Paul Hina

In the Satchel, On the Train, Selling Dreams to Nancy

“The dream contains the image of ‘people serving a smart machine,’ but in the shadow of the dream, human beings have lost the experience of critical judgment that would allow them to no longer simply respond but to know better than, to question, to say no.”

-Shoshana Zuboff

“In the Age of the Smart Machine” (1988)

“The thoughts in our dreams reach us from the outside.”

- P. Tissié,

“Les rêves, physiologie et pathologie” (1898)

“It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.”

-Michel Houellebecq

“Platform” (2003)

Part One: In the Satchel

One

I

“The users of this program type up some very basic information about a person or a character. This character information is asked of the user by the computer during a very basic question and answer process. The computer then stores up all these profiles in its database. The user then has the option of picking which characters, out of the database, that it would like the computer to create a story around. If you were the user you could pick out a single character, or several characters, and the computer would put that particular character, or characters, into a certain situation, or situations, and that character’s reaction to that situation, or those characters’ reactions to those situations, would be wholly dependent on the personal information you entered during the earlier question and answer process. ”

“So, essentially the computer tells the story.”

“Not exactly. The programmers have entered hundreds of possible story templates into the system, and when I say hundreds, I mean, that I really don’t have any idea how many templates the programmers have entered, and when I say system, I mean, that I really have no clue where this information is entered.” This was the moment when Doug started to become bothered by the restrictions of his own knowledge. His head falls a notch or two further down near his shoulders, and his expression appears disturbed by what he was hearing himself say, or what he wasn’t able to say. This was a morning ritual. It normally took him about half an hour before he became annoyed by his limited knowledge of whatever random subject he had chosen to speak about on any given morning. This morning his chosen topic is a computer program called “StoryTown” that he had heard about on the radio the day before.

Doug’s face fell further away from view. He took a deep breath. Then his eyes widened and his hands began their normal theatrical arguing, like they were wrestling with one another from a safe distance apart. He was finding his second wind. The coffee had finally kicked in. “But think about all the movies you have ever seen,” he spoke these words like he had a very painful sore in his mouth. “Think about all the books you have ever read. They are all essentially from a handful of stories. The entertainment universe runs on very few formulas. It is the characters that make the stories different. It is the characters that make the formulas come alive. Everything we watch, read, or listen to has been done before. Everything is redundant and formulaic, except for the people. The people, and our emotions towards those people, are what make entertainment, not the stories. The computers just give us the formula. We give the templates their reason, their third dimension.”

II

Jay is waiting for the train much earlier than usual today. He has a cup of coffee in his hand, a warm breakfast surrounded by hot plastic. He skipped the hearty stuff this morning, and went straight for the juice, the caffeine. The coffee always pushes him a few steps faster on an empty stomach, and he’ll take whatever extra jolt he can get.

The train is jangling down its underground tracks towards the platform where Jay is standing. His coffee steams from his right hand and a large black satchel is tightly clenched under his left arm. The warm, wet smell of garbage fills the platform as the train blows all that dirty wind from inside the tunnel. The oncoming lights are accompanied by the familiar, yet discomforting sound of the squeaking of brakes. The train stops quick and that normal mysterious force opens up the doors on every car in one simultaneous blow. Jay steps on the train, and notices that most of the seats are empty at this particular time, this slightly earlier hour. The train is always full when he normally gets on, just half an hour after this one.

Jay grabs a seat near the door, one that hinges down like a movie theater seat, a seat that he is expected to relinquish if the train begins to fill, but as the train is nearly empty there is not much danger of that. His foot is jumping from the extra caffeine hitting his empty stomach. His mind is juggling a hundred different thoughts, mostly about old subjects, old ideas he once thought would grow into something other than dormant.

Jay looks out the window, watches the fast stream of lights fly by his head, and he glides on that unsustained white light in the tunnel that this train slides through, wondering what this train ride would be like had he become a success, had one of his ideas been given life. He has thoughts like this a lot lately. As he gets older, and more miserable, they become more and more prevalent. What thought would he be juggling if one of those ideas had made it through to the rest of the world?

There is a woman standing across from him. She is not sitting, though there is another hinged seat behind her. She has chosen the metal rail above her as comfort. She looks around the train, notices Jay, realizes that she has not seen him before. He is clutching a black satchel, squeezing it like a last hug against his chest. She thinks about what he might have in that satchel. She likes to play games like this with the passengers. Nancy rides this train every morning. She has played this game with everyone on this car of the train.

