Connect

by Julian Gough

  The roar is deep, rough, angry, like the big old Siberian tigress he heard in the zoo in San Diego, coughing and roaring at the lions that she could smell but not see on the other side of the high concrete wall. But this roar goes on and on, no pause to take a breath. A creature with no lungs.

  Not a creature.

  Lightning. That was lightning whiting out his sight, and then thunder, very close. It’s the gap in the air cut by the bolt of lightning, collapsing. An inch wide, and miles high.

  Once he can run the physics of it in his head, he is OK again. All his muscles relax.

  Almost no gap between light and sound. Very near. Almost overhead.

  Uh oh. He left his booster out, on the ridge top.

  ‘Whewwff,’ she is saying. ‘That was close.’

  Should he be polite? Mama always says, when in doubt, just say something polite. Yes.

  And he says, ‘Come in, out of the rain.’

  And she does, she squeezes past him into the house.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, and as he is turning in the doorway, horrified, to watch her walk into the house, there is another blast of light, and this time he sees it, the jagged line of light leaping over his head – must be from the top of the ridge, hidden by the house – to the black clouds above.

  He can’t believe he’s said it. Invited a stranger inside the house. Why did he say it?

  Someone said it in a film. Yes. Rain, lightning. ‘Come in out of the rain.’ It’s a pattern, and he had to finish the pattern.

  ‘Don’t you have more deliveries?’ he calls after her.

  ‘Nah,’ she says, ‘you’re my last tonight.’

  His hands unobtrusively by his sides, he drums a quick pattern on his hip pockets with his fingertips, all four fingers one after another, five times, both sides, in balance. It’s not good, when his mouth doesn’t check first with his brain. That usually leads to trouble.

  He’s so worried about the stranger in his house that he stops worrying about his new booster on the ridgetop.

  36

  He doesn’t really get the next few minutes, he’s closed down, it’s too much, she’s in the house, she’s talking, asking questions, he can smell her, it’s a complicated smell, there’s some perfume – though it could be soap – and there’s her hair and the leather of her clothes . . .

  She notices him looking at the leather jacket. Glances down. ‘It’s actually pretty hot in this, indoors,’ she says. ‘On the bike, you cool down, with the speed, and the wind.’ She unzips the thick black leather jacket, and slips out of it. Hangs it casually on one shoulder.

  She wears a red T-shirt underneath. It’s a nice red. Maybe Pantone 187, he thinks, staring at it.

  ‘So you’re Colt.’

  Colt frowns. He’d placed the order using his mother’s information.

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  She shrugs. ‘There aren’t many Chiangs in Nevada. And I’m a huge fan of your work.’

  ‘My work?’

  He’s totally off balance.

  Is this normal? Is pizza delivery always like this? They do research, and talk to you?

  She smiles. ‘Ingame . . .’

  ‘You play?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ She pauses, about to say something. Changes her mind.

  And again she’s looking at him in a way he doesn’t understand. Well, it’s probably nothing. He seldom does understand what people mean by their looks. But this . . . There is something weird about it.

  It reminds him of something.

  What?

  ‘What’s your name?’ he says.

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘Guess.’

  ‘Ingame, I mean,’ he says.

  She keeps her eyebrows raised. ‘Guess . . .’

  And Colt realizes with terror that she’s the girl he met last week, ingame.

  The girl who touched him. Who removed her clothes. Removed his clothes.

  Who set off his mother’s parental controls, and was snatched from his arms, vanished from the game.

  But now they are standing in the real world, close enough to touch. He’s close enough to smell her skin, the leather of the jacket draped over her shoulder.

  ‘Your pizza is getting cold,’ she says, and turns away from him, and walks into the kitchen.

  He feels his legs tremble: they want to run, they want to hide, in his room, but then she would be free to roam the house, could be anywhere . . . he follows her into the kitchen.

  And somehow he is sitting at the kitchen table, across from her.

  He smells her own smell now, it’s coming out from under the soap and the leather, it has a lot of elements, perspiration, very fresh, nice, and other smells.

