In My Memory Locked

by Jim Nelson

  “I knew I was dead before I died.”

  “Stop it.” He shook my shoulders once more and stood. “You’re not this Gannon guy."

  "I was pushed by someone else. It wasn't Naroy. It couldn't have been him. Someone else on that ledge pushed me over."

  "I should never have done this," Gillette said. “No man is built to live two lives.”

  27.

  Gillette allowed me to rest in the kitchen. He was not the accommodating type. He believed in transacting business and showing the customer the door with tasteful haste. His stock and trade existed in a legal gray zone, but there was nothing gray about the black magic we'd just performed with Gannon's memex.

  "I still need something from you," I told him across the kitchen island. "The reason I called you yesterday."

  "What—mainlining a dead man's memories isn't the reason you called?"

  "That developed this morning. The reason I called is I need a sidestream.”

  He shook his head. “You are really a piece of work, Naroy, you know that? First a mainline, now a sidestream. Why don’t you just hire me to kill someone?”

  “It’s only for a couple of days.” My mouth was parched. An hour in Gannon’s head made me feel like I’d survived a week of the Spanish Flu.

  “Only a couple of days. Mainlines and sidestreams put people into comas. The only thing you haven’t asked me to install is a rabbithole, but that’s only because I don’t deal in death merchandise.”

  “I might need your help with a rabbithole too, actually.”

  He coughed a skeptical laugh. “You’re whacked in the head, you know that? You are whacked.” He was having a beer he poured from a carton in his refrigerator. He drank with a faraway look in his eyes. “When do you need that sidestream? You need it now, don't you?”

  I nodded.

  “Sidestreaming is social suicide, you know that, right?”

  “I’m not going to walk around town with it turned on. There's a couple of people I need to question.”

  “Sidestreams aren’t lie detectors,” Gillette told me. “Even the cops don't use them.”

  “Spare me the warning label,” I said weakly.

  He held out his hand across the kitchen island. I removed my memex and dropped it in his palm. He rolled it around before folding his hand shut.

  “I got hit with a rabbithole yesterday,” I said. “It was embedded in a engram-locked safe. I’ve never seen a rabbithole like this before. Most I've seen are endless tasks."

  "Chess games that never end," he said. "Drawing water from a well that never empties."

  "This one was a looped scenario. Rooms filled with doors leading to more rooms filled with doors.”

  “Sure. Escher snares.”

  “When I broke the loop, it had some failsafe mechanism to keep me trapped in the rabbithole. It took a memory of mine and fed it back to me. A bad memory, one I’d rather forget. It created a loop of that one too.”

  He scratched his jutted chin. “That…I’ve never heard of before.”

  “I want to know who builds that kind of rabbithole.”

  “Russian hackers, probably. Or Brazilians.”

  “I don’t want categories. I want a name. Talk to people you know.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe you didn't see the sign outside. I talk to the dead." He pursed his lips, intrigued at what I'd told him. "I'll ask around, though. For you."

  *

  I picked up an autotrolley at Parnassus Heights. As the trolley rocked and sputtered down Cole Street, it gathered more passengers. Rain sprinkled against the windows, little dotted slashes drawn at the same angle.

  Every building and sidewalk and intersection in this town is soaked through with my memories. I lived here for ten years before running to Japan and spent another ten years here after returning. Two decades of walking and riding buses up and down avenues and alleys like Cole Street. That bus stop I just passed, I waited for how many buses—hundreds?—and how many drove on without recognizing my hail. That dry cleaner on the corner used to be a bookseller. There I bought used copies of Day of the Locust and The Blunderer and The Way Some People Die. Each neighborhood in this city has its own character, its own colors and shapes and proportions. Poetry readings in the Haight-Ashbury taste different in my memory than poetry readings in the Mission District. The Haight tastes fire-hydrant red and the Mission tastes burnt orange. Stories are burned into the sides of every building here. Every city block a paragraph, every doorway a comma, every crosswalk a hyphen, every stoplight a period.

