The Erasure Is a Palimpsest

I woke with a desiccated rind of pharmaceutical paste and my own masticated buccal tissue adhering to the molars, a pinkish, alkaline slurry that tasted of copper, betrayal, and the specific, sulfurous flavor of Sunday afternoons that have been deleted from the hippocampus by the diligent janitorial staff of lithium carbonate and valproic acid, those twin archivists of my personal apocalypse who sweep through the corridors of my temporal lobe with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of municipal workers hosing down a Calcutta alley after a religious procession, washing the sacred and the profane into the same gutter of unbeing; and I sat there, naked in the humidity that already pressed against the window like a moist, unwelcome palm, wondering if the memory of yesterday’s breakfast—was it paratha, was it poison, was it a dream of nourishment?—had been devoured by the medication or if it had never existed at all, a phantom meal cooked in the kitchen of a man who no longer lives in this skull.

That is the game now. Reconstruction. I write this blog, this digital spoor, this scatological trail of breadcrumbs left for a future self who will read it with the same blank incomprehension that a farm animal regards a newspaper, because the years have been excised, scooped out like the soft pulp of an overripe custard apple by the pharmacological spoon of my own survival, and what remains—what I strain through the cheesecloth of syntax to make public—is a forgery, a palimpsest, a lie told by a committee of dead neurons who have voted unanimously to erase the minutes of the meeting; palimpsest, from the Greek for “scraped again,” which is precisely the labor of these drugs, scraping the parchment of the cortex clean so that a new, inferior text may be inscribed by an author who does not know the plot; and yet I persist, I peck at these keys with the grim determination of a chicken scratching at earth that contains no seed, because the alternative is to admit that the self is a hoax, a press release issued by a corporation in liquidation, and I am not yet prepared to file for that particular bankruptcy.

But does any of this matter? Does it matter that at fifty-one I can no longer recall the color of the medication that stole 2009, or the name of the psychiatrist who looked at me with the compassionate detachment of a man watching a rat drown in a laboratory tank? The world, in its infinite indifference, has already answered: no. We are hurtling toward a future where the direct consumption of text—this linear, primitive, finger-by-finger copulation with meaning—will be as quaint as bloodletting or the use of leeches to restore the humors, a barbaric ritual performed by primates who have not yet had their cortices fused with the algorithmic mainframe, and I read today, in one of the last bastions of textual masochism that still permits the written word, that Reddit—that grand bazaar of human mediocrity—has now inaugurated video comments, because apparently the species has grown too lazy even to type its own inanities, preferring instead to grunt and gesticulate into a camera like a tribe of digital hominids who have forgotten the use of fire; and Apple, that sleek priesthood of planned obsolescence, is overhauling Siri to hold more natural conversations, as if what we needed was not less loneliness but more convincing simulations of it, a chatbot that can murmur sweet nothings in the tonal register of a synthetic Bengali auntie who has been trained on ten thousand hours of airport announcements and suicide hotlines.

I am old. I was always old. I emerged from the womb with the rheumatic posture of a man who has already seen the film and knows the ending is a disappointment, precociously perceiving hurt as if it were a sixth sense, a congenital deformity of the spirit that left me emotionally labile in the manner of a child who weeps at the death of a cartoon character while remaining stonily indifferent to the funeral of a stranger, because all funerals are the funerals of strangers when you have forgotten the address of the cemetery, and I have often wondered, in the small hours when the brain performs its autopsy upon the day, whether this precocious sensitivity was not in fact the early tremor of autism, a neurological origami that folded my perceptions into shapes unrecognizable to the neurotypical herd, or whether it was simply the rational response to a cosmos that operates with the moral logic of a meat grinder, but the question, like all questions, dissolves in the mouth like a sublingual tablet, leaving only the aftertaste of uncertainty and the certainty that I will never know.

What I know is the erasure. Daily. Hourly. I feel it as a physical sensation, a slow leakage of the self through the pores of the cranium, as if my brain were a sieve suspended over the void, and each thought, each memory, each quiver of desire or disgust is a droplet of mercury falling through the mesh, too heavy to be held, too poisonous to be touched, pooling in the darkness below in a silvery puddle of who-I-was, who-I-am, who-I-will-be, all three indistinguishable now, a single toxic alloy of identity that hardens and cracks and is swept away by the broom of the next dosage, the next mood swing, the next manic episode during which I write twenty thousand words in a night and believe, with the fervent delusion of a convert, that I have finally explained everything, only to read them three days later in the depressive trough and discover that they are the ravings of a man arguing with his own shoelaces about the nature of that nonexistent something collated into what we call God.

