I have a rule. The rule wasn’t something I figured out myself; Dr. Bergman was responsible for conceptualizing it. Because I trust her, I have decided to implement the rule, even though sometimes it’s difficult to abide by my decision.
Less is more.
I leave gatherings soon after the first person departs, because the host always wants the last few people to get going, but they’re too polite to simply come out and say it. I end conversations before I “talk the subject into the ground,” because other people are not nearly as interested in mnemography as I am, despite the fact that they nod along and tell me my theories are very interesting. And I wait a few days before contacting people who I’d like to call or see so that I give them “space to breathe.”
Intellectually, I get what Dr. Bergman means by that, even though I dislike the implication that my presence can smother someone. She is always right about how I should handle personal interactions—usually her advice echoes what Beth has already told me, but in more neutral and clinical words—and that is why I was relieved that Daniel would not be playing thought-sherpa today. I think if I knew I could tap in and find him in mnem, I would not have been able to resist paying him a visit.
And anyway, there wouldn’t be enough time. Every one of my classes had enrollment.
At least the day would go by quickly.
The mall was still done up for Christmas, with bows and ornament-covered evergreen boughs tethered to every horizontal strut and light fixture. They brought attention to the structural aspects of the building I normally ignored. Now I’d have a hard time seeing the huge open expanse as anything other than a collection of industrial struts painted to blend in.
When I got to Memory Forge, JoAnn was dusting the tops of the plastic blister-packs of mnem toys, because the positive electrostatic charge in plastic attracts dust. Ryan was at the register. Ryan is several inches taller than me, and bulkier, too. The red Memory Forge uniform apron (which I don’t have to wear, of course, just the clerks) looks disproportionately small on him, and he always mentions going to the gym. I think he showers there. And maybe he uses gym-soap. Whatever it is, it leaves him smelling like a car air freshener. “Oh look,” he said, “It’s Twitch. What the hell’s that around your neck—you think you’re Harry Potter now?”
For Christmas, Beth had given me a new scarf, which was very long, and very striped. She said I looked good in it. And she said that since there was some color in it, I’d be less likely to lose it, which made sense to me. While the scarf looked nothing like Gryffindor’s house colors (my scarf being three colors, purple, red and black, rather than two, red and gold) I preferred the J.K. Rowling reference to the open speculation about my sexuality he’d been toying with ever since Daniel Schroeder had come to see me at work.
Unfortunately, the reprieve was short-lived. “Your boyfriend give you that?” Ryan said under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear. Daniel Schroeder was well-known in our profession, he was openly gay, and he’d stopped by specifically to talk to me. That was the reason Ryan insisted on calling him my boyfriend. I assumed so, anyway. The taunting had begun before I’d made out with Daniel in his basement, and there was no way Ryan could know about what had happened between Daniel and me in mnem. None at all. I’d run through the scenario a half-dozen times to be sure. Still, in that chillingly accurate way neurotypicals did, Ryan had managed to find a very real vulnerability in me, one he was eager to exploit.
Deliberately ignoring him, I said good morning to JoAnn and headed back to double-check my schedule and get ready for my day. Intro to Mnemography at Twelve-thirty, Four-thirty and Eight-thirty. Careers in Mnemography. Mneming is Fun for Everyone. Lightweight stuff. Nothing about memorysmithing or bit-coding. Nothing that really mattered.
The second Intro class was particularly full, eight students, one of whom was a very serious middle-aged lady with a lot of questions and too much perfume. At least it didn’t smell like a car air freshener, but it still made my nose burn. She was at that age where people tend to wonder about the technology. The teenagers don’t ask much, because they’re so used to the idea of mnem they’re not even curious about it. And the retirees just shake their heads and accept whatever I tell them, since for them, mnem is just the latest new thing in a long line of technological developments. It’s the forty- and fifty-somethings who feel the need to pick it all apart and examine it closely so they can decide whether they trust it or not. I don’t mind the questions, usually. At least it shows the student is engaged with the material. Today, though, the student seemed to be asking the same thing over and over, but with different words.
Or maybe it was just my lack of sleep making it seem that way to me.
“So if the mnem machine is activating parts of a client’s brain,” my student said, “then that client is having an experience. It would be like activating a neuron that produced pain, say, in their limb. Nothing would be chewing on their arm at that very moment, but the pain would be real.”
“Real to them,” I said. “Subjectively.”
She frowned and looked down at her handout. I turned to my next PowerPoint slide. “Seven items (plus or minus two) can be held in short-term memory in the prefrontal cortex. In order to be recalled after that, a process called encoding needs to take place to transfer the items into long-term memory, which causes permanent changes in the neural connections of various parts of the brain. In mnem, that encoding mechanism is bypassed—”
“Mr. Crowe?”
