The Memory Police: Chapter 15  Summary & Analysis

One morning, the womanrealizes that her typewriter is broken. She can’t get the keys to move no matter what she does. She’s completely confused because it had just worked the night before, and she can’t communicate without it. As she forcefully prods at the keys, her typing teacher kneels next to her, telling her that will just make it worse. He opens the typewriter’s cover and says that the damage is serious. However, he knows a room in the church where he gives his typing lessons that has the right tools, and they can take it there to fix it.

The woman and the teacher climb the stairs to the top of the steeple. The woman remembers how this room always scared her, since the sound of the clock-tower bell reminded her of the “groans of a dying man.” The door is locked, but the teacher has the keys to the room. Once they are inside, the woman is shocked to find a mountain of old typewriters. The room is cold and dusty. The teacher tells her to sit over at a table in the middle of the room. He seems uncharacteristically happy. He asks her how she likes the room. The woman is agitated, since she’s lost her voice and needs her typewriter to communicate with him. She wonders why he’s not starting to repair her typewriter.

Although the woman taps the teacher on the shoulder, indicating he should start the repairs, he just takes off his pocket watch and starts polishing it. He does this for a while, and she can’t understand why he won’t begin working on the typewriter. He changes the subject, mentioning that he has a class that afternoon. The woman takes note of how many typewriters there are in the room, stacked nearly as high as her head and all sorts of different sizes and shapes. She wonders if they are all waiting to be repaired. She goes over to one that seems the least damaged, but she can’t get it to work. He tells her that every last one is useless. It is then that she realizes there is no paper in the room.

Unable to communicate, the woman wants to say, “fix one, quickly!” but she can only move and grip the teacher’s shoulder. He finally looks up from his stopwatch and says, plainly, that her voice will never come back, because it’s trapped inside the typewriter. “It’s not broken, it’s just sealed off now that it no longer has a purpose.” He then looks around the room and observes how extraordinary it is that each broken typewriter also contains someone’s voice “wasting away” in that room. The woman tries to move her mouth and ask him why he’s doing this, but he tells her there’s no use, that she’ll soon forget she ever had a voice.

The typist tells the woman that she no longer has any use for using words—she will now be all his. He holds a hand over her mouth, then holds her throat. She is tense and frozen. He tells her that he became a typing teacher because of the silence of the classroom. His students’ voices disgusted him when they would make idle chatter, but when they were typing, they could not speak because they were so focused. He says he is glad he was able to erase the woman’s voice. He finally lets go of her throat and she sits down, in shock. He tells her he needs to go to class, but she is to stay in the room and be quiet. He leaves and locks the door, leaving her alone.

The narrator realizes that the protagonist of her novel (the woman) is also now “trapped in a tight place.” This wasn’t her original plan—she’d initially thought her two characters, “bound by a more ordinary affection,” might calmly go on an adventure to seek out the woman’s lost voice. However, this isn’t how things ended up. Her writing does often take unexpected turns.

When the narrator wakes up the next day, calendars have disappeared. She isn’t too concerned about this disappearance—it feels like more of an inconvenience than anything else. As she puts her calendars in the neighborhood fire, she realizes how, when something burns, it’s like it loses all sense of what it once was. A neighbor, who used to make hats, begins talking to the narrator, saying how cold it’s been lately and how little food there seems to be at the market. All the people on the street commiserate about finding food. A woman with bad knees mentions how other neighbors, a young couple with no children, had recently been rude to her and seem not to want to engage with the neighborhood association.

The narrator and her neighbors all continue to chat on street. One person wonders if spring will ever come back, and the woman with the bad knees says that it might not. She thinks that maybe the disappearance of calendars means the seasons will no longer change. Everyone is very anxious about the prospect of the cold staying, but the ex-hatmaker says that’s unlikely. Spring will come soon, and then summer. Calendars are just scraps of paper. However, the woman with the bad knees ends up being right, and spring never comes. The island remains buried in snow.