How desperately unhappy do you have to be, Andrew thinks, to pothole your own mind like that?
Andrew, a lawyer for the neural implant company Aleph, has been struggling with his memory. There are gaps in time that he cannot account for, and an intense anxiety he cannot explain. Andrew knows he has been making use of his own implant’s Privacy Mode to conceal things, from himself as well as others. Because the Aleph bundles a user’s thoughts along with their search data, the only way to keep something truly private is to hide it even from the user themselves, except when they are in Privacy Mode. And so Andrew can’t figure out what he’s hiding from himself, or how to bring that knowledge into public mode where he can remember it all the time.
Andrew’s working theory is that he is cheating on his wife Madeleine, and he spends much of the story trying to figure out how, and why, and with whom. But Andrew’s therapist—who seems to have a fuller picture of what Andrew is going through—keeps trying to get him to think instead about his sister Medo. That’s harder for Andrew to do, since Medo is not a part of his upper-crust San Francisco life and “doesn’t live in the city—she doesn’t live nearby.” As we learn over the course of the story, there are a lot of reasons that it’s difficult for Andrew to think about Medo, and the reasons themselves are part of what he is trying both to remember and to forget.
Amid Andrew’s personal struggles, the story follows a lawsuit about Privacy Mode that Andrew, as Aleph’s chief lawyer, is arguing in federal court. The government is prosecuting a money-launderer, and they are seeking to jailbreak the accused man’s Aleph in order to find out whether he has been hiding illegal financial transactions using Privacy Mode. These courtroom scenes shed some useful light on the history and workings of the Aleph, including the fact that some other Aleph users are managing their memories in a way similar to Andrew. But on the whole, the San Francisco of this era, some decades in the future, is built upon many layers of forgetting, at a social level as well as an individual one.
This is a story you will almost certainly want to read at least twice. Our perspective on the story is tied very closely to Andrew, and specifically to Andrew while in public mode: the first time through, you will be as confused as he is. On second (and further) readings, however, you will be able to see coherence and clarity where Andrew himself cannot and fill in some of the gaps he experiences but cannot explain.
One question lies at the heart of ethics: what do we owe to each other? “Lacuna Heights” takes us into the head of one character to ask us to consider what we owe one another with respect to our own minds and memories, and how technology organizes our attention.
“I think I might be having an affair,” Andrew says.
He is a bulky man, and he sits hunched forward in the berry-red leather armchair, elbows braced on his thighs and his meaty hands dangling between his knees. The trickle of a motorized desk fountain is the only sound in the office. Clear, silky water over edgeless pebbles. Andrew’s therapist crosses her glossy legs.
“We were talking about your sister,” she redirects, waving her pencil in a circle.
“I mean I’m cheating on Madeleine,” he says. “Maybe,” he says. His therapist nods wearily and makes a note.
Andrew has been going to her every Monday for three months, for generalized anxiety. He hasn’t improved, not noticeably.
The sky, in gaps through the bamboo along the window, is a strange, sickly green.
Every day, Andrew notices gaps in his memory. He knows someone brings him his dry cleaning and he looks forward painfully to seeing her, but can’t picture her face, not quite. Every morning, he runs on the treadmill for twenty-five minutes and promises to push himself to thirty, as soon as he shakes off this cold—catches up on sleep—gets his neck thing fixed. And then he’s at work. He understands he took a car but can’t remember doing it. There are no cars on Market Street: none parked, none driving. It’s quiet enough to hear sparrows moving in the heavy summer trees.
There is a type of dissociation that comes from overwork or exhaustion, his therapist tells him. But she looks embarrassed, even miserable, proposing this explanation.
Andrew Cornejo-Holland, at 47, is a tech illiterate. He hates his Aleph; the implant feels like a bullet lodged in his palate and gives him vertigo when it updates. He takes perverse pride in his indifference to neurotech—perverse, because as a law partner at Morrison, O’Melveny & Xi, he runs the Aleph Corp client account. As a litigator, he can afford to leave the technical knowledge to the patent group; he can afford a lot, now, including a life in analog. No ads flickering dreamlike in his mind’s eye while he jogs. No prick of conscience from the GPS navigator when he turns a wrong corner; he can’t even switch on GPS.
