Sci-fi: The Pearl

A wide flank of Manhattan schist in Washington Heights rose exposed, an evisceration of the island petrified as a backdrop for parkways and picnics, to remind the hunting hawks of their ancestral home, as salve for slaughtered pigeons’ last sights. Laurussia collided with Gondwana and very near the center of Pangea lay an almost Himalayan height of mountain where New York City would appear after all the recessions of geology: red garnet, blue kyanite and by furnace, pressure and time schist, gneiss and marble, Manhattan, Inwood, Fordham. The mountain of New York, nearly eight miles high, was eroded by eras of pleasant breeze to today’s stately hills. They put up the Chrysler building 300 millions years later and it was not nearly eight miles tall. It was barely a blip into another 300 million years that the skyline was torn through with the pikes of Freedom Towers, alterior islands, and shortly after the sunbulbs to fix the flesh of the otherwise permanently shaded residents of Midtown and Lower Finance with vitamin D, robbed by artificial shade and light of both day and night.

Against this solidity, soft life happened—children skinned their knees at the Wright Brothers playground while their Italian ices melted in the late June sun.

“Excuse me? I lost my. Sorry, if you don’t mind I—” Disturbing benched mothers Rosy peered in slats and shifted mats of plastic trash with her toe, adjusted strollers beaming with cherubic smiles over cries of protest.

“Lady,” Fanny said, peacekeeping, “what’re you looking for?”

“It’s my.” Rosy stayed her flitting eyes and stood upright. “I lost my journal.”

From the youngest mothers came hums of sympathy. A brave child on the aluminum slide behind took flight.

“There’s incriminating stuff in there, huh?” Fanny asked.

“Well. Not exactly but it’s. About two months of my life.”

“Uh huh.”

“I feel myself. Disappearing.” She laughed at her word, then frowned.

It was a blackbound pulppaper docket, adorned with a single capricious sticker donned by a visiting cousin, a flower with a face (not that unfamiliar a sight with the pregnant water running through the pipes after the fertilizer boom in Elizabeth). She was slowly inebriating at the Yellow Fin that night, sitting at the cherrywood bar with Spud the Tender feeding her snacking beans marinated in vinegar, bad advice, and Berliner Weiss with a spritz of crimson food coloring. She had been writing about her childhood capsule in the East Side Kibbutz, the smell of bovine lactate and flax steamed in to wake them in the morning, stomping all the roach-sized silverfish fleeing as the nursery pressurized with her laughing brothers and sisters. Absorbed, she missed Spud switching the social light to red, the influx of horned men and gogirls, ladydongs and gagguys. It was Friday night. The northmost sunbulb on 68th street was dimmed to 20% and tinted orange, a concession to the sensual that took years of grassroots activism.

“You’ve got a funny look focusing, darling.” By way of this toothy face speaking with a corkscrewed horn tied above it, Rosy was lurched from memory to the packed interior. “Kind of a loser pose to scribble on a hot night?”

Rosy wasn’t up to date on latest signage and was liable to miss a mating call for a Pepto Bismol jingle. What did a corkscrew horn mean again? And which side was the gay side to wear it? It’d been four years since she’d gone cruising and the rapid convolutions of fashion and its backlash in irony meant if you missed a month, you’d misread all the winks: all the guys around hung with horns were semiotically opaque save for she could tell by the bare musculature of their faces they were hungry.

“I missed the time, buddy,” she said. “It’s no pose, I’m actually working. I mean I’m not working. It’s kind of a diary.”

He seated himself on the stool beside her and his amped-up pheromone cologne tickled and fizzed inside Rosy’s nostrils: acid and lust. It was only what he put on in front of the mirror, now he came on gentle.

“I kept a diary till I was sixteen. Ma got it for literacy, like anybody. Filled it up once, never got a new one. I remember the paper was nearly black on account of we’d get the cheapest recycled pulp from the district, sometimes you could make out some other kid’s diary on the sheets when the bleach was running low at the plant. You must be paying a fortune for yours, goodness: practically white. You see on the cast about how they’re almost out of hemlocks and larch.”

