Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction by John Crowley
“Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I understand this system right.”
“A problem?” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at me a little wide-eyed and shy, hoping not to be called on for anything difficult. “Equipment’s all working?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that it could be.” I described what I thought I had learned about The Park’s access concept. “That can’t be right, can it?” I said. “That access is totally random…”
He was nodding, still wide-eyed, paying close attention.
“Is it?” I asked.
“Is it what?”
“Random.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, sure. If everything’s in working order.”
I could think of nothing to say for a moment, watching him nod reassuringly. Then: “Why?” I asked. “I mean why is there no way at all to, to organize, to have some kind of organized access to the material?” I had begun to feel that sense of grotesque foolishness in the presence of death, as though I were haggling over Georgie’s effects. “That seems stupid, if you’ll pardon me.”
“Oh no, oh no,” he said. “You’ve read your literature? You’ve read all your literature?”
“Well, to tell the truth…”
“It’s all just as described,” the director said. “I can promise you that. If there’s any problem at all…”
“Do you mind,” I said, “if I sit down?” I smiled. He seemed so afraid of me and my complaint, of me as mourner, possibly grief-crazed and unable to grasp the simple limits of his responsibilities to me, that he needed soothing himself. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think I understand. I’m kind of dumb about these things.”
“Sure. Sure. Sure.” He regretfully put away his coffee makings and sat behind his desk, lacing his fingers together like a consultant. “People get a lot of satisfaction out of the access here,” he said, “a lot of comfort, if they take it in the right spirit.” He tried a smile. I wondered what qualifications he had had to show to get this job. “The random part. Now, it’s all in the literature. There’s the legal aspect—you’re not a lawyer are you, no, no, sure, no offense. You see, the material here isn’t for anything, except, well, except for communing. But suppose the stuff were programmed, searchable. Suppose there was a problem about taxes or inheritance or so on. There could be subpoenas, lawyers all over the place, destroying the memorial concept completely.”
I really hadn’t thought of that. Built-in randomness saved past lives from being searched in any systematic way. And no doubt saved The Park from being in the records business and at the wrong end of a lot of suits. “You’d have to watch the whole eight thousand hours,” I said, “and even if you found what you were looking for there’d be no way to replay it. It would have gone by.” It would slide into the random past even as you watched it, like that afternoon in Ibiza, that party in Paris. Lost.
He smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “They didn’t predict that. The randomness. It was a side effect, an effect of the storage process. Just luck.” His grin turned down, his brows knitted seriously. “See, we’re storing here at the molecular level. We have to go that small, for space problems. I mean your eight-thousand-hour guarantee. If we had gone tape or conventional, how much room would it take up? If the access concept caught on. A lot of room. So we went vapor-trap and endless-tracking. Size of my thumbnail. It’s all in the literature.” He looked at me strangely. I had a sudden intense sensation that I was being fooled, tricked, that the man before me in his smock was no expert, no technician; he was a charlatan, or maybe a madman impersonating a director and not belonging here at all. It raised the hair on my neck, and passed. “So the randomness,” he was saying. “It was an effect of going molecular. Brownian movement. All you do is lift the endless-tracking for a microsecond and you get a rearrangement at the molecular level. We don’t randomize. The molecules do it for us.”
I remembered Brownian movement, just barely, from physics class. The random movement of molecules, the teacher said; it has a mathematical description. It’s like the movement of dust motes you see swimming in a shaft of sunlight, like the swirl of snowflakes in a glass paperweight that shows a cottage being snowed on. “I see,” I said. “I guess I see.”
“Is there,” he said, “any other problem?” He said it as though there might be some other problem and that he knew what it might be and that he hoped I didn’t have it. “You understand the system, key lock, two bars, ACCESS, RESET….”
“I understand,” I said. “I understand now.”
“Communing,” he said, standing, relieved, sure I would be gone soon. “I understand. It takes a while to relax into the communing concept.”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
I wouldn’t learn what I had come to learn, whatever that was. The Wasp had not been good at storage after all, no, no better than my young soul had been. Days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye. It hadn’t seen well, and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the unforgettable than my own eye had been. No better and no worse—the same.
And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh, look, hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.
The sun was setting when I left The Park, the satin sea foaming softly, randomly around the rocks.
I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred and was past.
It was two years, nearly, since Georgie had died: two years until, for the first and last time, I wept for her; for her, and for myself.
Of course I went back. After a lot of work and correctly placed dollars, I netted a HAPpy card of my own. I had time to spare, like a lot of people then, and often on empty afternoons (never on Sunday) I would get out onto the unpatched and weed-grown freeway and glide up the coast. The Park was always open. I relaxed into the communing concept.
Now, after some hundreds of hours spent there underground, now when I have long ceased to go through those doors (I have lost my key, I think; anyway I don’t know where to look for it), I know that the solitude I felt myself to be in was real. The watchers around me, the listeners I sensed in other chambers, were mostly my imagination. There was rarely anyone there. These tombs were as neglected as any tombs anywhere usually are. Either the living did not care to attend much on the dead—when have they ever?—or the hopeful buyers of the contracts had come to discover the flaw in the access concept: as I discovered it, in the end.
ACCESS, and she takes dresses one by one from her closet, and holds them against her body, and studies the effect in a tall mirror, and puts them back again. She had a funny face, which she never made except when looking at herself in the mirror, a face made for no one but herself, that was actually quite unlike her. The mirror Georgie.
RESET.
