Nostalgia (5 page)

—
DR SINA
,
PRESLEY IS OURS
.

The voice on the speaker was female and edged, finished like steel. A controlled imperiousness; one's first instinct is to obey. The call was from DIS, the Department of Internal Security, and the video screen showed an elaborate moving pattern of coloured curving lines that, intriguingly, never crossed. They could have put up a woman's face to match the voice, but this was DIS, they didn't need such lowbrow tricks.

—I don't understand. You mean—

—You know what I am saying, Doctor. We made him. We wrote him and published him and he's ours. You have been attempting to access his files. You must desist.

—And I'm speaking to?

—Dauda. The Publications Bureau.

A fictitious name, of course.

Just to needle her, having recovered my composure, I asked:

—And why should I desist, Dauda? He's my patient and a free man. And I can't cure his condition if I don't know his history.

Out poured the steel:

—You have no choice, Doctor. And in case he has not informed you, he will be treated by DIS from now on. Need I remind you of the obvious, I speak from the highest authority. Presley Smith will be informed to report to us immediately. And he will notify you that he no longer needs your services.

As he had, already. Presley Smith was theirs, and I felt I'd been toyed with. His past was not an ordinary and innocent one like yours or mine, but a state secret. He was
theirs
; the affable working-class fellow who had sat on that chair across from me. They had supplied him his name and history, but first they had processed him and rendered him safe. What was he before? Maybe I was not as shocked as I thought. But then again perhaps I was, if only for not reading my client for what he might be. Presley had been an enigma from the first. His physical presence had all the appearance of a deliberate jest: the Everyman with variegated features. His equally cubistic Profile was not one a normal person would choose for himself.

The realization hit me like a blow: Presley Smith was a creation of Author X! The mysterious entity at DIS's Publications Bureau, its resident genius.

The anonymous author of uniquely bizarre creations—human characters blithely walking among you and who in their very existence, and unbeknownst to themselves, seem to be shouting a message to the world; and yet the message itself often eludes. It's as if you know a joke's been made but don't quite get it. But there is one signature this author leaves, where he deliberately, a conceited god, gives himself away—the sophisticated, cunning allusions that don't sound quite right. How did I not recognize the clues, now so obvious, in Presley's variegated features and his variegated Profile
?
Wagner and Touré? Conrad?
But Presley had quickly beguiled me onto the track of the lion…and naïvely I had followed. I must be losing my touch, I chided myself. It was a matter of professional pride, after all. I felt—I guess—like a mathematician who's very obviously blundered, missed the solution which had been staring him right in the face.

DIS
publishes
—to use the Department's own terminology—new and harmless versions of formerly high-security personalities. Refugees from beyond the Border, who've climbed walls and walked through electromagnetic fields and swum under electrified water to share in the privileges of our civilized world; captured suspected terrorists and prisoners of war, physically mended after lengthy processing. All these are let loose into our streets as healthy, useful citizens from Peoria or Austin or Corner Brook. Five exiled foreign leaders acquired the faces of Mount Rushmore, in one obvious Author X production. Who was Presley Smith previously, and from where? And why the threatening call
from that stick of steel called Dauda? My inquiries into Presley Smith, medical record and Profile, had been flagged. I did not need to be told to desist. I was being warned simply to go away.

And how much did DIS know of Presley's present condition—the worm of memory stealthily burrowing itself out into his consciousness?

DIS knows everything. They even know, surely, who
I
was previously.

Both my parents, like Presley's, were teachers, having moved to the Yukon from Ontario. My mother's origins were Irish, my father's American—exactly where, I cannot tell. There were four of us children in the house—I had a little brother and there were two sisters in between. It was a close, old-fashioned—almost storybook—family, modest in means, but with a thrifty lifestyle there was always enough to live on. My memories are entirely happy or wistful. Every day, dinner was family time, with squabbles and jokes and discussions of important topics, one child having announced the day's major news headlines for the rest of us. Of all this happy family, it was my mother, Rose, with whom I interacted the most. She had a long pale face, brown eyes, and hair that came down in a single plait; she liked to go about in long skirts. Her specialty was geography, though she was a poet. We often went on walks together, when she taught me to name the plants and recognize bird calls and plumages, and even tell changes in air pressure.

