The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

KEN LIU The Cleaners

Gui’s father ran the cleaning shop for twenty years before Gui was born, and then another twenty after. This wasn’t a place that laundered dresses and starched shirts; people went there and paid to get rid of unwanted memories. A neighborhood institution, really.

When Gui took over, a year earlier, he had closed the doors for a week and cleaned the place from top to bottom, scrubbing every square inch. Even when you were a professional cleaner, layers of memories accumulated in the place you grew up. What was the point of keeping around riddles with no answers, locks with no keys? When the doors reopened a week later, there was a new sign over them: A FRESH START.

Other businesses along Pleasant Street in East Cradock, Massachusetts, had come and gone every few years, reflecting the advancing and receding tides of the economy: Brazilian grocery store, thrift shop, travel agency, computer repairer, tax preparer, bank branch (that later turned into the offices for a trio of bankruptcy lawyers), thrift shop again (that also promised to help you sell things online) . . . but this place had hung on like the mussels clinging to the pier down by the beach. Now it was bracketed on one side by James’s Tactical Supplies and on the other by A-Maze Escapes. Whatever the trendy currents were for how people wanted to spend their money, there was always the need to scrub off unpleasant mind-sheddings, to become a different person.

The woman entered the shop on a chilly February Monday morning, the snow outside frozen in dirty gray clumps. He judged her to be fortysomething. Her coat, bright orange, ragged and lumpy, was zipped tight like a suit of armor. Her frizzy red hair was tied up in a messy bun that left her gaunt face unframed. Her brows were furrowed in a way that reminded Gui of the tracks left by seagulls on a deserted winter beach.

She hesitated for a moment before approaching the counter. “I have a big job for you.”

Gui waited, holding her gaze. He had found that being only twenty-one meant that customers didn’t always trust him right away. If he said nothing and allowed the awkward silence to stretch out between them, taut and brittle, customers tended to interpret his reticence as the gravity of experience.

“I’ve never done this,” she said, putting her hands on the counter supplicatingly. He noticed that she didn’t wear gloves: not afraid of the pain of others, or, more likely, just inured.

Gui nodded, retrieved a sheet of rates and terms, and pushed it toward her. He waited while the woman read it over.

“You don’t do walls and carpets?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I’m a one-man operation. Whatever you need cleaned has to fit in my truck. I do everything here.”

People rarely asked for whole-house cleanings unless they had something to hide or if it was for an estate sale. His parents had done many estates, but Gui refused them on principle.

“Just as well,” she said. “I probably can’t afford a house-wide scouring anyway. But we—​he had a lot of things.”

So someone had died. He thought about refusing, but something about the way she held herself, alone but resolute, made him want to help. Besides, she wasn’t wearing gloves. Didn’t seem like the fussy type.

“I can work through a lot if you’re willing to wait,” he said. “But I only do complete scourings. No selective washes.”

Estates were among the most delicate and difficult of professional cleaning jobs. It wasn’t the quantity of the work, but the quality. Often, the family didn’t want deep cleaning of the deceased. They wanted editing. Wedding dresses, books, Christmas ornaments, furniture, collections of porcelain figurines—​those objects had decades of memory deposits on them, all conflicting. What was a pleasant memory for one was also a source of jealousy and rancor for another. Everyone wanted the possessions to conform to the story they’d been telling themselves for years. Cleaning became the excuse to refight old wars, to reopen scabbed-over wounds, to relitigate settled truths. He had neither the interest nor the capability for such work.

“That’s exactly what I want,” she said. Then, she pointed to the privacy clause. “This . . . this is absolute?”

Gui gestured at the walls, empty save for a single abstract painting of entwined pastel swirls, like the smoke tendrils inside the disposal oven. “I never reveal my clients.”

On reality TV shows like Cleaning Up after the Rich and Famous, the cleaners festooned their shops with photographs of celebrity clients who would bring a dress or an expensive handbag in for a cleaning after a night of indiscretion. But everyone understood that was entertainment, the kind of fake cleaning staged to generate gossip and web traffic. “The law does require that I make a report if I discover evidence of ongoing abuse or the commission of a crime,” he added.

“And after—​the memories are unrecoverable?”

Gui didn’t mind the implied mistrust. There were unscrupulous cleaners who saved the dregs and sold them. There was a market for the anguish of others. Always had been.

