by M. O. Walsh
Cherilyn liked her phone for the conversations it provided, not the distractions from them. Her texts with friends when alone in the house, the way Douglas would call her on his lunch break: These were good things. If given the chance, Cherilyn would always choose real-life people over her phone, she was sure of that, and if someone were to ask her, she would likely say that this phone stuff was a big part of what was wrong with the world these days. People weren’t connecting. When she and Douglas had dinner, for example, neither of them ever had their phone on the table. Not like eating over at Jeannie and Ted’s house, where he was always looking up every little point they brought up to try to prove people wrong. Like that time she told them mayonnaise is actually sort of a miracle food because it’s the only food that literally changes its chemical composition when mixed together. It’s no longer its separate parts like other things are when you mix them. It becomes an entirely new thing. And then Ted spent five minutes at the table googling around, trying to prove her wrong, like she was some sort of idiot, and there was a person, Cherilyn thought, who could benefit from taking his head out of his ass. Even if people are wrong every once in a while, if they misremember something, that’s okay. Put up your silly machine and let them wonder, Cherilyn thought. This was important.
Perhaps all this crusty philosophy was a sign of her age. Although not an old woman by any stretch, Cherilyn already felt apprehensive about the teenagers of Deerfield, who walked around the square like zombies, thumbing away at who knows what. She’d see a group of high school girls, for instance, still in their school uniforms, all walking together but each laughing at something different on their phones, and felt that, although these girls were barely twenty years younger than her, although she remembered high school like it was yesterday, she now had absolutely nothing in common with them. And what about the ones who got addicted to those games where you shoot other people you don’t know while talking to them on a headset for thirty hours in a row? Now, there was a problem. She’d read that some people in Japan were just dying there in the coffee shops because they forgot to eat for like two days. Even those people who were tweeting all the time, or getting angry about what other people were tweeting: What was wrong with them? How does a person get angry about something someone they don’t even know didn’t really even say? That’s what Cherilyn wanted to know. These were the people who lived “online,” she thought. And, no, she was not that.
If anything, she felt, her phone just kept her more local, more grounded. Her Facebook feed was made up of her friends who lived down the street, same with Instagram. Her email filled only with ads and bills, maybe an uplifting meme of a possum with its head stuck in a Pringles can that she would then forward over to Douglas. She had intentionally structured her Internet to mirror Deerfield itself, she understood, but would never prefer it to the real thing because it had no sky and no love and no wind.
Yet she was surprised how much she missed it today, her phone. It felt odd to be sitting at Douglas’s old computer in her bathrobe in the middle of the day. She’d already had a strange enough morning, having woken flushed and breathing heavy beneath a mound of pillows after a dream in which she ate figs off a lone tree on an island in the middle of the Mississippi River. The sweet taste in her mouth upon waking was like syrup and, when she reached over to grab her phone and check the time, she felt almost panicked not to find it. The strange reality that it was sitting cracked in a bowl of rice made her wonder if she was even awake. She looked at the clock on the dresser and couldn’t believe it was nine-thirty. When was the last time she’d slept so late? Was Douglas already gone? she wondered. When was the last time she hadn’t kissed him good-bye before work?
And with this thought came the memory of the previous night. What had she been thinking? Asking him to go twice in a row like that? Poor Douglas. She knew he would try to make up for it somehow. He’d probably start doing push-ups in the morning, buy a new pair of running shoes, he was so sensitive. What on earth had gotten into her? The romance, maybe, of the royal women in that textbook had taken to dancing in her head. The strange feeling of his clean-shaven upper lip on her neck. Maybe something to the idea of being worshipped. Or perhaps it was simply the delight of their reliable sex that she had both wanted and received that thrilled her, the sex that had become less frequent those last few years, she had to admit. The simple idea of asking for more. It was intriguing. She enjoyed being with Douglas, she always had, yet pleasing him was about as challenging as dropping a letter in the mailbox. Maybe she was merely looking for a challenge? She had no idea.
