Plastic Afterlife

Just as my body is a collection of atoms, my mind is a collection of facts. My personality, a collection of interests. My identity, a collection of goods and services.

I’m currently eating a butter-and-pickle wrap. I love the acidic bite on my tongue as the vinegar blends with the paste. The butter itself is not technically butter, being made of unknown vegetable fats from a plastic tub. Fake butter. I prefer it to the “real” stuff.

I sit at my desk, tortilla crumbs forming a connect-the-dots game on my notepad. I scrape the inside of my ear with my mechanical pencil, careful to retract the lead each time. I haven’t written anything among the crumbs.

The upcoming memory wipe has put society on edge, to say it gently. We’ll all wake up without our memories. At worst, we won’t remember basic language. We won’t know how to tie our shoes, button our shirts, strap our bras. But that’s just worst case. More likely—and to some, more frighteningly—we just won’t remember who we are.

I won’t have that problem.

I am a snowball. I roll and grow. A katamari of experiences, references, homages. The universe expresses itself in verbs, one of which is me. I, too, express myself in verbs, one of which is “collect.” I shake my notepad like a wrinkled blanket and apply the first of many words to come—“ALBUMS”—in cramped block letters. A list.

Over the upcoming year (a collection of days), I will curate the collection of myself. A Smaug-like horde of treasure. When looked upon, this treasure will glitter and gleam. That shimmering signal will be a reflection of me, as a person. I will awaken like a kid on Christmas morning to unwrap myself. I’ll watch my movies, play my games. I’ll assemble my Gundams from the collection of their plastic pieces, then do the same with my SpongeBob SquarePants LEGOs, my Bionicles, my K’nex, my Star Wars jigsaw puzzles.

I’ll marvel at the atomic intricacies of myself, and quickly become who I was before the memory wipe.

I spend the next three days brainstorming the collection. It fills every corner of my notepad.

************

I borrow my mother’s truck to empty out my storage shed. I’ve been renting this metal shed for years, inflating it with odds and ends. A lot of my favorite childhood memories are packed in cardboard, emitting mossy aromas. I bring all of it to my apartment.

Very quickly I understand that I won’t be able to fit everything in one living space. My apartment is nothing more than a kitchen and a bedroom connected by linoleum flooring. My bathroom is closet-sized, tucked into the corner like an afterthought. I cut through the box tape with my mailbox key, carefully organizing my old belongings into piles: photo albums, notebooks, framed posters (I used to pull them out of gaming magazines and take them to a framing shop), electronics (large), electronics (small), cords, shirts, shoes, action figures, LEGO sets, funny-shaped rocks, cat toys (RIP Babu), spare supplies of all sorts. It’s overwhelming, but it becomes clear very quickly which piles represent who I am as a person and which are just piles of heartless “stuff” and “things.” Most of my clothing, all of my old footwear, and practical goods like spare light bulbs and garden hoses—all of that goes back to the storage shed.

I line everything else up against the wall. There’s a lot, for sure, but it’s also... vaguely disappointing. As I look at my Scarem Transmetal Beast Wars Transformer, a toy so mangled it can no longer perform its one definite action of transforming into a scarab beetle, a wave of sourness washes through my stomach. If this is me, I am pathetic.

Most of my interests, most of my nostalgia, is incomplete, like a deck of cards with only the spades. My love of Metallica is minimized by the fact that I only own one album. My love of comics is undermined by the fact that I only own about five, not including the Watchmen graphic novel. None are even about my favorite superhero, Hawkman (Carter Hall, not Katar Hol).

I scan the list. Twenty-five pages of things which I would consider necessary to understanding myself, my interests, my past—and maybe only a dozen of those things have any representation in the piles lined up like criminals against my wall.

I open my laptop and start buying. 

************

Three weeks later and my apartment is starting to look more like how I imagine myself. It hasn’t been cheap.

For the most part, I’ve filled in all of the album gaps of my favorite musicians. Metallica, Styx, Queen, Bowie, Limp Bizkit, Ghost, Dream Theater. My less flattering albums, like Enya and Vienna Teng, aren’t really “me” enough and get tossed in the trash—although I keep Zimmer’s The Prince of Egypt soundtrack because it slaps. I add a hefty array of manga. I buy toys from my childhood, rare, expensive, nearly impossible to find. I go a little crazy. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures (including Splinter, Shredder, and some fly character I don’t remember but who looks cool) and a miniature pseudo-foosball table where they flick a whole pizza like a hockey puck; three colors of Furby; an eight-pack of Beanie Babies, unsorted; five themed variants of Monopoly; a Rugrats lunchbox, Tommy Pickles in his diaper and tiny blue shirt.

