Their eyes even lit up, like they were excited by my request.
“We’re not supposed to do this,” they said gleefully, like a teenager playing hooky for the first time. They leaned in and turned their computer screen toward me.
And there she was.
Joey popped up on the screen, following a woman—another caseworker,I realized—through a hallway not unlike the one through which I had just passed. I turned to the doorway. It couldn’t be—
I stood up.
“You won’t find her out there,” they warned me.
All-knowing son of a—I felt suddenly irritated and impatient with my caseworker. “Where is that?” I asked, retaking my seat and nodding to the monitor.
“That’s one of our offices.”
“Where? If I were to walk out into the hallway and wander for long enough, would I find her?” I asked with another jerk of my head toward the monitor.
“That’s not how the offices work.”
“Whenis that? Is that—” Joey looked just like she had on the night she—
The screen went dark. I slumped over. That was nearly thirty years ago. This was a fucking video recording.
“Whenis a complicated word.”
“It really isn’t,” I snapped.
“Not to you. It wouldn’t be to those who don’t understand it,” they said cryptically.
“I just want to know—is that happening right now? Is she… here somewhere?”
“She is not. And in point of fact, neither are you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It does not matter.”
“Of course it fucking matters. If I’m not here, where the hell am I?”
“You are nowhere. All that you are, your very being at this moment, is achoice. You are choosing where you would like to be. You are choosingwhenyou would like to be. Until that choice has been made, you are nowhere. You are no-when. You are no one.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose in frustration and took a deep breath.
“Okay. Well, if I’m a choice, my choice isher. I want to be with her. Wherever she is,whenevershe is—send me to her.”
My caseworker nodded, hit a button on the screen, and there Joey was again, this time on the familiar grounds of our college campus.
Even weirder, thereIwas.
It was surreal seeing myself, age eighteen, on that screen. It had been forty years since I’d seen that face staring back at me in the mirror.
It was weird to watch a memory I had forgotten I had. I used to love sitting at that picnic table reading whatever book I was devouring that week.
I used to read for pleasure.
Odd—I couldn’t fathom doing anything like that at this point. The only time I consumed art, I did it in front of my eighty-five-inch flat-screen while drinking cheap beer.
I expected the Joey on the screen to strut right past my eighteen-year-old self, but she stormed directly up to me and started telling me off for my taste in books.
