The Memory Machines by Michael Overa

---You see them during mornings, afternoons, and evenings. All of the Memory Machines. They line up in shops and churches and office buildings and schools. The wait for buses and trains. They line up wherever it is that they line up best. There is often no order. They sometimes resemble crowds, and sometimes resemble people standing alone.
---They have come to where they are to remember.
---Or, where they are has brought them to remember.
---Or, they will eventually remember where they are now.
---Sometimes they are eloquent Forgetting Machines. Memory Machines that are too old to work properly. Those that are badly damaged also become Forgetting Machines. Some become Machines that don’t want to remember.
---Heading east into town on Highway 3, the road curves up and around a hill, moving up and to the left simultaneously. Old 3 crests the hill and curves back down the opposite direction. Though the line painted on the road is a double solid, which means: “no passing,” people still pass here. To one side of the road is a steep rock embankment that leads to “The Spot.” To the other side of the road is a steep embankment that leads down a cliff, so to speak, towards more rocks and a thin trickle of a river.
---Near there, off of Old 3, at the exit to Dayton, is a grand collection of fantastic Memory Machines. In fact, one of the best collections.
---There are splendid old Machines that sit outside all day, in the sun, doing nothing but Remembering. And sometimes, nothing but Forgetting. They talk about the things they remember, and try to remember the things that they’ve forgotten.
---There are even newer models of Machines now. Some are born and programmed in hospitals and schools nearby.
---One of the new models is named Johnny.
---Johnny is a dazzling Memory Machine. He began by remembering words, then he learned and remembered how to walk, then remembered how to feed and cloth himself. He is a Feeling Machine, a Dreaming Machine, a Wanting Machine, a Needing Machine, and, of course, a Memory Machine. But he had to learn and remember to Want, then to Feel, then to Need, then he had to remember to Dream. All that before he could do anything else.
---Johnny likes The Spot, although he is still too new of a Machine to hang out with the older Machines. The Machines older than Johnny remember more things: dirty words, and dirty jokes. Those models slightly older than Johnny still remember being a younger Memory Machine. Those older models park their cars (which they learned, then remembered how to drive), on the hill and spend their time drinking and making-out. These are things that they will remember later. Johnny will remember watching them from the bushes, remember riding his bike up the big steep hill from town, and coasting into the dirt lot that is the Spot. He did this almost every day. Of course, the older Machines only did this on weekends, usually Fridays and Saturdays.
---He would do it right after he got out of his Remembering Lessons at John F Kennedy Jr. High. This was the school that taught him how to remember and gave him certain things to remember. Arbitrary things mostly. Things that everyone was supposed to remember, like the names of wars and places, and dates and times. Some of it he didn’t mind remembering. Some of it was interesting to remember. His parents remembered some of the same things. So did the older Machines.
---The Oldest Machines, he knew, were there when certain events had originally happened and could remember the events in detail. Many of the events that they remembered were events that Johnny was supposed to remember learning about. The things those Really Old Machines had done, were things written in the books Johnny was supposed to read.
---After his Lessons he would ride to the Spot, and stop for an hour or so and count how many cars passed by him. There were particular days that he could remember when the average was significantly higher or lower, and he would go through the numbers sometimes in his head: September 9th, fourteen cars -- November 16th, one motorcycle. He wrote them down in his notebook, so that he could remember later.
---Some Machines are better at remembering certain things, some remember numbers, some remember words, some remember gestures. Most Machines remember things that have happened to them, or what they have done.
---Sometimes the things that happen, are things that are not important enough to remember. There is too much to remember every detail of every moment. There are memories that can only be remembered with the help of people, places or things. Remembering, even for some of the best machines, can be like looking through a thick pane of frosted glass.
---That is not what Johnny was thinking about when he was standing next to his bike one afternoon at The Spot. He was, in fact, remembering, in detail, a girl who had jumped half-naked from a car several nights ago, and run down the road screaming with her shirt in one hand and her bra in the other.
---While he was thinking about this, remembering in too vivid color-texture, a big white van started up the road. Standing where he was standing just then, he could see the road for at least a mile in both directions, which is probably why it had become the Spot. If the police were going to show up they had to come up the hill, and at night their lights would be seen from a mile a way, quite literally.
---This white van was the boxy delivery type, and it looked to have been painted over several times. At one point there had been a slogan or the name of a company painted on the side, it had since been covered with paint not quite as white as the rest of the van. The doors on both sides were open, slid back along the frame, and the flat window was splattered with bugs. The driver, as he passed, looked at Johnny. He was a man much older than Johnny’s father. Maybe two times his age, which was thirty-three. The woman next to him was a bit younger. They looked to Johnny like someone’s grandparents, and they probably were.
---Johnny was not remembering his father or his grandparents just then, but he would think of them later, while remembering the van.
---That afternoon Johnny rode his bike home, following the direction of the van. He didn’t think he would see the van again, but people in town started talking about it, and he knew that it must be the same van.
---The van was parked in the lot of the supermarket for a long while. In all, as people would later say, it had been there for about eight or nine days. It was parked in the far corner of the supermarket’s lot, against a chain link fence that separated the parking lot from a boggy little marsh. The lot was far too big for the supermarket, and no cars had to park anywhere near to this van. Fully aware of this the driver had parked sideways across three parking spaces.
---After the first night the store’s manager made the long trek across the parking lot to have a talk to the people in the van. He told everyone it was mostly to make sure everything was okay, and that the van wasn’t stolen or missing. As he approached the old man stepped out, hiking up his pants and leaning back against the van his thumbs jammed through his belt loops.