Despite the time, Cherilyn didn’t immediately hop out of bed. She instead conducted a mental body-check in her head, something Douglas didn’t know had become part of her daily routine. How was she feeling today? she wondered. Her feet felt normal, none of the peculiar cramping she’d had last week, and her legs seemed okay, too. So maybe it all had passed. All of the symptoms she’d been worried about: the strange tingling and numbness in her hands, the sometimes overwhelming exhaustion, maybe today they would disappear? Nothing to see here. Nothing to fear. Wouldn’t that be nice?
She eventually got up and made a fresh pot of coffee and turned on the TV and then walked outside in her robe to sneak a cigarette, when she discovered her car was missing, along with the smokes she had stashed in there. She tried to start Douglas’s car to no avail and it bothered her, she had to admit, that she found herself stranded. Was that her word for it? Stranded? Had she felt this way before about her own home? Since when had she become so dramatic? Come on, Cherilyn. It’s not like she had anything to do anyway, she figured. She’d still get a call every once in a while asking her to fill in for someone, a receptionist at the veterinarian’s office, maybe running the checkout at the church garage sale, but she’d quit most of that. And so what was on her docket today? Nothing at all. She needed to run to the store for some groceries, go check on her mom yet again, whose house she could easily walk to, but, dear Lord, maybe this lack of unpredictable options was the problem. She had the birdhouses to finish, that was true, but nothing in the world sounded quite as boring as that. And why had she chosen birdhouses anyway?
She stood barefoot in her humid carport and thought with remarkable clarity: There is nothing at all in this town I want to do. So, as she had the night before, she went to Douglas’s computer. She had info to gather, some details she wanted to figure out.
What Cherilyn wanted most, though, was to feel better. Although everything seemed okay when she woke up, she couldn’t deny that her right hand was tingling again. This was yet another in the mysterious and niggling string of symptoms she’d been trying to chalk up to aging, maybe some seasonal allergies. These occasions were also dotted by migraine headaches, though, some dizziness, and a few other obvious nuisances that had her worried. Even right now, once she thought about it, a slight burning in her neck. Had she slept crooked? Maybe a pinched nerve in there somewhere. Perhaps an ibuprofen would do the trick. Or an allergy pill. An Excedrin. What was it like to not feel like something was missing? To not feel like she needed medicine to make her right again? Did she remember?
No, she did not.
She sat and listened to their old desktop try and start itself up. Even though she turned it on last night, it still grumbled like an old man getting out of bed when she moved the mouse. A few lights on the hard drive blinked by her feet and the machine sounded like it was chewing on nickels.
Once it warmed itself up, the first thing she googled was DNAMIX. She needed to find out about this machine, maybe talk to some other people who had tried it, see what they were thinking, but her search came up empty. There was a DNAMIX.com, but this led her only to an unimpressive page that read “This Site Is Under Construction.”
Who could she talk to about it? She’d not mentioned her readout to anyone yet and had heard only vague mentions of the machine from her friends. One in a text from Christine Wi
llis, who wrote: Have you ever heard of a sommelier? And another from Bruce Newman that asked her directly about it. Hey, there, it said. Have you tried that DNAMIX machine? Tell me what it said if so! And it was odd the way he texted her out of nowhere, but that was always Bruce’s way. As soon as you’d forgotten about him, he’d pop right up beside you. This could be annoying to most people, she knew, but Bruce was lonely and she pitied him. She did not mention this text to Douglas, though, that was for sure. She knew his thoughts on Deuce Newman, who was not a man she had any interest in, in the grand scheme of things, but a man she sometimes thought of.
She also did not mention to Douglas that the real reason she dropped her phone yesterday was that, just for an instant, she could not feel her right hand.
