“It was all about money. Since high school. Not money in terms of what is in a wallet or a pocketbook. Not what it could buy. Not really. Just escalating numbers on a computer screen that referred to the contents of a series of accounts.”

A slim man in a Nehru jacket deferentially filled the listening woman’s water glass.

“I was appalled at college. Everybody was using the experience like an extended summer camp. And it was costing money, causing a subtraction process to one of those accounts I had worked so hard to bulk up to spread a portfolio over various sectors.”

The dessert menu was offered and refused.

“So I went to work full time while I was at college but that kind of double life lasted for no more than a semester. I didn’t need what these academics were lecturing about. They had, by the very definition of their jobs, opted out of the race that I expected to win.”

The usher showed them their seats. “Come this way, Mr. Westcott.” The lights went down. The curtain came up.

“My full time job as a trader got me some money, but even if I put in seven days, working the foreign exchanges when our windows were closed, and something like eighty or ninety hours a week, I could not break through past a certain junior status.”

The xylophone’s three tone call back announced the end of intermission.

“I had to make investments of my own. Investments that I could see so clear they hurt my eyes but my superiors would not let me make them for the company because of leverage or because of analytics, any old excuse. So I made them for myself in between company responsibilities. Like a bookie laying his own bets. And was smart enough to cash out two years before the bubble burst, cash out still on the way up, and have no possibility of being able to go through all the money I now have before I die.”

A trusted chauffeur, with a third degree black belt in mixed martial arts and a masters in personal security services from The University of Jerusalem, drove so slowly and gently into the Westchester night that the woman was not always sure if the car, which operated three different interlocking suspensions at once to accommodate bumps in the road, was actually moving. The chauffeur, who was receiving a six figure salary and an apartment for his family and private school tuition for his three children and full health insurance, knew he was destined, also, to inherit the car he was driving once his boss tired of it. The chauffeur’s wife routinely drove last year’s S600 to the grocery store and back. So he had even more incentive to drive carefully, to keep to the right lane, to negotiate turns as if they were physics problems, as if they could be straightened were the equation variables studied long enough.

“I was thirty-three. And if it was all about money, then I had won because the numbers could not go up any faster than they were going up. I had to find something else. As long as I did not get married and did not involve myself in any other kinds of reckless behavior, my goal was accomplished. My numbers were worth watching on their own. They moved up practically at the speed of the increase of the national debt.”

The woman, Deirdre, tucked her knees underneath her chin and hugged her legs to herself, her back against his headboard, in a kind of protective post-coital gesture. She probably needed to go to the bathroom.

“I have been looking, ever since, for some way to occupy my time. I bought and sold companies for about three years and made a fortune on that too, but it was not satisfying. I did not even know half of the time, what these companies made or what services they provided. They were just balance sheet names, and I played them like Monopoly properties, trading them, recombining them, firing everybody from one group, hiring them again.”

The lights moved past the car window at the same dreamsleep pace. The chauffeur pulled up in front of her apartment and got out to open the car door on her side before Deirdre had even gathered herself together and found her keys in her bag. Mark’s voice still echoed in her head.

“I remember hearing a senior partner say, when I was just a kid in the firm, that if you can have anything all the time that everything loses its meaning or even its interest so you end up with nothing. I did not believe him. I thought he was kidding. From the point of view of somebody who does not yet have everything but who has his sights set on achieving everything by the time he is thirty-five, his statement sounded like a fortune cookie.”

Deirdre felt the pull of the elevator on her body. The smoked mirror against the back wall distorted the reflected image of its passengers just enough to obscure their features but not enough to turn them entirely into silhouettes. She looked at her blurred face and realized that she had not said five words the entire evening.

