Memory Wire

(Years later she tried to return, with the idea of making some kind of apology to Rosita, achieving some sort of reconciliation … but the neighborhood had grown much worse, and her Guatemalan family had gone away. Just packed and left one day, an elderly neighbor told her, nobody knew where or what happened to them—except for that Ruy, of course. He had been killed in a knifefight.)

She put together a makeshift studio in the Floats off Long Beach, invested some money in supplies, acquired a new source for the small black pills. She learned that they were laboratory synthetics, synthetic enkephalins, very potent and very addictive. But that didn’t matter: she could handle it. She knew what she was doing. She began to meet other Float artists and understood that she was not alone, that many of them depended on chemical pleasures in one form or another. Some of them even used Exotic stones, the oneiroliths from the Brazilian mines. But that was different, she thought; too strange—not the thing she wanted.

She could not say exactly when her habit got out of hand. There was no border she crossed. It didn’t interfere with her work; strangely, the opposite was true. It was as if the thing inside her that created art was spurred on by her addiction—the way a dying tree will sometimes produce its most copious fruit.

She did sometimes, in her lucid moments, notice a kind of deterioration. She perceived this as a change, not in herself, but in her environment. Her studio was suddenly smaller: well, yes, she had moved into a cheaper one, saving rent. Her image in the mirror was gaunt: food economies, she thought, making her money go a little further. It proceeded in such gradual increments that nothing seemed to happen—nothing at all—until she was alone in a corner of an ancient bulk-oil terminal with a dirty mattress and a jar of medication. A jar of happiness.

She knew it was killing her. The idea that she was dying eased into her mind so cleverly that it seemed to appear wholly formed and yet familiar. Yes, she thought, I am dying. But maybe dying in a state of grace was better than living in a condition of unrelieved pain. Maybe it was a kind of bill come due at last: maybe, she thought, I should have died in the fire.

But anorexia and malnutrition had made her ill, there was physical pain in her knees and elbows, she was feverish much of the time. For relief she went back to the pink-and-yellow spansules—added them to her now almost exclusively chemical diet—and they helped for a time, but in time the pain reasserted itself. She would have welcomed death—her massively abused body cried out for it—but she could not bring herself to attempt suicide. It was as if she could sneak up on death but must not approach it directly; if she looked death in the face, some force inside her would recognize it, cry out in protest, pull her back from the brink. The frustration left her weeping.

She knew Byron Ostler vaguely: he was one of her dwindling circle of friends, not an artist but a dealer in dreamstones. In constant pain now, frightened of taking too many of the spansules, she reconsidered the idea of using an Exotic stone. It made visions, her artist friends said. Well, she did not want visions. She had had too much of vision. But visions, at least, might force out the demon of pain. It was worth a try.

She was careful to avoid seeing the pity in his face when she approached him. She held out the money in her hand. Only a very little of it remaining now. But he wouldn’t take it. Just blinked at her through his moon-shaped lenses, this ragged veteran in his threadbare fatigues, and gave her a stone. It was small and faintly blue and oddly shaped; when she took it from him, casually, it made her hand tingle. “Do it here,” he said.

“What?”

“As a favor to me,” he said. “Do it here.”

The visions were intense. She was only tranced out for a couple of hours, Byron said, but it seemed like infinities. She saw, like pieces of a mosaic, the distant world of the winged people. She danced like a whirlwind through history. Strangely, although there was much of misery in what she saw—and grief, and pain—she derived a certain strength from it. From the vigor of it, she thought: this river of life, twining in its endless double helix.

She saw, too—for the first time—the little girl who would occupy so many of her dreams.

The girl wore rags for clothes, athletic shoes bound with twine. “You have to look for me,” the girl said solemnly. “You have to find me.” And Teresa discovered that the imperative was there inside herself, and maybe had been all along… find her, yes.

Byron fired up his motor launch and took her back to the studio down south. Except it was not really a studio. She could see that now. It was a filthy corner of an abandoned warehouse. She looked at her jar of pills, appalled.

“I can bring in a doctor,” Byron said.

She shrugged. She was dying, she was resigned to it, she told Byron so… but even as she spoke, she felt a new reluctance welling up. “I want to do the ’lith again,” she said.

“Then let me bring a doctor. And some food.” He looked around. “And maybe clean this place up a little. Christ, it’s a pit.”

She agreed.

Withdrawal was agony. The doctor Byron brought was a refugee MD who shot her up with vitamin supplements and charted her neuropeptides on a hand monitor. When the ordeal was finished, Byron coaxed her to eat again.

Health came as a shock. The world took on brighter hues; food tasted better. She began to work again. With some money coming in, she found a place nearer to Byron. She began taking long walks out to the tidal dams to watch the weather sweep in from the sea. She had not stopped wanting the pills—the doctor had said it was a craving she might never lose, burned too deeply now into her neurochemistry—but the dreamstones seemed to take away the edge of the need. She did not understand much of what she saw in her stone trances but she attempted to incorporate it into her work; she did the first of her crystal paintings, a bright Exotic landscape.

She was aware, too, that Byron had fallen in love with her… aware that she did not love him.

For a time she tried. She moved in with him; they made love with dedication if not passion. But it was a failed experiment and they both knew it. He wanted her, he said, but he didn’t want her as payment.

It made her feel cold. She tried to reassure herself— and maybe stake out some independence—by taking other lovers among the artists she knew, but the effort was finally unsatisfying. Maybe, she thought, she had lost the capacity for love; maybe it had been burned out in her addiction.

Her obsession with the oneiroliths deepened. Byron introduced her to Cruz Wexler, the academic who had written two books about the ’liths and who ran a kind of outlaw academy on his threadbare estate in Carmel. Wexler, a middle-aged man with guileless features and a progressive and untreatable emphysema, was enthusiastic about her artwork; he had agented some of it to his wealthy friends. So she had money again. She refurbished her studio in the Floats; she invested in tools she had never been able to afford.

And when a new unease began to overtake her—a sense that she had gone as far into the ’liths as she could go, and was still lost here, incomplete, on the margin of her own life—it was Cruz Wexler who hinted at the existence of a new kind of ’lith, a deep core ’lith, a ’lith that might answer her questions.

The eagerness she felt was almost physical. “Can I get one?”

He smiled. “None of us can get one. I’ve talked to people in the research compounds. The lid is down very tight.”

It was a huge disappointment. The stones Byron grew, for all their strange access to the past, had not resolved the mystery of her early childhood. She had occasionally glimpsed the fire—a chaos of smoke and flame—but nothing of herself; she did not know where she was born or when or who her parents were. The memories, Wexler said, were too deeply suppressed. And she had come increasingly to believe that the thing she wanted was hidden in that darkness: a well from which she might draw out a shining key and unlock herself, become a new thing altogether.