The Reconstructionalist

The ninth instalment of “From the Booth”, my Weekly Story Subscription Service (!”$)

When I show clients certain materials they cry and they don’t tell me why they’re crying. Almost always it’s a video of them in a state of exuberance. I can show them reams of text, deep stuff. Love and deaths and break-ups and foul language, promises to hate the correspondent until the end of time, and it never seems to move them much. Maybe some wincing here and there. But show them a short clip of them laughing with a paper hat on and they melt into a puddle before me. Why is that?

Once a severe man in a torn suit jacket told me it wasn’t my business to ask why. I concluded he too didn’t know.

When we saw the amount that disappeared after the first haze there was a confused scramble to archive as much as possible, but nobody was really in control of what they were doing.

I remember trying to copy the contents of an old laptop onto a silver drive with my name, address, and date of birth written on it in marker pen. I remember it was warm in the room and the drive was on the carpet in a patch of sunlight, and I kept thinking maybe I would just go out into the garden and lie on the grass, but I don’t have a garden, and I kept thinking to myself, Oh! I don’t have a garden! As if it were a problem I’d been working on. Then the second haze happened and after that I couldn’t tell you what became of the laptop, or the silver drive.

They say there was only a week between the hazes but I have doubts about that. My hair was long afterwards, and I feel like it was short before. When the second haze cleared I woke up on a pile of yoga mats in an abandoned school hall, with my hair in two plaits. I had the sense I’d been there for some time, maybe even living there. This was just a sense though. And my hair may well have been long before the hazes, though I don’t understand how it came to be plaited as I don’t know how to do that, as far as I know. I’ll never be sure though. About any of it.