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In other cases, Thomas was not so sure. He found a sequence in which a man in a business suit met up with a young girl–fourteen or fifteen–in a car park by night. He seemed anxious, but she pulled him to her and they began to kiss against a concrete pillar. Her fingers made furrows in his hair; he tried to stop her as she undid his trousers but she seized him still harder. ‘Fuck me!’ she said as she lifted her skirt to reveal her full nudity. They made love greedily. Thomas watched to the end.
‘I don’t know what to do with this,’ he announced to Jo, his voice breaking the silence in the room. She remained absorbed in her computer screen for a few seconds before getting up to look at his. He started the scene again and watched with some embarrassment as Jo leaned fixedly over his shoulder, scentless.
‘What are you thinking?’ she said. ‘This girl is blatantly under age! Get rid of it!’
‘But don’t you think–I just thought–it might be a very important memory for her. I mean–she looks as if she really loves this man.’
‘Thomas. This is a criminal act! We don’t get mixed up in this kind of thing. Delete it.’
Thomas became fascinated by his power to watch lives unfold. For two days he followed the experiences of a young aristocrat named William who worked for The Times as an obituary writer. He would go to spend lengthy afternoons with ageing baronets and senile Nobel Prize winners, interviewing them about their past, and filing the review of their life in anticipation of its imminent end. Memory Mine had purchased the rights to much of The Times’ archive so that Thomas could listen to the actual recordings of these conversations. He witnessed the young man’s respectful grace as he sipped tea with old men and women, the feeble voices with which memories of past greatness were hesitantly recounted, the antiseptic interiors of old people’s homes, the soothing effect of the distant past on a young man who was not very comfortably contemporary. He listened to William in phone calls and read his emails, followed the course of a love affair that ended painfully. Thomas explored every document, every conversation, every relationship, and became absorbed completely in the largeness of so many lives and so much time.
He worked till late and spent his evenings thinking about the memories he had examined during the day. His own past merged with those of so many others; he began to have startling dreams. He dreamed that he was looking for his room but could not remember where it was. He had lost his arms and legs and could only wriggle on his stomach. He squirmed on the ground, unable to lift his head to see where he was going. He realized he was wriggling on glass–thin glass that bowed and cracked with his movement, and through which he could see only an endless nothingness. He sweated with the terror of falling through, could already see his limbless body spinning like a raw steak through the darkness. And then he reached a green tarpaulin that covered the glass and he could stand again and walk. He entered a corridor of many doors. Every door looked the same: which was his? He tried to open doors at random but all were locked. As he was becoming mad with apprehension, one door loomed in front of him, more significant than the rest. He turned the handle and entered. Lying in his bed was a man with a bandaged arm. Thomas realized he was dreaming not his own dream but that of the man in his bed. The dream of a man whose memories he had been scanning that day: a construction worker who had walked across a roof covered in a tarpaulin, stepped unknowingly on a skylight, and plunged through the glass to fall three storeys and lose a hand.
One day Thomas asked Jo a question that had been preoccupying him for some time.
‘Are we going to lose our memories too?’
Jo was eating a sandwich at her desk. She looked at him and smiled.
‘I don’t think you are. That’s why I chose you. The past is tangible for you in a way that is quite exceptional. You seem to have an effortless grasp of it. I don’t just mean dates and facts. It’s as if memories seek you out and stick to you intuitively.’
‘So what about you?’
‘This was of course one of the things we were all most concerned about. How could we run this project if we all forgot everything? So we tried to understand exactly why this was happening to see if we could avoid it in ourselves. The fact is that no one really knows. Some say it’s to do with the widespread availability of electronic recording formats that are much more effective than human memory, which have gradually removed the need for human beings to remember. Others find the causes in the future-fixation of consumer culture. People cite causes as diverse as the education system, the death of religion, diet, and the structure of the family. There’s not just one theory.
‘But they put together a lifestyle programme for all of us to try and ensure we would escape the worst of the effects. No television, weekly counselling sessions. We all have to keep a journal. We are all assessed every three months to monitor any memory decline. Et cetera.’
A strange image was fluttering in Thomas’s head while Jo was talking. All the memories of the world were stranded and terrified, like animals fleeing a forest fire. With nowhere to go, they huddled in groups and wept, and the noise of their weeping was a cacophony of the centuries that filled the skies but could not be heard. And the earth became saturated with their tears, which welled up and dissolved them all, and they seeped away into nothingness.
Not long after, the office had a visitor.
