Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

The doctor found his car in the parking lot, one of the last three there, and joined the flow on the street. He drove with his air-conditioner fan on full blast, into traffic as the sun set, into dusk, with the full moon rising in his rearview mirror, almost taunting him with her big presence in his car alone and every car around and none of it being how he liked to think or was interested in thinking. And yet. Why did he love the rabbi? He loved her. He got home and looked through the mail, and he had driven past the drive-through, so instead he sent out for a meatball sandwich, which he ate in pieces, because it was too unwieldy to eat all at once, and even the bread he cut into bite-sized parts. He could feel it, just feel it, the glimmer of something that he did not understand. He would never call it God. He would not call it prayer. But just beyond his sandwich, and the four TV shows he watched back to back, and his teeth brushing, and his face washing, and his nighttime reading of a magazine, and his light switching off, just the faint realization that there were many ways to live a life and that some people were living a life that was very different than his, and the way they lived was beyond him and also didn’t interest him and yet he could sense it. Comfort and fear rose together inside him. Like standing in the middle of a meadow, where no one had his back.

I can’t remember the words of things. The words for words. I have lost my words. What’s this from? Is it the Internet? Texting? E-mail? I see it in kids, too; it’s not an aging thing. An aging issue. I do know that at the supermarket yesterday, I asked the guy where the weighing thing was, the thing that weighs other things, flailing around with my hands, indicating, and he crumpled up his forehead and said, “You mean the scale?”

“Yes”—I said, beaming, pumping his hand—“the scale!” As if he was the winner of an SAT prize giveaway.

At the doctor’s office, I told my doc that it was sore.

“What’s sore?”

I pointed to my neck. “This.”

“Your throat,” he said.

“Of course,” I said.

We went over my symptoms. He gave me a subscription.

With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience , fastness instead of speed , honestness instead of honesty . With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works. At the shoe store, I watched a lady walk up to the mini socks and point right at them, and the salesguy knew just what she wanted. Plus, who knows what those flimsies are called anyway.

“Cavemen point,” said Susan, my neighbor, one Saturday morning. “You can always point at what you want, but you’d be returning to Neanderthal standards.”

“Well, maybe we’re going back to caveman times,” I said, pouring a circle of wet pancake into the pan. “Tech forward, language back.”

“Reverting,” she said.

“What?”

“ Reverting to caveman times.”

“That’s not my word choice,” I said, picking up the flipper thing. “I said ‘going back’ on purpose. I don’t like that word, reverting .”

“If it was on purpose, then fine,” she said, standing a fork on its end.

I flipped the pancake. “Oh, fuck off,” I said.

Once the edges were all gold, I put one on her plate. A perfect goldy circle. She smiled at me. But not a thank-you smile, no: a self-satisfied one. She always looks so smug. Smug, smug, smug. I like that word very much, and I won’t forget it easily.

Susan calls social Web sites silly distractions. She refuses to even look at an electronic book, because she says she must have pages, must. Fine; I read pages, too. I too enjoy the book smell everybody goes on and on about. Time for the perfumists to wake up, right? A perfume called Book? With its cologne follow-up, Newspaper? The question is, does she have to be so goddamn righteous about it? Does she have to raise her eyebrows like that, when I mention an app? She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind. She rolled her eyes then, way back into her head. She’s not even my girlfriend. We did sleep together once, right when I moved in, but then it sort of drizzled away. We both got busy and I woke up to the neighbor problem. The neighbor-lover problem. And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it’s better than smoking, that’s what I say. It’s the new, lung-safe cigarette.

“Those breathing things,” a student of mine said last week, gesturing at her chest. She was trying to explain to me why she had to miss the history test. I nodded. I got it.

“Pneumonia,” she said.

“You okay?”

“I think so,” she said. “The doctor gave me drugs.”

“Drugs?”

She thought for a second. She made that little wheeze sound. “Antirobotics?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “So you will not become a robot,” I said.

“Hope not,” she laughed.

In the daytime, I work at a school where I teach junior-high-school history. I have been working there for eight years, since I had a crisis of identity in law school and realized I hated reading red and beige books. Teaching’s way better. I teach American history, and, true, we do spend a lot of time on the Revolutionary War, more than on any other war, but junior-high-school kids like the idea of people throwing tea in the water.

You’d think in school it might be better with the words, but it’s worse. When we have a good class discussion, my students will sometimes raise their hands with enthusiasticness, jumping up and down in their seats, but by the time I get around to calling on them, most of them say, “I forgot what I was going to say.” A good 50 percent of the time. I have taught now for a long time and this did not happen even five years ago. It is new.

“Where did it go?” I ask.

“Where did what go?”

“Your point?”

They shrug. “Don’t know,” they say. They hold up their cell phones. “Sorry. We are holding a lot of small things in our heads.”

“What things?” I say.

“Things,” they say. “In our …”

They point to their heads.

“We are holding a lot of them.”

I’d be irritated, except as soon as they leave I have a thing I am planning to do and I walk into the center of the room to do it and whatever it was flies away. Half my days I find myself standing in the centers of rooms.

In some study, they say phones and computers are replacing our cerebral cortexes, externalizing our thoughts so that we do not need to think them—the same way certain couples will have one quiet, meeky person who trails off all the sentences and one overeager type who leaps in to finish. We’re the trailer-offer, Google’s our jumpy mate. Susan is worried about this, but is it so bad? Sure, Shakespeare knew ten thousand words, or a million words, just a lot of words, and he was real good at what he did, but also no women were allowed in his shows and if you got sick with pneumonia you’d just die, probably in two days, and only half the children made it to age ten. So it’s a trade-off, is what I say.

Susan shook her head. “It’s no trade,” she said. She was over again, with wine. “Meaning,” she said, “you can improve your vocabulary and still get your amoxicillin and vote. It’s not like there’s a checklist and for each era we only get ten helpful options, and everything else goes to shit.”