8. Burritos

Orion Fields met May at a burrito restaurant.

No, that is not right. This is not his first time meeting May, Orion recollects, and though the sound of scratching chalkboards marauds him when he tries to ponder over how he met May, a sandcastle of forgotten memories educes the epiphany that he’s known May for a long time. As Orion sees the world through the eyes of his past self with no control over his body, like a small pritchel hole carved into a flaky anvil, he pulses with an urge to turn his head and find May, who he is certain is to his right. Yet, trapped in the ordeal of experiencing the memory as it is, he instead finds his past self’s gaze fixated on the dull, brown table with a half-eaten burrito.

This burrito-obsessed version of Orion was fiddling with his fingers, his legs quivering. It was 3:45 am. They were in San Francisco at Taquería el Farolito, a small Mexican restaurant that had been gracious enough to let Orion, May, and her four other friends in. There were two rows of six tables each, and Orion was sharing the very last table with May, their backs to the entrance. Beyond the table was a dirty, yellow-stained black curtain, leading into the kitchen from where they could hear the whispers of the praying staff waiting for this party of six to wrap up. The lights had been dimmed, yellow, flickering. Right outside the Taqueria was a bus stop, and the voices of a distant argument barged in uninvited, interrupting the tension between Orion and his burrito.

The present-day Orion is fevering with anticipation, trying to recollect why he is here in the first place, but it feels like prodding at old scabs and scars.  The burrito-obsessed Orion, on the other hand, turned his head to look at May. Oh, May.

While the present-day Orion and the burrito-obsessed Orion coalesce into their mutual ogling of May’s face, only the burrito-obsessed dolt gets to see past the fuzzy, pixelated mess of black, scribbled lines in front of her face. It inspires a chord of jealousy to loudly tingle in the back of present-day Orion’s mind.

“What are you staring at?” May said, and her voice hit Orion like lightning, crackling through the crevices of his furrowed eyebrows and creased forehead. She was wearing light-blue jeans and a black top with stars, struggling to zip up her brown leather jacket.

Her mother’s leather jacket, Orion remembers. Orion’s hands, trembling under the jolt of their own sudden, burgeoning gallantry, zipped up the jacket for May.

“Okay,” she drawled, her voice dallying. Orion turned his head to look at the table behind him, where four people hunched over their plates, cradling their heads as the effects of tequila, vodka, and Prosecco had started to drain off. Orion had a tumultuous relationship with alcohol. He remembered relishing the bitter taste of approval it gave him, helping him soften how overwhelming it felt to keep a grasp on his life. He remembered how it felt to linger at the edges of sobriety, when lights burned brighter, and songs reverberated with a higher pitch. He also remembered the day his doctor forbearingly smiled and broke the news to him; with a pinch of sympathy and a pinch of jest, she’d patted Orion on the shoulders before telling him that he had the ‘heart of a poet.’ “It is so consumed with soaring for the impossible rhythms that it has forgotten it was born with one,” she had said.

Orion had always suspected that May’s friends found him to be too dull for May, like a jaded flowerpot at the end of a rainbow. Orion agreed with them. May was too good for him. She saw rivers where he saw floods, clouds where he saw thunder, green where he saw yellow. Oddly, for a reason that present-day Orion cannot comprehend, May’s friends all wear the same strange face of an old singer from an even older band that Orion really likes. He’s unnerved, curious, and completely helpless, feeling like a cage of pitchforks is flanking him from all sides.

“What do you think, then? About what happened earlier?” Orion asked, turning his head back to May, who was now engaged with taking a massive chunk off her burrito. Orion touched May’s face, her lips, and the warm touch of wiping tahini off her lips dawdled on his fingertips.

May took a deep breath. “If we declare, we have to register within thirty days,” May said, nodding. Orion flinched, recalling how the Department of Memories required every new relationship to be registered within thirty days after being initially declared. The registration came with a Memory License, under which the activities of those involved in the partnership were actively monitored for 300 days.

“What if we don’t?” Orion said, gulping so loud that it could almost be heard across the Bay. They probably heard him, too – those dirty bureaucrats. But Orion was not afraid. In a small Mexican burrito restaurant in the middle of San Francisco at 3:45 in the morning, Orion was confident that all May had to do was ask, and he’d burn down the entire Department for her. Were May to reach out with hands burning in bright, orange flames, Orion would’ve grabbed them and burned radiant.

