Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Son of a bitch,” Byron said. “It’s a walk, he says, it’s a fucking vacation^. It’s a walk through the fucking cemetery is what it is!”

  Teresa said quietly, “It’s all right.”

  “He fucked us over!”

  “Byron, please—”

  “Goddamn,” Byron said. But he sat down. She turned to Ng. “If it’s so dangerous, why did you agree to get involved?”

  Ng sat back, hugging his knees. “I’m easily bored,” he said.

  2. Oh, but I can feel it now, Teresa thought.

  In the midst of this brutality it was so close. She felt it like a pain inside her, like the poignancy of old loss, a kind of melancholy.

  She lay in the darkness of Ng’s small shack, curled on a reed mat at the heart of the world.

  Melancholy, she thought, but also—she could begin to admit it—frightening. She was not as naive as Byron seemed sometimes to think, but the mine had taken her by surprise … the brutality, the squalor of it, the lives that were lost here. It was not meant to be this way, she thought.

  She sat up in the darkness. Through the paneless window she could see Pau Seco sprawling at the foot of this moonlit hill. Oil-can fires burned sporadically like stars in the darkness.

  She thought of the Exotics, the winged people she had seen so often in her ’lith visions. She was not afraid of them; the impression of their benevolence was strong and vivid. But they were different. There was something essentially unhuman about them, she thought—something more profound than the shape of their bodies.

  They would not have created Pau Seco. They would not have expected it to be created.

  She lay back in the darkness, weary and confused.

  It had not been wholly her own idea to come here. It was an imperative she felt more than understood, a kind of homing instinct. Her own history faded back into darkness, lost in the fires that had swept the Floats fourteen years ago. Her childhood was a mystery. She had come into the Red Cross camps scalded and smoke-blinded and nearly mute. She had been cared for—adopted, though it was never legal—by an extended family of Guatemalan refugees; they fed her, clothed her, and practiced their English on her. They named her Teresa.

  She was grateful but not happy. She remembered those days as a haze of pain and loss: the searing conviction that something valuable had been stolen from her. She became attached to a rag doll named Amy; she screamed if the doll was taken away. When Amy fell into a canal and disappeared beneath the oily seawater, she wept for a week. She adjusted to her new life in time, but the nameless pain never went away… until she discovered the pills.

  One of her Guatemalan family, a hugely fat middle-aged woman named Rosita—whom the others called tia abuela—brought the pills home from the public health clinic. Rosita suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and took the pills for, as she put it, “ree-lif.” They were narcotic/analgesics keyed to the opiate receptors in the brain; Rosita was frankly addicted but, the clinic told her, the pills did not create a tolerance … the addiction would not get worse, they said, and that was good, because the arthritis would not get better.

  Teresa, alone one afternoon in their antiquated houseboat, stole a pill from Rosita’s bottle and hid it under her pillow. The act was impetuous—partly curiosity, partly a dim intuition that the pill might work for her the kind of magic it worked for Rosita. In bed that night she swallowed it.

  The effect was instantaneous and profound. Inside her a huge and unsuspected tide of fear and guilt rolled back. She closed her eyes and relished the warmth of her bed, smiling for the first time in years.

  Tia Rosita was right, she thought. Ree-lif.

  Rosita collected her prescription twice a month. Twice a month, Teresa took one off the top. Rosita did not seem to notice the thievery, or if she did, she did not suspect Teresa. And Teresa did not dare take more, for fear of drawing attention to herself.

  Still, she lived for these moments. The pills seemed to detonate inside her, tiny explosions of purity and peace. Words like loneliness and loss began to make sense to her; she realized for the first time that they might not be permanent or universal.

  When she was sixteen one of the boys she had come to think of as her brother, a rangy twenty-year-old named Ruy, took her out to the empty margin of the tidal dam and showed her a fistful of pink-and-yellow spansules—the same kind Rosita got from the clinic.

