It was as if all of them had been fished half-drowned from the water of Lethe. None of them from the point of waking up had memory problems, save one due to the natural consequences of aging. Yet their lives before were gone. The way water-logged pages give up cheap ink until it is nothing but stains. The memories they did keep they clung to like debris, each of what remained distinct between people, so that one could differentiate the ships had wrecked and left them adrift in the river of unknowing. One, many years on, would admit over dinner that he didn't even remember what people called him.
"It's wild," He'd say. "I only lived in Hoboken about two years, before moving back across the river. I remember the sidewalks near Stevens down to the cracks, but my name? Gone. Couldn't have mattered to me, so I picked this one." He would pause, looking down at his drink. "For all I know, I picked the same one again."
"That'd be funny," someone said.
"That'd be sad," someone else replied.
With one notable and obvious exception, no one stuck with the name they'd had before arriving, not really. One forgot, two took the chance to dispose of legal names, and one feared he'd be remembered, even though none of them knew each other before. Most of them suspected the others had done the same as them, but to question another was to put one's self up for question, and this was either a transgression or a matter of shame.
Old names are dead weight, and when someone has nearly drowned, you cannot blame them for fearing to hold on to stones. When might the tide rise again? Shall Lethe overwhelm its banks, sweeping away the world around them again? Survival at the station was rarely ever a physical concern, but always a psychological one.
Five hands reach for five doors. A point of syncronicity. The moment it starts, a singular instant from which the past and future spread down and out, like streams cutting down either side of a mountain. Clap here. Sync the sound and image. Look a little longer at the point of symmetry, before it's gone and everything scatters that order like ashes in the wind.