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“You cried out for her.”

I said nothing.

“Aromatherapy works on the body and the mind at the same time. Some people react to essential oils in unpredictable ways. Feelings repressed for many years could suddenly resurface.”

“—I haven’t seen her in nearly five years,” I blurted out.

“Would you like to talk about it? It can help with your therapy.”

I took a deep breath, exhaled, and the flame in the lotus candleholder flickered. She couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see her. This made me feel safe enough to talk.

My lack of reservation surprised even myself. This was the first time I had ever told anyone of the history between my mother and me. I told her of my childhood, my mother’s odd moods, my stepfather, and my many boyfriends. Finally, I brought up my experience with MAD.

“You really went through with it?”

“But it didn’t work. I changed the past, but I couldn’t change the present.” I mentioned the strange dream I had just had. “Maybe I even made it worse.”

Doctor Qing seemed to be deep in thought and didn’t answer me right away. When she spoke again, her tone sounded unnatural.

“Have you ever thought . . . it might not be your mother’s fault? The dreams—they might not belong to you either.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Before I became a masseuse, I was involved in scientific research. A dangerous project I was working on blinded me, and then I was laid off. I was just glad that I survived.”

“What kind of research, exactly?”

“I don’t know. They erased all my memories of it.”

“Oh.” In fact, I had heard many other stories like hers. The state would sometimes erase the memories of some individuals because they violated the law or because they knew too much. Afterwards, their social status inevitably declined. “But what does this have to do with my dream?”

“After I lost my old job as a researcher, I tried to make a living in many different ways. But because of my blindness, I couldn’t last in any of them very long. In the end, I sort of stumbled into this profession. Sometimes, I wonder if it was all arranged ahead of time.” Her tone was casual, amused. She also didn’t really answer my question.

“Arranged? By who?”

“The person who saved me, who laid me off, and maybe even . . . who blinded me in the first place.” She sounded so calm, as though she were only discussing some essential oil. “Even though my memory had been erased, some aspects of my training remained with me. My intuition and logical approach have served me well in this new profession, too. For example, I’ve noticed that some of my clients react to certain essential oils in an unusual manner. They’re like jewelry boxes that are opened by different keys; yet, once open, they all held the same jewels.”

“You mean—” I held my breath.

“Yes. You’re all dreaming the same dream. I can’t say it with one hundred percent certainty, but based on the descriptions, you’ve all experienced the same scene. All of you saw your parents as children. It’s . . . odd.”

My heart beat faster, as though suddenly free of the bounds of gravity.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I like you. You remind me of my daughter. After the accident, she never let me near her again. Sometimes, I think maybe there’s a way to correct all these errors. I don’t believe in fate or any kind of supernatural force. I believe in rationality and logic.

“I believe it’s almost time to reveal the answer to the riddle. I can help you, and you can also help me—assuming you want to.”

“ . . . how do I help you?”

“Go see your mother.”

She lay in the special care unit, looking even thinner and older than the version of her I had imagined. Her eyes struggled to hold me, but her gaze kept on slipping away as though my body had been covered by light-deflecting grease.

The doctor told me that she was suffering from ataxia, cause unknown. They needed to do more tests, but something was probably wrong with her cerebellum.

In front of her bed, I stood with my arms crossed, staring at her coldly. Even the most impatient nurse would appear more like a daughter to her than I. I tried to push away the hateful thought, but it refused to obey and leapt into my consciousness, unbidden:

You deserve this.

“Come, come closer.” Her lips quivered violently.

I shook my head, sighed, and walked to the head of her bed, getting as close to her as I could tolerate. I detected a strong medicinal odor, but under that was another scent that I hadn’t encountered in a long time. In a flash, it was as if a tunnel through space and time had opened up and brought me back to my distant childhood.

It was the smell of my mother.

“I’m going to die soon . . . ”

“No, you won’t.”

“I know you hate me.”

“No.” My voice grew fainter. “I . . . don’t.”

