by Claire North
“Well, Jerry, yes, yes I have, and it’s been absolutely sensational! Not only do I feel positive about leading a more goal-orientated existence, really trying to achieve who I want to be, but the rewards it gives for consistent effort are just fantastic. It’s not just a reinvention of a lifestyle app, it’s a reinvention of me…”
I turned the TV off and lay, face-down, on the single bed. The duvet cover was thin, layers above, layers below, ready for a hot, sunny California day, a cold California night when the breeze from the sea and the chill from the mountains combined. An embroidered sampler above the bed read “There’s No Place Like Home”. A copy of the Bible lay beneath the green-glass lamp on the bedside table. Someone had left a receipt for barbecued ribs and a bottle of Coca-Cola in it. Hear diligently my speech, and my declaration with your ears. Behold now, I have ordered my cause; I know I shall be justified.
I stood in front of the bedroom mirror, studied my face, my eyes, ran my fingers over my skin, stared at my reflection, and wondered why I could remember it.
Why was I here?
The sound of water stopped in the bathroom.
I counted packets of sugar standing up in the jar by the kettle.
Buttons on the TV remote.
Lights appearing in the city as the sun went down.
Byron gasped as she saw me, drew her towels tight, shook her head, said, “Wait,” went into the bathroom, came back out in a dressing gown, added, “Maybe we should have got singles.”
“Nervous of being caught walking around naked?” I suggested.
“Dignity and old age are difficult to reconcile, especially when you forget the company you’re keeping.”
“You wanted a twin so you could watch me,” I sighed. “You’re afraid that when you can’t see me, I’m not real.”
She didn’t answer, and I turned away from the mirror, and lay down to sleep.
Chapter 62
I woke, to find Byron sitting on the end of my bed. Her notebook was open, new writings, new questions and recollections, filling the pages. The napkin on which I’d scrawled my terms was in her hand. The reflected light of sunrise came in off the bay below, California dreaming, perfect climate, orange trees and vineyards, wealth and water – but perhaps that was the past. Before the drought and historical modality and the world gone mad.
Again, briefly, that look in her eyes, almost sensual, her fingers flicking out, brushing my face, fascinated. “When I woke this morning I thought I came here alone, because I wanted to visit Berkeley.”
“What’s in Berkeley?”
“The beginnings of my team. My objective is still to dismantle Perfection, to re-write treatments, but to do that… there are some promising candidates on campus.”
“You were just going to recruit them? Walk up and say ‘Hi, I want to destroy Perfection from the inside out – you game?’”
“Of course not – charitable fronts, corporate appointments, layers within layers, I’m not new to this.” She dismissed the question with a flick of one hand, butterfly-light flapping through the air. “When I turned on the bedside light, I saw you, and remembered writing about you, but even that’s barely enough. It is extraordinary, how the mind creates a story to fill in the place where you should be; simply extraordinary.”
Suddenly uncomfortable; I pulled the sheets higher around my chin, and she said, “I’ll… find breakfast. Give you a little privacy.”
She wrote in her notebook: The woman who joins you for breakfast is called Hope. She is the one you cannot remember.
This done, she let herself go, finger lodged in the page of the book, eyes fixed on it, in case the ink dissolved.
For a week, nothing happened. Byron went about her business. She visited Berkeley. She talked with people in quiet corners of cafés. She spent a lot of time on her laptop. She read the newspapers. She waited for phone calls, which she always took outside.
“I am thinking about you,” she mused, “but plans were in motion before I knew of your condition.”
“How will you destroy Perfection?” I asked, when she came home one night from a meeting with a person she would not name. “What will you do to it?”
