nowhere in the universe

patrick doerksen

ONCE, THE GOOGLE SEARCH BAR WAS AN OPEN HORIZON, broad as the mind. I asked it the existential questions. What’s worth loving? Why are we not at home in the world? How much, concerning ultimate reality, should I let myself hope for? But Google liked it better when I was more direct. I asked, Are the forces of good and evil equally matched? Has any philosopher successfully defended the freedom of the will? Still, this was not direct enough. I needed a stance if I was going to get anywhere in these searches; I needed personal values. My questions assumed goals: What was Sartre’s solution to ennui? How did Santideva define inner peace? But this was making me feel foolish. I was beginning to realize how thin and pallid that search bar is, how strange that only words and nothing else may be entered there, how appalling that curious minds are made to press through this slim rectangular gate, walking with the twin legs of questions and answers, if they are to go any place at all. I had hoped for so much more of Google; now I ask it less and less, and my searches are without ambition. How do I unshrink a wool sweater. Who actually likes candy corn. How do you know if your partner is thinking of leaving. Sometimes, I open the homepage and stare, the cursor blinking like a mind awoke, and I am hit by a longing that seems to have travelled to me from a great distance. I want and want—Google, what is it I want when I can’t stop wanting? But even as I grow full with ex-pectancy, even as I ready myself to start over from the beginning, I remember doing so before, I know where it’s got me, and I let the feeling pass. The whole ever-happening universe contracts and I face again that waiting search bar. I know it well now. There is no other. I must be strong and take the answers I can get.

But once, forgetting myself in contemplation, I glimpsed a strange terror. The laptop screen, having been inactive, went suddenly black, and for just a moment I thought I saw the search bar’s dark reverse, where the crowded answers wait.

ii.

I don’t know how it happened. You were sending me text messages, and it was urgent that I reply, but I had no smiley emojis. Where had they gone? My whole emoji bank was cleared of grins, of chuckles, of any kind of happy expression. Only frowners and weepers remained. I scrolled to the travel and places section and confirmed it. I panicked, started using objects instead, a butterfly, a balloon, a jolly snowman, but it wasn’t sufficient, I turned to more potent symbols, a bone, a skeleton key, a DNA double helix, all possibilities in the emoji bank. I sent a galloping horse with a jockey, then a galloping horse without a jockey. Would you understand? Frowns, I even started sending frowns. No, it was hopeless, but what could I do, I had no smiles, so I turned to the bitter and the angry to represent me. Together we said what we needed to say, though it was almost the opposite of what I was trying to say, and all my texts were wrong. But they were sent, that was something, they were sent, and I no longer felt like myself.

iii.

Sometimes, sitting alone in my apartment, having been apart from you for months, the need to hear from you grows so strong that, knowing my inbox is empty, I refresh my email anyway. There’s nothing new, of course. Impatient, I check Facebook. Nothing. I check Twitter, Instagram, even the private messages on Skype. I check all the platforms. Finally, I move on to check the final platform only to discover I can’t find it.

I sit there, stumped. Is it momentum that’s led me astray? Led me to believe there must be this other access to you? Is it a vain hope that’s made me regard email, Facebook, etc., as arrows to another, surer platform on which I can always find you, on which we can talk freely just at these moments of need?

Facebook open, I try opening a second Facebook tab as though it might really be a second Facebook. After all, the final platform might look like an existing one and function just the same and yet not to be that platform. I try a third Facebook tab, and a fourth. On the tenth I almost expect the notifications icon to light up. On the twentieth I think perhaps my newsfeed, at least, will change. I attempt to max out my tabs: the prize must be there at the end. But Firefox has no limit and at four hundred tabs I understand that this is not the path to that other Facebook just behind Facebook where all the real stuff happens.

Where, then?

There is in the Internet so much endless unknown space where anything might occur, anything exist; why not this? The perfect platform, designed for the two of us alone. A secret email with secret inboxes not found on the desktop, not hidden in the book-marks, not searchable on Google, filling up with messages impos-sible for me to find.

iv.

We are familiar with the secular Waze mapping app, which lets us choose our own destination, then directs us there by the speediest route. Fewer have heard of Zen Waze, which states that no matter what destination you enter, you have already arrived. There is the Waze which allows no other destination but Mecca, and the Waze which directs you to the nearest confession. There is the cynical Waze, which says of any address you type in, be it thousands of miles away or across the road: “Your search is outside our current coverage area.” In other words, you can’t get there, don’t bother trying. And in a sense, it’s right.

My Waze is different still. Though I enter my destination, it refuses to take me, for it has a place of its own in mind. I don’t want to go, and it should be as easy as closing the app, but it isn’t. Again and again, needing to get somewhere some Friday night, I will, without thinking, open the app. And again it will try to bring me elsewhere. It’s always the same place, somewhere in east Vancouver, a house or a bar, I don’t know. I’ve never been there, not that I know of, and I don’t know what it has in store for me. I’m curious, of course. How could I not be? But once, some time ago, you had a Waze like mine, and now where are you? Your change happened suddenly, and though you couldn’t explain it, I thought perhaps you had done it at last, had given in and followed your app where it led you, to the place it had prepared. And if I’m right? If there really is something there for me, something that might change everything? I dare not go. Far better to choose my own route, to ignore the glowing blue line trying so insistently to lead me to a different future. Trying, trying to give me something I would never want, no, not until I have it.

v.

