The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  You’d think the memory being constructed out of other people’s experiences would make it hurt less. I don’t have fond memories of Micheline visiting her cousin with me in tow. We went to a nice middle-class flat on the fifty-first floor of a giant block in Montparnasse. I just think I have those memories.

  The walls were dove-blue and the furniture mostly modern, but there was just a little bit of that French nineteenth century that gives a room in a middle-class Paris household such a feeling of substance. The dining room was purely modern. It could have been stark if the colours had not been gentle. The focus there was on food, not furniture. I know all this. I was there. And yet…

  If I dropped in to say “hi”, my hostess would recognise the evening, but not me. I try not to think of her as a once-upon-a-time hostess, rather than as an erstwhile hostess, but this whole situation wears fairy tale clothing, doesn’t it? The memories of other people have been stolen and cannibalised for me, to enable me to fit nicely in and create science at the service of anthropology.

  The memories of the various people who were stolen and then returned are a part of my data. Micheline thinks I was her pen friend as a child, too. She, too, remembers my visit. Yet I’ve never met these people. I’m not one of them. If her husband were one of the cartoonists who was killed, I’d be mourning a phantom. As it is, her husband is a cartoonist, but in a less endangered publication. But he’s Jewish. He could have been killed. And if he had, the irony of it all would have overwhelmed me.

  If I don’t know them, why does it hurt so much when I start to forget them? Patchy memory is an ordinary facet of ageing, after all. It isn’t merely that my actual self creeps out from under the veil and shatters the reality of my past. My memories of Earth and self are playing tag with each other, and each time they collide I lose a bit of each. This is not supposed to happen.

  Am I becoming too human? Is there such a thing as being too human?

  I didn’t know it hurt until I started writing it down. My face is faded with the exhaustion of deep emotion. If I look in the mirror, I will see a mere shadow of myself. And yet…I don’t know these people. I barely know this species. Why should I feel everything but a superficial concern, an interest in the breaking news, a technical curiosity?

  I blame my husband. He’s away again and I always feel smaller and more isolated when he’s not here. He grounds me. Right now, I need him. He rang, but it wasn’t enough. I need him to hold me.

  Do humans always hurt this damned much? If they do, I want to belong to another species. One hundred and fifty-eight innocents were murdered in Paris. They could be people I walked past in the street last summer. I did go there last summer: that memory is real. And I met Micheline and we both said: “How you’ve changed.” And yet I am hurt more by the fake memories from thirty years ago.

  If my brain has cogs, those cogs have rust spots.

  My heart aches. My brain aches. My eyes ache from unshed tears. I want to strip my mind of these false memories. I want to strip my heart of these all-too-real emotions.

  I want to go home. I do not remember my home. That French dining room from my twenties has more reality to me. Nevertheless, I miss home. I wish I were there, now.

  The Observer’s Notes

  “Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”

  —LM Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

  Anne Shirley has a solution for me. I’ll explain why I’m meeting with Anne Shirley in a moment, should I feel like it. I don’t know if I’ll feel like it. I’m erratic today. I’m being Anne Shirley for a little, first. Living in her body in my imagination. Wearing her red hair and perfect nose. This is because Anne Shirley has a solution for me.

  I don’t have my own memories. This much is obvious. By this stage, I can’t assume that my own memories are ever going to return. Obviously the emotional aspects are returning, but not the actual memories. I know myself, but not much about my life. My moods drift in a sea of loss.

  I know that the reasons for this are outstanding. Alien memories on this green earth: it doesn’t bear thinking of. I fully agree with these reasons, having thought it through very carefully, in my proper anthropological manner. I even agree that I’m not supposed to be self-aware in this way, although I’m unwilling to tell the techs and get it fixed.

  There’s another reason. It hit me one day and I’ve been playing with it since. It makes me restless and unhappy: I don’t trust the techs.

  I have never trusted them, if I’m honest.

  Even in the days when I had no idea who I was until I walked into a mysterious building and through a green-lit doorframe and it all returned, only to disappear again as I walked out through another of those door frames. Arcs, they were called. Memory arcs in the doorways governing the memory ark that contains most of me. For my memory was stored in an ark. Except my storage leaked. It’s still leaking and it’s still full of patched repairs: there’s no consistency in what my memory does.

  It worries me exceptionally that it comes and goes so much. If the techs didn’t worry me so very much more, I’d ask for help.

  This is very wrong.

  I need to work out what is it about the techs that worries me. This consumes that hour before I go to sleep. I listen to his breathing and I make my mind focus on the memory of what lies beyond the arc and I call up conversation after conversation and try to muddle through it all.

  My given Memories are almost all of them terribly, terribly dull. White picket fence dull. Even my memory of being forty-two is really just me thinking of Douglas Adams and his play on the meaning of life. It’s as if the creators of the Memories took a bunch of human averages for Western society, gave it a bit of personality (science fiction, literature, a fairly standard education, a small group of friends, first marriage, divorce, all setting me up for what I am now) and tried to create a story from them.