Mark woke up and could not remember her name. He could not remember the name of the opera they had attended or the restaurant they had eaten in. He ate an orange in bed. He said a prayer. The smell of the orange on his fingers disguised the smell of the woman from last night somewhat. He played I Got Rhythm off his classic jazz playlist. The prayer was something new he was trying, like the yoga and the vegetarianism and the piano lessons. He read every morning from The Bible, making his way through it page by page. He was up to Ezekiel. “As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber.” That was good stuff, but he could not say why. Might need to hire somebody who could take him through these things and help him understand them, which would change the game because he had promised he would rely on himself this first time. Maybe if he got to the end and started again he would hire someone then. “As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl; and the four had the same form, their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel.” Beryl was a gem-like substance. Something like emerald. He had looked that detail up online. “When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved.” Veering was going off course. He knew that, but what does it mean to move in any of the four directions without veering? At once? Or in succession? Or not moving necessarily but having the ability to move in any of the directions and knowing that “veering” would not occur regardless of which direction one took?

After his personal training session and his shower and his hour long massage, he ate another orange, this time in the solarium, and felt an undefined urge as he picked a pit out of his mouth. His phone rang. The woman on the other end was the woman from last night. He was almost sure of it. She wanted to see him again, and she was suggesting the specifics: the hotel and the time. But it felt less like a date and more like a business meeting, which more directly addressed his undefined urge, anyway. He wanted a new project. Not a new human dependent.

+

Deirdre ushered Mark into a room and introduced him to two men.

“We have several pet names for it.” The two young men, one goateed and bald the other dreadlocked, indicated a plastic seat that looked as if they had stolen it off of a television set for a bad science fiction series. “Bert calls it The Matrix.” The joke did not register. Mark Westcott had only seen a handful of movies since he was taken to them as a child, forced away from his chess problems. “I like to call it the Rubber Ring.” This allusion also fell flat. Pete tried to jar Mark’s memory with a little back of the throat falsetto: “…They were the only ones who ever stood by you…” Pause for some kind of recognition. Nothing. Had not seen The Matrix and had not become obsessed with The Smiths. Bert and Pete had spent hours combing through online biographies of Westcott and developing demographic probabilities for a forty year old slightly geeky male who had grown up on Long Island and had thought that they had nailed it. Who the hell were they dealing with then? “You sit in it. We strap you in for your own safety. You might thrash about a bit, involuntarily, if you get taken back to an action packed bit. And we swing this virtual reality headset thing around to your front like this, sort of like you are in a dentist’s chair, but instead of feeling pain, you drift into pure bliss.”

He could not believe how impossibly young Pete and Bert were. Some kind of vitality he had forgotten about emanated from their bodies wasting itself into the atmosphere.

“We are at the very early stages. We do not have a proper name yet for the thing. We only have a few songs. It still takes a very long time to register even a single song, and we know that we will need to speed the process up considerably to make the product viable, which is why we are asking for so much. All of it will go into research and development. We are scientific artists…”

“…artistic scientists…”

“…we think you will agree, once you have experienced our contraption, but we are not idealists…”

“…or rather, we have set our idealism aside.”

“We are realists who will bend every fiber of our bodies toward making this product viable for the international market. And we believe that once you experience the power of this little baby that you will want to be part of the revolution.”

Mark was used to getting pitched, but these guys didn’t sound like they’d ever pitched before. They sounded like they’d read a book called How to Pitch Your Idea. He let himself be strapped in, which consisted mainly of his arms fitting into vinyl extensions like blood pressure measurement cuffs attached to the arms of the chair. He leaned back. They plugged each ear, one at a time, causing a bizarre sensation, half deafness and half dizzying sound-wash followed by total deafness. The screen in front of his face listed five songs and the artists and the albums and the dates released. He did not recognize any of the songs, so he keyed in on the only familiar information in the database: the dates. He chose a date, from when he would have been about seven years old and clicked on it. Eye movement apparently controlled the cursor. A double blink did the trick. A new window opened.

The song began behind a dark screen. He had heard it before. The first forty seconds was a manic, pulsing synthesizer melody somewhere between a bluegrass banjo sped up and a washboard rhythm cascading. Big power piano chords broke in at forty one seconds as if some crazy rock star was playing his guitar through a Steinway. And then at the minute mark, the drums kicked in at a slower rate than he had expected, furiously pounding out the same rhythm as the piano chords but also leashing in the synthesizer arpeggios. The voice sounded like whiskey. The voice was singing about farming and fighting and forgiveness. The electric guitar joined the piano and the drums but the burbling synthesizer still kept the background anchored to the manic feeling of the opening measures. He could not figure out what was verse and what was chorus. The screen stayed black. The guitarist went up its neck for some quick solo figures and then the singer repeated the phrase “Teenage Wasteland” several times before a fiddle took over and danced over the synthesizer loop still hacking away. The end built to a fury and paused. Three seconds of silence and then the song began again. The screen shot awake.