The first time it happened, I was in the gym listening to an album I had recently downloaded. I wasn’t really paying attention, but I couldn’t help noticing when, in the middle of this dancy uptempo song, in the quiet of a caesura, a voice intruded, as though it had been dubbed in. With great enthusiasm a man said, “Horses!”

Then the beat dropped.

I let go of my weights and laughed. To have chosen that precise moment, that vulnerable silence just before the chorus’ rush of sound, was calculated mischief. It was like passing off a strange and unwanted gift to a passenger just after a boat leaves the dock; no chance of passing it back, they are forced to take it on their voyage. And yet the voice was all innocence. Someone was simply excited about horses.

A few weeks later it happened again: another song, another occasion, same word. Horses. I pirated a lot of my music; perhaps it was some uploader’s tag, I thought. But there was an art to this, something more than a signature. The voice knew just where to enter, just what emphasis and tone with which to pronounce the word, that it derailed the song and dismantled everything the musician was trying to do. I started listening for that voice and discovered that my music library was overridden by a herd. More than my music: files all over my computer. In an old college essay on Shakespeare there was a small jpeg of a horse in profile above a Richard III quote: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” In my Chrome bookmarks was a link to a website on horse grooming. Someone was doing it. Who? Why? They were grazing in my photo albums, in my Federal Taxes software. I found them in the very bowels of my hard drive.

Then one night a horse came into my room and stood over my bed. It was a buckskin mare, ungroomed and exuding a startling energy—a wild horse. “Go away!” I wept. “Leave me alone!” The horse looked at me, indifferent, and I understood about the horses then. There was nothing I could do; they would not leave, they would claim what they wanted for their pastures. I knew their reason. But I knew I could not bring it with me outside that moment. I would leave that horse behind in a way that, in the daylight, I would be unable to fathom.

vi.

For so long I have been looking for the perfect place to hide my password and finding only the usual places. Hackers can get anywhere. To be safe, it must be nowhere online, nowhere on my hard drive, nowhere in my apartment, preferably not even my own head. It must be nowhere in the universe. I was looking and looking. And then it occurred to me.

No, don’t ask me where. I should not have told you even as much as this. But I’ve found a place, yes, and that’s where my pass-word is, safe, utterly, utterly safe.

vii.

I never thought I would end up on Bumble. What have pixels and algorithms to do with the erotic ache? Glance and swipe, glance and swipe; one spends actual hours at it, but it only blunts the pining. I flip through duckface car selfies and phoned-in self-summaries, becoming a meager searcher. It’s against nature to desire a person in the abstract, to want qualities and not characters, parts and not wholes. How could this possibly, by what process of stochastic convergence, produce the result of a lover?

But somewhere on the other side of this, there are people.

“Why are we not at home in the world?” my first match writes. I don’t know what to say, how to behave. The twenty-four hour window runs out and she disappears forever. When I match again, it’s: “How much, concerning ultimate reality, should we let ourselves hope for?” I remove any mention of my philosophy studies from my profile.

My third match has a picture showing a tattoo below her crop top, above the left hip, of a leaping whale. There’s a sarcastic knowingness to her gaze. It makes me feel something—the strangeness of her being a stranger. She writes, “What do we want when we can’t stop wanting?”

Type and delete, type and delete. Finally, lamely, send: “I think it’s the nature of the best questions not to have an answer.”

“But they do.” She gives me an address I recognize.

I’m nervous. The building, a large abandoned brick warehouse, has a single door. The inside is so dark that I have no sense of the walls or ceiling. Perhaps there are none. The air is warm and astir. I take a few steps in and stop, feeling dizzy. I wait for my eyes to adjust but they don’t. From afar comes the sharp clomp of hooves on hard ground. She rides towards me, cupping a sphere in both hands. It is the size of a child’s head and made of light. The sphere, I know, is the universe.

She dismounts. Then, as though it were a delicate fruit, she begins to peel the sphere with her fingers, unfolding it outward and outward until at its center is revealed a set of keys. But it’s the one key I notice, because it is the key to the human heart.

I take it.

“It’s remarkable how little we demand from life,” she says. “Isn’t it?” Only then do I notice the other keys. What are they for? What other things are there that I haven’t thought to unlock? She closes the sphere and I find myself outside the warehouse, back in the world.

viii.

On Reddit, the user u/1392Person has made only one post. The post appears in a travel subreddit concerning etiquette in a certain foreign country, and it has no comments. It’s all but disappeared from the web. And yet now and then, browsing through archived threads, a user will encounter these words and lean back heavily in their chair, feeling that ache in the throat which might precede tears, or might precede a roar.

You have something, it goes, and it is too great for you alone. It cannot be measured; it is broader than the summer sky, stranger than deep ocean fish. No one needs it, no one knows what it’s for or where it belongs. It is incomprehensible. Time stretches and stretches but cannot reach its end. How could you not laugh and leap? You could give it to me, you could give it away to everyone in the world for eternity, and it would still always be yours.

Goodbye, my love.