Mr Daigo
A short story by Ed Turner
Like the photographs on the mantel. Your memories will also fade. (Author unknown)
It was clear to Neal — he wasn’t living in the same world anymore. But no one else seemed to see it like that. In his opinion, contemplating killing himself every day for the last one hundred and twenty-six of them, felt like good evidence to the fact. After all, he used to be a pretty happy go lucky guy before his family completely disappeared, even though everyone else he knew, maintained they had a relationship with them. There was no explaining to anyone why they weren’t in his life. Only after the first couple of weeks of bumping into folk on the high street, did Neal realise that less said, was going to be more.
Neal kept a diary next to his bed. It told him the real number of days since things had changed. Without this document he’d be waking up on day one every day. He had engineered his waking self, so the diary was the first thing that came into view every morning; The faux leather book covered in post it notes with the phrases ‘read me now’ ‘fill me now’ ‘remember me’ written in capital letters with red marker pen; Failing that, the rest of the house was covered in post it notes and pieces of a4 paper too, which he had taped to the walls annotating everything that was not right about the world anymore.
On the two white gloss doors of his children’s bedrooms — Neal had written with a black sharpie, everything he remembered about the room’s former occupants. After opening his bedroom door in the morning, the two doors were waiting for him. And when turning to descend the stairs, the deep sickness would fall further within him — everything he remembered and loved about Lisa would be starring back at him. She wasn’t going to be downstairs either.
Every day, he resolved to pick out one fact, from each door, to carry through the next twenty-four hours.
Outside, physically the world was the same. But populated differently. Like a film, shot from the same camera position; then cut together from different times of the day. People weren’t where you’d expect them to be.
If Neal took a walk down to the shops; someone he knew might appear and start a perfectly normal conversation. But as I’ve already mentioned, after week one, he wasn’t really listening. How can you — when the buses aren’t passing, and the drug addicts aren’t sat outside the YMCA anymore. And what the fuck were these apparitions of old associates actually talking about. When everything you have in common isn’t there in your version of it; but it is in theirs? — and where did they go after he’d spoken with them.
He had on many occasions before now, followed people he knew; only to find they didn’t just disappear. As long as they were unaware of Neal; a life of their own seemed to be unfolding quite naturally around them.
Neal had learnt the hard way by this point, not to ask anyone if they knew what he meant about the world. How some shift in reality had obviously happened. He could however learn all about what his family were doing, just by casually asking his ‘walk on friends’ (as he was now personally referring to them) if they had recently seen the relevant aged member of his family. Although puzzled that he seemed so interested in something that he should already know about — they would invariably share their social interactions with his family, with him. Which were always detailed and believable in context. But the longer the days passed; these conversations felt more like Christmas letters sent from distant continents. At first, a perverse enjoyment was to be had in the shear ridiculousness of what his family were all apparently up to in their own parallel universe. But before long, not sharing their apparent progress with them, was too painful to bear.
If the coffee shop on the high street was empty; Neal would jump at the opportunity to cross the road to the cash point and get some real money out, for his daily Latte. He had taken to using cash because it was tangible — he could feel it between his fingers. And the girl behind the counter in the coffee shop would give him real change. He liked to see his balance on the screen and then in turn compare the clean and dirty coins before dropping them into his pocket.
A returning real nightmare was standing at the same cashpoint watching an overdrawn figure scrolling up before his eyes. This way he was challenging the machine to match his dream with a lift in heart rate until his eyes rested on the correct balance. Standing at the terminal, Neal could hear the buses on the road behind him, the hair below his ears lifting slightly as they passed. The smell of diesel and the noise of a busy high street. In these moments, the lesser engaged senses would become lucid, with placebos of ghostlike sounds and smells. During these small reminders of the real-world, Neal didn’t want to move from the position he’d found this bliss in. If one sense wasn’t engaged, the others would create the lost reality.