It wasn’t an entirely uninteresting conversation though her nose had carried its tingle into a recollection of cordite and sulfur, the smell of the sleeping chamber closing for pressurization (being bred for the violent future, her pod slept in heavy air till the age of eleven to guarantee the development of overachieving lungs)—and so more out of inertia than an honest flirtation she finished her interrupted passage verbally. “That’s just what I was writing about, when Randall’s Island was all overtaken during the ‘65 heatwave, ginkgo biloba on every bit of bald soil, the river crammed with fruit and stink: we’d swim off the old ferry landing and come home orange. The mothers figured they would just have to shave all our heads if they wanted to get rid of the stench. And they did. The cicada year. Then the blight.”

She felt hollow as she spoke, her small girl memory mis-sized to the adult body she was being yanked into by the atmosphere of romance.

The orbicularis oris of her interlocutor twitched: his smile was a little more charmed than any he would have put on himself. But it couldn’t catch up to the precision of his routine flirtation, “Let me get you a Grün Berliner Weisse for variety, what do you say?”

Rosy ached to write more, interrupted: she hadn’t quite made a complete landing in her present skin. Turning from the corkscrew horn, Rosy waved at Spud the Tender the universal gesture, though archaic by a long shot, a signature scribbled invisibly in the air: I’m finished. In the imagination of a refrigerated computer in La California, the numeral associated with her name was deducted the appropriate amount. “Sorry, friend,” she said, “I’m kind of on a roll.”

After her he exclaimed: “What an interesting life!” But it was too late, Rosy waved and edged and shimmied, her journal wedged underarm, past the daggering and spelunking on the dance floor, under the disco orb, into the cacophony of the directional bloomboxes (green, purple, red) and finally out into the summer where a sniff of hibiscus pollen gave her a sneeze and her ears attuned to… The dirty thump of the music had disoriented the aural sense but it was, she was sure, not memory but contemporary cicadas. And the man inside had surprised himself how much he meant what he said, going off of so little.

She followed the thrum to the playground, hung with trees of heaven, and wrote on a bench with the face of her page angled towards the sunlamp until—she was sure she had her journal going home that night.

“That’s a sad story, sweetie.” Fanny said. “But it’s called a cellphone. A tablet, a stationary pad. Backed up in the cloud.” The other mothers clicked their tongues in agreement. But the chide was halfhearted: everybody listening knew the censors took such an interest in the overpacked cloud that if you had any bitterness at all in what you wrote the FCC and the EPA would evict your data for fear of acid rain withering the already embattled Purple Kingsessing and Shackamaxon beans growing on the Spuyten Duyvil banks that fed the poor. It was one of those trickle down policies that literally altered the content of life, like how when they repaved Alphabet City after the Con-Ed blast so that the streets all aligned to the rising sun, half the neighborhood became oil painters and we had a third renaissance. Here was a motion in the opposite direction: private life was not that resilient, the inconvenience of keeping manual diaries simply meant that people became less articulate to their depths.

Rosy sat on a bench between three women discussing how to feed their rapacious husbands and a ward sent outdoors for her constitutional, gesticulating and speaking from her wheelchair—and though she watched the woman’s mouth move perfectly ajar, it sounded like she was muzzled. Children with wingbats and fizzbobs tottled and tramped on the Neanderthal bars and Denisovan slide, their sticky tags dangling and tinging on the chrome set. Her hands spasmed impotently towards her bag, no notebook, a couple of memories breaching the hot present of her senses. But… They were indistinct. A kind of purple neon. A liver-wide ache when. Jezebel. Who was Jezebel? Gluey lips. Bran and oats, the sweet yet medical odor of… The infirm woman beside her directed a few enthusiastic moans in her direction. She’d just have to get a new notebook. 

Rosy did intake at Schiesser & Schiesser, a walk-in personal injury law firm slash urgent care in SoSoHo that could turn an ingrown toenail into a spinal tap. It wasn’t honest work but it was helping people and her role was all bedside manner and the administration of painkillers, an angel of life. It wasn’t hardly a month later, an abrupt polar vortex in October floating over Manhatta, that this woman comes in with a slipped disc having slipped outfront of an improperly thawed piece of permeable pavement. Knowing the best anesthetic for waiting for the anesthetics to kick in was good conversation, Rosy asked this woman, Marissa Barbucci, what variety of life she’d led to lead her to her horrible injury.

