Remember Me, Martin Schechter
by Wildman Schubert Reed
“I’ll be honest, it’s a front-loaded career,” Milroy had allowed. “But in the back half it’s all gravy.”
***
On the train, I collect their signatures one last time. Census, evidence, proof––call it what you want. I certainly had over the years. One woman says, “I don’t sign anything without having my lawyer read it first.” I brandish my weathering notebook tattooed with urban scrawl and I plead with her. “This is how they will know you after you are gone.” With a flourish of her pen she signs and takes up two lines––Jane B. Ellison, PhD., right beneath Benjamin Furman, Alex Gross, Christina Yi, and Esther Fell, the cellist.
I can’t recall how long it’s been since I was last here. A lifetime, surely. Yet oddly, even now, the subway is more or less as I remember it. Perhaps that should come as no surprise. Up past Spring into Bleeker and then Astor, as I make my way four cars, five up from the back, pausing for a Camel in between, one of my last––one of the last, come to think of it. All those names, pages of them, leave a bittersweet residue, pungent even after the smoke. They whisper, “Remember me!” Mark Eschman, Annie Allard-Hanes, Harry McGrath, Gabriel Feinstein, Allison Weir, Hank Crawford, Jr., Callie McMann, Brandon Ellison. “Remember me.”
At 42nd Street the conductor announces that this will be the last stop, and it’s now, amid sighs and groans of inconvenience––from Katherine Hill, Frank Friar, Janet Jennings, and others––that I make my last ever collection. They file by so quickly I hardly have time to match the names to the faces. Then, when it is just the two of us, the conductor slides open the door to his cabin and shifts us into gear and out of what’s left of this city.
Up past 125th Street and over the river––we unhitch from the rail so seamlessly that I barely notice the transition. The conductor pats the dashboard of the ramshackle locomotive and whispers, “Nearly there now,” and the engine purrs in approval and shifts into a higher gear. It’s only when we reach the open countryside––what feels like a good half-hour later, though probably it was years––does he finally speak. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
I look back, but before I have time to respond he continues. “It was ugly, too. Don’t forget that. Otherwise it couldn’t be beautiful.” It is a well-rehearsed line. I wonder how long he has been waiting to deliver it. He takes the notebook from my hands and signs his name at the bottom.
“What are you doing that for?” I ask. “Aren’t you coming with? You are with Collections, aren’t you?”
“For one last ride, yes,” he responds. “But after that?” He nods his head back toward where we came from. “I was one of them.”
The conductor––my messenger––and I––his message. Together we watch the buildings grow green with moss, the tallest crumbling under their own weight, and I know we two are the last. Bird nests made of equal parts twig and newspaper clippings spill out of penthouse apartment windows breaking yesterday’s headlines again today. I feel the guilt, now, heavy between my shoulder blades. Not my guilt, but someone else’s, unquelled, poignant in its persistence. And yet another’s pride, and a third’s anticipation; anger, joy, irreverence, spite, gratitude, relief, ego the whole way through, my list––and I feel each as if it is my own. I’ve never gotten used to carrying all this weight. Bill Bradley’s, Erika Williams’, Spencer Wilfred Compton’s… and hers, too, of course––whose page I still find myself turning to even after all these years.
To think that I had a say in it to begin with. Milroy down at the employment office. I remember.
***
“Martin Schechter! High School degree. Graduated in forty-six. After that, let’s see… Four––no, five seasons picking California citrus. Two years as track gang for the Union Pacific Streamliner––now that’s hard work. Further down… One year on the assembly line at General Motors. A season of copper mining for Kennecott––also hard work. Three fire lookouts for the U.S. Forest Service. And… Two seasons with the New Bedford scallop fleet. Wow, son! You’ve led a busy life.”
I had.
“No immediate family,” he continued. “And why is that?”
“I guess that’s just the hand I’ve been dealt. I’m a roamer.”
“That’s great news, seeing as roaming is most of the job here. Roaming and remembering.” He chortled. “Though you’ll have a list to help.” I stared at him blankly, waiting for him to elaborate. Instead he asked, “Can you read?”
