Читать книгу Tokyo Cancelled - Rana Dasgupta - Страница 8

IN THE CITY of London there was once a wealthy stockbroker who had three sons. Even when they were all still young, everyone could see that while the first two sons were able and hardworking, the youngest, Thomas, had his head in the clouds.

Thomas liked nothing better than to bury himself in history books and read of how the world was before. He thrilled at the struggles of Romanovs and Socialists and put his face close to black-and-white photographs of firebrand Lenin and little haemophiliac Alexei, trying to envisage the lives that hid behind the scratched surfaces and foreign-seeming faces. He read of places that were now summer holiday destinations where millions were killed just a few decades ago, and wondered at how death had in that short time become so exotic. He could never quite become accustomed to the idea that people were growing old long ago when the world was so much younger; so he knew he had not truly understood the scale of time.

One day Thomas sat in his customary reading seat in the Islington Public Library, not two minutes from the monumental black front door of his father’s Georgian townhouse that sat in a serene row of precisely similar houses on Canonbury Square. He read of the slow rot in the Ottoman Empire, of schemes hatched in Berlin, London, and St Petersburg to divide the imperial carrion, and of Bulgarian and Romanian revolutionaries studying poetry and explosives in Paris. The library was still save for a few occasional page-turners and the strenuous silence of the librarian who wheeled a cart of books and re-shelved them under Crime and Local Interest. Thomas thought of Thrace and Thessaly.

An old woman entered the library and sat down next to him. She lowered herself slowly into her seat and began to lay out things: a raincoat (on the back of her chair), a handbag, an umbrella in a nylon sleeve, a stick, a set of keys, a Tupperware lunchbox. The ritual was so deliberate that Thomas could not shut it out of his head, and he wished she had not chosen that particular place.

He tried to concentrate on sensational insurgencies and brutal massacres but now she had unwrapped the tin foil from her egg sandwiches and the smell was banishing the past. NO EATING said the big bright sign with the green logo of the Borough of Islington: Thomas looked hopefully around for someone who might enforce the rule, but suddenly there was no one else there. The old woman began to mash her bread noisily with toothless gums and he stole at her what was calculated to be an intimidating glance. He saw that she was blind.

‘I can see’–she hesitated, as if playing with his thoughts–‘you don’t like me being here.’ She spoke loudly, oblivious to the silence of the library. Thomas felt ashamed. She was fragile and tiny.

‘No it’s not that. It’s just–’

‘You don’t think I should eat egg sandwiches in a library. Luckily there’s no one here to catch me!’ She shot him a conspiratorial grin. ‘And anyway, a blind woman is not likely to drop her mayonnaise on the pages of a book, is she?’ Her eyes were like marble.

‘You are reading about the past. Making mental notes of dates and names, fitting together all the little things you know about a place and a time. Trying to remember what happened long ago. But here’s a question. Can you remember what will happen? In the future?’

She seemed to expect an answer.

‘Clearly not,’ Thomas ventured. ‘Remembering is by definition about the past.’

‘Why so? Is to remember not simply to make present in the mind that which happens at another time? Past or future?’

‘But no one can make present that which hasn’t happened yet.’

‘How do you know the future hasn’t happened yet?’

‘That’s the definition of the future!’ Thomas’s voice betrayed frustration. ‘The past has happened. It is recorded. We all remember what happened yesterday. The future has not happened. It is not recorded anywhere and we cannot know it.’

‘Isn’t that tautology? Remembering is the recollection of the past. The past is that which can be recollected. Well let me tell you that I am unusual among people in being able to remember what has not happened yet. And the distinction between past and future seems less important than you might imagine.’

Thomas stared at her. He assumed madness.

‘For you, the present is easy to discern because it is simply where memory stops. Memories hurtle out of the past and come to a halt in the now. The present is the rockface at the end of the tunnel where you gouge away at the future.’

There was still no one else in the library. They talked naturally, loudly.

‘I, on the other hand, was born with all my memories, rather as a woman is born with all her eggs. I often forget where the present is because it is not, as it is for you, the gateway to the future. My future is already here.’

‘So tell me, if I am to believe you, what I am going to do tonight, when I leave this library.’

‘You make a common mistake. I didn’t say that I know everything that will ever happen. I said only that I already possess all my memories. (And they run out in so short a time! I have lived through nearly all of them, and now there remain just a few crumbs in the bottom of the bag.) Still, I do have more memories of you.