I take this opportunity to fill out my bookshelf. I also take this opportunity to buy a bookshelf. I’ve always felt that I was the type of person who was intimately interested in novels, especially the classics. After high school, I never really found the time to catch up on any reading other than a few excellent YA novels. To my great shame, I never got around to finishing the Harry Potter series despite ostensibly being a Ravenclaw. Once my memory is wiped, it won’t matter. It’s very likely that when I wake up, those Harry Potter books will be among the first I see, and the conclusion will fall into place: I read that. That’s the type of person I am.

I also fill my shelves with some of the notorious troublemakers. Joyce. Pynchon. Dostoevsky. Foster Wallace. For non-fiction, anthropology, archeology, Egyptology. I throw some Seuss in there to remind myself of my childlike whimsy.

Once my shelf is nearly full of books I haven’t read, it occurs to me how much the memory wipe is allowing me a second chance. It’s likely that I will engage with my collection not only as a reminder of self, but as an inspection of routine. I can imagine myself on a bench in the park, pen in mouth, notebook propped open on one knee, finally reading Moby Dick. Maybe!

So I get a paperback of Moby Dick.

Then I order a running machine and a set of free weights. Perhaps I’ll become a runner, a sculpted Adonis. I’ll wake up a better person than I was.

************

I find an old shoebox of photos. My mother used to be obsessed with photo albums. She’d snap an image at every opportunity, no matter how unimportant, print it out at Walgreens, and carefully layer it between sticky plastic sheets while watching the evening news or late-night reruns of Happy Days. I wanted to help. I asked grandma if I could borrow her Polaroid camera, the kind that spits out a flat square you shake to make the image appear, like violently summoning a ghost. My plan was to surprise my mother with extra photos for her album. 

Over the summer, I took twenty-two pictures. Frugality was important. Grandma had given me three packs of film. I only took a shot when I thought it was golden, then secreted it away in an empty box, a former coffin for Converse shoes.

The only photo worth keeping is the picture of my father, asleep on the couch, flat like a fallen post. He often fell asleep on the couch after work. He was a construction worker. I don’t know what he did exactly, but I always imagined him laying bricks, one by one, with a pointy trowel of cement like in the cartoons. I don’t think he did that. Wasn’t that masonry? In any case, he’d come home smelling like sweat and salt. Mother would get angry at him for soiling the furniture, but arguing with a sleeping man got so useless that she compromised by laying a grass-stained sheet on the cushions before he got home—the sheet we also used for picnics in the backyard.

What I didn’t know when I took this picture was that he wouldn’t wake up. He had died at some point after laying down, something about his heart. I can see it now. His face is especially sunken. It looks as if he had been shaken around, like a Polaroid, then rolled back into place. 

I never showed this to my mother. I couldn’t stand the thought of her pressing this photo between her sticky pages, smoothing it out, closing the book around him like a family tomb.

Without the context of memory, he’s alive, pinched between my index finger and thumb. He’s just sleeping.

************

Three months in, and the weight of my project has reached a tipping point. My apartment isn’t big enough. The boxes pile up. The room shrinks. It was always going to come to this, I knew. I simply wouldn’t have enough space for everything.

I consider renting a larger place, but most of my disposable income has gone towards filling my shelves. Shipping fees are my nemesis. I high-step, like a dog in socks,  every morning from bed to bathroom, careful not to knock over limited edition Snoopy shot glasses or a stack of trading card binders full of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.

Every wall is now packed with IKEA’s Kallax cubbies, a beehive of bleached cubes. I seek efficiency. Whereas one Kallax cube might be dedicated to nothing more than a few Cowboy Bebop figurines, the book-cubes are models of compression, packed by the dozens. If only everything stacked as easily as books.

I need to relax. To think. I open a box of DVDs and selected Dexter, season 1, from 2008. A comfort food. On the cover, Dexter, played by Michale C. Hall, stands wearing all white against a white background. He holds a finger to his lips, the universal shush. A splash of blood cuts his visage horizontally. I hit play.

I also dig up a toy. Something to fidget with. I set aside a few Mummies Alive! action figures (with Ram Armour and Javelin Missile!) and settle for a plastic ball maze. It’s a Taco Bell toy from 1997, used to promote Super Mario 64. It’s shaped like two pyramids stuck together at the base, their points sliced flat. Inside, images of Mario with his wing cap, and the Starman, and King Boo, are flat, trapped. I rotate the maze, guiding a little metal ball around the overlaid plastic labyrinth.

