by Karen Lord
He considered her proposal and then shrugged.
“What you’re saying makes a lot of sense, Doc. You can save me . . . even if you can’t help me . . . Eh, what the hell, Doc. What do you want to know? Ask away.”
“Well,” she said. “First of all, have you spoken to . . . that Steven fella for the day?”
“About what?”
His expression was blank.
“About the devices I brought with me. Not particularly concerned whether you discussed breakfast.”
There was a fleeting look of recognition in the man’s eyes.
“Would have been a terribly brief discussion if we had. But, yes, I’ve seen them. A tiny black phone with a cracked casing, and a silver tablet with finicky touch controls.”
“Oh. So you got them working.”
It was strange for her to think of seeing those devices blink to life again after so many years; to think of seeing the images lost to the electronic depths beyond black screens. It was a miracle that she had held on to them this long, that she had them in her tent when the men with guns had appeared.
“I didn’t make them work,” he assured her. “That was the other guy. He’s a magician with electronics, and quite the scavenger. You should see his workspace. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of wires, exposed circuits, and old batteries and gadgets of every shape and size. Hell, I could show it to you later. He also maintains the generator downstairs, though we rarely use it. Precious little gas left.”
“Impressive,” she remarked. “Easy to see how he lasted so long. Has a skill-set critical to rebuilding, or, more realistically, clinging to some vestige of what we lost. Makes him valuable.”
“Just like you, Doc.”
“And, strangely enough, like you.”
“Yeah, imagine that.”
“You know,” he said, with a heavy sigh, “when they first paired me up with him that was what it was about. Rebuilding. Well . . . actually, at first it was personal correspondence, blog posts and the like from loved ones. Whatever wasn’t lost to the “cloud” on servers halfway across the world that probably don’t exist anymore. But, once you’re dead, no one gives a damn about a collection of emails to your dead wife. And people kept dying.
“Then it was about rebuilding, archiving all of the history, culture, text books, maps, schematics . . . recipes. Anything important for remembering and restoring what we lost. Anything without hardcopies. Things that would be gone for good when the printer ink dried up, the batteries all died and the gas was all burned.
“But then people accepted that survival just means a slow death. Just staving off the decay as long as possible with no hope of restoration or progress. So now I transcribe tales of fantasy and intrigue from old e-readers, so that the few of us left can try to forget how screwed we are for a few hours.”
“What were you in your past life?” she asked. “I was then what I am now. But your current job didn’t really exist back then. Were you a teacher, something where a photographic memory might be helpful?”
“Nah,” he replied, drawing out the word. “There’s no real connection between who I was then and what I am now. I don’t dwell on that other man. He’s dead and buried.”
“Okay. If you don’t want to talk about that. How about your partner, was he an engineer or electrician in his past life?”
The record keeper chuckled. “Our actual discussions probably tend closer to breakfast choices than the sharing of profound revelations about our past.”
“You work with him, I’m guessing, almost every day, but you don’t have any real conversations?”
“Those are complicated,” he said dismissively. “We just stick to our process. He finds a way to power the devices long enough for me to read the content. Then I write, or typed–back when the typewriter still worked, and we could still scrounge up ribbons for it. The rest is just noise.”
“And how long have the two of you been doing this? How long has this settlement been here? How did they discover your skill? Did you offer yourself up?”
He gave a dry chuckle. “Been doing this about as long as we’ve been here. One of those things where you just fall into a role; find a way to make yourself useful, because useful is worth keeping alive. It’s basically been the same routine day-in and day-out for all those years. Time sorta just lost meaning after a while. I’m sure that you know how it is, Doc.”
She had stopped trying to count the days and the years long ago. She could hardly venture a guess as to how long. But, then, she was not the one who was supposed to have a perfect memory.
“You keep calling me ‘Doc’,” she remarked. “But you said that you got my tablet working. My name is all over that thing. Certainly you would’ve seen it. And, certainly, you would remember it.”
He hesitated.
“Of course,” she continued, “as far as I recall, no one was ever proven to possess such a skill. There were several people known for remarkable memories, sure. But they used memorization techniques.”
“I can certainly tell you your name, Dr. Schwimmer,” he said, holding his hands in front of him as if flipping through the pages of a book, although not looking down at it. “Melissa Schwimmer. I can also tell you about your digital collection of bodice rippers and detective novels.”
She realized what he was doing with his hands. He was miming swiping through the contents of a touch-screen device. Probably a visualization technique to help him remember. He might not even be aware that he was doing it.
“I can tell you about the romantic rendezvous between Hans and Margarette on the beaches of Ibiza,” he continued. “About the beach resort where they stayed at Playa d’en Bossa. About the pool there, and the concert stage across the courtyard from it, with the half-dome ceiling supporting an arch of floodlights.