ACCESS. By a bizarre coincidence here she is looking in another mirror. I think the Wasp could be confused by mirrors. She turns away, the Wasp adjusts; there is someone asleep, tangled in bedclothes on a big hotel bed, morning, a room-service cart. Oh: the Algonquin: myself. Winter. Snow is falling outside the tall window. She searches her handbag, takes out a small vial, swallows a pill with coffee, holding the cup by its body and not its handle. I stir, show a tousled head of hair. Conversation—unintelligible. Gray room, whitish snow light, color degraded. Would I now (I thought, watching us) reach out for her? Would I in the next hour take her, or she me, push aside the bedclothes, open her pale pajamas? She goes into the john, shuts the door. The Wasp watches stupidly, excluded, transmitting the door.
RESET, finally.
But what (I would wonder) if I had been patient, what if I had watched and waited?
Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport. Whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon, there is no fun in replaying it. The waiting is excruciating. How often, in five years, in eight thousand hours of daylight or lamplight, might we have coupled, how much time expended in lovemaking? A hundred hours, two hundred? Odds were not high of my coming on such a scene; darkness swallowed most of them, and the others were lost in the interstices of endless hours spent shopping, reading, on planes and in cars, asleep, apart. Hopeless.
ACCESS. She has turned on a bedside lamp. Alone. She hunts amid the Kleenex and magazines on the bedside table, finds a watch, looks at it dully, turns it right side up, looks again, and puts it down. Cold. She burrows in the blankets, yawning, staring, then puts out a hand for the phone but only rests her hand on it, thinking. Thinking at 4:00 A.M. She withdraws her hand, shivers a child’s deep, sleepy shiver, and shuts off the light. A bad dream. In an instant it’s morning, dawn; the Wasp slept, too. She sleeps soundly, unmoving, only the top of her blond head showing out of the quilt—and will no doubt sleep so for hours, watched over more attentively, more fixedly, than any peeping Tom could ever have watched over her.
RESET.
ACCESS.
“I can’t hear as well as I did at first,” I told the director. “And the definition is getting softer.”
“Oh sure,” the director said. “That’s really in the literature. We have to explain that carefully. That this might be a problem.”
“It isn’t just my monitor?” I asked. “I thought it was probably only the monitor.”
“No, no, not really, no,” he said. He gave me coffee. We’d gotten to be friendly over the months. I think, as well as being afraid of me, he was glad I came around now and then; at least one of the living came here, one at least was using the services. “There’s a slight degeneration that does occur.”
“Everything seems to be getting gray.”
His face had shifted into intense concern, no belittling this problem. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, see, at the molecular level where we’re at, there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose—you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got, but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off.”
“It does?”
“We think it does. Sure it does, we promise it does. We predict that it will.”
“But you don’t know.”
“Well, well you see we’ve only been in this business a short while. This concept is new. There were things we couldn’t know.” He still looked at me, but seemed at the same time to have forgotten me. Tired. He seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition. “You might start getting some snow,” he said softly.
ACCESS RESET ACCESS.
A gray plaza of herringbone-laid stones, gray, clicking palms. She turns up the collar of her sweater, narrowing her eyes in a stern wind. Buys magazines at a kiosk: Vogue, Harper’s, La Moda. Cold, she says to the kiosk girl. Frio. The young man I was takes her arm; they walk back along the beach, which is deserted and strung with cast seaweed, washed by a dirty sea. Winter in Ibiza. We talk, but the Wasp can’t hear, the sea’s sound confuses it; it seems bored by its duties and lags behind us.
RESET.
ACCESS. The Algonquin, terribly familiar: morning, winter. She turns away from the snowy window. Myself in bed…and for a moment watching this I felt suspended between two mirrors, reflected endlessly. I had seen this before; I had lived it once and remembered it once, and remembered the memory, and here it was again, or could it be nothing but another morning, a similar morning? There were far more than one like this, in this place. But no; she turns from the window, she gets out her vial of pills, picks up the coffee cup by its body: I had seen this moment before, not months before, weeks before, here in this chamber. I had come upon the same scene twice.
What are the odds of it, I wondered, what are the odds of coming upon the same minutes again, these minutes.
I stir within the bedclothes.
I leaned forward to hear, this time, what I would say; it was something like but fun anyway, or something.
Fun, she says, laughing, harrowed, the degraded sound a ghost’s twittering. Charlie, someday I’m going to die of fun.
She takes her pill. The Wasp follows her to the john, and is shut out.
Why am I here? I thought, and my heart was beating hard and slow. What am I here for? What?
RESET.
ACCESS.
Silvered icy streets, New York, Fifth Avenue. She is climbing shouting from a cab’s dark interior. Just don’t shout at me, she shouts at someone, her mother I never met, a dragon. She is out and hurrying away down the sleety street with her bundles, the Wasp at her shoulder. I could reach out and touch her shoulder and make her turn and follow me out.
Walking away, lost in the colorless press of traffic and people, impossible to discern within the softened snowy image.
Something was very wrong.
Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar snow and bright, sleek skiers were not really the winter she feared, though even in fire-warmed chalets it was hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed. It was continual false, flavorless spring all winter long.
How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?
Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often. Not always.
“There’s a problem,” I said to the director.
“It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”
“Well, no,” I said. “Actually, it’s gotten worse.”
He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.
“Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.
“That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”
“Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”
“No no no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”
I sputtered, trying to explain. “But but but…”
“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment, and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care.”
He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.
“I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it. Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things
“It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”
He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”
He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.
“So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone.
“Well, it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”
With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”
The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.
“So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”
I didn’t go back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.