How to curate a life
A short story by Rachel Connor
Winner of the Storgy international short story competition in 2017 and first published in the Storgy Exit Earth anthology.
It has taken a week to harvest the girl’s life. Jesse’s device is connected to hers by a flex that curls across his desk like an umbilical cord. She was haphazard in her digital existence. Over six months of life-log footage, none of it edited. All that’s left of her now, though, is powder; food for some memorial bush. The anachronism of a freshly-dug bed in winter. The garden of her parents’ house, suburban, detached, red brick. He remembers, as they sat in the kitchen, the father’s rolled-up shirt sleeves, his tanned forearms. The easy way he slid the notes across the chestnut counter.
Jesse couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen real cash. It was stacked in piles, centimetres from his bag. It would have been easy to scoop it up and leave, bargain struck. The urge to touch it was strong. No wonder transfers were the sanctioned means of exchange. Less messy that way, no coins or paper rubbing against fabric, or flesh.
‘They’ll want to know where it came from.’
‘They won’t ask,’ the father said. ‘Not at my bank.’
The wife, opposite, with her indolent eyelids. The warm spiced smell, churning out from the vent: cloves and cinnamon. It made him think of a distant December. Hands around a mug, feeling the heat spread across his palms and his mother’s face, eyes closed, satiated by the moment.
‘More than a hundred times its electronic value.’ The father caught his eye.
Jesse would become a man with capital; the owner of a box held deep in the innards of a building. He’d heard about those who visited their bank just to touch it. He imagined the texture of ink against his fingers, the pattern in relief of some long-dead monarch.
‘I don’t have the authority,’ Jesse said. ‘Not without a will. Your daughter’s digital estate — it still belongs to her.’
‘We’re her parents.’ The mother’s voice was stretched tight like a rubber band. ‘Surely we have a say?’
‘Legally she was an adult. There’s no loophole. I can’t just —.’ He looked at the father.
‘We hoped you’d consider it. Discreetly of course.’ The mother nodded at the money.
Jesse had only once pressed delete. He didn’t know if he was ready to do it again. He looked at the sister. She didn’t want this, he was sure. ‘If your daughter had come to me —.‘ He opened the laptop. ‘Look, I can still collate her data.’ He clicked open the tab and angled it towards them. ‘Why don’t you take a look at the designs?’
‘If she were alive, we wouldn’t need you.’
At the mother’s words, there was an intake of breath from the sister. She turned sharply away. He saw, through the window, a bird table in the centre of the lawn. The ground was strewn with rotting leaves.
The mother sat forward, back ramrod straight. ‘Have you ever lost anyone?’
‘My parents,’ Jesse said. ‘Both of them.’ He realised they were waiting for more. There was silence and a blast of warm air from the room conditioner as they sat staring at each other: the sister, the mother, the father, and him.
‘Then you’ll know. You’ll know what it’s like. You’re online and her face pops up. Photos you didn’t know existed, maybe even one you’ve taken.’ She looked at him. She was in the hard phase of grief, he could see, the angry part. The echo in Jesse’s ears, the words he wanted to say. That once it is done, there’s no going back.
A movement across the partition makes him look up: Sal sliding from one end of her desk to the other, the sound of casters on the hard floor. She initiates a FaceTime and he hears her caffeinated laugh, thinks of the freckles in that dip below her throat. Some days, when it’s hot, he sees the sheen of sweat on her skin, a suppressed urge to taste it again. That last time on her kitchen floor. He’d had a sense, even as she opened the door, that she was going to end it. But that word — passive — jabs at him even now.
‘You plan on taking a break this month?’
Django’s voice behind him, at the entrance to his booth. It’s almost violent, being wrested away from the world he’s been populating, the world of the dead girl. Footage of summer days, light cutting across the lens, the fizz of orange and yellow at the periphery of vision. Insta images. Haystacks in a field, perfectly spaced.
‘Lunch?’ Django sticks out his thumb and motions to the door, a hitch-hiker in an old movie.
Jesse opens the drawer to retrieve his cards, turns to the window to assess the day. Bright winter sunshine. He pockets his sunglasses. They walk down the corridor together, Jesse trying to match Django’s pace. He follows him down a flight of stairs to the ground floor until they push through the automatic doors and into the light.
It’s just about mild enough to sit in the quad, the central square of green that is subdivided by wooden decking and bamboo grasses. They pick up soba takeaway from one of the coloured trucks parked at the entrance. A runner in a fluorescent vest laps the perimeter, tracking his progress on a watch.
