Fiction: Command + S

By Jessie Atkin

 

My therapist asked if having the conversation would matter. Like, if I brought up the issue (one of many) to my sister, would it change her behavior? I thought of the computer room instead. 

In a big family, you can’t go no contact with a person unless everyone is willing to oblige, or you’re willing to go no contact with everyone, whether they are harming you or not. My parents were good parents, to me anyway. The people who really fucked me up were my siblings. 

The best thing about being one of four siblings was seeing the different colored iMacs all lined up in the computer room together. The candy-colored iMac was the pinnacle of late 90s style and technology, and that style has not been matched since. But aside from the iMacs, there was little about being a set of four that often felt like it was the best of anything. 

The pounding of feet on the stairs, the slamming of doors, the rattling of windowpanes, the cracks, scrapes, and holes in walls. There was very little time to breathe, or rest, or recuperate. Someone was awake at all hours, and someone was asleep at all hours, and there was never an air vent that did not contain at least one lost Lego brick or singular Barbie shoe. But it was the bruises and scrapes our parents didn’t see or hear that lasted the longest. I can still remember the first time my younger sister whispered “dyke” at me, even if I grew up to be pan. 

Yes, back then, before computers traveled or fit in a pocket, they had a room all to themselves where, on a good day, four could sit in silence and load CD-ROM games between typing school assignments. There was a calm and respect for the space that didn’t exist in any other room of the house. It was clear this peace was only accomplished because there were four computers instead of one, and the beauty and blessing of that setup cannot be overstated. 

On a rare occasion, between marathon games of Word Munchers, Math Blaster, Zoombinis, or Nanosaur, we might even have shared a screen to play a CD version of Life or Monopoly, so that no one could cheat or steal cards. The computers leveled the playing field. The chaos of pieces haunted other spaces. We used up hundreds of dollars’ worth of printer ink by reproducing the effects of the rainbow paint can in Kid Pix over and over again. The computer room makes me think of texting now. There’s a safety with physical distance. My younger sister and I get along much better with a screen or two between us. Apparently, that’s how it has always been. 

The iMacs were Strawberry (my younger sister’s), Grape (my older sister’s), Lime (my younger brother’s), and Tangerine (mine). It was very nearly a complete set at the time, or as close as most people ever saw outside of a school computer lab. Four computers, lined up in a row in one room, in one home, really highlighted how many four (particularly children) were. 

Four was enough that my younger sister and I had to share a room. One of us could not reside in the computer room because it was downstairs in our basement, and the bedrooms were upstairs. That was our parents’ decision. Neither of us received any of the rewards or accolades offered to children who held the standing of eldest or the adoration offered to the baby of the house. But, I suppose, at least we merited computers. 

There was the unfortunate fact of proximity. And, while we had little in common in personality, drive, or interest, we would always hold our birth order in common, along with our desperation for individual identity and attention, and a dream of more space. That’s all very true. But truth isn’t a balm the way love or understanding can be. 

The security of regular passwords, or FaceID, was still far in the future when the computer room was a thing in my house. Who had to worry when everyone was equal? Who had to worry when each child had her own access to the internet? I was not used to anything being private, anything being sacred. When you share a room, privacy is a concept, not a fact. I stopped keeping a diary by the time my younger sister could read and used to sit in the bathroom when I was on the phone (thank you, cordless landlines). But, for some reason, I never worried about the computer room the way I worried about my bedroom. Aside from color, our computers were the same. It never made sense that she would need or want to access mine. 

Have you ever lost a research paper, or a letter, or any type of written or creative endeavor on a computer because you forgot to save, and the software crashed? I hadn’t. Because I have anxiety and save after every typed paragraph. The fear of creative loss was enough to make me save documents even more than I wrote them. Command +S. Command +S. Command + S.

I said I didn’t keep a diary. I tried to keep as little of personal value in my bedroom as possible. This was after the experience of money theft, clothing destruction, poster tearing, homework disappearance, and the discarding of a treasured stuffed animal. The space belonged to my sister only because I refused, idiotically, to abuse her possessions in return. Sharing a room meant I was not allowed to have nice things. 

The one nice thing I could depend on was my computer. That’s where I kept my high scores, and perfect papers, and a folder of stories that I hoped would grow into a book one day. But digital belongings, like all belongings, can disappear. Especially before the cloud, and wifi, and continuous connection. A file could burn just as easily as a notebook. And one day, my folder of stories, on the Tangerine iMac, was gone. A blank space on the desktop was as apparent as any flame or torn pile would have been. The silence, aside from the low hum of the four desktops, highlighted all that had disappeared.

Despite the stone in my gut, and the heat in my face, and the shake of my hands, it was no real struggle to track down the culprit, though my parents refused to bring in the police or invest in a fingerprinting kit that I’d seen on an infomercial on late-night TV. Despite my tears and my appeals, I could still hear my sister deny it. I could hear her say she hadn’t done it. I could hear her say,

“Well, they, wouldn’t let me in the room to play.” 

My older sister and I had been working through a card game of Spit, a two-player game, I might add, and, as we were in my older sister’s room, for once, there were restrictions on how close my other sister could get to me.

Even without admitting to the wrongdoing, she was offering up her reasoning. Though being left out in the hall for a game of Spit was hardly as permanent as the deletion of a person’s entire creative output for nearly ten years. I can never leave the house now without a thumb drive in my pocket. I don’t care about the cloud. You always need more.

She was reprimanded, but nothing was done. In the same way, nothing was done when she picked the plastic lock on my bank, or when she ripped my favorite teddy bear. And perhaps that’s why it kept happening. Even as my therapist suggests more nothing to me now.

Despite the raised voices and the “disappointment” that I’m sure, if my little sister ever went to a therapist, she would talk about when reflecting on my parents, it was not enough, or just not what was needed, especially where I was concerned. One more instance of loss. What frightened me most was not that she could delete my work, but that she never once wondered whether she should.

She lost her right to her computer for a few days, but was still allowed in the computer room. And my older sister never did offer to share her safe space with me. It would be “rewarding” bad behavior for my younger sister to be the one with her own room. 

There were no safe rooms in my house anymore. Not my bedroom, not the computer room, and certainly not any spaces even more public. I try to remember a feeling of safety, because I certainly remember the feeling of missing it, so it must have been there, once. 

But I can’t remember it. The tangerine of my computer is clear in my mind’s eye, though I hate to think this is only because of the trauma it witnessed. Like my laptop now, I never leave anything open on my desktop, and I know better than to use shared drives. Command + S was never enough. I can talk about all the ways I recognized I needed to protect myself, even as the world and my doctors tell me there is no good way to do it. The wrong in the world wasn’t me. They say it. They make me say it. But the wrong in the world is still there. Like a computer that’s finally been turned off. It just sits and stares, even if we all know there’s still something inside.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessie Atkin writes fiction, essays, and plays. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, HerStry, The Writing Disorder, Space and Time Magazine, and elsewhere. Her full-length play, "Generation Pan," was published by Pioneer Drama.