This is how James Renner’s The Great Forgetting opens: a Scoutmaster finds an ape-like arm, with a watch still attached to the wrist, at the memorial site of the crash of Flight 93, a plane hijacked on 9/11 but diverted from its intended course when the passengers overtook the terrorists onboard and crashed the plane into a Pennsylvania field. The Scoutmaster takes it to the coroner who was at the crash site all those years ago.
The coroner studies the arm and tells the man someone must be playing a prank on him. If it was an arm from the crash (and he very much doubts it is) it’d be nothing but bone. Many remains from that crash were vaporized on impact. The watch is engraved with a name that sounds familiar to the coroner. He checks the names of those aboard Flight 93 and the name on the watch matches the name of a man who died when the plane crashed.
But why does it look so ape-like?
Jack Felter, a history teacher, is headed home for the summer to help his sister take care of their ailing father, a former pilot in the Vietnam War who has a violent form of dementia. Jack’s childhood best friend Tony has been missing for two years. A psychologist working at a mental hospital, Tony was accused of funneling money from the hospital and disappeared. Tony’s wife, Sam, was Jack’s first love. She believes that Tony committed suicide and is now at the bottom of a quarry and wants Jack’s help finding the body. This is where the plot really takes a turn for the bizarre.
It seems Tony was acting strange even before he left, becoming more and more paranoid, boiling all of his drinking water and delving into conspiracy theories. He’d been an intense kid, but Jack hasn’t seen him in years. Jack reluctantly agrees to help Sam out, figuring he’ll ask around and get her questions answered, then return to his life in another town.
Jack heads to the mental hospital where he meets 16-year-old Cole who was Tony’s patient. Tony told Cole that one day his friend Jack would come for a visit. Cole begins telling him a story: There’s a group of people who have come up with a program called The Great Forgetting. They want us to forget important things like world events. They keep resetting time. They put fluoride in the water to make us forget. Start boiling your water.
“What day do you think it is?” Cole asks Jack.
Jack looks at him with that condescending indulgent smile sane people give to those they deem bat poop crazy and answers “It’s Tuesday, June16th.”
Cole says “It’s Wednesday, the 17th”. Boil your water, he tells Jack. Begin to remember.
Cole is the only one who knows where Tony has disappeared to and thinks that finding him might save the world. Unfortunately, some very nasty things are not only after Jack and Cole but want to hunt down Tony as well. Jack and a motley group head for a secret bunker under the Catskills which leads them to a forgotten island in the Pacific and eventually the truth about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared without a trace a year ago.
The Great Forgetting is a fantastic book about time travel, enduring love, and setting things right. If you crave paranoid conspiracy theories with a little sci-fi thrown in, this book is the one!
I gotta boogie on out of here. I have 8 gallons of water to boil. I want to remember.
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