The Monitor

by Janice Macdonald

Dion: Maia. *LOL*

  Sanders: Well, let’s see, what can I say? It was a fascinating evening, and the conversations weren’t too bad. I’ve been spoiled from on-line interaction, though; I tend to judge group dynamics and conversations a lot more rigorously than before.

  Chimera: I know exactly what you mean.

  Sanders: There was a nice selection of nibblies, and a pretty good band, although, this being Alberta, they had to throw the Chicken Dance in there somewhere.

  I couldn’t recall them playing it, although it wouldn’t have surprised me. It had been an enormous hit for The Emeralds, the premier dance band from Edmonton for the last forty-odd years. Maybe the combo had covered it after Steve and I had left.

  Maia: So, were there speeches? Or dancing?

  Sanders: Blessedly few speeches, and unfortunately no dancing. There was a silent auction, though. That was the high point of most folks’ evening—checking on their bids.

  Chimera: Did you bid on anything?

  Sanders: No, I didn’t, but one of the women I met managed to snaffle some pretty decent opera tickets.

  Gandalf: Y’all got opera up there in the frozen north?

  Sanders: My friend, you would be surprised what we have up here. This place is the greatest little secret in North America, I tell you.

  Maia: Sure it is, except for that bit about forty-below six-month-long winters.

  Sanders: *chuckle* Well, there is that, I’ll grant you.

  I’m not quite sure how long I sat there, staring at the screen, but it refreshed itself automatically two or three times, pushing that amazing sentence to the top of my screen before I could think to type anything. Sanders had been part of the group I’d been talking to. But who had he been?

  I couldn’t trust myself to chat any longer, so I made my farewells and logged out. I rinsed out my cup, and set it in the sink. My computer whired itself into shutdown as I walked back through the office-slash-dining-area toward my bedroom. Who on earth was Sanders?

  23

  The greatest thing about telecommuting is the ability to appreciate the morning light in one’s own apartment. I did half an hour of crunches and stretches on my yoga mat while the coffee was brewing, and then sat in my sweats and work socks while sipping Colombian Supremo and watched the lines of light and shadow created by the venetian blinds on the hardwood floor. I loved the old, fat venetians that had come with the apartment. They might be a bugger to clean once or twice a year, but they felt so much more sincere than their skinny, plastic, modern children. My apartment had an eastern exposure, but, what with working for a living and all, it had been three years before I got to experience this light and shadow interplay on a regular basis.

  It had been way more than three years since I’d been this adrift in terms of scheduling. Although the year off I’d taken to get my MA had been far from nine to five, more like seven to eleven, I’d been working about fifteen years or more before that, and this loosey-goosey way of logging in my teaching time had taken some getting used to. In a way, having to punch a clock at Babel had been a blessing in disguise. Now, at least, I had some sort of structure to answer to.

  Still, on a lazy Friday morning like this, having had a lovely mid-week evening out the night before, with no place to go and no clock to punch until eight this evening, it felt as if I was getting away with something. In fact, I knew I was getting away with something. There were plenty of people putting in longer hours to make what I was earning. I was lucky that I didn’t need too much overhead to keep myself afloat, but, on the other hand, I took some pride in staying simple in my needs. While I enjoyed eating out more than I likely should, I did economize in other ways. My home-cooked meals were simple and very often meatless, which brought down my grocery bills considerably. I shopped for clothing at thrift shops, all except for underwear and shoes, and I tried to wait for the second-run cinema offerings, if I couldn’t wait for the video rental.

  Books were another matter. I had to admit, I can’t recall ever looking at the price on a book, except to see how much to pull out of my wallet. I can spend more than twenty minutes pondering the differences in the price of chicken pieces or cheese blocks and occasionally go away empty-handed. I don’t think I’ve ever left a bookstore without something.

  I guess, all in all, it was a good thing I economized in some measure, or I’d have gone broke years ago. Of course, with all the books I owned, I didn’t ever have to worry much about heating bills. Any place I lived would have to be rated R40 on bookcase insulation alone.

