As long as I’m not in the midst of a project, I tend to be better-than-average at time management. I’d scheduled my mnem to end an hour before my first class at Memory Forge which, even with the icy streets, should have allowed plenty of time for me to go home, shower, change, and pick up my lunch. Unfortunately, I couldn’t have accounted for the four-car accident in Middleton that kept me stuck on Junction Road for nearly twenty minutes.
Start with the most important task. I wasn’t wearing work clothes and I hadn’t showered, but I could still teach a class unshowered and overdressed. I wouldn’t last much longer without eating, though. And I absolutely couldn’t teach the class if I didn’t get to the mall. Working backward, I dealt first with getting there, and with parking, and jogging through the slick parking lot. I arrived with only twelve minutes to spare, but since I had access to several varieties of ready-made meals in the food court, I’d make it to my class—barely—if I chose my lunch based not on what I wanted to eat, but rather which stall had the shortest line.
One large slice of pizza was definitely overpriced at $3.99 plus tax, but I could eat it while I walked, which would allow me enough time to get to work without running, and to hang up my coat and scarf. I was confident the timing was going to work out perfectly fine until I tried to hand the cashier my debit card. He didn’t take it. Instead, he scowled at me and said, “Five dollar minimum for credit.”
I didn’t see what that had to do with me. “So?”
“Your total is $4.21.”
“And this is not a credit card. It’s a debit card.”
“Same thing.”
“It is not the same thing,” I said. “The funds from a debit card purchase are deducted from a bank account at the time of the transaction. Credit cards are run in batches and paid to the merchant days later.”
The cashier, a chunky boy with braces who was maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, said, “Whatever. If you run it through the slot in the card reader, it counts as a credit card. Five dollar minimum.”
“Fine. Then charge me five dollars.”
“That’s not how the register works.”
How some people could function effortlessly in neurotypical society, yet be so thick, I’ll never know. “This minimum,” I asked, “is it a strict limitation of the processor or just a company policy?”
“What difference does it make?”
“If it’s company policy, you could choose to make an exception. I work at the mall too. My shift is starting in three and a half minutes and I don’t have time to keep explaining this to you.”
The teenager stared at me for a moment I could hardly afford, blinking, then said, “Geez, guy…just get a drink with it.”
I looked to the drink selection—pick anything—but the choices were overwhelming. Fountain drinks, specialty sodas, bottled water, iced tea. All those options, yet they didn’t have the one flavor I really liked, ginger ale. Cola was too thick and brown, orange was too fake, and lemon-lime was a pale imitation of ginger ale. I couldn’t see paying money for water….
“So are you gonna get a drink or what? You’re holding up the line.”
I’d been doing my best not to think about the cluster of people that had been gathering to my right. I was just about to request to read the label on the iced tea when I realized that between paying for the pizza and getting to Memory Forge without being mistaken for a pickpocket by mall security, I’d run out of time. “Never mind,” I said. “Forget it.”
“Seriously?” the cashier called out as I strode away as quickly as I could without running. “It’s on the plate. Now I’ve gotta throw it out.”
Not my problem—he should have made an exception instead of arguing with me over 79¢. Skipping one meal is unpleasant enough. Now, thanks to his unwillingness to compromise, I’d need to teach without having eaten either breakfast or lunch.
I rushed through the door of Memory Forge. That bully Ryan wasn’t there—thank God. JoAnn watched from behind the cash register as I hurried toward the classroom. “Wow, you almost didn’t make it,” she said.
Sonic was busy prying a red velvet bow off the corner of a high shelf. He sounded amused when he said, “Five more minutes and we would’ve had to give everyone a refund and a gift certificate.” He always sounds that way, so I’ve trained myself not to bother reading anything into it.
“I’m aware of the store’s policy,” I replied, but I didn’t stop to discuss it. Only four people were waiting in my classroom. Between church and football, Sunday class size is small, but there’s always enough attendance to keep it from being canceled. As far as I can tell, the more “serious” topics are scheduled for the weekend, so the type of person who holds a typical 9-to-5 weekday job can attend. It’s not a very sound strategy. I can’t imagine anyone but a dabbler taking a mnemography class at the mall.
The syllabus for Intro to Bit-Coding was sufficiently accurate, but an hour wasn’t really enough time to dig deeply into the subject. Add to that the fact that I was rushing, reading off the first slide before I even had my coat hung, and the engagement level on the part of the dabblers was pretty low.
I was hungry, confused and impatient. Maybe the customers sensed my state of mind. No one asked any questions, not one. A man with bifocals did slip out halfway through. I presumed he needed to use the restroom, though he didn’t return, so probably not.