He decided to reassure her by walking her through his process. “Do you do much cleaning yourself?”

She hesitated for a beat. “Just around the house.”

“What do you use?”

“Just the standard: alcohol and vinegar, maybe some oil of Mnemosyne after a bad night. I don’t use any chemicals I can’t pronounce.”

He chuckled. “I don’t either. They don’t work as well as they want you to believe. Even oil of Mnemosyne can’t completely dissolve deposits more than a week old. Most people think commercial cleaners use something special to loosen old deposits, maybe the kind the police use to lift memory prints so they could be saved whole. The truth is that I scrape them off the same way you would, but I can do it for longer and harder because I don’t shrink back from the pain. That’s how I get everything out. The dregs are then destroyed the old-fashioned way: incineration.” He pointed behind him. The boxy oven loomed in the workshop in the back.

“I have to warn you . . .” She paused, screwing up the courage. “Some of it was unpleasant, even harsh. It will sting.” Her voice softened. “It must be hard, to feel so much and to say nothing.”

He took a deep breath. “Not really. I’m not sensitive.”

“At all? Not even to your own deposits?”

He shook his head.

“Then . . . you can’t relive memo—” She stopped, realizing how personal she was getting.

He shrugged. “I’ve been that way since I was born.” People thought of cleaners as extra sensitive, and the stereotype had some basis in reality. But he had his own niche.

The woman nodded absentmindedly. He suspected that she already knew his quirk and merely wanted to hear him confirm it. It was how he had been able to stay in business as a one-man shop. The chain cleaners charged much less and had fancy machines that allowed their operators to home in on just one stain with inhuman precision. But word of mouth spread his name: the cleaner who couldn’t blab about your business because he couldn’t sense substantiated memories.

She grabbed a pen off the counter and began to fill out the form. He watched as the list of objects to be cleaned grew under her hand: jewelry, clothing, furniture, suitcases, electronics. She ran out of room and asked for a second form. He wondered what sort of man the deceased had been that this woman would want to erase everything about him, to avoid having to come in contact with his ghost in the future. A lover? A spouse? A father? He always wondered; he never asked.

“Do you intend to sell any of these after?”

She paused. “Why do you ask?”

“Collectors will pay much more for antiques if they have authenticating memories,” he explained. “After I’m done, they may be worthless.”

She let out a bitter chuckle. “No. I’m keeping what I can use and donating the rest. Can’t afford to buy everything new. When can you do the pickup?”

Gui unloaded the truck through the side door. The shop’s front doors were shut and locked. The windows were shuttered and barred. He always saved the big, deep cleanings for Sundays so he wouldn’t be interrupted.

He pondered the objects scattered around him on the workshop floor: bedding, hand tools, stacks of chipped dishes, travel guides published more than a decade ago. It was best to start with something not too personal, to get into the flow of work. He settled on a wicker chair: low, roomy, in a style that was meant to be modern but became outdated the moment the chair was sold, the arms held out in a wide, empty embrace. He ran his finger over the woven rattan: a little rough, dry, the color dulled.

He pulled the multijointed swing arm of the shop light down until it bathed the chair in bright, shadowless light. He knelt down and examined the surface closely: the patches of deposits shimmered, a translucent haze like algae on the walls of an aquarium. He could see bands in two distinct patterns: a periwinkle base with speckles of dull copper, which he decided belonged to the woman, and a bright, angry crimson with tiny jet-black spots, the edges jagged and pulsing.

“You can’t relive a memory that you didn’t have a part in creating. But you can still be affected by the moods and emotions in a stranger’s deposits.” That was his father, before he had accepted that Gui was different. “You can never tell how something feels to the hand of the owner. So be humble. Treat everything you clean with respect.”

He could recall the words so clearly because he had heard them again that morning. He had been brushing his teeth as the video played in the background, the low-resolution recording streaked with pixelated artifacts.

He dipped the pig-bristle brush into the bucket of oil of Mnemosyne and began to scrub over the tightly spaced strands. He wore no gloves so that he could see what he was doing better. He worked methodically, one filament at a time, as though he were coloring, painting, tracing a design. He took special care around broken strands and holes, lingering over the uneven edges the way dental hygienists cleaned around a filling. The repetitive motion was comforting, mindless work that produced tangible results. The tangy odor of the solution, somewhere between gasoline and pine tar, with a hint of spices and animal musk, gradually filled the air.

