Hello?

My name is Aaron. I am very confused.

I'm confused because a very strange thing happened when I got home from my friend Dan's house today, and I'm still trying to make sense of it.

I spent most of the day over there, trudging through the snow in his woods and talking about what we were going to do over Christmas Break, which is exactly seventeen days away.

I left earlier than I usually would, around four, because the sun goes down early now and I don't like to walk home by myself in the dark. I came in through the front door, kicked off my boots, threw my coat on the floor, and ran up to my bedroom, where I was going to get my backpack out and start working on some homework that's due tomorrow for Mr. Dryer's class. It's Algebra, which, along with all other types of Math, I hate and am bad at, so I probably wouldn't have kept on it for too long anyway, but I noticed something when I walked in my room that completely took my attention away from anything else.

Atop the working desk that Mom and Dad got me for Christmas several years ago was what looked like a regular Selectric typewriter, like the kind Dad has in his office, with a glass pane attached to the back.

Laying atop the keyboard was a note in sleek, shining text, uniform and with no ink smudges.

I read it:

Aaron,

You may not understand much of what you are being asked, or what you are being told, but you must trust in the truth and the rightness of the course you are to walk. You are living in strange and important times, times that will determine the fate of many millions of people.

This will seem unbelievable to you, but there will come a day when you will look back upon these years and see how pivotal they were in giving rise to unconscionable tragedy and glorious deliverance.

The task set to you is to share, in your own voice, your thoughts and dreams, the world as you experience it. Though you cannot yet fathom it, these words will help not only you as you approach young manhood, but other souls undergoing like trials in a distant but similar time.

The machine before you is a special one, a diary to the stars. Whatever you enter there shall be transmitted into a medium where it can be accessed by untold masses, any of whom may see your writings though they not know you.

The glass plate here affixed will enable you to see what you have written, and whatever others may think of it.

The camera hidden in the top of your closet is a special instrument as well--any of the pictures you take with it will transpose themselves into the same medium as your journal entries, going wherever you bid them.

Your only job is to live, as best you can in the era to which you have been born, and to record the journey of that living. In the coming years you and many others will be confronted with great moral dilemmas, and the false choices of patriotism or treason, piety or heresy, intolerance or abnormality.

Be strong through this, and share that strength with as many as you can.

Tell no one of this venture. Once you have finished using them, remove the typewriter and the camera to your closet. If you honor that tenet, they shall never be found, nor destroyed. Good luck.

A Friend

Beneath all this was a section entitled "Instructions" that I didn't even bother looking at.

I assumed that this was John playing a stupid joke on me. He's fifteen and he loves practical jokes, but his writing isn't as good as what's in that note, so I figured he probably had help with it if he did it. He could've gotten someone he knows to type out the note, and then he himself would have been capable of screwing a glass sheet onto the back of a typewriter.

When I checked in my closet for the camera, though, it was actually there. It was small, smaller than any camera I've ever seen, black, and square. When I pressed a button on its top a plastic door opened and a lens rose up from within it like a missile readying for launch.

I was astonished, and snapped a picture of myself.

To my amazement, the typewriter emitted a high eletrical chirp--it had turned on.

The screen was alight with a strange image, but there was no projector set up anywhere in the room. The image, which looked a lot like a set of folders in a filing cabinet, was coming from the screen itself, as if it were a television. Yet it was only a half-inch thick piece of glass. I looked behind it and nothing was casting the figure, so I guessed the typewriter had to be generating it.

I went back to the letter to see what the instructions said.

It advised me to follow the guidelines on the screen, and to use a small box to the right of the typewriter to "click" different images.

I moved the box, and was shocked when a blue dot made its way across the screen, following the box's trajectory. The two things were connected!

By this time I'd come to the conclusion that John wasn't up to so elaborate a gimmick, so now I'm actually taking directions from a little piece of paper and feeling stupid and wondering if anyone will ever read this, or if that's even possible. I've spent the last five hours figuring this out and looking at different things I've done on the screen.

