The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer

by Janelle Monáe

Deep breaths. Dreams aren’t memories. They are memories’ voices.”

Her apartment smells of burnt coffee and burnt tires and the sage they burn to mask the first two.

Without words, communicating only in the fragments and symbols of their singing unconscious, they build something they both long for. A city for everyone, not just the few New Dawn deems valuable. Graffiti leaping off of the downtown financial high-rises; Skee slinging margaritas on the esplanade; a tiny woman rapping so hard sweat slides down her face while the white boys who harassed Seshet the other day are lined up behind her, bound and blindfolded. Seshet has never felt anything like this raw creative energy before. She doesn’t understand how she lived without it all these years. Dreams are better than memories; they bite.

More than a week of remixed Nevermind seems to have rewired her synapses, opened paths she’d never dreamed existed within herself.

eidetic

soporific

She’d been willing to accept so much wrong with New Dawn for the sake of the promise of safety, of control. But there is no safety here, certainly not within those golden walls.

She wants control, she always has. For a week, she thought she could relax her grip around Alethia. She was wrong.

Now, is that a drug or a bomb?”

She pops the remix and slides into her dreams like a warrior, ready to do battle. She’s found her anger again, that molten hot, emboldening thing, though she’s not sure who most deserves it.

suborning

“IT’S NO ONE PERSON,” DOC YOUNG TOLD HER. “THIS GENERATION of kids growing up with remixed Nevermind and recollectors everywhere, their brains are wired a little different.

At first it was a game. But it’s more serious now, isn’t it? Now it might be revolution. But what do I know? I’m getting too old for this. I think this will be my last season. I don’t want to die a Torch.”

And now she’s in her office again, more alone than she has ever been. Alethia has left a dozen messages on their private channel, but Seshet doesn’t check them. Dee is shut down, silent as death. Jordan wasn’t even in the clerks’ office. She has no friends. Her life was the obelisk, and the obelisk is a lie. She has always known that, but she thought that its lie could be in the service of the greater good.

Of course, officially we at New Dawn frown on homosexuality, but it’s not a problem at our level. No one’s going to call the Minneapolis Director a dirty computer, no matter who she sleeps with! In fact, a little grit in our systems makes us stronger. We’ve been worried, to be honest, watching you hole yourself away up here. You’re a paragon of virtue, but virtue needs to bend sometimes, or it might break. You understand that, right?”

What were her paltry dreams of control, compared to this white man’s bulldozer of self-assurance?

limned

Was that enough? Had she changed enough? Were their good memories enough, if their bad memories couldn’t ever be erased? But isn’t that what life had been like before the Repository, before New Dawn? Whatever choices you made, you couldn’t just erase your own knowledge of them. You had to live with them until you died.

In the hard, old way of forgetting, which is remembering with grief.

If Seshet’s heart is breaking, why can’t she stop laughing?

Maybe even enough of a risk to love a reformed Memory Librarian learning, too late, to let go?

to plant her hands and her heat in the soil and hope to find her roots,

The sterile walls, the way numbered names and faces stood over her as if to comfort, as if to assure her that clean was the only thing she could ever want, desire. Cleanse the dirtiness from her mind, her lips, her tongue, the way her thighs moved, so that then—and only then—she would be something holy. But it was the dirt in between her fingers now that was real, not their lights and dictates. Not the dirt they perceived. She reminded herself of the dirt before her, under her—the real dirt—of the way it shifted in her hands; at her fingertips it was suddenly smooth and cold, the slab they’d placed her on in that New Dawn facility. Around her wrists, dirt tightened, the straps that they’d held her down with, and she remembered that fighting against these would be fighting against the flow of memory, not New Dawn acolytes.

the gas New Dawn had used to try to clean her body of her soul and her memories.

Do you want me to remind you? Or do you want to let it grow yourself?” Jane wanted to seed the memory herself, wanted to push it to grow and take root and never ever let anyone pluck it away again. She took a deep breath, though; she welcomed Neer’s guidance, welcomed the way that Neer cataloged every story that Jane thought needed remembering. Healthy plants often had a caring gardener. Even as she was frustrated with herself for needing someone else.