You will spend your life in the realm of the past You will fail entirely to keep up with the times But your wealth will make your father seem poor A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines.’

Thomas thought over the words.

‘What does all that mean? Can you explain?’

The old woman gave a flabby chuckle.

‘Surely you can’t expect me to tell you more than that? Isn’t it already encouraging enough?’

She put the lid on her lunch box.

‘Anyway. It is time for me to take my leave.’ Her possessions found their way back into her bag and she stood up, slowly and uncertainly. ‘But I have just remembered what will happen to you tonight. My mind is more blurred than it once was. You are going to have an encounter with Death. Don’t worry–you will survive.’ She smiled at him–almost affectionately–and departed.

Thomas could not return to his books. He sat for a long time reciting the woman’s words to himself and wondering about his future. He left the library in a daydream and wandered home. Full of his thoughts he rang at the wrong bell. A hooded figure answered the door, black robes billowing around its knees and only shadows where its face should have been. The figure carried a scythe. Made of plastic. Thomas remembered it was Halloween.

Not long afterwards, Thomas’s father received a big promotion. He worked for a small but thriving investment firm in the City that had made a name for itself in private financial services. He had joined the firm twelve years ago from Goldman Sachs and had from the outset consistently delivered better returns to his clients than any of his peers. Tall and attractive, with an entirely unselfconscious sense of humour, he also had a talent for entertaining the high net-worth individuals that were the firm’s clients. Now the board had asked him to take the place of the retiring managing director. He had agreed unhesitatingly.

In celebration of this advancement, Thomas’s father took the entire family to the Oxo Tower for dinner. They drove down from Islington in the car, crossing over Blackfriars Bridge from where the floodlights on St Paul’s Cathedral made it look like a magnificent dead effigy of itself. The restaurant was a floating cocoon of leather and stainless steel with lighting like caresses, and their table looked down over the row of corporate palaces that lined the other side of the Thames. Thomas thought his father looked somehow more imposing even than before. His mother had put on a new sequined dress and talked about the differences in the dream lives of modern and ancient Man as described in the book she was reading about Australian Aborigines. Champagne was poured. They all clinked glasses.

‘So here’s to the new boss,’ proclaimed Thomas’s father.

‘I’m so proud of you, darling,’ said his wife, kissing him on the cheek.

‘I can tell you boys: investing is a great business. A great discipline. It forces you to become exceptional. Most people are just interested with what’s going on now. Getting a little more, perhaps. But basically turning the wheels. When you’re in investment you have to be completely sceptical about the present, aware that there is nothing that cannot change, no future scenario that can be discounted. You exist on a different plane, predicting the future, making your living by working out how other people will be making their living tomorrow. And not only that, but making that future materialize by investing in it. There’s no sphere of knowledge that’s not relevant to this job. It might be water, it might be toys; it could be guns or new kinds of gene. The whole universe is there.’

His wife looked lovingly at him through mascara-thick lashes. Sculpted starters were brought that sat in the middle of expansive plates and seemed inadequate to the three brothers.

‘So tell me, boys–you’re all becoming men now–what is it you’d like to do with your lives? What is your ambition?’

The eldest spoke first.

‘Father, I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I think after I’ve finished at the LSE I’d like to get a couple of years’ experience in one of the big management consulting firms. I think that would give me a broad exposure to a lot of different industries. Then I can do an MBA–maybe in the US. At that point I’d be in a really good position to know what direction to move in. But what I’d really like to do–I say this now without much experience–is to run my own business.’

‘Sounds good, son. Make sure you don’t get too programmatic about things. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come at really inconvenient times. If you’ve planned your life out for the next twenty years you may not be able to make yourself available for them. Next!’

The second son spoke.

‘Father, I want to work for one of the big banks. The money industry is never going to be out of fashion. I can’t see the point of working in some shoe-string business for just enough to live on. The only respectable option to me seems to be to work damn hard and earn serious money–and retire when you’re forty.’

‘Well I’m forty-nine and I haven’t retired yet! Remember that it’s not enough simply to desire money very much. You have to be good at earning it. But I’m sure you will be. So finally to young Tom. What about you?’

Thomas looked around at his whole family, his eyes glinting with champagne.

‘I will surpass you all,’ he said. ‘I will make you all look like paupers.’

