Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

4 Interviews of Importance ^{Malka Older}

THEN THE NOTIFICATION WENT OFF, A SHORT MINOR-KEY MELODY, AND CHELA FELT the usual pang of surprise and sorrow, although she was fairly sure she knew who it would be.

She picked up her phone and checked. Yes, the ninety-eight-year-old, the registered nurse and great-grandmother, had died. Not unexpected, but still sad.

Elder Resources talked a good game about recognizing the necessary emotional complexities of the work, and they were allowed to—really allowed to, and not discouraged—wait a few days before opening a new client relationship, but Chela preferred to set one up right away and then take a little time before the first interaction to psych herself up. She pulled up the app and spun the simulated wheel.

Chela thought, as she did every time she fired up the app, about how much they must have spent on user experience. It was just a randomizer; there was no need for a pretty colored wheel that clicked so satisfyingly as it turned. Compensation, she imagined, for the rest of the process being distinctly low tech. Everyone wanted a fancy solution, something new, and so even when the obvious answer was just talk to people they tacked on technological frills and furbelows to get you to do it.

Regardless of the reasoning behind it, there was a sensual pleasure in the design, the spin of the randomizer, the palette, the pacing. And then she had been assigned an elder to refill her portfolio.

A man. Chela wished they would let her filter by gender, but no. Eighty-seven, no major health issues but some recent cardiovascular concerns that would have moved him up the list. He had lived in Boston his entire life. Chela usually loved listening to people who had moved around, but there was a certain interest in the view of a single place over a long stretch of changing times.

Bueno. No point in delaying it. She pinged with an appointment request. A few seconds later he called. Of course.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Hello, this is your Elder Resources interviewer. I was hoping to set up a time to talk.”

“Sure, now’s fine, nothing else to do.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do it right now.” Chela didn’t have another appointment, but she needed to prepare herself. She needed to know when it was going to happen, build up to it, settle herself first with her routine. And she needed to set the tone from the start, control access to herself. She was so grateful that the interactions were anonymized both ways.

“Then why did you call me?”

“To set up an appointment.” Practice had made Chela smoother at this, no longer inclined to argue the fact that she hadn’t, in fact, called, only sent a message. She knew her irritation was unfair. Who knew how she would manage with newer technologies when she was eighty-seven?

The man was still grumbling. “An interview, as if anyone cared what I thought.”

“We care,” Chela said, with a fixed stare to get herself through it. We, a kind of we that might not include her individual I.

No, that wasn’t true. She did care. Or, at least, she found it mildly interesting. “And it’s not just what you think. It’s what you remember. What you’ve seen. What you want to contribute that maybe no one is listening to.”

“You’re only asking me because I might die.” There was an extra querulousness in his voice for that, and his fear opened up a welcome path to sympathy.

“I might die, and nobody’s interviewing me. Anyone might. That’s not why we’re requesting an interview with you. It’s because your long memories are rare and useful.” She didn’t know yet whether he in fact had long memories. She had interviewed some people who couldn’t tell her much of anything about their childhood or young adulthood, others who’d recalled movies as their own history. And she didn’t know if the memories would be useful. But there was no reliable way to find out without trying.

“Not so rare as all that,” he mumbled, but he agreed to a time two days hence.

Why did some people not want to be interviewed? Yes, there was the whole reminder-of-mortality thing—would have been very fashionable in the Middle Ages or whenever those skull paperweights had been trendy—but it seemed more than that. An ingrained reticence about seeming to demand attention? Some old-fashioned notion of privacy? The recordings were fully anonymized if people asked, but most didn’t.

The interviews were what everyone thought of when they thought about Elder Resources, this new agency in every local government and at the federal level. It wasn’t supposed to be the most important part of their mandate, at least not when the program had been designed, shortly after the pandemic. The goal had been to create a network connecting elders with working-age people, both to reduce loneliness and isolation (supposedly among the elders, although Chela thought that was also what some of her colleagues got out of the job) and to have some early warning and support for vulnerable people in any kind of future disaster. Then there had been the additional consideration of technological competence for the elderly: the new measures for digital democracy required people to feel comfortable conversing, debating, and ultimately voting virtually, and the user interface for the network had mimicked the one used for civic participation.

