The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I think it’s boring,” I say. I stand up and I reel because I’m still light-headed. “I think we need to get moving.”

  There is a certain amount of halfhearted approval, but mostly I think the pack are as stunned as I am.

  I look at the pack and wonder which one of them told Kimmie about the Turkmen style.

  One of my friends has betrayed me.

  “Spending a Friday night looking at videos?” I ask. “How pathetic is that?”

  “Yeah!” Anatole says. “Let’s get out of here!”

  We go outside and the cool night air sings through my veins. There’s a heavy dew on the grass and mist drifting amid the trees. I turn back and see Errol’s house, with its red tile roof curving up at the corners like a Chinese temple, and the trellises carrying twining roses and ivy up the sides of the house, and the tall elm trees in the front and back.

  “You know,” I say, “this place would be great for gorillaball.”

  Errol looks at the house. “I’m glad you didn’t say that back when—”

  “Let’s play now!”

  Errol turns to me. “But we’re not—we’re—”

  “I know we’re not gorillas,” I say. “But that’s no reason we can’t play gorillaball. Let’s have the first gorillaball game without gorillas!”

  Errol’s horrified, but I insist. Errol’s parents, who actually own the house, aren’t home tonight, so they can’t say no. I captain one team, and Errol captains the other. We choose up sides, all except for Amy and Lisa.

  “I’m not playing,” Lisa says. “This is just crazy.”

  Amy agrees.

  “You can referee, then,” I say.

  We set up one ladder in the front and another out back. We put one goal in a tree in the front, another in a tree in the back. I win the toss and elect to receive.

  The ball comes soaring over the house and Sanjay catches it. He goes for the ladder and I lunge for a trellis. Errol and his team are scrambling up the other side.

  Sanjay reaches the roof, but already two of Errol’s teammates are on him. He passes the ball to me and I charge. I knock Michiko sprawling onto the roof tiles and then I hit Shawn hard under the breastbone, and he grabs me to keep from falling. So now we both fall, sliding down the tiles that are slippery with dew. As Shawn goes off the roof he makes a grab at the gutter, something he could have done easily as an ape, but he misses. I get the gutter myself and swing into a rosebush just as I hear Shawn’s femur snap.

  Thorns tear at my skin and my clothes. I drag myself free and run for the elm tree that overhangs the street. I grab the goalkeeper’s foot and yank him out of the tree, then climb up myself and slam the ball into the bucket we’ve put in a crotch of the tree.

  “Goal!” I yell.

  The others are clustered around Shawn. I’m limping slightly as I join them. Blood thunders in my veins. Which one of you ratted us out to Kimmie? I think.

  Errol turns to me.

  “Shawn’s smashed his leg up bad. Game’s over.”

  “No,” I say. “You’re down one player, so we’ll give up one to keep it fair.” I turn to Sanjay. “You can take Shawn to the hospital. The rest of us can keep playing.”

  Lisa looks at me. “I’m going, too. This is insane.”

  I look at her in surprise. It’s practically the first thing she’s said in public.

  “Go if you want,” I say. “The rest of us are playing gorillaball.”

  And that’s what the rest of us do. No more bones are broken, but that’s only because we’re lucky. By the end of the night I’m bruised and cut and bleeding, with sprained fingers and a swollen knee. The others look equally bad. I’ve scored seven points.

  The trick, I decide, is not to care. If you don’t care who you hit and who you walk over, you can score a lot of points in this world. You could be like Kimmie.

  We should have fought the Samurai tonight, I think. We’d have crushed them.

  The ratings are great. Many more people watch us live than watch Kimmie. And when I edit the raw flash into a coherent, ninety-minute experience the next day, the number of downloads is as good as anything I’ve done.

  Gorillaball leagues start forming again, only without the gorillas. People are inspired by the madness of it.

  I’m back on top.

  But only for a short ride. I have to cancel the Cryptic appearance, and after the gorillaball blip, my numbers resume their slide. And word gets out about Kimmie’s new style, so her numbers start to soar.

