Jim drives all night, and he can smell New Jersey before he actually gets there. From the Pennsylvania Turnpike he hits the NJ Turnpike, then snakes through the early morning traffic of I-95 until he’s approaching the Lincoln Tunnel on his right. To his left, the sun rises over the monstrous copper and gray New York City skyline. Truthfully, he’s not sure how to get to Brooklyn. He’s a little afraid to take his still-new car through the city, so he takes the ferry from Weehawken. It’s nice, traveling that way – it’s been a long night and he hasn’t slept and he needs coffee and a toothbrush – but the cold, wintry air whips through his hair, slaps his face, turning his cheeks a faint shade of pink. He slips his hands into his pockets, trying to stay warm, and watches the city get bigger.

The palpable lack of sleep and food has demolished his senses, made him emotional. He hasn’t been on a boat since the booze cruise. And those seconds of silence, when he longed to tell her everything, to reach across the distance. How his arms had ached, the muscles in his biceps tightening, as he struggled to keep them at his sides.

I’m cold. She should get inside. Yeah, okay.

He should’ve gone after her, grasped her arm, pulled her back, shielding her from the brutal wind that gusted off the lake that night. He’s not even sure what he should’ve said, really. I love you seemed trite. Don’t marry him, Pam, felt desperate. For some reason, what had really died on his lips that night had been I want to be more. I don’t want to be the only person in America who doesn’t want it to be five o’clock every day so I can leave work and go home. I don’t want to watch you walk out the door at night, knowing that you’re going home to him. He gets to have you, to see you in your pajamas. He gets to watch you fall asleep, and gets to brush his teeth with you every night.

At the same time, he had a feeling that Roy found no special pleasure in any of those simple everyday things. He took her for granted.

He lives that unspoken silence over and over, lying in bed some nights, alone. Or not alone. Doesn't matter; he thinks of her, just the same.

He’s never been to Brooklyn, and had he been in town for any other reason he might have taken his time, browsed through a used bookstore, popped into one of the many ethnic eateries, or just explored. But this morning he’s on a mission.

Too focused, in fact, to notice a familiar face from Scranton several blocks back, steadily following him.

According to the address, Lacuna was in an area of Brooklyn known, oddly, as DUMBO – down under the Manhattan/Brooklyn overpass. Jim stops for a bagel and coffee at a nearby deli, and he asks the teenage girl behind the counter what DUMBO means. She explains it with a jaded, wary eye. What a weird city, Jim thinks, cautiously stepping over a homeless person sleeping on a flattened cardboard box on the sidewalk. This isn’t even the bad section. He thinks briefly about breaking off a piece of the bagel and leaving it for the man/woman (it’s impossible to tell), then thinks better of it. Wouldn’t want the food to attract birds. Jim’s heard crazy things about the pigeons in this place.

He finally tracks down the address, and he stands in front of the building for a second, blinking in the early morning light. It looks suspiciously like an apartment building. Oh, shit, is it possible that the address is wrong, that the whole thing was a joke? Not real? I mean, who am I kidding? A company that can help you forget your past? Right. Just like in Vanilla Sky.

Gazing up at the dark windows of the building’s second floor, he snorts a little at the absurdity of it all. Most likely a lack of sleep and a ridiculous worry about Pam – who had clearly not cared enough about their friendship to let him know she was fucking alive – had driven him to near-insanity. He shook his head. He should call Karen and explain.

Just then, a face, a round white O, appeared in one of the windows. Jim squinted, trying to make out the details, but just as quickly as it had appeared, the face disappeared. A white hand came up and drew the curtain back in a way that convinced Jim that this was, in fact, exactly what he was looking for.

He walks to the front door, hugging his black peacoat around him against the cold morning. His hand is literally in mid-air, poised to knock, when the door opens, and a perfectly normal-looking middle-aged man dressed in a sweater vest over a blue button-down answers the door. He looks at Jim quizzically.