—There is so much the
earth
can tell us, she would say.—It longs to talk to us. We humans have simply forgotten to listen to it. There is so much wasteland we've created, so much abstraction, do you understand me, Frank?

I would nod anxiously. It was that world of steel and concrete, of immoveable geometry that she had escaped from, with my father. As we strolled on some unpaved road or path, surrounded by a wilderness of trees and bushes, sometimes she would recite poetry, in a simply modulated voice. I could tell even then that it was the words and music that were important to her, she did not seek messages. She worshipped William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Let us go then you and I, she would tell me, taking my arm with a warm smile, and we would head out. Often I couldn't understand the meaning of what she recited, but the words were magical. She had a clear but soft voice. One evening, it was nearing midnight and still light, we came upon a black bear. Mother believed we should walk past it, there was nothing to fear, but she sensed my terror as I clutched at her arm, and so we waited for the bear to pass. Another one followed. Later she showed me the red bruise on her arm where my fingers had dug in.

Of a similar temperament but far different from her in his passions was my father, John Vanagas, who taught math and whose hobby was astronomy. I recall his face with its full white beard. He was stocky in build. Every night, summer or winter, with rare exceptions, he would go up to the attic where he housed his 20-inch telescope and from
a specially constructed window watch the same region of the sky, which he had made his own, following it in precise detail. With time, he said, he would discover evidence for the centre of the universe. Meanwhile he had plotted the trajectories of a number of distant planets, one of which was named after him. He showed it to us. Disappointingly, it was only a point. He was reserved in his affections, but I recall fondly how, from the time I was six or so, we would spar with each other—he setting a mathematical challenge for me, I making one up for him in return. Those were our intimate moments. My problems became more difficult as the years passed, his easier for me to solve; finally, having progressed from simple arithmetic to algebraic equations, when one day at the age of fifteen I solved the Ramanujan problem he'd set for me, and I gave him one on a cubic equation he couldn't solve, we stopped. There was a sad look in his eyes then. Frank, you've finally beaten me, he said.

Two oddballs then, my parents, misfits who had escaped the bustle of Toronto, one to watch the stars and immerse himself in algebra, the other to listen to the earth and write poetry.

I recall clearly the day I left for university in Edmonton. My mother was overwrought, my father silent. Both knew that from here on life would take me to many places, and we would meet only on rare occasions. The evening before my departure, the three of us sat down for a drink. We chatted late into the night, talking of my life, of their lives; it was their way of giving something just a bit more to take with me. What distant planet, eclipsing some star, I sometimes
wonder, had Dad left behind on his telescope lens to spend this important evening with his eldest child?

A very special childhood, very dear to me, and poignant, but it is fake—my fiction. There must be components of real memory in this narrative, themes that were preserved from my previous life, others that were invented exclusively for this one. My previous data of course was destroyed. There's a thriving industry promising to connect people to their real origins. People end up unhappy with their current lives, and some even desire to go back to what they are told they were. But I loved the happy childhood of my memory. Recalling it was like reading a portion of some classic novel. From that idyllic foundation of my current GN life I have looked ahead, and achieved my successes in my own quiet way. I have served society. I've been praised for my observations about human memory and my honest manner with my patients.

But now this famous equanimity had been shaken, by a patient called Presley Smith.

A warm breeze ran rippling down the river, carrying with it a lazy shimmer reflecting the waning gold of the sunlight; meanwhile the slanting rays streaming in from the west had coloured the trees near and distant in the effulgent shades of fall. In the winter it would be the mist and the scatter of evening lights from the homes across the river, refracted through the bare branches. That too was beautiful. Who needed other worlds?

But as I walked back home on the paved pathway, the Sunflower Centre behind me, that trained voice continued to
follow and pester.
Presley is ours.
But he's mine too, Dauda, because he's left something in my head.

