“Your absence is as of the blue rose from the kingdom of flowers.
Who knows, some day you may yet appear.”
—From Seven Poems, Benoy Mojumdar, 1969
Translated from the Bengali by Jyotirmoy Datta

It’s what they have been waiting for:  a statuesque model in a black evening gown strides onstage, a bouquet of roses in her gold-bangled arms. She waves at the audience, some of whom oooh and ahhh in appreciation, some only breaking into polite applause. Cameras flash on her cocktail dress and luminous smile, the photographers jostling each other for a better view—not of the woman herself, who is after all only the last in a row of models displaying Suntory Ltd.’s newest product line. It’s the pale mauve roses she holds that they have come to see.

The date is October 26, 2009, more than twenty-three years after the first scientists and biochemical engineers at a small Australian firm set upon their quest to create a true blue rose. They could not have known then that their effort would eventually span four continents, involve hundreds of researchers, and cost over forty million dollars. And at the end of the road, this.

“A rose the color of the sky just before sunset,” the announcer booms out at the crowd. “The Suntory Applause!”

. . .

As long as the rose has symbolized love and beauty, the blue rose has been its missing counterpart: the symbol of a beauty that does not exist. Of literally hundreds of rose varieties, nearly all developed through artificial breeding methods, none naturally contain pigments in the blue range—a fact that has frustrated breeders for centuries.

In terms of natural selection, there is no reason why they should. Rose blooms, like all flowers, exist for the sole reason of attracting pollinators, and only recently in evolutionary time have human aesthetic preferences exerted any influence. Biologists theorize that, unlike violets or petunias, which often rely on bees that favor the blue wavelength of light, roses evolved alongside pollinators that prefer red and yellow: moths, small birds, and differnet types of bees. The function of any pigment is to signal nectar resources to pollinators, and roses differentiated themselves with a distinctive scent.

The blue rose stands out so clearly in the human imagination today precisely because it has for so long evaded human grasp. Unattainable, it came to symbolize unrequited love; transcendental, it came to evoke moral perfection; ethereal, it has been co-opted to name cultural ephemera from rock bands to mystery novels. The very fact of its nonexistence made it possible for blue roses to mean all things to all people, whether as the symbol of immortality in the 2006 movie “Pan’s Labyrinth,” or as a badge of surreal creativity to Moscow symbolists, including Wassily Kadinsky, whose Blue Rose group comprised leading figures of the Russian avant-garde.

. . .

The world market for cut flowers generates $10 billion a year in sales, out of which roses account for nearly half. Bridal roses, ceremonial roses, Valentine’s and Mother’s Day and anniversary roses: an entire industry is built on the classic symbol of romantic love. When you actually consider what it is you are buying in a rose—a few ounces of dead plant matter much like a stalk of celery or a switch from a tree—the fact that the average bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed red roses costs nearly sixty dollars is evidence enough that the whole industry is based on one of the most successful marketing schemes in the history of the world.

It is no wonder, then, that a group of Australian biological engineers saw in flower genetics a promising business application for one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 1980s. Genetic engineers had just made significant strides in the splicing and manipulation of plant DNA, and they hoped to apply new genetic methods to the yet-untouched field of horticulture. With the promise of gene transfer, anything seemed possible. With those high hopes, and only a little capital, Calgene Pacific Pty Ltd. was born.

From their first day of work, the Calgene Pacific researchers were on a mission to create an authentic and marketable blue rose. But to copy the indigo-violet hue of grapes, blueberries, blackberries, and eggplants—which all have different genes contributing to the same function—presented a complex puzzle that all involved knew would take years to decipher. They entertained the possibility of testing their techniques—and consumer demand—by simultaneously working on the development of blue carnations and other decorative blooms, but as managing director Richard Dalling had no qualms assuring the world, perfecting the blue rose was the firm’s raison d’être. When questioned on the firm’s single-minded object, his reply was always blunt, and clear: “It’s the Holy Grail.”

Edwina Cornish, a petite woman with a halo of auburn hair curling at her chin, can still remember the day she entered Calgene Pacific’s labs for the first time nearly twenty years ago. “I was so impressed by the new IBM computers,” she says today. “That, and the camaraderie. We danced to Michael Jackson on our late-night breaks.” She also remembers the incredible goals they immediately set for themselves: “Five years. Five years at the most.”

She laughs, now. “How wrong we were.”

. . .

Whenever they were asked whom their product was meant to serve—in a tone that unerringly meant that it had no audience at all—the Calgene Pacific executives had the same quick answer: the Japanese.

They weren’t merely being facetious. Even the scientists themselves worried that Western markets might be disappointing. It is the red rose, after all, that European culture had indoctrinated most of the world to love. Lost to the legacy of Shakespeare and Donne, most Americans and Europeans can only imagine the blue alternative as a novelty, a touch of dramatic flair. There’s a touch of the ridiculous about them, like purple cows or green ketchup, and romance rarely sits well with ridicule. At the crucial juncture, could risk-averse men seeking only a conflict-free anniversary be counted upon to reach past the comfort of deep red blooms for a pricier blue alternative?

Calgene Pacific’s stategists doubted it. They chose a very different market instead: wealthy businessmen and women in Japan who might give them to their peers—not as symbols of love, but merely in the course of conducting their mundane but critical daily affairs  “The Japanese are ritualistic gift-givers,” Dalling explained to investors and journalists alike. He described to them a culture in which the word novelty had no negative connotations, in which a blue rose might be worth its $78 price tag simply “because they are unique.”

A typical end-user might send roses when a business associate won a new contract, or to a new client if he did; when her boss’s daughter graduated from university, or to ensure that her own got in. The price tag of a dozen blue roses alone—nearly a thousand dollars—would prove well enough how much one admired its recipient. As with a bottle of Chateau Margaux or an ice sculpture, the fact that a bouquet of midnight blue blooms has neither longevity nor purpose could only add to its appeal.

Even skeptical media critics were eventually convinced that the odd habits of the Japanese were yet again the proper targets of scorn. “It’s important to their whole social being,” Dalling said. His subtext may have been insidious, but it was certainly a comfort to Calgene Pacific’s investors. “We are merely mercenaries of another culture’s inane whims,” he seemed to be saying: his team had not fallen under the blue rose’s spell—they were simply in it for the money.

. . .

Five years later, Calgene Pacific’s original funding had nearly dried up, and it was in desperate need of more money. Progress on mapping the rose’s genome was not coming as quickly as the team had hoped—as they now admitted to one possible investor after another, getting the rose onto the market might cost upwards of $20 million.

