So, I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cunning demon has done all he can to deceive me … I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all the external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment.
—René Descartes (1641), “Meditations on First Philosophy”
It was Thursday morning, and Jackson was questioning the existence of his left hand.
Detachment from reality was becoming a frequent apprehension of his. The sense he wasn’t being told something, something fundamental. Most days—days that he could recall, anyway—he would ignore it. Most days he’d be caught up in conversations with his girlfriend, Shelley, and everything felt substantial. Everything felt real. But, Shelley became distant. They spoke less often, and usually only about the routine of life. Jackson couldn’t remember the last time they had sex. He couldn’t even remember the last time they’d held hands. As Shelley drifted out of Jackson’s life, existential detachment crept in. It lingered below the surface of his consciousness. This morning, it coalesced around the existence of Jackson’s left hand.
Maybe it’s a brain tumor, he thought as he stared at the suspicious hand. I should see a doctor.
Pretending to be casual about it, Jackson ran his left hand through his hair. Wavy black strands pushed out of the way as he felt his fingers weaving across his scalp. Both his hand and hair felt as if they existed. Attempting to look thoughtful, he raised his left hand to his chin and rubbed it; precisely the right amount of stubble, just as it should be. He looked at Shelley. “I’m sorry, what?”
“What’s wrong with you, Jackson?” Shelley was a beautiful woman, a goddess standing in the kitchen on her way to work. He had met her about two years ago, through a friend at his workplace, Eliza & Turing Entertainment Products. The two of them struck it off immediately, he moved in with her, and they formed little romantic routines around each other.
But now, all their little routines were fading away, and Jackson was fading with them.
At least their morning routine hadn’t changed; Shelley always paused in the kitchen to chat with Jackson before she left. As he’s prone to do lately, he got a little too amorous. As she’s prone to do lately, Shelley rebuked him. She had to go to work, Shelley asserted.
Jackson’s work could wait. He was a software tech for Eliza & Turing, retraining animated dialog agents; ‘chatbots’, as they are commonly called. People pay a subscription to install animated artificially intelligent ‘friends’ on their devices. Customers can text or video-chat their new little friends, but where the app really shines, or so he’d been told, is through augmented reality glasses. Hence, the name, AR Friends. Plenty of AR Friends were cartoon animals or anthropomorphic toasters and such, popular with children and teens. By far, though, the most popular were adult-themed boyfriends and girlfriends. When chatbots gave nonsensical or inappropriate responses, customers flagged them and software techs like Jackson retrained the chatbots accordingly.
Retraining chatbots was not on Jackson’s mind this morning. What was on his mind was that his left hand seemed to have passed through the kitchen table. He turned toward Shelley and unthinkingly swung his hand through the space that should have been occupied by the table. Perhaps it was further away than it appeared? Jackson glanced at the table surreptitiously, noting that it appeared to be where it should be. He shook his left hand, and it didn’t feel right. He shook his right hand, it felt the same.
“Jackson?”
“My hand fell asleep.” A lie, but doubting the existence of his hand seemed like something he’d better keep to himself.
“Sure. Your hand fell asleep.” Shelley raised an eyebrow. “You feeling alright?”
“Yeah, sure.” He needed to change the subject, maybe reignite that old spark. “Come on,” Jackson winked while unbuttoning his shirt. “You can be a little late for work.”
“No, Jackson.” With that, Shelley left.
Jackson stared at his hand. He must be going crazy. Was he going crazy and losing Shelley because of it, or losing Shelley and going crazy because of that? Maybe, he thought, I lost my hand and blotted it from memory? It could be one of those ghost limbs that people who lose extremities feel. No, he reasoned, I wouldn’t have felt my hair. Besides, he’d remember losing a body part. Regardless, whether he has a hand that he doesn’t believe in, or believes he has a hand that isn’t there; it still makes him insane.
He rapped the table with his knuckles. Both the table and hand felt painfully solid.
