What the Forest Remembers, by Jennifer Egan – The New Yorker

Charlene, whom they call Charlie, is six. This morning she scrutinized Lou, wrinkling her sunburned nose, and asked, Where are you going?

Short trip north, he said. Some fishing, a little duck hunting, maybe.

You dont have a gun, Charlie said. She watched him evenly, her long tangled hair raking the light.

Lou found himself avoiding her eyes. The others do, he said.

His little boy, Rolph, clung to him at the door. Pale and dark-hairedChristines coloring, her iridescent eyes. Its the strangest thing when Lou holds his son, as if their flesh were starting to fuse, so that letting go of him feels like tearing. He has a guilty awareness of loving Rolph more than Charlie. Is that wrong? Dont all men feel that way about their sonsor, at least, those lucky enough to have sons? Poor Tim Breezely!

There will be no fishing, no hunting. What Quinn divulged, that afternoon on Montgomery Street, as they drank and smoked their Parliaments and roared with laughter before driving their big cars home to their wives and kids, was that he knew of some bohemians who grew grass in the middle of a forest near Eureka. They welcomed visitors. We can go overnight on a weekend sometime, if you like, Quinn said.

They did.

How can I possibly know all this? I was only six, and stuck at home, despite my fervent wish to come alongI always wanted to go with my father, sensing early (or so it seems, looking back) that the only way to hold his attention was to stay in his presence. How can I presume to describe events that occurred in my absence in a forest that is now charred and exudes an odor like seared meat? How dare I invent across chasms of gender, age, and cultural context? Trust me, I would not dare. Every thought and twinge I record arises from concrete observation, although getting hold of that information was arguably more presumptuous than inventing it would have been. Pick your poisonif imagining isnt allowed, then we have to resort to gray grabs.

I got lucky; all four mens memories are stored in the Collective Consciousness, at least in partsurprising, given their ages, and downright miraculous in my fathers case. He died in 2006, ten years before Mandalas Own Your Unconscious was released. So how could my father have used it? Well, remember: the genius of Mandalas founder, Bix Bouton, lay in refining, compressing, and mass-producing, as a luscious, irresistible product, technology that already existed in crude form. Memory externalization had been whispered about in psychology departments since the early two-thousands, with faculty speculating about its potential to revolutionize trauma therapy. Wouldnt it help you to know what really happened ? What youve repressed ? Why does my mind (for example) wander persistently to a family party my parents took me to in San Francisco around the time this story takes place? I remember scrambling with a bunch of kids around the roots of an old tree, then being alone in someones attic beside a white wicker chair. Again and again: scrambling with those children, then alone in an unfamiliar attic. Or not alone, because who took me there, and why? What was happening while I looked at that chair? Ive wondered many times whether knowing the answers to those questions would have allowed me to live my life with less pain and more joy. But by the time one of my fathers caregivers told us about a psychology professor at Pomona College who was uploading peoples consciousnesses for an experimental project, I was too wary to participate. A gain is also a loss when it comes to technologymy fathers imploding recording empire had taught me that much. But my father had little to lose; hed had five strokes and was expiring before our eyes. He wanted in.

Rolph had been dead for years, and my other siblings were elsewhere. So it fell to me to greet the young professor, who wore red high-top sneakers, along with his two graduate students and a U-Haul full of equipment, early one morning at my fathers house. I parted the sparse remnants of my fathers surfer shag and fastened twelve electrodes to his head. Then he had to lie stillasleep, awake, it didnt matter and there wasnt much of a difference at that pointfor eleven hours. Id moved his hospital bed beside the pool so that he could hear his artificial waterfall. It seemed too intimate a process to let him undergo with strangers. I sat next to him for most of the time, holding his floppy hand while a wardrobe-size machine rumbled beside us. After eleven hours, the wardrobe contained a copy of my fathers consciousness in its entirety: every perception and sensation he had experienced, starting at the moment of his birth.

Its a lot bigger than a skull, I remarked as one of the graduate students wheeled over a hand truck to take it away. My father still wore the electrodes.