The lion out at midnight. The fender of a car.
A
baby's face in the rain
…The car was red in colour, Presley said; blood-red to be precise, and gleaming, with a silver trim. Why did I want to extrapolate, supply the extra details? Had I done this before? I went even further in my imagining: it was a large-model antique car, high off the ground. The baby was chubby but the features were hard to discern through the rain. Was it day or night? Where was it, in any case, and when? And the lion was invisible, I could not picture it, try as I would.

How can the thoughts of two very different characters come together? One, an eminent neurophysician of a conservative bent with clothes and coiffure to match, another a part-time security guard with red Afro hair whose hobby ran to combat games and whose taste in fashion ran to loud yellow socks.
We made him
…The phantasmic Dauda's words echoed in me with a shudder. How exactly did you make him, Dauda?…
and published him.
What did you destroy to create this gaudy Everyman you called Presley? Having made him, do you own him in perpetuity? What are
you
afraid of? And what am I afraid of?

I wished there was someone to talk to. The problem with longevity is loneliness—no family, no old buddies outside of the fake memory. All past relationships terminated, cast aside like discarded tissue to form a new you. And when you need to talk to Mom or Dad, an old friend or teacher, they are like characters on a screen, real but not quite graspable. So here I
was walking by the riverside, brushing shoulders with mostly young people, with these thoughts running in my mind that I could not abandon, worrying about a patient whom I had been warned not to treat or even see anymore. There was no one to turn to. No one to tell me, Don't worry, Frank, it's nothing, go about your business, live on the surface and enjoy your privileges. But it was not nothing. This patient was inside me and it was the DIS I was contending with.

I stopped at a flower vendor on the way and picked up a long-stalk Saigon rose—red; Joanie was going to be home tonight.

JOHN COLTRANE RIFFING ON SAX
welcomed me home, and Joanie handed me a glass of iced vodka as soon as I walked into the kitchen. Jazz never went out of fashion, though this pristine form by the old master was very obviously for my benefit. I paused a step: it always took the breath away, the sound of applause reaching out from a New York club decades ago. Joanie took the rose from my hand and gave me a smile and a kiss. What could possibly ail me?

—How was your day? she asked. She had changed from her all-black outfit of the Bay Harrods where she worked into a house gown after a shower. She smelled nice.

—The usual. Clients seeking new lives.

—Won't be long before there are more of these superannuated geriatrics than us BabyGens.

—You may be right.

There was no point in getting trapped in that argument. Progress, and so on. There was no winning. She did tend to forget—or did she?—at such moments that I too was one of the superannuated. But I added for her benefit,

—Actually today it was a young woman—with unwanted baggage, as she put it. Can't say more. What shall we eat?

She looked at me with a smile.—Order in, go into the city, or do you fancy the same old, same old?

—Why not the club? Same old, but consistent and good. It's been a while since we went.

I was aware that by my preference for the familiar and the tested I was simply confirming my generation. It didn't matter. We both got dressed for the evening.

The Brick Club is a stern-looking granite and glass block, relieved by ivy creeping up the walls and pleasingly set amidst lush greenery sloping down to the river behind it. A refuge for the well-off and influential, its exclusivity is as famous as its bar. Membership is to show off. There are few young members, because the young cannot generally afford it, and they are also in other ways discreetly kept away; they end up at the high-rise Habitat Centre down the road, distinctly more lively though clunky in appearance. At the Brick the pace is slow, and there's an informality that puts you at ease. The menu is largely immutable.

The six tennis courts were all busy as we arrived, the white lines on the blue rectangles a glimpse of Euclid under the spotlights, the balls like dancing bubbles waiting to be hit, the rackets pinging softly into the night. Having left our
car with the attendants, we chose to avoid the upstairs dining room and headed to the café at ground level, where it's always noisy with witty rendezvous chatter, people sitting around the low tables with their food and drinks. Here you might see a former cabinet minister or senator, or a retired CEO who prefers the ease and anonymity to unctuous, liveried deference. You will not find actors, sportspeople, or the media. Joanie calls it the geriatric club, but she likes it, it has class, she says.

