokes here. It’s an easy distraction. Your eyes flick to the mark, acquiring detail quickly and methodically.
You’re at the table again. Listening to him speak. Emotion again: disbelief, annoyance, a flicker of something that feels a little like hope? Disillusionment coupled up with anger. You’ve got a variety of emotions, all of them close to the surface. Memory within memory: dreaming yourself awake, pain blinding and burning, the sun in your eyes, your friend in your lap, his torso separated from the rest of him.
You’re in the interior of an office. Academic. Books. The memory catalogs the books without dwelling on titles, they all look the same. A couple open on a desk, the memory perceives them as nonsense, incomprehensible. You peer all the same. Deliberately. Visibly. He’s opening a box, from behind the desk. An academic sat in the chair looking at him as if he’s made a mistake.
Music. The memory here doubles back on itself, looped in with newer memory spliced in: a woman, swaying somewhere in the middle of a collapsing dream in white silk and chiffon, rain against windows, the presence of expectation, of time running out. But music. Your arm, bared to the elbow, the careful impatience of the man with the needles, the machine that hisses and sucks at air.
You’re drawing upward, through smoke and fog, your head clearing like a bell rung. Euphoria, fuzzy on the tongue
You’re lying back. Against a chaise longue that looks moderately ridiculous but is overstuffed and comfortable under your spine. One foot has gone to sleep, your left. You see the academic’s face, here him arguing as the lull underneath the music soaks you in, absorbs the room until you’re nowhere, except the cafe table again.
The memory folds over again neatly. You’re bathed in the remnant of the emotions. Triumph. Curiosity, but triumph. It floods until the wash of the rest of the memory is fuzzy and it ends there.