Tokyo Cancelled

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 to go, they huddled in groups and wept, and the noise of their weeping was a cacophony of the centuries that filled the skies but could not be heard. And the earth became saturated with their tears, which welled up and dissolved them all, and they seeped away into nothingness.

Not long after, the office had a visitor.

‘Good morning Jo. How are you?’ The man wore an impressive three-piece suit and his bright greeting sounded mass-produced.

‘I’m well, thank you. Larry–meet Thomas. Thomas–Larry runs Memory Mine in the US. He’s our boss.’ She shot a playful smile that Thomas had not seen before.

Larry gave a handshake that felt like a personality test. ‘Good to meet you, Thomas. Jo–can we talk?’

They moved over to the window and talked quietly. Thomas could hear them perfectly but pretended to work.

‘How’s this one doing?’

‘Well. A bit slow.’

‘Look, Jo–the whole thing is waiting for him now. Everything is in place. We just need that sample of twelve thousand grade D memories so we can clean up the whole database and launch. How many has he done?’

‘I think about six hundred.’

‘Six hundred! At this rate it will take him a couple of years. Let’s get someone else.’

‘No, let’s keep him. I think he’s the best person for this. We’ll just speak to him about the urgency and get him to work faster.’

‘Are you sure? We don’t have much time.’

‘Yes. I’ll talk to him.’

From then on Thomas did not have time to explore the lives of people like the obituary writer or the construction worker. He rushed through as fast as he could, working later and later in the office to keep up with his deadlines. He found so many memories of terrible things: deaths, betrayals, injustices, accidents, rape, ruthlessness, ruin, disappointments, lies, wars. He saw mothers losing their infants, suicides of loved ones, devastating financial losses, children beaten and brutalized by parents, countless violent and senseless murders. Every minute was a new horror, a new nightmare that forced its way inside him and unfurled unexpected lobes of dank emotions that grew in among his organs. At night he left the office bloated and dazed with hundreds of new memories that leapt in alarm at their new confines, beating against the sides of his mind, flying madly like winged cockroaches in a cupboard. He could not separate himself from the memories: they lodged in him and burst open like over-ripe fruit, their poison sprayed from them and seeped through his tissues. He wanted to vomit with the sickness of the thoughts, to purge himself. But there was no escape: the memories seethed and grew in his mind during the day and erupted into startling, terrifying dreams at night. Thomas arrived at work each day pale and wide-eyed, ready to sit again and absorb more of this acid from the past.

At last, after one month, it was over. Larry came to the office and sat at Thomas’s machine. Twelve thousand memories exactly sat in his folder.

‘Jo–are you confident this is 100 per cent accurate?’

‘Sure. We’ve checked it very carefully. I’m confident.’

‘OK. Now we should be able to calculate the parameters.’ He logged in to the administration section of the system and activated some functions. ‘There. And now we can run a search on the entire database and locate all grade D memories.’ He hit Run query. Numbers started mounting on the screen.

He unbuttoned his jacket. ‘So: many thanks to you, Thomas. You got there in the end. What now?’

‘Er–no plans really.’

‘I see.’

‘Maybe we can find something,’ said Jo.

Larry looked at her. ‘Your budget is already blown. I hardly think you’re in a position to make suggestions like that. Please get real.’

The search ended. ‘2,799,256,014 results found.’

‘Christ–that’s nearly ten per cent of our database,’ said Larry. ‘That’s a lot of trauma. And this is just in the US and UK where life is pretty good. Imagine how many we’ll get in all those places where life sucks. My God. Let’s just check some of these before we delete them.’

He opened the first memory. A daughter found her tycoon mother dead in a running car full of carbon monoxide after a major feature in the Daily Telegraph detailing her illegal business ventures. The second was a man being beaten by the police in prison and threatened with razor blades.

‘OK, this looks good. This is the kind of stuff we really do not need. Good job, Thomas. So I’m going ahead and deleting these.’

Jo and Thomas looked at him and said nothing. He pressed Delete all. ‘2,799,256,014 records deleted.’

‘Excellent. Now let’s start selling the hell out of this thing.’

That night Thomas had a vivid dream. He dreamt he was back at his parents’ house in Islington. The house was empty. Sun poured in through the windows and he sat in his bedroom reading books rich with tales and characters from history. Suddenly he looked up; and through the window he saw a beautiful thing floating slowly down to the ground. It was magical and rare and he felt a deep desire to own it. He ran down the stairs and out into the garden, and there it was floating above him: a delicate thing, spiralling exquisitely and glinting in the sun. He stood under it and reached out his hands. Spinning like a slow-motion sycamore seed, it fell softly and weightlessly into his palms. It looked as if it was of silver, beaten till it was a few atoms thick and sculpted into the most intricate form: a kind of never-ending staircase that wound round on itself into a snail shell of coils within coils. He looked at it in rapture. How could such a beautiful object have fallen from the sky! He was full of joy at this thing that had chosen him and fallen so tamely into his hand.

And then he understood that the thing was a memory. It was a wonderful memory: of music first heard by a young woman–a big concert hall–a piano that produced sounds so astonishing that the woman was lifted up on their flight. And Thomas was exhilarated: he laughed out loud with the memory of those passages that seemed like they would burst the limits of loveliness.

But as the memory entered him and took root in his heart he realized there were many more falling from the sky. He looked up and saw there were memories of all kinds and colours dropping not only around him but as far as he could see. He went out into the street, where memories had already begun to cover the ground. Each gust of wind would send them skating across the tarmac to collect in the gutters. They fell everywhere: some wispy, some like multicoloured feathers, some fashioned out of a substance that collapsed and became like tar when it hit the ground.

All day and night the memories fell. They floated on puddles like a layer of multicoloured leaves, and stuck in trees, giving them new and unnatural hues of cyan and mustard yellow and metallic grey. They accumulated in clumps on the roofs and window sills and porticoes of Georgian houses, softening right angles and making a kind of pageant of the street.

The next morning the skies were low and dense and the memories fell harder than ever. The roads had become impassable and people had to clear paths to their front doors.

He left the house and wandered until he reached King’s Cross Station. The memories fell on his head and shoulders. Everywhere they lay flattened and dead on the ground, as if there had been a massacre of insects.