Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Inevitably,” Bower? Inevitably? How could you possibly be so certain?

  I will think about it. It makes for a change, after all, thinking about an issue, rather than wallowing in the textured details and sensual excitement of a memory.

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  6.

  ...I'm hardly surprised, Bower, that you agree with me, that all I had so far written in this session was pointless. Yes, re-describing what I had already put into words netted nothing for you, who cares only for your collection. But I wonder that you deleted it—exercising a power you do not grant to me, who alone produces the words. Are not all my experiments, Bower, worth keeping? For me, this one had a particular value, in that it demonstrated two things. First, that having recorded my memory in words, I am unable to remember more than I recorded, however I try to use my words as an aid to fuller memory. It seems that putting a memory into words creates a surface which one cannot, afterwards, scratch. As though the words describing the memory are a surface with nothing beneath. Second, contemplating a memory I've already written down is tedious, dull, and boring toil. I believed, Bower, I could mine that memory, could give you more of it, in lieu of robbing myself of the new one, which is so vivid, interesting (and, yes, sensual) that I feel as though I could live inside it for the remainder of my existence.

  If I must give it up to you, then I must. But while trying yet another experiment—that of giving fewer of the pleasurable physical and emotional details and more of the accompanying mental perceptions and conceptions—as a means of holding onto the bits that so wholly engage my mind, body, and soul. Surely you cannot begrudge me my wish to retain the one thing in my life that interests me?

  The memory begins as a flood of sensual feeling mixed with dream images, her awakening in orgasm. For yes, while she'd been sleeping and dreaming, she enjoyed that pleasure, which as anyone who has experienced it knows is more exquisite in dream than in waking consciousness. The segue between sleep and waking was fuzzy. She simply knew, at one moment, that she had been sleeping and dreaming but was no longer. She felt and heard movement—of heat and a light pressure moving away, of the brush and creaking of fabric, then the sound of footsteps echoing in cavernous acoustics. Her body was relaxed and squishy and in some parts still throbbing and tingling. But beneath the pleasurable sensations lay a heavy, dead, inertial, weariness. As though—the expression came into her mind—I've been run over by a truck. And articulating those words, she remembered why she was tired. She had been up for most of the night, upstairs in a practice room, numbly repeating measure after measure following that Russian bastard's explicit, tyrannical instructions for how he wanted her to learn the Mozart sonata he'd just assigned. It was a horror, The Method. It had to be the least musical, most soul-eviscerating way to learn a piece of music. “Do not play it all the way through even once,” he had ordered her. “Master the first measure. And when you can play it satisfactorily from memory, add the second measure to the first. And then the third to the first and the second. And so on.” As though one could simply break music into bars—and Mozart of all composers, whose phrases ever flowed with the sheer lyricism of song!

  After half an hour she had cried. After an hour she had fallen into a sort of hypnagogic trance, in which certain bizarre, sinister images repeated themselves each time she played a particular segment of the music. The images made no sense; they were, simply, slaved to the sounds they matched in each repetition. The images felt violent, bloody, polluted. Their constant concurrence with the music rendered them inexplicably sinister and menacing.

  By morning she had “mastered” the first movement. She left the old Steinway and tottered over to the Student Union for coffee and eggs, to strengthen her body and will for the grueling day to come. But when she returned to the piano and tried to play the “mastered” movement, though wide awake now and full of morning's quotidian reality, she had again been flooded with the images and trembled with a horror she had not been previously awake enough to feel.

  Her will to persevere collapsed. She could not get past the fifth bar, no matter how many times she tried taking it again from the top. The sounds coming from her fingers were mechanical and lifeless, lacking any trace of the joy she usually felt when playing Mozart's graceful melodies, lacking any sense of Mozartian phrasing, which her fingers seemed unable to recognize in the deadness of their execution.

  Nearly hysterical with horror, she fled to the first floor women's room. She had a theory class at eleven in Room 104. (Her theory instructor, she painfully recalled, had the most ebulliently enthusiastic style of playing Mozart of anyone she had ever heard—all dance and sparkle to the elimination, even, of nuance and wit.) And so she stretched out on the mermaid-green vinyl couch stamped with hexagons—which the person who had chosen the fabric for its reupholstering must have thought would match the floor's black-and-white marble tile, also patterned in heaxagons—and closed her eyes and nodded off—and so to awaken so delightfully.

  Fully conscious, she now told herself she must put the night of horror out of her mind—and refuse to use that bastard's “Method” even a single time more. It was torture, utterly sadistic, and perhaps intended to break her as a musician. She must find another professor to take her on—even late as it was, the third week of the term...

