“How’s work?” she blurted, and instantly regretted it. Talking about work with Beatrice never went well. She found her sister’s ramblings about her clients’ schemes and plots incomprehensible, and Beatrice just assumed that Clara never wanted to talk about her job. But what else was there to talk about? For two people who had grown up together, they had remarkably little to converse about. They no longer knew each other at all.
“It’s fine,” said Beatrice, absorbed in answering an email. “Just let me finish this. If the food gets here, start without me . . .”
Clara decided she would order the lobster roll.
Beatrice tapped away, her thumbs deftly sliding around the glass. “Can you believe the defendant would have the gall to claim that my client stole the idea from her? She says she has authenticating deposits, but she’s dragging her heels on giving me the laptop. She must be artificially aging the memory right now, and I need my useless assistant to expedite the request for production . . .”
Clara’s hands still tingled, and she massaged them reflexively. Even with gloves, it was impossible to avoid stings completely at work. Phones came down on the conveyer belt, one every thirty seconds. It was her job to inspect and wipe off the residue from the workers in the distant factory-cities across the Pacific in which they had been assembled.
The last phone before her lunch break had hurt her. Her mind had been drifting, and she had picked up the phone with her left hand directly instead of using tongs. Most phones, after all, were coated only in mild anxiety or mind-numbing boredom, perfectly safe to touch. Without examining it closely, she had given it a few wipes with the cloth in her right hand, soaked in the foul-smelling high-tech solution that was supposed to break down even the most crusted-over memory deposits. It had taken a few seconds for her mind to register the burning pain in her left hand, as though she were holding a live wire.
Despair, exhaustion, the terror of loneliness, and the paranoia of failing. Climbing high, higher, even higher. A moon hung in a hazy sky, serrated at both ends like a broken tooth. A passing breeze redolent of chemicals that burned the nose. The factory laid out below like a model, a map. Thoughts of jumping, leaping into a wind that would lift her skinny arms like a bat’s wings, a wind that would never actually come. And then hurtling toward the earth, yearning for the ultimate peace.
A server brought their food. Beatrice continued typing. Clara began to eat.
It shouldn’t have happened. She wasn’t like Beatrice. She was normal. Normal people couldn’t interpret the details of the memory deposits of strangers. It took intimacy to build that resonance of minds, to create memories together, to become vulnerable to the pain of another. Only mood and emotion, dampened by the distance of language and culture and the barrier of the self-preservation instinct, should have come through, a faint echo of a tingle.
But sometimes it happened anyway. When the suffering was intense enough. After all, she had glimpsed the chiaroscuro of anguish and manic joy that was Lucas’s world the first time she sat down in his wicker chair, before she had even known his name.
Beatrice held the phone up to her ear and spoke into it in a harsh, low voice. “No, I don’t want you to draft a memo! Just call Perry and explain what we need. This isn’t rocket science . . .”
Worst of all, Clara could tell it was the memory of a young woman, barely more than a child. She could see those slender fingers held up toward the moon, hear and feel the high-pitched keening in the back of the throat, like a creature trying to claw out.
What happened to that girl? she wondered. Did she go through with it? Please, God, no.
She was almost done with her sandwich. She slowed down, lingering over every bite. She didn’t know what she would do with herself when she finished. She wished she could talk to the hunched-over figure across the table, now absorbed by the screen again, to understand her and to be understood.
The contract manufacturer had tried to scrub the workers’ deposits, the detritus of an industrial process that turned humans into components. But the result had never been satisfactory. Despite all of Silicon Valley’s yearning for disruption, they hadn’t been able to figure out how to cleanse memories attached to objects without the participation of a human being. And since they didn’t want a buyer in America to unwrap their brand-new phone, only to be burned by the anguish of a foreigner, to be infected by a psychic wound like a virus—didn’t lifestyle gurus all say it was important to insulate oneself from the suffering of others, not to be dragged down by negativity one was powerless to stop?—they hired American workers to sit in warehouses to clean the phones and then to coat them with a spray of anonymized all-American fresh-product good cheer, as though things were not made by people, but by robotic elves. The manufacturing sector had collapsed in the USA, but there was always emotional labor to fall back on.
Assembled in China. Cleaned in America.
Clara had turned the phone in, and the supervisor had said they would look into it. Most likely nothing would be done except to destroy the phone as defective. But what else could she do? Her own life was such a mess; she had no room for the troubles of others. Why was a stranger’s pain being thrust upon her? She felt a dark wave filling her, exuding from her skin, depositing onto the plate, onto the tablecloth, onto her chair: resentful, selfish, guilty, furious.
Is this what it’s like, always, for Beatrice? To live the memory of another as soon as she touches a deposit?
The wave receded but did not fully retreat. It lapped at the shores of her heart, a murmuring undercurrent.
“Sorry.” Beatrice put away the phone and started on her salad.
Maybe this is why she always gets a salad, Clara thought. So she doesn’t have to worry about the food getting cold.
It was impossible to bring up what she had just experienced. They were so far apart that she couldn’t imagine creating a shared memory that would do anything but hurt them both.
“I went to see a cleaner the other day,” Clara blurted. She couldn’t understand why. She hadn’t meant to bring it up at all.
Beatrice’s fork slowed down. “For Lucas’s things?”
Just hearing his name spoken aloud was torture. “Yes. Everything.”
“It’s definitely over, then?”
Over? What does that even mean? Lucas had left without taking anything because he wanted to be “free”—free of her, of memories, of the weight of a life together that had become suffocating. Maybe it was over for him, but how could it be for her when being home was like being in a minefield? Touching anything brought back an explosion of flashbacks, of hurt.
“I haven’t heard from him in two months. I thought it was time to move on.”
Beatrice nodded. Clara waited. Beatrice resumed working on her salad.
Clara stewed. She didn’t want to hear I told you so. But this silence was worse. Even more judgmental.
“I thought you told me once you had some good times too.” Beatrice’s tone was oddly subdued.
Clara was surprised. Beatrice had never liked Lucas. “It’s messy.”
“Always.” Beatrice seemed to shake off whatever was bothering her. “It can feel good to use a professional cleaner. As long as they’re reliable.”
“He’s interesting,” Clara said. “He can’t feel deposits at all. He’s memory-blind.”