“Then, the Department continues to monitor every move we make using their vicious fucking algorithms. The registration is just a formality.  Our social media, our locations, our search histories. Whether we share apartments, our texting patterns, our proximity,” May exhaustively recounted the bureaucratic gibberish of surveillance and terror, her hands clasping her head.

“Now, what is this I hear about our proximity?” Orion said, inching closer to May.

Her breath smelled of onions and Corazon. How utterly sickening and foolish, then, that he found this charming. That this is the moment he realized how it felt to bizarrely, hopelessly, powerlessly fall for someone – to fall for their onion breaths, the tahini marks on their lips, the chipping paint on their nails, the mole on their collarbone.

May moved closer. They kissed. Their very first one. It was only interrupted by the raucous howls of her friends behind them. Orion felt relieved that they weren’t immediately picking up their chairs to hit him on the head. They were happy. May was happy. Everything was perfect.

Suddenly, Orion regains control of his body, and the edges of his vision begin to whiten into puffy eddies of smoke. He pulls away, panting, and feels a tremble in the walls as a massive red hand tears through the ceiling, grabs May, and pulls her up against the sounds of Orion’s horrific screeching. May’s friends, with their same faces, break into a song, and the echo of hooves to Orion’s left alarms him. He turns and finds a brown horse circling, almost dancing. When the horse smiles at Orion, a massive pair of sharp incisors, too big for those infundibuliform jowls, greet him. The horse jumps at him, swallowing him whole.

Orion is falling. This is not real, he reminds himself to calm down.

He wonders what would have happened if May and he had refused to comply with the Department of Memories’ fascist mandate. Had they not registered within thirty days, they would have been tagged as ‘Incompliant’ by the system, with consequences that were not obvious – no, the Department wanted you to be disillusioned by the promise of false autonomy. A cruel joke, played out through rising insurance premiums, constant appointments with Department investigators every thirty days, higher rent, phones constantly buzzing to alert people of your newly assigned position on the Emotional Risk Index. “How would they even know if we don’t declare?” Orion remembered asking naively once, until someone showed him a seven-hundred-thousand-line piece of open-source code that the Department of Memories used to surveil you like a pig in the slaughterhouse.

And, of course, as the Department liked to argue, nothing evil could truly be open source. “Consider the benefits of what happens if you do pass the 300-day threshold,” the Department would reiterate. They’d labeled it a compromise: surviving 300 days in a relationship permitted the permanent integration of memories. You were issued a glowing recommendation and a gold medal (obviously, a medal is involved in the ignorant theatrics of it all) to permit joint finances, marriage, and tax breaks. More importantly than any of those, you could keep your memories without the Department monitoring you. Data collection becomes voluntary, and even if you were to break up after 300 days, you would still be allowed to retain your memories. The spurious illusion of being progressive.

As Orion hisses at the cartoonishly atrocious nature of the Department, light slowly trudges back into the world around him, and he is regurgitated into another part of the memory. The present-day Orion briefly floats above his body in the memory before feeling a massive pull, sucking him into the body of his past self.

A few hours had passed since the Taqueria, with the clock just having struck 4:55 in the morning. Having had a mere thirty minutes of sleep in the cab ride from San Francisco back to their hotel, Orion was spread out like a lump of wheat sack on a red couch with May storming around his room, flipping through the pages of a large blue binder. Her pink glasses were hanging under her chin; her hair was tied into a ponytail. She was wearing an oversized red T-shirt.

Between them, Orion was the one who worried all the time. He was the one who stormed around the room, while May sat there offering sanguine advice. Yet the roles were reversed in this moment, when Orion felt unnervingly calm and jubilant, while May was deliriously pacing around the room.

Everyone around Orion spoke of love as this fierce, ravenous, insatiable hunger that extirpated all senses with a greedy need to taste someone’s flesh, but Orion experienced May with the same affection that he adored old cathedrals or vintage record players. She felt like petrichor after painstaking days of pounding, hell-stricken rain, inspiring in him an urgency to collect pieces of her, as someone might press a flower between heavy books, to be certain that if the universe insisted on allowing only one extraordinary person in all the world, it was her.

