The COVID Box

Back at the beginning of the pandemic — which is something I never thought I’d type unless I was working on a zombie novel — I was surrounded by piles of snacks from Costco and searching for something to take my mind off the daily body count. I picked up Nick Harkaway’s massive, challenging novel Gnomon again. It’s a near-future mystery set in a world where everyone is always monitored, and the state exists as a mostly benign busybody, nudging you gently into proper behavior with constant, 24-hour surveillance and AI-calibrated social feedback.

Harkaway throws away concepts that other writers would use for an entire novel. One of those is something called a Reboot Box. In the future he describes, it’s possible to bring people back from otherwise fatal conditions, but not without cost. They often wake up with broken memories, the inevitable result of the mucking about in their skulls and the damage done by induced comas.

I thought about this a lot, especially as the COVID casualties started to mount. A close family friend of ours was in an induced coma for weeks. When she came out of it, she had to learn how to walk again. And she was one of the lucky ones.

I’ve seen what happens when you lose bits of yourself.

One of my grandfathers died of Alzheimer’s, and before he passed, he would occasionally talk to me and my brother as if we were his sons, bringing up incidents that happened decades before I was born. My stepfather went through dementia before he died as well, and there were times when he would look at me and speak to the kid I was in high school. I could see his difficulty as he tried to bridge the fact of this middle-aged man in front of his eyes with his brain’s certainty that I was still only 16 years old.

I think that’s why he was most comfortable sitting in his chair at the kitchen table every day, reading the same magazine , starting over almost every time he got to the bottom of the page, beginning again at the top as if it were completely fresh to him. It was familiar, and it reminded him of who he was supposed to be: an accomplished businessman, a pilot who soloed when he was 12 and flew jets in Korea, an inventor with multiple patents to his name.

The description of Al, the father in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, seems like a very accurate summary of what he must have felt whenever he got up from that chair, and had to confront the world that would not sit still, that insisted on changing, every time he blinked:

“‘Al? What are you doing?’ He began a sentence: ‘I am — ‘ but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds…”

This past summer, I got to experience a milder form of cognitive decline myself, after a Homer Simpson episode where I cracked my skull. (I was doing pull-ups as part of my quarantine exercise routine, managed to yank the bar from the doorway, fell backward, hit my head on a bottom shelf and tore my scalp open. I got five staples and a mild concussion. On the plus side, I now know my wife can clean up a lot of blood.)

I thought I was fine, and then discovered that I would begin typing a sentence and lose track of what I was saying before I got to the end. I made more typos in a couple of weeks than I had in the whole year before. Reading exhausted me; I couldn’t remember what had happened in the previous chapter, or sometimes on the previous page.

It went away, but I still wonder what I would have done if it didn’t.

There’s a body of research that says much of what we think of as identity — who we think we are — is dependent on context: we become different people when we’re in different situations. We’re not fixed in place, but constantly shifting between different personas as we move through the world.

Likewise, who we are at any given moment depends on what we remember. As much as we’d like to think we have some stable core, we are surprisingly flexible and changeable depending on which version of ourselves we remember at any given moment. As both Daryl Gregory and Ted Chiang have illustrated in their fiction, we are different people at every moment of the day.

The self, like so many of the ways we interact with the world, is a story. And like all stories, it’s changeable. We can rewrite it at any time.

This is why I’m considering a Reboot Box of my own. I am trying to decide what is most important to me, what parts of my life I want to serve as touchstones, what memories I want to keep, and which pieces of me I wouldn’t mind losing.

A year into our quarantines and lockdowns, I know that a lot of other people have been cut loose from everything that used to signify who they are. They no longer have their work family. They no longer have their assigned roles. They may not have a job to go to anymore. They have to inhabit a different life, at home, all the time now. There is less room to be someone else. In some homes, there is no chance to escape.

Or they’re just alone. Which is its own kind of burden, if you don’t want it. Loneliness can actually kill people.

The joke now is that every day in the pandemic is Groundhog Day, and nothing changes. But that’s never true. Everything changes. And I think a Reboot Box — even a mental one — reminds us of that truth.

Lately, at the dinner table, we have taken to looking at the memories some algorithm selects randomly from our twenty-year-archive of digital photos. Our daughters get to see themselves as tiny babies and toddlers again. We get to remember the moments we brought them home from the hospital and what it felt like when the whole world changed because of their presence in it. I get to see myself younger, and wonder at the priorities of that man, and the time he spent as if it were an infinite resource. (My daughters put it another way: “You used to have hair, Dad.”)

I know that I’m lucky in this age of isolation. I’m safe and healthy, and my family is with me in our house with plenty of food and 100 mbps wi-fi. But I need to remember that, or it doesn’t exist. My wife, wiser and better than me, says it all the time: “How lucky we are to be alive right now.”

Of course there are days when I fail. When I’m insufficiently kind, or grateful, for all the gifts and love and luck that I have. When I forget that other people suffer worse with more grace.

Memory, like almost everything else we do, is a choice. Most of the arguments in our culture right now are about which parts we want to include in our stories. With the vaccine — and an end to the pandemic — in sight, I am less worried about being put on a tube and more about what happens next; how we recover from this injury, and how we decide what normal means after more than a half-million deaths.

So I try to remember who I am, and who I want to be. And I hope that tomorrow, I’ll be able to pull those same memories from the box, and be that person again for the first time.