  She could not help herself. She grabbed. Ruy pulled his hand away, laughing; a cloud of sea gulls whirled up from the concrete pilings. “Right,” he said. “I thought so.”

  She stared covetously at his clenched fist. “You can get those?”

  “Many as I want.”

  “Can I buy them?”

  “Acaso.” He shrugged loftily. Maybe.

  “How much?”

  “How much you got?”

  She had nothing. She had been going to the charity school up in the North Floats, where her English teacher called her “a good pupil” and her art instructor called her “talented.” But she didn’t care about the school. She could quit, she thought, get a job, get some money… acaso.

  “When you do,” Ruy said—walking away, heartbreakingly, with the pills still imprisoned in his hand— “then you talk to me.”

  But Rosita, older and more gnarled but no less vigilant, wouldn’t let her leave school. “What kind of job are you going to get? Be a whore down by the mainland, like your sister Livia?” She shook her head. “Public Works is pulling out of this place, you know. Too many uncertified people. No documents, no green cards, no property deeds. You’re lucky you have a school. Maybe won’t have one much longer, you think about that?”

  But it was Rosita’s anger and not any practical consideration that deterred her. She stayed in school, maintained her habit, and ignored Ruy when he taunted her with his apparently endless supply of drugs. Until, one day, her art instructor complimented her on a collage she had assembled. She had a real talent, he said. She could go somewhere with it.

  It was a strange idea. She enjoyed putting together collages and sculptures, it was true; sometimes it felt almost as good as the pills made her feel. It was almost as if someone else were doing the work with her hands, some part of her she had lost in the fire, maybe, making its presence felt. She would abandon herself to the work and find that hours had passed: it was a good feeling.

  She had not thought of making money with it. It looked like an outside chance. Still, she packed a bag lunch one Sunday and hiked along the pontoon bridges to the mainland, to the art galleries up the coastal highway. The mainland frightened her. She was not accustomed to the roaring of trucks and automobiles; in the Floats you saw mostly motor launches, and those only in the big canals. And there was the eerie solidity of the ground beneath her feet, rock and sand and gravel wherever she turned.

  She examined the artwork offered for sale in these landlocked places. Crystal paintings, junk sculptures, polished soapstone. Most of it had come from the Floats and was considered—she inferred from the way people spoke —a kind of folk art. Some of the pieces were very good and some were not, but she realized with a degree of surprise that her art instructor had been right—there was nothing here beyond her talents. She lacked the tools to tackle some of these projects, but the work she had done with scrap metal salvaged from the dumpboats was as good as at least half of what she had seen that day. Possibilities here, she thought.

  Two weeks later she carried three small pieces across the pontoon and chain-link bridges to a place called Arts by the Sea. She showed them to the owner, a woman only slightly younger than Rosita. The woman was named Mrs. Whitney, and she was skeptical at first, but then—as Teresa unwrapped the oilcloth from her work—impressed. Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “Such mature work!” She added, “For someone your age.”

  “You’ll buy it?” Teresa asked.

  “We sell on commission. But I can offer you an advance.”
>
  It was, Teresa learned later, a pittance, a token payment; but at the time it was more money than she had seen in one place.

  She took it to Ruy and offered him half of it. He gave her enough pills to fill up both her cupped hands. That night she took two.

  Ree-lif. It flowed through her like a river. She rationed herself to one a night, to make them last, and worked in her spare time on another sculpture for Mrs. Whitney. Mrs. Whitney paid her almost double for it, and that was good; but Ruy’s prices had begun to escalate too. She paid but she hated him for it. Ruy had become suddenly important to her, and she acquired the habit of observing him. He moved down the pontoon alleys swaggering, his bony hips thrust forward. “Muy macho,” Rosita always said when he struck these poses at home, but out here there was no one to deflate him. He hung around with his similarly hipshot friends by the graffiti-covered tidal dam; she had seen him dealing pills there. One afternoon—nursing her hatred— she cut classes and followed him halfway to the mainland, to a tiny pontoon shack listing in the North Floats, a gasoline pump gushing out bilge into the dirty canal beside it. Ruy went in with his hand on his wallet and came out clutching a fat paper bag.