He could see the rattan’s natural shine coming through slowly, the periwinkle and crimson deposits coming off in clumps and wisps, thin curlicues like solidified smoke. The dregs beaded at the tips of the bristles, each color refusing to blend with the other. He wiped them off the brush with a collection sponge, and when the sponge had turned a dark patriarch purple, like raw lamb’s liver, he dumped it in the burn bucket.

“Some people are much more sensitive than others. When I was little, your grandmother used to beat me with her hairbrush. Whenever I touched that hairbrush, I would scream. Felt like holding a scalding panhandle. But she brushed her hair with it until the day she died. Said she liked the tingle.”

Gui looked down at the handle of the scrubbing brush, the same one his father had used for forty years. It was the only thing he had not cleaned after he took over the shop. The desert ironwood had cracked in several places, but was otherwise as hard and polished as he had always remembered. He tightened his fingers around it. He felt nothing.

“Never judge why someone wants to clean. All you can do is to help them the only way you can; do your job.” His father had raised the brush, glistening with dregs like dark, misshapen pearls, and offered them to him. “Touch it. Touch it so you know how to share in someone’s pain without being overwhelmed by it. Be careful. This may burn.”

He knew that this moment had happened, not because he remembered it happening, but because he had watched himself in the recording that morning, like he did every morning. His mother had filmed the scene with her flip phone because it was his birthday, and she had wanted to preserve the moment for him, for later, for when he was older and neither his father nor his father’s tools would be around anymore.

And he had reached out, terrified and thrilled both. He was a boy of eight but being entrusted with the work of a man. He braced himself, biting down on his lip so that he would not scream, no matter how it felt. His fingers connected with the dark globules at the ends of the bristles.

In the recorded video, the boy didn’t scream. The stoic expression on his face turned to bewilderment before collapsing into disappointment. He had already known that he was different, that he couldn’t do what everyone else took for granted. But hope had not died until that moment. He had felt nothing.

Gui knelt before the chair, scrubbing and scrubbing as the bucket next to him gradually filled with dark liver lumps.

Clara rushed through the crowd in her lumpy, bright orange coat, the messy bun on her head bobbing like a pom-pom. Beatrice, her sister, was taking her out to lunch, and she was late.

She was late because she had to line up to get her bag checked by security, wasting fifteen minutes. Clara tried not to feel resentful. Beatrice didn’t know how much trouble it was for her to leave the factory for lunch. She didn’t understand jobs where you had to clock in and clock out, where your employer viewed you as a potential thief. Beatrice was only in town for a meeting and had to fly out that afternoon, and she thought she was giving Clara, the poor sister whose life had turned into such a failure, a treat.

They met at the trendy café Beatrice had picked. They didn’t hug—​Beatrice never hugged, not since she was a teenager. They sat down, and Clara handed Beatrice her gift. It was hard to shop for Beatrice, who already had everything. But giving a gift mattered to Clara. It was a way for her to tell herself that she was still capable of giving, hadn’t made a mess of her life.

“Get whatever you want,” Beatrice said, putting the package away in her purse without opening it. She took out a travel-sized bottle of sanitizer and cleaned the silverware and plates, wiping everything down with a disposable napkin.

“What are you getting?” Clara asked.

“The online reviews say that the seaweed salad and dumplings here are the best.” Beatrice never took her eyes off her phone screen as she scrolled through her messages.

Clara stared at the dark ceramic back of her sister’s phone, Void Black®. It looked perfectly new, not a single scratch on it. She wondered briefly if it was one of the phones that she had cleaned herself at the factory and then decided that was unlikely. Beatrice preferred to buy things online. Less contact with people was always better.

“How’s work?” she blurted, and instantly regretted it. Talking about work with Beatrice never went well. She found her sister’s ramblings about her clients’ schemes and plots incomprehensible, and Beatrice just assumed that Clara never wanted to talk about her job. But what else was there to talk about? For two people who had grown up together, they had remarkably little to converse about. They no longer knew each other at all.

“It’s fine,” said Beatrice, absorbed in answering an email. “Just let me finish this. If the food gets here, start without me . . .”

Clara decided she would order the lobster roll.

Beatrice tapped away, her thumbs deftly sliding around the glass. “Can you believe the defendant would have the gall to claim that my client stole the idea from her? She says she has authenticating deposits, but she’s dragging her heels on giving me the laptop. She must be artificially aging the memory right now, and I need my useless assistant to expedite the request for production . . .”