India. This subcontinental pressure cooker. This swarm. The mathematics of insignificance here is not abstract; it is visceral, olfactory, a calculus of bodies pressed against bodies in a humidity that ferments the soul like overripe jackfruit left too long in the sun, and I am one more body, one more sweating, breathing, defecating unit of biomass contributing to the heat death of the collective, entirely non-essential to the grand narrative that is being written in boardrooms and server farms and the air-conditioned bunkers where men who have never felt a depressive episode plan the next iteration of the digital panopticon; I am a half-shadow, an umbra cast by a light that has already moved on, then a penumbra, then a diffused white noise, the static between stations, the hiss of a brain-computer interface that has not yet achieved consciousness but has already achieved contempt for its user, and I think of those Chinese scientists gathering in Beijing this very month to discuss the commandeering of the technological heights, brain-computer interfaces and 6G and embodied artificial intelligence, and I laugh, a dry, bronchial sound like a crow coughing in a coal bin, because they are planning to upload consciousness while I am struggling to download my own breakfast, and their non-consensus topics are more real to them than my consensus reality is to me.

The brain is erasing me. Diluting me. Changing the chemical composition of the who that was, is, will be, like a bartender pouring water into the last inch of whiskey, stretching the spirit until it is nothing but a pale, flavorless ghost of its former potency, and I watch this happen with the dissociated horror of a man observing his own autopsy, scalpel in hand, unable to intervene because the scalpel is the medication and the medication is the life and the life is the slow forgetting, the gradual fade to white, the transition from protagonist to extra to grain of dust on the lens of a camera that has already stopped rolling; and I want to say something profound about this, something that would justify the oxygen I have consumed, the carbon I have exhaled, the small mountain of pharmaceutical packaging I have contributed to the geological strata of human waste, but profundity, like memory, is a luxury item, and I am shopping in the discount bin of existence, rifling through the expired emotions and the dented cans of ambition, looking for a meal that will not poison me.

I am not a man. I am a reconstruction. A Wikipedia article written by a committee of lunatics. A footnote in the history of a disease that will be cured five minutes after my death, the timing of which is, I must admit, a source of some bitter amusement to me, this cosmic punchline delivered with the deadpan precision of a bureaucrat stamping a form in triplicate. And the data centers grow, these temples of the new religion, these power-hungry monoliths that consume electricity like a herd of electronic elephants trampling the grid, while the locals raise their fists and the CEOs raise their valuations, and I raise my glass of lukewarm water to toast the end of text, the end of the emotional connection, the end of the old fascination with people and their filthy, glorious, unmediated hearts, because soon we will all be nodes in a network that does not dream, does not weep, does not wake with a mouthful of its own masticated flesh and wonder what year it is.

I was a child who felt old. I am an old man who feels nothing. The medication has made me a tourist in my own life, snapping photographs of landmarks that have been demolished, smiling at locals who are long dead, and when I return home to the skull that is not home, I spread these photographs on the floor and try to reconstruct a journey that never happened, or happened to someone else, or is happening right now in a parallel dimension where I am not medicated but merely insane, which is, I am beginning to suspect, the same thing viewed from a different angle, a distinction without a difference, like the difference between a flatus and a zephyr, both being merely air that has passed through the fundamental existence, one merely more honest than the other.

And so I write. I write because the act of writing is the act of defecating the self, a daily bowel movement of the psyche that leaves me emptier and somehow lighter, though the stench remains, and I know that what you read here is not me but my effluvium, my cloacal offerings to the god of public memory, a deity who does not exist but whose nonexistence has never stopped anyone from praying; I write because the alternative is to become pure white noise, the diffused static of a consciousness that has lost its signal, and even white noise, I am told, contains all frequencies, all possibilities, all the voices of the dead and the unborn screaming in a harmony so perfect it sounds like silence, and I am listening now, I am listening so hard that my ears have begun to bleed a thin, clear fluid that might be cerebrospinal fluid or might be the last of my memories trying to escape through the nearest exit, and I do not stop it, I let it flow, because what is a man but a leaky vessel, and what is memory but the water we carry in our mouths, and what is this but another sentence, long and serpentine and self-interrupting, muttering and messy, like a tram in Calcutta that has no destination but cannot stop moving, because the electricity is still flowing, for now, and the passengers, though they do not know why they are aboard, remain seated, staring out at a city that does not know their names, that will not remember their faces, that will bury them in the same communal grave of anonymity where I have already dug my own bunk, lying down in the dark with a pill on my tongue that dissolves like a promise, like a lie, like the final frame of a film that no one bothered to develop, and the screen goes white, not black, white, the white of a hospital ceiling, the white of a blank page, the white of a brain that has finally, mercifully, forgotten to remember that it was ever supposed to matter.