‘Good morning Jo. How are you?’ The man wore an impressive three-piece suit and his bright greeting sounded mass-produced.
‘I’m well, thank you. Larry–meet Thomas. Thomas–Larry runs Memory Mine in the US. He’s our boss.’ She shot a playful smile that Thomas had not seen before.
Larry gave a handshake that felt like a personality test. ‘Good to meet you, Thomas. Jo–can we talk?’
They moved over to the window and talked quietly. Thomas could hear them perfectly but pretended to work.
‘How’s this one doing?’
‘Well. A bit slow.’
‘Look, Jo–the whole thing is waiting for him now. Everything is in place. We just need that sample of twelve thousand grade D memories so we can clean up the whole database and launch. How many has he done?’
‘I think about six hundred.’
‘Six hundred! At this rate it will take him a couple of years. Let’s get someone else.’
‘No, let’s keep him. I think he’s the best person for this. We’ll just speak to him about the urgency and get him to work faster.’
‘Are you sure? We don’t have much time.’
‘Yes. I’ll talk to him.’
From then on Thomas did not have time to explore the lives of people like the obituary writer or the construction worker. He rushed through as fast as he could, working later and later in the office to keep up with his deadlines. He found so many memories of terrible things: deaths, betrayals, injustices, accidents, rape, ruthlessness, ruin, disappointments, lies, wars. He saw mothers losing their infants, suicides of loved ones, devastating financial losses, children beaten and brutalized by parents, countless violent and senseless murders. Every minute was a new horror, a new nightmare that forced its way inside him and unfurled unexpected lobes of dank emotions that grew in among his organs. At night he left the office bloated and dazed with hundreds of new memories that leapt in alarm at their new confines, beating against the sides of his mind, flying madly like winged cockroaches in a cupboard. He could not separate himself from the memories: they lodged in him and burst open like over-ripe fruit, their poison sprayed from them and seeped through his tissues. He wanted to vomit with the sickness of the thoughts, to purge himself. But there was no escape: the memories seethed and grew in his mind during the day and erupted into startling, terrifying dreams at night. Thomas arrived at work each day pale and wide-eyed, ready to sit again and absorb more of this acid from the past.
At last, after one month, it was over. Larry came to the office and sat at Thomas’s machine. Twelve thousand memories exactly sat in his folder.
‘Jo–are you confident this is 100 per cent accurate?’
‘Sure. We’ve checked it very carefully. I’m confident.’
‘OK. Now we should be able to calculate the parameters.’ He logged in to the administration section of the system and activated some functions. ‘There. And now we can run a search on the entire database and locate all grade D memories.’ He hit Run query. Numbers started mounting on the screen.
He unbuttoned his jacket. ‘So: many thanks to you, Thomas. You got there in the end. What now?’
‘Er–no plans really.’
‘I see.’
‘Maybe we can find something,’ said Jo.
Larry looked at her. ‘Your budget is already blown. I hardly think you’re in a position to make suggestions like that. Please get real.’
The search ended. ‘2,799,256,014 results found.’
‘Christ–that’s nearly ten per cent of our database,’ said Larry. ‘That’s a lot of trauma. And this is just in the US and UK where life is pretty good. Imagine how many we’ll get in all those places where life sucks. My God. Let’s just check some of these before we delete them.’
He opened the first memory. A daughter found her tycoon mother dead in a running car full of carbon monoxide after a major feature in the Daily Telegraph detailing her illegal business ventures. The second was a man being beaten by the police in prison and threatened with razor blades.
‘OK, this looks good. This is the kind of stuff we really do not need. Good job, Thomas. So I’m going ahead and deleting these.’
Jo and Thomas looked at him and said nothing. He pressed Delete all. ‘2,799,256,014 records deleted.’
‘Excellent. Now let’s start selling the hell out of this thing.’
That night Thomas had a vivid dream. He dreamt he was back at his parents’ house in Islington. The house was empty. Sun poured in through the windows and he sat in his bedroom reading books rich with tales and characters from history. Suddenly he looked up; and through the window he saw a beautiful thing floating slowly down to the ground. It was magical and rare and he felt a deep desire to own it. He ran down the stairs and out into the garden, and there it was floating above him: a delicate thing, spiralling exquisitely and glinting in the sun. He stood under it and reached out his hands. Spinning like a slow-motion sycamore seed, it fell softly and weightlessly into his palms. It looked as if it was of silver, beaten till it was a few atoms thick and sculpted into the most intricate form: a kind of never-ending staircase that wound round on itself into a snail shell of coils within coils. He looked at it in rapture. How could such a beautiful object have fallen from the sky! He was full of joy at this thing that had chosen him and fallen so tamely into his hand.