The first of these funds had come from an unlikely source. When the company was first founded in 1986, the state-sponsored Victorian Investment Corporation (VIC) pledged $1 million as part of an initiative to increase employment in the Melbourne area. The effort soon became a political disaster, losing nearly a third of its $60 million budget in a single year. By 1991, a change in government meant the VIC was facing dissolution. But the blue rose happened to be one of the government’s few winning calls—and in order to win investors, the team decided to publicize their advances and shocked the horticultural world with the announcement that they had identified a gene that created the delphinidin pigment responsible for the shade of deep, incandescent blue found in delphiniums and petunias—and were now looking for a way to integrate it into the right strain of rose.

Steve Chandler had only been with the firm for two years when the first media attention descended upon Calgene Pacific.  He recalls his colleagues’ shock when they started to receive calls from The Economist, The New York Times, and every major newspaper in Australia. “It was a great moment,” he says in a clipped British accent. “But we were kind of bemused that the journalists kept calling about the blue rose project. It seemed to fascinate them, I don’t know why.”

With Calgene Pacific’s budget woes, public interest in the blue roses had come just in time. The publicity brought new business relationships, and within months, the firm found a more traditional investor whose interest seemed to confirm everything Dalling had claimed in the early years. Suntory Ltd., the leading beverage manufacturer in Japan, approached him about acquiring fifteen percent of Calgene Pacific’s shares. As they had always known, Japan would be their first market, and their best.

If the small team of Australians were not the only ones interested in horticulture’s Holy Grail, they were now its best-funded. By early 1992, Calgene Pacific had acquired its main rival, the Dutch biotechnology company Florigene, gaining entrée to the European flower market as well as strategic alliances with its previous owners, the DNA Plant Technology Corporation and Zaadunie, both leaders in gene insertion techniques. The genetic-horticulture world lauded the marriage of two companies that, between them, held the patents to technologies isolating the gene for delphinidin and the method for inserting it into the rose genome.

Newly invigorated, the firm renamed itself Florigene Ltd. (“Essentially for marketing purposes,” Chandler admits) and set about completing its mission. “We expect to complete the remaining technical objectives by 1992, and we are confident that trials of the first blue rose will begin in 1993,” Dalling told The New York Times.

. . .

Nothing attracts charlatans and fools like the seemingly impossible, and so, like sightings of Elvis or El Dorado, tales of the mythical blue rose pepper history. Its first recorded false discovery can be traced to the thirteenth century, when the Moors first began using indigo dyes to create blue—or bluish—blooms out of white rosebushes. In those times as in all times, the rarity of blue roses gave them a regal and ethereal beauty. At that time, feeding blue water to a rosebush’s roots was the equivalent of magic, but a painfully expensive kind. The claim that these roses were naturally blue fell apart quickly.

By Renaissance times, blue roses created by simply soaking petals in indigo were common gifts among the merchant class. Breeders continued to pursue a ‘natural’ breed without success—except in the common imagination. In the nineteenth century, reports circulated of a rose breeder in Ulster discovering a single blue bloom in his seedling patch. It was said that he destroyed it immediately, believing that the mutant roses would corrupt public taste—and, perhaps, morals.

But if the morally-torn rose breeder lived in myth, the unscrupulous peddler was very much a reality. In 1864, The American Agriculturalist reported a widespread scam involving blue roses and tree strawberries, cautioning readers to beware in their areas of peddlers selling ‘astonishing’ fruit. One such hack managed to scam a town magistrate in Mayer, Virginia, among other upstanding if gullible citizens, planting rosebushes he advertised as “absolutely Genuinne [sic] and real” in front the courthouse—when the original blue blooms fell, the original patriotic planters became a disappointing candy-cane stripe. Citizens were not amused. The local Dispatch ran a first-page article above the fold: “Blue Roses A Fraud!”

. . .

Eight years had passed since the renamed Florigene boldly promised to take the cut-flower world by storm. By now, the blue rose project had burned through nearly $30 million dollars. To appease investors, the company decided to release what had originally been mere test subjects for the delphinidin-insertion experiments: the world’s first blue-spectrum carnation, the called Moonshadow, in a pale shade of mauve, and the Moondust, its deep violet cousin.

“It’s very exciting—we already have some nice rose flowers with interesting mauve and lilac colors and hope to have several different shades of blue within the next few years,” boasted Chin-yi Lu, principal research scientist at Florigene’s Dutch laboratory, when The Economist called.

Within the company itself, though, the mood was more ambivalent. The mauve carnations could only be described as a disappointment: Suntory wasn’t even interested in acquiring the rights to the brand. It wasn’t that the scientific breakthroughs had ended—it was merely that the escape from each dead end seemed to lead to a new one.  Florigene was now incorporating a special hairpin RNA interference technology developed by the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO) to switch off the existing color genes in roses and open pathways for the blue pigment to express itself. But even when all the right genes were turned on, and off, and on again, the rose remained frustratingly not-quite-blue. If once at the forefront of plant engineering, Florigene was rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Cornish was beginning to feel hopeless about the entire ordeal. Somewhere on the pathway from lilac to blue, nature had stepped in and refused to yield. She contemplated leaving the company—but the board offered her a promotion: with Dalling’s departure, she took over as managing director of the Melbourne laboratory.

. . .

Halfway around the world, the team suddenly gained an unexpected adversary when researchers at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine stumbled upon an entirely new method of turning roses—and, really, anything else—blue. Amusingly enough, the answer lay within the human body itself.

While studying how drugs metabolize in the liver, graduate student named Elizabeth Gillam stumbled across an enzyme taken from a human liver that had stained a flask of bacteria a deep cobalt blue. When she showed it to her boss, Peter Guengrich, he was confused—and then thrilled. “We were aware that there were people in the world who had been interested in making colored flowers, especially a blue rose, for a number of years,” he explained happily to the journalists who suddenly descended upon his laboratory.

The team at Florigene was thrust into the spotlight once again to defend their pallid blooms. “It depends on how you describe blue,” snapped John Mason, the Melbourne research manager, when his patience wore thin. “This is a very sensitive topic for us and unfortunately I cannot comment further.”

. . .

If most gene modification technologies have a frankly utilitarian purpose—to develop disease-resistant crops and better-tasting animals, for example, or even to cure genetic disease—the blue rose, admittedly, does not. But with less social purpose comes less social baggage: the idea of an oddly-colored bloom inspires neither vague apprehension about carcinogen-fattened beef, nor full-fledged paranoia about Gattaca-style genetic class warfare. A few serious horticulturalists may be able to summon genuine concern over cross-pollination, but all in all, a rose is just a rose. Why, then, does the idea of so much money spent on creating a natural-born blue rose—when dyed ones are so cheaply accessible—somehow seem even more wrong?

It’s not merely because they will be indulgences of the rich: not only are single blue roses within reach for most consumers, they are a far cry from the prices of most luxury goods. And it cannot derive from discomfort with genetic modification in general, since humans have been tinkering with the genetics of flowers nearly as long as we have noticed them. The kingdom of flora have always served as a canvas for imaginative gardeners—but their instruments were blunt and their genetic technique limited to crude meiosis. Centuries of human effort, then, yielded scores of pink roses and even red-orange ones—but the horizon of possibilities was firmly circumscribed by plant sex.