  “A sidestream disables the firewall between your mind and the Nexternet,” Gillette explained before I left. “The mod routes around the protections built into the neurotransmission protocol. You’re going to hear everything. It’ll be a fire hose of voices rushing you at once.”

  “And they won’t hear my thoughts."

  “A sidestream is all receive and no transmit. They won't even know you're listening in.”

  It took no more than a thought to throw the switch. The sizzling started in my wrists and ankles, just under the skin. Up my spine rumbled the signal. First hollow whispers behind my back, then mosquito whispers behind my ears. Voices began stampeding in the distance, rumbling in their approach.

  I smelled the residents of Cole Street defecating. I heard them sneezing and masturbating behind closed doors. Mothers nursed infants and I felt the little teeth biting my nipple. It was the Nexternet but more voices, more opinions, more rage, more lust. Every scrap of thought came in—emotions, sensations, opinions both educated and asinine. The racism, the sexism, the hatred, the wistfulness. Thoughts private and unguarded blared into my head like a boy trying out a trumpet for the first time. I knew the tech, I knew the specs, but the realization floored me: Thoughts that should never leave one’s mind were being broadcast across the Nexternet continuously. The human mind's raw emotional power is so potent, a device as crude as a memex can't contain it. The memex is a lightning rod for the soul. It attracts raw thoughts and redirects them into the aether. Our planet's atmosphere is irradiated with hate and rage and sorrow and disgust. It was this massive surge of unguarded primal emotions that almost did her in.

  The reason people can't hear these raw thoughts irradiating our atmosphere are the hard limits she mapped into place twelve years earlier. Gillette’s sidestream surgically altered the protocol barriers to leak in just enough neural traffic without flooding my mind with a gale force of human hatred, lust, and bile.

  I mentally fumbled to dial down the incoming signals. It required mental gymnastics to narrow the sidestream's reception to the passengers on the autotrolley.

  The number of voices in my head reduced to ten or twelve. Two were in Cantonese, one in Spanish. Of the remaining, I could hear the passengers listening to music via memex and engaging in hypernovels while sitting on their bench. I narrowed my search for unguarded thoughts, the inner voice, the private narration running through all our minds.

  One guy was thinking of me. He did not know my name, had never seen me before today, but see me he did. He was younger, late thirties maybe, and he was promising himself not to age like I’ve aged. A voice behind me sniffed I was taking up two seats. Automatically I closed my legs and straightened my back to avoid impinging on the open seat beside me. My sudden motion caught the attention of a teenage boy. His voice in my head said, That’s one ugly dude. From ahead of me, I sensed a shiver of disgust go down a younger woman's spine. She'd just boarded and was walking to the rear of the trolley for a seat. She halted and decided to stand until another free seat opened. There were other voices on the trolley, most unconcerned with me or my appearance. Their thoughts are not worth recording.

  Preparing for the disappointment and suffering the disappointment stand miles apart. Sickened, I turned up the sidestream's gain and amplified the boost. A thousand voices piled in from every corner of Cole Valley. I upped the gain again and tens of thousands of voices washed over me from across San Francisco. Voices from
everywhere and nowhere at once, a typhoon of accusations and loathing and disgust and rage we privately hang on each other daily.

  *

  When I reached Lake Street, police were swarming Gannon’s apartment building. Uniforms and plainclothes marched in and out of the main entrance. Patrol cruisers and unmarkeds were parked up the street. I failed to see Talley Whitcomb anywhere. None of the cops on the scene recognized me.

  There were too many cops on Lake Street. The scene of the crime was two miles away at Lands End, not here in bucolic, mosquito-infested Presidio Heights. It was black-and-white kabuki, a kind of police theater put on for the press, the Drake and Chancellor estates, and maybe even for Mayor Justin as well. An enterprising journalist would only need a single inside tip to learn Aggaroy worked for Gannon. Two murders in the span of one week, and both associated with the mayor's Senate campaign. There would be some panicking at the Palace Hotel by now.

  My memex had been notifying me of an incoming text-only message from Clift since I left Gillette Dalt's home. I'd put off reading it. I read it now:

  Have you sought out Dr. Daryl Lund? Please prioritize and report findings to me asap.

