Uranians, page 4
Andrew’s hair products are waiting for him on his doormat in a coy little blue paper bag. It’s his special stuff, for receding hair. System 2: Noticeably Thinning. “Oh,” he says, delighted. He looks around, startled; his jaw clenches. He was literally, literally just with his therapist.
• • •
ANDREW PLANTS HIMSELF at his dinner table with a legal pad and a plastic hotel pen. He’s printed out an instruction page for restoring the Aleph’s factory settings from inside Privacy Mode, which should erase any automatic triggers. Technological literacy was never Andrew’s strong suit, but when called upon, he can muscle through. He writes a note, for whatever shadow self waits on the other side: DON’T BE A JERK. Under it, for good measure: AND DON’T CHICKEN OUT. Nothing can be worth splitting himself in two like this.
It’s dusk; the windows are a murky blue. The living room furniture darkens into dense forms. Andrew reviews the instructions one last time before entering Privacy Mode.
First, he notices the changed light—now, the living room lamps are all on, it’s as bright as day. His pen is snapped in half and his hands are covered in oily, blue smears that fill in the fine crack-work of his palms. Andrew is shaking. In the living room, Madeleine perches on her black music chair, laying her flute in its velvet case.
“Did I say anything?” he asks her.
The cat paws at a paper airplane on the floor. Madeleine picks it up and sends it sailing toward him. It’s the printed instructions.
“Madeleine, please!”
“I’d like nothing better than to tell you,” she says crisply. She collects a stack of folded laundry left tied by the front door. She says over her shoulder, “She lives with her choices, Andrew.”
The legal pad in front of him is blank, the first page missing. Andrew looks for something to wipe his hands with and wonders where he goes from here. He should call Medo: no one holds him to his purposes like his little sister. It was her idealism, her faith in higher principles that kept him in law school when he wanted to quit. Together, they were going to save the world from itself. Madeleine carries her flute case on top of their laundry into the bedroom and shuts herself inside.
But Medo doesn’t live in the city—she doesn’t live nearby—she drives a ride-share, runs odd jobs, gig-economy stuff, somewhere—so the idea makes no sense after all.
• • •
HE LOVES MADELEINE, and she loves him. He can hear her trailing him, her patent oxfords grinding on the flagstones: “Andrew, please slow down.” They’re both in tuxes, and the others heading to the War Memorial Opera House are likewise in gala costume. The premier is Götterdämmerung, but underwater. A new production. Madeleine played the leitmotifs for him on the piano, with a look of solemn instruction, so he’ll recognize them during the show. He loves her, but maybe she does stand in for something more than herself: charity galas, formal wear, silent auctions. Is that what he’s unfaithful to? What about his life doesn’t he like?
On the borders of the plaza, through the strange lamppost sycamores, uncertain shapes run past, carrying backpacks or cloth bags. He can’t quite see them; the light is too vague, mixed, the dusk blues polluted by the giant ad screens on surrounding rooftops. The opera patrons flash lurid red and voluptuous purple. What, he thinks, doesn’t he like about his life?
Maybe there’s an aspect of the Aleph subpoena matter so confidential—a trade secret so valuable—that the Aleph Corporation set him up to forget it when he’s not actually working on it. It’d be ingenious security. He’d recommend it to them; but not on himself.
Would they have done it without his consent? Now there’s a lawsuit.
Civic Center Plaza has three-story advertisement screens that flash into the night, like those that still paint Times Square. New York is gone now; most coastal cities are. Couldn’t adapt to the rising oceans fast enough: a lack of vision, a fleeing tax base. The Port Authority runs gondola tours through the drowned city, Park Avenue by moonlight, black water stippled in white streaks up to the Grand Central Mercury; Times Square still flashing, its iconic, obnoxious ads preserved. Reflected images burst across the water, royal blues and lipstick reds, sunken TV shows and drowned Broadway revivals, beautiful, obsolete faces, washing over shadowy tourists standing astonished in their boats. Civic Center Plaza can’t rival Times Square—Andrew’s not sorry for it, but he does sympathize, in a morbid way, with that instinct to memorialize humanity’s pinnacle achievement in bad taste.
