In My Memory Locked

by Jim Nelson

  She made me promise I’d show up for the audition. All I promised was that I would think about it. It turns out, I was thinking of little else for the next week.

  *

  When Dr. Clift presented me the list of old web pages linking to Detachment, my business-like calm failed like a worn brake pad driving down the Sierra Nevadas. I was swamped with memories of that gray-green Thursday night in the Palace Hotel bar. In a blue moment, I relived the entire evening. With it came a flood of dread. My life was nearly decimated due to that film.

  When I returned to the present, Dr. Clift and Brill were staring at me as though I’d just suffered a mild seizure. I’m certain I appeared catatonic for a moment or two. When I regained my surroundings and realized they were staring at me, I mustered an excuse to use the restroom. Cold water across my face and deep breaths of the prison’s cold air helped steel me.

  When I returned to the research room, Dr. Clift and Brill continued as though nothing had occurred. They viewed the episode dimly, an embarrassing moment no civilized person would draw attention to, I supposed.

  I thought they’d written it off. I was wrong—so very, very wrong.

  6.

  The ferry approached the San Francisco Ferry Building with the same ponderous progress as its approach to Alcatraz Island. The roast beef lunch and the cups of wine made the return trip less adventurous and more delicate. Even the sturdy dock was not enough to settle my gurgling stomach. A sense of normalcy only returned once I stood on terra firma.

  The rain continued here, albeit lighter than out on the bay. It was warmer on the mainland too, a humid summer rain producing a medieval mist that lingered low on the streets like prowling apparitions. Vines and kudzu and lavender wisteria covered its exterior and spiraled up its drainpipes. The greenery completely choked over the ground floor’s windows and doorways. Two men in work coveralls and rain slickers carried electric machetes from entrance to entrance. They hacked back the overgrowth and tossed the cuttings in a wheeled compost container. They would need to do this tomorrow, and the day after, and every day after that. The hot rains arrived nine years ago and never left. With the hot rains came the jungle and Mosaic plagues of insects.

  Inside the Ferry Building, I took a moment to shake the rainwater from my hat and mackintosh. I combed my hair and dried my face in the public lavatory and squared my jacket on my shoulders. The restroom, like the building itself, was devoid of people.

  From the ferry ticket counter on the promenade I bought a pack of breath mints and a carton of coffee, which I asked to be heated. The woman behind the counter looked bored. When I asked for service, she exhaled a faint sigh and prepared the coffee as though I’d set upon her shoulders some great unseen weight. She never looked me in the eyes, always looking over my shoulders, unwilling to acknowledge me. Transaction completed, she returned to staring off into the nothingness. She’d reactivated her memex. She could now return to the constant river of inner voices and neural emotions that is the Nexternet.

  I found a bench to drink the hot coffee and gather myself. The Ferry Building was once one of the busiest terminals in America, second only to Grand Central Station, before automobiles got cheap and the underground train was installed beneath the bay. After the ’89 quake, the Ferry Building was converted to a food mecca, of all things. Organic bananas and hand-crafted ice cream and free-range pork belly for the throngs of San Francisco’s well-heeled gourmands.

  Now, after nine years of the hot rains, the Ferry Building was a deserted landmark, a memorial dedicated to a more vibrant time. It was me and the counter girl and thousands of square feet of empty retail space that afternoon. Beyond the glass doors, a solitary guy under the eaves took a break from the steady rain. San Francisco had shrunk to a quarter of its population at its height. People once learned to live with the fog and ocean wind, to brave the cold summers and endure the wet winters. When the climate shifted, it drove away the gourmands and the hipsters and the well-to-do. Now they live in Reno. It’s beautiful there. They call Reno the Venice of Nevada.

  The carton of coffee was not especially good. It settled my stomach. I sucked on a breath mint and steeled myself for the rain outside. I pushed out the glass doors to trek once again through humid, overgrown San Francisco.

