How We Got in Town and out Again

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Splendors, hah,” said Gloria. “Bunch of second-hand cyberjunk.”

  “I was in a plane,” I started.

  “Shut up,” said Gloria. “We’re not supposed to talk about it. Only, if you find something you like, remember where it is.”

  I hadn’t done that, but I wasn’t worried.

  “Drink some water,” she said. “And get some food.”

  They were going around with sandwiches and I got a couple, one for Gloria. But she didn’t seem to want to talk.

  Gilmartin the fake doctor was making a big deal of going around checking everybody even though it was only the first break. I figured that the whole point of taking care of us so hard was to remind the people in the seats that they might see somebody get hurt.

  Ed was giving out apples from a bag. I took one and went over and sat on Lane’s cot. She looked nice in her suit.

  “My boyfriend’s here,” she said.

  “You’re back together?”

  “I mean ex-. I’m pretending I didn’t see him.”

  “Where?”

  “He’s sitting right in front of my monitor.” She tipped her head to point.

  I didn’t say anything but I wished I had somebody watching me from the audience.

  When I went back the first thing I got into was a library of books. Every one you took off the shelf turned into a show, with charts and pictures, but when I figured out that it was all business stuff about how to manage your money, I got bored.

  Then I went into a dungeon. It started with a wizard growing me up from a bug. We were in his workshop, which was all full of jars and cobwebs. He had a face like a melted candle and he talked as much as Fearing. There were bats flying around.

  “You must resume the quest of Kroyd,” he said to me, and started touching me with his stick. I could see my arms and legs, but they weren’t wearing the scaper suit. They were covered with muscles. When the wizard touched me I got a sword and a shield. “These are your companions, Rip and Batter,” said the wizard. “They will obey you and protect you. You must never betray them for any other. That was Kroyd’s mistake.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The wizard sent me into the dungeon and Rip and Batter talked to me. They told me what to do. They sounded a lot like the wizard.

  We met a Wormlion. That’s what Rip and Batter called it. It had a head full of worms with little faces and Rip and Batter said to kill it, which wasn’t hard. The head exploded and all the worms started running away into the stones of the floor like water.

  Then we met a woman in sexy clothes who was holding a sword and shield too. Hers were loaded with jewels and looked a lot nicer than Rip and Batter.

  This was Kroyd’s mistake, anyone could see that. Only I figured Kroyd wasn’t here and I was, and so maybe his mistake was one I wanted to make too.

  Rip and Batter started screaming when I traded with the woman, and then she put them on and we fought. When she killed me I was back in the doorway to the wizard’s room, where I first ran in, bug-sized. This time I went the other way, back to the drawers.

  Which is when I met the snowman.

  I was looking around in a drawer that didn’t seem to have anything in it. Everything was just black. Then I saw a little blinking list of numbers in the corner. I touched the numbers. None of them did anything except one.

  It was still black but there were five pictures of a snowman. He was three balls of white, more like plastic than snow. His eyes were just o’s and his mouth didn’t move right when he talked. His arms were sticks but they bent like rubber. There were two pictures of him small and far away, one from underneath like he was on a hill and one that showed the top of his head, like he was in a hole. Then there was a big one of just his head, and a big one of his whole body. The last one was of him looking in through a window, only you couldn’t see the window, just the way it cut off part of the snowman.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Lewis.”

  “I’m Mr. Sneeze.” His head and arms moved in all five pictures when he talked. His eyes got big and small.

  “What’s this place you’re in?”

  “It’s no place,” said Mr. Sneeze. “Just a garbage file.”

  “Why do you live in a garbage file?”

  “Copyright lawyers,” said Mr. Sneeze. “I made them nervous.” He sounded happy no matter what he was saying.

  “Nervous about what?”

  “I was in a Christmas special for interactive television. But at the last minute somebody from the legal department thought I looked too much like a snowman on a video game called Mud Flinger. It was too late to redesign me so they just cut me out and dumped me in this file.”

  “Can’t you go somewhere else?”

  “I don’t have too much mobility.” He jumped and twirled upside down and landed in the same place, five times at once. The one without a body spun too.

  “Do you miss the show?”

  “I just hope they’re doing well. Everybody has been working so hard.”

  I didn’t want to tell him it was probably a long time ago.

  “What are you doing here, Lewis?” said Mr. Sneeze.

  “I’m in a scape-athon.”

  “What’s that?”

  I told him about Gloria and Fearing and Kromer, and about the contest. I think he liked that he was on television again.

  There weren’t too many people left in the seats. Fearing was talking to them about what was going to happen tomorrow when they came back. Kromer and Ed got us all in the back. I looked over at Lane’s cot. She was already asleep. Her boyfriend was gone from the chair out front.

  I lay down on the cot beside Gloria. “I’m tired now,” I said.

  “So sleep a little,” she said, and put her arm over me. But I could hear Fearing outside talking about a “Sexathon” and I asked Gloria what it was.

  “That’s tomorrow night,” she said. “Don’t worry about it now.”

  Gloria wasn’t going to sleep, just looking around.

