Something in me tells me to stop.

Something else tells me to go go go.

I feel light-headed, as if I’ve just noshed on a gift basket of Pavulon and Nix. I open the box. The ring is impossibly brilliant and seems to embody a purity I can never hope to attain. I close the box. I run a fingernail over the surface, making characters of unknown meanings in the velvet. It feels good: complicit and rare. Almost erotic. I wonder why I’ve never snuggled this box. That would feel great. A homeless Asian guy attired in a smock of canvas and discolored paper maps hobbles past, smiling in a way that makes his face go bruised and troughed like a dried apricot. Again I open the box. The ring is still there.

Platinum-banded shine: check.

Otherworldly sparkliness: check.

Inexplicable feeling of mortal dread: check.

I start staggering around the car to Charlie’s door, gargling some spit so I can speak.

How Memory Harvesting Can Save Your Life

In orientation Janus has a training segment for all new pulses to help them resist torture and/or to maintain clarity under chemical duress. Sensory transposition, they call it. During the “preenactments”⁵⁹ you are instructed to perform a “mnemonic dramatization,” a strategy that basically boils down to “if you have bamboo shoots shoved under your fingernails / barbed wire up your urethral meatus/ten milligrams of Nix sizzling in your brainpan, you should try to think pleasant thoughts.” In order to do that, however, you need to perform “memory harvesting” so that you can create a bank of vivid positive experiences to which you can retreat while enduring whatever pain you’ve got coming your way.

For me, sensory transposition is useless as a technique for enduring physical torture, but it’s perfect for making a triple-shift solo gig—or your whole life—seem less lonely, and I am in the habit of keeping a vigilant lookout for as many Charlie memories as I can harvest.

The carbonation and pomegranates in her mouth.

The Coco Rico pop-tops.

The image of her falling off of her bike. The consequent boomerang bend in her nose.

Her gracefulness when naked.

The childlike look on her face at the moment of orgasm.

Rubbing my jaw after I’ve gritted my teeth all night.

Her inexplicable love of my handwriting.

And, now, this moment.

I want to make sure I have what happens next available to me forever, so for a long moment, before I am able to speak, I just look at Charlie and do my best to deposit this moment, everything about it, in my memory bank for all the desolate hours I have left in my life.

I want, in other words, to freeze-frame perfection. I want to stop-time pure love.

The Sound of Our Future Together

But I do not get perfection. I do not get pure love.

When Charlie steps out of the car and faces me she is as beautiful as ever. She is standing sideways in a nervous, defensive posture, a kind of fighting-stance contrapposto, her face half turned from me aerodynamically, her pelvis slanting away in the slender silhouette of a bird in flight. Her hair is kiting behind her in the hot nighttime air and her cheekbones are awash in the blaze of cheap light from the storefronts. She is holding her breath in a way that makes the cords on her neck flex and the concavities of her collarbones deepen. And when I say the words I’ve waited so long to say—“Do you know what that sound is?”—I detect the pneumatic hitch of emotion in her voice and water makes her brown eyes turn slick and black as wet coffee grounds.