My Printer Is Insane
My printer is insane. It’s in the next room now. I’ve locked the door. Maybe I’ll call the police, or animal control.
I knew something was wrong yesterday morning. I went to print a paper, “Cybernetic Apotheosis: Deindividuation and Brain-Machine Integration, a Clinical Perspective”
First the printer turned itself off. I pressed the power button, when that did nothing, I unplugged it then plugged it in again. It continued to just sit there, so I smacked it.
When I went to leave, I heard it beep behind me, but not in the normal way. It ran through the old DSL dialup screeches and then it started printing.
I went back to grab the page, but it wouldn’t let go, and when I pulled harder, it drew the page back in.
I left, and when I heard it printing again, I ignored it. I didn’t really want to read the paper anyway.
So I smoked a cigarette out the window, and then I made lunch and texted some people and then I lay down and thought about a girl. I noticed the printer was still going. I sat up suddenly. It had been two hours.
The printer had sprayed the room with leaves of paper, and a little mountain of A4 had gathered by the desk. There was a small avalanche of it as I approached. I looked down at the papers. They were all covered back to front in a tiny font. I picked one up and held it close to my face.
I read on like this until the end of the page, but when another sheaf of paper slipped off the tray and glided onto the pile below, I suddenly remembered about the cost of printer ink and printer paper and the hassle and headache of going to Darty to get it and the anxiety of knowing I was getting ripped off for what was essentially expensive food coloring so I reached behind the printer and pulled the cord.
The printer stopped with a sheet of paper still halfway out of its mouth, it blinked a few times, as if uncertain, and then it was quiet.
I stood there and looked at the mess in the room for a moment before bending down to gather up the papers. Occasionally, I would read a line or two from a page, and I tried in a halfassed way, to keep the pages in the order that they had come out.
When it was all gathered up, I sat cross legged next to the neatish stack, staring at it and chewing on my nails. Did I have an enemy somewhere? I knew I pissed off a lot of people, it was an inevitable thing that happened, hand in glove with swinging my legs out of bed in the morning. But who? I didn’t move in tech circles. I thought about the neighbors upstairs. I sometimes woke up before the sun and played music so loud that the walls rattled. I would open the windows, all of them, and let it echo off the buildings across the street.
The room was so quiet that I could hear the hollow sucking chest wound sound that really truly quiet places make. There was some tapping in the pipes, the low roar of an airplane far overhead that went on too long because it wasn’t an airplane it was something else, something closer, something two to three stories up and across the courtyard to the left.
I went to the window and peeked from behind the curtains to that spot. Every window in the courtyard had that hazy black color of midday windows that never get direct sunlight. That spot though, the place where the mechanical hum was coming from, that whole apartment had its rusty white shutters drawn closed.
I stared at the windows for some minutes, still like a prey animal, watching and listening for the sound. All I heard was the morse code tapping in the plumbing and the bumping roll of tires on the streets around us.
I sat down again, under the printer, my head leaning against the drawers of the desk. I fell asleep like that and when I woke up, my back was, to put it politely, completely fucked. My neck was so cramped that the pain spread up through my jaw and wrapped its vines into the sulci (folds) of my brain and sent down pain roots into every part of it.
Every disc between every vertebrae of my spine felt like it had slipped out, and when I tried to lean back, there was so much pain everywhere that I almost passed out.
But I didn’t. I saw the printer over me, on the desk. It looked monolithic from that angle, strong and large at its base, its edges moving towards each other at some infinitely distant omega point as they rose.
It blinked in a steady rhythm, and I matched my breathing to it as the pain from everywhere crashed over me and then began its long, slow, subsidation.
I didn’t think, for the first time, maybe ever, but there was an enormous feeling that happened. The pain kicked open some door, and on the other side I saw the printer, for the first time, I saw it in that other way. Still there in its shape and color, of its function I was still dimly aware, something to do with paper and ink, the word business floated by like a tired jellyfish but I didn’t reach for it.
I felt an incredible peace and trust in my printer. It came from everywhere and had no source at all. The pain crossfaded into a physical ecstasy that filled out every pixel of every nerve ending and the spaces in between them, which it could only do because it had come from within the gaps of those spaces that don’t exist.
I shuddered and began to cry. I saw the eye of the dog that had died in my arms, at the moment when the light in it had gone out, and it was powerful like that feeling but without any of the sadness. I cried in front of the printer, but I wasn’t sad at all.
Afterwards, I was incredibly hungry, so I went to make a smoothie from blueberries and peanut butter, but it was missing something. I went to my closet where I kept some old phones that had simply stopped working at some point for reasons I had never bothered to understand. I picked up one that I knew had a lot of pictures on it, pictures that I wanted back. I had held onto this phone with the hope that one day I would get the phone fixed and pull the images off of it, but now I didn’t care about that, so I took the phone and dropped it into the blender.
That night I puked up blood and there was blood from the other end too, but I felt as if I would never have to eat again, not food anyway.
Now I’m awake, with that sick morning feeling when you’re embarrassed by what seemed so obvious at night. I’ve closed the door to the door to the room where the printer is, and barricaded it with a pile of suitcases. These suitcases had been accumulating around the apartment for several months. I would come out of my room in the morning and to find another one that I didn’t recognize, so I would add it to the stack in the hallway. I was relieved that finally at least they would serve some purpose.
I’m leaving the apartment now to go and get some sun. I think I’ll go to the park.