Кори Доктороу - Make Shift - Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

MOST PEOPLE WHO ACCESSED THE INTERVIEW ARCHIVES WERE LOOKING FORsomeone specific: a parent, grandparent, another relative. If they could prove the relationship, they could access the file by name. With other search criteria—a location and a place, for example—they could get detailed but anonymized accounts. There was also a function allowing for randomized snippets, an attempt to make the whole thing a bit more fun and social-media palatable.

Maybe some researcher would extract some life-changing, otherwise missed bit of knowledge from the archive someday, but Chela kept thinking about the people who went in trying to find their relatives. Did they feel satisfied after listening to their family stories told to someone else? Did they feel loved? Loving? Guilty? Wronged?

How would she feel if her mother was only willing to tell her story when she thought she was telling it to someone else?

Maybe she already had? Chela checked the archives, but there was nothing under her mother’s name.

SHE WAS FLUTTERY BEFORE HER INTERVIEW WITH THE SIXTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD WOMANfrom Maryland. Surely she would know immediately whether it was her mother, even if her voice was distorted? There had to be enough details in the early part of the interview for her to figure it out. On the other hand, how many sixty-two-year-old immigrant women lived in Maryland? A lot. How much did their experiences overlap? Probably quite a bit. Would there be enough specifics in the backbone questions for her to be sure? Would it be latitude or responsible professionalism if she asked the questions that would confirm it?

Chela initiated the call and waited for the response. It was the first time she had ever really wanted to see her avatar; she didn’t want to be wasting all this time stressing over some white woman who had nothing to do with her.

No answer. Chela panicked, called her mother, then realized what she was doing and hung up.

Her mother called her back ten minutes later. “¿Qué pasó? I was busy but then I saw your call.”

“Nothing,” Chela said. “Butt dial.” A desperately anachronistic concept, but her mother had loved the idiom when she discovered it, back when Chela was a teenager, and they still used it for that reason.

The (other?) sixty-two-year-old woman called her back two hours later. “I’m so sorry, I forgot, is now okay?” Would Chela’s mother be so flustered about missing something? Maybe for a stranger. Was it her mother’s voice, distorted? She wasn’t sure.

Normally Chela would have said no and insisted on rescheduling, but she was so worked up she thought it better to get it over with. “No problem, these things happen.” Soothing, that was her interviewing persona. Her mother would never recognize her in it.

There was a silence. It was time for Chela to do her intro talk. Instead she blurted out: “Why did you request an interview?”

She held her breath, waiting for the woman to say my silly daughter works with you and she kept bugging me until I decided to just get it done and then maybe won’t she get a surprise when I tell her triumphantly I did it . But the woman sighed and said, “I don’t know. I have some things to say. Sometimes it’s easier to tell these things to a stranger.”

Yes, that could be the reason , Chela thought, even as she made a note to offer this woman who might or might not be her mother the list of therapists provided by the organization, with a special note on those who practiced the talk therapy. That could be why Mami wouldn’t tell me. Meanwhile, the sixty-two-year-old was off, talking about her life and her difficulties and her long-ago childhood. She was an excellent subject, verbose but clear, with interesting stories from an interesting if unremarkable life, and she wasn’t Chela’s mother.

EVEN SO, WHEN SHE CALLED HER MOTHER THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCH TIME, SHE FOUNDherself expecting at every conversational turn for her mother to come out and say Guess what? I did the interview you’ve always been wanting me to do .

“Mami,” she said when she couldn’t take it anymore. “Why don’t you want to do the interview?”

Her mother, who had been telling her some story about her prima Graciela and her kids, stopped and looked at her. “Hija, if it means that much to you, I’ll do it.”

Inside her head, Chela screamed. Of course it means that much to me, I’ve been asking you to do it for months, how could you not notice ? “I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to,” she said, calmly. At least, she hoped she sounded calm. “But I don’t understand why you won’t. All those things you’ve been through…” Chela paused, searching for examples, for the right examples. “When we were kids, and you had to deal with the pandemic, all by yourself. Or when you came to this country, and found a job, and what that was like. Or when there was that riot here, and you were working the whole day and couldn’t get home, had to sleep at the shop at night… Those things are important. Don’t you want us to know about them?”

“Ay, hija,” her mother said on a long sigh. “Don’t you know, these things, they are not so easy for me to talk about?”

Chela didn’t know. Of all the reasons she had imagined for her mother not talking to her, the idea that it was difficult, painful even, had never occurred to her.

“I didn’t think you needed to know those things. I thought you just wanted me to do this thing for your work.”

“No, Mami!” Chela almost yelled it. “I don’t need you to do that for my work, I wanted to know for myself ! So I could understand.”

Her mother dabbed at her eyes, and fussed, peering at the screen to check her mascara. “Look now, I can’t cry here, I have to go back out to work.”

“I’m sorry, Mami,” Chela said. “I just want to understand you, and—”

“And you want me to tell all this to some stranger who will record it in a machine, so that other people can listen to it whenever they want to, for posterity you say?”

“You don’t have to,” Chela said, forlorn, and also a tiny bit resentful that she had been put in the wrong so effectively.

But her mother went on: “If you want to know about those things, of course I’ll tell you. If you want you can even record us talking or qualquier cosa que haces. But I don’t want to talk about all of this to strangers.”

“Of course, Mami, of course I’ll do it with you.” Chela was sniffing now too, and thinking about how she would show her mami the way the app worked for her, the spinning colors of the randomization, so unnecessary and so pleasurable; the mystery of the avatar; the coding, even. But probably her mother wouldn’t care enough to pay attention to all those minutiae, probably she was exaggerating what it would be like, as usual, pinning her hopes up too high. “When’s a good time? We—we can even do it in sections if you like, if you don’t have time to get through it all at once. Should I come over?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we could do it like this, on a call, instead? It might be easier.”

Chela swallowed her disappointment. Her mother needed the distance. Since she was making the effort to talk about things she didn’t want to talk about, it seemed only fair.

“But tell me, hija, why do you care so much? You know all these things that happened.”

Chela held back it’s my job because that was only partly true and because she wanted to meet her mother’s willingness to talk about herself at least halfway. “I might not know all the things, and anyway I’m sure we remember them differently,” she said, aiming for a reasonable tone. “Also…” This was harder. “I guess… I listen to old people’s stories all the time. I want to hear yours.”