The material was so simplistic, I had no trouble teaching it despite the fact that every few minutes, I glanced at my palm and saw the ink cross I’d marked there earlier. Each time I saw it, I reminded myself that I’d been mneming. And then I replayed the memory of Daniel telling me he loved me—not because I thought it was any indication of the way Daniel Schroeder felt, but because I thought it was the key to remembering as much of the experience as I could for as long as possible. Sex and a motel room and Daniel telling me he loved me. I’d repeated that set of words over five hundred times as I waited for the line of traffic to creep past the accident. Unless the mnem went persistent, which seldom happened, as Big Dan was the only person I knew who’d ever experienced such a thing, shortly those words I’d been telling myself would feel like nothing more than that: words. The memory of Daniel moving inside me while we crested wave after wave of utter joy would be gone.
Intellectually, objectively, I knew forgetting was for the best. Harboring a memory involving someone I knew that they didn’t share could only lead to confusion. But as I explained about the way pixels could be stacked—to create layers of experience or sequences of mnem events—my mind continued to drift back to Daniel. Not because of the interesting way he claimed to stack pixels. My three remaining dabblers wouldn’t have understood how brilliant he was if I’d explained it for the rest of the hour. No, there was something about Daniel, the real Daniel, that felt as if it needed to be realized.
While hands-on pixel work is usually reserved for intermediate classes, I only had three remaining students, so I figured I’d allow them to take a turn at the computer for the last ten minutes of our session. Maybe they’d realize they were getting a special treat, or maybe not. I didn’t particularly care. All I was concerned about was determining what my morning’s mnem about Daniel was supposed to mean.
The sex was fantastic, I remembered that much. But of course it would be. People didn’t mnem about all the embarrassing things that can happen while they’re naked with someone. Not unless that’s their particular fetish.
Maybe that was the point, though. Getting used to “taking it up the ass,” as Daniel so unflinchingly put it. Building a good association with the act so the next time we tried, I didn’t go rigid again.
“Mr. Crowe?” one of the students said. She had bluish burgundy hair that matched her nail polish, and glitter in her eyelashes. Hopefully she never ended up flushing out bits of glitter in an eye wash station.
“Yes?”
“I tried to stack a cat walking across the room, but the computer model shows it sinking through the floor. Why is that?”
I reached over her shoulder and moused to the view of her pixel array. I don’t tend to grab my students’ things, but that morning I was weak with hunger and I had my mind on my mnem. She didn’t flinch, thankfully. “You don’t need the pixel for ‘floor’ after ‘walk’ since it’s understood. Try ‘out’ instead.”
As the student navigated to the index column and located an “out,” I wondered how Daniel would stack that concept, in his vague and non-linear way. Maybe he wouldn’t even bother. Maybe he would determine how he wanted to make the subject feel by seeing the cat walk across the room, and stack the pixels for sentiment and curiosity and fur. Each of those mnemers would experience it in his own way, a beautifully personal and realistic way. A way in which someone’s date didn’t say cheesy porn lines that, in retrospect, they’d never say in real life. Not with a straight face.
The students switched places to take their turns. One stacked a football coming toward the subject, and the other a banquet of food, though the model rendered as a single bowl of cereal in the center of a long table floating in a void. My stomach twisted in hunger at the sight of the “food.”
Thankfully, the clock had ticked down. “That’s it for today,” I announced—loudly, to drown out the noises my stomach was surely going to start making. “If you’d like me to burn a DVD of the class for fifteen dollars, you can either arrange to pick it up at the cash register or have it mailed.” Two of the students left quickly, before I’d even finished giving the DVD pitch, but the burgundy-haired girl raised her hand to indicate she wanted one. Damn it. I felt like I might actually faint. Since we were alone and she seemed sympathetic enough to not report me to the manager, I flicked off the camera and told her, “It’s really not worth the money. You could find all this information and more for free online.” I grabbed a business card, jotted down a mnemography site that occasionally bought my articles on the back of it, and handed it to the student.
“Oh,” she said brightly. “Thanks.”
I’d be pretty happy if someone at the mall saved me fifteen dollars too, unlike the teenager with the overinflated sense of self importance who would let me starve while we quibbled over 79¢. I brushed past the student and hurried toward the break room. I wouldn’t have left anything to eat there—I’d remember if I had—but my co-workers abandoned food all the time. Maybe there’d be a lunch there, or a forgotten piece of fruit. Even a can of pop would fill my stomach and raise my blood sugar.
