You may recall reading short stories by Alastair Pollock and Marina McNeil inspired by Metric's track "The Police and the Private" or reading my rambling gibberish about the fab five, the group that inspired this project. Here is the third of five interpretations of Metric's song, this one by good friend Kristy Kalin. Here is what she has to say:
My writing process for Lord, Listen, Love was somewhat akin to banging one’s hand on a typewriter until a half decent sentence comes out. I was inspired by the seemingly disconnected feel of the lines ‘got to get to you, the orphanage is closing in an hour’, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how that would relate to the song. So the only way to explain that line was to make everything else random as well. I dealt with the idea of selling memories, and in particular – what happens when you lose your marbles (ha ha – oh god help me).
Here is Kristy's short story "Lord, Listen, Love":
Lord, Listen, Love
Once through I push my way towards a sanitizer. A dull beeping accompanies the movement, the routine ingrained. The cold air eats up my breath, make my lungs ache. I try to not think about the Memories weighing me down, heavy in my pocket and muffled in cloth in my bag. I watch people instead; study the sharp contours of their noses, the fleshy arms wrapped in winter clothes. A couple exchanges body heat at the end of the platform.
I once overheard Immi tell a girl “Don’t take love out of context.”
She’d said the same thing to me, although context wasn’t a part of the situation. “Don’t take love” she whispered, fingers carding through my hair as I, heartsick and bleeding with it, retched tears.
But Immi’s older. There’s a tremble I’ve seen in a thousand other hands whilst grasping, pulling, shifting, offering –palsy-struck, love-struck, all stuck.
My first Memory goes something like this: My boyfriend and I sit on a bench, his leg pressed close to mine. I don’t like the feel of his leg. Summer has come and he’s sweatin something fierce, but I keep quiet because he’s smiling at me goofy and open, and so damned pleased.
“What?” I ask, but he just shakes his head, and reaches into his pocket, pulling a small glass marble from his jeans.
I know what it is, even if I’ve never had one. After my best-friend broke her arm, they’d slipped her a Memory to keep her quiet and to dull the pain. She’d talked about a bright light for a week after, but I couldn’t understand.
“Wanna try?” He asks, and I nod, and so we slip the small globe between our clasped hands.
And we’re staring up at the moon from a broken down porch, a million moths seem to circle us and when the Memory ends, I find myself brushing away the dust of their wings even though there’s no trace.
We broke up not too soon after that, but I kept the Memory, and moths, and the moon.
I’d sat on the train once for three hours. Watched everyone slip past me even as they slid past themselves - I counted the nametags they’d forgotten to take off.
I counted phone calls they refused to hang up. Tears they refused to shed, laughs they refused, and I counted.
I sat counting.
And none of it counted.
I close my eyes and try to map out my travels – myself a blinking beacon on an old fashioned train map. A dash trailing behind as the glow flashed to the end of the line.
Sometimes I disappear. When I was younger I’d felt the future press down on me, demanding a decision. I’d felt the cloth of my family trade press against my mouth, my mother’s eyes blinding me, my father’s height crippling me-
But I have the Memory for that. I have a Memory for everything.
Blinding sun on the snow. And she’s seven.
“Take that guy for instance,” Stells says, jerking her head towards a harried and bespectacled man in a long brown coat.
“He’d probably take a night, maybe two.”
I scoff. She raises a brow and saunters towards him. Her hips sway, and I wondered how she’d managed to look seductive whilst tramping through snow.
Stells stops close beside him, her hands fisted in her puffy jacket, breath coming out in slow clouds.
She keeps her eyes on the track, but I can see her talking. The man dashes a glance back at me, then to her, before a quick sweep around. Drawing her hand from her jacket, Stellss presses a glass globe into his hand and his eyes shutter for an instant before clearing. He peels folded bills from his wallet shoves them into her palm – the exchange had taken seconds.
I occupy myself with studying the train map until she reaches my side.
“I told you, easy.”
“I need you to go to Centre Street.” I tell her, frown pressing in the corners of my mouth. “A man in a green tie will ask you about the quality of the food vendor. You’ll need to tell him not to eat it. Tell him you have a better place to go. He wants the full three hours so take him to our Blue house in Mar de Loop.”
Stells grimaces. “Come on, Ri – I just got us a bit of extra money, that’s all.”
I sigh before turning to her. “I know. You’ve just got to be careful. It’s better if they come to us first.”
Sunlit and seven, her gap-toothed smile beckons me forward. I swing her up in my arms, feel her weight. My arms tremble as we spin.
“People don’t get it,” Immi said. “It’s so much easier to pretend. It’s so much easier to live a lie.” She was hunched on the ground, chalk circles covered the cement. She was playing marbles with Memories, but when I reached to pick one up she batted my hand away.
“These are mine,” she growled, sweeping them into her palm. I pulled back, surprised at her vehemence. Turning her eyes up to mine, she slumps. She held her hand cupped in front of her and began to poke through the marbles until she found what she was looking for.
She raised the globe in the air and said, “here, you can have this one.” Then she smiled.
She’s seven and there’s a gap in her teeth. When she laughs, she hiccups, and her eyes almost shut. She’s delighted.
I feel my feet burning, feel the snow melting, feel my hands turning wood to ash –
So I sit two seats away from Stells.
I get off at Kensington and stomp my way to a solicitor’s office on the main street, push his Memory into his hands.
But he wants to share the Memory and I have to stop myself from screaming.
