What should trouble them most, she protested, was that she was unable to pinpoint where one memory left off from another—or where they began. Rather than a continuous, chronological archive, her memories were instead fragmented, scattered, often vague. That they would surface strangely, like photographs in a chemical bath—transformed into negative images of themselves. But that rather than—like a photograph—indexing any actual experience, they seemed instead to mark a void.
And what (she demanded one day—chin jutted, eyes sharp and hard; the very picture of adolescent impudence) of memories that could not be indexed at all? That were instead mere whiffs of sensations, brief bursts of colour, a feeling of being pricked by something—of going under, as beneath a sudden wave? What in fact were those memories, or any others (in which, say, she scoured the depths of the first oceans, or awakened in the mind of a cephalopod as the simple contrast between darkness and light), if not the products of someone else’s imagination? What she “remembered” was in any case not knowledge. It was speculation, conjecture. The purest of fictions!
In other moods, she would grumble that she hardly saw the point. The history of human thought, she would sigh despairingly, was nothing more, after all, than an arduous dream. In still other moods, she would become fierce, aloof. Only to brighten a moment later, laugh out loud, or surprise someone with a firm embrace.
Emotional turbulence was, of course (the Masters reasoned), an unavoidable side effect to the girl’s demanding course of study. What else could they expect from a young woman capable of grasping—simultaneously—both Cantor’s continuum hypothesis and mathematical Platonism? Or of recalling, in excruciating detail, what it felt like to die in battle both as a proud defender of the Orange Free State and as a Basotho child? It was for this reason, after all, that the human mind had evolved to remember only selectively. For this reason that experience became symbolic, then relative; that memories receded—sometimes altogether disappeared. Forgetting was as simple a defence mechanism as sex, or flight, the evolution of which (as the girl concurred) could be traced back to the very origin of the species.
* * *
—
It is not, perhaps, so surprising, then, that as the years continued to pass, and the question (how best to preserve two hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge?) remained unanswered, it also became less pressing. Enthusiasm for the program had long since waned, funding was siphoned to more immediate projects and concerns, and the girl continued to suffer from interruptive flashes of darkness. A general despondency and a sense of collective defeat settled over the twenty-two remaining Masters—though some optimistically maintained that the “flashes” marked not a limit but an as-yet-unexplored direction for the program. They implored the girl to describe, as minutely as possible, these periods of “absolute darkness,” hoping she might offer some clue as to what was on “the other side.”
She always left them disappointed.
The problem, she explained, was that she could never quite recall the darkness as it actually occurred, but only in relation to what happened next…
The less optimistic Masters coughed, or shifted uncomfortably in their seats. For some time now, it had been gallingly difficult for the girl to recall anything abstract—especially anything of a precognitive nature—without falling back on the bad habit of metaphor. She had also become increasingly prone to either conflating events or recalling only their general themes. And it was irritating even to the optimists among them that she insisted on relating everything from the first person limited, as if the whole of human history had actually happened to her.
Inevitably, whenever these shortcomings were discussed, one of the Masters would—in a wry voice that was deliberately impossible to read—remind them all that Whirlwind III had never, after all, been anything but a temporary solution.
“Yes,” another would reply dolefully. “And since we’re no closer to a better one, perhaps it’s time to start with a clean slate.”
“And do away with two hundred thousand years of accumulated human knowledge?” another would gasp. “Even accepting that the record has undergone, in the last few years—ahem—a slight process of revision, it hardly seems like a decision one could reasonably make.”
“We’ve simply invested too much time and money into this program to pull out now,” another would assert. And that would be the end of it—at least for a while.
* * *
—
One day, a philologist spoke up. She was among the more timid of the group, and had rarely contributed to the debate.
“It may be,” she said, “that we are overlooking a basic fact.”
Everyone turned, surprised, and looked at the philologist.
“And what is that?” demanded an attorney at law.
Ignoring the question, and avoiding looking the attorney in the eye, the philologist continued. “Just because,” she said, “the subject of our study has so far been compelled to fall back on metaphor does not mean, at least necessarily, that the memories themselves actually exist that way. Language, after all, is designed not to either imitate or replace, but instead to represent the objects of our experience. It’s a complicated code—purposely indirect. Intended to suggest affinity rather than to reproduce substantial structure.”
