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Someday, your great-great-great-great grandchildren will drag your latent consciousness from the dark. They will explain to you that there is nothing to be afraid of, that you are dead and you will always be dead, but that your mind has been reconstructed for their pleasure. They will start with benign questions:
“What was your building like?”
“How was traveling by bus?”
You will answer with the appropriate level of detail and they will nod along. When they ask you if you enjoyed your work you will say, “Yes, my data analysis pipeline led to a marked decrease in the per-person acquisition cost in the survival skills vertical, increasing revenue while saving several hundred lives.” They will not ask a follow-up question because they have studied you. You are their hobby horse, a novelty.
So when they ask you how the late empire air tasted, you can tell them it was saccharine and mealy, because they already know.
And when you tell them that, while most people were succumbing to smoke inhalation, your Condominium Association had negotiated for the newest line of air filtration devices, they will nod because they have heard this one before.
You will add meekly that you were kind of bored at the time—customer acquisition was slowing down. They nod. You will say you didn’t talk to their great-great-great-great grandmother much then, just the occasional phone call. They smile. You mention offhand that you took it as an excuse to repaint your apartment.
They stop nodding.
“Re—paint your apartment?”
“Yes, repaint,” You will say. It was a brownish grey before, I think. It reminded me too much of the smog so I painted it green with little tree silhouettes at the bottom.” Then their faces will wrinkle. As they explain to you, this is a delightful anachronism. They have never seen a non-optimally colored room. Before you can ask why, they will begin the interrogation:
“How did it smell?”
“How did you make sure the layers were even?”
They will question every aspect, focusing in particular on the technical details. You will insist that you don’t know how to answer these questions. It was all just trial and error, really. At this they will scrunch their noses, so try to remember:
You started by painting directly over the brownish grey, but it came out looking putrid. That’s how you learned about primer. You taped up the windowsills and used the roller to make long, even lines, saving the detail work for the end.
The first day after you finished, you woke up and thought you had made a terrible mistake. You could only notice the imperfections, the places where your hand had trembled around corners and light sockets. By the second day, you had convinced yourself that you preferred the brownish grey.
But on the third day, before your coffee, you sat down in the middle of the living room. Then you defocused your vision and spun yourself in circles until you were dizzy. Sprawled out on the floor, you swore to yourself you could hear the birds chirping again.
Now it spills out. Brush techniques. Color psychology. You were not a painter, but you knew a few. You fashion their opinions into bite-sized wisdom and dazzle your audience. In the back of your mind you wonder what else they haven’t been taught, but you won’t stop yourself to ask. All you can do is share what you know and hope that they understand.
Soon enough, suspecting that there are more curiosities to uncover, they direct you to music. You weren’t a musician, you say, but you loved it. You tried learning the guitar a few times, but you gave up for good when you graduated college and your friends’ tastes changed. Through your twenties you had run-ins with a saxophone, a steel drum, a few harmonicas. You recall:
As a boy you would stop to look at the buskers, staring with a sick jealousy. By your middle age you would go to sleep mourning them.
The audience leers at you, begging for more.
So you continue. You were not a writer, but you wrote—emails, project briefings, emergency memos. You would read and reread them until you were crosseyed. To emphasize the point, you offer to recite a few from memory. They rebuff.
You recount, medium by medium, story by story, until you have nothing left to give. You were not an artist, but you knew them. You ate their fruits. And that was almost enough.
Your kin will not stick around to chat, instead opting for a polite thank you before tossing you back into the darkness.
They do not understand what you gave them, but someday they may try to.