The Machine’s Arrival by Mensah Demary

I was twenty-five. My father and I were in his living room: the floors were overcast like marble and, along the walls, various prints featured animated Jazz musicians in suspended animation, frozen in creative glee. We spoke of my future, a topic-on-loop since I left Georgia. Back in New Jersey for the first time, full-time, in seven years, without a college degree or a sense of what I’d like to do in the “professional” arena, I relied on what was—and remains—my primary desire: writing.

“Well Dad,” I said, “I’m thinking about an English degree. I mean, I don’t know. Not much money in an English degree.”

“That is true,” my father said.

“I could teach.”

“You could. But you mentioned an MBA a few years ago.” Prior to my first marriage, days before maybe, I talked about attaining a business degree. For what purpose, I had no idea. In what hopes, no clue. “Business” was analogous to “stable” and in the midst of an impending marriage, stability, in all its forms, seemed appealing.

“It’s not what I want to do,” I said. “I’m not interested in being a businessman. Just seems like means to an end.”

“Right,” my father said, “so get a degree to help pay the bills. Who said you can’t work and write at the same time?”

What I thought was, “It’s not about time, Dad.” What I said was, “I hear you.”

Before my family was obliterated by divorce, we lived in a three bedroom home, an “A-frame” house, with wood siding and a deck that wrapped around half the building like an incomplete skirt, and a small front yard where my brothers and I, neighborhood kids included, engaged in whiffle ball, tackle football and foot races.

I was seven. My father, in school for his Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing, brought home a word processor: a fifteen inch monitor atop of a horizontal base where the computer’s inner-workings were housed. The computer was utilitarian: though it had the shape of more flexible PCs, it processed words…and nothing else.

Before the machine’s arrival, I had no discernible desire to write. I was atypical, I suppose. I didn’t care for reading as entertainment, I never scribbled stories in a spiral notebook. But I played with action figures, pretended to be a ninja and spoke to myself often. My mother thought I had an imaginary friend. When I told her, “No Mom, I’m talking to myself,” she frowned and said, “Dennis, only crazy people do that.” So sure, I had the makeup of a writer, after all.

Writing surfaced as a means to emulate my father and, therefore, garner his approval. He spent many nights on the terminal, keyboard “click-clacking” in the name of academia, of medicine. Being seven, I thought of cartoons and ways to piss off my younger sister. One day, I asked my father if I could use his computer.

“It’s a word processor,” he said.

“I want to write a story.”

“Really? Tell me about it.”

“I have to write it first, Dad.” He sighed and fumbled in a desk drawer and pulled out a plastic case. Inside were square, black disks. Each one had a colorful label to them: he handed me a blue one.

I sat down and inserted the disc, like I saw him do many times before. After that, I looked up for guidance. The screen had a black background with white lettering. There was no mouse. There were no Windows. Again, utilitarian. Myopic in its purpose. The screen displayed so many file options: open, close, erase, and a hundred more ways to create and handle a document. My father walked me through the process and, within minutes, I was confronted with my first blank screen.

“Press this button here,” he said, pointing at the keyboard, “when you want to save.”

I spent what now seems like days on my first story. “The Man Who Died And Came Back Alive.” I will admit that while my titles have improved over the years, I still lack a general feeling, a seventh sense, so to speak, and my titles still trip over themselves. That said, the printout was 1.5 pages long.

I don’t remember how the man died and, more importantly, what force brought him back to life. The idea itself was as fantastical as I could get. Defeating death—this was the secretive preoccupation of my childhood. My father, upon reading the story, was neither worried about my state of mind nor impressed. To give him some credit, maybe he was impressed that I actually did what I set out to do; the product, on the other hand, achieved a pat on the head.

“Good, Dennis. Good.”