J. E. Landau

I decided to buy the machine when my in-laws were visiting. My husband and his father were in a shouting match in the backyard, because I didn’t want them to yell at each other in front of the kids, and my mother-in-law was insisting that I talk to her about my plans for the future. That same long weekend—which was supposed to be a holiday, Memorial Day, Tyler was sick, Dylan was, as most little kids do, making a mess of everything.

It’s hard. I love my family, like everyone else, but more than anything, I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be alone, curled up in a recliner with a book and a cup of tea, my knees against my chest and my feet on the seat. But part of having a family, especially having kids, is that you have to make those sacrifices. It doesn’t matter how much you want to spend time alone, because you’ve got a family to take care of, and people need you, and it would be irresponsible to leave them alone just because you feel like you want some alone time.

So I decided to buy the machine. I ordered it online, and it didn’t cost nearly as much as I thought. Actually, I think that ordering it probably saves most people money. After all, it’s a machine for busy people, and when you’re busy, you tend to prioritize the kinds of entertainment that cost money. When I was young and single, I could get by watching YouTube or reading a book from the library, but now that I’m middle-aged, it’s movie theaters and books I buy, since I don’t have time to read them before I have to return them to the library. And, you know, people online sometimes say that they keep the machines artificially cheap, and it’s all some big conspiracy. I don’t believe that.

The in-laws didn’t stick around forever. We hugged and kissed each other, and then they got out of my house, since it was probably just as stressful for them as it was for me. My husband was a lot happier, then, and he gave me a kiss on the forehead before I went off to work.

“I love you,” he said, while he held Dylan in one arm. There’s a little twinkle that goes out of his eyes when his parents are around, and it comes back when they leave. But I love him either way.

And that night we left the kids with a neighbor, and went out to a nice restaurant. It’s expensive, like I said, to be entertained, once you’re all grown up. And it’s not that we can’t afford it, but that we shouldn’t, while we have to worry about saving up for college and paying for preschool and keeping ourselves in a nice big apartment. My husband’s remote job pays pretty well, and my in-person one pays a little better, but money is slippery, and it’s always trying to get away.

So I didn’t end up using the machine for a few weeks. It sat in a box under our bed, behind the little fence we put up, just to keep Tyler from crawling underneath, and it’s not like it’s hard to keep a hold of a machine like that. They come in a recycled cardboard box, neatly fitted like any other tech product, and I didn’t even open it, since I knew all the cables and manuals would come spilling out.

The trouble came at the end of June, when Tyler was getting a little stir-crazy, and so my husband and I took shifts keeping him entertained. We’d take him to the park when it was cool enough, or to friends’ houses, and we did our best to make sure he’d have lots of friends. Neighbor kids, people from the school district he’d be going to. We felt like it was important, and it was.

And, you know, when you’re a parent, your kid’s friends’ parents become your friends, too. You come over for playdates and you share a bottle of wine and a jigsaw puzzle with a little boy’s mom, or sit at the park with a little girl’s fathers. And when you host, you put on sports on the TV for your guests, not because you like sports, but because it’s okay for the kids to watch and not mind-numbing for you and the other parents.

And as it turns out, that’s work, too. That important, family work, that everyone’s supposed to do, that creates memories that last forever. But it made me restless, It made me want alone time, sitting-and-reading time. But I couldn’t really justify it. Because family time is important. And, one day, in the middle of a playdate, with the kids fighting with foam swords and the parents arguing politely about football, I couldn’t take it anymore. So I told everyone I had to use the restroom, and that I’d be right back, and I got out the machine.

When I bought it, I’d read a little about it, to make sure that it was safe. I’d heard from a lot of people that it wasn’t, but it was approved by the FDA—and whatever does the approving in Europe—and I read some scientific papers about it. There was a lot of mumbo-jumbo about “trans-cranial magnetic stimulation” and “adaptive response to regions of the brain” that sounds a little scary, but really, you just put on a headset, and turn the dial, and press a button. It doesn’t even use an app, and my oven uses an app. It’s just like that.

