Me Talk Pretty One Day — Chapter no 14

there’s no use arguing with him. “You know,” he says, “you really should be using a computer.”

You have to wonder where you’ve gone wrong when twice a day you’re offered writing advice from men in funny hats. The harder I’m pressured to use a computer, the harder I resist. One by one, all of my friends have deserted me and fled to the dark side. “How can I write you if you don’t have an e-mail address?” they ask. They talk of their B-trees and Disk Doctors and then have the nerve to complain when I discuss bowel obstructions at the dinner table.

Who needs them? I think. I figured I’d always have my family and was devastated when my sister Amy brought home a candy-colored laptop. “I only use it for e-mail,” she said. Coming from her, these words made me physically ill. “It’s fun,” she said. “People send you things. Look at this.” She pushed a button, and there, on the screen, was a naked man lying facedown on a carpet. His hair was graying and his hands were cuffed behind his doughy back. A woman entered the room. You couldn’t see her face, just her legs and feet, which were big and mean-looking, forced into sharp-toed shoes with high, pencil-thin heels. The man on the carpet shifted position, and when his testicles came into view, the woman reacted as if she had seen an old balding mouse, one that she had been trying to kill for a long time. She stomped on the man’s testicles with the toes of her shoes and then she turned around and stomped on them with the heels. She kicked them mercilessly and, just when I thought she’d finished, she got her second wind and started all over again.

I’d never realized that a computer could act so much like a TV set. No one had ever told me that the picture could be so clear, that the cries of pain could be heard so distinctly. This, I thought, was what my father had been envisioning all those years ago when words had failed him, not necessarily this scene, but something equally capable of provoking such wonder.

“Again?” Amy pushed a button and, our faces bathed in the glow of the screen, we watched the future a second time.

Deux*

*two