The Cleaners (Faraway collection)

by Ken Liu

  A server brought their food. Beatrice continued typing. Clara began to eat.

  It shouldn’t have happened. She wasn’t like Beatrice. She was normal. Normal people couldn’t interpret the details of the memory deposits of strangers. It took intimacy to build that resonance of minds, to create memories together, to become vulnerable to the pain of another. Only mood and emotion, dampened by the distance of language and culture and the barrier of the self-preservation instinct, should have come through, a faint echo of a tingle.

  But sometimes it happened anyway. When the suffering was intense enough. After all, she had glimpsed the chiaroscuro of anguish and manic joy that was Lucas’s world the first time she sat down in his wicker chair, before she had even known his name.

  Beatrice held the phone up to her ear and spoke into it in a harsh, low voice. “No, I don’t want you to draft a memo! Just call Perry and explain what we need. This isn’t rocket science . . .”

  Worst of all, Clara could tell it was the memory of a young woman, barely more than a child. She could see those slender fingers held up toward the moon, hear and feel the high-pitched keening in the back of the throat, like a creature trying to claw out.

  What happened to that girl? she wondered. Did she go through with it? Please, God, no.

  She was almost done with her sandwich. She slowed down, lingering over every bite. She didn’t know what she would do with herself when she finished. She wished she could talk to the hunched-over figure across the table, now absorbed by the screen again, to understand her and to be understood.

  The contract manufacturer had tried to scrub the workers’ deposits, the detritus of an industrial process that turned humans into components. But the result had never been satisfactory. Despite all of Silicon Valley’s yearning for disruption, they hadn’t been able to figure out how to cleanse memories attached to objects without the participation of a human being. And since they didn’t want a buyer in America to unwrap their brand-new phone, only to be burned by the anguish of a foreigner, to be infected by a psychic wound like a virus—didn’t lifestyle gurus all say it was important to insulate oneself from the suffering of others, not to be dragged down by negativity one was powerless to stop?—they hired American workers to sit in warehouses to clean the phones and then to coat them with a spray of anonymized all-American fresh-product good cheer, as though things were not made by people, but by robotic elves. The manufacturing sector had collapsed in the USA, but there was always emotional labor to fall back on.

  Assembled in China. Cleaned in America.

  Clara had turned the phone in, and the supervisor had said they would look into it. Most likely nothing would be done except to destroy the phone as defective. But what else could she do? Her own life was such a mess; she had no room for the troubles of others. Why was a stranger’s pain being thrust upon her? She felt a dark wave filling her, exuding from her skin, depositing onto the plate, onto the tablecloth, onto her chair: resentful, selfish, guilty, furious.

  Is this what it’s like, always, for Beatrice? To live the memory of another as soon as she touches a deposit?

  The wave receded but did not fully retreat. It lapped at the shores of her heart, a murmuring undercurrent.

  “Sorry.” Beatrice put away the phone and started on her salad.

  Maybe this is why she always gets a salad, Clara thought. So she doesn’t have to worry about the food getting cold.

  It was impossible to bring up what she had just experienced. They were so far apart that she couldn’t imagine creating a shared memory that would do anything but hurt them both.

  “I went to see a cleaner the other day,” Clara blurted. She couldn’t understand why. She hadn’t meant to bring it up at all.

  Beatrice’s fork slowed down. “For Lucas’s things?”

  Just hearing his name spoken aloud was torture. “Yes. Everything.”

  “It’s definitely over, then?”

  Over? What does that even mean? Lucas had left without taking anything because he wanted to be “free”—free of her, of memories, of the weight of a life together that had become suffocating. Maybe it was over for him, but how could it be for her when being home was like being in a minefield? Touching anything brought back an explosion of flashbacks, of hurt.

  “I haven’t heard from him in two months. I thought it was time to move on.”

  Beatrice nodded. Clara waited. Beatrice resumed working on her salad.

