We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1966

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Themes

Reality Versus Illusion

In We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, discerning the difference between reality and illusion is complicated. At the beginning of the story, the characters live in an agreed-upon reality. Quail is a boring office clerk who wants to go to Mars. His evidence for this reality is that it is confirmed by those around him: His wife Kirsten demands he drop his dreams of Mars and go to an underwater hotel instead, McClane produces a version of Quail’s fantasy in response to Quail’s letter, and the team at Rekal check Quail’s records to confirm his social status. Since everyone—characters and readers—agrees this to be true, the accepted reality is that Quail is a boring office clerk.

However, as soon as Quail is sedated, reality fractures. For Quail, what follows is an escape from his humdrum clerk life. There is evidence that his conviction that he is remembering previous lives is a delusion (after all, this is exactly what Rekal promised him, complete with physical evidence). There is also evidence that it might be real (the chronology of the sedation and implantation is purposefully murky). Nevertheless, whether he truly recovers real erased memories or is suffering some kind of memory implant malfunction, Quail no longer has to imagine that he is a swashbuckling hero or the most valuable person in the world: In his new reality, both things are true. Quail’s transformations trap the story’s other characters in several possible realities. They are now either figments of Quail’s imagination, performing actions that are in keeping with his delusions (so, for example, Kirsten is no longer an unhappy wife, but a devious Interplan agent); or they are facing a completely torn apart reality (Interplan discovers that they are facing a far greater threat than any Martian politician from tiny aliens bent on exterminating humans).

Most interesting is what happens to the story’s readers. They must decide which of the story’s many possible realities is actually happening—or accept the story as ambiguous, without any definite way to determine whether Quail is in a delusion or a succession of actual realities. One telling theme is that when confronted with each new reality, characters frequently voice their desire to live in comforting illusions. Within his new reality, Quail asks Interplan for a new false memory, even if it results in his death. But the desire to escape reality into fiction makes us wonder: What more comforting fiction is there for Quail than the idea that he really is the single most important person on Earth?

A Yearning to Be Important

In We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, a key theme is Quail’s desire to be important. He feels constrained by his life as an office clerk and wishes that he was a more significant person. This yearning to be important is so strongly felt that he is willing to implant false memories in his mind to satisfy his desires. To Quail, falsely believing that he is a hero is better than a reality in which he is an insignificant clerk. Quail actively seeks to live a lie because he is so desperate to feel as though he is making an impact on the world.

The story’s ambiguity pivots on Quail’s need to be significant. Is Quail really a highly skilled government assassin who has killed an important Martian politician? When the Interplan agents strike a deal with Quail, Quail knows that erasing his memories of being a spy will make his need to be important bubble to the surface again, so he does everything in his power to avoid his old dull life. Instead, Rekal grants him an even more extraordinary fantasy, one so narcissistic it comes from the psychologically naïve mind of a nine-year-old: Quail is the sole protector of the Earth and the savior of humanity who prevented an alien invasion by showing an alien race that humans were capable of empathy and kindness. Is this real or the ultimate manifestation of Quail’s psychological need for significance?

But even this form of reality is not enough for Quail. He is not satisfied with being the savior of Earth until the rest of the population knows about it—this is why he reveals his status to Rekal staff. Being quietly important does not matter. Quail yearns to be important, but only in a way that others recognize his importance.

Commodification and Capitalism

The story paints the future as the domain of unbounded, greedy capitalism where money is key to every transaction. The Quails are too poor to travel, and they live in a clearly cheap lodging called a conapt; Quail carefully considers whether he can afford a memory implant and later demands a full refund. Rekal Incorporated uses technology to commodify memories, tricking people into buying versions of their own delusions for profit. It is plausible that Earth’s government would pay an assassin to kill a Martian leader.

McClane is the embodiment of the future’s moral bankruptcy. For McClane, the most important cause is Rekal’s capacity to earn money; even when he thinks he has harmed Quail’s brain, he is only willing to refund half the man’s money. After Quail’s final transformation, McClane’s confidence fades when he realizes that the world’s safety—and Rekal’s existence—is predicated on a transaction that has nothing to do with money. Quail is keeping the world safe by showing invading aliens empathy and altruism—qualities notably absent from a capitalist system. Rather than monetary payment for his protection, Quail wants the world’s attention and recognition. The sweaty, nervous McClane at the end of the story is a stinging indictment: McClane is now the nervous, sweaty-palmed office clerk that Quail started out being. This is either just comeuppance (if Quail really is the world’s savior) or a way for Quail to imagine bringing the oily, overconfident McClane down a notch (if Quail is hallucinating the whole story).

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale offers a critique of capitalism’s drive to profit at any moral cost. Rekal creates comforting delusions because comforting illusions sell better, while ignoring the moral implications of their actions. Rekal is a profitable enterprise because it provides inherently vacuous and unsatisfying solutions to the deeply socially alienated—charging people for the temptation to escape from the mundanities of life through infantilizing fiction.