The Screen

-The Screen-
by ali shaw

I had always wanted to own a three-wheeled motor car until one smashed
me off of the pedestrian crossing, and out onto the hot black tarmac of
the T-Junction, where tyres wheezed to abrupt halts just inches away
from me, and horns sounded violently, as if a fox hunt were riding
through the town.

I sat up expecting to feel a plethora of bruises and broken bones
calling for my attention. Although my back was stinging from my fall, I
felt, with thankful surprise, no real harm done, no wounds and no
shattered appendages. I moved into a kneel, and then grappled with my
balance to get back on my feet, concentrating my vision past the giddy
brightness of the noontide sun. A ring of bewildered car drivers stared
at me through dusty windscreens, but nobody offered any aid. As for the
culprit, I could see the tiny, tri-wheeled frame scuttling away into
the smoggy distance, too ashamed or too afraid to face the consequences
of barging through a red light and into a pedestrian.

Permitting this audience in this make-shift arena a glimpse of my
escapee's grin, I strode away and continued on my journey home,
conducting an inner celebration because my life remained intact. I set
my heart upon a hot bath, and some tea cakes to accompany it.

I was heading past the train station when I noticed the screen for the
first time ever.

At school, I had been called Midgie by my classmates, partly because of
my height, and partly because of the grubby lenses of my glasses, thick
as your thumb, that made my eyes as big as an insect's. I was fortunate
in that my eyesight developed dramatically for the good in my teenage
years, and I was not wearing glasses on the day that the three-wheeler
slammed into my side like a battering ram pounding through a castle
door.

When one wears glasses, one doesn't often notice the frames. They skulk
about like beggars excluded from a city centre. Only occasionally do
they pester the corners of one's vision, and in those moments the
memory that the world is seen through a screen returns, like the
recollection of unpaid bills.

I reiterate that I was not wearing glasses, I pressed my hand to my
forehead just to be sure. And yet, I was so suddenly aware of a screen
that I stopped dead in the street. My world had shrunk into a frame
that was so palpable, and contrasted so violently with what I could
glimpse outside of it, that the only comparison is with the huge cinema
screens that one finds in the largest of modern multiplexes. And, as a
frame hangs on a wall, there was a black wall without this
screen.

This meant that what I had until now taken to be light searing through
the lenses of my eyeballs and into my retinae was actually some sort of
electric signal pushing its way through fibre optics onto a giant
monitor. Which meant that the nexus of my sight was viewing the screen,
and therefore not of it. Presumably, then, I could remove my focus from
the screen, to see what was on either side.

Solemnly, I turned my head to the left. My neck felt stiff, but I let
my gaze follow the wall behind the screen, turning a right angle
towards me just after the screen, and then running past me, over my
shoulder and behind my back through monotone darkness, then around to
join the first wall. No doors, no windows, only myself and the enormous
screen, on which, like a movie, my life rolled on.

I looked down.

My body appeared as two things at once, or rather it felt utterly my
own, humming with the warmth of the blood and organs I had shared so
much with, and presented itself physically as something entirely alien.
It was flesh coloured, but that was the limit of the comparison I could
draw with what I was accustomed to seeing in the mirror. My lower body
was, more or less, a block of fleshy jelly, jam-packed with probes and
wires, each of which ran out of my flesh and through sockets in the
floor. Not a knobbly knee or a dirty toe nail in sight, not even a
thigh or a shin, just a slightly translucent block of flab, hairy with
wire, syringes and pads.

Similar apparatus prickled across my torso, which was only a little
more conventional than my lower half, owning puny little arms,
stretching out in front of me for no more than a foot. At that point,
they branched out into slim palms, with ten fingers and two thumbs
each. These hands were holding a curved piece of unreflecting metal,
covered in brightly coloured buttons, one for each finger, and a big
red ball as on the base of a computer mouse, for each of the thumbs
that were not occupied with supporting the device. Lying a little way
across the texture-less floor was something that looked not dissimilar
to a broken neck brace.

Needless to say, I was a mite confused by this stage in the afternoon,
and quickly looked back up at the enormous screen.