  Clara stewed. She didn’t want to hear I told you so. But this silence was worse. Even more judgmental.

  “I thought you told me once you had some good times too.” Beatrice’s tone was oddly subdued.

  Clara was surprised. Beatrice had never liked Lucas. “It’s messy.”

  “Always.” Beatrice seemed to shake off whatever was bothering her. “It can feel good to use a professional cleaner. As long as they’re reliable.”

  “He’s interesting,” Clara said. “He can’t feel deposits at all. He’s memory-blind.”

  “Sounds like he’s in the wrong line of work, then.”

  “No. It makes him better at it. He’s not afraid of touching, doesn’t get bothered by anyone’s pain.” She could see that Beatrice was about to object, to say something like That’s a nice way to spin it, so she rushed on. “I wish I could be like that.”

  Beatrice set down her fork, and for the first time during lunch, looked Clara in the eye. “Do you?”

  “I do.” Pure fury surged in Clara as she held the gaze. Who are you to question me? What do you know about my life with your jetting around and being paid handsomely to peel off the memories of the rich and famous? You’ve never lived with Lucas. You’ve no idea how his self-loathing was like a bottomless pit that sucked the life out of anyone who loved him, how his anger at the world left the taste of ashes on everything he touched, how his self-pity drew me like a flame and burned me to a crisp.

  Beatrice looked away. “I was cleaning up my apartment, and I found this.” She dug around in her purse.

  “You clean?” Clara asked. She had seen a photograph of her sister’s place once. It looked like a hoarder’s nest. “You hate to clean. You said you could never find anything after.”

  Beatrice ignored this. She found what she had been looking for and held it out to Clara. A four-color retractable click pen: red, blue, green, black.

  Puzzled, Clara reached for it, but Beatrice didn’t let go. Both of their hands held it, one at each end.

  A warm flood gushed through Clara’s fingers, up her arm, flared into her heart. Unlike the buzz from the jars of memory-grounds they sold as mood enhancers at places like Yankee Mementos with names like “A New Job!” or “Reunion,” it didn’t feel artificially sweet. Like all true joys, it was laced with the shadow of pain and terror—pain that was assuaged, terror held at bay.

  It felt genuine, Clara realized, because it was her own memory, one shared with Beatrice. She could decipher it.

  She was eleven again, and Beatrice nine. The younger girl had been sobbing inconsolably. Their parents had not understood how unique Beatrice was, had not accepted her gift. They thought she was being childishly dramatic when she said that the secondhand blanket gifted by their mother’s friend hurt her. They had not yet known of the abuse suffered by that woman’s child.

  “It’s just a nightmare. All kids get nightmares.”

  “No! They’re hurting Ellie. They’re hurting her!”

  Clara cleaned the blanket, scrubbed it in the sink despite how it stung her hand. They were poor, and the heat was unreliable. Beatrice needed that blanket. Clara couldn’t interpret the deposit in the blanket, couldn’t relive what Beatrice relived. All she could do was to reassure her sister that she believed her unconditionally, that she knew she was telling the truth.

  While Clara cleaned, Beatrice wrote down what she had seen inside the blanket. Then she had used her favorite pen, a four-color clicker, to draw a picture of herself and Clara. The figure of Beatrice was small and black;
the figure of Clara was large and blue—approximations for the shades of their deposits. Clara leaned protectively over Beatrice like the sky, a fierce presence of absolute trust.

  Later, that account written in a childish hand would be the first piece of evidence in the case that led to Ellie’s rescue and confirmation of Beatrice’s gift.

  “I had forgotten about this,” Clara said, looking at the pen in her hand. Beatrice had let go.

  “We all need to be reminded, from time to time, that we’re better than we remember,” Beatrice said.

  Clara’s hand still prickled, the hairs standing up. She had also sensed that the memory, though a shared deposit, had been colored much more deeply by Beatrice’s perspective. How many times had Beatrice held this pen, relived this moment, redrawn her big sister to be better than she deserved to be remembered?

