In the archive, I find a recording from the security camera opposite her apartment building. Riva, Zarnee, and Aston are tagged. It’s over a week old. They come out of the building together, engaged in a lively conversation. Riva laughs and touches Aston’s hand. They look at each other, a fleeting glance. Then he says goodbye, waves, disappears from the camera’s field of vision. Riva and Zarnee stand next to each other for a moment. His shirt collar is folded slightly inwards on the right side of his neck. She tugs it into place.
Maybe she’ll come back after all.
I know she’s not coming back.
On the monitor, the apartment in the morning light. Empty. Motionless.
The only visible movement is the daylight gliding across the floor on time-lapse mode, the shadows. There are still a few traces of Riva, the unmade bed, a sweater on the living-room table, a blanket hanging off the sofa. The sofa, where she so often sat with Zarnee, close together like they were a biofamily. Under the right corner of the sofa, I spot the top that Riva had been compulsively spinning at the start of my project. How long it must have been there without anyone noticing.
Suddenly, the images on the split screen drop out simultaneously. All views of the apartment are black, only one exterior view remains. I tap on the black windows to reactivate them. The cameras in the apartment don’t seem to work anymore. I try to log in again, but the account no longer exists.
-
36
I feel a sense of déjà vu, even though I’ve never set foot in the administration building before. I remember Riva’s hesitant steps through the corridors. Her posture, how it revealed her nervousness no matter how hard she tried to hide it.
I walk with determination to avoid making the same mistake. To avoid exposing any weakness. In case Masters is logged in to the security cameras here and watching my movements.
I remember when Riva couldn’t find the room and had to turn back. I try to concentrate as I scan the room numbers. 1217A. Even if it doesn’t have the same number, the room is identical in terms of furniture and technical equipment.
I sit down in front of the monitor and look directly into the camera.
—Please state your full name and identification number.
—Hitomi Yoshida, MIT 3403 7734 0113.
—Do you fully understand why you’re here?
—Yes.
I have an urge to call the motherbot and ask for advice. To tell the mother about the lawsuit that PsySolutions has filed against me. My career is over. My license revoked. Permanent entries in the criminal record, which are displayed at the top of my profile. Removal of company data. Theft of company data. Hacking.
—Would you like to appeal?
The public defender advised me to agree to the expulsion. All legal possibilities have been exhausted. And I have no credits to finance another appeal.
—No, I say.
My voice sounds distant. I have problems recognizing myself in myself. The inner divide that I felt when I was fired has become a sort of permanent state, one part of my consciousness in my body, the other outside it at a distance. Even now, I observe myself from afar, how I’m sitting in front of the camera, keeping my back straight, my shoulders pulled back to signal confidence.
Mom, I want to tell the motherbot, there’s nothing I can do. Hugo M. Masters has audio and video recordings from my apartment. From my private devices. From my tablet. The evidence is overwhelming. He also recorded our conversations. Everything I confessed to you. I don’t know why I didn’t follow the rules. I don’t understand it myself, mom.
I won’t be able to call the bot. As of this morning, my tablet is also non-operational. The last of my devices that had not yet been turned off. The bill that I had paid the longest until I couldn’t get any more credits.
—Then do you agree to relocation on the basis of services not rendered?
—Yes.
Four days ago, in a moment of weakness, I tried to reach my biomother. I called the contact number that was listed in her profile and wrote several messages to the linked M-Message account. When I didn’t get an answer, I contacted the company where she’s currently registered as a lobbyist, but the secretary refused to put me through.
—Would you like to leave a formal message?
—No.
I can imagine what a disappointment my life must be for them. A wasted investment. An outlier in the official institute statistics, which otherwise say that ninety percent of those leaving city homes make the leap into the top ten percent.
I would also refuse contact in their position. Remove the biochild from my biography so that it doesn’t destroy my own career. Another argument for early sterilization. Directly at the age of sexual maturity.
—The relocation measures will be initiated in the next few days, says the gender-neutral voice of the administration computer. We will inform you of the specific conditions electronically. Please sign here.
I use the stylus to put my initials in the blinking field on the form and hold my hand over the fingerprint boxes until a check mark appears.
—We wish you a pleasant day.
I remember how Riva lingered in her seat at this point. How my pulse rose. How I was afraid of Masters’s disapproval. One of Riva’s many incomprehensible behavior patterns that no longer concern me.
