The Memory Police: Chapter 2  Summary & Analysis

Years pass. The narrator’s mother and father have died. The narrator mentions that she might have family living on the other side of the mountains from her, but she has no way of knowing where, since maps, too, are “disappeared.”

The narrator thinks of her father, who was an ornithologist. He spent his time collecting data and photographing birds, and the narrator, when she was young, loved to visit him while he worked. His coworkers would spoil her. She’d sit on her father’s lap, look through his binoculars, and study the birds (which she calls “creatures”). In these intimate father-daughter moments, the narrator always wanted to ask him whether he knew about her mother’s secret chest of drawers, but she’d stop herself. She is relieved that birds were not disappeared until after her father died.

The narrator explains that most people are able to quickly move to another profession when a thing disappears that effects their work (though she doesn’t think her father would have been able to do this). She marvels at how most people—and she notes that she’s not an exception—are “capable” of forgetting just about anything, as though their island could float in an “expanse of totally empty sea.”

The narrator remembers the morning birds were disappeared. In the memory, she wakes up with the familiar, strange feeling that disappearances give her. She checks the items around her room and then goes out into the garden. There, she sees a small, brown, flying thing, and realizes that all of her knowledge about these creatures is gone, though birds themselves will continue to technically exist until they are somehow disposed of by the Memory Police. A neighbor confirms her intuition that it is birds that have disappeared—good riddance, he says, but then feels guilty when he sees the narrator and remembers her late father’s profession. All sense of connection is gone for the narrator as she watches the bird. It is now “nothing more than a simple creature.”

The day after the birds’ disappearance, there’s an unexpected, violent ring on the narrator’s doorbell. The Memory Police—the feared arm of the state that enforces “disappearances”—are at her home, and they demand to be taken to the narrator’s father’s old office. She reminds them that her father died five years ago, but they don’t care. They are rude, dismissive, and forceful, barging into her home without removing their shoes.

The Memory Police then storm into the narrator’s father’s office, seeming to know exactly how to get through the house. They brusquely go through all of her father’s old papers, tossing everything out from the drawers that haven’t been touched in years onto the floor, making a mess. They search for anything having to do with birds. They even go through a drawer that only contains family photos—mercifully, they put these photos back after they look through them, but that is the “only kindness” they show her that day.

After an hour, the Memory Police leave with 10 bags full of the narrator’s father’s old papers. She feels like this experience is different than when her mother was taken away—this time, they’ve taken everything they need and will likely not be back. The narrator stands in her father’s old office and feels how empty it now is—all traces of her father, which she’d tried too hard to hold onto, are gone. She feels like she might be swallowed up by the emptiness of the room.