---“Hello,” said the man.
---“Hello” said the manager.
---“Everything all right out here?”
---“Peachy, nice spot of wetland.”
---“It is,” said the manager, “But say, I don’t mean to be rude. You see, it’s just, I can’t really have you camping out in the parking lot.”
---“Why not?”
---“Well, it’s that it isn’t exactly a camp ground.” He said, “there is a campground a bit up the way.”
---“That’s a shame, me and the wife, we were enjoying this little area, could we pay you maybe?”
---And he handed the man a coin. In fact it was a 1948 penny. The manager, of course, did not look at the date on the penny, instead he noted, aloud, that a penny wasn’t worth much.
---“You could never have a million dollars if you didn’t start with a single cent.”
---The manager’s First Memory of his Grandfather Machine was when the old man, wheel chair bound from a war wound, handed him a penny. His grandfather had given him 1948 pennies on every birthday. The manager was born in 1948. It was the only birthday present his grandfather ever gave him. Not that the old man was stingy, he was quite generous at Christmas, and usually bought the boy several presents. But for every birthday it was only that penny. At seventeen the boy was outraged at another penny, one can guess what his grandfather told him.
---No, in fact that never happened.
---Not at all. Not ever.
---Johnny would be able to tell you because he could remember that the van had passed straight through town and out the other side. It didn’t even stop for gas. He would have been able to tell you the license plate number, if he had not been too far away to read it. And he was.
---But Johnny was thinking about memory, trying to remember the way that people talked about it. He tried to remember how to remember. He thought about how remembering seemed later when he was remembering it.

---There were the Old Machines that sat on the porch outside the small coffee shop in the center of town. They would be there for the early morning senior breakfast and they would be reading their papers or drinking their coffee, smoking pipes of smooth dark wood. These things always made them seem like props in an old movie, and some of them had vague accents. Hints of England or France or some other imaginary places called Norway or Denmark. They were men that had escaped from the war torn countries and moved from the Old World to the New World, Johnny was told when he was younger. He thought that the Machines must be old because they were from the Old World. Just as he was new, and was from the New World.
---But these Machines were young then, as they remembered it. And they had come for some sort of solace for a new life with all the scars on their memory that they would ever need. Some of them had scar tissue so thick in their memories that the could not remember certain things that Johnny new had happened to them.
---There had been lovers, and women with silk stockings and knee length dresses, with sensible handbags and carefully pinned hair. There had been nights out dancing to big band music at the USO. They remember nights here and there. One of them remembered every bar fight he had been in during the war. He had been in bar fights in thirty different bars in nine different countries, and he was ready to admit that to anyone willing to listen. Most of the fights he started himself, and only a few had to do with women. More of them had to do with not having enough alcohol or someone looking at him cross-eyed. The way he told the story you were sure that he could still feel the wool jacket on his arms, and see the glint of polished brass and freshly shined shoes.
---If you looked at the old men close enough you could see the young men in them. Handsome young men that had been fiery and eager and had their own version of The Spot, and who were somewhat preoccupied with life and making babies in 1948.
---There were other men, younger men, some were even younger than Johnny’s father, even they had war memories. But it was a different war and a different place.
---It was the war memories that he liked to listen to most. They seemed more real, though he knew they were more a composite. It was the memories that seemed the least possible that probably were. It was ungodly to try and understand how any of them found peace in their own heads.
---At 54 Willow Lane there is a woman who sits drinking tea, and thinking about her childhood. Her husband is dead and her children have gone away to school or to live lives of their own. Thinking of the possibility of grand kids she remembers the days when she walked four blocks to school alone. What is it that makes her think about those days? The strangest thing about Memory Machines is that no one is exactly sure why it is that they remember what they remember.
---She wishes she could live those days again. She tries to tell herself that she can live those days again any time she pleases if she just shuts her eyes. In the darkness she tries to see those days again, the sidewalk and the cold blue winter sky. She can smell the road dust, she can smell the plants. She can smell a smell that is nothing but the memory itself, some mixture of soap, detergent, shampoo and everything else in the air. The smell of her lunch in the small lunch box swinging in her hand. The weight. The way the cold bites at her cheeks and her ears. Wind on her legs as she walks. The house when she arrives home, which is empty because her father is at work and her mother is out with the car doing this or doing that.
---She is crying now, because she can not walk down those same roads again. The roads themselves have changed since then. The cars that drive by are not the same cars, and she no longer lives there. There would be no point to walk there except to remember and she doesn’t seem to want to remember. Walking those roads she would remember that those times were past. She would have to remember that she was only remembering. Thinking about the friends she had and the things she did she makes herself tea and turns on the radio, maybe this will make it easier to remember things.
---All through the town there are men like the old men on the porch, and woman like the woman at 54 Willow Lane.
---This is not the only town with Machines like this. Machines made here have drifted to other places, and they think about this time sometimes or never. It really just depends on the Machine.
---Johnny will soon become a Machine that is sad. He will be one of the Memory Machines that turns into a Sad Machine, a Drinking Machine, a Fucking Machine. A Machine that does one thing well. A Machine that only wants to do one thing. Johnny will become one of the great Self-Destruct Machines. He will do something brilliant, he will be an artist or a rock star, and he will then fall into the world of drugs and he will become a junky machine, and his Memories will be laced with drugs, and his dreams will be laced with hallucinations.
---These Machines are not breaking.