  He’s way too hot. ‘Aircon, lower the temperature three degrees,’ he says.

  ‘Sure thing, Colt,’ says the aircon, in the voice of Ronald Reagan, a long-dead actor and politician whose voice Naomi finds amusing.

  ‘Thanks,’ says the girl to Colt, ‘it is kind of warm.’ She opens the lid of the cardboard pizza box towards him.

  The lid goes through the full 180 degrees, until it sits flat on the table in front of him.

  It stays flat; he likes that.

  A lot of olives, good.

  The pizza’s already cut.

  A pie chart.

  Eight wedges of 12.5 per cent.

  They’re not totally equal, symmetrical, but not too bad.

  She pushes a half-moon of pizza, four slices, 50 per cent, towards him, into the open lid. Pushes it further, right across the lid to the far side.

  Now her half mirrors his half exactly. Symmetrical. Better.

  ‘Eat,’ she says.

  ‘How did you find me?’ he says.

  The mist from the raindrops has already evaporated from the visor. He lifts the visor up, leaves the game off; but removing the helmet would be too naked.

  She shrugs. ‘Tracked you down.’

  ‘You’ve been tracking me?’ A blush of pleasure and a shiver of fear collide, and he is red-faced and trembling and has to turn his face away.

  ‘Yeah, I discovered your mom had an account.’ She points at the pizza box. ‘I mean everybody does, it’s pretty good pizza . . . I hacked the system so that when your order came in, it routed to me.’

  ‘You hacked . . . you could be fired . . .’

  ‘Well, I was already hacking the scheduling system. Otherwise it gives you bullshit shifts. They play favourites.’

  ‘But . . .’ Colt is having trouble navigating this. ‘You’re a hacker? Not just a player?’

  ‘Mmm. I’ve even contributed some code.’

  And now he gets it. Wow. Wow. Wow . . . No, she’s not just some anonymous girl player who took his clothes off last week. She’s also . . . ‘You’re the Snow Queen.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Her blizzards . . . He’s been caught up in one, in an abandoned mining town, totally convincing. Great use of fractal geometries. Beautiful, stable emergent order from a chaotic system. The melt rates, the drifting. Each flake generating more detail the closer you look.

  ‘I love your work,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you.’ She gives a startling smile, and he moves back in his chair. ‘That’s good, because I love your work too.’

  ‘But . . . it’s just . . .’ He can’t think what to say. ‘Code.’

  ‘Oh come on. There are a bunch of open-source gameworlds, and they all suck except for ours, and that’s because of your code.’

  ‘No.’ This is too much, this is like being touched, he feels hot. ‘The team, they all . . .’

  She shakes her head. ‘Most open-source gameworlds are completely incoherent and they’re down half the time. When this world breaks, you fix it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say, that you were the Snow Queen, when we . . .’ He runs through a bunch of words but he can’t imagine saying any of them.

  They stare at each other until she touches her nose with her thumb, and stretches it up a little. Holds it ther
e. Lets go.

  Colt stares at her nose, fascinated. He’s done that one.

  She tics.

  ‘You’re . . .’ No, he doesn’t want to use any of the words. ‘You’re like me,’ he says, amazed. But she says nothing.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.

  Embarrassment washes over him, like a bucket of ice water tipped over his head, and he shivers. He shouldn’t talk to girls, it goes wrong.

  Finally she says, ‘I’m not good with people. I got on pretty good with you.’

  Oh, we did, we did, we got on great, he wants to say, but that was ingame.

  Ingame, I kill people. I kiss people. I talk to people. It doesn’t mean anything. Ingame, it’s just a manoeuvre.

  Killing someone, kissing someone.

  It’s nothing.

  Just running some code.

  This . . .

  I’ve never killed anyone in the real world.

  Never kissed . . .

  He can’t say any of this. He can’t say anything at all.

  Colt sits silently, trying to process it. That he’s kissed the Snow Queen, ingame.

  That she’s in his kitchen, for real, now.

  That they’re having an actual conversation.