  Human averages aren’t human beings.

  This is why I’m doing the Anne Shirley thing and I’m inventing stories for myself. It takes much invention. Names for my parents. A half-remembered sibling becomes a fully realised brother, and then I add two sisters. And a missing child. I don’t yet know how they’re missing—I’ll find that out quite soon.

  And gender. I can chose whatever gender I like. Or have none.

  I miss none, just sometimes. It’s a better place to be for so many reasons. Not technically none. I’ve never had no gender. I had five wonderful years when I was agendered, however. It was longer than average, for I am not a compilation of averages. That’s one of the reasons I’m in this mess. Why I’m here at all.

  I still treasure the memory of the memory of the memory. I have remaining to me the sense that it was perfect and happy. That’s something.

  That’s also the other problem with the techs and their insistence on doing everything in a certain way. They have obliterated happiness and replaced it with lies that don’t even come close to matching my inner self.

  If they’d done a better job at matching, I’d probably be walking this green Earth, oblivious.

  I met a person the other day and they were like me when I was agendered. I suspect this is why I have such an onslaught of mood today. I remembered what it was like and was terribly, terribly envious. I hope they enjoy it as much as I do. They may not, for they’re agendered in the middle of mostly males and females. It might not be so pleasant.

  “Would you please call me Cordelia?” That’s what it reminds me of. Anne Shirley. Defining herself rather than letting society define her.

  This person was like me for a while there, quite gender neutral, and as happy about it as their society permitted them to be. Elegantly slow. The sort of person who is comfortable to be with in sexual terms and who must be assessed by other means. I love these people—I would seek them out here on Earth if I could, fo
r here on Earth they understand me. In all my shades, they understand. They do not judge.

  Yet they must define themselves: “Call me Cordelia” when they are that person, down deep, and the whole world insists on seeing them as Anne. Even with an e. Anne is not Cordelia and a gender neutral person is not male or female. They are different, and English doesn’t have the words to express the qualities of that difference. It’s a good difference; the fault is in the language.

  I do not understand why I am obsessed with Anne Shirley.

  First I read the books. I also had the books as Memory, because they were part of the standard childhood package. I asked six visits ago—of course I asked: visits are a safe time to ask, for during visits I’m expected to remember and question, within limits. They said they chose conservative packages based on our assessment of societal norms, rather than creating one that fitted too precisely into a particular place or time. This reeks of laziness.

  Conservative packages are basically packages that use random selection of “typical” memories and aren’t carefully configured. It used to be properly researched, I suspect, because the Memories that are derived from earlier work are more solid. There was time spent on crafting them back then. The youngster seeing to me that moment admitted that they didn’t understand children. This is why my childhood and the state of my child were both left so…dauntingly unconfigured. So they don’t understand childhood and program it anyway. That goes for humans, too, I suspect. The childhood education package was set up in 1951 and it truly demonstrates that, after all these years of study, our understanding of humans is still woefully lacking.

  I cried when I read the Anne books the second time. I probably would have cried if I’d read the books the first time.

  It’s a problem with our education system. Special quality life education for the anthropologist in your life. Fake Memories, fake lives, fake emotions.

  They become real when we cease watching them. Tears fall for no apparent reason. When I saw the first episode of the series just now, I cried as Anne renamed a path. I may never know why my emotions distilled into tears at that point. I don’t have to know. But now, now that I have those tears, they are mine. They’re not Memories. Meeting Micheline didn’t do that to me. There was no emotion in it. I wish I knew why. I have no feelings for most humans. None. This is why those Anne-tears were so very important. I have a moment. It’s real. It’s all mine. And it’s far too rare.

  I shall call those tears “the flood of Shining Waters”. My sister will be Cordelia and will be so beautiful that I was envious throughout my childhood. She shall have a perfect nose. And all my memories are now underpinned by the book, the TV series and my Shining Waters.

  Although maybe “Shining Waters” is a mistake. There’s some­thing about it that nags at me. Something physical. Something not at all human.

  There’s another thing about Anne Shirley. She was abused as a child. Appallingly treated. Yet…it’s not her. The abuse is not her. She has kept herself whole, despite it. And my Memories are not me. I hold them. They accompany me in my real life. I produce them, politely, whenever the situation requires. But they’re not me.

  Apparently this is not true of all of us. For most of the others, their Memories become them. I was told how unusual I was when I fell into a small error, early on, and it was suggested that I might remember things outside the green lights. Fortunately, they believed in their techstuff more than they believed in me. This trust in themselves and distrust of my personal experience caused me to backtrack and hide that what I was saying was the literal truth. It also gave me time to do so, for they were full of hot air and hot talk. Mostly, however, it meant I had feedback and was given some contexts. Food for thought. Data. This is why I silenced myself and refused to tell anyone that I was self-aware sometimes, outside the regulation time. I’m not unique, it appears, but rare.

