The Memory Police: Chapter 17  Summary & Analysis

The narrator freezes at the sound of the doorbell. The old man puts an arm around her shoulders, and R looks up at the trap door above them. The doorbell continues to ring, and the three now hear pounding at the door. The narrator whispers that it is the Memory Police. The front door is locked, and the old man decides that it is better to let them in than to pretend the narrator is not home. They need to act as though they couldn’t care less. He assures the narrator and R that everything will be fine. As they climb the ladder out of the room, the old man insists that he’ll be back for his birthday present.

The Memory Police are indeed at the narrator’s front door. They tell her and the old man to put their hands behind their heads. They instruct the old man and the narrator not to touch anything or talk; they’ll be put under arrest if they don’t comply. There are about five or six of them. The narrator thinks how they must be used to giving this speech at people’s doorsteps. She sees through the window that they’ve parked their trucks in front of other houses throughout the neighborhood.

The Memory Police are brusque and systematic. Without “any trace of emotion,” they begin searching the rooms of the narrator’s house. They never take their shoes off, and spots form on the floor from their boots. The narrator tries to keep herself calm by remembering the song from the music box.

The Memory Police ask the old man why he is there, and he replies that he’s been doing odd jobs for the family for years. They ask why the sink is full of dirty pots and pans. The narrator amazes herself by being able to lie, saying that she cooked enough for a whole week and froze the food. She is grateful that they left the three dirty dishes in the secret room. This seems to fool the guards, and they move on.

The Memory Police then move upstairs. Though there are fewer rooms upstairs, they seem to search more thoroughly. The old man and the narrator are able to see what is happening in the study because the door is ajar. One man examines a space on a bookshelf behind some books, and another rifles through the narrator’s manuscript pages. The narrator worries about the manuscript’s proximity to the dictionaries on her desk, behind which is one end of the makeshift intercom. She thinks how the Memory Police’s well-tailored coats make the men seem unusually and terribly tall.

A guard then asks the narrator what the pages on the desk are. She looks at the floor and tells them that she is writing a novel. At this, he snorts and throws the pages on the ground. The narrator thinks that his disinterest in books is good luck, because he moves away from the dictionaries.

Suddenly, the narrator realizes one corner of the rug that covers the trap door is askew. She begins to chide herself in her head, wondering how she could have been so careless as to not smooth down the rug before she left. She can’t take her eyes off the rug, even though she knows this might draw attention to it. When a Memory Police guard says, “what’s this?” she thinks he must be asking about the rug.

Luckily, the guard only holds an old datebook that the narrator had missed when gathering up all her calendars, and she is able to calmly say that she’d forgotten it was there because she hardly used it. The Memory Police guard flips through it and tells her that she should have gotten rid of it, then lights it on fire with a lighter from his pocket and tosses it out the window. She hears it hit the river. Just then, the guard in charge calls for the men to stop, and they immediately form a line and march down the stairs. They leave the room a mess. When they are out of the house, the narrator collapses into the old man’s arms.

People from the neighborhood look outside to watch the Memory Police leave. The narrator notices three figures come out of the house east of hers. She hears some of her other neighbors talking: the ex-hatmaker says that he had no idea that the young couple had been hiding people in their house. The two were part of an underground group. He never would have guessed it. They note that the third person getting escorted away is only a child, a teenager. The old man and the narrator hold each other’s hands tightly.

Later that night, back in the secret room, the narrator weeps for longer than she ever has in her life. She knows she should be happy that the Memory Police didn’t find anything, but she seems to be overcome with emotion. She doesn’t even know how to describe what she is doing, exactly—she isn’t sad, and the crying isn’t relieving tension. It is more that the tears are impossible to stop. R sits next to her, trying to comfort her. She tells him that for once, she’s happy about the tiny size of the room, because it means the two of them are close, and it’s peaceful to be together in such a small space.

The narrator thinks she can smell the slightest hint of the old man’s birthday cake from earlier. R tells the narrator that she can stay in the room as long as she’d like. She can’t seem to stop crying, but through her tears she assures R that she’s not crying out of fear. She thinks it must be because her heart has weakened, but R says it is the opposite: her tears are a sign that her heart is doing “everything it can to preserve its existence.”

R wipes a tear from the narrator’s face and holds her. The narrator thinks how, sitting there in the quiet, it feels surreal that the Memory Police rang the doorbell only an hour ago. In fact, everything from that night feels like a “distant past”—but now, alone in the room, she and R are “entirely in the present.” The narrator, her cheek on R’s chest, thinks about all the memories he has stored in his heart. She tells him how after the Memory Police left, she stood outside in the cold without a coat or gloves, hoping to figure out where her memories went if she waited long enough. Before she can tell him that she’s sure she’ll never figure it out, he kisses her.