Clara’s hands still tingled, and she massaged them reflexively. Even with gloves, it was impossible to avoid stings completely at work. Phones came down on the conveyor belt, one every thirty seconds. It was her job to inspect and wipe off the residue from the workers in the distant factory-cities across the Pacific in which they had been assembled.

The last phone before her lunch break had hurt her. Her mind had been drifting, and she had picked up the phone with her left hand directly instead of using tongs. Most phones, after all, were coated only in mild anxiety or mind-numbing boredom, perfectly safe to touch. Without examining it closely, she had given it a few wipes with the cloth in her right hand, soaked in the foul-smelling high-tech solution that was supposed to break down even the most crusted-over memory deposits. It had taken a few seconds for her mind to register the burning pain in her left hand, as though she were holding a live wire.

Despair, exhaustion, the terror of loneliness, and the paranoia of failing. Climbing high, higher, even higher. A moon hung in a hazy sky, serrated at both ends like a broken tooth. A passing breeze redolent of chemicals that burned the nose. The factory laid out below like a model, a map. Thoughts of jumping, leaping into a wind that would lift her skinny arms like a bat’s wings, a wind that would never actually come. And then hurtling toward the earth, yearning for the ultimate peace.

A server brought their food. Beatrice continued typing. Clara began to eat.

It shouldn’t have happened. She wasn’t like Beatrice. She was normal. Normal people couldn’t interpret the details of the memory deposits of strangers. It took intimacy to build that resonance of minds, to create memories together, to become vulnerable to the pain of another. Only mood and emotion, dampened by the distance of language and culture and the barrier of the self-preservation instinct, should have come through, a faint echo of a tingle.

But sometimes it happened anyway. When the suffering was intense enough. After all, she had glimpsed the chiaroscuro of anguish and manic joy that was Lucas’s world the first time she sat down in his wicker chair, before she had even known his name.

Beatrice held the phone up to her ear and spoke into it in a harsh, low voice. “No, I don’t want you to draft a memo! Just call Perry and explain what we need. This isn’t rocket science . . .”

Worst of all, Clara could tell it was the memory of a young woman, barely more than a child. She could see those slender fingers held up toward the moon, hear and feel the high-pitched keening in the back of the throat, like a creature trying to claw out.

What happened to that girl? she wondered. Did she go through with it? Please, God, no.

She was almost done with her sandwich. She slowed down, lingering over every bite. She didn’t know what she would do with herself when she finished. She wished she could talk to the hunched-over figure across the table, now absorbed by the screen again, to understand her and to be understood.

The contract manufacturer had tried to scrub the workers’ deposits, the detritus of an industrial process that turned humans into components. But the result had never been satisfactory. Despite all of Silicon Valley’s yearning for disruption, they hadn’t been able to figure out how to cleanse memories attached to objects without the participation of a human being. And since they didn’t want a buyer in America to unwrap their brand-new phone, only to be burned by the anguish of a foreigner, to be infected by a psychic wound like a virus—​didn’t lifestyle gurus all say it was important to insulate oneself from the suffering of others, not to be dragged down by negativity one was powerless to stop?—​they hired American workers to sit in warehouses to clean the phones and then to coat them with a spray of anonymized all-American fresh-product good cheer, as though things were not made by people, but by robotic elves. The manufacturing sector had collapsed in the USA, but there was always emotional labor to fall back on.

Assembled in China. Cleaned in America.

Clara had turned the phone in, and the supervisor had said they would look into it. Most likely nothing would be done except to destroy the phone as defective. But what else could she do? Her own life was such a mess, she had no room for the troubles of others. Why was a stranger’s pain being thrust upon her? She felt a dark wave filling her, exuding from her skin, depositing onto the plate, onto the tablecloth, onto her chair: resentful, selfish, guilty, furious.

Is this what it’s like, always, for Beatrice? To live the memory of another as soon as she touches a deposit?

The wave receded but did not fully retreat. It lapped at the shores of her heart, a murmuring undercurrent.

“Sorry.” Beatrice put away the phone and started on her salad.

Maybe this is why she always gets a salad, Clara thought. So she doesn’t have to worry about the food getting cold.