She appeared to want to laugh, but the muscles on her face spasmed and twisted even more violently. The sides of her face throbbed as though they were about to take off into air.

“You’re indeed my flesh and blood . . . when I was young, I also . . . hated my mother.”

“Grandma? Why? She was so good to you!”

“Not your Grandma. She was only my stepmother. I’m talking about my real mother. She died . . . when I was a teenager.”

“What was she like?” I tried to imagine the grandmother I had never seen.

“Pretty, like you. Bad-tempered, like me.” She finally managed a smile. “They called her a hero not only because she had survived, and not only because she was among the first to be implanted with a MAD . . . When she had decided to have a child, the world had already started to collapse. Your grandfather had lost all hope and wanted to abort the baby. But she insisted on having me . . . ”

“Why did she want a child so much?”

“I couldn’t understand it, either, not until I was pregnant with you. Then I understood that feeling. Though the Catastrophe had been over by then, every day, I lived in fear, wondering whether it was the right thing to do to bring you into this mess of a world. What little sleep I got was filled with nightmares. Everyone tried to talk me out of it, but, in the end, I made the same decision she had.”

I understood what my mother wanted to say but didn’t.

“My father didn’t want me. Am I right?”

My mother’s eyes began to wander, as though she couldn’t find anything on which to fix her gaze. She looked outside the window.

“Your father was a good man. But . . . he had seen so much that terrorized him . . . ” Like me, she wasn’t any good at lying.

“Maybe he was right,” I said, keeping my voice cold.

“No! You don’t understand!” My mother’s voice was hot, searing. “Every time I see you, it’s like I see the past that had been wiped away from me and your father. You’re the proof that we were
alive.
I’ve never regretted that decision.”

I felt like crying.

We fell silent together. In the surviving pieces of this family history was a heart-breaking story. Much of it wasn’t motivated by love, but survival. Doctor Qing was right: I understood my mother too little. She had been molded by too many stories that had been forgotten, that had been erased, but I blamed everything on her, as though she had become the way she was by an act of conscious will. I felt apologetic.

The smell in the room became intolerable; I needed fresh air.

“Rest well. I’ll come see you again.” I got up and gently patted the back of her hand. But she grabbed me and held on. In my memory, my mother had never touched me except to hit me.

“I had a dream . . . It was so dark, so frightening. I dreamt that I was a child again . . . ” Her breath was shallow, fast, her gaze anxious and without focus. Her dry, thin fingers refused to let go.

We shared the same dream. This was far more frightening than the dream itself.

“It’s only a dream,” I said gently, trying to comfort her. I combed through her thinning, gray hair.

“So dark . . . so dark . . . ” My mother muttered, as though she had turned into the little girl in the dream.

I thought,
Maybe it’s possible for me to become a good mother.

The blindfold was very tight, and I couldn’t see anything. My hand rested on Doctor Qing’s shoulder. As a blind woman, she was skilled at leading another.

I took each step with care, as though walking into the depth of the night sky. When deprived of sight, your ears and nose became especially sensitive. I could hear tiny teeth grinding in invisible corners; I could detect the stench of rotting garbage, mixed with the sweet, rusty scent of metal, and the remnants of the complex compounds in essential oils lingering on Doctor Qing.

She thought I was the one they had been seeking.

“Who are
they
?” I asked.

“The less you know, the better,” she said.

After a long journey during which we passed several cramped, tight corners, the air smelled fresh again. We had arrived.

“Sorry, but we can’t take off the blindfold just yet.” The man’s voice was flat, without a trace of regional accent.

I nodded, indicating that it was all right.

“I need to thank you. You’re without a doubt the best subject. But I hope you understand that the experiment is not without risks. If you want to back out, there’s still enough time.”

I shook my head. “I just want to know: why me?” I meant not only for this experiment, but also the rest of my life.

He laughed. The sound was open, frank.

“Remember your dream? It’s not a dream at all, but the remnants of memory. It came not from your mother, but your grandmother.”