‘So.’ Django’s mouth is full of noodles, sauce dripping onto his chin. ‘The file you’re working on. Want to tell me about it?’
Jesse is aware of the knot of office girls sitting nearby. They’ve brought those thin, plastic-backed travel rugs with them. Even wearing coats and cardigans, they stretch out their legs to catch the sun. One of them has her eyes closed. He wonders if she is listening.
Jesse nods towards them. ‘Best not.’ He tastes tofu and peppers, a sharp hit of chilli. ‘Anyway — you know the pact. It’s lunch.’
Django turns to look at him. Wide open eyes, fringed with black lashes. Jesse sees why women go crazy for him. ‘I checked the drive. You haven’t set up a template.’
He feels a prickling at the back of his neck, that cold clamminess he’s experienced before. A flash of his father’s dying face. The rasping breath. The hand on top of the sheet that everyone expected Jesse to hold. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He focuses on the action of his chopsticks. He needs to be careful, even with Django. ‘The parents haven’t come back on the design yet.’
Django leans into him. ‘They made you a deal, didn’t they?’
Raucous laughter erupts from the office girls. One holds her hands over her mouth and the others are ribbing her about something.
‘In your job, it’s always going to happen. It did to Rasmus. Remember him?’
‘The Danish guy?
Django nods. ‘The client’s husband was cheating on her. When he died, she got Rasmus to —.’ He makes a cutting gesture across the throat. Jesse checks to see if the office girls are watching.
‘He made a will, though, right?’ Jesse whispers. ‘The husband?’
Django shakes his head.
The runner has stopped, stands with hands on hips, face contorted.
‘How do you know this stuff?’
‘I keep my eyes on the drive. You start to see the patterns.’ Django takes a swig of water and offers the bottle but Jesse thinks of the black bean sauce residue, shakes his head. Django looks back at him. ‘I don’t see what’s taking you so long.’
The office girls are on their feet, shaking out their rugs, collecting the remains of their lunch. Django darts a look at them, then turns to Jesse.
‘If you’re going to delete everything,’ he hisses, ‘why bother to collate it?’
There’d been very little of his father. A few scanned-in photos with a thick white border, taken in his sporting days. Rows of young men with long hair and green jerseys, those at the front squatting. His father in the middle, the grinning and victorious captain, the ball by his feet. When Jesse hit delete, he erased the photograph. But he couldn’t forget the smile.
Django reads something in his face and his laugh reveals disbelief, frustration. ‘You haven’t decided.’
‘I’ve got ’til the end of the week.’ Jesse can’t tell his friend that he hears the dead girl breathing. He knows her. ‘I just think — ’ The runner is lying on the ground, legs vertical, stretching his hamstrings. ‘They might change their minds.’
‘You’re insane. You know that?’ Django gathers up their detritus — the empty cartons, drink bottles — signalling the end of lunch. The way he dumps it in the canister makes Jesse’s irritation rise.
By Friday afternoon, he’s gone through everything but the video content. She preferred Polaroid Swing, so her YouTube is minimal. In the first film, she’s in a park; a dot moving amongst the trees, so far off that he wonders if it’s her at all. A face comes into the frame. A boy. Downy hair on his cheekbones catching the light. He is smiling, confident in the knowledge that, even across the distance, he has her in his grasp. Jesse can trace the boy’s movements, the sensation of grass under bare feet. Then the screen goes dead. What happened? Did the boyfriend grab her? Did they collapse on a blanket, his hands on her hot skin?
Jesse clicks on the Polaroid folder. He hadn’t watched them when he was collating, just used the still of the first image as an index. There are so many images of her at parties, gardens in the dark, fairy lights strung in the background; girls wearing too much make up. He hovers over the icon, risks being pulled in to the memories of places she’s been. Travels around Europe; festivals. It’s not so long since he was doing the same, and he remembers the American backpacker in Prague. The hostel’s musty sheets. The way the ends of her hair felt against his chest and thighs.
The file has somehow opened. Jesse’s fingers are on the mouse. A still of the girl’s face: dead but very much alive. She’s laughing, pulling back a strand of blonde hair. It must be hot because she is wearing very little. There is the whisper, underneath her shirt, of a bikini; cornflower blue. It brings out the colour of her eyes. She is looking at him. He activates Swing and the image becomes real; a woman’s body moving in time and space, the hand settling the hair back into place. She turns away but, over her shoulder, her smile, broadening.
