Memory Wire

They found a cheap room by nightfall. Byron went out with a fistful of coins: he wanted to make some calls, he said, “but not from here.” And maybe get drunk. He looked at Keller, at Teresa. Maybe definitely get drunk.

The door sighed closed after him.

Teresa pulled the drapes and switched off the lights. The room was dark as a cavern now, the roar of traffic from the main street loud in the darkness. She climbed onto the cheap sprung mattress where Keller was lying and curled against him. She was wearing the clothes she had worn from Pau Seco, and he could smell the oil from the truck and the pungency of her sweat. After a moment he realized she was shaking.

“Scared?” he said.

She rolled over and nodded into his chest. “We’re in over our heads, aren’t we? That’s what all this means. We’re in way over our heads.”

It was true, of course. Wexler had promised her an easy trip—“a vacation.” But the huge military presence at Pau Seco and the palpable fear in the eyes of Meirelles demonstrated that the project had gone a long way beyond that. Someone had taken an interest in them. The federal agencies, Keller guessed. Wexler must have been harboring an informant at his estate in Carmel. Or Wexler was the informant, or had confessed under interrogation. It didn’t matter which. What mattered was that someone had taken an interest in them—someone powerful.

Because he could not think of anything reassuring to say, he soothed her with his hands.

“You’re an Angel,” she said sleepily.

He nodded in the dark.

“Everything goes into memory?”

“What I see. What I hear.”

“Even this?”

He admitted, “Even this.”

“Who sees it?”

“Maybe nobody.”

“Who turns it into video?”

“I do,” Keller said. “I do my own downloading at the Network shops.”

“Would you download this?”

This conversation, he thought she meant; or more broadly, what had begun to happen between them. He hesitated. “No,” he said finally.

She traced the contour of his skull with her fingers. “You have wires in there.”

He nodded.

“They say it affects you.”

“It can.”

“Does it?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Memory plays tricks.” He looked into the darkness. “Just before they installed the harness, back in the military hospital at Santarem, I lifted a text out of the medical library. There was a list of side effects, what could happen if things went wrong. Blindness, amnesia, disturbance of affect—”

“Affect?”

“Emotional affect.” He smiled, although of course in the darkness she could not see. “Love, hate.”

“You have that?”

“I don’t know.” The question made him uncomfortable. “Sometimes I wonder.”

There was no way to tell her what this really meant. No way to condense the experience. He had emerged from the military hospital into a world of complex uncertainties. It was not the brain the wires had invaded; it was the essence, the self. Every perception became suspect, every emotion a potential symptom. So you learn,, Keller thought: you practise wu-nien very carefully… you become, in some fundamental way, a machine.

It was, he wanted to say, a strange combination of clarity and confusion. Like those nights when the fog comes in so thick you might as well be blind, but sound carries with great intimacy over startling distances. You can’t see your feet, but a buoy clanging out in the bay comes to you with that high, sad tonality all intact. He was able to register the distant bell-ringing of events, commerce, politics. He was good at it. But the fog concealed love. The fog concealed hate.

“It must be strange.” She was calmer now, drifting into sleep, nuzzled against him.

“It is.” But he was not certain she heard him. Her breathing grew deeper until she was limp in his arms. “It is.” He addressed the dark and silent room. “It is.”

They bused into the northern province of Para and stayed a night in Campo Alegre, on the Araguaia River. It was an old cattle town surrounded by corporate ranches; the accommodations were crude, the smell of the slaughterhouse reminded Keller unpleasantly of Cuiaba. They checked into a twentieth-century hotel occupied by the morose agents of foreign meat wholesalers, and surprised the clerk by paying cash. Cash was bad, Byron said, cash was conspicuous; but until they could arrange some black-market credit, cash was also a necessity.

Teresa invested in less obviously American clothes and a canvas bag in which to conceal the oneirolith. Keller had watched the way she carried the stone, the exaggerated care, her obvious desire clashing with her fear. What she wanted from it, he understood, was memory, and that struck him as dangerously naive—the idea that memory would dole out meaning into her life. Memory as buried treasure.

He knew all about memory. Memory, he thought, isn’t the treasure; the treasure is forgetting. But where was the stone, the drug or the pill or the powder, with that magic in it?

Teresa stepped into the room’s tiny shower stall and left Keller alone with Byron. Byron had been staring out the window, a view of the swollen Araguaia. Now, with the hiss of the shower filling the room, he turned suddenly to Keller and said, “I know what’s going on.”

Keller stared at him.

“It’s hardly a secret,” he said. “Christ, Ray. I’m not deaf. I’m not blind.” He straightened his shoulders, and the gesture had a pained and immense dignity in it. “It’s not hard to understand. And I don’t necessarily disapprove. If it’s good for her, all right. If you’re not using her. But the thing is, I don’t want her hurt.” Keller said, “Look, I—”

“You think this is easy for me?” He turned away convulsively. “I was like you. You remember? I know how it is. I had good Angel habits. I was dedicated. I did my job. And then I came back from the war, I had my wires stripped. You make these gestures. You think okay, well, that’s it, I’m back in the world now. But it’s not that easy. You carry a lot around with you. It’s not a physical thing. If you really want to be back in the world, you have to reach out for it, take hold of it. You have to care for something.” He drew in a deep breath. “I cared for her. It wasn’t an infatuation. More than that. More than that. Maybe it was love. Maybe it still is. She was my ticket back into the world, Ray. People find out you were an Angel, you know, they act strange. Like you’re some kind of zombie—the walking dead. Maybe I let people think that, or maybe I even encouraged it a little bit. It’s not so bad sometimes, being on the outside. But I did not want it to be true. You understand? I wouldn’t let it be true. And she was my way of proving it wasn’t true. I cared about her enough to save her life; I cared about her enough to come down here with her. I know how she feels about me. The sentiment is not mutual. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I cared and that I continued to care even when she slept with other men, and that I care now, when she is obviously falling in love with you. Because it’s the caring, the caring is what matters.” His fists were clenched; he faced the window. “Now,” he said, “maybe that’s hard for you to grasp. You’re still wired, you’re still deep in the Ice Palace, even though you probably think you’re not. You can look at her from that safe high place, you can allow yourself the luxury of falling a little bit in love. How fucking brave. But my wires are gone, Ray. It makes a difference. I’m not a machine anymore. I’m a human being or I’m nothing. A broken machine. So I care for her. And if she loves me, that’s good, that’s best of all, but even if she doesn’t, even if it hurts, as long as I care enough to let it hurt, then that’s good, too, because it means I’m really back from the war, that I’m here in the world, still breathing—” He rammed his fist against the arm of his chair. “Still flesh and blood.” Keller could only stare.