In answer, she opened a file on her laptop. A document from my USB stick, stolen from Perfection. Names running down the screen, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands – men and women from every corner of the world. Next to them, date of birth, home address, net worth, annual income, annual expenditure, credit score, current score on Perfection, and drop-down menus to bring up more data. Last two months of movement, according to the GPS logs from their mobile phones. Next of kin, friends, family, with links to Facebook pages and little yellow flags for any of those who were also on Perfection. Calories consumed, purchases made on the credit card, restaurants visited, illicit lovers contacted in the dead of night, last three films purchased through the internet on-demand service, most visited websites, last fifty text messages sent, last one hundred emails, shoe size, trouser size…
“Enough,” I said, as she picked through the lives on the laptop. “Enough. What does Prometheus do with all this information?”
“Sell it, of course. What do you think?”
“And what will you do with it?” I asked.
Her lips thinned. “This list contains the names of everyone who’s currently using Perfection. I do not have time to go to each one individually and show them the truth, so I shall create a spectacle.”
“What kind of spectacle?”
“That depends,” she mused, “on how the next few months go.”
I poked again, and again, the next morning, the next evening, breakfast and supper, but one day she said, “I seem to have written down that you’re worried about what I’m going to do with Perfection, now you’ve stolen it for me. Are you worried?”
“No,” I lied, face flushing hugely, pulse suddenly fast and high in my skull. “Not at all.”
She nodded, and made a note in her notebook, and I didn’t ask again.
Terror. Horror. Maybe…
… ecstasy?
Is this what it feels like to be remembered?
Is this – this moment in which Byron challenges me on a thing I have said or done, a thing she can, in her own kind of way, remember me doing – is this what consequence feels like?
I race a trolley car up a hill, and for a moment think I might actually win.
Then Byron said, “I’ve been thinking about your condition. I’ve had a few ideas.”
And all things changed.
A private clinic in a private hospital – were there any other kinds in America, I wondered? Private medicine brought bad coffee, a receptionist who greeted you with a cry of “Hey hi there!” and a waiting time of ten minutes.
The doctor, thin grey hair combed over a spotted scalp, incredibly long fingers curling to manicured, glossy nails, leather shoes and a bright blue stethoscope slung about his neck, greeted us like we were old friends come to visit, and ushered us into the room.
Byron did the talking. fMRI, bloods, spinal fluids, DNA, thyroid function, eye exam – the extent of tests she wanted performed on me was long and, in several cases, painful.
“This is how you’ll be remembered,” she explained, as they helped me onto the rolling platform of the MRI machine. “We’ll find out how you work.”
Inside the machine, they played soothing music through oversized headphones. I closed my eyes against the tightness of the walls, remembered a cupboard in Istanbul as the fire started, the cold of the waters in Hong Kong when I jumped. Despite myself, my breath came faster, and I squeezed my eyes tighter and counted the muscles in each of the toes on my foot, capillaries in my fingers, clicks in the machine, the thunk-thunk-thunk of magnets moving. I counted flickering, dancing points behind my eyelids and, when the motion of lights in the darkness became too jumbled and difficult to track, I counted my breath again, and found that it was steady, and I was calm.
The doctor, when they pulled me from th
e tube, was briefly – but only briefly – surprised to see me. He had remembered putting a patient inside, for of course he’d just spent the last forty minutes examining my brain – but in that time my face had blurred, and he managed just about to bite back on a surprised “Oh, you’re British?” when I spoke.
On her list, Byron crossed off the word “fMRI”.
Spinal fluid.
Knees to chest.
Tighter.
Chin down.
Spine curved, distended, a good word, distended; expanded, dilated – the French protuberant from the Latin protuberare, to swell, bulge out
the needle hurts like crap when it goes in
the pain is my body
just a body thing
they leave it in for a while, letting the spinal fluid drip, drip, drip out from between the vertebrae into a little plastic cup.
Byron watches, and I watch back, and her face shows nothing at all.
In the evening, Byron went to more meetings for her other work, her real work, Perfection, always Perfection.
“Are you going to follow me?” she asked. “I have it in my notes that you like to follow me.”
“Not tonight,” I replied, curling up on the hotel bed.
She nodded, without conviction, and left me alone.