  So here I was, wiggling my toes in the sunny dust motes and wondering what the poor folks were doing. Truth was, I was trying not to think about Sanders, but it wasn’t really working. All I had to do was look up at the corkboard beside my study window and see the opera tickets I’d pinned there the night before, and it set me back to wondering which one of the men in a blue suit he’d been.

  The Man in the Blue Suit. It sounded as if it should be the title of an Alec Guinness movie, not a conundrum to ruin a winter morning. Oh well, I sighed, and hauled myself off the yoga mat. When all else fails, make a list. Or two.

  I rolled up my mat and tucked it behind the non-­functioning gas fire that sat where it had probably sat for the previous sixty years or more. My knee was acting up on me. I wasn’t sure whether it was due to the witch boots I’d been wearing the night before or if it was acting as a harbinger of the weather changing. Such fun to have your own built-in barometer, but, as you aged, and assorted aches and pains added themselves to the mix, the old faithful quirks stopped being quite so useful. I could no longer state with certainty that we’d be getting snow tomorrow; it could be me just wearing out.

  I went over to the desk, which was also bathed in stripey sunny splendor. It was a good thing I didn’t have any marking to do; I was obviously having too much of a Wordsworthian moment to be entirely useful. I grabbed a pad of lined paper, a few colored cue cards, and a pen, and pushed the book and magazine on the table closer to the condiment basket.

  If Sanders knew that I had successfully bid on the opera tickets, then he had been one of the men I was talking to at the end of the evening. Surely I could determine who Steve and I had been talking to and extrapolate his identity from what I knew of both Sanders and the folks I’d met at the gala.

  It would be like one of those logic puzzles I used to do on long, boring car trips. Woody, John, Curtis, and Clem live on this street. Their wives are Leslie, Susan, Kristie, and June. With the following bits of information, determine who lives in what colored house with which wife. Simple. Easy-peasy.

  Okay. I had spoken with Denise and Chick Anderson. I then talked with Valerie and Alex Danvers and met that fellow Winston the Perpetual Student. We had seen Timothy Anderson and Greg Hollingshead, but they hadn’t been around after I’d paid for the tickets. Maybe Sanders had been near when they’d closed the table of silent-auction items and had just seen my name on the bidding sheet? No, that couldn’t be. He had mentioned that it had been someone he’d been talking with. Besides, whoever would recognize my name on a bidding sheet would have to be someone I knew well enough to talk with at the gala. That brought it back down to the people I’d already listed on my pad of paper:

  Chick Anderson

  Alex Danvers

  Winston Graham

  I couldn’t conceive of Sanders being a woman, although I had read plenty of scary stories about how people on the Internet disguised their gender and ages and marital status to dupe the people they professed to love and respect. The thing was, I knew it couldn’t be Denise and I just couldn’t imagine it being Valerie, even with her background in creative writing. There were just far more interesting things for her to be doing with her creative energies, and I am sure that with her full-time teaching schedule and her publishing credits, she was definitely using her time more wisely than by cross-gender chatting.

  There was one other person I hadn’t put on the list, of course, and although I really couldn’t see it, I wro
te his name down just for the sake of absolute precision. I looked at the list and stood up to get some distance and perspective on it. Also, to get another cup of coffee. The list was still there when I got back to the table:

  Chick Anderson

  Alex Danvers

  Winston Graham

  Steve Browning

  Now, I needed to list everything I knew about each man, beyond his sartorial taste in colors. I laid out the cue cards like a tarot reading, after labeling each one with a different name. There wasn’t all that much I knew about most of them, but Chick Anderson’s was the least. I could, I suppose, get some more information from Steve, but he would want to know why, and, besides, it didn’t seem fair to use him if I was also going to list him as a suspect.