Somehow the screen had been engineered to allow for depth. Mark was in the screen, moving around almost, negotiating an airport. The ear plugs pumped Baba O’Riley as the only sound into his ears at first, but then he was slowly aware of ambient sound underneath the song and between the song and his ears, a depth of a palette. An announcement. Paging passengers on connecting flight one-seventeen. The smell of fried food. The light through the windows glinting off of the fuselage that taxied by outside on the asphalt apron. His back was to a pub. The song played out of the pub’s hanging speakers. He was able to move for five minutes and nine seconds through the aural arc of this memory. He was not able to travel past the distance that would have allowed him to hear the song when the memory was in the present. He was not able, for example, to go into the bathroom, as the door to the men’s room was at the very edge of the aural landscape. He satisfied himself by looking at a passing flight attendant who professionally pulled the perfectly sized carry on behind her on small black rubber wheels. The song ended. He expected the song to begin again and the same scene to play itself out – some memory from his life, he supposed, some nameless airport, somewhere in America, sometime in between flights.

The song began again, but as the screen came to life this time, he was in an entirely new place and time. Driving, actually. He had not driven himself for more than a decade. The same song was on the radio. The traffic was moving. The windows were open. He was drumming his hands on the steering wheel. He did not know the words, but he was singing along in a manner of speaking, vocalizing along with the path of the melody. Nodding his head along with the crashing piano chords while he kept his eyes on the road. The song did not finish itself out in this version, as his phone rang and he watched himself reach out and shut off the radio to answer the phone. Memory ended. Synthesizer again, from the top.

He was eleven, maybe twelve. In summer camp. One of his parents’ last ditch attempts to normalize him, to make him see value in sports and social interactions with people his own age. And he sat on the top bunk of a bed next to a window screen. Smell of camp must and encrusted sweat. The boy on the top bunk of the next column of beds held a large cassette player in his arms. It was silver and modern looking for 1981. It took eight D batteries to pump the volume to this bone chattering level. His parents sent him batteries weekly in care packages. Batteries and licorice. The silver cassette player’s two massive speakers, each the size of crepe pans, vibrated so violently as to make the boy on the bunk seem as if he was having a seizure as he cradled the radio in his arms like a trembling baby. The song coming out of them was Baba O’Riley. And somehow, even before the five minutes and nine seconds was up, Mark knew that this moment was the first time he had ever heard this song. He remembered marveling at its ferocity. It had haunted him, whistling weirdly through the wind in his ears all afternoon, while he struggled to learn how to sail Sunfish on the protected cove of the Long Island Sound that their camp surrounded. He wanted the memory to last. It did not. It folded, screen blank, at exactly the five minute and nine second mark.

Bert pulled the visual apparatus away from Mark’s face, and for a moment Mark was disoriented. The plugs were still in his ears. The depth perception of the real as opposed to the virtual was causing his eyes to adjust as if someone had turned on the lights at a meeting that had previously been focused on a Powerpoint presentation. He thought he was still in a memory. He sort of remembered Bert’s face from somewhere, but where was the song? That song. That stomping redneck ending. Pete removed Mark’s ear plugs. Air whooshed into his ear canals.

“How much do you need?” he heard himself ask.

+

Two years later, Bertrand Paysel and Peter Alberini presented at the 2009 Conference of Memory Scientists at the University of South California Viterbi Scool of Engineering as part of the “Looking Backward / Looking Forward” panel moderated by Dr. Frank Boudreau.

Mark attended. Conflicted. Sitting in the back. Acutely aware that he was not a scientist. But pleased to be invited, to be part of something again in a ground floor kind of way. He waved at Bert and Pete, but they did not return his greeting.

“We would like to thank Dr. Boudreau for assembling this panel, and we are keenly aware of the honor of sitting up here with such important contributors to our field.”