The paterfamilias smile vanished.

‘Oh really, Thomas. And how are you going to do that?’

‘You will see. One day you will see my mountain of jewels.’

His father’s voice became unpleasant.

‘Thomas, I’m just about sick of your stupid talk and your irresponsible, lazy behaviour. How dare you talk to me like that when you haven’t got the first idea of the world–especially on a night like this!’

His mother continued.

‘Your father and I never stop condoning what you do, tolerating your insolence and absent-mindedness. But sometimes I think we go too far. Do you realize who your father is? He is not just some average man who can be talked to like that. I don’t know how a member of your father’s and my family came to act like you. Think like you.’

Thomas’s brothers looked under the table. Waiters glided around in practised obliviousness. ‘Sometimes the future is not just an extension of the past according to rules we all know,’ said Thomas. ‘Look at revolutions, the collapse of empires. I think that something will happen to all of you that you have not even thought about. And you will not have devoted one minute of your lives to preparing yourselves for it. I don’t even know what it will be. But I know it will happen.’

The silence that followed was the silence of Thomas’s father’s rage. When he spoke it was with a self-restraint that burned white.

‘Thomas, when we go back home tonight I want you to pack your things and get out of our house. I will not have some mutant element in our home. Our family will not be abused by someone who is ungrateful, someone who likes thinking about the destruction of his brothers and parents. You will get out. Do you understand?’

Thomas nodded slowly, amazed and aghast that things had gone this far.

His father left the table and did not come back for half an hour. No one spoke as they drove home.

The family went to bed with raw feelings and empty stomachs. Thomas’s mother whispered to him that they would discuss all this in the morning. But Thomas could not bear the idea of waiting for such a discussion. He lay still until he could hear no movement and then silently got up, packed some clothes by torchlight into a school sports bag, and crept downstairs. He took two antique silver picture frames he had once helped his father choose for his mother’s birthday in a gallery on Ladbroke Grove, a gold pocket watch that was on display in the drawing room, and his father’s state-of-the-art SLR camera that had lain untouched in its wrappings for the last year. He disabled the burglar alarm, undid the locks on the heavy oak front door, eased it open, and stepped out.

The moon was so bright that the streets seemed to be bathed in an eerie kind of underexposed daylight that was even more pellucid for the absolute quiet. Insomniac houses and Range Rovers blinked at each other with red security eyes. Thomas wandered aimlessly, up to the point where gentility broke and the streets opened up around King’s Cross station. He bought a bag of greasy chips in an all-night kebab shop and sat in his coat on a bar stool at a narrow strip of tabletop looking out through his own reflection at the sparse traffic of taxis and night shelter regulars. He studied a much-faded poster of Istanbul hanging on the wall next to him, the skies above the Hagia Sofia unnaturally turquoise and the cars on the streets forty years old.

He left and wandered aimlessly around the station. It was late November, and morning came before the sun. Timetables took hold again as commuters arrived in waves and departed in buses and taxis. Eventually it grew light, and the shops opened.

Thomas went to a pawn shop. He removed the photographs from the frames and placed his items on the counter. The shop owner offered him £2,000. At the last minute he decided to keep the camera, and took £1,750.

Next to the pawn shop was an advertisement for a room for rent. Thomas called the number from a phone box; a woman came downstairs in her slippers and showed him up to a single room overlooking the station. He paid her £600 for the deposit and first month’s rent and closed the door behind her. He sat on the bed and looked at his photographs. One was of the wedding of his mother’s parents, both of whom had died before Thomas was born. The other was a studio portrait of the same couple with a baby–his mother–in a long white christening robe. Between the two photographs the man had developed a long scar on his right cheek that Thomas had never noticed when he had looked at them before.

For several days Thomas walked everywhere in the city taking photographs of his own. He went to the sparkling grove of banking towers that sat on the former dockyards among the eastern coils of the Thames and took pictures that were rather desolate. He took photographs of pre-Christmas sales in Covent Garden. He photographed Trafalgar Square at 4 a.m.

He called his mother to say ‘Hello’. She was frantic with fear and pleaded with him to come home. He said he would at some point.

One day he was sitting having lunch in a cheap sandwich shop in Hackney. A woman sitting at the table next to him asked, ‘Are you a photographer?’ He looked at her. She gestured towards the camera.

‘Not really. I take pictures for fun.’

