Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver
Screen Time
I remember thinking that my brain was going to fry like a drop of water on a sizzling hot pan. Then everything around me disappeared and my sight was suffused with a dark orange that reminded me of the edges of fire. When this orange blast dissipated I saw the same stretch of water before me.
I looked down and saw my old laptop in front of him. A cup of coffee, still steaming, was within the usual reach of my right arm.
The screen of my laptop had a miniature version of the ocean view I saw out my window. I tapped the trackpad and the view disappeared. In front of me was a wall-sized black screen with a thin silver frame.
The room is circular and the screen wraps 90 degrees in front of me, from floor to ceiling. It’s about eight feet high and sixteen feet wide. Swivelling on my chair, I see behind me a single bed, a chair, a stationary bike, a sofa with a coffee table, a glassed-in toilet and shower, a small dining table, and behind that a kitchenette. There are three avocados on the counter and a Nespresso machine with a glass bowl full of coffee capsules beside it. I think to myself, Like an executive suit in a hotel.
One thing I can’t see, however, is a door. Behind the bed and sofa is a green wall that looks like it’s made of moss or lichen. It looks spongy. The ceiling and the floor are made of perfectly fitted planks of dark wood, perhaps mahogany or teak.
I take another look at my laptop. There’s the usual keyboard, but the keys have different symbols on them.
I’ve never been any good with computers, so I do what I usually do: I start pressing buttons. I press one with an arrow pointing to the right. The laptop doubles in size to the right. I push the arrow on the left and the laptop doubles on the left. When I put my fingers above a key with a box icon on it, a holographic grid springs upward from the laptop. The colours on the keys become progressively more bizarre. Some appear to be miniature three dimensional grids, others are spectra. The holographic projections are crisp and dense. Yet my coffee cup’s still there, the steam rising up through the illusion of what my dad used to call ‘bells and whistles.’
I push a key labelled “1 AM” and a series of time frames appears. I think I’ve been unconscious for a few seconds, but it could have been two weeks. I vaguely recall a dream in which I was suspended in a dense fog. Different colours of light massaged my body, and traced the patterns of my muscles, organs, and nervous system.
Next to the “1 AM” key is one that looks like Saturn: 🪐 . When I press it the large screen on the wall becomes speckled with dots of white light and various splotches of colour. At the centre of the screen is a green and blue image of Earth. Using the trackpad, I enlarge the centre, and the image of Earth expands to half the height of the eight-foot tall screen. I enlarge it further, keeping the cursor in the middle. I see the outline of North America, then the West Coast, then the familiar shapes of the Olympia Peninsula and Vancouver Island. I’m reassured that there’s still a place called Vancouver, although the closer I zoom in the less it resemble the city I knew.
I press a key with the number 1 in the middle of a rectangle and am back on my parent’s deck in Victoria. The ocean’s in front of me, just as it had been. But the smell is different. And there’s no ocean breeze slipping through the patio door. I knew it was an illusion, yet it was comforting. Like an old family photo.
Which makes him wonder, Where’s my brother, and my parents? I try to rotate the image, to see the other side of the room. The image is a fixed loop: the same seagull flies across the same stretch of sky again and again.
And Sylvia. What on earth has happened to her? I press a key with two interlocking circles, ⚭ , and up pops a dialogue box beneath the graphic of the Guildford Links golf course. I took this picture several weeks ago. Had I worked on this graphic during the week that I can’t remember?
I enter Sylvia’s full name in the dialogue box marked ⚲ . A split second after I hit the return key, a message pops up: “Information unavailable.”
I worry about what has happened to my slim Teutonic beauty. Is she still in her little apartment in Kitsilano, down the hill from UBC?
There must be some logic to my present situation.
I type: “Why am I here?’
The words appear on the screen: “Dear Matthew.”
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Next: 💚 In the Field of Flowers
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