She began by googling “royalty” and went through them all: the pictures of palaces, the lines of descent, the estimated wealth, the beautiful clothes. Hours passed until she found herself staring at one single page, and all those feelings she’d had the night before began creeping back to her. Some sort of heat. Some form of desire. She’d come across the Al Said royal family of Oman and this rabbit hole had a strange effect. On their Wikipedia page she’d found a picture of a striking man with a silver beard and an ornamental gold-and-blue turban on his head and she stared at this person a good while. He was apparently a sultan, which, paired with the photo, now had for Cherilyn an almost erotic ring to it, sultan, although the only sultan she could remember seeing previously had been in the Disney version of Aladdin, which Cherilyn understood was not at all erotic.
She clicked on some other images, one of them of this same man handing Barbara Bush a ceramic jug, another of this man sitting in what looked to be a solid-gold chair. She then came upon a picture of the most elegant-looking woman she had ever seen, and it nearly knocked her breath out.
It was a close-up of a white woman’s face, or at least she appeared to Cherilyn to be that way, wearing a black hood with a beautiful gold dragonfly pinned to the side of it. Her green eyes, her sandy-colored hair, the soft turn of her lips and nose. Oh my goodness, Cherilyn thought. She looked both beautiful and relaxed, not at all stuffy the way some of those British royal women appeared. But what injected Cherilyn with a type of energy, a type of adrenaline, was that she and this woman looked, very much, alike.
Cherilyn clicked on her picture and was brought to a page called “How to Live Like an Omani Princess.” She gained no clearer idea what an Omani princess actually did after reading the page, but what Cherilyn most wanted to know was the woman’s name, to find out if this person was a living, breathing reality, and, sure enough, she was. She was Princess Susan of Oman. And what broke upon Cherilyn as she studied the delicate freckles along her cheeks, the touch of strawberry color in the sweep of her hair, was pleasure. She felt she’d come across a sister she didn’t know she had. It was not true, of course, but she felt it all the same.
This idea sent a flush through Cherilyn’s chest and made her realize how alone she currently was in that house, how truly alone, without her phone to reach in and ping with a text, without anyone to question her. And, as anyone who finds themselves completely alone with their thoughts might do, Cherilyn began to wonder if she was going crazy. Why had she become so enamored with this idea of being someone important? Someone royal? Her mother’s recent battiness didn’t help to calm her, that was for sure. She knew the whole idea was ridiculous, that Douglas was probably right about the impossibility of it all, and yet she’d spent yesterday morning in front of her bedroom mirror, trying on the few fancy dresses she owned, ones she hadn’t worn in years, which she could not even zip all the way up. And why had she dug out that old Elton John CD with the remake of “Candle in the Wind” that he’d made for Princess Diana? Was she simply bored? Was she flat-out losing her mind? These were both legitimate concerns.
Although finding a person to talk to in Deerfield would have been easy enough, where everyone chatted on the sidewalk or at the gas station, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, this seemed the exact opposite kind of talk that Cherilyn needed now. What she wanted was something anonymous, where she could chat with anyone in the world, about any subject she desired. A place where she could talk without judgment. That sounded pretty nice.
So, Cherilyn went to the search bar and typed in “chat with strangers.”
The first site that came up was called Omegle and she clicked on it. She had to choose if she wanted the adult chat or the regular chat and, since she wanted to talk to adults and not children, she clicked it. Two small video screens popped up next to a text bar and after she clicked “OK” she was surprised to see her own face materialize in one of them. She looked on top of the monitor and saw that their ancient webcam had lit up with a green light. They had used this device only once that she could remember, she and Douglas, back when someone told them Skype was going to change the world. So, they bought a webcam and skyped with an old college friend of theirs who now lived in France and it was a neat thing but that was years ago, before FaceTime, and the webcam was forgotten.
The other screen said it was connecting her to a stranger and suddenly a man came to vision in the little video box above hers. He looked to be in his sixties and, when the screen became clear, she saw that he was shirtless and holding a bottle of baby oil. The man typed: Are you looking to be dommed? Cherilyn grimaced and quickly pressed “Next.”
