Phantom Power
by Anthony Schneck
While hunting for documents required to bureaucratically finalize my mother’s death, I found her old laptop. Not the one left open on her stomach when they found her, but the computer she bought when the two of us lived together, many technological iterations ago. It was tucked in her closet behind a shoe organizer. The power cord lay like a snake curled next to it.
I picked it up, trembling slightly. Thick, heavy, more bricklike than the newer models, the device felt substantial in my hands.
Holding it, a sickening, anxious feeling flowed from my diaphragm, like I’d broken some rule and was awaiting punishment. I wanted to slap myself across the face for acting like a nervous child. Grow up, I told myself, there’s no other choice.
Growing up consisted of satisfying the bureaucratic demands death places on the living. I’d started to conceive of life – my life, currently in progress, if you could call it progress – as a minuscule affair reducible to paperwork, insurance policies, misplaced passwords.
How many people died staring at their computers?
My mother was dead. She was dead like the trillions before her, and no one would ever know what it felt like, what was going through her mind just before it shut down for good. As I walked through the house, I heard her voice explaining it in terms of photons bombaring eyes that could no longer convert them to electric signals in the brain which could no longer transform those signals into intelligible images. I set aside the computer and decided to end my search for the day; I couldn’t accomplish anything substantive. Couldn’t continue calling bankers and insurance representatives.
That night I wandered through the house, drinking from the 12-pack I’d placed in the empty refrigerator, rifling through drawers, stopping at each of the generic, mass-produced reminders of her, objects found in thousands of other homes but which to me signified Mom, only her. They carried no market value – markets and insurance and death, all I could think about – but their unexpected appearance dredged up sunken memories. A butter box with little milkmaids painted on it, which she only brought out for special occasions even though it couldn’t have cost more than a few dollars. A piece of artificially aged wood with the word “Home” burned into it in flowing, cursive font. Candlesticks, fake silver, used for holidays.
I noticed the coffeemaker, unplugged, as I reached for another beer. Always unplugged. It drove me crazy when I had to live with her, that long, miserable year. Each day when I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, I would groggily pour water, scoop out grounds, click on the percolator only to realize five minutes later that it wasn’t brewing. Enrage internally, but be too tired to express or suppress it. I usually slapped the counter, hoping it would wake her, though I was unwilling to create a larger commotion.
She insisted on keeping the machine unplugged to minimize the expense incurred through phantom power. I can’t afford that kind of wastefulness! she would yell. Phantom power is real, look it up! It’s expensive! It doesn’t matter if it’s off – as long as it’s plugged in, it’s sucking up electricity!
We live these lives of convenience, she would continue more philosophically, and we don’t even know how anything works, we just use and waste and use and waste and we understand nothing!
You’re wasting your time and energy, I’d respond. You’re talking about a few cents, it can’t be much more than that, and my time – your time – has to be worth more than that, right?
Don’t confuse time and money! she’d retort.
We repeated this argument with no resolution during the tense months we spent together. She nearly drove me to the edges she claimed to protect me from.
I resented that I had to live there, even if I’d brought it on myself. Resented that she charged me rent yet wouldn’t let me keep the coffeemaker plugged in, resented that any time I wanted to go out on my own, even for a walk in field down the block that marked the end of town lines, she asked me to check in every hour. I had no choice but to comply while I still lived with her.
Amid these battles, her mood oscillated between combative and resigned. When she fell into the passive phase of her depressions, when arguments drifted into abstraction, I’d come home to find all the lights on, Mom in bed on her computer, all day buried in a theoretical physics rabbit hole. She had no expertise, no background in it, but string theories and quantum communication gave her license to imagine simultaneous alternatives to her life. She used uncertainty to create an existence more interesting, beautiful, acceptable than her own.
It’s not that different from religion, she would tell me, a combination of mystery and order. Maybe the explanations are well beyond view, outside our understanding of the world, but they’re based in logic – numbers, atoms, subatomic particles.
She’d talk esoterically about the powers of the universe, the quantum nature of existence, what dark energy might be, all her theories on how little we knew about life and death, whether our definition of life was far too narrow. Wasn’t a star alive? It could die, after all.
But most of her fixation centered on how scientists changed reality merely by observing it. It’s perspective, she would say, if they can do it on a subatomic level, why can’t you change reality by choosing what you see?
