The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  “I can understand what you’re saying, but the truth is, it doesn’t really seem to describe what happens.”

  “This may sound counter-intuitive, but some of these severed memories may have to be released. We need to start to track around this function, which is going to mean letting some of the things, those things you typically return to, go, so we can build in new pathways.”

  “So, I’m remembering too much? That’s supposed to be the problem?”

  The therapist considers, then tips her head to the side, her flesh folds wagging at me. “Think of it more as—you’ve carved these memories too deeply in. They’re easy to slip into. New things want to connect to them. Perhaps you’ve already guessed what I’m getting at, though. The reverse of misplaced meaning. That’s what I think we need to consider. Some long-term users have reported a dulled sense of attachment. Trouble bonding with a supposed intimate. Historically, can this describe you? Are there people you ought to love that you can’t feel anything for? Have you ever surprised yourself with your capacity to hurt someone else?”

  I am listening. I have tried, since the night Juni fell down the stairs, not to think too much about the meaning of what happened, that she couldn’t breathe, that she came for me, and that instead of helping, I watched her tumble. Everyone has bad nights. But it haunts me, what Emily said about her ex. What if I’ve been that woman all along? What if Juni has survived two years of that night, and it’s only just now I can see it? And not just Juni. Even if I cannot call up the deeds, I know I have done things a normal woman with a normal mind would be repelled by. It is true, there’s a slowness to my heart. My love does feel a beat behind.

  “Mellie,” she says. “What’s going on? Tell me what is happening in your head at this moment? I’m getting the feeling something is there.”

  “Oblako,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” says the therapist. “I’m not familiar with that term.”

  I shrug. It is a word which has surfaced from some point in the past, but which I cannot now place. I would write it down, but instead I roll it on my tongue, searching for the link. “Stupid slang. Junkie code word.”

  “I know that you are skeptical of the OneLife teachings, but the program has been successful with people like you. Not cloud addicts, necessarily, but people with memory gaps. We call it a curriculum, and its outcome, in successful cases, has been to identify the faultline and to navigate new pathways and eventually, hopefully, over time to build in new tracks in place of the broken one. We use a series of targeted activities, and self-study, which you’ve already begun with the workbooks. The method has been very successful with soldiers, with disaster survivors.”

  “Cloud sickness isn’t PTSD.”

  “There are parallels though, with dissociative episodes, with blackouts, with the sudden onset of attacks.”

  I’m being difficult, but I’ve read enough about trauma to follow what she’s saying: her process helps you locate the blank left by years of cloud use, and then you do these deliberate, forced activities which are supposed to kind of compensate for the half your life you missed in a fog. Early in film, I did some editing. This is back when you worked with splicers and glue. Sometimes, if a take went bad, you could cut out a part of it and put another in. That’s what she wants me to try.

  “Isn’t it, though, going to make me into a fake person?”

  “If it works, it might make you into a functional person. A functional mother. I know that’s important to you.”

  The drawing on the page open between us shows a staircase, a little tumbling blur falling.

  “It’s obvious,” she says, “if you think of it in terms of addiction. The drug puts itself first, last, and in the middle. It is always the cause, and the effect, everything else slides into it. You go another way, and eventually, other things will have room to grow.”

  The therapist turns the page. In today’s exercise, I’ve drawn my secret identity. I know what the point is—to locate the underdeveloped parts of yourself. I know it because yesterday I made a spiritual pie chart and the day before that I was supposed to write a letter to myself at five. Dear Young Me: You will spend the next thirty years screwing everything up. Love, Old Me. I have begun to run out of fascinating insights, but then the secret identity concept made me think of cartoons, and cartoons reminded me of a jest I’d once made to Emily about Adequate Woman, a single mom who has to change a diaper before she can save the passengers on a speeding train, so this was the figure I drew.

  The therapist does not like it.

  “I can do it over,” I said. “I was also thinking of snakes, of that Cretan goddess with snakes.”