  Shame, gratitude, lucid incomprehension.

  The memory was fading in intensity, but she knew she could call it back the next time she held it.

  Clara opened her mouth to speak, but her own phone buzzed then, reminding her that she needed to get back to work.

  They embraced. Very briefly. Coats and gloves on.

  “Thank you.”

  Beatrice

  Airplanes were generally troubling places for Beatrice. There was never enough time for the crew to clean properly between flights, and so every seat was a stew of anxiety, confinement, the sense of being suspended between places, life on hold. She tried never to take off her coat or gloves when she flew.

  She unwrapped the package from Clara. It was a book, a limited edition of found deposits by a prominent artist. Each copy of the book was unique, the thick pages bulging with the physical carrier objects, hydraulically pressed or sectioned with a laser scalpel. It was used, but still must have cost Clara more than she could afford.

  That was vintage Clara, always the big sister, the giver, the thoughtful one. Even after they had grown apart.

  Beatrice opened the book and skipped over the pretentious Artist Statement. She turned to the first entry, a flattened little plastic arm, a fragment from a discarded doll that had been found on the beaches of Henderson Island in the Pacific, at least three thousand miles from the nearest continent. The plastic limb had been deformed and stained by its voyage through the excretory system of modern civilization and battered and bleached by the action of waves.

  She took off her glove and put a finger on the plastic arm, pressing down gently and allowing her skin to come in contact fully with the artificial flesh.

  She was tossed into a swirling montage, fragments from the lives of strangers. A young man with dirty hair and a frown stamping the arm, one of thousands like it, with a machine that thumped like thunder; a clerk packing boxes in a cavernous warehouse, walking through the aisles to the beeping of an electronic timer, more robot than person; a little girl arguing with her brother about what the doll should say; a carefree run through the rain-slicked streets of some city; an old man bending to pick up the doll and stuffing it into a nearby trash can; an expressionless woman tossing the half doll into a floating mess of other discarded objects, an undulating mat of abandoned possessions that bobbed together, scraping, jostling, flaking off their memory deposits and commingling; the artist picking up the doll fragment and bringing it aboard a ship; the careful cleaning that picked off the dried seaweed and encrusted sand but preserved the artful deposits of consciousness . . . and then: the memories of those who had purchased the book and read its contents layered on top, men and women who sought solace or escape or voyeuristic pleasure in moods and emotions and glimpses of other lives, a growing sediment formation to which she was now contributing her own.

  The accompanying essay talked about the problem of trash, the physical as well as emotional. Modernity was reveling in the disposable, objects as well as experiences. The Pacific was filling up with microbeads and our corporate-manufactured memories. How many of us now relied on empathy-sheaths so that a bad date could be flushed down the toilet? How many of us coated our nightstands with a dusting of internet celebrity gossip rather than extrusions from our supposed loved ones? How many of us followed weekly self-help cleaning regimes rigorously to scrub ourselves of “negative deposits” so that we could live in the eternal present, heedless of what it was doing to our planet and our souls?

  Beatrice stopped reading. It was all such high-minded nonsense, chicken soup photographed in a studio to be peddled as wisdom. The art was always better than the explanation of the art.

  The plane banked, and in the shifting sunlight, she saw the rainbow hues scintillating in a haze over the plastic arm, a jumble of externalized psyche. She wondered if the artist had ever intended her work to be consumed by someone like Beatrice, someone who, when touching a memory deposit from a stranger, sensed not only moods and emotions, but discerned the details of the recollection with photographic precision.

  It was hard to make anyone else not like her understand. Everyone thought a prodigy like her had an easy path to riches and happiness. After all, hadn’t a guy, after he had gotten his hands on the Codex Leicester and run his fingers over every page, become a prominent inventor with ideas that many suspected were derived from Leonardo da Vinci? And that woman who begged to be allowed to hold Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti Lettera 32 for a few minutes before it had been auctioned off—she had become a bestselling author, though one dogged by persistent allegations of plagiarism that couldn’t be proved.

