The Memory Police: Chapter 13  Summary & Analysis

Snow falls on the island for the first time in a long time. It collects everywhere. The Memory Police patrol the town in extremely elegant clothing (soft-looking coats with green-dyed fur trim). These coats are far lovelier than any coat that a civilian on the island could dream of finding for themselves.

The Memory Police begin to search houses without any particular reason—showing up on a block, surrounding the houses, and searching from top to bottom. Nobody knows how they select the houses for these searches or who will be next. Even the lightest sounds wake the narrator up at night, as she’s worried for R. People have taken to staying in their homes, as though “the snow had frozen their hearts.”

One day, without warning, the Memory Police take the old man. The narrator opens the trapdoor of the secret room and desperately calls out to R. She says that the Memory Police must have learned something. She is shaking so hard that it is difficult to climb down the ladder into the room. She feels certain that the Memory Police will be at the house soon, and she frantically lists all the other places R might go to hide. He puts an arm around her to sooth her, but this just quickens her heartbeat. R says that if they had known about the secret room, they already would have come to get him, so there is no need to panic yet.

R concludes that the old man must have been taken for something unrelated, since the Memory Police often round up people just to try and collect information. The narrator hopes nothing horrible has happened to him. R says that it’s possible he’s been tortured, since there’s no way of knowing exactly what the Memory Police are capable of. If the narrator wants R to leave, he will—but she says she’s not fearful of being arrested, only of losing him, which is why she’s shaking. R holds the narrator for a long time.

The next day, without telling R, the narrator decides she’ll go to the Memory Police headquarters. She wants any information she can get and to help the old man if possible. She trudges to the headquarters—the sun is weakly shining, but there is still snow everywhere, and only the Memory Police have snow boots Two guards stand outside the front door, staring straight ahead. Although the narrator tells them that she’s here to visit someone, the guards do not look at her or acknowledge her. She asks to go inside, but they still do not reply or look at her. She manages to open the heavy wooden front door on her own and walk inside.

Once inside the building, the narrator is in a large, dimly lit hall. There are more Memory Police officers inside, marching across the room. The narrator hears no voices, no laughter—just boots clacking against the floor.

The narrator sees an officer sitting at a desk and approaches him. She tells him that she has a package she’d like to deliver to someone. The officer repeats back the word “package” as though it were a challenging philosophical term. He asks her who she is here to visit, and the narrator responds with the old man’s name. The officer says that the old man is not there. The narrator asks how he could know if he didn’t even check, and the officer responds that he knows the name of everyone there.

The narrator tries to argue with the Memory Police officer, determined to figure out where the old man is, but the officer says it’s a complicated system that the narrator doesn’t understand. He then makes a subtle movement, and two guards appear next to the narrator. In silence, the guards hurry her away through a “maze” of hallways until they are in a room in the center of the building.

The narrator is shocked by the elegance of the room—tapestries on the wall, leather couches—but this suddenly reminds her of the fancy car that took her mother away. A man comes to sit in front of her, telling her that he is sorry she made the trip, but that “both visits and packages are forbidden.” The man is wearing medals on his chest, and the narrator figures he must be high-ranking in the Memory Police.

The narrator asks this man why she is not allowed to visit or to bring things, and he tells her that those are the rules. She counters that she has brought nothing dangerous and shows the man everything in her bag. The man tells the narrator that she shouldn’t worry, that her friend is being fed and cared for. She argues back, asking why such an innocent old man would be taken. He says that it is up for them to decide if there is any reason to hold the old man.

The narrator then asks if they can at least tell her if the old man is safe, to which the man suggests that if he is indeed as innocent as the narrator says, she should have no need to be worried. The old man is being fed three meals a day from a first-class chef, and the man says that he’s sure the old man wouldn’t even want any of the food that the narrator brought even if he was offered it.

The man continues that his job is only to ensure that memories disappear the way they’re supposed to, saying that it is like a bodily infection: “if your big toe becomes infected with gangrene, you cut it off as soon as you can. If you do nothing, you end up losing the whole leg,” and memories after a disappearance follow the same principle. Since their “adversary” is invisible—since they cannot see inside each person’s heart to figure out what they’ve forgotten—they do “extremely delicate work.” The Memory Police must work in secret, then, to protect themselves.

The narrator looks around—she can see outside, where people are huddled waiting in line for a bank. She decides it will do no good to ask any more questions. The man then tells her that it is his turn to ask questions and hands her a form asking for her name, address, occupation, academic history, religious affiliation, employment expertise, height, weight, shoe size, hair color, blood type, and more. She starts to realize that coming here might have been a mistake, because the more information she gives the Memory Police, the closer they will be to R. Still, she decides that she must not hesitate—since they likely know most of this information already, she thinks this is more of a test to see how she responds. She fills out the form slowly, to avoid shaking.

Later that night, back at home, the narrator is alert and on edge. She thinks she might write, but she can’t put down a single word. Snow falls. After staring out the window for a while, the narrator uses the makeshift intercom to ask R if he is asleep. She tells him that it’s snowing, and he says it’s hard to imagine that there’s snow just outside his windowless walls. They have a tender, slow conversation about the snow and the world outside—the narrator tells R how different the island looks with snow everywhere.

The narrator then tells R about how, when she was younger, “the mystery of sleep” fascinated her—she thought that in the “land of sleep,” there would be no chores, bad meals, or pain. She recounts how one day, when her parents were out, she found a bottle of sleeping pills and takes as many as possible, “in search of the land of sleep.” She was disappointed when the pills only made her fall sleep until the evening—she felt refreshed, but she hadn’t found what she was looking for. After her story, the narrator offers to bring her end of the intercom to the window, so that R can hear the snow falling. She does, and R says that he can feel the snow up in the secret room.