Remember to Remember

Judy had somehow expected to see more people at the meeting. When Lin sent her the invitation for 'Friday Planning Meeting - Post-Preliminary', she figured...well, she figured that today was the day when her company gave up on all the pretending and fully embraced its slow transformation into a Dilbert cartoon, for a start. But she also figured that there would be a crowd of department heads and managers here to discuss whatever initiative or strategy or whatever it was they were planning.

But the only other person in the vast fifth-floor conference room when she arrived was Lin. He favored her with a polite smile that didn't quite seem to touch his dark brown eyes, and gestured to a seat directly across from him. "Please," he said, his voice so quiet under the hum of the air-conditioning that she could barely hear him, "do sit down."

Judy looked around, taken slightly off-balance by the near-total emptiness of the room. She walked all the way down the twenty-person conference table, feeling Lin's uncomfortably patient stare on her the entire way, before taking the proffered chair. She tried a polite smile of her own, but she knew that it came off more hesitant and confused than anything else.

It was pretty much always like this between her and Lin. She knew that if a stranger walked into the conference room right now, they would immediately be able to pick out which one of them was being fast-tracked for senior management and which one of them took ten years to make it to department head. Lin's long black hair was immaculately groomed and pulled back in a ponytail that somehow managed to look business-like, with not a strand out of place. His charcoal-gray suit was perfectly pressed, each fold looking like you could use it as a paper cutter, and the vivid red tie provided just the right note of color for the ensemble. Even his pinky ring was tasteful, with just a little red stone that matched his tie.

Whereas Judy...God, she knew that if she had to be summed up in a single word, it would be 'frizzy'. Her sweater had little pills of fuzz all over it despite her best efforts, her pantyhose developed a run every third day, and her honey-blonde hair turned into a dandelion puff whenever the humidity jumped above ten percent despite all her best efforts with hair products (or today, hair ties). She always looked disorganized and she always felt disorganized, and being in the same room as the discomfitingly perfect Lin only made it worse.

"Welcome back, Judy," he said warmly, taking out a pen from his jacket pocket and pulling out a crisp white notepad from his organizer. He didn't even give her the opportunity to be annoyed at him by acting superior; his unnerving professionalism extended to a smooth, polite charm that never seemed impersonal. He always treated Judy with the utmost respect, which just made Judy feel guilty about expecting him to start berating her any minute. "Shall we pick up where we left off?"

Judy smiled widely, the over-bright smile of someone suddenly thrown into panic mode. "Um, where we left off, I..." She opened up her organizer. It was hopelessly disorganized. "Well, it's just that I thought this was a preliminary planning meeting." She flipped through the stacks of dog-eared paper, but saw nothing that reminded her of any previous meetings with Lin, planning or otherwise.

"Post-preliminary," Lin corrected calmly. He didn't seem surprised by her 'blonde moment', but he didn't seem particularly upset, either; probably Lin's world was a constant parade of people not quite as capable as he was and he just did his best to bring them all along. "You don't remember our previous meeting?"

Judy stared at him for a long moment without saying anything, until she realized that she had just been sitting there staring at him for a long moment without saying anything. "Well," she said, aware that it wasn't a strong start to her statement. But she didn't remember any previous one-on-one meetings with Lin. She didn't even remember what they were planning. She surreptitiously pinched herself under the table, just to make sure that this wasn't an anxiety dream that she didn't realize she was having.

Nope. Real. "I, um...well, it's sort of...I thought we..." Judy frantically tried to come up with a strategy for at least bluffing her way through the next few minutes until she could get up to speed, but she was uncomfortably aware that she had spent about thirty seconds staring at Lin like a deer in the headlights and a further forty-five seconds stammering like an idiot. It was safe to say her options for verbal maneuvering were limited at this point. "Sorry," she said, feeling utterly humiliated. "I'm drawing a blank."

Lin reached over and gave her a reassuring pat on the hand to go with his sympathetic smile. "Honestly, Judy, there's no need to feel bad about it. A lot of experts will tell you that memory is a remarkably fickle thing." He chuckled warmly, his eyes almost willing Judy to calm down and let go of her anxiety. "Really, how can it be otherwise, when there are so many steps involved in remembering?"

