The Last Jew

Disconnection

Dysfunction

It wandered in and out of his life. It was the half glimpsed presence in the woods. It was and had always been there, yet it hadn’t. It slipped in and out of his mind. It slipped in and out of him for that matter. It was the random thought that made complete sense, yet otherwise was utter madness. It was ancient and new. The secret and the open truth. It was the unacknowledged longing for reunion.

It and he met occasionally throughout his life. The meetings were random, and to him quite meaningless. For him there was no pattern. He could never predict what would cause it to meet him. Unlike the migraines he was to suffer later in life, there was nothing that he could or did do that would cause it to appear in his life. The meetings would cluster together for a couple of months and then give themselves years of space before clustering once again like a huddle of loudly gossiping pensioners. They once met in the pages of a book whose rhythms and cadences, whose themes caressed him in ways that he wished his lover would. They were intimate, they looked him in the eyes and giggled at some secret only they knew…and for now weren’t about to share.

 How it viewed the meetings he never knew. Perhaps it was planning the meetings to be the way they were. Perhaps its’ plans meant that there was no randomness to the meetings, there was logic and a goal in them. That the true purpose of the meetings was to prepare him for an event that would change how he self-identified. If this was true, it was neither the first nor the last thing in his life to do so. A wife had done as much. University in middle-age would change him to the point that people who had known him for twenty years would need to look into his eyes twice so that they might recognise him.

They met one day whilst he was weeding a client’s garden and heard the familiar alien cadences of Hebrew as a boy practised for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah by reading from the Torah, and he stopped as suddenly as if he had been slapped in the face. The Hebrew he was hearing was ringing his soul like a bell struck hard with a hammer. The words in a language he had heard so rarely before transfixed him, struck him dumb, yet at the same time they comforted, warmed and nourished him like his favourite bowl of hot oat porridge on a bleak and dreary winter’s morning. The Hebrew he was hearing in this Rabbi’s garden and the effect it had on him was something that no one could ever have prepared him for.

They met in his living room. They stood together and wept in the inconsolable sadness of the theme from the movie “Schindler’s List”, with its haunting violin that only spoke of loss, grief and the shadow genocide can cast upon an entire people. Why else would Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs cut not only glass with its soaring, haunting, lamenting soprano, but also cut deep into his sense of comfort with himself? Cut him in ways that went deep and surprised him. Which is no doubt why he kept returning to Isabel Bayadrakian’s performance of it on YouTube with its images of Auschwitz. The haunting, melancholic soprano engaged him in a conversation with himself, one he could not bring to an end. A conversation that took him to places within himself that he had never thought of going. Places that were at once both alien and well known.

They met in the certain complete sense of incompleteness that walked in the shadows of him. It was the perfect and missing piece of him that made no sense in existing at all and one that no matter how much it changed, never fitted in, a piece that would only fit in when he finally acknowledged that it didn’t fit. The only way he could complete himself was to find something he could not see, to ask a question he could not frame, to think the thought that refused to be born into consciousness.

They had met throughout his life, but there had never been a conversation between them. It had always stood dumb, stood mute, as if it was waiting for him to see something, to hear something, to feel something that he clearly wasn’t. Eventually it must have gotten tired of dropping clues that he wasn’t picking up, wasn’t seeing, and wasn’t understanding. One day it must have decided that direct contact was needed. A meeting would have to take place.

One clear, bright autumn day in the middle of the street, in his fifty-first year of life, for the first time, it walked up and spoke to him.

“Hello” it said.

“Hello” he mumbled back.

“I am you” it said, looking him straight in the eye as it did so.

“I doubt it” he replied and began to walk away. 

It watched him go and wore his lopsided smile, the smile that he wore when he had something particularly mischievous in mind. The smile he wore when he waited for people to get the punch line of a joke. Truth be told, it expected this reaction to their meeting from him. It had watched him his entire life and knew him in ways he was yet to know himself. It knew that his first response would be denial. Denial was something his family was particularly skilled in. So it was that it watched him walk away, and wore his smile as it did so. Why shouldn’t it wear his lopsided smile? He wasn’t wearing it at that moment. As he walked away from himself he was wearing the complete frown his wife loved to laugh at. 

