by Kit Reed
“Careful, they’re probably listening.”
“What are they going to do to us, pull the plug? If the corporation channels everything anyway, what’s the point?”
“A little regulation never hurt anybody.”
“That’s what you think. They’re cutting us off at the knees.”
Playing on group paranoia, someone says cleverly, “Unless they’re running us like rats.”
Who’s out here talking? People like us, Zan thinks, letting the talk scroll by as she reflects. People nothing like us.
Then Jazzy says, “It’s not the pudding you have to prove, it’s the chef.”
She types, If this is the pudding, are we the chefs or the plums?
Five people respond. Look at them all! Strangers like packages, waiting to be unwrapped. Zan trusts her personal radar; some of the people she meets here are keepers; others, she’s let slip away. Jazzy’s a keeper. “Think of this as the oven,” he says, making her laugh.
“And Suntum’s the kitchen. And if we can’t stand the heat…”
Several people laugh. Then hostility smashes into her like an incoming wave. “If this is a kitchen, bitch,” Azeath says to her, “why don’t you give us all a break and jump in the fire?”
Jazzy says, “Watch it!”
But this enemy Zan has never met tells the room, “Watch out for that one; she may look sweet, but she’s Reverdy’s puppet; everything she types, he writes.”
She types: look at Azeath. The description is daunting.
Azeath is God’s demon in a platinum tunic: tall, blond, imposing. His naked biceps and his huge thighs tell you that he is an expert love machine. And a killing machine. He knows the law to the letter and is ready to die defending it. Behold him. Be afraid. Be more than afraid. He is a terrible enemy.
His girlfriend Mireya jumps in, no surprise. “Oh, Reverdy.” Everybody knows she and Reverdy used to be lovers and Mireya snarls at Zan as if she still owns the man, studding her insults with asterisks. “We know all about Reverdy’s *tool*s. Correction. Reverdy’s *fool.* Lady, can’t you tell when you’re being used?”
When Zan doesn’t rise to the bait, Mireya says, “Only a fool would come in here talking Reverdy’s line without ever wondering. If he’s not using you, prove it. What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Sorry, I don’t do catfights.” Not caring what Mireya says behind her back or that both Mireya and Azeath will page her relentlessly, sniping at long distance, Zan goes home.
Safe in Zan’s Tower at the top of the hotel, she considers. This is life, all right, but it’s life in a pressure cooker. Here in the dark we are all equal, the attached or unattached, carefree or careworn, the large and the unwieldy, the halt and the ugly, the lovelorn …
No. Lorn. Lorn, she thinks, strung out it. And what about Reverdy? Is he lorn? Maybe we are all lorn, she thinks, lorn being the condition of missing something terribly without knowing what it is.
Shaking off sadness, she opens a post from Lark.
Last night after they went to sleep I sneaked up to the kitchen and made those white chocolate chunk brownies I told you about, and I put them in a beautiful box I had and took them over to my girlfriend’s house? You know, Daisy? Well, she was almost my girlfriend before I got sick so I thought, when she comes to the door I’ll just give them to her and she’ll know, I put my phone number in so she can call? But oh shit Zan, I got there OK, and they were still up and all, but I never saw her because I couldn’t get up the guts to ring the bell. It made me so sick that on the way home I threw them off the bridge. I’ll log back on as soon as they let me, I have to talk to you; right now my dad has to use the phone.
If she and poor Lark could talk it would be better, but if synchronicity is one of the wonders of life in space, it is by no means guaranteed. Things happen in the world outside that keep people from logging on. Exigencies separate friends when they most need to meet—power outage, computer crash, the server’s down or someone is disconnected in mid-conversation because downstairs his wife just picked up the phone. Zan mails Lark instead, not knowing whether she’ll still be here when he reconnects. StElene is built on talk, but it’s held together by mail. She writes:
Oh, Lark, I’m proud of you for making the gesture and I’m sure if Daisy knew what you’d done for her, she’d be proud of you too. I wish you’d stayed long enough to see if she came to the door. I knew if she could just talk to you, she’d know how special you are. Have you thought of sending her a note?