It had been a grand idea, one of the sweeping policy innovations that had come out after the crisis, ticking off the objectives of valuing the elderly and creating jobs and community preparedness and democracy. And then the misinformation had hit. Suddenly everyone was asking why the government wanted to track old people (as if that weren’t thoroughly answered in the policy paper and legislative documents!). People posted indignant comments about other people letting themselves be controlled by government agendas. The phrase death panels resurfaced. There were suggestions that anyone who let their parents enroll in the program didn’t care enough about them to take care of their elders themselves. Predictably enough, participation plummeted, as did the energy of the employees. Even Chela’s mother had asked her—cautiously, because they were having a lot of fights about politics at that time—whether she was sure she wanted to work for Elder Resources.

Somehow, though, the interview component had escaped most of the opprobrium. Maybe because the interviews were a one- or two-time thing, instead of an ongoing relationship. Maybe people liked talking about themselves more than they liked the idea of someone keeping tabs on them. In any case, at this point, seven years later, Elder Resources was almost exclusively associated in the public’s mind with the interview portion of the program; the networks still existed, but the agency focused its public communications on the interviews and how they “preserved knowledge for the future.”

Chela had been trying to persuade her own mother to do an interview for months, and the vieja always put her off. She wasn’t on the roster yet, since Chela’s mother was (thankfully), at sixty-two, not considered remotely urgent, but anyone could request an interview.

“Mmm, I don’t know, I don’t really see the point,” her mother said, and Chela felt like kicking her.

“It’s only my entire thankless underpaid job that is predicated on there being a point to this, Mami.”

“Claro, claro, that’s not what I meant. It’s a lovely thing you’re doing, you know I think that.”

Chela did not know that. Even after she had (more or less) convinced her mother that Elder Resources was not an evil, exploitative conspiratorial government surveillance operation, she still reliably made a face whenever Chela mentioned it.

“Es que I just don’t know what I have to say that should be recorded for posterity. Lots of people lived like me.”

“Not all of them are getting their stories told, Mami.” Chela had explained it to her so many times: how the priority was given to the oldest and the chronically ill. A lot of people got missed, their stories lost until it was too late, which was exactly what the network was supposed to mitigate… but no use crying over that at this point. “They do adjust somewhat for different life expectancies for historically oppressed groups.” That was the usual term these days; Chela had expounded often on how the oppression was not just historical. “But not enough, and definitely not a granular enough level to account for—”

Her mother usually interrupted her before she could list some of the conditions that could exacerbate standardized categories—displacement by violent national upheaval, poverty-wage work, poverty-wage nutrition, child-bearing and -rearing—and eventually Chela had twigged to the fact that her mother didn’t enjoy being reminded of her own diminished life expectancy.

Which was reasonable enough.

Still, though.

“Your perspective is so important. We don’t hear from enough people like you—”

“I know, I know, because we fall apart before you can get to us.”

“—precisely because you’ve all been taught to believe your voice is unimportant! None of you want to talk about it because you think your lives are boring or trivial, but—” and Chela had to stop before blurting out how much she wished she could better understand her mother’s life, how frightened she was of losing her before she could.

“I just think they should be paying you more,” her mother said with classic tangentiality.

“They should, but nobody else is going to, so why should they?” Chela responded almost automatically. She didn’t know what strand of disinformation was making her mother so resistant to being interviewed, and she didn’t have the strength to attempt a debunking right now, so they might as well rehash her salary expectations again.

THE INTERVIEW WITH THE EIGHTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD MAN WENT ABOUT AS EXPECTED. Chela’s avatar was designed to be noticeably not video—a slightly stylized line drawing, like a filter set over the video—but it still showed her reactions and expressions in real time, allowing for nonverbal encouragement. She couldn’t see her own avatar, though, because it would always match the respondent’s in race; ergo, if she saw it, she would know the race of the person she was talking to. Not that it was hard to figure out, if she cared to. She probably could make a statistically certain guess if she bothered to track the demographics of the various neighborhoods he had moved into and out of throughout his eighty-seven years in the Greater Boston area. But she had a pretty good idea already and it didn’t matter enough to her to confirm it.