  She’s riding the trend that should have been mine.

  We trade in the Vicious Lawyer look for Byronics. It’s one of the styles I’d considered, then rejected in favor of the Turkmen look. Byronics is all velvet suits and lace and hose with clocks and beads and braid and rickrack. It’s the sort of thing that the part of the Demographic who enjoyed being gorillas would hate.

  The true weakness, though, is that Byronic music is boring. They’re supposed to be sensitive poets, but all they really do is whine. I’m young in an old world.

  Yeah, tell us something new.

  My numbers continue to sicken. I try not to think about the fact that I’m losing thousands of friends every day. I try not to want their love, but I do.

  The crowning insult comes when Dr. Granger gives me a B in my Media and Society class. He decided that my understanding of the media scene was “insufficiently informed.”

  I complain and flash the complaint. It gets me a lot of sympathetic messages, and a notice from Dr. Granger that he’s decided, after all, to fail me.

  The swine. It’s a piece of petty malice beyond anything even the Duck Monkey has ever done.

  He must have read what the Demographic was saying about him.

  I have nothing to lose. I make another flashcast, this time telling the world what a pathetic old geezer Granger is, sucking up to me as long as he thought he could vamp a piece of my fame. For a moment, my downloads blip upward again, then start to slide.

  It’s then that the management of the Samaritain decides to repossess our clubhouse. I’m passe, and they don’t want anyone connecting their expensive hotel with passe.

  I’m told that they’ve decided to repaint and redecorate the suite, and that we should get our stuff out.

  “So you’re getting rid of the furniture and the carpet and everything?” I ask.

  They assure me that this is the case.

  I call a pack meeting—the pack is down to eleven now—and we rendezvous at the Samaritain for one last live flashparty. The hypocrisy and opportunism of the Samaritain’s management have got me in a rage. I show up with buckets of paint and brushes and knives and crowbars.

  “Since the Samaritain’s going to redecorate,” I announce, “I think we should help them. They don’t want any of this stuff anymore.”

  Most of the paint ends up on the walls, though a lot gets ground into the plush carpet. We smash the furniture and cut up the pillows. Foam padding falls like snow. We rip out paneling with crowbars. We tip the couch in the pool, and then skim the paintings onto the water. We’re in our Byronic finery as we do this, and all our clothes are ruined.

  We leave the Samaritain singing and head to my place.

  After the cameras are turned off, we groom each other as if we were still gorillas. I sit at the foot of my bed as Lisa sits behind me and tries to comb the paint out of my hair.

  I check the ratings and announce that they’re stellar. Anatole gives a little cheer.

  “They’re only watching to see you fall apart,” Lisa says.

  I give her an annoyed look over my shoulder. What’s wrong with that? I want to say.

  If the audience wants me to fall apart, I’ll fall apart. If they want me to cut off my hand, I’ll cut it off and flashcast the bleeding stump.

  Anything to get the love back.

  “Maybe you should decompress,” she says. “Just be a regular boy for a while.”

  “Don’t know how,” I say. Which happens to be true.


  “You could learn.”

  “Who wants to be normal anyway?” Anatole asks. I agree, and that torpedoes the subject.

  We talk about other things for a while, and then Lisa bends over me and murmurs in my ear. “You know that project we’re working on? Some people are getting very interested in it. I’ve been able to hold them off by routing everything through the moons of Saturn, but it’s not going to last.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You’ve got to stop it,” she says.

  Errol is looking at us strangely. Maybe Lisa whispering in my ear made him think we might be an item.

  “Soon,” I promise.

  But I’m lying. The Duck Monkey is my only consolation. By now he’s become the whole dark Mr. Hyde of me. The Duck Monkey doesn’t have to worry about the Demographic or my pack or anyone. He can just be himself. He eviscerates everything he looks at, Kimmie in particular. There’s a whole subculture now who view Kimmie’s flashcasts, then check the Duck Monkey to see what he says about her.

