The Memory Manager
Imagine a slim, tall woman with her hair slicked back and her navy blue pencil skirt perfectly hugging her legs. When she walks, her 3-inch heels clack and echo, and her very presence radiates like an ember. This, my friends, is the memory manager. She is inside all of us, with her thin, pursed lips and eyes like a hawk. A promising business woman forced to live in a rundown warehouse, she enjoys being in control, organizing everything she sees, and showing no mercy to things that aren’t of use.
What does she do, you ask? This is the woman who supervises your memory. Her job is to facilitate memory trade offs, to make the best deals when new memories come in. After all, when new products enter the warehouse, others must be thrown away. There is limited storage in the mind, and we typically reach capacity after only a couple of years – the memory manager understands this thoroughly. When capacity is reached, it is the memory manager’s job to eradicate old shipments, weeding out the deformed ones, the ones that are excessively colorful, the ones that are not colorful enough, the ones that she simply doesn’t like. In a world of practicality, there is no use for dysfunctional or flashy objects.
Sometimes, the memory manager receives more shipments than usual. Two trucks full of shiny pristine
microscopes, ready to identify the miniscule organelles of a cell. Another truck full of ancient Turkic artifacts, collected from the remains of the Ottoman Empire. A third load of computers, wires, and all things mechanical. Now, you may not see the value in these, but the memory manager does. Her hawk eyes register their importance, calculate the profits that can be made. And once she has finished her calculations, she welcomes the new memories in, and begins her work of destruction.
The memory manager detests those who are dirty or disorganized. She herself has memorized each piece of cargo in the warehouse, complete with a mental ledger of every item’s relative value. That’s why it’s rather easy for her to move along the shelves, and pluck an item from its place. Anything too red, too blue, not red or blue enough, perhaps a tint of yellow or green – it doesn’t belong. With her latex gloves and as little fingers as possible, the memory manager delicately picks up old shipments, clacks her way over to the disintegrator on the ground, unlocks its trap door, and drops the item in. As she does so, a single bright spark – nothing more – jumps up like a hopeful child waiting to be held. Then it falls, and the manager locks the door, and the room falls back to its usual gray.
Thus, she has a heart of ice, and yet she is subordinate to the heartlessness of the brain. She froze her heart slowly with time, so that now she knows what memories to remove, what memories to keep. She didn’t arrive like this: she used to be a sweet, eager youth who saw the value in everything. She was a hoarder of memories; she treasured every last shipment that came into her vast, disorganized yet pleasantly bright warehouse. It is only once she grew older that she began to see the bounds of her home. At the same time, the brain, her manager, began to act more strictly. And she saw the consequences of her actions, too: holding on to old shipments meant less new imports. Without some of these imports, her world could not continue. The warehouse had threatened to collapse if she hadn’t thrown away some of her prized possessions to intake new tools, memories that could ward off failure.
Yet, despite her icy heart and hawk eyes and slick back hair, sometimes you will see the memory manager soften. She will find a memory that she cannot throw away, and she will lose her rigid composure. She will wilt a bit, overwhelmed with emotion. Then, she will smile. I believe we may keep this one for another day.
by VICTORIA WOO