Tessa Berens

Tessa Berens is Jim’s wife. She is a multi-lingual poet of “Caribbean-European-Asian origins,” which the narrator and other characters often make a point of noticing (7). She also works online as an editor for a group that gives advice to people with medical conditions. She carefully notes details of her life in little notebooks that she carries around with her everywhere she goes. In her notebooks she writes down every detail she can remember or anything that strikes her as meaningful. In a novel about a post-technological world, many of her ingrained habits are holdouts from the earlier times of pen and paper. This explains why she has a stronger ability to remember things than other characters in the novel.

Language is an important medium through which she perceives the world and accesses her memories. In the midst of the collapse of technology and society, she feels...