I sat at the dining room table, the smell of tomato vine greening my hands after tending my garden. How had I been suckered by fear? The voice on the other end from India or Illinois, who knows where, said Windows, product key, shut down, let me help.
It's like the Indian two years prior, but I was more lucid then. I got suckered and realized it too late last night. When I cussed the fucker on the other end, he was already in control of things I knew nothing about. Son of a bitch, I thought, I never used to be so gullible.
Echoes of Wendell Berry's poem, "The Peace of Wild Things" edge at my psyche just as Ecclesiastes finally came through to Montag.
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the
great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still
water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am
free.
The man locked down my computer because I wasn't nice to him. He wanted me to pay $199 for him to fix it. Did he hear the oldness of my voice? I hung up on him, unable to cope with being extorted as the screen went green with a box that showed a number to call if I wanted to resolve the situation.
I called Microsoft in utter frustration over my own powerlessness, the edging fear encapsulating every thought of data, money, some invisible being in my ear taking control of things I only think I command.
I paid $49 and listened to someone who sounded Asian, allowing this person to dictate to me what must be done to regain some false sense of security. We were on the phone for more than an hour, our lives never touching. It's so very difficult for an empathic such as myself. The only emotion she expressed was frustration when the knot in my belly pushed through my voice and she couldn't resolve the problem. She instructed me to take the computer to a Microsoft store.
I obeyed.
There I faced, no, was surrounded by flashing images of violence on every wall. And I thought of Montag, the Fireman from Farenheit 451. The young Caucasian man, etched like a character on one of the screens, assured me that this happens more often than you think, and yes, he can save my data, my pictures, the stuff of life I stored in the thing we call a "notebook." Until now, I never knew it's power.
Two days, he needs two days to fix my gullibility. Maybe not that, but my little notebook which is the essence of some philosophic debate. Does it feel? Is it alive? As I left the store all I wanted to do was sit by the tracks and wait for a slow-moving train with an open-door box car, with the hopes that some bearded men might be willing to let me travel with them a while.
So as I finish Fahrenheit 451 having lived out some semblance of the book in this escapade, I know this: as long as I keep moving I know in the end it will be okay and if it's not okay it's not the end.