Erased

He never did find out why any of it happened.

He called his best friend who also worked in the city, to tell him about it. Although they worked in different buildings, it was their habit to catch up every lunchtime for a coffee and a quick snack. Sometimes, they would miss out because of work commitments, but most weeks they would try to meet at a different café each time. It happened that, on his way home from the office by tube he got chatting with a fellow passenger. Although he couldn’t remember most of the conversation, the subject of coffee shops in the city came up and he was told of a small café down one of the lanes that had just opened for business. He was told how good the coffee was and how highly he recommended it.

The following day he had rung his friend about it. Unfortunately, it was one of those lunchtimes when he couldn’t make it. However, intrigued with the idea, he went along on his own. He found the shop. It was very small and had no customers, there was only a barista behind the counter.

The coffee was good, but again, he had only a patchy memory of the casual chat he had with the guy making the coffee. He only knew that he got back to the office very late. Instead of the usual thirty minutes, he had been away for over an hour! As it turned out, the call he was trying to make was a waste of time. It being a Friday, his friend had left work even earlier than usual. He decided to leave it until Monday.

Naturally bothered by the whole experience, over the weekend he gave more and more thought to the strange event. Although he was not usually given to conspiracy theories, he couldn’t rid himself of the idea that at least half-an-hour had been erased from his memory in some way. He spent a lot of time trying to retrieve bits of what had occurred. Most of it made no sense. There had been something about the city arcade he had walked through on the Thursday lunchtime. Was he alone? Who was with him? He had the feeling that he’d been asked a lot of questions about what he’d seen or heard at the time, but little else.

On the Monday morning, he took a slightly longer route to get to his building. He had the odd notion that he should walk past the café to make the event more real. When he arrived there, he was hardly surprised to find the place boarded up, with ‘Closed’ and ‘For Lease’ signs on the door.

During the morning, he called his friend. He decided to say nothing about the incident, but arranged a place to meet at lunchtime. He would discuss it when they met. His friend agreed, saying that he’d had a peculiar incident on the weekend that he’d tell him about over a coffee.

After putting the phone down, he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He was sure that their two stories were connected.

In the café, his friend said that he’d come into town on Saturday to shop. He said he’d got talking with a man on the bus about coffee houses, who told him about a new one that had recently opened. Because he raved about the quality of the coffee, he visited the shop before returning home. He only meant to spend a few minutes there, but when he got to the bus stop, he checked the time of the bus he meant to catch. At first, he thought there was something wrong with his phone’s time settings. He had then asked someone if they had the time. He was amazed to discover that his phone was correct. Somehow, he’d lost forty-odd minutes out of his morning!

Having listened patiently to all this, he then told his friend his own story. He explained that he had a vague memory of being questioned about their walk through the arcade. He also pointed out that the café in question had been closed. He ended by saying that he believed they had seen or heard something that they shouldn’t have, and that part of their memories of when they had walked through the arcade had been wiped.

His friend listened with interest to his story. He then raised his eyebrows and chuckled, saying, “Well now, that’s a very interesting theory, but to be honest, I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Well,” replied the other, “of course you don’t. You’ve been wiped!”