Hello Laptop, My Old Friend

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.

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Tim Lahan