The Guardian of Memories
by
Jen Prill
I'm not a professional storyteller, never have been, never will be. But, there comes a time when inability can no longer excuse silence. That time came for me today. I wish I could tell you that it came dramatically as the commandments came to Moses with burning bushes and big time sacrifices. But, it didn't. I've known for years that my code of silence was wrong. Yet, I kept falling back on it.
Then today's meeting came, just like it comes every Tuesday afternoon. It's one of those meetings where you have your boss, you have your boss' boss, you have your boss' boss' boss and so on. And, of course you have me. I'm nobody's boss. The only reason I was told to attend the gathering is because, out of the entire bunch, I'm the only one who knows anything about prisoners. I'm the only one who has ever talked to one, touched one, screamed at one, or listened to one. Since the purpose of these meetings is to discuss said prisoners and decide their fates, management thought it would look innovative if someone like me, someone from the front line, was on “The Team.’”
Of course, the discussions at these meetings aren't like normal discussions. They're more like a chance for the educated to display their education. I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, when I first joined the team, one of the prisoners I was scheduled to do an intake on, was up for discussion. The discussion went something like this:
Rienway, Phd.: “Looks like we have a libidinally fixated character here with inappropriate, ineffectual expressions of the self-actualizing impulse.”
Naturally, at that kind of comment, I got nervous, but then Rienway, Phd. had always made me nervous. She isn't a normal creature by my standards. She has a head of hair (and a face to match) that makes you wonder if she had inadvertently stuck her finger in an electrical outlet when she was a child. Her body is fairly standard though, meaning it has two of a lot of things, but it's so damn thin that I'm afraid to sneeze in the same room with her.
The next person to say something was Wheeler, MD.: “From the report I was sent, the prisoner is suffering from hypertrophy. Medical intervention is contra-indicated.” The doctor then shook his head as if he were taking the tragedy personally.
My reaction to his comment, however, was to make sure I conducted the intake from a safe distance. The last thing I needed was to come down with an incurable hypertrophy.
Rienway, Phd. then said: “So, what do you suggest?”
And Wheeler, MD. said: “Isolation.” And that was the end of that.
Needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to interviewing this fixated, infected character, but I had no choice. It was my job. I should have known that I had nothing to worry about though, because as it turned out, this prisoner was a human, a nice looking guy who liked to play with his dink in public. That's what all the big words were about. So, my guess is that libidinally fixated refers to someone whose mind is permanently trapped in a gutter and that hypertrophy refers to something that's bigger than I care to see in this life time.
That should give you a feel for these meetings. I could have just told you that they were attended by psychiatrists, sociologists, and doctors but I was afraid you would be impressed and that's the last thing I want you to be.
Maybe I've just lived with the dregs of the universe for too long to appreciate the elite's point of view. At least, that is what I was told the first time I tried to break my code of silence. That was a while back when I was doing a Pre-Treatment Interview (PTI) on a prisoner from the plantet Igunia.
You see, my job involves many different kinds of interviews; intakes, out takes, pre-this and post-that. All of the interviews I conduct are computerized, meaning all of the questions I ask are unilaterally standard and all of the information I gather is distilled into clinically clean data.
That's true for every kind of interview except the PTI. A PTI is conducted prior to prisoners being subjected to a curative program that wipes away all of their memories. Apparently, some bright-light came up with the theory that memories were the cause of all criminal behavior, so some other bright-light quickly developed a machine that removed said memories. When the general public caught wind of how the prison system was curing criminals, there was a momentary flutter of indignation, which was subsequently quieted by the introduction of the PTI.
The PTI is where I sit and listen to a prisoner's life story. The story isn't recorded anywhere. The interview isn't even video taped. The only place those memories are documented is in my mind.
I have to admit that at first, I was honored to participate in the process. I imagined myself as the guardian of all these eradicated lives. But, after a while, I realized that in order to be a guardian, you had to have something someone else might want or else there was nothing to guard against. Well, nobody wanted to hear about these lost lives and it was the Igunian prisoner that proved to me just how ephemeral a memory is when handed over to someone else's care.
Igunians, I have come to learn, are an exceptionally pleasant species. They live on a heavy gravity planet and the air is oppressively thick, so understandably, the form their body evolved into is sleek, low to the ground, and aerodynamically sound. They look a little like an ice cream cone on wheels with all of their senses, orifices, and life producing protrusions on the large end where the ice cream should go. Of course none of this would be particularly noteworthy if the creatures walked toward you face first. But, they don't. That would be aerodynamically dumb, so what they do is go forward into life, (at an incredible speed I might add,) backwards.
I asked this Igunian what it was like to race around without seeing where you are going and she said one didn't need to see where one was going when one carefully monitored where one had been. When she said it, I wasn't sure if I really understand the broad implications, but I knew it was profound because it gave me goose bumps.