“Well I’m an alumna of the East Side Kibbutz, you know. Product of the utopian dream to produce a race of happy children—” 

As Marissa spoke Rosy checked the chart against the woman’s face. They were the same age.

“—but at sixteen they dump you on the East End, as liberated, happy and tough as the program’s made you and you line up like everybody at the Verizon store, you know? But I got an education, learned Psyconautistry until the whole industry was rendered obsolete by the trauma surgeons. And—”

“Sorry to interrupt but,” Rosy said, “I was also a Kibbutzer. East Side too. Class of ‘39.”

They traded full names, Rosy shared that her hair was a hue and half closer to auburn back then and Marissa described the kind of snaps on her sandals. But they failed to land in each other’s memory.

“There’s no way we didn’t know each other,” Marissa said. “Remember mommy Jezebel?” 

“Oh my goodness I was just trying to…” Rosy trailed off. She had also had snaps on her sandals, a double-buttoned band that wove and clicked into slats. 

The ether had thickened fast in Marissa’s blood and knocked her out cold. Rosy stood there for a moment in the abrupt solitude of a proximate unconscious. She pulled the lever on the mediport console and Marissa was off, on her way towards health and a generous settlement. The next patient came in with a horrible case of winter dick. 

New Mount Sinai hovered over the Central Park Extension an approximation of where God gave Robert Moses the commandment to make more parkland and parkways: tallgrass, coywolves, possums and tangles of dilapidated rail. A memorial wing named after a lithium mine massacre mogul was where the trauma surgeons pried open psychies and seared out bad memories. A traumat with a shaky hand once dove into one of Rosy’s friend’s noodles and took away the soft touch of pancake as collateral damage along with the scar of a collegiate date rape. It seemed like everybody was having some work done. The world was horrific in every corner. The war was always on TV, the weather wasn’t easy, there always seemed to be another bat plague. It’s like getting a mole removed: all the trauma denting your soul as you trudge onward through life, it can make a person ugly. Well the whole idea upset Rosy, who was widely derided as sentimental by her peers at the Psychomat. They were all out of work within the year, the Psychomats either shuttered or went coin-op for only the most rote talk therapies with chatbots. The talk of the town was Cosmetic Personality Work and the wing at New Sinai gave it just the legitimization to take off. Now some mysterious medihack in Tokyo Minor had been pioneering a new procedure that was spreading through the medical underground. Identity transplant: it all happened on the psychic plane. Human beings omit a radio frequency around the wavelength of 12 micron, mostly in heat, so dim that it would require a four mile tall radio tower to pick up, an experiment once attempted in the heady days of South Germany’s scientific separatism (they separated from ethics boards)—they picked up some human blips before an errant flock of highflying gulls crashed their tower and their few attempts at transmission literally liquidated a couple of high school volunteers. But they got results: it wasn’t meaningless heat. Those radio waves, really radio ripples, contained information. In retrospect, the radio receiver and transmitter that covered the same range was obvious: another human being. A human body, that incredibly compact and subtle coil of communication. Other experiments in child-rearing equally as dystopian as Rosy’s home kibbutz (which attempting to produce children with perfect childhoods derived from before-time nostalgias) had produced, by means of imposing incredibly rigorous and imperfect childhoods, a select group of individuals with such minute and exacting control over their bodily function that they could modulate their own radio emissions deliberately, and in turn alter the highly reactive radio fields of others. The original plan had been to make them strong enough to crush cans without footwear or tools but science is the art of accident. By an obscure colloquial process passing through the expression “earworm”, these radio people came to be referred to as slugs. In turns out the radio is a kind of mainline straight into the human psyche, which explains a great deal of the 20th century’s enthusiasm for Marlboros and politics. After a horrific psychic crime perpetrated by a rogue slug fled from New Freshkills (a boatload of quarantining cruise-gowers committed mass suicide while docked in Crimson Hook), the practice of slug-rearing, dubious anyway, was banned and the extant ones were sent to the Luna-7 Golf Course Resort Concentration Camp instead of the Luna-6 Super Max to throw a bone to the bleeding hearts on the left (“they are only children”)—they were replaced with bulldozers. Still, some slugs were trained in the unmonitored breeding grounds of Staten Island’s left bank. It was these human hacks that could without incision lobomificate the psyche in increasingly complex directions. Every day in the fabloids and feeds it seemed like there was a new story of slugwork run amok. There was even a primetime Psychorama that took it up as a major plotline. Escher Fox, who used to travel the galaxies deflowering maidens for good, was abruptly turned evil by a stowaway slug (his behavior didn’t change only its morality). That’s what Rosy thought bobbing on the uptown express that night: she’d been caught in the crossfire of some illegal sluggery, an inept grub with bootleg training had misaimed their aura. It buried Marissa Barbucci, Mother Jezabel, and who knows what else, what nostalgic smells?

