Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison

Author:M. John Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

But wait! This carpet is full of clothes moth! Is that possible here in the future? Surely that’s a 1950s thing, not a 2011 thing? Clothes moth? Will there be clothes moth after the Singularity, that rapture of the nerds? Or only the molecular description of clothes moth stored somewhere in the Cloud? Clothes moth infestations are like credit ratings. They remind you that a single unnoticed shift of fortune & odd things – irreversible things, frankly unbelievable things – will start to happen to the fabric of your life. They are entropy in action, the end of the Edwardian Afternoon, the end of the Second Elizabethan Era, the end of the future as being somehow even more the present than the present; the horrid proof that things aren’t so dependable after all. I mean, can you imagine? It’s your grandmother, maybe your great-grandmother, who had the recession, not you. But suddenly clothes moth is in everything. It’s nationwide. It’s the future of the future, and people are frantically darning their socks again.

2003: Every other night between midnight & three, I take my hard drives to the river. I turn right out of the house, then immediately right again, past magnolia, past wisteria. Barnes is empty. Maybe there are a few high clouds. A bit of moon the texture of fish skin. Maybe it’s snowing on a raw wind. Maybe the wind is blowing up from the river along Cleveland Gardens; maybe down towards it. Maybe it’s an August night, soft warm air more like Valencia than London. Anyway, walking is easy. It’s like a kind of floating, at least until the riverfront, the station, the dark brick heel of the bridge. There’s always a little urgency then. The situation’s not unpleasant, but it’s no longer a trance. Every other night, in the centre of Barnes Bridge, facing downstream along Corney Reach to Chiswick Eyot, I take the hard drives out of my pocket, line them up carefully on the parapet and imagine that I will drown them. Sometimes I imagine pushing them over with one finger; sometimes I imagine throwing them out over the water suddenly and with the most violent body language. Whatever. It’s essential they’re still intact when they go. It’s essential I imagine them entering the river undamaged; that they’re carried along by a falling tide; that they sink slowly; that they become over many years eroded, corroded, buried in the deepest parts of the channel. It’s essential they never be found. Essential, too, that the data remains for as long as it can; but also that it can be understood from this moment as dissolving, or as being etched away, liberated from the prison of its encodement. Whatever it was before it passed from my life into words, becoming bound, I imagine it now etched & dissolved away forever, leaving behind, in ten years or two hundred, only some unreadable, cakey, wafery, fossil combination of rust and mud. As soon as I have imagined all that, I’m released to put the drives carefully back in my pocket and make my way home.

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