In his heart he knew he was wrong. The knowledge of his error in not recognising himself when he had walked up and said “Hello” was as clear as his own two coloured eyes. He knew with deep certainty that it was him that had walked up and spoken to him so clearly.

Yet who was this person? He looked and sounded like himself. Yet it was patently impossible that he should walk up to himself in the street. Even as he thought these thoughts, he reminded himself that his life had been liberally littered with events that he had considered clearly impossible, yet had come to pass. In the course of his fifty plus years he had stopped laughing at the patently absurd, for all too often the patently absurd had come to pass. The patently absurd had come to pass often as not with a joy, a wonder that had transformed and uplifted him. His wife and three sons being amongst the patently absurd things that could not have happened, yet had happened and that also happened to be joyous.

There was a very clear and simple reason why he had refused to recognise himself when he had walked up and greeted himself. The truth was that this person who stood before him on that autumn day was the last thing he had consciously thought of himself as. Of all the things he had self-identified as over the years, which included being an alien, and at one point in his mid-teens being Gay, the well-dressed self was the self-identification he had scrupulously avoided and never looked straight at and the reasons for him doing this weren’t hard to find.

The reasons began with his father who his entire life had been a careful, assiduous cultivator of racism, bigotry and atheism. Of all the things his father has succeeded at, racism and bigotry were the greatest. Being a father to all of the seven children he is known to have fathered with his wife Frances and being a good husband to Frances were, in the sons’ eyes at least, not one of his fathers’ achievements. To the son his father was a paradox more insolvable than Schrodinger and his cat. How could so much racism, bigotry and hate fit into a heart and mind so small? Yet they clearly had done just that. Denied the richness of other ways of thinking, of other ways of doing and being, his father had never come fully into life as his son thought of life. Because the father refused to accept, let alone love what was different, the son thought of his father as being disabled in a particularly sad and limiting way. To the son emotionally and culturally his father had simultaneously been both alive and dead and had done so without the benefit of the closed box that Schrodinger’s cat had taken refuge in. The son was never sure exactly whether his father was alive or dead, he knew beyond all doubt that his father had hated anything remotely different. In this man’s life there was no room for ways or opinions that weren’t his.

The son was different. He was, his mother once told him, different from the very beginning. She had seen the difference the moment he was born. He was her sixth child, her fifth and final son. The mother told the son that upon looking at him covered in the mess that accompanies birth that she had known, in ways that only mothers ever do, that he was different from his older brothers and sister. She was never to put a name to it, nevertheless the difference was there and it was obvious from the moment the son had been born in the evening of May 7 1965. The difference in the son was subtle, more a mathematical equation that never arrived at the correct answer, than an obvious visual difference. He was the piece of a puzzle that on first sight fitted wonderfully, it was only when he was known better did the difference become visible. No amount of effort, no amount of transformation would or could make the piece that was him fit the puzzle of what it meant to fit in and belong, to be “normal”, whatever that was supposed to be. 

At the age of eight whilst sitting in a car with his third eldest brother outside a restaurant in North Mackay the son told the elder brother that he thought of himself as an alien. Often songs would play themselves repeatedly in his head. Even at this tender age the son knew he was different from everyone else around him. To the son, the disconnection, the sense of aloneness, of Otherness, was already well known. 

At Walkerston State School, the son was the kid with “germs”, the one who was bullied. The kid who when pushed far enough reluctantly, yet successfully fought back. The snapping point was a long time in coming, yet when the son snapped, people bled. In common with all autistics, when the son fought back and usually beat his tormentor(s) half to death it was an event that few forgot. Whilst he was bullied throughout his childhood it was never by the same person after he had snapped. People were loath to experience the sons’ rage in the form of a punching, screaming, weeping horror twice. At the age of ten the son had his nose broken by Andy Williams, a Torres Straits Islands kid who he fought back against being bullied by him. Everyone else was giving in to Andy, the racism at home meant the son could not and would not bow to a black kid.

The bullying continued into high school with the same pattern of response by the son. The pattern never changed, however with the onset of puberty a new bully emerged in the sons’ life. Never content with bullying his wife, the father issued an ultimatum to the son. The father decided that he wasn’t going to accept the same rebellion from the son as he had his older children. So it was that in 1980 that war entered the house where the son had been raised.