Then one Saturday she’s sitting in a cafe in Old Haarlem drinking an iced dairy behind the corrugated plastic of the sidewalk shed’s siding, looking out at the funhouse mirror of the passersby distorted by the ripples. She’d bitten the bullet and bought a stationary pad in e-ink where she could scribble snippets of recollection and store them safely in the monitored cloud, encrypted and retrievable for as long as the Earth’s atmosphere lasts: holographic bytes glittering, condensing, coming down as drizzle, rain, evaporating again. Rosy had actually found some tranquility in the limits of this new, more communally sensitive mode of writing, straight in the clouds everybody toils under. It located her tranquilly in the present. She wrote about the light and its distortions, the minutiae of her body’s regeneration and decay, and the people she saw. On the corner a gorgeous Wall Street hunk in snakeskin pressing with sisyphean enthusiasm the crosswalk buttons that since Mayor Bzoom adorned every intersection (just on the cast was an in-memoriam to the NNYC public advocate who was disappeared a decade after publicly admitting those buttons at crosswalks do nothing, the case finally declared cold: people still press those buttons, Rosy still pressed those buttons, it kept the peace.) An elderly man with a whole body transplant strode into the cafe with the ballistic up-and-down stride the ambulatories had discovered was more efficient than the nostalgic languid gait of full-on biofolks. The urban panoply was diverse: right behind him was a luddite teen in a cotton tee sans implants, staring at her antique Apple Watch. Rosy entered her observations into the pad, felt the tickle of the uptown exhaust on her vellus hairs, sipped her dairy. It was the last that brought on a hollow sensation, a kind of dry heave of memory. Rosy frowned. It had been a while.

She was sharing the sidewalk shed with a woman in pink pumps and just the kind of updo she used to wear at the Psycomat so as not to get logorrhea in her hair. Rosy needed some deep breaths before speaking. Her childhood at the Kibbutz had naturalized her in the obsolete Westchester ideology of Stranger Danger that her own shrink had so worked tirelessly through her early twenties to minimize now that the cosmopolis had moved into its era of mandatory melting pot, the fine for passed-up small talk, however unenforceable, still altering the character of life with the gentle nudge of regulation.

“I like your hair,” Rosy said. But her voice contained a quiver that betrayed its operation beyond civic duty. Something about this woman had her transfixed. 

“Oh thank you.” The woman said. Then Rosy saw it: the split-second conscious puncturing of the interior; the inhale in social preparation; the clean, deliberate gulp of saliva, to fill the self with self before exposure to the infectious uncertainty of social contact. “How are you doing today, lady?”

The recognition was absolute. Another recovering Kibbutzer about her same age whose face she’d failed to recall. With rising panic, she grilled this woman on her memory: guppies in the entry fountain when the filter got busted when Gabe poured in rice for pure chaos and the pet duck Cracker’s webbing snapped on a threaded screw moaning a sound they’d thought impossible for ducks and when they loaded everyone on the bus to watch the Draconids meteor shower at Roanoke Falls where the atmosphere was so thin that even through the masks all the flaming tails were so precisely drawn that falling asleep by bobbing on the ride back she dreamed of a sky where the stars were always moving and how dizzy she was standing, finding her capsule, and how dizzy she was ever since.

“Psychic overload, dear.” That was a nurse’s voice. Rosy heard the bing and bongs of medical hardware foregrounding from the gray hum of sleep as her ears attuned themselves outwards. “You’re at New Mount Sinai. Nothing major but.” The nurse’s face from the gray of sleep’s vision. “Have some Gatorade Zero.”

Rosy landed in her skin. Her left big toe ached. 

