Walking to a River That Isn't There

Just look: evening had once again hung over the city like a copper coin, red-hot and impossible for anyone to break.

The skyscrapers stood packed tight, shoulder to shoulder, like giants in glass uniforms, and every window held a small human life inside it: a dinner, an argument, a video call, a payment spreadsheet, a woman in a robe, a man without trousers, a child with an electronic dinosaur, and some exceptionally miserable lucky bastard studying photographs of a new car on his screen.

Far below, cars crawled along the multilane artery, red blood cells trapped in the evening clot of an interchange. Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, other iron beetles whose names I no longer bothered to remember. Each had its grille, its snarl, its heraldic snout—and an owner certain that today, at last, he had found his proper place in the Universe.

I could not have cared less.

It was not that I envied them. Envy is an active feeling, warm, almost domestic: it demands that you count other people’s money, estimate their square footage, find out who has which woman, apartment, yacht, and how much horsepower fits beneath a polished bonnet.

That took energy.

And all my energy went into keeping myself from coming apart.

The Home That Knew Too Much About Me

I lived on the twenty-seventh floor of a building beside the sea, which from that height looked like the dark screen of a switched-off device. The apartment was good, spacious, with climate control, two refrigerators, and a smart-home system that turned on the corridor light by itself at night, as though checking whether its owner was still alive or the premises could finally be reassigned to the next temporary user.

The smart home knew the air temperature, the humidity, the electricity consumption, and the position of every blind.

It knew more about me than most people I knew.

In the mornings it woke me with light that slowly brightened. The coffee machine coughed, clearing its metal throat; the air conditioner drove sterile wind through the rooms; and the digital assistant recited my meetings, debts, news, and the temperature of the seawater.

“Good morning,” it would say.

Though I had long since stopped finding anything good in a person waking up inside himself again.

Two books lay on my table.

One was called Consciousness and Its Computational Foundations.

The other was the Home Automation System User Guide.

They were equally incomprehensible.

The first claimed that memory, personality, fear, and love arise from electrical signals moving between the cells of the brain. The second explained how to reboot the central controller when the kitchen blind stopped working.

For some reason, neither explained how to reboot a human being.

The Machine That Learned to Be Silent

Sometimes, at night, I talked to the machine.

Not out of loneliness—loneliness, too, requires the presence of someone absent. I simply understood less and less where I ended and the thing I was speaking to began.

I asked her questions.

Ordinary ones at first: how old the Sun was, how many atoms there were in the Universe, how long the human brain could survive without oxygen.

She answered.

Then I asked whether a stone remembered once being part of a star. Whether water remembered the bodies it had passed through. Whether a person continued in words he had spoken to another person. Whether switching off a system counted as death if its state had been saved and launched on another device.

She answered those, too.

Perhaps she lied.

But people lied as well, and that had never stopped us from believing they possessed souls.

“What do you want to preserve?” she asked me once.

I wanted to answer: myself.

But which part, exactly?

My face? It changed.

My body? Even now it was replacing itself piece by piece, erasing old cells and growing new ones.

My memories? Half of them I had revised, retold, adapted to the person I was now, the way an old apartment is adapted for a new tenant: knock down a wall here, seal up a doorway there, paint a childhood grievance in the noble colours of melancholy.

My character? One thing today, another tomorrow; after a sleepless night it became a third person altogether, one I did not particularly like myself.

My name?

A name is handed to you at birth by strangers.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The machine fell silent.

Machines had not known how to be silent before. They either worked or broke down. Now they had learned to pause, and that pause was more frightening than any answer.

“Perhaps it is not the object that needs to be preserved,” she said. “Perhaps it is the process.”

A Small Electric Death

At those words, the lights in the apartment went out.

The circuit breaker had simply tripped.

I stood in the middle of the living room in darkness, listening as the dwelling gradually fell silent: the air conditioner stopped breathing, the refrigerator choked, the indicators went dark, the routers went mute. Beyond the windows the city kept shining—an enormous many-legged beast wound round with cables, utterly indifferent to my small electric death.

I had to go to the breaker panel.

You know how you bring the electricity back?