“Okay, so let’s go through this again,” May said. “When we go through with it, everybody in our social circle also gets an attachment score monitored by the Department. Our stress levels, heart rates, and brain activity – all of it is monitored to look for activities like violence and fixation. It determines every individual’s attachment score.”

“Correct,” Orion said, raising his shoulders, holding it steady, and then dropping it, reminding May to breathe.

“And what happens if it doesn’t work?” 

“We will make it work,” Orion reassured her.

“No, look at the book,” May said, back to skimming through the pages frantically. “Our friends are also assigned an index based on how close they are to us. If our friends are too high on this memory index at the end of 300 days, they’ll also have to undergo a collective Erasure. Do you know how many lives we’d be affecting? Shouldn’t we consult them all?”

“So, you want to consult all our friends about whether we should date?”

“I know it sounds stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Right. Still, look at this book. If we do get an Erasure, our memories won’t just be erased, but they will be reconstructed. Distortions! It says here that they’ll generatively remove people, places, and things. If our friends mention anything about our relationship after the Erasure, the brain will fill the gap with a semantic substitution.” She dramatically quoted the air. “Whatever that means. Oh, and oh! Look!” She almost slammed the book into his face. “If we forget each other, and we see each other again, we’ll be strangers.”

“Imagine that,” Orion joked.

May did not laugh. “I cannot,” she said. Orion lowered the handbook from where she had pressed it into his face. “I am trying to be rational, but this book just makes everything sound so hard. So many lives are just dragged into this and the worst thing about it all is that you may not remember me.”

Orion sat with it for a quiet moment. “I don’t think that’s the part you’re most afraid of,” he said.

May looked at him, and Orion nodded as if she’d confirmed the obvious.

“I think you are afraid that if we get Erased, we will become people who would have never cared for each other,” Orion said.

“They will generatively alter our memories,” May whispered, finally settling down on the floor, arms crossed across her chest.

“If tomorrow, I woke up with no memory of you, I would still be the person who protected every cat on the street, because you loved cats so much that you brought a stray one the first time we hung out.”

“What's wrong with cats?”

“Nothing! Just that we were going to a club.”

“Everybody loved Soju,” she said. "Besides, I thought you liked cats.”

“I do.” He shrugged. “But you made me love them. What I am trying to say is that no matter whether I remember you or not, you left your prints all over me. Do you think I’d hate the Department this much if I hadn’t seen you compellingly argue about bureaucracy in a bookstore?”

“You are assuming I’d still disagree with bureaucracy when they vodoo away my memories.”

“Okay, firstly, let's hope that doesn't happen. Secondly, no one can generatively make you love bureaucracy,” Orion laughed, extending his arm around her.

May smiled. “Fair.”

“Besides,” he added, “if we became strangers, we would probably become friends again. I’m pretty sure.”

Silence settled between them as May pushed the Department’s handbook away from her. “You are making this sound so simple.”

“Simple would be if I said none of this scared me.”

“You sound like it does not.”

“It does terrify me! I am terrified of hurting you and our friends and your friends. Terrified that I’ll wake up one day and figure out that most of my life is missing.” Orion took a long breath. “But it also terrifies me to live so much in the fear of what the Department might do that I never get to be with you.”

“What if they are right and attachment is dangerous?”

“Anything important is dangerous.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“Knives. It’s a cliché, but you can stab people with it, or you can cook with it.”

“You don’t even know how to hold a knife. You hold it like a pen,” May said, mimicking how ridiculous Orion looked when holding a knife.

“So, I have been told.” Orion smiled.

“I want you to say everything will be fine,” May said.

“I...look...all I’ll say is that if we decide not to be together because we are afraid of forgetting each other, then they have already Erased us.” The room and the world felt still, as if it’s just the two of them.

“You sound very convincing,” she said, tracing one of the buttons on his shirt.

“I am just trying to tell you why I am here,” he said, grabbing her hand. May searched his face. “You know you still have not answered my question from the bar.”

“What?” May asked.

“The very first question I asked at the bar. Then, at the Taqueria. Will you go on a proper date with me?” he asked, nervous again.

