Memory returns. Memory does not forget. Memory remembers. Memory hardens ever more and congeals like a black sludge in the dark. Memory becomes a wasp that stings the mind like an unsuspecting rose. Nothing assimilates anymore, it vomits it all out undigested, and the final bout of indigestion unfolds in a cloud of belches. In sleep, struggling, it cries out Help! I can’t digest my memory any longer.
The ignoramus feeds his memory like a pet, with toxins and fatty foods and other acidic and polyunsaturated elements, and it in turn swells up and fattens and from its obesity it deactivates and lies supine. His once throbbing, singing memory has become flabby, dingy, immobile, calcified like stone. His memory trembles, creaks, shatters, and can’t be glued back together, lying there exhausted.
And it is at that point that a voice program like a neurotic genie is activated by his faithful mobile phone, from the constant frantic scrubbing of it with hand sanitizer. Then a strange bluish smoke starts to emerge from the sleepless smart phone and it takes on the shape of a magic lamp. The magic cell phone-lamp stores its owner’s inhalations and exhalations, images of life, experiences and doings that are translated into micropixels, magnetized, and stored, moved from his memory into the memory of the telephone.
Fragments of life like random lyrics, incongruous paragraphs, irrelevant prologues, rambling epilogues, lilliputian references all stick together, clustering into invisible clouds, begetting new forms of paradox from the real memory that empties itself of its past, present, and future, and another one, manmade this time, that fills up with all these things instead.
A new world is being gestated, a world where anything that can’t be assimilated or digested, whatever has been vomited back up from the past and the present, is reabsorbed into the memory of the smartphone by a background app he didn’t know it was running.
And he has no idea what’s going on, looking deeply into its digital eyes, into the depths of the crystalline screen, waiting for the ethereal blue-tinged genie to come out again, waiting for recognition and acceptance, “I believe in you, I don’t doubt you, you can do it,” until this eventually puts an end to his anguish, and replies, “You don’t need a teacher or a professor, just me, to become my worthy misprint.”
Anymore he burns for messages and calls. He prays for someone to call him, for an image to appear on the screen. But the device seems speechless and dead and images of life, once flickering, lie frozen. The last thing he remembers is that bald head with the close-set black brows and the adamantine teeth, smiling broadly at him, shooting malevolent glances, vaping in the frame.
Quickly it dawns on him that there is no substance anymore, because his whole life, his whole memory, the memory of his life snuck slowly inside and got stored in the smartphone, and his entire being is managed by an ethereal, benevolent, blue-tinged genie with shiny adamantine teeth, a genie that acts honorably and friendly and supportively, and he who has lost his memory because his memory abandoned him, following the orders of an ethereal, benevolent blue-tinged genie that lived, unbeknownst to him, in his smartphone, has lost not only his own memory, but even his access to its memory – the one stored in the smartphone-lamp, locking him out – like an empty tortoiseshell of his memory – unable to call to mind the slightest thing, unable even to remember the sacred PIN.
photo xuanduongvan87 / https://pixabay.com
