Windows

Remember commuting to work? Remember waking up and getting ready to travel up to two hours, repeating the trip home, and doing it all again the next day? We used to do that every day. You remember. I remember. So many things are worse today, but not that. Of course you remember the megacities of the past: their congestion, their smog and garbage fumes, their tenements and back alleys and crime.  Though there’s a certain peacefulness to a commute. It’s something that doesn’t exist much anymore, not just the traveling between cities, but the simple act of getting into a train car and sitting and being shipped to another location entirely. The passivity of the world passing by, watching your known world expand before your eyes. You’re doing it now.

Sitting alone in an empty train car, one elbow resting on the window ledge, the other fumbling with a frayed lace from your hooded sweatshirt. Putting it on this morning you laughed, because you thought back to your youth, wearing a similar sweatshirt as a crusty-eyed and hungover teenager, looked in the mirror and asked yourself if you would still wear something like this when you were old. 

Now you know the answer.

It’s funny how we can remember small thoughts; fleeting things, if you can even call them things, that pass through our minds and may never even leave a mark or a trace of their existence, can randomly pop back into your consciousness decades later, and your consciousness floats back in time. It’s happened to you a lot recently, I know. Time can make things confusing.

Most necessities are available in each mini-city, but others still have their competitive advantages. You were lucky to get this appointment with one of the best neurologists in the country, because he’s friends with Leo. Shelby would’ve liked that you’ve begun to connect with him again after all this time.

You continue to gaze out the window, and on the horizon the pointy shards rise above the ground, the skyline so different than what you once knew, but not without some of its old familiar landmarks. It’s pretty crazy what people can do in such a short period of time when they’re aligned on a common goal. Looking out this window now at the passing outskirts, modern buildings and structures and streets abound. Huge warehouses, one after the other, pass by, followed rows of Cohabs. There are spots here and there, in the cracks of these perfected, efficient habitats, like a beautifully calculated and equilibrated ecology, where the old world peeks through. A junkyard that was left behind, not yet cleared out; an old parking lot that’s been repurposed into a market, but the white and yellow street lines remain; and a small house, a single family house, its roof caving in as if the tall Cohabs around it had bullied it into implosion.

You feel like you’ve seen this house before. I feel it too. It’s possible we’ve thought about this exact thing before, a single, dilapidated house hunkered down in a minefield of noise and debris and purchase offers by hungry realtors and corporations. But the house is calling to us. Maybe it’s the simplicity, the symbolism of something old sticking it out in a world so new and hostile. Like you. It could be the shape of the house, its details acting like a stencil that fits right into a memory of a thought you had, a lingering memory of seeing it with that door such a unique shade of green, like freshly mowed grass, even as the rest of the house crumbles around it. There’s that itching thought once again, the ghost of an old conversation you had with yourself so long ago coming back to haunt your present. You give in to it, let it rear its head after so many years, clearing the debris in your cobwebbed mind. I wouldn’t suggest this, especially on the way to the neurologist, that’s the whole point of this trip. Not after all these years. No, wait—

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There’s something about that house, I think to myself. It’s beginning to deteriorate. They’ve just started construction around it, making it look like a kid with lice as the construction workers and their worksites make a busy horseshoe around it.

“Imagine what the future might look like, once these buildings are done?” Duncan says to me.

“I feel like you bring this up twice a week,” Rob says. He may be right, but we spend so much time on this train I’m sure we’ve all repeated ourselves.

“I just read this article about them the other day,” I say, “these ‘Cohabs.’ Widespread networks of green homes and coworking spaces with spas, pools, basketball courts, everything.”

“Maybe at some point we won’t commute at all.” Rob says with playfully wide eyes. He’s probably right, at some point soon the Cohabs will take over and we won’t need these commuter trains or offices. There’s something good about holding onto the past though. Props to whoever held onto that house. Even though it’s deteriorating it means something. One day I hope I can take a stand for my values like that.

“Maybe,” Duncan says—

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Okay, good, you’re back. Listen, you can’t trust these memories or thoughts or whatever they are. 

That’s why we’re on the train, you have to remember that. Speaking of which, we’re here.

You just tried to check your phone. I get it, nostalgia. You must still be in that other place. Try to come back so we can explain to the doctor exactly what’s happening to your mind. Remember: there’s no Wifi anymore, and for good reason. Look up. Everything is hardwired. The touchscreen on the headrest could help you out, but it won’t have your private list of saved locations, that’s a time of the past. You don’t own your preferences now, remember that. Let’s go.