The Aleph Corporation isn’t offended; it likes Andrew’s work and him personally. The General Counsel has him and Madeleine over to Los Altos every month, and every month, the GC ticks his head toward his second floor, saying, “Wish you two had wanted kids,” like he’d wanted his to play with or marry theirs. Andrew always freezes and looks to Madeleine’s severe beauty for reassurance, and Madeleine laughs and wiggles her fingers: “Oh, it would ruin me!” like having kids does something mysterious to your hands. She plays the flute for the orchestra and hardly uses her neurotech because she’s afraid it will spoil her ear.
He loves her, he is certain: in the serene, cordial way that long-married couples love each other. He can’t fathom what else he’d want.
“How do I take a snapshot? ” Andrew asks her, leaving the GC’s stupendous front porch. He runs his fingertips along her bare shoulder. “I want to keep this, always.”
Los Altos is dark, clouded. Everything smells of the dry eucalyptus trees, which rustle in a salty, sea-acid wind.
“Picture me bathed in a powerful green light, then blink,” Madeleine says. “Like Kim Novak in Vertigo.”
He smiles. Andrew is the sort of man pleased to confirm that old movies are still in the world, that things his grandparents loved survive in a dizzying, painful new century—when so much has been lost. Drowned. Buried. A long time ago.
Madeleine smiles for the Aleph: a tipsy crinkle of her lips. The front door opens; the GC stands backlit against the houselights.
“That subpoena, Andrew,” the GC reminds him, then shuts and locks the door.
“Blink, Drew,” Madeleine reminds him, still holding her smile.
The Aleph Corporation has been subpoenaed in a federal money-laundering investigation: An Iowa City bank executive is suspected of hiding reportable transactions in his Aleph’s Privacy Mode, and the feds want Aleph Corp to jailbreak it. The case couldn’t have come at a worse time for the company, when it’s about to roll out a mid-priced implant to expand its consumer base.
Privacy Mode is a sacrosanct feature of the neuroimplant—at least, in theory. In practice, it’s unusable, but consumers are still attached to the idea of it. Privacy is self-determination: You get to choose what to disclose about yourself, and to whom, and when, instead of letting the data-miners and ad-slingers haphazardly clap your profile together for you. The Aleph bundles your search data and sells it, that’s nothing new. But it also bundles your thoughts. It’s unavoidable—the Aleph’s search engine displays its results using the same neurochemical processes as waking memory. The implant literally can’t tell the difference between an organic memory and a search result, projected into the user’s hippocampal recall, so it scoops up and transmits both to Aleph’s ad partners. There are strict security controls at the corporate level, but people still like to know they can enter Privacy Mode and keep some thoughts totally secret.
The trade-off, the one that makes Privacy Mode impractical, is that once they exit Privacy Mode, they can’t access any thoughts or memories they had while using it.
The federal court building, renovated, looks nothing like its old self; its clean strangeness makes Andrew unaccountably anxious. He is an anxious person generally, but a canny litigator. In front of the judge, the Department of Justice lawyer, Mr. O’Connor, overplays his arguments. He claims Privacy Mode is used only to shield nefarious activities from scrutiny. Andrew assumes a genteel dignity and shakes his head.
The senior judge cocks a brow at nefarious. She is older than Andrew, even more baffled by neurotechnology. She gets angrier and more confused, until she cuts the both of them off. She orders more briefing on the data subpoena, but in the meantime, she grants Mr. O’Connor leave to depose someone at Aleph on how Privacy Mode works.
Andrew exits the courthouse and crosses Civic Center Plaza, weaving through its ranks of pollarded sycamores in a muddy fog. The pruned branches, thickened into knobs of tree flesh, look like fists or lampposts. In the distance, he makes out a vague shape vaulting up the stairs of the old BART station, carrying delivery bags, pitching port and starboard. Andrew thinks, This is wrong. The BART entrances aren’t BART anymore. The BART tunnels flooded a long time ago. A long time ago. The new system is just “U,” for “Under.” He goes down there every day, but he can’t picture it. Pain under his lungs—why? He thinks hard, but the thought is already slipping from him.
“This is what I’m going to do,” he tells his therapist. “I’m going to find out who this other woman is, I’m going to end things, and I’m going to apologize to Madeleine. I have to do the right thing. I’m just not that kind of guy.”