I get up quickly and leave the room. In the hallway, I think about how someone is probably watching me on my way to the exit to make sure I leave the building. The media training at the institute taught me to keep every muscle of my body tensed and my facial expression neutral in these situations. It conveys the image of a competent, highly functioning individual. At least now, on this last official occasion, I would like to act as is expected of me. As I expect of myself. So that if someone should ever go to the trouble of researching my personal data, the last images of me show an upright and self-confident woman. A woman at the height of her career.
-
Epilogue
The complicated system of walkways and park paths at the ChoiceofPeace™ complex have become as familiar to me as the veins in my forearms. There is no before. The past that brought me here no longer concerns me.
Early in the history of psychology, it was long believed that childhood was decisive in the formation of the human psyche. During my education, I personally doubted modern psychology and its strict exclusion of childhood. Meanwhile, my insistence on contemplating the past now seems absurd to me. What determines my life today is not my childhood in the institute, not my youth at business school. Not my work as a business psychologist in the city.
I live the only way worth living: in the present. Our caretakers remind us daily to savor our last weeks, days, hours with all our senses. To make use of the facilities and their numerous wellness offerings. In the seminars, they teach us not to dwell on memories. When clients click through their data archives too often, their caretakers recommend physical fitness, massages, and social events. I understand the need to look back, even if I don’t share it myself; it’s not out of hope for change, but out of nostalgia or regret. At the end of life, you feel like you have to take stock. A kind of score. I often tell the other clients that the decision for assisted suicide requires us to close the books. Every one of us has considered our credit score, physical state, performance curve, and social status. And we have all come to the conclusion that we can no longer serve society. That the degradation of our bodies, our mental facilities, or our potential for productivity has already reached the point of no return.
Let it all go now, our caretakers say. You’ve already made the most difficult and responsible decision in your life. Enjoy the fruits of that decision. You don’t want to be a burden anymore and we want you to feel light and balanced on your last days. Our sponsors will do everything in their power to make it easier for you to say goodbye.
Because the other co-client
s have such a great need to look back, the ChoiceofPeace™ data department now modifies the personal memory apps so that they don’t offer any opportunity for remorse. Negative memories are deleted, positive ones added. Depending on the patient’s state of mind, they rely entirely on artificial personal profiles, universally acceptable images of a fulfilling life. The artificial profiles achieve the best results on the emotional index.
In my memory app, there are no more court cases, no more forced eviction and relocation. No more arrival in the peripheries, the details of which I have already successfully erased from my mental memory. I am confident that I’ll completely forget their existence by my chosen departure date.
I have to struggle with other memories, isolated fragments of memory that are buried deep in my brain in an inexplicable way. Images of Andorra, for example, details of her face repeatedly flash in my mind. The fuzz on her earlobe, sweat on her upper lip. And, even more irrational, the absurd false memory of my own misshapen, disgustingly furry body along with the feeling of warmth that follows. For some reason, I can’t erase the sensation of a person’s body lying behind me, pressed against me, leaving an imprint on my back. The feeling is deeply embedded in my inner being.
I’m too ashamed to talk to a caregiver about these abnormalities. I have to just hope that they’ll fade in the course of our mind-cleansing sessions.
Riva is also still far too clear in my memory and has been even harder to shake off since our chance encounter.
I don’t usually leave the facility. I’m repulsed by the peripheries. Just once, shortly after registering at ChoiceofPeace™, I felt drawn outside of its walls. I left the secured area at night, when the temperatures were not as unbearable as during the day and the crowds had hopefully already returned to their hovels. A strange curiosity came over me, an inner restlessness that I wanted to satisfy before living out my final days.
I walked the streets without a specific destination. The rectangular apartment blocks reminded me of the bartender’s apartment, although his home had seemed almost luxurious compared to the buildings here. Even in the peripheries there seem to be certain hierarchies, better and worse districts. Internal rules that are not easily recognized by outsiders.
I tried to walk along roads where there were very few other people. Whenever anyone walked past me, I kept my head down so that no one would try to approach me. I had been walking for about half an hour when I saw Riva.
It was a complete surprise; I wasn’t prepared for it. She came towards me, our paths crossed right in the beam of light beneath a street lamp. I recognized her immediately, even though her face and body had changed. She had gotten rounder. Her figure was voluptuous, wrapped in a short summer dress that reminded me of the one she had worn on the first day of video analysis. Her face looked younger. When I recognized her, her name instinctively came across my lips.
—Riva, I shouted, without thinking about it. She stopped and looked at me.
