The Gnome Stories, page 17
Perhaps on account of the claustrophobic dark and the smoke and porn, I flip back to Riyadh at this point, 130-degree days burning the sun into you, leaching your will to live. Being outside felt a little like living in slow motion, so you avoided it when you could. When I lived there I never saw real fire except the occasional plume from the derricks that worked far outside the city throughout the night: they flared and waned like embers disappearing behind clouds of smoke. Outside of their constant cigarette smoking, no one there ever burned anything. The whole place felt already burned.
I flipped my days so I’d get up at 4 or 5 p.m. and work my way through the dark, get through the bad stuff before the sun came up. The country was better then. It was still safe for Americans. The patriarch passed after I left, and the ruling family lost control in the revolutions when the price of oil bottomed out. It was always authoritarian but a convenient kind of authoritarian: clean, controlled, moneyed, safe for us. For the Saudi men, it was a playground, a safe world. But for the third country nationals, those not lucky enough to be born Saudi, who immigrated without citizenship, and who worked there for next to nothing, it must have been a terror. I’ve never seen outright slavery, and as it was explained to me, their condition wasn’t slavery, exactly, but it looked to me like I always thought it might: you could tell in their eyes that they might as well have been bound. For all I knew they were. It was hard to ignore.
I was there working in the caves below the bluffs where the servers slept and blinked and sprung to life when one was triggered. I’d never seen caves like that: not just excavated but cleaned and polished so everything shone. Eerie LEDs refracted down the corridors. I got the gig on account of my father, who worked with the US government and knew what I could do. This being a government gig—technically I didn’t work for the Saudis, I worked for the US government on loan to the Saudis; on account of the advanced tech we weren’t allowed to work directly for foreign governments, even friendly authoritarian ones—I didn’t have to do much. Mostly maintaining code, building ecosystems, and massaging the root systems that function below memory and enable it. We understood the systems differently then, how they interconnected and interacted. We thought we could isolate one and edit it without disrupting others. This was four years ago.
Our larger task was to cache the collected memories of the aging members of the royal family in preparation for some kind of cryonic sleep. The bloodline was dwindling on account of a shared degenerative disorder. Maybe they could see that their rule would soon come to an end. We never saw their faces in real life: only in memory. One of them had premonitions, we were told, and so we encoded those as best we could. We weren’t fully sure that they would work, since we’d never done premonitions before: the circuitry was like memory but we had to bring in a specialist since the mechanisms were just different enough so that our certifications didn’t cover it. No one’s did, but it was worth a shot, they thought. We had carte blanche, they said. Make it work, no matter the cost.
It’s a weird country, or maybe rings of concentric countries each encapsulated by the next: the poor country, the contractors, the rich country, the superrich, and then the family. Or perhaps the encapsulation works the other way around, and the poor country is the largest country, the real country, and contains all of the others.
To be rich is to be weird. You start to want things that don’t exist—that can’t exist, not yet. What else is there to covet? But in many of the Gulf states there’s no limit at all: no media to check you, no fiction of the courts. There are laws and there is money, and the latter bends the former. There’s only as far as you believe you can push those underneath you, which inevitably isn’t quite as far as you think. This is why power fades. So the family got involved in this crazy project, caching as much as they could of what remained of the elder family members on interconnected, liquid-cooled servers, which is where we came in.
It paid well. It had to. My wife refused to come. I don’t blame her. It’s not an easy place for women. And she didn’t want our son taking cues about gender roles from Saudis. So I was there only a year, not enough to feel like I could ever pick much up from the culture myself aside from the food and a few marhabas and masaalamas, and the electric strangeness of the place. Most of the time I spent underground, and when I wasn’t underground I was out mostly at night, moving through the souks and eating foil-wrapped shwarmas in the darkened streets: thousands on thousands of blinking networked lights, wavering in the heat.
