Rebecca Campbell Read online

  Such Thoughts Are Unproductive

  — by Rebecca Campbell —

  The woman whom I sometimes believed to be my mother flickered. Once. Twice. Her face—smiling—froze in a cloud of pixels, while her arm—the wide, emphatic gestures that were as much a marker of her identity as the color of her eyes or her fingerprints—swept the screen, leaving blue eddies, whirlpools of information. Then silence, but her mouth moved, leaving a flesh-colored smudge across the top half of her head. “You’ve cut out again,” I said.

  The picture reset. She was saying something that made her laugh.

  “Your hair looks really good,” I said.

  “Wha—”

  I waited. Repeated myself.

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly clear, “I cut it myself because the guy they get in is terrible. He let me use his scissors, at least. So chic and DIY. If it was 2015 I’d pin it—”

  Slideshow, for which I was paying five dollars a minute. Figures in black pacing against the yellow cinder block wall of the common room. I tried not to look at them because it was always better not to look at them. It was better when I could see the windows and get a look at where she was.

  “We’re running out of time,” I said. “I only paid for fifteen minutes, cause last time you had the drill and I thought maybe—”

  The hand, now trailing pixels. It was definitely her face, but I searched her jawline for the suture where her appearance had been attached, virtually, to this body, a scrim of pixels over the person that was—as far as anything was these days—my mother. Her smile. Her expressive hands. No matter how empty the content of our words, there was comfort in seeing her speak.

  I could not, though, let go of the suspicion that this face I was searching—hanging again, lag deforming the number on her gray uniformed shoulder—was not my mother, so much as the collected fragments of her from a hundred thousand hours of CCTV footage and intercepted video conferences and Google hangouts and whatever other material had streamed through the state’s huge filter-feeding machines, snuffling all traffic—dark and light, private or public—for the information it required on problematic—

  —Such thoughts are unproductive.

  This woman I speak to, who is my mother, and may not be by mother, but who fills the space in my life called mother. I will continue to chat with her when I can because the illusion—if it is an illusion—is so close to reality that sometimes I am taken in and relax into daughterly affection.

  The black silhouettes in the background of the common room do nothing to interfere with our conversation because no part of our conversation can be hidden from the eye that watches us all, which is not an eye, but the hundred thousand eyes of a filter-feeding behemoth made entirely of information. She sends me messages at night, long discourses on the problem of making the food palatable, or the solitaire she plays, or the scrabble tournaments she organizes. I can hear the powerful gears of her mind grinding against the cinder block walls of the place, finding things to put in order, to make, to fix. Her resources are limited: games and other companions, the discussions and lectures and regular chastisement that she undergoes, but which she does not mention, but which is always implied. I can imagine her turning that mind toward the problem of 2 + 2 being 5, producing the right answer for the individuals who ask her—daily, hourly, by the minute—to repeat this new truth. A problem of philosophy? Perhaps of language, she would say, from the perspective of neo-radical-orthodoxy, or post-Platonism. One needs only to adjust the definitions in that portion of one’s brain that is cordoned off from reality in order to comply with the ideologies of the state. That’s how she could give the “right” answer without dying of it.

  She never says these things. The mother who exists in my mind—which might or might not align with the mother on the screen, or in my messages—would do such things. It would be necessary for her survival, once the small collection of paper books had been arranged by the Library of Congress system, with gaps on the shelf for “critical theory” and “resistance” and “escape plans.”

  But what kind of escape could she possibly need? The enclosures are beautiful, despite the yellow cinder block walls. I’ve seen them when her back is to the window, trees and mountains framed in bulletproof glass. When I was a kid, we often drove through the Rockies and stopped at Banff. Once we stayed in a massive château on Lake Louise. There were men and women in lederhosen outside, playing alphorns. The air, when we left the sticky lowland fug of our car, was so fresh and lovely I wanted to laugh. The glaciers had receded, but you could still see the blue-white glow of them up high, far beyond us.

  I think—I’m not sure—but I think I have seen similar mountains in the brief moments she directs the camera over her shoulder and out the window. The time zone can’t be far too different, but the summer nights are bright there, so it must be farther north. Toad River, I think. One of the big provincial parks. I have looked at maps—antique ones on paper, tearing at the folds—and seen the gaps in the satellite images, and I have wondered, is she there? Close to 60?

  This winter I’ll watch the angles of sunlight and track the darkness behind her. I’ll hope she picks up on my questions: I’ve had trouble with my nasturtiums again. Are you growing anything? And hope she turns her camera toward the window, talks about what she’s planted in the gardens that are supposed to be so therapeutic.

  * * *

  We live in an age of infinitely preserved information, so it’s not actually odd that I saved every video call on an external hard drive. At night I turned off the Wi-Fi and studied my mother’s face for evidence of fakery. I didn’t search for “ten ways to spot deepfakes” because that left fingerprints, and I’m already a problematic citizen, confirmed as such by my associations, rather than any action I have taken. To be visible meant you have done something to deserve visibility, after all. And if our exploration of the human genome means anything, it’s that my genes matter. I am treacherous.