On screen, Dexter admires his blood collection. A little box of glass slides, each with a victim’s blood inside. He’s fascinated, and so am I. I slam forward, knocking over a stack of Heroes Reborn: The Return comics. Dexter has it all figured out!

I press the Super Mario 64 toy between my palms. I imagine the plastic shell heating into a lava-lamp-like liquid, slowly compressing, at first into a disc, then into a rectangle. Like a book. Like a DVD. Like a CD jewel case. How many could I fit on my shelf if only they were as thin as blood slides?

The chaos swirls into order; Dexter, on screen, flattens his victims into a single droplet of blood; he places these flattened people into his slides. The show itself has been flattened onto a disc, and then flattened into a case, and then played on my flat-screen TV. The act of watching Dexter look at slides is a nesting doll of unpacking, of awakening what was once vacuum-sealed. That’s the secret! That’s the missing piece to my plan.

To collect first, then to flatten.

************

The next day, my plan accelerates.

Not everything needs to be on full display, stretching and yawning like a pampered cat. If an object takes up less space in its packaging, it should remain packaged. If it takes up less space disassembled, it should be disassembled. 

I start by tackling one of my larger LEGO scenes, a Peter Pan-style playset complete with treehouses, angular palms, and hook-handed pirates the size of my thumb. I pry it apart and slip it back into its box. I do this for three other LEGO sets. They fit snugly, much like they did on the racks at Smyths Toy Superstore. In just a few hours, I’ve managed to clear up two Kallax cubes of space.

Many of the toys are easily repackaged. Each surface of each package displays a miniature image of its product. At a glance, I can “enjoy the meal through the menu,” as they say. I keep the exercise machine and free weights accessible—hopefully I start using those as soon as I wake up—but many objects condense without issue. 

Knowing that I haven’t read most of the books on my shelf, I make a bold decision to gut them entirely. What purpose does it serve me to keep the pages? I remove the covers, burn the rest in a trash bin behind the building. This creates more space for more books. By the end of the week, I’ve squeezed Agatha Christie’s entire oeuvre into two inches of width. Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Aquinas, and Proust become bed-buddies with John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and Suzanne Collins—with room to spare!

The last book I rip apart is Become What You Are by Alan Watts. I bought it after watching Spike Jonze’s Her (which I own on BlueRay) and then reading a bit more about Watts’ cameo on Reddit. This book’s appearance is a grand omen. Become what I am, yes. I will wake up, see this book, and realize, “I must be an Alan Watts guy.” It won’t matter that I’ll have no memory of reading the book. Hell, I have no memory of reading the book already! Even without being brain-wiped! And yet I can already tell I am—or will be, or was—an Alan Watts guy.

As I look at the pageless book, I imagine my new self doing the same—in turn imaging me, as I am now, reading the book, devouring it. This future reflection of myself creates a feedback loop, an ever-growing, shrieking echo more loud and more powerful than any sum of supposedly “actual” experience. It echoes from the future to the past. 

The echo clears the muddy water of my identity.

************

Larger items are more difficult to flatten.

But not impossible.

The trick I’ve done with my books has extended to the entirety of my media library. DVDs and CDs are already slim enough, but VHS tapes are nealy two fingers wide! I can do better. I flatten and shelve the VHS boxes. They now take up mere millimeters of space. The movies themselves, newly naked, are hauled to storage. 

I want to do the same for the VCR, an otherwise chunky, unreliable piece of old tech that I barely use to begin with, but I don’t have its original box. As a compromise, I search Google Images for a similar brand and print the box cover onto a blank piece of letter paper. What difference does it make if I use the original box versus one from online? They are the same image, both printed at some point. Spiritually, there is no difference. 

The flimsiness of the letter paper worries me, however. What if they tear? Or get damp? A particularly humid summer day could destroy half of my movie collection. They need protection. I dig up some unused DVD cases and repurpose them for my VCR and VHS tapes. I’m struck by how satisfying the result is. Hundreds of objects, many of which had different shapes, sizes, and colors, rest snugly in uniform comfort. This is progress.