Anyway, she told me all about her life and to make the long story short, Igunians don't do anything other that eat, drink, and build homes to make whoopee in. They make a lot of whoopee. She went into great detail describing the process to me which involves an endless period of taunting and tantalizing and then an equally lengthy period of joining. By the time she had finished her tale, there wasn't a dry inch on my body. I felt as though I had listened to a composer give birth to a sonata. She used lyrical words that were so sensual and erotic that I thought I might ignite from wanting and extinguish from not having.
But believe it or not, making whoopee wasn't the most significant aspect of her life, at least not to me. You see, because Igunians move into life backwards, they cherish hindsight over foresight. In fact, they have no words to describe the future. Their philosophy is that if you can't see it, it doesn't exist, and the only things worth looking at are the things that are behind you.
It didn't take me long to figure out that they lived in the past, not the future. They thrived on memories and not dreams. I asked her if she knew what was about to happen to her, if she knew her memories were about to be fried like so many re-fried beans, and all she did was look at me with her big black-mesh eyes as if I hadn't understood a word she had said.
So, I decided what I always decide, which is to keep my mouth shut. But it wasn't a painful decision because I realized that I could give her back her memories after the treatment. Somehow, the thought of taking away someone's future even though it came in the form of someone's past was more than my conscience could stand.
Anyway, a few days later, I saw her walking around and I was going to run over to her and give her back her memories when I noticed that she was moving into life face forward. Of course, physically, it wasn't that big a deal. Gravity at the prison is fairly light, the air is thinner than she was accustomed to, and there aren't any high winds to hurt her large unprotected eyes. But still, it looked wrong.
Hesitantly, I went over to her and said, “Hi there, how are you doing?”
She, of course, didn't remember me. In fact, she didn't remember anything, which shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. I guess it had just never occurred to me that wiping away memories also meant wiping away knowledge. So, I went and talked to Rienway, Phd.
“Do you know you're reindoctrinating species without taking the time to learn about its culture and philosophies?” I had asked her.
She told me my concerns were misguided. “We're dealing with criminals here, creatures who have inflicted damage on other creatures, creatures who don't deserve the same courtesies we bestow on law abiding citizens. The point of prison is to be a deterrent not an all-expenses-paid resort.”
I couldn't really argue with that, but I tried anyway. “It seems to me that rehabilitation should mean teaching prisoners how to live productive lives in the context of their home planets. The very least you could do is teach someone how to walk properly.”
That was when Rienway, Phd. told me that I had lived with the dregs of the universe for too long and that I had to remember that the universally good could only afford generic rehabilitation of the universally bad. Once again, I couldn't argue with her, this time because I didn't know what the hell she was talking about. That was when I learned that perhaps the price for silence is taken directly out of the pocket of self-respect, but on the other hand, speaking up sure doesn't make you feel any richer for it. So, I remade my pact with myself. I was determined to keep my mouth shut from there on out.
The purpose for telling you all of this is so you'll understand that just because I vowed to keep my mouth shut, I did it for a good reason. I did it to keep my sanity. I did it because every time I've let my thoughts be known, other people have muddied them, soiled them, and then I didn't want them back and then I felt empty instead of just lonely.
I guess you might be wondering about now what momentous event caused me to break my code of silence today. In truth, it wasn't all that momentous. Yesterday, I was conducting what I thought at the time was just one more PTI. The prisoner was human, which I have the most feel for since I'm one too, and her name was Joney.
If you went by looks alone, she wasn't the kind of woman you would do a double take over but she certainly wasn't the kind you would hate to look at even once. Her hair was thick, dark brown and short cropped. Generally, people who have short hair, do so because they want it to look nice without having to fuss over it all the time. Joney's however, was a mess. It made her look wild.
But I have the feeling it was intentional on her part. Her eyes were an eerie greenish blue, her complexion was unusually fair for this day and age, and her body looked slightly overweight only because she wore pants that hugged her shape too hard and that fastened just under a rounding belly.
Some of what I found out about Joney was that when she was fourteen, she was an actor in a prime-time weekly TV series. She told me that it had made her much too rich and famous, much too quickly. Apparently, all through her stardom, older and wiser actors advised her that her money and fame could be taken away as quickly as it had come, so she should be careful. Joney interpreted that advice to mean live for the moment. Unfortunately, that moment didn’t last long.
Her demise came on the evening of her fifteenth birthday, an evening she described as “a hot summer night, the kind you welcome with open arms because it's the first of the season, the same kind you'll be shaking a fist at by the end of the season.” Her director's wife had invited Joney to their beach cottage. Joney had gone, knowing full well what the older woman wanted, knowing that it was probably dumb, and knowing that she didn't care. To Joney, it was the opportunity she had been waiting for to lose her virginity.