He started about as antagonistic as she had expected from their earlier conversation. “I hope this is worth my time. And my tax dollars!”

Chela did not say that the last time they spoke he had said he had nothing else to do, did not point out that as a retiree he was on the benefitting side of taxes. “Sir, do you participate in ElderWheel?” She already knew he did, so she didn’t have to wait for his affirmative grunt. “Have you benefitted from the Supporting Aged Independent Life Act? Both of those initiatives came directly from ideas and information collected during interviews like these, and they might not have become reality without the accumulated data we collected about the needs and preferences of the elderly.”

“Well, I suppose…”

“Did you talk to elders when you were younger?”

“Well… my parents and other relatives, I suppose. Never really had much call to barge in on other old people.”

I made an appointment! Chela screamed internally. “This program gives younger people like me the opportunity to connect with and learn from our elders, even without a family relationship and in perfect anonymity.” She had said this so often that she didn’t even have to think about it—and this was the extra, extra pitch. People really did hate being interviewed.

“I guess. What is it you want to know about, anyway?” the old man asked, suspicious.

So predictable. If it weren’t for the fact that most of them loved it once they got into it, that so many of them showed her explicitly or implicitly how much they appreciated the conversation, Chela probably would have quit by now. “We want to hear about the conditions of your life, the context, what was going on in your neighborhoods and city when you were younger, as well as anything you want to share with the future.” She phrased it as soothingly as she could (not saying, for example, tell us what you would want to tell your grandkids if they cared to listen to you), although that last bit was always dicey. Hard to refer to posterity without reminding people of death.

The old man was silent for a moment, and Chela spoke again. “If you have a story or impression you want to start with, we can do that.” Some people were primed to share, stuff they had told their grandkids a million times or maybe didn’t have any grandkids to tell. And then there were the other ones, who for one reason or another—dominance, the opposite of dominance—had been trained not to talk about themselves with any type of interiority, anything that might spark emotions. “But otherwise I have plenty of questions.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ll answer whatever you’ve got.”

So she got them started. There was a backbone (that was Elder Resources’ term, not Chela’s) of questions they had to ask everyone, but from there Chela had the latitude, or responsibility, to explore different avenues.

It had started out as latitude, when Chela was still excited about the job and the way it dovetailed with her grad school research, when she found everything interesting, when she believed in the whole Elder Resources concept, hoped it might fulfill itself like a fucking prophecy. Now she told herself it was a responsibility, that she had to do her job as well as she could, for professionalism if nothing else. Not that she didn’t still occasionally get interested enough in what some elder was telling her to want to explore more, but a lot of the time she had to remind herself not to rush through it.

She was trying not to get so calloused that she would forget about anything but the backbone.

“What’s the point of this, anyway?” The old man sounded restless, and Chela realized she probably hadn’t been giving the right cues (I’m interested, I care, this is fascinating and useful, tell me more) for the last few answers.

What was the point? Chela took a fortifying gulp of her now-cold espresso and a deep breath.

The old man, probably not realizing that she was about to speak, went on. “I mean, I understand the principle. People think that maybe what some old people knew, if we’d paid attention to it, could have prevented a lot of the stuff we’re dealing with now, or fixed things sooner, back when—but I mean, do you really think I hold the answer to any of the world’s problems?”

No, I don’t. But that self-deprecating note reminded Chela inescapably of her mother. “That’s not really what this organization is about.”

“It isn’t? But everyone says—”

“There’s a lot of misrepresentation.” That understatement explained their entire century. “Yes, it would be gratifying if these interviews were to result in some breakthrough—and it would certainly help with our budget. But our agency was founded by people who lost parents, or other elders, and wished they had spent more time with them, learned more from them. There’s value in your stories even if there’s no monetary value in them.”

The old man’s voice was gruff. “My kids don’t want to spend any more time with me than they have to.”

