“Amelia!!!”
“Coming!”
Daphne balances her skull on her fist, her elbow a hinge holding stress and confusion. While she waits for her daughter she pretends to scan the screen in front of her.
“What happened?” Amelia leans over her mom’s red shoulder.
“It looks different,” spits Daphne like a pouty toddler.
“Oh yeah. It must have updated.”
“I didn’t touch anything.”
“I know. They just auto-update now.”
Amelia thinks for a second. Nothing arises.
“Let me see. Can I sit?”
“Go bring another chair. My knee is acting up with this rain.”
Amelia walks to the kitchen. In the eight-and-a-half seconds it takes to get there, she unsheathes her phone and squeezes in flashes of five images:
- Her friend Annie, head cocked, the backs of her hands under her chin, lit from behind on the beach;
- An advertisement for shelf-stable guacamole;
- A cartoon dog wearing a tiny cowboy hat, generated by a sophisticated computer program running trillions of matrix multiplications on vast quantities of image data obtained under gray legal provenance;
- Her dad’s former colleague Joe, grinning, gripping a big white mug emblazoned with the phrase “DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL I’VE HAD MY MORNING JOE”;
- An advertisement for an app that lets you finance food delivery purchases, where you can knock down your interest rate by playing a pinball game that drains your phone’s battery fast because of a background process that mines infinitesimal shards of a cryptocurrency that has climbed in value due to its popularity in parts of Ghana.
Amelia closes her phone and returns it to her pocket. She grabs the good kitchen chair and hauls it back to the other room.
“Scoot over.”
Daphne groans as she makes a show of hoisting herself a centimeter off her rolling chair, fleshy arms straining, corklike toes nudging her mass to the left. Amelia mans the mouse.
“What were you trying to do?”
“I need to check my bank account”
“Check it for what?”
“I just need to check it.”
“OK. Where’s your Web browser?”
“I always just had it open.”
The screen displays a smooth high-definition image of an abstract 3D swirl, a blue lump of soft-serve over a background of a gradient scientifically proven to minimize eye strain in Americans over fifty-five. On the desktop sits a single icon, another abstract swirl labeled “Start.”
Amelia retreats into her memory, reaching for an idea of a keystroke or some other command. She grew up on this computer, once so proud, majestic even, now stumbling in pathetic bursts, unable to shoulder bloated modern software. A warm memory appears of an array of distinct skeumorphic icons, a metropolis of worlds unto themselves, her own personal slice of the infinite possibilities that the computer offered an eleven-year-old in the new millenium. She recalls a virtual pet, Bucki, a fuchsia chimera of dog and shrimp, now twenty years unfed. She recalls waiting breathless for a high-resolution movie poster to download and render, one row of pixels at a time, the anticipation of airbrushed abdominal muscles widening her eyes and rocketing her pulse. She wonders when the last time she felt anything like that was.
No keystroke comes to her mind. Her memories retreat.
She double-clicks the “Start” icon. A white rectangle with rounded corners materializes then immediately disappears. She waits a breath.
Daphne exhales and asks, “what are you doing?”
“Mom. Hold on.”
Amelia clicks the icon again, just once this time. The round rectangle returns. It is a pure, hurtful white, with only a gray wheel spinning in its center. Six seconds later, various bubble-shaped elements popcorn along the top of the window. Amelia finds what appears to be a search bar. She clicks.
A speech bubble appears, half-obscuring the search bar.
Hi! I’m here to help. What can we get started for you?
The words populate one character at a time at an irregular pace.
“Are we supposed to be hearing this? Mom, where’s the volume control?”
Daphne’s blank eyes give Amelia nothing. Amelia lets instinct take over. She reaches her right hand around the back of the monitor and gropes for buttons. She finds them in a long column like a dog’s nipples. She fingers the lowest one. It mushes inward, unsatisfying. The monitor goes black half-a-second later.
“Now you’ve done it!” Daphne throws a hand into the air.
“Mom, it’s fine! I’m turning it back on.”
She mushes the button again. After a few moments, the monitor comes back to life and displays a login screen.
User: [DAPHNE]
Password: [ ]
“Oh, shit. Mom, please tell me you know your password.”
“Of course,” Daphne says indignantly. “It’s my social.”