Zan wants to keep writing, to tell him about Charlie and the baby she can’t have because it hurts so much that she has to tell somebody, but her sense of privacy is too strong. Let other people spill their stories incessantly in public rooms and on StElene’s dozens of mailing lists. She doesn’t complain.
She’ll wait for Reverdy.
And he is here. “Zan!”
They hug. “Love, I’m so glad!” Of course Zan tells him everything she said last night, what Charlie said before he fled into sleep. Tears glaze her cheeks here in the third-floor room in the physical world as on StElene she tells Reverdy, “I feel so lost.”
He says, “You’re like Gauguin painting for a blind man. He can’t see it. He can’t see you at all.” This is why she loves Reverdy.
“We’re in love.”
What he says next warms her. “Not the way you and I are.”
“Charlie does love me, it’s just. The kids. They’re like military orders that he has to follow, damn the torpedoes.”
“You deserve better, Zan. You deserve everything you want.”
She’s tempted to ask whether he would let her have a baby but the territory’s brand new and she knows better. “Oh, Rev.”
“Let me be here for you.” He quotes the poet she loves best. “In this and the other kingdom.”
Reverdy is so quick to understand that Zan tells him things she’s never told anybody else in the world. They know each other so well that they talk in shorthand; almost every point of reference is shared. Her lover knows she is crying RL and he says all the right things to her, every one; weeping with gratitude, she says, “I’ve never known anybody this way.”
“You mean all the way through to the soul.”
Softly, she repeats, “All the way through to the soul.”
After a pause he builds on it, leading her. “As if we’re the same person. I know we’re not, but we are.”
Deep inside Jenny in the night in the quiet third-floor room, love twists like a leaping fish. Yes it’s sexual, but she has to elevate what she feels or she can’t be here. Swiftly, she transforms it. “Or the same soul.”
“That’s the beauty of meeting you here.”
“Meeting you anywhere.” She knows where she’d like this to go; what they have here is beautiful but it’s conceptual. She imagines meeting Reverdy in some real place where they can really touch.
“Oh Zan, who would I be if I’d never met you?”
“You’d be you. Oh, I’m so glad you’re you!” She is casting for something she may not be able to name. “I love you and I trust you with my life. And you…”
Reverdy does not exactly address this. In fact, she tells him everything and there are a number of things he’s never told. He offers this, to make it better. “I tell you things I never told Louise. Things I could never tell Louise.”
“She doesn’t understand.”
“Exactly. She can’t! But you … It’s as if I know what it’s like to be inside your skin. And I love what I see.” He lets a little of his daily life show through, delicately hinting at the pain: “Being with you is so different. Louise…”
“I know.” She does; they’ve talked about it for hours.
“Yes, you know.” Smiling, he touches her hair. “And I couldn’t live without you knowing.”
It’s strange and wonderful that Zan is deep inside Reverdy’s consciousness, when her true knowledge of Charlie stops at the sweet smile on his blunt, loving, uncomprehending fac
e. “Charlie is a good man, but he doesn’t…”
“Love you?”
“Understand. I wish you and I could be forever.”
And this is the joy and the danger: his love! Reverdy seals it. “We are.”
seven
HUBERT PINKNEY, A.K.A. LARK
Everybody has to disconnect sometime. Either you have to sleep or everybody you care about has gone to sleep. Nobody you know is logged on. You don’t have the psychic energy to start up with strangers, fishing for something to talk about with players you don’t know. Life’s too short to waste on the hundreds of anonymous guests who drop in with their unformed expectations, discover they can’t handle it and go. You’ve read all the posts on your favorite mailing lists on StElene, starting with *complaints. You’ve even posted a few sassy notes on *politics in hopes somebody will post a response or mail you privately. You’ve @investigated every room in the GrandHotel and nothing’s going on.
Your ideal world is as good as dead. For now.
You’re sick of waiting for your friends. Your bladder calls. BRB, you type, for “Be right back,” but there’s nobody around who cares. You might as well disconnect. Push back your rolling chair and turn your back on the vacant screen. Type @exit and your brilliant, colorful, crowded world goes out like a light. It is like a little death. Lark, a.k.a. Hubert Pinkney, is brought down.
