Robert Wilson: Memory Wire

He could hear the fascination in Byron’s voice. Byron had come into the military a college draftee, and when he was excited, curiously, it was the working-class patois that dropped away—he began to use words like “redundancy.”

In the fogged depths of the Chemware vats, Keller discerned the faint colors and cloudy shapes of new, nascent stones. Mineral life. He felt their strangeness like an aura.

“They’re indestructible,” Byron said. “They fracture along their axes of symmetry, but they cannot be burned, drilled, or dissolved. Theoretically, if you could collect all the Brazilian stones in one place, you could put them together like a puzzle. Topologically they’re mostly orthorhombic or triclinic—those are the most common shapes. No one can say exactly what they’re made of. The evidence is that they’ve been engineered—the substance of them has been engineered—down beyond the subatomic level. Complex micropotentials propagate along the axes of symmetry, which is how the lab people tap in. Their observable physical properties are very strange, and it has been suggested that they exist in several more than three dimensions.”

“Serious medicine,” Keller said.

“Serious indeed.”

“You used it,” Keller said, “to save her life.” He saw Byron’s expression harden in the dim light. “You could say so.”

“You care that much?”

There was a pause. He said, “I’m not drunk enough to have this conversation.”

Keller persisted, “But you’re worried about her.”

“I’m worried about Brazil. This new stone. Not just that it’s physically dangerous.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think it’ll be okay. I really believe that. Maybe better than okay. We go down, we come back, she finds what she wants. Maybe we have a life together.” He added faintly, defensively, “She might consider it…”

“And if she doesn’t find what she wants?”

“Then she might die. She might let herself die. This time I might not be able to stop her.”

Keller slept half drunk, riding the swell in a bamboo-frame bed and dreaming of a manioc field in Rondonia. Large words circled like birds inside him. Amnesia, agnosia, dysphasia, aphasia. In the dream he could only see the left sides of things; when he spoke, the words came out skewed and hollow.

He woke at dawn with a halo of sweat on his pillowcase.

He bought lunch at a stall near the tidal dam. Byron arrived after noon, smiling blankly, and handed him an envelope containing his black-market ID, a passport, and a plane ticket to Brazil.

1. They arched up beyond the curvature of the Earth in an AeroBrazil jumpflight, briefly spaceborne; but the journey was not so much outward, Keller thought, as inward —into the Basin, into the strip mine of Pau Seco, into the past. Gliding down the arc of the trajectory, he wondered whether there was not some hidden momentum that had carried him here, his mind’s own traitorous clambering into the abyss of memory.

The wheel, Byron had said. It was a bad and persistent thought.

The plane banked toward the floating runways of Guanabara Bay, past the statue of Christ the Savior threadbare and alone up windy Corvocado Mountain. Last time he came here, Keller had been a nineteen-year-old draftee riding a military transport, and the statue dominating the mountain-top had been his first signal that he was entering strange territory: this weatherbeaten Christ, granite eyes unfocused, hands raised in mute blessing over a city as big as the horizon. Seeing it again, Keller felt his fingers tighten against the armrests. He had vowed once that if he were allowed to leave this country, he would never come back … an old but fervent promise, and it echoed with painful irony in the roar of the aircraft cabin.

“You all right?” Teresa asked, and Keller managed to nod.

“Be fine,” he said, thinking wu-nien, abstracting himself, retreating down the icy corridors of his cultivated aloofness—taking refuge there.

They had to wait overnight for their connection to the capital. Byron, extravagant with Wexler’s credit line, had booked them a room in one of the bone-white hotels overlooking the bay. “Only the best,” he said. But Keller had fixed his attention on Teresa, on her profile as she peered ahead through the window of the transit bus.

The image was spooling down into his memory chip, but most of this was wasted footage, trivial and hardly dramatic. Too, by the final edit she would have become a stranger, her features systematically altered beyond recognition: protecting his sources. Keller was, in his own wordless way, a journalist, and he understood the necessity of editing, of extracting significance from the raw ore of experience. Still, the finished product never failed to surprise him. He had felt that way about the last Network project he had worked on, an expose of the joywire underground. He had spent three months in hospitals, in lean-tos, in the grimmest recesses of the Floats. He had grown to know some of these men (almost always men, mostly combat veterans) who had accessed the deep reward centers of their brains and who burned out slowly, like wax candles, in the neglected corners of the urban nuclei. He thought sometimes that what he saw, the tertiary stages of their terrible addiction, must surely cauterize the wires in his own head, overload the circuits, defy memory. It had tested the limits of his wu-nien, his old Army training. He had cared perhaps too much about these people whose deaths had become inevitable.

The documentary aired in prime time and drew a respectable market share through the urban Pacific Rim. Keller’s footage was embedded among statistics and interviews and a pious commentary. The documentary was not exploitative, and he was not ashamed of his work; still, he thought, it was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat glaze of a video screen. Even the deaths he had witnessed—digital traces of his immediate experience, enhanced and polished for the final cut—had become squalid but somehow inevitable, a logical consequence of the schematic flow of events.

It tested his faith. Faith, he thought, was not too strong a word. He believed in what he was doing; he was not cynical about his work. The joy wire documentary had fueled the demand for publicly-funded rehab clinics; some lives had been saved. He believed in his objectivity, in his ability to become a dispassionate witness; he believed it was important.

And yet … in the face of such horror, wasn’t “objectivity” itself a little monstrous?

He talked it over with Byron after the documentary aired. “You dignify it,” Byron said, “with all these words. All the Angel Zen they taught you back in Santarem. But : maybe that’s not what it is. Maybe it’s a side effect from the neural harness. Flat affect. Maybe you don’t know how to care anymore, maybe you can only piss and moan over whether you care. Or maybe it’s something else.”

“What?”

Byron hesitated. “Fear,” he said at last. “Cowardice”.

No, Keller thought.

You cope, he thought, that’s what matters. Some things were simply too terrible to bear. You have to look away, that’s the truth of it… and if you cannot look away, you have to learn how to look for the sake of looking.

Vision without desire. The perfect mirror.

They rode an elevator up to their room, Byron pressed his thumb against the lock, and through the window Keller once more confronted the Christ of Corvocado Mountain across the blue angle of the bay.

This country made you, the statue seemed to say. This country is your mother and your father.

Teresa moved to the window, obscuring the view. “We’re wasting time here,” she said. “We should have gone straight on to the capital.”