Glancing at the floor, in the shadow of his real self — cigarette butts and old covid mask elastic and black hardened gum appeared. Stuffing the notes into his wallet and turning around, the glaring sun was illuminating just how clean the pavement really was, or appeared to be, in the new world. Looking up and down the road, there was not a soul in site, bar the now long queue snaking out of the coffee shop door. His back had been turned for possibly only forty seconds.
In Neal’s new world, days had the same drugged feeling as the night. Either awake outside, or asleep inside — they were the same, minus the breeze and the birdsong. Waking, or in his dreams: the sun was always bright, so fucking bright. Wasn’t England supposed to be grey for fucks sake, just grey or even randomly moist. Come to think of it; even the temperature remained a spring like warm. He had worn the same t-shirt and denim jacket combo the whole time he had been here, in this new version. He fantasied — just once, could he wake up to different weather? It would be like tearing the filters off his eyes and surely the old reality would be there again. In plain view, like it had never gone away. His family, his friends, the cars and delivery vans, the rubbish collecting against the curb.
It’s not like it didn’t rain. It did rain — just enough to keep the grass and plants alive. But creating temporary quagmires everywhere. It came down in unannounced short heavy bursts, unnatural and torrential, heavy, non-broken vertical plumes of warm water — as if from a firemen’s hose, hidden in the cloudless sky. Then, the constant sun would create a myriad of polarised effects over every available smooth surface. Multiple rainbows would fill the sky reflecting off windows and passing sunglasses, like a snapshot of California recreated in southwest London.
Neal’s work as a freelance designer in television had quickly dried up on account of all his colleagues, and in turn his agent, thinking he had simply gone mad. All the stories of the ‘new world’ and the ‘crack in reality’. But the truth was: Neal had tried to continue his work, and it was impossible. He would turn up to a location or to the office and the people and the projects that were supposed to be there, weren’t there. Later they would ask him where he was and he would say “I was there, but the room was empty” and in turn they would say “Um…we were there, and the only thing missing was you mate?” There are only so many times you can be forgiven for being clinically insane in the workplace. Or as Neal liked to call it: ‘Sane in the clinically invisible workplace’.
So, if no one believing that your family have disappeared — but only by your version of everyday life, was enough to drive you mentally unstable; Neal now worked in a warehouse. His days spent forklifting similar palettes of things around and feeling lost in the same twenty aisles of bright orange racking constantly changing but staying the same. Only finding his way out in time, to clock off. But as long as he clocked in and out and did whatever any appearing manager would ask of him — it seemed to work and he stayed employed.
Neal felt no progress in this work. And on the off chance it was all part of the matrix’s plan, he wasn’t yet aware of any purpose to him being there. However, he got paid; the money actually going into his bank account. He had work colleagues as friends too. So, he wasn’t going to fuck this up. Plus, an overriding speculation, that if he were to end it all, he may just wake up in the same dimension, but with no way of finding his way back.
His new friends, however virtual, were Billy, Frank, and Joe, who were younger than Neal, In their thirties. They were fun and principally quite normal in Neal’s eyes. ‘Non-creative types’ is what he would tell himself. They liked their music and football and more than the occasional beer. Obviously they found Neal a little unreliable outside of work, on account of there being two versions of every pub they would agree to meet in, but they didn’t know that. The mobile networks however worked between dimensions, so he’d taken to just being really unreliable; sending constant excuses when he was the one in the empty pub, or the suddenly full one, his friends weren’t in.
This side of Neal’s new life had extended the post-it culture he had at home, to now carrying a diary everywhere he went. Making a written note of everything that was agreed between himself, and the walk-ons. That’s what they were — accessories to a play, paid to be there and pretend it was all real. For Neal, keeping a constant note was being the bystander before the trial. Luckily, the catalogue of social excuses had become a near book-full of well documented banter fuel for his new mates; material to rib him over. This was seen as a fair trade off against what most other people would quickly find inexcusable. So, Neal counted his lucky stars that his new friends were simple, and not over-questioning. In private (or we could more realistically say ‘In dialogue with himself’) Neal referred to his new friends as ‘The Labradors’ — a healthy cross between stupid and loyal and that was good enough for him. Under the circumstances, he was glad he had them.
