Single-Bit Error

  by Ken Liu

  Before he met Lydia, Tyler’s life, like the lives of most people, involved the steady accretion of names:

  — “What happened next?” “Nothing,” Grandmother said. “They just lived happily ever after.” “Forever?” “Forever.”

  Until Grandmother read him “Sleeping Beauty,” Tyler thought every story ended the way his parents ended them: “And they lived, sometimes even happily, until the day they died.”

  — Tyler and every other kid avoided the new boy because he was bigger than all of them and stared at everyone like he was looking for a fight. But the only empty seat in Mrs. Younge’s Art class that day was next to Tyler, and that was how Owen Last and Tyler became best friends.

  — Tyler looked at her until the music stopped. He was just about to ask her to dance when her date showed up. “So it is possible to fall in love in half an hour,” he thought. He wrote “Amber Ria” on a slip of paper and sealed it in a beer bottle with aluminum foil and threw the bottle as far into Long Island Sound as he could.

  — Whenever somebody said “Tyler” they both looked up. But then the thin boy with a scar on his chin stopped coming to class and Tyler never found out what his last name was.

  — San Francisco was just a dot on the map until he saw the seals sunbathing by Fisherman’s Wharf.

  — At the coffee house open mike, he read a poem called “Allure, Obsession, Desire and Devotion.” Tyler could not understand why all the women were laughing until the woman sitting behind Owen showed him the perfume advertisements in the magazine in her hand. Lena Lyman and Tyler dated for exactly two months. Her favorite scent was Envy.

  — Tyler didn’t know what that bright star in the sky was called until he moved into his new apartment and found an abandoned star atlas in the kitchen, next to a bowl of fresh clementines. He tasted sweetness on his tongue whenever he thought about Sirius, the Dog Star.

  * * *

  The first time Tyler saw her was in a dumpster behind the Wholly Place two blocks from his apartment. He had gone around the back of the store to look for some empty boxes to carry his organic potatoes and free range chicken breasts home (the Wholly Place believed in neither paper nor plastic).

  She was standing up in the dumpster, her hands lifting into the sun a giant jar of olives that had just passed their expiration date. A dark blue cotton tank top showed off the creases and dimples on her elbows. Her sun-bleached, ginger-red hair was pinned into lopsided coils on top of her head with a black barrette. A scattering of freckles gave color and vibrancy to her pale face.

  She turned to him, putting the jar of olives down on top of the pile of other things she had fished out of the dumpster. She had chapped lips, the sort of lips that came from smoking cigarettes and laughing at statistics. Her eyes were the color of moth wings. She’s going to smile, he knew, and he wanted to know if her teeth were white and crooked.

  Tyler thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  “You know that most of the stuff they throw out here is still good for at least another week, right?” She beckoned him closer. “Come and give me a hand.”

  Yes, she was smiling.

  * * *

  We think we know a few things about the way memory works. We think that memories of things that actually happened, such as what you ate for dinner, things that could have happened but didn’t, such as the smart retort that came to mind too late, and things that simply could not have happened, such as the way sunlight might reflect from an angel’s eyes, are encoded the same way at the level of neurons. To distinguish between them requires logic and reason, and a level of indirection. This is troublesome to some people in so far as they believe that our construction of reality is based on memories. If you cannot tell these kinds of memories apart, then it seems that you can be made to believe anything.

  The consolation of philosophy and religion both was that they helped men classify the types of memories and keep their hold on the fragile authenticity of their waking lives.

  * * *

  When Tyler was very young, his grandmother was his favorite person in the world because, unlike his parents, who believed that children should always be told the truth as adults understood it, she would fill in the gaps in his knowledge — Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, God. His parents were always too busy and often a little too serious, but his grandmother had a sense of peace about her, a lightness that lifted his spirit. A few times, when Tyler’s parents were away, she took him with her to church. He remembered liking the singing and the colorful windows, and how safe he felt there, in that large, empty space, sitting on a hard bench next to her warmth.

  When she died, grief overwhelmed Tyler. But like most adults, when he grew older he could only recall the intensity of that love in childhood in an abstract way. He made the common error of identifying maturity with worth, and assumed that the love he had for her as a young child must have been lacking in strength and depth.

  For many years after her death, however, Tyler was tortured by the memory of a certain visit from her. He was five or so, and they were playing some board game at the kitchen table. As he swung his legs in his excitement, he kicked her repeatedly in the shins. She asked him to stop, and he refused, giggling. When she finally frowned at him and threatened to stop playing if he didn’t stop he told her to go to Hell.

  In Tyler’s mind he could see her face grow taut, lose color, and then, for the only time he could remember, she began to cry. He also remembered his own utter confusion. His parents did not have much use for religion and so for him Hell was a word without much mystery or power. At that time he knew only vaguely that Hell was a place you did not want to go, like the dark basement or the even darker attic. He remembered feeling resentful that she was crying and he did not even understand why.

