I sold the memory when I was young. The startup offered enough to bridge the gap in my funds for a month or two. For weeks after the extraction of the memory, it felt like an inch wide section above my right eye was missing. I swear I could feel the wind coming in.
When I went to buy back the memory years later, I couldn’t afford it. It had been sold to a firm that resold it to another firm that—
I was six in the memory, walking in the woods on the way home from school, following a path I’d taken many times. It was June, two weeks before summer break. I was about to come upon a pond whose water was covered in all seasons with an inch-thick layer of algae. A steady wind shook the canopy, the sky visible in pinpricks between the leaves—and then suddenly I was back home, my handle on the round knob of the rear door, relieved to see my stepfather’s car was no longer in the driveway. If anything unusual happened on the walk, the significance was wiped as well.
The category in the memory’s publicly available metadata was, “Insight.” The description read, “A six year old boy fully, completely, totally understands his place in the universe while walking around a pond.”
Years later, I became obsessed with recovering it. I went to a support group, but they only offered a way to manage the absence. I found a pirated version of the memory, but it was just an hour of static ending with an advertisement for a cruise ship. I would stare into the gray noise, convinced I could see the curve of the pond, the pattern of the leaves.
Later, the firm that owned the memory went out of business. I lost track of who bought it in the liquidation sale. And then the rain came, and then the drought, and then the infestation, and then the light grew toxic.
After a period of silence, those forces withdrew.
*
During the blights I had next to no desire for the memory, but in the silence, it came pummeling back. I no longer thought concretely about the need; I only felt it.
I traced ownership of the memory to an old woman on an extended cruise in the Pacific. She’d bought most of the available memories from that time period—well worn by that point, devalued through use—but was unwilling to sell or rent them.
My stepfather’s meager inheritance had whittled down to a reproduction Eames chair and some leafed-through comics. I liquidated everything to rent two days in a shared berth several decks below hers.
I was helicoptered onto the ship mid-voyage. Ahead of it, rows of turbines fixed at a distance ate the top layer of oceanic trash. From time to time, a turbine would hit a fish and send a quick jet of red spitting out the back. No system is perfect; no progress is made without a cost, my stepfather used to say, slurring. The ship left a strip of clear blue water in its wake.
In her cabin, invited under false pretenses, I demanded the elderly woman show me the memory, but she refused. Her body had contracted in on itself like a fist. “I couldn’t if I wanted to,” she said. The device she had to replay the memory—a chrome monolith occupying a full quarter of her expansive berth—had been configured to show all the memories she owned all at once. Through overuse, they’d fused.
Her hands shook like branches in the wind. Her pupils gave the impression of infinite depth, not flatness. Before I met her, I looked up how she had acquired her wealth, but I didn’t understand it. It involved the buying and selling of things I didn’t think of as commodities: thought, burden, and time.
“Then show me all the memories,” I said, but she shook her head.
“The combination of them, the shape the melt makes—it’s mine.”
*
At that, the upper level of the boat caught fire. According to court documents, a candelabra tipped over in a ballroom causing the velvet wallpaper to go up like a cheap wig. I surprised myself. I picked up the old woman and removed her from the room. I left the memory machine behind. It was too large to carry, but she insisted I go back, yelling about a removable hard drive and jabbing her pointed elbow into the crown of my skull.
It was too late by then. The boat listed left then right. We weaved our way across the slanted deck, dodging flaming debris ejected from above. I carried her over the side of the vessel and into a lifeboat.
The ship went under the skin of plastic and trash, but not before lighting the skin on fire. It was just us in the lifeboat. We were lucky to be drifting in the clean, nonflammable wake.
The other boats?
One by one into the wall of flames.
Night fell, day came. The flames exhausted themselves. We ate rations from a metal box on the lifeboat, flavorless gels the colors of plastic gems: seven emerald, one ruby. She wailed at the loss of the memories. Her pale skin somehow did not burn, did not blister. She tried to claw out my eyes, but her limited reach only bloodied my shoulders.
Time passed. The sun seemed to have stopped rotating, fixed above in permanent day.
Throat dry and croaking, I asked the old woman to tell me a story.
She pursed her cracked lips. They folded in like origami. “Alright,” she told me. “But all of it, all at once.”
________
Will VanDenBerg’s short fiction has been published in X-RAY, Denver Quarterly, New South, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Literary Arts MFA program at Brown University and lives in Queens.