  All I knew about Chick Anderson fit easily on four lines of the cue card. He was relatively the same age as Steve, he came from a wealthy family that had been situated in the Edmonton area for at least sixty years, he ­wasn’t, as far as I could see, an intellectual, but he did profess to admire the arts. Being the western Canadian chicken heir apparent meant that he certainly would have enough money to indulge in computers, and not having to punch a time clock would allow plenty of time for chatting. I wasn’t too sure how much computer knowledge he would necessarily have. I knew that Steve had bitched a bit last spring when the police department had brought in a new networking system, which meant he would have to relearn things. If Chick was anything like his old ­residence mate, he wouldn’t be racing out for the latest megachip. I couldn’t be sure of that, though. Maybe he was a diehard ham-radio operator who had made the jump to bulletin boards and chat rooms early on. Maybe he was a complete Luddite who still wrote with a quill pen. Maybe he’d just been “here for the beer” in his university days and was now living on the family reputation and trust fund.

  Alex Danvers had an MA in English literature, with a focus in modern British novels. He was in a committed relationship with Valerie, had a part-time job at Grant MacEwan College, had his degrees from the U of A, and had taught there for a few years during and after his MA. With marking and prep time for courses, his chatting time would be negligible. Of course, given the strange timetables for Grant MacEwan English courses, his ­ability to come into Babel at odd hours might be ­understandable, plus two of his courses this term were distance ones. He was awfully proud of his credentials, though. I wasn’t sure he would subsume all that into the persona I knew from the chat room.

  Winston Graham was a perpetual student and seemed in many ways the most likely to be connected to an on-line chat community. I figured that he would have the time and inclination. As well, there was a greater chance he had slid into computer courses over the previous ­twenty years and might be more fluent on-line than Alex and Steve. Enigmatic, I’d written on his card, mainly just to fill up another line. Damn him for even being in the circle near the coat check last night. I knew nothing about him, and had no real line on checking him out.

  I flicked the Steve card in irritation. Here was the one blue-suited man I could write reams about, and I still couldn’t be sure of anything. He had a BA from the U of A, knew his way around the arts, was quick with general repartee, and able to hold his own with anyone. He professed to be non-conversant with the chat-room end of the Internet, but I had learned in the past that Steve kept his job and private life very much apart. Maybe he was part of the INTERPOL task force organized to sweep the Internet for child pornography. If he was, I would never learn it from him.

  I shuffled the cue cards. This wasn’t going too well. Now I would have to create a card for Sanders and see what I could possibly glean that would attach itself to the suspects.

  I knew from his level of discourse in Babel that he was educated. He was literate without being showy, although I seemed to remember that he could quote some lines of modern poetry when the need arose. The sheer fact that he thought there was, on occasion, a need for poetry ­lifted him well above the norm in my books. He worked odd hours, if indeed he did work. He was very coy about his profession, much more likely to speak about current events and cultural concepts than work issues.

  I knew that he was flirtatious, that he seemed to be single, and that he lived in Edmonton. If I could believe him, he had been wearing a blue suit last night at the writer-in-residence gala. (I was hoping this logic puzzle stuck to the men on the street with their wives and variously colored houses and didn’t turn into the one about the blue-eyed island elves who lied or told the truth.) He had been near enough to me to know I’d snagged the opera tickets. And his name was Sanders.

  I pulled the other four cards back toward the edge of the table. Handles in chat rooms were strange things. Some folks used nicknames very close to their own names. Some people tried on personae that seemed to match their mindsets at their time of entry into the community, and then were stuck with that moniker for better or for worse. No one, to my knowledge, had ever gone into a chat room disguised as a Bertha or Eustace. The names were sexy or cute or meaningful to the bearer in some iconic way. Maybe if I could come at it backwards, figuring out why Sanders called himself Sanders, I’d have a better idea of who I was dealing with.

  Well, Sanders could be another diminutive for Alexander, which I was assuming was Alex’s full given name. I wasn’t sure why he would have pluralized it, but I pulled the blue cue card toward me and jotted “Alexander - Sander” across the bottom.

  I stared at the name I’d written across the top of the pink cue card. What did Sanders mean to me? Had I never paused to wonder at all what the label implied?