The train glides to a stop and the doors open to a huge, blindingly white hall, like a fictionalized version of a train station in heaven. We walk through the hall, and a hologram rises from a circular spot on the floor.

“Hey Trevor, you didn’t eat breakfast this morning.” A generically rendered humanoid says, now moving with us along with its circle. It produces what looks like a tray, but it has more projections on it. Logos. “Check out these spots nearby if you’re feeling hungry.”

We need to talk about what happened before. I don’t totally know what it was, and I know you don’t either. It couldn’t have been time travel, right? It felt so real. Yes, I was there too, you just didn’t know it. They haven’t invented time travel yet, to my knowledge, but there have been crazier updates. A hologram just offered you food and knew your name. Imagine people a hundred and fifty years ago, with only access to a radio and books, and how they would think of us now.

We keep moving through the main corridor of the station, and you realize you are actually hungry. We stop in an alcove, the walls decorated with snacks and drinks, all bearing one of the logos from the hologram. It’s still strange that the system knows you bought something without having to actually purchase it. You grab a nutrition bar and notice a song playing in one of the speakers overhead. We know that song. The guitar sounds oddly like—

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“We’re up all night to get lucky, we’re…”

The music plays throughout the bodega, almost awkwardly loud. I notice the cashier bopping his head to the beat, so he must have turned the store’s music up. I smile, remembering what it was like to be a teen and so infatuated with the new music of the day, and place the bag of Hershey’s nuggets onto the counter along with the Ritz crackers, chocolate milk, and a frozen pizza.

“This it?” The kid says.

“Yep,” I say appeasingly. “Pregnant wife.” He scans the items but doesn’t say anything,  and I feel like I need to fill the empty silence. “Crazy cravings, ha.” I fake a laugh. I pay and get out of there.

The drive home is quick, but as soon as I enter the house I can tell Shelby’s definitely already asleep. 

She didn’t immediately tell me to bring one of the various snacks to her, which is a key indicator.

“Daddy,” I hear from the hallway. Leo, in his little full body Buzz Lightyear pajamas and carrying his favorite stuffed animal that he hilariously named Allen. “Daddy, I can’t sleep. Can you come lay with me.”

“One second, pal.” I say to him. “Let me put the food away and I’ll be right in.”

He returns to his room. I get a text then from Duncan. He sent me a video of his dog bringing him a beer when he rings a bell, which is so confounding to me. How does he have the time? I answer his text with a quick “absurd.”

“Dad!” I hear from the other room, impatience rearing its youthful head.

“I’m coming,” I say, quickly putting everything away and walking back toward his room. He’s already in bed, his duvet wrapped around his little body, waiting for me. I lay down on the floor next to his bed, releasing that involuntary noise every man does with each physical movement after they turn thirty.

“Are you nervous?” I ask him, and can already tell he’s nodding in the dark. I’m sure a lot of parents have that intuition with their kid, knowing exactly what they wanted to hear. “It’s okay to be nervous before the first day. Everything will be just fine.”

“Yeah.” He says, though I can tell he doesn’t mean it. He waits a second, and we both breathe in the dark as I feel a buzz in my pocket. Could be Duncan, though it might be a sports update. “What if something bad happens?”

It’s his first day of first grade, so I remind him he’s done this before. And if anything bad was to ever happen, he could call me or his mother.

“You remember the phone number and address right?” I ask him, quizzing him on the knowledge we’ve drilled into his head. We just don’t remember those things anymore, and Shelby and I made a point to not let Leo fall into that same trap. I barely know anyone’s phone number anymore, and if I hadn’t lived in this house for ten years now, I probably wouldn’t know how to find it on a map. I’ve always been terrible with directions, and—

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“Well, no, but it’s not much farther,” her lilting words mesmerize me, stringing those simple words into a ballad. She had said her place was a short walk from the bar, but we’d been walking for ten minutes now. Short I guess could mean different things to different people.

I had seen her across the way at a hidden garden rooftop bar, and I told my friend right then, that she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. I made it a point to sit at a table near her, and when the time arose I struck up conversation. She made such intense eye contact, like she had known me forever. I could probably draw a picture of the exact shape and pattern of her amber irises, that’s how deeply and prolonged our mutual gaze was.