An Aleph ad comes on, two giant human eyes carefully searching the plaza. The irises’ striations are glacier-blue and flow with streams of binary digits. KNOW EVERYTHING, the ad says. Not unfriendly, those eyes, but so big and godly they can’t not be ominous. Andrew will have a talk with Aleph Corp about the ad, it’s just awful. He cranes his head. He sees one or two others in the plaza staring at the words, craning their heads in the same expression of shapeless regret.
In the theater, the sopranos toddle out in antique diving suits and sing by opening their faceplates. Madeleine whispers, “This is so stupid, I’m so sorry.” Andrew is sobbing helplessly.
• • •
HE GOES TO get his implant checked. It’s embedded in his soft palate, sending filaments into his brain from underneath. “I never use it,” he tells the neurodentist, “but I think it’s malfunctioning, going into Privacy Mode when it shouldn’t. Like an automatic trigger? Can you disable it?”
The dentist looks knowingly at him in the weird aquarium light. Her whole office is under sea level, a design fad in offices along the Marina District piers: turn a problem into an aesthetic. The floor dances in wraiths of gray-green light. One wall is built of fully transparent vitreous stone and through it, white fronds and scraps suspend in dead water.
The neurodentist has three instruments in Andrew’s mouth when she leans close. “I can’t say you’re the only person who uses it like this, Mr. Cornejo-Holland, but it’s not a good idea.”
Andrew’s eyes grow wide; he can’t swallow, but gurgles something like a nervous laugh. “There are things you need to know,” she says.
• • •
HE’D BEEN WALKING along the old beaches south of San Francisco with Remedios when she told him her vision of Hell. This was near thirty years ago, before those beaches disappeared into the rising, dying ocean. Remedios was thirteen and dressed for swimming, but she wrinkled her nose when they saw the ocean’s color—that day, it was lavender-gray, and its waves slopped viscously, like liquid velvet. The smell, too: salt rot, dead kelp. Andrew (Andrés, then) had come from his community college, having survived his first moot with the debate club, and still wore a short-sleeve button-down and tie like a Latter-day Saint, but carried his shoes in his hand as they walked. “What I want Hell to be,” Medo was saying—because she had a mind like that, an intellect that felt entitled to grab into life’s most difficult crevices—“What I want Hell to be, is the perfect knowledge of everything you did in life and what happened because of it, good or bad. You feel exactly how much you hurt or helped people. All the pain or joy you caused, you feel it yourself.”
At their feet, and stretched out as far as they could see, were hundreds and hundreds of spiny pink prawns, dead and washed ashore, such that their corpses traced the morning tide line. Medo stepped around them, her face antagonistic and precise. “That way, you’re punished if you did mostly bad things,” she said, “and rewarded if you did good. See? It’s elegant. But you’d have to know everything you did. Like, when you scowled at the bodega guy and it made him feel like dirt, so he beat his kid that night. I guess we’re in for some shit, for gas-driving here.”
He can’t remember what he said, but he remembers looking back at his car parked by the carbon-poisoned beach—the last car he ever drove. And he remembers—Medo had to shout over some awful machine drone that carried down from the city. That crashing, that grinding, a chorus of generators, engines, cranes, jackhammers, backhoes, and pumps, grinding, groaning, growing.
• • •
THE CITY IS storming when he finishes at the office: one of the new San Francisco storms that tear the sky into pieces and throw it into the bay. Hail, thick as eyes. Diseased rain vomiting into the water, sending waves crashing against the Presidio’s seawalls. Andrew is drenched and totally wired as he splashes from Laguna Street into his condo lobby. In the bedroom, Madeleine is sleeping, her ears plugged with orange plastic that looks like blood in the storm-light. Andrew, too buzzed to sleep after finally finishing his brief, strips down to his underwear and pads barefoot on the treadmill. The storm thrashes outside and he’s giddy with the thrill of change. Everything is new, he thinks mysteriously. Everything is fast and risky, and different. He feels his heart breaking and his cock plumping at the same time, but he’s high on adrenaline and accepts his middle-aged body’s imprecision as part of the new world’s logic.
