“Kerry. Yeah. Came to us eight, nine months back.”
“Us?”
“Everyone’s an ‘us’ these days, friend. We’re a group, a project, over in Mountjoy Square.”
The old tenement terraces of the ten-to-a-room people, the bread-and-tay people who had birthed Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan, had new tenants now. A race beyond their ancestors’ conception, come creeping up the tenement steps and staircases, through the derelict high-ceilinged rooms, looking for a place to strike roots.
“A multi community?”
“Beyond the multi scene,” Feargal said. “For multis who don’t want to be multi anymore.”
“She never really was, Stevie,” Clionadh said. “She hated going back. Couldn’t bear it that she would have to go back to it in the end. To what she was. The black.”
“Found us,” Feargal said. “They do. Don’t advertise, keep ourselves to ourselves. Word passes. We could do this thing she wanted. Not cheap, but price okay to her.”
“Her bank account was closed. That was you?”
“Standard practice.”
“What did she buy from you?”
“Complete new life. Identity, history, memories, emotions, personality. Everything.”
I thought they were fictions of films, those moments when the camera zooms in on the face of the hero while the background pulls out to infinity. They aren’t. Art imitates life. The camera in my skull shrank the noisy, pushing bodies in Daley’s bar to distant, buzzing insects.
Clionadh touched my hand. It felt like mist. Her face swam before me, at once remote and enormous, like a face painted on the side of a blimp. She was speaking.
“Okay? You okay Stevie? Feargal, is he all right?”
Daley’s resumed its proper dimensions of sight and sound and smell.
“God,” I whispered.
“Feargal,” Clionadh said urgently.
“Lot to explain,” Feargal agreed. “This isn’t the place. Easier to show. She’s all right, your sister. Believe me. She isn’t hurt; we wouldn’t hurt anyone, anything. But you should see. Then you’ll understand, maybe.”
The electric cab left us at the tenement in Mountjoy Square. The driver charged us wrong-end-of-town prices. Long long since I was north of the river. Tribal banners bearing a dozen different crests swung from broken street lights or flapped against the fronts of the old townhouses. Traveler campervans and trailers were nose-to-tail around the central grassed square: clusters of tents, bashes and refuse sack yurts had been erected on the small green. Goats grazed, skinny dogs scavenged, heedless of traffic. Campfires sent wreaths of sparks into the cold, clear night. There was music; many musics; overlapping tribes of sound.
It had begun with these traveling people, when Britain decided it could no longer tolerate a nomadic population. They came to Ireland, they found peace, they stayed, they spread the word. For most of its history, Ireland has exported its young, scattering its brightest and boldest and best like seed across the planet. Now the brightest and boldest and best were being gathered in from across the planet, and Ireland was a country of the young again.
The steps to the tenement stank of urine. I think it’s compulsory.
As we climbed the spiral of worn stone stairs, Feargal explained that his project owned the whole apartment block. They’d needed somewhere big and cheap. The equipment. He paused on the first landing to call five names. Kerry’s was not one of them. His voice echoed in the big, cold stairwell. Tracks of condensation ran down the glossy, institutional paint. A door opened on the next floor, a head appeared over the bannisters: a girl, shaggy blonde hair, age indeterminate, terrifyingly thin.
“Feargal! Feargal! I remembered! Bray beach! And they were there! All of them! But they never existed!” She giggled and disappeared. The door closed loudly.
“Trina’s a transient.” The name was not one of those Feargal had shouted out. “We’re mostly transients. Nature of the community; you pass through on your way from somewhere to someplace better.”
“And you?” I asked.
“Permanent. Eternal. Day-oner. Invented this place. Least, that’s what I remember.” I didn’t understand why he smiled.
“And Kerry?” I asked.
He nodded up the stairs.
Feargal took us to the door at the top of the stairs, under the glass cupola. We entered the room beyond. It was dark but the acoustic and the chill of the air suggested immense size. The lights clanked on, battery by battery; heavy duty industrial floods. White light, white room: the old tenement attic, the length of the whole building.
The thing in the middle of the floor was white too. Feargal’s footsteps echoed in the big white space as he crossed the floor to the machine. A faint pulse beat of street rhythm transmitted through the row of skylights. Feargal’s expression as he stood before the device was a combination of pride and awe; Clionadh’s, as she ran her hand over the white scanning ring, bewilderment and disgust.
The sheet on the padded vinyl surface was white, and neatly folded down at the top.
“Most of the work was already done by the end of the century. Complete map of the human brain. Scanned in sections by one of these things. Axon by axon wiring diagram. What fires in response to what stimulus. Took us to make the concept jump: what can read can be taught to write.”
“You use that thing—scanner—to rewrite memories?”
“What are we but what we remember we are? We came up with a new model of the brain; as an imaging system. Memories move through the brain along established paths of neural activity.”
“We?” I said.
“Six neuroscience researchers. With a vision. And some money. Imagination, my friend. That’s all it takes. Imagination is the sister of memory. Imagine that other life, that other friend, those other relatives, parents, and the scanner identifies the activated neurons, and imprints the image into memory. Single neuron e/m induction. Like making photographs from negatives. The long darkroom of the soul.” Feargal fished a translucent plastic pharmaceutical tub out of his pocket. Such was the power of his metaphor, I thought for a moment it was a film can. He popped the lid, scattered white pills on the white sheet. The pills were stamped with the image of a flying dove.
“Acetylcholine activators. Play a double function in the process. Reinforces imprinted memory while depressing the existing engram on that site cluster so there is no conflict of memories. Beautiful. Remembering and forgetting. After a couple of months the memories become independent of the imagination; like Trina, down there in thirty-three. Works best on those with fugue state tendencies. Got a complete alternative personality with ready established memory routings, so much the better. Takes about four months for new memories and personality to become permanent; about six before the old memories and personality are supplanted and erased. One thing we can’t erase; what we call the cognitive discontinuity: they remember the process of imprinting, but not why they came here.”
“Kerry?” I asked.
“She’s gone, man. Not here anymore.”
He was smiling. He was proud of what he did. He was a savior; Jesus of the ganglia. Believe in me, be born again. A Jesus that stank of Beamish and cigarettes, with a fistful of pills. Suddenly I wanted very, very much to plant my own fist in the middle of that loop of beard around his mouth. I wanted to grab him by his sticking-out ears and smash his stubbly head against the scanning ring of his hideous machine, smash and smash and smash until his memories flowed from the cracks like grey juice. It was seething black bile, rising up my gullet, choking me. Anger.
Clionadh saw my clenched fist trembling. She did not speak. I did nothing. Again. Again. Ma was waxy and swollen with gas and rot, a week deep in the dark November soil, and still she would not allow me to be angry.