“And I would like to add to my colleague’s introduction by singling out Dr. Helen Tor’s magnificent insights into how passive cable theory may be a reduction of more complex dendrite phenomena, which provided us with the breakthrough we needed.”

“The two of us would also like to apologize beforehand for the qualitative and experimental nature of this presentation.”

“We have chosen to quote liberally from reflective journals. Not because we see them as definitive, but because we seek to move the conversation from the neurological to the perceptual.”

“Which we understand is at odds with the stated goals and parameters of this conference.”

“But which I would like to add we do not offer as some kind of rebellious replacement of accepted practice but rather as a kind of informative gloss on the more important work done by other people on this esteemed panel.”

“We have several pet names for this contraption you see before you.”

“Bert calls it The Matrix.”

The joke registered thin laughs in the back and to the right side of the audience assembled in the Fort Ticonderoga room of the Queensbury Ramada Inn.

“I like to call it the Rubber Ring.”

Mark remembered the same reference from when he’d first met them. It didn’t seem to go over much better with this audience.

“We are just at the very early stages. We do not even have a proper name yet for the thing. We only have a few songs. It still takes a very long time to register even a single song, and we know that we will need to speed the process up considerably to make the product viable.”

“We will start with Subject Thirty-One’s reflections.”

“Next slide, please.”

“And we should indicate at this point that these reflections were encoded right from the subjects’ unconscious, during the process we were administering, using the Unconscious Translator Model Three.”

“Our grant would not afford us Model Four.”

Mark thought Bert shot him a look, but he was not sure.

Subject Thirty-One; Song One – I Got Rhythm: “I woke up and could not remember her name, the name of the opera we had attended or the restaurant we had eaten in. I ate an orange in bed. I said a prayer. The smell of the orange on my fingers disguised the smell of the woman from last night somewhat, but I held the back of my middle three fingers on my right hand up to my nose anyway. The prayer was something new I was trying…”

Mark heard the recording of his unconscious thoughts and knew what the next words would be, the way one could listen to a familiar song and know the next lyrics, but when the song was not playing, the lyrics were a mystery, so when the recording was over he did not know what he had heard.

Bert poured himself water from the glass pitcher. “We were interested in this reflection for its abstraction. You will find that most of what we recorded was physical.”

“And there was some physical in this piece: the smell of the orange or the sensation of somebody having left him.”

Mark was sweating.

“But the Gershwin song, in this case, seems to have unearthed a moment of contemplation rather than an actual physical memory qua memory.”

“On to Subject Thirty-One’s second song.”

The room was hushed, but Mark could hear the hum of fluorescent lights overhead. It felt like the grey walls were closing in, bending, compressing.

“That’s the one we have before and after on.”

“Oh right. So we like Song Two for Subject Thirty-One a lot for you because for most people the Unconscious Translator only really kicked in after the music began, sometimes a ways into the song, but somehow this subject was attuned enough that the process of translation began before the song.”

“As you’ll see…or hear.”

“And this song also had multiple memory recaptures.”

“Which was rare.”

“Which only happened with five percent of our subjects.”

“One of the recaptures was fragmentary, but two of them were substantial.”

“And I should add that the process included a playing of the song in front of a blank screen first, which we built in for purposes of acclimation.”

Mark knew what was coming. He wanted to flee through the side door, head for the wine bar he’d seen them setting up as he came in, and obliterate himself. But he forced himself to stay in the faux wood chair.

Subject Thirty-One; Song Two – Baba O’Riley: “I am being strapped in, my arms fitting into vinyl extensions like blood pressure measurement cuffs attached to the arms of the chair. I lean back. They plug each ear, one at a time, causing me to have a bizarre sensation of half deafness and half dizzying sound-wash for a minute and then total deafness. The screen in front of my face lists five songs and the artists and the album and the date released. I do not recognize any of the songs by name or by artist or by album, so I key in on the only familiar information in the database: the dates. I choose a date, from when I was about seven years old and click on it. My eye movements apparently control the cursor. A double blink does the trick. A new window opens.”

“We should pause here and give full props to Deirdre Flake, who created the blink controlled cursor. Would you stand please. Right where you are. Deirdre Flake, ladies and gentleman.”

Applause.