There were the cars, the pavements, the double yellow lines and the
barber's shop sign. There was a young mother thrusting her daughter
forward in front of her and scowling down at me, here in my one man
audience. I glanced back at the pad in my hands. Beneath it, somewhere
on my belly, an orifice I can only term the stomach nostril briefly
issued out a rich blue gas, and sculpted it into a twirling
helter-skelter before it dissipated again. I tried to ignore this
unpleasant new feature of my body, and commanded one of my pallid new
thumbs to twirl the red ball on the handset to the right.

The view on the screen swung with it. I rolled the ball left, and then
up, and my view on the screen obeyed appropriately. I pressed a green
button at random, and saw the world shudder as I jumped up and down on
the screen's pavement. By this point, I was wondering rather
desperately about what was going on, but I continued to experiment,
holding down a yellow button. "What ever's going on?" the screen said,
using my usual voice.

As I tested the buttons individually and then in escalating
combinations of complexity, I performed increasingly outlandish actions
on screen, and received stranger and stranger glances from the passing
inhabitants of the pavement. Yet I was far less concerned by the
judgements of others with a gargantuan rectangle between their lives
and mine. I was rapidly assuming mastery of the controls to this
strange game, and although I blundered into one or two lamp posts, I
managed to guide myself through the remaining five minutes worth of my
homeward bound journey in just over two hours, going by the watch on my
screen arm. I was pleased with myself, considering that I had just
unveiled the long suspected hidden terror of my entire life - as I had
known it for forty-two years - having been nothing but an elaborate
projection operated by twenty colourful buttons and a ball.

To comfort myself, I ran the bath and made the tea cakes. When I dipped
my virtual finger into the running waters, I could feel it, piping hot,
swimming across my skin. When I lifted my teacake to my virtual mouth,
one of the many wires implanted in my new skin whispered fanatically,
and I felt the familiar taste of toasted teacake, uniquely sweet and
crunchy, crumbling on my tongue. Whether or not I truly possessed a
tongue was impossible to say, for there was nothing in this vast black
room that would reflect my newly acquired features.

When I was not really lying in the bath, and not really feeling real
water on my real naked flesh, I began to wonder about the future. I
wondered what would happen when the character I was portraying on this
giant screen died. Would I be assigned another? I began to wonder what
the objective of operating this frail little man through this vast
universe really was, and I was disappointed to realise that the same
age old question had not made itself any clearer. Yet there was
something safer about my day to day living, now that I had something
other so concrete to believe in. As assorted needles pumped the
sensations of piping hot steam into my body, as it licked my cheeks and
chin, an unusually cheerful mood gripped me. As a bat hurtled back and
forth above my yard at dusk, I marvelled at the special effects
achieved by all of this bizarre technology. Not only was the bat a
beautiful streamer of darkness in the air, but each plank of drab grass
was a miraculous pattern of possible sensations. I went to work the
next day, transformed into the most dedicated aesthete ever to walk the
Earth, precipitated two affairs, got fired, drunk, and arrested by
seven thirty, without ever once losing a second of glee. I began to
believe that this vast world was created for the sole purpose of the
pleasure principle. Everything was permissible and every indulgence
crafted exclusively to give me joy. I had known a lot of people who
lived like that throughout the years, but not until now had I fully
comprehended the excesses of happiness that came hand in hand alongside
that lifestyle.

I was arrested, jailed, and served ten years as punishment for my
sudden, whimsical attitude.

There is little I can record about the aching expanse of a dull day in
prison. Sometimes I would spend hours watching the occasionally
twitching wires that slipped in and out of my stationary body, rather
than contemplate the four thousand and twenty seven bricks that
composed the view on the screen. The only highlight was being whisked
outside for exercise, skipping being particularly engrossing because it
required the utmost precision when manipulating my handset
controller.

I sat through ten years of prison, and left with nothing, save for two
ideas.

The first was that, very probably, the presence of pain in my existence
meant that hedonism was, after all, not the meaning of life.

The second, that to continue as an atheist while faced with such a
miraculous rapport of technology, creativity, places and people and
entities unfathomable to my slim experience - each one complete with a
thousand unique qualities to be explored, would be roughly as
intelligent as saying that there is no colour other than grey. I
resolved, therefore, to set off on a quest; to use the virtual world of
the screen to track down, and break into, if such a thing were
possible, the tangible world in which I sat, a lone figure, plugged and
wired into the floor of a vacuous black room.