When I found a red tin decorated with cartoony smiling reindeer in the center of the table, I staggered with relief. Christmas cookies had been showing up periodically for the past two weeks. I hadn’t consumed any, since the thought of some stranger’s hands touching all the dough struck me as potentially unsanitary. Besides, it would be embarrassing to end up with powdered sugar all over my dark clothes. Now, though, I didn’t care. I charged up to the tin, pried off the top, and gasped. Not a single cookie inside. Just a big brown loaf of fruitcake.
Someone had cut a single slice from it, then cut that slice in half, as if they weren’t willing to commit to eating a whole piece. If the first half was any good, they wouldn’t have left the second half in the tin, would they? My stomach made a gargling sound. It was so empty it hurt. So I braced myself and hoisted the half-slice…and I smelled it. I shouldn’t have. It had a rancid citrus odor with a bitter molasses undertone. And now, with the thing right up against my face, I could see it was full of nuts. Ever since I was in first grade and I chipped a tooth on a fragment of shell in a pecan sandy, nuts have made me gag.
But I was so phenomenally hungry, and my next class started in four minutes, twenty-three seconds. My mind was telling me, “Someone else has already touched that piece,” as I hurried the half-slice over to the garbage. It was either spend time sawing off a new piece or use those precious moments to dig out the nuts. Plus, it was office food anyway. Anybody could have touched anything, so I’d need to try my best to stop thinking about that.
The walnuts were easy enough to pry out with my thumbnail, but as the sticky bread released them, it also released more of that funky baked citrus odor as the nuts pinged into the trash. What the heck was in there? I recognized cherries—those should be edible. But what about those bright green things? I was attempting to pick the green stuff out too when JoAnn charged in breathlessly and said, “Elijah?”
“What is this supposed to be?” I held up a sticky green sliver between my thumb and forefinger.
“I dunno.” She observed the picked-over fruitcake in my hands. “Candied fruit. So, uh, you gave Courtney your number?”
“Who?”
“Courtney? From Bit-Coding? The gothy redhead?”
“Oh. Her.” I tore off a chunk of fruitcake and stuffed it in my mouth. I knew I should chew, but chewing would only ensure I found fragments of unidentified fruit, or small bits of nut I might have missed. I mashed it around with my tongue a few times, swallowed, gagged, and swallowed again.
As I tried to determine whether I was going to throw up or if I could swallow another bite, JoAnn said, “I see what she means about the mixed signals.”
I tore off another piece and swallowed it, wishing I could bypass my mouth and get it directly into my stomach. Unfortunately, without a feeding tube, that wasn’t going to happen.
“Elijah, were you asking her out?”
“No.” I wished I had a ginger ale. “What makes you think that?”
She gave a dramatic, exasperated shrug. JoAnn is seventeen. Most of her gestures are dramatic, just like most of her statements are questions. “I dunno, the fact that you gave her your number?”
I forced down another bite of fruitcake. “I gave her a URL on the back of my card. That’s all.”
“I know it’s against policy to hit on Memory Forge customers…but really, where else are you going to meet someone normal?”
“Plenty of places.” In mnem, for instance. Two minutes to class. Mneming is Fun for Everyone, the most inane PowerPoint that’s ever been made. I forced down another bite…and then felt my esophagus spasm. I hiccuped, tried to swallow, and hiccuped again.
“She seems like your type,” JoAnn said.
“She isn’t,” I hiccuped.
“You know, dressed in black and stuff.” She waited while I searched the fridge for something to drink and found nothing, then watched me pour a quarter-cup of stale coffee and force it down. The hiccups abated. “Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“I’m not interested in her.”
“Are you intimidated ’cos she’s so cute? She just spent the last hour listening to you and she likes you anyway. You should at least—”
“Stop it, JoAnn. I said I’m not interested.”
“But she’s perfect for—”
“I’m gay.”
JoAnn’s face froze. In the sudden silence, “edgy” music from the cheap clothing outlet next door pulsed through the wall. I dumped the coffee dregs from my mug, maneuvered around JoAnn, ducked in to the staff bathroom, and locked the door behind me.
In the mirror, I saw the red star on my cheek. I checked my palm. Ink cross. Already, I’d forgotten exactly how the mnem started—how I’d ended up in that motel room, what we’d been wearing. I closed my fist around the cross and whispered, “We had sex and it was amazing.” Except it didn’t feel amazing anymore. It felt sad, because my prefrontal cortex was now beginning to understand that Daniel hadn’t really been there. What good was the experience without him?