  She summoned up all her courage and, when she was certain Ruy was truly gone, knocked at the door of the shack.

  The man who answered was old, thin, hollow-looking. He peered at her a long time—her mouth was too dry to speak—and said at last, “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Pills,” she said, panicking.

  “Pills! What makes you think I got pills?”

  “Ruy,” she said desperately. “Ruy is my brother.”

  His expression softened. “Well,” he said. “Ruy’s little sister cutting out the middleman.” He nodded. “Ruy’d be pissed off, I bet, if he knew you were here.”

  “I can pay,” she said.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  She described the pink-and-yellow spansules.

  “Yeah,” he said. “If that’s what you want. It’s a waste of money, though, you ask my opinion.” He rummaged in a drawer in an old desk at the back of his single precariously listing room; she watched from the doorway. “You might like these better.”

  They were small black-coated pills in a paper envelope, maybe a hundred in all. Teresa regarded them dubiously. “Are they the same?”

  “The same only more so. Not just pain pills, hm? Happy pills.”

  Flustered, she gave him her money. It occurred to her during the long walk back that she might have made a fool’s bargain, the pills might be coated sugar. Or worse. That night, in bed, she was not sure whether she should try even one. What if they were toxic? What if she died?

  But she had run out of Ruy’s spansules and she dared not pilfer more of Rosita’s. The need overcame her reluctance; she swallowed a black pill hastily.

  Pleasure spread out from the pit of her stomach. It was, gradually and then overwhelmingly, everything she could have wanted: the satisfaction of a successful piece of artwork, the satisfaction that came from being loved, the satisfaction—this perhaps the best of all—that came from forgetting. Afloat on her mattress, rocking in the slow swell, she might have been the only person in the world. She loved the new pills, she thought. They were better. Yes. And one was enough. At least at first.

  She lived happily with these arrangements for months, selling enough work to Mrs. Whitney to keep her supply up, idling through the days—she had begun to take a pill each morning too—as if they were hours. She felt she could have continued this way indefinitely if it were not for Ruy, who had been cheated out of his immense profit on the cheap pink-and-yellow spansules and who had discovered her arrangement with his supplier. He retaliated by leading Rosita to Teresa’s pill box, concealed behind a broken floorboard under the bed. Tia abuela Rosita was both angry and hurt, and made a demonstration of washing the pills down the Public Works conduit one by one. Teresa was so shocked to see her store of happiness flushed away that she displayed no emotion, merely packed her things, took what remained of her gallery money, and left.

  (Years later she tried to return, with the idea of making some kind of apology to Rosita, achieving some sort of reconciliation … but the neighborhood had grown much worse, and her Guatemalan family had gone away. Just packed and left one day, an elderly neighbor told her, nobody knew where or what happened to them—except for that Ruy, of course. He had been killed in a knifefight.)

  She put together a makeshift studio in the Floats off Long Beach, invested some money in supplies, acquired a new source for the small black pills. She learned that they were laboratory synthetics, synthetic enkephalins, very potent and very addictive. But that didn’t matter: she could handle it. She knew what she was doing. She began to meet other Float artists and understood that she was not alone, that many of them depended on chemical pleasures in one form or another. Some of them even used Exotic stones, the oneiroliths from the Brazilian mines. But that was different, she thought; too strange—not the thing she wanted.

  She could not say exactly when her habit got out of hand. There was no border she crossed. It didn’t interfere with her work; strangely, the opposite was true. It was as if the thing inside her that created art was spurred on by her addiction—the way a dying tree will sometimes produce its most copious fruit.

