"What's so sad about it ... is that all the really bad things you ever did were done for love." [p. 136]
The anonymous narrator of The Last Witness has what he believes is a unique talent: he can steal memories. The person whose memory is stolen has no idea that they've forgotten -- or lost -- something: the memory thief has a new memory that is indistinguishable from his own.
People pay him to take their memories of things they want to forget; people also pay him to take inconvenient memories from other, inconvenient people. Our narrator picks up a lot of useful skills this way, such as playing the flute. He also collects a great deal of dangerous knowledge: bribes, corruption, murder, every nasty thing that humans can do to one another.
Of course, these are also useful skills.
Our narrator believes his talent is unique, but perhaps it's not. Perhaps someone else can steal memories, or even put ideas into other people's minds. Perhaps this has already happened to him.
This is a dark little story, somewhat obfuscated by Parker's habit of not using names. Instead we have the first-person narrator, the father and son, the ambassador, the skinny girl, the sister. There are a few likeable characters, but the narrator is not really one of them -- though by the end of the novella I did feel some sympathy for him. Parker explores the concept of memory-theft thoroughly: the narrator's principled stand on never divulging the content of any memories he's stolen; the risks of people seeking revenge on him, or attempting to force him to tell the secrets he's stolen; the danger of being unable to distinguish between events that happened to him and stolen memories of other people's lives; the possibility that at least some of his (generally horrible) behaviour did not originate in his own mind.
'Only forget,' he says near the beginning of the story, 'and who’s to say any of it ever happened? What’s forgotten might as well never have existed.' For you, yes: but for the people around you, perhaps not so much.
For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 06OCT2015, prompt 'snack' -- it's a novella.
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