The son was to learn that monsters didn’t necessarily hide under his bed. The son was to learn that monsters, well the monsters he was to know, walked under the same bright sun as he did and wore the same skin as he. Monsters, in the sons’ life, were those who wore the robes of hypocrisy, of a piousness that was false. The primary monster in the sons’ life, was of course, his father. People with addictions can blame the addiction. The father was at his most violent whilst stone cold sober. The father blamed everyone but himself for the way his life was. The depth of self-pity the father displayed dismayed and disgusted the son. For the son, the father had a lethal dose of “First World Problems”. The father was unpredictable. The son learned to “look inside peoples’ heads” in order to tell what mood his father was in, and if at all possible, make his escape.

Much, much later in his life, the son was to spend time with the monsters who lived inside his own head. The internal monsters were the depression, self-doubt and insecurity laid inside him by his parents. They were to be his greatest teachers and largest fan club. The monsters inside the sons’ head encouraged him to achieve much. Often his single biggest achievement in any day was ignoring them. The shrieking, keening aos si of self- doubt were only to be silenced when the son had a university education and survived the chaos of  twins being born in the midst of an Honours year.  Depression never entirely went away, instead it grew smaller and less capable of inflicting damage as the son became familiar with its lies and strategies. Insecurity was defeated when the son had a family of his own and knew beyond all doubt that he was loved by his wife and family. 

Unable to fit in, and not feeling that he belonged to much or anyone, yet with a desperate thirst to both fit in and belong, the son was faced with problems as a child. Being in a world where precious little makes sense to you and everyone around you has access to a book of social rules that they will neither explain nor share, was a problem faced by the son. This problem led to Depression. Only much, much later was a name and an explanation for the invisible book of social rules that he never had access to be given to the son. It wasn’t until the son was forty-five and a father himself that the difference gained a name and a reason. The reason was simple: he had Asperger’s’ Syndrome. His brain was wired differently. The wiring had been subtly altered at the very beginning of the pregnancy that was to become the son. Eventually in the light of knowledge, Asperger’s was to become an asset. Eventually in the light of hindsight Asperger’s had always been an asset.

Another one of the sons’ problems was his immediate older brother. The two boys were as different as any cliché would describe. They were polar opposites in personality and intellect. The son, a gentle child. The brother a bully with a sadistic streak. The brother made the sons childhood a misery. Unable to escape, the son presented the perfect outlet for his brothers “inclinations”, and was made to engage in fist fights with friends, thrown out of trees over swimming holes, nearly drowned when he won too many ducking contests and beaten at night when he had had the audacity to offend the brother. 

The brother thought nothing of getting a girlfriends guard dog to attack the son, knowing he as a ten year old was afraid of dogs. The brother casually chatted to the girlfriend whilst the son hung from a sheds rafters all the while begging for the dog to be taken away, convinced the dog was going bite him as the dog snarled and growled less than a metre below him. The brother began his career as a sex offender at the age of ten when he molested a neighbour’s pretty blond three year old daughter in a grove of oleander at the end of their street, barely 20 metres from the girls’ house. 

The son could never decide whether his brother was simply born bad or mentally unwell. The son knew that his brother had been as unusual a child as he had been. The difference was that with the brother when people did the mathematical equation that was the brother and arrived at the right answer, people often wished they hadn’t done the math. With the brother, the line between reality and fantasy wasn’t so much as blurred, as it was nearly erased. In the brother, the line between fantasy and reality, good and evil, was faint, even when it was at its most clear. Where the son had run and screamed whilst being beaten with a wooden spoon as punishment for being naughty, the brother simply stood silent. This enraged the mother to the point where one day she hit the brother so hard the wooden spoon snapped in half. 

The brother preyed on everyone that he could and flattered those too strong to fall prey to him. The result of this was people refusing to believe someone so charming could rape his own daughter when she was five and to do so for ten years.  So it was one summers evening in 1976 after they had gone to bed that the brother pinned the son down and tried and failed to have the son perform fellatio on him. The son threatened to bite what was so close to his face. The brother withdrew.

The other problem for the son was his parents’ violently dysfunctional marriage. The sons earliest memories where of violence and fear. As a small child he was desperately afraid of his father. An early memory of the son had him too afraid to tell his father during a lunch at home whilst the mother was in Mackay that his bladder was full, wetting himself as a result, the father spanking him. The son remembered being about eight years old and from the slightly open door of his bedroom witnessing a violent argument between his parents where his father pointed a rifle at his mother and threatened to kill her unless she stopped talking. His mother baited the father, almost daring him to kill her. The night was wet. The house in Walkerston where the son grew up was violent both physically and emotionally.

