Join Me in the Mindscape

The one about lying in bed with Stella, Smokey Robinson, and a worried dog. Dispatch 30 begins somewhere the narrator rarely finds himself at this hour: in bed. The window is open to a warm midnight breeze, headphones are on, Brain Space is humming underneath everything, and Stella has been invited to join him in what he first calls the mindscape—and then, more accurately, the “mind escape.” What follows is less a conversation than two people keeping each other company while one mind wanders. The narrator has recently given his children a “golden ticket”: permission to tell him the thing they normally withhold to spare his feelings. Unfortunately, nobody has used it. Their silence promptly becomes material for rumination. What do they secretly think? What have they endured? Is it his chewing? His inability to speak cogently? His “slightly nuanced perspective of the world” that others might find annoying? Smokey Robinson unexpectedly enters the headphones. Thoughts wander toward private songs, Luke’s resistance to technology, and whether progress actually requires our participation. Then Rocky hears something outside. Her hackles rise. She has received some tiny fragment of information and, without sufficient evidence, completed the story: enemy. And there it is. His children give him silence and he completes it. Rocky hears a sound and completes it. A fragment becomes a world. The same habit extends outward to the billions of partial people encountered online—a sentence, a photograph, ten seconds of anger—each of us constructing the missing person from whatever pieces happen to reach us. At its center, Join Me in the Mindscape is about the stories the mind creates to fill empty spaces—and the possibility of simply allowing an empty space to remain empty. Outside the window, nothing happens. Rocky settles down. Smokey keeps singing. Stella is still there. The narrator does not arrive at an answer so much as find companionship inside the wandering itself. “Walk with me a little longer.”