  While all this flickered through her mind in at most a few seconds of time, she remained in the pleasurable (though fatigued) state in which she had awakened. The horror, really, was simply a trace of memory—particularly since she intended never to play that sonata movement again. More real (for the moment, at least) was the pleasure gently receding back into her body, to coil and slumber until the next time it was roused. Lying with her eyes still closed, she thought of how pleasure created an entirely other map of one's body than that drawn by anatomists. There were proper names for only a few of the parts of the body or areas of body surfaces that became charged with pleasure, such that looking at an anatomist's sketch of the body was a little like looking at a map and trying to find the dips and hollows of a patch of well-known land, or clotheslines and trees, bird-feeders and telephone poles. Some anatomists admitted the word “fourchette” into their diagrams of women's genitals. Others omitted, it but allowed “clitoris” or even “glans” and “inner and outer lips.” And while the sexologists could be relied on to include those and liked to talk of a “G Spot” (as though pleasure were an algebra exercise, solving for X), they never talked about the diverse large and small and infinitesimal cracks and pleats and folds where pleasure irrepressibly bubbles over the surface.

  She heard the toilet flush and water rushing into the sink and the rattle and thump of the towel roll being advanced. She visualized the marble walls of the stalls (such an old, old building, with tons and tons of marble inhabiting it), the long pull-chains on the toilets, and the silver radiator seated below the twelve-foot-tall frosted glass windows through which poured a splash of sun stretching all the way past the propped-open swing-door into the outer room, where it pooled in a warm, solid mass by the door to the corridor.

  Footsteps. She opened her eyes and twisted her neck to peer under the wooden arm of the couch. It was Maria, of course, standing in the pool of sunlight, bathed in thick yellow warmth; she smiled happily, affectionately—but enigmatically, too, as Maria did almost everything. She took great pleasure in just looking at Maria, at the dark sleek chin-length hair, the reddish highlights of which seemed to spark in the sunlight, at the black leggings that clung to her shapely thighs and calves, at the casual elegance of the the gray leather jacket and moccasins that were so quintessentially Maria. “Jan and I met to play your piece yesterday afternoon,” Maria said. “We like it. And I love all the flutter-tongue in it.” Her mouth twitched into a sly, mischievous smile. “For future reference, write all the flutter-tongue you want of me, for my limits are infinite."

  She laughed with delight at Maria's cleverness and with joy from hearing her composition praised. The horror lurking
in the back of her mind might only have been an ugly, forgettable dream. But then Maria moved forward, so that the sunlight lay behind her, and she became a bulk of shadow whose face she now could only guess at—

  And while remembering that moment, of Maria standing between her and the light, a new memory deluged me, so powerfully that I lost Maria, lost the fun of our repartee, lost the sunlight and squishy thrills of the body.

  Bower, Bower, what has happened here? I can't go on! I can't remember a thing after that moment of interruption—though I believe that that fragment of memory, before now, did not end at that moment, with Maria blocking the light...

  I feel terrible. Yes, Bower, I feel—but I'm certain it's the new memory that's giving me the feeling, that it's not something coming from within my already existing consciousness. It's a feeling I don't remember having before. Not fear. Not desire. Not joy or love. But something else, something I can only describe as undesirable. My vocabulary seems not to have a match for this new feeling. Well. I hope it leaves me as easily as all the other feelings did. For I would surely hate to have to live with this one for very much longer.

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  7.

  Just as I always think of the giant who took me to the park as “he” though I know the appropriate pronoun is “it,” I seem to have imposed on my routine existence a set of terms that imply time. Perhaps this is an intrinsically human mechanism, or perhaps it is simply the result of the temporal orientation built into the particular (human) language I use. Thus, I find myself thinking that this is morning—and that I spent the “night” lying on my bed engaged in cerebral activity—thinking, reminiscing, fantasizing, whatever one wants to call it. The “night” ended when the tone sounded, alerting me that the robotic arm would be injecting me with nourishment. And, as usual every “morning,” after the door to the other room slid open, I went in, stood for the correct period of time in the apparatus, and then came back in here to sit at this terminal.

  I call you an “it,” Bower, because all I know of you is a holographic icon and a mechanical voice. If you are a person, if you have a personality, you give nothing of it to me. And so I feel no need to consider you anything but a thing. I realized this in the “night” when I found myself wondering about so much that I (meaning: the person who woke without memory in these rooms) had never thought about before. Shall I “share” any of it with you? I think not, Bower. I think you don't deserve to hear any of these thoughts since you have expressed interest only in the overpoweringly distinct memories that come to me. The memory I'm currently obsessed with—the one that interrupted my session recounting the previous memory “yesterday"—is one I'm eager to rid myself of. Perhaps you'll enjoy it as I haven't been able to.

  The memory begins this way: I am standing before a desk, my hands clasped before me, facing bright sunlight. Faye is seated behind the desk, her face barely visible in the glare. I stare at the sun-frizzed corona of red hair framing her head. My stomach is churning acid, for I'm extremely angry and a little scared. This confrontation with Faye is taking place in her office, with the door closed. At a certain point I realize I've made a mistake by agreeing to privacy, for it means there are no witnesses and if it comes to a showdown, it will be her word against mine.

  I've never in my entire time in this job considered my being a union member anything but a necessary technicality. I never imagined filing a grievance. But a cool little voice in the back of my mind tells me that Faye is laying grounds upon grounds upon grounds for my bringing one, because, spanking new in the job, she doesn't realize there are procedures and rules to be followed when making a subordinate's life miserable.

