Excerpt: ‘The Candy House’

I worked as a counselor at a methadone clinic not far from where I used to make my drug buys from Damon. My studio apartment was nearby, and as I walked to work under those same shadowy overpasses where Damon and I used to roll down our windows, I often wondered what had become of him. I didn’t have to wonder, of course—thanks to Own Your Unconscious™, we can track down a person we’ve glimpsed just once in our lives. My dad was a big proponent of Own Your Unconscious when it first came out, in 2016; he’d gotten to know Bix Bouton, who invented it. I had no interest in externalizing my consciousness to a Mandala Cube and revisiting my memories, or—worse—filling in what I’d managed to forget. Still, my curiosity about Damon gradually wore away my scruples. Doesn’t it always? If my life has taught me anything, it’s that curiosity and expediency have a sneaky, inexorable power. Resisting them is easy for a minute—a hundred minutes—even a year. But not forever.

In the thirteen years since Own Your Unconscious had been released, one of its ancillary features—the Collective Consciousness—had gradually become central. By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online “collective,” you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same. Finally, I caved and bought Mandala’s Hey, What Ever Happened To…?™. The process was frictionless, as promised: thirty minutes with electrodes attached to my head as I closed my eyes and pictured my interactions with Damon (thereby releasing those specific memories to the collective); then a twenty-minute wait while my “content” churned in the collective gyre, searching for facial matches. As I watched the wheel spin on the desktop computer in my studio apartment, I noticed I was gritting my teeth; I wanted Damon to have achieved something great! What that meant, I wasn’t sure: Stockbroker? Managing partner at my old law firm? Governor? (Illinois joke.)

I had the story soon enough in the form of scattered “gray grabs” from the Collective Consciousness: people’s anonymous memories that included Damon. I watched teenage Damon in prep school slacks, whittling the underside of a desk; then slightly older Damon hyperventilating in a teen group therapy session in deep woods, firelight lapping his anguished face; young-adult Damon gazing out the window of a college classroom at a crisp white steeple, and around the same time (same haircut, sweatshirt), Damon hawking stolen stereo equipment from the rear of a Toyota hatchback; Damon as I knew him, a young man toiling for a drug dealer to pay off some kind of debt. The last gray grab, dated the previous year, showed Damon in orange, doing push-ups in a penitentiary yard. The smile he sprang at the anonymous viewer was the very same I remembered seeing through our open car windows. I realized that the person Damon had reminded me of was myself: another white male who’d managed to blow through countless advantages and opportunities and fail catastrophically. The knowledge that he’d fared worse than I had was depressing, literally. I became depressed. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d wished for Damon to thrive.

In the recovery world, we often speak of outcomes: who succeeds in treatment; who relapses or disappears or dies. My ability to stay sober was more than explained by my ACE score, the metric for Adverse Childhood Experiences, which in my case was an almost unheard-of zero. Loving family; no incarceration, addictions, or domestic violence—all of which raised the question of why I’d turned to drugs in the first place. Was there some trauma I’d repressed? That was entirely possible; Own Your Unconscious has turned up all kinds of repressed brutalities, and thousands of abusers have been convicted based on the evidence of their victims’ externalized memories, viewed as film in courtrooms.

But what I kept coming back to was my cousin Sasha. Her ACE score would have been high: Her father, an embezzler, vanished when she was six. As a teen, she’d fled the country and drifted through Asia and Europe for a couple of years before my father tracked her down in Naples and persuaded her to come back. I saw now that Sasha’s stealing was an addiction like my own. Yet she and Drew were still married, and their kids—even the boy, Lincoln, whom I remembered as being impossible—were reportedly fine. How had Sasha done this? Curiosity: I had to know. So I asked my dad to put me in touch with Sasha and wrote to her out of the blue, asking if I could come to San Bernardino County and see her sculptures. And she wrote back, more graciously than I deserved, and invited me to visit.•