  I walked to the foot of Market Street and boarded an autotrolley heading into the heart of the city. It was rush hour. Half the seats were filled. I started to take a corner seat, then thought better of it and offered it to the guy climbing aboard behind me. He ignored the offer and continued to the rear of the car. The rain snapped like triggered mousetraps against the roof of the autotrolley’s carriage. The automatic driver’s patient, smooth programming carried us through the city with effortless ease.

  No one looks you in the eye here in San Francisco. It’s a peculiarity of the place. No one smiles or nods or signals any manner of acknowledgment when you pass on the sidewalk or slide past on a train or bus. It’s just how it is here.

  Petroleum-based plastics and synthetics are illegal here too, save for medical purposes. Tobacco is banned entirely. Toxic chemicals are banned as well; no more herbicides brewed in vats and delivered by the trainload to distribution factories. Organic herbicides might thin the vines and weeds, but it could never actually damn the overgrowth back to the earth from whence it came. Bittersweet, nightshade, wisteria, and ivy—these breeds made our city’s steel-and-concrete structures leafy and lush. Greenery covered the lampposts like fur. They stood in rows down each side of Market Street like giant leafy chess pawns lined for battle. Leaves dripped from stoplight overhangs like saliva down an invalid’s chin. Kudzu clawed up the four sides of the Transamerica Pyramid, a leafy contagion fighting gravity to overcome its host.

  A woman sitting at a window seat stood and stepped over the empty seat in front of her. She had to climb over it, really, like crossing a low fence. She continued up the autotrolley's aisle, clutching her sides as though cold. She took a seat near the automatic driver.

  I tried to piece together what might have happened. While I stared out the trolley window at the rows of chess pieces now lining our streets, an overweight and unshaven man had boarded the trolley. He took the seat beside her. As she hurried away from him, he looked around at the rest of us with an expression easily read as guilty. It was just as easily read as bewilderment.

  “What did you do?” a passenger called to him. Another person called him out as well.

  The man retreated into himself. He slumped his shoulders. His head hung as though napping, but he wasn’t asleep.

  “What did he do to you?” someone asked the woman who moved.

  “I don’t want him near me,” she said.

  Like an ant prodding a crumb of food with its antennae, I used my memex to query the man’s Nexternet profile. It took no energy at all on my part. One moment, I thought it, the next moment, my memex reported back on the man’s background. It’s so easy now, it’s become second nature, mindless even, like scratching an itch.

  Every Nexternet user has a public profile keyed by a unique personal identifier. Everyone I interact with in real life mentally tags me with whatever knowledge of my identity they can attest to. It’s a silent process called attestation. They form an opinion of me and their memex delivers the attestation to my Nexternet profile. Every person's profile gathers scores of attestations daily, like a magnet dragged through a pile of iron filings. These attestations are nothing more than snap judgments shared instantly with the rest of the world.

  If I make a pass at a woman in a bar, she might attest I’m straight and male, but she might also attest I’m a creep. If I were to attend a church, the members of the congregation could attest me to be Protestant, or Jewish, or whatever faith I seem to be routinely adhering to. If someone were to play a gag—say, attest I’m a female—the false attestation is outvoted by the millions of others attesting I'm male. The noise of a few false attestations fades out among the signal of millions of more accurate ones.

>   Nexternet profiles are like 19th century European treaties festooned with diplomatic seals and stamped wax. Each attestation verifies the physical identity I claim to inhabit. Soon one’s virtual self is composed entirely of attestations, like an invisible man covered from head to toe in adhesive tags, each bearing an identity: black, white, female, male, stupid, gorgeous, bright, smelly.

  On the Old Internet, the world was composed of documents woven together by hyperlinks. On the Nexternet, the world is composed of identities woven together by judgments.

  The heavyset man on the bus possessed a rich Nexternet profile. Unsurprisingly, his attestations indicated he was male, which he seemed to the eye. They also described him as slovenly, a drunk, an overeater, lazy, and easy to anger. He worked in a bookstore of paperbacks and hardcovers and boxes of old Photoplay magazines, which in 2038 was like working an archaeological dig. He played chess and, I learned, was well-versed in 20th-century French literature, although there was no indication he spoke or read French.

