He was digging through old inboxes in disused email accounts when he found it. It wasn’t what he was looking for, but he couldn’t help but click for nostalgia’s sake. An email from May 2004. An old powerpoint he had made for his sixth-grade social studies class. It was a wonder the attachment was still hosted on the server. He opened it and smiled. The presentation was on the ancient Greek gods. Demeter, one slide said. Aphrodite.
The slide template was this tacky thing, mountains in the foreground and a vast blue sky above, brilliant shades of turquoise fading in a gradient to dark blue. The background, known as Mountain Top, was one of the design templates bundled with Powerpoint 2003.
As he stared at the laptop, he found himself drifting off…
And landed with a thump at the bottom of a dune. His sandaled feet sank deep into the sand. He was wearing that Casio watch his mom had given him for his eleventh birthday. On his right wrist, the way she wore hers.
In the distance, massive sandstone columns looming up from the desert floor. The sun had set a few minutes ago. Brilliant turquoise and teal behind the mountains as the last rays disappeared behind the horizon. Dark navy blue indigo purple above. The desert sky so huge you couldn’t take it in all at once. The desert air was crisp and cooling by the minute as the sun slipped away.
“Haven’t you had enough?” said his mother. “We have supper back at the hotel.”
“Just one more. Please, mum.” He clambered back up the dune, tripping over himself as he sank knee deep into the reddish sand. He paused at the top. It looked like another planet.
She sighed.
Smiling impishly, he launched himself off another dune, landing ten feet below in the thick sand. She snapped a picture with her oversized film camera. She was always doing that.
His sister waited in the Jeep grumpily. “You always let him get away with it,” she complained.
His dad, now stern, called out from the driver’s seat. “That’s enough now. We’re losing the light and we have a long drive ahead of us.”
Happy and exhausted, he trudged reluctantly back to the car. “Hang on. Stay still. You’re going to get it all over the car.” His mother fruitlessly batted at him with a scarf.
He could feel the sand gritting between his teeth and trapped under his waistband. He was thirsty. He didn’t mind.
“My darling boy,” she said.
He awoke from his reverie with a start. He was in the coffee shop. Hot latte in front of him. Laptop open. “What in God’s name just happened?” he said to himself, out loud.
He looked around, disoriented. He felt a new heaviness in his bones.
“Excuse me,” he said to the stranger sitting across from him at the table. “Did anything happen in here just now?”
“What do you mean?” replied the man, looking suspicious.
“Like anything unusual. To me?” He added, unhelpfully.
“I didn’t see anything. You’ve just been sitting there with a kind of glazed expression on your face.”
“For how long?”
“I wasn’t exactly counting. A few minutes. Are you ok? You look pale.”
“I’m fine, I think. Thanks.”
He shut the laptop and left hurriedly.
As he walked home, he was distraught. That wasn’t just a recollection, he thought to himself. I was actually there. It was real. I felt the sand between my toes. The desert breeze on my face. And my mom. I could smell her perfume.
He beat back tears, embarrassed.
He collected himself and called his girlfriend.
“Listen to me. The most unbelievable thing just happened. I know this sounds completely crazy. But I was just transported to a desert in Jordan for 15 minutes.”
“Settle down.” she said. “Are you high? It’s 11 am on a Tuesday. This isn’t like you.”
“No. I’m dead sober. I was just in a coffee shop and I had a kind of … a daydream? A reverie? You know when a smell or a sound stirs up an old memory and you feel transported? That just happened to me, but for real. I actually went somewhere.”
He explained the powerpoint, the desert, the dunes, the Jeep, and then waking up inside the coffee shop like nothing had happened.
“It was like I was inside my memory. I know where it was. It was a family trip we took to Jordan in the early two thousands. It was this red sand desert called Wadi Rum. And somehow, opening this sixth-grade class presentation sent me back there. Seeing the powerpoint again, twenty years later, triggered the recollection. But I actually went there.”
“Look,” she said. “I believe you. You really felt like you went to Jordan for a moment. It happens! Marcel Proust dipped a madeleine in tea and then wrote seven books about his childhood memories. But you didn’t actually … go … anywhere.”
He wasn’t convinced.