  You could inherit treachery, or be infected with it, by the people who waited in government offices, slouching from hard blue chair to hard blue chair, sharing between them the rumors and possibilities regarding what happened to the missing. Camps. Education centers. Wilderness highways that stopped dead on the other side of the great divide. The blank spots that are slowly overtaking our digital maps, even archived versions I thought I had kept safe. No more news from Fort Mac, not for a couple of years now. The pipelines never leak. Silence accompanied any disruption of gasoline, or the regular oil slicks up and down the Salish Sea, where all the fish are dead. There’s another dam on the Peace River to celebrate, but the blackouts got worse.

  When I had thoroughly and silently examined the information available (is that a tamarack? A black spruce? Is that a mountain?) It occurred to me that as the woman I talk to might be scrimmed with my mother’s face, so might be the room in which she sat. The darkness and light I have so painstakingly tracked, the faint, blue line of a mountain, and a pink winter sunset at three in the afternoon? That may well mean nothing. Worse than nothing: deception.

  At work I was also a watcher. I was part of a team that sanity-checked the AI that surveils traffic errors in the western provinces. I looked for anomalies and found ways to integrate them into the AI’s understanding, slowly eliminating my own job, as the anomalies grew rarer and the world more perfectly known. I thought, sometimes, following on my father’s philosophical leanings, that this was the goal of our state: perfect knowledge of landscapes and people and relationships. So perfect that the simulacrum we saw on the screen was more perfect than the territory we possessed. The woman on the screen was my mother, as was the woman in my messages, so perfectly had she been synthesized by the state that al
so slit—

  —Unproductive.

  * * *

  “Have you heard from da—”

  “—He’s okay. Did you get that? You’re a slideshow.”

  “Weak—”

  I was a slideshow, too. Maybe she didn’t even think it was me. Maybe there was another woman she spoke to midweek, and she believed that was the real daughter, and she only spoke to me because the system required her to maintain the fiction. Maybe she had a million daughters asking her leading questions. Maybe.

  Still smiling, in case we connected, I wrote on my tablet and held it up to my phone: HE’S STILL WORKING ON THE SOLAR PANELS. Dad withdrew from the city to our old cabin in the interior (is she near there? Farther north and east. The forests I have seen out that window are deep and green), when Mom left, or disappeared, or was taken, whichever mode you choose to use for description. Dad and I just say “when Mom left” like it’s the only date that matters. He hasn’t come back to the city since. I took two weeks off work to help him chuck their things, and carry what was important—photographs, old books, her clothes, her jewelry—to the cabin. We couldn’t afford to take much, with the cost of gas. The house was requisitioned later, for a nominal fee that didn’t cover the time or gas it would have taken him to get the papers signed. I don’t go by there anymore. I don’t like to see it.

  “Do you remember when we camped at Banff?”

  “When you graduated from high school? Or are you talking about before Sophie’s wedding?”

  “Sophie? Piano teacher? At Banff?”

  “Aunt Sophie, not piano Sophie. We were roommates all through grad school. If you were going to have a godmother, she would have been your godmother. You were pretty little that trip, though.”

  I remember Banff, because we went right up to the glacier and Dad showed me where it had been each year, walking backward through time, saying this is when you were born and this is when I was born.

  “I was like five? Four? I thought that was Emily’s wedding.”

  “No, Sophie. And I was maid of honor so I had to be there three days early, and you and Daddy just ate junk food and went on the swings until you threw up. You hated Fudgsicles for a year after that summer. I should have done that with more junk food. You’d be vegan now.

  * * *

  I actually am vegan. I do not remember having an aunt named Sophie. I’m pretty sure it was Emily’s wedding. Dad and I played on the merry-go-round until we were so dizzy, we stumbled across the soccer field toward the edge of the forest, collapsing on the grass until the world stopped spinning and we’d expelled all the Doritos and gummy worms we’d eaten. That afternoon, Mom—woozy and white-faced after a late night—got ready in a blue dress I had never seen before, her hair up high and her makeup all pretty. She carried me into this old lodge halfway up the mountain and shouted over my shoulder to friends I had seen in pictures, but never met, making jokes about things I didn’t understand. Dad and I left during the dancing, but she came in long after that, laughing. She slept in late, grouchy, cuddling a water bottle to her pillow, while we went driving in search of coffee and hot chocolate. “And what do you say to more Doritos, Mar?” Dad asked, and I pretended to throw up.

  She said other things that left me watchful and adrenalized. I didn’t draw attention to the discrepancies because her memory might be flawed, but so was mine. So was everyone’s, except the filter-feeding behemoth that follows us all, and while we didn’t seem to possess the same past, it possessed us equally. We found an equilibrium. For more than a year I didn’t even hear from her, not even to confirm she still existed. I waited patiently in offices, both virtual queues and in person, and I went to Victoria to line up with all the others at the Ministry of Information Management and Retrieval. The answers were always the same: here’s a chit with a number. We’ll be in touch. Said with a synthetic smile by an AI phone tree, or a tired clerk behind glass. They will always get back to you.