One thing though, that suggested the world might not be an altered reality, was: Neal could remember his dreams. You surely couldn’t have a dream, while in a dream.
Waking up having dreamt, invariably about his old life, kept the old life alive. Somehow the dreams were more potent than memories and photographs. They were cerebral, with emotions and a sense of place attached to them. Being asleep was now an escape, one that was more than the standard shutdown it was, before everything changed. Neal had taken to loading up on extra mature cheddar on crackers before going to bed, in the hope that the dreams would continue. If you pitched the idea that dreams within a dreamlike state felt more real than the dreamlike state itself, you could be forgiven for questioning the reasoning of preferring an illusion within a delusion. But because the dreams were an escape; that’s what made them, sadly, more precious than the sickening repeat of the days.
Likewise, the only waking space that felt real in Neal’s life now, was his home. During the times in between, surrounded by his notes, a growing decoupage of information, confirming what was wrong. Going out was something he had to do, to make money to feed himself. That was it.
Getting dressed in the morning was always a very real experience. This confirmed Neal was no longer in a slumber state with the sense of reality being generated by the sleep itself. Making the first coffee of the day also felt very real. Some mornings as Neal walked from his front door, he’d wonder if today might surprise him. Maybe today things would be back to the old normal — anxiety growing inside him until he witnessed the first glitch. He would stoop slightly to open his garden gate or look down, to place his glasses into his breast pocket. Then, upon glancing up, everything had shifted again.
At lunch times, when Billy, Frank and Joe were on the same dimension, they would all walk to the café together. Sam’s Café was right at the end of a long residential road, nestled in the middle of a run of other long residential roads. The route from the warehouse seemed to change every time, and Neal had no idea where the café really was. Anxiety would build before taking the simple stroll to the café because, just imagining how lost he could become, if he were to attempt the walk on his own, gave Neal a feeling like drowning in a maze of identical semi’s and endless rows of parked cars, all baking in the constant sun. But Billy Frank and Joe knew just where to turn, knowledgeably traversing the grid of houses until finally arriving at the café with its tiled exterior and long yellow sign. Only going when they were going, was just another survival tactic Neal had developed to survive the endless days.
One day much like any other — bright and much warmer than usual; the boys set off down the road, shielding their eyes from the sun. Neal was listening painfully to the other three comparing notes on their girlfriends excuses for not wanting sex.
As often the case, the roads were silent and free of all moving cars, except for one, four long roads over, nearer to the café; an immaculate cream-coloured 1970 Datsun 510 Sedan was creeping slowly around the suburban circuit in search of something. In this car was Mr Daigo; a short Japanese man, only tall enough to see over his steering wheel. His black hair was shaved, and the skin of his head was creased like the wrinkles of a Shar-Pei puppy. His kind smile was framed above his lip by a small and tidy moustache, and below by a small clump of black hair sprouting from the dimple of his chin. Mr Daigo wore a cream-coloured chore jacket over a shirt and orange tie. A mechanical pencil and matching biro were clipped into the top pocket of his jacket. As he drove he looked left and right, dipping and tilting his head, so not to miss what he was looking for, between the rows of parked cars.
Inside Mr Daigo’s car there was nothing, except the shiny leather of the seats and the simple old controls. The original radio player was speaking in Japanese through the tinny speakers, as if giving instructions: “Tsugi no wakimichi o sasetsu” (Turn Left at next side road) — “Tsugini hidari ni magatte susumimasu” (Then turn next left and continue).
In the distance Mr Daigo spotted a shuffling cluster of boiler suits. Was this what he was looking for?
