Restricted Fantasies

by Kevin Kneupper

  I heard a voice calling my name. “Ruby! Ruby!”

  I ran towards it. It was Emily. She looked freaked out. She’d thought she’d lost me, and I don’t know what kind of trouble she’d have gotten into if she did.

  “Where the hell where you?” said Emily. She brushed the grass off my dress, tidying me up.

  “With Payton,” I said. “Out under the moon.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That boy. You ran off with that boy.”

  “It’s my Rumspringa,” I said. “There’s no rules in here. That’s what they told me. I can do whatever I want. Why can’t I?”

  Her face softened. She’d been through it herself, I think. She knew the temptations. She’d given into them, or she wouldn’t still be in there. “It’s not that you can’t. It’s that you shouldn’t.”

  “I have to find him,” I said. “He’s gone.”

  “Oh, honey,” said Emily, putting her arm around me. “Of course he’s gone.”

  I cried for the rest of the day. I didn’t believe her, but Payton never showed up. He could find me whenever he wanted to. Emily told me that, and I don’t know whether it was to cheer me up or to let me down easily. Maybe both. She tried to distract me. We picked out a place for me to live. An English manor on a farm, and I had servants to run it for me. I had my own personal knight, and a butler who called me “your Ladyship.” It was fun, but it wasn’t Payton. There was a hedge maze out back, and I’d wander around in it, letting myself get lost, spending entire days thinking about him.

  I was moping. Pining, really, like the teenager I was. Emily knew that. She came there every day to check in on me. I told her this was what I wanted to be doing, but she knew I wasn’t enjoying myself. It was pretty obvious. I kept asking about him every time I saw her. I couldn’t help it.

  After about a week of that she decided she was going to pull me out of my shell. She showed up in this outfit. It was black lingerie, and she was wearing it like it was her clothes. She was showing off everything, and she didn’t even care. Her hair was done up in a bright orange mohawk. And she had these metal spikes on her butt. I couldn’t help laughing, but she was entirely serious.

  “Let’s go to a party,” said Emily. “Let’s be bad. Just for a night.”

  She helped me dress. She called in a small army of dressmakers, jewelers, and hairstylists. It was the first time I wore anything that wasn’t Amish. I couldn’t handle something as racy as the lingerie, so we went with ballroom fancy instead. A ruffled gown, bright yellow, with bows all along the back. Canary diamond necklace and earrings to match. They did up my hair into a big tower. I said I thought I looked like a princess, so they even gave me the crown.

  We went to the Volcano Club. It was a sealed-up metal disk perched right on top of one, and every ten minutes or so there’d be an eruption. Magma blasted by the windows, and we’d all be enveloped in a sea of red. The avatars there were wild. No dress code, so anybody could be anything. Some people came straight from their preferred fantasies, still wearing suits of armor or cowboy boots. Others were done up for the occasion, styles from every period in history.

  I had a drink. My very first drink.

  “Have as much as you want,” said Emily. “There’s no hangovers in here.” She handed me a glass full of pink fruity stuff, and I took a sip. Then a gulp. Then another drink, and another, and another.

  I danced. I sang. I clapped. I talked to people who were so strange. I made friends with a talking dog and a man who was half horse. And then I tried the drugs, and the rest of the night was a blur of lava and fun.

  I woke up back at my manor. No hangover, no headache. I’d found something I liked to do, and it was all parties from there.

  Three months. It was just about three months of non-stop parties. I met so many people, and I couldn’t keep any of them straight. They looked so different every time I saw them. One night they’d be a cat person, the next they’d be a queen. It’s hard to bond with anyone when they look like a totally different creature every day. Plus I was drunk or high most of the time. It felt so good, and there weren’t any consequences. Not to my body. Emily thought she’d distracted me. I thought I’d distracted myself.

  But young love isn’t like that sometimes. I kept thinking about him. I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was that he was my first. Maybe it was that he didn’t want me. There were so many handsome men in there. I even kissed a few. But there was only one first. There was only one him.