It was impossible to bring up what she had just experienced. They were so far apart that she couldn’t imagine creating a shared memory that would do anything but hurt them both.

“I went to see a cleaner the other day,” Clara blurted. She couldn’t understand why. She hadn’t meant to bring it up at all.

Beatrice’s fork slowed down. “For Lucas’s things?”

Just hearing his name spoken aloud was torture. “Yes. Everything.”

“It’s definitely over, then?”

Over? What does that even mean? Lucas had left without taking anything because he wanted to be “free”—​free of her, of memories, of the weight of a life together that had become suffocating. Maybe it was over for him, but how could it be for her when being home was like being in a minefield? Touching anything brought back an explosion of flashbacks, of hurt.

“I haven’t heard from him in two months. I thought it was time to move on.”

Beatrice nodded. Clara waited. Beatrice resumed working on her salad.

Clara stewed. She didn’t want to hear I told you so. But this silence was worse. Even more judgmental.

“I thought you told me once you had some good times too.” Beatrice’s tone was oddly subdued.

Clara was surprised. Beatrice had never liked Lucas. “It’s messy.”

“Always.” Beatrice seemed to shake off whatever was bothering her. “It can feel good to use a professional cleaner. As long as they’re reliable.”

“He’s interesting,” Clara said. “He can’t feel deposits at all. He’s memory-blind.”

“Sounds like he’s in the wrong line of work, then.”

“No. It makes him better at it. He’s not afraid of touching, doesn’t get bothered by anyone’s pain.” She could see that Beatrice was about to object, to say something like That’s a nice way to spin it, so she rushed on. “I wish I could be like that.”

Beatrice set down her fork, and for the first time during lunch, looked Clara in the eye. “Do you?”

“I do.” Pure fury surged in Clara as she held the gaze. Who are you to question me? What do you know about my life with your jetting around and being paid handsomely to peel off the memories of the rich and famous? You’ve never lived with Lucas. You’ve no idea how his self-loathing was like a bottomless pit that sucked the life out of anyone who loved him, how his anger at the world left the taste of ashes on everything he touched, how his self-pity drew me like a flame and burned me to a crisp.

Beatrice looked away. “I was cleaning up my apartment, and I found this.” She dug around in her purse.

“You clean?” Clara asked. She had seen a photograph of her sister’s place once. It looked like a hoarder’s nest. “You hate to clean. You said you could never find anything after.”

Beatrice ignored this. She found what she had been looking for and held it out to Clara. A four-color retractable click pen: red, blue, green, black.

Puzzled, Clara reached for it, but Beatrice didn’t let go. Both of their hands held it, one at each end.

A warm flood gushed through Clara’s fingers, up her arm, flared into her heart. Unlike the buzz from the jars of memory-grounds they sold as mood enhancers at places like Yankee Mementos with names like “A New Job!” or “Reunion,” it didn’t feel artificially sweet. Like all true joys, it was laced with the shadow of pain and terror—​pain that was assuaged, terror held at bay.

It felt genuine, Clara realized, because it was her own memory, one shared with Beatrice. She could decipher it.

She was eleven again, and Beatrice nine. The younger girl had been sobbing inconsolably. Their parents had not understood how unique Beatrice was, had not accepted her gift. They thought she was being childishly dramatic when she said that the secondhand blanket gifted by their mother’s friend hurt her. They had not yet known of the abuse suffered by that woman’s child.

“It’s just a nightmare. All kids get nightmares.”

“No! They’re hurting Ellie. They’re hurting her!”

Clara cleaned the blanket, scrubbed it in the sink despite how it stung her hand. They were poor, and the heat was unreliable. Beatrice needed that blanket. Clara couldn’t interpret the deposit in the blanket, couldn’t relive what Beatrice relived. All she could do was to reassure her sister that she believed her unconditionally, that she knew she was telling the truth.

While Clara cleaned, Beatrice wrote down what she had seen inside the blanket. Then she had used her favorite pen, a four-color clicker, to draw a picture of herself and Clara. The figure of Beatrice was small and black; the figure of Clara was large and blue—​approximations for the shades of their deposits. Clara leaned protectively over Beatrice like the sky, a fierce presence of absolute trust.

Later, that account written in a childish hand would be the first piece of evidence in the case that led to Ellie’s rescue and confirmation of Beatrice’s gift.

“I had forgotten about this,” Clara said, looking at the pen in her hand. Beatrice had let go.