Most of my large electronics have their original boxes. I cut and craft rectangles for my GameCube, GameBoy Color, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and GameBoy Advance. For my “regular” Nintendo (broken), SNES, Nintendo 64, original GameBoy, Super GameBoy adapter, original Playstation, all of my computers, keyboards, mouses, and TVs, I settle for the same printing technique I used for my VCR, this time with 120-gsm cardstock. I do the same for all of my video games. Games with paper-based packaging, such as Gameboy games or Nintendo 64 games, are easily flattened and set to the side. Others, like GameCube and PlayStation 2 games, are left in their original cases.

The paper and cardboard covers fit nicely, but it looks haphazard. The distinct sizes of game components have broken the pattern created by the DVD cases. It’s too eclectic, like a mosaic of shattered tiles. Plus, it creates an unfair “weight” that favors larger, more colorful objects. I need the same type of “container” for everything.

I order 10,000 plastic media cases.

************

While I wait for the media cases to arrive, my scissors get a full workout. I become a machine, perfectly attuned to the process of squaring, folding, and cutting anything, no matter the thickness or shape, to perfect uniformity. My PlayStation 2, which had been gaining dust in storage, now sits comfortably on my shelf in military erectness alongside its fellow soldiers, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and even the PlayStation 5 which, despite me not owning it, also finds its way into my collection via Google Images.

Posters are given an origami flair, centering the most eye-catching elements: the full shark from Jaws; Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz in The Mummy; two of the Seven Samurai.

My next project is t-shirts. I have a couple of ideas. At first, I think simply folding the shirts will suffice. Then I consider hangers. But I realize that my t-shirts are less about the “shirt” and more about the image on the shirt. A custom Pikmin print from GDC 2011. A limited edition K-mart shirt with a stencil of Crash Bandicoot that says “Player” beneath it. The Trololo Meme Guy, pointing, smiling—a classic!

I cut each shirt’s image into squares, then staple them to flaps of cardstock. My dresser empties quickly, so I take it to storage, keeping just a small drawer of stuff to wear. The shirted flaps lay almost perfectly alongside my shelf of book covers, regally awaiting their plastic encasements.

I take my mother’s truck out a few more times, weighing it down with Kallax cubes and printer ink and a child-size flat of cardstock.

The media cases arrive in bulk on a Monday morning, along with more movies, video games, comics, trading cards, and a healthy assortment of board games. I spend days placing cut-outs into their new cases. 

My library has once again taken a new shape, cleaner and more direct. Splotches of inefficiency are measured, sawed, hammered, varnished out of existence. Every shelf can hold 120 media cases. The longer walls on each side support a total of 70 shelves. The shorter walls, after covering the windows, support 38 shelves. Two short walls, two long walls, minus a few shelves for the exit and the bathroom door, is 210 shelves, for a total of 25,200 media cases, each an atomic fragment of self. I order more cases.

I add more books to my online shopping cart. I focus on health, as a genre. It couldn’t hurt to wake up a stronger, healthier me. I find plenty of used and cheap books about health, nutrition, and cooking. I decide to wake up a vegetarian. I buy Skinny Bitch in the Kitch by Rory Freedman, The 30-minute Vegetarian Cookbook by Lisa Turner, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, and so on. I even get more Alan Watts. I’m a Watts guy now, remember?

When my Amazon shipment arrives, I’m daunted. I have gone a little crazy and end up with over 100 new books. A single shopping spree clutters my apartment once more. However, once I get to flattening, my optimism returns. Not only will the covers fit neatly, but my bookshelf is seriously impressive, even to me. I’m now a healthy person who reads a lot.

This book shipment is my last big shipment.

I eat a butter wrap. The wrap is stale, discounted day-old stuff that gets the job done. I’m running low on funds. Like many people faced with the upcoming terror of the memory wipe, I’ve stopped going to work. My bank account reflects this. Unemployment, excessive expenditures. Not only do I need to stop buying, but I have no choice but to start selling.

I sell my storage unit completely, everything inside included. My consoles, my games, my rare comics, all gone. I have an appraisal on Wednesday. Six professionals of different types. I get less money than I hoped. It’s surprising how worthless an object becomes once its box is removed. Still, in bulk, most of my stuff auctions off for higher prices—and much more quickly—than if they were sold individually.

But, who needs them anyway? There’s no meaningful difference between an object in storage and proxy internet print-outs. Once my memory’s wiped, it will all be the same. Seeing the thing will be believing the thing.