Gene modification techniques are not so limited. Suddenly, traits can move between species—even, as the liver cell research demonstrated, between kingdoms. From blue roses, it is not so far a leap to glow-in-the-dark puppies (if you’ve ever met an eight year-old child, you know the market exists).  Far more than passionate and futile attempts to combat death, this is what it means to play God: our mastery of science will finally give us mastery over life itself, with the rest of the plant and animal kingdom the canvas for human imagination.

This vision is as seductive as it is surreal. With nothing to limit us but our humility, who knows what fad will dictate and science provide? History is full of examples of humans exerting their power over the animal kingdom, but genetic engineering, unlike growing kittens in bottles or training rats to locate mines (both of which raised PETA’s reasonable ire) would not cause animals any pain—certainly less so than factory farming. If Gelett Burgess’s infamous ditty is any indication (“I never saw a purple cow / I never hope to see one”), there is something about using science to create a purple cow that seems worse than using it to create a meatier one.

In the end, of course, the violence of absurdity is much like any postmodern assault on preconceptions: it can only be wielded against ourselves. It’s all the same for the cow.

. . .

Florigene’s quest concluded as those of nearly all plucky little companies do: with a buyout and a compromise. In December of 2003, Suntory Ltd. bought up nearly 99% of its subsidiary’s shares in order to gain the rights to the pale mauve roses that stubbornly refused to become blue.

Suntory quickly took the lead on the blue rose project, placing its own Tokyo-based research team led by Yoshi Tanaka on the case. Chandler, who was still working with Florigene fifteen years later, was sorry to see it go, but he now claims there was little controversy over the decision. “They were going to use techniques they had gained from working with various artificial flavors in their beverage business,” he says, “and working on it in Japan would be better for marketing later on. It was the right business decision.”

When their efforts failed to break though the Florigene team’s stalemate, however, Suntory decided to market the mauve roses they already had. By 2003, Tanaka was leading field trials and scouting for the right South American grower to produce his distinctive crop. Within a year, the beverage giant threw the weight of its marketing colossus into the blue rose, and its humble subsidiary Florigene once again became a media darling. But Edwina Cornish sensed her time there had reached its natural conclusion. She left the company and moved on to teach at Monash University, where she was soon named Deputy-Vice Chancellor of Research. “I don’t regret the time I spent at Calgene,” she says now.

Florigene would continue to sell the Moondust and Moonshadow carnations under its own brand to the present day. But the blue rose project now belonged to Suntory and its hype machine alone.

. . .

Even the Japanese are not willing to pay eighty dollars for a mauve rose when lilac ones sell for under ten. In the end, the Suntory Applause was priced at a mere $25 per bloom—and even then, it was greeted by the gardening world with a resounding yawn. To this day, authentically blue-ish roses have not seen significant release outside Japan; Suntory continues to list the project as one of its current research efforts. “More are in the pipeline—colors ranging from lavender to pale violet to, you know, mauve,” Chandler says. He can list the scientific puzzles still in their way: pH. Background pigments. Choosing the right variety of rose. “It’s that simple.”

It’s that simple—but it has always been that simple. Perhaps Florigene and its investors simply placed too much faith the process of their discovery—and perhaps even a bluer rose would have eventually faded quickly from novelty into the mundane. But there is something to be said for their choice of subject: unlike other nonexistent things—hen’s teeth and bicycle-riding fish come to mind—blue roses have never suffered the irony of becoming laughable. They suffer instead the indignity of poor imitations—silk flowers, dyed white blooms, and now this travesty of mauve—each reminding us of what we have yet to find.

Perhaps it’s not even the blue rose but the crazy quest itself that matters. Actually finding the Holy Grail, after all, would have ruined many a medieval story and at least one middlebrow action novel. Even Steve Chandler, who has spent twenty-four of his twenty-six working years at Florigene doing everything—“from research, to marketing, to operations, to press, oh yes, just about everything”—to create and sell blue roses and carnations, sometimes forgets why he is there. “Maybe paying a mortgage,” he says, “I don’t know.” A pause. “I got stuck here, I suppose. It’s a compelling business.”

Just a business, then: the Grail, too, was cast in gold.

Should we care that when Suntory’s competitors at Vanderbilt discovered their miraculous enzyme in the human liver, it was roses they chose to modify? As Guengerich willingly admitted, “We could have tried to create blue cotton, blue anything, really.” But the financial promise of the blue rose was ultimately too tempting to resist.

“I would have called you crazy five years ago if you told me I would be pursuing a blue rose,” he told journalists who suddenly began to call, bemused at the attention after years of work on life-saving drugs went ignored. “It’s not something we set out to do,” he said, again and again, as if that was any justification, as if the search for a true blue rose required one at all.

—Elise Liu is an associate editor.

When Kyle picked up Nora, he followed his usual pre-date routine: he rubbed Debenhams (Imported!) on his wrists and neck, turned his satellite radio to “BBC News,” and, the second she entered his car, told her how much he liked her “flat.”

In response, most girls giggled, excited once again by the novelty of a “British guy.” Their own, local James Bond. A modern Paul McCartney. Some of them even asked him the expected questions immediately: “Do you go back overseas often?”, “Is it true that it rains every day?”, “Are you near the Big Ben?” etc. Given how annoying he found these questions, Kyle couldn’t help but imagine how annoying they must be for actual British people.

“I really like your flat,” he said when Nora entered the car.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, adjusting her shoes. They were black ballet flats, and Kyle could see the bare tops of her feet. “My friend’s having a meltdown.” She finished and then looked through the windshield. “Where are we going?”
He smiled and looked ahead. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, his hard final “t” hovering in the air between them. “It’s top-secret.”

“Okay,” she said, slipping off her flats and curling up on the seat.

Kyle always practiced his British accent first by listening to things—usually several Beatles songs, followed by a Mary Higgins Clark novel read by a British narrator—and then by trying out various words and phrases in the bathroom mirror. He had identified the phrases that he found himself using most often early on, and quickly mastered them. These included: “How are you?”, “What did you do today?”, “Interesting”, “How’s your meal?”, and “Do you want dessert?” But while he said these flawlessly, his favorite word to use was “solipsistic.” He loved the way it sounded, how the middle “s” sounds hissed and took over the word, and because of this, he tried to use it in every possible conversation. Usually, he could do it pretty easily—he’d simply turn the conversation to the Old Testament and charge a minor prophet with solipsism.