  He knows how conversations work: you ask questions, stuff like that. But the question he wants to ask is, why are you here?

  And he is afraid of all the possible answers.

  To buy time, he finally eats some pizza.

  Weird. Gluey.

  She copies him, matching slice, directly opposite.

  Nice. Symmetrical.

  ‘You shouldn’t eat this stuff all the time,’ she says through a mouthful of pizza. ‘Mmm. It’s not really food.’

  ‘I don’t,’ says Colt. ‘I haven’t had a pizza since I was ten.’

  She raises her eyebrows at him, chews, swallows. ‘Wow. OK. What do you normally eat?’

  ‘Smoothies. All kinds of smoothies. Sometimes a milkshake.’

  ‘Oh right. Like the Chinese guys.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing solid?’

  ‘I don’t really like eating.’

  ‘Uh huh. I have friends like that. How come, with you?’

  ‘I don’t like it inside me,’ he says.

  ‘Pizza?’

  ‘Anything. Food.’

  ‘Growing boy. Got to eat.’ She picks up an olive that has fallen off her slice, and eats it.

  ‘But it will become part of me. And . . .’ He stops. Is she . . . like me? But she’s really confident.

  And people don’t usually react well to what he’s about to say. Yes, maybe stop talking now.

  Maybe count for a while.

  She has nice zippers on her jacket. Like Mama’s, but not.

  Zippers have a lot of teeth. Even numbers of teeth. Same either side. Meshed together, pulled apart.

  Zipper, good word.

  Zipper. Teeth either side, like a mouth. A hole with teeth.

  You could call a zipper a mouth. You could call a mouth a zipper.

  Yes, he’ll stop talking for a while.

  ‘I’ll close my zipper,’ he says, experimenting with the metaphor. His mother had explained metaphors, again and again. This one should work. Zipper, mouth. Teeth, teeth.

  She raises her eyebrows, leans over sideways, and glances under the table, between his legs.

  He feels the throb of blood into his penis increase as the arteries widen, and the throb of blood back out again decrease, as the small muscles around the veins tighten, closing them down.

  He’s looked it all up, studied the data, diagrams, CAT scans, the physiology. He knows it all, he knows exactly what is happening, technically, as his throbbing penis rises, inside his briefs. But the data leaves out how it feels. And it feels overwhelming, it feels out of control.

  She sits back up straight, grinning. ‘Your zipper isn’t open,’ she says.

  ‘My mouth,’ he says. ‘It was a metaphor. Because a zipper has teeth, and a mouth has teeth.’

  ‘Metaphor?’

  Is it not a metaphor? No, probably not, because he hates metaphors, the feeling they create in his head, and this one is OK. He can see a mouth with a zip, and then without a zip, just teeth. That’s OK. But with a metaphor, it’s real; he can see it, solid. And then it isn’t real; it’s just some words. There’s nowhere stable for it to sit. Neither is true, so it flip-flops between the two. Like a fish dying on the sand, he thinks. Is that a simile? Now that sentence flip-flops in his mind. He’s breathing too fast. His vision blurs. This isn’t good.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she says.

  ‘Maybe it was allegory,’ he says. His mother has explained allegory, too. Allegory is like algebra, she had said. ‘Allegory is like algebra,’ he says. ‘You replace ideas with symbols. But the ideas have to be pretty clearly defined.’

  ‘Gimme an example,’ she says. That was what he had said to his mother. His breathing slows. He knows this conversation. She had said . . .

  He closes his eyes and lowers his voice, like his mother did sometimes. ‘“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me: for I am meek and lowly in heart.”’

  ‘Uh huh. And what does it mean?’

  This girl is just like him. Just like him. The same questions! This girl is . . . Is she a woman? Maybe she’s a woman. Mama always says you have to use the right word. He opens his eyes and looks at her. Looks straight into her eyes. The Snow Queen.

  She looks straight into his.

  ‘Are you a woman or a girl?’ he says.

  There is no answer.

  Oh poop, I’ve screwed up again . . .

