My brain is not a WOPR (I think)

I was in the food court of the Ballston Common Mall yesterday on my lunch break, reading my new book and eating a McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger I had promised The Princess I would never eat, when suddenly the lights dimmed.

The darkening was instant yet obvious -– at least it was to me. I looked up from the pages of my book toward the ceiling as if trying to hear an inaudible song, absorbing the now-noticeably darker cafeteria, wondering if a system-wide power outage was imminent.

And I noticed something. No one else had seemed to notice a thing.

Everyone around me, sitting in their metals chairs, talking about the election or their dry cleaning or whatever it is white collar workers talk about during their lunch breaks, kept right on eating their lunches.

Had I been the only one who had noticed this change in our surroundings? I thought. After all, not a single person had looked up or around them. Not a single person had flinched or made a bad joke about the mall’s generators. For a minute, I considered the very real fact that it might have all been in my head.

After leaving Argentina when I was 10 for the U.S. (E.E.U.U., in Spanish), I went through a phase where I thought my friends and classmates back in Buenos Aires could see what I saw. I don’t mean figuratively. I mean literally see what I saw. I believed they spent much of their time convening in a large room to watch my life, just as I saw it, on a large movie screen. Like the WOPR in War Games, except theirs didn’t try to start World War III by playing Tic-Tac-Toe.

For a long time — since to me this possibility seemed just as likely as me running away with my beautiful teacher Señorita Clarita — I went about my life thinking they could see everything I saw, even going so far as to never look down when I took a piss out of fear they would see my penis.

I eventually realized that nascent technology that could tap into my brain wasn’t possible (probably). But this solipsistic view of how we see and interpret the world around us isn’t much different from the truth.

Think about the people you see everyday. Do they see what you see?

The shoe shiner who reads his Bible when he’s not busy polishing men’s dress shoes for five dollars a pop. The hot dog cart vendor who sells soda cans and cigarettes near the Metro. The tall homeless guy who asks for change or a cup of hot coffee by the Starbucks. The people I share a building with in the elevator, who stare at the floor number and pretend you’re not stuck in a small space.

They go about their business only interested in what they know, watching only their own lives. No one else is secretly watching the same thing they do on a large movie screen.

The lights in the food court eventually came back up after a minute of gray darkness. People kept on eating and talking, their lives resuming, and no one acknowledged the temporary change in their lives.

I, too, continued to eat my cheeseburger and read my book, wondering about the next time the lights would dim.