Robert Wilson: Memory Wire

“It’s hard work,” the medics warned him. “It’s not a free ride. Don’t even think it. If you’re an Angel, there’s an attitude you have to cultivate. Wu-nien. You know what that means, Mr. Keller? It means you’re a machine. You don’t think, you look. You don’t look where you want, you look where it matters. You are a camera, right? You’re not there to do the work. You are the work.”

Keller had understood perfectly. Byron had already taught him a little Angel Zen. To see without desire. The perfect mirror.

“You won’t be Raymond Keller anymore. What you want, what you care about, you have to learn to leave it all behind. You’re a pair of eyes, a pair of ears. That’s all.”

He thought it sounded pretty good.

That night, for the first time in a month, he slept without dreaming. In the morning they wheeled him into surgery.

5. Back in Grossman’s apartment Keller fixed himself a light meal. He needed to drop a few pounds, make himself lean, shed Grossman like a skin. When he had eaten, he gathered up the contents of the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, put them all into two shopping bags, sealed the bags, and carried them down the hallway to the building’s communal annihilator. They vanished into the metal chute in a puff of actinic light. Good-bye, Grossman.

He thought about burning his cards, decided to postpone the ritual. First he would call Lee Anne.

A sex agency had supplied him with Lee Anne. Buying sex on credit had been a novelty for him, but it seemed like something Grossman might do. He had hired Lee Anne on a short-term contract and expanded it to long.

She appeared on the telephone monitor as immaculately groomed as ever. How she managed this daily perfection in response to an impromptu phone call was a mystery to him: some kind of digital enhancement, maybe. She was beautiful in a manner that was rigorously contemporary, her cheekbones suppressed, her face heart-shaped, her eyes blue inside bright orange rays of mascara. She smiled… pleased to see him, or professionally seeming to be.

“I’m going away,” Keller said, already uncomfortable with the Grossman persona, wearing it this last time.

“For how long?”

“Long time,” Keller said. “I have to cancel the contract.”

She was silent a beat. “You should have told me.”

“I’m sorry. There wasn’t time.”

“Well.” She shrugged and smiled. “I wish we could have gone on. It was a good time. The best.”

It was a lie, but so professional that Keller felt a sudden pang of regret. There had been nothing between them but commerce and gestures, but for one terrible moment Keller felt the overwhelming urge to confess, to pull out of his commitment to Vasquez, to tell her how unbearably lonely he had been these past ten years. Worse: he wanted to put his fist through the video screen, touch her somehow through this insect tangle of optics and wire.

The image left him shaking. He forced a smile, registered his regrets, and signed off with his fists clenched at his side.

Wu-nien, Keller thought as he burned the last of the cards.

His Angel basic had comprised a kind of roughshod Zen instruction. Selflessness, fearlessness, focus. His master sergeant had been a Roshi of the Rinzai School. There was talk of the Three Pillars: great faith, great doubt, great perseverance. They were setting aside the mind. Everyone was very solemn. They believed—Keller believed—that it just might be true, that satori might lurk, mysterious enlightenment, among the oxbow lakes and green heron islands of the Amazon.

Wu-nien. He was an Angel. He was Keller once more. It was the ultimate objectivity they had all striven for: wu-nien, wu-hsin, no-mind, no-thought; only seeing, vision apart from judgment, vision without desire. The perfect mirror.

It was like a place, Keller thought; a place without love or loneliness or fear. A calm and brightly illuminated place in which the only memory was AV memory, clean and mutable.

He called it the Ice Palace.

He had come to that place again.

1. From the balcony of her floating balsa, moored deep in the tangle of tidal industries and boat barrios that had grown up where the coast jogs eastward from Santa Barbara, Teresa Rafael watched an old woman approaching across a pontoon foot bridge from the east. She set aside her pencil and thought, A customer.

She switched off the pencil and listened as its insect hum faded to stillness. She was an artist. A decade ago she had begun selling junk sculptures to the seaside galleries up Highway One—pinwheels oxyacetylene-welded to antique crankshafts, pachinko boards of rivets and sheet aluminum. Later, after Byron Ostler introduced her to the dreamstones, she took up softer media. Currently she was working on a crystal painting, a translucent plate less than an inch thick, shaping and shading its laminar depths with a homemade interference pencil. The piece, a landscape, was nearly complete. Green paddies stretched to a hazy horizon. The sky was a chalky shade of blue, and from it a flock of frail gossamer-winged people—a slightly darker blue than the sky—sailed down to a wooden pagoda by an irrigation canal.

It was something she had seen in a stone trance.

She looked up from her work as the door bell—an old cowbell on a twine pulley—sounded. Sighing again, she padded down and opened the door.

The old woman’s face was familiar. “Mrs. Gupta,” Teresa said. She encountered Mrs. Gupta periodically at the fruit and vegetable stalls out along the market canal. The suggestion of familiarity destroyed any hope she’d had of turning the woman away; she said resignedly, “Come in.”

Mrs. Gupta shuffled inside, frail in a faded yellow sari. “I don’t mean to disturb you.” Her voice was faint, her accent bleached by years in the Floats. “It’s just I heard… somebody said you do memories.”

“I do, yes. Sometimes.”

“Would you try? For me?” She peered up at Teresa through magnifying lenses set in wire. “I have money.”

“It’s all right… you don’t have to pay.”

“That’s nice,” Mrs. Gupta said placidly.

They went up to the workshop. Mrs. Gupta gazed enviously at the broad wooden floor, at the tall leaded windows Byron had liberated from a grain terminal out in the old city harbor. A balcony surrounded the second floor, and Teresa had hung spider ferns along the western wing of it; the ferns cooled and filtered the afternoon light. For the Floats her studio represented a luxury of space and air. She had subsidized it with cash from private sales; her artwork had been fashionable these last few seasons.

She could guess a great deal about Mrs. Gupta just by looking at her. A refugee, probably; probably one of the wave of displacees airlifted in from the Madras reactor accident decades ago. Since the unemployment riots of the twenties, the Floats had been in effect a borderless state, haven for refugees of all kinds, a collecting basin for the marginal people who could not survive in the crowded boom cities of the coast. People like Mrs. Gupta, Teresa thought. People like me.

The old woman said, “May I see the stone?”

Teresa brought it out from the drawer of an ancient wicker desk. It was not an original stone but a copy, grown in Byron’s overheated laboratory. Technically, her possession of it was a violation of federal and state law. But in the Floats such laws were seldom observed and almost never enforced.

Mrs. Gupta held it a moment in one arthritic brown hand. The stone had been polished but not faceted; it was an irregular octahedron the size of a grape. The peculiar latticing of its molecules drew the eye inward; the old woman stared. “People say they come from far away.”