—Do we know each other? she asked.
I hesitated for a moment because I didn’t know what she meant.
I wanted to say: Don’t you remember me?
Even after all these months, she still seemed so familiar to me. I had the urge to touch her. During the analysis, I often felt like Riva knew about my existence, knew that I was behind the camera. Her movements, her few words seemed directly addressed to me, an invitation to decipher her soul. But now I was looking into the face of a stranger. Friendly, but distant.
I considered telling her about my assignment. Asking her where she lived now. Why she had left her apartment so suddenly. I wanted to ask her about Aston and Zarnee.
I know you, I wanted to say, I know you well. I almost managed to get you to dive again. Your life was in my hands.
—I was a fan, I said instead. I went to one of your performances when I was a kid. Too bad you stopped so early.
Riva shrugged.
—It was time, she said.
I nodded, I wanted to say something else, keep her with me for a moment. Talk to her for a bit. But she had already started walking away.
—Nice to meet you, I said.
She politely shook my outstretched hand. I felt the rough surface of her skin between my fingers. She works with her hands, I thought, somewhere in the peripheries.
I watched her disappear into the twilight. She had a lightness to her steps that I’d never seen from her before. Even after the rest of her had disappeared, her arms and legs fading into the distance, her brightly colored dress was still visible for a while.
I considered following her. To see where she lived. If the others were there, too. I took a few steps in her direction, but then I stopped myself. I thought about what my caretakers had advised me to do. To concentrate on the present. Riva was no longer a part of my life.
Still, as I made my way back to the ChoiceofPeace™ grounds, I felt a strange emptiness. It was as if an organ had been removed from my body. I had never known a person more intimately than Riva, not even Andorra. And yet there was no connection between us.
My body tensed up. I had to sit down on the dusty street and lean against a wall. I sat like that for a while, hunched in the dark. I tried to fill the emptiness inside me with breath. I did various breathing exercises, but nothing helped. Then I tried a visualization.
In one of the seminars where we learned to overcome the fear of death, we were taught a visualization exercise. We were advised to do it at the moment of the procedure. We practice it over and over again in preparation. We are instructed to visualize a high-rise diver. The dive.
Imagine your body in eternity, the caregiver tells us. Look for an image that makes you feel like death doesn’t exist, only life.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Riva as a young high-rise diver. Standing at the edge of the dive platform against the light. Her symmetrical silhouette, her power.
When I couldn’t picture it, I tried to imagine rising up out of the scene, up above the city. Soaring like a bird. The city getting smaller and smaller until it finally merged into a uniform surface, a glittering sea far beneath me. I closed my eyes, concentrated all of my thoughts on it.
But no picture would appear.
-
Thank you
Frank: for, you know, everything.
Nazanine: without you I would not have dared to be a writer.
My bioparents Ingeborg and Franzeff: for a genetic literary disposition, basic psychotherapeutic upbringing, and the credit points.
Karsten: for the great, in no way Lish-like editing.
Clemens: for your books and your astronaut support.
Silvio: for your faith in the text.
Martina and Lulu: for your eyes on the text and crisis intervention.
Florian: for Thomas and Thomas: for Karsten.
My literary classmates and teachers for your companionship, especially Ruth, Verena, Regina, Marina, Sara, Maria, and Baba for your help with this novel.
And to everyone else who ever had anything to do with this text.
-
-
On the Design
As book design is an integral part of the reading experience, we would like to acknowledge the work of those who shaped the form in which the story is housed.
Tessa van der Waals (Netherlands) is responsible for the cover design, cover typography, and art direction of all World Editions books. She works in the internationally renowned tradition of Dutch Design. Her bright and powerful visual aesthetic maintains a harmony between image and typography and captures the unique atmosphere of each book. She works closely with internationally celebrated photographers, artists, and letter designers. Her work has frequently been awarded prizes for Best Dutch Book Design.
The color combination of silver, black, and yellow has been chosen for its futuristic techno effect. The font is called “Empire,” a
nd was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1937. These titling capitals became the headline style for Vogue magazine, and later on for Publish magazine in a restyled and expanded version by David Berlow. The extremely high and narrow letters create a feeling of height and depth, suggesting skyscrapers for the diver to jump from. The drawing of the diver was created by Annemarie van Haeringen, an internationally renowned Dutch illustrator.
The cover has been edited by lithographer Bert van der Horst of BFC Graphics (Netherlands).
The High-Rise Diver Page 21