Recently he’d been ending his practice sessions the same way—he’d go into his closet, get out Bob’s Your Uncle, and study it while sitting on his bed. He’d bought the book at a garage sale the day he moved into his apartment, along with an unmarked book of horror stories and a brown leather ottoman. The latter two had proven generally useless—the only good story in the book was missing its last page, and the ottoman was filled with ants. But Bob’s Your Uncle was not useless; Kyle read it. In fact, he got through all 473 pages (not including appendices) in just under three hours. It was the most he’d ever read in one sitting, and by the far the most exciting.

The book was about a teen-aged boy who, after learning a British accent for a school drama production, decides to keep the accent up for the rest of his life. But what Kyle liked most about the book was a glossy color chart in the back. “How to Speak with a British Accent if you are American” was written at the top, in big block letters. He’d opened to this chart so many times that the book, when laid flat, automatically opened to it, as if mechanically powered. “Pronounce T as T, not as an American D” was one bullet point. “Unless it comes at the start of a word, don’t be afraid to completely omit R” was another. “Speak confidently and use slang as much as possible” was a third. Once he felt he’d seen enough, Kyle would close the book, neatly wrap it in a white cloth, and then put it back in his closet, deep behind his hats.

Though the restaurant Kyle took his dates to was not British but Italian, it was nevertheless a very specific choice. During college, Kyle had taken dates there often, and in some stretches, very often. He knew everything about it—the layout, the wait staff, the little tricks to getting better service, and, most importantly, the menu.

“So,” he said when they were settled at a table, “what did you do today?” Classic.

“Talked to my friend,” Nora said, crunching a bread stick. “His girlfriend just told him she wanted to be ‘friends’ and nothing more. They’d been dating for three years! Anyway, he’s obviously a wreck.”

“Do you think they’ll stay apart?” Kyle made sure to leave out the “r.”

“Unclear,” she said. “She’s pretty skittish overall, so it’s hard to say. Plus, he’s moving away next week.”

Suddenly, their waiter appeared. His nametag said “Julian.”

“If it isn’t my good friend! What a pleasant surprise!” he said. Kyle had called ahead of time. “What will you two be having tonight?”

That was the cue, and at this point, the two men launched into what was entirely an act, a practiced and perfected method of ordering. First, Kyle would ask for their best bottle of red wine. Then, after his date ordered, he’d concentrate on the menu for several seconds before looking up and saying “Maybe I’m being dim, but I think I’m up for the Grilled Veal Chop tonight.” Julian, who after four years of this charade, understood exactly what Kyle was doing, would then ask, “Would you like that to be a half- or full-portion?” to which Kyle would say in perfect English, “The Full Monty! Yes please!”

Without fail, this mini-performance had been working for Kyle as a kind of aphrodisiac. Up to this point, all of Kyle’s dates had swooned after that last line. In fact, Melanie, one of his first dates, had been so taken by the exchange that she began blushing and didn’t stop for the entire meal.

But Nora was different—she didn’t smile. Her eyes were on the menu. She’d missed everything.

Within minutes Julian brought out the bottle of wine. The label featured golden leaves entwined with words written in a thin cursive: “Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Grands-Echezeaux 2004.” What was actually inside was a simple Candoni Merlot, a twelve-dollar wine.

“I could pour you a taste,” Julian said, already filling Kyle’s glass. Kyle took a sip, paused, and then suddenly smiled at Julian.

“Smashing,” he said, making sure to pronounce the final “g.”

Part of the reason why Kyle kept the accent up was the immense success he’d encountered early on. A month after he started using it—also, a month into his freshman year of college—he’d lost his virginity. To Kyle, who couldn’t even talk to girls in high school, let alone date them, this outcome was clearly causal, so he kept the accent up, and cultivated it, until it was quite good. So good, in fact, that often the first question people around him asked was where in England he was from. “South of Parth,” he’d always say, confident that no one could call him on a made up town.

Kyle and Nora spent most of the meal discussing their respective college experiences. They had both majored in psychology, but hadn’t met until a mutual friend introduced them at a graduation party. Kyle was attracted to Nora immediately, though he wasn’t completely sure why. Maybe it was her brown bangs or the way she keeled over in silent laughter after he told a good joke. Maybe it was just the novelty of a new, pretty girl in his life. He wasn’t sure.

As was his custom, right before dessert, Kyle steered the conversation to sports—specifically, European football. This was a topic he’d become pretty familiar with over the past two years. Mostly, it had happened through simple osmosis: Kyle’s two best friends—also his two largest friends—were huge fans of Manchester United. Often on weekends, they’d go to a bar, get drunk, and watch the game, and they sometimes brought Kyle along. As a result of these trips, he now knew all the rules, teams, and players. He knew which players were the fastest, which ones could kick the ball the farthest, and which ones, according to popular magazine articles, vigorously masturbated in the locker room minutes before every game. Recently, and to his own surprise, he’d started referencing players and game moments in his own daily interactions at work. He didn’t feel bad about this, since his older co-workers usually seemed excited to hear about something novel. But on dates it wasn’t the same. For some reason, whenever he brought up European football, he thought about playing “UNO” with his little sister, and how she’d always save a “Wild Card” until the very end.

“I’ve always been a Manchester United fan, myself,” he said, wiping his chin with his napkin. “Do you follow football?” In response, he expected the usual: “Do you mean soccer? Because here we use the term ‘football’ to refer to another sport,” etc., etc.

“Where in England are you from?” Nora said. “You have an interesting accent.”

Kyle froze. He looked at her, then at the people at the table behind her. He was about to say “South of Parth,” but at the last minute decided to try to buy to some more time. “What do you mean?”

“Well, my friend Paul, for example. He obviously has a British accent because he’s from there. But it’s actually noticeably different from the accents of other English people I know.” She looked at him and smiled. “And yours I’ve never heard before.”

On the outside, Kyle appeared calm. His natural demeanor was a kind of scowl anyway, so even when he was stressed his face didn’t tell very much. But inside, he was anxious. “A bit off my trolley” is what he would’ve said, had she asked him if he was okay. Did she know he wasn’t British? Had she just been playing along the whole time? How many English people did she know?

Suddenly, Julian emerged from the kitchen, carrying two large slices of key lime pie. As he moved, he apparently caught his foot on something and fell to the ground, the two slices neatly crashing down on top of him. This was the final act. Julian had come up with it the previous month, during Kyle’s first date with Brenda. As he explained to Kyle afterward, when you’re with someone, you can talk about three things: your life, her life, or what’s happening around you. The best conversations, he explained, always drew from the third.

“I’m okay! I’m okay!” he shouted, wiping whipped cream from his face and hair. “Just a slip!”

“Wow,” Nora said.

“Wow is right,” Kyle said. “I feel like I’m watching an early Monty Python skit.”

They talked about movies while they ate dessert. While talking, Kyle noticed writing on Nora’s left hand.

“Did you run out of paper?” he said, pointing.

