“Presence” by Gina Chung
After Leo left, I had trouble keeping track of myself.
I had just moved into a new apartment, and I felt like I was existing in an endless twilight. I would drift off for a nap in the living room, only to find myself standing in the kitchen, washing a dish I didn’t remember using. Or I would leave a cut of meat to defrost in my shining, empty refrigerator and forget it was there for days, until the sour smell of old blood dripping into the crisper reached my nose. I lay on my couch and watched car headlights and long shadows chase one another across my ceiling as the hours went by, listening to Billie Holiday and sipping whiskey. Leo had loved Billie Holiday, owned every album she’d ever made on vinyl. I wondered where all those records were now, if they were collecting dust in storage somewhere, or if they were still nestled in the built-in bookshelves in our old apartment.
The money from my divorce settlement would last me for a while, but not forever, and although I knew this, had tallied up the remaining numbers in my accounts to determine how long I’d be able to go without seeking new employment, I couldn’t bring myself to begin the process of starting afresh. Despite the genericness of my name, Amy Hwang, even the most negligent recruiter or hiring manager could find out everything they needed to know about my connections to Gnoss and its founder with even a cursory Google search.
I stared into the abyss of my past accomplishments, listed row by row on a CV that I had once been so pleased about, so proud of compiling, like a house I had laid brick by brick. Now I felt as though I was staring out through the bars of a locked window in that same house, imprisoned by the vestiges of a life that would never be mine again.
I ignored all incoming calls, except for Lila’s. Lila and I were roommates throughout most of college, and though we were never very close, we had remained in each other’s lives long after our relationships with our other friends had faded. We were different enough that we never felt threatened by each other’s news or achievements. We were barely a year out of college when she showed up to one of our infrequent drink dates with a diamond on her finger and photos on her phone of a clean-cut, handsome man with family money and a history of successful investments. Her husband bought her a boutique, where she sold designer clothing for children in soft colors like oatmeal, blush, and buttercup. In other words, Lila had a lot of time on her hands, and she prided herself on knowing just how to use that time. She knew the perfect place for everything, from sunrise yoga to natural wines, and she often posted about all her experiences on the internet. She was a member of Yelp Elite, a superuser whose enthusiastic or negative review of a restaurant, riddled with exclamation points and emojis and cross-posted to her Instagram, could be significant for a new business.
So when Lila told me about a spa she knew of and offered me her upcoming reservation there, I thought, Why not? Leo used to say that I never knew when to take a break, that this was one of the things we had in common, and it’s true—I always felt guilty whenever we took vacations away from the company, and I have never been a person who enjoys relaxation rituals. But I had also thought I was not the kind of woman who would find herself newly divorced at the age of thirty-six, blocking all unknown numbers and deleting all of her social-media profiles to avoid reporters’ insistent and aggressive messages, and ordering everything online so she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew on the street. So many unprecedented things had already happened to me; I figured, what was one more?
“The location alone is so worth it,” Lila said. “It’s far away from everything, and there’s hardly even phone service out there. It’s the perfect place to rest and recharge.”
Lila was the first person I called when the news about Gnoss came out—the accusations of falsified lab results, the lawsuits. She flew out to New York City from LA and rubbed my back while I sat numbly in our living room, the room I had so proudly and lovingly decorated. “It’s not your fault, Amy,” she kept repeating soothingly. “You didn’t know.”
The drive to the spa would take me about four hours, so I left the city hours before sunrise, when the traffic was sparse and the sky was still dark. I stopped for coffee and gas at a station along the thruway. I considered keeping my sunglasses on when I entered the convenience store, but decided that I would probably not be recognized up here. The clerk barely looked up from her phone to give me my change, and I relaxed, the coins warm in the palm of my hand. Leo never carried cash, so I was always the one who had to bring it in case we went to a place that didn’t take cards. He hated bothering with currency, but I liked having money in my hands, the rustle of green bills and the weight of metal coins in my wallet. We used to joke that it was the immigrant in me, even though I was technically the child of immigrants.
When I got back into the car, the presence was there, in the passenger seat. It must have crept in sometime during the drive up, or while I was in the gas station. I could practically taste it behind my teeth. It watched me as I took the first few scalding sips of gas-station coffee, made no better by the addition of slightly sour milk. My head began to ache, the way it usually did around the presence.
There was no use in trying to avoid it. “Hello, old friend,” I said. It did not respond. It never did, no matter how many times I addressed it or implored.
I tried to settle my nerves by fiddling with the radio and landed on a country station. I turned it up, a familiar electricity rushing through me when I realized it was a song I had loved once, long before I’d ever met Leo. I sang along to the radio, and we continued up the thruway without stopping along the way. The radio continued playing ancient hit after ancient hit as I rolled the windows down, letting the wind whip my hair into a greasy frenzy. I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror and noted idly to myself that I was starting to go gray, lines of iron interrupting the long coils of black.