Jesse is mesmerised. He’s there, on the sand dunes; the prickle of marram grass against his legs, gritty sand in his mouth. She is soft. The heat of her midriff under the shirt. He closes his eyes as she hoists herself on top of him, because he knows what will happen next. She will touch him. He will grow hard. Hidden in the hollow of the dune, the heat on their backs; he’ll feel her breasts brush against him. He will enter her gently and she will be wet, making it easy to work inside her.
He feels overheated, pushes back his seat. In her cubicle, Sal is staring at her screen, earbuds jammed in. Across the way, Django grins. In the toilets, Jesse closes his eyes but can’t prevent the images replaying. He splashes his face with water and looks at himself in the mirror. How is it possible to feel desire for a dead girl? He can’t believe she isn’t here, laughing, dancing, having sex. He swears he can feel her mouth on his neck.
He leans over the basin, breath into his lungs: the biological function that keeps him alive. It stopped, suddenly, for her. He never asked how she died. There are photos of her grinning from a kayak, helmeted, paddle in hand. He imagines her slipping under the surface, her foot catching on a reed or a piece of metal on the riverbed, toiling and fighting to break free and finally relenting, everything slowing down. The last thing she would see: her boyfriend’s face.
Jesse looks at the scar under his left eyelid; the stubble on his chin. Signs of the body being alive, trying to heal itself. He turns the tap on again, washes his hands. He remembers the first time his father took him to visit his mother in hospital, the chemical smell, her tight smile, welts across her wrists: her only means of escape. Only later did he realise how persistent she must have been.
Back at his desk, Jesse puts his headphones on and selects a soundtrack. Deep Focus. He’ll need it for what he’s about to do.
By the time he’s finished, everyone has gone. As he leaves the office, the sensor lights activate and the corridor twitches into life. He feels, momentarily, like an actor on stage. The muscles in his legs ache from the strain of clenching them at his desk. He longs for the rhythm of the tram and a few minutes’ sleep before he’s spewed out of the station and onto the streets.
At reception, the reflections in the windows make it difficult to see where the outside begins. Starkey is in his usual seat, head down, staring at a tablet. Jesse recognizes the porn site. His dick twitches, involuntarily. He thinks of her.
Starkey closes the cover of his tablet. ‘A late one for you.’
Jesse nods, hands over his staff id and Starkey files it away with the others.
‘No devices tonight?’
Jesse smiles. ‘Giving myself the weekend off.’
He pushes his bag through the X-ray scanner and pictures what the machine won’t pick up: a piece of paper. A handwritten letter that he’ll deliver to the girl’s parents tomorrow.
Jesse wants to be outside, to feel the evening cold against his skin. The revolving door is slower than usual and he waves as he goes through: see you next week. There’s no need for Starkey to know. He’ll find out soon enough when the email reaches Jesse’s boss on Monday with news of a job elsewhere. He wonders, briefly, if Sal will miss him.
The bag is so light. The girl no longer exists. But what he’s done is much more creative: a new template, a record of her life. He has managed her online presence, locked it away so no one can retrieve it. No one — not even her parents — will know she’s there. The data is encrypted. She’s indelible, anyway, for him; stored in that part of his brain he vaguely remembers from his ancient science class. The limbic region. The hippocampus.
Jesse thinks about tomorrow, how he’ll sleep until late, watch movies in bed and eat takeaway from the carton. At some point, he’ll cross the threshold to run along the river, altering his route to take in the suburbs. The sun will set slowly. He’ll breathe as he runs, inhaling water vapour, the girl’s molecules; her biological traces.
AFTERWORD
There is something fascinating about imagining a future we cannot yet see or know, just as we might reconstruct a past that is out of our reach. ‘How to curate a life’ began as an idea from something I found online about careers that will be ubiquitous in the future. It is predicted that, some day, there will be a job for people overseeing the digital estate of a person after death: a digital death manager. This prompted so many questions. When we die, who owns the self in virtual form — the deceased person, or the next of kin? Are we ever truly dead if there are traces of the self in images and our exchanges online? And where, in all this, is the soul? Once the body has expired, is our online footprint a repository of the soul, a means of achieving immortality?
Of course, there are no answers. Being human is a mystery that has puzzled us for millennia and will surely continue to, whatever era or cultural context we exist in. ‘How to curate a life’ is my attempt to explore the fundamental needs we have, as humans, to connect, to touch and be touched, physically and emotionally; to matter.
And, there’s the thing. We are matter: simply collections of atoms, cells and stardust. But the human condition can also contain, if we allow it, the feeling of something bigger; something that is both burden and gift. Our connection to other beings makes us, in the end, weightier than bodies, more powerful than the constellations of energies clustered in the stars.