And then he understood that the thing was a memory. It was a wonderful memory: of music first heard by a young woman–a big concert hall–a piano that produced sounds so astonishing that the woman was lifted up on their flight. And Thomas was exhilarated: he laughed out loud with the memory of those passages that seemed like they would burst the limits of loveliness.
But as the memory entered him and took root in his heart he realized there were many more falling from the sky. He looked up and saw there were memories of all kinds and colours dropping not only around him but as far as he could see. He went out into the street, where memories had already begun to cover the ground. Each gust of wind would send them skating across the tarmac to collect in the gutters. They fell everywhere: some wispy, some like multicoloured feathers, some fashioned out of a substance that collapsed and became like tar when it hit the ground.
All day and night the memories fell. They floated on puddles like a layer of multicoloured leaves, and stuck in trees, giving them new and unnatural hues of cyan and mustard yellow and metallic grey. They accumulated in clumps on the roofs and window sills and porticoes of Georgian houses, softening right angles and making a kind of pageant of the street.
The next morning the skies were low and dense and the memories fell harder than ever. The roads had become impassable and people had to clear paths to their front doors.
He left the house and wandered until he reached King’s Cross Station. The memories fell on his head and shoulders. Everywhere they lay flattened and dead on the ground, as if there had been a massacre of insects.
Sometimes Thomas saw people picking up the mysterious new objects to examine them; but the experience always seemed to induce some kind of nausea, and they flung them hastily away. After a few such experiences everyone tried not to notice what was happening. They swept the memories away, they drove their cars more and more slowly through the accumulation, they were inconvenienced everywhere they went–but they asked no questions. The more the memories fell, the more blank their faces looked. Their eyes became hollow, their skin yellow and desiccated. They seemed to move differently, shiftily, darting from spot to spot.
For days Thomas wandered around London, sleeping on car roofs and other raised surfaces while the downpour continued. He watched people leave their houses and become wild. They began to build camps on high ground and on flat roofs. They squatted naked around fires on the steps to the buildings around Trafalgar Square while the entire piazza was filled, only the column protruding from a writhing, harlequinesque sea of baubles and crystals.
Weeks passed. For five whole days only memories of war fell from the skies. No daylight could penetrate the clouds of terrifying leaden forms that rained down on London, and only streaks of fire gave any illumination. It was now rare to see any people at all. They hid, clung like babies to anything that seemed familiar.
Thomas’s wanderings led him to the Thames. Rains had carried streams of memories down into the river until they filled the riverbed entirely, rising above the water to enormous mounds of multicoloured sludge. Its course was completely blocked; the water flooded out, rising above the bridges and submerging the quays. Tourist boats lay wrecked on the terraces outside the Festival Hall and everywhere was the stench of rotting fish. Dogs chewed at carcasses at the edge of the water; flocks of gulls perched on the huge misshapen islands that looked like waste from a sweet factory.
As he looked out over the river he realized that all these millions of memories had begun to whisper to him. He heard voices from every place and time talking in every language about terrible and wonderful and everyday things. He had the impression that all the memories had been cast out, that they burned with the ferocity of a dying parasite searching for a host. They stalked him, would not leave him alone, seemed to be speaking right up against his ear, called him by name. He tried to flee, but more and more of them billowed up, following him in a quivering line. Memories flowed out of everywhere until the trail was like a canopy over the city. And then, with a shriek from the depths of time, they rose up in one vast motion, descended on him, and buried themselves in his soul. It was like a gigantic explosion converging on its centre in a film run backwards. At that point, he passed out.
The predictions of Memory Mine executives turned out to be correct. There came a point in time when people lost their memories on a mass scale. They were unable to remember even the most basic outlines of the past–their own or anyone else’s–and could therefore not engage in normal human interactions. They began to be withdrawn and suspicious, and the public spaces of the city became empty and eerie. This phenomenon was accompanied by–or caused–a major economic recession; and the two blights swept entire continents hand in hand.
Memory Mine was well prepared. Under its new name, MyPast
, its advertisements suddenly flooded the media and the city. An elderly couple hugged each other affectionately as they played their MyPast
CD-ROM and remembered more youthful times. A grumpy businessman played the CD at work, saw himself as a young man laughing in a group at college, and was driven to make phone calls to friends he had not seen in years–bringing the smile back to his face. Despite the economic slowdown, the product was an instant hit. People sensed great relief at seeing evidence of their own past, and though for many this ‘quick fix’ actually worsened their psychiatric condition, nothing could prevent people rushing to buy editions for everyone in their household in order to try and re-experience the familial bond that was supposed to link them.