I really didn’t understand what people got out of recreational mnems. How could any thought possibly linger, aside from the realization that whatever scenario you’d mnemed and enjoyed, it’s completely lacking in your objective reality? Therapeutic mneming is different. A program from a talented memorysmith in the hands of a skilled sherpa might yield some insights, particularly if there’s someone present to help you clarify your feelings afterward. Love Connection, though? I glanced at the cross on my palm again….
It triggered a memory, not from the mnem itself, but from the moments of disorientation directly afterward, before my hippocampus had begun the process of discarding the subjective manufactured experience. I’d come to a realization myself, without the help of Dr. Bergman or the mnem nurse or anyone else.
I rolled up my sleeve. Penned on my arm in my own writing: If I prove I’m not selfish, Daniel will love me.
***
Finally, after three very uncomfortable classes, I was able to take my break and go eat something. Not pizza. The stubborn teenager was still working at the pizza counter, and I didn’t want to deal with him again. As I carefully chewed my french fries so as not to re-activate my hiccups, I considered the note I’d written on my arm and began brainstorming strategies to set things right between Daniel and me. I’d need to get used to anal, obviously. I’m naturally skeptical about information I find online. Still, Gator55 might be able to give me some more good advice, although quite possibly it was too personal of a question to ask someone I hardly knew. Normally I’d see what Beth thought, though she seemed so upset, I wasn’t planning on asking her. Maybe I’d start by watching gay porn. While the assertion that over half the Internet is made of pornography isn’t statistically accurate, porn is definitely easy enough to find.
Two heads jerked up from behind the counter when I returned to Memory Forge. Not JoAnn and Sonic, who’d been running the store when I left, but JoAnn and Ryan, big, smelly Ryan. I was so caught up in planning which search terms I might begin with that I missed the fact that Sonic’s shift had ended while I was on break.
They weren’t necessarily talking about what I’d just confessed to JoAnn, I told myself. They could have been discussing my tardiness. Or the fact that I’d worn date clothes to work (and I’ll never understand why being “overdressed” is such a big deal no matter how many times Beth tries to explain it.) Whatever it was they’d stopped saying just as I walked into the store, I was pretty sure it was something about me. I deliberately ignored them and headed toward my classroom…or, at least, I tried to. While my attention was fixed on the floor, on putting one foot in front of the other, Ryan stepped out from behind the counter. He stood, arms crossed, blocking the door. I looked up only enough to glimpse his expression. No taunting grin, no fellatio-face. Only anger. Hard-eyed, white-lipped anger.
I dropped my gaze to the floor and said, “I need to get to my classroom.” He didn’t answer. “I need to get to my classroom,” I repeated loudly. “Intro to Mnemography starts in eight and a half minutes, and I’ve got to run more handouts.”
Ryan didn’t budge.
“What’s your intention?” I asked. “To prevent me from preparing? I don’t see the point. All it will accomplish is crowding the schedule.”
It wasn’t that Ryan made a lunge for me, exactly, but because I was so focused on the floor, I did see him shift his weight as if he was about to come at me. Just as he did, JoAnn hissed, “Customers.” Ryan went completely still, almost on the balls of his feet. He held that position for another three seconds, then shouldered me out of the way and stomped back behind the counter.
Relief took a moment to set in. As I made my way down the hall on wobbling knees, I touched my cheek, my chin, my shoulder, my chin, my cheek. And then I remembered the mnevermind there, and all it represented, the encounter with Daniel that hadn’t really happened. I checked my palm and saw the ink cross—I had been mneming, but the things I was currently experiencing were real. That made sense. Characters in mnem aren’t usually as disappointing as JoAnn. I was on edge for the rest of the day. Maybe it was dumb of me to think JoAnn would be as supportive as Big Dan had been, but still, it hurt my feelings that she went running to Ryan to blurt out my sensitive news.
I fretted about Ryan too, wondering if he would attempt to block the path to my car, or maybe come up with some deeper-cutting insults. Hopefully he wasn’t formulating additional comments about the way I suck dick. Not that I thought he was actually looking for an answer, but I might not be able to resist snapping back, because apparently I wasn’t much good at sex. Not outside mnem. And my ineptness might end up costing me a shot at a meaningful relationship.
Luckily I’d opted to retain my next appointment with Dr. Bergman despite the additional session she’d fit in, so I would see her again in the morning. She tends to pick up on all the subtle signals I miss, even if she’s not present for a conversation. She’d know why Beth was so upset, and why my co-workers were acting so hateful.
Hopefully she’d be able to explain the behavior to me.