Wish for Amnesia

WISH FOR AMNESIA is a modern-day mix of futuristic fable and historical fact that follows six idiosyncratic characters in New York and Rome from 1968-1985, Hippiedom to Halley’s Comet. It pivots around Jack Rubin, son of Holocaust resistance workers, who develops a Messianic Complex as he struggles to be as exemplary as his father. Jack rises to great success in a life of politics, anthro-genetics and early computer technology, but is beset by doubt, paranoia and voices in his head. They say he has no right to lead until he has the perfect plan.

A troubled relationship with Beatrice, a blind, black performance artist, moves him to marry one of her students, Caroline, stunning, but disturbed. Caroline grows up in a dismal little town, her character set by rivalry. Jack becomes a tyrant to his family as he uses his wife for sex and their precocious daughter, Jewel, as his basis for creating a perfect hominid through genetic engineering.

The artist is named the child’s godmother. She takes Jewel to Rome, where they fall in with a nefarious cabdriver, Toto, who causes several transformations in them both, some good, some harrowing.

Jack desperately strives to fulfill the potential of his father’s sacrificed generation, but when he travels to Rome to bring his daughter home, as he descends a ramp at DaVinci Airport on the day of a historically infamous attack there, he’s killed by someone he knows.