The sun rose yellow outside. I wondered what kinds of treatments the spa would offer. Despite the events of the last few months, I finally began to look forward to my stay. I managed to mostly forget that the presence was there, though I continued to feel its magnetic pull.
The air grew sharper and the trees grew taller and darker as we wended our way farther north, especially once I’d turned off the main thruway. We passed through small, sleepy towns with names like Cheshire and Hancock, towns that seemed like they hadn’t changed at all in the last few decades. American flags and festive scarecrows beckoned from every porch. Soon it would be autumn, time for leaf-peeping and apple-picking. Leo and I had gone apple-picking once, not long after we’d gotten married, on a rare weekend when neither of us had to work. I was twenty-eight then, determined to live up to the role of younger, vivacious wife that I was aware had been assigned to me. We wore coordinating plaid flannel shirts and posed dutifully for photos next to the trees we picked our apples from, though more often than not we decided to go for the fruit that was already on the ground. When we got home, we found that almost all of the apples were filled with worms.
The houses grew taller and narrower when we entered Vermont. Picturesque views of peaked roofs, church steeples, and treetops began to appear outside the car. The sound of the radio grew fuzzy, and the voices faded in and out behind waves of static. I turned it off and listened to the quiet and the hiss of my tires on the tarmac as I navigated the sloped roads. I could feel the presence pulling at the edges of my consciousness again. My headache sharpened.
Leo had been my lab supervisor at Columbia when I was a PhD student. At first, I didn’t notice him much beyond the functional role he played in the lab, fixated as I was then on getting ahead, ignoring the statistics about how hard it was for women to succeed in the sciences. I am going to be the exception to every rule, I told myself. I would graduate well within the expected time frame of seven years. I would author several papers, all of which would be published in reputable journals. I would find a tenured teaching job at a prestigious university.
Leo was much taller than he seemed when he was sitting down, with narrow shoulders and a shock of thick graying hair. He had a loud, braying laugh that was both disconcerting and disarming, the kind of laugh that turned heads and flattered its recipient into thinking they’d said something notably witty. He gave everyone nicknames, including me, calling me “Aimless,” which was his way of making a joke, because I was anything but that. Though I have never been a naturally gifted or brilliant student, I have always prided myself on my diligence and my ability to focus for long periods of time.
I was not popular in our lab, given that I seldom joined the team for after-work drinks or weekend Frisbee games. But the work (we were studying immune-system responses in mice experiencing environmental stressors) was enthralling. Once, on a slower day when I had gotten particularly in the zone, Leo had to shake me to alert me that the fire alarm was going off. We were the only ones in the lab that day. I was preparing to give one of the mice an injection of the serum we were testing them with, when I was startled by the weight of a hand on my shoulder.
“Amy! Didn’t you hear the alarm?” Leo loomed above me, looking concerned and, for some reason, a little angry. I stammered out an apology, put the syringe and the quivering mouse away, and shuffled outside with him. It was just a routine fire inspection, and afterward Leo found me in the lab and apologized for startling me. “I’ve never seen someone with the ability to focus the way you can. It’s a little scary,” he said.
“Thank you?” I said.
“I mean that in a good way, mostly,” he said. It wasn’t until he’d walked back to his station that I realized he’d called me Amy, instead of Aimless.
A few years later, when Leo left the university to start Gnoss and asked me to join him, telling me he’d make me the head of one of its most important projects, Lila urged me to go for it. “But my degree,” I said weakly. She pointed out how miserable academia made me, all my years of toiling away in the lab, applying for grants I didn’t get and struggling to get my name on papers that I had coauthored with the (mostly) white men I worked with. And it was true that my heart was no longer in my work, my project having stalled for years while I remained unable to obtain the results I needed to finish. The confidence and certainty that had once fueled me, given me the kind of laser focus other people had to take drugs to obtain, was in tatters, a ragged white flag where there had once been a victory banner.
She counseled me through signing the onboarding papers and the NDA, and, once I was hired, instructed me on how to respond in a flirtatious but still-professional way to Leo’s increasingly frequent and informal emails asking for status updates about my project. When he finally asked me out, she told me what to wear, how to wear it, and why I should wait to have sex with him until our third date.
It was 11:30 a.m. by the time I reached the hidden lane that supposedly led to the spa. I almost missed the gate and had to reverse the car back to it. Welcome to Dripping Pines Spa and Sanatorium, read a small hand-painted sign. Sanatorium? I blinked, and then the letters rearranged themselves to form Sanctuary. I was tired from the drive, wired from the coffee, I thought. I prepared myself to step outside of the car, to punch in the code that Lila had given me, but the gate slid open without any prompting. I guided the car in through the narrow opening and down the well-paved driveway, which was bordered by trees and white stones. It led to a small lot, where I parked. Mine was the only car there, besides a blue Honda Civic that I assumed must belong to the proprietor. “You’ll love Ruth,” Lila had said of her. “Make sure you request the hot-stone massage. It did wonders for my lower back.”
