Prologue
The young man came into the room where the three others were already seated. They put him at once under their appraising scrutiny in those first few moments before anything was said, before even the gestures of welcome were performed. The one with the salt and pepper beard, the one who seemed to occupy the summit of authority, peered up from over his glasses, smiled, and motioned toward the one empty chair in front of them. The young man took the chair and put an expression on his face that meant he was ready. When the silence in the room threatened to become something more meaningful than merely a prelude to conversation, Salt and Pepper Beard spoke.
“Thank you for coming up, Mr. Rivera. Your first time in England, I take it…”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, as it is here, we put a lot of credence in the value of a first impression, a first look, as it were.” His icy blue eyes sought out fear on the young man’s face, but found none. “There are those who would call it a mistake to place as much weight as we do on whatever can be demonstrated in the space of fifteen or twenty minutes. But as I see it, everyone knows judgments are sometimes made quickly. For better, for worse. To try to pretend it isn’t so, is simply naive. Yes? I’m as interested in what you think you ought to be, before us here today, as I am in what you actually are.”
Salt and Pepper Beard leaned back between his two colleagues, to study with some detachment what effect his words had had on the young man. The woman to his right, on the inquisitor’s side of the broad oak table, pushed her glasses higher on her nose and began to jot ferociously on a pad. To Salt and Pepper Beard’s left, a man with a black goatee and dark, avid eyes cleared his throat and began to speak.
“In other words Mr. Rivera,”said Black Goatee “we’re looking at you, you know we’re looking at you. We’re thinking our thoughts, making up our minds about things. That’s it.” he laughed. “That’s the face of things. It’s better not to waste too much energy trying to conquer your own nervousness though. We expect a certain amount, after all.”
The young man was unruffled.
All three inquisitors were leafing through the open folders in front of them now. Salt and Pepper Beard started talking again. “Normally, we treat the interview as a blank slate, as it were. No agenda. We just like to see what happens.” He colored the last word with theatricality and flashed sly smiles to his left and right. “But in your case William, if I may call you William, we’re rather more specifically interested. This short story you’ve submitted along with your application — one gets the uncomfortable impression that it might actually be something other than a work of fiction. Well, for lack of a better word, true.”
The old man waited for the impossible to be declared so.
“It is entirely true.” Said the young man flatly.
Salt and Pepper Beard was turning pages in front of him and nodding his head minimally but with great concentration of thought. “But I don’t understand.”he said “It says, or rather you wrote, that the boy never regained any memory of these terrible events. So if you are the boy – how could you write…�?
“I pieced it together.”the young man interrupted. “You see, I’ve spent the last eight years of my life reconstructing what happened to me, Sir. As a matter of survival, I spoke with anyone who remembered anything, anyone who was there, and who would talk to me about what happened. So the story you have read is based on their memories, not mine. It is as you said, Sir, the tenth year of my life is a black hole to me. In my memory, it is simply not there.
The story is what it appears. You read it with curiosity when you thought it was a fiction, and now you find it impossible to accept as a biography. Nevertheless, there it is. It’s the patch I made to cover the hole in my memory, Sir…”