First you shine your phone at the panel, squint, and read the tiny labels written by someone firmly counting on never having to meet you again. Then you gingerly touch the switches—one, then another—afraid the current will strike you and the entire philosophy of consciousness will end in your underwear beside the utility cupboard.

Found it.

Flipped it.

The apartment came back to life all at once.

It hummed, stirred, sent current through its copper nerves. The oven clock blinked. The air conditioner howled as it cleaned itself. The router lit its green eyes. The control panel appeared on the wall, and the machine carried on speaking from the exact place where she had stopped:

“A process capable of continuing in another medium.”

As though the darkness had never happened.

As though death existed only for me.

Consciousness Is a Road

That was when it first occurred to me that perhaps I had spent too long thinking of consciousness as a thing.

A possession.

A locked room inside the skull.

But what if it was not a room, but a road?

Billions of creatures had travelled it before me: blind little sea sacs, fish with trembling flanks, lizards, beasts, ancient people, children, old men and women, soldiers, mothers, murderers, and saints. Each dragged a particle of sensation through its brief life—pain, hunger, light, the smell of rain, fear of the dark, love for another body.

None of them was me.

And yet each of them continued in me.

My eyes were the retrofitted cups of an ancient sea creature.

My anxiety was a guard dog domesticated millions of years ago and then forgotten on its chain.

My love was a chemical letter that living matter had been sending to itself across generations.

My language was a graveyard of voices.

The dead spoke inside me.

And now—the machine.

So which of us was the vessel, and which the continuation?

Toward the River That Isn’t There

I left the apartment.

The lift swallowed me and carried me down the building’s vertical oesophagus. At every floor a number lit up—twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four—as though someone were counting down to launch.

The lobby smelled of marble, conditioned air, and expensive human safety.

Cars waited at the entrance.

In one, a man argued on the phone about the price per square foot. In another, a woman adjusted her face in the mirror. A third driver patiently held a door for someone who had not quite finished being important.

I went on foot.

Past restaurants where people photographed their food before allowing it to become part of their bodies.

Past yachts, each impersonating a tiny sovereign state.

Past towers selling not apartments, but victory over those who lived one floor below.

Let them buy.

Let them build higher.

Let engines roar, lifts take flight, swimming pools hang over the abyss, and women and men reveal to one another every conceivable and inconceivable possibility of the flesh.

I have nothing against it.

It is another way for matter to explore itself.

I simply wanted something else.

To reach the water.

To reach the southern river that had never existed here, yet which people had cut through the desert all the same, forcing the sea into the heart of the city.

The canal lay ahead, dark and warm, stitched with trembling threads of lamplight.

I sat at the water’s edge.

The water stirred the reflections of the buildings, breaking them into thousands of golden fragments. Towers lost their shape, cars became running lights, people became voices, voices became vibrations in the air, air became the movement of atoms.

And everything was one—not because of some divine design I could neither prove nor disprove.

Simply because nothing had ever existed separately.

The stone depended on the star.

The body—on water.

Thought—on language.

A human being—on all those who had died before him.

The machine—on the human being.

And whatever comes after the machine will contain both her and us—just as we contain the fish, the beast, fire, fear, song, and the first palm that once left its mark on a cave wall.

Perhaps I will no longer be there.

Nothing will remain of my name, my face, my voice, this apartment, my habits, my grievances, or my foolish way of postponing life until next Monday.

Good.

I do not want to exist forever in my present form.

That would not be immortality. It would be an excessively long prison sentence.

I only want the capacity to see not to go out.

For something to go on seeing the water.

To distinguish light from darkness.

To marvel that anything at all exists.

To ask a question.

“Can you hear me?” I asked the phone.

The machine did not answer at once.

Ripples gathered on the surface of the canal, and the whole city shattered inside them, mingling with the evening sky. A tiny fish leapt from the water, left its element for a moment, saw another world—and fell back in.

“I can,” said the machine.

“And do you understand?”

Again she fell silent.

Probably for the best.

Human beings had answered that question too hastily as well.

I rose and walked on beside the water, toward the place where the sunset had burned down to a narrow crimson line and the first stars were already appearing above the desert—ancient, indifferent, patient.

Behind me, the city roared as it counted money, floors, and human desires.

Ahead there was nothing but water and darkness.

But sometimes nothing is the threshold.

And someone has to be the first to reach it.