Screen (3 page)

Poof
licked
Misha’s
fingers on her return. “Thanks, you,”
Misha
patted him. Searching for jobs would now replace
waiting outside Lydia’s office as her most loathed activity. For now, she
decided to check her phone messages instead. Ever since Tsai had called, the
old bug had returned to check the phone for any signs of life. Earl had told
her once that when cell phones fully took hold of society ages ago, they were
people’s best friends next to dogs. A citizen would be joined-at-the-hip with a
portable phone and check it constantly, trying to materialize phone calls and
messages. They would even get in car wrecks trying to interact with their
phones.
Misha
felt some desperation today to receive
more phone calls, knowing at the same time that society hardly used phones
anymore.

She
hovered her finger over the phone app, waiting for the familiar empty tinkle
that indicated zero phone calls and messages. Instead, a solid ding sounded
from the screen and showed
Misha
that she had fifteen
missed calls.
Misha
stared at the news incredulously.
Who was trying to reach her today, and for what purpose? She scrolled slowly
through the call log and couldn’t believe her eyes. They were all from the same
phone number, marked “Undisclosed.” Her nerves began
naggingly
buzzing at her, and she felt instantly worried. She pulled a pill out of her
purse and gulped it down, sitting still on her couch.

Okay,
she thought, maybe this is nothing. It could have been a wrong number, it
happens. But unfortunately, nothing unexpected ever happened anymore. Within
the big screen, it was highly possible to control it all—at least for most
people.
Misha
suddenly remembered how neurotic she
had been two years ago before she had started taking the pills. Her mind
crossed over terrains of worst case scenarios regarding the phone calls, and
then considered scenarios that were even worse than those. Her stomach did a
full turn and her hands itched to reach out and fix the problem, whatever it
was. She got back up and walked over to the big screen, which today resembled a
curse. She wanted to smash it in with a bat and watch it cry out or exhibit
some emotion. Real people were in that screen, why didn’t it feel anything?

--------------------------

Misha
tossed and turned in her sleep, waking up throughout the night to find
her T-shirt drenched in sweat. Her dreams had been too vivid and real.

She had
seen a laboratory. Stadium seating surrounded the steel floor and was filled
with spectators holding remote controls. A chair stood in the middle of the
room, an exact replica of the one in front of Lydia’s desk.
Misha
scanned the lab and found there were no exit doors. A man with silver hair
grabbed her wrist and flung her into the chair. The chair had straps and a
screen stood a foot away from it. Classical music filled the room and she could
not hear anything else. She cried out with all her strength and felt a painful
buzz rise in her throat, threatening to suffocate her. The silver-haired man’s
countenance morphed from one face into another rapidly, without any expression
to hold on to. 
Misha
tried frantically to
communicate with him but could never tell who he really was. His face crept
closer and closer to hers, mouthing words like ammunition that were all deaf to
her ears as the classical music became louder. Suddenly, only one large eyeball
was visible to her and in it, she saw the cruelest form of laughter and
ridicule she had ever seen.  

 
Misha’s
heart lurched her upright in bed with its pounding
and she searched the room for the silver-haired man and the steel floor. With
great hesitance, she began to realize she was in her own bedroom with Poof
curled around her feet. Poof snored softly as if nothing alarming had happened
and slowly
Misha
began to believe it too. Her guard
was not yet fully lowered, however. She had never advertised the fact, but some
of her past dreams had held uncanny resemblance to real life. Her college
roommate, who had gotten to know her well, used to call her “Dream Child.” It
was funny at the time, as
Misha’s
dreams held small
levels of predictability. These occurrences had become stronger and more
frequent over time and
Misha
found it less funny now.

Misha
traveled uncertainly to the bathroom and threw some cold water on her
feverish cheeks. She stared up into the mirror as if for help, and caught an
eye twitch grab both of her eyelids. She gripped the edge of the sink. What was
happening?

--------------------------

It was
raining the next morning as
Misha
got ready to meet
Tsai.
Misha
was starting not to care about this
meeting, an apathy that had been borne of disappointing encounters with friends
in the past. Tsai was probably hitting a slump in her own life and craved
seeing a friend worse off and more depressed than her. The other possibility
was that Tsai needed something. In this world of big screens and gadget
bundling, there were few people left to turn to for a simple favor. Everyone
was absorbed by screen pixels and dispersed into the stratosphere. If Tsai had
assumed
Misha
was one person she could still ask for
a favor, she would be right.
Misha
sometimes wished
it weren’t that way.

With a
couple hours left to kill,
Misha
downed a pill and
sat in her familiar position on the couch. The buzz encircling her eyebrows
simmered down to a tolerable level that still promised its future return in a
few hours. As
Misha’s
mind cleared, the question
posed by the young man on the night of the big screen unveiling popped into her
thoughts.
Who are people when they're in the screen?
Misha
had asked herself the same overarching question from a young age, but there was
no one to talk to about it. Once, she had tried with her mother and the result
had been awkward. For a split second,
Misha
had
thought she saw a glimmer of shared sentiment in her mom’s face. But the words
that left her mouth amounted to, “You’ll see when you grow up.” But
Misha
didn’t come to see. She didn’t see in kindergarten,
seated around other children who were inductees like herself into a new world
nebulously called the Screen. She didn’t see as she entered her thirties and
continued to work thankless and pointless jobs in the screen environment, not
knowing a single soul around her. She had nearly become convinced that she
simply lacked the wisdom to see, but was not fully sold on that either. In her
mind, but also seemingly out in the world, it was forbidden to talk about it.
Maybe she was crazy.

