04
<recollection>
It was the day we took those pills.
“I’m taking those things that gave me strength along with me,” Miach said.
I had gotten a call from her and come out to the river just as the sun was beginning to set that night. She was pouring gasoline from a plastic container onto a massive pile of books lying on the riverbank. I have no idea how she’d managed to get them all there. I asked her what she was doing, realizing as I did what an obvious question it was, and yet also feeling that it was my expected role to ask regardless.
“I’m going to burn them. Every one of them.”
If that were true, then the pile of books here represented her entire library, painstakingly compiled over years of allowance. I’d never been to her house at that point, so I had no way of knowing whether these were all of her books. Yet it seemed unlikely that Miach would lie about it.
“I don’t think I could go with these still here.”
“Go where?”
Miach waved her hand at our surroundings, no, at the entire world. “To the other side, away from here. To the place people call heaven or hell. To nothing. I’m afraid these little ones would hold me back, keep me bound here. Besides, if I waited any longer, I’d be too weak to carry them.”
Miach emptied the last drop from the plastic tank she carried. She looked inside and made a face, then pointed the tank mouth toward me.
“Ugh. Gasoline smells terrible. Want a whiff?”
I respectfully declined.
“When a new emperor came into power in China, they would burn all the history books. So they could write new histories,” Miach told me as she screwed the cap back on.
I nodded appreciatively, enjoying the feeling of agreeing with her. Whenever I did that, it felt like Miach was recording a little bit of herself onto me.
“Then, at some point, the whole world became a giant book,” Miach said. People thought they could record everything, so they did.
The advent of the CAT scan changed the world.
X-rays were just photographs, but CAT scans were X-rays taken from multiple angles, combined into images by formulas applied by computers before being output in a visual manner. A photograph was a representation, but a CAT scan was a record.
“You think WatchMe is like a part of that?” I asked.
Miach pulled some matches from a pocket and nodded. “It’s the ultimate form of body-recording.”
Our bodies were being replaced by a record, and it all began with a CAT scan. Whatever happened next would be only a matter of degree. It was constant, and it was already happening. That was what WatchMe was intended to achieve. “That’s why I want to die as a little girl, before I put that thing in my body, before I become something that’s read, like a book.”
To prove that these tits, this ass, this belly, aren’t a book.
“Why do you think people write things?”
I shrugged.
“Because words remain. Maybe for an eternity. Or at least for something approaching that. The Bible was written for that matter. And the pyramids are kind of a record too.”
People had always been obsessed with the idea of eternity. No other age had ever convinced more people that their bodies were eternal things. Old age still hung on, a weak, nearly silenced cry of nature, that would doubtlessly soon be conquered. Barbarism had been conquered. “Maybe the Maelstrom was a form of rehabilitation, returning the balance of things to their natural state,” Miach said with a sigh.
Miach walked over to where I stood behind her, watching.
“What?” I said, and she pressed the matches into my right hand and closed my fingers around them. Her cool hands felt good against my skin.
“Could you do this for me? I made it this far, but I don’t think I can do the rest.”
“Okay,” I said.
Like an athlete lighting a sacred flame, I solemnly tossed a match onto the pile of books. The fire caught in an instant, reducing the pile to ash in a matter of moments. The setting sun painted the riverbank with strange light, while the plasma glow of the fire lit us up from below.
“They used to burn bodies like this in Japan.”
“Really?”
“Of course, that all changed with the Maelstrom.” Miach smiled. Everything had changed. After the great chaos came the great control. And that hardened so fast it could never be shaken.
“They called it cremation. They would put the things the person loved in their life inside the coffin with them. That custom ended when they started liquefying bodies.”
“Is this your cremation, Miach?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Because they won’t put these books in my coffin. They gave me strength, so I’m taking them with me.”
We stood there for a long time, until the sun had set, and Miach’s books had burned out and Miach’s cremation was over. Then we sat on the riverbank and looked out at the town. Miach appointed names for the buildings with one finger, saying, “That’s eternity. That’s the castle of people who believe themselves to be eternal. There’s the king. There’s the government. Those are the old names for the stronghold of rule that the admedistrations have divided into tiny little pieces.
“I want to kick their eternity in the shins. Catch it with a sucker punch.
“I want to hit their frozen time where it hurts.”
“Is that what our deaths will be?” I asked. “Will the world change?”
“Everything will, for us,” Miach replied.
</recollection>