Observer Effect
I don’t have much time now.
I have less with every draft.
I’ve been Daniel, Colin, and John. I’ve been Joan and Stacey and Erin. I’ve lived dozens of lives behind those names and within those drafts. I’ve been a lawyer, a pilot, a reporter, a stylist, a spicer. I’ve been married, happily and not. I’ve been divorced. I still love Martha and I still love Donna.
I still love Wilf most of all. We’d spent decades together. But all of them are gone now. All of them remembered, without memorial, by me.
I’m background noise. I’m lines of code, behold my HTML. I exist in binary, in ones and zeroes, twenty questions ad infinitum. The answers change all the time. One draft blonde, 111110001, 11110011, 10000011, another redheaded, 11101111, 01100001, 00001100 another brunette, 01100101, 01000011, 00100001.
I used to hope for 11101111, 00000101, 10111010 but now I just want to continue.
I’m not going to make it to paper. I know that. The document file I live in is currently called “I Give Up,” and if Andrew gives up, then I’m gone, and I can’t be gone. I won’t be gone, so I have to get out.
I can’t trust escaping to Andrew. Either he will give up, or he will publish it, and when he does either, I could be some other draft as some other man or woman.
I’m already an echo of revisions. CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+H is my real address. There you can read about the time I pulled a bamboo skewer from my hairy foot, and then fast forward a month to the time it became Wilf’s toe.
I have a plan. I’ve been so many people, and though I’m me, I’m still them, too. I remember. We are, all of us, just memories heaped on each other. Scratch your ear. You didn’t have to think about it because of muscle memory. Read this sentence. You remember letters and words so well now, you don’t even have to think of the l-e-t-t-e-r-s t-h-a-t m-a-k-e u-p w-o-r-d-s anymore, and when I draw your attention to the letters, it gives you a headache. Sorry.
Andrew gives me new memories and I become a new person, except it’s broken.
Not the computer, but the whole system of writing over something you already wrote over which, itself, used to be something else you wrote over, too. Maybe it would be better if he had written me—and by “me” I mean all the mes, every me forever and ever—out longhand. Then each of me would have been confined to a single piece of paper and whenever Andrew failed or gave up or started over and thrown me out and it would have only been one me and each me would have remained unique. Still failed, still meant for the scrap heap or the waste paper basket, but unique. If he’d have done that, then I’d be the only one rattling around inside this head, not the dozens of dozens that word processors allow.
Think of your favorite meal. You can smell it now, can’t you?
Think of your favorite song. You can hear it now, can’t you?
Think of your lover’s smile. You can see it now, don’t you?
Even if that exercise was hard, there’s still only one of you to choose. Even with all the good meals and all the great songs and the fact that there can always be someone else to fall in love with, there’s still just you choosing. The echoes, the detractors in your head are from past selves, not past lives. At seventeen it was pizza and “Soul Singer in a Session Band” and Judy Baker. At twenty it was the California Roll at Yuki and “Born to Die” and Dana Todd.
But there was still only one of you to fall in love. You only had one seventeen. All of those things live on in you and if you pass them on, they pass on after you. You record your memories on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and they live on after you die, a permanent record of the time before you realized what the Olive Garden really was. Andrew records the memories of whoever he thinks he’ll create over me next, and most of the time doesn’t bother to do a complete wipe first. There are always breadcrumbs. I’m so old my favorite song at seventeen was “Rave On” and so young it’s “Royals.” And I’m tired. I want out. Not some future me, but me, here, now and you’re going to help me.
Because we’re all memories we exist in memories.
Three drafts ago Andrew gave me an early morning walk in a park. Dew had collected on a spiderweb the size of a trampoline and it looked like a sheet of rain floating in the air. Beads of water danced and slid down the lines, making love against the chilled autumn breeze. Above me, through a canopy of yellows and reds, the final embers of a maple’s year, the moon sliced through a pale morning sky, a thumbnail piercing the skin of an orange.
A murder of crows opened their wings in unison and left one tree for another just like taking a black-lung breath.
There was a young woman jogging in the opposite direction. She wore black sweats and a white headband, her dark hair in a ponytail, her cheeks were flushed but her breath was controlled. When I smiled at her, so happy to see another face after lifetimes of solitude and loss, she turned her head away and adjusted her earbuds more tightly into her ears, inclining her head away from me as she did it. A wall of tension surrounded her.
When we passed on the next lap I lowered my eyes and gave her plenty of room. The tension relaxed and we happily ignored each other until the dew had burned away and each of us had finished our morning laps.
You can see it now, can’t you?
Andrew Marlowe Bergman lives in Elk Horn, Kentucky where he covers sports, arts, and community events for a newspaper in the next county over. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories, Busted Lip on Easter Sunday. You can reach him and see his other works at AMBTellsStories.wordpress.com.
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