We bought our first computer today, at Jessie’s insistence. I’d been saving for some time for it, hoping to surprise her because, as Jessie says, we’re the last two people in the world without a computer, which may or may not be true.
We had to take a cab to the store for it, so that we could tote the boxes home in the trunk of the cab, while the driver waited impatiently for us to load and unload, meter running the whole time, never once offering to help. And then, at home, after Jessie and I lugged the boxes to the office, we sat on the floor, methodically reading instructions and trying our best to decipher which cords went where. The directions might as well have been written in Japanese, the illustrations done up for a four-year-old.
When all was said and done, I was shocked to find that, when we turned it on, the thing came to life, some sort of revolving image—a screen saver, Jessie told me—moving about on the screen.
Jessie went straight for the internet. “Look yourself up,” she encouraged me, and I asked what she meant by that, thinking she’d just use this computer to type up papers for school. I hadn’t thought much of her fiddling around on the internet, but I saw quickly that it was the one thing on her mind, the reason she wanted this computer. To look stuff up on the internet.
“Go ahead,” she said again with an enthusiastic nod of the head, dishwater hair falling into her eyes. “Type in your name,” she told me, “and see what you find.”
But I laughed only, telling her we wouldn’t find anything, because certainly I’m not on the internet. That’s the kind of thing reserved for celebrities and politicians. Not everyday, ordinary people like me. But Jessie was certain.
“The internet knows everything,” she told me, emphasizing that word everything, and I filled instantly with dread, trying to assure myself that it was only the ramblings of an eager preteen, that certainly the internet couldn’t know everything, like some sort of omniscient god.
But Jessie’s hands breezed past mine, and with nimble fingers, she typed Eden Sloane onto the keyboard and pressed the return key.
It didn’t happen right away.
No, there was a moment of naive disbelief while the computer did its thing. In that moment, I assured myself that we’d find nothing. Nothing at all. Of course the internet didn’t know anything about me because why would it? What reason did I have to be on the internet?
But then an image popped onto the screen before us. And there was my name, highlighted any number of times. My stomach dropped at the sight of them, all these results the computer had gathered for Eden Sloane. Some of them, I saw—as my eyes sailed past the results one at a time, trying to decipher which secrets of mine Jessie would soon find—were not me. There was a split second of relief.
It’s another Eden Sloane. It’s not me.
But then one listing caught my eye, rattling me to the core. Because there, on the internet, for anyone to see, was my name and, beside it, the address of Jessie’s and my home, our little bungalow on the northwest side of Chicago, where I thought no one could find us, where I stupidly believed there was no way to know where we were.
I was wrong.
Because now I see that any and everyone is privy to that information, that anyone who’s looking for me can find out just exactly where I am.
It was unconscious then, the way that I rose to my feet quickly and moved to the window, pulling the curtains closed post-haste. When Jessie gave me a look, I blamed the glare of sunlight on the computer screen—a glare that wasn’t ever there—and she believed me.
I haven’t disappeared after all.
All this time, I’ve been out in the open, living right under everyone’s noses.
My throat constricted and went dry. I choked on my own saliva. I coughed, a desperate, panicked cough, unable for a moment to breathe past the saliva that was lodged in my throat.
“You okay?” Jessie asked, patting my back, and I nodded my head yes, though even I didn’t know if that was true or not. Was I okay?
When I could speak, I asked her to run down the hall and fetch me a glass of water.
As she did, I snatched the electrical cord from the socket, watching as the screen turned blissfully black. I started packing the computer back in its box the moment Jessie left and, that very same afternoon, planned to hail another cab and return it to the store.
When Jessie returned with the glass of water and asked what I was doing—as I sat there on my haunches, wrapping foam paper around the computer parts—I told her that the computer was broken. That there was something wrong with it, which of course there was. There was something very wrong with it.
I told her that it would have to go back. I avoided Jessie’s eyes as, there in the doorway, her face quickly fell. “Can we get a new one?” she asked, and though I said yes, I didn’t for one second mean it.
Because there would be something wrong with that computer too.
As Jessie and I stood on the drive, waiting for a cab to appear, I couldn’t help but wonder, What other secrets of mine did the internet hold?
jessie
The music gets chased away with morning’s first light, and now the house is silent and still. It startles me, the way the music suddenly stops, and now that it’s gone, I have to wonder if it was ever really there. I sit up with a start, sticking to the wooden floor. I’ve been sweating. I say my own name aloud to be sure I can still speak, that fatal familial insomnia hasn’t stolen my voice from me already. “Jessica Sloane,” I say, my words slurred.
I find myself on my hands and knees searching for Mom’s urn, knowing I left her here beside me last night. I comb through the planks of the hardwood floors, as if somehow or other she’s slipped through the millimeter gap between boards.
It’s a sinking feeling. A spreading, sinking feeling that comes to me at once.
I’ve lost Mom.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I can’t go on, I won’t go on without her here. I hold my breath and refuse to breathe. And just when I think I’m about to die, I see her. Just two feet away, on the other side of me, right where I left her. My panic comes to a halt.
Mom is still here. She’s not yet gone. I release my breath and, at the same time, somehow hear the labored sound of Mom breathing through the air return. Short, shallow breaths followed by no breaths at all.
Only in daylight do I give up my perch. I rise to my feet, arching my back from the stiff muscles that come with three or four hours of lying on the hardwood floors. I creep across the room slowly, deliberately, one step at a time, my legs half-asleep. And I’m jealous of them because at least some small part of me still knows how to sleep.
In the shower, I shampoo my hair. I reach for the conditioner and end up dumping another handful of shampoo on my scalp. I wash my body and then, because I can’t remember if I did, I wash it again. Though later, when my skin starts to secrete a sour smell, I wonder if I washed at all.
I head off for a cleaning assignment. As I scrub away on the homeowner’s porcelain floors, I notice that my fingernails are still intact. Not a single nail is torn. There’s no dried blood clinging to my fingertips because they haven’t been bleeding. Even now I feel the sharp edges of the screw head burrowing into my fingertips, and I’m not sure if that happened or if I only imagined it did.
I lock up before I leave. I load my paraphernalia onto the back end of Old Faithful. Mop, bucket, rubber gloves. The September day is sunny and warm. I ride in the street, on tapered one-way streets, which narrow with parked cars like the thickening of arteries with deposits of fat.