Beatrice stopped reading. It was all such high-minded nonsense, chicken soup photographed in a studio to be peddled as wisdom. The art was always better than the explanation of the art.
The plane banked, and in the shifting sunlight, she saw the rainbow hues scintillating in a haze over the plastic arm, a jumble of externalized psyche. She wondered if the artist had ever intended her work to be consumed by someone like Beatrice, someone who, when touching a memory deposit from a stranger, sensed not only moods and emotions, but discerned the details of the recollection with photographic precision.
It was hard to make anyone else not like her understand. Everyone thought a prodigy like her had an easy path to riches and happiness. After all, hadn’t a guy, after he had gotten his hands on the Codex Leicester and run his fingers over every page, become a prominent inventor with ideas that many suspected were derived from Leonardo da Vinci? And that woman who begged to be allowed to hold Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti Lettera 32 for a few minutes before it had been auctioned off—she had become a bestselling author, though one dogged by persistent allegations of plagiarism that couldn’t be proved.
Clara thought Beatrice threw herself into her work because she was too pleased with her talent, but the truth was it was an escape. To be able to glimpse into the lives of others, without even intending to, made true intimacy impossible. She never wanted to go to friends’ houses, to borrow a pair of shoes or a dress, to accept anything that had been steeped in the memories of anyone she cared about. You never wanted to know the people you liked and admired too well; it was impossible to reconcile what they wanted you to know with what they didn’t. Few people were better than they remembered.
Moreover, it made you doubt yourself. When you were so open and attuned to the experiences and feelings and deposits of others, what thoughts could you claim to be original, nonparasitic, not derived, stolen, copied? Even as a child, she had known what it meant to be old, to be confused by the layering of different selves as one aged—she had touched their parents’ deposits, and then recoiled at the contradictory messiness of it all. That was why she hoarded possessions, piled them in her apartment: not just to protect her own secrets, but also the secondhand confessions, the baring of other souls.
Better to be paid to dig into the lives of strangers, a transactional invasion sanctified by law and custom. Clean.
She put the book away, picked up her phone, and began to work again. She was certain that if she could get her hands on the laptop in question, she could prove that the defendant’s authentication memory was faked. There were always ways to tell when a deposit was staged—a clock they forgot to reset, the position of a shadow and height of the sun, the crafted sense of ersatz reality. And no matter how thoroughly they cleaned it, the original memories always clung to something: the bottoms of the keycaps, the inside of a port or slot, the seam between the screen and the cover. She was a forensic memory tracer like no other. She could do it.
But the book that Clara had given her called to her from underneath the seat in front. She could not focus.
There was an imbalance between her and Clara that could never be bridged. It was harder, much harder, for her sister to know her than vice versa. Her childhood friends and her family were the only people she loved whose secrets she knew because she had seen them before she learned to keep her distance. She had to separate herself from them, to be apart, in order to know who she was and to know them the way they wished to be known. To allow others the space for secrets was the greatest gesture of love she knew how to give, but did they understand that?
She had once loved to draw, loved to tell stories to herself as she ran the pen over the page, fusing a memory into the drawing, a scene that came to life when she was done, running her fingers over the inked grooves. But she had stopped. Art was too open, too naked. Someone who could perceive the raw memory deposits of others was especially paranoid about revealing the self. She preferred to type than to write. She tried her best never to leave a personal trace in the world.
Except . . . when you did that, you also stopped conversing with yourself. Leaving deposits and examining them was how people understood their own story, how they grew.
But Clara had understood her. She was reminding Beatrice how she loved art, the beauty of the kind of deposited story that only she could make and appreciate. Just for herself. Not a performance for an audience.
She put away the phone and picked up the art book again. As she read and touched and absorbed the lives of strangers, she also imagined being back in her apartment, the phone off and forgotten, herself absorbed in creation: a box of objects that held the deposits from each year of her life. As she held each, she would sort through the memories and retell them in a whisper, adding in the forgiveness of age for youthful impulsivity, the appreciation that she had once been so fearless and gloriously beautiful, the understanding of a character arc that made sense only when a life had been mostly lived . . . She would never let anyone else see it, not as long as she was alive.
She sat still as the plane crossed the vast sky, casting an imperceptible shadow on the earth below.
Clara
She tried to imagine the life of the man who could not sense memory deposits, not even his own.
Everything must feel new to him, she realized. He could just buy a secondhand shirt and put it on, not worrying whether it would give him a memory-rash. He could just browse through the library stacks without gloves, unconcerned with whether the previous reader had been suffering from depression.
He’s not afraid of touching, doesn’t get bothered by anyone’s pain. But that would also include his own.
So he would also forget. Nothing he did would leave a mark, not unless he consciously and constantly reminded himself of it. He would lose that most unreliable, fragile, unwanted but also faithful witness of the very nature of existence, the exuviated skin of a mind growing through time.
Am I much better off, though?
She twirled the four-color pen, letting it tumble-walk across the back of her hand and catching it just before it fell. The periwinkle bands in the haze held bright gold specks, brighter than they had been in her deposits in a long time.
She still couldn’t believe she had forgotten that episode from their childhood together. Though she had never gone out of her way to keep mementos, she had believed she remembered enough. The inevitable sediments felt to her vaguely unhygienic, an aspect of being human that was unpleasant, like crusted sleep in your eyes when you woke up.
But she had forgotten; she hadn’t even known something was missing until Beatrice brought it back to her.
What else had she forgotten? What other scars had healed over and vanished? What joys faded and then sloughed off? What other parts of herself had she left behind in the basements of long-ago rental units, the hands of strangers who picked through her moving sales, the trash heaps in landfills that slowly fermented and rotted in the rain, leaching her memory, along with the memories of millions of others, into sewers, rivers, ocean currents, to be carried to the deep abyss where pale ghost crabs skittered over them, attendants at the final oblivion?
She looked at her cramped apartment, suddenly spacious because Lucas’s possessions had been removed—no, not his possessions. They were also hers. They had fused their lives and bought things together, during that time when he had claimed that she gave him strength, made him want to be a better man. She had been calling them his only because he had been the one who didn’t want to throw them out, not even when they had become worn and outdated.