I walked inside, where a fountain burbled in an atrium. The presence followed me, as unnervingly patient as always. An unseen diffuser emitted puffs of orange fragrance into the air. “Hello?” I called. Low tones and chants played softly in the background.
“You’re early,” said the woman behind the desk. I had expected a willowy white blonde wearing prayer beads and a caftan, but this woman wore a blazer over a turtleneck, and she was tan, with silvery hair cut into a neat bob, and she was Asian. I had not expected to see another Asian person this far up north. She stared at me over her rimless glasses for a beat too long, and I was wondering if she was thinking the same thing. “I can’t let you in with that,” she said, finally.
I felt chills rush up to the surface of my skin. No one else I’d ever met before could see the presence. I felt it pulse silently beside me.
No one else I’d ever met before could see the presence.
“Please,” I said. To my surprise, my eyes filled with tears. I must have been very tired from the drive. “I came all this way. I’ll pay extra.”
The woman studied me. “Sit down,” she said, gesturing toward a rattan stool. I sat and wiped my eyes. She disappeared down a hallway and reemerged with a cup of hot tea. I let it steam my face.
“It’s been with you for quite some time,” she said. “I can’t remove it for you, but it can be contained.”
I nodded, momentarily blind from the steam. My entire body felt sore. All I wanted was to rest, to lie down, to let the fatigue of the last few months overtake me. I took a sip of the tea. It tasted like ginger and tree bark.
“You’ll have to keep this on during your time here,” she said. She slipped a wooden cuff around my right wrist. It was made of a plain, polished dark wood. “That should help somewhat,” she said. “Rowan is good for protection. I’ll show you to your room now.”
“Thank you,” I said to her back as I followed her down the halls. She did not reply or turn around. Behind me, I felt the presence trailing me, a discreet distance away.
Leo had started Gnoss to address the problem of memories that no longer needed to be retained.“The brain is simply a hard drive,” he was always saying. “We do periodic data dumps on our personal devices to keep them running smoothly, so why not our minds? Why can’t we simply upload the memories we no longer need?” His model was simple—monthly memory data-collection scans, which could be performed at any Gnoss facility. After anywhere from five to ten scan sessions (depending on the number of memories a client had developed over the course of their lifetime), Gnoss would build the client a mind map, called a Chartis, of their own memories that they could then manipulate, categorize, and organize, choosing which memories to retain and which to upload to their own personal, private memory clouds. According to Leo, uploading traumatic, difficult, or simply unnecessary memories would alleviate day-to-day stress levels, improve relationships with others, and combat trauma-induced insomnia and other psychosomatic disorders, thereby allowing clients to take back control of their lives. And though reversing the process was more difficult than undergoing it, it was doable, in case the user wanted to recover any of the memories that they had previously uploaded.
I became part of a new initiative that was testing Gnoss’ latest innovation, Neolaia. Unlike the original Chartis process, which could take up to eight months depending on the number of scans that were deemed necessary, Neolaia was a shortcut—a flat metal disk the size of a dime that, when adhered to the skin, could absorb enough data overnight to create a simple mind map that the user could access via the Gnoss app. With Neolaia, Chartis creation now took only a matter of hours, and even though the resulting mind map wasn’t as complex or sophisticated as the map developed by the usual Gnoss scans, now almost anyone with a Wi-Fi connection could take advantage of the technology to organize and optimize their memories, up to a point. It also meant, thanks to the lower production costs of the device, that we could now offer Gnoss’ services at a significantly lower price point, and eventually phase out the original Chartis process.
Leo’s hope was that Gnoss’ treatments would also, over time, lead to decreases in more inscrutable psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. He had lost his father to Alzheimer’s when the man was only fifty-five, a fact that I knew haunted him, especially as his own age crept upward. My mother had also had the disease, which was part of the reason we had connected in the first place, and why he had hired me. “You have a personal connection to this,” he told me over our first lunch meeting. “I need top-notch people, but also people who get it. People whose actual lives have been destroyed by this.” He spoke of Alzheimer’s sometimes as though it were a human foe, an archenemy in need of vanquishing.