We spoke about nothing for a while— what we were doing there, where we were from. It could have been the few glasses of wine, or the thrill of meeting a beautiful stranger, but there was something about her, something that was so different than anyone I had ever met before, an easiness and quickness to humor that astounded me and kept me on my feet. I felt a presence, like I was truly alive for the first time to experience this moment, this night, this coincidental crossing of paths.

Shelby and I stayed in our seats long after both of our friends decided they no longer wanted to be there, and talked until the bar closed and shooed us out into the quiet street, an early morning wind picking up and connecting us in a way I find hard to describe. I remember her shining, long brown hair fighting against the wind, waving in the moonlight, the rogue strands covering her face as she fought to move them with a smile. I remember her smile, her many big teeth, a tiny mole on her upper lip, and a dimple in only one cheek, as if begging me to make her smile more, laugh harder, so that the other would show itself; her thin nose with its uniquely beautiful bridge scrunching the slightest bit, her eyes squinting but still so focused. As we walked, apparently close to her apartment but not just yet.

At the street corner I saw my chance. Like in a movie, that opportunity that every adolescent yearns for, the perfect time to reach out and fix a girl’s hair, moving it from her face to behind her ear, leaning ever closer. We kept our eyes locked, but the playfulness was gone, only a mutual yearning and certainty remained. We inched ever closer, and finally—

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We turned off the news. We found ourselves doing that way too much now. Things were just too upsetting and abnormal. There’s no way to fix everything around you, so why bother absorbing all of it?

That was our philosophy, anyway. Our practice was often different than that, including just before this moment. Because this wasn’t just the news, it was everywhere. A groundbreaking study on the long-term effects of wifi and cellular signals showed exactly what so many had feared. It’s so hard to wrap your head around a catastrophe so widespread, that elongated into your past. It’s like when a movie twists in the end and then you have to rewatch the whole thing with an entirely new point of view. Would it affect me? Shelby? Leo? He, along with so many other kids, had been on these devices constantly, just about since he could walk. TJ, our second, wasn’t there yet, but I wasn’t sure if that mattered.

The experts consistently tempered the hysterics, urging people to remain calm and not make any impulsive decisions. One study didn’t always define a scientific fact, I knew that.

“I still think we should get rid of it, Trevor,” Shelby said to me, and I could hear an unusual panic in her voice. Usually she was the calm one, but she was on her feet, pacing one or two steps each way as her mind worked in rapidfire.

“Let’s just give it some time. A few more days won’t change anything.”

“I have a bad feeling, though.” She said, her stoicism really starting to break now. Her voice caught at that last word with a slight inflection as she held back tears. “It was always a fear, but what could we have done?” She looked almost instinctively at the wifi router in the corner of the room. “How can we just do nothing?”

“I just think we have to wait. It’s such a huge change.”

My mind couldn’t escape the scene on the screen just before we turned it off. Panic in the streets, anti-wifi protests and burning piles of plastic and metal. Panels discussed the findings and reactions. 

Was the ever-shortening of our attention spans related? Could this be leading to a version of collective amnesia? Is our dependency on information and automation leading to the decline of civilization?

“Okay,” I said to her. I’d do anything to wipe that look of guilty panic from her eyes. “Shelb, if you’re that worried we can get rid of it.”

Right then she collapsed, as if in response to my words. I couldn’t even think, didn’t know what to do. Could this really be happening? How is it—

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You’re exhausted, I can tell. Remember where you are. WHO you are. WHEN you are. We need to keep our heads for this appointment. Get your bearings. We’re in the convenience store, we just bought some breakfast. Come on.

We continue walking down the corridor of the massive train station, and eventually make our way to the doctor’s office, past several more talking advertisements and all varieties of people bustling about their day. After some time we make it to the office, waiting in the sterile lounge.

You’re called into an examination room by a nurse, whose computer screen explains the vitals she took and how everything seems to be normal for a man your age. A young doctor comes in shortly after, bland and neatly presented; he has to be around the age you were when you had Leo, but seems put together enough. Usually they say the youth will save us, so why not trust in a young doctor?

There’s no real abnormality. That’s good. You explained what had been happening in veiled generalizations, avoiding talk of time travel or being unstuck.

The look on his mild, smooth face said it all. He had seen it before, and pretty often now, especially in people your age. It’s not alzheimer’s or dementia, you’re far too healthy for that. It’s a new phenomenon the medical community hasn’t been able to put their verbose tongues to yet, an extension of Attention Deficit Disorder likely brought on by years of short patterns of thinking, or hopping from subject to subject and stimulation to stimulation, not allowing your brain to function properly and take its time to absorb and work at a normal pace. It all sounds very heady, but when he explains these symptoms they sound right.