“Seriously?”
Amelia thinks that this must be a bad idea but cannot articulate why.
“Uh, type it in.”
Daphne leans over with a groan and tilts her head back to engage her farsightedness, tapping number keys with pink, arthritic index fingers. Amelia presses “Enter” when she’s done. The password box shakes like a dog drying itself, casting off Daphne’s incorrect characters.
“Goddammit!”
“Try again.”
Daphne selects each key with just her right index, double checking as she presses down. The box shakes again.
“Are you sure that’s your password?”
“Yes I’m sure! They ask you for it when you go to the bank in person now. Can you believe that?”
“What do you mean? This is your computer password, not your bank password.”
“Goddammit Amelia! Why didn’t you say that?”
Amelia stops herself before she retorts.
“Just type your computer password. Actually— Let me just do it for you.”
“I’ll do it,” says Daphne in a half-whisper, suddenly somber.
In 1972, Daphne, as a thirteen-year-old kid, spent a week with her semi-distant cousins at a fading summer camp in the Adirondacks. The camp had thrived in the 1950’s and survived the 1960’s but had had no hope of seeing 1980 without a dramatic reinvention of itself and its economic configuration. In ‘72, the counselors worked as a favor to an image they upheld of an American Golden Age; they hadn’t been teenagers in forever but nostalgia and loyalty kept the attrition rate low enough to cobble together something like a good experience for the youngest children of the most dedicated families. Daphne’s cousins’ mother, her own mother’s sister, had married a mostly-secular Jew from New Jersey who, by some twist of circumstance, had come to own an Italian pork shop in Bergen County, which triggered endless shame-spraying and kvetching from his ancient Russian grandparents that could only be softened with a continual stream of donations and family-oriented events. The pork shop made a killing so by the time Daphne’s cousins were old enough, they spent major chunks of their summers at that expensive time capsule of a camp, leaping from swinging ropes into a crystalline lake tucked away from the turmoil of the times. That year, young Daphne’s parents drove from Delaware to New Jersey, dropped off their daughter, then continued on to Philadelphia to visit an uncle who had been isolated for too long. Quiet Daphne never saw eye-to-eye with her cousins; during the long drive to the Adirondacks she daydreamed, anticipating the idea of “summer camp.” She envisioned basically the opposite of Wilmington, Delaware. Hard urban edges gave way, in her mental image, to the soft fractals of the forest; manmade grids gave way to the loping, tangled network of God’s original creation. She imagined deer and trout and fireflies replacing cars and cockroaches and streetlights. She imagined most of all, though so privately as to be veiled even from herself, a boy, faceless, undiscovered, yet emanating cool strength and electric confidence. His strong legs grew out of his tall socks and led to narrow hips, from which his jagged abdomen sprouted. Arms hung from shoulders; a jaw hung from ears. James from Maine fulfilled her image, giving it a face and thus a hot reality. He was fourteen but born the same year. He thought school was a waste of time. He wished the counselors would let him keep his knife. Daphne can’t remember saying a single word to him. Every memory is just a stammer surrounding a golden portrait, her looking up into him, pining to taste his breath, leaning back and towards him at the same time, weak in the knees.
Daphne’s knees are weak in another, sadder way now, calcified rather than aflutter. She elbows her daughter to the side and types
[19james72],
each character obscured behind a dot, the password hidden behind half a century of fermenting memories. She clicks an icon with a right-facing arrow and the login screen disappears.
[Installing critical security update 1/8]
“I thought you said it updated already.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
They sit. Daphne looks ahead at nothing. Amelia looks at the lying progress bar.
Amelia dreads the familiar dread of waiting for a computer to finish a so-called required task. This will take an eternity on this thing.
“Can we come back to this later?” Amelia asks, hoping to avoid an endless string of awkward and indignant interactions.
“…”
“Mom?”
“Yeah?” Daphne answers, looking over, jostled back to reality.
“Can we come back to this later? This is going to take a while.”
“I’ll wait here. I don’t want want to keep getting up with my knee like this.”
“OK. I’ll come back in five minutes. I’m going to nuke some popcorn.”
Amelia stands and reaches for her phone, flipping it open and scrolling past an advertisement for a one-size-fits-all knee brace.