And, she almost did. Unfortunately, when she was in a woman's most vulnerable position and about be filled with a world of abandonment, the director ran into the cottage, waving a pistol. The wife groaned, Joney screamed, and rose to her feet in an action that defied gravity.
Joney told me that her feet never stopped moving until she was in another country and that she made no other attempts to lose her virginity until she was well into her twenties.
That was the beginning of her life of crime. She must have been very good at it because she had only been caught one other time. Anyway, by the age of twenty-seven, she was very well off but unfortunately, the year after that, she had a major set back.
Her sister died. She was the only person Joney said she had ever truly loved. When I asked her to tell me about her sister all Joney said was that she lived in the hand of God and through her eyes, others could see God's spirit. Then Joney abruptly switched the subject and somehow she got me talking about my own youthful escapades and I forgot all about her sister until she later interrupted me in mid sentence and said, “Will you do me a favor?” and I said, “Sure,” and she said, “The next time something good happens to you, something that makes you smile, will you say my sister's name for me?” I didn't know what to say so I asked why. She said nothing so I said, “Okay, what's her name?” and she told me that it was Alicia. Her eyes turned watery so I let the subject drop.
We spent the rest of that day (yesterday) together, and most of it was spent laughing and trying to top each other's stories. I had a wonderful time, one of those times you know you'll want to remember forever, one of those times you know you'll use later on to cheer yourself up. I made the mistake of telling Joney that. I wanted her to know just how much I appreciated the time we had spent together.
“All you're telling me is that memories can cure as many problems as they can create,” she said bitterly. I felt like an idiot. I had forgotten why I was interviewing her.
“I'll remember for you,” I whispered. “I promise.”
“Get out of here,” she grumbled with a wave of her hand.
“Okay,” I said and headed for the door.
When I got to it, she said in a softer tone, “Maybe you could give me back my memories after the treatment. What do you say?”
I wanted to say, “Sure I can. What a good idea,” but I couldn't make myself do it. I couldn't lie to Joney like that. Instead I said, “That would be like handing a photograph to someone who’s blind.” She just nodded and I started to leave the room.
“Wait,” she called out after me.
I turned around.
“Remember what I told you about Alicia? I don't care about anything else but someone has to remember that she lived, that she was good and kind, that the universe is a better place because she was in it.”
I looked at Joney for a long time. I even think tears fell out of my eyes. Then I smiled weakly. “Alicia,” I said and I walked out and went straight to my quarters.
I tried to distract myself with various activities but my mind kept going back to Joney. I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if we tried to cure every problem the way we tried to cure a criminal. What would happen if the worst moments of history were forced into darkness forever? How would our children learn from our mistakes if all our mistakes were erased? These might not sound like life changing thoughts to you but they were to me. When I woke up this morning, I knew I was different. I couldn't get rid of the goose bumps.
With that frame of mind, I went to today's team meeting. For the first time ever, I demanded the floor. I told the roomful of doctors first about the Igunian, and then about Joney. I must have been wound tight because then I accused the team of having a severe case of what I call the toilet syndrome and that I wouldn't be their toilet anymore; that prisoners were more than a lump of sewage. When I finally finished, I was proud of myself. I even whispered Alicia's name because I thought something good had just happened.
But, I was wrong.
Wheeler, MD said: “So, what do you suggest?”
Rienway, Phd. said: “I think Ms. Peal (that's me) has been under a great deal of stress and we might have made a mistake by having a living creature listen to the memories. We can rectify that problem quite easily, don't you think? Perhaps a video machine and an interactive software program.”
I must have blinked several times or maybe I uttered a few obscenities, I don't remember now.
“I think,” one of the psychiatrists then said, "that we have done a disservice to Ms. Peal and I think the best course of action would be to have her go through the memory treatment herself. All of those burdensome memories should be lifted from her mind as soon as possible.”
My inclination was to scream. In fact, I think I did scream. But, before I knew it, I was being ushered across the prison grounds and into an interview room. Then the door was locked. It was a PTI interview room, only I knew no interviewer would show up to listen to my memories.
That's when I knew I had been beaten, when I knew that breaking my code of silence was as useful to me as foresight was to an Igunian.
Nonetheless, I've decided to give it one last try. That's why I'm writing you this story, hoping that there is a you to read it, hoping that the powers that be on this prison planet don't find my story in the computer banks before you do. Soon, everything that was me and all the memories I have guarded, will be lost forever. I wish I could tell you that I was like Joney. She could laugh in the face of adversity. But, I can't. The truth is I'm sick about it.
As I told you from the beginning, I'm not a storyteller, never have been, and never will be. All I ask is that you think twice before you listen to someone who thinks the best cure for a problem is to forget.
J. J. Peal
Guardian of Memories
Penal Planet #003
