This is Cast of Wonders, the young adult fiction podcast featuring stories of the fantastic. Welcome. Episode 627. I'm Alicia Caporasso, assistant editor and your host for today's episode. Every year, Cast of Wonders highlights some of our favorite episodes from the previous year. It's a great chance for us to take a bit of a breather and let you, our listeners, catch up on any missed episodes with new commentary from a different member of the crew.
Our story for today is The Restaurant of Object Permanence by Beth Goder, which was first published in Diabolical Plots, April 2024, and reprinted as one of our Banned Books Weeks episodes. Cast of Wonders 604 in September 2024. Beth Goder is an archivist and author. Over 40 of her short stories have appeared in venues such as Escape Pod, PodCastle, the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, Analog,
Clark's World and Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as here at Cast of Wonders. You can find her online at www.bethgoder.com. This story is narrated by Katrin Kaania. Katrin is a medieval archaeologist specializing in historical textile techniques. She has written The Middle Ages Unlocked, An Introduction to the English Middle Ages, together with historian and fiction writer Gillian Pollock.
She also spins, weaves, knits, and blogs about all these things at palya.net. And now we have a tale to tell. The Restaurant of Object Permanence by Beth Goder Read by Katrin Kanya Kaja files a folder of correspondence and closes the manuscript box.
She leaves the archives as the sun is setting. Her head is filled with the collection she is processing, the papers of Elgar T. Bryce, noted American biologist. For 11 years, she has worked as an archivist, arranging and describing the papers of scientists, economists, and professors. She loves the quiet of the archives, the way folders line up in a processed box.
tangible history in her hands. Outside the archives, there's a strange flyer on the bulletin board. The first thing she notices is the paper, a small blue square, probably acidic, attached to the board by the thin metal line of a staple, not yet turned to rust. It's an invitation.
to the restaurant of object permanence. To go, one is instructed to eat the flyer. She pulls the paper from the board and swallows it in one bite. The restaurant of object permanence is brightly lit, each table under a spotlight. Although four chairs surround each table, every diner sits alone.
Before Kaja are two objects, a worn work boot and a bracelet drooping with dainty emeralds. Kaja recognizes the items immediately. She picks up the boot, Misty's favorite toy. A wave of memory washes over her, throwing the shoe, which first belonged to Kaja's father, Misty's tail wagging.
sunlight streaming through the oak in their backyard. The bracelet was a graduation gift from her grandmother, lost in a move a decade ago. She has not thought of these things in years, but now that they are before her, she feels tenderness for them, like light touching a place long dark. The woman at the next table
has a merry-go-round figurine and a black rock. She ingests the merry-go-round, which shrinks to fit perfectly into her mouth. The look on her face is a mix of sorrow and wonder, a version of nostalgia. The door to the restaurant opens. The woman leaves. Kaja looks at the boot and bracelet.
Both a promise of memories renewed. Also, escape. To leave the restaurant, she must eat. Carefully, she puts both objects to the side. She has never liked limited binary choices. So little in the world reflects this structure. If this is a restaurant, she should be able to order what she wants.
Book, she says, experimentally. A Wizard of Earth Sea appears before her. Not just any copy. She'd recognize the scratch on the cover anywhere. When she was eight, she bought the book at a garage sale and devoured it in one city. Since then, she has believed in the true names of things. This belief carries over to her work.
where she tries to divine descriptions for archival documents. All three objects sit before her, waiting for her to choose. She loves them all in different ways, but she's reluctant to eat any of them. What sort of gift is the past? Is this a gift at all, or a responsibility to remember?
She wonders what will happen if she orders something intangible. Determinism, she says. All these choices have made her think of free will and that competing philosophy, determinism, the idea that all our actions are predetermined, the inevitable consequences of the motion of particles tracing back to the birth of the universe.
Perhaps, she thinks, determinism will manifest as a rendition of the Big Bang, some strange tableau. However, what appears is a black bow tie with a broken clasp, the one Adrian left behind in the apartment that used to be theirs. All at once, she remembers herself.
at 23 years old, crushing the bowtie in her hand. Her past self is wondering how her choices have brought her to this place and if her choices mattered at all or if the universe had planned this all along. Her bracelet is gone, a graduation gift from her grandmother. Perhaps it had gotten mixed up with his things.
