The Peacock Cloak

possible, and back to the desk in his room.

    But when he turned on his screen, he found it impossible to concentrate on his current task. (It was an analysis of the effectiveness of the Agency’s literacy programme.)
    He began instead to go through diary he’d kept before his transmission out.

    May 30th. Day 39: Got up. Had boiled egg for breakfast. Played chess for one hour then swam in pool. Watched movie King Kong (4th remake): quite enjoyed it, crap but fun. Went for a walk down to beach. Had omelette and fries for lunch, and overheard couple at the next table talking about a young bar girl who was murdered here a few weeks back. Head beaten in with a spanner, apparently. There’s quite a lot of crime here, the guy was saying, but most of it is never solved. Thirty thousand tourists pass through here every week, and a lot of the people who work here are illegal migrants, so it’s hard to keep tabs on who is actually here, never mind who is doing what. And anyway the locals prefer to hush crime up, if possible, so as not to put visitors off. Apparently that dead girl never even made the local news.
    Stayed in restaurant for a bit reading a boring book, then gave up, binned the book and came back. Quick dip, then reread briefing documents on Lutania and worked on Luto for a couple of hours. Not much point of course if I turn out to forget all this, but I probably won’t, not this early. Very tired for some reason. Chicken for dinner. Two beers. Played Solo Agent for three hours. Watched most of a porn movie on TV – girl with green hair and huge boobs who liked threesomes – don’t know why. Too tired and bored to think of something better to do, I guess.
    I wish they’d have let me do some work.
    Just about awake enough to write this. It’s only 10.30 but can’t keep eyes open any more.

    Yes, he remembered it perfectly well. King Kong, the omelette, the couple at the next table, the breasts of the green-haired girl: he remembered it all. Same with Day 38, 37, 36, 35, 34. All the movies, all the books, all the games, even many of the individual swims and beers. Same with 33, 32, 31. He remembered them all. In fact he remembered these days rather better than he’d normally have expected to remember days from a vacation three years previously. His awareness of the steadily increasing likelihood that he would not remember them had lent a frisson, a vividness, that had actually made them more memorable than they otherwise would have been.

    June 8th. Day 30: Woke up about 5.30.
    This feels weird. Kind of exciting, but weird. There’s an 87.3% chance that I won’t remember anything about today at all. If that’s turned out to be the case, hi my future self. You were alive now I promise you. Even if you don’t remember it. If you want to know what it feels like to be me right now, remember a time when you were excited about something but a bit scared, and in the meantime it was really boring. Like that time Uncle Gary took you caving, and there was that long boring drive to get there.
    Anyway, I couldn’t get back to sleep again so I got and went for a swim. In the sea this time. I thought it would be good on the beach when no one much was there yet. It was too and I had a good appetite for breakfast, which was…

    It seemed that in anticipation of not being remembered, his past self had begun to detach itself from the person it would become, addressing him in the second person, reassuring him, offering him tips as to how to reconstruct a moment in the event that he’d forgotten it without trace. But in fact he had not forgotten it. On that particular Day 30 (and it wouldn’t necessarily be the same this time, when he reached Day 30 again) he had turned out to be one of the 12.7% who remembered the day in its entirety. In fact he remembered it very well.

    June 9th. Day 29: Now this is very weird. There’s a 98.5% chance I won’t remember today at all. And I know for certain, I know absolutely for certain, that even if I do remember today, or part of it, I won’t remember tomorrow. So from tomorrow on, I can get up to what I like, my future self, and you won’t know it. I could get away with all kinds of things in a place like this, as long as I didn’t write it down in this diary. And, you never know, I might not feel like it, not after today. Ha ha. Only kidding.
    No seriously , dear future self, I’m only kidding. The whole point of this diary is so you know what really happened. Not much