As I sat alone in her house, I replayed these memories, letting them become nostalgic. After seven beers, I was getting sentimental. I didn’t like it. I went to my old bed to pass out. From my mother’s room came the whirring sound of straining circuitry. I ignored it and felt my heart thudding, too loudly and too quickly, as I waited for consciousness to fade away.
* * *
I woke up sober and dehydrated hours before dawn. Stumbled down the hall into the bathroom, where I turned on the tap and drank straight from it in greedy slurps that disturbed the stillness in the house. Splashed water on my face and took a few deep breaths.
As I stepped out of the bathroom, I heard the whirring noise again. No one else was in the house, but I found myself tiptoeing to Mom’s bedroom. I remembered her bizarre belief that tiptoeing at night was a carryover instinct from our hominid ancestors which modernity had failed to destroy. Millennia of evolution had failed to eliminate a fear of dark.
The sound came from the closet. I opened the door and saw a blinking red dot. The computer I’d found. Its fan was churning and its bowels were heaving, trying to fire 1s and 0s. This thing must’ve been dead for years. I couldn’t imagine Mom would’ve turned it on or plugged it in recently. But it was possible, I certainly never understood her alternating bursts of technophilia and phobia, switching like currents according to an unknown law.
I picked up the computer, which continued whirring in my hands, and I opened it. No password; several document files appeared to be open at the bottom of the screen, so I clicked one. It read:
in the trash, devices have no positive value – only destructive waste
think: david bohm
What was that supposed to be about? Some kind of note to herself? I was groggy, I’d been drinking, it was the middle of the night, I needed to go to bed and could figure this out in the morning. I shut the computer, plugged it into the wall, and returned to my room.
* * *
It was late when I finally regained consciousness, close to 10. I stared at my phone in bed, unwilling to encounter life again, killed 45 minutes scrolling through ink after link on post after post, absorbing information that would instantly dissolve into vague shadows of knowledge. By the time I’d learned more about David Bohm than I’d ever have use for, I despised myself enough to drag my body out of bed.
In the kitchen I encountered the unplugged percolator and remembered the previous night. I poured grounds into the filter, turned it on, and walked to Mom’s room.
The files remained open on the computer. A shiver crawled down my forearms.
time is nothing more than a watch
actually: a watchmaker constantly making a watch, but the watchmaker is also a watch
I clicked another and read:
never leave a charged laptop plugged in
worse than phantom power
I smiled and for the first time thought with something close to affection for my mother’s obsession. About the coffeemaker, the toaster, any number of other appliances she insisted remain unplugged when not in use to avoid the dreaded phantom power effect. She went so far that she began unplugging the router while I was online, which sent me on an angry crusade to prove that phantom power was a negligible source of electricity usage, if it mattered at all. Instead, I found that “phantom power” was a term used for microphones, whereas the energy sucked up by appliances was called “phantom load,” or “vampire power” or “ghost load.”
There you have it, she said, what do vampires do? They suck! These machines are sucking the blood out of my bank account. You should be grateful I don’t ask you to contribute to the electric bill.
My laziness and obstinance prevented me from conducting a full audit of our appliances, their power use, electricity costs. I conceded defeat and plotted my escape from the clutches of phantom power, dreamed of an apartment where I would leave all appliances plugged in, eternally ready for use, jacking up my bill with their vampirism.
Now her obsession existed only in my memory. Connective associations, imperfect storage. Lossy data. Before closing the screen, I pulled up the next document:
what is the smallest particle-wave that could contain my consciousness?
if you’re going out, unplug the computer
Dutifully I unplugged the computer. Was I taking orders? Were these old notes messages to me from… what, the beyond? Couldn’t be. I knew it couldn’t be; consciousness ended with death. The pointedness of her words was merely an illusion.
Her thoughts on the matter wormed back into my brain, a belief in the unseen, in the impossible, is one of those idiosyncratic traits that separate humans from other animals. It’s what makes us such a flawed and ambitious species – a dolphin couldn’t discover the atom, chimps don’t believe in god.
Don’t they? I’d say sarcastically. With distance, I could acknowledge the truth in these crude aphorisms. Indulging was harmless, at least, and in my current circumstances proved irresistible. Paraphysical notes made more immediate sense than whatever technologically rational explanation accounted for what I was seeing.