When I was in high school, my mother began roaming around the neighborhood on her own, sometimes without shoes, and often without a clear explanation for what she had been doing or looking for. She was fine in the mornings—calm, sweet-tempered even—but as night fell she would become angry with me, sometimes accusing me of lying to her over trivial things, like where I’d put the salt. Her condition rapidly worsened when I was in college. With my father at work, she was left largely alone during the day. I didn’t tell any of my friends, even Lila, about it, about how my father had to lock my mother in their bedroom at night, or how she would forget his face and scream when he approached her. It was easier to bear that way. I continued to go to class and excel in my studies, but between the hours of midnight and 7:00 a.m., I was completely unable to sleep. If I did fall asleep, which I seldom did, I usually woke up an hour or so later and lay awake, paralyzed by anxiety, until the morning light streamed through my curtains.
My mother finally died when I was in my twenties, and afterward, my father and I, who had never been very close, drifted further apart. He moved back to Korea, and our messages to each other grew increasingly infrequent, until they took on the tone of communications between polite, apologetic acquaintances. He remarried when I was twenty-five. “I’m sorry not to have told you sooner. I know you were probably busy with work,” he said when he wrote with the news. He sent me photos of my half-sisters sometimes, two little girls who looked nothing like me.
Not long after I joined Gnoss, I began the Chartis process myself. I decided to upload those core memories of my mother and her decline to my cloud, so that, while I could remember the basic facts and chronology of what had happened to her, I was no longer troubled by the sense memories that had plagued me before, like the stale smell of her nursing facility; the way her terrified and rageful eyes followed me around the room whenever I came to visit; or the exact tone and timbre of her voice when she confused me with someone else and accused me of stealing from her. I filed each of the memories away, labeled them, and then thought no more of them.
Afterward, I slept soundly for the first time in years. My skin cleared and my digestion improved, as did my overall sense of well-being. I took deeper breaths, became more generous with myself and my colleagues and friends. I no longer felt racked by guilt and grief. Gone were my sleepless nights, the nightmares, the grinding of teeth that made my dentist warn me that I’d be left with nothing but a mouthful of dust by the age of fifty if I didn’t change my lifestyle.
It was then that the presence first arrived. I woke one night to find it sitting on my bed, regarding me quietly. I’ve been working too hard, I told myself, I’m seeing things. But the next morning it was still there. And though it sometimes went away for a while, it always came back, no matter where I went or what was going on in my life. Leo never saw it, and I never pointed it out to him, afraid of what might happen, of whether he would look at me as if I were crazy. Besides, I told myself, if I don’t pay attention to it, it might just leave on its own.
But as time went on, the presence grew stronger and more insistent, especially whenever I asked it to leave. I wondered if it felt it was owed something for its years of loyalty. Sometimes, it tugged at my attention like a recalcitrant dog at its leash, distracted me, made my head throb.
I tried to find out if it was an as yet unknown side effect of the Chartis process. But Gnoss had reached unicorn status three months before I joined, and demand was high across all market sectors, including among seemingly “normal” individuals, many of them high-functioning and quite successful. According to their introductory questionnaires, the typical Gnoss client hadn’t experienced more than the average number of Adverse Life Experiences (or ALEs), but simply wanted to “optimize” their cognitive and memory skills by data dumping the memories they no longer needed.
Our testimonials were overwhelmingly positive. Even users with the most challenging types of ALEs—abuse and assault victims; addicts; war veterans; the recently bereaved—all of them found reprieve from the memories of their traumatic experiences via the Chartis process, and not one of them, even those who had experienced the few negative side effects like occasional nausea or sleepiness, ever reported being followed around by a shadowy presence that no one else could see.
My room at Dripping Pines was small and plainly furnished, with one bed and a desk and chair, but it was well kept and tidy. I hung the few clothes I had brought with me in the closet and sat down on the narrow bed to stare out the window, at the murmuration of green and sunlight outside. It was warm outside, but early September in the mountains of New England meant that the temperature would dip below fifty degrees in the evening. I studied the informational brochure that the woman had left behind. “Spa hours are ten a.m. to five p.m. every day,” she had said. “Lunch and dinner are served at twelve p.m. and six p.m. No bathing after hours, no exceptions.”
The spa setup was simple. There was a sauna, made of teak, into which steam was piped, and two pools in a large, tiled room. The first pool was heated and smelled of eucalyptus and rosemary. The second was kept cold and filled with salt water. Additional services, like massages or private soaking baths, were also available upon request. My room was stocked with fluffy white towels, a plush bathrobe, a pair of slippers, and a pair of rubber flip-flops. I was surprised by the simplicity of it all, as it did not seem like the kind of place Lila would rave about—her tastes were generally more refined—but I could tell that everything, including the bed linens, was of the highest quality.
I kept the bracelet on at all times, even bringing it into the shower with me, and I felt the presence at a remove, as though it were not allowed to come within a certain distance of me when I was wearing it.
Over the next few days, I rarely saw the woman at the front desk, and it wasn’t until my third day there that I realized I didn’t even know her name, if she was the Ruth that Lila had told me about. Nor had she asked for mine, not even to check what name the reservation was under.