The therapist takes a deep breath through her hands. “If you’re not going to engage with treatment,” she says, “what’s the point of you coming? We need to talk about your sister.”
“I want to talk about Madeleine,” Andrew says. He fishes a pebble out of her fountain and thumbs at it. “It’s my anxiety—I think I know what I’m anxious about.”
“What does Madeleine represent to you? ”
“What? ”
Today, his therapist wears a slate pantsuit with wine-red pumps. Is it just him, or has she been vamping it up these last few weeks?
“You like her,” she says. “I accept that. But she’s classy, and old-money, and we both know that means something more to you.”
Andrew’s eyes narrow. What if, what if he’s having an affair with his therapist?
What if Andrew is not so tech illiterate as he claims? What if he’s actually quite good at using the Aleph, at least when he’s using it for Privacy Mode, to keep his affair secret even from himself? This is what scares him about neurotech: We’ve outsourced so much of our selves to an array of companies, so their algorithms shoulder the hard work of living—and now he’s doing it himself, to outsource the planning, lies, and guilt of adultery to this other, shadow self. And if he doesn’t figure out what’s going on, soon, he’ll lose Madeleine and this world he has with her.
How can he test if he’s doing it? An implant-repair tech—some independent neurodentist, nothing Aleph.
He wants to buy Madeleine something. Just in case. Alone in his office, he fumbles the Aleph glasses over the bridge of his nose and jaws a bit, thinking, SHOW ME GOLD, in lime-green letters. His mind cramps with memories: bullion hoards inside Fort Knox; gold grains in a black pan; rings; coins; burial regalia in a pyramid; a gilt guitar; champagne-gold wedding shoes. They come as apparitions, as emotions he’s felt before. “Stop!” he says aloud. As if he’s seen before in a dream those wedding shoes. If he concentrates, he can tell the difference. It doesn’t taste like a real memory: It has that sweet tackiness of wallpaper glue.
He can’t stand the idea of all this foreign stuff dumping into his mind. He can’t fathom how everyone else does.
He pulls off the Wi-Fi antennae, camouflaged as ordinary eyeglasses. Strange, chilly tears are leaking from his eyes and he has an ice-cream headache. Andrew hates his Aleph with the infatuation of a great love.
After work he walks home; the condo on Laguna Street is just thirty minutes from his last client meeting, in Russian Hill. He scrapes along the yellow center line of Leavenworth. A lonely seagull calls from behind a crenellation. It’s an easy walk and he snags on why the neighborhood is “Russian Hill” when there’s no incline. Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Noe Valley—don’t the names suggest a rolling city? Of course San Francisco has no hills, he thinks. Except in old movies.
Andrew pauses in the middle of the empty street. There are hills in the old movies—in Vertigo, those long, Herrmann-scored driving shots.
He takes out his Wi-Fi glasses. SAN FRANCISCO HILLS: He concentrates on the words in flickering sea-green. And there were gulls all along these piers, once.
At home, Madeleine lifts groceries out of cloth tote bags set on the kitchen island. “I’m going to attempt a paella,” she announces grandly. There’s no seafood worth eating anymore, but she has the recipe for a chorizo paella. Andrew looks intently at the totes, thinking, Are those our bags?
He asks Madeleine, “Why is there no hill in Russian Hill? ”
Madeleine lowers her hands into a bag with her shoulders at her ears, her narrow, birdlike chest caved. She’s disappointed in him, more so every day.
For the second time that week, he discovers his feet heading for an old BART tunnel and stops himself. The entrance is a yawn in the ground, a tongue of stairs. It’s well lit but darkens as it descends, the golden light shading to deeper, dead ambers, the steps’ shadows lengthening and sharpening. Beyond, a dark that isn’t dark at all, only a sour colorlessness. “U” for Under. “U” for Under, Under, Under.
The Aleph deposition proceeds at the DOJ branch office on Golden Gate Avenue. Mr. O’Connor grills Aleph’s chief technology officer on Privacy Mode and how the data gets stored.
