Novelties & Souvenirs by John Crowley Page A

mean your eight-thousand-hour guarantee. If we had gone tape or conventional, how much room would it take up? If the access concept caught on. A lot of room. So we went vapor-trap and endless-tracking. Size of my thumbnail. It’s all in the literature.” He looked at me strangely. I had a sudden intense sensation that I was being fooled, tricked, that the man before me in his smock was no expert, no technician; he was a charlatan, or maybe a madman impersonating a director and not belonging here at all. It raised the hair on my neck, and passed. “So the randomness,” he was saying. “It was an effect of going molecular. Brownian movement. All you do is lift the endless-tracking for a microsecond and you get a rearrangement at the molecular level. We don’t randomize. The molecules do it for us.”
    I remembered Brownian movement, just barely, from physics class. The random movement of molecules, the teacher said; it has a mathematical description. It’s like the movement of dust motes you see swimming in a shaft of sunlight, like the swirl of snowflakes in a glass paperweight that shows a cottage being snowed on. “I see,” I said. “I guess I see.”
    “Is there,” he said, “any other problem?” He said it as though there might be some other problem and that he knew what it might be and that he hoped I didn’t have it. “You understand the system, key lock, two bars, ACCESS , RESET ….”
    “I understand,” I said. “I understand now.”
    “Communing,” he said, standing, relieved, sure I would be gone soon. “I understand. It takes a while to relax into the communing concept.”
    “Yes,” I said. “It does.”
    I wouldn’t learn what I had come to learn, whatever that was. The Wasp had not been good at storage after all, no, no better than my young soul had been. Days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye. It hadn’t seen well, and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the unforgettable than my own eye had been. No better and no worse—the same.
    And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh, look, hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.
    The sun was setting when I left The Park, the satin sea foaming softly, randomly around the rocks.
    I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred and was past.
    It was two years, nearly, since Georgie had died: two years until, for the first and last time, I wept for her; for her, and for myself.
     
    Of course I went back. After a lot of work and correctly placed dollars, I netted a HAPpy card of my own. I had time to spare, like a lot of people then, and often on empty afternoons (never on Sunday) I would get out onto the unpatched and weed-grown freeway and glide up the coast. The Park was always open. I relaxed into the communing concept.
    Now, after some hundreds of hours spent there underground, now when I have long ceased to go through those doors (I have lost my key, I think; anyway I don’t know where to look for it), I know that the solitude I felt myself to be in was real. The watchers around me, the listeners I sensed in other chambers, were mostly my imagination. There was rarely anyone there. These tombs were as neglected as any tombs anywhere usually are. Either the living did not care to attend much on the dead—when have they ever?—or the hopeful buyers of the contracts had come to discover the flaw in the access concept: as I discovered it, in the end.
    ACCESS , and she takes dresses one by one from her closet, and holds them against her body, and studies the effect in a tall mirror, and puts them back again. She had a funny face, which she never made except when looking at herself in the mirror, a