For the next few days, he was deeply unsettled. He had spent fifteen minutes as an eleven-year-old with his mom, and then he was abruptly back in the coffee shop in Boston with the latte. He used to pray that he would dream about her. But this was more real than any dream had been.
He brought it up to his therapist.
“Can an image trigger a memory so real you feel like you’re living it all over again?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” said the therapist. “Involuntary autobiographical memory. Often triggered by a sensory cue.”
“But to feel like you’re really in the memory. Living it.”
“Some recollections can be extremely vivid. Almost hallucinatory.”
She asked if he had been hearing voices or experiencing any paranoid delusions.
“No,” he said. “I just had a memory that I thought was real for a moment.”
“In that case, I’d only be concerned if the memory was distressing. Was it?”
“Not at all. It was… lovely, in fact.”
Involuntary auto something something, he thought to himself as he left the office. Nothing to worry about then. But he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that it had been real.
After turning the matter over in his head for weeks, he decided there was only one way to settle the question. I’ll just open up the file again and see what happens, he decided. All good science replicates.
With his heart furiously beating, he logged into his old Hotmail account and found the presentation. He hadn’t dared look since that time in the coffee shop.
Double click. Powerpoint loaded, slowly. The turquoise and blue background popped up. “Ancient Greek Gods” it was entitled. “Mr Miller’s Sixth Grade class.”
Nothing.
He was still sitting at home on his couch. Thirty-two years old. Still a consultant. At home in Boston. Same left shoulder injury.
He flicked through the presentation. Hermes. Dionysus. Poseidon.
He made it full screen and stared intensely at the low-resolution gradient of the mountains and the sky.
Still nothing.
He was crushed. He realized now that he had wanted nothing more than to go back for another fifteen minutes. To see his mom. To feel weightless and free jumping from the dunes. To smell the crisp clean air of the desert and watch the sun disappear behind the mountains.
Over the next few weeks he tried everything he could think of. He went back to the coffee shop and ordered the same drink and tried again in the same seat. He meditated and conjured the image in his head, focusing on it for minutes at a time. He visited his dad place and found a scrapbook with pictures from the trip. Christmas 2003 in Jordan, it was labeled. He gazed at the images hungrily, as if they could bring him back. Is this the picture my mom snapped when I jumped, he wondered.
Maybe he couldn’t force it. If he wanted it to happen, it wouldn’t. If he stumbled on it accidentally, it might. But he couldn’t think of a good way to surprise himself.
He tried to remember making the presentation. He had indeed been fascinated by that template at the time. Looking back at it as an adult it seemed comically low resolution and cheap. But he remembered his younger self being transfixed. The other slide templates you could pick were a mess of corporate blues and burgundy. There was the rippling water one that everyone used. He had picked the mountains. Sunset over a desert, the sky going dark. An unspoiled frontier.
He found it a bit funny in retrospect. Some product manager at Microsoft must have insisted on including it. “These templates are practical but dull. Let’s do one artistic, atmospheric one. Mountains in the desert after sunset.”
He had been out of sorts for weeks. Eventually, over dinner, he asked her:
“If you could go back and live in your 11-year-old body, would you?”
“Is this still about your daydream?” she said.
“No, it’s just a thought experiment. Humor me. Would you go back?” he said.
“Would I keep all of my current knowledge, or would the slate be wiped clean?”
“You wouldn’t know anything of your future. You’d just be 11 again. Everything would be exactly as it was.”
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t go. I would miss you. I’d miss everyone. I like my life.”
“You wouldn’t know you missed me,” he said.
She looked at him sadly and took his hand.
“Are you doing okay?” she said. “I know it’s been ten years this month.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I just miss her. I don’t miss her any less, even after all this time. But I have started to forget the sound of her voice.”
The next week they planned a lunch date. He didn’t show up. She knew something was amiss. He would always text if he was running late.
She checked his location. At home. His phone was on but it just rang and rang. None of his friends knew where he was. His family didn’t either.
She had a spare key and hurried over to his apartment. The door was locked.
Cautiously, she let herself in.
The lights were on. She called out and heard nothing. No one was home. His phone was on the counter. Fifteen missed calls. She sat down on the couch beside his laptop. On the keys, a few grains of red sand.
Read more short stories by me:
Human in the Loop
At 4:38 pm, Martin Bell’s phone chimed gently. It was Gladys, his home intelligence system.