“Are you suggesting,” a philosopher asked cautiously, “that the subject is merely a veiled reference to the object?”
“That she exists only as a sort of cipher,” a cryptanalyst put in excitedly, “which, if properly decoded, could point us toward the unbiased historical record, which—as you seem to be suggesting, and despite our inevitable biases—beneath it all, actually exists? That it is just a matter of getting beyond language, to what the language was designed to simultaneously obscure and convey?”
In a voice that suggested the conversation had strayed, a psychoanalyst turned to the subject herself who (though forgotten) had been present all along, and asked her to recount to them her earliest memory.
A statistician groaned. “And what will that prove?”
“Shh!” a poet replied.
A deafening silence ensued, and after several minutes had ticked slowly by, even the optimists began to assume that the girl was suffering from another petit mal. Either that or she simply had nothing to say.
But then—so quietly that some of the Masters failed to hear—the girl said a single word: “Imagine.” And then nothing more for such a long time that even those who had heard began to suspect that they hadn’t.
“Imagine,” the girl said again. “Imagine you are looking at a painting of a landscape and suddenly you are not yourself at all, looking at the painting of the landscape, but you are the landscape itself. Or the small glint of light, for example, on the waves in the far corner of the landscape’s frame.”
As she spoke, her voice began to gain confidence, then speed. “Imagine being just that,” she said. “Just the brushstroke—without thought to the brush, or the hand.”
When she had finished speaking—and though they had come no closer to a solution, and nothing at all had been “proven”—the Masters were forced to admit, once again, that despite the girl’s episodes, an incurable dependence on metaphor, and a tendency to lapse (as then) into near-uninterpretable lyricism, her capacity for retaining—and sometimes expressing—the breadth and complexity of human experience remained nothing short of extraordinary.
“And that alone,” remarked a physicist, by way of closing, “is a reason to continue the program. One does not, after all, pursue science, or any other worthwhile human endeavour, with anything like a guarantee. One pursues it only with the sense—a sense that all of us have had, at one point or another, here—that one has touched upon the extraordinary.”
* * *
—
Despite—or because of—the Masters’ continued, if faltering, faith, the girl was increasingly plagued by flashes of darkness and fits of dread. She imagined being subjected, at an undesignated point in the
future and by an unknown adversary, to some terrible inquisition—and wondered how much, after so many years of silence, she would be willing to withhold.
She was visited by nightmares, hardly slept; her health suffered terribly. Once again the physicians were called, and once again they reported that the girl was in perfect health, that nothing was wrong. In the end, she diagnosed her condition herself: “the return of the repressed.”
If she only had some outlet, she sobbed, some way of relating her experiences…creatively, perhaps! Yes! Perhaps that was the answer! She could translate her experiences—everything she had felt and learned—into something else altogether. She could invent a whole other language if necessary, so that (though perhaps recognizable in certain parts) whatever it was she ultimately managed to express would be utterly transformed, virtually impossible to trace…
The Masters shook their heads.
But could they even imagine? the girl cried. Had they no empathy at all?
“Think of it!” she begged. “Two hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge, and no one to talk to—no one who even tries to understand! It’s enough to drive one positively mad.”
But regulations had only tightened since the project began, and the creative arts (as the Masters soon informed the girl) had always been particularly inconvenient for exactly the reason to which she herself referred. It was impossible to regulate. There was simply no way of anticipating if—or in what way—its meaning might one day be interpreted.
* * *
—
It was not long after this that the girl did go mad. At least, this was the only explanation offered by even the most optimistic Masters for why—instead of darkness, or faded picture-postcard memories of the past—the future began to flare up suddenly before her, in hallucinatory flashes.
At first, she had trouble differentiating these bewildering new episodes from the others, but she soon began to notice that where even her most abstract memories always appeared in the guise of some external image, or object, and she could only ever experience “absolute darkness” in terms of what it was not, the future was generated from somewhere inside her, existed only in positive terms, and was hers alone.
And yet, despite the thrill of freedom she felt at encountering—for the first time in living memory—what lay beyond living memory, the first thing the girl foresaw was her own annihilation.