Or was
she? There actually was someone out there to talk to. She had known it all
along, but had been scared to act on the implicit invitation. Maybe now she
could.
Misha
walked over to the fridge and rearranged
magnets, photos, and receipts until she found what she was looking for.
Standing in front of the big screen, she typed the necessary digits into the
phone app. The line rang five times and just as
Misha
was about to give up and end the call, she heard a click and a familiar voice
greeting her. “Earl, it’s me—
Misha
.” Earl replied
immediately without the typical delay of most responses, “Wait.”

“I can
call back if you’re busy,”
Misha
offered and Earl
interrupted her quickly. “Hold on.” She had never heard this level of
assertiveness or urgency in his voice and wondered immediately what was wrong.
Had she been ill-advised to call Earl? “Turn over and read the back of the
card,” Earl spoke softly after a moment. What was Earl talking about?
Misha
looked at her hand and the business card she was
holding there. On the front of the card, it displayed Earl’s contact
information at Mind Memo and the small light bulb logo that represented the
company. Upon turning it over to the back, she found one line of large words
hastily scrawled in pencil and scrunched into the small white rectangular
space. It read, “Who is she while she’s in the screen?”
Misha
looked up from the card and saw small flecks of color enter her vision.

She
wondered again like the night before, what was happening? Earl had known she
was going to call. He had written her question on the card. She didn’t know
what to say next. Before she could figure it out Earl continued, “We have to
meet. Morton’s tomorrow at three. I’ll see you then.” He abruptly hung up.
Misha
could not take enough pills lately to stave off the
buzz and it had now begun to return in small pangs everywhere. She yanked
herself from reaching for the pill bottle and closed her eyes for a moment. It
was time to stop. If the buzz was going to come, it was going to come. Her
meeting with Tsai was fast approaching and time was ticking out on the screen’s
reminder system. How did the screen know she had a meeting with Tsai when she
had never entered it in? With all questions suspended in the living room,
Misha
walked outside into the brisk air that propelled her
toward an uncertain future.

--------------------------

The city
streets contained technological stragglers who still worked jobs in the few
remaining office buildings and shops. People were returning to work
heavy-lidded after short and unfulfilling lunch breaks. Some services still had
to be conducted outside the big screen, for now. Health care was one that had
not made a full transition to the virtual world, as people could not find a
substitute there for surgery, dialysis, or anything else that required a hookup
in the hospital. Acupuncture had made an easy transition into the virtual world
and was currently thriving there. For the rise of the buzz in the population,
the Centers for Disease Control had announced that increased time spent in the
big screen would eventually normalize the symptoms and that everyone’s
adjustment period was different.

Out of
nowhere, a homeless man across the street yelled out to
Misha
,
“Naughty girl! Naughty girl!”
Misha
avoided eye
contact and started walking faster, yet the bum began to walk in her direction
and kept calling her “naughty” in an uninterrupted string of words until it
sounded like “
teenaught
” instead. He stopped in the
middle of the street, shaking his head and giving her the ‘shame-shame’ hand
gesture, running one index finger along the other like scraping ice off a
windshield. “Naughty, naughty girl. Wandering the old streets of San Francisco.
Naughty like Saran Wrap. Remember Saran Wrap? It never does what you want it
to.
Sarannnnn
…”

Misha
remembered Saran Wrap, and it was true it never did what you wanted it
to. Only soccer moms and chefs knew how to expertly use it. For a moment,
Misha’s
buzz somehow felt calmed by the homeless man’s
insights. She turned back once to look at him and he stood there in the middle
of the street expressionless and seeming to discover he did not know where he
was. The way he looked described how
Misha
felt today
and she remembered that she still had to meet up with Tsai.

As
Misha
reached the intersection of the Embarcadero and
Chestnut Street, she could see that only a handful of people were seated inside
Minnie’s. One of them would turn out to be Tsai. Tsai had been a one-of-a-kind
friend in her life, one that had redefined in
Misha’s
mind what a friend could be. Fifteen years ago, they had worked together in a
tense and pompous office setting doing research for the most prestigious and
trusted medical community in the nation, Ballard’s Holistic Medical Group. It
had been the nation’s premier medical establishment that combined conventional
and alternative health care into one approach, without the two groups wringing
each other’s necks.

Somehow
even with a bunch of diverse and eclectic doctors working together, the white
coat stench of orthodox medical training still hung in the air and made
patients’ blood pressures consistently rise in the office. The positions that
Misha
and Tsai were hired for had been their first jobs out
of college and they'd been very enthusiastic and bright-eyed about the
place—for about three months. After that, the two friends became frustrated by
the lack of challenge at work, the low pay, the workplace drama, and the
pushiness of medical professionals. The worse things got at work, the closer
the two friends became and the more they tried to find humor in what happened
around them. With creatively doctored paperwork, they convinced the research
department to pay for their “work-related” education at the Ballard University,
including courses on how to make ice cream, draw self-portraits, and do the
quick step. They drew caricatures of the doctors they worked for and hung them
up behind the office door. They set up elaborate baskets to shoot crumpled
paper balls into.  

Misha
and Tsai only saw each other at work, but they knew everything about
each other’s lives. When
Misha
learned she had to get
a root canal treatment, Tsai was the first person she told and Tsai offered to
accompany her to the painful appointment for moral support. The two came to
take it for granted, but they actually looked forward to going to work at their
stuffy jobs in a weird way.
Misha
stood in front of
Minnie’s and wondered what had happened. Fifteen long years had gone by, and
she didn’t know why she and Tsai hadn’t talked since the days of Ballard. But
the question almost seemed moot considering no one talked anymore.