What Do We Do with the Memory that Lives in the Body?

There are memories that live in your body. They awaken at unexpected moments like slack sheets invigorated by a sudden gust of wind. You know, at the electrical level, that this is time travel. The way the impulses in your brain cannot distinguish between then, now, maybe, and never. The firing is the same, the cascade of chemicals identical. In this way, you know, you can occupy the same space as them again. The same time. Sip their presence like a bracing tea, exchanging charges. Literally physically transported.

You try to limit your trips in this internal time machine even though your fingers itch for the ignition. There’s only so much to be gained in rewinding through everything that came before the collapse—and much more to lose. Increasingly, it’s less that you relent to the temptation to relive the past than your weak mental ankle buckles under some quotidien pressure and you fall into it like an open mouth.

Like the time, a few months back, you forced the loading dock door of an old warehouse with a piece of rebar, the presence of the rusty-but-intact bolt indicating that, miraculously, the facility hadn’t been ransacked. The huge metal door shrieked as it rolled up into the frame, and you were clasped in an invisible fist of cool, dry air from inside.

And then you were sucked spine-first into a memory so vivid it was like a waking dream.

The sensation of the canned, unnaturally deodorized air took you, in that moment, back to the dentist's office at your local mall. Of all places.

You pitched headlong into the irresponsibly air-conditioned offices of Dr. Jeremy Crowe, DMD. Your mother had picked you up early from school. You skipped seventh period biology—a triumph. Outside, the sun was broiling the asphalt parking lot and bouncing like bullets off the sparse lines of cars and the bleached stucco exterior of the mall’s cheap shell. The slight ozone smell of the too-teal waiting room at 12:45 p.m. on a Tuesday. A bruised-looking spot on the wall where a large plant had once sat, the cheap wallpaper bleached around its approximate silhouette.

Someone handed you a whispery plastic bag with a new toothbrush and travel-sized cube of floss and left you at the desk.

“Sorry about the water situation,” the receptionist said with absolutely nothing behind her eyes. She must have been saying that to every patient every day for months.

“It’s ok,” you responded, jiggling the half-empty water bottle you brought with you everywhere now.

“Do you have your backpack? Your shades?” your mom asked. She put on a lightweight ventilator and shoved her own shades over her eyes, ready to make a run for the car.

Two days later, the school closed for good.

When you returned to yourself on the loading dock, you felt like a rubber band that had been stretched to its powdery breaking point before being discarded unceremoniously. You realized you’d been crouching in front of the door, your shoulders crowded around your ears, breathing messily, making a high-pitched whine like a damaged machine.

Clearly, this warehouse had been prepped, probably well in advance of the actual collapse. So many businesses had just suspended, battened down their hatches, furloughed most of their employees, ready to wait it out. Someone would figure out the potable water shortages. Someone would figure out how to cool the power plants. Someone would figure out how to stabilize the amphibian population, which would stabilize the insect problem, which would stabilize the vegetation problem, which would stabilize...

The only thing you took from the whole place was a lumbar pillow left attached to the seat of a forklift. The rest of the shelves, as far as you could see, were stacked with car tires. Useless.

What do we do with the memories that live in the body? How many generations of cells must be tilled under the corporeal soil for the original imprint to fade, becoming a grave marker, now only a monument to a monument, protruding like a tooth in a forgotten corner of the cemetery? How long before even the institutional memory is gone, the cellular curriculum expunged even of the contours of the thing, deprioritized under new management?

You don’t know the answer, but you do know it’s longer than fourteen years, four months, and either six, eight, or seventeen days, depending on where in the country you’d been concentrated and whether you counted the day most of the electrical grid fizzled out or the day the water was gone for good and the rioting began in earnest.

You think that maybe the answer is “never.” Regardless, you are certain you will not live long enough to forget.

***

One evening, at dusk, you stumble upon a massive house plugged into the chalky mountainside. It was once a marvelous retreat, something a wealthy person who had never been camping would have called “the cabin.” Between the angle of the sinking sun, the steepness of the mountainside, and the obviously missing landscaping, it takes a moment for you to realize that the house is drooping into itself on its near side, a cantilevered wing listing like a drunk.

Approaching the house, you see how much of the ground under and around it has crumbled away, exposing its bones like shriveled gums around a dying tooth. You know that the die-off had precipitated extreme soil loss, and landslides in this region had been a scourge for years. Though it was more stable these days, it was still considered a perilous place, which meant that while you were less likely to meet someone out here, the people you did meet tended to be exactly the worst sort. You will need to be agonizingly careful here.