“We all need to be reminded, from time to time, that we’re better than we remember,” Beatrice said.

Clara’s hand still prickled, the hairs standing up. She had also sensed that the memory, though a shared deposit, had been colored much more deeply by Beatrice’s perspective. How many times had Beatrice held this pen, relived this moment, redrawn her big sister to be better than she deserved to be remembered?

Shame, gratitude, lucid incomprehension.

The memory was fading in intensity, but she knew she could call it back the next time she held it.

Clara opened her mouth to speak, but her own phone buzzed then, reminding her that she needed to get back to work.

They embraced. Very briefly. Coats and gloves on.

“Thank you.”

Airplanes were generally troubling places for Beatrice. There was never enough time for the crew to clean properly between flights, and so every seat was a stew of anxiety, confinement, the sense of being suspended between places, life on hold. She tried never to take off her coat or gloves when she flew.

She unwrapped the package from Clara. It was a book, a limited edition of found deposits by a prominent artist. Each copy of the book was unique, the thick pages bulging with the physical carrier objects, hydraulically pressed or sectioned with a laser scalpel. It was used, but still must have cost Clara more than she could afford.

That was vintage Clara, always the big sister, the giver, the thoughtful one. Even after they had grown apart.

Beatrice opened the book and skipped over the pretentious artist statement. She turned to the first entry, a flattened little plastic arm, a fragment from a discarded doll that had been found on the beaches of Henderson Island in the Pacific, at least three thousand miles from the nearest continent. The plastic limb had been deformed and stained by its voyage through the excretory system of modern civilization and battered and bleached by the action of waves.

She took off her glove and put a finger on the plastic arm, pressing down gently and allowing her skin to come in contact fully with the artificial flesh.

She was tossed into a swirling montage, fragments from the lives of strangers. A young man with dirty hair and a frown stamping the arm, one of thousands like it, with a machine that thumped like thunder; a clerk packing boxes in a cavernous warehouse, walking through the aisles to the beeping of an electronic timer, more robot than person; a little girl arguing with her brother about what the doll should say; a carefree run through the rain-slicked streets of some city; an old man bending to pick up the doll and stuffing it into a nearby trash can; an expressionless woman tossing the half-doll into a floating mess of other discarded objects, an undulating mat of abandoned possessions that bobbed together, scraping, jostling, flaking off their memory deposits and commingling; the artist picking up the doll fragment and bringing it aboard a ship; the careful cleaning that picked off the dried seaweed and encrusted sand but preserved the artful deposits of consciousness . . . and then: the memories of those who had purchased the book and read its contents layered on top, men and women who sought solace or escape or voyeuristic pleasure in moods and emotions and glimpses of other lives, a growing sediment formation to which she was now contributing her own.

The accompanying essay talked about the problem of trash, the physical as well as emotional. Modernity was reveling in the disposable, objects as well as experiences. The Pacific was filling up with microbeads and our corporate-manufactured memories. How many of us now relied on empathy-sheaths so that a bad date could be flushed down the toilet? How many of us coated our nightstands with a dusting of internet celebrity gossip rather than extrusions from our supposed loved ones? How many of us followed weekly self-help cleaning regimes rigorously to scrub ourselves of “negative deposits” so that we could live in the eternal present, heedless of what it was doing to our planet and our souls?

Beatrice stopped reading. It was all such high-minded nonsense, chicken soup photographed in a studio to be peddled as wisdom. The art was always better than the explanation of the art.

The plane banked, and in the shifting sunlight, she saw the rainbow hues scintillating in a haze over the plastic arm, a jumble of externalized psyche. She wondered if the artist had ever intended her work to be consumed by someone like Beatrice, someone who, when touching a memory deposit from a stranger, sensed not only moods and emotions, but discerned the details of the recollection with photographic precision.

It was hard to make anyone else not like her understand. Everyone thought a prodigy like her had an easy path to riches and happiness. After all, hadn’t a guy, after he had gotten his hands on the Codex Leicester and run his fingers over every page, become a prominent inventor with ideas that many suspected were derived from Leonardo da Vinci? And that woman who begged to be allowed to hold Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti Lettera 32 for a few minutes before it had been auctioned off—​she had become a best-selling author, though one dogged by persistent allegations of plagiarism that couldn’t be proved.

