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Remembering everything was everything to Larry Gapinski.
Larry had no room for predictions or prognostications because his head was filled up with remembering everything else. He was hands-down the best memory guy in the Southwest at the moment live entertainment came back to life after the pandemic. He was back doing shows in Boulder, Taos, Reno, Winslow—you name it. Larry had a circuit in place going back to the 1990s, but lean times for a memory master generated a need for people like him to remember all kinds of things in no particular order.
You could start with phonebooks, of course, because everyone loved phone books. Someone in Laramie would give Larry a page number and coordinates from the local directory, for example, and he was off to the races, identifying Grace Morales by street address and home phone number. Larry could literally do that in his sleep, though he would wake up in a cold sweat if he could not remember an entire phone book in his dreams.
He was particularly good with local newspapers—Larry could remember the names of everyone who died and even the names of cats the local firefighters coaxed out of trees.
He lived in a studio apartment above an LP record warehouse in Scottsdale, Arizona. You could not find Post-it notes or scratch paper of any kind in his apartment no matter how hard you looked. He had a new car, the new/used kind he liked, and he paid for the apartment, the car, and his gigantic television in cash because he refused to live beyond his means. He had no phone books in his apartment and no books whatsoever because Larry religiously kept work separate from home life. Larry liked to cook, and he never forgot a recipe. The truth is he never forgot entire cookbooks down to the smallest spice. Even that became a thing in his act to go with the phonebooks.
Larry was a handsome man who did pushups and situps every morning, and being good-looking never hurt on the road. Women across the Southwest loved Larry because he remembered every little thing about them. They always wanted him back for a return engagement—and that explained why Larry was heading north. Ladies of a certain age in the Southwest were getting in the way of his craft. Sad to say but Larry was unforgettable and the ladies would not leave him alone.
Of course, Larry lived out of a suitcase just like everyone else on the circuit. He played in bars and supper clubs, in comedy stores and concert halls, and even a few state fairs. If his suitcase were not always packed, he would have been packing that morning for his first ever trip north through Idaho and the Dakotas.
In the moment before he hit the road, Larry looked at the news on his huge TV. In one of those pop-up surveys, you might find people who live alone and keep the radio or television going because of the need to hear the human voice. Larry Gapinski needed the human voice like a hole in the head—but he needed something to sound like someone was in his apartment when he was gone. He never paid attention to the news, but if he had that morning, Larry would have heard a morning anchor say: “We apologize again for our technical difficulties.”
That was how it all started but Larry was the last to know.
The three stoplights between Larry’s studio and the Interstate were out, so Larry had to creep through the intersections before he found breathing room on the highway. He set his cruise control at 75, same as always, and he automatically assumed the trance of long distance drivers making a living on the road.
At first, the green signs on the highway flew by unseen and unheeded because it was a long way to The Badlands. Had he turned on the radio, Larry would have heard about massive problems with the Internet that day—and the fears of ransomware on a cosmic level—then the empty-headed assurances from officials at every level of government: local, state and federal.
He would assume, as anyone would, that none of this had anything to do with him, but Larry’s first clue was staring him in the face when he pulled off the Interstate for gas because he was down half. This exit was new to him because he had never taken his show north before, but he expected the usual chitchat while his mind robotically memorized everything in the store. If anyone asked, Larry could have ticked off the price and/or color and size of the entire inventory—from flip flops and sunblock to Slushies and lottery tickets.
But Larry never got that far because a line of cars, fifty at least, were all backed up at the pump. No one was pumping gas and no one was going anywhere—but no one seemed to know why.
People were beyond angry and launching out of their cars with the doors left open the minute they found a place in line. At the QuikStop one man had a gun out and was trying to bust open the locked glass double-doors. Larry remembered everything he ever saw but he had never seen a riot waiting to happen at a gas pump.
Larry popped up out of his car and asked man in an RV what was going on.
It’s the end of the world! the man said. Just turn on the radio!
Larry had never turned on the radio in his car before because he had no radio bits. No one was playing music on the radio as he spun the dial but all the news people had a note of panic in their official newscaster voices. They said no one knew what was wrong other than something to do with computers on the cloud. One expert after another said it was either a cyber-terrorist attack or a ransomware hit by a foreign power. On the lunatic fringe every cockamamie group was already taking credit for the chaos.
Larry immediately realized his memory act would not be breaking new ground in Idaho or the Dakotas anytime soon. His motor was still running and he looked at the gauge. If he kept it at 55, he might make it back home on half a tank. So that’s what he did.
Going south, Larry Gapinski actually listened to the radio for the first time in his life. He found three National Public Radio stations at the bottom of the dial and kept spinning to get the best reception. As he drove home, public radio talked to every expert they could find, but it was a waste of time: no one inside or outside the government had any idea what was going on. To Larry, the experts sounded like the dumbest people on earth.
Traffic kept moving south on the Interstate as he got closer to home, but cars were slowing down to less than 30 miles per hour. A few were pulling over every few miles as they ran out of gas.
Larry was one exit short of home when his gas gave out. He pulled over onto the off ramp, slammed his car door shut, and started to walk the six miles to his apartment. Traffic was one big traffic jam and no one was going anywhere anytime soon. People left their cars pointing in all directions on the streets, including akimbo. Stores were on fire, windows and storefront glass was smashed, and people were carrying out toasters and microwaves and television sets even bigger than Larry’s. He saw people were fighting on the streets for no obvious reason other than they could.