The coffee was ready. Bitter, black, cheap. I filled a thermos to take on a walk, hoping to shake off the previous night’s sludge. A quarter mile of asphalt road led to the open, rolling field where I’d wandered so often, texting Mom every hour to let her know I hadn’t gone off the rails, would return home soon. The grass brushed against my ankles, my heart eased its incessant knocking, and the anxious claustrophobia of a morning spent hungover in bed began to dissipate. But I knew I’d have to return to the computer – I still hadn’t found any of the insurance info or house and car documents I needed to close out her estate, or resolve her estate, or whatever I was trying to do with the possessions she’d left behind. The remains of her life were no more than ballast to toss overboard as quickly and efficiently as possible to avoid sinking with them. A passing guilt seized me as I realized that this was how I thought of her. What kind of child was I?
On the horizon a swelling blanket of dark clouds began to obscure the sun. The wind lashed at my face. A summer storm would punish me if I didn’t hustle home, so I forced down the rest of the coffee and half-walked, half-trotted out of the field. The first raindrops began falling just as I opened the door at home. Within minutes they sounded like a series of snare rolls pounding on the metal roof. Thunderclaps shook the windows. My heart sank. It was another of those primal fears I never outgrew – whenever the flash of light and the whipcrack of thunder arrived together, I was certain lightning would rip through the windows and electrocute us all.
Instead, the power went out.
Candles and flashlights remained in the drawer where they’d always been. Guided by beams of battery-powered photons, I placed candles on tables and shelves. A jolt of giddiness shot through me, the excitement of returning to a pre-electrified world. When the walls flickered orange against the gray-green daylight sneaking through the curtains, I walked to my mother’s room to examine the laptop.
The documents from earlier were still on the screen. I pulled up the next one:
we do not understand physics. we do not understand life or death. hubris makes us believe the atoms of our bodies are different from the rest of the atoms in the universe. all forms exist in a particle-wave state. everything operates according to unseen laws. the watch ticks even when we are stuck in time.
More of her quantum mysticism. What did I care what she believed? When she was alive, I tried to explain the logical errors in preferred slogans like, We’ll exist forever in the quantum universe, and aging is a product of quantum uncertainty, but in truth my own understanding faltered beyond rehashing cats with Schrodinger.
But see? her voice would rise excitedly, that’s what I mean! We exist in multiple states, living and dead, wave and particle, at all times. We contain multitudes. How can the cat be both alive or dead? An actual cat! Close enough to a human, cosmically speaking! How does conscious observation have the power to decide the fate of a cat? What does that say about the power of consciousness? You can’t explain that, can you?
I couldn’t. There was so much I couldn’t explain. What about the fact that the universe is 95% dark matter and dark energy, and we have no idea what those are? she’d continue. We’ve sent men to the moon and can microwave frozen beef stroganoff, but we still only understand 5% of everything that exists – if we’re even right about that, which I highly doubt.
At this point I would give up, a solution to dark energy wouldn’t arise from these asinine arguments. It worried me to hear her talk about life and death, age and youth, as matters of perspective, to listen to her claim that what most people considered alive was more similar to dead than different, but I attributed it to another depressive episode, one that would pass – or shift in nature – like the rest.
The next document churned my stomach:
the light in your room is on
I jumped. Ran to my room. The light was on. My heart bounced in my throat, then I realized the power must’ve returned. I flipped the switch down and up. It worked. Lights in the hallway and kitchen responded similarly. Surely I’d left the switch on when I’d gone out to walk.
Hadn’t I?
What was this? Were these notes an elaborate postmortem joke Mom planned in advance? She had a 50% chance of being right about the light, maybe more. Or it was a coincidence, another random note to herself that I interpreted as applying to me. Maybe she knew I’d go through her things, maybe she knew she wasn’t well, even though she didn’t seem more depressed than usual. If she planned on dying, that would at least explain why the computer was powered up.
I returned to the laptop and clicked through to the next document:
electricity powers the brain. the brain makes the mind. electricity is electrons. electrons swirl in every atom in our bodies. we think we can contain them
with wires. they play along for our benefit. we never know where they are until we ask them. we decide where the electrons are, but they’re never exactly
there. so: where is the mind? the watch ticks constantly.
Is this how grief drives people insane? I wondered. Some weeks before she died, Mom began calling me every day, something she’d never done before. Most of the time I ignored her. I reasoned that couldn’t spend all my time chatting about her latest attempt to unlock the cause of her distress, unfurl the mysteries of the universe and become one with them. She never left messages.