Essentially, the implant tweaks how the hippocampus indexes memories for recall: It adds a special indexing “key” to the memory so that it’s “lost” to recall outside of Privacy Mode, but retrievable inside it. Within Privacy Mode, the user has access to a whole world of memories, even old memories, that’s walled off from recall otherwise.
“But why? ” O’Connor asks. “Why isn’t Privacy Mode designed so it’s just, while you’re in it, the implant stops transmitting anything up to Aleph? ”
“Then the data-bundling protocols would scoop up a ‘private’ thought as soon as the user remembered it in normal mode,” says the CTO. “Privacy Mode wouldn’t really be private, then.”
In a corner of the room, the Iowa bank executive and his defense attorney listen and take notes. Andrew has trouble hiding his revulsion. The banker is pasty, rumpled, stupid with greed, scared of his own shadow. He stinks of deodorant wearing off. How desperately unhappy do you have to be, Andrew thinks, to pothole your own mind like that?
Aleph’s CTO isn’t thrilled to disclose proprietary neurotech protocols, but the deposition is sealed and, on the whole, Andrew leaves Golden Gate Avenue satisfied. He’s eager to see the transcript; he has an undignified pleasure in reading himself. But it’ll be a few more days before the transcript is ready, and meanwhile, the brief on the data subpoena is more important.
It’s only as he turns down Larkin and checks his internal clock that he realizes it’s an hour later than he thought. Andrew runs over the deposition in his head carefully. There’s a foggy, inaudible patch halfway through—a gap—and he realizes he must have, somehow, and for some reason, entered Privacy Mode during the deposition.
“Sometimes I wish I were crazy,” Andrew tells his therapist.
She folds forward. “When’s the first time you recall wishing that? ”
“Law school.” Andrew digs for the memory, and he’s relieved to find it largely intact. “I got into Hastings here in the city, but then it closed, it closed because …” He frowns. “That’s not the important part. Berkeley was still open, then, and it took a dozen of us from Hastings, which always made me feel I hadn’t really earned being there. So much pressure and stress—at the time, I was working to send money home to my parents, and one day I’d been going on no sleep, I was so afraid I’d fail my classes, and the prof just nailed me to the wall for coming in unprepared—it was too much—I got up and just started walking, down the steps, out of class, under all the dying gingko trees, down, down, down the hill. There was this roar of drilling machinery, or—no, they were pumps, in the distance, there were huge platforms like war machines, and networks of pipes and engines, and a droning that filled up my body. I kept walking and thinking, I should have a nervous breakdown, I hope they lock me up, then I won’t fail. How do you like that? That’s what I kept fixating on. If I’m crazy, I don’t have to take the final, and can’t fail.”
Andrew’s hair products are waiting for him on his doormat in a coy little blue paper bag. It’s his special stuff, for receding hair. System 2: Noticeably Thinning. “Oh,” he says, delighted. He stops, and looks around, baffled; he was literally, literally just with his therapist.
Andrew plants himself at his dinner table with a legal pad and a plastic hotel pen. The dusk outside is a murky blue, and inside, the living room furniture darkens into strange densities. He can’t remember how to enter Privacy Mode; the transition itself gets key-indexed along with the protected memories, so he has to look up the instructions each time. No matter what, Andrew promises, he’ll write down what he remembers inside Privacy Mode. Nothing is worth keeping a secret from himself, wondering around it. He finds the instructions with his Aleph, and now he’s always known what to do.
First, he notices the changed light—now, the living room lamps are all on, it’s as bright as day. His pen is snapped in half and his hands are covered in oily, blue smears that fill in the fine crack-work of his palms. Andrew is shaking. In the living room, Madeleine perches on her black music chair, laying her flute in its velvet case. The legal pad in front of him is blank.
“Did I say anything? ” he asks her, but she only shuts the instrument case. She rises and carries off a tied stack of folded laundry left by the front door.
The pad is blank. Andrew is flouting himself. Is he really his own enemy?
He sets up a camera on the bookshelf but realizes this is stupid—he’ll just turn it off when he’s in Privacy Mode. Andrew can’t think of anything else to do, though. Madeleine looks offended—he can’t explain to her that he suspects himself. He claims to think someone’s breaking in. He has that feeling again like there’ve been strangers in their apartment, but they both know that feeling again just means anxiety.