Before burning The Way of Zen, I caught a quote that sticks with me: “when we look for mind there is nothing but things.” How true! I have everything, in spirit, on my shelves. Even with a hundred more years of life I would never be able to read all of those comics, or play all of those games. And yet, they will always be a part of who I am, even untouched, even just looked upon. Art on the wall. Every memory is a piece of art on the wall. You engage it by looking at it, and you look at it by remembering. When I wake up and take The Way of Zen from my shelf, I’ll be looking at the memory of me reading The Way of Zen. And what does it matter that there are no pages? There will be no pages in my memory, either. I’ll forget the contents all the same. The important part will be the act of looking at the book and knowing that, at some point, I had read it.

************

I call my mother. I need the best picture of her, the most representative. I have three albums from storage, but I only need a few pictures. The rest will take up too much space. She gets angry. She doesn’t understand my plan, so I pick for her: a picture of her in her early thirties, holding my hand as we walk through some park. I’m wearing a yellow t-shirt with blue trim and little Mickey Mouse heads rotating like ink-dark polka dots. I label the picture “MOM,” stick it between the plastic layers of a fresh media case, slide it into a cube between my sleeping father and my childhood Garfield plushy. No matter what happens to them now, they are my DNA. By making them permanent, I’ve given them life.

I sell my running machine and free weights, printing their images and adding them to the collection. I assemble the last Kallaxes, stacking them at the foot of my bed, taking advantage of every last inch.

A week remains, nothing much to do but wait. I spend a lot of time in the shower, motionless, pruning, until the water gets cut off, unpaid bill.

I conserve what little water I have in the fridge, plastic bottles front to back alongside a half-empty pickle jar. I only drink little sips at a time, careful not to steal from my future self. I feel dehydrated, dusty. The little cash I have left gets spent on margarine and crackers at the gas station. The cashier wishes me a sour “merry memory wipe” before kicking me out and shuttering the building for good.

That’s my final expedition to the outside world. I have all I need. I lock the door and cover it, brick by brick.

************

Two days remain. 

With the windows and exit blocked, the air is both cool and cottony, a faint smell of paper, glue, and skin. At first, I just sit in awe at what I’ve done. I try not to touch anything, afraid I’ll disrupt its precious order. But as the hours go on, nothing to occupy my mind, I eventually inspect the cases, one by one, analyzing the images, hungry for stimuli. Nintendo Power magazine promises a “Dino-Mite Adventure.” Elijah Wood looks troubled, a ring in his palm. Uma Thurman, cigarette in hand, short black hair, lays stomach-flat on a messy bed. Optimus Prime, heroic Autobot, more than meets the eye. Special edition Pickle Rick-flavored Pringles. Hockey mask in the shape of a duck’s bill. Thragtusk, creature—beast, five mana to summon, “when Thragtusk enters the battlefield, you gain 5 life.” Voltron, form feet and legs, form arms and body, and I’ll form the head!

I realize I’m missing a vital component in my plan. I don’t know which memory I should remember first. Doesn’t that matter? The first thing I see will undoubtedly form the foundation of my identity.

I hot-glue empty cases into a door-sized rectangle, piece by piece, holding them flat in place with my palm for an hour after each strip of hot goo. Then I place some of the cases at angles, 90 degrees, forming a hood, like the top of a shoebox. It covers my mattress. A colorless stained glass. My idea is simple enough: I can place the most important memory into the rectangle directly above my face. I test it out. It’s too muggy, too low for comfort, but it will work. 

However, I don’t know what memory defines me. In the few hours I have left, it seems impossible to do the final flattening, the reduction of all into one. A utilitarian would use this key position for a directory, a simple tool to navigate the memory maze, a Dewey Decimal System of the self. Someone more sentimental might write a letter: “Hello, future self! How’s the afterlife!” Neither of those feel right. Not that I could accomplish them anyway. With the flattening of my pens and printers, nothing new can be added to the library. I leave it empty, thankful for the final diversion.

Then I wait.

The memory wipe will happen any minute. I’m anxious. Anxious for my renewed self. Anxious to learn who I was, find out who I will become. Excited, actually, like a kid before the most extravagant Christmas morning in the history of Christmas mornings, tears on cheeks. I’m sitting in bed, and I can see it all around me. The corridors of shelves, the walls of wax-white spines. Everything is flat and smooth, waiting for my touch. Waiting for me to finger out an atom of self, then begin the joyous process of reassembly.

I snuggle beneath the plastic hood, a hermetically sealed action figure. 

Sleeping Beauty, lost in glass, awaiting the kiss that will change her life.

A king entombed with endless, uniform treasures.

A photo in an album.

And then it happens. Through my collection, I perceive an entity. A smudged reflection, a waxy face that never blinks.

I flatten.

------------

Image from WIX