Amnesia Moon

by Jonathan Lethem

  He saw the televangelist, the one he’d seen with Fault when they first came back to the city. It was drawing in chalk on the pavement, its huge body bent over double, its tattered smock hiked up to expose a cluster of wiring and fuses. Two Mexican children stood a short distance away, shyly japing. The robot ignored them. But when Everett moved closer, curious to see the drawing, the televangelist sensed the attention and turned its telescreen face. Everett knew it wasn’t the video image of the televangelist’s eyes that actually watched him, but he couldn’t help gazing into them.

  The drawing was of a crucifix, the style borrowed from some medieval icon, duplicated with uncanny accuracy by the robot’s hand.

  “Do you even recognize this form?” said the televangelist in a surprisingly small voice, the blustery features crestfallen now. “You, man, who have fallen so far.”

  “I recognize it,” said Everett.

  “There was once a time when Christ was your king,” said the robot. It stood up over the drawing and faced Everett. Its smock was smeared with chalk dust. “I know this to be true. I remember.”

  “Maybe you’re only programmed to remember,” said Everett.

  The televangelist shook its head, doubly, the robot moving the telescreen from side to side while the video image of the old preacher pursed his lips and closed his eyes and shook his head sorrowfully. “I remember,” it said. “The world has fallen away from Him. We have failed in our work. There are few now who believe, fewer still who come to praise Him.”

  “We?”

  “Others like myself. We were sent oul alone and separate into the world. But it is better, in the darkness, not to be alone. It is better to be found than lost.”

  The televangelist might remember the world before, Everett thought. It wouldn’t be bent by dreams. It might have preserved a kind of objectivity, might be able to provide an account of what happened—if there was some way to weed through the biases of its programming. A tall order.

  A beggar came and stood beside them with his hand stuck out, his feet scuffing the chalk crucifix on the pavement. The robot turned, the sun flashing off its screen, and handed the man a pamphlet from a pocket on its tunic. Everett spread his hands and shrugged, and the beggar wandered off.

  The televangelist straightened and looked into the distance, as though listening to some faraway call. A bedflat soared overhead, shadowing the avenue. Everett had a stray memory of the time when discarded antigrav mattresses first worked their way out of rubbish dumps and began floating above the city. This one had red spray-paint markings on the underside, but it drifted out of view before he could make out the words.

  “What changed?” asked Everett.

  “Everything,” said the televangelist, and the face on the screen seemed to wince in pain, as though the body underneath had suffered a blow. “Men began to hear voices. Here and there you see a man drawn upward, but then the voices come again and pull him down.”

  Everett understood that it meant the dreaming.

  “Do you hear the church bells?” said the televangelist.

  Everett listened. There were no bells. “Church?”

  “It is Sunday, friend. Will you come?”

  Sunday. Somewhere, back in Vacaville, Edie had moved again. But had he been here that long? The count of days was different here. Or else the televangelist was wrong.

  Everett followed the robot from Submission Boulevard to a large white church a few blocks away. The neighboring houses were quiet, some with boarded windows, some open to the light and perhaps inhabited, all dominated by the oversize cast-iron gate of the church. There was a pile of charred rubble in the center of the church parking lot, blackened wire armatures in a pile of cinder. Everett thought of ceremonial burnings, crosses, wicker men. The televangelist unlocked the gate of the church with a key kept on a chain around its neck, and they went inside.

  “Shouldn’t it be unlocked?” said Everett. “What if someone wanted to come in?”

  The televangelist turned, its huge body tilting ominously over him. “The altar here has suffered, as you will see. Someday men may wish to return to His house. Until then we must keep it in good order.”

  They stepped through the inner doors and into the central room. The pews were filled with dozens of robots, all weatherbeaten and dented like the first. On their screens were a crazy variety of faces: corpulent black Baptists, stern Orthodox rabbis, sober, guilty Catholic priests. Others had malfunctioning screens that showed only static. All the robots wore ragged tunics, many of them jeweled with a wild assortment of religious trinkets—crosses, stars of David, Christian fish, tiny jade Buddhas, Masonic eyes. One, whose screen showed an FBI warning against illegal reproduction of copyrighted computer-graphic formats, wore an ungainly crown of thorns. At the sound of Everett’s footsteps they turned and stared. The room was silent.

  “I found a pilgrim,” said the first.

  Everett thought suddenly of Cale and Gwen. Stepping into this church was like taking the injection from Fault and entering a hidden space, a preserve of—

  What?

  Simulations?

  One of the robots came forward. Its face was that of a missionary lost for years in the jungle, bearded and drawn and impossibly grave. Everett pictured a programmer working to craft an image that would resonate, inspire religious awe, and settling on this one. “Welcome, sir. We’re honored, though we have little to offer a seeker anymore—perhaps Ralfrew has told you.”

  “He didn’t say,” said Everett.

  “Ralfrew is courageous to go out among the fallen,” said the wizened prophet. Its screen blurred momentarily with static. “The rest of us rarely do. Since anointing us with holy zeal, God has cast us adrift.”

  “But you stay in the city.”