“When’s the last time you called your sister? ” she asks. Andrew nods: He should have Medo hide the cameras. Then his other, shadow self won’t find and uninstall them.
But Medo doesn’t live in the city—she doesn’t live nearby—she drives a ride-share, runs odd jobs, “gig economy” stuff—so the idea makes no sense after all.
He dreams, that night, of thronging shadowy crowds he hasn’t seen since he was a child, pushing through narrow streets under a sky that seems impossibly close, like he could knock his head on the sun. He’s looking for his sister, Remedios—calling for her over the heads of people he can’t make out because they’re so close, “Medo! Medo!” He finds her where a depression in a brick wall makes a pocket of space. She’s standing with her face in the corner and when he turns her, her skin is raw, sunburned, blacked with old coal soot. Medo recognizes him breathlessly, dazed, ready to faint. She’s been facing into that wall for days.
He loves Madeleine, more or less: He can hear her trailing him, her high heels grinding on the flagstones: “Andrew, please slow down.” She’s in a silk gown slit to the knees, he’s in a tux, and the others heading to the War Memorial Opera House are likewise in gala dress. The premier is Götterdämmerung, but underwater. A new production. Madeleine has played the leitmotifs on the piano, with a look of solemn instruction, so he’ll recognize them during the show. He does love her, but is he dissatisfied? Is he already losing her? What about his life doesn’t he like?
On the borders of the plaza, through the strange lamppost sycamores, uncertain shapes run past, carrying backpacks or cloth bags. He can’t quite see them; the light is too vague, mixed, the dusk blues polluted by the giant ad screens on surrounding rooftops. The opera patrons flash lurid red and voluptuous purple. What, he thinks, doesn’t he like about his life?
Maybe he’s not having an affair; he considers his missing hour at the deposition. Maybe there is a part of the litigation so confidential—a trade secret so valuable—that Aleph set him up to forget it when he’s not actually working on it. He knows that’s possible, to set up an automatic trigger. It’d be ingenious security. He’d recommend it to them; but not on himself.
Would they have done it without his consent? Now there’s a lawsuit.
Civic Center Plaza has three-story advertisement screens that flash into the night, like those that still paint Times Square. New York is gone now; most coastal cities are. Couldn’t adapt to the rising oceans fast enough: a lack of vision, fleeing tax base. The Port Authority runs gondola tours through the drowned city: Park Avenue by moonlight, black water stippled in white streaks up to the Grand Central Mercury; Times Square still flashing, its iconic, obnoxious ads preserved. Reflected images burst across the water, royal blues and lipstick reds, sunken TV shows and drowned Broadway revivals, beautiful, obsolete faces, washing over shadowy tourists standing astonished in their boats. Civic Center Plaza can’t rival Times Square—Andrew’s not sorry for it, but he does morbidly sympathize with that instinct to honor humanity’s pinnacle achievement in bad taste.
An Aleph ad comes on, two giant human eyes carefully searching the plaza. Their irises’ striations, glacier-blue, stream binary digits. KNOW EVERYTHING, the ad says. Not unfriendly, those eyes, but so big and godly they can’t not be ominous. Andrew will have a talk with Aleph about the ad, it’s just awful. He cranes his head; he sees one or two others in the plaza staring at the words, craning their heads in the same expression of shapeless regret.
In the theater, the sopranos toddle out in diving suits and sing by opening their faceplates. Madeleine whispers, “This is so stupid, I’m so sorry.” Andrew is sobbing helplessly.
He goes to get his implant checked. It’s lodged up at the back of his soft palate, sending filaments into his brain from underneath. “I never use it,” he tells the neurodentist, “but I think it’s malfunctioning, going into Privacy Mode when it shouldn’t. Can’t you turn that feature off? ”
The dentist looks knowingly at him in the weird aquarium light. Her whole office is under sea level: a design fad in offices along the Marina District piers, turn a problem into an aesthetic. The floor dances in wraiths of gray-green light. One wall is built of thick glass and through it, white fronds and scraps suspend in dead water.
The neurodentist has three instruments in Andrew’s mouth when she leans close. “I can’t say you’re the only person who uses it like this, Mr. Cornejo-Holland, but it’s not a good idea.”