The boys had moved onto this weekend’s football fixtures and Neal had tuned out altogether, enough to sense the shiny cream car crawling along beside him. The driver’s window was open, and Mr Daigo was staring at Neal. He had a puzzled look on his face. Neal shrugged. Then Mr Daigo tightened his eyes and smiled, looked ahead, and drove on up the road.
“Did you see that boys?” Neal interrupted the conversation — “That little Japanese guy in the old Datsun?”
“No mate, you been seeing things again?” said Frank –
“Yeah, was it Mr Miyagi from the Karate Kid” added Joe -
“Ha! Yeah wipe on wipe off Neal” chipped in Billy, gesticulating like he was wiping his mind clean, with the back of hand.
Neal didn’t answer, he was lost in his own thoughts — who was that guy? and he bloody did look like the bloke from that film.
The Datsun was sat outside the café when they arrived.
“That’s the car” said Neal –
“That is a lovely old motor” responded Frank. They stood for a minute and admired it. The car looked like it had come off the production line that very day. The boys agreed –‘Another two or three like that outside the café and you could have been transported to the seventies’. Oh, the irony, thought Neal to himself.
The café was empty bar an old couple on one of two tables in the window. Mr Daigo was sat nearer the counter, facing back towards the door, as if to keep an eye on his car. The boys took the other window table. Neal glanced back at Mr Daigo who seemed unaware of Neal and his friends entering the cafe. He had an impassive look on his face but smiled and thanked the waitress when she brought him his tea.
Thirty minutes passed. Both the boys and Mr Daigo had eaten their lunches. Neal and his friends had consumed a noisy round of full English breakfast’s and Mr Daigo had eaten, very slowly, two slices of white toast with marmalade and finished his mug of tea.
It was unusual for there to be a shift in dimension during a social episode with real interaction happening. But Neal had no recollection of his friends getting up to leave, or for that matter — no recollection of them even paying.
The old couple had also disappeared. The only other customer left was Mr Daigo. He sat still, smiling kindly at Neal. The waitress collected his money and he stood and walked towards the door. Neal watched him. Mr Daigo’s eyes were firmly focussed on the door; but Neal somehow knew that wasn’t going to be the end of Mr Daigo in his new life.
Mr Daigo took hold of the café door handle; the sun was shining on his face. He turned to Neal and smiled one time again — “perhaps I can give you a lift, your friends have already gone”.
In the Car Mr Daigo concentrated hard on the road. The leather of the seats had warmed in the sun and was releasing a classy and homely aroma –
“You know where the warehouse is” Neal offered, to break the silence.
“Oh yeah — I know the warehouse — where you work”
Neal relaxed a little. In his old life he probably wouldn’t have got into a car with a random person he didn’t know. But in this version it really didn’t matter. His heartbeat raised a little as Mr Daigo drove straight past the warehouse.
“That’s the warehouse — back there?”
“Yes I know — I know the warehouse. I already told you”
A few minutes passed and Neal resigned himself to the weirdness of an unexplained journey. It was hardly out of the ordinary. At one point he laughed out loud. Mr Daigo just smiled and continued driving.
After half an hour of no sound except the engine of the car, Neal had grown strangely comfortable with this particular type of the unknown. During this time the conversation had been more than sparse:
“What’s your name then?”
“Mr Daigo”
“Oh, ok mine is Neal. Neal Smith”
“Yes”
“Yes — as in, ok thank-you for letting me know your name, seeing as we are sharing a car ride to nowhere together? Or ‘yes’ I already know your name?”
Mr Daigo just smiled and concentrated on the road –
“Yes, Neal Smith, I know. I need to know the names of those I am sent for”
Instead of questioning Mr Daigo further or screaming to be let out of the car, Neal felt strangely calm. In fact, excited. There was something more tangible, with a spark of possibility that the fug of his never-ending dream was going to be lifted by this strange little man. Neal sunk back deeper into his chair, even closing his eyes for a few short, deeply relaxed, moments.
As the town roads gave way to open countryside, Mr Daigo became suddenly excited about a pub –
“This pub, The Golden Lion. Very good, do you know it?”