My father once asked me: What are you willing to wreck to get what you want? By this point his marriage had dissolved. He had “other interests,” as he explained, in which we were only secondarily involved. He asked me what I wanted. I said I didn’t know. I wanted to say something stupid like “to be loved.” He said anything you want comes with a cost, right? He has this habit of saying “right?” after things he wanted me to agree with, so I ended up agreeing before I caught myself, even when I didn’t. I was often baffled by his intutions about the world.
I have this vivid memory of his flat mouth against the background of the conversation, which took place in a brightly lit fast food restaurant with a group of children all dressed up like pigs in the background. They were dressed like pigs on account of a pork sandwich that the restaurant had just deployed. The best-looking pig—it had to be a girl, I heard some employee say; I watched the faces fall on all the boys—got a big silver star almost as big as she was, would get entered in the competition to be in the commercial for the sandwich, and would get to eat for free. My father’s lips barely moved when he spoke. He once claimed it was on account of how he used to be a ventriloquist and though he didn’t do it anymore he found it advantageous in his new line of work to betray as little as possible. He worked on major high-level finance deals that sometimes I would see reported in the papers months or even years later. Companies would split or declare bankruptcy based on what he said and did. One very small country went into receivership and was divided up between its creditors—actually and physically: it was but is no more; now the countries on either side of it are each slightly larger. He was not a demonstrative parent. We don’t talk now. We communicate only through books: I send him one. He sends me back another. You could choose to read meaning in the title selection but mostly I think it shows how little he knows about me. Sometimes I get a gig because of him. I can always tell those from the others. The interviewer asks questions from a battery of them designed to make me lose my cool. I’ve done enough of these by now to know. They want to see just how unstable I’m said to be. I say I’m not unstable. I’m just drawn that way.
This section could use a little more heat—not Riyadh heat but a winter holiday heat, the kind you might associate with family and safety if you’re lucky. Here it’s a see your own breath like a dragon kind of cold, clearly impressionistic, and frankly a nice effect. Rarely does the emotional temperature of a memory manifest itself so literally. And father still doesn’t see us. Whatever we do, he won’t see us in this memory. It’s just watching, no real action—as if watching isn’t action. You can feel the action. You can feel just how grinding it must have felt to watch when you’re forced to live inside of it.
Still, we’re not quite sure what’s happening. He’s got his magazine. He flips the page slowly to another spread. He licks his hand. These are not pleasant memories. It’s hard enough to map the tunnels as we’re doing; it would be worse to live them every time we closed our eyes. So much of what we keep is weird and dark and vaguely sex-related—you learn that fast—even if time and distance smooth it out a little. That’s what we are, what we’re made of, what all of the better parts of us are built on top of. You may not want to visit it—or maybe you do. I can’t say.
Yet we encounter little miracles: the detail of the hair on father’s legs is spectacular, for instance, how it curls and moves, and you can even find little hairs on the ground from time to time. I hear a little oo from Caribou in response—she’s noticed, too—and we turn away before we catch him masturbating. We’ve seen this before, when he’s a little older, when the memory is fresher, and we know exactly where this leads.
The problem is the same with all of these reexperiences: they get rewritten from time to time so the maps are only temporary. They’re usually stable for a year unless some kind of trauma overwrites them first. We’re paid to map them, since the technicians need the maps to simplify their work. I am not supposed to know how they edit the code. That’s not my job any longer. My certifications lapsed a couple years back, though I still recognize most of the protocols. That is what they do; this is what I do. There is a line between. It’s all in the contract. The better the maps, the easier it is to edit a room’s code without disturbing larger narratives. It’s like a scan before a surgery. No one sings the song of the radiologist, but it’s necessary work. Everything is sensitive. Which is where Caribou and I, professional sensitives, come in.
I should clarify: I am real but Caribou is not. Or: Caribou is real but not real in the way that I am. She is a companion-construct, here because the work is real lonely otherwise: the longer you’re down in it, the more it unravels your belief in meaning or in meaningful action or in anything. Having someone else helps. Even if she’s not real, she’s here, and it’s easy to fall into the sort of conversation you can have with a comfortable fiction.