  I’d mope, and I’d drink, and the thoughts would go away for a while. I think I was an addict. You’re not supposed to be able to get addicted to anything, not in there. But when you use something like that as a crutch to get through your days, what else can you call it? It hurt to think about him. It hurt that I loved him and he didn’t love me. It hurt that I couldn’t quit loving him, even though it didn’t make any sense, even though he didn’t deserve me, even though there were better men all around me.

  But sometimes you want something just because you can’t have it. And in there, he was the only thing I couldn’t have.

  I thought I’d never see him again. My plan was to party myself silly until I didn’t think about him anymore. It might have worked, until one night at the Orion Orbital Bar.

  It was a space station. I don’t know where it was. Some star far, far from Earth. I went with some friends I’d met on the Great Crawl. That’s what they called it. From club to club to club and the party never ended. Most of them never took a break. They didn’t have to. Not me. I still went home to my manor every morning. It just felt like I should. I wasn’t seeing Emily as much anymore. The tour guide duties were over, and she had her own worlds to play in.

  I was dressed like a Martian. Green skin, a couple of antennae poking out of my 1950’s bouffant, and a sleek black dress with glowing red lining. Retro space person, the avatar designer had called it. I still looked like myself, other than the skin. I never got comfortable with some of the changes people did to themselves in there. Too radical. Too weird.

  My friends were all dressed in the same style as I was. We were doing lines of Tripwire off the table. I got this burst of energy, and I grabbed one of my girlfriends and took her out onto the GravFloor. It was this place to dance, but you were floating. Everybody swimming through the air. I miss dancing. I didn’t have any problem giving up the drugs or the alcohol or the parties. But I wish I could go back and dance just one more time.

  I was swirling through the air, gripping my friend’s hand as we did an aerial ballet. Whirling in circles, her eyes glowing green, her smile so big. I was having so much fun. Then someone bumped into me from behind, hard.

  I whipped around. I was furious. I figured it was just another drunk, some jerk who’d come up with an excuse to grope all the girls on the GravFloor by pretending he couldn’t control his moves. Whoever it was, whatever they were up to, I was about to smack them.

  But it wasn’t just some drunk. It was Payton. He was smiling at me. A little sheepish, a little smug. “Sorry.” He looked at me, then over at a couple of my friends who’d floated to my defense. “What’re you girls up to tonight?” He glanced over at his own friends, the same crew he’d been hanging out with back at the circus.

  “Fuck you,” I said. It still felt so hard to curse, but he was bringing all the anger out from deep inside me. “You fucking asshole. You fucking—”

  “Relax,” he said. “It was an accident. I’m a few in. Let me buy you something. I’m a good guy once you get to know me. Your friends. My friends. Let’s make this an evening.”

  Then it hit me. He didn’t even recognize me. I’d spent months thinking about nothing but him. I’d cried out so many tears. I’d rolled it all over in my head so many times. Dreams of what could have been, what should have been. What I should have said, what I shouldn’t have. He’d been my everything for months. And he didn’t even know who I was.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. I looked like an alien after all. But it still hurt. It tore me r
ight up.

  “Payton,” I said.

  He just gave me a blank look. “Rigel-7. Amanda, right? From the asteroid colony?”

  “Ruby,” I said coldly. “From the circus.”

  “The Amish chick,” said Payton. Recognition flashed across his face, then surprise. “Holy shit you’ve changed. Decided to stay, huh? Join in all the fun?”

  “I thought you loved me,” I said. “The tunnel. The kiss. The fireworks. I thought we had something. I thought we had a connection. And you just left me there.”

  “Baby,” said Payton. “Ruby.” He floated closer, leaning in and whispering into my ear so the others couldn’t hear. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. It was just one of those nights. I had to leave. There was something I couldn’t miss. The boys and I were supposed to be suited up for battle the next morning, real early. We were having dogfights out in the Crab Nebula for weeks. You looked so happy. I didn’t want to wake you up. I figured we’d look each other up sometime—”

  “You never did,” I said. “You never said a word.”

