Blueprints of the Afterlife

her DJ lost interest in her and set her on autopilot. He got her a job waitressing and wiped his hands of her, setting her loose on autogenerated subroutines. She described it as being like living the same boring day over and over again. She woke up exactly at 7:02 a.m., had the same cereal for breakfast, ran 4.2 miles on the treadmill, and went to the same stores and bought the same three items every day—a nail file from the drugstore, a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita from the bookstore, and a set of shoelaces from a shoe repair shop. Then she’d go waitress at a greasy spoon that served only regulars who ordered the same things every day. After that she’d come home, watch a tape of the same stupid comedy, take a shower, and go to bed at 9:00 on the dot. And every night she had the same dream, in which she separated bottles for recycling behind the restaurant where she worked. Brown bottles, green bottles, clear bottles. The dream always seemed to last a couple hours, but got more detailed every night. She started to be able to read the labels, see the air bubbles in the glass, feel the texture of the glue on the bottles. Her dreams became so high-def that they started making her waking reality look foggy. Then she’d wake up and start all over again. Treadmill, shopping, work, home, movie, shower, bed, dream. It went on like this for months. Part of her remained aware of what was happening, a weak little section of her brain, and she started to suspect that the regulars at the cafe were embodiments, too, retired embodiments also on autopilot. She’d become this reliable little machine, a component that did its part to keep the companies that made the nail files and the shoelaces and the copies of Lolita in business, programmed to be a battery plugged into the economy. On her days off the routines automatically changed, and she’d send us an email and tell us how she was looking forward to enrolling in school again and finishing her degree. Very little variation to these messages. Hiroko and I kept trying to plan a trip up north and see her but stuff kept getting in the way. I broke my leg, Hiroko got a grant to write her book, all the usual we’ve-been-busy BS that keeps families from seeing each other. We were just happy to know she was planning to go back to school. So, finally, a couple months ago we got our act together and headed up to Vancouver. She kept trying to dissuade us from coming. I got suspicious. So we head on up there and found her new apartment, in some lousy part of town with people crazy and passed out, trash all over the place up and down the street. I ran up the steps to her door. We pounded on it and she told us to go away, so I knew something real foul was going down. The worst scenarios ran through my mind, you know how it is with a daughter. So I got all commando and broke down the fuckin’ door. Really messed up my shoulder for the weekend, I might add. We found her looking completely normal, standing in the middle of her apartment. With a hundred ninety-seven copies of Lolita, a hundred ninety-seven packages of shoelaces, and a hundred ninety-seven nail files all piled up on the kitchen table. And she was standing there dressed, smiling, making the same repetitive motion with her arm, a little shuffle with her feet, waiting for the clock to strike 9:00 a.m. so she could go out and do her shopping. Her smile terrified me. A smile a thousand miles from happiness. I just came out and asked her if she was an embodiment.”

“Christ,” Skinner said. “Did you ever catch the son of a bitch who did this to her?”

Carl shook his head. “The cops are still looking. They’re about five years behind the technology, if you wanna know the sad truth. It’s shocking. There’s a whole underground economy driven by embodiments. People just set up to work at mindless jobs, to consume the same shit every day, punch in and punch out, keep products in production, services rendered, walking around numb and dumb and compliant, without an original thought in their damn heads.”

“She’s doing better,” Hiroko said, “but it’s a long recovery. The ego atrophies during the embodiment state. It has to be rebuilt little by little. It takes weeks for them to be able to introduce themselves or shake someone’s hand.”

Skinner said, “I remember holding her little hands. Giving her shells and sand dollars. Your story breaks my heart.”

