Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page A

the tape across his nose. He wanted to see who he was talking to.
    â€œTake your hand away from your face. Now. That’s good, keep your hands in your lap. Tell us your real name.”
    â€œMoon,” he said.
    The man sighed. “If Moon’s your real name, then we want the name you used before. There’s no Moon anywhere.”
    â€œWhy are you doing this?”
    â€œNo,” said the man. “Uh-uh. Why are
you
doing this? Coming up here with this fake name and this fake daughter and trying so hard all of a sudden to get inside. You’re a fake, Moon. We want to know where you come from. Your clothes smell, you know that? You smell like you’ve been in the woods. Why’s that, Moon?”
    Moon strained to focus on the two men sitting opposite him. They both moved, crossing and recrossing their legs, tilting their heads, and he wasn’t even sure which of the two was doing the talking. He wanted desperately to tear the plastic away from his eyes.
    â€œI had to get out of the green,” he said slowly. “I was going crazy. I couldn’t think of anything else. I . . . I started to think it was coming from me, that it was something that was only wrong with me, that everyone else could see, except me and my daughter. That my craziness had made her blind too. I had to find out, I had to show her—”
    â€œOkay, Moon. Enough of the sob story. Everybody thinks he’s the only one. Everybody wants out. That’s why we have locks on our doors. But why now? What brought you out of your hole to come up here scrabbling at our doors with your fake name and your poor little match girl?”
    â€œWhat?” Moon was deeply confused.
    â€œLet’s keep it simple,” said a different voice. “Three questions: What’s your name? Where’d you come from? And what do you want?”
    He grew uncertain. “I live here,” he said. “In the green. It’s my right to try to get Linda into your school.”
    â€œYou live here. What do you do?”
    â€œI—”
    â€œYes?”
    What was the matter with him? Was he suffering some form of amnesia? He felt desperate, baffled. He smelled of the forest, they’d said. “I work on a farm,” he blurted out. It was a guess, but the more he thought, the righter it sounded. He knew there were farms, he knew everything about this place and how it was organized. It was only his own history that was a blank.
    â€œAll I do is grow the food you eat,” he said. “Just as important as what you do up here. Insult me for my smell if you like.” As he grew more confident of the memories, he grew more indignant. “We have to feel our way through the fields by guide wires; you should try it sometime. I’m not just some dumb hick whose arm you can twist, you know; before the disaster I was a very important person . . .” He stopped again and struggled to resolve the image. “I lived in San Francisco. So I should be up here with you, in fact. It’s certainly my right, in any case, to try to get Linda—”
    â€œSo you’re not from around here,” noted the voice. “You weren’t living here at the time of the disaster.”
    Moon worked to recall, but it remained elusive. Here? Of course—
but where was here?
All he could remember, all he knew, was the green.
    Wait. He remembered the afternoon when everything changed; that much, anyway, was vivid. He’d groped his way home from work and sat by the radio, waiting for updates, smoking what he didn’t know then would be his last cigarettes.
Biochemical trauma
, the radio called it at first.
Earth’s atmosphere opaqued.
Then, for a short time, they called it
the bloom.
As though the sky itself had grown moldy. But soon everyone called it what most had called it at the very beginning: the green. As to the duration of the catastrophe, well, the experts differed. Of