The Emoticon Generation (21 page)

I didn’t want this gift. I didn’t want to access it. I didn’t want to touch it.

But I couldn’t just leave it.

At least for appearance’s sake; Melanie must have spent a
fortune
on this! I had to type
something
!

I looked at my watch. Nine p.m. No need to change the time.

Fighting every instinct I had, I typed in an arbitrary number: 5 years, 0 months, 0 days, 0 minutes, 0 seconds. Who knows what I must have done then.

I shut my eyes, pressed ‘ENTER’, and opened them.

“Thanks, mom.” My voice. In my living room. The TV was turned on, though muted. Some news program. At the corner of the computer screen, I could see a piece of the phone. I was on the phone.

“And really all the very, very best.” My mother’s voice, as it sounds on the phone.

“Sure, mom,” my voice. “Put dad on.” My breath caught. My real breath. Dad’s been dead for two-and-a-half years!

“Just a minute,” her voice, again. Then I heard some faint rustling. I could hear me exhale. I changed another channel. Oh! Where did that show disappear to? I hadn’t seen it since!

How can this All-of-Me give such detail? Do I really remember that much? Ah – but these images aren’t pulled out of my memory, they’re pulled out of ‘me’. I am who and what I am now, because every second of my life has led me here. So if there had been different images on the TV, I guess that means I’d’ve turned out slightly different – perhaps not noticeably, but at least with a different number.

“Jake?” my father’s voice. Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!

“Yah,” my voice right back at him, as I switched another channel.

“Happy birthday, son.” And for a minute, I froze. How did he know it was my birthday? He’s dead, this was years ag—Oh, right. This was exactly five years ago. It’s my birthday today; it was my birthday then.

“Thanks, dad.” It was like he was wishing me happy birthday from the grave.

Long silence.

“Thanks, dad.”

“Yeah, sure, you know.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“No. Bye.”

“Okay. Bye, dad.”

I pressed ‘F1’, and looked at the frozen screen.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

What now? Even as I asked myself what I should do, my fingers were already clicking away: 15 years, 0 months, 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes. My birthday. 15 years ago – my eighteenth birthday. My hand hovered above the ‘ENTER’ key. My spine tingled.

I should stop—No, I should—I know what I should do—I should—I should go someplace I know well, I should find safe ground—I should—I should—I—I pressed ‘ENTER’. Almost immediately, I froze the picture. I needed time to take it in.

Nighttime. Outside. Stars. And that face in front of me, oh god, I can’t believe it, I haven’t seen her since... since... since my eighteenth birthday. Oh, my god. Has it happened yet? Are we after it or before it? And look at that face – that face I fell in love with. Just as it is etched in my memory. Just as clear as I saw it then.

I pressed ‘F1’ again, and the picture came to life.

“It’s my birthday,” my squeaky, awkward 18-year-old voice was saying. Touching her shoulder. “Don’t you want to be with me for my birthday?” Could I ever have been that stupid?

“Jake, I really didn’t want to see you today. I had other things to do. You’re the one who wanted to see me.”

“But you’re here. Let’s make the best of it.” Did I really talk in clichés back then? On the screen, I put my hand on her cheek, trying to build up to a kiss.

She took my hand, and put it back. “I didn’t want to do this today. But you’re forcing me.”

“To do what?”

She looked down, then straight at me, into my eyes. Into my eyes
today
. “I don’t want to see you again.”

Her image on the screen actually wobbled, became wavy in a drunken sort of way, then, after a long silence. “What? Why?”

Watching, today, I put my own hands to my head. I knew what was coming. Tears were already forming in my eyes.

She looked at her feet. “I... I met someone else, Jake.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to see you again. Okay? You asked for this today. You asked for this.”

“What, you don’t love me anymore? You met someone else? What?
Why
? Maybe we can—”

“You know, I don’t want to talk about this.”

“But—”

“I don’t want to see you again, Jake. I don’t want to see you. Okay?”

And she got up, and she ran away.

And I froze the picture.

I needed coffee. I needed drugs. I needed therapy. This was... This was the greatest heartbreak I’ve had till that age. And...

