The Gnome Stories, page 6
Each chamber had a microphone into which you could speak or sing or coo or whisper all your secrets to the dead. The thinking was that, as with coma patients, perhaps there was a connection to be preserved by intimate human speech. The more intimate, the better, the visitors were told.
What they were not told was that these messages were recorded. I didn’t find this out until a year into my employment, when they’d asked me to splice and isolate and loop a couple of hundred samples from the reassurances, as they were called. I’d bragged about my abilities with software at the interview, and someone had made a note, my supervisor Denise told me, and so this was an opportunity to use those tech skills, a chance to move up and increase my investment in the company, and vice versa.
I had assumed that the mics were there for the visitors, placebos to preserve the semblance of connection, to ensure that they felt included in the process, which was of course ongoing and costly, of pointless preservation, but I was wrong: Denise explained that research did show some lingering effects of consistent human speech on the cryogenically preserved. As if it had some cellular effect. Like consciousness? I asked, bedazzled. No, she said. But it was an effect! They weren’t sure yet what it meant, so specialists sorted through the recordings of the reassurances, what was said into the microphones, and spliced out reassuring bits that would be looped and played daily to the clients in the absence of visitors. It was hard, she’d said, to keep up with the visitations. You probably noticed this since you’re a keen observer, obviously, she said, with a bit of a wink that even I, oblivious as I was to social cues, picked up. Families and friends move and die. They have lives. They go on. With the reassurances, we can be sure that the clients receive communication in an ongoing and consistent manner. That’s what we want you to do today, she said. Screen these tapes and identify the reassuring bits. Edit them down and save them in this folder. Have a good time, she said.
I loved doing this. What I heard, however, was not largely reassuring. There were, to be sure, pretty overtures of love and support, the sorts of things that you’d write on a Get Well Soon card. More often than not, though, you’d get a voice rambling on to the client about the troubles and intrusions in their daily lives: I was in the Fry’s Grocery down in Tucson, you know the one on Speedway and Pantano, and I was in the checkout line, and the checkout girl, I know you don’t call them that but what do you call them when the checker is a girl? At any rate the checkout girl was flirting outrageously with a man in line as his groceries, a depressing lot, frozen pizzas and chicken nuggets and wine coolers, not a vegetable to be seen, and the man was married, obviously, I saw his ring, and well you know me, I was never one to hold my tongue and I did not and things got rapidly out of control from there, you wouldn’t believe what this little bitch … and at this point I clicked that one off and flagged it for deletion.
The reassurances got sadder, though, when they edged into confessions, in which visitors unburdened themselves to the pretty-much-dead at length. I wonder if that helped, having a handset in which to speak, knowing that your words wouldn’t go anywhere. Except of course they did, to me, their accidental confessor. I have to say I listened raptly.
These shook me. When I asked, Denise explained, pressing her hand down onto my shoulder and gesturing at the screen: the reassurances fell into several different sorts of language act. There were the confessions, the one-sided conversations, the expressions of anger and abuse, declarations of affection, stuff read out loud into the mic for no obvious reason, songs, and other. Code it using the chart, she said. Sometimes you’ll need more than one code per message. And go back once you’ve coded those that you’ve flagged as appropriate and clip them down into loops of sixty seconds or less. It doesn’t matter how much sense they make. I asked her: What do I do with the other stuff? She said just code it; recordings with the right code get deleted automatically every night. We can’t save everything.
So here I was in charge of what the dead would listen to on loop, which messages got conveyed and how. Listening to one story someone was telling on the headphones, not a good one obviously, since I sort of faded out, I thought back to a story Sharon had told me that she had been told by this guy she was with on this caving expedition, like down in a cave for three days, no light no exit no nothing, and how spectacular that was, how it felt unlike anything else she’d ever felt, our whole relationship included, being there in the darkness and how you find the need to fill it, and on day three this guy, of course it was a guy, had told this story as they were camped out around their LED and their coldserve food packs about how he and a friend were camping in one of the national forests north of here, up in the mountains, and they were pretty high on mushrooms at this point (of course they were, I said to her), and they were out wandering in the woods, his friend and him, and they came across a gnome. A gnome? I said. Yep. They brought it back to the camp and some stuff obviously occurred without their noticing it, and the next morning they got up—sober now, or more sober now—and looked at each other and the guy asked his friend, So did we find a gnome in the forest last night? Yeah, his friend said. We brought it back. We gave it some dog food since it seemed hungry. I don’t know what happened then. And they unzipped their tent and sleeping by the ashes of the fire there was a kid, like a three-year-old. It turned out, as they’d find out later, that the kid had been abandoned by his parent, or maybe parents, in the forest; turns out that happens sometimes, especially with first-generation immigrants from certain other countries with kids who had special needs; it was real fucking sad but it was true, which made it not racist, he said; and fair enough, I guess; and they’d found the kid wandering and hungry in the forest and thought he was a gnome and they had saved his life. They’d brought him back and fed him and given him water, thinking all the time they’d found a gnome and fed it, and they were heroes, they were told eventually when they got back within cell phone range and the cops came and took the kid. They were able to track down the parents, and I don’t know what happened after that, but the guys got citations of bravery or valor or were otherwise compensated by the Forest Service or were given lifetime passes to camp on national forest land.
