Memories

            “I’ll give you fifty.”

            “Dollars?”

            “What, there something else you want fifty of?” This woman is staring at me like I’m the crazy one, her glasses perched on the edge of her nose as if she is scolding a child.

            “It’s a first kiss,” I say. “That’s, like, one of the most valuable memories. You have to do better than that.”

            “It ain’t a good one, kid. People don’t wanna relive crappy memories. No one’s gonna buy this, I’m being generous offering the fifty.”

            In the booth to my right, an old man is glued to his screen. A woman is swaying back and forth in her living room, a pair of big arms wrapped around her waist. I wonder if it’s one of his, or if he bought it from someone else and was just having a shitty night. Maybe he misses his wife. Maybe she kicked him out. If I were a little drunker I might have asked him.

            “Look, this memory’s important to me.”

            She shrugs. “Then don’t sell it.”

            Huddled in the far corner of the bar are a couple of men laughing together as if they’ve just heard the funniest thing ever. Neither wears shoes. I wonder if they even remember how to read.

            “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

            A woman sits on the stool beside me.

            “Yeah,” I say. “It is.”

            “To be fair,” she says, “It’s fifteen fucking dollars for a bag of bread. You can’t really blame them.”

             I nod. She tips her cup in acknowledgement. There is a sort of comradery in those of us that are desperate enough to have such gaps in our memories. Like we know that we’re all the same. Shells of who we used to be and fucking poor.

            I finish off my drink in one go and slam the glass down. “Can I get another?” I say to the bartender.

            She takes it. I watch her saunter over to the rack of bottles. The old man is crying now, quietly. It has to be one of his memories, then.

            I think about Sarah, and Ben, who she is probably having trouble putting down because he’s gone to bed hungry too many nights this week.

            “Fuck it,” I say finally. “I’ll take fifty.”

            The woman slides my drink in front of me so a little bit sloshes on my jeans, and gives me a smile. “I’ll get you a receipt,” she says.

            I take the glass and down it on my way to a table before she has time to wheel over a screen. She tells me I better not be too drunk because she won’t pay unless the memory is fully intact. I say I know, and that I’m fine.

            “These might be finicky,” she says, handing me a set of applicators. “They’re not as sticky as they used to be.”

            I stick them to my temples and press until they stay, which is difficult on account of the nervous sweat beading around my forehead. I feel a little jolt of electricity as they connect, and the screen lights up.

            “Don’t take too much time,” she says. “This thing doesn’t have a whole lot of memory left.” With that she takes my empty glass and walks off. I watch the static take shape as it tries to focus.

            There’s a burst of color and then there she is.

            I think about Laura all the time; except now her face is sort of fuzzy because I don’t have much left of her. I’m waiting for the day she disappear entirely.

            That day we were in my dorm room, in our second week of college, and she was still a stranger. She had wandered into my room in a sort of daze like she had no idea where she was.

            “Hello,” she had said as if she was supposed to be there.

            “Hi,” I said.

            “I was looking for my philosophy class and I got lost.”

            I couldn’t tell if she was joking. “It’s about three buildings down from here,” I said. I waited for her to leave, but she didn’t. Instead she sat down across from me. She was dressed like a little old man; a baggy sweater that went past her knees and some old work pants. Her shoes looked way too big for her feet.

            “Aren’t you going to be late for class,” I said.

            “It’s only the second week,” she said.

            After a while I would learn that Laura was always in a sort of perpetual daze. It’s how she went about her day. It did, however, make for a confusing first impression.

            I learned that she didn’t care about class but got good grades anyway. That she skipped often but her teachers still adored her.

            “Damn, you must be crazy smart,” I said.

            “I suppose,” she said. “I haven’t thought about it that much.”

            “Weren’t you worried when you applied to college?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Like, did you ever think, shit, maybe I’m not smart enough to get into this college, or something.”

            She said that she hadn’t really but she understood. I laughed and said I didn’t believe her. We both decided to ditch and watch a movie instead because she didn’t like her class very much and I wasn’t worried about homework.

            “Were you worried about college?” she asked.

            “Of course.”

            “Did you apply to a lot?”

            “Yeah. My brother got into Georgetown so it was a pretty high bar.”

            She considered this. “Did you want to go to Georgetown?”

            “Not really,” I said. “I’m not much of an overachiever.”

            It was hard to watch the movie because it was just my laptop propped on top of a stack of textbooks and I didn’t want to turn all the lights off because that felt sort of creepy. I wondered if this is how people made friends in college.

            Towards the end of the movie, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t know what to say so I just sat there with my face hot. She went back to the movie like nothing had happened. I wondered if she liked me.

            The movie ended and I was thinking about asking her out. Before I could say anything, my roommate came in.

            “Hey,” Laura said.

            “Hey, Laura, thanks for waiting,” he said.

            “You guys know each other,” I said.

            She got up and gave him a hug.

            “Yeah,” he said. “She’s my girlfriend.”

            “Oh.”

            “Thanks for waiting,” he said again.

            “It was fun,” she said, then to me, “We should hang out again sometime.”

            I said sure. I don’t remember what I thought in that moment but it was probably a little depressing.

            As Laura and my roommate leave together, the screen fades to black and the memory is gone. I know that by the end of the day, all that will be left of that afternoon will be the hazy idea of a Monday at school. It won’t be anything special. Perhaps it never was.

            Once the screen is dark I tear off the applicators and the woman sees that I’ve finished and comes back over to collect her equipment and give me my money. The fifty feels frail in my hand. I wonder how much food I will be able to buy for the three of us.

            “You need anything else?” the woman asks. “Unless you have any other half-assed memories for me, I need that booth.”

            I say no, I’m all done, and relinquish my booth to the next desperate asshole.

            Over her shoulder she says, “It’s funny, there was a girl here who had a similar memory.”

            “What?” I say.

            “Saw you guys talking earlier,” she says. “Doesn’t matter though. She left a while ago.”

            “Thanks,” I say.

            When I pass the old man, the woman on his screen is saying how much she loves him. He’s still crying. I hope someone buys him a drink.

            The night is cold and clear, and my footsteps splash a little in the wet street. As I walk I feel the last bit of Laura fade away, which is sort of a relief because once you’ve forgotten it gets a little bit easier.