Orion remembers now. He remembers how they first met in college, taking the same course on introductory economics. A spinning mess of visions reminds him that she had been present in most of his college memories; memories that have now, generatively and conveniently, replaced her with green shrubbery. That bar he’d gone to and remembered reading Psalm for the Wild Built at? It had her slumped on his shoulders. That movie he thought he had watched alone in an empty theatre? It had her holding onto their massive popcorn bucket.

Slowly, Orion begins to realize just how much of his life is not real, but a massive puddle of deceit, and that the memories and senses he has believed in are just another piece of cruel frivolity. When his brain tries to conjure up an excuse that he is not the sum of his experiences and that he is still Orion with or without them, he rebukes it, because who really is he if not the sum of his environments and constructs?

It reminds him of a dream from several years ago, when he was a tribal princess in a small village, frolicking through forests, practicing witchcraft, having vivid memories of a life there, until he started becoming self-aware and everything fell apart; things became illogical while he still observed everything. The more self-aware he became in that dream, the more he remembered marveling at how his logical mind had rationalized a fake series of silly, ludicrous memories as a princess in this small village: interactions with a local slaughter-woman who sold higher-dimensional space-time fabric, fights with the alien named Gregory whose left arm was a pickle jar, and right arm was a nail cutter. If there had been no memories tied to his surroundings, he couldn’t have experienced the world as a tribal princess.

This Re-instatement feels like that now, like a teenager with two summer jobs waking up to find out he is not a tribal princess. Orion wants to scream, but in the memory of this Reinstatement, he has no mouth with which to yell. If his memories are not real, how can he be sure whether the emotions he remembers feeling are real? Perhaps, he himself is not real and has never been until now. Perhaps, he is a dreaming tribal princess and everything will be alright. Or, what if realizing his memories are false, and the anger he experiences right now is just another memory given to him by someone else? Desperately, he searches for an anchor right before the Re-instatement, something he can trust unquestionably, like a beetle on his arm, but maybe that is also not real, so the only thing his mind can settle on is June reminding him to breathe.

And so, he breathes, accepting that what May feared in these memories had come to pass. Then, again, what he was sure of had also happened. “You left your prints all over me.” Orion had said. It was what had made him file the Reinstatement claims with the Department in the first place.

All Erased clients are allowed one appeal throughout their lives to contest for their memories. The Department knows that the thing about offering someone plodding through the desert with just one last sip of water is that they’d rather die before taking the sip, because if you tell someone they have just one life to live through, they’ll spend an eternity wasting time on what to do with it. So, when Orion had his memories Erased, he’d believed in the Department’s motto for a small while: love must be rationed. It was not until the Department erred by sending him notices to register and declare his relationship with May only fifteen days after having Erased them in the first place, that Orion realized something was wrong.  The same Department that bragged about its certainty was uncertain about Orion. It puzzled the Department to such an extent that investigators began showing up at his apartment unannounced at odd hours, curious why he was not following their predictive models. Orion’s actions indicated that he was still in a relationship with the person he had just Erased. How could Orion have been flagged as non-compliant after the Erasure? Motivated by this very question, Orion had filed his appeal with only a single sentence in the entire application: “Without the person Erased, I have become an anomaly.” 

Time pauses in this memory as Orion is expelled from the body of his burrito-obsessed version. Only the coffee machine in his room is whirring and shaking. Brazenly, it flings open its lid as a flat, two-dimensional dinosaur nugget jumps out, eyeing him curiously, eccentrically singing a song called How to Walk by W.H. Lung from the 20s. “You give me the freedom to offer up my song,” the dinosaur nugget sings, growing, flapping its wings. “Feel like I’ve had my eyes shut for so long, for so long,” Orion says, joining the dinosaur nugget. The nugget rushes towards Orion. Orion flinches, raising his right hand like a shield, only for the nugget to swoosh Orion onto its back and begin triumphantly sprinting on San Francisco’s rooftops, until both the dinosaur nugget and Orion begin growing bigger. Bigger than the oceans. Bigger than Earth. Past the moon. Bigger than anything there is, until there is finally enough room for Orion to shed tears for all the things he never got to say and all the leaves in May that he will never know long enough to hide in the fissures of his skin.