Madeleine stirs and turns on the lamp. Its glow falls over Andrew’s large feet clapping on the treadmill. “Oh, hey,” Andrew says, grinning. “Can’t sleep?”
Madeleine jackknifes out of bed and crosses to the window. Weather always upsets her.
“I’m going to win this one, Maddie,” Andrew declares, and he turns up the treadmill speed so that he’s running. It’s nearly two and his eyes are sore for lack of sleep, but everything in him is driving forward. Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! He outruns the waters pooling through Laguna Heights, swamping gutters, sending up death smells. “The feds don’t have a chance.”
Madeleine smooths her hair down the back of her head. “Come to bed?” she says. “I’ve got a pill if you need it.”
“Need it?” Andrew laughs. “Hey,” he says, “hey, check the left breast pocket of my suit jacket. Something came for you-u.” He never knows what to do with Madeleine’s remote moods; she’ll never explain, never say what’s gnawing at her, so he’ll play it into a kind of marital caper.
But Madeleine doesn’t smile exasperatedly or even angrily wave him off. She slumps, and a look of dread steals over her face. She retrieves the box from his suit and finds the gold spangle earrings he’s bought her. “Oh, oh sweetheart,” she says mechanically.
“You don’t like them?”
“You know I love them.” She sighs. She crosses the room and tosses them inside a drawer without looking. Her face in the storm-light takes on a new bitterness, even rage. “Andrew!” she says. “Get off the treadmill. It’s crazy! You’re insane, do you realize that? No one does this!”
Andrew slows the treadmill, and they fight. The details of the fight, like all their fights, are hazy and he recalls only the broad fact of one the next morning as Madeleine leaves for the conservatory. The sky has stopped convulsing and now hangs in a sort of stupor. Andrew goes to the bureau drawer—he can’t remember the fight, but he remembers her picking that drawer—and inside he finds a dozen identical pairs of gold spangle earrings. His mind runs into a wall.
• • •
HIS THERAPIST LOOKS at him blankly. Then her face creases into impatience.
“You’re not telling me things,” Andrew says.
She rolls her eyes slowly around the room. “You need to start taking responsibility for yourself,” she says. She raps her pen on her palm.
“Why won’t you be straight with me?” He adds stupidly, “I’m paying you.”
Her glance skewers him. “You’re paying me not to tell you, Andrew.”
• • •
“THERE ARE LACUNAE,” Andrew tells the judge, and immediately regrets it. The senior judge scowls from high on her bench. She looks like a crab from this angle. Salty, hard-shelled—unimpressed with Latin. “Gaps,” Andrew clarifies, “in the law.”
A witness can’t be forced to self-incriminate, so memories locked away in Privacy Mode cannot be subject to compulsion. That’s the logical extension of the Fifth Amendment, although Andrew acknowledges the Framers didn’t provide for exactly this scenario: so, lacunae.
Behind him, people are entering and exiting the courtroom, and the heavy wooden doors creak and slam and slam.
The judge orders the data subpoena quashed. She reads off her ruling from the bench, an impassioned defense of civil liberties that draws applause from the gallery and rouses even Andrew’s old lionheartedness. They’ll teach it in law schools next year; he might even get an award. But, leaving the courthouse, Andrew has no memory of the order, only an impression. He’s tired and disappointed, because this is one more thing he’s taken away from himself, though he can’t tell whether it’s the forgetting or the judge’s order that’s made him feel this way.
A tickle of recognition tells him the deposition transcript is ready for him. It’s beside the point now, but he still wants to read it, and he fishes in his breast pocket for his Wi-Fi glasses.
His fingers brush something delicate. It’s the gold spangle earrings—which, of course, he doesn’t remember putting in his pocket.
Before he knows it, he is again at the old BART entrance in UN Plaza.
The tunnels are flooded, and yet his steps are so certain. He knows what’s down there—an inaccessible part of him knows. He can remember, now, the sounds his shoes have made on the stairs, the special clap of his soles on the rubber traction strips. He’s been down here; he’s been down here a lot. He recalls the strange, stale, cool air, the aftertaste of metal and grease and filtered air. But it’s no subway. “U” for Under. The BART entrance isn’t anything like a BART entrance, not really. It looks like one, but that’s just nostalgia.