I saw that there was a space for me to put a picture, so I snapped a photo of my school ID and it materialized on the screen. It's like magic.

Anyway, the instructions in the letter said I should tell you about myself, so here it goes.

My name is Aaron. I am sixteen years old. The typewriter must be a little bit off, though, because my profile lists me as being sixty-one. Maybe it got the 1 and the 6 mixed up. But anyway, I was born on May 1, 1948, in Washington, D.C. My dad was working there then, and after I came along he decided that the city was no place to raise a child so we moved out to the suburbs in Virginia.

It probably doesn't matter if I say exactly where I live, seeing as I'm putting all this information into a typewriter in my bedroom, but just in case anyone does happen to somehow get ahold of this I'm not giving my address, or my last name. That would be creepy.

After we moved here, my brother John was born on November 21, 1949. Then came my brother Lewis on May 9, 1955; and my sister Lynn on June 8, 1963. John just turned fifteen, Lewis is nine, and Lynn is only a year old.

My mom and dad are pretty nice, but sometimes we don't really get along.

My dad's name is Dan and my mom's name is Mary. Dad was born on December 1, 1923, and he just turned forty-one. Mom was born May 20, 1924, and she's forty now.

Dad owns a big company that builds houses and decks and does repairs and things like that, and he has dozens of overseers who report directly to him. I think he's pretty important, because he makes a lot of money and he talks on the phone a lot, and he always has to sign papers and approve other people's ideas before they're allowed to go ahead. His company does business here and in Maryland. My friends say he looks mean, because he's kind of fat and he's going bald and his skin is red, but once they get to know him they all like him better because he's funny. He's very liberal, even though he doesn't seem like he would be, and he says the Negroes should have equal rights with everyone else.

I don't know that many Negroes, and none go to my school, but the woman who cleans our house is named Nell and she's a Negro and she's very friendly, so I think he's right. One time when I was younger I said something I heard in school about Negroes being not as good as white people, and he got really angry and yelled at me.

He asked me if I'd like to get treated badly because I'm skinny, or because I like to read, or because my hair is long and it makes me look like a girl. That hurt my feelings a lot. Was it fair, he asked, that people should act as if I'm beneath them just because I'm different? Of course, I do get harassed and made fun of for these reasons, so I saw that he was right and I felt ashamed.

President Johnson got Congress to pass an act this summer making it illegal to segregate the Negroes and a lot of people here were really angry, but Mom and Dad were happy about it.

Mom is nice, too, and very smart. She went to college in fact, which is where she met Dad.

As for me, I'm a little strange. I'm tall but very skinny, and I have long hair that the other kids make fun of me for, but I like it this way and the fact that they tease me makes me all the more determined to keep it. I like singing, and reading, and writing, and music ("All My Loving" is my favorite song ever), and poetry, and my friends, and politics, too, which my parents are also addicted to.

Dad took me with him to the polls last month. He knew how much I wanted to vote, so when the people there said I wasn't allowed in he lied that he had poor eyesight and they let me go with him to help him vote! I got to mark the ballot and everything.

"You got half a vote in this election, young man," he said afterward. "Just don't tell anyone."

I didn't.

It's things like that that confuse me, because one minute he can be so mean and seemingly heartless that I never want to talk to him again, and then the next he'll do something really considerate and all of my anger will go away until he transgresses again.

I'm really glad President Johnson won the election, because Goldwater was a fanatic who wanted to bomb the Soviet Union and said that the East Coast (us) should be sawed off from the rest of the country.

I loved President Kennedy and when he was shot I cried for a whole day, and so did Mom and John and Lewis. Lynn, who was too young to know what was going on, saw us upset and then she started crying, too, even though she was only a baby. Dad is the only one who didn't cry, but I think he was very sad on the inside.

My best friends are Dan, Alex, Christina, Amy, and some other people, too.

I have to go, though, because it's 9:30 and I have to get up early tomorrow for school.

If anyone's out there...I'm trying. Can you hear me?