of not less than twelve thousand traumatic memories in order for the system to be perfect.’
Jo stopped talking. Thomas said nothing. The idea was so far-reaching that he did not have an adequate response.
‘Do you have any questions?’
He searched within himself for the most urgent of his doubts.
‘Assuming that everything you’ve said is true–from the shrinking memory horizons to this massive database of memories–and it still seems rather incredible–I can see why people might want to come to you to retrieve some of the memories they have lost. That makes sense. But isn’t it only fair to them to give them everything? Who are you to edit their memories for them? They are a product of the bad as well as the good, after all.’
‘Thomas: we are not making any promises of completeness. We are providing a unique service and it’s totally up to us how we want to design it. It has been decided that we are not prepared to sell just any memory for fear of the risk to us or our customers. That’s that. Any other questions?’
He could find only platitudes.
‘What is the company called?’
‘Up to now we’ve been working with a codename for the project: Memory Mine. That name will no doubt fade out as the advertising agency comes up with a new identity for us.’
A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines went off in Thomas’s head. Was this what the old woman had been talking about? Was this where the prediction was supposed to take him?
‘So are you going to do it?’
‘I think so. At least–Yes.’
Thomas began work the next day. Each morning he would arrive at the office in Hackney and he and Jo would sit in silence at their computers at one end of this huge empty space. He would wear headphones to listen to recorded phone calls and video; the room was entirely still.
‘We have short-listed around a hundred thousand memories that you can work from. They’ve been selected on the basis of a number of parameters–facial grimacing, high decibel level, obscene language–that are likely to be correlated with traumatic memories. It’s a good place to start. Within these you are looking for the very worst: memories of extreme pain or shock, memories of unpleasant or criminal behaviour. Apply the logic of common sense: would someone want to remember this? Think of yourself like a film censor: if the family can’t sit together and watch it, it’s out.’
Some were obvious. A woman watches her husband being run down by a car that mounts the pavement at high speed and drives him through the door of a second-hand record store; two boys stick a machete into the mouth of an old man while they empty his pockets and take his watch–a sign in the video image says Portsmouth City Council; four men go to the house of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to collect a loan–when he can’t pay they shoot him in the knees; the police inform a mother by telephone that her daughter has been violently raped while taking a cigarette break from her job as a supermarket cashier and has almost died from loss of blood.
In other cases, Thomas was not so sure. He found a sequence in which a man in a business suit met up with a young girl–fourteen or fifteen–in a car park by night. He seemed anxious, but she pulled him to her and they began to kiss against a concrete pillar. Her fingers made furrows in his hair; he tried to stop her as she undid his trousers but she seized him still harder. ‘Fuck me!’ she said as she lifted her skirt to reveal her full nudity. They made love greedily. Thomas watched to the end.
‘I don’t know what to do with this,’ he announced to Jo, his voice breaking the silence in the room. She remained absorbed in her computer screen for a few seconds before getting up to look at his. He started the scene again and watched with some embarrassment as Jo leaned fixedly over his shoulder, scentless.
‘What are you thinking?’ she said. ‘This girl is blatantly under age! Get rid of it!’
‘But don’t you think–I just thought–it might be a very important memory for her. I mean–she looks as if she really loves this man.’
‘Thomas. This is a criminal act! We don’t get mixed up in this kind of thing. Delete it.’
Thomas became fascinated by his power to watch lives unfold. For two days he followed the experiences of a young aristocrat named William who worked for The Times as an obituary writer. He would go to spend lengthy afternoons with ageing baronets and senile Nobel Prize winners, interviewing them about their past, and filing the review of their life in anticipation of its imminent end. Memory Mine had purchased the rights to much of The Times’ archive so that Thomas could listen to the actual recordings of these conversations. He witnessed the young man’s respectful grace as he sipped tea with old men and women, the feeble voices with which memories of past greatness were hesitantly recounted, the antiseptic interiors of old people’s homes, the soothing effect of the distant past on a young man who was not very comfortably contemporary. He listened to William in phone calls and read his emails, followed the course of a love affair that ended painfully. Thomas explored every document, every conversation, every relationship, and became absorbed completely in the largeness of so many lives and so much time.
He worked till late and spent his evenings thinking about the memories he had examined during the day. His own past merged with those of so many others; he began to have startling dreams. He dreamed that he was looking for his room but could not remember where it was. He had lost his arms and legs and could only wriggle on his stomach. He squirmed on the ground, unable to lift his head to see where he was going. He realized he was wriggling on glass–thin glass that bowed and cracked with his movement, and through which he could see only an endless nothingness. He sweated with the terror of falling through, could already see his limbless body spinning like a raw steak through the darkness. And then he reached a green tarpaulin that covered the glass and he could stand again and walk. He entered a corridor of many doors. Every door looked the same: which was his? He tried to open doors at random but all were locked. As he was becoming mad with apprehension, one door loomed in front of him, more significant than the rest. He turned the handle and entered. Lying in his bed was a man with a bandaged arm. Thomas realized he was dreaming not his own dream but that of the man in his bed. The dream of a man whose memories he had been scanning that day: a construction worker who had walked across a roof covered in a tarpaulin, stepped unknowingly on a skylight, and plunged through the glass to fall three storeys and lose a hand.
One day Thomas asked Jo a question that had been preoccupying him for some time.
‘Are we going to lose our memories too?’
Jo was eating a sandwich at her desk. She looked at him and smiled.
‘I don’t think you are. That’s why I chose you. The past is tangible for you in a way that is quite exceptional. You seem to have an effortless grasp of it. I don’t just mean dates and facts. It’s as if memories seek you out and stick to you intuitively.’
‘So what about you?’
‘This was of course one of the things we were all most concerned about. How could we run this project if we all forgot everything? So we tried to understand exactly why this was happening to see if we could avoid it in ourselves. The fact is that no one really knows. Some say it’s to do with the widespread availability of electronic recording formats that are much more effective than human memory, which have gradually removed the need for human beings to remember. Others find the causes in the future-fixation of consumer culture. People cite causes as diverse as the education system, the death of religion, diet, and the structure of the family. There’s not just one theory.
‘But they put together a lifestyle programme for all of us to try and ensure we would escape the worst of the effects. No television, weekly counselling sessions. We all have to keep a journal. We are all assessed every three months to monitor any memory decline. Et cetera.’
A strange image was fluttering in Thomas’s head while Jo was talking. All the memories of the world were stranded and terrified, like animals fleeing a forest fire. With nowhere