“We gave you some brain-thinners to ease the weight but they should be wearing off. Try deep breaths.” Then the nurse’s tone gained a sternness. “It’s an epidemic, you know. All this quack slugwork. You’re the fifth one today.”

“Slugwork?”

“Oh don’t play dumb, dearie. We’ve been getting ourselves a new schtick like all the hologirls do when the remembering gets rough? My daddy was in the salt mines on Hell-3 for a decade of hard labor and he just screams with the nightmares. Nobody ever offered his head a scalpel.” 

Rosy realized that despite her youthful voice and hip lingo this nurse was nearly twice her age. 

“I—” she stopped after that word, slim and monosyllabic. “I honestly didn’t.”

The nurse frowned. A specialist was summoned who had Rosy inhale a minute psycho-thermometer disguised as a molecule of adenosine to pass the blood-brain barrier and give a fore and past cast of her interior weather. Nothing seismic, but they noted a particular smoothness in the anterior—really just a cosmetic feature, prized by the brain perverts who salivated over scans on the graymatter market. Rosy wondered whether her’s was being uploaded now in a giggling backroom to the dark web.

“That’s it, sister. Hydrate, meditate, stay away from the psychoramas for a week and if you ever need someone to stir your noodle, leave it to professionals a couple floors down. Got it?

“Excuse me, nurse?” Rosy said. “Don’t take this the wrong way but you seem to be a hip pussycat, no? What’s a corkscrew horn mean nowadays when the light’s flashing crimson?”

She laughed, all roar and no teeth. “It means nothing more and nothing less than ‘it’s complicated.’” 

Rosy wasn’t satisfied. She walked through the upper level of the Central Park Extension as the sunlamp dimmed from 80% to 20% over a period of 128 minutes, appropriate for the season if not the aberrantly chilly weather. Geese wobbled, confused by the artificial altitude. An estrogenized willow growing in the mulch of recycled receipt paper dangled its fronds. She found herself walking further west, out over the Hudson riverwalk and all the way to Hoboken before descending to ground level amid the flurry of Saturday night’s activity.  

Mister and Misses Softees licked and laughed and ogled, dogs wrestled on the cobble and post-prandial strollers gorged on sipping chocolate. Children rolled blockheads and squabbled, betting frizbins in the alleys. All of this Rosy knew should have produced a pang somewhere deep in her emoter. She wept openly outside a grinder shop, living in the present.

A pair of sweet alternative boys asked after her psyche. In Rosy’s sanitized notion of politesse it’d been a faux-pas like in the beforetimes to grill anonimos on the temperature of their freakout. But she was determined to be friendly: the affirmation she most frequently repeated in the reflector was, “Hello, my name is Rosy.” 

She met Json and Cob, earnest filmographers on the commercial psychoramas who made artsy stuff on the side. Their job was to point and tune the receptor to the proper bodies at the proper times so that the folks in their headsets at home could lock into the appropriate mindset to follow the plot. A balancing act: too sensitive and you could sear an individual’s psychic scar across the planet (gone were the experimental days of psychoramas live after the great character actor Hilton Vlodstok suffered a fatal heart attack mid-performance and five hundred billion viewers experienced the flood of sentiment and pain that precedes death followed by the full stop on their sofas)—not enough and, of course, the dial was just below their earlobe. It made them particularly sensitive to duress, to the joy buried beneath skin, to any heightened brainwave: once Cob spotted a simmering orgasm through three layers of drywall.

“You lucked out, sister,” Json said, putting his arm around her, “we’re on our way to the wrestling match, it could cheer up a suicide.” 

They steered Rosy towards what she’d have considered a more suburban part of town, past the square where patriotic locals asserted baseball was invented, folks in prehistory bubbling up the feeling they wanted to throw something: and it was here they picked up a baseball. It was a monument to violent emotions tamed. 

“You guys are being awful kind to me,” Rosy said. Here a streak of the real sun, Sol, she spotted giving up its final fireworks in the mirror of a heavy industrial cloud’s gray underbelly. “Kind of bleak to get out of New Mount Sinai on a weekend. They should comp the night and give you a sherbert to cool your forehead. What kind of wrestling?”

Cob smiled, sniffing out a sine wave with a moderate deviation emitting from her ears. She’d calmed down a little.

