Read an Excerpt From Tell Me an Ending

What if you once had a painful memory removed? And what if you were offered the chance to get it back?

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Tell Me an Ending, the dystopian debut novel by Jo Harkin—out from Scribner on March 1st.

What if you once had a painful memory removed? And what if you were offered the chance to get it back?

Tell Me an Ending follows four characters grappling with the question of what to remember—and what they hoped to forget forever.

Finn, an Irish architect living in the Arizona desert, begins to suspect his charming wife of having an affair. Mei, a troubled grad school drop-out in Kuala Lumpur, wonders why she remembers a city she’s never visited. William, a former police inspector in England, struggles with PTSD, the breakdown of his marriage, and his own secret family history. Oscar, a handsome young man with almost no memories at all, travels the world in a constant state of fear.

Into these characters lives comes Noor, an emotionally closed-off psychologist at the memory removal clinic in London, who begins to suspect her glamorous boss Louise of serious wrongdoing.

“Just a few more questions,” says Noor. “Box ticking. And then we’re all done.”

She remembers from her training, years ago, that she’s supposed to give a reassuring smile at this point, to let the client sitting in front of her know that the difﬁcult bit is over, that this is just a small matter of paperwork before they can begin their new, happy life.

Noor said to Louise at the time that the clients Noor forgets to smile at probably feel more reassured than the ones who receive a smile, see the forced nature of the smile, and start worrying what Noor might be hiding, but Louise said it didn’t matter.

Nobody expects it to look authentic, Louise said. You look like a competent professional doing a token smile, and that’s perfect. That’s all they want from you.

Noor smiles at her client.

“Great,” says the client. He rubs his face. His body softens into his chair. He’s only about thirty; his notes say he saw a man being sucked into a snowblower at a ski resort. “Good to know.”

“So. Since your deletion procedure, have you experienced any insomnia, unexplained mood changes, symptoms of paranoia, hallucinations or visual disturbances, headaches, anxiety, depression?”

“No,” says the client. “Does that stuff often happen after a wipe?”

“After a removal,” Noor says, because Nepenthe doesn’t like the word wipe. They prefer Targeted Removal Solution. Not that it matters. Slang is slang: they can’t ﬁght the tide.

“None of these are common aftereffects,” she continues. “In fact, incidences are far lower for our clients than for the general population.”

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Tell Me an Ending

“Cool,” says the guy. “Well, I haven’t had any of those.”

“And you say your PTSD symptoms have subsided.”

“Yep. All gone.”

“Well, that’s certainly good news,” she says. She stiﬂes a small burp, apple ﬂavored. It reminds her that the apple she ate for breakfast was a while ago. She wonders how long she’s got until lunch.

Noor is the head of the Aftercare team. She doesn’t usually conduct follow-up interviews personally, but she’s doing a few to test out the new script. She’s looking forward to the end of them.

There are two kinds of clients at Nepenthe: self-informed and self-conﬁdential. The self-informeds know that they’ve had a memory removed; the self-conﬁdentials don’t. Self-informed clients tend to be people who have witnessed terrible but relatively simple events, like snowblowing accidents. In most cases, these clients are content with knowing that they saw these things, without being able to remember the thing itself. It’s enough that the incident has become… abstract.

The self-informed clients usually arrive for their interview a month after their procedure, say they feel great, and leave. Even on the rare occasion that someone doesn’t feel great, they’re usually civilized about it. Before Noor started working at Nepenthe, she thought that she’d be facing a lot of chair smashing, desk tipping, door punching. But in fact, the clients are almost uniformly well-behaved.

It’s because we’re messing with their brains, Louise says. Makes people very polite.

Noor never meets any of the self-conﬁdentials. Their procedures take place at night. And nobody interviews them afterward. Obviously. Noor gets reports from their GPs instead, who usually reach the same conclusion: the patient, to all appearances, is feeling great.

“I do have one thing I was just… wondering about,” says Noor’s client now. “Maybe it’s stupid.”

“Please,” Noor says. “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Her stomach mutters, as if to disagree. She folds her hands over it.

“I remembered something I read, about how life is like a symphony, and what Nepenthe does is edit out the wrong note. But then, I was… I mean, I’ve been kind of unmotivated, I’ve been wiping out on the mountain bike a lot, I was wondering the other day if I’m in the right job. And I’m thinking—what if I accidentally deleted a good note along with the bad note? Or if even if it was just the bad note, if I needed that note to, well, be me.”