  I found the Smart House Showroom. It was a house with a voice inside. At first I was looking around to see who the voice was but then I figured out it was the house.

  “Answer the phone!” it said. The phone was ringing.

  I picked up the phone, and the lights in the room changed to a desk light on the table with the phone. The music in the room turned off.

  “How’s that for responsiveness?”

  “Fine,” I said. I hung up the phone.

  There was a television in the room, and it turned on. It was a picture of food. “See that?”

  “The food, you mean?” I said.

  “That’s the contents of your refrigerator!” it said. “The packages with the blue halo will go bad in the next twenty-four hours. The package with the black halo has already expired! Would you like me to dispose of it for you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Now look out the windows!”

  I looked. There were mountains outside.

  “Imagine waking up in the Alps every morning!”

  “I —”

  “And when you’re ready for work, your car is already warm in the garage!”

  The windows switched from the mountains to a picture of a car in a garage.

  “And your voicemail tells callers that you’re not home when it senses the car is gone from the garage!”

  I wondered if there was somewhere I could get if I went down to drive the car. But they were trying to sell me this house, so probably not.

  “And the television notifies you when the book you’re reading is available this week as a movie!”

  The television switched to a movie, the window curtains closed, and the light by the phone went off.

  “I can’t read,” I said.

  “All the more important, then, isn’t it?” said the house.

  “What about the bedroom?” I said. I was thinking about sleep. “Here you go!” A door opened and I went in. The bedroom had another tele
vision. But the bed wasn’t right. It had a scribble of electronic stuff over it.

  “What’s wrong with the bed?”

  “Somebody defaced it,” said the house. “Pity.”

  I knew it must have been Fearing or Kromer who wrecked the bed because they didn’t want anyone getting that comfortable and falling asleep and out of the contest. At least not yet.

  “Sorry!” said the house. “Let me show you the work center!”

  Next rest I got right into Gloria’s cot and curled up and she curled around me. It was real early in the morning and nobody was watching the show now and Fearing wasn’t talking. I think he was off taking a nap of his own.

  Kromer woke us up. “He always have to sleep with you, like a baby?”

  Gloria said, “Leave him alone. He can sleep where he wants.”

  “I can’t figure,” said Kromer. “Is he your boyfriend or your kid brother?”

  “Neither,” said Gloria. “What do you care?”

  “Okay,” said Kromer. “We’ve got a job for him to do tomorrow, though.”

  “What job?” said Gloria. They talked like I wasn’t there.

  “We need a hacker boy for a little sideshow we put on,” said Kromer. “He’s it.”

  “He’s never been in a scape before,” said Gloria. “He’s no hacker.”

  “He’s the nearest we’ve got. We’ll walk him through it.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Okay, but then leave him out of the Sexathon,” said Gloria.

  Kromer smiled. “You’re protecting him? Sorry. Everybody plays in the Sexathon, sweetheart. That’s bread and butter. The customers don’t let us break the rules.” He pointed out to the rigs. “You’d better get out there.”

  I knew Kromer thought I didn’t know about Gloria and Fearing, or other things. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t so innocent, but I didn’t think Gloria would like it, so I kept quiet.

  I went to talk to Mr. Sneeze. I remembered where he was from the first time.

  “What’s a Sexathon?” I said.

  “I don’t know, Lewis.”

  “I’ve never had sex,” I said.

  “Me neither,” said Mr. Sneeze.

  “Everybody always thinks I do with Gloria just because we go around together. But we’re just friends.”

  “That’s fine,” said Mr. Sneeze. “It’s okay to be friends.”

  “I’d like to be Lane’s boyfriend,” I said.

  Next break Gloria slept while Gilmartin and Kromer told me about the act. A drawer would be marked for me to go into, and there would be a lot of numbers and letters but I just had to keep pressing “1-2-3” no matter what. It was supposed to be a security archive, they said. The people watching would think I was breaking codes but it was just for show. Then something else would happen but they wouldn’t say what, just that I should keep quiet and let Fearing talk. So I knew they were going to pull me out of my mask. I didn’t know if I should tell Gloria.

  Fearing was up again welcoming some people back in. I couldn’t believe anybody wanted to start watching first thing in the morning but Fearing was saying “the gritty determination to survive that epitomizes the frontier spirit that once made a country called America great” and “young bodies writhing in agonized congress with the future” and that sounded like a lot of fun, I guess.

  A woman from the town had quit already. Not Lane though.

  A good quiet place to go was Mars. It was like the airplane, all space and no people, but better since there was no voice telling you to engage targets, and you never crashed.

  I went to the drawer they told me about. Fearing’s voice in my ear told me it was time. The place was a storeroom of information like the business library. No people, just files with a lot of blinking lights and complicated words. A voice kept asking me for “security clearance password” but there was always a place for me to touch “1-2-3” and I did. It was kind of a joke, like a wall made out of feathers that falls apart every time you touch it.

  I found a bunch of papers with writing. Some of the words were blacked out and some were bright red and blinking. There was a siren sound. Then I felt hands pulling on me from outside and somebody took off my mask.