While most people were suffering from total amnesia, Thomas seemed to bear the burden of an excess of memory. He appeared haunted, and wandered the streets slowly and gingerly, as if afraid of upsetting an intricate balance in his head. His mind was crammed full like the hold of a cargo ship, containers packed in to every inch of space, every one roasting in the airless heat below deck, and heavy with a million whispers that each tried to rise above all the others. He could take in no more thought or experience of any kind and avoided all human contact.
He was aware, of course, of what was happening to the people around him. He tried to call his parents on a couple of occasions to see if they were all right–but there was no answer. He could not face the flood of memories that might be released if he went home, so he did not.
He ended up one day back at the office in Hackney. He had nothing to do there, but it was a place to go that had a connection, however strange, to this thing that had overtaken everyone and it exerted a pull over him.
It was very different now. The huge empty space of the office had been entirely filled with lines of desks, where incessantly ringing phones were answered by clean young people with their efficient ‘Good morning, MyPast
, how can I help you?’ People ordered memories for themselves and their friends and families; they were located immediately on the database and burned straight onto CDs; the printer spat out attractive labels and pockets with pictures of happy families and a personalized message. The CDs were stacked in big plastic bins and dispatched twice a day.
Thomas sat in a corner, preoccupied and detached. He went there every day, and Jo did not try to stop him. She may have felt slightly responsible for his state of mind. People got used to him being there. Sometimes he lay down and spent the night under a desk. The murmurings in his head kept him haggard and silent.
Those forgetful times, while they remained, were terrible, even if few could remember them afterwards. But they did not last.
One day Thomas awoke and felt that his mind was lighter. It was as if a thick splinter that had been lying buried in his brain for months was now removed. The voices diminished. He could look outwards again at the world without feeling that the incoming information would make him explode.
The memories were departing.
Very slowly, the city started to be populated again. People’s faces regained their depth, and they started to talk to each other. They could remember more and more.
Frantic phone calls raced between the MyPast
offices in London and Washington. They had assumed that their graphs of diminishing memory horizons only moved in one direction and had never accounted for this sudden upswing. Very soon sales had dropped alomost to zero; the workforce was sacked en masse. The office in Hackney became almost deserted again. Even Jo did not bother to turn up. Thomas spent days there without seeing anyone.
One evening the phone rang. Thomas picked it up.
‘Is this MyPast
?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need memories. Everyone else’s memories seem to be returning. But my mind is still empty. I can’t do anything. Can’t work, can’t sleep. I need my memories.’
Thomas realized with a shock that it was his father on the phone.
‘I think I can help you, sir.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘I can send them out to you tomorrow. You should get them on Monday morning.’
‘Where are you? Can I come over myself and pick them up?’
‘You could. We are in Hackney.’
‘OK. What’s the address?’
Thomas told him.
‘I’ll be there in a few minutes.’
Thomas logged in to the MyPast
database. He entered his father’s name and searched. There were nearly a thousand memories. He saved them onto a CD and printed out a label. He decided to go down to the street to wait.
His father came with his two brothers. Thomas watched them approach from a distance. They all looked strangely diminished. His father had lost his poise and sophistication and walked wild-eyed and hunted, and his brothers scuttled close to him for safety. They drew close without any sign of recognition.
‘MyPast
?’ asked his father aggressively.
‘Yes,’ replied Thomas.
‘Where are they? My memories?’
Thomas led them inside and they crammed into the tiny lift. His father breathed heavily and he twitched with impatience, but somehow it felt good to Thomas to touch him again. They arrived at the sixth floor. Brightly coloured MyPast
signs announced their arrival.
‘I need this quickly. Right now. Where is it?’
Thomas picked up the CD from the desk. ‘Here it is. You can see it has your name on it here and today’s date. I’ll need to ask you for a cheque for £999.’
‘Don’t waste my time. Just show it to me.’
Thomas grew nervous.
‘Perhaps it would be best if you took it home. There’s a lot of stuff here and that way you can share it with–with your wife and sit in comfort. In your own home. In fact I’m just locking the office up.’
‘I’m losing my mind here. I haven’t got time for your–just put this damn thing on for me. I won’t pay you a penny till you show me.’