“There will come a time,” she announced to the Masters one afternoon, “that, for the precise reason that you once honoured and celebrated my tremendous gift, you will turn against me.
“Even now,” she warned, “I have already become too dangerous for you, and my memories—rather than a resource or a point of pride—have become a risk, a liability. Even I cannot tell you what, if captured, I would or would not say. I am, after all, only flesh and blood—no more resistant to abuse or simple boredom than any one of you.
“Who knows what little it might take to make me speak? As you know, I have complained often of my own great loneliness—my urge to unburden myself of all that I know.
“This will occur to you,” said the girl, sadly. “It is occurring to you now. Very soon, the risk will strike you as simply too great for the sake of the simple past. There is, after all, you will think, the future to consider.
“And this is it. Before our adversaries have the opportunity to do so, it is you who will destroy me. You will end what you began, having come no nearer to your goal. And I cannot blame you.
“Because, when I think back to everything that has happened, to all the decisions I made, or failed to make; to the wars I helped to win or lose; to the thousands of children I bore; to the mistakes I made, the lovers I lost, or, against my better judgment, kept; to the ideas I had and discarded; to the faith that was born, then lost, then born again, on so many different occasions, and in so many ways…
“When I remember what it felt to be a simple splash of light on a painting of a landscape I have never seen—to be just that simple contrast between darkness and light—to be the product of every imagination, and every hand…
“When I remember what it felt like to be just an empty waiting thing, when there was nothing to wait for, nothing yet to begin…I cannot blame you. Because at every moment there is only one decision, and that is the decision made by every moment—in deepest ignorance—as it returns to what it has not yet been.
“You will make this decision, just as you have made every other: in perfect darkness. Because that is the future—which I have seen and foretold.”
The Masters bowed their heads. They felt embarrassed for themselves, and for the girl—and then ashamed. Because somehow they all felt certain that what she said was true.
Finally, the oldest among them cleared her throat. “If you are right,” the old Master said, “and the future is, by contrast to the present or the past, of our own making, why choose to speak of your own demise? I cannot help but be reminded of the old tale—I forget where I heard it now—the tale of the bridge across which you were permitted to pass only if you told the guard in advance where you were going and why, and swore on oath that whatever you said was true. If you swore the truth, you were permitted to pass, but if you swore falsely, you would die on the gallows. There was no chance of pardon.
“One day, a young man came along who swore an oath before crossing the bridge that he would die on the gallows. His oath perplexed the judge and jury, because they knew that if the man was allowed to pass freely, then he would have lied—and so, according to law, must die. But if they hanged him, he would have been telling the truth—and so, according to the law, he must be set free.”
“I am afraid,” said another of the Masters, rising and glancing nervously about—including in the direction of the girl, though she did not appear to be listening—“that this long story is not at all to the point.”
“On the contrary,” the old Master said. “Is it not possible that we are faced, once again, with the decision whether or not to bind ourselves to truth by death or to pass by lies? As well as with the questions, which path is more honest in the end? And by whom, or by what, are we judged?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“The Opening” first appeared in “Short Story Sunday,” on November 30, 2014.
“A Horse, a Vine” first appeared in XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (Penguin 2013), edited by Kate Bernheimer. I am grateful to Kate for selecting this story, as well as for her thoughtful editorial suggestions. I am also grateful to myholysmoke.com for the original inspiration for this story—and for the wording of the advertisement Dean reads here and here.
“The Rememberer” first appeared in Granta 141: Canada. I am grateful to Madeleine Thien and Catherine Leroux for selecting this story, and to Maddie for her careful reading and comments.
Thank you to Sam Ace and Rebecca Silver Slayter for their helpful insights and suggestions for “Mr. Doyle’s Ancestral Genetic Homeland.”
Thank you to my agent, Tracy Bohan, for her continued belief in, and support of, my work.
And to my wonderful editor, Nicole Winstanley, for her energy, editorial insights, and friendship.
Thank you, also, to my husband, John Melillo, for his love and encouragement—as well as for listening to, and helping me to revise, countless drafts of these stories.
And—as always—thank you to Janet Shively, my mother.
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