“How is that possible? You’re telling me that memory can be inherited?”

“I concede that this is a bit hard to believe . . . ” He paused, as though pondering how to explain.

It was that damned epigenetic memory again. At least I wasn’t completely ignorant anymore.

Diet, the environment, and drugs can all cause DNA to methylate, affecting genetic expression. While the DNA sequences are not altered, these methylation results can be inherited. Moreover, certain traumatic events, such as childhood neglect, abuse, surviving a massacre, drug abuse, or mental breakdown, can also affect epigenetics. In other words, the experiences of our most recent generations of ancestors can leave wounds in our DNA in the form of methylation patterns. Even if those experiences have long been forgotten, and the bodies that had experienced them long gone, the scars, passed on through bloodlines, become part of our lives.

Take my mother: she inherited not only my grandmother’s beautiful features, but also her apathy, irritability, and nervousness. These features then influenced the next generation—me. It was like a row of collapsing dominoes without end.

“You’re not the only victim.” Doctor Qing placed her hand on my shoulder: warm, strong, comforting, the way I imagined how a mother’s touch would feel. “Many have experienced similar dreams . . . ”

“That means . . . ” I tried to understand what this implied. “Their ancestors all shared the same experience, like . . . the Catastrophe?”

The truth was so obvious.

“The timing works out,” the man said. “But no one knows exactly what happened. All the official records describe the Catastrophe vaguely as nothing more than a natural disaster.”

“And everyone who lived through it had their memories erased by MAD, just like my grandmother.” My body began to tremble uncontrollably.

“Memories imbued with too much pain cannot be erased. They are etched into our DNA through methylation, and are passed onto the next generation. This is why we need you.”

“But I don’t remember anything . . . ”

“Not you, but your body.” As Doctor Qing spoke, I seemed to smell the neroli oil again, soothing my sorrow. “Remember what I told you the other day? A certain essential oil is like a key, and can unlock the box of your memories. The chemical ingredients in the oil can demethylate specific DNA sequences, freeing the fragments of memory.”

I recalled the first time I saw her. It wasn’t a comfortable experience.

“We want to collect as many of these broken bits of memory as possible and decipher their meaning,” the man said. “With them, we can piece together the truth about the Catastrophe, and stop the scars of history from extending into the future. You will become a hero.”

The corners of my lips twitched, but I said nothing. I knew I was no hero.

Memory is like an onion. The different sensory input sources correspond to different layers. Visual memories are the outermost layer: easiest to trigger, and easiest to be erased. When I used MAD to weaken the memories of my mother, the process stirred up all the pieces of the past. Like a long montage, I was forced to relive through everything, and only then could the emotional content, buried deep within, be stripped away. That sinful pleasure felt like scratching a wound into a numbed arm.

I looked forward to the sensation of those painful memories, inherited from my grandmother, exploding into joyful fireworks in my mind.

I lay down. A harness secured my neck and head, and a mask was put over my face. I smelled a familiar, grassy fragrance: White Angelica, the oil of angels. The demethylation compound was about to be injected into my brain.

The countdown began in my ear: five, four, three . . .

Something shattered in my brain.

I was wrong. The fragments of memory did not manifest visually, but rather were like an epic recited by a blind bard. I experienced condensed emotions, feelings, but no concrete scenes. The long passage of time and the multiple generations in between meant that the original memories had become blurred, twisted, broken, and were now mixed with the real memories of my mother and me, as well as the official explanations and propaganda about the Catastrophe. History rewrote memory, and memory recreated history. I could no longer tell what was real and what was not. Judged by emotional impact, they were equally effective.

But they were wrong, too. The dream they had been so interested in wasn’t a real memory. It was more accurate to call it a side effect of the Catastrophe, a psychological wound suffered during pregnancy, extreme anxiety at the possibility of losing a child. Even though my grandmother had no idea back then what her unborn daughter would look like, like all parents, she had imagined a person and projected her fears onto it.