The brain is a miracle of compression, the professor said.

I have no memory of that exchange, by the way. I saw and heard it only when I reviewed that day from my fathers point of view. Looking out through his eyes, I noticedor, rather, he noticedmy short, uninteresting haircut and the middle-aged gut I was already starting to acquire, and I heard him wonder (but hear isnt the right word; we dont hear our thoughts aloud, exactly), How did that pretty little girl end up looking so ordinary ?

When Own Your Unconscious came out, in 2016, I was able to have the wardrobes contents copied into a luminous one-foot-square yellow Mandala Consciousness Cube. I chose yellow because it made me think of the sun, of my father swimming. Once his memories were in the Cube, I was finally able to view them. At first, the possibility of sharing them never crossed my mind; I didnt know it was possible. The Collective Consciousness wasnt a focus of early marketing for Mandala, whose slogans were Recover Your Memories and Know Your Knowledge. My fathers consciousness seemed like more than enoughoverwhelming, in factwhich may be why I began, with time, to crave other points of view. Sharing his was the price. As the legal custodian of my fathers consciousness, I authorized its anonymous release, in full, to the Collective. In exchange, Im able to use date and time, latitude and longitude, to search the anonymous memories of others who were present in those woods, on that day in 1965, without having to invent a thing.

Let us return to the men scrambling behind or (in my fathers case) alongside Quinn Davies, their guide. The introduction to grass took place at the trailhead, where Quinn passed around a small pipe, refilling it several times. Most people didnt get high on their first exposure. (This was good old-fashioned pot, mind you, full of stems and seeds, long before the days of hydroponic sinsemilla.) Quinn wanted to get this first smoke out of the way, to prime his palsBen Hobart in particularfor getting well and truly wasted later on.

A river flashes in and out of view far below, like a snake sliding among leaves. As the men climb, their stumbling and guffawing yield to huffing, wheezing, and struggle. All four smoke cigarettes, and none exercise the way we think of it now. Even Ben Hobart, one of those preternaturally fit guys who can eat anything, is breathing too hard for speech by the time they crest the hill and glimpse A-Frame, as the house is known. Tucked in a redwood clearing and built from the cleared redwood, A-Frame is the sort of whimsical structure that will become a clich of seventies California architecture. But, to these men, it looks like an apparition from a fairy tale: Is it real ? What kind of people live here ? Compounding the eeriness is Simon and Garfunkels Sound of Silence eking from hi-fi speakers facing outward on the redwood deck. A-Frames mastermind, Tor, has somehow managed to get electricity to a house in the middle of a forest, that is accessible only on foot.

Hello, darkness, my old friend...

A hush of awe engulfs the men as they approach. Lou falls back, letting Quinn lead the way into a soaring cathedral of space whose vast triangular windows reach all the way to its pointed ceiling. The scent of redwood is overpowering. Quinn introduces Tor, an austere eminence in his forties with long prematurely white hair. Tors old lady, Bari, is a warmer zaftig presence. An assortment of young people mill about the main room and deck, showing no interest in the new arrivals.

This odd setup leaves our three newcomers unsure what to do with themselves. Lou, who cant tolerate feeling like a hanger-on, is abruptly angry with Quinn, who speaks quietly and privately with Tor. What the hell kind of greeting is this ? Nowadays, a man ill at ease in his surroundings will pull out his phone, request the Wi-Fi password, and rejoin a virtual sphere where his identity is instantly reaffirmed. Let us all take a moment to consider the isolation that was customary before these times arrived! The only possible escape for Lou and his friends involves retracing their steps through the forest without bread crumbs to guide them. So Lou paces around A-Frame in a way he cannot seem to help (though he feels its disruption), barking occasional questions at Tor, who sits aloft on a tall wooden chair that looks irritatingly thronelike: Nice place, Tor. What sort of work do you do? Mustve been hell getting pipes laid this far out.

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What the Forest Remembers, by Jennifer Egan - The New Yorker