Judy felt her muscles unknotting themselves, the tension evaporating as she realized she wasn't about to be on the receiving end of a hectoring rant about her lack of organizational skills. She was so relieved she almost forgot to ask Lin what the heck he was talking about. "Steps?" she asked, hoping she didn't sound even more air-headed by asking for clarification. "What kind of steps are involved?"

He chuckled, making an airy gesture with his hand as though pointing to an invisible PowerPoint display. "Well, before you can remember something, you have to remember to remember it, right?" Judy nodded along, as much to show she was listening as anything else. "So you're not just remembering, you're remembering to remember. And if you're remembering to remember, then that means you can also remember to forget and forget to remember."

Judy furrowed her brow in mild confusion, but Lin kept going, obviously enthused about the topic. "And yes, of course you can forget to forget as well, but the important thing to keep in mind is that only one of those four outcomes leads you to remembering what you were trying to remember. If you forget to remember, you won't remember to remember, and if you remember to forget, you'll just remember perfectly exactly what it is you don't need to remember. Isn't that right?"

Caught off guard, Judy said, "Well, yes, I...I suppose..." She wasn't really sure she followed the exact differences between remembering to forget and forgetting to remember, but she wasn't about to contradict Lin when he seemed to know exactly what he was talking about and she couldn't even remember what the topic of the meeting was.

"Exactly!" Lin said, favoring her with a beaming grin that made Judy feel like she was doing something right for the first time all day. "And of course, if you forget to forget then you don't even remember what it was you've forgotten. Everything you remember and everything you forget slips away from your mind until you don't even remember to remember at all. So you can see how remembering is so tricky, Judy."

He winked at her. "But it gets even harder." He raised his hand a little higher, the red stone on the pinky ring gleaming as it caught the light. "Because before you can remember to remember, you have to remember to remember to remember first. And that means that there are actually eight possibilities. You can remember to remember to remember, but you can also remember to remember to forget and remember to forget to remember. And you can forget to remember to remember and forget to forget to remember and forget to remember to forget."

Judy had completely lost the thread somewhere around the third or fourth 'remember'...or perhaps the fourth or fifth 'forget'...but she continued to nod along. The last thing she wanted was to give the impression that she wasn't paying attention, not when Lin seemed to think this was all really important. She just watched his hands as if she could see the invisible PowerPoint and let the words wash over her.

"And sometimes you remember to forget to forget, so the thing you were trying to remember is just one more thing you're forgetting to forget and even if you remember that you've already forgotten just what it is you've forgotten, and sometimes you forget to forget to forget and all your memories are just things you're forgetting to forget so easily that you've forgotten you forgot to forget them. You can imagine how hard it is to remember all that, can't you, Judy?"

"Um, yeah," Judy said, no longer at all certain of what it was she was agreeing with anymore. She wasn't sure whether she was agreeing with forgetting to remember to remember, or remembering to forget to forget, or...she just decided to keep nodding. Keep smiling. Keep agreeing. Following along was getting too confusing for her.

"So that means that only one of those eight paths is going to lead you to the memory you're trying to remember," Lin continued, speaking smoothly and quickly. His voice was a sports car on a twisting mountain highway, and Judy felt increasingly like a passenger as she listened. "And that means that you've only got about a twelve percent chance of remembering anything you want to remember. But even that's a best-case scenario, because before you remember to remember to remember you have to remember to remember to remember to remember, right Judy?"

"Uh-huh," Judy said, her eyes glazing over in bewilderment as she tried to process the new layer of information. She watched Lin's hand raise a little higher yet, the gleams of light from his pinky ring catching her eye and distracting her from the complicated sequence of events he was describing. She hoped it wasn't too obvious that she was really just staring and nodding, but she suspected that her blank, confused expression gave it away.

If it did, Lin didn't seem to mind. "And if you can remember to remember to remember to remember, then surely it follows that you can remember to remember to remember to forget. And if you can remember to remember to remember to forget, then you can also remember to remember to forget to remember and remember to forget to remember to remember. And all those are just the same as forgetting to remember to remember to remember, which are all the same as forgetting to begin with."

