The Memory Dealer
by Katharine Tyndall
There is a wash of water, the floor rears up to the darkening sky, screams sound amidst the churning seawater, a cold crackle of ice splitting, and I am falling. I am being swallowed by darkness and sinking into its depths, seeing only my hands above me in the black sea, my cold pale fingers beringed, lace-cuffed wrists done with buttons. My waterlogged skirts drag me down into the unforgiving depths until I can no longer tell which way to swim for air.
I am being shaken. I look around in fear and Silvy is staring at me. I am sprawled on the floor in her living room, clinging to the coffee-table like an ice floe.
“Fuck,” I tell her, “another Titanic flashback. Pour me?” I hand her the empty glass, which she refills with bubbling pink benzosecco.
“Why in god’s name would you buy a Titanic memory,” she shakes her head, cheeks flushed, curls dancing.
“It was a great deal, and I love historical ones,” I rationalize. “But this one’s a bad bootleg. The memory was alright, but I keep getting flashbacks.” I take a long sip of the effervescent sedative, fully chilling.
“When’s the last time you cleaned out some memories?” Her voice is pitched with friendly judgment.
“When’s the last time you cleaned your kitchen?” I glance at the shifting stack of dishes that surrounds her sink on three sides. Her face reddens further. “I’ll go tomorrow,” I say.
My memory dealer works at the farthest-back corner of the market, a plain canvas tent with its rope ties gray from smog and age. The sign outside says “21st Century Media – 10-Minute Download & Install—50,000 Titles!” Inside, a folding chair stands empty and the grimy tablet-table is dark, its black surface betraying hundreds of smeared fingerprints. As I approach, it lights up to a dense library of filenames. I back out of the folder to see that the previous customer has been browsing celebrity sex memories. I wipe my hand on my pant leg.
“Oh hey, hun!”
The dealer emerges from between the back flaps. She is too glamorous for this shabby tent, dressed in the kind of outfit you see worn by intimidating clubgoers. Her red hair is blown out and her face glitters with a half-mask of wire and crystal, she is wearing wide-legged pants of iridescent chiffon, a dress of the same material, though both pieces are so transparent I can see her flat chest and black undergarments. I look down at the dusty floor between my boots, unremarkable in my black workwear.
Behind her a skinny young man with an unpleasant face slinks out, eyes glazed, mouth slack.
“That’ll be 500, darlin’!” the dealer chimes as the man stumbles forward.
He places a sweaty hand on the table and there is the familiar chime of the cash register, a “+500” blooms into being under his palm amidst a cloud of digital confetti and floats across the table. The porn consumer hurries from the tent, still immersed in his daylight vision.
“Back again?” the dealer says pleasantly, fingertips kneading her side of the table. “What are we looking for today? Just so you know, I have a new library of Anise Chesterley sex memories in, and 20th century historical events are still half price.”
“I need to do some cleaning out, actually,” I tell her, “I’ve been having flashbacks ever since you sold me that Titanic memory.”
“Oh, no!” she says, her pity unconvincing. “Well I’m sure we can get those scrubbed for you. Let me pull up your account.”
I am confronted by the library of purchases I’ve made and begin to sort. Titanic is out, as are the memories of partying in Old Miami, the collection of classic films I never got around to experiencing. I keep the literature classics and the university lectures on pre-regime psychology.
“I’ll just hold on to these,” I tell the dealer, “The rest can go.”
She gives me a probing look but says nothing, gestures to me to follow her back to the tent’s other room. Inside is the familiar barber’s chair, the vinyl upholstery cracked, stuffing swelling from between the seams. Her rig hangs on a stand behind the chair, helmet linked to a monitor on a tall desk by a mess of cables.
“Before we start,” she says, eyeing me, “I wanted to ask if you’re interested in trying something out. Doesn’t have to be today.” She walks to the tall table and opens a silver case, begins to roll a smoke with long, thin fingers.
“Um, what is it?”