  The pack descends on the opening of Saionji, the artist who’d foolishly invited us to his opening. We’re in our wrecked Byronic outfits, shabby and torn and splattered with paint, a complete contrast to Saionji’s art, which is delicate and fluttery and imbued with chiming musical tones. Saionji is polite but a little distant, knowing he’s being upstaged. But I have some intelligent things to say about his pieces—I’ve done research—and he warms up.

  Over the buffet I meet Dolores Swan. She’s petite and coffee-skinned and wears a short skirt and a metallic halter. She’s got deep shadows in the hollows of her collarbones, which oddly enough I find the most attractive thing about her. I’m vaguely aware of her as a model/actress/flashcaster/whatever, and even more vaguely know that she was last employed as the host of a chat show that lasted maybe five weeks. We make polite sounds at each other, and then I’m off with the pack to ruin the tone of a long series of clubs.

  It’s a week later that Jill Lee dies playing gorillaball in a human body. Even though they return her to life from a backup, there’s a big media flap about whether I’m a good example for youth. I point out in interviews that I never told Jill Lee or anybody else to play gorillaball without a gorilla body. I point out that she was dead for what, sixteen hours? Not a tragedy on the order of the Titanic.

  The consensus of the media chatheads is that I’m not repentant enough.

  That wrangle hasn’t even died away when the Duck Monkey is unmasked—by that cheeseball Ahmose, of all people, who paid a group of electronic detectives to dig out my identity. Ahmose is shocked that a celebrity with such a wholesome image would say such bad things about him. Kimmie tells the world she’s so terribly, terribly hurt, and she cries in front of her worldwide audience and scores about a million sympathy points. I’m besieged by more interviewers. I answer through the Duck Monkey.

  While I am flattered that some people claim that I am Sanson, I am in fact a completely separate person, one that just happens to live in Sanson’s head.

  The chatheads agree that I’m insufficiently apologetic. My ratings jump for the sky, however, when the Duck Monkey takes a scalpel to Kimmie’s interview with the Mad Jumpers, the number one band from Turkmenistan. I mean, when you’re doing an interview, you’re supposed to talk about something other than yourself.

  The Duck Monkey thing is at its height when Dolores Swan drives up in her vintage red Hunhao convertible, the one with the license plate that reads TRY ME, and invites me to elbow my way through the mass of flashcasters and personality journalists camped out in front of my house and drive away to her bungalow in Marin.

  Next morning, I’ve got a new girlfriend who’s forty years older than me.

  THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU’RE CRACKING UP

  • Fly to Palau for a romantic honeymoon with your girlfriend.

  • Have a drunken fight the first night so she runs off to Manila with a sports fisherman named Sandy.

  • Throw up in the lobby fountain.

  • Console yourself with a French tourist called Frangoise, who looks fifteen but who turns out to be older than your mother.

  • Have Dolores catch you and Frangoise in the bed that she (Dolores) is paying for, so there’s a huge scene.

  • Make up with Dolores and announce to the world you’re inseparable.

  • Throw up in the swimming pool.

  • Record everything and broadcast live to your worldwide audience of millions.

  • Repeat, with variations.

  • Repeat.

  • Repeat.

  • Repeat.

  • Repeat.

  The ratings are great.

  By the time I make it back to the East Bay, there is no longer any debate about whether I’m a bad influence on youth.

  A consensus on that issue has pretty much been reached. The thing with Dolores is over. She gets enough of a bounce off our relationship to get a new job with the Fame Network as an interviewer and fashion reporter. When I last see her she is on her way to Mali.

  After the suborbital lands in the Bay and taxis to shore, I walk to the terminal through a corridor lined with posters for KimmieWear. Her clothing line, now available worldwide. Even I never managed that.

  I wonder if Kimmie has ripped out all the parts of me that had talent and taken them all for herself.

  My dad takes me in and makes three pizzas. He doesn’t reproach me for running off because, face it, my ratings are as good as they ever were. He talks about his new viral marketing campaign, which sounds just like the last forty years of his viral marketing campaigns.