  She did sometimes, in her lucid moments, notice a kind of deterioration. She perceived this as a change, not in herself, but in her environment. Her studio was suddenly smaller: well, yes, she had moved into a cheaper one, saving rent. Her image in the mirror was gaunt: food economies, she thought, making her money go a little further. It proceeded in such gradual increments that nothing seemed to happen—nothing at all—until she was alone in a corner of an ancient bulk-oil terminal with a dirty mattress and a jar of medication. A jar of happiness.

  She knew it was killing her. The idea that she was dying eased into her mind so cleverly that it seemed to appear wholly formed and yet familiar. Yes, she thought, I am dying. But maybe dying in a state of grace was better than living in a condition of unrelieved pain. Maybe it was a kind of bill come due at last: maybe, she thought, I should have died in the fire.

  But anorexia and malnutrition had made her ill, there was physical pain in her knees and elbows, she was feverish much of the time. For relief she went back to the pink-and-yellow spansules—added them to her now almost exclusively chemical diet—and they helped for a time, but in time the pain reasserted itself. She would have welcomed death—her massively abused body cried out for it—but she could not bring herself to attempt suicide. It was as if she could sneak up on death but must not approach it directly; if she looked death in the face, some force inside her would recognize it, cry out in protest, pull her back from the brink. The frustration left her weeping.

  She knew Byron Ostler vaguely: he was one of her dwindling circle of friends, not an artist but a dealer in dreamstones. In constant pain now, frightened of taking too many of the spansules, she reconsidered the idea of using an Exotic stone. It made visions, her artist friends said. Well, she did not want visions. She had had too much of vision. But visions, at least, might force out the demon of pain. It was worth a try.

  She was careful to avoid seeing the pity in his face when she approached him. She held out the money in her hand. Only a very little of it remaining now. But he wouldn’t take it. Just blinked at her through his moon-shaped lenses, this ragged veteran in his threadbare fatigues, and gave her a stone. It was small and faintly blue and oddly shaped; when she took it from him, casually, it made her hand tingle. “Do it here,” he said.

  “What?”

  “As a favor to me,” he said. “Do it here.”

  The visions were intense. She was only tranced out for a couple of hours, Byron said, but it seemed like infinities. She saw, like pieces of a mosaic, the distant world of the winged people. She danced like a whirlwind through history. Strangely, although there was much of misery in w
hat she saw—and grief, and pain—she derived a certain strength from it. From the vigor of it, she thought: this river of life, twining in its endless double helix.

  She saw, too—for the first time—the little girl who would occupy so many of her dreams.

  The girl wore rags for clothes, athletic shoes bound with twine. “You have to look for me,” the girl said solemnly. “You have to find me.” And Teresa discovered that the imperative was there inside herself, and maybe had been all along… find her, yes.

  Byron fired up his motor launch and took her back to the studio down south. Except it was not really a studio. She could see that now. It was a filthy corner of an abandoned warehouse. She looked at her jar of pills, appalled.

  “I can bring in a doctor,” Byron said.

  She shrugged. She was dying, she was resigned to it, she told Byron so… but even as she spoke, she felt a new reluctance welling up. “I want to do the ’lith again,” she said.

  “Then let me bring a doctor. And some food.” He looked around. “And maybe clean this place up a little. Christ, it’s a pit.”

  She agreed.

  Withdrawal was agony. The doctor Byron brought was a refugee MD who shot her up with vitamin supplements and charted her neuropeptides on a hand monitor. When the ordeal was finished, Byron coaxed her to eat again.

  Health came as a shock. The world took on brighter hues; food tasted better. She began to work again. With some money coming in, she found a place nearer to Byron. She began taking long walks out to the tidal dams to watch the weather sweep in from the sea. She had not stopped wanting the pills—the doctor had said it was a craving she might never lose, burned too deeply now into her neurochemistry—but the dreamstones seemed to take away the edge of the need. She did not understand much of what she saw in her stone trances but she attempted to incorporate it into her work; she did the first of her crystal paintings, a bright Exotic landscape.