"Mhmm," Judy mumbled, filling in the pause with a vague affirmation. Her mind was a jumbled pile of phrases, and every time she tried to follow each new line of reasoning, she found herself forgetting to remember, or remembering to remember but also remembering to forget, or just sometimes forgetting entirely even to forget to remember. Her train of thought wound through a thicket of confusion, and she found herself getting more and more completely lost each time Lin spoke.

"But even if you remember to remember, you can still forget to remember to remember to forget," Lin continued, his hand moving like he was conducting an invisible orchestra. Judy's eyes followed his hand with magnetic fascination. "And that's just as bad as remembering to forget to forget to remember, or remembering to remember to forget to forget. When you forget to forget to remember to remember, you're also forgetting to remember to forget to remember, and then you may just as well be remembering to forget to remember to forget because it's all just one big forgetful fog by then."

Judy's mouth opened, but she realized she forgot what she was going to say. It seemed too hard to remember anything now, the path of clear thought so slender and tangled that all she could do was watch and listen to Lin's words as he explained everything to her. She sighed, her eyelids trembling slightly as the effort of even failing to understand him slowly exhausted her.

"So you mustn't forget to forget to forget to remember, and you mustn't forget to forget to remember to forget, and we know you can't forget to remember to forget to forget any more than you can remember to forget to forget to forget. That leaves just forgetting to forget to forget to forget, and you know how forgetful that leaves you, don't we, Judy?" He paused, waiting for her response.

It took a surprisingly long time for Judy to say anything at all. Her thoughts all seemed to be running down one dead end after another, scattering and chasing in all directions and none of those directions led to clarity. Judy stared vacantly into space for a moment, her eyes reflexively following the sparkling gem of Lin's ring, until he said, "Judy? Say yes for me."

"Yes," she replied vacantly, glad to finally have something simple to do. It seemed so much easier to agree than to think now. She could feel her mind shutting down, spread and diffused down all those snarled threads far beyond her ability to pull them together, but Lin's instructions gave her direction. So she followed it. It was all she could really do now.

Lin smiled happily. Then he kept going. "So you can see how easy it is to go blank and let all those thoughts slip away, Judy. How easy it is to forget them all. Even if one in every sixteen thoughts is clear in all that forgetful fog, you still have to remember to remember to remember to remember to remember that thought. And while you're trying, you can forget to remember to remember to forget to forget, or remember to forget to forget to remember to forget."

The ring went up even higher, and Judy's eyes struggled to follow it. She wanted to tilt her head up to look, but it felt so impossibly heavy, so she simply stared up through her eyelids at the sparkling gem and listened to Lin as her eyes rolled back in her head and her chin slumped down onto her chest. She sagged into her chair, her muscles going limp as she helplessly let Lin's words flow through her dazed, foggy mind. She was aware of her hands lazily peeling off her sweater, unhooking her bra, but as soon as she did it she forgot to remember to remember to remember to forget it.

"And of course, Judy, the most important thing you can do right now is forget to forget to forget to forget to forget. You can forget...to forget...to forget. To forget. To forget." His hands teased her nipples, slid up her skirt, pulled down her pantyhose, but her eyes were tightly shut and she couldn't see any of it. And as soon as it happened she forgot. "To forget. To forget. To forget. To...good girl, deeper and deeper now...forget."

Judy forgot what happened after that.

*****

Judy came into the room hesitantly, somehow expecting more people. But apparently Lin's 'Tuesday Planning Meeting - Post-Post-Preliminary' only needed her and Lin. Which was somehow comforting-Judy was never sure how Lin took to her scattered organizational style, but it seemed that he wanted to work with her very closely on at least one project. Judy felt almost flattered.

That is, until Lin said to her, "Welcome back, Judy. Shall we pick up where we left off?" The expression of confusion on her face must have given everything away, because Lin gave her a patient, sympathetic sigh and said, "Did you forget to remember this meeting, Judy?"

"Did...I...forget?" Judy said, her thoughts descending into a whirl of confusion. She tried to remember the previous meeting, or the meeting before that, but there were so many ways to forget and so few ways to remember that she simply couldn't. She couldn't think of anything anymore.

Judy's gaze softened. Her voice whispered, "...forget...yes..." As she began to undress, her eyes were already locking onto the stone in Lin's ring. And she remembered to forget all over again.

THE END