I turned from my slide. The middle-aged woman was reading something on her handout, following the words with the capped tip of her pen. “What do you really mean when you say something’s ‘subjectively’ real?”
“The semantics? Substitute ‘internal’ if it makes more sense to you.”
“No, that’s not it. I don’t care about the word. What I want to know is, if you’re the only one who’s experiencing something, and no one else in the world can verify it, then how can it be real in any way? It’s a daydream. Maybe with more sensory details than a person would normally come up with on their own, but it’s still just an elaborate fantasy.”
Great. I had half a PowerPoint to get through and she was hung up on the meaning of the word subjective.
Or maybe the entire concept of subjectivity.
“It’s an internal experience,” I said, “created by a collaboration of the mnem packet and the client’s own mind, delivered by the mnem hardware.”
The student stared at her handout, brow furrowed.
I advanced my slide. “The hippocampus is the neural structure responsible for encoding the short-term—”
“But it’s not real.”
“Is happiness make-believe? Is anger an illusion? Is it real when you experience an emotion? It’s subjective. There’s no way I can state it any more clearly than that.”
“Mneming that you’re smart or funny or successful doesn’t change anything. For instance, if you mnem that someone’s attracted to you, and in the objective world you don’t even know them, what good is it?”
You could show up at their house and see what transpired in objective reality. But I wasn’t going to think about that. Not now.
“The significance of representing other people in mnem would be a valid topic…in Mnem Ethics.” Which I didn’t teach, since I had a reputation for getting argumentative. “For this class, it’s beyond the scope of the material.” I advanced my PowerPoint. “This graphic demonstrates the various states of brain waves, from beta, which is a state of alert wakefulness, to delta, which is a deep, dreamless sleep….”
Was mnem real? It was indistinguishable from an objective experience to the human brain, so in that sense, it was. And beyond that, mnemographers could see their clients’ mnems, which brought into question whether the experience really was subjective after all, since it could be perceived by someone else. True, the client wouldn’t remember. But wasn’t that a separate concern? A matter of encoding? Add to that the complication of co-sherpas being able to see and interact with each other, and you had a multi-faceted issue fit for an undergrad-level Philosophy of Mnem section.
After I got through that worksheet (only seven minutes over schedule) and dismissed the students, I was on my way to the refrigerator for a ginger ale when I passed Ryan coming out of the bathroom. I do my best not to engage with him, but there was something odd in the tone of his voice that made me pause when he said, “Elijah. Hold up.”
Maybe it was the way he actually used my name instead of calling me Twitch. Not that it matters, I guess. I turned.
Ryan is as fair-skinned as I am, but in addition to that, he flushes easily from any sort of exertion or emotion. Having a conversation with him is like talking to a cuttlefish. Currently, his cheeks were slightly pink. Agitation. Either that, or he’d been jogging. He frowned, looked at me really hard, and then broke into a huge smile that made me uneasy. “What the hell’s that on your mouth? A present from your boyfriend?”
Not touching my face in front of anyone else—that was another one of Dr. Bergman’s rules for making people less uncomfortable around me. But in this instance, I couldn’t resist. My hand went to my lips before I could stop myself—and I realized my lips did feel strange, though I’d been too busy to take notice of it. I ducked into the bathroom Ryan had just vacated and took a look in the mirror. My upper lip was definitely pink, even pinker than Ryan’s cheeks. And chafed-looking.
“If you see any weeping sores,” Ryan said, “you should probably wait for the herpes to die down before you put his dick in your mouth.”
“Shut up.” My lip really was raw. But it didn’t look like the beginning of a cold sore, and I couldn’t feel that telltale tingle. I leaned closer to the mirror and touched the redness, and the memory of Daniel’s whiskers scraping over my mouth flooded me, sudden and visceral, as if his kiss had only just faded from my lips.
My gasp fogged the mirror.
“That’s why they make mint-flavored condoms, you know.”
All day, I’d been doing my very best to not obsess over Daniel, because it would be too soon to call him, and too soon to see him. But there it was, the whole time, this unexpected reminder of the things we’d done the night before. Right on my face.
In the mirror, motion caught my eye. Ryan was behind me making a jerk-off motion toward his mouth. I said, “Quit it.”
“So…do you spit, or swallow?”
I edged past him and wished I’d left my ginger ale for later. He wouldn’t have come after me in my classroom. Lots of times I would go the whole day without seeing him at all. Why today?
And why did he have to be the one to notice the chafing?
