“All Bryce ever told us was that the two of you had grown apart,” Daniel explained. “He said you’d become more like roommates than husband and wife, and that you’d become distant over the last few years. He said he’d tried to work it out with you as best he could but you’d essentially told him you weren’t interested, were no longer in love with him and had stayed as long as you had only because of the children.”
“And once again, the answer can be found in the question no one ever wants to ask: Why?” Maggie crushed her cigarette out in the already overflowing ashtray on the table, leaning closer to Daniel as she did so. “Why did we grow apart? Why did we become more like roommates than husband and wife? Why did I finally decide to cut him and what was left of our sick and dysfunctional marriage loose? Go ahead, ask me.”
Daniel let out an exhausted sigh. “Why?”
“Bryce is a sex addict.” She said this matter-of-factly while holding her glass up to the light, as if inspecting it for foreign matter. “Except when it came to me, that is. I wasn’t exciting enough for him. Come to find out, I’m a little too humdrum with my whole fidelity in lovemaking thing. That was too mainstream and dull for a cutting edge swinger like him.”
“This is none of my business. Whatever sexual problems you two had are—”
“Not ‘you two.’ Him. I never cheated on Bryce, I never needed more than what we had together.” Her slippers scuffed along the tiled floor as she shuffled back over toward the center of the room. “It’s not like I was super naïve when I married him, but I didn’t realize he had the control problems he does. He was always…Bryce always had a really strong sex drive, but from the moment we got our first home computer, things got out of hand. He was on the damn thing constantly, and the more he was on it, the more he’d bring his fantasies and hang-ups into our bedroom. It was like the computer brought those walls down or made him more comfortable with the darker sides of his sexuality.”
The knot in his stomach tightened. “Computer?” he asked bleakly.
“When it comes to Bryce, computers are like heroin to a drug addict. He’d sit in front of that computer a lot when we first got married, but it eventually grew into something he did every day. I’d catch him on it at all hours. The middle of the night, early in the morning, after work, before work, I never knew when he’d be on there. And when he started getting secretive about it and allowed it to interfere with our lives, I knew he had a problem.” Maggie sipped her wine, closed her eyes a moment as she swallowed, then continued. “First of all, he has a serious addiction to pornography. He looked at it every day, sometimes for hours a day. He’d masturbate to the point where he’d actually injure his penis, scrape it or leave little tears and abrasions in the skin. Sometimes it’d be swollen and sore to the touch, and when I’d ask him about it he’d claim he caught it in his zipper or blame it on our lovemaking and say it had happened during intercourse. He thought I didn’t know about his little adventures online, but I’d come home and check his cache and download manager, and there it was, more and more of it every day.”
It’s real. I’ve experienced it.
“That was bad enough,” she told him, “but he was addicted to chat rooms too. His favorite one was a place where men trade pictures of their wives and girlfriends and fantasize about other men doing things to them while they masturbate to, and sometimes even on, the photographs. Christ on the cross, who thinks of these things?”
So have you, haven’t you, Bryce.
“Maggie,” he mumbled, unable to finish the sentence he’d hoped for.
“It was bad enough that he was talking about me to other men online,” she continued, “sometimes even showing them pictures of what I looked like. But then one day I came across another chat archive. In this one, he wasn’t just talking about me…he was pretending to be me.”
It’s in your head even now…fucking with you.
Suddenly, horrifically, it all made sense.