Neal did in fact know it and it was very good.
“I do, I have been there. It’s busy in the summer”
“Yes, sometimes busy, sometimes not, isn’t it”
The winding country road snaked under a canopy of trees, the sunlight dappling through the windshield, instantly cooling the interior of the car. After a couple of sweeping turns through the forested road, Mr Daigo turned off at a landscaped driveway, passing a faded sign written in an 80’s typeface, clearly leading to some kind of large out-of-town office building. As the car turned the bend at the end of the tree lined avenue, the grand disused brutalist building appeared — almost like it somehow belonged to the world Neal had left behind. It must have been built in the sixties, but he had never been here or seen it from the road before.
Mr Daigo parked neatly; square with the building in the space closest to the ramp that led to the front reception. He turned to Neal, now with more enthusiasm in his tone –
“Ok! We’re here now, let’s go”
At this point, Neal did, suddenly, have a jumble of questions blocking the pathway between his mind and mouth. He couldn’t decide which one he wanted to ask first, only managing to make an unintelligible noise while using any remaining brain power to un-belt himself from the car.
Mr Daigo was already hotfooting it past the first switchback of the ramp leading to the Gotham-Esque portico at the front of the huge mausoleum of a building. At the top of the ramp, between two towering square columns was a tall pair of tall glass doors leading into a large marble floored lobby. A long marble reception counter stood unmanned to the right, and to the left there was a waiting area with cream leather Barcelona chairs and an oversized stainless-steel planter with long plumes of pampas grass sprouting from it. At the far end opposite the doors, a large wooden slatted staircase sat between two sets of elevators. Everything was very clean but felt used, like the building was still in use. But it was deathly silent and there were no people anywhere to be seen. Like Neal had stepped inside one of his momentary glitches, but with the sense of relief that it wasn’t going to change back anytime.
Mr Daigo motioned for Neal to take a seat, while he approached the reception counter. Neal assumed someone was going to magically appear like the shopkeeper in Mr Ben. Although he hoped they wouldn’t. Instead, Mr Daigo went behind the counter and started rummaging around. His little head popped back up; he had a piece of card, in his hand, approximately A5 in size.
“Ah! Here we go”
He came over to Neal and stood in front of him, holding out the small piece of card. It had a single, feint grey, dotted line running along the middle of it. To Neal it looked like something that hadn’t worked out properly in a household printer that was running out of ink. Mr Daigo nodded and raised the card level with Neal’s eyes –
“Concentrate on the line”
Neal looked at the line –
“Mr Daigo, it’s a dotted line, what am I doing”
“Just focus on it, that is all”
Neal looked hard at the dotted line. He thought maybe this was one of those optical illusions where the line became something else, in fact it struck Neal — Mr Daigo was the kind of guy who would relish sharing a trick like that. After all, he had broken the reverential silence of the car ride for a nominal outburst praising the Golden Lion pub.
Mr Daigo grunted and nodded his head, willing Neal to further concentrate on the grey dotted line. Neal, now Starting to lose his patience, took one harder look at the line. The card flashed a bright iridescent light into his eyes, simultaneously burning Mr Daigo’s fingers, who dropped the card and Neal fell violently off his chair.
Neal lay on the cold marble floor; a high-pitched ringing in his ears. He opened his eyes cautiously. He could only liken the feeling to being woken up from a hungover slumber on a holiday sunbed; paisley and amoeba like coloured shapes filling his vision, placing heavy shadows on all shapes around him.
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Neal sat up, clutching his throbbing head–
“What the fuck was that….for fuck’s sake. You bring me fucking here….here for fuck knows fucking what. And I just trust you, you fucking….fuck……what the fuck?”.
As Neal’s vision grew clearer he saw Mr Daigo was kneeling in front of him, his head bowed. He was blowing his fingers trying to soothe them. The piece of card sat unblemished on the floor, in front of him.
