Project Memory
by Jeffrey Greene
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
The high excitement of the early days, the sense of being a participant in something historical, has gradually given way in many of us to a pervasive mental fatigue and a hollowed-out feeling, as if the ostensibly benevolent forces in temporary control of our lives have vacuumed up every scintilla of personal history, and that our pasts no longer belong to us. We have donated our inmost selves, if not our lives, to a project that most of us have come to believe is a scientific pipe dream. Yet who would not have done the same, if it was his mother, brother, friends, hometown, that had disappeared?
Two years and two months into the project, after millions of hours of recovered memories, dreams and impressions had been stored and exhaustively analyzed, the Project Director, Dr. Herve Diego-Nuñez — a native of Miami, living in Boston at the time of the Event — made an extraordinary announcement to our entire community. In those mountains of data, a pattern had been discovered, so vanishingly subtle that, like a single white thread running with apparent zig-zagging randomness through a roll of black fabric, the pattern of which is repeated only after several yards has been examined, it was many months before the researchers perceived it. Because human memory is, with few exceptions, chronologically unreliable, it was impossible for the analysts to establish exact dates and times, and the experience of the phenomenon was different for each of us.
But it appeared that at intervals of about six and a half years throughout our lives, give or take a month, both native and longtime Floridians not in-state at the time, and by extension, they inferred, all the Floridians who were there when it disappeared, experienced brief periods, lasting a few seconds at most, of what was variously described as “a feeling of unreality,” “dissociation,” “ontological displacement,” “weirdness,” “dreaminess,” “brittleness,” “like an aura,” “strangeness,” “walloping déjà vu” and “jamais vu” (a feeling that the familiar has become strange).
Unfortunately, it isn’t known, and probably can’t be known, whether these “quantum hiccups” — “quantum” is, regrettably, the Director’s verbal catch-basin for everything defying simple explanation — were experienced by us simultaneously or at intervals of seconds, minutes, or hours apart, but there is some confidence among the researchers that it happened to all of us, even those who don’t remember more than one or two of these sensations in an entire lifetime. Wherever we happened to be, either in or out of the state, even on the far side of the planet, the experiences occurred every six and a half years.
“This would suggest,” the Director went on, “that the state of Florida was, for an indefinite period of time, maybe thousands of years or even longer, enclosed within a field of spatial or dimensional instability that, after approximately twelve to fifteen years, somehow pervaded and altered the atomic structure of any living and non-living thing within the state boundaries, yet at the same time causing no obvious changes in health or outward appearance. This might explain why those of us no longer living in Florida continued to experience these anomalous sensations. It does not, however, explain why — thankfully — we didn’t disappear along with everyone else, no matter where we were, as theory would seem to predict. We’re still working on that.
“Apparently, this instability finally resulted, on February 17th, twenty-six months ago, in the so-called quantum occlusion. The state could still be existing, exactly as before, in an alternate universe of similar probability, or it might have reappeared somewhere incompatible with carbon-based life and lost forever. The number of possible fates is virtually infinite. But if our revised theory is correct, there is definite — let me repeat that — definite cause for hope.”
In theoretical circles, there was now, he assured us, “a scarcely containable excitement,” that what had phased out of our universe might very well phase back in, when the next “quantum hiccup” occurred — assuming there would be another one — four years and four months from now.
“In the meantime, Project Memory must and shall continue,” he said, concluding with what was, for him, a whimsical flourish, “until our model of Florida is so data-dense in every reference frame that one can play it back and almost smell the orange blossoms in spring, feel the hammering heat of a midsummer’s day, and that oddly pleasant wriggling feeling of pink, yellow and violet coquina clams burying themselves under our feet as a receding wave pulls away the sand on virtually any Florida beach. That day, I’ve been assured, will come for all of us sooner rather than later. At that time, you will be free to rejoin your families and friends, provided with generous financial compensation and the thanks of a grateful nation.”
It may have been the Director’s reference to our loved ones that triggered a release of the grief I’d so long repressed, but that night, lying in my bunk, I wasn’t the only one in the barracks wishing for more privacy. After what seemed hours later, still unable to sleep, I remembered a day from the mid-1980s, probably a Saturday or Sunday in early summer. I was with two old friends, Steve and Gunnar (Steve is one of the disappeared; Gunnar is here at the facility, far from his family in upstate New York), hiking the six-mile circuit trail at Lake Kissimmee State Park in the southeast corner of Polk County. It was a fine, clear day, cool in the morning and heating up to brutal by afternoon.