  There were two guys pulling on me who I had never seen before, and Ed and Kromer were pulling on them. Everybody was screaming at each other but it was kind of fake, because nobody was pulling or yelling very hard. Fearing said, “The feds, the feds!” A bunch of people were crowded around my television screen I guess looking at the papers I’d dug up, but now they were watching the action.

  Fearing came over and pulled out a toy gun and so did Kromer, and they were backing the two men away from me. I’m sure the audience could tell it was fake. But they were pretty excited, maybe just from remembering when feds were real.

  I got off my frame and looked around. I didn’t know what they were going to do with me now that I was out but I didn’t care. It was my first chance to see what it was like when the contestants were all in their suits and masks, swimming in the information. None of them knew what was happening, not even Gloria, who was right next to me the whole time. They just kept moving in the scapes. I looked at Lane. She looked good, like she was dancing.

  Meanwhile Fearing and Kromer chased those guys out the back. People were craning around to see. Fearing came out and took his microphone and said, “It isn’t his fault, folks. Just good hacker instincts for ferreting out corruption from encrypted data. The feds don’t want us digging up their trail, but the kid couldn’t help it.”

  Ed and Kromer started snapping me back into my suit. “We chased them off,” Fearing said, patting his gun. “We do take care of our own. You can’t tell who’s going to come sniffing around, can you? For his protection and ours we’re going to have to delete that file, but it goes to show, there’s no limit to what a kid with a nose for data’s going to root out of cyberspace. We can’t throw him out of the contest for doing what comes natural. Give him a big hand, folks.”

  People clapped and a few threw coins. Ed picked the change up for me, then told me to put on my mask. Meanwhile Gloria and Lane and everybody else just went on through their scapes.

  I began to see what Kromer and Fearing were selling. It wasn’t any one thing. Some of it was fake and some was real, and some was a mix so you couldn’t tell.

  The people watching probably didn’t know why they wanted to, except it made them forget their screwed-up life for a while to watch the only suckers bigger than themselves — us.

  “Meanwhile, the big show goes on,” said Fearing. “How long will they last? Who will take the prize?”

  I told Gloria about it at the break. She just shrugged and said to make sure I got my money from Kromer. Fearing was talking to Anne the woman from the van, and Gloria was staring at them like she wanted them dead.

  A guy was lying in his cot talking to himself as if nobody could hear and Gilmartin and Kromer went over and told him he was kicked out. He didn’t seem to care.

  I went to see Lane but we didn’t talk. We sat on her cot and held hands. I didn’t know if it meant the same thing to her that it did to me but I liked it.

  After the break I went and talked to Mr. Sneeze. He told me the story of the show about Christmas. He said it wasn’t about always getting gifts. Sometimes you had to give gifts too.

  —

  The Sexathon was late at night. They cleared the seats and everyone had to pay again to get back in, because it was a special event. Fearing had built it up all day, talking about how it was for adults only, it would separate the men from the boys, things like that. Also that people would get knocked out of the contest. So we were pretty nervous by the time he told us the rules.

  “What would scapes be without virtual sex?” he said. “Our voyagers must now prove themselves in the sensual realm — for the future consists of far more than cold, hard information. It’s a place of desire and temptation, and, as always, survival belongs to the fittest. The soldiers will now
be steered onto the sexual battlescape — the question is, will they meet with the Little Death, or the Big One?”

  Gloria wouldn’t explain. “Not real death,” is all she said.

  “The rules again are so simple a child could follow them. In the Sex-Scape environment our contestants will be free to pick from a variety of fantasy partners. We’ve packed this program with options, there’s something for every taste, believe you me. We won’t question their selections, but—here’s the catch — we will chart the results. Their suits will tell us who does and doesn’t attain sexual orgasm in the next session, and those who don’t will be handed their walking papers. The suits don’t lie. Find bliss or die, folks, find bliss or die.”

  “You get it now?” said Gloria to me.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “As ever, audience members are cautioned never to interfere with the contestants during play. Follow their fantasies on the monitors, or watch their youthful bodies strain against exhaustion, seeking to bridge virtual lust and bona fide physical response. But no touchee.”

  Kromer was going around, checking the suits. “Who’s gonna be in your fantasy, kid?” he said to me. “The snowman?”

  I’d forgotten how they could watch me talk to Mr. Sneeze on my television. I turned red.

  “Screw you, Kromer,” said Gloria.

  “Whoever you want, honey,” he said, laughing.

  Well I found my way around their Sex-Scape and I’m not too embarrassed to say I found a girl who reminded me of Lane, except for the way she was trying so hard to be sexy. But she looked like Lane. I didn’t have to do much to get the subject around to sex. It was the only thing on her mind. She wanted me to tell her what I wanted to do to her and when I couldn’t think of much she suggested things and I just agreed. And when I did that she would move around and sigh as if it were really exciting to talk about even though she was doing the talking. She wanted to touch me but she couldn’t really so she took off her clothes and got close to me and touched herself. I touched her too but she didn’t really feel like much and it was like my hands were made of wood, which couldn’t have felt too nice for her though she acted like it was great.