“I could tell you about the peach-coloured walls of their room, with the unusual green stain that Margarette couldn’t stop looking at, and about the bellhop with the styled moustache who seemed to fancy her. Or I could tell you whodunit in the case of the St. Helena murders.”
“Hold off on that last one,” she told him, holding up a hand. “I’ve long forgotten how that book ends. In case you do manage to transcribe it, I wouldn’t want you to ruin the surprise.”
“Well, I couldn’t really spoil that anyway,” he confessed. “Didn’t get that far. I could, however, tell you detective Furlong’s favourite dish at the Italian place he frequents. That came up in chapter three.”
“Do you always read pieces of several things at once? Or were you just trying to sample everything my collection had to offer in the little time you had with it?”
“A little bit of both. Wanted to see what was there; maybe something I liked. But I do actually find it helpful to jump from novel to novel like that, instead of reading each all the way through.”
“So, that’s part of your memorization system? Are names difficult for you in general, or just mine?”
She recalled his seeming confusion when she had asked about his partner by name.
“Look, I don’t really have some formalized system,” he said, agitatedly. “And I stumbled on your name, because I try not to associate real names with anything.”
“Real names?”
“Yeah, real people’s names. I do whatever I can to not associate them with what I read, or with photographs, faces. I always try to avoid thinking about what story, what document or correspondence, what face belongs with what name. Otherwise I would start to obsess about it. And, eventually, I would ask someone something that I shouldn’t.”
“Like what?”
“Like, what happened to your son?”
She froze. Silent. As the barriers in her mind began to crumble, she thought of her child’s smiling eyes, of his infectious laughter. It had been so long since she had seen a child. That had made it easier not to think of him.
“You’re right,” she finally said. “You probably shouldn’t ask such things.”
“Sorry,�
� he said feebly, staring down at his hands. “The picture of you two . . . It was your tablet’s background image. First thing I saw when it was turned on. The resemblance was unmistakable . . . He had your eyes.”
His chuckle was completely mirthless.
“You were quite the looker back then,” he said. “Smooth, caramel skin, dark, braided hair, hazel eyes, and a gorgeous smile.”
“So,” she said, quickly wiping away the teardrop that had been welling up in the corner of her eye. “You’re saying that I’m not a looker now?”
He smiled weakly, glancing up at her sheepishly. “Time’s been unkind to us all, I think. Don’t know about you, but I don’t spend much time in front of mirrors anymore. Don’t know just how wrinkled, decrepit and scarred I’ve become in my advanced age.”
“I already told you,” she said with her own weak grin. “You look like shit . . . Remember?”
There was actual liveliness in his laugh this time.
“Oh, I’ve forgotten so much,” he said, sighing. Then he leaned forward and whispered to her in a conspiratorial tone. “Don’t tell anyone I said that. Kinda undermines the whole keep-me-around- because-I-remember-good pitch.”
“I imagine that you’d have to forget a lot to keep cramming new stories into your head.”
“The old stories I remember fine,” he told her, solemnly. “All of the words, the details, the recipes and equations. Don’t understand half of it, but I remember. Images are harder. I lose details after a while, get confused . . . Pieces that scatter in the wind.”
“Excuse me?”
He looked over at the door.
“Getting back to that first question you asked me,” he said. “About what my oldest memories are like . . . With images, faces . . . It’s like seeing . . . like feeling a vague impression embossed on varnished wood. The details, the texture, the granularity has been smoothed out, just leaving an indistinct shape.
“The details come with effort. But I have to focus on a particular part of the image. Can’t ever seem to hold the entire thing in my mind. The older the memory, the less of it that I can clearly visualize at once.
“It’s like starting with a featureless mannequin, and having the shards of a shattered porcelain face that you’re trying to piece together like a puzzle. Only you have no glue to keep the pieces together, so you’re struggling to hold them all in place at once.”
She noted they had returned to the violent imagery of their initial exchange. The image of a loved one’s face shattered. So he had not been describing some traumatic recollection, but rather how his memory worked in general.
She was surprised that he had been so frank about that with a stranger. But, then, his response had been so off-putting it had made her drop that line of questioning. Perhaps that had been his intention.
“So maybe you can just hold together the image of the eyes,” he continued. “Or maybe just a smile, or even just a hairline. What’s worse is that you’re not sure that all the pieces belong to the same face. You have all these scattered fragments of shattered visages swirling in the wind around you, and you don’t know which ones to grab to assemble your puzzle.
“So that’s what it’s like for me. Piecing together bits of different faces, different images. Trying to sort out what does and doesn’t belong. Am I remembering the right nose that goes with those eyes, the right door that goes with that house? Or am I mixing up two . . . somehow . . . similar faces, similar buildings.
“Even recent memories get jumbled sometimes. No firewall for the associations of my cluttered mind. Just a twisted mess that I’m constantly trying to untangle. But those associations continue to come unbidden.”
He looked at her with wavering eyes.