  “Let’s dance,” said Payton. “Let’s start over. Let’s forget about the past. Start something new.”

  His friends joined us on the GravFloor. They paired off with my friends. And then it was just me and him, floating beside one another, me sniffling tears and him trying to cheer me back up. I should have known better. But I was young, and I was still in love. I had a fantasy, and I wanted to believe in it. Of course I fell for it. Of course I did it to myself again.

  We danced the night away. Bouncing off the ceiling, bouncing off the floor. Floating together hand in hand. Holding each other close and twirling through the air like a torpedo. I forgot the anger. I forgot the pain. I remembered the hope, and the love, and all those firsts. I took more drugs. I had more drinks. And pretty soon he was my Payton again. Not the boy who’d left me sleeping alone in the grass, but the boy who’d listened to me talk about my family, who’d told me how he was going to think about me while he was out among the stars, who’d coaxed me through my first acts of love.

  He was charming. Very, very charming. And he should have been. He’d had quite a lot of practice.

  At some point in the night the Great Crawl was ready to move to another bar. There was an exodus. My friends were all heading on to the next one. Payton held me by the hand and walked me towards the door.

  “You wanna see my ship?” said Payton. “I’m the captain. I’ve got an entire deck on the thing to myself. And this baby is fast. We can be anywhere in minutes. I could show you a sun going nova. The ice rings on Alphalon Four. Anyplace you wanna be, we can be.”

  “My friends,” I said.

  “They’ll be okay,” said Payton. “They’ve got my friends to take care of them. And you’ve got me to take care of you.”

  His mouth curved into half of a smile. It looked so cute. And I was so drunk. He wanted me, and I wanted him. More than anything in the entire universe, I wanted him.

  We stumbled back to his ship. He bragged about the hull, the engine, the laser guns. I didn’t know what any of it was, but it looked impressive. Big. Masculine. The kind of thing you fought a war with.

  His quarters were just as macho. It looked like the den of some space king. Artifacts everywhere. Heads on the walls of aliens he’d hunted. Trophies from missions and conquests. Plasma rifles and energy swords and golden axes. His bed wasn’t even a bed. It was just an air cushion, a vortex of air circulating so fast that it was almost solid. You couldn’t even see it, just the headboard. But when he rolled us over onto it, it felt just like something was there. We were lying flat on the air cushion, floating above the floor. I pushed my hand down and the air gave way, just a little. Slowly. It firmed right up when I pulled back. Payton took my hand and pulled me into his embrace.

  “I want you,” said Payton. He kissed me, biting my lip. “I want to make your toes curl. I want to show you everything you were missing outside. I want you to be mine.”

  “Maybe we should go slow,” I said. “Maybe this time—"

  “Maybe we should do it under the stars,” said Payton.

  He reached over and hit a button on the wall. And everything around us disappeared.

  I freaked out at first. We were just floating there out in the middle of space. Everything was black. I could see the space station off in the distance, and the big green planet it was orbiting loomed behind it. Two suns on one side of us, and nothing but stars on the other. I panicked, kicking around, crying.

  Payton hit the button again. The ship came back. He smiled. “It’s still there. You just can’t see it. Now lay back and enjoy the view.”

  He turned the ship invisible again, and it felt like we were floating out there in space together. I was so out of it. So drunk. It was romantic, caressing one another, kissing, an entire planet the backdrop to our evening. I started to think maybe he did love me. He’d given me the stars. He wanted me to be his, and I wanted him to be mine. Maybe it was fate that I’d found him again. God’s will, even.

  I was so drunk.

  I rested my head on the air cushion and let him lead. And that was my second time, and my third, and my fourth. And I fell asleep in his arms, again.

  I woke up back at my manor. Back in my bed at home. My butler was waiting with breakfast in bed. I was still in my avatar, still dressed like an alien.

  “Payton?” I said.

  “His Lordship had an urgent engagement on the opposite end of the galaxy,” said the butler. “He asked me to give your Ladyship his regards, and to tell her that he hopes to encounter her again someday.”