I took a deep breath and produced the menu, more to get rid of the image of Sarah running away than anything else. But the second the menu appeared, my hands were already at the keyboard, clicking.

This
was
a drug. It was habit-forming, it messed with your mind, it was addictive, and—And I wondered how far back I should go now.

Let’s go really back. Let’s test the limits of this thing. Would it be able to show things as they were when I was five, when my brain was less developed, when things were different?

I typed in: 28 years, 0 months, 0 days, 6 hours (or else I’d find myself asleep), 0 minutes, 0 seconds. I pressed ‘ENTER’, and the screen came to life, showing something else.

“Do it again!” My voice as it must’ve been then. “Again!”

The red carpet – the house – oh, it was exactly as I remembered it – so huge, so rugged, so homey, so... so like my parents!
This
was my definition of home.

The screen was filled with two huge pillars in pants – my dad’s favorite pants. And I ran between them, giggled, then looked up.

And, here, in the present, looking at the screen, his face took my breath away.

I froze the picture.

Yes! This was how I’d always seen my dad. Even when I grew up. Even when I grew taller than him. Even when age began to change his face and body. What I saw then was not a thirty-three-year-old man, as old as I am today. He was a giant to me. A huge, colossal man, whose face was so...
grownup
in a way only children understand, in a way only children see. This program, this All-Of-Me, it showed things as I had seen them, not necessarily as they were. Through
my
eyes.

Should I unfreeze the picture? No. I could come back to this whenever I wanted. I summoned the menu.

I wondered how far back I could go with this. Does this program have
any
limits?

I typed in: 32 years, 8 months, 0 days, 4 hours, 0 seconds; then pressed ‘ENTER’.

The focus was off. Two huge blobs of brown above me, yellow background, a lot of colors. A huge brownish thing hovered into view, then a smaller pinkish thing met and engulfed it.

“Look!” A sound. A familiar male sound. “He’s holding my finger.”

Cheers all around. I looked away from the screen – it was too distracting – and listened. Slowly, one by one, I picked out the voices...

My mother showing me off to
her
mother. My grandfather giving my father advice about what I should eat, how I should sleep.

I could listen to this for hours. I could learn so much. About myself. About my parents. About the past...

For a second it was like I was falling down, out of control control, helpless.

I pressed ‘F1’.

How far back does this go?

I fed in the numbers: 33 years, 3 months, 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds.

Before I was born. When my mother was six-months pregnant with me. When I was
inside
her stomach.

I hesitated for a second, then pressed ‘ENTER’.

The screen was filled with bursts of shapeless yellow and orange. There was constant and fast thudding. And in the background: Music. And... Muffled sounds. Voices! People talking! Muffled but I could still make them out. I upped the volume, and listened closely.

“Bang! Zoom!” Jackie Gleason’s voice.
Jackie Gleason’s voice
! I could hear him now, through the womb, through my mother’s stomach, more than 33 years into the past – I could hear what happened then.

Oh my god. Oh my god!

I froze the picture.

How far back does this
go
?

I typed in the numbers – I had never typed numbers that slowly in my life: 34 years, 0 months, 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds.

Before my father’s sperm met by mother’s egg. Three months before I was conceived.

I hesitated, then pressed ‘ENTER’.

The screen turned into a violent explosion of abstract colors and sounds, screeches, and vague sounds. Occasionally, a sound made sense, a word here, a bit of music there. It was mesmerizing. It was chaos. It was impossible.

I stared at the screen for a while, until I made sense of it.

Sooner or later, the further back you went, you’d have to reach some sort of ‘first moment’, some state-of-mind that had no reasonable state-of-mind before it. Only the computer didn’t know that. Each number is caused by another number. So if you go back enough, you get chaos and gibberish.

Hmm.... Good to know this program has
some
limits.

And yet, there was something about the shapes, something about the sounds. Something hypnotic... It touched me at a spot I couldn’t recognize.

I pressed ‘F1’, and stared at the frozen picture, a shapeless form of a million different hues of red. And it was more beautiful than any picture by any painter I’d ever seen.

Gee-
eez
!

I pressed ‘ESC’ and exited the program. There’s always tomorrow. Always tomorrow.