“I look at your face now,” he said, “as . . . different as it may be, and I see that picture of you with your arms wrapped around your boy. Then I remember, years ago, seeing a child frozen from exposure in his dead mother’s embrace.
“That was in the early days. But, like the kid with the cracked skull outside, I see them every time I climb the steps of this building. Every time I tread over the memory of their corpses. That repetition keeps the image clear. Can’t hold on to everything; can’t choose what to forget.”
She focused on that word. Repetition.
“You mentioned not wanting to obsess. Is that how you memorize things? Are you obsessive compulsive? It sometimes lends itself to remarkable recall.”
“The others basically just think that I look at something and take a mental snapshot. The truth is a lot . . . noisier.”
“You repeat things to yourself in your head over and over, don’t you? See the same words and images again and again?”
“It helps that I can speed read,” he told her. “Words tend to repeat in the order I read them. I started to forget about more recent things before the echoes caught up. Jumping from book to book seemed to help with that. My mind can get back to things before they slip away from it.
“I try to forget the older things once I’ve written them down; make it easier to remember everything else. But those are the ones that have been repeated the most, the ones that are in there the deepest. It’s very hard to make them stop.”
“How do you even function?”
“How do any of us function?” he retorted. “I guess obsession is my own escape from reality. And, since it’s not my own life that I’m obsessing over, I avoid painful reminders of personal loss.
“Of course, it can be overwhelming at times; all the noise in my head; voices of hundreds of different authors, letter writers, and everyone else. My private chorus of cicadas and crickets chirping in my skull, now that the real ones are gone.
“I do my best to keep to myself, avoid conversations, extra noise. Luckily, no one’s particularly chatty these days.”
“I don’t know,” she remarked. “You seem oddly talkative for someone who doesn’t like conversing.”
“Ever had someone call you out by name, but you can’t quite place them, and don’t want to say?”
She nodded. There had been some awkward social gatherings in a previous life.
“That’s what I do whenever necessary. I try to ignore the noise in my head while I talk to strangers like they’re old friends. Strangers who I may have known for years. Steer the conversation to what I know. Speak of the general. Dance around forgotten details. Avoid the personal. Avoid names. Think I got pretty good at it at some point.”
“Were you always like this? Or was obsessiveness a coping mechanism?”
“I’m beginning to feel studied, Doc,” he said, leaning back. “You going to start taking notes?”
“I’ll admit, I was intrigued when I heard about you,” she conceded. “Not much left in this world that I can say that about.”
“Is there anything on that old tablet you want preserved, or was your only interest discovering whether I was truly what they said?”
She thought about her collection of half-forgotten whodunits and silly romances on the device. She thought about the desktop image, her son’s smile. Her own unbidden association.
“There’re a few things on there that I wouldn’t mind having written out,” she told him, putting Isaiah out of her mind. “But, like you, I’m not really interested in dwelling on my past.”
“You planning to leave now that you know the truth about me? Might be able to help the others around here, even if I’m a lost cause.”
“Have nowhere better to be. And I doubt that your friends outside, with the rifles, would just let me leave. Besides, we made a deal. You talked to me about your memories, so I’ll impress upon your keepers the value of sustaining you.”
“Honouring your word, huh?” He seemed pleasantly surprised. “Thought honesty died with civilization. Hard to trust when every little advantage means so much.”
“Maybe a little easier now that everything seems to mean so little.”
“Fair point,” he conceded. “But even the hopeless might fight over scr
aps.”
“How much do you remember,” she asked, “of your life before the world went to hell?”
“I remember by repetition, Doc. Routine. I wake up in the same cold, dark room every morning; in the same pain. What came before the routine? Where did I wake before that room? When wasn’t I in pain? That was drowned out long ago . . .”
He gazed past her at nothing in particular.
“I sometimes see a face,” he almost whispered. “Parts of one anyway. I think she was someone important. Someone who made me feel safe. But her likeness slipped away. Shattered and scattered on the wind.
“The most vivid image in my mind is of an old swing set on a grassy lawn. One of the swings is broken, the wooden seat dragging on the ground, hanging limply from a single chain.
“But was it mine, something from my childhood? Or was it just a dream, or something I read in a book? That one image sticks with me, and I don’t even know if it’s real. Yet I can’t remember the face of anyone that I loved.”
“There’s a cost to remembering. Would it be better to be like you, to forget the things that were lost?”
She had certainly spent much of the last few decades trying to forget.
“I can’t really answer that.”
“Not asking you to.”
“I can only say that some people here still want my partner to let them look at the old photos on their phones every now and then. Some don’t. And I sometimes wish I had some treasured memory to hold onto, wish I could remember what that important person looked like, who she was.”
She was not sure that she could bear to look at Isaiah’s face now.
“You don’t even remember her name?”
“Nah.”
Sad, feeble husk that he was, he had not looked as pathetic before as he did now, sitting there, staring down at the floor. No, she certainly did not want to be like him.