“And when the gas of Nevermind threatened to come back, there was always the dirt. The solid dirt in the Cave that the Pynk Hotel shared with me, to heal.”

New Dawn labeled her a dirty computer, and so there was a certain satisfaction in this dirt saving her. It would outlast any attempt of theirs to “clean” her, to scrub away her memories.

“The dirt is still good, Neer.” “It always is.”

Foolishness, leaving it as a problem for future her to pick through. At the time, though, it had made so much sense. The past can be like that.

even nicer was the fact that it had been years since Jane had last woken up panicked because she couldn’t feel Zen beside her—or worse, couldn’t recall the beautiful dirtiness of what it felt like to be in her arms.

Once put together, their outfits were castoff couture meets salvaged streetwear, their personalities and energy on display in every piece.

Everyone had their own schedule, their own things to do for the community—whether it be farming or salvage, in addition to the creative pursuits that filled their days—but it was uncommon for quite this much of the hotel to be awake this early.

Ché and Zen had gotten very good at helping figure out whether they had to rescue someone or avoid a trap—and had even managed to dirty up a few of the cleansed in the process.

Having escaped New Dawn and brought more so-called dirty computers to the hotel over time, Jane had grown into a position of leadership at the hotel. Not intentionally, and she certainly wasn’t in charge—things were decided by the committee, by the Chord coming to harmony via vote—but she knew her way around the hotel and, more important, the world outside of it in a different way from most. She was wary of what the smell of legendary and heroic could do, and gently sidestepped anything that resembled authority. She was happy to be a counselor, an adviser, and voted along with the rest of the conclave.

All the groups had something else in common, aside from uniting as queer and woman-aligned: they’d sought out an escape from a world that dealt in painful binaries, in good or bad, dirty or clean. Everyone at the Pynk Hotel was here to experiment with art, with freedom, with life, and whatever that meant for them. It was why Jane could heal here, and why Jane stayed. There was so much self-discovery and reflection with healing the scars that New Dawn left, and New Dawn had made sure to create a world outside the hotel where few people had the freedom for either. Here, those were encouraged and supported in a way that Jane had always dreamed of. It was hard not to think about what made Pynk a safe place

Fear stabbed her momentarily, but as was typically the case with her, it mutated quickly to righteous anger.

“It shouldn’t be any single person’s responsibility. We are all notes in the chord, and without it, the sound doesn’t work.”

She didn’t like to use the word forget when she didn’t have to, when it wasn’t literal.

Pick something that calls to you, that feels right on your skin. Wear it or deconstruct it, they told her. Make it into something new. And when it doesn’t feel right anymore, we pass it along.

a mini documentary. A memory of a memory.

I’m saying that we don’t need a single person sacrificing themselves. That’s not very . . . Pynk of you.”

“What if sometimes . . . everything is too much?” Jane blinked, surprised. “We’re not too much. Never too much. Who we are and what we feel can’t be too much. Might feel that way sometimes, but it isn’t true.”

It was cruel, how trauma made her remember now when she needed to be present, when getting lost in the past could get her dragged back

Tell me about where you’re sitting, Jane. Jane didn’t understand. You keep talking about the past. Tell me what the seat feels like now. Jane struggled to find the sensations of the present while wondering what stories of the past her mouth rambled about.

How much present had happened just now that Jane wasn’t awake for?

“How’d you figure out how to speak to me?” Neer put their hands back on the steering wheel, starting the car up. “You were talking to Ché and Zen, but not . . . You’ve had me hold on to your stories for you, Jane. All these memories . . . you trust me to know when you’re mixing them up.”

“When I got here,” Jane said carefully, “the second time . . . it was a relief. My head was still foggy with Nevermind, but there’s so much support here that I could still move forward. I was still free, and Zen and Ché were okay. We could create art and make love and help others do the same.”

“I needed grounding. I needed to just remember what I want to remember, not everything that floods in when I think about New Dawn.”

“Plants have a lot of roots that spread out wide sometimes. I figure it’s kind of like that.”

The only thing that matters is that we remember.”