  It looked down and said, “We stay in the church.” Then it turned away. The rest of the televangelists went back to their prayer, heads bowed, ferroplastic fingers grating as they folded them together. Everett could hear one robot murmuring to itself, a small sound that echoed in the vault of the church ceiling.

  Everett went through the lobby and out of the church, baffled, his eyes stinging. Tears. The televangelist named Ralfrew rushed after him, covering the distance in a few huge strides.

  “What is it?” said Ralfrew.

  “Your memories are fake. Software.”

  “Fake?”

  “You’re just an empty space,” said Everett. “Like the church.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Ralfrew.

  “The memories, God, whatever, they just floated through, once, a long time ago. They’re gone now.”

  It was pointless even to discuss it, Everett thought. The robot had no real self to get back to.

  “We remember—”

  Everett fled, back up the hill.

  “Explain,” Everett commanded. He’d rushed back to the basement apartment, broken the lock on Fault’s refrigerator, and helped himself to a dose of Cale.

  “Let me show you something first,” Cale said.

  A door appeared in the black. “This way.” He went through, and Everett followed into emptiness. Cale shut the door, and suddenly they stood before a scene, horizon, hills, trees, a nestled lake. At first glance Everett read it as depthless, flat, a brilliant mural inches away. But as he moved his head, it bloomed into three dimensions, a world. He turned then and saw the small house. The house from Chaos’s dream.

  He shut his eyes, overwhelmed, and was flooded with sounds, the rustling in the trees overhead, the noises of living things, a chirping, a keening. Then the smells: pine, dew, rot. He felt the slickness of the grass, the hollow thump of the ground beneath his step. He opened his eyes. They were on the lawn beside the house. A cloud crossed in front of the sun and shaded half the lake. Nearer, a squirrel spiraled out of view on a post.

  “I built it for you,” said Cale. “It’s a place for you and Gwen.”

  “How—where is this?”

  “I built it from your memories. T
his is where you lived when you left the city.”

  “I remember. But only from the dreams.”

  Cale sat down on the grass. Everett sat too, leaned back on his hands and felt the cool grass tangle in his fingers, felt the slight moisture of the ground beneath it. How far would the detail go? What if he dug in the ground? Would there be insects?

  “This is what I spend my time doing now, Everett. Making worlds. I’ve made a lot of them.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” Cale shrugged, almost embarrassed. “It’s just what I do. I don’t usually show them off.”

  “Why not?”

  “Billy’s not particularly impressed. And it takes a lot of effort. I wear off faster.”

  They fell into silence.

  “You could do this too,” said Cale. “Make a world here. You could do it better. It wouldn’t fade away.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You could dream it into reality.”

  “You’re like your father. You want me to do impossible things.”

  “Don’t compare me to Ilford.”

  Compare isn’t the word for it, Everett thought. I don’t know where Ilford stops and you begin.

  But all he said was, “Your father and Harriman want too much from me.”

  “Don’t talk to me about fucking Ilford,” snapped Cale. The world around them flickered and flattened, briefly short-circuited.

  “Cale, how did things get like this?”

  “The break. Everything changed.” He was still angry, but his voice, and the landscape, had settled.

  “You don’t remember any more than I do, do you?”

  “I don’t know what you remember.”

  “Almost nothing. You—you triggered a memory for me, the story about the train. I thought you remembered our past. Growing up.”

  Cale laughed. “You gave me the memory of the train. It was the first dream I had when you came into range. Vacaville, I guess. Something about your friend Kellogg, in an underground well. Then it turned into us in the tunnels.”

  Everett didn’t know what to say. He looked at his hands, which were crisscrossed with lines from the grass. But were they his real hands, in this pretend place?

  “I know you and me and Billy were friends, before,” said Cale. “The rest doesn’t really matter.”

  “Do you remember my family? My parents?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  Everett felt like a flash of static electricity in empty space, something brief and lost.

  He said, “What about Gwen?”

  “You and Gwen were together before,” said Cale impatiently. “That’s obvious.”

  “But you don’t remember her.”

  “That isn’t exactly true. I have a few stray memories. But it doesn’t matter, Everett. She’s here, now.”

  This wasn’t the consolation Everett was seeking. What did his attachment to Cale and Gwen mean if he could barely remember them? Who was he, if all he knew of himself was the shreds of memory that clung to these people?

  And were they people at all, if they lived only inside refrigerated vials?

  “There’s something I want you to do, Everett. For me and Gwen. Make it real here.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “It’s easier than things you’ve already done. I’ve supplied the ingredients.” Cale gestured at the sky. “You only have to finish the job. The one limitation here is the connection to the outside world. The dependence on it. You can break that.”

  Everett didn’t speak. He looked up. The sun had crossed the sky once and now it was back at the other end, starting over.

  “What would it mean, anyway,” he said after a while, “to make it real?”

  “An inversion,” said Cale. “Turn it inside out.” He modeled it with his hands. “Ilford and Kellogg and everything, all the broken-up, tired American reality—make it small. Make it into a drug we can take if we want, the contents of a test tube. And make this the real world, the one that persists.”

  Everett was silent.

  “Make Gwen real, Everett.”