“Well,” she sets the pink-papered smoke to her lips, inhales. “I saw you have some black-market resources saved, and I thought I might tell you about a service I’ve been developing.” The tent is filling with the scent of burning herbs, her voice is deep with the smoke held in. “I’ve been interested in pre-regime psychotherapy for a long time, have pretty much everything on file that survives. I was looking to get off medication, and realized that memory modification could be adapted to suit twenty-first century psychotherapeutics. Initial events in our childhood trigger patterns of behavior that persist well into our adult lives, becoming maladaptive. Nowadays, every little neurotransmitter is controlled with medication, but – erase the memory of the initial trigger, insert a new pattern for the brain to follow and—” she snaps her fingers, the smoke clenched in her other hand raining ash on the ground—“voila, the bad behavior is gone, permanently, without the need for meds.”
She tells me of friends she has cured of drug addictions and suicidal thoughts. She explains how she copies memories from donors with happy childhoods, uses them to overwrite early trauma and stitches together healthy behavior patterns with real memories of her clients’ childhoods, to make natural-feeling false memories that leave her clients better people.
“Better versions of themselves” she insists, like a billboard for State Pharma.
I pause before answering. What she’s talking about is deeply illegal, a black-market service based on banned junk science. Both of us would be arrested if anyone reported us, and I’d probably be sedated for life as a punishment.
“I think I’ll just stick to the cleanup for now,” I smile and nod politely, wanting to get the fuck out of there.
“Sure!” the dealer says, “Just think about it.”
Ten minutes later I am walking back to my apartment, no longer able to recall the feel of the frigid North Sea. With my crammed memory emptied I am free to remember everything else I had to worry about—my shitty job, pathetic love life, the apartment I cannot keep clean no matter how many forticize I take. I get home and open my medicine cabinet and take two, waiting for energy and focus to materialize in my body as I get onto my walking desk to start writing applications. My legs tromping along beneath me, I open the tablet table and begin to re-read a job application, but before I finish a paragraph I am checking my five dating profiles. I find two unsightly dick pics waiting for me on Hookr, no new hearts on Soulm8, the guy I was messaging all week on BLuv hasn’t replied in two days, my profile on Qweird has a new like but she has a cat in every pic, and a voice message on CYRN0, the new voice-only dating app, is six minutes long and turns out to be an acoustic cover of an Anise Chesterley song by some would-be lover. I send the voice message to Silvy so we can suffer together.
Thts just sad, she writes
ikr, I reply, but ugh honestly not the most depressing part of my dating life
hang in there luv ur a precious gem!!! ur gonna find the one for u
ty <3 <3
Despite Silvy’s encouragement I feel slightly sick, either from the high dose of forticize or my turbulent treadmilling or because there’s something wrong with me, I am too ugly and no one will love me but maybe I don’t want them to, because really, letting someone into your life, spending decades together and slowly becoming part of each other, intertwining like mold on bread seems suffocating, a total loss of individuality and yet the very thing I have been conditioned to crave, and I can’t tell whether this desire for partnership is a thing which emerges from me or from societal expectation, from unrealistic accounts of true-love in media and memory, because in the memories it’s so deep you start to believe it, one time I bought a true-love memory of being a girl in a fluffy white dress on the porch of a house in some country that no longer exists, and in the memory I look at this guy once, just once, and he’s in some gray army uniform and sweeps me off my feet and I love him so much, so that even after the memory was over and after I deleted it I would dream about the guy, lie awake in bed and wonder if he had been my actual true love in another lifetime, and that’s the sort of thing that fucks you up and leaves you unable to tell whether you’re yourself or just a slurry of false memories, and
my table opens a notification, New heart on Soulm8!
When I check it’s some boring-looking guy who probably sings acoustic Anise Chesterley covers. I realize I am spiraling, walking fast at my desk doing nothing, the forticize has kicked in now and it’s hyperfixating me on my empty love life instead of work, and I can’t even open the job applications without feeling a little wrench in my heart. I need to reset from the forticize and self-pity. I need to take a nap, maybe, and wake up refreshed. So I hop off the walking desk and go to the medicine cabinet and take a buxoxamime and three zaloravam, because two wasn’t enough to knock me out last time.
For a few minutes I pace around, anxious from the forticize, until I feel myself begin to sweat, the sleeping pills fighting the focus enhancers in my body. I see them as two warring dragons, the forticize quick as a dagger, slicing at the massive dark beast that is the sleeping pills, but in the end it is not quick enough to defeat them, and my eyes grow heavy in my head as I lean back onto my bed, the zaloravam has won and the black beast of drugged slumber descends upon my eyes.