There is David who always shaves just to the stubble on his face. He works in sales. She is not sure what he sells. He hasn’t ever tried to get her to buy. She has seen him try to grab a quick sell on the train in the past. His card is passed around quite often in this car of the train, especially in the afternoon. She has seen his cards discarded on the floor on more than one occasion, dirty shoe prints mapping out another failed sale. She has seen him look at the dirty cards. He acts as if he doesn’t see them, and tries to forget that the cards are his. She could have easily picked up one of those cards, but David is on the train well past her stop. She doesn’t want him to see her picking it up. However, she was too curious to know his name not to at least take a peek, and so has on one occasion been able to catch a quick glimpse of his first name, but nothing beyond that.

There is Susan, who runs a small farmer’s market downtown. She is sweet, old, but sweet. She often smiles at Nancy, and Nancy always smiles back. Susan actually gave her an apple one morning, and introduced herself. She accompanied the apple with courteous conversation. Nancy lied to her and said that her name was Tammy, and that she was a school teacher. For all she knows, Susan may have been lying as well, but she suspects not. She looks too sweet, old, but sweet.

It is strange that the same people are on this train every morning. The new character pops up so rarely that all the people in this particular car have gotten used to one another, grown accustomed to the strangeness of this socially comfortable distance, this public familiarity. This train, this car, binds them all together, and Susan has tried to bind herself and Nancy closer with an apple and some conversation, and Nancy lied to her. In fact, Nancy immediately started going to the opposite side of the car to avoid Susan, and she was just growing accustomed to all the people on this new side of the car when this guy with the satchel came through the sliding doors.

He is embracing that satchel so tight, and his foot is wagging so fast, she half expects that he is on drugs. His appearance doesn’t help this presumption. His shirt is haphazardly buttoned, and his beard is darker, even, than David’s. He isn’t wearing a tie, but a suit jacket with old ragged pants that match the newer looking jacket. He watches out the window as if he were counting the lights that fly by the windows. He does this until the train comes out of the tunnel, stops, and the doors open. Nancy watches his face, wondering if he is tallying up the numbers. If he is, he is not letting her know. His face is unmoved, unstaggered. It is almost as if he were still counting lights, perhaps he is counting the ghosts of the lights that still burn in his eyes. He is wearing a dark pair of sunglasses, which is very strange considering their current proximity to the sun. He lifts the glasses up quickly, and rubs his eyes free of the ghosts of the tunnel’s fluorescent lights. His hand is free from the satchel and Nancy notices that the bag is not zipped. Perhaps, the zipper is broken. She tries to see inside, but his arm is back too quick. She wonders if he might have caught her looking. He acknowledges nothing.

III

The train stops again, the doors open, and Jay emerges into the warm stale air of the underground. The heat and stink rushes down from the stairways of the world above, which is still hidden. He rushes to the top of the stairs, trying to escape the mad rush of people this time of day. When he sees the portal to the world ahead of him, there is always a sense of relief that comes with it, a sense of returning somewhere. Once he gets outside, he wishes there were another portal, a portal that would let him pick which world he chose to return to.

Jay’s world is black and white, literally. His optometrist says that he has acquired, or cerebral, achromatopsia. He was in a car accident about four years ago, and he has been suffering with the condition ever since. His doctors say that the head injury he received during the accident caused considerable damage to the portion of his brain that processes color. One of the major problems with cerebral achramotopes is that they can remember that they had once known color, but they don’t know exactly what that means. Oftentimes an achramotope forgets the name of colors because words are only processed objectively, or at least that is what many linguists say. Jay hasn’t done too much research on the subject. He can tell you that an apple is red, but the apple may be green. It doesn’t matter either way. Green and red are both shades of grey to him. He has no recollection of either color, and if he did recollect either one, his therapist says that all color would come to him all at once, like a wave of coming alive again. He has been waiting for four years, no color.

The funny thing is that, though Jay doesn’t recollect any colors, he does recognize their absence. His life has changed significantly since the accident.  He has had major fits of depression, and since the cones in his eyes are working overtime to compensate for the lazy rods, light has become extremely intense. He has to wear sunglasses during any period of daylight, even in rooms with the most subtle and unshaded windows. If he doesn’t wear sunglasses he gets massive headaches, and these headaches can knock him out for entire days. This doesn’t help the depression. However, the sunglasses have helped quite a bit.