Bad things happen to you in the interstices. Lark knows. You have to take care. “Take care,” Zan said to him right before she disconnected, when was it, 2 a.m? Just now Reverdy said, “Take care” and typed @exit. It’s even night in Alaska, which Lark happens to know is where Reverdy lives IRL. In, as they say, Real Life. Lark looks around the cluttered basement at 553 Poplar Avenue, where he grew up. This isn’t life. It isn’t safe!
Off StElene the world is fucking fraught with peril. People are hard to take and shitty to you. Alone is the only safe way to be. And the only safe place to be is: LOGGED ON.
Lark is … No. Sadass Hubert Pinkney is on the floor in farthest corner with his feet sticking out in front of him, gleaming in Nikes that the mother bought in hopes they’d inspire him to go out and run a mile. Yeah, right.
He looks about the way Zan thinks he does—skinny and anxious, triangular face with lemur eyes; the accuracy of her imagination would make her smile. Until Jenny Wilder stepped in and took a look at him, assessing with a professional sigh: He is not a whole human being.
Yeah right, I’m not. Lark is pretty messed up. Yeah, they can call him Hubert but he’s Lark even here, the ’rents are just too stupid to see it. And he knows they can’t stand him.
Howard and Marjorie Pinkney’s son the computer junkie stays out of sight but he lurks in the mind. No, he looms in the mind, which is why they are determined to get him out of here. Like kicking him out will make him all better. The mom thinks he’ll, like, hang out drinking coffee in some nice, healthy student union far, far away from Poplar Avenue instead of crouching like a raptor at his keyboard in their very cellar, which is usually lighted only by the eerie cathode glow from his computer screen. Eviction will be good for him! Their little Hubert can make friends, get some color in his face. Build some muscle, out in the fresh air.
Look, he can’t keep going on the way he is.
“You can’t keep going on the way you are. Right, son?” Marjorie, looking at him with those swimmy eyes. That’s the problem with moms, even when they don’t like you. They hope.
Howard, he just wants the kid unshelled—un. fucking. shelled. He was a freak accident. They thought they were done having kids. Two grown sons, both gone. And now … this! Freak accident, as Howard never ceases to remind him. They are too old!
When the ’rents sent him off to college they thought the inconvenience was finally done with. Threw a private block party and redecorated his room. Not their fault that like a bad check, he bounced. And landed here. Last thing he wanted, and look at me. Not his fault. Not theirs.
Marjorie keeps holding these sad little conversations from the top of the basement stairs. “Son, why don’t you go out and play?”
“I’m too old to play.”
“You’re not too old to have fun.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“You know what I mean. You’ve got to come out sometime. Son?”
“No I don’t.” If she knew he went out at night she might lock the house and not let him back in. “I’m cool right here.”
She acts friendly, but Lark knows. The father sends her to ask when is he going to get a job. Howard even writes her damn lines: be warned, they are done paying these phone bills from you always being on that terrible internet what are you doing out there where we can’t keep an eye on you. It’s time to kick the habit or else get a damn job or think of something you can sell to pay for your keep here. That useless comic book collection? Your CDs? Why don’t you sell that damn computer, it brings nothing but grief, look what happened to you in college. Sell sperm or something, help with this huge phone bill. Sell your blood. But that’s Howard talking.
The mother never says anything straight out. She just starts in that lala voice of hers, “Your friends Ed and Ben called.”
“I don’t want to see Edward and Benjamin right now.”
“They’re only home for two weeks. Spring break. Harvard!” He can hear the tears in her voice. “UCLA. You could have a party.”
“I don’t go there.”
“Son, why won’t you look at me?”
Because I can’t look at people. Not straight on. “I am.”
“If you’d only go out! Or let your friends come in.”
“I don’t go there, Mom. Go away.”
“You never go out!”
“Is that a problem for you?” But I do. Just not that you know about, he thinks and can’t know if he means the deep hours when he slips out the back and goes running or the daily escape to StElene.
