Charlie Walsh ’22
Ignorance is Bliss I remember when our cat left. I was three. One day she was dozing around the house, the next she simply was not. It wasn’t death—I didn’t understand what that meant then—just departure, a state of nonbeing. She might not have existed at all. Over the years, she faded to a shadow, a mere phantom in a dream. I imagine it was more real for my parents and my older sister. They knew what death was. It’s not pleasant to know what death is. I first realized that at my job decades later. I’m in the business of helping people forget—it’s all very clinical. War meant good business: more paperwork for the clerks, sure, but more clients ready to get strapped into the machine and simply forget. Childlike naïveté was their aim, the last refuge from whatever awful trauma they had endured. I didn’t care much about the reasons myself, of course. I’ve never been much attached to emotional affairs, which made me a perfect candidate to operate and monitor the machine. I must not interfere with the process, which is just fine with me. It’s all very impersonal. Some rail against memory manipulation, as the media calls it; it is unnatural, disabling, humiliating. Really, it is nothing more than selectively removing memories, tweaking some emotions and chemical imbalances, straightening things out. They like to get angry at me, but I just pull the lever. Through the one-way mirror, I see clients enter with long stares, eyes alternatingly shining or empty. They grimace, or their jaws hang. They are strapped in by an assistant. The assistant leaves, I flip the switches, I pull the lever. I look away—the process unnerves me, like few things do. After mere minutes, I look back, and their lips slowly contort into an unfamiliar smile, a child’s face, one that their face has not felt in years. With wonder, abandon, and unbothered innocence, they look around the now-unfamiliar room as the assistant takes off the restraints. Their eyes are always a dull black. They are led into the discharge center to re-learn basic skills of living, but they will ultimately be dependent. The process is complete. As a matter of procedure, I check over their entrance papers, liability forms, waivers. The most common reason for treatment is death, of a child, maybe, or comrades, brothers-in-arms, patients, friends, acquaintances, even strangers who happened to be near the admitted at the time of their passing. Always death.
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