“Yes.”
“Write?”
“Of course. Like I said, I have my high school degree.”
“That’s right. These resumes, they all start to blur together. How are you with names and faces? I hope you’re better than I am––that’s why I’m on this side of the desk!”
“How am I with––?”
“Names and faces, yes. Do you remember them well?” he interjected. “In our line of work, remembering the people we meet is––well, let’s just say that cuts to the core of it.”
“Oh, well then… Yes, I’d say so!” I responded enthusiastically. “I like people quite a bit. I remember something about almost everybody I meet.”
“That’s excellent.” And he really did seem to think it was excellent. “Do you mind me asking who was the first? Just as a––well, don’t think of it as a test, but––just for me to be sure.” He looked suddenly apologetic.
“Excuse me? The first…?”
“Person you ever met!” As if it were an obvious question. “Who was it?”
“Well,” I thought, “I suppose it would have to have been my mother, though I don’t really remember the details of the encounter.”
“Oh, don’t even worry about the details! You were a baby, after all. But yes, that is correct. It was your mother. Very good! We have that right here. Gracie Schechter, born Gracie Wallace. The two of you met for the first time on April 11th, 1928. Do you recall the occasion?”
“The occasion? Well, it was my birthday. The day I was born.”
“Of course it was. April 11th, was it? Oh! But that’s just passed. Hope you did something to celebrate? Lovely start to Spring this year, don’t you think?”
I was taken aback, still confused as to what exact job I was interviewing for. These questions weren’t unveiling any clues. I managed a “Thank you. Yes, lovely.”
“Now tell me, Mr. Schecter––back to business here for a moment. Tell me, do you like to travel?” I hoped he was finally getting to the point.
“Travel? Oh yes, I love to travel.”
“Never stay in the same place twice?”
“Like I said, I’m a roamer.”
“Then you’re hired, Martin Schechter. When can you start?”
Hired? I was once again entirely confused. Hired for what? “Well, I suppose I can start right now,” I’d said to Milroy. “Just one question––what exactly am I being hired to do?”
“Hired to…? Well, son, I’ve just told you that! Somewhat explicitly if I do recall. You’re being hired to remember.”
***
By the time we reach Albany it is an ink smudge on a fading map. And Montreal, too, nothing of what it was when I passed through last. Two-hundred-thousand years of human history, and I am ripe for the very end of it. I run my hand across the surface of my notebook as if to remind myself it’s all right here.
North, we travel, just me and the conductor and the chicken scratch memory of everyone who has ever lived. One hundred billion names, and I remember all of them. That Milroy––he hadn’t been kidding.
The conductor thumbs them through, page after page. Bill Farley, Andrew Weiss, Collette Coleman, Barry Schuster, Effren Iglecias, the baker Maude Aillard. Further back there are names in languages neither of us recognize, and further back still the lines are blank. “These languages were only spoken,” I say. “One of my predecessors collected them.”
He flips back close to the present day (close only in the grand scheme of human history), and the spine finds a familiar page. My heart skips a beat. To me it feels like a lifetime ago, and also just yesterday.
“Why this page?” The conductor looks at me, but I can tell he is already putting it together, peering over the list, looking for the name––a wry smile of surprise that I hadn’t given myself away sooner. He finds it, practically erased from decades of my running my fingers over the ink. How could I not? She had been here!
Her words ring out like a promise. “When this is all gone.” Well now it almost all is.
The conductor squints his eyes, parsing the signature. “Tell me about Agnes Costigan,” he says. The name out loud, and the wind goes straight out of me.
***
Suddenly I am right back there in 1953, having just made my way east from Portland through Boise into Salt Lake, then across and down into Denver, then over again to Omaha, and only in those last few days snaking my way south into Kansas City.