They moved on to discussions more germane to their surroundings. Skinner fingered the memory cards in his pocket, wondering at the horrors preserved in their wafer-like forms. Why punish himself like this again? Other retired private contractors, sitting in their deck chairs flipping channels and keeping their bowels operational with concoctions of herbs, didn’t seem burdened by the same obsessive need to recontextualize their former lives. For Skinner’s neighbors at the shrink-wrapped retirement community, the wars moldered. They were content to follow college football and steady their swing at the driving range. The FUS was to be actively avoided in conversation, not sought out. Skinner almost admired their ability to evade the terrors of their pasts. On his worst days he prayed for the strength to do the same. But his earlier life on battlefields demanded accounting. This need was so consuming that the only way for Carl to remain his friend was to humor him and take part in the trip, to follow him down that flaming hole of cunt-shit-molten-fuck. But now—this was a surprise—Skinner’d found some new psychic armor with which to fortify himself. He had a grandson.

Skinner took the cards out of his pocket and set them on the table. The other three regarded the cards with visible sadness as Skinner separated them into piles of innocuous memories and memories of war, the innocuous ones outnumbering the wartime ones three to one. Then, with the bottom of the pepper shaker, he smashed the war memories into pieces. When he was done, Skinner exhaled and fingered his fortune cookie, reluctant to find out what it revealed about his future.

“You did it, my friend,” Carl said. “Good for you.”

Chiho rubbed Skinner’s shoulder and kissed his weathered hands. He swept the pieces of the memory cards into his palm and sprinkled them atop the remnants of his panang curry. All that remained now were memories of banal civilian life and the one memory from the war he refused to destroy, the one piece of unfinished business: the memory of the day he came back from the dead.

The next day after breakfast, the women left the men reclined on plush furniture beneath portraits of Carl’s and Hiroko’s ancestors that went back generations, to slaves and dynasties. On the coffee table were arrayed bottles of water and an Apple memory console, a black lump of elegant industrial design about the size and shape of a baseball, smashed in on one side.

“Sure you don’t want to watch the NCAA semifinals instead?” Carl asked.

“Plug us in,” Skinner said, closing his eyes.

Carl pushed the card into the slot. A little pinwheel icon on the display indicated that the console was recognizing and syncing with the whatzits embedded in their skulls. This reality hung on for a while—the books on the shelves, the red rug. The scene trembled a bit at the edges as the stored memory worked to displace their surroundings. At this in-between stage, inanimate objects asserted more emphatically what they truly were. The water in the bottles wanted desperately to escape the plastic, yearning to become lost again in oceans and clouds. Skinner drew a Pendleton blanket around his shoulders, listening to individual wool fibers creak, snap, and whisper memories of ewes grazing in valleys. Carl reached out and took Skinner’s hand, squeezed it to remind him he was there. A few minutes in, the living room went into rapid retreat. The effect was like looking at a department store window and not knowing what to focus on—the objects on display or the reflection of the street. Slowly their senses adjusted to perceive more acutely what lay beyond the pane. They were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. A percussive frozen rain raked at them as clouds merged with plumes of smoke rising from all over the island.

“Carl?” Skinner said. He was trying to pivot his head but it was as if his neck was in a brace.

“I got you,” Carl said behind him, or beside him, or both. A representation of Carl sidled up, his old-man face superimposed on his younger man’s body, a weird bug in the software. “We’re in, man.”

“Jesus, the smell.”

“It’s always the smell that’s the worst.”

“I can smell the bodies.”

Younger Carl spoke, his voice fuzzy. “At least the smell of bodies don’t make you cough up your damn lungs. It’s those other smells we got to be afraid of.”

Up ahead in a pile of rags a baby cried beside its mother’s detached bodily components. As Skinner veered toward the baby a greasy hand dug into his bicep and yanked him around. Malmides, his direct supervisor, barked into his face, “Keep moving, shitstain.”

Skinner saw that he was in a vast video game of men that stretched back through Brooklyn, bristling with weaponry and trudging into death. He didn’t march so much as let himself get carried along. He looked down and watched his legs flop retardedly forward, unable to stop. Piles of refuse burned in the East River, decapitated bodies swung from the bridge supports like demented mobiles. He strained to take in the magnificent destruction ahead. Here, on the bridge, all was panorama, but soon those buildings would entangle him, a grid turning into an unforgiving labyrinth. Inexplicably, a herd of goats ran bleating past them, their hides scorched and speckled with