fiction – Brooke Allen

Do you ever get lost in the World Wide Web?

Early Saturday morning before going shopping you decide to find a recipe for breakfast soufflé and the next thing you know you’ve visited 37 sites and watched half a dozen TED videos, and now it is past lunchtime and you’re starving and so you search for a recipe that can make best use of what’s in the kitchen: 6 ounces of sharp Vermont cheddar, a pickle, and four pieces of salt licorice.

If this hasn’t happened to you then I hate to break it to you but you’re not normal.

But do you do the same carefree flitting about in the real world?

If you haven’t tried it then you should; it’s awesome — like a truly interactive 3-D immersive hi-def IMAX experience with Dolby Surround-Sound and Smell-O-Vision. Only better.

For example…

On the morning of Saturday, September 6, 2014 I wake up in a rented room in Beit Hall at Imperial College, South Kensington, London. I have only two things on my calendar: 1) a late lunch with a guy I’ll call Fred at 2:00 PM at Ottelenghi restaurant on Upper Street in Islington, and 2) dinner in Covent Garden with my friend, Kai, who I first met in Nuremberg, 2004, and who I talk about in Stories from Germany.

I have only 20 pounds and tube pass in my wallet so my first order of business is to find a Barclays ATM and withdraw some cash. My iPhone tells me the nearest machine is not far away but I still manage to take 30 minutes finding the place — partially because in London they change the names of streets every block, and partially because sometimes I’m an idiot.

When I get to the ATM it says it is out of order.

I’m about to ask my iPhone to find the next machine when I say to myself, “This is stupid.”

The thing is, when I was 19 a friend and I took a week off work and with $20 in our pockets we hitch-hiked from New Jersey to California and back in nine days. When you go on an adventure like that it is good to have a purpose and a clearly identified destination, and in this instance our purpose was to take an ounce of the Atlantic and put it in the Pacific and then return with an ounce of the Pacific for the Atlantic. Oceans make for good targets because they are hard to miss, the sun will tell you east from west, and you know when you’ve arrived because your feet start getting wet.

We did all that without fear, an iPhone, or even a watch and we didn’t worry about getting lost because wherever we were there we were. And in the event we needed to know the name of the place we were at or which way to the ocean then someone who knew the answers always seemed to be loitering nearby.