The dial goes from one to one hundred, and those numbers actually mean something—at one percent, it fills in for one percent of your entertainment. At one hundred, it fills in for all of it. The whole thing is made out of plastic and it charges over USB-C, just like everything else, and it wouldn’t look out of place at all on a bathroom counter, next to electric toothbrushes and ultrasonic cleaners and bottles of mouthwash.

There’s a bit of a stigma around using the machine. In TV dramas, characters get addicted to it, but it’s never been shown to be addictive, in any of the studies. But, I wanted to be careful, so I started it up on a low setting, five out of a hundred, and put on the headset, and pushed the button.

On TV, they show people getting shocked electrically, or having whole books beamed into their head, or something else dramatic. It’s not like that. You just press the button, and you feel relaxed, and you don’t feel like you need to take as much time off anymore. It doesn’t even make my skin tingle, and then you can put the headset back. So I zapped myself, and I felt ready to go back and face it all again.

I used the machine on and off that summer, but never that much. Even though I didn’t feel good or feel like I wanted to use it, I was still scared I’d get addicted. My husband never used it, although he didn’t seem to mind much that I did.

“It could help,” I told him, one night. “You seem stressed.”

“It’s alright,” he told me. “I can handle it. After all, my parents handled it.”

And for the next couple years, I didn’t need it. I put it back in its form-fitted cardboard box, with all the cables, but now it bulged out since it was designed to fit just perfect the first time it was packed up in the factory, and now it didn’t really fit at all. And when we moved to a house on the edge of the city, far enough for the schoolbus to come around but still close enough that the neighbor kids could come over, the little box with the machine in it got packed into a closet.

Our kids got older. When people talk about parenting, they talk about how the early years are the hardest. There are the terrible twos, and the time when kids are too young to be even in preschool, and those times are definitely hard. But once kids get a little older, and they start becoming tweens and teens, they need to be driven everywhere still, and they have so many more places they want to go. They still had playdates. And Tyler had soccer practice after school, and Dylan had dance recitals, and so my husband and I split the chores and traded off, and we tried to get lots of time with our kids.

And my parents started getting older, and so did my husband’s parents. Both families moved into town. They were sick often, even with the fancy new drugs that were coming out, and even though some people started living forever around then, we knew our parents wouldn’t.

“I love my dad,” I remember my husband saying, “and I’m really worried he’s not going to make it.”

And I knew that it was a bit more complicated than that, because his dad had hit him when he was younger, and my husband was always quiet and calm and sweet, except when he was with his father. But I also knew that it was complicated. “Maybe you should spend more time with him,” I told him.

“I don’t want you to have to spend all your free time with the kids.”

“It’s alright,” I told my husband. “Someday it’ll be the same way with my dad, too.”

And, as it turned out, that day came quickly. So we kept trading off the kids, and we both saw our parents, and I knew that I needed the machine again. It was a little trouble to find it, but the new machines were more expensive. So I found it in the storage racks at the top of the garage, wedged between a burnt-out electric car charger and a robot we’d bought for cooking, that had never really done a good enough job to keep, but which had cost too much to throw away.

And this time, I dialed it up to fifty percent. And I felt a lot better.

So I went to my kids’ soccer games and ballet recitals. Dylan was a good dancer, I thought, and I knew that Tyler wasn’t very good at soccer. But you don’t say that to your kids. So I kept encouraging them, and I loved every second of it. It was all so important. And I really didn’t have time for myself. The machine made it work, and it went back under my bed.

“Are you sure you don’t want to try it?” I asked my husband.

“No,” he said. “I’ve always managed.”

And it got a lot harder when his dad died. First there was the funeral. Both kids had to get little suits, and that cost a lot of money, and then there were all the arrangements. And Tyler was sick when the funeral happened, too, and my husband had to give the eulogy, and he was just so nervous. And then, once all of that was wrapped up, his mom wanted to move in with us, because she was lonely. And I understood, and I thought it was okay. I’d always gotten along with her better, especially now that we had the house. Old folks care a lot about houses, I think, because back in the day it was the only way you could ever retire. Now, it’s easier to do without, but she still respected that we had one.