The waters softened my skin and hair. I felt relaxed and clearheaded in a way I had not been in quite some time. At lunch, I took my simple meal of porridge, vegetables, and a boiled egg, which was always prepared in advance and left for me on a tray in the large dining area, outside. The spa was indeed a sanctuary, and some areas of the grounds were marked as being off-limits to guests because certain migratory birds liked to nest there. I knew nothing about birds, but I felt my heart lift when I began to recognize their bands and markings, and the sounds they made when they called to one another.
Lila had been right about the lack of phone service. I had just enough in the parking lot to send a text, but not enough to call anyone. At first, I considered asking the woman at the front desk if there was at least a Wi-Fi network I could connect to, but as the days went by, I found the absence of the internet from my life a welcome change. It was a relief not to feel the need to check in with the world, not to tense up every time a name or a call flashed across my screen that could be someone asking me how I was doing, or a reporter seeking a quote.
At night, I slept soundly, so soundly that I was even starting to remember my dreams. I used to have the most vivid dreams when I was younger, so vivid that I would sometimes wake up laughing or crying, or to the sound of my own voice carrying on a conversation or arguing with a dream person. After the Chartis process, my dreams had become harder and harder to remember. I had started trying to track them in a journal, after a brief fit of attempting to learn about dream analysis and interpretation, though I rarely remembered anything significant enough to write down.
But at the spa, I found myself falling asleep earlier and earlier each night, satisfied by the simple but hearty food and worn out from another day of bathing and sweating and walking up and down the gently sloping hills of the spa’s grounds. And I dreamt about fantastical situations, in colors so bright that when I woke up, I found myself wondering if I was still sleeping and had passed into another dream, because the real world seemed almost unrecognizable for the first few seconds.
On my third night at the spa, I dreamt that I lived in a house that stood on two scaly legs, like a dinosaur. Inside, my bed was lofted, an airy nest under which I cooked and washed and ate. There, I found a cat, curled up in a corner. She was a beauty, with dark-gray fur and bright-blue eyes. She purred at me and swished her long tail. When I returned from fetching her a bowl of milk, she was gone. In her place was a small orange kitten, with tiny, tufted ears like a bobcat’s. He let me trail my fingers over his fur and pet him, rubbing him under the chin and behind his ears. He curled himself around my ankles like a sentient ribbon and followed me as I tidied up, underneath the great lofted bed. When I turned around, he had vanished, and there was instead a large white cat with a round, squashed face, whose flat yellow eyes regarded me with dull disdain. Hello there, I said, and I offered him my hand to sniff. Instead, he unhinged his jaw and encaged my hand in his cavernous mouth. I could feel his small but pointed teeth digging into my flesh. I wondered if I would lose a finger. I had to pry his jaws off my wrist, as though he were an alligator and not a cat.
In the morning, my whole body was tense and sore, as though I really had been wrestling with a cat. I decided to book a massage. I needed to feel human fingers prodding and digging into my flesh, to rearrange and pummel my body.
I showed up at the front desk at the appointed time, to find the woman who had greeted me on the first day there. “Our usual masseuse is out of town,” she said. “I’ll be taking care of you.” She began walking down a corridor to the left of the entrance that I hadn’t noticed before. She inquired after my health, asking me how I had been sleeping lately.
“Very well, though I keep having the strangest dreams. And today I woke up feeling as though I’d been walking for miles.”
“Many of our clients report the same thing during their first few nights here. Our spa is quite haunted, you know.” She said this very casually, as though she were telling me about some inclement weather we were due to experience later that week. “You didn’t happen to dream about cats, did you?”
I almost stopped in my tracks. “I did, as a matter of fact.”
“They belonged to the previous owner,” she said. “They show up in my dreams, too. They died in the fire.”
“There was a fire?” I asked. Lila had said nothing about this in her descriptions of the spa. I stared at the woman’s taut back as she continued walking down the hallway. She didn’t respond.
The massage room was dimly lit; the shades were drawn. A diffuser in the corner piped out lavender-scented clouds, which made me feel drowsy. She handed me a plush white towel and a yellow robe. “You’ll need to take off the bracelet, too,” she said.
“I’ll give you a few minutes to get settled.”
The door closed, and I undressed, slipping out of my clothes, and settled myself on the massage table. I hesitated before removing the bracelet, and when I did, I could feel, with a disorienting whoosh, the presence slide into the room with me, its familiar heaviness making it a bit harder than usual to breathe.
“So it’s still with you,” she said when she returned.
I felt cold pinpricks run up and down my exposed spine. “How is it that you can see it?” I asked. “No one else has ever been able to.”
