The Fortunate Fall

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The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know. I suppose I can’t complain. I knew the risks when I became a camera. If you see something important enough, your thoughts become a coveted commodity: they steal your memories and sell them tied in twine. Now you may find my life for sale in certain stalls, on dusty street and twisting alleyway; it is available on moistdisk, opticube, and dryROM. There are places on the Net where you can make a copy free, although the colors may have faded to sepia and the passions to pastel. You have taken my memories and slotted them into your head. And you have played them through, reclining on a futon in some neon-streaked apartment, reliving my every sensation and thought from the hour underground with the whale.

If you paid extra for the moistdisk, you have more than just that hour. You can peer around each thought to see the memories implied in it, the way you’d turn a hologram to see what lies behind the rose. You can freeze-frame at the moment I first saw the whale, and follow the associations back—to the argument over Moby-Dick the night before; to the first time Voskresenye said the word, in the cafe on Nevsky Prospect; to the dolphins that made me clutch my mother’s hand with fear, at the amusement park when I was six years old. You have searched me and known me: and when at last you put the disk away, you thought of my mind as a sucked orange, dry of secrets.

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