  “N-noo. No. This is—well—” she turns it around on her desk so I can see it more clearly. “This is what you made. There are no right answers, but take another look. What do you notice here?”

  It’s me. Big glasses, full lips, baggy under-eyes and decent bone structure. I’m wearing a cape with a sort of logo on it.

  “What do most people draw?”

  The therapist laughs, the folds of her skin quivering. “Someone better looking.”

  “I’m not much of an artist.”

  “That’s fine. Fine. But, it’s a hero, yes? This is a cape, and that’s an A W? Not the root beer?”

  “It’s Adequate Woman. Her superpower is to pull everything off, but just barely. Just adequately.”

  “Adequacy is a super power? That’s a new one.”

  “Some days,” I say, “it feels like it.”

  “But do you know,” says my therapist, “how many times you have referred to cloud as a ‘power,’ a ‘skill’ or a ‘talent’?”

  “Oh,” I say, “Now wait. I didn’t say cloud was a talent, I said it enhanced—”I pause. “Crap.”

  “It is very common,” she says. “It is utterly unexceptional for an addict to consider herself to be somehow gifted, or for that relationship to the substance to be qualitatively different from others’ relationships with the substance.”

  I fix my jaw. I know where this is going now. Because of a stupid drawing. “So, you’re not going to approve my day pass?”

  “You earn privileges here. How would it look to the other residents, some of whom have been here three times as long as you, if we gave you an early pass because you need a faster internet connection?”

  “It’s just one file,” I say. “Your system won’t let me access it.”

  “I am aware,” says the therapist. “You have made me aware.”

  I have, of course, been thinking about the object between the pages of my paperback since I arrived here, but I’d been able to talk myself down. I could wait. My house felt like I’d left it burning, but that wasn’t real. Then, something happened a few nights ago that made it feel as if the fire were actual. It was late, and I had wandered down to the communal kitchen, past the computer terminal, for a snack. We surrender our phones on check-in and we’re not allowed personal electronics, but we’re allotted time to job hunt, whatever, during the day. I had promised Emily not to go after the OD TO man, and I had stuck to it, mostly. Mostly, I had been using my computer time to gawk at my dwindling bank balance. A check to Independence House had nearly bounced. The next one wouldn’t clear. I’d also portaled over to the Seychelles server, and linked to the headless woman video. In the back of my mind, I thought of Apollo Blue, of the missing middle, but I told myself that wasn’t why I was idly surfing the widening web of conversation about the headless woman. I reread Lew’s instructions. You have your part and I have mine, he’d written. The site’s visit count was over a hundred thousand now, some portion of those people presumably clicking through the dialogue box, the malicious program burrowing in. Under our old model, this was already a finished job. Yet there was more to it. Complete as discussed according to timeline. He was waiting on me for something; Emily had said, it stopped right at the good part. Rerun season is over, the OD TO man had said. The middle is missing and the middle is the alarm.

&
nbsp; Lew, I should say, did not believe in telephones. When I’d worked for him, it would always be an assistant who called, Lew barking in the background. The days of his having assistants, however, was over. I might have tried his wife, or the landline at his bungalow, but those numbers were in the pages of my paperback. And, anyway, I felt a growing caution about this thing, which I had hidden even from myself, which was perhaps the same thing as the OD TO man was seeking, and perhaps not. I felt a need to understand what it was which was driving me.

  The thing in my paperback. In my mind, I traced its edges, reconsidered its shape and size.

  Sitting there, in the late-night hush of the Independence Common area, I cheated on my promise to Emily in a small way and ran the search again—Bright Big Future Apollo Blue. People had been talking. The results now yielded eight more terms, and I derived that the filmmaker-actor in the background of the clip was using that pseudonym: Apollo Blue, and that the project itself was called Bright Big Future. Of the rest of the results, two were from message boards in the sicko corners of the internet, but others were from an exchange on a Leeds University discussion group called Avant GBarde. Buzz was building, I understood, a sense of something more coming. They want to see how it turns out.