I did not travel with much at the time. Everything I owned was tucked into the trunk of my cherry-red Chevrolet Bel Air as I thundered down US 75, stopping along the way in Nebraska City, Shenandoah, Rock Port, Mound City, Savannah and St. Joseph to collect––Kitty Foreman, Byron Wells, Thornton Ashford, William Walkingstick. Many of the roads were still in disrepair from the Great Flood a few years earlier, and being my young and cocky self, I’d sought out no direction in navigating the many detours and makeshift thoroughfares plotted to assure my safe passage from Platte City into Kansas City-proper where the highway was still washed away.
Of course within minutes I was entirely turned around, without a map or landmark in sight to point me in any sort of direction let alone the right one, and before long I had drained every last drop of fuel from my sixteen-gallon tank. I sat there humiliated, castrated, engine sputtering, unable to tell North from South from East from West until the sun dipped low enough in the sky to inform me that I’d been slowly working my way toward Topeka, a good fifty miles in the opposite direction of where I wanted to be.
Woefully destitute, I spent the better part of the night pushing the car backwards down the road in the hopes that I’d missed a gas station or at least a road-side diner where I could get a bite to eat. Of course I was pretty certain I hadn’t, but hope sustains a man like no other sustenance. By morning I officially concluded I had not, and was all but ready to roll into my backseat and waste away for eternity, save for the fact that I was still on the clock and with a quota to meet that would take me at least until Indianapolis. Only then did I hear that euphoric rumble, its sweet and round thrum, the promise of deliverance motoring its way from far off toward me and my marooned Bel Air. By the time I sprung out of the car it was practically upon me, a brand new blue Cadillac Series 62 with chrome wheels.
Out stepped a man named Alfred Costigan, dressed to the nines, who right then and there offered to refuel me from his own tank. We got to talking, and I told him I was heading to Kansas City on work for the Census Bureau, which was not altogether a lie. A smile blossomed beneath his generous moustache, and he told me that any friend of the government was a friend of his; his father had been the Governor and he intended to be the same. He rattled off a handful of names of friends he had at the Census Bureau, and luckily I had been in Maryland not two months prior.
Alfred Costigan offered that I stay one, two, as many nights as I needed while I was working out of Kansas City, all in exchange for singing his praises to the good voters of Missouri once I finally went on my way. I accepted his offer and thanked him kindly, though I assured him I’d be out of his hair quickly as I rarely stayed any place longer than one night, and it was only when our caravan reached his estate that I anticipated breaking that promise.
“Mr. Schechter, this is my wife Agnes,” were the last words I was able to make any real sense of before my eyes fell upon the most beautiful specimen of a human I had ever seen. I said a prayer right then and there even though I didn’t yet believe in God, because I knew how wrong it was to fall in love with another man’s wife, let alone the future Governor’s, and in his own home of all places! But how could I help myself? The planet ceased to turn, the wind ceased to blow, the tide’s ebb and flow sloshed to a furious halt, suspended lopsided, pulled toward the moon which was suddenly erected overhead and blocking out the sun, as if the two were permanently frozen in the totality of an eclipse. Though it was coming up on high noon, the birds around us quieted as if it were twilight, and the world was for a fleeting moment entirely silent.
Then I overheard Mr. Costigan saying, “Agnes, Mr. Schechter will be staying here while on work for the Census Bureau. A government man!” And all I could think to say was, “It really isn’t a glamorous job,” because Agnes was already walking toward me and extending a hand which I took with the ginger care of a lepidopterist handling a rare moth, and for the first time in my life I became aware of how perpetually terrified one really should be of breaking beautiful things.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Schechter,” she said, and I practically laughed out loud because the pleasure truly was all mine.
At dinner that night I considered thrice over telephoning Milroy to proffer my resignation. I felt that I had in an instant come to understand the meaning of the universe, and it was not wrapped up in the contents of my notebook as he had suggested it was, but rather sitting across from me at Alfred Costigan’s dinner table in the form of his wife. I was someone’s replacement, and if Milroy dug through my list he could certainly find another. Alfred, the poor man, was of course privy to none of these thoughts and retreated to his study soon after dessert, leaving me alone with Agnes to polish off the meringues and peach cobbler.