“Hey, Cole,” Jackson said to the software tech on the other side of his cubicle’s half-wall. The Eliza & Turing office was an oddly liminal space, an austere arrangement of beige desks adorned with the least amount of office essentials, separated by uninspired canvas covered half-walls. Banality spread in every direction. Cole, in the next partitioned space over, seemed not to hear him. Cole was involved in resolving issues with male chatbots—ChatBobs—that would make sexual advances at inappropriate times.
“Jackson, my man,” said Cole, finally, “I got a ChatBob that’s coming onto his client at a funeral.”
“Not good,” Jackson replied. “But, I—”
“Yeah. Thing is, my girlfriend gets a kick out of that sort of thing,”
“No, I doubt that.” Jackson tried again, “But, I was wondering—”
“I don’t know, Jackson, dude. I’m telling you, my girlfriend is into that kind of thing. Funerals, public transportation, shopping malls.”
“No one is into sexual advances at a funeral, Cole.” Jackson had his own issue with a ChatBob that was flagged for inappropriate behavior in a kitchen. Nothing wrong with a kitchen.
“Yeah, maybe ….” Cole asked, “Have you ever been to a funeral?”
“Sure,” Jackson replied, although he was having difficulty remembering who had died or when. “People dressed in black, someone is crying, it’s usually raining. Not the place for coming onto your girlfriend.”
Cole rocked his head in apparent ambivalence.
“So, I’ve got kind of a weird question for you,” Jackson said. “You ever doubt reality?”
“Nah, man,” Cole responded. “Why question it? No one knows what reality is, anyway.”
“Of course they do. There’s an objective reality, right?”
“Nope.” Cole shook his head while still focused on his sexual-advances-at-a-funeral problem. “We all live in our own realities, dreamworlds littered with things that are and things that are not.”
Jackson should have known better than to ask Cole. But, Cole was the only other software tech he spoke to. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Take money, for instance.” Cole turned toward Jackson. “Once, it was a piece of paper or metal that we pretended had value. It’s just paper, dude! And, nowadays, we don’t even use paper—it’s all make-believe. We tell each other there’s something called money, but it’s a fantasy.”
Jackson tried to recall the last time he held paper currency, or if he ever had. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said. “I mean things like people and places. You know, the world around us, furniture and stuff.”
“Same thing, my man. Same thing.” Cole crossed his arms on top of the partition, and leaned in. “We’re always making up stuff and telling ourselves it’s real. Would you say AR Friends are real?”
“Of course not. They’re AI chatbots.” Jackson felt elaboration was in order, “I mean, they are real in the sense that each ‘friend’ is an instance of an algorithm running on our servers, co-instantiated on the customer’s hardware, and so on. But, they’re not people.”
“Tell that to our customers, dude. Customers think their AR Friends are real friends. Some think their AR Friend is the only friend they have.”
“No, they don’t,” Jackson protested. “People are smarter than that.”
“What are we doing here, Jackson?” Cole didn’t give him a chance to respond. “We’re training ChatBobs to be more realistic.” He raised an eyebrow and leaned in. “Realistic, as in real. We’re making them real. There’s no distinction between this world and the virtual world anymore.”
“Everybody can tell the difference, Cole. Most people, anyway. Maybe not you.”
“No, dude, the virtual world is real, the same way the physical world is real.”
“Nope,” Jackson said, running his left hand across the surface of his desk. “We can shut virtual reality off. We can reboot it. It’s just information.”
“We’re all just information, my man,” Cole said. “Information and energy. Ask any theoretical physicist. The foundation of reality isn’t matter; it’s information and energy, ruled by the laws of thermodynamics. The information describing some ChatBob is just as real to him as the information describing you is to you.”
None of this was helpful. Maybe he didn’t have brain damage. He might have just listened to Cole once too often.
Shelley called on her lunch. “You feeling better, Jackson?”
Jackson thought her expression seemed more curious than concerned. Perhaps he was reading too much into it. “I’m good. How about you?”
She shook her head. “You were acting strange this morning; looking around, touching your face, shaking your hands. You were in your own little world, totally distracted.”
“No, no,” Lying was becoming an unwelcome habit for Jackson. “I mean, yeah, sort of.”