And probably had good reason for that. “Maybe they will someday.” Or maybe they will just want to learn about you without having to spend time with you. “Or maybe it will be nephews or nieces, or kids from the neighborhood. Or, maybe a historian studying the time of your youth, or a novelist writing a story set there. Who knows? But I’ll tell you something.” Chela lowered her voice to indicate truth, or rather, a secret, which most people believed was like truth. “I think your first idea was right too. We don’t know what the next threat is going to be or what might help, but based on the last few, it seems prudent to collect as much knowledge as we can.”

“All right, all right.” And by the end of the interview Chela had that tired but satisfied feeling of difficult work well done. The old comemierda even thanked her at the end, sort of. “Nice to talk to you. Nice conversation. Brought up some things I’d forgotten.”

Then she settled down to the solitary part of her job, the paperwork and coding of the topics he’d mentioned, so that future researchers could dig information out of the transcripts. She set an alarm to check in on the old man in a week, see if he was still ornery or if he was ready for the idea of joining the Elder Resources network and getting regular pings from her. She didn’t have any other calls that day, but she messaged some of the other elders in her portfolio, and got satisfying replies: all well, all well, talk next week. And she thought about her mother.

Chela wasn’t even sure why she was so insistent on getting her mother’s story. Surely not because of some commitment to her organization and its principles. Nor was it some emotional existential question like Who is my father? (she had heard plenty about that man from her mother, none of it good.)

There weren’t gaps, exactly. But there was a difference between knowing the outline and understanding why things had happened and what they felt like. Why had her mother left the island and taken the huge and dangerous step of immigrating? What had it been like when she arrived? What had she thought when her new country convulsed around her? Had she ever imagined going back? She had asked these questions a few times, but her mother always changed the subject or plain ignored her.

Chela had trawled through traces of her mother on the Internet, in search of this elusive understanding of the woman who knew her better than anyone. But the pickings had been sparse. Her mother’s Facebook account was mainly postings picked up from other people (including several very debunked viral bits about what to post on your wall to prevent Facebook from invading your privacy in whatever sneaky new way, with comments below from a younger Chela explaining that they were both false and useless) and a few back-and-forths with childhood friends from the island that never went beyond “Cómo estás, amiga?,” “Bien y tú?,” “Todo bien, cuídate,” “Que Dios te bendiga.” She had a Twitter account briefly but had used it only to retweet Chela and her sisters before letting it trail off into disuse. No, although her mother was theoretically a member of the social media generation, she had never entrusted the Internet with her thoughts and feelings and the record of her selfhood.

Good, thought Chela. But also bad. There were no diaries, no journals, no baby books; some photos, yes, but not very many, and fewer still once cameras had gone digital and phones had been successively lost or broken.

Where was her mother’s life? Where were her memories?

Only in her mother’s brain and body.

Where no technology in the world could get to them.

ON TUESDAY CHELA GOT AN EMAIL STATING THAT BUDGETS, DIFFICULT TIMES, high demand, and so on meant that all Elder Liaisons would need to add one person their portfolios. She could almost hear all of her colleagues groaning in near-simultaneity. Except she couldn’t hear them because she’d only ever met five of them, and those only virtually. For all she knew, the email was a lie and not everyone’s workload would increase; maybe it applied only to her.

But either way, Chela wasn’t planning to quit her job over one more relationship; might as well get on with it. She spun her randomizer, watched the colors trickle by (technological frills for non-technological solutions, etc., etc.).

A woman. Sixty-two years old.

It was like a thump to the stomach, the surprise and burst of excitement, and Chela tried to calm herself. So unlikely. So unlikely. There were thousands, tens of thousands of interviewers. The great re-employment scheme, some senator had called it, as if that were a bad thing. (Chela did wonder how many of the interviewers had any research training or experience at all, but maybe she was wrong; there were an awful lot of out-of-work postgraduates out there).

She checked the location: Maryland. Her heart beat faster.

Nothing else in the data, nothing about how long she had lived there or where she had moved from, or her profession.

It was possible.

She sent a ping for an appointment, wondering if it would be her mother’s voice calling her back to ask if they could start right away (surely her mother, after delaying so long, would be eager to get started?). Did they distort the voices? She had never thought to ask.