She smiled. “No, but I write on my hand when I really need to remember something.”

He gently turned her hand and leaned in, so he could read the writing. The letters had a jagged, unpredictable look to them, as if she’d been on a bumpy car ride while writing. The e’s, particularly, stood out—the bottoms of them curled up sharply, more like v’s than u’s.

Kyle looked confused. “Remember to roast porks?”

She bent forward and laughed silently. “Remember to return books. I took some books out from the library and don’t want to get late fees.”

Kyle wondered what library she belonged to, if it was the same as his, but decided to save that discussion for a future meeting. He drove her home and walked her to her door.

“I’ll ring you this week,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, and laughed.

Most mornings Kyle went for a five-mile run before breakfast. On days when he slept through it, he lifted weights after work. Rarely, but occasionally, he was too busy to do either. On these days, he would do three sets of fifty push-ups before bed.

But on the Monday and Tuesday after his date with Nora, he did nothing. He couldn’t focus. He ate hardly anything—a couple slices of toast for breakfast, some cereal for dinner. At work, he struggled with simple tasks, and proofreading a basic client report took him all of Tuesday afternoon.

The one thing he could focus on—really, the only thing—was Nora. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. This was a new development for Kyle; most girls dropped out of his mind quickly and easily. Even Belle, whom he’d really liked and possibly even loved, became an afterthought when his mom surprised him with a refurbished Playstation 3.

Kyle still wasn’t sure what he liked so much about Nora. She was pretty, no doubt about that. Very pretty. What eyes! Those dark, dark eyes. And her hair. Boy, she had great hair—thick and brown and sweet-smelling, like she had just shampooed. But that wasn’t the only thing, was it? Her looks? He wasn’t one of those guys, was he? He hoped not, but, to be completely honest, he wasn’t sure.

Whatever.

He wanted to see her more.

One of Nora’s phrases stuck in Kyle’s mind more than any other: “You have an interesting accent.” He kept playing it back. Interesting. She had said it in the smoothest way possible, as if the whole word were one prolonged syllable. Did she buy it? Or did she know enough about English accents to know that it was all a sham? Kyle knew from his studies that there were, indeed, many different kinds of English accents: from Queen’s English to London Cockney to Estuary English to Kettering to Scouse and so on.

He waited until Wednesday night to call her. Before calling, he got out a bottle of whiskey and took two shots to calm his nerves. Then he took two more and dialed.

“Cheers,” he said when she picked up. “This is Kyle. I was wondering if…well, first: how are you?”

“Great. You?”

“Excellent.” He was gaining confidence. “A bit zonked from work, but doing well.”

“That’s great,” she said. “Still got that British accent I hear.”

He choked briefly before pressing on. “I was wondering if you might be up for another dinner later this week…perhaps Friday?”

She paused. Through the receiver, he heard what sounded like a Beatles song in the background. He pictured her black flats. “I can do Friday.”

“Great,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

“Actually, can I pick you up?” she said. “I’d like to see your place. You know, to make sure there are no bodies.”

“Really?” He didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t been expecting this. He decided to play it cool. “I mean, sure. If you really want to.”

“I really do.”

“Okay. That works. I’ll make sure to hide the bodies.”

“Smashing,” she said, and hung up.

Immediately after the call, Kyle’s mind went into overdrive. Why did she want to see his place? That was a weird thing to ask. Isn’t that a question you ask after dinner? Did she think he was hiding something?

He looked around his apartment. He’d have some cleaning up to do, that was for sure. There were socks everywhere. A pair of red-striped underpants hung from the ceiling fan. His Green Bay Packers trashcan was overflowing with microwavable pizza boxes. He had yet to see any mice, but he often saw lines of black ants vibrating along his walls, quietly slipping underneath his posters.

He had two posters. One was a copy of an Edward Hopper painting that he’d bought at a garage sale a year ago. He didn’t know the official name of it, but it showed a lone man at a gas station in the country. The other poster featured Jimi Hendrix smoking while playing guitar. According to the caption, the photo was taken right before he went on stage to play the Star Spangled Banner.

Reading this again, Kyle finally realized the root of all of his fear, why he was so worried about Nora coming over: his apartment was too American. It exuded Americanism. None of his things were things an actual British person would own. The posters, the Coca-Cola coin holder, the Paul Newman lemonade in his refrigerator—all of it, he decided, had to go.

So, for the next forty-eight hours, Kyle gave his apartment a makeover. A “British invasion” is what he called it. He threw out all of his American food. He shredded his Ford Explorer warranty and his old TV Guides. The posters came down and went under his bed. In their place, he put up a huge Union Jack that he bought at flea market in Seattle. From the mall he got two soccer jerseys—one Liverpool, the other Tottenham Hotspur—as well as a glossy photo of the House of Commons, all of which he hung over his desk.

He bought three new umbrellas and put them in the corners, in front of the ants. He bought the Fawlty Towers TV series and carefully placed the DVDs and their cases around the couch. During his lunch break on Friday, he went to the library and took out the following books: Churchill: A Life, The Love Poems of Lord Byron, Famous Historical Maps II: The Norman Conquest, and Underwater Guts: How I Swam the English Channel.

Kyle’s car got a flat on the way home from work. He changed it successfully, but by the time he got home, he had just twenty minutes before Nora was scheduled to arrive. As a result, he had to rush through his routine. He listened to one Beatles song and just five minutes of Mary Higgins Clark’s Lucky Day. He practiced a couple of phrases in the bathroom mirror. Then he got out Bob’s Your Uncle.

He was reviewing the chart when he suddenly heard a rapid knocking on his door.

“Help!” a voice cried. “Dear God, open up!”

Kyle tip-toed to the door. He was pretty sure it was Nora trying to prank him, but the abruptness of the screaming had made him overly alert. He looked through the peephole but couldn’t see anything.

“Please!” the voice said, before becoming a desperate whisper. “Please.”

“Nora?” Kyle said. “Is that you?”

“Nora?” the voice said. “Who the fuck is ‘Nora’? Jesus Christ, open up! I’m bleeding.”

Kyle opened the door. Standing before him, with a huge, toothy grin on her face, was Nora. She was not bleeding but was wearing a stunning red blouse. She looked right at him and blinked several times, in a cartoonish sort of way. Her eyes looked very big today.

“I was just trying to flirt with you,” she said, before stepping past Kyle. “Wow, what a room.”

While he made drinks, she walked around his three rooms, occasionally calling out questions.

“What’s Fawtly Towers?” she said.

“Oh, it’s just this BBC show I used to watch.”

“Who’s this guy above your desk?”

“Why, the great Bard!” Kyle called out, smiling and pouring their drinks. “Ever heard of Shakespeare?”

“Yes, many times” she said, before retrieving her drink and downing it in three gulps. “Let’s get going now.”