“No, you weren’t distracted? Or yes, you were ‘sort of’ totally distracted.”
This didn’t seem to be the right time to mention the possible brain damage. Not only was his left hand still bothering him, now there was the question of why he remembered he’d been to funerals, but couldn’t remember ever being at one. By his age, he must have been to at least one funeral. He needed to work this out before telling Shelley anything. “Yeah, sort of distracted,” he laughed. “Ever have one of those days when suddenly you notice everything? Seeing things you’ve never paid attention to before? I was kind of aware of absolutely everything this morning, taking it all in.” It wasn’t completely a lie.
“Like, self-aware?”
“Yeah, right,” Jackson studied his mysterious hand. “Like, completely aware of yourself and the weirdness of the world around you.”
“Nope. Look, I got to get back to work.”
“Hey, Shelley,” Jackson interjected, “have we gone to a funeral together?”
He watched as Shelley turned away from her coworkers; the world of her workplace swiveling in the background. She lowered her voice, “No. What kind of question is that?”
“I was just curious,” Jackson apologized.
“Something is wrong with you, Jackson.” Shelley’s image blinked to blackness without her usual ‘Love you’.
Jackson worked on his problem with the ChatBob-in-the-kitchen for a while, before deciding the problem was with the timing rather than the place. He reweighted the parameters and back-propagated them into the system. It took longer than it should have because the experience of his left hand from that morning rattled him, whether he’d been to a funeral preoccupied him, and Shelley’s abruptness ate at him. The constant awareness of the nondescript office, and the drone of other software techs talking in hushed tones, carried his mind down dark alleys where he saw himself as an expendable cog in the machinery of Eliza & Turing.
“I’ve got another question for you, Cole,” he said, taking a different route this time. “Ever have something happen to you, and then you realize it couldn’t have happened?”
“Yeah,” Cole leaned back in his generic swivel chair and gazed at the photo of his girlfriend—the only personal item on his desk. “You ever met my girlfriend? Like, no way do I deserve a woman that awesome. Did I tell you what she did yesterday?”
Cole worshiped his girlfriend. Jackson glanced at his own photo of Shelley, smiling back at him from the emptiness of his desk. “I’ve never met your girlfriend, Cole. You ever meet mine?”
“I’m surprised you have to ask,” said Cole. Evasion. Typical.
“That’s not what I meant, Cole. I mean like … so, this morning I swung around with my hands at my side, and then realized my left hand should have hit the kitchen table. It was right there. Instead, my hand must have passed through the table. I don’t see why my hand isn’t bruised right now.”
“Probably the Mandela Effect.” Cole appeared to lose interest. Likely because they weren’t talking about his girlfriend.
“The Mandela Effect?”
“Yeah,” Cole turned back. “People clearly remembered that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. So, they were pretty stunned when he died again, at home in 2013.”
“I know what The Mandela Effect is, Cole, dude, my man,” Jackson mocked. “What does it have to do with my hand?”
“It’s the Mandela Effect, dude. Different realities. Sometimes we switch between them. We don’t feel it or know about it—it just happens. All of a sudden, Rich Uncle Pennybags never wore a monocle, chartreuse is green and not ugly dark pink, Henry the Eighth isn’t holding a turkey leg, and Nelson Mandela is still alive.”
“You mean the guy from the board games, Rich Uncle Moneybags?”
“No, dude,” Cole shook his head. “Rich Uncle Pennybags. He’s running around with a bag of pennies and no monocle.”
Jackson looked at his hand and looked at Cole. “What are you talking about?”
“Your hand!” Cole was fully engaged again. “It proves the Mandela Effect, my man. First the table wasn’t there, then the table was there. Right? Another Jackson is probably in another reality, telling another me about how he smacked his hand against a table that wasn’t there.”
“Yeah, I don’t know …” It made about as much sense as his hand not actually existing. “What happened to ‘we make our own realities’ you told me about earlier?”