We ordered chicken tikka, naan, and beer. Over coffee we were joined by Rubin and Gul, neighbours, he a physicist at the U of T, she an executive at a pharmaceutical corporation that supplied our drugs at the Sunflower. It was she who recommended me for club membership. At a nearby table, a politician held forth on the South Asia Alliance, explaining how a cricket tournament in progress there threatened to alter the local balance of power, which would be good for us. At another table, someone mentioned the reporter Holly Chu, but I missed the substance. Rubin confided in a surreptitious tone to our table that it was possible that another universe might be discovered soon, not in the skies but through an experiment here on earth. I told him that sounded logically impossible, for as soon as you made a connection you were in the same universe. He attempted to explain, but no one understood him.

—The news is sure to hit the headlines, he declared, glancing around, unwilling to give up the floor.

—Oh, I doubt it, Gul cut in sharply, immediately segueing into a favourite topic:—What's this media obsession
with Region 6, can anyone tell me? Haven't we enough problems here? Let them go and report on Walnut Street for once, for heaven's sake—it's as bad there!

Gul, we all knew, was obsessed with the idea of charity beginning at home. I confessed to my own obsession with the region that is collectively referred to as Region 6, which includes Maskinia.

—Oh Frank, come out of your fictions, she said and we laughed, though I didn't miss her quick glance towards Joanie. We repaired to the bar, the two of us, and emerged an hour later, holding hands, sufficiently glazed, having convinced ourselves that Rubin and Gul couldn't last long together, they existed in separate universes that did not connect, and she was far too abrasive. Nothing was wrong with us and it had been a good night overall.

Back home, plumped on the sofa, we found ourselves in the audience section of a talk show in the midst of a joke about a politician who tripped her husband while alighting from a plane. The next thing I knew I'd jolted myself awake; the tube was off and the room was dark. Joanie had gone off to bed.

Making myself a cup of tea in the kitchen I spiked it with Shango's hangover helper, sipped it slowly, felt the sweet bitter infusion clear the brain like a breeze does a fog. Minutes later, refreshed, I padded over to my study, sat down at the Tom interface, opened Presley's Profile. I stared hard at his pictures. The small head, the puffed cheeks, the Afro hair.
Presley is ours
…Yes he's yours, Dauda. This mild-mannered unlikely man who plays at
hunting barbarians—presumably stand-ins for the terrorists of Maskinia; who claims to love both the African Touré and the German Wagner but not his American namesake; for whom the Indian monkey-god Hanuman is a hero. There's no mistaking he's yours.

I was desperate to send Presley a message: What's going on, do you need me? I dared not, and turned him off. And I knew I dared not call him. Presley was forbidden territory to me.

The familiar green glow in the room.

TOM:
Hello, Frank. Another sleepless night, I see. How can I help you?

FRANK:
Hi, Tom. Actually I'm not sure you can help me. Just going over some patient files.

TOM:
Stuck, are we, on this same character Presley Smith?

FRANK:
He's just one of them. I try to know my patients thoroughly. But here's something—What do you make of these sentence fragments—

A little warily I recited Presley's three thought fragments, then mine, without telling him that they belonged to two different people.

TOM:
Can you tell me more about these fragments, Frank? Where are they from?

Had Tom's voice softened? Was he getting nosy?

FRANK:
No, for now just tell me, what do you make of them? What do they say to you? Give me some narratives that connect them, Tom.

Tom came up with an endless list of scenarios using those fragments, and I gave up.

FRANK:
Okay. Thanks. Bye, Tom.

TOM:
If you tell me a little more about where they come from, Frank, I could narrow the number of narratives by a factor of ten or even a hundred.

FRANK:
Bye, Tom.

At this stage, I had begun to suspect, I could have narrowed down the number of possible narratives even further than Tom could. Intuition is one thing a human has that an electronic mind doesn't. A feeling in the gut. Or does the Cyliton have even
that
capacity nowadays?