The Gramophone (A Dream)

My gaze fell upon my laptop. I told Erin, “I miss using my laptop. Sometimes I wish I could log in to it once in a while.”

“Maybe we can run the generator tonight. Then you could use it for a bit.” That was typically kind of her; gasoline for the generator took a lot of effort to obtain, and firing up the laptop qualified as a frivolous use of the power. Besides, the Internet was gone, with so many dead from the plague. What did I really want to see? I could write some code, but there weren’t any problems that I needed a computer to solve any more.

After thirty minutes’ walk through the empty, silent streets, I walked right in to the doctor’s office; there weren’t any other patients. I had never met him, and there didn’t seem to be much point in small talk. “I wonder if you would give me some Prozac, please,” I asked.

“Do you have a prescription?” the doctor asked me. “I can't find it,” I replied, and I wasn’t sure that I had ever really had one.

“Then I will have to examine you, so that I can write a prescription for it, if, in fact, it is indicated.” The doctor’s leather swivel chair squeaked as he leaned back.

“Look, it’s not like I’m asking you for anything dangerous. What could possibly go wrong? Who would care at this point?”

“It’s fortunate that you’re not looking for anything dangerous,” the doctor replied, “for everything that had even the slightest potential to get anyone high was looted from the pharmacy a long time ago. But it doesn’t matter whether what you want is dangerous or not. I am a doctor, and doctors have rules. If you want me to prescribe medication for you, I must examine you first.”

But the doctor did not mean to examine me personally. He escorted me to a little room where there was a stool set before a video screen. A computer-generated image of a nurse appeared on the screen and began to ask me questions, building up my medical history from scratch. I had trouble remembering the answers to the questions. It had been so long since I had thought about any of this. I wondered where the doctor got the power to operate the device.

Night was falling as I walked home. I saw that while I was away, Erin had somehow managed to find a gramophone, and a stack of old gramophone records to go with it. It was powered by a spring wound by a crank, and played the music through a metal horn, so we could listen to music without running the generator. She hadn’t heard me come in. I watched her look at the gramophone records one by one, trying to find something that she thought we might enjoy hearing, I supposed, though the records were very old; the most recent was from the thirties. My heart swelled with admiration for her. She is making the best of a bad situation, I thought.