The lights dimmed further, and the scents of ginger and jasmine filled the air. She was dripping oil onto her palms. “Perhaps they weren’t looking closely enough,” she said.
Her hands were strong, her fingers supple. She began with my head, massaging my scalp, before moving down my neck to rub the tendons and cords there. As her hands traveled across my shoulder blades and down my back, a deep well of feeling began to open up inside me. The heat emanating from her hands felt almost unbearable. I felt as though I would start to shake or cry. I took a deep breath and waited for the well to close back up.
Gnoss went public the same year that Neolaia became available in the North American, European, and Asian markets. Leo was ecstatic. For once, he seemed happy with what he had accomplished, instead of brooding on what could have gone better or what was next. And although it wasn’t like I hadn’t been expecting our lives to change, it still took me by surprise, the influx of wealth and exposure Gnoss’ success brought us. We moved into a new apartment, bought vacation homes, pieds-à-terre. Leo, never one for flash, or so I’d thought, got a few luxury cars. We went for joyrides together in them, the wind streaming in through the open roof as we held hands and blasted his favorites—the Talking Heads, the Pixies, the Doors. By then, I knew all the words to the songs he’d grown up listening to and I hadn’t.
He appeared regularly on the covers of magazines and the front pages of national newspapers, and I was interviewed for women’s glossies and talk shows. I was given a stylist, for public appearances. I found the attention uncomfortable at first, but I grew used to it, and to all the attendant perks and benefits.
Privately, I tried not to think about what the larger implications of Gnoss’ developments might be, what could happen to a society in which memories were no longer something you inevitably had to live with until they faded away or were replaced by others. I ignored the usual doomsayers, the op-eds and forecasters who warned of dire times, of loosening moral standards and the potential for dictators, predators, and abusers to take advantage of the tech to further subjugate their victims or inoculate them from the consequences of what had been done to them. We’re helping people, I thought. I told myself that Leo was a visionary, that Gnoss was, in fact, changing the world in a way that so many tech and biotech companies promised to but never could.
‘Extraordinary people aren’t bound by ordinary rules,’ Leo liked to say.
“Extraordinary people aren’t bound by ordinary rules,” Leo liked to say. I never asked if he thought I was extraordinary, because I didn’t think I had to. After all, he had asked me, of all of us at Columbia, to go with him. With Leo, I never had to worry that he would think less of me for putting my work and ambitions ahead of other matters. Unlike other men I’d dated in the past, he didn’t balk at my insistence that I didn’t want children and never would, as he felt similarly. Gnoss, what he was building there—that was our baby, our shared vision.
When the news about the Chartis process and its drawbacks started breaking, I tuned out, refusing to look at the reports and even ignoring company emails, worded in polite, smooth tones, about what was going on, and reminding employees that they were bound by company policy to avoid speaking to the media. But it was hard to avoid the stories, the footage, the countless interviews. One woman, a childhood cult victim who had used Neolaia to dispense with her most difficult memories of the abuse she had suffered during her family’s time in the sect, was interviewed in a nightly news segment. She could barely string together her sentences, and had to be reminded several times of who she was. Her face was blurred out, for privacy, and the network referred to her as Cynthia.
“What would you say,” the host said, leaning forward sympathetically in his chair and narrowing his eyes, “is the most debilitating side effect?”
Cynthia began to cry. “I can’t remember anything. Anything at all.” The camera panned away from the blur of her face over to the host, who pursed his lips and reached across the space between them to hold her hand.
“You’re somewhere far away,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m going to ask you to turn over now,” she said. I obeyed. I closed my eyes as her hands traveled down my legs, handling my calf muscles with strength and tenderness. I realized, with a small shudder of sadness, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been touched.
“So how long has it been with you?” she asked. It took me a moment to understand what she meant by “it.” I tried to tamp down my awareness of the presence. I could feel it—not in the room with us, but on the outer margins of my consciousness—watching and waiting.
“About five years,” I said.
“And have you ever seen anyone about it?” she asked.
“To be honest, it’s not something I felt I could ever explain to anyone,” I said.
“Maybe you should have tried,” she said. I felt annoyed at the cool remove in her tone, the impression she gave that it was somehow my fault that I had been dogged by the presence for so long.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the session. My breath slowed again as I relaxed back into the massage. I felt like I was floating above my own body, watching it be handled and squeezed and kneaded like dough. The rope of tension that banded my muscles loosened, as though she were undoing its knots.
As a child, I was plagued by indigestion, and my mother would often massage my hands, pinching what she told me were pressure points that would help with the sharp, stabbing pains in my stomach. When I complained that it hurt, she would shush me. “Pain isn’t always bad,” she said. “It’s there because it wants to tell us something.”
What we didn’t think to take into account: Neolaia was perhaps making the Chartis process too easy.