Andrew’s eyes grow wide; he can’t swallow, but gurgles something like a nervous laugh.
“There are things you need to know,” she says.
He’d been walking along the old beaches south of San Francisco with Remedios when she told him her vision of Hell. This was near thirty years ago, before those beaches disappeared into the rising, dying ocean. Remedios was thirteen and dressed for swimming, but she wrinkled her nose when they saw the ocean’s color—that day, it was lavender-gray, and its waves slopped viscously, like liquid velvet. The smell, too: salt rot, dead kelp. Andrew (Andrés, then) had come from his community college, having survived his first moot with the debate club, and still wore a short-sleeve button-down and tie like a Latter-day Saint, but carried his shoes in his hand as they walked. “What I want Hell to be,” Medo was saying—because she had a mind like that, an intellect that felt entitled to grab into life’s most difficult crevices—“What I want Hell to be, is the perfect knowledge of everything you did in life and what happened because of it, good or bad. You feel exactly how much you hurt or helped people. All the pain or joy you caused, you feel it yourself.”
At their feet, and stretched out as far as they could see, were hundreds and hundreds of spiny pink prawns, dead and washed ashore, such that their corpses traced the morning tide line. Medo stepped around them, her face antagonistic and precise. “That way, you’re punished if you did mostly bad things,” she said, “and rewarded if you did good. See? It’s elegant. But you’d have to know everything you did. Like, the face you made at the bodega guy and it made him feel like dirt, so he beat his kid that night. I guess we’re in for some shit, for driving here.”
He can’t remember what he said, but he remembers looking back at his car parked by the carbon-poisoned beach—the last car he ever drove. And he remembers—Medo had to shout over some awful machine drone that carried down from the city. That crashing, that grinding, a chorus of generators, engines, cranes, jackhammers, backhoes, and pumps, grinding, groaning, growing.
The city is storming when he finishes at the office: one of the new San Francisco storms that tear the sky into pieces and throw it into the bay. Hail, thick as eyes. Diseased rain vomiting into the water, sending waves crashing against the Presidio’s sea walls. Andrew is drenched and totally wired as he splashes into his condo lobby. In the bedroom, Madeleine is sleeping, her ears plugged with orange plastic that looks like blood in the storm-light. Andrew, too buzzed to sleep after finally finishing his brief, strips down to his underwear and pads barefoot on the treadmill. The storm thrashes outside and he’s giddy with the thrill of change. Everything is new, he thinks mysteriously. Everything is fast and risky, and different. He feels his heart breaking and his cock plumping at the same time, but he’s high on adrenaline and accepts his middle-aged body’s imprecision as part of the new world’s logic.
Madeleine stirs and turns on the lamp. Its glow falls over Andrew’s large feet clapping the treadmill. “Oh, hey,” Andrew says, grinning. “Can’t sleep? ”
Madeleine jackknifes out of bed and crosses to the window. Weather always upsets her.
“I’m going to win this one, Mad,” Andrew declares, and he turns up the treadmill speed so that he’s running. It’s nearly two and his eyes are sore for lack of sleep, but everything in him is driving forward. Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! He outruns the waters pooling through Laguna Heights, swamping gutters, sending up death smells. “The feds don’t have a chance in hell.”
Madeleine smooths her hair down the back of her head. “Come to bed? ” she says. “I’ve got a pill if you need it.”
“Need it? ” Andrew laughs. “Hey,” he says, “hey, check the left breast pocket of my suit jacket. Something came for you-u.” He never knows what to do with Madeleine’s remote moods; she’ll never explain, never say what’s gnawing at her, so he’ll play it into a kind of marital caper.
But Madeleine doesn’t smile exasperatedly, or even angrily wave him off. She slumps, and a look of dread steals over her face. She retrieves the box from his suit and finds the gold spangle earrings he’s bought her. “Oh, oh sweetheart,” she says mechanically.
“You don’t like them? ”
“You know I love them.” She sighs. She crosses the room and tosses them inside a drawer without looking. Her face in the storm-light takes on a new bitterness, even rage. “Andrew!” she says. “Get off the treadmill. It’s crazy! You’re insane, do you realize that? No one does this!”