I headed toward my classroom with him following so close the toe of his shoe snagged the back of my heel. “I’ll bet you swallow—wanna make sure you impress Mr. Big Shot Mnem Fag. Then you say, ‘Ooh, yeah, gimme some more…that’s right, shoot your herpes all over your li’l bitch’s face.’”
Dr. Bergman would say I should ignore Ryan—after all, it wasn’t as if he would risk his job by getting physically violent with me, and his words were only words, with no more impact on me than I chose to allow them to have. Since I have never been the type to come up with a response that didn’t just provoke whoever was set on antagonizing me to greater and more obnoxious heights, I have decided that Dr. Bergman is correct. There was an edge to the taunting today that bothered me, though. I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was, so I mentally rehearsed the things he’d just said a couple of times to ensure I’d be able to repeat them next week when I saw Dr. Bergman in person. If I got the inflections just right, she might be able to read into it whatever I was missing. And then explain it to me.
One thing was for sure. I didn’t like him getting close enough to touch me. When I got to my classroom, I spun around in the doorway and our chests bumped together. He had a weird look in his eye, like he was truly angry with me, even though I always tried my best to stay out of his way and interact with him as little as possible. I stared back at him and said, “Get out of my classroom. Now.”
He paused—actually, he kind of swayed toward me for a second, and I wondered if maybe he was too stupid to realize that assaulting an instructor was probably not a good vocational move for him. Time hung there, suspended and subjectively long for the mere second it probably lasted. But finally he only scoffed at me, made another jerk-off move toward his mouth, and parted with, “I’ll bet you fucking swallow.”
I closed the door behind him, and locked it, too. And then the urge to stim welled up in me, as hard and unstoppable as a sneeze. I touched my cheek, my jaw, my cheek, my cheek, my ear, my cheek, and only then could I stop myself, clench my arms, and try to slow down my breathing and quell the surge of panic that threatened to send me running off to my car. I’m not sure how much of the need to self-stimulate is physiological and how much is psychological. All I knew was that as much as it soothed me, it made everyone else phenomenally uncomfortable, so I could only do it if I was alone, and only as a last resort. Finally, after a dozen more touches and a couple minutes of controlled breathing, I could hold my arms still without squeezing my hands into fists. By then, my mouth was dry and my armpits were clammy.
Maybe I needed to start looking for another job. As much as I hated interviewing, I hated dealing with Ryan more. Was it fair for an instructor to be harassed out of a job by a minimum wage clerk? No. But I’d learned a long time ago that worrying about fairness was basically useless.
I sat with my back to the door and cradled my ginger ale against the side of my face, and touched my upper lip again—not to stim, but to feel the abrasion. I really, really wanted to talk to Daniel. I could call him. There was something wrong with his phone—the operator had said it was in service, but off the hook—but I’d memorized his father’s number, and I was pretty sure Big Dan would let Daniel use his phone, since the two of them seemed pretty comfortable with each other. It was too soon, though. And so I opened my soda and drank it, touched my cheek three more times, and breathed very slowly in hopes that I might stop shaking before my next class began.
There’s a pane of glass in the classroom door, which is inconvenient when I’m trying to borrow Memory Forge’s equipment, though my long black coat hides a lot. I was glad for it, though, when someone knocked. It was a gentle tap, but I wouldn’t put it past Ryan to try to disguise his knock so he could get me back out into the hall and start bothering me again. It was JoAnn’s face in the window, and that’s the reason why I unlocked the door and let her in.
JoAnn is seventeen, but she only needs to go to high school half-time since she’s got nearly enough credits to graduate. She was trying to decide if she wanted to go into mnemography or veterinary medicine. In terms of looks, she’s pretty average, except for the pierced eyebrow, which was sometimes a little pinkish or crusty, but not today. I could tell because she got pretty close to me as she was squinting at my upper lip. “I thought maybe you got an electric razor for Christmas and you weren’t used to it yet,” she said.
“I already use an electric razor.”
“Oh. Um, well…I met this guy at a party last summer? A junior? Like, in college? And we totally made out. And then…” she giggled, and shrugged. “My chin looked a lot like your lip. Whiskerburn.”
There was a word for it? “Oh.”
Her smile faded quickly, and she added, “Not that I think you….” She looked somewhere over my shoulder. “Ohmigosh.”
I glanced over. There was nothing unusual there. A whiteboard. My coat and scarf hanging off a peg. A pile of books.
“That’s it.” She sounded pretty excited. “It’s your scarf. It’s wool, right? And you came in with it wrapped all around your face? You’re probably allergic to wool.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Totally.” She was nodding her head now. “An allergy for sure.”
Since she didn’t seem to want to know that I wasn’t allergic to wool, I didn’t bother repeating myself.