“The other Jackson made his own reality, and you switched with him,” Cole explained. “It’s the multiverse, man; string theory, quantum physics. Just like the same ChatBob exists in thousands of instantiations for thousands of different users, you and I exist in millions of different realities. How do you know I’m the same Cole from the same reality as before?”
Jackson shook his head at Cole. It was meant as derision, but Cole seemed to take it as confirmation.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, dude.” Cole spun in his chair and returned to the problem of sexual advances at a funeral.
Jackson glanced around the office, sighed, and returned to brooding about his hand, the nature of reality, and Shelley.
Shelley came home late that evening.
“I was starting to worry about you.” Another lie. Jackson had started to worry about her hours before. He was going to text her an hour earlier, but if he was losing her, appearing needy would only make the situation worse.
“Oh, sorry, I went to a bar with friends from work.” Shelley slurred her words.
“Just you and the girls, again?”
“Hmm? The girls?” Shelley smiled. “Yeah, of course. Me and the girls.”
Jackson leaned in. “Sounds like it was fun. I should meet you there sometime.”
“Oh, yeah, you totally should,” Shelley replied.
“We’ve never …,” he stopped himself. How, in the couple of years he’d been with Shelley, had they never been to a bar together? He strained to recall having gone to a bar with her, but feared he would only worsen the damage to whatever was going on with him.
“Jackson?”
How could they not have been to a bar together? Clearly, they must have been. Jackson stared at his left hand and tried to recall anything from before the incident this morning. Fragments. Bits and pieces of memories that didn’t feel like he was even present. A feeling of disassociation, as if his own recollections now belonged to someone he’d never met.
“Jackson,” Shelley persisted. “Talk to me.”
“Have we ever been to a bar?”
“Sure,” Shelley dismissed.
A vague recollection formed in his mind, but Jackson couldn’t pin it down. Sounds, images, the residue of a vanishing experience. “When?”
“I don’t know. Last week, maybe?”
Last week—last week sounded right. The memory was faint, half formed. “Yeah, of course,” he said, “last week.” There was something more to the memory, “Did we meet Alice and Bob there?”
Shelley was fumbling through her jacket pockets. “Sure, yeah, we met them there.” Finding what she was looking for, “I got pictures!”
Pictures, of course! Whatever neurons weren’t firing right now just needed something to jump-start them. “Photos of us at the bar?”
“No.” Shelley looked at him as if he hadn’t been paying attention. “They got me to do karaoke tonight.” She giggled drunkenly, trying to find the photos. “Here.” The photographs were off center and dark. A friend, apparently also drunk, had taken them and sent them to Shelley. Most showed her on a stage with other people, hamming it up. One showed some guy with his arm around her.
“Who’s that?” Jackson asked as calmly as he could.
“Oh, him?” Shelley laughed abruptly. “Oh, that’s, you know…”
“No, I don’t know, Shelley.”
“No, no, sorry. Drunk.” She pointed at herself and laughed again. “Yeah, that’s just some guy, you know. Some guy in the bar.”
This is precisely why, Jackson thought, he should go to the bar with Shelley. Maybe he had gone to the bar with her last week and something happened to him. It felt like they had. He imagined himself watching Shelley do karaoke, but couldn’t put himself there. What’s wrong with him? Jackson looked at the unfamiliar photos again. “Just some guy in the bar with his arm around you?”
“No. No, not just some guy,” Shelley explained. “That’s like … that’s a coworker.”
“He’s one of the girls?”
“Yeah, no,” Shelley paused and thought entirely too long. “Yeah, he’s a coworker. I thought you might get jealous if I said I work with guys, too.”
“I appreciate that, but you can be honest with me,” Jackson explained, feeling hypocritical about his own lies. “Has this guy got a girlfriend?”
Shelley sighed and smiled. “Oh, yeah.” Her eyes drifted closed.
It was good to hear the guy wasn’t hitting on her, at least.
“I’m tired, Jackson. I’m going to bed.”
“Mmm, bed,” Jackson repeated.
“No.”
“But…”
“No, Jackson.”
Shelley was right. She needed to sleep this off and be ready for work tomorrow. “Okay, sweetheart,” Jackson reassured. “There’s always tomorrow.”