Clara thought Beatrice threw herself into her work because she was too pleased with her talent, but the truth was it was an escape. To be able to glimpse into the lives of others, without even intending to, made true intimacy impossible. She never wanted to go to friends’ houses, to borrow a pair of shoes or a dress, to accept anything that had been steeped in the memories of anyone she cared about. You never wanted to know the people you liked and admired too well; it was impossible to reconcile what they wanted you to know with what they didn’t. Few people were better than they remembered.

Moreover, it made you doubt yourself. When you were so open and attuned to the experiences and feelings and deposits of others, what thoughts could you claim to be original, nonparasitic, not derived, stolen, copied? Even as a child, she had known what it meant to be old, to be confused by the layering of different selves as one aged—​she had touched their parents’ deposits, and then recoiled at the contradictory messiness of it all. That was why she hoarded possessions, piled them in her apartment: not just to protect her own secrets, but also the secondhand confessions, the baring of other souls.

Better to be paid to dig into the lives of strangers, a transactional invasion sanctified by law and custom. Clean.

She put the book away, picked up her phone, and began to work again. She was certain that if she could get her hands on the laptop in question, she could prove that the defendant’s authentication memory was faked. There were always ways to tell when a deposit was staged—​a clock they forgot to reset, the position of a shadow and height of the sun, the crafted sense of ersatz reality. And no matter how thoroughly they cleaned it, the original memories always clung to something: the bottoms of the keycaps, the inside of a port or slot, the seam between the screen and the cover. She was a forensic memory tracer like no other. She could do it.

But the book that Clara had given her called to her from underneath the seat in front. She could not focus.

There was an imbalance between her and Clara that could never be bridged. It was harder, much harder, for her sister to know her than vice versa. Her childhood friends and her family were the only people she loved whose secrets she knew because she had seen them before she learned to keep her distance. She had to separate herself from them, to be apart, in order to know who she was and to know them the way they wished to be known. To allow others the space for secrets was the greatest gesture of love she knew how to give, but did they understand that?

She had once loved to draw, loved to tell stories to herself as she ran the pen over the page, fusing a memory into the drawing, a scene that came to life when she was done, running her fingers over the inked grooves. But she had stopped. Art was too open, too naked. Someone who could perceive the raw memory deposits of others was especially paranoid about revealing the self. She preferred to type than to write. She tried her best never to leave a personal trace in the world.

Except . . . when you did that, you also stopped conversing with yourself. Leaving deposits and examining them was how people understood their own story, how they grew.

But Clara had understood her. She was reminding Beatrice how she loved art, the beauty of the kind of deposited story that only she could make and appreciate. Just for herself. Not a performance for an audience.

She put away the phone and picked up the art book again. As she read and touched and absorbed the lives of strangers, she also imagined being back in her apartment, the phone off and forgotten, herself absorbed in creation: a box of objects that held the deposits from each year of her life. As she held each, she would sort through the memories and retell them in a whisper, adding in the forgiveness of age for youthful impulsivity, the appreciation that she had once been so fearless and gloriously beautiful, the understanding of a character arc that made sense only when a life had been mostly lived . . . She would never let anyone else see it, not as long as she was alive.

She sat still as the plane crossed the vast sky, casting an imperceptible shadow on the earth below.

She tried to imagine the life of the man who could not sense memory deposits, not even his own.

Everything must feel new to him, she realized. He could just buy a secondhand shirt and put it on, not worrying whether it would give him a memory-rash. He could just browse through the library stacks without gloves, unconcerned with whether the previous reader had been suffering from depression.

He’s not afraid of touching, doesn’t get bothered by anyone’s pain. But that would also include his own.

So he would also forget. Nothing he did would leave a mark, not unless he consciously and constantly reminded himself of it. He would lose that most unreliable, fragile, unwanted but also faithful witness of the very nature of existence, the exuviated skin of a mind growing through time.

Am I much better off, though?

She twirled the four-color pen, letting it tumble-walk across the back of her hand and catching it just before it fell. The periwinkle bands in the haze held bright gold specks, brighter than they had been in her deposits in a long time.

She still couldn’t believe she had forgotten that episode from their childhood together. Though she had never gone out of her way to keep mementos, she had believed she remembered enough. The inevitable sediments felt to her vaguely unhygienic, an aspect of being human that was unpleasant, like crusted sleep in your eyes when you woke up.

