The committee met on the second Tuesday of each month, in a low building near the civic records office, seven members around an oval table. Norel had joined six years ago after a career in urban planning, where he had spent twenty years thinking about how communities shaped themselves around what they chose to remember and what they allowed to fade. The committee work seemed a natural extension. He was good at reading petitions, good at identifying what a neighborhood actually needed versus what it was asking for, good at the deliberation. He had voted against erasure more often than any other current member.
The Kasel neighborhood petition had been submitted in March and cleared the threshold requirement with seventy-one percent support. Thirty-seven of fifty-two households. The event in question: a flood in August of 1983 that had lasted six days and killed nine people. Forty-three years had passed. Most of the current Kasel residents had not been there. The petition's language was careful: the collective memory had become residue, it said. An active weight with no active function. The community wanted to move into a new orientation, it said, and the held memory was making that difficult in ways they could not fully articulate but could feel.
Norel's grandmother had been one of the nine. She had died in the flood when his father was eleven. Dael had never met her. He knew her only through his father's telling, which was sparse and factual, and through one photograph kept in a drawer in his parents' house: a woman with short hair standing in front of a doorway he did not recognize.
He had declared his conflict of interest at the start of the session, as required. The committee chair had offered to excuse him from the vote. He had said no. He wanted to vote.
The deliberation had taken forty minutes. The main arguments were ones he had heard before: the right of a living community to determine what it carries; the difference between erasure from the civic record and erasure from personal memory, which the system did not touch; the question of what a collective memory served when no one alive had formed it firsthand. There was one argument he had not made aloud, which was that the civic record was the only official acknowledgment that those nine people had been there at all. His grandmother's name was in the 1983 municipal flood report. After erasure it would still be in the city archive, but it would no longer be in the community record. The neighborhood would no longer be required to hold her.
He voted no. He was the only no. The erasure passed six to one.
He wrote the dissenting notation as required: one sentence for the record. He wrote: "The collective memory of an event does not belong only to the living." He did not write the rest of what he meant, which was more complicated and would not have changed anything.
Walking home he passed through Kasel. He had done this before, many times. He did not know which street had flooded worst, which house had been his grandmother's, which doorway was in the photograph. He had never looked it up. He had six months before the erasure took effect in the civic system. He did not know what he would do with that information if he found it.