“Wow, that impressed, huh?”

She looked at him and smiled. “I’m very hungry.”

For dinner they went to Ed’s Diner. Kyle had wanted to go to a new seafood place by the bay, but it was closed, and anyway, Nora was allergic to shellfish. So, at Nora’s suggestion, they went to Ed’s.

Ed’s was famous for almost going out of business every spring. Usually around February, the newspaper articles started coming out. Each week for several weeks, Ed would be quoted in papers saying things like “It’s obviously a tough situation, but it’s been a great run” and “We may be closing, but we’ll never forget our loyal patrons…thanks!” By May, the diner’s windows would be covered with signs reading “Come 4 a final meal!” Sometimes, late at night, Ed’s wife Glenda could be seen sitting alone at the countertop, crying.

But then, usually during the first week of June, the signs would come down. The articles would stop. And the restaurant wouldn’t close—it would simply stay open as if nothing had happened. Waiters who had already started at other jobs would come back. Glenda would never work late. When people asked Ed what was going on, he’d knock on the nearest piece of wood and simply say, “Business is good, business is good.” The place was never crowded.

The hostess seated Kyle and Nora at the table next to the kitchen. Whenever the doors swung open, Kyle felt steam on his back and Nora could see the chefs cooking.

“So,” Nora said, closing her phone. “You’re not going to believe this, but I think my friend Paul might be bringing a date to this same restaurant tonight.”

Kyle studied her face, looking for a sign that she was joking or plotting. But he saw nothing. She was just smiling.

“He’s single again—maybe I said that already. He’s trying to get back into dating. Anyway, just warning you.”

Warning him? Kyle pretended to look down at his menu but couldn’t get his mind off of Paul. Paul was from England. He was almost certainly going to know Kyle was a fake. Had Nora planned this all along? Pretending to be British around naïve Americans was one thing; convincing actual British people would be near impossible.

The waiter came and took their orders. Nora forgot about Paul and moved the conversation to books. Kyle was thankful for the shift, even though he knew hardly anything about literary criticism. In college he’d joined a book club but accidentally slept through all the meetings.

“My favorite books are ones where the author doesn’t throw all that bullshit at you,” Nora said. “You know what I’m talking about? Like philosophical shit.”

“Right, right,” Kyle said.

“Like all those existentialist books I had to read for school. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. I mean, there’s this one guy, I can’t remember his name, whose main point of all his books is that what he’s writing is meaningless. He spends chapters and chapters making this point, that it all means nothing.”

“Were they long books?”

“They were really long! Can you imagine? This guy was getting up every day and working on this thing that he knew was ultimately worthless.”

“Wow.”

Kyle studied Nora’s face. He still wasn’t sure how smart she actually was.

Suddenly a tall man in a navy-striped sweater appeared behind Nora and gently placed his hand on her shoulder.

“Pardon me for barging in,” the man said in a flawless English accent. It sounded very natural. “Just wanted to say hello.”

“Paul!” Nora said, putting down a piece of bread. “What a treat. This is Kyle.”

They shook hands.

“Are—are you alone?” Nora said.

“No no,” Paul said, then laughed. “At least, not yet. She’s supposed to meet me here. I guess I’m a little early.”

The three of them—Kyle and Nora sitting, Paul standing—chatted for a few minutes. No one mentioned England. Then Paul’s date appeared and they went off to a table across the room.

Kyle and Nora got their food and ate slowly. They talked about their favorite bands and weird concerts they’d been to, and on several occasions Nora lost her breath laughing. One time this happened just after she took a drink and it almost came out of her nose.

Nora liked him—Kyle could tell. He’d been blessed with few strengths when it came to girls, but one thing he knew was when they actually liked him. The way he found out was, he would lean in and say something very soft and sweet to a girl, and then immediately fake-sneeze in her face. If she smiled—or better yet, laughed—he knew she liked him. If she became annoyed, he’d sigh and sadly accept the truth.

Kyle had learned the method from his uncle Dan. According to him, the suddenness of the sneeze within a previously intimate environment activates certain cells in the girl’s hippocampus. As a result, he said, her reaction has to be completely honest.

“That’s how I knew Ann was the one,” he’d say when his wife was in the room.

“He sneezed in my face,” Ann would say back.

When Kyle sneezed in Nora’s face—it was a loud, wet one—she instantly turned her head away. But it wasn’t because she was upset—she was laughing too hard. She couldn’t catch her breath. She didn’t fall out of her chair, but Kyle could see that half of her butt had slipped off. At this point, Kyle knew he had her. Whatever she knew about it him at this moment, she liked. The only question left was: did he like her?

He smiled.

He did.

So, then: it was his job not to lose her.

At various points during the meal, Kyle noticed Paul glancing over his shoulder at their table.

“I really liked your apartment,” Nora said after their food was cleared. “It’s got really good feng shui.”

“Hey, thanks for noticing! I made sure to set it up using a Chinese compass.”

Suddenly, Paul and his date appeared tableside.

“And how were your meals?” he said, flawlessly omitting all the r’s.

“Mutt’s nuts!” Kyle said with maybe too much energy. “And yours?”

“Pardon me, I’ve been rude. This is Charlotte.”

Charlotte stepped forward and shook Kyle’s hand. She apparently already knew Nora.

“Mind if we sit for bit?” Paul said, bringing over chairs.

They sat down—Charlotte next to Nora, Paul next to Kyle. The empty table now seemed comically undersized.

Paul was heading back to England in the morning. For this reason, he explained, he was attempting to get “sloshed” tonight. “They don’t serve Sam Adams in London,” he kept saying.

Kyle kept looking over at Nora, but she was talking quietly with Charlotte.

“Don’t mean to be nosey,” Paul said abruptly turning to Kyle, “but I couldn’t help but notice your accent. You’re from England I take it?”

Paul’s face reminded Kyle of a character in a computer game he and his friends used to play. The game was called TortureWorld 3D. In the game, you played the role of a torturer and simply had to torture your victim. There was no back story. To accomplish this goal, you had to choose one of the following: a samurai sword, a heart extractor, an aluminum baseball bat, or a belt. Those were the only options. After you made your selection, the game went to a “Loading…” screen for several minutes and then finally reported what happened. The victim always died.

“Yes,” Paul said. He was almost whispering.

“Whereabouts?”

Kyle had anticipated this question and thus prepared an answer, which, unlike his previous one, involved a real place. He just had to say what he’d rehearsed and he’d be all set.

But he could hardly speak.

“Roxton,” he finally got out. “In East Bedfordshire.”

“Oh my God,” Paul said, bolting up, his voice now high and shining. “What an incredible coincidence. That’s where I grew up!”