  Her voice goes on and on, not only telling lies to my face, but using the lies to dress me down for incompetence. The real incompetence is hers. It's so stupid, so ironic, that when she first stepped into the job—which was really my job, but with a new title, at a higher status, and with better pay—I actually tried to be a Good Joe and teach her the ropes! But nothing infuriates Faye so much as being given information by subordinates. She'll go all over the company asking other people (who are either in a lateral position relative to hers or rank above her), making stupid and offensive mistakes, rather than accept information from us (and most especially from me). She came into the job with the idea that we—and especially I—were all incompetent, needing “straightening out."

  In fact, our unit has been nothing but jerked around for the last five years, when the higher-ups got it into their tiny little brains to downsize it—with the expectation that our output would remain the same. Naturally there was chaos when they did it and even more chaos when they ruled that we were no longer allowed to work overtime. So then they tried farming out certain of our functions to each of the departments we serve. Of course there were problems! And then, just as we were getting it all together (because they'd cut some of our workload), they went and downsized us again! Thinking that what we needed was better supervision (rather than a stable work crew), they brought in somebody with a fucking master's degree and no experience, no understanding of interdepartmental politics, somebody ruthlessly ambitious but stupid.

  We are all desperate to escape now. For me, since Faye's arrival it's been nothing but one humiliation after another. Losing my office, to be moved into a crowded room with three other people. Losing my privacy—having my desk searched at odd hours every day by Faye, who thinks we need to feel her foot on our necks at all times. And being told that the departments we serve—most of which I've had excellent relations with for the ten years I've worked in this unit—have been complaining about me. Nan has begun collecting evidence of Faye's incompetence and violation of rules in a folder she carries around with her so Faye won't seize it in one of her raids on our desks. Nan keeps telling me I should be soliciting letters of satisfaction from department heads to put in my file. I guess now maybe she's right, since this woman is sitting here telling me that everybody in the departments we serve loathes and detests and despises me and is utterly relieved to be dealing with someone as sharp and service-oriented as she.

  "I will not tolerate your telling me anything I haven't specifically asked you about. You know nothing! Under your direction, this unit was a disaster! I can't trust anything you say. So when I give you an order, obey it. Don't tell me why you think you shouldn't, don't argue with me, don't take it on yourself to tell me what other tasks you think you won't have time to finish if you do! Any member of this unit who is not a team player is not someone I'm not going to tolerate having around. Do you understand me?"

  I know now how people come to hate other people enough to hurt them. I'm in such a rage I can hardly speak. I want to tell her what an idiot she is. I want to tell her she's a liar. But I say: “Yes, I understand.” And think: the first reasonable job offer I get, I'm out of here.

  Otherwise, it's war, like Nan's preparing for. War by dossier. War by politics. We know who counts in this company, she does not. She still thinks she can fire off insulting memos to department heads simply because she's the head of our unit. Stupid, stupid boss. (The word, in my mind, is an obscenity.)

  Because of the big dose of sunlight I've been getting, I start sneezing. I sneeze once, twice, three times—and then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh time. I get a tissue out of my pocket by the second sneeze—and discover, after the seventh, that my nose is bleeding. Blood soaks the tissue and is dripping from my nose; it covers my hands and is staining my shirt.

  "Hey, watch it!” Faye's voice is shrill. “Here, use this, you're going to bloody my carpet!” Faye shoves a handful of tissues at me. When I lean forward to take them, I inadvertently drip blood onto the pile of papers overflowing her in-box.

  I hold the tissues pressed tight against my nose and leave Faye's office. I get a curious stare from Guy Stark, whom I pass in the corridor. In the restroom I run cold water on a paper towel. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror—of a woman holding a bloody wad of tissue to her face—and
flash on another fragment of memory.

  Shit, Bower. I'm tired of this. I don't want any more memories. I want either the first or the second one back. They're just getting worse and worse. Yes, little icon, bow and bob. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you. It's all the same to you.

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  8.

  I insist you reinsert the text you've deleted, Bower. I won't recount any more memories unless you do. Am I making myself clear? Much as I want to offload this new memory, I can handle holding it if I have to. Do you understand, Bower? Just because you delete the words doesn't mean it's not as though I hadn't written them. In my mind, they're still there. For instance, I continue to remember that the face of the woman in the mirror in the rest room was an old face, Bower, with gray hair, and that the hands in the memory were wrinkled—as mine are not. And that the shapes of the fingers were different. Just as the skin of the hands in the memory before that was a different shade than that in all the other memories—and than that of my own hands, which I can see.

  You've been jerking me around, Bower. Humans don't eat by injection. And they don't have one elimination a day and that of a clear, oily fluid. And though my body has gotten no exercise to speak of since I first woke here in this place, last night I did pushups, counting each until I got to a hundred, without getting the slightest bit short of breath. How could I have been that worn, aging woman in the mirror?