Oregon’s teeming woods: an escape from New York City, from screens. Right now, there’s no wind, only the warm air and beaming sun. My lungs are open, my muscles eased, my mind glowing.
“Ah!” Through a wall of trees, I spot a lifeless shack. I enter and the floor boards creak.
Then: Click! Rumpled man! Shotgun!
“I’m sorry! It looked empty… No, I wasn’t pursuing you… Alone? For how long? But why?”
Wind grazes the windows.
The man lowers his gun, dips his hand into a jerky jar, then collapses onto a homemade chair. He gnaws a piece of meat.
He invented the “Are You Sure?” computer prompt. First, it was useful, but then it annoyed millions, then billions. Frustration contorted into outrage. He was anonymous, but whispers of finding and killing the inventor roared. His wife divorced him, took his kids. Finally, he emptied his bank account and bookshelves and office, fled Palo Alto, came here, pushed his Porsche from the cliff. After, for thousands of days, he has hunted, read, meditated, tinkered. But relief cum solace cum despair. He visits that cliff daily, looks down.
“I meant to help people!” he wails.
“But that button,” I instruct, “now prompts us two-to-three times! Sometimes four! We’re crazed! You did this!” I sneer.
His crying builds into messy heaving.
Wind rattles the windows.
The man reaches for my hand. I: recoil. He: gun to chin. Click!
I stare at him, ball my hands, sweat. My countless clicks: Humane Society, Greenpeace, DNC — “Yes, yes, yes! I’m sure, sure, sure!” my mind echoes.I clutch my head, stamp my feet, look down, up.
My mind: “Pull that trigger, you S.O.B!”
My heart: Help this suffering man.
Wind thrusts the windows open, whips the man’s things, papers swirl around us.
His trigger finger trembles.
I reach forward. “Wh-what’s your name?” I ask.
“What did you say?!?!” he demands, his phlegm spraying.
“Your name. Wh-what is it?”
“Eh, Ed… Edward,” he confesses. He drops his gun. He sobs more. I approach him, crumple, hold him. A hug of thirty years of sorrow, quivering, clamping.
Edward’s body eases. He staggers up. He’s peed on himself: heart-shaped.
“What now?” I ask.
The wind overturned dusty family photos, scattered computer parts. A ratty, company t-shirt, snagged on a chair, then flies off.
“I’m 64,” he admits, rubbing his nose. “I want to live again!”
“Are you sure?”
Andrew Calderaro is a social worker, writer, and editor in New York City.
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