After this came a person wearing an Easter Bunny mask and then a group of three teenage boys passing around a pipe of some sort, but what Cherilyn noticed was that she was really looking at herself this whole time. It was odd to see herself on camera. Her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her green eyes, her freckled nose, the top of her bathrobe in the little screen. It was not a bad tableau. A number of people appeared and disappeared above her as she studied herself. She liked what she saw, she realized, and then the house phone in the kitchen rang.
She got up and walked through the den, pausing to look at the television, which she had left running on the twenty-four-hour-news station. She saw footage of bombed-out brick huts in some dusty landscape and read the scrolling headline that said “Police pronounce all of the victims ‘OK.’” She looked at the caller ID and saw that it was Douglas calling. She felt irritated, for some reason, that she’d been interrupted, that she’d been reminded of chores and reality and the fact that he had taken her car without asking. She answered the phone and said, “Your car won’t start.”
After she’d asked him to pick up a few things to make something called moussaka, Cherilyn went back to the office, where she planned to shut down the computer entirely. When she got there, though, she saw that a man was sitting in the little video box above hers. His location said “Jordan” and he was dark-skinned, with a thick stubble on his face. He looked maybe twenty-five years old and wore a red soccer jersey and seemed to be sitting at a desk. Behind him was a flag that she did not recognize. When he saw her picture come up on the screen, he smiled. He waved his hand. He was, Cherilyn had to admit, quite handsome.
He leaned forward and typed something and then a string of Arabic letters popped up on the screen. It looked, to Cherilyn, like art. She must have smiled because he smiled back and typed English?
She typed yes.
The man typed back Not great at English. But you are very beautiful.
Cherilyn looked at the words, read them over again, and then rose from her desk and walked to the office window. What was this feeling inside her? She looked outside to their backyard, nearly glowing green with its thick St. Augustine grass in the sunlight. Against their aging wooden fence, she saw, a dark shadow from an oak tree cast a shape like a hand. On the small table in the middle of their yard, the birdhouses made from Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue that she’d set out yesterday to dry. And on one of the red Adirondack chairs she and Douglas had purchased last Christmas, the ones they often sat in to drink wine an
d watch the sun set, Cherilyn saw a plump squirrel turning an acorn in its little paws, again and again, as if it was the greatest discovery. Cherilyn watched it for a moment and reached up to close the blinds. She then walked back to the computer, loosened her robe a bit, and sat down.
The man was still there and so she smiled at him. He smiled back.
You think I am beautiful? she typed, and he nodded.
She undid her hair from her ponytail.
She swooped it over her eye like Susan of Oman.
Okay, she wrote. Now tell me. What else do you think I am?
5
A Crooked Piece of Time
They met mouth-to-mouth in the woods.
It had been only a minute, maybe two, since the three-o’clock bell, and Trina popped out from behind an oak, grabbed the back of Jacob’s neck, and shoved her rough tongue through his teeth so aggressively that to call it a kiss at all may have been a mistake. Yet Jacob wasn’t searching for words as the taste of her smoke on his lips, the remainder of her breath in his own lungs, both disturbed and delighted him to such a degree that he felt he’d gone blind, the way he’d read in Human Behavior that people sometimes did in the midst of a trauma. By the time he’d regained his sight, Trina had already pushed him away and was now thumbing the screen of her phone. Jacob wiped his mouth with his fist.
“What the hell was that?” he said.
“I’m worried you’re backing out on me,” she said, and turned her phone around so he could see the picture she’d just taken. It was of the two of them, selfied tongue to tongue like teen lust birds. He’d not even noticed her taking the photo, such was the shock of the kiss, which was the only one they’d ever shared, and the only one Jacob had ever received. “Aw,” Trina said, and looked back at her phone. “A couple’s first kiss. I’m putting it up on Instagram. Now, no matter what happens, you’re implicated.”