  We’re all here as anthropologists, but the others (most of the others, nearly all of the others) actually have to be reminded of our purpose each and every Download. There’s a set of recorded words: the first thing we hear as we come to full awareness. This is one of the differences between Download and uplift. Without those words I do not understand at all how they uplift—it must be automatically. I think it might be, because the techs laugh about some of the problems that uplift causes. Once, one of us was killed standing in the middle of a busy road, a victim of uplift. This gives the laughter a vicious edge, to me.

  I need to repress my hate of the way the techs laugh at the pain of those of us who are on this Earth. I cannot let them know I know about it. I could be the one in the middle of the road, next time.

  The other anthropologists are human, but not human. Their humanity has lost them their selves. And I’ve lost swathes of self and swathes of memory, but I remain me.

  All of our work is flawed. Over and over I realise this, for even at its best my memory is not complete and doesn’t remain intact for long at a time. It’s getting better, but is not even close to enough to make this study of Earthlings consistent and scientific.

  I guess the question is whether our anthropologists are human, with our pretend gender and our pretend memories, or whether we float on the surface of humanity, never touching on its reality.

  “Whether”—does that mean I have more humanity in my tears than others of my kind have in their lives? Am I going native by remembering I’m not? It seems that way.

  I wonder if I cried when I was in my own body. Did I even have tear ducts? I wonder if water was something different and special. No, I don’t wonder. Somewhere deep inside, I know. The difference is glorious and it is dangerous and it needs to be suppressed while I’m here, while I inhabit this frail body. Now, in this time and place, the only Shining Waters I am permitted are tears.

  I need to read Anne of Green Gables again.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  It was far too hot to sit inside that day. Too much late November and too little Spring.

  “Takeaway?” suggested Diana’s text. “Sit in the park?”

  “We can do better than that,” Antoinette contributed. “We can get ice cream and climb a hill.”

  “Climb? I’m wearing heels.” Trina, of course.

  They puzzled through various options at a time, slowed down by the vagaries of instant message. Finally they agreed that they all wanted chocolate ice cream. Two of them indicated it had to be gourmet chocolate ice cream.

  “I live near a good place. How about I buy for all of us and meet you on top of Mt Ainslie?”

  “Not a good idea, Trina. The ice cream will melt and we will be faced with snogging couples.” Leanne was ever-practical. Everyone was near giving up, however.

  “Let’s meet at Trina’s ice creamerie. We can go to Black Mountain together. Or Red Hill. Or walk through Haig Park?”

  “And get coffee!” Janet liked this idea.

  So this is what they did.

  They chose Black Mountain because, as Janet put it, “It looks the most like an alien spacecraft.”

  “Why do we need an alien spacecraft?” asked Antoinette.

  “It adds to the richness and the abundance of the universe?” suggested Leanne.

  “Do not mock your own beliefs,” suggested Janet, in return, “for we will remember that you mocked them and will tease you about it for a long time.”

  “How long is a long time?” asked Diana.

  “Too long,” said Leanne. “I hereby swear that I will not mock my own beliefs again. Out of fear. So whose can I mock?”

  “Mine,” said Diana. “You can say all the rude things you like about aliens today. I’m annoyed with them.”

  “And this is why we need Black Mountain Tower,” said Janet. “For I am always right. My intuition is amazing.”

  “Your intuition is certainly something,” Antoin
ette agreed. “I need to be precise for mockery. I can’t just mock aliens generally. I need to know specifically what aliens I’m mocking. And there need to be no gender issues involved.”

  “Why no gender issues?” asked Leanne.

  “So many people see me and assume my whole life is about gender issues. Because something is important, doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that counts.”

  “Of course not,” Diana agreed, acting shocked. “There’s always chocolate. And aliens who live in burrows. They count.”

  “But not aliens who live on top of landmines. They’re much less unimportant,” Leanne suggested.

  “Maybe not less important,” said Janet. “Maybe just more damaged.”

  “Like my ice cream.” And all four of them looked at the bulk of Trina’s ice cream, now a chocolate sprawl on the asphalt at the base of the tower. “Do we really want to go up?”

  “That’s like saying ‘Do we really want aliens?’” Diana mocked, gently.

  “Well, do we? With either?”

  “No, to both. Let’s keep Earth alien-free and go to the Botanic Gardens.”

  “We could walk there,” suggested Leanne.

  “So near and yet so far,” said Diana, a bit longingly. “It would hurt to walk that far. Anyone want to come by car with me? We can meet up at the kiosk and see if we can replace Trina’s ice cream.”

  “Me, obviously,” said Trina. “And if we can’t, then I shall have an iced chocolate, instead.”

  “There we have it,” declared Antoinette.

  “Have what?” Janet was confused.

  “Evidence of aliens on Earth.”

  “How is the kiosk evidence of aliens?” Trina was now confused, too.

  “Not the kiosk. You wanting chocolate. Everyone knows you hate chocolate. An alien is playing nasty mindgames with you.”