The Other Bernard
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The house had her handwriting in three places: a phone number on the wall by the kitchen phone, a list of perennials in the garden shed, and inside the piano bench, a single index card with the words "for when you need it" in blue ink, nothing else. It's odd, pertaining little to the rest of it. But with one, he'll be able to find the other two if it gets removed, messed-up, broken, or whatever.
The index card says,
"Do as Bernard does.
"Calm. Curiousity. Compassion. Care.
"If Bernard was still alive, I'd tell him I love him.
"Melanie"
Written in the maroon ink of her marker or something like it that used to grace the sign above the coffee counter.
I don't remember herite, not really, not at first.
It has been a strange thing about me, my memory. It isn't that I can't remember or that I'm bad at remembering. I've just never had a good reason to remember.
When I first met her, there was no reason. She was just a short, slim, brown-haired girl with her fair share of pockmarks, freckles, and plain clothes following Bernard's heels, hot on his heels. They were in their twenties, at least, but I wouldn't have guessed.
she could never guess, not my memories. They're not like her papers, except they are both mine and not mine. They're multiple.
I took Melanie's card and read it. I don't remember the order in which I read it or the order I kept it, the circles I made in the few pages of my notebook dedicated to the house, the system I arranged things in to find patterns.
Bernard was her brother. She'd introduced him to me when Sandra told her to bring me out here, but he'd been dead. He'd died four years earlier and still I did not remember.
I remember little, but, I think, bits and pieces came back to me, sight, then smell, then a touch so light it wasn't light at all but an invisible hand on my shoulder, a voice you couldn't dismiss.
"David," Bernard had said, a translator, a guide, a lookout.
"Michele."
They'd been brothers, twins, I supposed, if you equated high-speed math to a particular shared mind. How they came to be remembered, though, by Jessica. I don't know.
"Melanie," Jessica had repeated, and I'd thought I could see the resemblance in the way the younger girl frowned, but when I looked again the resemblance was gone.
"Sounds different than what we call our kids." I could hear Bernard chiding Melanie from a time when he was alive. I remembered even as I was remembering.
"My name is Michele, not Melanie."
Just like that. I did not know where Bernard was, but he was still the older, wiser, or at least◆ About the ending
❧ About the title