Just as Kraft himself believed, he could barely remember what it felt like to forget. When he thought, his consciousness wandered through the vast library of his memories, plucking out the files he needed with no more difficulty than looking up a word in a dictionary by its first letter.
It wasn't just his memory; his thinking had become more efficient, too. He could search faster and through more information, making it easier to build a rigorous chain of logic.
So when he said he'd "forgotten something," he didn't mean that he'd found a book in the library of his memories whose ink had faded. He meant that he lacked the first letter of the title—the clue that would tell his consciousness where to go and what to look for.
In other words, he hadn't so much forgotten something as failed to think of it. There was a hole in the vast web of his thoughts, and something he shouldn't have overlooked had slipped through—quite possibly something that should have been common knowledge.
"Help me figure out what I haven't done." A major characteristic of many people with mental illness was a lack of insight; they were completely unaware of what they were doing wrong. Self-examination wasn't reliable in such cases, but the resulting abnormal behavior was real and could be observed by others.
He needed a "prompt" to jog his memory and point him toward what to investigate.
"Uh, you mean that piece of ore?" William took back his bottle of liquor and sipped from it, savoring the strange sensation as it both moistened and burned his tongue. Once swallowed, it warmed his belly, as if a steady stream of heat were pouring out from within and driving the chill from his bones.
He gently swirled the bottle. Kraft