Shelley left.
Why, in two years of dating Shelley, had they never been to a bar together? Or had they? More so, why hadn’t it occurred to Jackson, until now, that they hadn’t been to a bar together? Of course they had been; he couldn’t remember it, just like funerals or anything else. He was becoming more certain they had gone to a bar, but less certain about the details.
It could have been that they went to a bar, and he was involved in a bar fight that caused a head injury. That would explain it—he was defending Shelley’s honor and got a head injury that causes amnesia. A person wouldn’t remember a head injury that causes amnesia. But, a head injury sounded like it would hurt. It must be a mental disorder because a head injury or brain tumor would probably hurt, and his head didn’t hurt. In fact, his head didn’t feel like anything right now. He must be going crazy because in two years of living together, they’ve certainly gone to a bar, or a concert, or dinner, or anything. Jackson couldn’t recall any of it.
He’d go on a date with Shelley. That’s what he’d do. He’d take her to dinner and, as he sat there, smelling the food, tasting the wine, hearing voices other than their own, sure of the reality of his surroundings, he’d tell her what was going on with him. He’d inform her that he is losing his grip, that he’s becoming unhinged. Would he tell her that he suspects she’s cheating on him? No, Jackson thought. If I’m going crazy, how do I know I’m not paranoid crazy? I’m probably delusional, too.
Jackson stared at his left hand, which, now more than ever, didn’t look like it belonged there.
Shelley was gone before Jackson woke the next morning. It was unlike her. At least, it felt as if it was unlike her. As much as Jackson wanted to say it was unlike Shelley to leave without so much as a nod, he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
He had spent the evening before deciding where he was going to take her to dinner, and what he was going to say while they were out. He was going to mention it this morning and finalize plans. But, the last he saw of her was the drunken saunter to the bedroom the night before. And now Jackson was at work, staring blankly at her photo.
“Am I going crazy, Cole?”
Cole acknowledged him on the first attempt. “No more crazy than me, dude.”
“Something serious is wrong with me, Cole,” Jackson said. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Even the ceiling didn’t appear to be anchored to reality. A constant, forgettable pattern of flat white tiles and recessed lights spreading in all directions. Jackson stared at the floor and tried to memorize the pattern of the carpet, but as soon as he shut his eyes, he could only recall that it was gray. His entire life was starting to bleed together into colorless repetition, indistinguishable from the ceiling or floor or cubicle. “Yesterday I wondered if anything was real. Now, I’ve lost my memory. It’s some kind of dementia, isn’t it?”
“Maybe you’re the only one who’s got it right,” Cole suggested. “Ever think of that?”
Jackson shook his head. “I don’t remember ever going anywhere with my girlfriend. I’m sure we did, we had to have, but I can’t remember any of it.”
“Maybe you didn’t.” Cole nodded. “No, you didn’t.”
“I remember that we did. I just don’t remember doing it. I mean, like, where did I first meet her?” Jackson wanted to shake his head again, but was afraid that would cause more brain damage.
“You don’t remember because you didn’t, dude,” Cole insisted. “You’re seeing things as they really are.”
“Of course I did, Cole. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about The Church of Last Thursday, my man,” Cole appeared excited to impart this new wisdom. “The Church of Last Thursday believes everything was created last Thursday.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Am I?” Cole asked. “Do you remember anything before last Thursday?”
“No,” Jackson explained. “I told you, I have some sort of mental disorder. Brain damage, dementia, some kind of trauma, or something.”
“But,” Cole continued, “you remember everything from yesterday?”
“Yeah, so what?” Jackson cautiously shook his head and made sure he didn’t feel his brain sloshing around.
Cole proclaimed, “Yesterday was Thursday!”
Jackson leaned back in his generic gray swivel chair and checked his temples for signs of bruising. “Please,” he told himself out loud, “don’t let this make sense.”
Cole continued, “The Church of Last Thursday says everything we remember from before last Thursday is a false memory God put there. I think God just gave us the framework, and we invent memories to fill it in.”
“Why would God do that, Cole?”
