The Cleaners (Faraway collection) by Ken Liu

Author:Ken Liu [Liu, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2020-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Beatrice

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

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