I’m not sure why that story is the one that sticks with me of all the ones Sharon told, but I think of it a lot, what it might have been like for the kid to have been dropped off out there all alone, for who knows how long, looking into the darkness, like it might have been fun for a couple of hours, depending on the kid’s disposition and willingness to run around and hit shit with branches, but I think of the moment where he must have maybe realized that this wasn’t going to change, that this was how it was now for him, just him out in the wilderness, and I can’t even follow that thought further without tearing up, and then I think about the parents or probably parent, I’d imagine, it being harder to imagine how two people could have come to this, and what that might have felt like to them later, like what the shape of their guilt or shame was, and what they must have felt they deserved when the cops showed up in their driveway and carted one or both of them off.
The thing is, though, that people disappear in national parks all the time. There’s this whole database of missing people that this guy Sharon knew had been putting together. He was writing a book about it, those gone missing in Park and Forest Service Lands, which he pointlessly abbreviated PFSL. For some reason, she said, they weren’t counted with the regular missing persons by the police. And so there were no data on them anywhere, and people went missing more often than you’d think in national forests. Sure, I said, I could see that, getting lost or whatever. Or murder, she said, or abandonment. And so her friend was compiling all this data, calling all the parks and trying to document it and see what the data had to say. She was fascinated by this. She told me all about it as we cruised through one of the many unincorporated cities outside the highway rings that form the outer and theoretical outer-outer border of the Phoenix metro area. There might at most be a couple of buildings or something industrial or a gas station. They’re called Census-Designated Places (or CDPs), and are populated but unincorporated, pre-towns, perhaps, not exactly within the law. She had a thing for driving through them, trying to understand something essential about Arizona that had given rise to so many CDPs. I think the one we were going through when she told me about her friend was called Wittmann. I only know this now because I looked it up, trying to cement its memory. Some stories seem to make a home in you, and asserted themselves when you were idle, I realized, and I wanted to remember where this one started burrowing, and I could thank Wittmann for that.
In life, Sharon had surrounded herself with these fringy friends, those who’d opted out of big parts of the culture because of how they looked or acted. It made for interesting and occasionally interminable party conversations, yes, but these were the sorts of people who most people weeded out of their lives. That she hadn’t seemed like either generosity or inertia, and I wondered what that said of me.
The bombings didn’t escalate so much as spread throughout the city apparently unplanned, like the city itself. Someone blew up a payday loan building that had recently been closed because payday loans had been outlawed. Another one—that now offered not payday loans but payday advances—sprang up right behind it, overseeing the ruins of the first. It took less than a month to clean, sort through, and recertify the demolition site for redevelopment. I watched it happen on my drive in and back each day. I followed its progress as the forensic trucks came and left and then the hazmat trucks came and left, and the tape came down and the hole was filled in, the contractor signs went up, the rubble got carted away to some godforsaken chunk of desert, and here it was, the new foundations and steel girders, the promise of another future, and then another business, and soon if you didn’t know you wouldn’t notice it had gone.
The group that claimed responsibility for this particular event called itself the Small Hand. They did it and would keep on doing it for reasons I forget. We are in your city, they wrote, among you all the time. That wasn’t news, but the news reported it like it was. If you didn’t know that the Core Facility was here, for instance, you’d have never guessed. The signage was unassuming—though it looked grand in its pyramid, the credit union down the street looked grander, an inverted pyramid twice as tall and half again as wide, even less architecturally viable. You couldn’t drive by it without wanting to blow it up, I thought: how easily it would fall! The facade of the Core Facility had seen better days—the sun fades things fast down here—and so it gave no indication of the extent of the storage tunnels underneath the thing. So who knows what other secrets this city held? Most of Phoenix was this way. It felt like everything was concealing something: a terrible secret; a day care; a pyramid scheme; a crime scene; that this building had been built on Indian remains, cursed ruins, or irradiated ground. In fact, Terry had told me once, most of the companies based in Phoenix aren’t even real. Eighty percent of the locksmiths, for instance, listed in the search engines in Phoenix don’t actually exist. Companies pay, he explained, to insert fake images in the street view database so that a store appears where none exists. It’s a redirected calling center to someplace elsewhere that will rip you off.
I wish I could say I was surprised but after Sharon’s death nothing felt new to me. Most businesses didn’t exist. Bombers were among us. Everyone who’s here, I figured, came here to leave some wreckage behind: ripped-off relatives, angry customers, a spouse you killed and interred in a lake, lawsuits, disgruntled and impregnated student interns, just-healed stab wounds to the gut, who knows what. I’m not from here. Who is? So the prospect of bombers in the car behind me slowing to a crawl in traffic and sizing up my block, well, there was something about the city that sometimes made me want to blow something up too. Why had it taken them so long?
