Free Forgiving Ararat by Gita Nazareth

warned. “It’s too soon. You’re not ready.”
    “Who are they?” I asked. “Who am I?” I grasped the door handle.
    “No, Brek,” Luas spoke sternly. “You must do exactly as I say or you will lose who you are. Do you understand?”
    “Who am I, Luas?” I said, confused and lost. “Or, should I say, who was I?” I pulled on the door.
    Luas tugged on the empty right sleeve of my suit jacket, causing me to turn toward him.
    “You did it on purpose,” he said, indicating the empty sleeve. “Quite bold, actually. Why, there isn’t a child who hasn’t comforted herself to sleep knowing that if pushed too far she could simply deny her parents what they treasure most of all. Children play the same dangerous game adults play on the tips of ballistic missiles, but unlike adults most children recognize the futility of trying to win by losing. Not you, Brek Cuttler. No, you heard your grandfather’s instruction to stand clear of the conveyor chain as an invitation to trade a pound of your own flesh for the pleasure of the pain on your parents’ faces and the sorrow in their voices.”
    It all came back to me, my own darkest secret, never shared. The secret of the princess in Santiago. “How did you know?” I asked.
    “I know many things about you, Brek Cuttler,” Luas said.
    “Then you know they were getting a divorce,” I said, “and that my mother was an alcoholic and my father hit her and he.... You know I thought I’d only get a cut when I reached into the machine and maybe be taken to the hospital for a few stitches, not that I would lose my arm. I just wanted them to listen. I just wanted them to stay together. Is that too much for a child to ask?” I glared at Luas as if he were my own father. “You have no right to judge me,” I said. “I’ve been punished my entire life for the sin of trying to keep my parents together. I’ve more than paid for my crime—if you can call wanting a family a crime. You know many things about me? Do you know about the phantom pains, when you think your arm is hurting even though you don’t have an arm? Do you know what it’s like not to be able to hug another human being because you’re missing an arm to hug them back? Do you know about bathing, dressing, eating, and sleeping with only one hand, and about the jeers of children and the cruelty of adults? Do you know about the awkwardness of every new meeting, about the shattered hopes and dreams? Do you know about clothes with useless right sleeves?”
    “All that was forgiven long ago,” Luas replied.
    “Forgiven? Really? I don’t remember forgiving anybody.”
    “Please, Brek,” he said, “sit down.”
    I released the door and sat back down with him on the bench. Two sculptures had been chiseled into the stone wall opposite the bench: one of a Buddhist temple in the foothills of Tibet and the other of a synagogue in the foothills of Mt. Sinai. Luas noticed me looking at them. They seemed out of place in a train station.
    “Have you heard of the Book of Life and the Book of Death?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    “They don’t exist,” he said.
    I exhaled in relief, prematurely.
    “God doesn’t maintain them. We do. Each one of us. A record of every thought, word, and deed in our lives. The storage is quite perfect, actually; it’s the recall that’s incomplete. Not that this is a defect. Important reasons exist for narrowing the field: forgetting traumatic events helps one cope, and there’s the exquisitely practical need to discard portions of an ever-growing body of experiences to avoid being consumed by them. Memory isn’t the defective tape recording you’ve been led to believe it is; memory is the tape player itself, playing back the tracks of music we select—and sometimes those we don’t. Replayed on the right machine—a high quality machine—the music can be reproduced with great fidelity and precision, nearly as perfect as when it was first produced.”
    Although hewn from solid rock,