Jay, as well as all achromatopes, has incredible night vision. This is due to the achromatope’s adjustment to using only their cones. He often takes walks at night, and can go into wooded areas that no normally sighted person would dare go without a light. At first he did a lot of night hiking. He could see the grass and the trees, but the grass and leaves weren’t green, and autumn, his favorite season before the accident, really isn’t very special anymore.

The morning wind is damp, but nice, not too cold. The leaves from the trees are stuck to the ground in moisture, and they are everywhere. The colors of the world are probably changing. The lazy grey tones of autumn lay dark and beautiful on the ground, and the trees are naked, still complex but without beauty, jagged screens projecting the world behind them, a world previously unseen for the leaves. This is the time of year where this city huddles inside itself, shelters its participants in buildings, cars, and the machines of public transportation. The social air of spring and summer has seeped back indoors, and now the passers-by hold their eyes to the ground, posture leaned towards a singular destination, their legs moving with an almost comic speed.

It is a Monday morning and the faces that are visible, mostly in car windows, are tired with discontent. There are a few people on the streets, but they blend into the building facades like bricks. It is hard to catch a glimpse of face, impossible to look into an eye. The street is humming with cars and buses, and the city is waking, but all the people want to do is sleep deeper into the day, and so they walk under the pretense of a dream, imagining somewhere other than where they see.

Jay moves down the street in those same hurried steps as everyone else, but he is different somehow. His head is leaning down toward the ground, but his features –except for his eyes– are not hidden. His sunglasses have a glare that seems to peer out on the sidewalk, mapping out his future steps. His poorly parted, and oily, dark head of hair hangs down over his forehead. He is wearing an old tan suit jacket, and his pants, also tan, are worn down to lighter shades of tan at the knees. It is not hard to notice him on these streets. There are a lot of people walking on the sidewalks at this time of day, and yet he is really the only one. The blur that fades into the walls that bind the street is a blur of the invisible inhabitants of a dream. All of these people are moving in predetermined lines towards nothing more than what they have been given. There is an air of untraveled desire that follows the haze of their hidden faces. But Jay, with his satchel tightly trapped under his left arm, is traveling somewhere other than these streets. He is walking somewhere in his head; maybe he has entered that portal to another world, or perhaps he is just thinking of where he would go if he were to find it.

Jay stops, turns up his head. His chest swells. He is breathing the air, deep. He turns around, and looks at the town around him, really looks. It was as if he realized his speed, corrected it, decided to soak up some of the breezy autumn air. The wind smells like a memory, something, or some place, he remembers but can’t quite identify. There is something about the fall that moves things from the past, shakes them awake. He smiles, laughs out loud.

Two

I

“This is what we like to call at Dreams Incorporated our stairway to heaven. Before we go upstairs there are a few things here on the first floor that I would like to draw your attention to. As you can see to our left, the sky blue door with the clouds painted on it is the original dream room. It is now labeled, as you can see, ‘Dream Room #1’. We have expanded and now have three dream rooms. This one, No. 1, is the smallest of the three. The largest is in an old airplane hanger. I can’t tell you where that facility is located; Dr. Wintruth has made it clear that our new Dream facility is to remain top secret. In all truth, I don’t even know where it is, but I have heard wonderful things about the building.

“As we go up these stairs I would ask you to watch your step, they are steep, and quite narrow. We have had to make several changes to the building since we first moved in several years ago. These stairs have been renovated because of the dimension changes that were necessary to make the original Dream Room a viable dream facility. We have high standards here at Dreams Incorporated. I am sure you will notice if you look down from this height, that the lobby is pyramidal. I am not an architectural expert, and can not tell you the reasons for this, but Dr. Wintruth is an expert on the subconscious world, and here at Dreams Inc. that is what we strive to conform to.

“As you can see, please watch yourself on that last step, this hallway appears to get smaller and smaller, until that last door. This may appear to be reminiscent of something from a movie. As a child, one of my favorite movies was “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”, and this is very similar to that, except the tiny hallways in movies really serve no purpose, but for the abstract. Whereas, here at Dreams Inc., this hallway gets smaller because Dream Room No. 1, the room downstairs, was made to fit into dimensions that would be more complimentary in attempting to recreate the normal subconscious world. As I said earlier, I am not an expert on the subject of the subconscious, so I would refer you to Dr. Wintruth’s expertise on the subject.