Andrew slows the treadmill, and they fight. The details of the fight, like all their fights, are hazy and he recalls only the broad fact of one the next morning as Madeleine leaves for the conservatory. The sky has stopped convulsing and now hangs in a sort of stupor. Andrew goes to the bureau drawer—he can’t remember the fight, but he remembers her picking that drawer—and inside he finds a dozen identical pairs of gold spangle earrings. His mind runs into a wall.
His therapist looks at him blankly, and then her face creases into impatience.
“You’re not telling me things,” Andrew says.
She rolls her eyes slowly around the room. “You need to start taking responsibility for yourself,” she says. She raps her pen on her palm.
“Why won’t you be straight with me? ” He adds stupidly, “I’m paying you.”
Her glance skewers him. “You’re paying me not to tell you, Andrew.”
“There are lacunae,” Andrew says, and immediately regrets it. The judge scowls from high on her bench. She looks like a crab from this angle. Salty, hard-shelled—unimpressed with Latin. “Gaps,” Andrew clarifies, “in the law.”
There is no law to cover a federal investigation subpoenaing witnesses’ private thoughts. A witness can’t be forced to self-incriminate and memories locked away in Privacy Mode cannot be subject to compulsion. That’s the logical extension of the Fifth Amendment, although Andrew acknowledges the Framers didn’t provide for exactly this scenario: so, lacunae.
Behind him, people are entering and exiting the courtroom, and the heavy wooden doors creak and slam and slam.
The judge orders the data subpoena quashed. She reads off her ruling from the bench, an impassioned defense of civil liberty. They’ll teach it in law schools next year; Andrew might even get an award from the ACLU. But leaving the courthouse, Andrew has no memory of the order, only an impression. He feels disappointed, even appalled, although he can’t tell whether it’s the forgetting or the judge’s order itself that’s made him feel this way.
A tickle of recognition tells him the deposition transcript is ready for him. It’s beside the point now, but he still wants to read it, and he fishes in his breast pocket for his Wi-Fi glasses.
His fingers brush something delicate; it’s the gold spangle earrings—which, of course, he doesn’t remember putting in his pocket.
Before he knows it, he is again at the old BART entrance in UN Plaza.
The tunnels are flooded, and yet his steps are so certain. He knows what’s down there—a part of him, inaccessible to him, knows. He can remember, now, the sounds his shoes have made on the stairs, the special clap of his soles on the rubber traction strips. He’s been down there; he’s been down there a lot. He recalls the strange, stale, cool air, the aftertaste of metal and grease and filtered air. But it’s no subway, he remembers. “U” for Under. The BART entrance isn’t anything like a BART entrance, not really. It looks like one, but that’s just nostalgia.
DEPOSITION TRANSCRIPT (p. 118 of 253)
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) But what legitimate use could that have? Criminal activity—that’s the obvious utility.
A: (by WITNESS) Well, um, trauma, for example. We’ve developed relationships with providers and it’s very effective in managing, um, intrusive memories in treatment. So, like an abuse that’s—the patient and his therapist decide that’s a memory that needs to be walled off and, um, reintroduced in a structured way. That’s my understanding of it.
Q: You’re not a mental health expert yourself, correct?
A: No.
Q: You’re not aware that, in fact, blocked memories are a symptom of PTSD? A pathology, not a treatment?
A: I am not aware, no.
Q: And you don’t require a therapist or a doctor to sign off on such a use of Privacy Mode. Anybody can wall off any memory or even any subject matter they want to hide and it’d be inaccessible in an investigation.
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) I’m going to have to object to that. Compound. Calls for a legal conclusion.
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) I’ll rephrase. Let’s say—OK, let’s say you want to forget what happened to San Francisco. It’s too quote-unquote traumatic, so just forget it.
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) Objection.
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) The flooding, the refugee crisis, just too painful. Put it away. The food shortages. The riots. Let’s forget all of Unfrancisco itself. Forget it exists. You could do that, right, without a doctor’s approval? Set it up yourself?
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) Objection. Relevance. Speculative. Compound. Argumentative.
Q: (by MR. O’CONNOR) I want the record to reflect that deponent’s counsel is using an extremely loud voice and striking the table very aggressively and violently.
(by MR. CORNEJO-HOLLAND) Objection. Objection. Objection.