‘What do you take pictures of?’

She wore lithe urban gear that looked as if it had been born in a wind tunnel.

‘I don’t really know.’ He had not talked to anyone for several days and felt awkward. He thought for a moment. ‘I am trying to live entirely in the realm of the past. Trying to take pictures of what there was before.’ He looked at her to see if she was listening. ‘But I don’t seem to be able to find it. Sometimes it’s not there anymore. And sometimes when it is there, I can’t see it.’

She looked at him inquisitively.

‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Do you need a job?’

‘Actually I do. I have no money.’

‘Can you keep secrets?’

‘I don’t know anyone to tell secrets to.’

‘Come with me.’

She led him to an old, dilapidated brick building with a big front door of reinforced glass that buzzed open to her combination. They stepped into a tiny, filthy lift and she pressed ‘6’. They were standing very close to each other.

‘I’m Jo, by the way.’ She held out her hand. He shook it.

‘I’m Thomas. Pleased to meet you.’

The lift stopped inexplicably at the fourth floor. The doors opened to a bright display of Chinese dragons and calendars. Chinese men and women worked at sewing machines to the sound of zappy FM radio. The doors closed again.

On the sixth floor they stepped out into a vestibule with steel walls and a thick steel door. There were no signs to indicate what might lie inside.

‘Turn away please,’ said Jo.

He turned back to face the closing lift door as she entered another combination. He heard the sound of keys and a lock shifted weightily.

‘OK. Come on.’

He turned round and followed her inside. Computer lights blinked in the darkness for a moment; Jo pulled a big handle on the wall and, with a thud that echoed far away, rows of fluorescent lights flickered on irregularly down the length of a huge, empty expanse. The floor was concrete, speckled near the edges with recent whitewash whose smell still hung in the air. The large, uneven windows that lined one wall had recently been covered with thick steel grills. Near the door stood three desks with computers on them and a table with a printer and a coffee maker.

‘Have a seat, Thomas. Coffee?’

‘Yes please.’

She poured two mugs.

‘We are setting up probably the most extraordinary business you will ever encounter. I’d like your help and I think you’ll find it exciting. Your interests will qualify you very well for the task and I’ll pay you enough that you’ll be satisfied. I will need from you a great amount of effort and imagination–and, of course, your utter secrecy. OK?’

He nodded.

‘Right. About twelve years ago there was a round of secret meetings between the British and American intelligence agencies. They convened a panel of visionary military experts, sociologists, psychologists, and businesspeople to look at new roles that the agencies could play in the future–particularly commercial roles. It was felt that organizations like the CIA were spending vast amounts of money on technology and personnel and that it should be possible to make some return on that investment–in addition to their main security function.

‘The most radical idea to come out of this concerned the vast intelligence databases possessed by the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and a number of other police and military organizations and private companies. As you know, most of this information is collected so that security forces have some idea of who is doing what and antisocial or terrorist activities can be thwarted. One of the social psychologists suggested, however, that there might be a very different use for it. He pointed out that average memory horizons–that is, the amount of time that a person can clearly remember–had been shrinking for some time: people were forgetting the past more and more quickly. He predicted that memory horizons would shrink close to zero in about twelve years–i.e. now.

‘I won’t go over all the research and speculation about what kind of impact this mass amnesia would have on the individual, society, and the economy. But one thing became clear: the loss of personal memories would be experienced as a vague and debilitating anxiety that many people would spend money to alleviate. Our databases of conversations, events, photographs, letters, et cetera, could be repackaged and sold back to those individuals to replace their own memories. This would possibly be a huge market opportunity for us. It would also serve a valuable social and economic function in helping to reduce the impact of a problem that was likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in psychiatric treatment and several billions in lost labour.’

Jo took a sip of coffee. ‘Is this making sense?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

‘We started with a small group of people and started to record everything they did. We looked at what systems we had available and invented new ones. We put cameras absolutely everywhere. We developed technologies that recognized an individual’s voice, face, handwriting and everything so that the minimum human intervention was required to link one person’s memories to each other in a single narrative. Gradually these systems were expanded to cover more and more people. We finally reached 100 per cent coverage of the populations of the US and UK around nine years ago, and we have been working with partners in other countries to gather similar data there too. This is the largest collection of data ever to exist. We will be able to give our future customers CD-ROMs with photographs of them getting on a plane to go on holiday, recordings of phone conversations with their mother, videos of them playing with their son in a park or sitting at their desk at work…It will really be a phenomenal product.

