Robert Wilson: Memory Wire

“Like Ray,” Teresa said.

“Like Ray. Like everybody else. And it’s bad, it’s dangerous. It makes us conscienceless; in some important way I think it makes us soulless.”

But he had said much of this before. She remembered him at his estate in Carmel, a rambling Spanish-style ranch house he had bought with the money from his early successes, maintained—but shabbily—with the money funneled back through ’lith chemists like Byron, lecturing to a crowd of equally shabby Float artists. He had talked as grandly about the traditions of Paracelsus, the Gnostics, cryptic wisdom. Grandiose nonsense. And it had come down to this: a sick old man in a decaying float shack. It depressed her.

He must have seen her skepticism. He ducked his head; he put his hands on the table. Old hands. The skin was pale and papery, the nails gnawed short. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I get carried away.”

“I couldn’t bear it,” she confessed. “The stone. The Pau Seco stone. It was what I wanted. It really was. The memory. Myself. But … I couldn’t bear it.”

“I wonder if that’s true.”

She glared. “You weren’t there.”

“Obviously. But I think it’s what they demand of us.” He said gently, “It makes sense.”

She felt offended, obscurely threatened.

“It’s the part of themselves they withheld,” he said. “The part of themselves they wouldn’t give to the machines. A wealth of real knowledge. Time and history. But only between mind and mind, you understand? A whole mind.”

“I don’t want it that badly.”

“Maybe,” he said softly, “you need it.”

She stood up. Her head had begun to ache. He had come here and confused her, and that was bad. “You do it,” she said petulantly. “You be the one.”

His voice was faint. “It frightens me,” he said. A confession. “Distressing. After all this time. The gnosis. The real thing. But it frightens me.” He smiled hollowly. “Not only that. I think it demands a kind of innocence. Which I do not possess.”

“You think I do? You think I do?” Mysteriously, she was shouting. The words erupted from her, sourceless. “I’m not innocent!” She was panicking. She needed a pill. Quiescence. Peace. Her body cried out for it. “I’m not good!”

She ran for the door.

Byron had been listening from the other room. Wexler stood up when the chemist emerged. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I thought—”

“It’s the way she’s been,” Byron said. “I meant to help.”

“I understand.”

“Well … I should leave.”

Byron said, “You meant all that? What you told her?”

Wexler nodded.

“We can’t help her.”

“Apparently not.”

“But Ray could?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe.”

Wexler allowed Byron to roll out a mattress for him in the corner of the float. Too late to go back to Cat’s; his breath was troubling him. So he accepted the offer. Three people in this two-room shack.

He was awake when Teresa came home. She moved through the darkened room with the elevated grace of her enkephalin high. She had been an addict, and she was spiraling back into her addiction now with terrifying speed.

He had sent her perhaps blithely to Pau Seco. But in fact he had anticipated none of this… suspected, at least, that if a crisis came it would be a domestic crisis and she would be safer out of it. The arrangements had been meticulous, and he had put a vast amount of money into it, confident that he was guaranteeing her safety.

What he had not counted on was his own weakness.

So he owed her whatever help he could give. And so he had come here.

But the help she needed—as Byron had pointed out— was not within his power.

He slept and dreamed of a terrible and oppressive future, half men like Oberg riding out to the stars in warships, chitinous bodies of metal welded to flesh, protein circuits spiked into their nervous systems. It was not so much dream as prophecy, and he woke from it with a sense of imminence, a sense that this conflict—between Oberg and Teresa, between Teresa and her fears—would one day be played out on a much larger stage. That what they did here prefigured an enormity.

It was an oppressive idea. It was more than he wanted to believe.

He woke with morning light harsh in his eyes.

Terrible, he thought, to be so old and so frightened.

Teresa was cooking up breakfast; he resolved not to mention their conversation of the night before. He moved around her cautiously. Her attention was focused on the food.

It was for him, she said. She wasn’t hungry. He said, “Byron’s gone?”

“Gone to the mainland.” She regarded him across the table. “I think he’s gone to look for Ray.”

1. Keller was alone in the booth when Byron found him.

The lights were dim and the monitors running, images cascading across the tiny enclosed space: the Mato Grosso from the window of a bus, Pau Seco, the Ver-o-Peso. The audio was faintly audible on all these sources—ghost whispers from an ancient world. Keller said, “I’m surprised you found me.”

“I talked to Vasquez. He gave me a Network pass.”

Keller worked while Byron talked. His fingers moved deftly over the mixing board. He felt quite firmly embedded in his Angel training now, gliding over this memory landscape around him, an archeologist among the ruins of his own experience. On a dozen monitors the altered Teresa gazed palely across the docks at Belem, at a Japanese tanker moving with silent grace toward its harbor. All events converging, Keller thought; all of us moving toward harbor. He had been drinking a little.

Byron talked in a soft, persuasive voice about the Floats, about the shack he had rented there, about Cruz Wexler (who was impoverished and alone now)—finally, about Teresa. “You know,” Byron said, “she’s not really here. You edited her and you ran your programs on her and you filed her and now you think that’s her—this picture you made. But it’s not. I know how that works. It’s easy, and it feels good. But she’s not here.” He waved dismissively at the monitors. “She’s out in the Floats, Ray. She’s flesh and blood out there. And I think she would like to see you again.” He hesitated, then—firmly—“She needs to see you again.”

Keller turned away from the board. “You don’t understand.”

“No. I don’t. Definitely not. But I will tell you what I do understand. I understand that she is in a desperate situation, and that I can’t help her, and that she is wanting you so bad it hurts.”

“I can’t help her either.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

Keller said faintly—it made him unhappy to admit it —“We were together. Back in that hotel room with the stone. Together in a way you can’t imagine. She saw things—”

“You think …” Pure outrage in his voice. “You think that matter \s?”

There was silence for a moment. On the walls luminescent numbers counted down seconds to the minute, minutes to the hour. Past time, Keller thought, spooling away.

He had been awake last night, staring at the sculpture he’d bought at the gallery up the coast, the twin faces of it, woman and child verso. It fascinated him and it made him uneasy. She needed help. Well, obviously she needed help. Maybe she had always needed help.

I would go, Keller thought bleakly, but there are things I cannot face. Her fears and his had been connected somehow. The stone had connected them. She could not face the child in the sculpture; he could not face her.

He could not imagine this changing.

But… if someone is hurting, you help.

Wu-nien, he thought desperately. The Ice Palace. He longed for it; lately it had been elusive.