It wasn’t immediately apparent that something was wrong, in our initial trials. Some of our subjects did experience side effects like mild disorientation and vertigo—nothing to be alarmed about. I took notes, ran trial after trial, wrote up reports.
“We have full confidence in Neolaia’s potential to further the overall goals of Gnoss’ mission,” I wrote in my final report. “Chartis production time has been significantly decreased throughout our trials, and while data integrity is always a concern when it comes to scalable tech, our main objectives, to increase accessibility and intelligibility, have been achieved. We have no reason to believe that further beta tests are needed at this time, and are excited to recommend Neolaia production be ramped up to full capacity.”
What I didn’t tell Leo was that the first time I’d received access to my own Chartis, I was immediately hooked by the simplicity and beauty of it. I tried, somewhat successfully, to ignore the urge to continue purging my memories, to discard everything I no longer needed. I also ignored reports from my own team about how some of our subjects experienced a significant downturn in their mental and emotional well-being in the months after undergoing the Chartis process via Neolaia. I told them that their data were insubstantial and that they had better run the numbers again to come up with better ones.
“Are you sure?” Leo asked me later at home.
“Are you doubting my results?” I said. He’d assured me early on in our relationship that I’d have complete freedom in my lab and my clinical trials, that he’d never take advantage of our personal connection to weigh in on my professional findings.
“Never,” he said, leaning in to kiss me. We were grilling vegetables and plant-based burgers. It was late summer. I was slicing lemons and making salad dressing. “I just want to make sure we’re ready. This is a turning point for Gnoss. For us.”
“I know that,” I said. “And I’m telling you that Neolaia is good to go. The sooner we can roll it out the better, right?”
“Look at you,” he said, amused. “Usually, you’re the one telling me to slow things down, to check all the data twice.”
“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me,” I said. I had been heading up our efforts around Neolaia for nearly three years at that point, and I was eager for it to debut on the markets, to make my mark as more than just the wife of Gnoss’ founder. I knew what my peers thought of me, that I had only gotten to my position—my own credentials and years of experience had no bearing, of course—because I had been sleeping with the boss. And there it was again, that surging sense of certainty and drive, as slippery and silver as a fresh fish, almost as though it had never left me. I felt the urge to make something of myself, to prove people wrong, to achieve something again.
They say you’ll never go broke underestimating people’s intelligence. The same goes for their willingness to avoid feeling discomfort. When memories are the medium through which we experience most of our emotions and relive our highest and lowest moments, it makes sense that, after a while, it would become addictive to edit, delete, and manipulate them over and over again, in search of a clean slate. A place beyond pain.
Early user complaints about Neolaia were smoothed over easily enough. Minor kinks, I told myself and my team. But when a news story broke about how a prominent senator in Illinois who had lost her teenage son in a drunk-driving incident years earlier was found wandering the cornfields of her hometown, weeping and clutching his school uniform—that was the beginning of the end. The senator had been a Neolaia user, and had, in her determination to keep her grief from derailing her career, uploaded too many memories in one go. An emergency redownload of her memories was planned, but it was too late—so many of her memories had been threaded through with thoughts of her son that it became impossible to detangle them from the ones she needed in order to function normally. She ended up in a nursing home, unable to articulate her sorrow or remember her own name.
After the hearings and the consumer lawsuits, it was ruled that some users’ adverse reactions to Neolaia were not due to faults with the technology, which worked as promised. Leo was allowed to stay on as CEO. The company pivoted. In the end, it was me and the rest of the high-level Neolaia team leads who took the fall. And, still, I knew I was lucky that the only fallout I really experienced, at the end of it all, was in legal fees and the dissolution of my marriage and my career.
After the massage, I felt wrung out, loose, like a newly washed garment. I thanked the woman and wobbled to my feet, wrapped myself in the complimentary robe. I imagined I would go back to my room, pass out for another night of sleep. Instead, she offered me a joint.
“Smoking after a massage is the best,” she said. “It goes through the body as clean as a knife.”
It turned out she was right. We sat outside, watching the last of the sunlight fade from the purple-edged mountains, and passed the joint between us. The air was thick with the smell of chamomile and weed. My limbs felt pleasantly heavy.
“It’s good to remember how big the world is,” the woman said. She seemed younger like this, with her glasses pushed up onto her hair and her eyes half closed in relaxation.
“How long have you been doing this?” I said.
“This?”
“Massage therapy. Running this place.”
She smiled. “Too long to remember,” she said. “I used to be like you. I had big plans, once. Now my days have a slower rhythm.”
“But you don’t know anything about me,” I said, bristling slightly.
“Don’t have to,” she said. “Everyone who comes here is running away from something. The body reveals everything, if you know how to listen to it.”