A walk around Fort Mason as the sun went down. Here it was almost possible to imagine that you were in a European city: low rise-apartment blocks painted pale pastels, cyclists weaving between the cars, ginkgo trees ready to drop their foul-smelling fruit, chestnut trees heavy with prickly seeds, children dodging the cracks in the pavement. A woman was raising money for an animal shelter.
“Every year we receive over two thousand animals from the bay area alone!” she exclaimed, shaking her tin under my nose. “That’s dogs that have been beaten by their owners, cats thrown out of a moving car, pets that have been tortured and starved and left for dead; traumatised, vulnerable animals whose only sin was to trust people. We do what we can for them, but there are some that are just so badly hurt, psychologically as well as physically, that they have to be put down. But this year, with your donation, we can get the euthanasia rate down to just 1 per cent. That’s thousands of beautiful, loyal, loving creatures given a second chance, a second home!”
“Why do people treat their pets badly?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Honey, I’ve asked myself that for years, and every time I think I come close to an answer, I realise it’s just another sad story for a sad individual. Truth is, I can never understand what’d make a person hurt a thing that loves it, that just wants to be cared for, and I hope I never do understand it neither. You wanna meet Sally?”
Sally, a brown dog with scars fading across her ribs, backside and neck, stared up from behind her mistress’s legs with huge, wet eyes, and, at the offering of my hand, came forward to nuzzle and press her skinny body against mine.
“Her owner was a lawyer down in Forest Hill. That man can argue the balls off a city judge but when he got home, he just raged out against Sally. She had pee problems, you see, and a guy like that I guess he didn’t realise that you can’t argue a dog into obeying, you gotta use love, you gotta be patient, you gotta help her understand for herself. One day he just went at her with a kitchen knife, left her bleeding fifteen blocks away, but she found her way home, and the city found her dying in his front yard. We ain’t supposed to get too attached to the animals that come into the shelter, but Sally – I couldn’t say no.”
Sally stared up at me, tail beating out an expectant rhythm on the ground, and I wondered if animals remembered me in a way humans did not, if perhaps their brains were wired differently. Should I tell Byron? Would she then cut open a dog’s brain, as well as mine, to see how it ticked?
I gave the woman twenty bucks and squatted for a while on the path while Sally put her paws in my hands, and licked my fingers, and wondered if I could stay there for ever, and couldn’t, and kept on walking.
EEG. Inject radioactive materials, watch them flow through my body. I pissed blue for a week.
A doctor spluttered, “Oh, goodness, I hadn’t… Well, no of course I had, so sorry, my mind must have wandered…”
A nurse said: “You’re new here, aren’t you?!”
A professor of neurochemistry exclaimed, “No, I was alone, then you came into the room, there wasn’t anyone here, I would have remembered…”
A student of cognitive science mused, “We don’t have a model. We don’t just not have a model, we don’t even have a box to try and put the model in, we don’t know where to begin with this sorta thing…”
A patient sitting two chairs down from me as I waited in the hall sighed, “I was on twelve thousand points yesterday but today it’s down to eleven thousand and I don’t know why. Do you think I lose points for radiotherapy?”
Byron declared, “We’re making progress, I promise you, I know it doesn’t feel that way, but Filipa’s research, the treatments, your brain, we’ll find out how she did it, we’ll find out how to make you memorable…”
She was repeating herself, of course. Everyone always repeats themselves, when I’m around.
A night in… some place. The Mission, probably. Tacos. I was tired, a little drunk, the streetlight burning, chilli on my lips, a pleasant pain, a pain that reminded me of the blood running through my body, count my pulse, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum…
I run, and having run, I run further, Golden Gate Park, why am I here? I didn’t intend to find it but I remember this spot, my feet found their way on their own, tarmac between the trees, the wrong shoes for running but I run anyway, in the day this is the perfect place to visit, an incredible place: the Japanese tea garden, archery range, bison enclosure, tulip garden, ducks on the pond, the AIDS memorial grove
I run.