I’d been ignoring her for nearly a month when I found out she died.
I minimized the documents, but instead of the usual black backdrop, a screen appeared with an image that left me dizzy, reeling. It was a picture of my mother and me, one arm around each other, smiling widely. Not only did I have no memory of taking it, but it was physically impossible that we ever posed like this. There I was, a full beard, which I’d never grown before my mother’s death. We were outside in the picture, apparently hiking. I kept staring at it, too surprised to comprehend my own shock.
Surely there was an explanation, it must’ve been doctored somehow. But when? And who? Or was there a point in the past when I did have a beard, and I’d somehow forgotten? Rationality was failing me.
* * *
Someone else, someone with technical expertise, needed to figure out the source of the photo, the documents, everything. I found a guy online called The Laptop Doc. Cheap with a promise to find the solution to whatever ailed my device in less than an hour or I wouldn’t have to pay. He suggested meeting in a mall parking lot. The likelihood that he would steal the computer, or my car, or murder me, seemed, to me, low. Bright side: even if something happened to the computer, or to me, my problem would be solved.
The lot was empty except for a white van with a gaudy “The Laptop Doc” decal stuck on its side. A bald man in his late 40s, wearing the suburban white male uniform of sport sunglasses and a polo shirt tucked into slightly baggy khakis, opened the door and held out his hand. I brought the laptop to his van and explained that it had been my mother’s, she’d passed away, I was trying to find more info about documents and pictures on there, if he could do that. He nodded, said, Sure, sure, I’m sorry about your mother, let’s take a look. Then he attached Mom’s computer to his own while I looked on.
When the screen illuminated the background, I tried to maintain a neutral expression. The picture wasn’t there. Just an empty black void.
So, looking for any docs and pics? the Laptop Doc asked. I answered unsteadily, There were some files pulled up when I turned it on a couple days ago, I was just trying to figure out when they’d been created, and if there were other document files or pdfs or photos or whatever on there that I maybe missed. And if they weren’t created on this computer, can you see where they came from? Not sure if that’s possible.
He nodded and typed, saying, Well, I didn’t see anything open when we turned it on, but I’m sure we can find whatever you’re looking for.
Fingers clacked on the keys as I watched in silence. I tried to see what he was doing, wondering when I should ask him what was going on, when he said, Hmm, this is strange – this hard drive has actually been wiped. It’s totally clean, nothing on it, no docs, no files of any kind, really, just the basic applications, looks like the whole thing has been refurbished. Essentially it’s a brand-new computer. Old, obviously, but works like it would’ve worked whenever it was bought.
I could barely see, blackness threatened the edge of my vision. My brain was misfiring, trying to comprehend what was happening. You’re sure it’s been wiped? No documents? No photos?
That’s right, he said, and waved me over beside him to watch as he clicked through menus, inputted some code, and revealed nothing I could decipher. Look, you don’t have to pay me full price, it didn’t take long to figure out, and you didn’t get what you wanted. How bout fifty bucks?
I nodded, reached for my wallet, handed him sixty and left.
* * *
The drive back further scrambled my neurons. A psychotic episode? If that’s what was happening, would I have the mental capacity to ask whether it was happening? Did asking the question prove it couldn’t be happening, or did the observation itself make conditions more favorable for a total break from reality? Logic looped on itself, I couldn’t think it through, I wanted to understand, to work through the problem empirically, but a boulder of unintelligible information blocked the way. The data was bad, the model was bad, the outputs were bad.
I hurried into the house, sat down at the table, and opened the computer. The picture stared back at me. Documents were visible at the bottom of the screen. Nothing made sense. I opened the first one.
it only happens when YOU look
I couldn’t help myself. I tried typing back:
mom? i can’t believe i’m typing this
Five minutes. Nothing. How much time could I give to this Ouija keyboard?
A smell pricked at my nostrils, something I couldn’t place immediately. Sharp, roasted… coffee, smoke, burning. The smoke alarm started screeching, and I ran to the kitchen, where the coffee maker was sputtering and white wisps crawled out of the socket. My hand shot instinctively to the cord to pull it out, sending a shock through my body that knocked me on the floor and left me dazed. Old coffee spilled onto the linoleum. The machine lay on its side. My brain felt like it had been rinsed clean.