What a bloody stupid question, thinks Noor.

Instead she says, “Your state of mind goes through changes all the time. You’re only noticing it now because—post-procedure—you’re on the alert for side effects. It’s a well-known cognitive phenomenon. When the brain takes up a theory, it focuses on gathering evidence to support it and ignores everything else. It’s not objective.”

“Huh,” says the client. Eyebrows up, slow nod. “That’s nice. Reassuring. They should tell people that earlier.”

Noor waits.

“Oh,” says the client. “They already did, didn’t they?”

“In your ﬁrst appointment, yes. In fact, your notes indicate you felt positive about it then, too.”

“So I am still the same person,” the client says. “That’s good.”

“Absolutely,” Noor says. She sighs. “So, last question: Do you feel that every element of the unwanted memory has been completely removed?”

The client stops smiling. He frowns.

Noor knew he would. This is part of the new script—reworded in a hurry not by the psychology department, but by Nepenthe’s legal team.

“Is this about traces?” says the client.

“How do you mean?” asks Noor. Neutral tone.

But she knows exactly what he means. Over the years since Nepenthe opened, there have been a small but vocal number of people claiming to be former self-conﬁdential clients who’d been left with part of the memory intact—or else, that part of the memory had somehow regenerated. The media picked up the story and blew it out of all proportion. Traces was the word they came up with for the phenomenon. Which hadn’t been a phenomenon until the media decided that’s what it was.

Are you suffering from traces?

Documentaries were made, interviewing mostly mentally ill people about their unexplained visions. Films, TV dramas, novels followed—usually clenchingly moralizing, usually having puns in their titles—and Noor considered them a good thing in that they managed to trivialize the whole issue. The phenomenon eventually dropped off the front pages. People moved on to new phenomena.

Then about a year ago, Nepenthe scientists discovered that deleted memories weren’t actually gone for good. That—with another procedure—they could even be recovered.

Oh no, Noor remembers thinking when she found out. Please, no.

But yes. And once that got out, a signiﬁcant number of people who claimed they’d been tormented by traces argued that they should have the right to know if they were former self-conﬁdential Nepenthe clients—and not only that, to get their memories back. It became a class action lawsuit in several countries, and—in most of these—the former clients won.

Hence: the restorations.

Noor knows her client knows all of this. She’s just not sure how much he’ll feel emboldened to ask. She sits back and allows her smile to fade into her usual expression, which she’s been told variously is one of coolness, ﬂatness, hostility.

“I mean,” says the client, with a look of minor deﬁance, “are you checking to see if I have any traces—”

“Regarding the alleged phenomenon known as traces,” Noor says carefully, “the company’s ofﬁcial position is that evidence of this is only anecdotal. There are yet to be any peer-reviewed, methodologically sound studies proving their existence, let alone explaining what they are or why they occur.”

“Sounds very formal,” the client says. “But this is about that whole fuckup, right? Excuse my language. The… eff-up. You know. Aren’t the traces the reason you guys have to give all the night clients their memories back?”

“It’s true that the former self-conﬁdential clients who claimed to be experiencing traces happened to be the ones who brought the lawsuits,” Noor says. “But the argument wasn’t about whether or not traces exist. It was about the right to have a memory restored, now that restorations are a possibility. Any former Nepenthe client could have brought that case. It’s just that the only people who cared enough to do it were the ones who believed they were experiencing traces.”

“I just don’t see why they cared,” the client says. “I mean, given the absence of any peer-reviewed methodologically sound research proving that they ought to care.”

Is he mocking her? Noor sighs.

Yes, he’s deﬁnitely mocking her. He’s forgotten that he’s afraid of Noor, and Nepenthe. Noor blames the fuckup, personally. It’s undermined their authority.

After the client has gone, Noor carries her cold cup of tea down the long, glass-walled corridor divided by geometric patterns of light and enters the staff kitchen. She’s pleased to see there’s nobody else in there. She tips the tea away, puts the kettle on, and allows herself to lean against the empty countertop, enjoying the moment despite the continued keening of her stomach.

Before the moment has a chance to get going, several technicians and a nurse arrive.