“Mr Smith — slide the card between the middle two folds on the top of my head, make sure dotted line is facing you”
Neal picked up the card — “You want me to…what?”
“Just slide the card in”
Neal looked again at the card “Oh well, this couldn’t get any weirder”. He placed the edge of the card between the centre of the two rolls of flesh on the top of Mr Daigo’s head. Pressing down, assuming it would just bend, and nothing would happen. But something powerful and mechanical grabbed the card. Neal pulled his hand away in shock as the card slowly disappeared into Mr Daigo’s head, the folds in the skin returning to normal once it had completely vanished. Mr Daigo raised his head. His eyes were wide and bright — “Ok, now follow me”.
Mr Daigo walked off towards the lifts, like nothing weird had happened. Neal on the other hand, had to walk slowly, and re-adjust his sense of balance.
“Ok, you live North or South of town?”
“Well. I live on the South side I suppose”
“Ok, we take right hand lift”
“Right hand lift, and does that make a difference — Hey Mr Daigo, where are we going, in fact: what are we doing here, the card in your head thing, that’s kind of weird and fucked up?”
Mr Daigo seemed to be reasoning with himself more than anything else — talking more under his breath than to Neal –
“Well right for north always seems to work better, but no reason for it, but now right is for south. West we tend to take the stairs”
Standing in front of the lifts, Mr Daigo turned to Neal –
“No real reason, just good success rate. So, I developed superstition. I normally collect people from home. You are different. You keep going out. Like everything is normal!”
There was a shrill ping and the doors to the right-hand side lift opened. Neal stood, starring at the space where Mr Daigo had been stood. Mr Daigo walked back out of the lift -
“You coming? Mr Smith”
Neal still dizzy, staggered into the lift.
Mr Daigo and Neal exited the lift on the third floor. Mr Daigo led Neal along a long corridor with doors either side until they got to the end, where a large window was flooding the corridor in light; small specs of dust are floating in the air. Mr Daigo opened the door to the last door on the left. Upon entering, all Neal could think about was ‘the doors were open downstairs and apart from that weird shit with the piece of card, this door was also open — anybody could just stroll into this place and, well, do what?’
It was a long room, that was strangely also accessible via at least four other doors off the same corridor, which Mr Daigo and Neal had already walked past. There were banks of dormant pc’s set up on tidy rows of regular looking office desks. Large glass plate windows overlooked the car park. Mr Daigo counted along the rows, as if remembering where he was supposed to be going. He seemed to pick a very specific workstation, counting the rows and then along to the chosen desk — “Five rows down, two desks across, second desk in from the window”
By this point Neal was so resigned to following Mr Daigo; when Mr Daigo sat down at the workstation, Neal pulled up a chair next to him –
“No, you sit at desk, behind me”
Neal did as he was told, he felt like he was about to be sick. There is a click from the door directly opposite their isle and in came two very pale, and skinny ladies, in blue tabards. The strange bliss of remaining in one glitch didn’t feel broken though. They both shared the pushing and navigating of a large trolley. That as far as Neal could work out, was a hybrid between a cleaners trolley and a tea trolley. They both had blonde hair, one was in a short bob and the other was long, in a ponytail. Under their tabards they wore tight blue jeans and white cropped t-shirts. The top of the trolley had a large hot water urn at one end. And tea bags and instant coffee in clear glass jars and a transparent scratched green plastic jug of milk and a China bowl of sugar cubes, at the other. On the side of the trolley was a paper cup dispenser with a stack of very pleasing looking paper cups, made from a cream card with a design of faded red and blue stars, moons and spacecraft. At the ends of the trolley were brooms and a hoover, dustpan and brush, and assorted cleaning materials.
This was too much for Neal now — “Ok, so I’ve trusted your weird unexplained shit so far. But we come into a completely — well, seemingly abandoned, beautiful brutalist building, with hundreds of unused desks — Oh yes and a building which might I add, I didn’t even know existed! Mind you what does really exist anymore — but I’ll tell you I did study architecture, so I think I would have known about this place being on my doorstep. And now the cleaners are here with a huge and weird tea trolley!! I mean, what the fuck is going on?”
