Memory

THE BEGINNING

Blue. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Um… now Red. Green. Blue again… I press Yellow again. Beep Beep Beep… “Correct combination”.

My name is John and these are my last memories, the last memories of an evil that has crept inside me. I wrote them in the hope that something or someone would make them known and if you're reading them it means that my obsession with memory loss has overwhelmed me and that someone has decided to let people know that… it wasn't just an obsession.

MY STORY

“Without memories. Forgetting everything… what can life be like with no more memories of one's past?” I repeated it to myself every day as an obsession, a fixed thought. Started many years ago.

At the age of 14, I had started recording all my passwords in a note in Windows Block Notes in the hope of keeping them safe from ever being forgotten. I then moved on to a password-protected Excel sheet that I told myself I could never forget. Then came the turn of Evernote and again a different password from all the previous ones telling me that if I lost this one "I was done". How could I recover the Bank codes? of credit cards? The numbers of the burglar alarm and the front door of the house? My dog's name? if all one day had vanished from my memory. But I found relief, albeit temporary, in telling myself that “one day I would forget everything even the fact that I was forgetting”.

Over the years the situations of real amnesia that I was able to "intercept" increased! My short memory often made fun of me and so I forgot to remember where I had put the car keys, or the telephone or even the last phone calls I had received. I laughed about it. Then I thought back to my last actions, retracing the last steps backwards as if I could press the "Rewind" button of my life. But even if weird and without logic, this method always worked. The mind reconstructed the passages and I remembered everything. And life resumed. Sometimes this trick wasn't enough so I would sit down, take a deep breath and think of something else… freeing myself from the anxiety of having forgotten. And with this I was able to recover the grimmest memory lapses.

All of this was the beginning of a slow deterioration that turned my obsession into something real. I understood it after a long time, after having engaged a form of artificial intelligence that at the time of him I imagined to be just a stupid game from my childhood.

I bought on EBAY what seemed perfectly suited to my purpose, especially now that I was approaching the age of 60. After reading books and books on dementia and memory loss, I came across a website that reported several cases of people who had managed to slow down memory loss by training it and thus avoiding the more acute phenomena.

“I had to keep my mind trained!” – this seemed to be the cure and so I made sure that that miraculous object reached me immediately.

Just 3 days went by and the anxiety of waiting couldn't make fun of me in such a short time. As soon as the box crossed the gate of the house, I rushed to open it, breaking the cardboard, puncturing the plastic and inserting the batteries on the veranda table. Yes, I was excited like a child, between the amazement of the novelty and the childhood memories that surfaced in my mind and created the memory of that nice colored thing.

Beep. Beep. Dong.
“Hi, I'm Memory. A game that will help you keep your memory sharp. Want to start playing? Press the red button. If you want to increase the level of difficulty press the blue button”.

The sounds, those sounds, were so familiar that they took me back in time, far back. Back to the days when, in my room, I sat cross-legged on the floor facing my bed, flashing the ceiling of the room four colors… red, green, blue, and yellow. The memories were so vivid in my mind that I believed I was still there, protected within the walls of that room where nothing and no one could ever hurt me, except the fears that were already making room for me.

I immediately began to establish a daily training program. I decided to start every morning with at least 2 intermediate level tests, after breakfast.

Thus several and many weeks, months passed, until I got bored because the tests had become too simple and I passed them without difficulty. So I decided to move up a level and bring the daily tests to 3, keeping the last one in the evening, generally after 22pm to check my clarity of mind at the end of the day.

The days continued to flow and the tests with Memory became more and more complex and the results I obtained were amazing. I had achieved in a few months what I considered to be an unthinkable result when I remember how it all began. My short-term memory was perfect, responding day after day better and better. Even the small amnesias had disappeared and I then gave all the credit for the result to training, allowing myself to be convinced that my progress depended only on the exercises I did. But then I was too optimistic to think that it was anything else that guaranteed me this enormous improvement.

It had been 2 years since I bought Memory and I went out of my way to take it with me wherever I went, even making sure I always had a backup battery pack in case I ran out of battery. New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Milan, Rome, Saint Moritz, Baku, Vancouver… wherever I went for work or pleasure, in the same bag as my iPad, there was that thing too.

I often tried to convince myself that it was time to end the exercise therapy, but the fear of losing all the progress I had made prevented me from doing so. I continued and continued. It had become a medicine, perhaps even a drug that had taken possession of my will. By myself I would not have been able to decide to stop, convincing myself that I was totally healed and that the obsession was gone too.

But one day I decided with my wife to try to interrupt the training in stages and thus check if the improvements were stable. I also wanted to find out if, in addition to my memory, I had also improved other aspects that had troubled me over the years and had taken away my self-confidence.