“Oh Hubert, you’re going to lose all your friends.”
“I don’t have any friends.” His heart turns over. I have closer friends than anybody. Just not here. A phrase bounds across the screen of his imagination: not of this world.
This Tuesday, my God, she came down. Crept up behind him and touched him on the shoulder. “For God’s sake, son. At least tell us how you are!”
“I’m fine, Mother. I’m fine.” You’re in my space. Stand. Stare at her feet. Wait for her to go.
Tuesday she craned to read what was scrolling up his screen. “At least let me see. Are you writing a book down here? Tell me you’re writing a book.”
“No Mother, I’m not writing a book.”
She swelled, filling his space. “Then what is it? Let me see!”
“No!” He threw his body over the screen to keep her from seeing the scrolling text.
Reverdy just said: Your mother is some bitch! Zan was saying: If only I could arrange ten minutes with them. They don’t even know who you are!
Marjorie was pushing so Lark had to shove. Hard. “Go away!”
“You hit me!” Wounded, Marjorie regrouped. “I thought you might be writing something. You know. To get back into school.”
“Fuck school.” I’m sorry about the fucking nervous breakdown, Mother. If that’s what it was. “I can’t talk now. I’m busy.”
“I just don’t understand you, Hubert. In the dark all the time. Wasting your life down here in the dark.”
“All right, I’ll show you. I’ll fucking show you.” Desperate, he types BRB and then home. And on StElene, Lark disappears from the Dak Bungalow and returns to Lark’s Mandala. Let the mother read what he has wrought. If she asks, he’ll open some of the puzzles for her, @unpack the coding that supports his elegant schemes.
“For God’s sake, Hubert. Stop typing. The sun’s out!”
Why do I need to see the sun when I can build a world? What Lark does is too huge to explain to outsiders. On StElene he has built a bungalow; the text presents a neo-Victorian place with a little cupola, an exterior in keeping
with the island theme, but he has customized the interior. Enter Lark’s place and you’re inside an Oriental contrivance, text describing spheres within spheres. The first solution to the problems set by the mandala admits you to an inner sphere. The mathematical scheme is based on those intricately carved sets of ivory balls within balls with a beautiful kernel at the center. Each sphere in Lark’s place contains a series of games, puzzles. Solve each set and eventually you find your way to the center of the inmost sphere and the lotus throne. Lark sits here. Solve all the puzzles and you’ll get to the center of Lark. Some day the perfect woman will find him waiting here. Until then, Lark is content to wait. The thing took months to devise. Hours spent coding followed by hours in the hotel talking to his friends, how much more life does a person need? What could Hubert Pinkney tell his mother about this? What could he really, really say to her? “OK, Mother,” he said at last. “You want a look? Then look!” And stepped aside, trembling, so she could read his screen.
Reading, Marjorie blinked. And blinked and blinked. He still doesn’t know why it made her so angry. Screaming, “This is it? This is all?”
“Yes this is it. This is fucking it!”
Furious, she pushed him. “Don’t speak that way to me. Don’t you dare speak that way to me.”
And he pushed back! “Oh, go to hell. Just fucking go to fucking hell. Mother, do you have any idea who I am?
“Is that all you can do, hit me? You hit me twice!”
“I’m sorry, I was upset.”
“That’s twice. That does it! I’m telling your father. Then we’ll see.”
OK, the fire in the kitchen wasn’t only logical. It was inevitable. And yesterday Howard came downstairs and read him out. Hubert this, Hubert that. Then he yanked all the plugs.
So the ’rents are pissed about the fire. Lark and his computer, his things. That he sneaks upstairs in the night and steals food. That they never see him go out. Now they’re in the kitchen talking about him. He guesses the sun’s up. He hasn’t slept, so what else is new? Day, night. It’s all the same to him. But the ’rents are regular. It’s their breakfast time again. He hears them shambling around up there on muffled feet, padding around in their matching slipper socks like worried bears, circling the kitchen on a loop. Trapped inside those thick, sagging bodies, wedged into narrow minds while on StElene, Lark soars.