66.

I catch the #4 tram from the Hauptplatz towards Carnerigasse, as I’ve done all my life—or as I’ve done for exactly the past year and no longer. The tram rattles towards Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Kai and the waterfront of the river Mur, skirting the bottom of the Schloßberg with its pathways and tunnels, its steps and funicular railway, the clock tower with the hands that don’t mean what you think they’ll mean. All these things are so familiar to me, they feel like the memories of a lifetime.

Is it possible—is it conceivable—that I was born in Sydney and not Graz, that it was in Sydney that my parents taught me how to read the book with the caterpillar and the watermelon, that nobody ever tried to teach me to read German or to speak it, they only taught me English—or Australian? Is it possible that I did see the whale with my own eyes, not in the Mur where no whale has ever been, but in the marvellous Sydney Harbour where the whales are known to come and play in the water by the Opera House—the Sydney Opera House, not the Graz Oper? Is it conceivable that perhaps hardly more than a year ago I travelled with my backpack to San Francisco and signed up for proof-of-concept testing with an Internet startup that tried to read the memories from my brain? Backpackers do a lot of risky things, particularly for money. And I do own a backpack, though I have no memory of taking it anywhere.

Could I have met Kirsten Taylor at the eMonic.com campus or basement and become involved with her? Was it her on the side of the hill with the American biplanes dogfighting above us, was it not the Schloßberg at all but some Californian hill topped by a monument like our Uhrturm? Maybe I’ve seen a hill like that in a movie. But if it was her—is it possible that she could have somehow pressed the wrong button or tripped over the wrong cord and—I don’t know—erased my memory instead of preserving it? The mind and the memory are complicated indeed, as Professor Womble told me—perhaps a memory can’t be copied, only moved. Really? And then—and this is where the tram seems to be rattling off its tracks, off the surface of the earth, as we leave the river and scream up Körösistraße—is it all conceivable, is it at all imaginable that Kirsten—or someone else at eMonic.com, more likely someone else—could have realised what had happened, seen my memories vanish into the electronic void, and tried to replace my memories with information from the Internet—reversing the process—putting back something like what they had taken? And after all that could it really happen, in any of the universes we know or can posit, that someone could be so stupid or careless—or panicked and guilty—that when uploading all the information they thought I might have had or found useful, when telling the data crawlers where to begin repopulating my neurons, they mistook Austria for Australia? Read it wrong or typed it wrong? Or just didn’t know the difference? No. No. Surely not. Not even in America.

No, I’m just being paranoid. Nobody dumped me here in Austria with a suitcase full of money and the wrong memories—or not even memories but a bunch of random facts and statistics, low-resolution images, perhaps the odd movie or animation that my brain had to work at, to weave together into memories, maybe tapping into the echoing spaces where my real memories used to be, where the ghosts of my strongest memories might have held on for longer than the rest. No, that didn’t happen. No strange interaction between the scorched memory centre of my brain and the relatively unscathed but baffled language centre, my Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas. None of that. Maybe I’ve got a tumour, that sounds much more likely, that’s why I speak English with an Australian accent and can’t remember things clearly enough and kidnap tree-kangaroos and have paranoid thoughts about Internet companies stealing my brainwaves. It must be a tumour.

I decide I’m going to take Bennett back to the zoo tomorrow, he won’t survive if my tumour gets the better of me.

• 18/11/08
• Arquivos

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