In the restaurant, she picks up the bowtie, letting the silk run over her thumb. Kaja worries that if she eats this manifestation of determinism, the world will disintegrate into its component parts. She puts the bowtie aside, adding it to the archival collection of her past objects. She's tempted to order a paradox.
because it is in her nature to explore the limits of a system in order to ferret out the underlying structure. But she doesn't. She refrains from ordering any other intangibles. Love, sadness, morning, noon, night, nostalgia, the feeling before falling asleep, or the bright dawning of understanding. All of her objects have been personal.
What would it look like if she ordered love or grief? Would she be given Misty's collar, her grandmother's lace tablecloth, a photograph of her father? The restaurant of object permanence, she says. A model of the restaurant appears. Object permanence is the ability to remember objects.
when they are no longer in sight. Archival records, she thinks, are a method of object permanence for our history, a way to remember events that have disappeared from living memory. The record is a physical object describing the intangible past. She peers into the model of the restaurant.
with its tiny tables and chairs and folks diners, with miniature artwork on the walls. In front of each diner sits a choice of objects, but the objects are obscured from Keija, blurred like a memory. The static model cannot possibly convey the significance of those objects to the diners, the crucial choice the restaurant has to offer. But everything that can be represented is.
What Kaija sees is an archival obsession with the past, with collective memory and the spaces between, the empty chairs and tables, moments undocumented in the historical records, lost now forever. These spaces are what she focuses on most, the places where things are missing. This is what she will eat.
She can remember her own past without the use of objects. It is the concept of the restaurant she needs to carry with her, the knowledge that so much history has been lost, the silences in the archives. Documents tell a story, but what happens when the documents that would speak are not saved? What happens to those stories?
Into her mouth goes the restaurant of object permanence. It tastes like nothing she's ever eaten. It's as if she has forgotten the words to describe taste. The door opens. In the distance, she sees the archives. She sets out toward the building. The archives will be locked now.
but she will touch the pebbled walls, run her fingers in the spaces where the pebbles meet, and feel the absence there. Our senses may play tricks on us. Do my eyes deceive me? Or am I hearing things? And taste is subject to, well, taste and genetics. While our sense of smell may be the most closely linked to emotion and memory, I've found that people's belief in sensory connection to the past
is most closely tied to our ability to touch physical objects. Fiona Canlan, professor of museology at Birkbeck University of London, has researched why museum visitors are compelled to illicitly touch exhibits. Interviewees gave a variety of reasons, including proving they were real, to appreciate the artistry in making it, and to share empathy, i.e. the personal connection, with the person who made or used the object.
I am a historical archaeologist, and as someone who has had the opportunity to handle many historical objects and artifacts, I understand this compulsion. Yes, object permanence tells us that an artifact from the past is there in front of us, but it doesn't tell us if it's rough or squishy or cool to the touch. It doesn't tell us if it warms as we hold it in our hands. We get a lot of information through touch, and that desire is powerful. This is compounded when the historical objects are our own.
especially ones that are forgotten and returned to us. That is why I was so drawn to this story. I can't imagine being offered so strong and cherished memories, and then having to choose only one to ingest. Clearly, Kazuya didn't forget any of the memories by not choosing one, but at the same time, all the objects she was offered had been lost to her. All she had was object permanence, memories.
As an archaeologist, I would feel the loss of the swallowed object keenly with such a strong memory. It would have been very difficult for me to leave the restaurant. I think she chose wisely. A memory of the spaces in between. Remembering how we know what we know is based on what is remembered. Only someone like an archivist would write this story. Short and powerful, this was definitely one of my favorite stories that we ran this year. Join us again soon.
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Our editorial assistant is Amy Brennan, and our audio producer is Jeremy Carter. Cast of Wonders is part of the Escape Artist Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License. That means you can download or listen to the episode on any device you like, but you can't change it or sell it.
Our theme music is Appeal to Heavens by Alexia Nov, available from Promo DJ or his Facebook page. Thank you for listening.