 The emotional violence between his parents left the son insecure. The domestic and emotional foundations that were meant to build confident, stable personalities were never laid for the children of the sons’ parents’ marriage. Not content with making each other’s lives Hell Realms, the parents undermined and weakened the personalities of their seven children. They never prepared their children for life as adults, no life skills such as cooking were taught in the house at 12 Bold Street.  For the son the result of this was sitting one day in the first flat he had ever rented at the age of 19 and crying tears of frustration at being unable to change a light bulb. The son in his teens was nervous and insecure. By any measure his readiness to function as an adult was limited. A much loved brother died young at the not so old age of 60 having been completely undermined as a functioning adult by his father. The siblings of the son indulged in drugs, promiscuous sex, domestic violence and the same racism as their parents as ways to cope with a marriage that should never have happened.

The son was, as always, different. The son was angry and determined to never be like his parents. Having witnessed the emotional undermining of his brother Mark, the son in his rage became obsessed with never giving in and never allowing his father to stand beside his grave and pronounce that he had always known the son to be weak and a loser. This was how the monsters inside the sons’ head became his teachers. In overcoming the rage, the son came to know himself deeply. The son achieved where he at times felt that he shouldn’t have. The screaming self-doubt placed in him so early by his parents drove the son.

Not surprisingly the son had an emptiness in him. With an absence of affection at home after the birth of his younger sister, the son sought it elsewhere. Short, intense and imploding relationships defined his teens. Until his first marriage at the age of 23, none of the sons’ relationships lasted longer than six months. At the end of each relationship the son was angrier, lonelier and in greater need of the acceptance he never had at home. 

Nothing and no one could fill the emotional emptiness in the son. The knowledge that the emptiness could only be filled by himself was, in 1982, literally decades in the future. In the midst of a nervous breakdown that saw him leave high school and facing a torrent of bullying from his father, the son found the Samurai. Contact came in the form of James Clavell’s “Shogun”. Finally a crowd who were all about not giving up. The love affair with the Samurai and most things Japanese was to be lifelong for the son. The son discovered Buddhism when he was seventeen. Already unable to reconcile the Christianity that was spoken which was gentle, tolerant and inclusive with the Christianity he saw being practised which was none of those things. The son went in search of an alternative. It took him six months to read Suzuki’s “Introduction to Zen Buddhism”…all 200 pages of it. Later Buddhism was to assume a central and defining role in the sons’ life.

Teenage years saw an orgy of physical and emotional violence for the son. Most of this violence was between the son and his father. In the sons fourteenth year, the father demanded things from the son that no teenager, especially a teenager as ill prepared as he was, should be asked to give. With the absence of older siblings, the nervous, insecure son, who by now was actively afraid of the father was obliged to be the labourer in his fathers’ concreting of the driveway and other projects. Violent intimidation followed as a matter of routine. The son was all of 70 kg, his father closer to 90 kg.

As a sixteen year old, fresh from time in the Mackay Base Hospital’s psychiatric ward and facing a violently bullying father, the son was placed in the “care” of the Anglican priest, Father John Paine who resided at St Charles in Nebo Rd. The son was placed with a sexual predator. The son experienced penetrative sex. When a complaint was made by the sons’ mother, the church protected Fr Paine. They threatened the sons’ parents with the loss of their house if the mother took the matter to court. The father gave in to the threats. The father denied being in the room when the Anglican Church threatened him. The church placed him in the room, the sons’ mother insisted he was there, even logic had him in the room. Rather than protecting the son, the father gave in to threats. 