  “I just sat down,” he said loudly, a hoarse grumble. “It’s not illegal to sit on a train.”

  A local election lit up in my memex. The other passengers were silently calling for an anonymous vote to kick the man off the autotrolley. I mentally voted No. From the growing tally, I saw I was the only person aboard to vote that way.

  The autotrolley halted mid-block. A pleasant automated voice announced the man’s name and asked him to step off the trolley. He had thirty seconds before the police were notified.

  The man rose from his seat. He stood beside me. I could smell the Scotch on his breath and see the liquor in his eyes. He’d not combed his hair that morning and he’d not shaven in days. He was weighty. His worn leather belt was a ruler measuring his worth. He wasn’t poor, he wasn’t in rags. He was hopelessly sufficient. He peered around the trolley accusingly. Attestations were flying to his Nexternet profile like bats across the jungle sky.

  His face, though. His face was slapped together from cafeteria mashed potatoes. He was born with a drinker’s nose. I only thought I could see the liquor in his eyes. Looking again, I saw he was tearing up. I checked around and realized not a single person was facing him. The trolley was a gallery of heads turned away. He stumbled down the steps and into the rain. The doors slammed shut behind him.

  Messages from the autotrolley’s passengers began to fan out across the Nexternet. The man’s profile and description went out to followers worldwide. Warnings were posted to avoid him.

  Another message was locally broadcast to every passenger on the trolley: Who voted against? The autotrolley lurched forward.

  *

  After deboarding the autotrolley, I walked north on Battery Street and pushed through twin brass doors into Tadich Grill. With the sun set, rain came down in bullets now. I found a seat at the hardwood bar running like train tracks to the open kitchen in the rear. I hung my raincoat and hat on a wall peg and squeezed into the swivel chair. I ordered a dry Gibson. The bar was sparsely populated. A guy came in two minutes after me and took a stool at the far end.

  The other bar patrons conversed and mingled over their drinks. If they weren’t talking, they were entranced with the Nexternet. The memexes embedded in their necks transmitted a steady stream of emotive-sensory neura to anyone tuned in worldwide. No doubt the quality of the cocktail in their hands was being expressed to friends, family, followers, or even random users neuro-surfing other's experiences. The saltiness of the pomme frittes, the hardwood decor, the body odor of the man sitting beside them, the attractiveness of the waiter bringing them their drinks—every sensation was broadcast and conveyed worldwide.

  The bar patrons were also tuned in to the neural sensations being streamed by anyone they cared to follow. While drinking their Anchor Steams and rum-and-Cokes, they could be feeling the rage of a neo-punk concert in Rio de Janeiro or experiencing the chocolate-high of young love while soaking up the brown gaze of a particularly handsome Italian male at Trevi Fountain. This blending of your emotional output and others’ emotional input is the pastime of our times. I fail to understand the allure. To feel everything is to feel nothing. Perhaps that’s the point.

  I made quick work of a swordfish steak served with hollandaise sauce, baby potatoes, and a steamed vegetables. I ordered a second Gibson. I was living richly that day.

  The waiter who brought me my second drink said, “The police were in here earlier asking about you.”

  I did not know the young man's name, but I’d seen him in here enough times. He wore a black bow tie and a crisp white shirt. With a damp rag, he wiped down the surface of the hardwood counter at the stool next to mine.

  “What about?”

  “They wanted to know about your dinner with Mr. Aggaroy last night.” He did not look me in the eyes, sternly concentrating on the countertop. Counter clean, he began assembling silverware, white cloth napkin, and a bread plate for the next patron. “They questioned a few of us to get the details straight.”

  “Did they ask you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  My dinner with Agg was a touch blurry. “You were here last night?”

  “I was, but I work the counter. You two took the window table.”

  I remembered that much, to be sure. “What did you tell them?”

  “Only that you and Mr. Aggaroy had dinner together.”

  Knife and fork in hand, I sliced off a triangle of swordfish. “What did the others say?”

  “Much the same. We also told them you two parted ways on the sidewalk outside after you finished your dinners.”