Mark knew her. He thought he knew her.

Subject Thirty-One; Song Two – Baba O’Riley: (continued) “The song begins behind a dark screen. I have heard it before. The first forty seconds are a manic, pulsing synthesizer melody somewhere between a bluegrass banjo sped up and a cascading washboard rhythm. Big power piano chords break in at forty one seconds as if a giant howling infant were playing a guitar through a Steinway app….”

Here again, his own words. For five minutes and nine seconds, it was like hearing a voice mail message left while he was drunk played back. It did not seem to end. It started up again, the airport experience, being next to the pub. It did not seem to end. It started up again. The driving fragment. It did not seem to end. It started up again. The camp experience, the first time he had heard the song. That person he had been before orgasm, before money.

“We have one last recapture reflection.”

It had ended. Mark exhaled.

“I should add that all of our test subjects were male.”

“Which is a funny story how that came about…but Dr. Boudreau is indicating that we have only a few minutes left. So we should carry on.”

“Maybe we could just say that the subjects all came from volunteers whom Deirdre brought us.”

“Deirdre Flake, ladies and gentleman.”

“We should probably not say anymore.”

“Anyway.”

“She was good at getting us volunteers.”

“Anyway.”

“So.”

“We chose this subject’s reflection because it contradicted his interview sequence.”

“Should we go into that?”

“No. Dr. Boudreau is indicating that we have four minutes left.”

“We should just say that we interviewed the subjects separately.”

“Actually, Deirdre did.”

“True.”

“Deirdre Flake, ladies and gentleman.”

“And we had Deirdre correspond the two…”

“The unconscious translation and the conscious interview.”

“In terms of contradictions, correlations.”

“Here we go. Subject Thirty-One, Song Three.”

“Next slide, please.”

Mark stood. “Wait.”

The audience turned toward him. Deirdre turned toward him. The people up on the panel turned toward him. He was lightheaded on his feet, and felt like he might fall over.

“Strap me in.”

A hushed buzz electrified the conference room.

“Sir, it’s not properly hooked up.”

“We cannot just strap someone in. There need to be the proper procedures.”

“I am Subject Thirty-One.”

“Sir, the protocols for a successful experiment dictate that we keep all due anonymity.”

“Let him do it,” a woman called out.

Mark was already approaching the machine. It had been a while, but the equipment was as familiar as if he’d used it that morning. He slid into the chair, repositioned his back and placed the ear buds in his ears.

He watched Bert and Pete huddle together, whispering to one another, and then Bert was approaching the machine, and Mark was saying, “It’s my money, isn’t it?”

Bert clicked the switches and settled Mark with a touch to his shoulder, as if they had rehearsed the revelation.

The lights dimmed, and Mark felt that sensation, familiar yet alien, wash over him again, that sonic ebb and flow. Then, amidst it, he heard his own voice, amplified, as it took over the room, as if he were sleep-reading:
“Piano… A music box kind of repetition…A woman’s voice…A fretless bass and then the drums…And the woman’s voice seems to be at the absolute edge of emotional stress…A chorus behind her voice and the sound of wind over the plains…Bells…Some kind of exploding synthesizer sound…And I am immersed in this voice, into a shadowy unfamiliar place…I wear white pants and white socks and white sneakers and a white shirt…People are slow dancing, coupled off…I am moving to the right, putting a column of the cafeteria’s architecture between myself and a specific couple and then moving past the column to look at them from the other side, where the strobe-light lights up the girl’s face, eyes closed, mouth buried into the boy’s shoulder…The boy looks out manfully into the middle distance as if he is unaware of what he holds in his arms. The boy is from my homeroom…He is on the varsity football team, but not a starter in this his sophomore year, so not as arrogant as the steroid-addled offensive linemen who take breaks from the weight room to come down the hallway and blow their noses in their short sleeve shirts and to mess with me and my friends who are practicing for Robot Challenge…The football player dances, shuffles in place really, with the girl of my dreams, the girl who sits next to me in art…From my current point of view I watch my fourteen year old self watching the couple kissing…And I can move right next to the couple…I am moving closer to the couple than I was at the time…I smell the hair-sprayed head of the girl…I feel their slow gyrations…I know, even from my current point of view, that she had come to the dance with me but is dancing with him…She had sought me out the week before the dance…She had sat with me at lunch and she had kissed me once tasting of ash and she had pressed her body up against me and asked me questions and listened to my answers until on the phone one night I had mentioned this boy, the one she is dancing with, expecting her to join in, mocking his second string running back’s thick rubbery neck but something in her silence on the phone even through the phone had told me that I had overstepped and misinterpreted, which caused her to start pulling away…And I had chased her, wanting her desperately to seek me out again after robot practice and to be waiting for me, my own cheerleader, with the short hair, waiting for me so we could walk home together, her exhaled smoke and my exhaled plumes of frozen misting breath mingling as we made our way down the sidewalk that ran alongside Francis Lewis Boulevard…But chasing her so that she would chase me was backwards and impossible and the more I chased the less she responded and the more I chased… Still, she and I had planned to go to the dance together, so we went, dutifully almost, and we had stood awkwardly together for the first few songs, over by the trophy cases, and then this song, Total Eclipse of the Heart started to warble its way out of the speakers, the girl I had come with and the football boy from homeroom had found each other and now I am watching them and I’m falling back and watching them and…”