Kyle’s eye darted back to Nora, who was listening to Charlotte say something. He knew that if his own conversation went any further, that if he said, “Yeah, Roxton, let’s talk about it,” that Paul would very quickly figure out the truth. And he knew that if Paul knew the truth, Nora would know it. And that would be the end of things.

Kyle pictured Julian interrogating him the next time he went to Puzzioli’s.

“What happened to the girl?”

“Nothing. We’re just friends.”

“Something happened. You liked her.”

“Nothing happened.”

“You fucked it up, didn’t you?”

“Listen, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“She was really hot!”

“She wasn’t that hot.”
“Good luck finding another one like that.”

So, Kyle did the one thing he’d hoped he would never have to do: he gave the signal for the emergency plan. Kyle had invented the emergency plan right after he’d decided to start using the accent in the first place. The plan, Kyle knew, would almost definitely save him, but he’d never considered the possibility of actually having to carry it out. In fact, he and his friends often joked about how crazy it would be if he ever did give the cue. “That would be insane,” his friend Steve would always say. “That would be fucking insane.”

Kyle excused himself, made a phone call outside, then waited in the bathroom for five minutes. Just as he was coming back to the table, two men—both very large—burst into the restaurant, pointing and screaming at him.

“That’s the bloke!” the bald one said in a hoarse English accent. “That’s the one!”

Kyle visibly tensed up and put a confused expression on his face. It was the same face his dad made whenever he looked at the burnt eggs he’d just scrambled. “Me?” he said to the huge men. “Are you referring to me?”

“ ‘Are you referring to me?’ Unbelievable. Give us our bloody money.” The one with hair yanked Kyle out of his seat so that he fell on the tiled floor. Then the bald one kicked him in the ribs. The kick didn’t look that bad, and actually sounded like it didn’t connect at all. But Kyle instantly clutched his ribs and grunted in pain.

During all of this, Nora and Paul just sat and watched in horror. They were frozen—everyone was. Even the waitstaff didn’t move. The two men were so perfectly burly and had entered with so much bravado that people in the restaurant felt more as though they were watching a movie than witnessing actual events. One woman whispered “Bruce Willis” and snapped a picture.

The bald one kept kicking Kyle, over and over again. Each time, Kyle would react by covering his face and drawing into an even tighter fetal position. “Beastly!” he’d cry out. “You’re beastly!”

“We’re beastly? You must be bladdered!” The bald one momentarily stopped kicking Kyle. He tilted his head slightly upward—away from Kyle—so that everyone in the restaurant could hear him. “You’re the one who put it all on Devonshire Abbey ten years ago!” He paused and briefly squinted his eyes. “Don’t you remember? The West Cheshire Football Championship? Of course you do. How could you not? You bet on it every year!” He paused again and squinted. This time, he did it for a while. After about ten seconds, he nodded at his partner, who then began speaking. “Listen you little shite, just give us our money and we’ll be gone. Simple as that. Otherwise, we’ll have to keep this up.” Now he paused and looked at the bald one, who shook his head and looked back. The one with the hair continued: “Oh, and one more thing: I was in Roxton last weekend and talked to a man who recently bonked your old mum. Says she’s quite a handful in the sack!”

At that, Kyle shot up with newfound energy and charged at the one with hair. But before he could lay a hand on him, the bald one stepped him in and delivered a perfect uppercut to Kyle, who instantly fell flat on his back, knocked out cold.

The bald man bowed his head and sighed. “Back to England, I guess.” The two exited the diner as police and ambulance sirens started coming closer.

When Kyle finally opened his eyes, he desperately had to go to the bathroom. He was lying in a stiff hospital bed and even though the room’s shades were drawn, he could tell it was already late morning. He went to the bathroom. On his way back, he bumped into a nurse.

“Excuse me,” he said in his normal, American accent.

The nurse smiled. “Sir, I actually have a message for you. From your wife. Or the brown-haired woman…is that your wife?”

“No, not my wife. Where is she?” Kyle knew exactly where she was because he’d heard her talking to the nurse earlier.

“Not here. Well, she stayed until eight but then said she had to drive someone to the airport. She wants you to call her as soon as you’re awake. Which I guess you are now.”

Kyle nodded and waited until the nurse was gone and closed the door to his room. He cleared his throat. This was it—the last installment of the emergency plan. It didn’t depend on anyone else, and, to his pleasant surprise, he didn’t even need to talk to anyone face-to-face. He just had to make one call.

The call went to Nora’s voicemail. For a brief moment, Kyle considered hanging up and trying again later, but then decided against it. He would leave a message. That way, he wouldn’t have to react to anything unexpected. He was sticking to the plan.

After the beep, he took a deep breath. Then he began, speaking in his natural American accent:

“Hi Nora, it’s Kyle. First of all, thanks so much for coming to the hospital with me and staying so long. The nurse told me everything. Second, you probably realize my voice is different. I just realized this myself, and I’m not going to lie: it’s pretty shocking.” He paused and, for a split-second, remembered a magazine article he’d read about how rarely the Green Bay Packers practiced their trick plays. “Basically, what the doctors here tell me, is that last night, when I got knocked out, my brain was damaged. Specifically, my medial temporal lobes and hippocampus. Anyway, according to them, the result is that I now have a rare form of ‘post-traumatic amnesia.’ Parts of my past I can’t remember. One thing is, my linguistic retention has been damaged. The doctors aren’t sure how long it will last—a day, a week, forever—but at least right now, I no longer have my British accent. Also, I definitely remember ‘being British,’ but I can’t remember anything about my past, not even where I used to live or who my parents are.” He paused. He was close. “I bet this is pretty confusing or startling. To tell you the truth, I can’t really believe it myself. I’m still in shock. Anyway, they’re letting me out soon, so I’ll be at home for the rest of the day. Maybe we can talk later. Okay. Goodbye.”

And that was it. Now he just had to wait. He hated waiting, but he was happy to be done. He had run the plan to perfection.

When he got back to his apartment, he ate a sandwich and watched television.  Then he fell asleep on the couch. Late in the afternoon, he woke up. It was still quite light out. He went through his bedroom to the bathroom, and when he came out—he saw it.

Bob’s Your Uncle was lying on the other side of his bed. He’d forgotten to put it away the previous night. It was open, as usual, to the chart, but something about it looked different. It looked like there were marks on it. He walked around his bed, carefully side-stepping a stack of library books and the corner of a poster.

On the chart was writing. It was done in pen, but was so faint that Kyle had to pick up the book and bring it closer to his eyes and squint to see it. Part of one of the bullet points—“Speak confidently”—was underlined. In the margins next to it was written the following, in a jagged hand: “We have to work on this, buster.”

Buckminster Fuller—visionary, futurist, owner of twenty-eight patents (including the geodesic dome)—was also an obsessive archivist. From 1917 until his death in 1983, Fuller documented every fifteen minutes of his life in the Dymaxion Chronofile, which contained copies of all his correspondence as well as newspaper clippings, business cards, sketches, and even dry-cleaning bills. The complete collection, now at Stanford University, takes up 270 feet of shelf space.

