And it seemed that somehow in each other’s eyes we were suddenly [heavy cross out] we were disgraced — caught in a disgraceful moment that we didn’t know how to shake off.
I, a white boy, disgraced in front of a black boy, and he, a black boy, disgraced in front of a white boy.
At that time it meant something, being disgraced like that.
We stopped on the platform, and our bodies began to turn — inward, toward the other.
I wanted to hit him, for real this time — needed to hit him — we each wanted to hit the other, I think — and our bodies tensed.
It was evening and snow was coming down. The distant windbreak pines retreated like ghosts into the gray. All that remained was a diffuse glow within the solidifying darkness — a darkness that seemed at the point of undoing everything.
It was all so cheap to me in that moment — the lunch counter with its sandwiches and us two boys — when set against this grand new backdrop, the snow I’d never before seen.
I felt my entire body tense as I prepared to hit him in the face, aiming behind his face — the muscles of my feet and hands, my torso and pelvis, all clenched and ready — to strike again and again, to do as much damage to his face and the skull behind the face as I could, as quickly as I could.
In that moment I felt sure we would fight and wondered how it would start and what the damage would be.
I faced Lewis, and at last he spoke. “Second thought,” he said, “I could go for something.”
I didn’t want to look him in the eye. I waited, and then I met his gaze. It wasn’t desperation. It was a waiting that was somehow freighted — his eyes seemed to be going up by degrees, as though pride would require them to keep moving like that — up and up — to an impossible degree. His eyes, and the black face, had only ticked up a few degrees, yet in that moment I could see the head going up and up, turning to the roof and still farther, until it went right around.
“All I want’s one of them root beer barrels,” I said.
That broke the spell. We ran back to the counter, and we each bought root beer barrel candy — a penny — and received ninety-nine cents change for our dollars.
We sucked them, and talked more easily until we arrived in St. Paul.
Lewis was my friend.
And I try to remember, try to understand, the life of my friend, but his life is something I cannot remember, and I cannot understand.
I can remember him as the Memex might — as a biographical sketch, a few bare details fleshed out with anecdotes and odd facts. But those are husks set next to the life we lived together.
Lewis was the first to exhibit the symptoms, almost three years after our arrival. One morning he pushed his knuckles at me — the black hairs. [heavy cross out] we escaped. We might have had razors fabricated under some pretext, or simply found a blade at the institute — though our monitors rigorously accounted for blades following a suicide, it could not have been any more difficult or risky to steal a blade than to [illegible] through shaftways to an unguarded stairway leading out. But I think [heavy cross out] St. Paul’s Winter Carnival, and we walked across Rice Park to the foot of the great tower of ice erected each year, and a clock of ice struck the hour — the sound like the distant keening of a thousand crystal birds — and gears and cables creaked to life, and the ice sculptures ranged around us rose from their pedestals and took flight, turning and dipping in a rigorous, jittering dance, stars and angels, fish and whales, on a sort of airborne carousel, blinking and flashing and chasing one another around and around. [heavy cross out]
drugstore a few blocks away.
[heavy cross out]
For all our knowledge and learning, we had never been taught to shave. [heavy cross out]
Back at the institute they were all waiting: the boys and Dr. Vannevar. He asked Lewis to strip. Lewis refused, and with cries of gorilla! gorilla! the other youths tore his clothes off. Dr. Vannevar looked in the bag and found the safety razors and shaving cream. Lewis was shivering and crouching, trying to cover himself with his hands.
Gorilla! Gorilla! they shouted.
Dr. Vannevar handed the bag back to Lewis. You’ll be leaving tomorrow, he said.
I think he handed the bag back knowing what would happen — that Lewis would go back to his room and slash his wrists.
[heavy cross out]
Lewis was perhaps the lucky one — other boys began to fail, one after the next. They were not held as youths, they hit a delayed and monstrous puberty, puberty as wild and agonizing cancer, and those who advanced beyond the initial stage died in tremendous agony, skin scaling or sloughing away, bones bubbling, then going brittle.
When Lewis died, as much as I had once loved the Memex and devoted myself to the Memex, now did I hate it: and I would destroy it, overthrow it, I decided — or at least render it obsolete.
We all remember everything.
I knew I had it all — everything that ever happened.
But I couldn’t find it.
Everything that ever happened to us — we have it all perfectly.
Don’t you know this? Don’t you know deep down it’s true?
And with perfect memory should come perfect understanding, because now at last we see not this piece or that, we would no longer move through our strange lives baffled and suffering, stitching ourselves together from the few scraps we’ve chosen to remember, or that have chosen us.
We all have everything, but it’s not here — it’s not where we are.
We don’t know where it is.
How paltry my own memories seemed, how incomplete. A gesture in the direction of some lost homeland, but no more than that. Just the gesture. Not the homeland.
I could no longer countenance the Memex. That type of information. The lies of that type of information.
To assemble information like that — I would go to a Memex terminal and see what the Commission was doing, the surfaces they were assembling, Commissioners with their specialties based all across the globe. Images that shuttled back and forth, tape and cable, images little better than the Bartlane system, all these years later — but how much worse, how much more artificial, were the emerging texts, this new world system of knowledge, to be held by the Commission alone — how they loved it, and how little it knew, how little it understood the truth of a single soul. The type of information they wanted would bury the whole world, strangle the whole world, every soul held captive within the fields of information, of surveillance, and yet what would it know? Nothing, not the first thing about a single soul.