But, you know, she was a lonely old lady. And so she always wanted to do things with me, and the kids were still busy, even as they got a little older. Tyler was driving around. I saved a little time by making him drive Dylan to school, but Dylan was getting into more trouble. He still liked dancing, of course, but the other kids gave him crap for it, and he was never one to let people give him crap, and so he got into all kinds of fights, and we spent a lot of time meeting with principals and talking to counselors. And my husband thought that it was important the go to those things, too. And he was right. But it still meant that between the two of us, we had less time for chores. And my mother-in-law always wanted walks in the park, and my own mom was getting sicker and sicker, and so I tried to spend more time with her at the government clinic, since she couldn’t come home. I stopped buying books, because I had a pile of them I hadn’t read, even though they were just popcorn thrillers that I could blow through in an afternoon each, and I hardly watched any TV. It’s not that I didn’t like doing any of the things I was doing, and everything was important, but it wasn’t relaxing. It wasn’t “me time”. And, you know, that’s one of the things that people need.

Eventually, I turned the machine up to one hundred percent.

Around that time, they were coming out with more machines, and there was a bit of a panic about them. The new machines filled in for things like self actualization, career fulfillment, and sex. Eventually, congress got around to passing laws to regulate the machines, and it’s not like anyone died or anything. It was just scary. The new machines, even the harmless ones for free time, had interlocks. They wouldn’t go over fifty percent. But I remembered the studies from back in the day, when I’d first gotten it, where they’d proven that the machines were safe up to a hundred, as far as they could tell. I couldn’t find anything saying otherwise when I looked into it again. So I turned the machine up to one hundred, and I whisked away the need to relax.

“Are you sure it’s good for you?” my husband asked, when I was using the machine in the bathroom, while he brushed his teeth. “That machine’s pretty old, and, you know, I’m grateful for all the time you spend with me, but it seems pretty extreme.”

I just shrugged. “It lets me focus on what matters most, I guess.”

And I didn’t begrudge him the time he spent on his hobbies. He’d gotten into whittling, since it was easy to do while he was taking care of other business, and spending time with people, and he could even do it on the go, although he got into a little trouble a few times for doing it while he was spending time with the kids. People get weird about knives, even when every school has a full doctor on staff and the knives are real short. But people inherit their fears from the past.

You might have expected things to go wrong at this point. My husband and I did have to have some serious talks about it, and he worried about me a little, since I wasn’t doing hardly any of my hobbies anymore. But I was spending more time with him, and I wasn’t unhappy at all. I made everything work: I balanced my time with my parents, I gave the eulogy at my mom’s funeral, and then at my father’s. I handled my son’s gender transition, when Tyler went from Ana to Tyler, and I even made friends with Dylan’s girlfriend, and helped plan their wedding, and then I planned Tyler’s wedding, although I’m still not sure how I feel about the complicated and tangled relationships he has had, with half a dozen girls and guys. I took the time to meet them all.

And then, when my children were all grown up and married, it turned out that my mother-in-law was going to live forever and so she stopped worrying so much about spending time with her family, and started going on the vacations they sell old folks who expected to be a lot poorer than they ended up being. And my husband and I were still getting along great, and we didn’t have much to do, and I stopped using the machine altogether.

It wasn’t addictive. I didn’t have trouble quitting. I just had more and more time, and I finally started working through those books. They hadn’t quite gone yellow, but they smelled old, and they seemed quaint, since they were set in a world where borders mattered less and money mattered more, a world without space travel and where people still ate meat from real, living cows. But they had their charm, and it didn’t take me long to finish them, since they were short books. And the more free time I had, the less I used the machine, until I didn’t feel like I needed it at all, and it was just sitting there on the counter, picking up stains from the hard water. And eventually, I packed it up, and put it back in the garage, where we only had one car, now, and the other half of the space was my husband’s workshop.

And, looking back, I don’t regret ever using the machine. It meant that I got to experience the most important part of my life to the fullest, and when we come to visit, my sons don’t yell at their father or their mother, and we’re getting ready for grandkids.

But sometimes, I miss those moments, sitting there in a beat-up leather armchair. I miss the smell of paper and real tea, and I miss staying up too late, and going to work dead tired after staying up for cliffhanger after cliffhanger.

They don’t make leather armchairs anymore, and almost nobody reads paper books. I still read, and I still enjoy it. But maybe those moments could have been important, too.