A Calculated Life

by Anne Charnock

Two nights ago, she experienced a new development. As she fell towards sleep, she felt a tension in the muscles of her lower arms and she knew, most surely, that this sensation presaged the onset of a nightmare. She forced herself, on the cusp of sleep, to leave her bed and pace the small room. Then she washed herself down with a wet cloth and made sure she was fully awake before she dared attempt sleep once more.

  The second thing that perplexes Hannah arises from her private research conducted in her own time—research, that is, on sleep dysfunction. This is the real reason she’s in no hurry to contact her Constructor. It appears, according to medical papers—or, more specifically, mental health papers—that there’s a link between the frequency of nightmares and suicidality. There’s no consensus on whether this is a causal relationship but the statistics are striking. And the nightmare link seems to correlate not only for people with a current propensity for suicide but also for people who are previous suicide attempters. Which makes no sense to her as far as her own circumstances are concerned. It must be a red herring.

  Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe there’s something causing me stress that I’ve failed to recognize; something that isn’t too serious but is sufficient to unbalance my particular psyche. It could be a recognized phenomenon. The Constructor may already hold an easy remedy.

  She stares out at the office workers and wonders if they, too, absorb stresses in their daily routines, unaware of the physical manifestations that may follow. Quite likely. They probably have a lower stress threshold. And, naturally, her own tasks are well within her capabilities whereas they must find themselves out of their depth occasionally.

  She explores the book in her lap without consciously making the decision to do so. It’s a tactile curiosity that compels her hands to test the book’s surfaces: the textured leather binding, the embossed lettering, and the smooth-edged pages. Her fingers investigate these edges, finding the page marker—a burgundy-red ribbon, which she instinctively pulls sideways and then up, slipping her thumb between the pages. Her eyes, however, are fixed ahead. An office worker is waving, she assumes, to attract a colleague’s attention and she scans across. But, before she can find the recipient of the wave, Hannah is distracted by…it’s like a tapping on the center of her forehead. Her focus retracts as she notices for the first time that the library has a fustiness. This realization only dawns now because the book in her lap acts as an amplifier. She finds the imprint. This book has remained closed, she reckons, for over one hundred years. Ridiculous waste of space. The book creaks as though ready to snap as she spreads open the pages. She registers the archaic form of legal reporting, so resistant to change: the emboldened and capitalized names of judges—surname, initials, full-stop, colon; the margin numberings—H1, H2, H3—set beneath the headings, Introduction, Facts, Held; and margin numberings—1, 2, 3, 4—set beneath the Judgment. She flicks the pages and lifts the open book to her face with both hands, in a movement that seems as ancient as the book itself. She inhales. It’s a specific, almost recognizable smell. It makes her scramble to place a marker.

  She thinks, feels…what? She lifts the book closer. The tip of her nose touches the ink. The smell hits her now—a slap! She’s rooted in the armchair. And there she stays for minutes. She breathes steadily and waits for a spark, a word or thought, an image. She chases barely formed feelings, hunts for an association, for the source, and tries to transport herself to another place far from here. And, at last, she sees something.

  A clear sky and a lazy flapping sheet; it’s pink.

  She stands, drops the book to the floor, walks to the nearest shelf and pulls Chitty on Contracts by the top of its spine. It’s tightly wedged and the spine tears. Hannah opens the book at random, page 1095, chapter twenty-three, Discharge by Frustration, and she inhales, deeply, before pushing it back atop its sequenced partner editions. She tears another spine, opens and inhales, drops the book and takes another, testing again. And another, grasping pages, dropping more books until she’s halfway around the library.

  How easily a room surrenders its order and harmony.

  She walks over to the window, stares without seeing, clutching a handful of torn pages. What is she trying to uncover—a thought, an idea, something familiar that she’s misplaced? It can’t be that, surely. She never forgets anything; she knows the sum total of her life as well as her life’s every incremental progression.

  A siren is just audible twenty-three floors below her and she sees an ambulance crossing Blackfriars Bridge with a police escort; not much work for the constabulary these days. And, as the two flashing vehicles swerve around a recycling truck, she maps—for she can’t help herself—the one-way system at the southern end of the bridge and determines the shortest route to Guy’s Hospital. But in her subconscious, other thoughts are meandering in loops of great magnitude. She stares across at the office workers—doing their best, trying so hard.

  The ambulance will be there. She feels relieved for someone she’s never met. Meanwhile, the deep meandering thoughts reach a precipice and, in their free-fall, Hannah gleans and grasps a moment of clarity. I’m not trying to remember—It’s the other way around. My memory is trying to find me. She raises the torn pages to her face. A blue sky, a pink sheet. I can figure this out.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have the pleasure of thanking individual members of the Charnock Family (Garry, Adam, and Robert), Andrew Fletcher, Roy and Roberta Nurmi, Basheera Khan, Fiona Curran, Mike Lemmy, and Margaret Garman. I am also grateful to my editor David Pomerico and all the team at 47North for their support and enthusiasm.

  Several non-fiction books provided useful background material for A Calculated Life. These included Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza—Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan—The Impact of the Highly Improbable. In the chapter Confirmation Shmonfirmation! in Taleb’s book, he suggests that the nature of human instinct was formed in primitive environments and is ill-suited to the modern world.

  Some of the ideas I explore in this novel came to my attention in Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. In this book, Kurzweil predicted the future for neural implants.

  I am grateful for a conversation I had with Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading. He later wrote I, Cyborg—the story of how he became the guinea pig for his own implantation research.

  On a more specific subject, the earliest known writing that refers to citrus fruit is contained in the book Yu Kung or Tribute of Yu. Emperor Ta Yu reigned from 2205 to 2197 BC. I came across this fact in History and Development of the Citrus Industry by Herbert John Webber (revised by Walter Reuther and Harry W. Lawton).

  I also thank the many contributors to online forums for sharing their knowledge about citrus growing, bee keeping, and stick insects.

  Recumbent Figure of Jesse, which I refer to as Jesse Recumbent, was exhibited at Tate Britain’s Image and Idol: Medieval Sculpture in 2001. It was sculpted from oak in the late fifteenth century and was loaned by St Mary’s Priory Church, Abergavenny, Wales.

  I may have occasionally misinterpreted my research sources or added embellishments for fictional purposes. For the former, I apologize.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Garry Charnock © 2012

  Anne Charnock’s writing career began in journalism; her articles appeared in The Guardian, New Scientist, International Herald Tribune, and Geographical. She was educated at the University of East Anglia, where she studied environmental sciences, and at The Manchester School of Art. She travelled widely as a foreign correspondent and spent a year trekking through Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya.

  In her fine art practice she tried to answer the questions What is it to be human? What is it to be a machine? and ultimately she decided to write fiction as another route to finding answers.

  Anne is an active blogger and reviews fiction for the online magazine Strange Horizons. She contributes exhibition reviews and book recommenda
tions to The Huffington Post. She splits her time between London and Chester and, whenever possible, she and her husband Garry take off in their little campervan (unless one of their two sons has borrowed it), traveling as far as the Anti-Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco.

  http://www.annecharnock.com

  http://www.twitter.com/annecharnock