You find yourself wondering what Shelby would think if she was here. Her beautiful face, forever forty-six and frightened, telling you it’s all alright, though I don’t believe it. Not after the way those last moments had gone. She knew something was coming. But was it? Or is this young doctor just a quack and overreacting to the normal forgetfulness of aging? Your grandfather was forgetful too, remember, and prone to some confusion.

The quack suggests you try to sleep more, eat healthy “brain foods,” stay hydrated. We leave and follow that same path back to the train station. These new screens showing the departures can be hard to read, and you see a policeman nearby so you approach him and ask if he can help.

“To start,” he says, calm and matter-of-fact, “I must let you know this information is brought to you by the efficient and ten-time safety award winning family sedan, Ford. A better way to travel. Can I interest you in more information?”

You look at him, dumbstruck. You had to know this was coming, it had been this way for a while. He returns your look, but more in expecting an answer from you than searching for one from the unexplainable ether. His eyes flutter and his eyebrows raise, as if urging you to speak, and clearly he won’t say more until you do.

“No thank you.” You say, and begin to shuffle onward, defeated.

“Not a problem,” he says, somehow returning to the normal demeanor of a peace officer, and glancing at the board he tells you which train to get on. You thank him for his help, though I can tell you’re wary. I don’t blame you, it’s jarring to have something so basic corrupted like that.

“Why is no one just helpful for helpful sake?” You say to nobody but yourself as you continue onto the train. It’s good to see you returning to yourself a bit, with that strange external monologue meant for no one and also likely one person in particular. “I can’t remember the last time—”

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“Let me help you with that.” My father says to my son, leaning over with his stooped posture, his wrinkled and bony but still agile fingers working a thin wriggling worm onto the even thinner hook at the end of TJ’s tiny fishing rod. We stand side by side by side by side: me, my father, TJ, and Leo, like a miniature of the uneven skyline before these crazy Cohabs started being built everywhere and bringing an off-putting uniformity to the world.

We stand in silence, three generations in four people, with our rods in the water and our gazes on the horizon. It’s unusual to see Leo and TJ this quiet, but they seem to be following our lead.

I have this feeling like I’m dreaming, like at any point I’ll wake up and this won’t be real, like I didn’t ever have this life, these kids, my time with Shelby. That I’ll blink and I’ll be old and lost and without these memories.

After some time Leo’s arms jerk forward and his rod bends down, and with alarm and excitement we begin reeling in the catch. It’s a heavy one, and he needed me to help otherwise he probably would’ve fallen into the water. We finally get the fish up on the deck and it’s massive; big enough to take home and eat for sure, so we get a cooler and ice and place it in there. After several pats on the back and congratulations, we pack up and head back in, Leo walking tall and proud, his smile impossible to remove.

We get into the car and begin our trip home, me driving and my father in the passenger seat, the two boys in the back. At some point in the ride TJ, in his booster seat, says something that astounds me.

“Daddy, does the fish know it’s been captured?”

I don’t even know how to respond to such a deep question from such a young child. For a moment I find myself wondering if there’s some otherworldly presence at play, if somehow time travel was possible and his future self was stopping by and transmitting these thoughts. As unsettling as that was, it gave me comfort that one day he’d get to be old.

My father and I laugh before gently explaining the way of the world, the food chain and the circle of life in a way TJ could understand. Eventually he gave up the line of questioning and got caught up in the shapes of the clouds. I’m still wondering when I’ll wake up.

We near the end of the drive, the familiar twists and turns of the neighborhood, the stops and starts we’ve done hundreds of times, and the new Cohabs constantly infiltrating and growing. I can’t blame the people who sold to these builders, but I can’t see myself doing the same.  We pull up to the house, park, and help the boys out of the car before grabbing the fish. TJ wants to hold my hand, and I oblige, the cooler in one hand and his small, warm palm in the other. The Cohabs feel like they have been inching closer and closer to my home as they increase in size, almost enveloping the house. We walk the path and approach the door, that green, green door bright and welcoming, even after the tragedy that had happened behind it. Wait—

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“What the hell?” You say aloud, the few passengers around the traincar turning for just a moment to glimpse the crazy old man before gazing back out the window at the moving landscape.

What’s going on? You say in your head this time. I can tell you’re confused. I understand that.

You understand?