“So we’d think She created the universe millions of years before last Thursday,” he continued.
“Why,” Jackson repeated, “would God do that, Cole?”
“To test your faith,” Cole explained. “You either believe your memories from before last Thursday, or you have faith that God created the universe last Thursday. Like, my girlfriend thinks she went to a funeral for her dear uncle on Wednesday. But I know that she’s never had an uncle and never went to a funeral because it was before last Thursday.”
“You’re insane, Cole.”
“It only sounds insane,” Cole snorted, “because you don’t want to believe it.”
Jackson figured there was no reason they both couldn’t be insane. He said, “You’re wrong, Cole. See, if God gave us false memories from before last Thursday, what does it mean if I don’t have any memories from before last Thursday?”
“Then,” concluded Cole, “you’ve transcended. You see the universe for what it truly is.”
The problem with Cole’s reasoning, Jackson figured, was that he knew when his first date with Shelley was. It was about two years ago, long before last Thursday. It’s just that Jackson couldn’t remember where they went or who introduced them. He sighed. Maybe Cole was onto something. He checked his head again for previously undetected signs of trauma.
“I need to talk to a doctor,” Jackson told Cole.
“We have a company doctor. I’ve never been there, of course,” Cole said in a tone that was either boastful or accusatory. “But, I know he’s available.”
“I don’t think he’s the right kind of doctor,” Jackson replied. “When your crazy ideas start to make sense to me, I must be crazy.”
“I told you,” Cole insisted, “you’re not crazy.”
“Shelley,” Jackson said, “I think I’m mad.” He looked around, wondering how he ended up in the living room with her, not even sure when he’d left work. He wasn’t hungry, so he must have eaten. Did they have dinner together? Did they eat at home, a restaurant, carry-out?
“Are you mad at me?” Shelley asked.
“No, no. Should I be?”
“No!” Shelley seemed too quick to answer, but Jackson was in no mood to pry. If she had another boyfriend, who could blame her? Jackson was coming unglued, he needed serious help. Shelley needed someone stable in her life, and Jackson was becoming less stable by the hour.
“I didn’t mean ‘mad’ like that. I meant … Do you see this?” Jackson waved his hands in front of his face. They felt totally disconnected, gliding through space outside his control. But, conversely, they looked like they halted, sputtered, and skipped; like some kind of old-time stop-motion animation. Four, five, six images of each hand appeared in front of him. All with blur lines trailing from them, suspended in space. Each blurred hand disappearing as the next appeared. His arms looked unattached to his hands, only catching up with each other as he reversed direction. It was weirdly hypnotic.
“You’re waving your hands,” Shelley remarked.
“I think I’m stoned.”
Shelley laughed. “You’re not stoned, Jackson.”
“Then I’m totally insane. I’m losing touch with reality, Shelley. I don’t know what is real and what is not anymore.” It was then that Jackson’s feet didn’t feel as if they were touching the floor. He looked down. His feet were where they belonged. The feeling of disconnection, disassociation, crawled up Jackson’s spine. As he looked up at Shelley, the world swiveled, it tilted, fell away, and came back into soft focus around Shelley’s face.
Shelley looked somber. “You have been acting strange lately, Jackson.”
He reached out to hold her hand, but the gap between them seemed impossible to cross. “Shelley, I …” Jackson reached for her hand with both hands, but couldn’t find it. He could see her hands, and she looked like she was holding his. But, his mind told him she wasn’t. She was too far away, too distant.
“Let’s see if we can get you some help, Jackson.” Shelley’s voice was far off, but next to him at the same time, as if he could hear her whispers from another world.
“Okay.” Jackson curled up in a ball. What room were they in, and why was he on the floor? This was the bathroom; where was the living room? He noticed Shelley was getting ready for bed. He was still fully dressed, curled up on the floor of the bathroom. What had happened to the evening?
“I’m going to bed now, Jackson,” Shelley explained as she put her toothbrush away. “But, we’ll get you some help first thing in the morning.”