The cleaner with the bob haircut, who upon closer inspection was, incredibly pale, smiled sweetly, revealing a few bad teeth and spoke quietly in an attractive eastern European accent –
“Would you like a cup of Tea or Coffee?”
Mr Daigo who had completely ignored Neal’s rant, (in fact he had picked his nose in a most unselfconscious way during all of it), was suddenly quite animated again -
“Mr Smith, I really do recommend the instant coffee. You will thank me. It is excellent”
Neal didn’t quite know what to say. He was aware of his head shaking in disbelief, the words queuing up in the back of his throat, falling over each other again. He did need a drink though. So nodded his confused approval to a cup of instant coffee.
The two tabarded ladies performed a ritual-like making of two precious small cups of equally surreal steaming instant coffee. Short haired girl held out the cups while long haired girl heaped, what Neal counted as six, spoonful’s of sugar into each, without asking for preference, into the small beautiful, cherish-able paper cups.
“Have sugar, better with sugar” added Mr Daigo.
Neal nodded again — thank you, more confused. Neal took a sip; it was good coffee. Neal couldn’t really tell why. But it was good. He felt a sense of vibrancy restoring him.
The two girls smiled and left as arbitrarily as they arrived; but continuing some quiet but random conversation with each other in Polish, as they pushed the trolley towards the door.
“Ok now turn on your computer” declared Mr Daigo, spinning on his chair, to face his screen.
Both men booted up their consoles in unison. Neal’s desk had one central screen and one either side, and a fourth above. Mr Daigo’s workstation had one large screen and four webcam like cameras pointing back towards him; these were fixed to all four outer corners of the screen. Neal had noticed, not all desks were the same. Some only had one screen, while others were busy like these two. Like a stockbrokers workstation, but the vast room was just a sea of unused black plastic. But they were sat at this random place for no reason.
“You must relax now and concentrate on the screen, don’t think of anything else, don’t look around — you can drink the coffee, but concentrate on the screen”
More fucking concentrating Neal thought, whispering under his breath — “Don’t tell me this explodes in my face”
Mr Daigo heard Neal just fine and whispered under his breath — “No, but probably blow your mind”
“Sorry Mr D, I didn’t catch what you said?”
“I said, just concentrate on the screen Mr Smith and drink instant coffee”.
Both sets of workstation monitors started phasing in and out of changing full screen colours, broken parallel stripes in different thickness’ of light grey, breaking up the screens while pulsing through the shifting colours. A small black box sat to the right of the keyboard on Mr Daigo’s desk. It had a hole on the front of it about three quarters of an inch in diameter. He placed the index finger from his right hand inside the hole in the small box; his monitor suddenly stopped phasing in and out of different colours and turned a bright white, lighting up the whole of his face. Mr Daigo forced his eyes open against the white heat of the screen. He repeated again to Neal “Concentrate on the centre screen now Mr Smith”.
Neal stared at the screen; the phasing colours started to break into separate lines of colour, between the grey lines, pulsing across the screens, working their way simultaneously from the top, towards the bottom of each screen.
Mr Daigo’s screen continued to glow bright white; his eyes were now locked unblinkingly onto the screen. Neal felt the need for more of the delicious coffee. He couldn’t take his eyes off his central screen. It had started doing something beautiful inside his head; something heavenly, like the fleeting moment of post orgasm, when endorphins and serotonin all converge, leaving you in a blissful haze — closing your eyes, and hoping the sense of cranial dehydration, will last for ever.