You suspect the doors are on the far side, where you thought you spotted the shoestring trace of a long-defunct driveway snaking its way up the mountain to meet the house. Picking your way around the building’s downhill face, you cross a cracked patio and the husk of a pool now half-filled with mounds of dirt and debris. In the sloping piles, you see a crooked T of wooden planks upright but askew. You let your mind slide over it and do not look back. Could have just been a faulty impression in the orange glower of sunset.

You come to a flat area on the uphill face of the house, and the chewed remains of concrete tell you this was the driveway. The front door has been ripped off its hinges and is propped up next to the doorframe. Around to the right, where sliding glass doors must have been, there’s now just a square hole in the structure, gaping dumbly over an empty space where a deck no longer stands. Continuing around the left side, you find the remains of a flagstone patio and another open doorway—no door in sight—that seems to lead into an area near the cantilevered wing.

It doesn’t surprise you that this house has been picked over previously, and the almost louche carelessness around its entrances tells you that either no one currently lives here or they’re stupid enough to overpower. Still, your ears, eyes, even skin are vigilant as you walk inside the doorway off the flagstone patio.

It only takes a moment for your eyes to adjust since the last few hours of the day don’t require shades. You’re in what you guess was a generous guest room, though the furniture is in smithereens. Picking your way over a tangle of bed frame fragments, you exit into a hallway whose defining feature is an enormous crack that seems to run its whole length where the wall meets the ceiling.

The doorway that leads to the cantilevered wing is to your left, and you are momentarily disoriented by the fact that you can look down into the room as it slopes away from you, its far edge leading the sink into the mountain. You skirt away from it, afraid, perhaps irrationally, that one ill-placed footfall will be the tripwire that precipitates collapse.

You follow the crack down the hall instead, the low light here muting everything to grayscale. An open door on your left is a minimalist bathroom, its sink in several pieces on the floor with the exposed, dry plumbing twisting from the wall like broken fingers.

The next door is on the right—closed. Your hand is on the knob before you notice an ominous black stain from under the door, blooming across the tile floor of the hallway. The stain is long dried, but you release the knob and continue forward. It’s a mistake you only make once.

Another door stands open on the left. The furniture is trashed, too, and anything of value is certainly taken, but you can tell that this was a child’s room. There is wallpaper here—a pattern of tasteful, illustrated hot air balloons piloted by realistically drawn lions and monkeys and giraffes—and lots of colorful plastic litter. Shells of barnyard animals. Puzzle pieces. The torso of a doll.

You’re about to leave when something caught in a wedge of junk crammed behind the door snags your eye, your animal mind drawn instinctually toward the familiar. You excavate a satiny ribbon on which is strung a yellow plastic heart-shaped locket with a faceted magenta gem in its center. You recognize it as the same kind your little sister got from a generic princess dress-up kit.

Then your mind pinwheels, and you fight hard against the undertow of another all-consuming memory you didn’t know you had.

It’s you and Cara. Her sixth birthday. She’s wearing the entire princess kit plus a pair of your mom’s pumps, sacrificed to the dress-up gods. She’s put lipstick on—badly—and she is staring at you with her little wet mouth in a snarl.

“That’s why I wrote it down—you’re not suppossa see it!” she shrieks, clutching the locket around her neck.

“I just wanna know your birthday wish!” you whine. “Just show me. Don’t be dumb!”

“No!” she howls. “It’s a secret! Mom!”

When the memory releases you, you realize you’ve crushed the hinges of the brittle, heat-weakened plastic locket in your hand. The two halves slide apart, and for a moment your stress-addled mind imagines, impossibly, that you’re about to see Cara’s wish after all these decades. Your stomach even turns when a tiny feather of paper flutters out. But in barely legible pencil, it says:

madisen g is mi best frend

You let the paper and the locket fall to the floor and walk out of the room like a light’s gone out inside you.

You reach the end of the hall. You’re now standing in one of those open-concept, all-purpose-everything rooms with a vaulted ceiling so high it disappears into gloom. A trashed kitchen is to your right and a sunken great room, populated by the unrecognizable lumps of mutilated, upturned designer furniture, is ahead to the left, flanked by two sleek slate fireplaces. But it’s the gleaming panorama of floor-to-ceiling plate glass that makes you literally gasp.

This place was clearly built around this view—the first pillar the house was hung on. Transfixed, you walk down into the room, barely noticing the soft slough of your feet as you move through spent food trash and upholstery foam.

From this high up, you can see a few of the crufty foothills below and down across a vast plane you know was once a rangey suburban neighborhood, now an immense field of irregular gray stumps and spikey ruins. The sun’s low angle through the atmosphere is striking the array of decomposing houses so that their uneven purple shadows stretch desperately toward the mountain, exaggerated and stark.

A field of thousands of elongated ghosts, yearning toward you. The straining fingers of a civilization lost. Even its remembrance now only palpable at an angle, through a certain trick of the light.