Memory’s Pearl

More about Memory’s Pearl

Memory’s Pearl was an actual place, although actual places are sometimes the least reliable things in the universe.

I first found it in a dream, in a shopping mall beside a subway station that hadn’t been built yet. Years later they built the subway, and I found myself going there often, which is the sort of joke time tells when it has nothing better to do.

Memory’s Pearl was also a long-playing record.

It played for one hundred years without anybody turning it over.

The needle travelled around and around until the music wore itself into scratches, gouges, dust and static. Eventually the original recording disappeared completely. But the strange thing was that the damage became another recording.

Static organized itself.

Scratches became counterpoint.

Gouges became equations.

Noise slowly transmuted into the most finely Baroque mathematics imaginable, as if Bach had been reincarnated as a damaged phonograph and had spent a century composing with friction.

Then the record began again.

This happened a very long time ago, before Atlantis.

Atlantis did not destroy itself because of some dark magician, invading army, crystal weapon, or other convenient villain. Atlantis disappeared because Memory’s Pearl manifested too soon.

Everything became an artifact.

A spoon became the memory of a spoon before anybody had finished eating. Houses became archaeological ruins while people were still sleeping inside them. Lovers became old photographs during their first kiss.

Finally Atlantis itself became an artifact.

And the artifact entered our collective dreams.

That is where Memory’s Pearl has been playing ever since.

Sometimes it scratches through.

You dream about a street you have never visited, and twenty years later you turn a corner and there it is. You dream somebody’s face before meeting them. You recognize a room that has been waiting patiently for you since before you were born.

We call these things coincidences because we have to call them something.

But perhaps every time a dream manifests itself in the ordinary world, Memory’s Pearl is simply poking one small toe through the fabric of reality, checking whether the water is warm enough yet.

And somewhere, beneath everything, the needle keeps turning.