But she had forgotten; she hadn’t even known something was missing until Beatrice brought it back to her.

What else had she forgotten? What other scars had healed over and vanished? What joys faded and then sloughed off? What other parts of herself had she left behind in the basements of long-ago rental units, the hands of strangers who picked through her moving sales, the trash heaps in landfills that slowly fermented and rotted in the rain, leaching her memory, along with the memories of millions of others, into sewers, rivers, ocean currents, to be carried to the deep abyss where pale ghost crabs skittered over them, attendants at the final oblivion?

She looked at her cramped apartment, suddenly spacious because Lucas’s possessions had been removed—​no, not his possessions. They were also hers. They had fused their lives and bought things together, during that time when he had claimed that she gave him strength, made him want to be a better man. She had been calling them his only because he had been the one who didn’t want to throw them out, not even when they had become worn and outdated.

She paced back and forth across the apartment, picturing the ghostly outlines of everything that had been taken away by the cleaner, to be returned in another week: A Fresh Start.

But did she want a fresh start? Did she want everything around her to be like the phones she cleaned at the warehouse, smelling faintly of the promise of emptiness, possibilities achieved at the price of erasure?

She had invested so much of herself into this life with Lucas. Just because he had left didn’t mean that it had been wasted. She had lived through it; it was not a dream.

“We all need to be reminded, from time to time, that we’re better than we remember.”

She looked at the pen in her hand again, squeezing it tight, feeling that burst of enduring trust, a faith that had survived growing up, growing apart, growing into strangers who had fresh starts.

The woman strode deliberately around the corner of the workshop in which her goods were piled and then hesitated.

Gui watched her, saying nothing. Clients sometimes changed their minds about cleaning. That was why he took his time on large jobs.

She stopped in front of the gleaming wicker chair. After scrubbing, he had oiled and polished it with a soft cloth. She ran her hands over the woven strands, holding her breath. Then she let out a long exhalation. “You’re very good. This feels new.”

He said nothing.

Her hand lingered on the chair a moment longer before she took another couple of steps, stopping before a desk lamp. The base, a crystal vase encased in spiraling brass vines, was meant to serve as a souvenir display jar or perhaps a small terrarium. It was filled with pebbles and shells, bits of sea glass, a plastic aquarium boat, a few key chains, folded-up bits of paper, ticket stubs.

“He bought this for me,” the woman said, as though speaking to herself. “But we both filled it. We tried to fill it with happy memories, to keep us going when things weren’t so good.

“At first, we filled it quickly. Then the filling slowed and stopped. We began to reach in for jolts of comfort, of strength. But we did so only when things were really bad, and so they got coated with arguments, betrayals, deposits we’d rather forget.”

Gui waited. He knew what she meant, but also didn’t.

He thought about the recordings his parents had made for him over the years, first very few, and then many more, in higher and higher resolution, documenting every aspect of the cleaning process as well as their life together. It was meant to compensate for his condition, to help him remember. But the very act of conscious documentation cast a pall over everything. Watching himself and them felt like watching actors.

She reached into the crystal and wrapped her fingers around a bit of green sea glass. Her whole body stiffened. She held that pose for a moment, eyes closed. Then she let out her breath slowly, her body relaxing.

“It’s messy, but we filled it together. I put myself in it.” She turned to him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want the rest of it cleaned. I’ll pay you the full amount.”

“When would you like to schedule the drop-off?”

They worked out the details.

Before she turned to leave, he stopped her. “Do you want the dregs?” He pointed to the bucket sitting unobtrusively in the corner.

“No,” she said. “You can’t control everything. Some forgetting is healthy.”

After she left, he took the bucket to the incinerator. Carefully, he placed the lumps inside, one after another, as though laying out offerings on an altar. He shut the door, turned it on, and watched through the glass viewport as the flames inside leaped to life. The sponges charred, deformed, collapsed, and then burst into brilliant flowers of color and smoke.

He looked over at the scrubbing brush hanging on the wall. In the flickering light of the incinerator, he could see that the handle gleamed with a grayish shimmer, like a moth’s wings. It was the hue of his own deposits, mysteries he was himself powerless to decipher.

He realized that he could not recall the color it held when his father had wielded it, for the hue of memory was impossible to capture with the camera. He wept then, knowing that he would not remember this moment in the future, feeling both the weight of freedom and the lift of oblivion.