My index finger and thumb were stained black and my head reverberated like the echoes of a scream into a canyon. I cleaned up the coffee and drank a glass of water, waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal. Then I remembered the computer and what I’d just written.
The screen had gone black, and when I pressed a key to resuscitate it, a new document appeared:
stop leaving everything plugged in!
No. It was another example of her compulsions, a necessary self-flagellation that served some psychological purpose I had no access to. Occam’s razor, and all that. The immediate juxtaposition in time of the coffeemaker malfunctioning and seeing this particular message made the two seem cosmically connected, but in reality she could’ve written it at any point in the past few years. Even in death she projected her anxiety, her moods, her ridiculous beliefs on me.
But I was sure I’d typed something just before smelling smoke, was sure my absurd attempt to communicate had been recorded. Clicking through the other documents revealed no trace. Nothing could’ve made it disappear, unless somehow I lost it when the laptop went to sleep? Was that even possible?
I opened another file:
can’t we shift existence into another description of the same phenomenon? aren’t we all in the superposition: living/dead? we exist in multiple states simultaneously. living and dead. good and evil. wave and particle. the tangible and the intangible. matter and antimatter. binary and nonbinary. i am everywhere now.
I shut the computer, went to the kitchen, unplugged all the appliances, grabbed two beers from the fridge, and sat down in Mom’s room. I’d started to hyperventilate, my heart skipped beats, I could feel droplets of sweat forming in slow motion on my temples and hairline. Deep breaths. I opened one of the beers and swallowed the entire can in seconds, then immediately opened the other. What was happening? I paced. Nothing had changed, the ebony chest, the wicker nightstand. I opened the nightstand’s top drawer. A green notebook, some hair ties, several half-full or empty prescription bottles. I flipped through the notebook and saw her familiar looping handwriting along with what looked like doodles. I never knew her to keep a diary or journal. Most of the pages were blank. Several were covered with what looked like diagrams – wavy lines, arrows, small dots, occasional letters. Boxes, branching paths. Some scribblings showed how far down the quantum rabbit hole she’d fallen. Most barely made sense to me.
She wrote about degeneration as the only outcome possible for the human body, all organic matter. We are designed to decay, she said, but only because we have the capacity to watch ourselves decay. Entropy is deterministic only at the macro level. She regretted ever having me, the guilt of bringing me into a world in which she’d be my mother failed to subside over the decades. She also wrote that I was the only reason for her to live when she had no desire to.
What she had written sounded like it came from a stranger; no anger, no confusion, no desperation ran through the descriptions of her own physical and mental illnesses. The breakdowns, the teary-eyed knocks at my door, the demands that I leave home for the weekend – I found none of it. As I observed her life through this lens, she became more poised, more aware, less a slave to her mind and more in control of her thoughts than she ever appeared to me.
Then I found:
Notes on Quantum Suicide
My left eye twitched. The doctor I’d spoken to told me it was an accidental death, the toxicology report showed several drugs, but none was at an overdose level. Probably just a mistake, forgetfulness after taking anxiolytics, made fatal by heart condition. We’ll never know for sure, he told me with gravity, and I couldn’t decipher whether he was speaking in code or this was what he really meant. Now I felt stupid, incurious.
If the quantum universe contained many worlds, she’d written in elegant, looping letters, then there would always be a scenario in which Schrodinger’s cat survived. Or, rather, what if I, the observer, were the one who might be alive or dead? Consciousness must exist outside the seat of the individual human mind in order to exert its power over matter. If that’s true, consciousness didn’t have to be accessed by a so-called “living” human. Some version of self could continue to exist after a conventional organic death, albeit in a changed form, a new kind of sentience. What happened when electrons weren’t cooped up in her terrible brain, her restrictive body, no better than the wires that ran through the house?
The possibilities of a new life, or a different experience of life, of not having to be bound by physics as we understood it – this sounded appealing, I had to admit. Hadn’t she succeeded? Just as that question fired across my neurons, I turned the page and read:
you will never find the peace you deserve. existence – life – consciousness – are not what you believe them to be. even the electron is informed with a
certain level of mind.
I closed the notebook and lay down in her bed. Leaning over to the open nightstand drawer, I pulled out the prescription bottles, dumped out their contents on the ground. Did it even matter what I did? No one could say yes or no.