  Something else I had tried, once or twice, was to test myself. Ten seconds. Stop. Fifteen. Stop. A little clip at a time. It hadn’t escaped me that my reaction to the video bore something in common with what my therapist had been saying about cloud research. There was nothing in the clip I recognized, and yet I reacted as if I knew it. Cloud slippage, I would have said, if I’d been talking in Uno’s, the reflection of some branching left behind. At home, I’d fallen into a trough of forgetting, come back with the sense I had almost seen something, that in that place I knew more. So, say I tried it the new way. Then, it followed that I could assign myself a bit of a curriculum, lay in new tracks around the blank place. I could build up a tolerance. Two nights ago, cars occasionally passing outside, the Independence women sleeping above, I thought I might try for thirty seconds.

  From the point of view of the industry, the adult film industry, the video was inexplicable. The woman put on makeup and made inane small talk with the cameraman. Apollo Blue was, I gathered, the husband as well as the cinematographer. You couldn’t see the subject’s head or feet, but her body was young under the lights and makeup and her smoke-spoiled voice incongruous. You could see how it might be addictive, Emily had said.

  This was what I was mulling as I sat at the terminal that night. I don’t know. Juni was upstairs, and I shouldn’t have left her alone. What if she’d woken up? A handful of cereal rested in the well of my lap as I linked to the video. While I waited for the little spiraling counter to launch, I linked through the new search results. A couple years out of the business, and you can’t be surprised if all the hubs and aggregator sites have changed, but the meta tags on the feeder sites for my video included descriptions like experimental video and museum studies, instead of the more familiar young girls live nude hott cam. Message boards theorized about another video upload. It would be snuff film in which the girl in the underwear was knifed on camera. It was part of a viral plot to take over the US banking system, launched by the Azerbaijanis. It was a marketing ploy by a defunct porn company.

  On one techie site, there was a brief discussion of the program that implanted if you responded to the dialogue box. Russian origin? Sleeper virus? Harmless, unless activated.

  Seconds ticked by, as I shoveled the last of the supermarket-brand oatios into my mouth. The video began to play. I hastily lowered the volume to a murmur and I half-listened to the trite dialogue begin. I watched the ticker measure traffic. 106,432. 106,665. A hundred thousand views. I couldn’t see it, but my reaction was no good measure. High, perhaps, I would have understood.

  Don’t talk to me like I’m some animal. As the video reached the thirty-second mark, I switched windows and watched intently. The filmmaker spoke. Show me your—you have such a pretty little—At his voice, my old queasiness rose in my throat, but I swallowed against it. He reached for the waistband of the actress’s panties, and then—

  A dialogue box opened. Click yes to continue?

  The finger at the pantyline, the static stutter in the clip, the benign little question in the plain black box. It wasn’t just that the program was already embedded. I recognized the handiwork, knew it like I knew my own mind. Rerun season. This was my work, I who had done it and so, of course, even though I knew better, I clicked. A counter appeared—a countdown: sixteen days, three hours, twenty-nine minutes. Beneath were the words Bright Big Future Part II: Found Footage. The whole world. They were waiting on something, and they weren’t going to wait forever.

  Everything shivered, the room, the screen. I stood, oatios spilling from my lap. Before I could write it down, be sure, whatever file it was began to worm into our server, and the system booted me. Moments later, I heard the sound of the night staff making his rounds, and I hastened back to Juni, her openmouthed snore. You can believe I’ve tried again, but the site is inaccessible now, whatever malicious thing I’d downloaded having been tagged in the interim. But now I understand the timeline, and something of what I am meant to do.

  There are pieces of the puzzle I still can’t solve, the fancy traffic from the high-end sites, what Lew could have meant by his part and my part, but since that night, I have been going back over the conversation with the SUV man. Why the delay, he’d asked. Something’s missing, he’d said. Something dormant would be woken up. I think he’d said these things, but without my paperback, I cannot be sure. If the middle is what’s missing, then where is the end? And what of Kif-Vesely’e? What about way back?