DEPOSITION TRANSCRIPT (p. 118 of 253)
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) But what legitimate use could that have? Criminal activity--that’s the obvious utility.
A: (by WITNESS) Well, trauma, for example. We’ve developed relationships with providers and it’s very effective in managing, um, intrusive memories in treatment. So, like an abuse that’s -- the patient and his therapist decide that’s a memory that needs to be walled off and, um, reintroduced in a structured way. That’s my understanding of it.
Q: You’re not a mental health expert yourself, correct?
A: I’m a neurophysiologist. No.
Q: You’re not aware that, in fact, blocked memories are a symptom of PTSD? A pathology, not a treatment?
A: I am generally aware of that.
Q: And you don’t require a therapist or a doctor to sign off on such a use of Privacy Mode. Anybody can wall off any memory or even any subject matter they want to hide and it’d be inaccessible in an investigation.
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) I’m going to have to object to that. Compound. Calls for a legal conclusion.
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) I’ll rephrase. Let’s say, OK, let’s say you want to forget what happened to San Francisco. It’s too quote-unquote traumatic, so just forget it.
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) Objection.
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) The flooding, the refugee riots, just too painful. Put it away. The food shortages. The killings. Let’s forget all of Unfrancisco itself. Forget it exists. You could do that, right, without a doctor’s approval? Set it up yourself?
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) Objection. Relevance. Speculative. Compound. Argumentative.
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) I want the record to reflect that deponent’s counsel is using an extremely loud voice and striking the table very aggressively and violently.
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) Objection. Objection. Objection.
• • •
SO DOWN AGAIN, into the undercity. As I hurried into the phony BART tunnel, my legs remembered before I did and carried me into a ride-share. The Under-Plaza was scrambling with giggers, running deliveries across town in canvas bags, or pedaling on bicycles with groceries in the basket, to cook a dinner for some rich jerk like me, or dashing up the stairs waving dry-cleaning bags like a flag. I got a ride to Noe Valley from a sunken-eyed kid with a hipster chignon and wisps of blond beard floating around his chin. With me in the back seat were deliveries for some next job: a fresh baguette that filled the EV with the smell of hot bread, a giant jackfruit that must have weighed twenty pounds and cost more than that day’s commissions. These were the people I’d forgotten, daily, nightly, the poor kids running the city out of the corners of my eyes. I looked back through the rear windscreen to see the city I knew as a boy: hills, dipping down into asphalt ravines, rising right into the false sky; historic buildings’ porticos and paneled double doors, their higher floors refitted to open identically onto a new surface city; knolls of fake grass where parks had died sunless; false maples and ginkgoes hiding air-filtration machinery and broadcasting ads for soap, sitcoms, or vacations always a hundred more jobs out of reach. Under their chatter, the churn of the pumps in the seawalls keeping the swollen bay from flooding the undercity.
It had all happened so slowly, and still so fast: the seawalls built higher, higher—no one really knew how high they’d have to build to keep up with the Big Melt. Roof gardens became roof lawns, roof parks, but the rich wanted sun and just kept building, building, higher, higher—the Big Lift, we called it hopefully. No one was so tasteless as to call it the Rising Tide that Lifts All Boats, but we all kind of thought that.
The news shoved images at us: long flotillas of bodies lacing drowned shantytowns. Madeleine cried and wrote checks, cried and wrote checks, then one day stopped crying.
We’ve done what we can, Andrew.
Forgetting is a human right. That’s what the judge’s order said. I remembered now: All progress contains the decision to not look backward. Our State of California cannot exist except by forgetting the claims of the people who were here before us. The peace of mind we struggle to keep in this terrible present depends on a certain mental distance from those who didn’t survive the crisis, or who now survive so miserably. There is moral failure here, no doubt. But the moral imperative, when wielded by the arm of the law, too easily slips into tyranny, and this Court will not midwife that tyranny to pursue one alleged criminal.