I wake hours later with a pounding headache. Silvy is at the foot of my bed, shaking me again.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her.
“Well, as your designated medical contact I got a notification that someone was experiencing bradypnea,” she is concerned but smug. “What did you take?”
“A few forticize and a few zaloravam. And a buxoxamime.”
“What’s a few?” her thin eyebrows ascend into her curly bangs.
“I was fixated on dating apps so I needed a little nap to reset.”
“Well you’re gonna get a reset alright. There’s a medic on the way.”
“What the fuck? I wasn’t even out that long.”
“Girl, you were breathing like, ten times a minute. I didn’t even call the medic, your room did.”
“Fuck, this is gonna be expensive.”
I hear a beeping and my door swings inward forcefully. “Medic!” someone cries from the hallway, and a serious-looking young man enters, handsome despite a slight pockmarking of his cheeks, dressed in emergency orange and carrying a swinging pack of equipment.
I am still a bit fuzzy so I smile at him as he hooks me up to a blood cleaner and I watch, amused, as my red blood seeps cheerfully up a swirly tube and into a machine, which hums and beeps and spits it back out into another swirly tube that puts it right back into my arm.
“Ma’am,” the medic is looking at his handheld, reading the results of the blood cleaner, “you’re on a too-high dose of both forticize and zaloravam, at the same time. I’m gonna need to see your medicine cabinet.”
Fuck. I smile at him, sheepishly, hoping I look helpless and cute.
I have disabled the dosage monitor on my medicine cabinet so that I can take more than the recommended doses, which is slightly illegal but not that illegal, so the medic reinstates my dosage monitor with a tamper-proofing program and issues me a citation for the tampering and the overdose, along with a bill for his services.
“Can I get your handle, too?” I ask, the last of the zaloravam speaking through me.
Silvy slaps my knee.
“Ow.”
But the medic looks around and scribbles something on the bottom of the bill before kneeling to disconnect me from the blood cleaner, now beeping to be removed.
“All right, ladies,” he says with formality, “take care now,” and absconds with a nod. I gleefully show Silvy the medic’s social handle on the bottom of the ticket, medi_martin0.
Silvy looks at me in amused disgust “You would be trying to flirt at your own overdose.”
“Overdose is an exaggeration. How many times have you had your blood cleaned this year?”
“OK, but that was at, like, parties. This is Monday afternoon.”
“Whatever.” I am itching from this too-clean blood, hearing the siren whisper of the medicine cabinet across the room. I cross to it and see that I am prohibited from withdrawing any medication until tonight, 8pm, when I am allowed one buxoxamime.
“Fuck, Silvy, do you have a forticize or something?”
“Sure,” she says, and reaches into her pocket, withdraws a pink sparkly case. “Just one, though.”
Silvy sprawls on my bed, asks me if I want to order food, and while she browses menus I am back where I started, forticized, walking at my desk cycling through apps, wondering if I should give Soulm8 guy a chance.
Silvy leaves hours later after dinner and a bottle of benzosecco. I stand at the medicine cabinet eyeing the lone buxoxamime with distaste, knowing it won’t be enough to put me to sleep after my 4PM forticize. I open another bottle of benzosecco and drink it while thinking about this morning and what the memory dealer said, about becoming a better version of myself, envisioning a version with a little more self-control, a little less desperation. I try to think of what she could erase—my parents’ divorce, my dad’s absence for most of my childhood? The memory of nights spent alone at the tablet as my mother drank herself to sleep somewhere in our apartment? Weeks spent in immersive games as a child, playing superhero or medieval lady or 20th century it-girl instead of doing schoolwork? There is no one thing, no singular event or trauma I can point to as the cause of my dependency on drugs and memories. But I might as well try it—after all, I can’t afford any more blood cleanings this year, and the idea of trying to get through the next few days on only the strictly legal dose of forticize and zaloravam makes me want to jump off a bridge.
