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the stratosphere. If Tsai had
assumed Misha was one person she could still ask for
a favor, she would be right. Misha sometimes wished
it weren’t that way.
    With a
couple hours left to kill, Misha downed a pill and
sat in her familiar position on the couch. The buzz encircling her eyebrows
simmered down to a tolerable level that still promised its future return in a
few hours. As Misha’s mind cleared, the question
posed by the young man on the night of the big screen unveiling popped into her
thoughts. Who are people when they're in the screen? Misha had asked herself the same overarching question from a young age, but there was
no one to talk to about it. Once, she had tried with her mother and the result
had been awkward. For a split second, Misha had
thought she saw a glimmer of shared sentiment in her mom’s face. But the words
that left her mouth amounted to, “You’ll see when you grow up.” But Misha didn’t come to see. She didn’t see in kindergarten,
seated around other children who were inductees like herself into a new world
nebulously called the Screen. She didn’t see as she entered her thirties and
continued to work thankless and pointless jobs in the screen environment, not
knowing a single soul around her. She had nearly become convinced that she
simply lacked the wisdom to see, but was not fully sold on that either. In her
mind, but also seemingly out in the world, it was forbidden to talk about it.
Maybe she was crazy.
    Or was
she? There actually was someone out there to talk to. She had known it all
along, but had been scared to act on the implicit invitation. Maybe now she
could. Misha walked over to the fridge and rearranged
magnets, photos, and receipts until she found what she was looking for.
Standing in front of the big screen, she typed the necessary digits into the
phone app. The line rang five times and just as Misha was about to give up and end the call, she heard a click and a familiar voice
greeting her. “Earl, it’s me— Misha .” Earl replied
immediately without the typical delay of most responses, “Wait.”
    “I can
call back if you’re busy,” Misha offered and Earl
interrupted her quickly. “Hold on.” She had never heard this level of
assertiveness or urgency in his voice and wondered immediately what was wrong.
Had she been ill-advised to call Earl? “Turn over and read the back of the
card,” Earl spoke softly after a moment. What was Earl talking about? Misha looked at her hand and the business card she was
holding there. On the front of the card, it displayed Earl’s contact
information at Mind Memo and the small light bulb logo that represented the
company. Upon turning it over to the back, she found one line of large words
hastily scrawled in pencil and scrunched into the small white rectangular
space. It read, “Who is she while she’s in the screen?” Misha looked up from the card and saw small flecks of color enter her vision.
    She
wondered again like the night before, what was happening? Earl had known she
was going to call. He had written her question on the card. She didn’t know
what to say next. Before she could figure it out Earl continued, “We have to
meet. Morton’s tomorrow at three. I’ll see you then.” He abruptly hung up. Misha could not take enough pills lately to stave off the
buzz and it had now begun to return in small pangs everywhere. She yanked
herself from reaching for the pill bottle and closed her eyes for a moment. It
was time to stop. If the buzz was going to come, it was going to come. Her
meeting with Tsai was fast approaching and time was ticking out on the screen’s
reminder system. How did the screen know she had a meeting with Tsai when she
had never entered it in? With all questions suspended in the living room, Misha walked outside into the brisk air that propelled her
toward an uncertain future.
    --------------------------
    The city
streets contained technological stragglers who still worked jobs in the