  Using my memex as a guide, I taxied to every blue lounge between the Richmond District and Lower Pacific Heights. I worked my way down Sacramento Street and east toward the Fillmore. By four o’clock, I'd reached an old movie theater on Clay Street converted to a blue lounge. Exhausted from being inside my head and Gannon's head all afternoon, I pried the memex out of my neck for a breather.

  They called the lounge Clay Street Red. Seated in the theater’s ticket booth was a raven-haired woman in a bright red dress with a scarlet orchid pinned in her hair. She collected the cover charge. Through drawn red satin curtains, I entered the refurbished lobby. A plush red shag carpet blanketed the floor. Red velvet with cranberry embroidery papered the walls and the ceiling. The concession offered pink popcorn, whips of red licorice, and Red Hots scooped from a pharmacy jar. The sound of midcentury jazz came from the theater proper, a live band covering the old music at quarter-speed and their instruments tuned a full register lower. The clockwork drums boomed like monks tapping wine kegs. It was like listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet with your head submerged in a bathtub of gin.

  The theater was one of the larger blue lounges I’d seen. The silver projection screen was lowered. It had been drenched in blood-red paint thrown on by some monstrous monochromatic Pollock Jackson imitator. The rows of theater seating had been ripped out and replaced with lounge chairs, divans, even four-poster beds, all of red plush and red cotton and red-painted wood and steel. The furniture legs were cut offset so it all stood level down the ziggurat descending to the projection screen. Red candles flickered across the darkness like distant campfires. Waitresses in red cocktail dresses with scarlet orchids in their hair puttered about serving Blue Pharjé from thimble-sized glasses instead of the usual flutes.

  To blue junkies, this is called homeopathic Pharjé. The syrupy neuroliqueur is dispensed by eyedroppers, three or four drops in each glass. The effect is closer to inebriation than a full blue-out, allowing one to forget the harsher memories while still preserving some notion of one’s self and one’s past. In a full blue-out, you can’t remember what state you were born in, and if it comes on strong, not even your name. With homeopathic Pharjé, you remember going to high school but don’t recall a single bad thing about your time there. You were never bullied, you were never ridiculed, you were never shut out of parties or turned down for the prom. Your ex-spouse didn't leave you—did you leave her, though?—and your ex-lovers never complained about your—what did they complain about, anyway?

  I searched the crimson dimness for Leigh. The people here were beautiful, young, well-dressed, and well-polished. There was an air of old Internet money here, trust fund babies with enough security to live large in San Francisco but not enough to live even larger in New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo. Although the lounge was arranged for sitting, the people were up and moving and freely mixing. The Blue Pharjé had stripped their inhibitions. It greased their interactions and made it effortless to approach anyone and start a conversation.

  Let me tell you about the very beautiful. They are different from you and me. They enjoy it early. It does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and trusting where we are cynical. Unless you are born beautiful, it's very difficult to understand. Deep in their hearts they think they're better than us because we cannot turn our gaze from them. We gift them with praise and congratulations for doing little more than being. Even when they enter our world, or even sink below us, they still think they're better than we are. They are different.

  I wandered the ebb and flow of the beautiful as a rat would swim through a French pond of white swans. It seemed I could do nothing to avoid collisions. Certainly no one apologized to me. Only when I slipped in my memex and activated the sidestream did I realize they were smudging me.

  Memexes have the power to blank anyone in your sphere of view, rendering the affected person a slight grayish blur hovering in the air. It’s much like the vote taken in the diner that rendered the man invisible. Smudging is not a democratic process, though. Smudging is a personal act. It’s a way of blanking rude or insensitive people from your field of perception. The memex “assists” your vision by blurring out the offending person. The reason I was being trampled in the mix was that no one could see me. They'd set a filter that erased me from view.

  Smudging was first introduced as a way of limiting social slights and controlling rude or aggressive behavior. There are unreasonable people in this world, people who cut in line and people who play their music loudly on the bus and people who say careless racist or sexist things without thought. Smudging is an effective way of ignoring them as you go about your day.