We build a fort, made of bed sheets and pillows, proclaim ourselves kings. I smile at him when it’s over and we share our secret handshake, although I’ve never bent my fingers quite that way before. He doesn’t tell me that he pretends I’m his best friend from childhood, because I know. I remember, just as he does, and when we promise to meet again next week, neither of us are free.
The next two drop-offs are sex Memories, and I’m surprised to remember how flexible I am, and also, how domineering. They leer when I leave and I’m glad that the next three deliveries on my chart are solitary.
Her hair is brown and when it swings it cuts the air. I wish I could braid. In the Memory I can’t tell her how I’m saving up to get her back. But I hug her and each time I remember the hug is a bit longer, and that she nods because if she nods it means that everything is going to be alright, but that’s just a Memory of a Memory and I’m getting presumptive.
George thinks so, his weekly sea-faring Memory long since cooled in our palms.
“It’s just a Memory, Rial. You don’t even know if she’s still there.”
“She’s there, I called. I know she’s there.”
George pushes away from the table, “she’s a fantasy.”
“No,” I protest, “She’s a Memory.”
“You think they aren’t the same things?”
Just moments ago we’d been struggling against a storm, rain lashing our face, plastering our hair to our mouths. We’d spat salt water and fear, running the deck to keep the boat above the sea and not below.
Now he wheels himself to the door, arms muscular from necessity, not vanity.
“You’re running late, Ri. We’ll talk about this more next week.”
People like to share Memories. Perhaps it’s instinctual – a biological yearning. They want another presence there to ground them, to witness them.
I’ve remember being so many people that sometimes when I wake up I can’t remember myself. I want to scream my name and I’m so terrified that the one I shout will be the wrong one.
I’ve never created my own Memories. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone’s hands holding my life in theirs, pressing their faces onto my beloved’s face.
I’d rather peer though the lavender smoke of another person’s dim-lit past.
“Heard you’re obsessed with some Memory,” Stells says by way of greeting, a peace offering of coffee in her hand to ease the sting.
“I’m not obsessed,” I murmur over the rim of the cup. “I’m just invested.”
Stells leans back in a squashy arm-chair, eyebrows arched.
“I once had a man follow me for three days convinced I was Anette – his French poodle. Never mind he was allergic to dogs and hated the French. He was invested. You’re actually thinking about crossing the Memory threshold.”
I winced, jerking my head to the side as if to deflect the bitter accusation.
“It’s not that, I just...she’s important, Stells – I just know she is.”
“No, Ri, the life you have right now is important. She’s just a marble.” Stells reached into her pocket and shook her handful of Memories at me, the glass chinking together.
“She’s just another fix.”
But she’s not – and here’s why:
She wears coveralls. What poor child wears coveralls? But they’re corduroy – oh god do people even make that fabric any more- and she wears a bright red shirt beneath it and I can tell she’s a messy eater because there’s a stain on her shirt and there’s discolouration from where she’s rubbed her greasy hands on her clothes.
I’ve never wanted children, never thought I’d be a person that would. But she’s seven years old, and in all the Memories I’ve seen and shared, I haven’t seen her in any others. What if I’m the only person that remembers her – loves her?
Because she’s seven, and when Immi handed the Memory to me, it had felt like a promise.
So when Stells says she’s just a fix, I stop myself from kicking her out of her chair.
Instead I say, “You’re wrong.” I sit down on top of Immi’s desk, and wait for her to bring us our Memories and our delivery slips. And I wait.
Immi’s office is a shabby-chic, beat up furniture straight from some grandma’s house, mixed with expensive light fixtures. Making and selling Memories turn a tidy profit- and hell, we’re good at what we do, legitimate or not.
Most times the police don’t even care if they catch us. Memories are Memories – and most of them are considered legal. It’s the seedier side of the Memories we sell that get us in to trouble, and that’s when they take up their troubles with Immi because, Honestly, Sir or Madame, we just deliver what we’re given- we don’t know what the Memories are.
Except when we do. Which is why we have a complex system of divvying up who deals with what Memories.
“Rock”
“Paper”
“Scissors”
“Come on, really? I hate the feather guy – I totally had him last time,” Stells complains.
“Yeah, and you lost last time too.”
“Connect Four next time.”
Most times I can deliver the Memories all in the span of a regular work-day, don’t want to give off the impression that we aren’t professionals, even if we aren’t. There are times though, when the sun has long since left behind our fragile bones that I find myself driving.
The back roads of Springbank pull me onwards to some strange unknown. I wonder about my parents. Not dead, just distant – gone to a warm horizon. They call twice a week to keep up their appearance. I answer to keep up mine. What would they think of her. Would they call her a fix, or would they understand?
But when they call, I talk to them about the small sales department I’m in, and how I find it hard to get along with my colleague, and they tell me of their golf-games and how they saw some-one or other’s grandson.
A.M. Lengreen. Born in Edmonton, made her way down to Calgary. Given up for adoption at age eight, one year after that Memory. I could, but I don’t ask around. I’ve worked for people who’d know where to look but that means sharing the Memory – her.
Not that I’m possessive, but I’m possessive.
“What if she doesn’t like you?” Stells asks
“She won’t thank you,” Immi says.
“I’m partial to vegetarian food myself,” Walter mentions.
And it’s not that I haven’t thought it out before – that I haven’t had those same conversations – barring the vegetarian one – with myself.
But she’s seven, and I remember her.
And so I’m driving. I shouldn’t be out with the ‘company car’, a hideous little Kia that Immi’s brother-in-law sold to her for a song.
Immi once told me, “don’t take love,” but does it count if that love belongs to someone else?
The snow is blinding, and she’s seven, gap-toothed, laughing.
And the orphanage closes in an hour.
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