I can’t sleep until the early hours of the morning and I have shallow dreams which don’t stick in my mind. When I awaken a few hours later I take my rationed forticize and head back to the market to the memory dealer. The forticize does nothing to combat the drowsiness from my sleepless night, my blood feels thick as toothpaste from zaloravam withdrawal. I trudge along and trip on a cobblestone and catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window—a hideous figure, bloodshot and scruffy, every inch the strung-out wastrel. When I reach the dealer’s tent she’s busy, but emerges soon after with a wide-eyed older woman who hurries to pay and leave. Today she’s wearing a white ribboned hairpiece, woven in and out of two thick red plaits, and a gown that seems to be a single long ribbon spiraling endlessly up her body. She tosses the hanging end over one shoulder as she greets me.
“Back so soon!” she chirps.
“I wanna try what you said,” I stammer. “The healing.”
“Oh, of course!” She acts as if she’d forgotten the whole thing, as if I’d just reminded her. “Let me just close up here, so we’re not interrupted.”
She hangs an “out for lunch” sign on the front of the tent, ties up the flaps and locks down the tablet table before escorting me into the rear of her stand. I lie back on the barber’s chair and she takes position behind me.
“So.” she pauses, and I hear her begin to roll another herbal smoke. “What brought you back today? What do you want to fix, and what do you think caused it?”
I have thought all night about this, I am exhausted and desperate and my mind feels like mud so I begin to list symptoms and suspected triggers in no particular order.
“I’m addicted to my meds and yesterday I took too much and had to pay five grand for blood cleaning. I feel anxious and desperate and lonely a lot, I feel sometimes like no one could ever love me, like I’m deficient. Like, one reason maybe is my parents’ divorce when I was five, but I barely remember that. I pretty much never saw my dad again except a few times. And then I guess mom’s drinking. But I’m pretty functional, I guess. I have a job, but I want a different one. I live alone, and I have some friends, but sometimes I feel like I’m faking every interaction. I rehearse things in my head before I meet anyone new and I try to get everyone to like me because I’m scared of being alone. But because I’m faking it, talking to people never makes me less lonely. I leave exhausted and still feel lonely because none of what I said was authentic, none of it was me. When I go home after talking to someone, everything I said plays in my head and haunts me. I think of ten things I screwed up and focus on them until I can’t sleep. I feel, like, a hunger to be touched, as if I was starving, but whenever it happens, if I get a hug, I don’t know what to do with myself, I just try to make it as brief as possible. And then when it’s over I go back to craving it. I just wish someone would reach inside my skull and take my brain out.” I blurt all of this in an unbroken stream, the truth of my lonely life, then catch my breath. “And I’m afraid of public transportation,” I add, “but that’s less important.”
“Are you sure?” she says, “could be part of it. Could be that the potential of human connection, the presence of all these strangers who represent the possibility of fulfillment, is overpowering at that moment.”
I consider that a moment. “Could be,” I admit, “but I think it’s just because I hate being trapped in a metal tube.”
“We’ll see,” she mutters, and I hear the clacking of her long nails on the terminal, “paternal abandonment… no no… hmm… neurotic desire… Tell me, when did you start on meds?”
“Forticize at 12, then axolone for ten years but I got off that, been on buxoxamime once a day since maybe 18? And in the past few years the zaloravam. Just one at first but now I’m on like, six a day.”
“Yeah, it sneaks up on you. Any bullying in school?”
I wince. “Only, like, a decade of it?”
“Yikes. Ok, hun. Here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna go in and find your parents’ divorce, and I’m gonna leave it in there, but dial back the emotional intensity. Then we’re gonna insert some positive parental feedback throughout early adolescence, overwrite mom’s drinking with some one-on-one time, and kick up that self-confidence in school by erasing most of the bullying. That should be enough to patch up some of the holes in your self-image. Then we’ll erase say, 25% of the drug use memories and pop in some addiction recovery about three years ago. You want to be all the way off everything or like, just have it under control?”
“Um, uh, let’s just have it under control for now?”
“You got it.”
Deftly her slim fingers push the hair from my forehead, the steel helmet descends to cover my eyes and I feel the pinch of the needle entering the base of my skill. And in an instant she is scrolling through my memories—flickers of my infancy flash before my closed eyes; being dropped off at a childcare center, playing alone in front of a bright screen, screaming at the bars of a crib, sitting in a wet diaper, uncomfortable and crying, for hours.
Can she see all this, I wonder dimly. I feel violated.