But the response was a laconic text message suggesting a date and time, and Chela accepted with a feeling of unreality.

She called her mother, as usual, during her lunch break and had to hold her tongue gently between her teeth a couple of times as a reminder not to bring up interviews.

“How is everything?” her mother asked.

“Fine.” Chela peered at the bottom of the screen, trying to make out what her mother was eating. “Is that a salad?”

“Chicken salad.” Her mother waved the fork. “Fake chicken, ya tú sabes, this new stuff they say is so much better for you, with all the vitamins and no sé qué added.”

Chela fought down a burst of panic. If her mother had decided to eat healthy and suddenly given in to doing the interview, that suggested something about her state of mind. Or her body. “Everything okay with you?”

“Oh sure. Busy.”

“Nothing new, um…” How to ask? “Any reason you’re eating so sensibly?”

Her mother laughed. “No, hija, this was the special of the day, I figured I’d try it.” She made a face. “Fake meat. I can try it once.”

“And?”

Another mueca. “Fine.” In the not-fine sense, clearly. Chela sighed. One more technological solution failing in the face of personal preference and habitual behavior. She searched for another topic. Don’t ask her about doing an interview, you talked about it last week, it would be weird to bring it up again so soon, don’t mention interviews…

“How’s work?” her mother asked, and Chela jumped, but her mother’s eyes were on something else—another app? A telenovela playing in the back room of her shop where she ate?—and it was almost certainly a ritual question requiring only a ritual answer.

“Fine.” Not-fine. Her mother didn’t seem to notice.

MOST PEOPLE WHO ACCESSED THE INTERVIEW ARCHIVES WERE LOOKING FOR someone specific: a parent, grandparent, another relative. If they could prove the relationship, they could access the file by name. With other search criteria—a location and a place, for example—they could get detailed but anonymized accounts. There was also a function allowing for randomized snippets, an attempt to make the whole thing a bit more fun and social-media palatable.

Maybe some researcher would extract some life-changing, otherwise missed bit of knowledge from the archive someday, but Chela kept thinking about the people who went in trying to find their relatives. Did they feel satisfied after listening to their family stories told to someone else? Did they feel loved? Loving? Guilty? Wronged?

How would she feel if her mother was only willing to tell her story when she thought she was telling it to someone else?

Maybe she already had? Chela checked the archives, but there was nothing under her mother’s name.

SHE WAS FLUTTERY BEFORE HER INTERVIEW WITH THE SIXTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD WOMAN from Maryland. Surely she would know immediately whether it was her mother, even if her voice was distorted? There had to be enough details in the early part of the interview for her to figure it out. On the other hand, how many sixty-two-year-old immigrant women lived in Maryland? A lot. How much did their experiences overlap? Probably quite a bit. Would there be enough specifics in the backbone questions for her to be sure? Would it be latitude or responsible professionalism if she asked the questions that would confirm it?

Chela initiated the call and waited for the response. It was the first time she had ever really wanted to see her avatar; she didn’t want to be wasting all this time stressing over some white woman who had nothing to do with her.

No answer. Chela panicked, called her mother, then realized what she was doing and hung up.

Her mother called her back ten minutes later. “¿Qué pasó? I was busy but then I saw your call.”

“Nothing,” Chela said. “Butt dial.” A desperately anachronistic concept, but her mother had loved the idiom when she discovered it, back when Chela was a teenager, and they still used it for that reason.

The (other?) sixty-two-year-old woman called her back two hours later. “I’m so sorry, I forgot, is now okay?” Would Chela’s mother be so flustered about missing something? Maybe for a stranger. Was it her mother’s voice, distorted? She wasn’t sure.

Normally Chela would have said no and insisted on rescheduling, but she was so worked up she thought it better to get it over with. “No problem, these things happen.” Soothing, that was her interviewing persona. Her mother would never recognize her in it.

There was a silence. It was time for Chela to do her intro talk. Instead she blurted out: “Why did you request an interview?”

