Small Towns Are Supernatural Technology

People think the frightening thing about a small town is that everyone knows everyone. That is not it. The frightening thing about a small town is that everyone knows everyone’s father, and everyone’s father’s father, and what happened at the wharf in 1971, and which family the money really came from, and they have known it your whole life, and they will know it after you are dead, and there is nothing whatsoever you can do about any of it.

A small town is a memory machine. It is a distributed, redundant, self-repairing archive of every human fact that has occurred within its reach, stored not in one place where it could be lost but across a few hundred skulls, cross-referenced at the post office and the church and the one good store, and it does not forget, because the whole apparatus is designed so that no single death takes the record with it. You could not build a better surveillance system if you tried, and nobody tried; it assembled itself, out of nothing but proximity and time and the human inability to keep a thing to oneself.

And like all the best supernatural technologies, it sees the dead and the living at once.

The thing that follows you

Here is how it feels to be inside it, which the tourists never understand because tourists are, gloriously, unknown.

You are forty years old. You have a job, a life, a way of holding yourself that says you are a competent adult who has made competent decisions. You go home. You walk into the store. And the woman at the counter, who is kind, who means nothing by it, looks at you and sees — instantly, without effort, the way you see a face you have known forever — not the forty-year-old, but the whole stack of you at once: the child, the teenager who did the thing everyone still remembers, the family you come from and cannot resign from, the version of you the town decided on decades ago and has felt no need to revise. To her you are not a person with a past. You are a past with a person currently attached, and the person is the least interesting part.

This is the specific haunting of a place where everyone remembers. You cannot become someone new, because there is no jurisdiction that recognizes the change. You can move away — most people do — and build a whole other self in a city full of strangers who take you at face value, which is the actual reason cities exist and the actual thing they sell, anonymity, the right to be only who you currently are. But the town does not update when you leave. It keeps your file open. And every time you come back, for the funeral or the Christmas or the slow decline of a parent, the file is there waiting, exactly as you left it, and you feel yourself being pulled back down into the old shape, the one everyone still holds, and you understand that you never actually finished leaving. Nobody does. The town won’t process the paperwork.

The two-way haunting

I want to be fair to it, because it would be easy to make this only a horror, and it is not only a horror.

The same machine that will not let you forget who you were is the only thing on earth that will remember you at all. In the city of strangers where you are blessedly unknown, you are also, when you die, gone — a name on a lease, a face a few people half-recall, erased in a season. In the town that knew everything, you are kept. Your dead are still spoken of in the present tense of local reference: that’s the Barron place, even though no Barron has lived there in thirty years; that road is called after a man nobody under sixty ever met. The town holds its dead the way it holds its living, in the ongoing talk, and that talk is the closest thing to an afterlife that most people are ever going to get. To be remembered by a small town is to be, in a real and slightly frightening way, not entirely dead.

So it takes with one hand and gives with the other, and they are the same hand. The place that will not let you escape your grandfather’s disgrace is the place that will still, gently, tend your grandfather’s grave. The intelligence that sees all your former selves and mistakes you for them is the same intelligence that will, when you are gone, keep one of those selves alive in its endless low murmur, so that a child not yet born will someday hear your name and a story attached to it, true or not, and you will flicker back into a kind of existence for the length of a sentence at a kitchen table.

What it is, really

That is the technology. It is older than the town and it runs on nothing but people staying near each other long enough to become a single remembering thing, and it is dying now, in a lot of places, as the young leave and the stores close and the machine loses the redundancy it needs to keep the record from decaying — which is its own quiet catastrophe, a whole distributed memory going dark bulb by bulb, taking the dead with it this time for good.

I don’t romanticize it. I have felt the weight of being known too well, and it is a real weight, and there is a reason so many of us fled to the anonymous cities and did not, entirely, come back. But I know what we fled from and I know what we lost in the fleeing, and it was the same thing: a place that would not stop remembering us. There is no scarier machine, and no kinder one, and they are, as they have always been, exactly the same machine.