In a recent issue of the magazine, I wrote about people in their twenties and some books that focus on their plight. The piece begins with an account of some weeks I spent in Iceland, in my own early twenties, and in working on that passage I relied on both memory and record. I’m a pack rat when it comes to correspondence and ephemera: I still have every substantive note or e-mail I’ve sent or received since the start of college—perhaps even earlier—plus pamphlets, birthday cards, maps, Playbills, boarding passes, brochures, brittle magazines, and fancy hardbound notebooks that I’ve started in the hope of reinventing myself as someone who writes in fancy hardbound notebooks. Who’d have thought that a map of businesses in pre-crash Reykjavík would one day help me write a book review? Not my twenty-two-year-old self, certainly. And yet that map, like many notes and e-mails from those weeks, was crucial in reëntering a particular experience years later—not just to tell the story to readers but to reclaim it as a memory of my own.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the evocative power of cast-off material, because the day that twentysomething piece appeared, my laptop died. It was a galling loss: it left me wandering around the house all morning, eating stale crackers and feeling like an unyoked mule before I figured out how to move forward again. I had a second laptop, I realized—an old one, stuffed into a bookshelf by my desk. It would be perfect. Yet I kept demurring. I’d retired that computer, with complicated feelings, years before. Put plainly, the machine—which I called Laptop, capital L: the genus particularized, like “God”—stands, even now, as one of the great, haunting loves of my young-adult life.
It was an affection born of shared interests and mutual experience. I bought Laptop when I was twenty, and for years after we were inseparable. We lived together in school, in the city, abroad, and back home—some ten towns on two continents in total, with short trips to several more in between. Laptop followed me to countless cafés, bounced through hostels, patiently waited at research libraries, and offered no complaint about the odd hours or the basic loneliness of his endeavors. I wrote college papers on him, then a thesis. Hundreds of pages later, he helped me compose my first magazine work. Laptop is an IBM T42: a stripped-down, strangely square model that was the standard issue at my university tech store. But he has a rare, marvellous keyboard—deep, well-defined, solid—and has proved indestructible. The only T42 I ever saw give up the ghost belonged to a friend who treated it badly—flinging it onto tables, hammering cruelly at its keys, and dropping it repeatedly—until, one day (I think there might have been spillage involved), she broke the unbreakable. That was around the time I started to suspect that people’s rapports with their laptops reveal more about them than we might want to know.
Here’s what I’ll tell you about mine, then, with the cool objectivity of sudden reacquaintance. Laptop is dusty these days. His shell is slightly scratched. But he’s still bright on the inside—even polished—thanks to the years of oiling by fingertips and palms. He bears the marks of his experience. The A, S, E, D, C, O, L, N, and M keys are worn down to a point of near-illegibility. There’s evidence of lots of activity on the BACKSPACE key—though, having just sifted through a bunch of writing from those years, I think maybe not quite enough. Crumbs were, and continue to be, a problem.
Still, he looks basically great. I turned him on. His hourglass spun. Half an hour later, after a long, groggy, somewhat painful-to-watch reveille, I found myself facing the desktop I’d worked on all those years. This is a little like trying on those weird pants that you wore in high school: memories, not all salutary, rush back; habits return; a mind-set reasserts itself, mocking the progress that you thought you’d made. For instance, e-mail. I’d nearly forgotten what a prolific, voluble, and capricious e-mailer I was for most of my early twenties; seeing Laptop’s home screen brought back an old feeling, and I found myself tempted to fire off a string of prolix missives. Other, obscurely related anxieties followed. Not long after I began to use Laptop again, I started to have strange dreams about failing to find gainful employment after school.
Nothing I discovered on Laptop’s hard drive, in fact, keeps the past at bay. It’s all there: all the awkward notes I’ve written, all the early drafts of projects I had gratefully forgotten. In my twentysomething essay, I mention a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to the young poet John Lehmann. She advised, “The years from twenty to thirty are years … of emotional excitement. The rain dripping, a wing flashing, someone passing—the commonest sounds and sights have power to fling one, as I seem to remember, from the heights of rapture to the depths of despair. And if the actual life is thus extreme, the visionary life should be free to follow. Write then, now that you are young, nonsense by the ream.” I seem to have taken such counsel deeply to heart. There’s also lots of weird music, music I’d forgotten that I ever heard, music like the Gipsy Kings playing “My Way”; a song about a talking crocodile by the German industrial metal band Rammstein; and, from Leonard Nimoy’s brief, creepy incarnation as a pop star, a moist ballad called “I’d Love Making Love to You.” (“I know you don’t know me, where I’ve been, or what I’ve done / And you’re not sure if all I’ve told you has been true….”)
Laptop’s air of general anachronism makes this cultural detritus doubly strange. He was around for long enough to join the transition from .doc to .docx, but just barely, and his processing often gets lost somewhere between the present and the past. His Web syntax is charmingly outmoded: I was a relatively early arrival to Facebook, and the standing bookmark still goes to TheFacebook.com, the site’s Mesozoic incarnation. Two of his three browsers are so out-of-date that Web sites think he is an early smartphone; home pages answer him with giant type and stripped-down formatting, as if yelling, at full voice, into his digital ear. The Internet has a cruel nose for obsolescence.
I’m chagrined to admit that these patient, quaint ways spelled the end of our working relationship. Some years ago, my life began accelerating while his slowed further down. We quarrelled more and more; I found myself screaming impatiently at him for his endless start-up rituals, his languorous browsing, his frequent stalled confusions. It was time to move on to a system more my speed. That was a heartbreaking realization, after the years and the distances we’d crossed together. Yet even after I’d stopped using Laptop, even when he’d been replaced, I tried to give him the retirement he’d earned: a comfortable shelf, a perch nearby, a lot of rest. I was never able to unplug him fully; it seemed to me that’s not something you do to a friend. Instead, I tried to carry some of his best qualities forward. His successor—the computer now itself in the I.C.U.—has the same desktop wallpaper, a photograph I took in the Bois de Boulogne, in winter, during a half year I spent studying in Paris: one of the first adventures Laptop and I shared. We work together well, the new computer and I, and we’ve come a distance on our own. But, when I’m honest with myself, I might admit: it’s not the same.
So coming back to Laptop this past week has been a bittersweet experience. I find myself surprised at how quickly I’ve settled into the old rhythms: as another writer noted in another context, it all comes back—and soon. After a couple of days spent typingsentenceslikethis, my thumbs readjusted to the stiff action on his spacebar. By the time I’d delivered my first piece, staring into Laptop’s high, pixilated text window no longer felt like an odd journey into distant memory. Even his time warp of a browsing history (“Free Studio on Park Ave. for Personal Assistant!”) and retro list of applications (what, exactly, was Google Talk, and what did humans use it for?) have lost their defamiliarizing edge. We like to think we make progress, but, in the end, perhaps we only change. Somewhere in memories we thought we’d lost but all too rapidly regain, there lurks a moral for computing and for life: press save.
Illustration by Tim Lahan.