  Then someone got the bright idea to connect the memex smudge filter with the Téron-Merrick Attractiveness Scale. With a single thought, you can simply delete unattractive people. You configure your memex to smudge anyone beneath a certain score, usually 8.00 or 8.25. Instantly, life becomes a hypernovel world where every actor is highly attractive and no one has bad skin or an outsized waistline. No wonder all the waitresses here were exceptionally attractive. It was the only way to collect the money.

  Being pushed around and bumped by smiling attractive people, utterly ignored, made a sense of claustrophobia grow within me. My lungs were working hard. I was perspiring beneath my hat. The more invisible I became in that room, the more under a spotlight I felt.

  I escaped to the lobby. A young smooth-cheeked man in a red porter jacket with unblemished pink skin worked the concession. I purchased a brick of pink popcorn from him. I stood in a corner of the empty lobby gnawing on the brick and allowing its sugar time to absorb in my bloodstream and calm me down.

  There were fewer patrons upstairs in the mezzanine. They were all seated at tables talking. Leigh was not among them. I would have to return to the slow-motion mosh pit below to finish my search.

  It’s not worth withholding this any longer. The reason for my panic attack on the theater floor had nothing to do with claustrophobia or being smudged. I’d been in this theater once before, in December of 2010. My “audition” was months behind me. I considered it an oddity, one of those weird-ass San Francisco experiences I’d filed away under Thankfully That Will Never Happen Again. Then in November, I’d spotted in the newspaper an advertisement for an independent film festival. It highlighted the premiere of a locally-produced short: Detachment.

  I’d come out of a naive curiosity. Surely Cline had found another actor to play my role. I paid my ticket but did not take a seat with the audience. Instead, I climbed to the balcony and stood against the back wall, just as I was standing now. Above me came the sounds of the projectionist’s booth, the reels spinning and clicking and the high-pitched whine of the fans working to keep the white-hot bulb from popping.

  Lights down, the film rolled. Only a few clapped with the opening credit
s. It was an independently-financed film in an independent film festival. No one expected greatness. No one expected anything at all. Certainly I didn’t expect much. My name never appeared on the credits. Only later, when my fame was secured, was my name listed across the Internet as star billing.

  The film opened with me returning home from work. It was me all right, the audition footage Cline had shot. I’m a computer engineer as evidenced by my Google T-shirt and tan slacks and the notebook computer in a bag slung over my back. I looked well over forty, although I was under thirty when it was filmed. My young and beautiful live-in girlfriend is supposed to be nineteen, which was not far off Melody’s age at the time.

  The audience groans started the moment I embraced Melody at the door. It's the silver screen, after all, decades of film and the language of film by this point, and this visual was not normal. The script called for French kissing at the door. This was met with audible disgust by the audience. The script called for me to be frisky, but the lingering camerawork made it look like I was groping her. My gorgon paws caressed her breasts and cupped her ass. The camera tracked my swollen red tongue as it slid slug-like over her belly and thighs. With each shot of the young woman’s face, the audience detected she was coming around. Each facial expression conveyed a slight uptick in her consternation at being treated like the steak dinner she was broiling for him.

  At the kitchen table, she prepared me a salad while I groused over my day at the office. I was oafish, bulging, and bulbous. My strands of thinning hair were pasted to my egg-shaped head as though naturally greased down by the oil oozing from my pores. As I gloated over what a lucky guy I was for having a hot young thing in his life—she washed his clothes and made his meals—her vegetable chopping became more forceful and more purposeful. Cline did not have Hitchcock’s subtlety. The close-ups of the knife at work on carrots and celery became the center of the scene.

  I never agreed to star in Cline’s little magnum opus. I showed up for a single audition. The cameras were not supposed to be recording. This was a screen test. It was an audition. I’d signed nothing. More than half of the dialogue I never spoke. I couldn’t understand how Cline had somehow puppeted me into starring for her movie. It was me, but I’d never said these words. I never unsheathed my penis, and yet there it was on-screen being pruned with a chef’s knife.