Birds called to one another as twilight fell. I wondered what story my body told. What secrets and hidden sorrows it still contained, despite my best attempts to erase them from my mind. How arrogant and foolish I had been, to think that I could outrun myself. As if on cue, my head twanged again as the presence hovered nearby.
“You’ve forgotten who you are,” the woman said. I felt my breath catch. “That’s what it wants. It’s just trying to remind you. That’s all.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“You said everyone who comes here is running away from something.”
She took one last drag of the joint. The sweet-acrid smell of weed hung in the air. The setting sun illuminated her face, turning her golden.
“It’s better to hold on to some things,” she said enigmatically. “Besides, I’m not running anymore.”
That night, the cats appeared to me again in my dreams. They wound themselves all around me, nuzzling my chest and face. The dark-gray cat sat on my chest, while the orange cat, which was now an adult, butted his head against mine. The white cat watched us impassively, switching his tail from side to side. Tongues of red flame licked the walls, but there was no heat. I passed one hand through the fire and watched as it came out unscathed. “Do you see this?” I asked the cats, marveling. They yawned, bored.
When I woke, the presence was sitting at the foot of my bed, just like it used to. I had forgotten to put the wooden bracelet on after my massage. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I left you behind.” It watched me, silently insistent. It seemed to need me to bear witness to it, acknowledge its shape and heft. I reached for it, and my hands passed through its dark, transparent membrane. I knew then what I had to do.
“Leaving already?” the woman said when I emerged from my room with my bags the next morning. “Most people tend to want to extend their reservations here.”
“I should be getting back,” I said. “I’ve been away for long enough.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said. She touched my arm, lightly. “There’s space for you here, whenever you want to come back.”
“Thank you,” I said. I handed her the wooden bracelet, which she accepted with a slight nod.
She came outside to watch me leave. I waved before I pulled out of the parking lot, and she raised one hand in reply. When she turned to go back inside, I thought I could see three tails—orange, white, and gray—floating behind her in the doorway.
The ride back seemed to pass much faster than the way up had. I didn’t play the radio, just rolled the windows down and let the wind sing in my ears. The narrow, winding roads soon widened into highways, and my car was joined by others, all heading south. Beside me, the presence waited, as silent and faithful as an old dog. Whenever I began to feel afraid of what lay ahead, I allowed its weight on my mind to soothe me, to bring me back to the road and the feeling of my hands around the steering wheel, guiding us home.
After Leo left me, I deleted the bulk of our later memories together. I didn’t want to be reminded of what exactly we’d said to each other, how much we’d hurt each other. I didn’t want to remember the look of anger and recrimination on his face as he accused me of sabotaging his work, of hurting the company. I didn’t want to think about how he’d instructed his lawyers and Gnoss’ PR team to craft a carefully worded statement implying that the user issues lay with Neolaia and, more specifically, with me and my failures, my negligence. I held on to just enough about those days to stay abreast of the details, to protect myself. But his facial expressions, the last things he ever said to me—the shards of memory that had caused me the most pain—I removed those exact particulars from my mind, so that when I considered those last few weeks and months, it felt like I was wandering around a half-built, abandoned house, with gaping holes where there should be scaffolding, or reading a letter sent during wartime, with several words and passages redacted by a censor’s heavy black lines.
I didn’t know if I was ready to bring it all back, to inhabit once more the dark rooms and passageways of my memories and all they held. But it was time to stop stepping around them.
When I arrived at my building, it felt as though I’d been away for months, rather than just under a week. I hesitated before fitting my key into the lock, certain that I had the wrong unit, that I had confused the one above or below mine with my own. I was still unused to this apartment, and had almost, on the way back, turned my car toward the home that Leo and I once shared, out of pure instinct.
But upon entering the apartment, I felt at ease. There were my books, my things, the few items of furniture I’d managed to purchase in recent months, including the bed where I slept alone each night. The presence followed me as I shut the door and locked it. It settled throughout my apartment like a fine layer of dust, and I realized that I hadn’t had a headache at all on the ride down.
My phone buzzed with a message from Lila. “So how was the trip? How are you feeling?” I ignored it.
I sat down at my scarred wooden desk and opened the right drawer, the one that always got stuck. The presence watched me as I felt around inside until I found what I was looking for—a dime-sized metal disk. It warmed at my touch. I placed it on my left wrist, waiting for the familiar pressure on my skin, the low hum that meant it was booting up.
I opened my computer to the Neolaia app and found the folder containing all of my data files. There it all was, in color-coded and alphabetized order—every memory I’d ever flinched away from, that I’d deemed too heavy to carry with me. I highlighted all of them and found the menu options I needed.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO REDOWNLOAD? A message asked me in flashing red letters.
I clicked YES and closed my eyes. The disk grew warmer and began whirring softly.
I sat back and waited to feel everything.