  But after studying his face a while she says, ‘A woman . . . OK, tell me about allegory.’

  He feels like singing. He stands up, and sits down again. He knows this conversation. His mother said . . . Just say what his mother said.

  ‘He’s saying, “Come to me, all of you that are exhausted by life, and I will show you how to endure it.” But he is saying it allegorically. As though they are farm animals who are exhausted from farm work, carrying . . .’ he can’t remember the word, she must have mumbled . . . ‘things, pulling the plough.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ she says. ‘Right. Allegory.’

  Her perfume is a little like coconut. Can coconut be a perfume? Must be her soap. His left leg begins to twitch under the table, involuntarily. He forces his right leg to twitch, to balance it, but he twitches too hard, and his foot shoots forward, and hits hers.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She turns in her chair, and swings her legs out to the side of the table. Long legs. He looks across, at her boots. Motorcycle boots, with zippers. More zippers.

  ‘So yeah, like, zip? Zip your lip? Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m not great with slang. All the dudes in the kitchen are from Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala . . . South America. But I can swear pretty well in Spanish.’ She takes another bite of pizza. He’s glad she isn’t still looking at his zipper, at the bulge of his penis under the layers of cloth.

  ‘You can?’ he says.

  ‘Mmmm. I know some pretty good ones.’

  ‘Tell me a good one.’ He watches her mouth move. Her teeth. She bites off some more pizza while she thinks about this. Chews.

  A nibble of crust, from the edge; no topping.

  He knows what is happening in her mouth. That is a calm thought. He knows what the inside of her mouth feels like. What she is tasting. How it is changing. Bread; the starches becoming sweet, becoming sugar in her mouth. Dissolving, transforming in her saliva. Becoming chemicals small enough to use. Fuel. Her next hour’s energy is in her mouth.

  ‘Something on my teeth?’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ he says politely.

  She laughs, and through the kitchen window behind her a silent flash of lightning lights up the desert, a bleached white, blurred from the rain on the glass. And now the thun
der comes.

  The storm is moving away.

  She smiles again. She smiles a lot.

  He smiles back. You’re meant to smile back. ‘Swear at me in Spanish,’ he says. He doesn’t like his mother swearing; but somehow the thought of this girl – this woman – the Snow Queen, in front of him, swearing . . .

  ‘Me cago en la leche de tu puta madre,’ she says.

  He is about to auto-translate, but hesitates. He realizes he wants to stay in the conversation. ‘What’s that mean?’ he says.

  ‘I shit in the milk of your whore of a mother.’

  He blinks. The image is startling. Vivid. ‘Wow. That really is a good one.’

  She swings her legs back under the table, and bows. ‘So what’s the problem with food becoming part of you?’ she says.

  Oh, beans. She remembered.

  ‘Well, matter comes in,’ he says. ‘Outside matter. It comes inside you, air and food and water. And it becomes part of you, your cells. And cells live for a while, and then they die, and the matter leaves again, and they’re replaced. New matter, new cells. None of the cells, none of the molecules, none of the atoms in you stay the same.’

  She shrugs. ‘Everything changes . . .’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ No, she doesn’t get it yet. He feels a surge of disappointment. He feels alone again.

  Keep going. More detail. Explain.

  ‘I mean there’s about a thousand tons of me in total,’ Colt says,

  ‘if you add it up, over my life. All the oxygen that comes in, and combines with other atoms, and releases energy, and then gets excreted. The water.’ He points to the pizza. ‘The carbon, nitrogen, sodium, everything. They come, they go.’

  His voice feels too loud. He leans forward, so he can talk more quietly, but when he leans forward he can smell her soap and her hair and the leather and the pizza, all together, much stronger now, and she leans forward too, and her eyes are . . . something, his body is reacting in some weird way to her eyes, and it’s too much, he closes his own eyes and sits back in his chair.

  She doesn’t get it; but he has to try, to explain, ‘I’m just a pattern, moving through this kind of flowing river of matter. Like a wave. All I am is the pattern; not the atoms.’

  ‘OK, I get you,’ she says.