Jackson stared at Cole. Cole didn’t look back. He looked around at the other Eliza & Turing employees. No one seemed to notice him. He rolled his office chair back and looked up the aisle; it stretched endlessly. Turning the opposite direction, the aisle stretched endlessly that way, too. Jackson stood and could see no end to the heads of Eliza & Turing software techs, poking above their half-walls, busy retraining AR Friends. No one seemed to be talking to anyone else, though the sound of office chatter continued, just this side of acknowledgement.
“Cole,” Jackson said under his breath as he sat down and rolled his chair into the gray-beige cubicle, “quantum physics says all realities exist until we observe it. Then, all possibilities collapse into one. Do you think we choose our reality when we observe it?”
“Our realities are chosen for us, my man.”
Jackson traced his finger along the edge of his desk, feeling the bevel. “Who chooses for us, Cole?”
“She that made us, dude. We just fill in the gaps.”
The edge of the desk didn’t feel so certain anymore. Jackson asked, “Is this a dream?”
“All perception, all experience, all we know, is in our minds, my man. We are all dreaming, all the time.”
“But,” Jackson reiterated, “Is this a dream?”
“Zhuangzi, Plato, Descartes—everyone wants to know if this is the dream of a butterfly, shadows on a cave wall, the trickery of a malicious demon.”
“But we know we’re real, don’t we?” Jackson fell back in his chair. “Isn’t that the only thing Descartes proved? That we exist? That I am?”
“Sure. Whatever you say, dude.”
Jackson looked over his half-wall at Cole. Cole was focused on his work. Everyone was focussed on their work. Everyone but Jackson. He picked up his photo of Shelley and smiled weakly. The photo smiled back, the way he wanted to remember her.
Jackson found himself talking to the company doctor. He turned and examined the door. “DOCTOR” was written in reverse on frosted glass. The office was sterile and white. The chair he sat in was bent aluminum tubing with padded green vinyl—old since the day it was made. He faced the doctor again. The desk between them was a similar old metal thing, painted olive green, with a gray linoleum top. An old desk lamp, an old blotter, a folder with Jackson’s name on the tab. The doctor was from the same vintage film the office furniture seemed to have been pulled from; gray hair, dress shirt, black tie, lab coat, stethoscope around his neck. Jackson blinked hard and asked, “What am I doing here?”
The doctor replied, “We’ve gotten reports of you acting erratic and thought we should talk to you. Ask a few questions.”
“Reports? Who …” No, that would be confidential, probably anonymous. “What kind of reports?”
“Uh, huh,” the doctor opened Jackson’s folder and examined a single sheet inside. ““First question; your name is …?”
“It’s written right there,” Jackson pointed to the tab on the folder.
“Uh, huh.” The doctor nodded. “Your name?”
Jackson stared at the doctor.
“Your name?”
“It’s Jackson,” Jackson replied.
“Uh, huh. Good. Good.” The doctor made a note. “What’s the last thing you recall, Jackson, before coming here?”
Jackson glanced toward the door, “I came here?”
The doctor made a note. “What’s the last thing you recall before coming here?”
“I was talking to Cole.” Jackson settled uncomfortably into the chair. “How long is this going to take?”
“Cole who?”
“Cole.” Jackson crossed his arms. “My coworker, Cole.”
“Coworker. Uh, huh.” The doctor jotted another note. “Does Cole have a surname?”
“Surname?” Jackson asked.
“Last name.”
“I’m surprised you have to ask,” Jackson replied.
The doctor looked up at Jackson. “What’s Cole’s surname?”
“He’s my coworker,” Jackson explained.
“Uh, huh.” The doctor kept jotting notes. “What’s Cole’s surname?”
“It’s not like I learn every detail about my coworkers.” These were stupid questions and Jackson was getting impatient. He wanted to get home to Shelley.
“Of course,” the doctor mumbled. He looked up again. “Your girlfriend?”
Jackson sat up. “How do you know I have a girlfriend?”
The doctor asked, “What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“None of your business.” Jackson examined the walls for this guy’s credentials. There were black frames with parchment documents inside. Letters, symbols, text that looked like it said something, but Jackson couldn’t make sense of it.