“Hi, Noor!” the nurse, Ben, says. He’s about thirty, new, and persistently friendly. Noor’s heard him in the kitchen before, trying to ﬁnd out everyone’s story.

You’re barking up the wrong tree, Noor said to him. This is where stories come to die.

“We were just talking about holidays,” Ben says. “Summer’s nearly over. Are you planning a late getaway, Noor?”

“Somewhere to unwind,” says a technician called Jennifer. She casts a meaningful glance at one of the other technicians, whose name Noor can’t remember.

“I don’t plan on it. Unwinding,” Noor says. She rinses her mug. “It sounds dangerous.”

“Well, I’m going to the Maldives,” says Jennifer to Ben and the technicians.

“Which island?” Noor asks her. “Hotel island or burning trash island?”

Jennifer doesn’t have much to say about that. She goes into a corner and becomes very involved with the preparation of her herbal tea. The technician whose name Noor can’t remember laughs uncertainly.

Two of the therapists on Noor’s team—Monica and Nij—arrive. The kitchen is beginning to feel overcrowded. Noor nods at them.

“How’s the new script going?” Monica asks Noor.

“It’s a disaster,” Noor says.

“Is it going to be ﬁxed?”

“Probably not,” Noor says.

“But Aftercare doesn’t even deal with the self-conﬁdentials! The self- informed aren’t getting restorations, right?”

“Nope,” says Noor.

“Do the self-informeds even get traces?” Nij asks. “And do they mind if they do?”

“Don’t call them traces,” Noor says. “We don’t know if they exist. Remember that.”

“But we’re asking clients questions that are obviously about… er, them.”

“Yep,” says Noor. “Like I said. It’s a disaster.”

Monica opens her mouth. She looks at something behind Noor. Then she closes her mouth again.

Noor turns around.

“It’s good to see you on message as usual, Noor,” Louise says from the doorway. “Afternoon, everyone.”

“Hi, Dr. Nightingale,” the others say. Then they go quiet. The air ﬁlls with the effort of thinking of something to say to Louise that will mark the sayer out as an interesting, well-informed, and promotable individual. Noor, enjoying the return of the silence, spoons three sugars into her tea and stirs it gently.

“Don’t rush on my account,” says Louise to Noor.

“Good tea can’t be rushed,” Noor says. She picks up her cup and heads out of the kitchen. Louise, holding her own takeout coffee, follows her.

“That is not good tea,” Louise says. “Three sugars?”

“I started drinking tea when I gave up smoking,” Noor explains. “I needed—wait, why am I explaining this? Did you know you’re ten minutes early? Normally you’re exactly on time.”

“I do know that, and I went to your ofﬁce to wait, but it was locked,” Louise says.

Noor could remind Louise that ofﬁces aren’t meant to be left unlocked, but it’s been a very long time since the two of them stood on any kind of ceremony.

“Crowshill,” Louise says meditatively. “I lived here for years, but I never enjoy coming back here. There’s something wrong with the atmosphere. A big clinic in a small town. It feels off. The other regionals are the same.”

Louise is usually based at the company’s London headquarters, but she visits regional clinics every month. Technically, Crowshill—the ﬂagship facility, and only ﬁve minutes on the wrong side of the M25, a border town between London, Surrey, and Kent—isn’t a regional clinic. But Noor knows how it is. She saw it that way herself, before she moved here from London. Regional is the word for the pleasant square with its plane trees, the ﬁfteenth-century pub where Alexander Pope once had an ale, the Waitrose supermarket, the coffee shops and charity shops and independent butcher with halved pigs hanging in the window, the 1960s Baptist church and old checkerboard Catholic church, the Victorian primary school, the tabby cat that sits at the end of Noor’s drive most mornings.

Noor’s come to like it.

Louise sits down, takes her phone out, and starts tapping at the screen. “So, ﬁrst things ﬁrst. They’ve ﬁnally worked out the schedule for the disaster—I mean, the upcoming restorations. The self-conﬁdentials will all be informed about their status in September. The restoration procedures will start in late October. You shouldn’t see much disruption. New self-conﬁdential procedures will remain suspended for the foreseeable, so Crowshill will be closed at night from now on, but that obviously doesn’t affect you personally.”

“Nope. I spend my nights sleeping,” Noor says.

(This is a lie.)