  Clara thought Beatrice threw herself into her work because she was too pleased with her talent, but the truth was it was an escape. To be able to glimpse into the lives of others, without even intending to, made true intimacy impossible. She never wanted to go to friends’ houses, to borrow a pair of shoes or a dress, to accept anything that had been steeped in the memories of anyone she cared about. You never wanted to know the people you liked and admired too well; it was impossible to reconcile what they wanted you to know with what they didn’t. Few people were better than they remembered.

  Moreover, it made you doubt yourself. When you were so open and attuned to the experiences and feelings and deposits of others, what thoughts could you claim to be original, nonparasitic, not derived, stolen, copied? Even as a child, she had known what it meant to be old, to be confused by the layering of different selves as one aged—she had touched their parents’ deposits, and then recoiled at the contradictory messiness of it all. That was why she hoarded possessions, piled them in her apartment: not just to protect her own secrets, but also the secondhand confessions, the baring of other souls.

  Better to be paid to dig into the lives of strangers, a transactional invasion sanctified by law and custom. Clean.

  She put the book away, picked up her phone, and began to work again. She was certain that if she could get her hands on the laptop in question, she could prove that the defendant’s authentication memory was faked. There were always ways to tell when a deposit was staged—a clock they forgot to reset, the position of a shadow and height of the sun, the crafted sense of ersatz reality. And no matter how thoroughly they cleaned it, the original memories always clung to something: the bottoms of the keycaps, the inside of a port or slot, the seam between the screen and the cover. She was a forensic memory tracer like no other. She could do it.

  But the book that Clara had given her called to her from underneath the seat in front. She could not focus.

  There was an imbalance between her and Clara that could never be bridged. It was harder, much harder, for her sister to know her than vice versa. Her childhood friends and her family were the only people she loved whose secrets she knew because she had seen them before she learned to keep her distance. She had to separate herself from them, to be apart, in order to know who she was and to know them the way they wished to be known. To allow others the space for secrets was the greatest gesture of love she knew how to give, but did they understand that?

  She had once loved to draw, loved to tell stories to herself as she ran the pen
over the page, fusing a memory into the drawing, a scene that came to life when she was done, running her fingers over the inked grooves. But she had stopped. Art was too open, too naked. Someone who could perceive the raw memory deposits of others was especially paranoid about revealing the self. She preferred to type than to write. She tried her best never to leave a personal trace in the world.

  Except . . . when you did that, you also stopped conversing with yourself. Leaving deposits and examining them was how people understood their own story, how they grew.

  But Clara had understood her. She was reminding Beatrice how she loved art, the beauty of the kind of deposited story that only she could make and appreciate. Just for herself. Not a performance for an audience.

  She put away the phone and picked up the art book again. As she read and touched and absorbed the lives of strangers, she also imagined being back in her apartment, the phone off and forgotten, herself absorbed in creation: a box of objects that held the deposits from each year of her life. As she held each, she would sort through the memories and retell them in a whisper, adding in the forgiveness of age for youthful impulsivity, the appreciation that she had once been so fearless and gloriously beautiful, the understanding of a character arc that made sense only when a life had been mostly lived . . . She would never let anyone else see it, not as long as she was alive.

  She sat still as the plane crossed the vast sky, casting an imperceptible shadow on the earth below.

  Clara

  She tried to imagine the life of the man who could not sense memory deposits, not even his own.

  Everything must feel new to him, she realized. He could just buy a secondhand shirt and put it on, not worrying whether it would give him a memory-rash. He could just browse through the library stacks without gloves, unconcerned with whether the previous reader had been suffering from depression.

  He’s not afraid of touching, doesn’t get bothered by anyone’s pain. But that would also include his own.