“I had to confront him. I told him he was sick and that this was destroying his ability to be a good husband and father. All he did was work and sit in front of that fucking computer. And now I knew exactly what he was doing on it, I had proof. I showed him that proof, and he couldn’t handle it. He broke down, said he was sorry, said he had problems, and he promised me he’d stop and get help. I loved him, Danny, he’s the father of my children and he was my husband, so I supported him.” Emotion shook her voice and she swallowed it back, chasing it with the rest of the wine in her glass. “He went to a doctor for a while. He was in counseling for sex addiction and a compulsive sexual disorder before we split. We were supposed to remove the computer from the house and he wasn’t supposed to use one unless it was at work for very specific reasons. He wouldn’t let me get rid of our desktop, so we just locked it away in a closet. He stuck to his recovery plan for a while—I think—but after a few weeks he fell right back into it. The psychiatrist was unreasonable, he said, a jerk, treated him like some nut, he said. I’m a guy, he told me, and I like sex, what’s wrong with that? Suddenly he wasn’t sick anymore, just a sex-starved husband whose wife wouldn’t get creative or kinky enough for his needs. Somehow it was my fault. He promised to lay off the porn and chat rooms, and I promised to be more open to things sexually. I did things I…things I didn’t want to do, but I knew they turned him on and I thought it might help us reach a happy medium. That is, until I came home from work one day and found the computer all set up again. There he was sitting right in front of it like the addict he was. He couldn’t stop. Whatever he found when he turned that thing on, he needed it, he couldn’t live without it, and in the end he was willing to throw everything away rather than give it up. His children. Our marriage. His home. Everything.” Maggie poured herself another glass of wine. “It’s a terrible thing to love and live with someone you can’t trust. Even if he’s sick—and make no mistake, Bryce is one sick puppy—if he makes no effort to get better and refuses to let you or anyone else help him, at some point, for your own sanity, for your own preservation and the preservation of your children, you have to cut him loose. That’s what I did, Danny, I cut him loose.” She swallowed a sip of wine. “I agreed not to bring any of this up during the divorce to protect him and the kids and because he promised he wouldn’t contest anything. He promised he’d never let this directly touch our children, and far as I know he never has. Then tonight he showed up and he was out of his mind. He was so scared, I—I’ve never seen him so scared. He was babbling about computers and someone named Russell, but he wasn’t making any sense. It frightened me to see him like that. I’ve never seen him lose it like that, not like that. I don’t know what he’s gotten himself into this time, but it must be pretty bad.”
Daniel struggled to his feet. “I have to find him.”
“He mentioned Lindsay too,” she said bitterly. “Some crazy shit about her still being alive or—I don’t know what the hell he was talking about. I’m not even sure he knew what he was talking about. It was that bad, like he’d totally gone off the deep end.”
“I think there’s a good chance that’s exactly what he’s done.”
She nodded. “He had a thing for Lindsay, you know. I found references on the computer to her in some of his sick online conversations. How hot his best friend’s wife was and how he fantasized about being with her, that kind of thing. He even claimed he’d been with her for real in some.”
“He was lying.”
“Was he?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t really matter now anyway, does it?”
“It matters to me.”
“Got to keep it all perfect right ’til the end, huh?”
“You always thought that, didn’t you? That Lindsay and I had some perfect marriage or something, where nothing ever went wrong, nobody ever argued and nobody’s feelings ever got hurt.”
“No, actually I think you’re the only one who ever thought that. But compared to us you two were Mike and Carol Brady.”
“We had our problems too,” he admitted.
“Guess yours just weren’t irreconcilable, how typically Dan and Lindsay.”
“Somewhere along the line things changed a bit. We got caught up in our jobs and the house and cars and all that. It was like, all of a sudden, we took each other for granted. We forgot what was really important. Lindsay’s career started to take off and she worked more and more. Made things hard sometimes, she was always out at a meeting or working late. Sometimes it seemed like I was alone again, single almost. It was…”
“Lonely?”
“Yeah.”
“People don’t realize just how lonely a marriage can be sometimes.”
He cleared his throat, snapped out of it. “But we had a good marriage. We had our ups and downs like anyone else, but our marriage was solid and things were good. Whenever we had problems, we worked them out because we were in love.”
She gazed at him like a weary cop trying to determine the validity of a suspect’s statement. “Well we couldn’t work ours out, OK? Why do you think Bryce never found anyone else after we divorced? He’s so deep into this computer crap he actually prefers it. It’s what he knows and where he’s comfortable. He’d rather live in some sick masturbatory online virtual world than the real one. He’d rather have sex with phantoms typing messages to him than make love or have a meaningful relationship with a living, breathing human being.”