I just sat there for half an hour, then got up, went into the living room, kissed Melanie, and thanked her for the gift. The gift she got just for me.

~

The next day, when I was at work, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop going over everything I saw, remembering, seeing it in a different light. I made up endless lists of all the places in my past I could explore. I could hear what conversations I had as a kid. Go over my birthdays. Get a glance, again, of the girls I had a distant crush on in high school. I could hear my father tell me good-night stories. I could see my mother hug me.

I left work as quickly as I could, made five traffic violations on the way home, almost ran out of the car – and stopped. Stopped the second I stood in front of the front door, my key in the lock.

The door was unlocked.

Robber? Melanie?

For some reason, my heart shrank more at the latter.

I opened the door. The living room was empty. The kitchen, in a clear line of sight, was empty.

“Melanie?!” I called.

“In here!” Her voice.

I entered the corridor. Not in the bathroom. Only two more rooms – the bedroom or my study. Again, my heart shrank at the second option.

The door to the bedroom was open, but underneath the closed study door I could see a sliver of light. My body began to pump adrenaline.

I shoved the door open slowly, “Honey?”

And there she was, at the computer, my face frozen on the screen.

She was sitting on the chair, hugging her legs, a cigarette hanging between two of her long fingers. She looked back at me. “You
gotta
see this,” she said, as I tried to push down my anger. What right does
she
have to—! “This is amazing!”

I took a step closer.

“Look at what I found a few minutes ago,” she turned back to the screen, “Oh, wait, I’ll save this, first.” Her hands flashed over the keyboard, and a me I don’t know vanished off the screen and somewhere into my hard drive. Sweat began to form on my forehead. “I’ve been typing numbers randomly, just to see what would happen. Get a load of this,” and she typed: ‘MELANIE_IS_GREAT’ and pressed ‘ENTER’.

My face appeared on the screen, unshaven, gray-haired. His face was all red and he was panting.

“Let’s see this from
his
point of view,” she touched a key, and the view shifted. A woman filled the screen, a naked woman I’ve never seen before. Her body was zooming in and out: I was kissing her. Melanie looked at me and smiled, “Now who the hell is that? What haven’t you been telling me?” She laughed, and pressed a few more keys. “Now, see, this isn’t you at all. If you go back, you’ll find that this version of you was raised in London. Yes, London. You even have a Cockney accent here. Now let’s try something else,” she turned back to the keyboard and typed ‘HOW_ABOUT_THIS’.

My face appeared on the screen, suddenly, screaming. Melanie and I both jumped, as the scream turned blood-curdling. Melanie pressed F1, and the picture froze. He was my age. And he was terrified.

“Hmm,” she said. “Let’s go back a minute.”

A couple of keystrokes later, we were seeing it from his point of view. He was on a bridge. My stomach sank. A trickle of cars going back and forth. Another person came towards him. A man in a long, black raincoat.

“Step away, step away,” I suddenly found myself whispering to the me in the computer.

“Excuse me,” the man said.

“Yes,” I heard my voice.

“Melanie—” I said. She raised a finger to shut me up, her eyes fixed on the screen.

“Do you have the time?” the man said.

“Sure, it’s—” and the me on the screen looked at his watch. The watch filled the screen, but you could see the background – the part with the shoes and the pavement – get suddenly darker in a fuzzy way. The darkness was the color of the raincoat.

“Okay,” the man’s tone turned aggressive. A quick change of angle, and we saw a gun.

“Turn it off,” I told Melanie.

“Shhh,” she said as the me on the screen said something I couldn’t hear. “Let’s see this.”

“Johnny says ‘Hi’,” the man said, as two of his big arms pushed us. The angle changed again, and in the screen there was only sky. He was pushing me off the bridge!

“Stop!” My voice came from the speakers, just as I was about to say the same thing. And then there was a scream, and water rushed towards the other me.

“Okay,” she pressed ‘F1’, “we already saw that part. Now, something else.” And she typed: ‘SOMETHING_ELSE’.

“Melanie—”

My face again. Young, this time, a kid. The way I had looked when I was six. Disturbed, frightened.