  Well, it could be a surname. It might be a carpenter’s nickname—someone who used a sander a lot. It ­reminded me of a gypsy or circus name, but I think that would have had to be Sandor, instead of Sanders. Sanders sounded more like the name of a man in a Tom Stoppard play, a small, insignificant man who trudged instead of ambled. Maybe it was the name of a theatrical character. I would have to check that.

  I glanced at Chick’s yellow cue card. His last name was Anderson. I wondered if his given name began with an S. I couldn’t remember if I’d been told his real name. Then he might be offering a handle of S Anders, the way some e-mail programs cut your name off after eight places. That was a distinct possibility, except that Sanders was only seven letters long. I’d have to ask Steve. Heck, I could probably ask Denise. By now, she probably knew his shoe size.

  I took a glance at the green card on which I’d written the pitiful little I knew about Winston Graham. I ­couldn’t imagine how on earth he could possibly make a leap to being called Sanders in an Internet chat room. Maybe he worked in a fast-food place to pay for his university jones, and the nickname his friends gave him for making sandwiches all night was Sanders. Okay, that was stretching it. Especially the part about him having a set of nicknaming friends while holding down a full-time service industry job and attending university courses. He did seem the most Sanders-like of all my possibilities. There was just no real connection I could make. If only the man I knew from Babel was calling himself Churchill or Cracker.

  I glanced at the cards I’d made for Steve and Valerie. They were too ridiculous to contemplate, and I pushed myself away from the table. Here it was, almost three in the afternoon, and I was still in my sweats. What was more, I hadn’t even made the bed. I could see the chaos of duvet, sheets, and blankets through the doorway. That was the trouble with a small apartment. If you didn’t keep things incredibly tidy, it could drive you insane.

  I went in to the bedroom and pulled my bedding into order. I plumped the reading pillows and set them over my space-aged polymer sleeping pillow. My Pooh Bear nightshirt was lying on the floor at the end of my bed. I shook it out before hanging it on one of the hooks on the bathroom door.

  I was halfway out of my sweatshirt on my way to the shower when it hit me. Pooh Bear. Winston equals Winnie equals Sanders. Of course!

  24

  I allowed myself a fully adequate shower, but I have to admit, I skipped the condition
er. I was eager to get out and test my memory of my favorite children’s story. I toweled and scrunched my hair, and I tried not to wrinkle my face while applying moisturizer with sunscreen, my one concession to daily face care. Sliding into my jeans and a denim shirt so faded that Mary-Chapin Carpenter would be envious of it, I dumped the sweats into my laundry bin and hung the towel over the shower curtain rail to dry out.

  My World of Pooh was hardcover with a rather fuzz-edged dust jacket, all cream and brown with the Shepard drawings wrapping entirely around. I kept it beside my complete Shakespeare, my Oxford Student’s Bible, Janzen’s History of Art, and my hardcover Bartlett’s. Most every quote worth finding could be found in one of those books, I figured. As long as I could keep “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” set in my memory, I would be fine.

  I slid it off the shelf, smiling because you just can’t help but smile at the chubbiness and good-natured bemusement that shines out of those original drawings of Winnie the Pooh.

  I flipped the book open and there it was, on page 8, right where I remembered it being. The narrator tells Christopher Robin that his bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, lived in the forest, “under the same of Sanders.” The illustration showed a sign with “Sanders” written on it tacked over the doorway to a small tree house. I had always been charmed by the matter-of-fact way in which A.A. Milne had played with the various idiosyncracies of the English language. Today, though, all I could think about was Winnie-the-Pooh and his assumed name.

  Winnie-the-Pooh was named, I knew, as did all good Canadians, for a small black bear in the London Zoo sent from Canada in the early twentieth century, whose name was a shortened form of “Winnipeg.” Most folks tended to confuse it, though, and assumed the bear of little brain had been named to honor the prime minister of the time, Winston Churchill. Here was a case of life imitating an approximation of art.

  Winston lived under the name of Sanders.