Everyone who wants the truth eventually finds it.
“I’ve known Bryce has had these problems for a long time now,” she went on, “but I thought he’d managed to keep them under control and since he was single again it wasn’t hurting anyone but himself.”
But it comes with a price.
“Tonight, seeing him like that, I realized I was wrong. He doesn’t have anything under control at all. He’s coming apart, Danny. He needs professional help, before he hurts himself or someone else.”
The realization of our true nature.
“He won’t listen to me. Maybe now that you know the truth you can get him to listen to you.”
Not so long ago, Daniel’s life had been orderly. It made sense; followed a plan. He and Lindsay had control. Every aspect of their lives was organized and plotted out, right down to when they’d have their children. Bryce was his best friend and he could count on him to be there for him, to have his back. He was successful in his field, and his marriage was sound. And now in this quiet, grim little kitchen, that all seemed so terribly far away, an afterthought in some fantasy never quite realized.
“What’s he done this time?” she asked. “It’s really awful, isn’t it? Get him away from computers. He can’t handle what they do to him. Goddamn things. I won’t even have one in the house. They give me the creeps.”
“They’re a bunch of wires and chips, nothing more.”
“They’re evil. They put things at your fingertips we were never meant to see or experience, things that should be hidden and kept away from sane, decent human beings, evils that do things to people, horrible things. And computers make it all so easy, so commonplace. They make it all seem so normal and harmless. It’s all just a keystroke away. A quick click of the mouse and you’re anywhere you want to be, anywhere your depraved and diseased mind wants to take you. No limits, no boundaries, no questions asked. It’s Hell in a fucking box.”
“People are evil, Maggie. A computer’s just a machine.”
“A toaster’s just a machine.”
We’re all in the cage, man. All of us.
“I have to go,” he said quietly.
Maggie looked over at the small windows above the sink and the flakes falling through the darkness beyond. “Bad storm out there. News said it’s supposed to snow straight through until morning. Roads must be getting bad by now.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You could stay.” She sipped her wine, her eyes finding his over the lip of the glass. “You know…if you wanted.”
He’d never seen such sorrow and vulnerability at once, and couldn’t help but wonder if when she looked at him, she saw the same. Perhaps somewhere in this cold and empty night, a moment, even a glimpse, of peace and solace might be found, were both willing to go in search of it in the other. But it all seemed misplaced somehow, too late.
“Maggie, I…In another time, another…”
“Life,” she said, rescuing him. “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘life.’”
He moved closer and gently kissed her forehead. She exhaled as he did so, her body subtly trembling, and he felt her warm breath along the front of his throat. “It’s going to be all right.”
“You’re a lousy liar, Danny, and the only one who doesn’t realize that yet is you, because the only one you’re still lying to is yourself.” She smiled sadly. “And what the hell kind of salesman can’t even tell a good lie?”
He answered with a sad smile of his own. There seemed little else to do.
THIRTY-THREE
The building was a modest walkup with no security or buzzer. The door to the apartment had been left ajar in anticipation of Daniel’s arrival. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him then leaned back against it for support, his coat dripping and caked with snow.
The apartment was dark, but for the light from a laptop positioned on a coffee table. Wearing only a pair of boxers, Bryce sat hunched over on the edge of a couch, his bloodshot eyes transfixed on the screen. His clothes lay in a trail on the floor before him, each piece discarded as he’d crossed the room, at home in the small and cluttered space. Two large windows faced the street, the curtains pulled back to reveal night, snow and fragile splashes of moonlight barely illuminating the area beyond the main room: a kitchenette, a bathroom, and an open staircase which led to a small loft bedroom.
The city was asleep.
“I never meant for any of this to happen.”
Daniel unbuttoned his coat. “Help me to understand, Bryce. Please.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Maggie told me everything.”
