David Brin: A Stage of Memory

“ Uh !”

Derek awakened suddenly from the drug-induced playback. He shuddered, and for a long time just lay there on the unkempt mattress, breathing.

The new drug certainly did release a charged, totally vivid experience. It also drew out the playbacks more rapidly.

All he had to do was somehow endure the next three years’ worth of memory recall. That’s all . At this rate it shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, real time. A few more weeks, then, if Bettide was right, it would be back to the golden years!

Derek had come to believe the drug did more than simply play back chemical memories inscribed in the brain. He was half convinced it actually took one back . Personally. And when the bad times were through he would be free once more to cycle back to childhood… to model airplanes and long summer afternoons… to ice cream and the sweetness of precocious first love… to a time when there were no regrets.

He got up, stretching to ease a crick in his back, and slipped a Diet-Perf dinner into the rusty old microwave. He barely tasted the meal when he spooned it down.

Derek got out the log Dr. Bettide had given him. Success depended on the physician’s goodwill, so he wrote down the times and places he had returned to… avoiding mention of the nasty little personal details. They were irrelevant, anyway.

He watched the Late Show on TV until, at last, sleep arrived. Then came the inevitable struggle with his dreams, trying to make them conform to his will. But they were not pliant, and had their way with him.

“Blakeney, just who do you think you are? This is the third time you’ve come in late and stoned, and gotten belligerent with the audience! We may be a small-time company, but we’ve got our reputations to consider…”

“Reputations!” Derek sniffed noisily. He had been doing a lot of coke lately and his sinuses stung. That only made him angrier. “Reputations, my eye! You’re a bunch of diapered juveniles pandering to tourists in a little uptown improv club, calling yourselves actors. Here I am, willing to lend you my name and my services, and you talk to me about reputations ?”

“Why, you conceited windbag!” One of the young men had to be physically restrained. Derek grinned as the others held the fellow back, knowing they would never dare back up their bluster with physical force.

“Conceit, my young friend, is a matter of interpretation. It’s all relative. Haven’t you learned that yet?” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “I try so hard to pass on what I know, yet the next generation is obdurate!”

One of the older youths stepped before Derek.

“Yes, Mr. Blakeney, you have taught us a thing or two.”

Derek smiled back benignly. But the fellow was not apologizing.

“You’ve given a bunch of hungry young actors an object lesson in the dangers of success, Mr. Blakeney. You’ve shown us how far the mighty can fall, when arrogance substitutes for self-respect. For teaching us that, we’ll slice you a percentage of the rest of the shows this month. It won’t be necessary for you to return.”

Derek snarled. “You can’t do that! We have a contract!”

“We also have witnesses to your foulmouthed abuse of paying customers, Mr. Blakeney. You can treat us like dirt beneath your feet, but mistreating the marks is something any court in the land will recognize as just cause. Sue us, or send your agent around. But don’t show up in person or we’ll call the cops.”

“Yeah,” one of the girls said. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll break your arm!”

Derek stood very still, his breath hissing angrily through clenched teeth. He dragged his memory for an appropriate quotation… something Shakespearean and devastatingly apropos to the ingratitude and treachery of youth.

He couldn’t come up with anything.

His mind was blank!

The blood drained out of his face and he clutched the stair rail. With a titanic effort he straightened his shoulders and turned so the young actors wouldn’t see. He was out on the sidewalk before he trusted himself to breathe again.

I couldn’t improvise a comeback to devastate those cretins! What’s the matter with me?

For an instant an unwelcome idea penetrated… the possibility that Peter had been right, that these punks were right.

The thought seared. It was too hot to be allowed to settle in. He drove it out by thinking about…

About getting high.

Yeah. Somewhere there must be a drug to help. Uppers did the trick when there was work to do. Downers helped him sleep. Somewhere there had to be a drug that’d bring back happiness.

All I need is a little peace. Then I could get my thoughts together. Make a plan. There oughta be a jizz to help me get through the summer. I’ll straighten out this fall.

Melissa won’t approve, of course. She’ll want me to clean up my act overnight—

What am I saying? Melissa’s been gone almost a year !

He felt very odd, like a man standing at a crossroads, undecided over which way to go and afraid that it was already too late to turn back. That sense of déjà vu returned again, filling him with a dreadful feeling that he had been this way before, and was doomed to choose wrong again. And again.

Unsteadily, he walked down Forty-seventh street, past the shops and the pedicabs, and the occasional licensed automobile. Flywheel jitneys hummed by, picking up tourists on their way to the Village or downtown.

Slowly, the unease began to dissipate. It was summer in New York. Hardly a time and place for heavy thinking.

I’ll go see Barney, he decided. Maybe he’s heard of something on the street. Something to get me up.

“They call it Time-Jizz.” Barney handed Derek a packet of white powder. “It’s the latest thing out o’ the Black Chemists. Man, this time they’ve really stolen a march on the guv’mint. Time-Jizz is the biggest thing there is now.”

“What it is, man? What’s it do, bro?” Derek unconsciously adopted the dialect of his supplier, mimicking the street tempo perfectly.

“Mooch-hooch, baby. With this stuff you can go back to any limber scene you ever had, and relive it. I mean, I tried it an’ it works! I went back to the best lay I ever had, and man, I found out my memory weren’t exaggeratin’ one bit. Mmm-mmm.”

Derek fingered the packet. “I dunno, Barney. A new blam-scam from the Black Chemists… I don’t want no junkie-monkey, now.”

“Aw, the shrinks have had this stuff f’years!” the dealer soothed. “Word is it’s safe. No monkey, for sure, babe. And you get to choose the time and place you go back and visit! Shoot. A deal like that makes you think them Black Chemists were really brothers after all, and not a bunch of old white syndicate clowns with Pee aitch Dees.”

The powder glistened in the light from a bare bulb. Derek stared at it.

“Anywhere or anytime I wanted…” he murmured.

“Yeah, man, you could go back to when you were suckin’ Baby Ruths and peekin’ up girls’ dresses.”

“My childhood was a boring crock.” Derek snickered. “Still,” he added thoughtfully. “It had its moments. Anyway, as the serpent used to say, why not?”

He looked up and saw the dealer was staring at him. “George Bernard Shaw,” he explained. “From Back to Methuselah .”

“Sure, man.” Barney shrugged. “Anything you say. Now about the price. Startin’ out I can offer you a real sweet deal…”

Derek came home to his cheap studio to find the mail slot filled with bills. He shut the door with his foot and let the envelopes slip to the floor. He poured a can of soup into a pan and stirred it over a hotplate. He contemplated a small vial of amber fluid, one of Bettide’s ampules, on the counter in front of him.