Paul Tremblay's "The Last Conversation" opens in total darkness. A nameless narrator wakes with no memory — no name, no history, no sense of how long they have been here — and the only thread back to the world is a woman's voice on the other side of a wall. She calls herself Dr. Kuhn. She is patient and warm and relentlessly evasive, guiding her patient through breathing drills, walking exercises and recovered fragments of language, while refusing to answer the one question that matters: who is the person she is putting back together?
Told entirely in the second person, the story confines the reader to a single sealed facility while a pandemic runs its course outside. What little the narrator learns arrives through Dr. Kuhn, which makes every kindness an act of withholding and turns the caretaker relationship into something closer to a slow, courteous interrogation. Tremblay uses that closed room to work on identity, memory and consciousness — on what is left of a self when the memories are gone, and on how far a person is entitled to go in restoring someone else's.
Published on 17 September 2019 by Amazon Original Stories, "The Last Conversation" is the fifth entry in Forward, the six-story collection of near- and far-future fiction curated by Blake Crouch. At roughly sixty-seven pages it is designed for a single sitting, and reviewers consistently single it out as the darkest and most unsettling piece in the set — unsurprising from a Bram Stoker Award-winning author better known for horror than for science fiction, and working here in the space between the two.