“Can I help you?” he asks, politely enough. Jim suddenly feels embarrassed.

“I, uh … I think I must have the wrong house,” he says, feeling a blush in his cheeks, unable to meet the man’s friendly gaze. “I don’t know what I’m looking for. Sorry to have bothered you.” He steps back, begins to turn to walk away.

“Wait a minute, son,” he says, and Jim looks back. “I think I might know what you need.”

* * *

He can’t believe that this is actually, like, a possible thing. Mierzwiak sits him down in a cluttered room filled with messy bookshelves (with books by people like Proust and Nietzsche and other names Jim can’t pronounce) and musty furniture and tells him he can erase his past.

Everything? Jim asks, an eyebrow shooting skyward. Like, do you have to erase years? Your entire past from the day you were born?

No, no, chuckles Mierzwiak, smiling kindly. Mostly, people choose to eliminate parts of their life, like a divorce, the death of a loved one. We get a lot of people who lose pets, actually.

And then what happens? Do you just wake up and the memories are gone?

Yes, Mierzwiak says, scratching his head. Of course, we ask the person to collect any material items that might jog their memory – photographs, stuffed animals, letters, e-mails, etc.

Well, that wouldn’t be too hard, Jim thinks, realizing that he doesn’t have anything of Pam’s to remind him of her. Karen had made sure of that. Actually, that was wrong. He did have something, something he kept in his Kmart desk at home. He’d kept one of her sketches, one of Dwight dressed as Captain America, that had really made him laugh. In the corner of the sketch she had drawn Cartoon Jim and Pam, dwarfed by giant Dwight, laughing and pointing.

He could have Karen pitch that, of course.

So she came here? Pam, Pam Beesley? Do you remember her?

Mierzwiak looks down and to the left, clearly thinking back. When would she have come here?

You’d remember her, Jim says. From Pennsylvania. Quiet, but funny, personable. She’d been engaged and was alone for the first time in a long time. She might have been lonely, scared.

The gray-haired doctor looks at him closely. No doubt he’s thinking I’m the fiancé, Jim suspects.

What does she look like?

Beautiful, Jim blurts, then blushes furiously. You know, uh, long hair. Curly, brown. Big sparkly eyes. She has a couple of freckles on her nose, right here, he says, pointing to the bridge of his own nose. He’s uncomfortable with how well he knows her face. Uh, and she’s from Pennsylvania.

Jim had leaned forward in his chair, anxious to hear what had happened. Had she underwent the memory erase?

Funny thing, I don’t remember her saying anything about engaged. That wasn’t why she was here…

And then Jim’s world had exploded.

She hadn’t come because of Roy, her wedding, one hundred unsent and unusable invitations, one hundred spoiled dinners, and one dress she might never wear.

She’d come to erase him.

The doctor was talking to him now. “So, Jim… do you think the procedure is something you’d like to do? I don’t want to rush you, but I have an appointment coming in at ten, so…

Jim bolts out of his seat and walks to the window, which faces the street he came in on. “Is it, uh, a little hot in here?”

Dr. Mierzwiak shrugs. “Open it if you need to.”

Jim does, and a gust of chilly wind rustles the thin white curtain in front of him. He touches it gingerly with his fingers, feeling torn and frustrated. He pinches the bridge of his nose, suddenly feeling overwhelmed. He couldn’t believe she would want to erase him – their friendship.

Oh but it was so much more than that. You know that. She knew that.

So she hadn’t felt the same way he had. Hadn’t they still had a strong connection, even just a friendly one? So why …? All their pranks, their inside jokes and winks across the office – and the way he thought he understood her better than anyone – all down the drain?

So he’s here now, and he gets to carry the knowledge that Pam had traveled hundreds of miles and spent God only knew how much money to never have to think of him again? She walked around completely unburdened, having no clue in the slightest that there was a tall skinny paper salesman somewhere in the world who thinks about her every day.