‘Now we’re ready for all that work to pay off. We have the stuff to sell. We’re working with an advertising agency on a campaign to launch it in the next few months. We just need to work out a few final details. That’s where you come in.

‘You see there is one issue we didn’t think about very carefully when we started this project. Some memories, of course, are not pleasant. We are making all kinds of disclaimers about the memories we are selling, but we would still like to minimize the risk of severe psychological trauma caused by the rediscovery of painful memories that had been lost. There’s no point selling bad memories when we know what kind of an impact they will have on individuals’ ability to perform well in the home and the workplace. So we want to take them out.

‘This is going to be a massive job that calls for someone with your unusual empathy with the past. What we need you to do is to go through the memories manually and produce a large sample of the kind we’re talking about–the most traumatic memories. We will analyse that sample and find all the parameters that have a perfect correlation with memories of this sort. Then we can simply run a search on all our databases for memories matching those parameters and delete them. But we need to go through a lot of memories to get there. The statisticians tell us we need a sample of not less than twelve thousand traumatic memories in order for the system to be perfect.’

Jo stopped talking. Thomas said nothing. The idea was so far-reaching that he did not have an adequate response.

‘Do you have any questions?’

He searched within himself for the most urgent of his doubts.

‘Assuming that everything you’ve said is true–from the shrinking memory horizons to this massive database of memories–and it still seems rather incredible–I can see why people might want to come to you to retrieve some of the memories they have lost. That makes sense. But isn’t it only fair to them to give them everything? Who are you to edit their memories for them? They are a product of the bad as well as the good, after all.’

‘Thomas: we are not making any promises of completeness. We are providing a unique service and it’s totally up to us how we want to design it. It has been decided that we are not prepared to sell just any memory for fear of the risk to us or our customers. That’s that. Any other questions?’

He could find only platitudes.

‘What is the company called?’

‘Up to now we’ve been working with a codename for the project: Memory Mine. That name will no doubt fade out as the advertising agency comes up with a new identity for us.’

A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines went off in Thomas’s head. Was this what the old woman had been talking about? Was this where the prediction was supposed to take him?

‘So are you going to do it?’

‘I think so. At least–Yes.’

Thomas began work the next day. Each morning he would arrive at the office in Hackney and he and Jo would sit in silence at their computers at one end of this huge empty space. He would wear headphones to listen to recorded phone calls and video; the room was entirely still.

‘We have short-listed around a hundred thousand memories that you can work from. They’ve been selected on the basis of a number of parameters–facial grimacing, high decibel level, obscene language–that are likely to be correlated with traumatic memories. It’s a good place to start. Within these you are looking for the very worst: memories of extreme pain or shock, memories of unpleasant or criminal behaviour. Apply the logic of common sense: would someone want to remember this? Think of yourself like a film censor: if the family can’t sit together and watch it, it’s out.’

Some were obvious. A woman watches her husband being run down by a car that mounts the pavement at high speed and drives him through the door of a second-hand record store; two boys stick a machete into the mouth of an old man while they empty his pockets and take his watch–a sign in the video image says Portsmouth City Council; four men go to the house of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to collect a loan–when he can’t pay they shoot him in the knees; the police inform a mother by telephone that her daughter has been violently raped while taking a cigarette break from her job as a supermarket cashier and has almost died from loss of blood.

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^TM, its advertisements suddenly flooded the media and the city. An elderly couple hugged each other affectionately as they played their MyPast^TM 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^TM, 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^TM 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^TM?’

‘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^TM 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^TM?’ 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^TM 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.’

‘I’ll tell you what–just take it. I don’t need the money. I can see you’re in need. Take it as a gift.’

‘I need it now.’

Thomas saw a menacing look in his father’s eye that brought back old fears. He took the CD from his hand and fed it into the computer. It started up on its own, a 20-second promotional jingle that talked in a comforting voice about MyPast^TM. Then it gave a menu of memories. Thomas selected one. It showed his father addressing a banking summit organized by the Confederation of British Industry three or four years before. He was confident and funny and people responded loudly, applauded.

‘Is that me?’ asked Thomas’ father, incredulous. ‘Is that me?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Is that who I was?’ The speech ended to camera flashes and applause. The video faded. The boys looked on mutely.