I clicked into the middle of a reassurance, someone dirty-talking to a client, and I had to rewind to locate the beginning since obviously I wanted to hear it all. What did it mean, I thought after superhot baby pussy this and oh oh oh oh fuck me daddy that, to dirty-talk the dead? I looked at the file to see if we had video, which we didn’t. Did this count as reassurance? I filed it under “other.” It got me a little hot, the thought of it more than the talk itself, I should admit, and I made a note of the locator code and took a break to cool down, avoiding Denise, since how do you talk about how you feel about something like that with your flirty supervisor?
Walking through the passages in the B wing of the Core Facility I was struck again by how intestinal they looked, how they weren’t smooth and clean like you’d expect, but kinked and serpentine. The thought was that architecture from organic forms might have advantages, as Denise had explained, over space-age steel and glass and lines. The A wing was like that, all straight lines and glass, what we thought the future would look like fifty years ago, she said, and those in residence there skewed older. There were still spaces in A wing for those, though, but B wing had started to fill up. How do you want your future? they might as well have asked, when they asked A wing or B.
Sharon was B wing. It was cheaper and Terry and Charles both skewed a little hippie, in case it isn’t obvious. Their home was filled with African carvings and beads and rugs. Charles had actually been in Africa when she was younger, she had explained, and brought a lot of it back with her. I believed the story because why not, but she didn’t seem like the kind of woman who had gone to Africa. The four little elephant stools that came together to form a table were kind of beat up now, and the ivory on one of them had broken. There was no point in throwing that ivory away, she’d explained, when I asked, feeling transgressive for a change; I mean, she said, the elephants that gave their lives had already given their lives, and throwing the ivory away wouldn’t change that. Really its display honored them. It showed that these elephants existed. In their way they did still, only as stools. You couldn’t sit on them without thinking about what they used to be.
B wing was where the facility was running a long-term study to see if the architecture made a difference on the conditions of the clients. Maybe only one person really thought it would—I got that sense—but why not, everyone else had figured. The more research the company seemed to do, the more legit it appeared.
It took a little doing to figure out where Sharon’s body was housed, and while I hadn’t yet lit up the tube where she was kept, I now walked by her on my rounds. You had to input a code to pull the screen back and light the tube. The computer made a note of every tube that got lit up for a visitor, and the lighting up of the tubes activated the recording. Walking by her tube was as far as I had got with my obsession. I didn’t know if even I wanted to see her preserved in there. I mean, dead was dead. Still I felt a little charge every time I turned the corner and saw her number pass. I would slow my gait a bit, run my hand along the white plastic of a cooling pipe, pretend to check an LED light or the numbers on one of the adjacent tubes. They never changed.
The weird thing was that the gnome story didn’t go away. I was at another party—in spite of the bombings there were more parties; there were even bombing parties with bomb-themed drinks. I thought it was in bad taste, honestly, but others said it spoke of our resilience! And besides, parties were the only times I saw other people, really, except for Terry and Charles, and so parties were how I marked the passing of time—and so I’d go to them, and at one, someone else was telling the story. I was pretty drunk by this point and into the lonely stage of the evening, even surrounded by people, and I walked into it. They were in a circle, the party guests, or the ones who wanted to cluster outside. It was Terry telling it. I watched people’s faces open in disbelief. I watched them more than I watched him. He’d embellished it with more details now about exactly which drugs they had taken, and how high they were. The park had changed: it was now on a mesa in New Mexico. And it was him camping, now, out there, with these guys who brought back the gnome.
I was overcome with disgust at these changes, the shift in ownership, though I couldn’t say why, it’s not like a story’s yours and yours alone, especially when it’s a spectacular one and you share it. So I had no reason to feel the way I felt, I admit it, and when people started laughing at the reveal I shot Terry one hard look before I walked away. He was wearing a ring of their approval. I didn’t know if he could read my face then—or ever, really. But couldn’t he see that the story’s sad? I wanted to tell him, to tell all of them, but didn’t. I wanted to say that’s your dead daughter’s story you’re telling, but I guess it didn’t matter because I didn’t say it after all.
Instead I went to the firepit out back and warmed my hands on it. I got my hands as close as I could to the fire without burning them, but I could feel them heating up. I wondered: How long could I take it here like this? I could hear them all behind me laughing and following up with questions. The night was cold. From here you could see the little glow of far-off fires down the mountain somewhere. Maybe they were natural.
The bombings continued, though with even less effect. I couldn’t always tell what had been bombed and what had been abandoned after a half-assed frenzy of development, so it was increasingly obvious that Phoenix was a poor choice as the Small Hand’s primary target. You could track their escalating frustration that their work had not yet achieved paralysis, the desired effect. Even their story changed. First they were anticapitalist, then they were singing the many charms of Phoenix even as they blew it up. I followed them on Twitter. Their tweets became increasingly histrionic, railing against the perils of late capitalism and urban sprawl. They occasionally got into online fights about the hockey team that used to be the Phoenix Coyotes and was now the Arizona Coyotes and in a year wouldn’t be anything at all, having moved to Las Vegas or Winnipeg or Oklahoma City.