In his early teens the son had read Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf” and in common with his father had embraced the absurdity of hating a people he had yet to meet, let alone imagine would be a part of himself. Which was as close as he would ever get to his fathers worldview. In a perfect act of rebellion, as he grew older the son loved differently and spoke of passions that only outraged his father. The Samurai obsessed him. Buddhism defined him. When love was finally found, she had almond eyes, black hair and spoke Cantonese. A language the son quickly learned. In 1990, aware of his fathers’ ignorance, the son played a practical joke on the father. The father was told that the son had eaten so much Asian food and had spent so much time with his Malaysian-Chinese wife that his eyes had changed shape and his nose flattened. So it was when the son visited in 1991 the father looked at the son rather carefully, expecting to see an Asian before him. The father was at a loss: How could the alien be so beautiful, so fascinating, that the son would, as the father perceived it, reject him in favour of it? Why learn the languages, cultures and religions of the despised, the hated and very much unmet Other? Yet his son did exactly that and not only learnt the languages, cultures and religions of the hated and unmet Other, he loved the Other and ultimately produced the single thing that his father hated more than anything else in the world. The son became a father in his own right. The children were beautiful and much loved Eurasians.

 The father grew to hate the son. The son, once he had been taught by his Buddhist practice the inherent stupidity, the un-healthiness of anger and hate, could not be bothered making his father so central to his life, which in hating his father others in his family had done much to their own sorrow. The son understood that to place his father at the centre of his life by being so angry at him, was to invite misery, inadequacy and failure to run his life. By the time he was in his mid-30’s, the son understood that there was a choice involved when it came to his father. He could give the man the control over his life that his father wanted or he could forgive him and deny his father occupancy in his head and his heart. Once forgiveness had happened and the son had stopped being angry at the man he could not understand and stopped being so utterly uncomprehending as to why he was unloved by his father. The son instead contented himself with thinking of his father rarely and even then with sadness. Years passed. Silence and distance, which had always been there between them, became more enduring than the patient planets in their orbits, more resolute than stone.

In his eighty-fourth year, the sons fiftieth, the father died. The father died as he had lived, finally receiving a generous bounty of what he had spent so much of his life giving to others. The father died in fear and in great pain. The son was relieved that the melodrama of his father’s life had come to an appropriate end. The son experienced no grief at his father’s death. Knowing that the father’s toxicity had finally consumed him was cathartic for the son. A life spent giving great pain had ended in it. A friend remarked that not all lives should be celebrated. The son thus chose to celebrate his father’s death. He visited the fresh grave the night his father had been buried and asked repeatedly: Did you get out of this lifetime what you wanted? Was the racism, the hypocrisy, the violence worth it? In February 2017, whilst in Mackay for his mother’s death, the son visited his father’s grave and found to his no small amount of satisfaction that the father was in an unmarked and un-visited grave.

For all this, it was undeniable that one day the son met himself in the street and refused to acknowledge that he was standing before himself. He was his mother’s youngest son. His mother was living out her death in the twilight of Alzheimer’s and her Schrodinger’s cat was a different feline to his fathers. She was dead, yet her body still breathed. The mother had a past hidden behind a solid wall of denial and ignorance. His mother had been as incomplete as he was.

The mother embraced a Christianity that was as intolerant, racist and bigoted as her ex-husbands atheism ever was. The mother never suffered as the father had from a lack of mouth control. The mother believed that self-identifying as Christian gave her the permission she needed to be narrow minded, intolerant and racist. Because she was destined for Heaven, the mother could treat the son as badly as his father had ever done.

For all this, the son loved his mother. When he needed to, the son emotionally journeyed back in time to when he was a three year old and very much “Mums baby boy”, and breathed the security of knowing that she, unlike his father even then, loved him. As he had done with his father, the son saw the stupidity of anger and refused to give his mother the space that would have been occupied by being angry with her. The bond between mother and son ran deep. Just how deep neither of them knew. On February 15 2017 the son received a call from the Good Shepherd Lodge where his mother had lived for the last nine years. It was time for him to return to Mackay if he wanted to see his mother alive one last time. The son arrived in Mackay shortly after 4 p.m. on Friday the 17^th. He spent a precious half hour with his mother. Telling her of his forgiveness, of his love and just how happy he was in life. Exhausted and suffering from food poisoning the son goes to his accommodation. The mother dies some time before 1 a.m. the next morning. The son is woken and spends time alone with his mother. Talking softly to her. Closure is affected. The son returns to bed knowing that he has done what he needed to do.

The brothers and sisters that remain are distant by mutual antipathy. There is no connection between them and the son. Too much time has passed, personalities that are wildly different in their goals, outlooks and interests, and a very real gap in education. The son by now has a Masters of International Relations from Monash University, the brothers and sisters stop at Year 10, the exception being Fiona who completes Year 12 and studies briefly at University of Central Queensland. The nieces and nephews and great-nieces and nephews are unknown. The son seeing what he has seen in his siblings only wants this to stay that way.