  I am patient and consistent, also better connected than a lot of people, so I have pushed further than most. I also know the system better, and know when to leave things be, keep my head down, be grateful that I know my mother is alive. I am the model supplicant, waiting in dovelike patience outside the walls for the emergence of her mother, whose radical spirit has been (will be) corrected by the benevolent ministrations of the state.

  * * *

  You got to know other people because you saw them at the offices and in the spillover corridors. Which wasn’t to say you know them, just that you were familiar with their faces and concerns. Julie’s looking for her brother and nephews. Chris wants to find his wife. Chris thinks she’s in the foothills somewhere. Alberta has a few sites. You avoided the ones with loud voices who talked too loud about what was happening, even the explanations you really shouldn’t say out loud: they have been replaced by bots of some description; their minds are being damaged beyond coherence by electroshock or DBS. Uncommon, but appealing: discrepancies are coded messages that only family will recognize, and thus communicate important information about location, and security movements, and the details of what’s happening inside, in preparation for a massive action. We should all pool the discrepancies, and see what picture they show us, if we stand far enough back. We should talk. We should organize.

  I have never contributed to these efforts. In lineups—the sorts of lineups that involve standing up every fifteen minutes to move one spot down in the long row of hard blue chairs—I listened, but said nothing, only thought, you don’t know how loud your voice is why don’t you care that the walls are full of cameras and your face is so well known to the machine no one you love can ever be sure it’s you talking to them.

  I didn’t need specifics regarding what happened inside, because what happened inside is what’s happened inside such education centers since they were first invented. Repetition and regulation. Rote recitation of truths regarding the nature of the society to which we belong. The principle being—I knew this, because Mom told me—that the surface recitation has a transformative effect on the mind, even if the mind resists the meaning of the words it says.

  And then the culturally-specific humiliation, and the strategic application of pain—

  “—Recite platitudes that deny climate change,” she said, “or the refugee crisis or ethnic cleansing or forced sterilization or eugenics. The perfectibility of the human animal in an ideal society. Repeat it and eventually you believe it. Or act like you believe it, which is just as good as far as they’re concerned.”

  That was near the end, when she said those sorts of things out loud, and in text, and every last fragment collected and shared them across whatever the network is now. Five Eyes. Nine Eyes. Ten Billion Eyes. In collaboration, those systems extracted meaning and implication from the marks she made on the screens and the sounds from her mouth—rarely out of range of a microphone—cross-referencing those patterns with other patterns. They flagged her profile. They saw the outcomes, and identified my mother as a point of vulnerability. In her terms: an imperfect citizen.

  Me too, probably, and Dad, though we’re less threatening. We don’t talk often anymore. It was difficult to have a conversation when most of what matters is dangerous to say out loud. Dad mentions that he’s repainting the garage. I talk about how I want to do a bike trip through Oregon. Dad says he thinks he’s got a rat in the basement. I say I had some decent wontons at a new place that opened around the corner. Hanging over our conversation, a list of things we don’t mention: droughts (unless historical); disappearing island chains; climate refugees; the rage associated with rising temperatures and food prices; the—

  —But this isn’t productive. We both know. We talk about whether he can catch the rat with a humane trap. We talk about how smart rats are, and how deftly they have adapted to human landscapes. I say I’ll make a trip to help. He says no no, no need. I’m fine. I say, you should come visit me, do city stuff, and he says no no no, no need. I’m fine. We’re both fine. As you can see, I am
now good at lying.

  I ran into an aunt at some event, and she said, “I haven’t heard from your mom in ages, how is she?”

  “Oh. She’s doing better.”

  “Better? What happened?”

  “She contracted one of the antibiotic-resistant strains of TB, and she’s taking some time to recover.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear it. Where is she?”

  “One of the new sanatoriums. She’ll be in for a while.”

  “Oh, Mar. She’ll be in my thoughts. Pass that on, would you? Or maybe I’ll email her.”

  This was the safe response. An innocuous message passed on. No further inquiry. No possibility of betrayal.

  * * *

  I set my keys on the little shelf by the door and sighed, the way you do when you take off high heels or get somewhere quiet where you can cry. Then I heard someone shifting on my couch.

  She squealed. “Mar! Mar! Look at you! The last time I saw you was at your mom’s fiftieth. When was that? Oh god don’t tell me. That means we’re old.”

  I have an Aunt Sophie. She was a thin, athletic woman, honey-brown hair, not Mom’s pixie cut, but of the same vintage, choppy, with playful silver highlights. She was dressed in elegant athleisure. And you know, at that moment she could have been an aunt, one of the women from Mom’s PhD program, or a second cousin, or someone from the Elder college where she talked political philosophy.

  * * *

  “Where did you—?”

  “—I’m just going to be in town for a couple of weeks, and I’m going to be nearby while I deal with a contract. I saw your mom, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Last week. That’s why I’m here. I knew you were in the city, but I didn’t know where, obviously, and—okay, I was a little embarrassed that I’ve been so out of touch with everyone. It’s these short contracts. They’re disorienting. I travel. So. Much.”