Flashes of school years, of sitting alone by a wall eating a bland sandwich, being picked last for a class project and the peals of laughter as I tear up. Falling and hurting my knee and crying, and my mother’s anger, “Why can’t you just be quiet like other people’s kids?” Screams and a crash of glass, my father leaving through the front door and reappearing years later, at a roadside steakhouse, my mother in a booth on the other side of the restaurant, fuming, as he and I converse awkwardly about my progress in school. The dry, bitter taste of a pill on my tongue and the way my body hums with my first forticize.
But then she calls up other memories—my mother holding me and singing; a 7th birthday party at an antigravity park, my friends screaming with joy as we float into soft obstacles; my parents proudly attending my school acceptance ceremony. Memories of childhood bullies, twisting and warping, vague—they blur with other people, different faces, become loving interactions with friends who care for me. My father holding me after I hurt my knee, the reassurance of knowing that I could scream and cry and still be loved. Memories of adulthood, of attending some therapy program, throwing pills in a bin, people clapping as I cross a small stage to pick up a certificate.
Abruptly the memories cease and I return to my body, feeling the painful slither of the contraption withdrawing its needle from my neck. I hear a rustling and see, under the helmet, the white ribbon and smooth skin of the memory dealer, coming to release me. I close my eyes against the brightness of the tent’s lamp as she lifts the helmet off.
“So that’s you done!” She’s as chipper as ever, but I am reeling. “Your instances of physical contact with caregivers were two standard deviations below the mean, so I bumped you up to just below average? Should take the edge off that touch-starvation. For the childhood friendships I patched over some donor memories, gave you a better relationship with dad and just deleted a bunch of the—”
She chatters on as I hold my head, struggling to stay in the chair.
“This fucking hurts,” I moan.
“Of course it hurts,” she says, suddenly serious. “Altering the self is painful. We’re erasing parts of your core identity and overwriting them. Decades of reinforced thought patterns are suddenly missing their initial triggers. Go home, take a nap. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”
I wake up in bed, somehow refreshed. It’s the middle of the night, I get up and use the bathroom, notice the little pile of pills that have dispensed from my medicine cabinet over the past day. I decide not to take them. There is a peace in me, perhaps just because it’s two in the morning and I feel no obligation to do anything productive to build my future at this hour. I decide to go for a walk, and for a while in the quietest part of the night I am out under the high buildings and blue-white streetlamps, hearing the sounds of animals and insects that live parallel to the three million people of the city, the tiny beings woven into the fabric of this place. I hear a rustling and see a fox run from its hiding place and cross a street, stopping in the middle to meet my eyes before continuing. One of his hind paws is held up close to his body and his walk is an effortful hop. He’s such a tough little thing, it brings tears to my eyes. It’s cold out so I turn back, feeling like there is a beauty in the city that I somehow had not been able to see before, a shift in the world by a hair’s breadth that reveals the liveliness that was always there. Maybe it really worked, maybe I’m cured of the loneliness and emptiness that was in me.
I get back up to my apartment and go back to bed, and in the morning I head to Silvy’s. We have breakfast and chit-chat, but I don’t tell her what I did yesterday. I am afraid to tell anyone, actually, because of the risk if it ever gets out. Though we usually chatter like sparrows to fill the silence, I am quiet this morning, and Silvy’s getting on my nerves, and when she senses I’m pulling away, she starts prying.
“What’s going on with you? Are you feeling alright? Why didn’t you answer me yesterday?”
“I’m just tired,” I lie. “I’m still tapering down from the meds.”
When at last she begins to browse her tablet in silence, I excuse myself and go home. She sends me five messages by the time I get home, but I ignore them. I get into my desk and begin to walk, applying to a job as a storyboard writer for memory immersions. After an hour I feel a dull headache beginning and stop the treadmill as a flashback overwhelms me, of the time I won a prize at school, the spelling bee in 6th grade, and my mom and dad’s faces in the audience, smiling. Though my head is splitting, I send out the application, a sense of assurance in me but beneath it an odd insecurity. There’s a familiarity to that insecurity, and for a moment I am at a crossroads and can choose to dive headlong into it, but I keep my distance, holding tight to my fragile confidence, the memory of victory. Spurred on by the memory, I write another application, and another, and after a few hours I have had my most productive day in years, knocking out four applications and two copy-editing jobs I’ve been putting off for a week.
