Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page B

course.
    â€œYes,” he said, barely hearing himself. “I lived here.”
    â€œNot under the name Moon you didn’t,” said the man stubbornly. “After the disaster White Walnut registered the name, address, and skills of every man, woman, and child in this sector, and there wasn’t any computer programmer named Moon, and there wasn’t any little girl either. Farm assignments come from us, Moon. Everything comes from us. We track lives—only you don’t have one.”
    Moon didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
    â€œLet’s take another tack,” said the second man. “What brought you up here? What changed?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    The man sighed. “Do you associate your little pilgrimage up the hill this morning with any sort of sign or portent? A little voice in your head? Or what?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œI’m thinking specifically of a dream. Did you dream last night? Was it the same as always?”
    He tried to remember. He had nothing to hide from them. But nothing came. All he could think of was the green.
    â€œDo you dream at all? What are your dreams normally like?”
    The questions were baffling. They sent him further and further into the mists of his own memory, and he was lost there. He sat, his mouth silently working, unable to speak.
    The man sighed again and said, “Okay, relax. You don’t dream. Here.” Moon watched as the man stepped towards him. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
    â€œThree.” Moon felt grateful for a question he could answer.
    â€œYour eyes hurt?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œOkay. Close your eyes.” The man reached out and stripped the plastic lens from Moon’s face. The tape seared the skin around his eyes and tore hair out of his eyebrows. Moon raised his hands to his eyes and squinted through them, then let them fall.
    The two men sat watching him from chairs a few feet apart. They were dressed in nearly identical gray suits, and they wore identical expressions of exhaustion and boredom. They looked the way they acted—like police. The room was otherwise empty. There was a green gloom over everything, a haze which Moon tried to blink away but couldn’t.
    â€œYour eyes hurt?”
    â€œNo. It’s still green, though.”
    â€œThat’s why it’s called translucent air, Moon. It never goes completely away. Hell, if the machines we’ve got pumping at the stuff go down, it goes opaque
in here
within the space of a few hours.”
    Moon waved his hand in front of his eyes, as if to disperse the mist. It had no effect. “But then . . . they’ll never fix the world.”
    The men shrugged, and one said, “Probably not.”
    Moon put his hand down. “Why did you take my daughter away?” he said. “What did I do wrong?”
    â€œWe’ve got a problem, Moon. Something very strange happened last night. Something that’s got people here very upset. And no one knows what it means, no one knows why it happened. And then you show up with your girl and your name that doesn’t register. It’s weird, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? It’s disturbing. It suggests connections. Now, if you started answering some questions, maybe we’d find out it’s nothing but a coincidence. That would be nice. In that case all you did wrong was show up here on the wrong morning. We’d owe you an apology. But until we can make that determination, well, you’re looking to us like part and parcel of our new problem.”
    There was a knock at the door behind Moon’s back. One of the men called out, “Come in.”
    The door opened, and another man in a gray suit pushed in an elderly woman slumped in a wheelchair. At least Moon thought she was a woman. She was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a plaid shirt, the cuffs rolled back to expose twiglike wrists. Her large, wrinkled head