So down again, into Unfrancisco, into the undercity. As I hurried into the phony BART tunnel, my legs remembered before I did and carried me into a ride-share. The Under-Plaza was scrambling with giggers, running deliveries across town in canvas bags, or pedaling on bicycles with groceries in the basket, to cook a dinner for some rich jerk like me, or dashing up the stairs waving dry-cleaning bags like a flag. I got a ride to Noe Valley from a sunken-eyed kid with a hipster chignon and wisps of blond beard floating around his chin. With me in the back seat were grocery deliveries for some next gig: a fresh baguette that filled the electric car with the smell of hot bread, a giant jackfruit that must have weighed twenty pounds and cost more than that day’s commissions. These were the people I’d forgotten, daily, nightly, the poor kids running the city out of the corners of my eyes. I looked back through the rear windscreen to see the city I knew as a boy: hills, dipping down into asphalt ravines, rising right into the false sky; historic buildings’ porticos and paneled double doors, their higher floors refitted to open identically onto a new surface city; knolls of fake grass where parks had died sunless; false maples and ginkgos hiding air-filtration machinery and broadcasting ads for soap, sitcoms, or vacations always a hundred more gigs out of reach. Under their chatter, the churn of the pumps in the seawalls keeping the swollen bay from flooding the undercity.
It had all happened so slowly, and still so fast: the seawalls built higher, higher—no one really knew how high they’d have to build to keep up with the Big Melt. Roof gardens became roof lawns, roof parks, but the rich wanted sun and just kept building, building, higher, higher—the Big Lift, we called it hopefully. No one was so tasteless as to call it the Rising Tide that Lifts All Boats, but we all kind of thought that.
The news shoved images at us: long flotillas of bodies lacing drowned shantytowns.
Forgetting is a human right. That’s what the judge’s order said. I remembered now: All progress contains the decision to not look backwards. Our State of California cannot exist except by forgetting the claims of the people who were here before us. The peace of mind we struggle to keep, in this terrible present, depends on a certain mental distance from those who didn’t survive the crisis, or who now survive so miserably. There is moral failure here, no doubt. But the moral imperative, when wielded by the arm of the law, too easily slips into tyranny, and this Court will not midwife that tyranny to pursue one alleged criminal.
The government can no more compel a citizen to remember a particular past than it can force them to think a certain thought. Our thoughts determine who we are as individuals of conscience and expression; so do our failures to think. The government has no say in either—so rules the Court.
In front of Medo’s building, in front of her door, I was already crying. I remembered, I cried every time I stepped into Unfrancisco, for what had been lost, who had been buried, and the decade of displacements that created this sunny underworld. It was Medo who pointed that out to me: how everyone looked hatefully at the false blue sky, because every day can’t be cloudless, a native San Franciscan needs the gloom of summer to believe their city is still theirs.
Medo and Mamá were both home. My sister was icing her knee and checking her phone for gigs to take, but Mamá lurched to her feet with a cry of joy that broke me. She hobbled to me, arms wide, telling me about the show she was watching, beautiful doctors solving mysteries, and without missing a beat, she reached up with her gnarled thumb and smudged a tear crawling from my eye.
These are for you, Remedios. I showed her the earrings I’d bought for Madeleine. I’m going to put money in the account before I head back, too, but I wanted you to have something fun. I wanted badly to see her smile, but she stayed in her chair, said thank you, you’re such a great brother, Andrés, but with one eye still on her phone. For the hundredth time, I prodded myself to ask them up to the surface to live with me and Madeleine, up to that new, foggy, flat Francisco—residency quotas be damned—but I’d already asked, they’d already answered no, how could we live up there knowing what’s down here, and I had been so relieved, I didn’t dare press it. I have always been a coward, and that’s why I need to forget, over and over again, where I’ve left them. I glanced around the room: It wasn’t a bad apartment, not at all, it had clean, dry walls and the fridge was full whenever I visited. It’s not like I’d abandoned them; I sent them money all the time; I was a good brother, even unconsciously.
I said to them, I think of you every day.
And they looked at me as Madeleine will look at me when my other, shadow self returns to the condo baffled by missing time: a blank look of buried answers—a look of patience worn from overuse, but intact—an indulgence I have no right to, but will ask for anyway.