Oh, you’re talking to me now. Yes. Calm down.

I can’t. I don’t know what’s happening to me.

Don’t you remember?

Remember what?

The house. The one we passed on the train with the withered green door. That was your house. Remember? You approached the owner and bought it, promising you’d never sell it to the Cohabs. You raised those kids there. Your wife died there, your sons said goodbye as they left for remote lands there. It wasn’t that long ago, but as the house rotted and withered, so did your memory of it.

Well… Clearly there’s something wrong. I’m not remembering.

I can tell you’re struggling, and I’m sorry for that.

Sorry?

Yes. I have to admit something: it’s been me. I’ve been jumping you through these memories and making you see your past. Don’t be mad. I needed to wake you up, to scare you into doing SOMETHING.

What do you mean?

What do you mean what do I mean? You’ve given up, put your life on cruise control, forgotten who you are and where you come from. What is living a life if you don’t remember it? Is life just a transparent timeline of moments forgotten as soon as they are created? If a life is lived and no one remembers it, does it still happen? Did you really live?

Of course I did. Just because I forgot a couple things doesn’t mean I didn’t live.

But you’ve done this for so long you didn’t even know you were forgetting. You trudge about your day, living in these little moments of future anticipation, not using your mind to remember the past and inform the present.

When Shelby died you ceased to exist. What if the wifi never really did what the studies said? What if Shelby just got cancer and you just wallowed numbly in your daily routine, confusing continuity for happiness? Or if the wifi panic was real, what did it change? You disappeared right into the next best thing. What if you’ve done it all wrong?

As opposed to what? I don’t understand what you’re trying to say? What should I have done when Shelby died? Just ended it there? Given up on the boys? Not gone to work? Life still can be lived unromantically. Who are you to judge the way I’ve lived?

Who am I? I’m nobody. I’m just a projection, trying and failing to bring you out of this unending revery. Or I’m a concrete thing, an amalgamation of your experiences that lives in the clouds, sucking the essence out of your experiences so you can keep moving blindly, in the dark. Or am I life itself, gazing helplessly through a window as you live your life without purpose or meaning, as you trudge on, wake, work, sleep, repeat, let machines memorize your information, solve your problems, give you your knowledge, predict your future? If I bang on this window will you hear it? Can you escape this zombified slumber if I could only wake you up in time? I’m here, clear as that train that passed by your window every day and night as you lived in that house, and you still won’t remember.

What do you want from me? This is just what it is. Life happens, we age, time keeps moving whether we want it to or not. I can’t help that. Neither can you.

Please don’t cry. I already told you what I want. I want you to wake up, to use whatever time you have left to live to the fullest, to not rely on machinery and media and whatever is happening around you to tell you what you should feel and do.

The train is slowing down, get off here. It’s the old stop. That’s it, walk off the train and toward the house. You can see it there, the green door, the only muted color remaining in the rotting corpse of it.

Turn around, with your back to the door. Watch the train pass by the other way, and let’s go back to this memory together.

We’re much younger, dressed in a suit, a briefcase in one hand and a paper cup of coffee Shelby made in the other. This is the first time you’re heading to work from this house, a young newlywed couple beginning to build something together. It feels monumental, like some great, epic chapter that’s beginning and unrolling out before you. Do you think all generations before you had this same thought, this same presentness for at least a fleeting second before time whisked away moment after moment? Is that just what time does to life, sucks it up and hides it beneath layers and layers of dirt and fog and more life? Did your predecessors feel the same thing, or was your life diminished somehow by the time in which you lived?

I don’t know. Drop it. Let’s just experience it.

Shelby calls us from inside the house. We must have forgotten something. We turn around and she’s already on us, arms wrapped around our neck, lips on ours in passion. You can smell the coffee she had just made, but also the scent of her shampoo, like a nature walk on a beautiful, bright day. She pulls back and smiles, and we do the same, as she wishes us good luck. We’ll see her later.

I miss her.

If you could do it again, would you do it differently? You can’t do it again, but the answer still matters. 

What was it all for? We may be unstuck now, living in these memories forever.

I don’t mind.

Neither do I. It feels more real to relive these past pleasures than to forget them and move on. I hope we’re on a similar journey to life, just backwards. The things we’d give to ride a train backwards through our life, to watch out the window as the feelings and sights and sounds and smells embrace us once more. That way we can do what’s easy and familiar, but with purpose. We can watch as the landscape of life passes us by, and just be—

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END