After another hour in which we discussed the vernal equinox, the end of the Korean War, the rumors of a new interstate highway system, and the trip upon which I’d acquired my Egyptian cotton peacoat, Agnes yawned, stood, and made for the door. “I do enjoy your company, Mr. Schechter. I hope you will stay awhile?”
I thought long and hard about how to respond to this––about how to intuit what kind of hope really sprung out of the lady, as it pertained to my remaining in her home and for how long. I opted for the safe response. “I could stay, Mrs. Costigan, but if I do I promise that I will fall in love with you, and if I fall in love with you I promise I will never leave.”
“And I don’t suppose you are the type of man inclined to break such a promise?” She responded immediately, as if she knew what I was going to say all along.
I fumbled for the right words once again, and settled upon something entirely underwhelming but completely true. “I fear I would not have it in me.”
“Then you are a very honorable man,” Agnes Costigan said, and she approached and kissed me once upon my cheek so that the skin beneath burned sharp and white and my hand went to it without thinking as if to swat away a bee.
“Promise me one more thing.” And suddenly I was flooded again with that hope that can sustain a man for one or, as I’ve now concluded, multiple lifetimes. “One, two, as many promises as I can keep,” I said. And she leaned back in, very close so that I felt her breath on my hand. “Remember me, Martin Schechter. When this is all gone.”
And then she left the room.
Milroy, and Alfred.
Alice Kane and Bill Haggardy. Junis Clark and Abigail Von Burstein.
Amina al-Zahra and Marcus Junius Silvanus, and also Chanyu Hulugu and Isabella de Castilla. Opechancanough Powhatan and Anne of Warwickshire, and Vladimir Petrovich Miroslavski and John Abbot Smith. Olufemi Adebowale, Seo-Hyun Park, Lucrezia di Borghese, and Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. And Sigríður Björnsdóttir, Mihai Corvinul, Fatima Zahra Al-Alawi, Ahuitzotl Tlatoani, Ogedai Genghisson, Guilherme Fernandes de Almeida, and Ananya Chatterjee. And every human who existed in all the millennia before our species learned to read or write or even talk and create names.
And Agnes Costigan.
Suddenly the list made sense.
***
The conductor gets off between Northern Quebec and the Arctic Circle while we are still moving, somewhere in the Northwestern Passages, entrusting the old train to me. I hear his voice in a doppler-shifted drone as we speed away: “Take care of her, and don’t skimp on the antifreeze!” The last word falls away like an abandoned thought. I continue North.
Milroy instructed me to leave my list at the North Pole when the job was finished, at which point, he said, I was to inherit the Earth.
The North Pole… Who was I, Santa Claus? But I do as I was told, as I have been doing, parking my ride in the polar ice and placing the notebook at the top of the world, right where Milroy wanted it.
Pulling in, I thought I saw her a dozen times. In the shadow of a snowbank, in my own reflection in the frosted windows, in the empty promise of this icy arctic mirage. But she didn’t appear. You might say I was disappointed.
Now, the rest of eternity spills out before me. I haven’t an obligation in the universe. Yet all I can do is remember. What is a man if not his life’s work? Even through the chill, I feel a twinge of heat on my cheek.
I retreat to my railcar.
Inside, it is as if a millenium has come and gone. Has it? Time moves quickly when there is no one to document it. The climate is temperate, and I lay down to discover that the floor has already been covered by a rich layer of soil. It ripples, alive again with bugs, while fungi explode out of fallen tree trunks and buds unfurl on nearby vines. Buds. They flower and drop to the ground to reveal fresh red grapes. I pluck a few and pocket them, and place one in my mouth onto my tongue. Is this it, then––the gravy that Milroy had promised? My own private vineyard in the cradle of a civilization passed.
My tongue tingles as I try my best to recall the flavors, digging back through centuries. I taste fertile soil and strong bitter tannins, and at the end, for a brief moment, peach cobbler and meringue.
Wiley Schubert Reed is a writer, musician, and theoretical physicist (theoretical because, despite studying physics in college, he never became a physicist). He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is currently writing a play about woolly mammoths. His fiction is also published in The Hopper.