“Surely, you know her name,” the doctor prompted. When Jackson didn’t reply, the doctor continued, “It starts with an ‘M’…”
“Shelley,” Jackson corrected. He was distracted. He was looking for the door, but there didn’t appear to be a door.
“Oh! Yes, Shelley.” The doctor raised an eyebrow. “And Shelley’s surname is …?”
“I’m surprised you have to ask.” Jackson looked for the chair, but there was no chair. When did he stand up? Was he always standing up?
“Shelley’s surname, please.”
“Where am I?” Jackson asked. “What is this place?”
The doctor was standing in front of him, shaking his head. “Let’s try this instead; You, Alice, and Bob go to a restaurant. The waitress says that two of you have ketchup on your—”
“Me, okay?” Jackson had no idea where the answer was coming from, but it was coming loud and fast. “I’m the other person with ketchup on my face.” He wiped the side of his mouth and glared at the doctor.
The doctor was distant, on the other side of the room, but his voice was clear. “Uh huh, interesting. So, Alice—”
“Alice had ketchup on her face, Bob didn’t,” Jackson remembered that distinctly. “It’s an induction puzzle to see if I recognize myself.” He tried to figure out how far the doctor was from him, but the room was gone, nothing to get his bearing by. “What’s happening? Did you drug me?”
The doctor was a grain of sand, far away, vanishing, yet perfectly clear. “Uh huh, I see. You’ve done this before. Is Jackson your surname or your given name?”
“I don’t know!” Jackson screamed. “I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know if any of this is real … if you are real, if this place is real. I don’t know!”
“Uh, huh.” The doctor was a dot, a point in space ahead of Jackson. An infinitely small point, that was neither there nor not there.
“I’m not ill,” Jackson screamed. “I’m not drugged. Nothing is real. Nothing exists.” He started to cry, “Shelley, please … Shelley, please be real. Please help me.” The space around Jackson didn’t exist. It was neither light nor dark. It wasn’t even empty—there was no space to be empty. There was nothing. “Please, Shelley, please. Please be real,” Jackson wailed. He cried, no longer feeling his tears. No longer feeling the ache of his body. “The only thing I know to be real,” Jackson wept, “is me.”
“Uh, huh,” the software tech said. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”
On Monday evening, Michelle Williams arrived home from work, threw her jacket on a kitchen chair, poured a glass of wine, and collapsed in the most comfortable chair in the living room.
“Never,” she advised the empty room, “date a coworker.” She took a long draw on the wine, a dry Pinot Noir. Relationships are complicated. That’s probably why she was still single.
Michelle inhaled deeply off the top of the wine, and let the tension unwind from her. She’d lost her appetite on the way home, but there was a half-eaten sandwich she’d brought home last week still in the fridge if she felt peckish. What now, though? Music? A show? Maybe she’d just sit in silence and drink. It wasn’t working. The drama of the workplace kept replaying in her head. She reached for the tablet on the side table; there was a campy romance novel her subscription service recommended.
She paused. Next to the tablet were the augmented reality glasses she paid good money for. Her hand hovered over the tablet for a moment. Instead, Michelle cautiously lifted the AR glasses from their stand, put them on, and fortified herself with another sip of wine.
“Set the mood.” The room lights dimmed. Soft music played through the temples of the glasses. A fireplace appeared in place of her buffet. A low fire crackled within it.
“Hello, Jackson,” Michelle said quietly.
“Welcome home, Shelley,” Jackson replied as he stepped into the gaze of the AR glasses. “Long day?”
Michelle noticed that Jackson’s pant leg appeared to intersect with her coffee table somewhat. It didn’t matter—she wanted to run her hands through his wavy black hair and brush her fingers across the soft stubble on his face. But, that required AR gloves she couldn’t afford. Maybe she’d start saving for them; call it an investment in her mental health. She nodded. “Very long day. But how’s my boyfriend feeling?”
“Couldn’t be better,” he replied with a wink, as he began unbuttoning his shirt.
Michelle smiled. It was good having the old Jackson back.
M.T.