  “When?” I said. “Did he say when?”

  “He stressed that the engagement was urgent,” said the butler. “And that it could occupy quite a bit of his Lordship’s time.”

  I was crushed. Destroyed. He’d done it again. He’d used me and spat me out, and it was on to the next girl. One on every planet, and a million in every galaxy. I didn’t mean a thing to him, and I never would. The Devil had tempted me, and I’d taken a bite of his fruit. And I’d never be the same again after what I’d learned.

  I was in there for another year or so after that. I’m not sure exactly. I spent all my time back at the manor, and I was high on SpaceOut the entire time. Just laying on the ground, staring at paintings, watching the colors spin round and round. Talking to my AI butler about gibberish. God and man and life and love and Heaven, all the things I always thought about, and when I was on the drug I felt like I’d put them all into a blender and churned them into a featureless mush. I could drink it right down and I’d know everything I ever wanted to, and all I needed was the drug.

  I was only sober for a few minutes a day. The mandatory minimum, just enough time for me to make an informed decision about whether I wanted to sink into the high again. Just enough time so they could call it a choice instead of an addiction. Most days I spent those few minutes bawling about Payton. A couple of sober minutes a day isn’t enough to give yourself time to process anything, and in all those months I’m not sure I spent more than a few hours with my wits about me.

  But one day I thought of something. Something that made me feel worse than giving up my purity to someone who didn’t give a whit for it. Something that snapped me out of my funk and made me finally put aside the drugs and pull myself together.

  I’d been at my manor for a year, and not a single person had visited me. Not Emily. Not my friends. Not anybody. I’d spent so many nights with them, and I’d gone to so many clubs. But they were all still out there on the Crawl. They couldn’t be bothered to take a few minutes out of their day to come see how I was. And Emily. She was supposed to help me. To guide me. And she’d just left me there to flop around in my own misery.

  I was furious. I mean livid. Nobody? Not one of them cared?

  I was going to give them a piece of my mind. And I was going to start with Emily.

  I asked the butler where she was. He gave me a bunch of “your Ladyships” and went to a
computer to look her up. “African Dreamscape Public Instance #24739-B. Would you like to enter the instance at her location?”

  I would, I said. And a door opened up to the place she’d gone to. A flat rectangle in the middle of the drawing room, and on the other side an African savannah. I could see gazelle hopping in the distant grassland, the sun blazing down on them. I thanked my butler, asked him to have dinner ready when I got back, and walked into another world.

  It was Africa down to the pixel. High grass everywhere, a bunch of termite mounds behind me that were twice as tall as I was, and here and there an acacia tree basking in the sun. It was hot. The gazelle were still bouncing around, and I didn’t know how they had the energy. Or how they would have had the energy if they’d been real.

  Emily wasn’t there. I didn’t see anybody at first. And then I looked in the distance and caught sight of him. A fat African man squatting in the dirt with no shirt on, his giant belly rolling over his jeans. He was leaning over, talking in a low voice, holding something in his hand and whispering to it.

  He looked up. He saw me and smiled this big wide smile. “Ruby,” he said in a deep bass voice. “How are you?”

  “Who are you?” I said. “Do you know a woman named Emily?”

  “I was Emily,” said the man. “Now I’m Jabari. Come. Sit.”

  I stared at him. Or her. I was never good at knowing what I was supposed to call people when they made those changes in who they were. She’d done a Switch. A total transformation of avatar and identity. It was the same person in there, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like I was talking to a total stranger. At least she was still a person. Not a cricket or a dog or a car.

  “You left me,” I said, and sat down on the ground beside him. “You just left me there on my own.”

  “I have my own life to live,” said Jabari. He held out his hand. There was a spider in it. A black hairy thing with a belly as fat as his was. “His name’s Anansi. We’re going on a vision quest together. It’ll be soon. We’re getting ready. We’re going down. Down into the network. Into the code. Into places people don’t usually see. We’ll swim with the algorithms. You can come if you like.”