I should also clarify: I made a bad decision two years ago that rerouted my life. Because of that I lost my wife. I lost my boy. I lost who I thought I was. Became someone—something—else. We’ll get to that. You can’t come right at it: like some memories it’s too tender to touch directly.
While I’m clarifying, here’s my foundational tragedy, as I see it: it’s probable that I burned a boy when I was young—a cousin, in the woodshed, badly, with gasoline, deconstructing model rocket engines—but knowing what I know about this world I know I can’t be sure. And if I can’t be sure, what does it mean that I was accused of it, that as a result my side of the family got disconnected from the other side, me cut off from all the cousins I spent every Thanksgiving and summer and Christmas with, on account of blame and how my parents treated me and how their siblings treated them after the event. What does it mean that I have a corridor just like this that replays the scene for me in my weaker moments? The scene is by now only that: a scene, a little fairy tale I tell myself over and over. I try not to tell it but still I tell it, or it tells itself: The Boy Who Burned His Cousin Badly While Believing He Could Summon Demons with Model Rocket Engines. I don’t remember it, not really.
You’d think that doing what I do I’d be able to keep a better hold on all of my memories, that I’d understand them better. That I’d be in control. Nope. I still get flashes of this cousin’s face, and then of running into the house, of finding my older cousin who was supposed to be watching us but was instead getting high as was his habit, tuning in and out of playing video games and performing unnecessary repetitive actions like climbing and descending stairs or equipping and unequipping various bits of gear for the sake of it, wondering if somewhere within the game he would discover some secret bit of code equivalent to the sort of cheats he remembered reading about in gaming magazines from his childhood (someone must have discovered them—by sheer repetition, no less), and chuckling darkly to himself at something that was less than obvious to me. I still get flashes of me interrupting his reverie, pulling on his shoulder, and trying to get him to take some action, get off the couch, dude! I need you now, dude! time to hero up! I remember saying (and even now thinking about it thinking what an odd thing that was to have said: did I even say it or did I later invent this bit of wit?), and his shruggy response, like he had been tethered to the television and if disconnected he might wither. And after he was finally cajoled into action how he freaked the fuck out and ran around in circles shouting to some god whose name I can’t remember, and how it was me who had to dial up 911 and get the flames extinguished. I remember what it smelled like, that burned flesh, how the mesh shirt my little cousin was wearing got embedded in the burn and even after it was removed in surgery the pattern remained. That pattern is what I remember more than anything else: a diagonal grid with little holes that must have looked hard-core in the 1980s when we believed that was what the future was going to look like: everything mesh and made from plastics, parachuting fabrics.
Everything’s still mesh but it’s not made of plastics. It’s made of memory: little bits of lace, intertwining everywhere. All of it made up of lattices of code. What you see and feel: it’s illusion. If you know where to find the seams you can pull them back and see the pulsing fabric underneath. If you want to. If you have the money.
My cousin’s still alive. His face still holds the evidence. I’d bet he has a whole complex of corridors devoted to it, to me, to that summer we played together, that summer we practiced incantations and launched rockets into the sky, believing in our futures in spaceflight or necromancy, and how it ended. Demons never appeared to us even after we sacrificed the neighbor’s dog. We never went to space. But there was a fire. We summoned mineral spirits and, with the engines, they conflagrated. Gasoline fumes caught and we barely got out alive. I think. I mean I believe. Or maybe I was told. I keep being told. I mean that I really can’t be sure anymore and I don’t know what that means or how to change.
