Most people, when they got their first Relive Box, went straight for sex, which was only natural. In fact, it was a selling point in the TV ads, which featured shimmering adolescents walking hand in hand along a generic strip of beach or leaning in for a tender kiss over the ball return at the bowling alley. Who wouldn’t want to relive innocence, the nascent stirrings of love and desire, or the first time you removed her clothes and she removed yours?”
The titular story, from which I have quoted above, carries the writer’s message to the technology-addled modern world, its obsession with Facebook or the smartphone making one almost incapable of living in the present or of having face-to-face interactions. The parody of our fixation with electronic gadgetry is apparent.
Wes, the narrator, is preoccupied with his past sex life, revisiting it repeatedly through the Relive Box, which is invisible technology — a “retinal projection… Anybody coming into the room… will simply see you sitting there in a chair with your retinas lit like furnaces.”
Freak knowledge
After long hours on the Relive Box, Wes feels sapped of all energy for the next day at work. And time passes, “the relived time and the lived time.” He begins more or less to live in the past as the ‘now’ becomes meaningless to him, deserted as he is by his wife. Getting into bed with Christine, her clinging to him, whispering his name in the throes of pleasure, was an experience he cannot let go of.
The story ends with the narrator admitting “I am not here”, hinting at the predicament of the post-modern man in a dreary world of freak knowledge from where it is possible to escape into the past and experience it all over again. The gifts of cybertechnology act as an antidote to a mundane existence devoid of dreams.
As Boyle says in an interview, “Without tipping my hand — we must let the reader decide such things — I will say that an addiction does tend to close one’s eyes. And mind.”
The other disturbing story, ‘The Argentine Ant’, is about a couple and their 18-month-old child who decide to leave their cramped, noisy surroundings and the dreary northern climate to move to ‘a flyspeck of a fishing village on the tip of the southern peninsula.’ They would like to move away from their doctor, who is utterly befuddled by their child’s ailment, a sensitivity to touch.
Phantom ants
The sunshine of the South tempts them: they dream of escape to the promised land that, they hope, will cure their child as well as give the husband the suitable environs to conduct research on a ‘projective algebraic problem known as the Hodge Conjecture.’ But they are traumatised by a harrowing experience their sleeping son undergoes, when he wakes up howling, covered with ants.
It is a scary coincidence that the child’s hallucinations are all about phantom ants crawling over his body.
Death by living
In ‘Subtract One Death,’ a couple arrives in town to attend the funeral of a friend. They are staying in the house of another couple who are presently in Italy.
News arrives that these friends have come under a terrorist attack. Death by disease or terrorism is a reflection of an unforgiving, ecologically damaged world in which our lives have become more unpredictable than ever before.
To enjoy these stories, you will, of course, have to willingly suspend disbelief. The narrative makes the unbelievable slowly turn believable, and the unreal real.
Bitingly incisive, witty and thought-provoking, these stories span the spectrum from the banality of addictive engagement with cyber technology to forebodings about environmental disasters and gene manipulation. Boyle draws you in and keeps you there, fascinated, horrified and amused in equal measure.
The Relive Box and Other Stories;T.C Boyle, Bloomsbury, ₹599
The author is Professor Emeritus and Fellow, Panjab University, Chandigarh.