“I’ve tried to stop. I can’t.” He ran a hand across the side of his face and up onto his balding head. A slick sheen of perspiration had formed across his pale flesh. He spoke and moved as if mildly sedated. “It wasn’t supposed to get so out of control, it—it was never meant to be this. Was it?”
Daniel pushed himself away from the door, took a few steps into the room. “Lindsay never even knew Gorton, did she? She never met him or spoke to him online or anywhere else. That’s why she reacted the way she did when Bartkowski approached her. She wasn’t embarrassed at being caught, she was telling the truth. She genuinely had no idea who Gorton was.”
“It was just fantasy. I never meant any harm.”
“Any harm? Any harm?”
“I was lonely. I was so fucking alone I didn’t know what to do.” Bryce finally looked up from the screen. “You don’t know what it’s like to be like this.”
“I don’t know what it’s like to be lonely? Is that what you just said to me?”
“Back then you had Lindsay.”
“And you had Maggie and your kids.”
“But I blew it. Once she was gone all I had was this computer. I’d go on and try to meet women, try to talk to them, make friends, but no one ever talked to me. They’d just ignore me.” A quick gush of pitiful, self-loathing laughter slipped free. “You know how much of a loser you have to be if you can’t even get women to talk to you online, for Christ’s sake?”
“It started before Maggie was gone.”
“Maggie was long gone before I ever started going on the computer.”
“You lost her because of it.”
“She might’ve still been living under the same roof as me, sleeping in the same bed as me, but she was already gone. I never knew it was possible to be so alone in a marriage until things went bad in ours. So I went online, I tried to find some comfort there. It just…got away from me…from us.”
“Once you and
Maggie were through, you didn’t have to be online at all. You could’ve gotten out in the real world and found someone, made something meaningful.”
“Look at me,” he whispered, as if a normal volume was too blasphemous.
“I am looking at you, Bryce. I’m looking and I’m trying to figure out what I see.”
“I’m not you. Maggie’s the only woman that ever looked twice at me.”
“You didn’t have to do this.”
“I just wanted somebody to talk to, that’s how it started. I wanted somebody to like me, to pay attention to me. One day, just for the hell of it, I made up a fake profile and went online as a woman. It was a joke. I thought I’d fuck with some people and have a few laughs. But then all these guys started talking to me, sometimes women too. When I was me it was like I wasn’t even there. But as a woman, I had more people talking to me than I knew what to do with. Any time of day or night, I could go on and they’d want to talk to me, to love me, to be with me, I didn’t…don’t you see what I’m saying? I didn’t have to be alone.”
Sorrow struggled with Daniel’s rage, battled for dominance. “Why Lindsay?” he asked. “Why did you have to pretend to be her?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“She was my wife.”
“—hurt either of you, I—”
“My wife!”
Startled, he jumped but remained on the couch. “It was just a harmless fantasy,” he said a moment later, head bowed. “It wasn’t—I never planned for it to blow up into all this. I used to fantasize about Lindsay sometimes, but I swear to God I never planned to do anything for real with her, not ever. It got worse when Maggie and I split up and I moved in with you guys. I was fucked up. I started seeing Lindsay differently, in ways I didn’t want to but couldn’t help. Before she was my friend, your wife, and that’s all. But I was having problems, Danny, the same ones that split Maggie and me, they had me thinking all these crazy things about Lindsay and doing things I would’ve never done before. In some ways I was jealous too. I had nothing, and you had everything. It was bad, I know. I had no right to do that or feel that way, I—I should’ve controlled it but…” He stayed quiet a while. “Lindsay was special. She made me feel good, like I mattered. I didn’t want to be so attracted to her, I tried to fight it, but it was so hard being under the same roof with her and spending all that time together. It started messing with my head. She spent hours talking to me about Maggie and our marriage, about the future. I never connected like that with a woman. I could talk to her, really talk. She cared about me.”
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