In the days that followed the decision to abandon Memory, I realized that the lucidity of my thoughts had in fact improved and so had the speed of my answers and reasoning. The memory training had actually helped my mind. “Amazing!” I said satisfied and with a broad smile on my face. Nonetheless, I wanted to check if the level reached was stable and so I definitively interrupted the training tests with Memory. I put it back in its original box and put it back in the attic.

My wife and I were very satisfied initially. Everything in me seemed to react in the best way. I picked up every signal and never forgot anything. My confidence had grown and it all contributed to greater personal satisfaction. I laughed… and at work I anticipated young people with greater brilliance, feeling more responsive than the average of my colleagues.

But all of a sudden and without any explanation, things went differently and had a strange and unexpected epilogue.

My memory started giving me little cutouts again. Now I forgot some words or even exchanged them for others. The reasonings often stopped and remained firm to the previous thought. If I saw a dog it happened that when asked I answered "a car", I said "that dog goes very fast... who knows what engine it has?!" and immediately my wife corrected me with “dog? you mean that car!”. Disappointed I looked at her and said “excuse me, yes the car… did I say dog? you see I'm overthinking. I must have liked that dog very much if he stuck in my mind so much ”.

But things continued to get worse and in a few weeks came to worry me nullifying all the previous progress. I had lost everything I had gained in recent years.

The fear of the abyss that appeared in front of my eyes only convinced me that the time had come to turn that thing back on.

John: Carol. Where did you put that thing…. uhm…. come on I don't remember… Me… Mem… Memoryyy?”
Carol: “Oh. Sure, Memory. You picked it up in the attic! do not you remember? In the black box… with some books”
J: “Okay. Thank you love! I'm going to get it back... I want to start testing again right away!"
C: "Are you sure? Don't you think this time it's better to go back to a specialist? rather than relying on that stupid machine!!!”
J: "It may be stupid but it helped me by making me feel better... don't say anything else please"

I should have listened to my wife's suggestion. But then I could not imagine what I would discover next.

Things with the new workouts with Memory didn't go as before and after weeks I found myself at the same point despite applying the same previous method. I immediately collided with a sad reality. Surreal, compared to before. There were no more benefits but rather an ever deeper and blinding anger.

Green. Red. Green. Blue… Beep. Beep. “Wrong combination, you made two mistakes. Try again and check.” Yet this time I was sure I had remembered them correctly. It's already the third test I've failed this week. Let's try again now. “But how is Memory possible… I had them all in my head, all of them…” – I shouted from the studio with my wife running to see if something serious had happened to me.

C: "John, are you ok?"
J: “Yeah… this damn car is still making me angry… it must be damaged! I remembered all the colors… how is this possible?”
C: “You must be tired honey. You've been traveling for three weeks and you don't stop. Stop your persecutions. Could it just be something passing…?”
J: “Like ten years ago… Do you remember the doctor. That cursed had already predicted a degenerative state due to senile dementia in an accelerated phase. I was 48 then. And then, training helped me, it slowed down what was…”
C: “Then continue. What should I tell you? keep going with that…”
J: “You don't want to listen… I'm failing all the tests. But I'm not really getting them wrong. It is like…"

I decided to interrupt the sentence and cut it off there, in the middle of a statement that would have upset myself even more than her. I was about to say something that I would never have imagined but which I then realized was part of a truth that was hard to believe: that thing was making fun of me, there was something strange and real about him.

“Are you something or someone?! Who are you? Who's in there… Shit!!!” – but the machine made no noise, no sound, no light on the ceiling. She looked like she wanted to talk any minute but she was actually completely silent and she was watching me and now she is laughing at me. She had me in her grip. She knows she's got me. Maybe I was going crazy.

THE END

A year later…

Carol had been accompanying me to the Treatment Center for Senile Dementia for months. I had, according to her, crossed the line and was aware of it myself despite the memory lapses. Tests and training with Memory had turned into acts of pure violence accompanied by insults and curses of various kinds. I was totally enslaved and given over to the will of that thing. I had tried to break it into a thousand pieces but the fear of depriving myself of it, accompanied by the desire to know its real essence, had burned my brain. What was supposed to be only the solution to all my ills turned into the worst trap of my mind, mocked more by that thing than by the advancing years. It was no longer my memory that was in question but my sanity. I watched the machine from morning to night, resting on the table in room 47. I started training and stopped them almost immediately, I got them all wrong. I was disoriented and did not understand what was happening inside me. I no longer felt any desire, except to abandon myself in the end. I was aware of where I was and that memory was no longer my real problem.

John spent the last 12 years of his life in a treatment center surrounded by machines that were supposed to keep him busy training his mind and slowing down the worsening of the disease. But he couldn't use them, he still kept Memory in the center of the table they had reserved for him in his room. And they never parted again until the end. After his death, the old owner of that property, contacted me and offered me an important amount, incredible not to be considered, to buy it back. I gave it to her asking him "not to let me see her again and to disappear with her", something told me that my husband was right about her, that thing was demonic and had driven him crazy.