Maybe half an hour ago I flipped on my computer.

Its blue glow brings an early if artificial dawn to the den. I turn to go downstairs for coffee, but in the doorway I stop. I'm not hearing that comfortable surging whine that says, "Good morning, I don't need no coffee, but you go ahead."

So I turn back and watch the screen. It boots through some of its routine, strangely silent. Then it flashes "Hard Disks Present: Zero."

Oh.

It goes blank for a moment as if searching for the right words. Finally it asks me - just flat out asks me in precise little words on a screen, printed words devoid of all compassion, all tenderness, all sense of things needful or the possibility of things needful - it asks me if I want to initialize Drive One or Drive Two. In other words do I want to start my life over?

It's a pretty big question; I've got to admit. I'm not even past the Zero Hard Disks Present part yet. I don't answer. Instead, I turn the computer off and turn it back on again. I do that a few times just in case it's all a big mistake. Of course it isn't.

So what's that supposed to mean? Zero Hard Disks Present. I guess I'll be asking much the same thing with much the same incredulity, using some sort of post-verbal longhand, when death comes and sits next to me robed in finality. Just comes. And is there. No drama. No escape. "supposed to mean? I'll ask. I wonder if death will give me the option of initializing another life or whether I'll want to.

Funny, but the definitive finality of death, the ultimate termination, the merciless cessation, has always hovered there in the corners of my consciousness, but has hit me only twice, I mean really hit me. The first time when we came upon that broken thing in the road that only moments before had been a girl and we bloodied ourselves in a vain, violent attempt to restore what was girl and chase what was thing while her boyfriend howled and howled as much for the mystery of it as for the tragedy, and we wondered where went all that was girl just a moment, just one moment ago before the crash.

Now this. It makes me wonder where all that was words went. What happened to them? Do they exist? Did they ever? Should I pound on the terminal like we did her chest? If I tipped it sideways would the screen bleed clotted words? Or are they encoded on a little master byte somewhere in IBM heaven where I can't get at them, where no one can? Goddam it! What exactly are those words? And how much of them is me or me them? And if they're gone, where am I? I should've taken one of those crazy semiotics courses in college then I'd know. At least I'd ask better questions. Maybe computer science and theology courses would have been more valuable - made me more diligent about backing up my stuff, going to church.

It makes me wonder what's the point. ‘What's the point?’ is exactly what I think. Nothing new, this thought. Nothing new. Like love is nothing new and then it slams you to your knees and tramples you into the mud of perpetual revelation.

It makes me realize, too, that a guy doesn't grieve for his own death. Oh, I suppose I'll tell my wife and family and maybe even the people at the parties who always ask so politely how my writing career is going which pretty much sets me up as a fraud because it never was a career and now it isn't even writing. They'll all feel really bad for me. Maybe I'll wallow in their sympathy for a while and manufacture myths about what might have been. But I don't think I'll need to being dead. Maybe the need is in them, to express sympathy and consequently inform with meaning the morning manipulations of my fingers on the keys, and in so doing feel more comfortable about their own pathetic manipulations mornings, noons, and nights.

It's strange, but my first thought when I realized what happened - or was happening, I hesitate to use the past tense as if it would confirm the reality of the event - was of my brother, Mike. Jesus H. Computer Expert.

He'll know what to do. In an hour he'll be awake. In another he'll be at work sitting by his phone ready to make my computer world right. I'll call him. It's either that or pray; at least with Mike I'll get an answer.

I know what he'll tell me, though. "Sorry," he'll say. But until he does, I've got this this window of grace. I'm dead and in that tunnel and moving up. For now he's that glowing world and those familiar faces at the end, so compelling ... and so false. Now, for some reason, I know for certain that all those tales of tunnels and lights and heavens and returns are just tales - desperate last attempts by the brain to fool itself to the end, to deny death by doing what it does best creating fictions, generating lies. Like me writing. Like me half-believing Mike can resurrect my disk. And wondering if he could, would I want him to?

I mean, hey, what are my options? Mike either nails my bootless bones into an IBM coffin, or he shoos me back down this tunnel so full of grace and fiction and out into a world where girls break and disappear but stupid words like mine remain.

Maybe I'll wait till tomorrow to call him.

 

 

Mitchell Metz graduated from Brown University in 1981 with a degree in English Literature, Honors program. But mostly he played football and wrote bad poetry for four years.