  “That’s not Gwen. Just a hint of her, a phantom.”

  “You hold it against her that she has a few blank spots? You’re a fine one to talk, Everett. There’s as much of her left as any of us.”

  Maybe he’s right, Everett thought. I came back to find her, and I found her. And what I felt there, in her arms, whatever the surrounding conditions, was real. Is real.

  A month ago he’d been living in a projection booth, drinking what amounted to rubbing alcohol, dreaming Kellogg’s dreams. Who was he to look a gift reality in the mouth?

  He was lucky that Gwen had recognized him, had thought there was someone there to recognize let alone love. She was as much Gwen as he deserved, he decided. Maybe more.

  But he couldn’t let it go. “Somebody must know, Cale.”

  “Know what?”

  “What happened to Gwen.” And to you, he almost added. “What about Ilford? What does he remember?”

  “Ilford is a liar!” The world around them flickered, crackled, brightened to impossible primary colors, then disappeared.

  They were back in the flat gray space, the default zone. And Cale had turned inward, sulking, his eyes down, as though it were Everett who had thrust the world away, rejecting an offer.

  In fact, Everett felt the disappearance of the landscape as a tremendous loss. No matter how little he trusted it.

  “Cale.”

  “Yes?”

  He had to find the right question. It wouldn’t work if he mentioned Ilford. “You said there was someone I should meet. Another point of view.”

  “Vance, you mean.”

  “That’s what I need, more points of view.”

  “Vance was a guy who passed through here. A year, six months ago, I don’t know. If he was real, they’re supposedly having this big war there. With aliens.”

  “Where?”

  “L.A. But other places too. That’s one of the things that makes it different from just another bad dream.”

  “There was a part of the desert,” said Everett. “Something military going on.”

  “It’s been a while since I visited him. It’s not exactly scenic.”

  “How—”

  “Billy gave him a dose so I could meet him. While he was here, I helped him create a version of his world, a record. You’ll see.”

  A new doorway appeared, and Cale and Everett went through. Everett experienced immediate vertigo; he’d somehow stepped into the rear of an airplane or helicopter or hovercraft which was tilted so drastically that the side windows nearly faced the cityscape below. He saw that he was dressed differently here, in a full bodysuit with wiring and terminals. Cale, standing beside him, was dressed the same way. The city beneath them was flat and gray and dead. Everett closed his eyes and felt the pitch of the craft, the vibration of the engine.

  “Cale,” said a voice. Everett looked up. A man, also in uniform, ducked through the low door from the cockpit of the craft. He was black and young, but his hair was completely silver. He wore tiny dark glasses that just covered his eyes.

  “Vance,” said Cale. “I brought a friend of mine—Everett Moon.”

  “Vance Escrow,” said the man. He stood, spread legs almost bridging the width of the craft’s floor, and stuck out his hand. Everett used the handshake to steady himself.

  “Everett’s been away,” said Cale. “He’s sort of caught Ilford’s interest.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Vance, making a face. He turned, and Everett could feel his stare through the dark glasses. “You dream?”

  “Well, yes,” said Everett.

  “You should join us,” said Vance.

  “Never mind that, Vance,” said Cale. “I brought him here to find out about the war.”

  Vance smirked. “What do you want to know? We’re what’s left, fifteen or sixteen hundred free men. Everyone else is just slave apes. We try not to kill to
o many of them, because it’s not their fault. It’s the hives we’re after.”

  The craft leveled and dipped low, buzzing the rooftops of an abandoned mall. Everett saw dark figures scurry around the corner of a building like rats. From the cockpit came the staticky crackle of voices on shortwave.

  “Hey, Stoney,” called Vance back through the cockpit doorway, “even it out. We’re talking.”

  “Yassuh,” came the sardonic reply.

  “I thought you were fighting aliens,” said Everett.

  “Right, but not like you’re thinking. Not just some bogeyman Martians. You know why we’re in the air, right? Cale tell you about that?”

  “They dominate on the ground,” Cale explained. “Like dreamers, but alien dreamers. The only way to stay clear of it is to stay in the air.”

  “If we set down, we’d be slave apes too,” said Vance. “Free man is airborne.”

  “Slaves—to what?” said Everett. He kept one eye on the shifting landscape in the window, trying to remind himself that it wasn’t real.

  “The hives,” said Vance. “They’re growing inside all the houses. Humans have to tend them, bring them food, trinkets, little offerings. The place where the aliens come from, the dominant species is some sort of hive intelligence, and the bigger animals serve as their arms and legs. So that’s what they did to us when they landed. Turned us into animals. And they don’t really give a damn about the condition of their animals, not when there are so many of them. People aren’t exactly brushing their teeth a lot anymore, if you get my meaning. Or remembering to eat.”

  “The hives—they don’t ever leave them?”

  “Nope. Think of it as a cancer, Moon. Tumors, earth-tumors growing inside the houses, breaking through the basement floors, teeming with this unnatural alien life that can get inside your head, brainwash you, make you care about keeping them comfortable. Like being the butler of a tumor.”

  They flew out over water. Everett stared down at their reflection: a propless helicopter, just like the one in the desert that had marked his car with pink goo.