“Now, if you will follow me, ignore all the doors here on the side of the hallway, these are all doors to Dr. Wintruth’s office. I have never been inside. So, I could not tell you why his office needs nine doors, but he knows what he is doing, as you will see in the video.

“Well, I realize that we are entering an uncomfortable position, and if any of you are claustrophobic, or if you have any particular back problems that could be further aggravated by persistent bending, then I would suggest that you end the tour here, and make your way back down to the lobby.

“As you can see the room does get larger once you get inside, and the chairs are low enough so that you will find no real problems with the height of the ceiling, except you, sir, I didn’t realize that you were so tall. Well, may I suggest that you may be better off sitting on the floor?

“Now, if everyone is seated I will begin the video, but before I do, are there any questions?”

“How much will it cost for me to have my appointment in the new facility?”

“All of that will be described in the video, and following the video you are welcome to sign up for an appointment with any of our certified dream brokers.”

II

Jay stops at a door next to a shop window that reads, “Revolutions and Books”. The bell on the door rings on its flimsy, worn leather strap as he moves inside.

Once inside you can tell immediately that this is a bookstore full of old books. The dust and mildew has sunk into the carpet, hangs on the walls. There are books stacked everywhere you look. The labyrinth of hardbacks is barely functional. Jay has left himself just enough room to walk, and the books seem to be split up into haphazard piles in an attempt to resemble some semblance of order. There are too many books here to go through in a single day. It would take a person of patience several days to peruse the material on the shelves, on the floor, and scattered about on the reading tables that are peeking out from the piles in the corners of this brilliantly dim room.

Jay finds his way through the labyrinth with the ease of a man who is very much at comfort with his clutter. He looks at the stacks, admires them, peers at them through his sunglasses with a stare of curiosity. The ghosts from these books are in this room. You can hear them whisper as he places his satchel on the biggest desk in the room; his desk, smack dab in the center of the place.

Jay is not young, nor is he old. He is a man who looks to have lived several lifetimes, but has carried more of the joy he has experienced than the pain. However, you can see in his body, the hesitation of smile, the richness of movement, that he has known plenty of both, but mostly he has experienced disappointment. The lines on his face read like the story of a man born of desire, a man who has settled for small things in a once huge future.

Jay turns to the right of the desk where a coffee maker sits on a small table. He flips a switch, and watches the slow dripping begin. He sits down at the chair of his desk and leans back on his chair. His legs find a stack of papers on the table top, rests his feet atop it, then he reaches over to grab a small black book from inside his satchel, lays it on the desk, reaches back behind him, still in the chair with his feet up on the papers, grabs the coffee pot, and pours a steaming flow into a cup that was already sitting on the desktop, stained from the day before, and the day before that. Then he leans back to put the pot back in its place, and returns to the small black book. The book makes a cracking noise when he opens it. It is clear that this book has been put through the wringer. The fabric on the cover is ripped on the corners, exposing the cardboard beneath. The spine has been taped and re-taped, and yet even the second layer of tape is ripping. He places the book in front of him on the desk, picks up his cup of coffee, blows into it good and hard before he takes a drink.

Jay sits at his desk sipping from his coffee cup for the better part of the morning. The cup rests warmly on his chest; his hands cradle the warmth of the ceramic. He stares out the large window of the shop, but is watching something other than what is displayed out that window. He is watching moments from his life walk by, flipping across his eyes like the pages of his book. The conversations he has had replay in his imagination like a real talking. The voices ring in the walls, he acts as an observer to his own younger self, watches the exuberance of a younger man defending his old passions with an attack of words and gestures. His face echoes the emotion of that young man, eyebrows raised, mouth teetering forward, but nothing falls out. He takes another drink of coffee, looks down at that ragged old book, reaches for it.

The spine cracks again as he opens it, and on the inside cover there is a landscape spilled into ink marks, words from one corner to the next, packed prose from the pen of a man who believed he had something to say, and that what he was saying was important. The next page will be as full as this one, and so goes with most of this thick volume of words, only a few pages remain unfilled. The ink on these pages was once so fresh that you could wipe the words to a smear. He rubs his fingers over the pages, and it is as if he can remember when he first laid his pen to that page, but now the ink is dry. The time is spent.

Jay leans back in his chair, letting the coffee cup rest in the palm of his hand, the book now lying open across his chest. His head is bent so far back that he can plainly see the water stains on the ceiling. He closes his eyes, and begins his trip through those places he goes to when he wants to remember that he used to be a writer, when the words were still coming, when the ink was still fresh.