He knew he'd lay waste to his relationship with Karen – he was sure he'd sabotage it somehow. She was a very cool girlfriend for a variety of reasons – but… it just wouldn’t work. Might as well admit it. The fact that she zapped me – all traces of me – makes me react more strongly than when Karen says “I love you,” and in return, I say “I know.”

“Jim? Any thoughts?”

“I, uh… if I tried to find her, do you think she might, maybe, remember me?”

Mierzwiak laughs softly. “Jim, people don’t pay me two thousand dollars to almost forget.”

“I have to try to make her remember,” he replies, grabbing his coat from the back of his chair. “I have to.”

He moves quickly towards the door, down the stairs, and is already outside before the doctor calls to him from the second-story window.

“Jim!”

Jim looks back, screening his eyes from the sun with the back of his hand. “Yeah, doc?”

“She won’t remember.”

“I have to try.” Jim’s voice is firm.

“I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

Jim turns and walks away without saying a word. “I have to try,” he says again, this time to himself. “Just once.”

* * *

“I know you know where she is,” the bold young man in the Pittsburgh Steelers baseball cap tells him, clutching the collar of his shirt. “You tell me, now. I have to find her before he does.”

“S-Sir,” the old man stammers, immediately backing down, “You are my second visitor about Ms. Beesley today. I take it that is not a coincidence?”

The man just stares at him, an icy cold glare.

“I am not sure what has become of Pamela. We had a brief conversation before she went under, and as she began to feel woozy, she mentioned that she had always wanted to become an artist.”

“A what?” The man looks puzzled, and Mierzwiak realizes that this guy might have been Pamela’s fiancé, but he had no idea what had been going on inside her head. His first guest had seemed to have a great deal more insight on what had made Pamela tick.

He lets go of the doctor’s shirt and sighs. “Okay, so how does that help me find her?”

Mierzwiak steps into the sunlight streaming through the window, and suddenly he feels older – old. “You might want to hang around some of the artsier neighborhoods, maybe there’s a possibility you’ll run into her.”

“Where would those be?”

“Oh, well… it’s been awhile since I visited any of the trendier neighborhoods, but I believe Park Slope and Williamsburg are both up-and-coming places for young hipsters and indie types. You could try there.”

“Okay.” The man seemed satisfied. “Anything else you remember from talking to her?”

Mierzwiak thinks back. He remembers the pretty, young, small-town girl with the curls well. She was the only patient he could remember – except for another young artist, a young man named Joel – who had seemed to change her mind at the last possible second. Of course it had been too late – she was already nearly completely under, and the doctor’s staff had begun pinpointing the particular memories she wanted gone. But she had fought it. She’d signed all the paperwork with a few tears, but no hesitation. Then, after the drugs had kicked in, her eyes had stayed open a crack, and she’d started moving, turning from side to side, as if trying to swim upwards, out of the hypnotic state. “No,” she’d murmured, “I don’t want to do this.”

Edna and Walter, the two indie college kids who comprised Mierzwiak’s staff (personally, he suspected that when he left them, nights, they probably did about an hour’s work and then smoked up and had sex) had glanced at him worriedly. Edna asked if they should stop.

“Keep going,” he’d said. She was probably involved in the memory they were chasing down. She certainly couldn’t still be in her right mind. She wasn’t talking about the procedure, surely.

The last thing she’d said before going completely and utterly under made him wonder, though: “I don’t want to do this thing. I don’t want to forget him. Don’t want to forget Jim. Jim loves me.”

“Come on, man,” his gruff visitor was repeating. Suddenly, the young man softened. His voice was pleading. “You don’t understand – I messed things up royally. I ruined something really good, and I want to try and change it. To do that, I really have to find her. Can you remember, was there anything else she said?”

Mierzwiak kept a poker face. “Nothing else that would help you.”

With that, the young man stormed off, no doubt off to find his ex-beloved somewhere deep in the Brooklyn streets.

Personally, he was cheering for the first young man, but Pamela remembering anything about him was, well, scientifically impossible.