  I’ve got a whole new Demographic now. Hardly any of my old audience watches me anymore.

  The new viewers are older. My dad wanted me to find a more mature audience, but I’m not sure he had in mind my present assembly of celebrity junkies, scandal watchers, sadists, and comedians. The latter, by the way, have been mining my life for their routines.

  Q: What’s the good news about Dolores breaking up with Sanson?

  A: She’ll never accuse him of stealing the best years of her life.

  Q: What’s another good thing?

  A: She’ll never complain he was using her. She was using him.

  Oh yeah, that’s funny all right.

  Dad offers ideas for growing my Demographic, like I need another legion of perverts in my life.

  I get a good night’s sleep. My current wardrobe of tropical wear is unsuitable for a Bay Area spring, and I can’t stand the sight of any of my old clothes, so I go shopping for replacements. I buy the most anonymous-looking stuff available. Everywhere I go, there are holograms of Kimmie laughing and pirouetting in her Turkmen coats.

  I remember that laugh, that pirouette, from the Style Days our pack used to have.

  The day wears on. I’m bored. I call the members of the pack. It’s been three months since I flew off with Dolores, and they’ve all drifted away. They’re all in school, for one thing—the spring semester that I blew off.

  I wonder whether, if I called a meeting, anyone would show up.

  I leave messages with people who would once have taken my call no matter what they were doing. I talk briefly to Errol and Jeet, who promise to get together later. I call Lisa and am surprised when she answers.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. “Want to come over?”

  She hesitates. “I’m doing a project.” I’m about to apologize for bothering her when she says, “Can you come here?”

  I program my Scion for Lisa’s address. As I drive over, I think about how Lisa’s the only person I knew who didn’t want something from me—attention, a piece of my fame, an audience, a boost in their ratings. Even my dad seems to want me around only to test his marketing theories.

  I think about how she had danced so expertly in my arms. I think about how I hadn’t kissed her because I’d thought the Demographic wouldn’t approve.

  I don’t care what the current Demographic thinks at all. They’re all creeps.
r />   Lisa’s sharing an apartment in Berkeley with a girlfriend, and when I come in she’s sitting cross-legged in the front room, with different video capes around her, all showing different flow charts and graphs and strange, intricate foreign script.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “Fifteenth-century Persian manuscripts. I’m trying to work back from illumination styles to a vision of manuscript workshops.”

  “Ah.”

  I find a part of the floor that isn’t being used yet, and sit.

  “So,” I say, “you were right.”

  “About what?” Lisa’s frowning at one of her flow charts.

  “About my audience watching only to see me fall apart.”

  She looks up. “I probably should have phrased that more tactfully.”

  I shrug. “I think you voiced the essence of the situation. You should see the kind of messages I get now.”

  Once I felt this whole swell of love from my audience. Now it’s sarcasm and brutality. Invitations to drunken parties, offers of sex or drugs, suggestions for ways I could injure myself.

  “The thing is,” she says, “it’s a feedback loop you’ve got going with your audience. They reinforce everything you do.”

  Positive feedback loops, I remember from my classes, are how addictive drugs work.

  “You think I’ll succeed in kicking the habit?” I ask.

  Lisa’s expression is serious. “Do you really want to become a real boy?”

  I think about it.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t. But I can’t think of anything else to do. Where can I go in flashcasting once I’ve mastered the art of being a laughingstock?”

  She doesn’t have an answer for that, and goes back to her work. There is a long silence.

  “Can I kiss you?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, without looking up.

  “Does that mean No, or does that mean Not Yet?”

  She looks up and frowns. “I’m not sure.”

  “Tell me about your work,” I say.

  So I learn all about the hermeneutics of Persian manuscripts. It’s interesting, and I love the intricate, complex Arabic calligraphy, whole words and phrases worked into a single labyrinthine design. There are charming little illustrations, too, of people hunting or fighting or being in love with each other.