  Even if the thing in my paperback (the size of a penny, but with hard edges) is not what he is looking for, even if it’s unrelated to Lew, whether they are the same or not, it feels like a house on fire, and I cannot tell whether to race in and save it, or watch it burn.

  Now, my therapist leans back and closes the workbook. “What is it you people say? You have to live in the likely world? That’s not enough. There’s still magic in that idea, mumbo-jumbo. There’s one world. Right here. This is the actual world, and you already live in it. Slog along in the muck the rest of us are slogging through. You know I lost 150 pounds? Wanted to do it for years, but I kept looking for the ‘periodic fasting diet’ or the ‘three simple tricks’ or the laxative herbal supplement or the metabolism boosting pill. These are like your memory trough—I kept throwing everything into to this one place. And it all disappeared. Then, I did the OneLife program, no promises, just a little bit of progress, every day. It was there that I saw: losing the weight was going to be hard, and depressing, and I was going to miss bingeing on mountains of cake. I gave up on magic, and then I started to drop pounds.”

  I get ready to argue; the OneLife I recall is all about magic and promises, but I draw in my breath instead. I’m trying. I really am trying. And I get that it has the stink of cloud, the man in my driveway and the missing video clip, my old boss. “I understand,” I say. “I’ll wait. I’ll try again.”

  “You’re doing great, Mellie. The worst thing we could do is send you out into the world before you’re ready. It could put your entire recovery at risk. When you qualify for a pass, you can go back to your house, or to the library or to whatever hip café in JP and sip kombucha lattes and watch performance art. But for now, we take it at the pace we take it.”

  She has turned the page again, found a doodle I’ve made on the endnotes. There is what appears to be a castle of some kind, a room in one of the towers spouting flames. OD TO 2f it says in the margins, TO DO DO OT TO OD.

  “What’s this picture?” she asks.

  I shrug. “It came to me. I don’t know.”

  She frowns. “According to the literature, initial memory repair can feel to the user like a cloud high, coincidence, kismet. This because the experience of a richly linked memory is so unfamiliar to you. You need to guard agains
t mystifying it. The research tells us that this is how the brain incorporates new pathways. Like the way leaves can sometimes fall in a beautiful pattern. You don’t then say the tree intended the design. Eventually, I think, leave off the writing, do the work, and you’ll find you begin to respond more organically to things, but in the short term, the process can be confusing. It’s important to prepare for this.”

  “But what do I do with actual coincidence? When things in the world really do connect?”

  “Twenty years of scraps in a book, Mellie. The entire internet. It’s easy to find links after the fact.” She taps the page—OD TO 2f. “It’s not even a word, Mellie. This feels like brain detritus to me.”

  She gives me a pity smile, and tries to pat my hand. “Listen: you’ve started week four. That calls for a structured outing. When your sponsor comes this afternoon, the three of us can talk about a proposal; I have an idea that fits a two-hour time-frame. If it goes well, the open pass will follow next week. And did you hear what I said before, about doing great?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I try to let it sink in. “Yeah.”

  It is mid-April. Days will go up to sixty, but the mud freezes into tread marks overnight. Emily and I stand on the smoking porch, she in a puffer vest and me in a shapeless wool sweater. On a patch of still-brown grass, the older Independence House children have shed their coats in a giant pile. Juni has been deposited with the non walking babies on a blanket where they flop about like caught fish, but my child will not stay in her spot. Every time the caregiver steps off to break up a fight or wipe a preschooler nose, Juni will toddle after, suction her baby self to the woman’s support stockings and hang on. After the nose wipe or whatever, the caregiver detaches Juni and deposits her back in the baby blanket. Juni rises again, stumbles again. I watch her little bow lips purse and release bubbles of air. I like that there are no other toddlers. I don’t think I could stand to compare.