Ever the technology enthusiast, Fuller would have been delighted by the archival possibilities of the digital age. In fact, Fuller’s feat would not seem so impressive today, when anyone can fire off a tweet at fifteen-minute intervals and e-mail correspondence is saved automatically and indefinitely on Google’s servers. With the explosion of digital memory capacity, to save is the default rather than the exception. Digital bits, though not physically tangible, have become more enduring than pieces of paper. Even without active archiving, we have each accumulated a massive dossier on our digital lives through emails, blogs, text messages, and the like. Now that this archive exists, what is the point of it? Who, if anyone, cares to wade through it?

Critic and poet Adam Kirsch imagines a distant future when archeology is a matter of digital excavation. In this future, technology has to the point where infinite resources can be devoted to understanding the past. “Literature tells us the way people thought they were and wanted to be seen; but these random, personal, undeliberated traces of lives show us the way they really were. Evidence, not eloquence, is what we need to understand our origins.” For Kirsch, these “traces” are blogs and Facebook profiles, but he mischaracterizes them here. Although more organic than the process of publishing literature, the creation of blogs and Facebook profiles is hardly “undeliberated,” and to claim them to be pure in expression would be naïve. Any content created for the public eye necessarily reflects how the creator wants to be seen.

To see people as they really were, we have to look elsewhere. True privacy on the Internet exists only between man and machine. The search engine, with its precisely timed blinking cursor, is an impersonal text box where one can pour the deepest desires and most embarrassing questions. (Unsurprisingly, pornography accounts for a quarter of search queries.) It is because of the impersonal nature of the search engine that these searches are an expression of personal desire, unfiltered by social expectations. After all, what we search for is what we want, and what we want tells us something about ourselves.

The most potent expression of this idea comes, from all places, an advertisement. Google debuted its first television ad during the 2010 Super Bowl. Competition for flashiness among Super Bowl ads is as intense as the competition between the football teams playing the Super Bowl, but Google went for something simple. A string of search terms appears on the familiar minimalistic Google page: “study abroad paris,” “how to impress a french girl,” “jobs in paris,” and finally “how to assemble a crib.” In essence, a love story unfolds across these individually meaningless search terms. This digital ephemera, when properly curated, can tell a meaningful story.

Curation is the key to unlocking the significance in even the most “undeliberated” data. The entire digital archive, which accumulates at a frightening rate with every email, search, and blog post, only makes sense when curated. An unassembled mass is as useful as nothing at all, and even a completely searchable archive lacks a natural entry point. Every one of us leaves behind piles of digital debris with each keystroke.

So who is there to curate the mess? It seems all too conceivable that we will soon be poring over the collected emails and tweets of eminent figures, but just as there are thousands of books sitting forgotten in library basements, most digital debris will remain unmined. Kirsch optimistically postulates a far-off artificial intelligence to make sense of it all, whereas Google has its marketing department. Neither of these are real options.

Fuller’s Chronofile was not merely an archive but an extension of his biological memory. When looking for a fact—a person’s name or the price he paid for a car—he could intuit where to find it among the dozens of volumes, and his “life and experiences are brought into focus by using the Chronofile.” Curation and memory are intertwined: Fuller was the curator of his own archive. While this system worked for Fuller himself, the Chronofile was only indexed in his mind. After his death, the Chronofile, to the rest of us, became nothing more than a massive collection of papers, organized chronologically, but the needles stitching together narrative and thematic threads are lost in the haystack. Cross-referencing the Chronofile is a still an ongoing endeavor for the Buckminster Fuller Institute at Stanford today.

Fuller’s lifetime achievements ensure that an institute will devote resources to cataloguing his papers. Most of the digital debris left behind by the rest of us will evince no such interest. Fuller had it half-right: curating the personal archive is a means of understanding ourselves. But it is also a means of having others understand us. The fruits of curation should culminate in presentation. A pile of debris is uninteresting, but when carefully assembled, the insights gleaned from that process can engage an audience.

For the past six years, graphic designer Nicholas Felton has done just that with his Annual Feltron Reports, each a beautifully designed infographic showcase of his life over a year. The things presented in his reports can best be described as minutiae: types of beers consumed, mode and duration of transportation, number of digital and analog photographs taken, etc. Felton’s reports are an Internet sensation, and his claim to fame as a designer. He sells copies through his website, not only to friends, who would naturally be interested in his life, but also to strangers. It is both the data and the presentation that make the Annual Felton Report so compelling. Aesthetically, they are works of art but there remains a fascination with details of daily life.

Since the success of his reports, Felton has created Daytum.com, a website where users input such data from their lives. Infographics in the Felton style are automatically generated, and users can share them with friends. In an interview about his website, Felton says, “I can imagine how counting fireflies over the summer would make a poetic record of the way the summer was spent for an individual, but if 100 or 1,000 people are doing the same thing, does it start to tell an aggregate story that speaks more to global warming or habitat loss?” Felton identifies why collecting and sifting through this data is worthwhile: there is an individual narrative to be found, and these individual narratives add up to a collective one. It would be a shame to allow such signals to drown in the noise, and the act of curation tunes us into the right wavelengths.

The writing of autobiography, which relies on letters and documents, has long had this kind of curatorial role. In his autobiography Speak, Memory, the writer Vladimir Nabokov recounts two intertwined stories: a Russian general showing the young Nabokov a match trick, and years later, Nabokov’s father asking a peasant for a light while sneaking across the Russian border. The peasant lights a match, and Nabokov’s father recognizes him as the same general. “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life,” writes Nabokov, “should be the true purpose of autobiography.” Autobiographies written in the future will surely sift through the digital debris. With a digital memory of near infinite capacity today, it becomes essential to find the matches and generals that make up the designs of our own lives. The fear is not that we forget, but that there is so much we cannot make sense of it.

—Sarah Zhang is a 2010-11 Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and a Tuesday staff writer.

Everything was quiet, the way things tend to be two hours before dawn. Simon let his weight fall on the wooden bench with a sigh and wondered about the purple raindrops he was seeing inside his eyes. He had just spent nine hours straight killing Nazis in a dingy gamer café, and he was wishing the night bus would come soon. He hoped his mother wouldn’t be awake already.

About one and three-quarter hours before dawn, soft footsteps broke the night. Simon looked over, and then just kept looking. It was a ballerina, dressed as if she had just stepped out of Swan Lake, her white costume shining in the night and crinkling like wafers breaking as she sat down on the other end of the bench. She wiped her eyes with her hand and sniffled. Her makeup was running, but she kept her head strangely high.

One hour and forty minutes before dawn, the bus thundered in. He got on; she did not. The bus took him home.