The sometimes flooded trail was dry on this occasion, taking us over a bridge across the Zipprer Canal, a wavy line of leaf-stained water bisecting the flat marshland to the horizon, through pine and palmetto woods, into oak hammocks of successive ancientness as we progressed, sabal palms with green-mossed trunks twisting up through the oak branches to find the light, and centuries-old live oaks mottled with scarlet lichen, their heavy, exposed roots worn smooth from foot traffic, tree-sized branches hosting communities of resurrection ferns, bromeliads, orchids, and many cicadas.
We saw deer, pigs, black racers, armadillos and wild turkeys that day, but — at least as I remember it — no other hikers (and if there were, will those hikers cease to exist forever if I can’t recall them?). The sinuous, arm-like, often horizontal branches, that sometimes dipped toward the ground and took root at the elbow, intertwined into a massive-beamed roof over our heads. The cicadas buzzing in those branches would briefly pause as we passed underneath them, then take up the thread as we left them behind, seeming to continue their chorus from one tree to the next, and we felt as if we’d been admitted inside the body of a living musical instrument, performing a composition not meant for human ears.
Only now has it become clear to me that the sounds we heard in that oaken chamber of cicadas were a kind of premonition, an overheard conversation from another world, as real as our own, and more thinly separated from the world we happened to call Florida than we ever imagined. That the natural landscapes of our vanished home always seemed more than a little fantastic and dream-like was something Gunnar, Steve and I had noted in a thousand conversations, even as the invisible breath of that other world was passing through the landscape, and our bodies, and altering the very atoms of both. Steve, the artist, would have chewed productively on the idea. I hope he still can.
From my notebook, the same night: “Fortunately, I never caught a Regal Darner.”
As it turned out, the Director, in what became known among us as his White Thread Speech, was mistaken in one vitally important point: those of us who had lived in Florida (including, as it happens, the Director himself) for longer than two of the six-and-half-year ‘quantum hiccup’ periods were by no means immune to the malady of disappearance.
Admittedly, discipline had become somewhat lax on the Hippo Campus, and as people formed relationships, they often migrated from one barracks to another, and at first, when the morning roll calls revealed a small but gradually increasing number of missing people, it was assumed they were AWOL from their barracks but still on the base, since it was closely guarded on all sides by a high fence and military police. But rumor soon swelled into campus-wide alarm, and in order to forestall panic, it was finally announced that the disappearances were unexplained, or worse, explainable as a delayed form of the same fate that had claimed an entire state and everyone in it, and apparently permanent.
The strangest aspect of the phenomenon, besides the fact of its being staggered and delayed rather than occurring all at once, is the apparent impossibility of its being witnessed. One might say goodnight to one’s bunkmate above or below him, and find an empty bed in the morning, without the slightest trace of violence. It has even happened while one is interacting face-to-face with one of the disappeared. As one of these near-witnesses put it, “I was sitting across from Miguel, my memory partner for the Shark Valley Project. We were free-associating: he’d throw out something that would remind me of something else. We were having fun, laughing. There wasn’t a fraction of a moment between seeing him and not seeing him, no flash or sound of any kind. I just realized, quite suddenly, as if waking from a dream in which Miguel and I were conversing, that I was talking to myself.”
There is something uncanny and horrifying about this kind of death, erasure, whatever it is, apparently occurring in a sub-atomic time frame undetectable by human perception. It is impossible for those of us who lived in Florida well past the fatal deadline of twelve years not to feel like marked men and women. Not surprisingly, it has engendered in most of us an uneasy combination of fatalism and urgency. We realize that it’s only a matter of time before we, too, disappear, and that every moment not spent divesting oneself of literally every memory of Florida we possess brings us a moment closer to the unimaginable.
I see pity, relief and sometimes terror in the eyes of fellow mnemonauts not under this sentence of imminent disappearance, and sometimes I catch myself hating them. Fear battles constantly with resignation, and I must keep reminding myself that human existence has always been provisional, temporary, subject to drastic change without notice, and of course, inevitable disappearance.
The government has no idea what to do about this, even how to break the news to the families of the disappeared, but the general consensus seems to be that there is no alternative to continuing the project, although a rising chorus of voices in Congress questions the massive expense of such a dubious, open-ended program funded by the U.S. taxpayer.
For the time being, we remain here, speaking into our digital recorders or filling notebooks with whatever continues to surface in our recollection, during the crowded mornings and afternoons, or between lovers, in whispered conversations in the dark, or those disjointed fragments bestowed by dreams, waiting for that day, not so far off now, when what passed out of this world may return, bringing with it all that we have lost and, in a sense (a hopelessly personal, attenuated sense), already captured with the ragged nets of memory.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