There is a younger Jay sitting at a table in a cafe. This young man leans into his book with an intensity that begs not to be bothered. He is stabbing at the pages with his pen, carving into them all that occurs to him. He looks up only to drink from his coffee cup, or to look around the room for some accidental inspiration.

Today he is lucky. Most days are kind to him, but this day is particularly prolific. He can not seem to find a single thing that does not inspire some movement in him. He grabs everything he can in great handfuls, shoves them in his book. The words spread out like a spilling, and yet not one word is forced. These words are not the words that are hastily thrown together by some amateur. This man, with his whole life ahead of him, knows the meaning of quality in his words. It is clear in his face that he takes his sentences seriously. He is not a man that takes any word lightly. This is not a man who takes anything lightly.

There is a woman near the counter of this cafe. She is a tall girl, reminds him of a girl he used to love. However, he tries to love this girl only as she is, and not as she might be. She doesn’t need the ornamentation of some transferred adornment. This is a girl who can be adored simply for her face. There is a kindness in her cheeks, a smile that warms, inspires.  He starts to set it down to paper; this girl’s face. He tries to make her move, to translate her beauty.

There are scribbles of many people in this book, people that he has seen on the street through the cafe window, people that he has seen inside the cafe, sitting alone over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. He is an observer of lives, and yet he ignores the disarray in his own life. Even his own appearance lacks any order.

Jay’s shirt is buttoned lopsided, the bottom button hanging out from the bottom of the shirt, exposing the shirt’s asymmetry. His pants are wrinkled from days of not changing them, and his caffeine beaten eyes express the tiredness he would feel if he hadn’t continued drinking coffee all evening. His free hand is shuffling through his oily hair and his concerns are nowhere but with the girl at the counter.

The pen slides and bounces on the paper. A younger Jay’s face is tight and tense as he writes. His writing hand is cramping, but he tightens his grip, loosens it, all without stopping the words. Where will he take this girl? He will place her into his mythology. The mythology of portraits he has in his book. She will live and converse with all the others that live in that book. They will create ageless characters pretending worlds for this writer.

This book is his inspirational reserve, the book he comes to when the ideas are dry. These are the people Jay has painted to help him in the future. There are people in these pages that he has met only once, or never met at all. These are people that existed and didn’t exist. The crowds that gather on these pages are the crowds of imagined voices from unimagined faces. The bodies here are real, but everything else that is done with these bodies is as much a fiction as his past. His past has to be fiction. That is the only way his mind can make it seem real, the only way he can watch it when he tries to sleep at night, or when he stares out his shop window at nothing in particular.

His heavy, but determined, eyes watch the girl at the counter, her dirty grey hair hangs out in front of her face. She blows on it, and it floats for a moment on the breeze of her breath. She grabs hold of it and twists it to tie behind her head. She loses control of a few stray hairs as they fall from the ribbon she uses to tie it all back with. She is self conscious of the mess of her hair, and doesn’t understand how beautiful she is when she lets it be a mess.

The old bell rings from the leather strap of his bookshop’s door. Jay looks over from the ceiling’s water spots, and watches his young girl walk inside. She is beautifully playing with that ribbon that holds those messy strings of grey sleeked hair all together. She stands in the center of the room, watches him, waits for him. He wants to speak to her, but he can’t. His words are dry. His ideas have long since gone.

Jay looks inside his book, and these are the places he goes, these are the worlds that he intertwines with reality. He allows himself these minor delusions now and then. The world is too narrow without a little imagination. These interludes are the only evidence left of his creations. He only wishes he had the creative energy to recreate this old stuff in this book that cracks when it opens. The worlds that are in the book are far behind him. There has been no progressing for years. He has stopped looking ahead, stopped looking for clues, abandoned the search for answers to the questions he used to ask himself. He has stopped looking for stories. The stories now come to look for him. This is why she is here.

Jay has left her on the page, unmoving, sterile of words and animation. She is relegated to a page and a half that has been faded by time. She is losing her reason. He has lost reason. Reason is something they are both looking for.

He has been having more and more moments like these, when the past comes to visit him. The movie of his mind is playing tricks on him, but he doesn’t mind. He likes the diversion from the everyday, but the ability to write has left him. He has not written anything of substance since the accident almost four years ago, and he is starving. The need for words has never left him, and the guilt of their absence is always near.