  Now he looked me in the face.

  “We knew better than to mention your argument with Mr. Aggaroy last night.”

  The swordfish had arrived sizzling hot with a precise char crosshatch, but fish does not hold its heat the way a steak will. It grew colder by the second.

  “Were we arguing about money?” I asked him.

  “That’s what I recall. It really wasn’t my business.” He nodded back toward the kitchen. “I would say most of us feel that way, in fact.”

  I cleared my mouth with a wash of the Gibson. With one hand, I found a twenty folded in half in my shirt pocket. I set it on the counter beside the bowl of cut lemons and bottles of malt vinegar. He regarded it with disdain, as though the bill emitted an off-odor.

  “That’s not necessary, Mr. Naroy,” and he headed down the counter toward the kitchen.

  *

  Strolling down California Street in the rain, I ducked into the Zuckerberg Building. A horseshoe-shaped reception desk filled a corner of the ornate entry lobby. It had been manned a long time ago but now stood empty. There was no longer the need. Three-quarters of the offices in the Zuckerberg Building were vacant, a situation most San Francisco high-rises find themselves in now. Beside the reception stood an old-fashioned telephone booth, a wood coffin stood on end and pushed into the lobby wall. I stepped inside and dragged the accordion door closed.

  Nothing in the phone booth worked now. The courtesy lamp that once lit when the door closed remained dark. The phone handset was dead, although its metal-wrapped cord still connected it to the phone box. The steel keypad buttons were sticky from disuse. This machine used to transmit the button's tones down the wire, a different pitch for each number pressed. Automatic switches on the circuit decoded the crude music and routed the call to the appropriate endpoint. The scheme was so fragile, it’s amazing it worked at all. And this probably wasn’t the first phone installed in the booth. Before the touchtone system, it would have been a rotary dial sending clicks down the copper wire, like Morse code, to route the connection. Before rotary, the caller would’ve had to talk to a human being to get service. Today, the only serviceable piece of equipment in the booth was the seat, a triangular block of wood wedged in the corner.

  The sound of hurried footsteps passed outside the booth. I counted to five and gently eased open the phone booth's folding doors. In the lobby, the man who'd followed me into Tadich Grill was
at the lobby elevators stabbing the up button. He'd been following me since the Ferry Building. He was the man I'd offered a seat on the autotrolley. Hell, he might’ve started following me that morning when I headed to the Palace Hotel. He could've been in my rearview all day.

  At the Ferry Building, I'd made him out to be in his early forties. On the autotrolley and up close, I realized he was under thirty. His knuckles were lined black with engine grease. His weathered skin crinkled into crow's feet in the corners of his eyes. He had a full head of dark hair and a healthy wash of stubble across his chin. Those eyes, though, they are what I remember the most. A man his age should still have had some spark in them. He looked weary to me. He looked like a man who'd half-given up and wondered daily why he'd not given up entirely.

  The elevator car arrived. Studying the floor lights over each set of doors, he guessed which floor I'd ascended to, entered the car, and stabbed a button. The doors eased shut and he was gone.

  7.

  It was nearly nine when I reached the Hotel Gerasene, a brown-brick four-story on Bush Street between Taylor and Jones. Like every other building downtown, the Gerasene was covered in overgrowth. Once a month, the foliage around the windows and doors was electrically trimmed back, each a bellybutton set in a doughy, hairy man’s gut.

  Inside my apartment, I stripped off my mackintosh, hat, and jacket. I hung the wet clothes on the rack beside my genkan. There I removed my shoes and set them in a cubby beside the door. I stepped up from the genkan and into a pair of house slippers waiting there.

  I called “Furo” toward the bathroom. The bathroom lights warmed on. Bathwater began running. Within a few minutes, steam was billowing out the bathroom door.

  My apartment originally came with an American-style bathroom, a room of mediocrity and half-baked notions. With a fair sum of money staked and the permission of my landlord, I had the room stripped down to the pipes and rebuilt. Along with the Japanese bath, I had a sit-down shower, a heated tile floor, and an automated toilet installed.