Being inside this thirteen-year-old makes me miss my boy, or the future of my boy. He’s not thirteen yet, less than halfway there, but he’ll have built up level after level of his own, only some of which I will be in. Children’s memories are stronger and stranger than adults’ memories, as you might expect. Everything’s exaggerated, like in a funhouse, if you’ve ever been in one of those: every slight and every pleasure, each embiggened. And things interconnect in ways that defy explanation, even when you’ve been through enough of these systems. Children don’t yet have the body of experience that walls off one story from another: instead they mix and bleed. Mapping them is risky work. Because of this we almost never enter someone before they get through adolescence. It’s just too volatile. But an adult’s memories of childhood are much stabler. Still, they can change—all of us can change, sometimes even without our knowing it—and the labyrinth can shift, get rewritten, with just a chance encounter or a little nudge. What you think is fixed isn’t. The brain keeps working until you’re dead, and even a little after. Or if you’ve migrated some of it to the servers it can continue whirring and clicking and rehashing everything it knows for a very long time indeed.
It’s particularly thrilling to be nine years old or younger in a memory. Being there you become nine too (or you’re superimposed: you can know what you know and think what you think, but you’re also aware of the pull of the emotional tenor of the child, which is more powerful than you remember, having lost some of that urgency in your adult life). You can see why some people get addicted to it, reliving at the expense of living. That’s one reason why we get sunsetted out after ten years, and get moved from client to client. It’s easy to become dependent, to find yourself too familiar, to begin to think of the client’s lovers as your lovers, her friends as your friends, her family as your family. You lose objectivity and start to miss things. And the longer you’re in strong memories, your own begin to shift. You can’t take them on exactly: memories can’t straight-up migrate from one mind to another, but you develop secondary systems of them: just as it’s possible to confabulate a memory from an experience you’ve only heard about, over time you can start to build your own simulacra from what you experience in a client.
Some of the client’s memories date back before her teens, but they’re only useful in how they crosslist and spider underneath the teenage years. No one doubts their veracity. They provide circumstantial evidence for evaluating these corridors. We took a little detour into one where she was four and eating oranges from wide steel bowls. She would keep eating and eating and never get full, her face—our faces—smeared with pulp and juice and building up, layer on layer, like a citrus cocoon.
We’re not supposed to know about the client. Nothing identifying. None of her data is provided. But you learn fast when you’re in the tunnels. You can’t help but be the protagonist in the memory. Being this thirteen-year-old watching her father masturbating, you start to figure out what and who she is and how she got that way. She looks, well, not the same now, but it’s not hard to connect the dots. She’s very well known. She’s had some facial work done. The breasts, obviously. If I told you her name you’d recognize it and we could get into the pop psychology, a side hobby of everyone who gets to come down here. Because of this we sign our nondisclosures, which are ironclad and spiked with scary legal language. This is also one reason why we work in teams of two, one human and one companion-construct, since one person’s voice can be ignored if we were to break protocol and leak something somewhere later. And who’d believe me anyway? I can’t export any evidence, can’t take a sex tape back with me. They search and wipe your logs and metadata when you come out, so each time when you return, you’re clean: you’re new. And so all it would be is whatever fragments I could secret away in my own memory and keep hidden through the cleaning, which isn’t much. What I could tell people is worth zilch since I’m easily discredited.
They only employ the compromised.
Celebrity or not, this memory—this is one of the abuse, down that other corridor—is painful to look at or just to know it’s there. I knew it was. I knew it was coming, so I’ve left it for the last. Being inside it is intense: one of the difficulties of the job is managing how easily emotion oozes from the experience, how completely you are filled by it. I’m breathless even pressed against the walls, as far as I can be from the action at the center. The painful thing is how sensuous some of the details are. There’s this moment with his smile that’s directionless—what could he be smiling about?—but almost loving. A focus on the skin around a mole. The rising of her body in spite of itself. The pointless, undigestible shame. It’s basically just a machine, the body. We shouldn’t ascribe so much meaning to its automatic processes. How much she hated it—that rising, and how it’s become complicated through years of analysis. A snippet of a song comes in and out. It’s familiar but I can’t identify it. Maybe “I Love a Rainy Night,” I think, distorted and looped, but the more I hear the repeating bit the less I’m sure. I can’t quite hold it long enough to tell. I don’t know what that means, but I make a note.