On another autumn day not much later, than the day their first meeting had taken place and in the midst of drenching rain, the son met himself again.

“Hello” said the son to himself whilst looking himself straight in the eyes.

“Morning” came the reply.

“I am you” said the son to himself.

“Yes, I can see that now” was the reply.

“Who and what are you?” asked the son of himself. Once the son asked this, he realised that he had spent his entire life asking this question of himself. The difference between those time and the one the son found himself in was that the self who stood before him was much better dressed than he was.

“I am Malak, which is as correct a name as any. I am everything and nothing. I am what you are and what you are not”, the better dressed self who was standing before him replied.

“That’s no answer”.

“Nonetheless, it is the best answer I can give. Perhaps it is best that I show you what I am”.

“Not a bad idea”.

“Do you believe in magic?”

“I believe in nothing much at all”. 

“Good, in that case you will accept what your eyes will tell you.  Do you want to begin finding out who and what we are? ” Malak asked.

“It’s haunted me for long enough. Now would be a good time as any” came the reply.

“Look into our eyes. Look deep into our eyes.”

And that is what the son did. He looked deep into the eyes of himself standing in front of him. Perhaps the son fell into a worm hole or subconsciously clicked his heels three times like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps he went mad. The truth is he couldn’t tell you what happened. It felt as natural as looking deeply into your own eyes does. He was here and then he was there, all the while in the company of the self who was standing before him.

The “there” that he had gone to was very different from where he had just been. It was dark for a start. The sky filled with stars, a sky so clear and full of stars that it seemed impossible that it would stay where it was and not fall on top of the son and his self. “There” was quiet, almost worryingly so. No distant rumble of jet engines, no blinking lights as helicopters wandered across the field of stars. The sky was empty except for stars.  The son could hear nothing of civilisation. The crowded, noisy world that the son knew was nowhere to be seen or heard. In the midst of such silence and with a sky so full of stars that he couldn’t tear his attention away from it, the son drank the moment with the driest parts of his soul. The son drank for so long that eventually an “Ahem!” broke the silence.

The self that was standing before the son pointed out that they were not alone. About half a kilometre away there was a fire and tents and beyond them a watercourse.

“You idiot! You’ve taken us to a campground” said the son.

“Yes I have”.

“All this look into my eyes nonsense and you’ve brought me no more than a couple of hundred kilometres from home!”

“Oh we’ve gone much further than that in a number of different ways”.

Something roared not far away. Australian animals don’t roar. Lions roar, kangaroo, wombat, Quoll don’t roar. Lions do.

“Is that a lion that just roared?”

“Yes”.

“So I take it we aren’t in Australia?”

“No, we’re not. Nor are we in the 21^st century, well not the 21^st century you know.”

“So which 21^st century are we in?”

“A couple of multiples of the one before Christ.”

Silence walks between the two men, sits down and looks at them. Silence takes such a long time looking at the son and his self, that eventually it gets bored and decides to do something.

The result of this boredom in Silence is that the son speaks.

“If this isn’t Australia and this isn’t the 21^st century CE, then where are we and who are they over there?” the son says gesturing towards the encampment.

“This is the land that in another 5000 years or so will be known by the Romans as Judea. You can take a guess as to who the people by the fire are” replied Malak.

“Jews?” asks the son.

“Eventually they will be known as such” came the reply. Mind you, they could just as easily be Arabs. But, no, they are Jews.

So why have you taken me here of all places?asks the son. 

Malak looks at the son.

The son looks at Malak.

Malak smiles gently.

"You know, for someone who knows so much, you understand very little" says Malak.

"What is it I'm not understanding this time?" asks the son.

"Why we've come to this place and this time."

"Oh I can understand the interest in coming here. The stars alone are enough."

The self standing before the son smiles at him in the way he does when he knows he is being either particularly stupid or just plain missing the point.

Malak looks at the son and says: "We are here because this is the very beginning of you. This is the certainty, the foundation you have always craved".

The son finally understands and before he can really form a thought, the son is back in his study sitting in front of his computer trying to remember what he was just thinking.