Now he was sobbing uncontrollably and fighting out of the Velcro arm stays and he began pummeling the machine, until he felt Bert grabbing him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

The lights were coming on again.

“It’s cool.” Pete talked, maybe because Bert still had the strange intimacy of Mark’s tears on his shirtfront. “We’re still trying to figure out, you know, what we have. As you can see, we have something.”

Most of the audience sat, purse-lipped. Those who had applauded were visibly moved. Many dried their eyes with their cuffs.

Pete tried to take everybody back to the conference tone. “We like that one because it took a window of another recapture within the first recapture.”

“Which might be confusing, but we loved the complexity,” Bert chimed in.

“The song took the subject to a dance, and then the dance took the subject to the history before the dance.”

“And also, we did Robot Challenge when we were in high school.”

“Yeah, we were geeks, which I know is a shock.”

Generous laughter. Again from a small section of the audience. Mark still stood next to the machine in front of the presentation dais.

At last, Dr. Boudreau spoke. “Thank you, Dr. Paysel and Dr. Alberini, for that passionate and interesting presentation. It went a bit over into the response portion of the hour, but we do still have a few minutes allotted for questions.”

Silence.

“If there are any questions…”

Silence.

“If there are no questions, then…Yes, in the front, with the green shirt.”

“What limits have you met? With the machine, I mean.”

“We have found one limit.” Bert spoke evenly, but Mark thought he detected a note of sadness in his voice.

“Listen.” Pete pressed play. A song began to fill the room. A pleasant piano introduction, something like a music box.

Mark waited to see how this song would relate to a limit.

A woman’s husky voice entered over the piano and the background singers who intoned “Turn around…” and she sang “Every now and then I get a little bit lonely and you’re never coming round…”

Mark looked at Bert and then Pete and then the audience and then back at Pete because Pete was usually best at explaining stuff about the machine that he did not understand but Pete was quiet on this one, so Bert tried. “You recognize this song?”

“Yes,” Mark said. “Sure.” But his eyes were worried and he put his hand to his mouth after he spoke.

Bert sucked in air. “Yeah.” He pressed pause. “Can you tell me what you remember from the machine again?”

Mark was blank.

“Something about a dance, about some girl, some guy, some heartbreak at fifteen?”

“I never went to any dances. I was all work and no play. It was all about money.” Mark looked at Deirdre who was standing in the aisle. “I know you. Don’t I?”

Deirdre smiled easily and generously.

Bert spoke again, his lecturing voice. “We’ve found that music changes time.”

“It does not speed it up or slow it down but it changes the quality of its passing and the memories created during the playing of it.”

“And the machine, in the act of reviving somehow erases.”

“Which might have useful applications.”

“For PTSD.”

“Or nasty divorce cases.”

“Or heartbreak at fifteen.”

“Who wants to carry that with you forever?”

“Right, Mark?”

Mark was disoriented, dizzy, needed to sit. He sat, and waited as Deirdre approached him with the water she’d already poured for him.