Despite what she might think, I really do want to know my wife better. I can tell there are things she wants from me or needs from me, important things she doesn’t know how to tell me. That isn’t my objection to getting the app—not really objection. My trepidation is, I think, giving my wife total insight into my mess. The past months or, if I am being honest, the past couple of years I feel like I have gotten further and further away from being the man/husband I want to be. But that’s also the thought that has me driving to the mall on a Sunday afternoon, going up and down the parking garage looking for a spot.
When I get to the store the greeter checks me in for the Imovation Station and asks me the nature of the issue. So I tell her about the app and how it’s pretty large and I still want to keep a lot of my other apps, which I start to list out to her, which is when she stops typing. She looks up at me with what I expect to be some absolute judgment, but she has a cordial smile as she asks me, “So, is this a memory issue?”
“Yes? I think. I’m not sure,” I say.
“I’m going to put it down as memory.” After she makes sure there isn’t anything else going on with my Imbed, she stares intently at my face as she updates the photo in my customer profile and tells me they’ll send a message when my Imovator is available to help me.
Available to help me. I spend some time walking around the store looking at all the latest gadgets they’re selling to augment our Imbeds. I don’t know what was so wrong with phones that we needed something more. It’s kind of like the appointment at the Imovation Station. At home I select the soonest available window, I show up 15 minutes early to check in, and I’m still probably waiting an hour or more until someone is available to help me. It’s the same problem, just more steps.
I wasn’t really surprised when my wife “gifted” me a subscription for a couple’s mindfulness app. Sponsored content has been coming up in her social media feed for a while now. You might have seen them. There will be a series of couples (often young, always attractive) doing one-sided interviews where they talk generally about how their relationship was transformed thanks to the app. Transformed. All interspersed with generic clips of couples jogging or cooking playfully together or folding the laundry while smiling like lunatics.
When I try to temper my wife’s expectations, she asks me why I have to be so negative.
“It’s worth a shot at least,” she says.
What I don’t say, what I feel like I shouldn’t say, is that I don’t see myself in any of those couples. I don’t think our problem is that we’re not exercising enough together. Maybe there are things that go beyond what the app is meant to handle.
It isn’t thirty minutes before they message me to make my way to a station where I meet my Imovater. He stares blankly for a moment as he does a quick name and visual confirmation and starts reviewing my issue. I can’t tell if this guy is my age or slightly older or very much younger. I want him to be younger than me, so my tech issue won’t be so embarrassing.
“Sorry if this issue is kind of basic,” I say to the Imovator, “I’m not a technology guy”.
“No problemo, that’s what we’re here for. And besides, I always tell people it’s better to be safe than sorry. We had a woman bring in her boyfriend just last week. He’d watched some how-to videos and accidentally reset his Imbed to factory settings.”
“No.”
“Yeah. Hey, If it’s alright with you, I’d like to physically connect.”
I pause. It’s not totally alright with me.
“When I’m working with people’s memory files I like to use the physical connection in case wifi gets buggy with all the competing signals, you know?”
“Sure,” I say and take the cord, inserting the usb-x connection in the port behind my left ear. “But the guy, you can fix that, the cloud?”
“Well, get this, the dude couldn’t revert to a backup on the cloud, because he’d canceled his subscription when he hit the basic limits. Seven years of his life, man, completely blank-slated.”
“Tabula rasa.”
“Uh, yeah. For sure. So, as I look at your system, everything’s updated, looks like your processor speed is good, you’ve just got a ton of stuff taking up space that doesn’t need to be there.”
I ask him what he means, and he shows me that what’s taking space really aren’t the other apps. It’s decades of videos and photos and text messages all the way back to when I was in college. I tell him I don’t want to lose them, and he kind of laughs and tells me, dude, that’s why we have the cloud. Yeah, if I want to pull up something from the cloud it’s another step, and it might take a second longer to process, but even if I’m in, like, the middle of the Sahara desert, I’ll still be able to retrieve it.
“There are satellites everywhere, bro. We’re more connected now than we’ve ever been.”
But if I don’t like that option, he tells me, I can delay the inevitable storage problem by getting an external hard drive for all the old data that I probably never look at anyways, “Or you just don’t download the app.”
He is trying to solve this problem, the system problem. And those are the options. But they don’t solve my problem.
Which I don’t think is his fault.
The whole process of exporting my old data to the cloud and installing the app takes a little under fifteen minutes. My Imovator tells me once I’m on the same wifi as my wife, the apps on our Imbeds will pair and then everything should kind of take their course from there.
He confirms with me that there are no other issues with my Imbed and marks the session as resolved. He gets up to go and stops, turns back to me, and says, “If you can, please complete the survey I just sent you, my name’s Ahmet.”
As I drive out of the mall parking garage, I fixate a bit on Ahmet’s story about the guy who got blank-slated. I try to imagine what that would be like. If that wouldn’t be easier in a way. Burn the ships. Give up the past.
But then what?
I think about my dad, the way he is now. Nothing but golf apps. His entire system. He’s retired, of course. But that’s who he’s become. We’ll go for dinner with my parents, my wife and my mom will talk a river, and I’ll turn to my dad. If I ask him what he’s been up to lately, he’ll share a video of his backswing with brightly diagramed instructions to fix his hook. If I ask him if he’s happy, he’ll tell me how many strokes he’s statistically over or under his handicap on courses he’s never played. If I ask him if he ever wishes he’d done things different. Maybe that’s unfair. I’m sure I’ve never asked him that.
I wonder if I could do that, replace everything with work or fantasy football.
Before I know it, I’m driving down my street and I can feel my pulse quicken, my breath shorten. I pull into the driveway and my Imbed syncs with our house wifi.
Pairing… the app says
I don’t know what this will do to us.
Pairing…
I don’t know how she will feel when she sees.
Complete.
A list appears of audio/video clips under “emotionally charged occurrences.” I realize it is a record of our life these past months. We are watching TV or in the middle of a fight, at dinner with her friends or looking at a pregnancy test, and next to each there is a one word description.
She is frustrated. She is angry. She is sad. She is lonely. Giddy, bitter, remorseful, lonely, hopeful, shattered, lonely, coping, angry, empty, lonely, lonely.
The app pings that I am experiencing my first emotionally charged occurrence.
It asks me to describe how I am feeling.
And I don’t know what to put, except, sorry.
I am so sorry.
That’s when I see my wife open the door to our house. She steps out onto the landing and she looks at me parked in the driveway of our home. She looks at me and I can see now she is crying. And I am crying. And I don’t know whether this feeling is coming from her or if it is coming from me.