  Tyler felt the guilt of this memory even in his teenage years. For him it summed up all his insecurities and fears about his own cruelty, ignorance, and the possibility that he was, in reality, not a good person. The fact that he had caused someone who loved him such pain with so little effort and understanding troubled him deeply.

  One day Tyler looked through an old family photo album, and in it was a picture of the kitchen in the house they used to live in. He was surprised to discover that the small kitchen contained a central island, and had no space for the table in his memory at all.

  The memory that had caused him such pain over the years could not possibly have occurred.

  With the discovery of that single error in his memory came a cascade of other revelations. Now he remembered that they always ate in the dining room, and when they did play board games, it was always on the coffee table in the living room. The memory that had caused him such pain over the years could not possibly have occurred. Somehow, he must have manufactured the whole scene in his imagination.

  It was not very hard to explain what really happened, he thought. The death of his grandmother had probably caused in him feelings of abandonment and guilt. In his confusion he had taken elements from storybooks and imagined out of nothing this memory to punish himself. This was the sort of fantasy that could have occurred to any young child who lost an important relative. With that realization, the image of his grandmother crying faded in his memory and became less and less believable.

  Tyler thought he was very lucky to have discovered the single error in his false memory, which enabled him to reason his way into distinguishing between reality and fantasy. He felt that it was a coming-of-age moment.

  Nonetheless, he admitted to himself that he was a little sad also at the discovery. For however imaginary that memory was, it was also a part of his love for his grandmother. When that memory lost its compelling aura of truth, it was like another part of her died with it. He had no name for the emptiness that remained.

  * * *

  The best pistachio ice cream in the world was served in Dora’s Ice Cream Parlor in the town of Los Aldamas. Tyler knew this because it was while they were there, with the air conditioner cooling the back of his neck and the sunlight streaming in through the cracks in the dusty windowpanes, while they shared a small cup of pistachio ice cream, that Lydia said to him, “Yes, of course I will. Let’s.”

  A month earlier he had helped her carry the olives and bread and grape juice she had salvaged from the Wholly Place dumpster to her apartment, which turned out to be in the same building as his, only on the floor below. What little furniture there was in the apartment was made from cardboard boxes with sheets draped over them. It was like being on the set of a minimalist play.

  Lydia spread a blanket on the floor and they had a picnic in the middle of the afternoon in her twelve-by-ten studio. She broke the bread into pieces and handed the pieces to him, and they drank the grape juice from the bottle.

  “The Eucharist,” Lydia said, “à la Lydia.” She said it with the same tone one would say, “Pollo Calabrese, my grandmother’s recipe.” It didn’t sound like a joke. She offered him an olive from the jar.

  It had been many years since Tyler had last gone to a church with his grandmother, and he didn’t know what to say. But he wanted to stay with her and look at her face, which, though it broke into smiles only occasionally, was suffused with a happiness that Tyler felt as a wave of heat.

  He told her about his job as a database programmer at a bank, and about his nights scribbling in his notebook and reading in smoke-filled coffee houses to other young men and women with dreams like his own. He told her a selection of the most impo rtant names of his life and the stories behind them. While he spoke, he marveled at her face, and how he was already crazy about her.

  Tyler asked her questions. He wanted to know the life of the woman he was falling in love with, to understand her collection of names.

  Lydia had grown up in New Camden, one of thousands of other towns just like it, exurbs cast adrift along the highways between Boston and New York. She was named in honor of a grandmother who died before she was born. When she was little her mother called her “Peapod” because she was chubby and loved the sun. Her father called her “Princess” because that was what he thought all fathers called their daughters.

  For much of junior high she did not know who she was. Her parents fought and when they finally stopped fighting her father wanted her to continue to be called Lydia Getty, and her mother wanted her to be called Lydia O’Scannlain. She spent her summers at her father’s new home in Arizona, where he took her to meet his friends at night. They called her “Baby Shark” because she beat them at poker. At school the girls called her Lydia O’Hara because her favorite color was red. The boys did not have a name for her because, as far as they knew, she had not yet kissed anyone.

  In high school she was Lydia the Pothead, and she was popular with the boys for all the wrong reasons. Her mother called her names that she would rather not remember. Once a boy drove her to a building in Boston, where angry men and women waving signs and placards lined the driveway as she walked up, alone, and called her names that made her shiver. Later, as she lay in a small white room, recovering, a nurse told her to ignore the noises outside and to try to imagine herself as A Very Brave Young Woman.

  She fell asleep, and was startled awake when she felt the room shake. Her life was transformed at that moment because she was visited by the angel Ambriel, the angel with eyes the color of moth wings.

  Contrary to most accounts of angelic visitations — Lydia told Tyler, who did not yet quite understand what he was hearing — angels do not engage in conversation with the visited. The power of the visitation comes entirely from the presence of the angel itself, which is a fragment of the being of God.