“It’s this underground slug hangout,” Json said. “A lot of psychorama punks go. Two amateur featherweight slugs sit across from each other and see if they can get the other to feel something only the other would using human radio alone. If you get ten counts in the other guy’s emoter you win.” 

Cob stopped all three of them short on a dark and cricketed corner they were turning. “You’re scared?”

“Well I haven’t had the best experience with slugs,” Rosy said. “Actually, I’ve never met one. But they’re the best guess what hospitalized me in the first place. I lost my,” she surprised herself, “journal.” 

Cob laughed. “It’s all prejudice, sister.”

They walked some more in the loud silence of insects and the nearby oceanic roar of New New Jersey’s interstate clovers.

“You lost your journal?” Json asked. But they were there. A colonial re-revival two-story with an exaggerated garage, the door open and around twenty alts and folkies laughing in yellow light around a low table capped on either side with a stool.

“Good, they haven’t started yet.”

A Jersey Splurge ended up in Rosy’s hand as blorp and twang came out of the amps. She mingled beside Json and Cob, introduced to the weird and beautiful before they dispersed to have low conversations with sensitive-types in the least lit corners. The hipster antiquity of the place had Rosy feeling at home, if a little disorientated, but she was proud that she’d allowed herself the rare luxury, for her, of being at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. 

“Where’s the toilet?” She asked a swaying emo.

“Upstairs in the house proper. But come back quick, the wrestling’s about to start.” 

Inside were manually knobbed doors, not the flitting portals of the new construction on Manhatta: just like the Kibbutz. With the evocative, antique gesture of a wrist turn, Rosy opened the first door she came upon into a bright, bare room: the small hairless sexless person lounging laterally on a loveseat looked up from their holodeck with mild surprise.

“Clara?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Rosy stood flatly in the doorway, her reflexes to make a pantomime of embarrassment shorting by the totality of her fascination with the slug, with the person she immediately recognized as a slug. They were about five foot one, pale, streaked with musculature that moved under their skin like eels in milk—and green eyes.

“You’re not Clara.”

“No,” Rosy said.

“It’s funny,” the slug had a voice like a boy soprano, “you must have gotten the same girl’s imprint. It’s very popular. Do you remember?”

“I’ve never been to a slug.”

“Ouch!” The slug laughed, fully upright. “Disdain! Sister, I hope you didn’t go to a total socio who even snipped themselves out of memory.” 

Rosy felt a tingle in an electrical part of her spine she hadn’t known was hollow. The party thumped in the garage. A newborn night heron waddled in the backyard. A respirator somewhere nearby wheezed.

“Goodness.” The slug’s hand was in hers, and the green eyes in hers. “Unless, sister, you’re the original.”

Comprehension hit Rosy before the words.

“It’s my dayjob, sweetheart, ever since they passed the law forbidding us to go legit. Giving folks a childhood following the Viennese Witch Doctor’s lead that there’s the stem which all unhappiness fruits. I’m not so sure but then again I was raised in a recycling center. Well, we have a menu for to spare us the labor of creativity: what do we know? And all abuzz on the radio channel is the story of an East Side Kibbutzer who lived a picaresque, coy and profound adolescence. I won’t say perfect. Now the women who come to me, Clara and Tiara, Penelope and Mercedes, they come from either side of uninteresting, they think, tight-lipped ease or unimaginable horror. Clara who I mistook for you watched her father get devoured by spotted lantern flies the summer of ‘68. Now we each take a little liberty in our imprinting from the docket we’ve passed around but the gist is the same for you. Tossing rocks at the barges on the East River Access, gazing the cicadas get shredded by copters at Hunt Island Spaceport, all water, water, lapping water, sleeping in the pods with your siblings, the snores under high pressure, oat and dried lilac, and sharing wild dreams when the mothers were asleep under polychrome, the pelican skull you managed to hide in your duvet for four dark autumn days—I admit, it brings a tear to my eye to matter how many times I transmit it—mother Jezebel’s confiscation. But there’s interference on life radio. Your story’s getting so popular people are running into each other. My pal had to refund a woman whose memory came in fuzzy from day one. Something too loud on a channel too close to yours. You’ve been forgetting?”