I feel itchy with energy, even without the forticize. I check back on the apps and find a new heart on Soulm8, open the profile and see a cute guy, shy-looking, an AI handler for a software company. His name is Tiber. We arrange to meet spontaneously, at a bar in the neighborhood. He’s already sipping a benzosecco when I arrive and has ordered one for me. He’s cute, and from his smile, I can tell he thinks I am, too.
“I saw on Soulm8 you like historical memories? Done any good ones recently?” he asks as I sip my drink.
“Oh—well, I did a Titanic one recently that was kind of low-budget. I kept getting flashbacks, so I had to delete it.”
“I hate that,” he commiserates. “Once I did a medieval one that I was really into, a really long, immersive one? I would do it every night after work. But at some point I started calling people ‘good sir,’ and saying ‘what, ho!’ and stuff. So I had to quit.”
“I’m taking a break from them, honestly. I need to get my real life going before I start living other lives in my free time.”
“Good call,” he smiles. There is an attraction here. This is going well. “So where did you grow up? Here in the city?”
“I grew up in a suburb,” I start, and stop. And think. And remember the suburb, and at the same time the city, and a bit of a village in another country, maybe, a farm with goats?
“Me too. Any siblings?”
“No.” Or there was one? No.
“I have two, older brothers. Are your parents still out in the suburbs?”
“My mom is, my dad’s…”
Where is my dad? We don’t talk much, but when was the last time I saw him? Years ago, I think, at my school graduation, he was there, clapping, maybe.
“Oh.” I can see from the look on Tiber’s face that he thinks my father is dead, but I don’t know if he is.
“I don’t know where my dad is, actually,” I admit. Tiber reacts uncomfortably, he wants to console me for the great misfortune he thinks I’ve suffered but does not know how. “How about you?”
Relieved, he launches into the story of how his older brothers moved across the country, his parents are still here and he takes care of them. I am listening, I want to listen, but I am distracted by the confusion I feel. I search myself for the plot of my life and do not find it. The way I think I have always been, the person who I became as the result of my experiences, has smudged into a blurred amalgam. I remember a cat, that I loved and had since I was a small child, but I can only recall a few hours with it. I remember school and a circle of friends who cheered me on at sporting events and graduations, but their faces and names are gone. I start mourning them – how did we lose touch? I can’t recall, I don’t know when I last saw them, I don’t even know who they are.
“So that’s me, how about you?” he asks.
“Oh—uh, can you just give me one second? I need to run to the bathroom.”
“Of course.”
In the bathroom I look in the mirror but it does not center me. I am me, that is what I look like, but this is not the person I remember being before the memory alteration. Altering the self is effortful, she said.
I get my shit together. I consolidate myself into a simple narrative, that may or may not be true, but which feels now like the truest form of me, the most consistent version of a haze of contradictory events. I rehearse it in my head, give myself a big fake smile in the mirror, return to the table.
“Where were we?” I ask Tiber.
“You were going to tell me about your work.”
“Of course.”
I manage to get through the date, gathering the fragments of myself as I go. At the end of the evening, Tiber gives me a chaste little kiss on the cheek, and we exchange handles. I head home to my empty apartment.
As if I’m seeing it for the first time, I realize the place is filthy, childish. There are cutesy little decorations on the wall, the trash has not been incinerated in days and is spilling out of the bin. I stuff the stray trash into the wall bin, push the button and see the slow-blinking red light as the old pills, benzosecco caps, tear-stained tissues, takeaway cartons, are reduced to ash. And then I start on the posters. I feed them into the bin one by one, the cartoonish big-eyed animals and emotional-support slogans – a sloth saying Hang in there!, a cartoon bunny from a children’s show I do not watch. One dog-eared card has a message from Silvy on the back, a birthday card referring to some bender I can’t remember, to the girl who always holds my hair <3 <3
The walls are bare. The bin is full. The incinerator light blinks. Time to make some new memories.
_______________
Katharine Tyndall writes from Berlin. Her work has been featured in ECO24: Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, Nightmare Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many more. She’s nominated for the Pushcart Prize, was a finalist for the Grist Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction prize, and is a recent graduate of the Granta Writer’s Workshop. When she’s not writing, she can be found in the woods identifying plants and fungi.