Until my feet will run no more, and then I walk until I can find a cab, and realise I have forgotten the address of the hotel, and laugh.
And then, one not very special night, I go to the bathroom at 3:30 a.m., and when I return I hear Byron move in the bed, and in the dark, the click of the safety catch coming off a gun.
I am still, and so is she.
There is no past, there is no future, there is only now.
This moment.
I say, “It’s me. It’s Hope.”
Silence in the dark. Then sheets moving, quilt being pushed aside. A click as the light comes on; I flinch away. Byron has a gun, don’t know where she hid it, she holds it in her left hand, looks at me, the light filling all the lines on her face, hard in its sudden intensity.
I am this moment.
I say, “Look at your notes. Listen to your recordings.”
She looks at the bedside table. A note has been written on it in her own hand.
YOU ARE TRAVELLING WITH _WHY. YOU CANNOT REMEMBER HER. YOU ARE SHARING A ROOM WITH HER.
Next to that, my picture. Slowly, she put the gun down, and picked the photo up, held it before her, between the two of us, my face recorded, looking slowly one to the other. A nod, a thought, a laying of the photograph down.
Without a word, she flicked the safety back on the gun, turned the bedside lamp off, and rolled over to sleep.
Chapter 63
Memories, sleepless in the dark.
Sometimes business is slow, a job is hard, and I need an easy fix for money.
Often, I choose casinos.
Card counting isn’t so tough, once you know the rules. There are no laws against it; in Vegas they’ll ask you to move on, in Macau they’ll break your fingers, in Abuja or Mong La they’ll break a lot more than that. Maths makes it easy for the house to spot, a statistical flare on their systems. Under such circumstances, the best course of action is to win quick and leave, walk round the block, and return to a different table, ready to bet on the next winning hand.
Playing blackjack in a casino in New Orleans, the man said, “Are you card counting?” smiling as he spoke, his voice low, his eyes fixed on mine, the dealer sw
apping shoes, attention elsewhere.
I ran my fingers along the growing stacks of counters and said, “Why do you ask?”
“You’re winning at a higher statistical rate than is normal for the game.”
“You work for the casino?”
He shook his head. “Teach high-school math. Here for a wedding. I lost five hundred dollars in twenty minutes and promised myself that was enough. Then I saw you, and I thought… are you counting?”
“No law against it.”
“No law; no. I hope you don’t think me too forward…?”
His body, already half turned away. I caught his arm, pulled him back to my side. If he went, he would forget. “No,” I said. “No. Stay. Watch.”
Later, in the lift, his hand brushed my arm, and for a moment he looked as if he might kiss me, before his eyes darted away. I took his hand, and when we were in my room he said, “Jesus, how’d you get yourself such a fancy place to sleep?”
“Put big money behind the counter in the casino. This place likes to keep its fishes hooked.”
“But you’re winning,” he replied. “Surely they can see that you’re winning?”
“The computers can see,” I said. “But computers can’t act, and everyone else forgets.”
When he went to the bathroom, I stayed outside the door, singing. “When I dance they call me Macarena! They all want me, they can’t have me, so they all come and dance beside me!”
The sound of my voice kept the recollection of me fresh in his mind, and when he emerged he was laughing, and said, “You’re like no one I’ve ever met before.”
He was nervous when I pulled him onto the bed, and gentle. After, when he looked like he might fall asleep, I talked, and he stayed awake, blinking bewildered at nothing much, so I kept talking, and found that I couldn’t stop, that the words wouldn’t stop, until finally at 4:30 a.m. I was still speaking and he was fast asleep.
I got a blanket, and placed it over him.
I pulled on my running shoes and top, and went out into the streets, past the shuttered restaurants and through the drifting litter, beneath the sodium streetlights and round the broad boulevards where the young trees were beginning to grow again, and when I returned, he’d left the room, perhaps having woken and remembered nothing, and I showered and lay awake on my bed that smelt of him, and didn’t sleep until dawn.