Rosy caught her breath. The slug’s hand was still in hers. “I’ve been forgetting.” 

One of them was sweating. 

She found her journal: it had been diffused through the city and returned to her secondhand in the aura of unhappy women. Rather, the difference between her journal and her memory was returned to her. Not too long ago during an acid rain lockdown nap, Rosy had a nightmare. She reached out to touch the flat of the mirrored medicine cabinet in the med-bay at work and instead of smooth silver felt the bulge and burr of brushstrokes on the surface of what she could have sworn was her face. The slug’s litany of her childhood panoply had given her the feeling that her past was anemic, that the history she tottered above was thin and precarious, as if she’d been living on stilts—and when those memories were jammed, those rehearsed memories refined and stained with the veneer of diary, what was left was some subterranean part of herself: a loneliness, desire, joy and pain that her journal’s East River idyll was only a kind of shorthand for, the scent of caraway a private metonymy to a melancholy without a name; and so she could write “the scent of caraway” and be done, but without the scent of caraway, anodized aluminum, without the round and seeded sunday grapes, or the clarion ring of sweet little Rocky’s singing voice, the fireflies so large that she mistook them for eyes, for devils, for coywolves who gobbled their ferret after it had wriggled through the air conditioning vents and went giddy with fresh air straight into its jaws—they’d found an eight inch oyster mudrucking once, alive, and the mayor came to get his photograph with it and bent down to say, “Little girl, do you know how pearls are formed? Some schmutz, a grain of sand or a tiny shard of seashit gets in and the poor mollusk does the only thing it knows to do prevent its itch: calcifies.” And once she dated Raul for a week, a stunning and intense Cuban who called her La Perla before that relationship imploded from the depths of their neuroses. And now, just now, she felt that she really had been the pearl and her memory, the person named Rosy Irzart, was only a glimmering elaboration on some central irritation that—

Screams from the garage. No, they were cheers. Now she was sure they were both sweating. The slug smiled, their left canine filed to a point. Green eyes, there’s nothing more to say about them. On the wall there was a poster of Bruce Springsteen, the 20th century rock musician. 

The slug looked like they were about to speak so, not to seem ungrateful, Rosy said, “Thank you.”

“Sister,” they said. “I was about to ask you what do you want from me? Your own memory back?” 

The Palisade cliffs rose nearby, hard, young rocks of basalt only 200 million years old that gazed with slow bovine curiosity on the city. The city was solid and the people, even with sockets, even the borgs and bots, they were soft. And they’d built the city, uncomfortable on stone, to have something solid to crash their lives against, to hold on to. Still, milkweed grew on ground zero pier. An orange moth with a lifespan of thirteen minutes lived a little more than a hundred and ten and a half generations in a day.

So Rosy’s memory came over human radio, morbid, malleable—and when she came blinking back into the garage now hilarious with nightlife, the slug around her arms, she danced. Not insulted, she was touched by the slug’s delicate perversion of her memory. No longer was her identity so rigid that it jabbed uncomfortably at the inside of her skin.

The city’s human radio jittered and fritzed. The women who countless slugs had altered Rosy-ward had their own relapses into selfhood. Clara dropped an unruly snakeplant on 9th Avenue realizing she was, profoundly, a brunette. Mercedes skipped town and moved to the nuclear prairie, following her yellow light. Tiara fled to the outer banks of the Broken Land and lived in a communal home, preparing taro salad every other day of the week, laughing and healthy. And Penelope just needed a single, very good, cry.

Eventually slugwork was legalized (it turns out it wasn’t necessary to be tortured as a child to be sensitive to other people’s feelings and the human radio could be tuned into by mere touch and attention), then fell out of fashion. The old slugs assimilated: they crushed cans again for a living and, after hours, in the docks and suburbs, enlived the airwaves with the stories they’d been told. The popularity of Rosy’s journaled disposition meant it had diffused into the communal white noise like a smidge of fertilizer stored in a lipid or a drop of cerebrospinal fluid—every once in a while, by playgrounds or runoff ponds, by antique gables or on hypnotic dancefloors, a small but statistically significant group of individuals paused an additional moment to reflect. 

Rosy got a new journal, mined her depths outward, and with scrupulous carelessness, lost it.

(for Annie B.)