‘Show me more. More.’

‘Really, sir, I must close the office now.’

‘Don’t give me that bullshit. Get out of my way.’

Thomas’s father seized the mouse from him and pushed him out of the seat. He stared impatiently at the screen and selected another memory.

He saw himself sipping wine with his wife in the bar at the Barbican in the interval of some concert. They were both dressed up. Thomas’s mother spoke passionately about something that could not be heard.

‘That’s my wife. How strong she used to be. How attractive. I wonder where she is now.’

‘What do you mean, Where is she now?’ asked Thomas, alarmed.

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember where she is.’

He clicked on something else. The whole family was on holiday in Florida, several years ago. Thomas was still a young child. The three boys were sunburnt and carried fishing nets. Their mother wore a wrap-around skirt and expensive sunglasses.

‘Look–there are three boys. Who’s the other one?’ He watched them playing in the sand, building mounds taller than they were.

He carried on clicking avidly. The family was wandering round the Natural History Museum–just a year or so before. Thomas was clearly visible.

‘Isn’t that you?’ asked his father looking round at Thomas. ‘Isn’t that you there–in the museum at the same time as us? What a bloody coincidence. Do we know each other?’

‘Not really know. No.’

Another scene opened up. Thomas froze with fear. It was a recording of their evening in the Oxo Tower. The lights of the Thames spread out behind them; the waiters served champagne, and Thomas’s father talked about investment to his family.

‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ he said. He turned to Thomas, his face hungry and furious. ‘Can you please explain what the hell is going on? Is this some kind of disgusting joke that you people play? You put yourselves into our memories? You sit yourself down at dinner with us, at our most intimate moments? You insert yourselves into our thoughts, our families, our past? Is that what happens? Just as I was coming to believe in my past I see you sitting there grinning out of it like some monster–and realize all of it is fake. What the hell is your game?’

The video continued quietly. Thomas saw out the corner of his eye the moment at which his father had told him to leave the house.

‘Sir, please understand. This is no falsehood. I am your son. My name is Thomas. These are my brothers. I am part of your family.’

Thomas’s father looked at him, looked deep into his pupils. He seemed to see something that he had been looking for, and the emptiness of his eyes was filled with a question. But something washed over the surface again and Thomas could peer in no more.

‘You bastard!’ His father hit him so hard around the head that he fell to the ground, dazed and astonished. ‘Think you can betray people like this and get away with it?’ He kicked him in the groin. ‘You bastard!’ He became wild, kicking him again and again in the groin and stomach.

His brothers joined in, kicking his head and face and back with all their strength. ‘You bastard!’ they chanted viciously, imitating their father. Thomas blacked out, became bloody and limp–but they did not stop beating him until they were too exhausted to continue.

Reality returned only half-way. He saw himself lying in an emergency ward. Jo had brought him there when she had discovered him lying in a kidney-shaped arc of congealed blood in the morning. He could not make things out, but his mind felt lighter. He realized that nearly all the memories had left him and soon he would be alone again.

He had the impression that he knew the person in the next bed. It was an old woman he had seen before. Gradually he remembered. She had given him a prophecy long ago. So long. She looked very sick.

‘Hello.’ His voice reached out to her, but she did not seem to be aware. ‘It’s Thomas. Do you remember me?’

She turned painfully towards him, her eyes like albumen. ‘Of course I remember you.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘It’s not easy being blind and old. I fell. Fell down the stairs. Broken my pelvis. I don’t feel well. I’m at the end.’

‘Everything happened as you said. My father became poor and I became rich. But it wasn’t how I imagined.’

‘It rarely is.’

The various sounds of the hospital seemed to become ordered and intended, like a fugue. Thomas listened for a moment.

‘As soon as she said “Memory Mine” I remembered what you said. I knew this was it! It was a good job. There was a nice woman. Her name was Jo.’ Thomas felt weightless, the memories breaking away like spores and floating back to where they came from.

‘A packhorse was needed. To get the memories through this ravine. This time. You happened to be the one. It could have been someone else. But it wasn’t. I’m sure you’ve worked that out.’

‘Yes. I think I understand things now. Things seem so much clearer.’

The old lady did not seem to be listening any more. Doctors whirled urgently around him, nurses came running, but he was content inside his mind. All that now remained was his own past; and it was good.