  Like that of millions of other people, Lydia’s life, though not filled with extraordinary suffering, had had enough disappointments and betrayals by that point that she had lost what little faith the church had been able to instill in her. God had the same status in reality as neutrinos.

  Now, Lydia looked upon the angel, and felt Ambriel’s light punch through her eyes and fill her mind, and the pain was so glorious that she could not even conceive of closing her eyes. Everything she had ever learned about anything was simply wrong, irrelevant. Ambriel’s light illuminated the deafening silences between her parents, the old and fresh scars from that zero-sum game known as social life in a high school, the humble, confusing and desperate inconsistencies of an ordinary life. In that light, all of it was coherent, sensible, and above all, beautiful.

  In that moment Lydia was made anew. She was filled with such love for God that she finally understood why Hell is really the absence of God, and has nothing to do with fire or brimstone.

  Tyler learned then what it was he saw in Lydia’s face that so pulled at his heart. He saw in that face the signs of that species of happiness we used to call blessed. To be blessed is to be without fear, which is just another name for desire left unfulfilled. But the very presence of God, even through the intermediary of an angel, made unfulfilled desires meaningless for her. The only fear left after a visitation was the fear that one might be denied the presence of God. But since the only requirement to reach God is to love Him, and it is not possible to not love Him after having experienced the joy of His presence, Lydia’s salvation was guaranteed.

  At that moment, Lydia learned who she was. She was one of the Saved. This did not mean that she had to give up drugs and swearing, or that she had to put on a white robe and roam the streets stuffing pamphlets under people’s doors. It simply meant that she could now go on with her life and everything she did in the future would be full of joy because she loved God.

  And so Tyler was in love with Lydia because God’s light, dim though it was by the time it was refracted through Lydia onto him, nevertheless dazzled him.

  He took Lydia with him to poetry readings, where Lydia met his friends who wanted to write poetry and congregated in those smoke-filled basement cafés. When Tyler read from the cocoon of the spotlight, he sought out her luminous face and bright halo of red hair in the dim light of the café because she smiled when she heard him read and he loved to see her smile.

  Because she couldn’t tell an iamb apart from the Lamb; because she smelled of soap and sunlight; because when she told him she would go look at stars with him she really meant it; because when he made fun of people who said “irregardless,” she made him look it up in a dictionary so that he learned that it really was a word; because he knew that he could always tell when she would laugh a fraction of a second before she did.

  Although Tyler’s friends didn’t know quite what to say at first when they heard Lydia tell her story of her encounter with Ambriel, they soon came to like her because she was nothing like what they would have expected from someone who claimed to see angels. She could hold her drink better than any of them — even Owen, who still looked like he would rather be out on the road on a motorcycle than in an office — and she would wink at Tyler when she was drunk and whisper, “I’m dangerous, and I’ll eat you like air.”

  On Sundays Lydia did not go to church. She never went to churches because they had nothing to offer her, and in any case most churches in the city were embarrassed by her story. Instead, she brought him to meetings of people who had been visited by angels and people who wanted to be visited by angels. These meetings occurred in the basements of churches and libraries, and they involved a lot of folding chairs and stale coffee, as well as a lot of desperation and phrases cribbed from the self-help aisles. Often Tyler wondered why he was in these meetings at all until he saw the light in Lydia’s face as she told her story.

  On other days they wandered the streets of the city after work. They took short road trips to small towns up and down the Pacific Coast. They talked about everything and nothing at all, and all the while Tyler gazed into Lydia’s face and wanted to believe.

  That month between the day he met her in a dumpster and the day she said yes, she would marry him, while feeding him pistachio ice cream was the happiest month of Tyler’s life.

  The only trouble was, he still did not believe in God.

  * * *

  On their way back from Las Aldamas, Lydia fell asleep in the passenger seat. The road was straight and smooth, and the traffic was light. Tyler put the car on cruise control and stretched his legs. He reached for Lydia’s hand and turned his head to glance at her sleeping form.

  Later, when Tyler tried to recall what he felt, as he watched Lydia slowly die in the seat next to him, her body upside down and held in place by the seatbelt, her back twisted at an impossible angle, the collapsed roof of the car trapping her arms, he was surprised to find that he could recall no pain from his own body at all.

  But that could not have been the case. Both his legs were broken, and the heat from the flames must have been intense on his side of the wreckage, judging by the burns covering his face and arms. When he finally recovered enough to sit up on his own in the hospital, he also found that the blindness in his left eye would be permanent.

  Be that as it may, the fact was that all Tyler could remember was how calm and unafraid Lydia was as she told him that she knew she was going to die, that she was not in any pain, and that she would see him in Heaven.

  Then her eyes got wide, and she said, “Hello, Ambriel.”

  Tyler tried to twist around in his seat so he could see what she was seeing, even though he knew that he would see nothing. The steering wheel got in his way and he gave up after a few seconds. He would regret those few seconds later because he took his eyes off Lydia’s face, and during those few seconds she died.

 

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