Neal tried to move his head away from the four screens, just long enough to grab a sip of the coffee. The sugary comfort of it reenergised his experience. As he pulled his head away towards the card rim of the paper cup, he could feel an elastic-like force; it was pulling his gaze back to the screens. Having suffered epilepsy as a child, or what his parents referred to as ‘petit mal’ (‘small bad’ in French he had worked out in later years, at school) This was almost identical an experience — like being locked into an epileptic fit. If you tried to move your head away from the internal swirling of a dishwasher inside your brain, which was forcing your head into an acutely ricked position, it would only be forced back again to the sickly swirling feeling.
The central screen began to break into a recognizable image. It was Neal’s kitchen and living room. His family were all there, going about their business.
“Hang on, what! that’s my family, they’re all there at home, in my house…our house. I have to go to them now”
Mr Daigo, had his eyes tightly shut, screwed up; his screens were just awash with multicoloured distortion, he struggled slightly to respond –
“Yes of course, this would be nice. It’s what everyone would like. But that isn’t possible. They are there, like you see — but they aren’t there when you are there”.
“No shit Sherlock, that’s one thing I think you don’t need to remind me of”
“But they want to talk to you, to tell you they are fine, and life is good”
The colours of Neal’s homelife had painted themselves onto the surface of his eyeballs, which were filling with water; cascading over the rims of his eyelids, like a very small garden water feature, taking the colours from the screens down, with the tears -
“But they are there, I can see them. They are never there anymore. How can they be there?”
Mr Daigo squinted harder to respond -
“They are there, in their own version of there. If you went back there now, they would not be there. Only the house how you left it”.
Neal stared at his family going about their business. His silent tears, now working their way, uninterrupted, up and over his cheeks.
Mr Daigo, now fighting mild contortions in his neck, forcing his head to stay focussed forward was finding Neal’s re-introduction, to be a particularly difficult one. Bringing an acknowledgement of empathy to his strained features for just two seconds — all he could mutter in response was — “I’m sorry”.
Neal’s daughter Kate who is 21 had been sat on the sofa scrolling through her phone but was now looking straight at him with a huge smile on her face — “You guys, over here, Dad’s on the telly”.
Neal was thrown. He realised he was viewing the room from perhaps the vantage of the television but hadn’t realised, he was on it.
“Hi Dad! how are you doing, we’ve been waiting for you to call”
Neal was bewildered. How could she be so matter of fact about this? He wasn’t sure if she would be able to hear him, there was no visible microphone. He didn’t feel he could even speak. It had been so long. Neal opened his mouth, the tears separating from his lips. But nothing came out.
“Hey Dad, you look sad, what’s wrong?”
Neal’s son Mikey, who is 17, wondered into the room and leant over the back of the sofa –
“Hey Dad, how’s it going?”
It was like — Neal was just calling in, to check on everyone.
A powerful sense of preserving his families innocence, came over Neal –
“Hey you, I’m good. Will you be there when I get home?”
Mikey jogged off shouting back –
“ I doubt it Dad, I’m going to the cinema with Tom tonight, I’ll grab mum, she’ll probably want you to pick something up”
Katy had taken to scrolling through her phone –
“So how are you Katy?”
“I’m fine Dad, why are you asking?”
She also jumps up as Lisa enters the room — “See you later Dad”
“Hi Love” said Lisa –
“Hi Babe”
The two of them just sat and smiled at each other. Neal felt they were somehow talking without saying anything; looking into each other’s souls. A timer went off in the kitchen and Lisa ran off. The view of the living room was suddenly back to how Neal had first found it. The screen went blank, and all of the energy seemed to disappear from the room. Mr Daigo was lying back in his chair, his eyes closed. A large patch of sweat across his shirt. The room was grey, without colour.
Neal shrugged Mr Daigo awake. The whites of his eyes were a mustard yellow with almost purple veins swimming around under the surface of their glazy sheen.
“Ok now we must go back” said Mr Daigo wearily. Neal had to help him to his feet supporting him, as they slowly walked down the long length of the room, passing all of the unmanned computer terminals.
“They won’t be there when I get back will they?”
“No Mr Smith. Only in your heart and your memory. Let’s get another coffee, for the road?”
The End.
