“So the dose of nonsense you just gave me, with mysterious effects that you won’t reveal, you’re hoping it will last, maybe, forever? That wasn’t worth mentioning, as a courtesy?”
Dr. Nelson smiled. “You’re welcome,” he said.
What we were doing that year in St. Louis—it sounds odd to call it that—was tagging the major feelings, sub-tagging the minor ones. This was the mandate at Thompson Lord, the company where we died a little bit every day. Even on the weekends, when we didn’t go to work. Because it taunted us on the horizon, brown and long and suspiciously moist. More of an animal reared up on its hind legs than an office building, even though up close it resolved into brick and glass and was just another future pile of rubble for the end-times.
We were giving order to the interior weather system, and whatnot. Telling a story about our moods. The thousand shades of disquiet, was what we called it in the pale halls of Thompson. A system of classification for all the ways to feel. But because the names of feelings are just so unpleasant, destroyed forever by poets and shameless emoters, we swapped in animal names. Bear and wolf and whatever. It was easier. A Noah’s ark of the possible tantrums, freak-outs, and moods. With such an approach, we wouldn’t box ourselves into some classification corner, or get lost in a subjective hell farm, and anyway it was better to be on the same page with Dr. Nelson and his team, and the middle geeks at the chem lab who had to conjure hormone equivalents of these feelings, using the ass glands of snakes and whatever.
It sounds a bit highbrow, but it was just an intellectual property land grab on the part of Thompson. They were boiling over with money, and as such were obliged to own what could be thought or felt, even if it could not yet be, well, done, by which I mean: sold. Because usually that was just a matter of time.
So, own the moods. Break all possible emotions down into chemical states, and simulate those states with drugs. Pretty simple. Then, curate the hell out of people’s days. Feed them their feelings second by second, like a DJ. The drugs would have names like Tuesday, Thanksgiving, First Day of School. We’d lose the animal branding and tag the chemical helpers with super-obvious monikers. Then we’d get into blends. Then we’d get into mods and hacks. The word “smoothie” would not be inappropriate. The horizon on all of this was pretty and it was filled with cake.
Except, of course, the tech sucked balls, and there was no agreement whatsoever in the so-called scientific community—“community” is the wrong word for what happened when these cretins got together in an auditorium—over what even constituted a particular emotional state. You wrote a protein poem for this shit, and you sidecarred a timeline of hormones, but the result too often wobbled when you squirted it into a live human body and eventually everything fell out of focus. People bled, they wept, they shat. Human ignorance turns out to be pretty durable, and it played a starring role in our work. The moods, in the end, were like ghosts. Not even. Less credibility.
And if 2014 really was the year of the sensor, as they kept saying on NPR, it had turned into a pretty long and terrible one, approaching one thousand days now. Maybe more. Who was counting? I was, along with lots of people I knew. Sensors in the trees, on the roads, slapped onto buildings, drinking from our necks, sucking up data on us. Sensors on our bodies, in our clothing. Sensors in our face cream. Sensors, yeah, in the water, finally, because water, really, has the broadest access in the world, inside our bodies and out, and how dopey we all were not to see it sooner. Water as the ultimate delivery system for that final frontier of surveillance—the inside of the human body. The data that came back was mountainous. It was crushing. Did the sensors work? Was the data sound, or even remotely reliable? Yeah, no. I mean, no one knew for sure. Or of course we did, and the answer wasn’t good.
It sounds pretty high tech, maybe, and it might have been, if it worked. These were the 2010s, after all, a time of hypotheticals and wish enterprises, when people still needed to eat, and the sun still behaved itself.
We fed this data, big and hairy as it was, to a crew over in a building we called the dorm, where beaver-faced children worked the curation. I mean worked the shit out of it. Maybe these wet beasts were of age, but just. And maybe they were human, but, well, also just. And that’s being generous. I don’t think they slept, and if they ate it must have been liquid food through a very thin straw, or the tiniest nibbles of mush, because their mouths were disturbingly small. Like, how did these kids really breathe out of such pinholes, at least without causing a balloon squeak? How did they stick a toothbrush in there to clean their teeth, let alone administer oral deliciousness to some hulking uncle who needed his emerson drained? Maybe the kids at the dorm were just, uh, small people, horrendously gifted with numbers, but there was something off in their appearance. Everyone kept reasonably quiet about the whole thing, though. Given the speech protocols at Thompson, not to mention elsewhere, you just didn’t really say what you were thinking. And if you could help it, you didn’t really think what you were thinking, either. I got good at that. My thoughts were going to die with me, whenever that day came. Or maybe my thoughts already had, preceding me to the grave. I wasn’t going to get caught out. I wasn’t going to get listened in on. I had a few tricks to protect myself.
The house was dark when I got home. Another cold St. Louis afternoon. There was going to be snow, supposedly, and there was going to be a lot of it. Maybe we’d all be buried alive. Everything would freeze and in hundreds of years they’d find us, chilled in position as we tended our homes or pursued our craven desires out on the street, and the story they would concoct—of who we were and what we were doing—would be so splendid. It would be majestic. Everything so small and remote in our lives—our handbags, our kitchen tongs—would be rescued from their current uses and gifted with tremendous, almost unbearable power, united to a meaning we could never even imagine. We’d be gods and we’d be animals, we’d be uncanny accidents in the larger trajectory of the universe, anomalies of light. It would almost be worth it, to die that way, and then to be understood through such a profound, new lens. To be upgraded and romanticized and lifted up. Weren’t we all just caught in a rehearsal for our fossilization? Stories would be written. Songs would be sung.
I called out into the house. Richard was usually back from work by now. He’d be up to something desperate in the kitchen. A cooking project from one of his books. Save your relationship with this brilliant stew. That sort of thing. The result was usually a cozy bowl of something to eat, and we’d sit together looking out the window at our favorite tree, trying not to argue. The children would be home as well, for sure. They’d be upstairs in their rooms, polishing their privacy until it glowed. You could sometimes see the light under the door. It stood for everything you’d never know about them. Everything you’d never understand.
But there was no one home. No one anywhere. Quiet in the streets and quiet abroad. Quiet inside the home. A pretty quiet world tonight overall maybe. I had the sense that if I turned on the TV it would not be able to penetrate such profound silence. It’d be no match for this hushed world. I’d just see the strange faces on the screen as if they were trapped under water, shouting silently behind the glass. For a moment I thought that if I cut myself open, there’d be no noise in there, either. Just the silent rush of blood, all perfectly muzzled, even as my body hurried about its business, working so tremendously hard, which you rarely got to see, just to keep me alive.