She held her breath, waiting for the woman to say my silly daughter works with you and she kept bugging me until I decided to just get it done and then maybe won’t she get a surprise when I tell her triumphantly I did it. But the woman sighed and said, “I don’t know. I have some things to say. Sometimes it’s easier to tell these things to a stranger.”

Yes, that could be the reason, Chela thought, even as she made a note to offer this woman who might or might not be her mother the list of therapists provided by the organization, with a special note on those who practiced the talk therapy. That could be why Mami wouldn’t tell me. Meanwhile, the sixty-two-year-old was off, talking about her life and her difficulties and her long-ago childhood. She was an excellent subject, verbose but clear, with interesting stories from an interesting if unremarkable life, and she wasn’t Chela’s mother.

EVEN SO, WHEN SHE CALLED HER MOTHER THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCH TIME, SHE FOUND herself expecting at every conversational turn for her mother to come out and say Guess what? I did the interview you’ve always been wanting me to do.

“Mami,” she said when she couldn’t take it anymore. “Why don’t you want to do the interview?”

Her mother, who had been telling her some story about her prima Graciela and her kids, stopped and looked at her. “Hija, if it means that much to you, I’ll do it.”

Inside her head, Chela screamed. Of course it means that much to me, I’ve been asking you to do it for months, how could you not notice? “I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to,” she said, calmly. At least, she hoped she sounded calm. “But I don’t understand why you won’t. All those things you’ve been through…” Chela paused, searching for examples, for the right examples. “When we were kids, and you had to deal with the pandemic, all by yourself. Or when you came to this country, and found a job, and what that was like. Or when there was that riot here, and you were working the whole day and couldn’t get home, had to sleep at the shop at night… Those things are important. Don’t you want us to know about them?”

“Ay, hija,” her mother said on a long sigh. “Don’t you know, these things, they are not so easy for me to talk about?”

Chela didn’t know. Of all the reasons she had imagined for her mother not talking to her, the idea that it was difficult, painful even, had never occurred to her.

“I didn’t think you needed to know those things. I thought you just wanted me to do this thing for your work.”

“No, Mami!” Chela almost yelled it. “I don’t need you to do that for my work, I wanted to know for myself! So I could understand.”

Her mother dabbed at her eyes, and fussed, peering at the screen to check her mascara. “Look now, I can’t cry here, I have to go back out to work.”

“I’m sorry, Mami,” Chela said. “I just want to understand you, and—”

“And you want me to tell all this to some stranger who will record it in a machine, so that other people can listen to it whenever they want to, for posterity you say?”

“You don’t have to,” Chela said, forlorn, and also a tiny bit resentful that she had been put in the wrong so effectively.

But her mother went on: “If you want to know about those things, of course I’ll tell you. If you want you can even record us talking or qualquier cosa que haces. But I don’t want to talk about all of this to strangers.”

“Of course, Mami, of course I’ll do it with you.” Chela was sniffing now too, and thinking about how she would show her mami the way the app worked for her, the spinning colors of the randomization, so unnecessary and so pleasurable; the mystery of the avatar; the coding, even. But probably her mother wouldn’t care enough to pay attention to all those minutiae, probably she was exaggerating what it would be like, as usual, pinning her hopes up too high. “When’s a good time? We—we can even do it in sections if you like, if you don’t have time to get through it all at once. Should I come over?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we could do it like this, on a call, instead? It might be easier.”

Chela swallowed her disappointment. Her mother needed the distance. Since she was making the effort to talk about things she didn’t want to talk about, it seemed only fair.

“But tell me, hija, why do you care so much? You know all these things that happened.”

Chela held back it’s my job because that was only partly true and because she wanted to meet her mother’s willingness to talk about herself at least halfway. “I might not know all the things, and anyway I’m sure we remember them differently,” she said, aiming for a reasonable tone. “Also…” This was harder. “I guess… I listen to old people’s stories all the time. I want to hear yours.”

“It’s not going to be so exciting,” her mother grumbled. “You are imagining me much more important than I am.”

And Chela told her mother what she would have liked to be able to say to every elder as she interviewed them. “No one is more important than you are.”