Larry made it home through local neighborhoods he had never seen before. Then he did a very smart thing. He stayed home. His refrigerator had nothing but condiments—ketchup, catsup, honey mustard, no-fat mayo, tartar sauce—but Larry had stocked the studio floor to ceiling after the pandemic, just in case, when he socked in everything a man could need for six months: bottled water, canned goods, freeze-dried delicacies, even beef jerky. After the first pandemic, Larry swore he would never be caught short again, and now his preparations paid off.
He still did pushups and situps every morning. The humongous television was still on with the sound bar and Larry never turned it off again because it hid the sound of sirens and the shouting and crying outdoors.
Keeping the television on also meant Larry would not be alone.
TV could not stop talking about the computer hacking around the clock and more of those unexplained “technical difficulties.” But it was not until the fourth day that an actual expert in computer science who actually knew what he was talking about came on the air.
“We have simply run out of space,” he said.
The expert said computer storage had been in crisis mode for some time because people and companies kept adding so much video and teleconferencing and “rich media” to the cloud that the world had run out of digital storage. He said the shortage had driven demand in an unforeseeable and unprecedented way until the criss-crossing global cloud had simply shut down.
The expert, a digital forensics specialist, said the result of this crisis was similar to the way the Twin Towers collapsed onto themselves on 9/11, leaving only useless rubble behind instead of bricks and mortar and bodies.
The expert said the only thing digital left after the world ran out of space were random bits and bytes of computer code that would never amount to anything.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, the expert said. And we have a digital Armageddon.
Larry tried to call his mother in Port Lincoln, but now his phone produced no sound and he safely assumed no phones were working anywhere in the world. When his power went off for good he made the decision to ride this out alone the way he had in the pandemic.
Without any sound coming from the television, Larry could hear everything going on outside, including gunshots and machine-gun fire and someone moaning on the sidewalk below his window.
Without any of the usual distractions, his mind had never felt so clear, so sharp, so Larry tried to remember everything in his life as it happened from the very beginning. Larry could bring it all back in perfect order in his apartment—not just newspapers and books but menus and coupons and even directions to a party someone scribbled on a napkin.
He had only made it up to high school when he heard someone thumping on his door. People had been coming to his door since he locked it and hunkered down with nothing but the things in his head and the survival supplies he was living on. He had ignored the other people at his door—even the ones screaming and crying—because he knew it was his job to remember things, not to save the world. Someone had even tried to break the door down once, but Harry had a metal door with three locks installed for peace of mind on the road.
The other people all gave up. The difference this time was the woman on the other side of the door knew his name.
Larry Gapinski? Open up, please. We’re from the government and we’re here to help.
So Larry unlocked the three locks and opened the door. Aside from the blubbering through the door, he had not heard the sound of a human voice for weeks, maybe even months. The streets you could see from his window were always empty now as if his whole neighborhood had been hollowed out by a natural disaster. Radio and TV were worthless without electricity even if someone were still broadcasting out there into the ether. The internet was dead as a doornail.
The fact is, Larry was lonely. He had been talking to himself for days now, not only talking loud, but also talking back in the voices of characters from his actual life, the one he now missed without misremembering. Every conversation and every detail, no matter how trivial, came back to him with total recall.
Larry could not lie to himself about anything anymore because everything was staring him in the face on the permanent record he now had to live with unabated.
Larry could see the writing on the wall all by himself. Sure, he had entertained tens of thousands of people in his act and made them forget their problems for about five minutes. But Larry Gapinski had been sleepwalking through life for as long as he could remember—and he could remember everything. Aside from the perpetual archive in his brain, Larry had nothing to show for himself. He had no friends, no brothers or sisters, and he told his mother only what she wanted to hear. Locked down in his apartment, he had to admit his life had no meaning and no real purpose other than remembering everything with the bizarre supercomputer that was his brain.
Larry was supposed to have a soul but that would have required something more than a photographic memory with full-motion audio and video capture included. A soul would have required Larry to be more than his memories.
In lockup in his apartment, Larry could not remember ever having a soul.
Mr. Gapinski? she said. Open up, please. This is a matter of national security.
Larry was so starved for human contact he opened the door to find not just a woman but a man.
Thank God! the man said when Larry let them inside.
A month ago, before the crisis, he imagined they both would have been impeccable as undertakers in their dark suits. As it was the man had not shaved for days and the woman’s hair was so dirty her comb was only a memory. They both smelled like street people to Larry—and street people all smelled the same. Their suits were filthy dirty.
Larry could see they were both starving by the way they looked at the piles of food stacked up all over his apartment. In normal times, Larry might have offered them coffee and coffee cake after they sat down, but instead he put granola bars and mixed nuts and bottled water on the table. Both the man and the woman wolfed down everything and drank the water like they might never drink again.
We work for the government, she said.
What’s left of it, he said.
What happened? Larry said.
We don’t really know exactly, she said, but we do know there’s nothing left anywhere—no data and no computer memory—no audio, no video, no words, no bills, no records.
Just what’s in your head, Larry, the man said. Just what you and people like you remember. That’s all that’s left.
We saw your flyers, she said. They’re all over everywhere.
In the Southwest, Larry said.
We talked to people who have seen your act, he said. Is it true?
If I’ve seen it or read it or heard it, Larry said, I can remember it.
The woman looked at the man and then back at Larry.
You’re all we’ve got left, Larry, she said. Your country needs you. Will you help?
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Larry said.
Of course Larry wanted to help. He was tired of living in his own head all by himself. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do with all those thoughts in his head with no act to put them in.
Where do I start? Larry said.
The Declaration of Independence, the woman from the government said.