Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  “What are you afraid of? It’s just the Internet!”

  “The Internet is made out of people,” Irene said. “Terrible people.” She’d gone back online a second night, and had quickly learned that the AOL interface was little more than a colorful picnic blanket thrown over a seething pit of sex. She was not going to tell him how much time she’d spent staring into that tawdry abyss. Matty was at an age at which dirty talk would be kerosene thrown on an already burning crotch.

  Last week the inevitable happened. Long after he’d headed up to bed, she’d gone into his room to deliver a load of laundry and found him rigid on the mattress, holding himself, staring up at the ceiling. She said a quick “Sorry!” and backed out of the room—and then was struck by the fact that he hadn’t moved a muscle, or even covered himself. Had the shock paralyzed him?

  She knocked on the door. “Matty? Are you okay?” Then: “Of course you’re okay, it’s fine, it’s natural.” He didn’t answer. “I know you’re embarrassed, but I really need you to answer me right now.”

  She pushed the door open an inch, not looking in. “Matty?” She heard a heavy thump.

  “Matty?”

  “I’m here!” he yelled. “Everything’s okay!”

  I’m here? She left him alone, and told herself she’d talk about this later with him. She’d already put him through a sex talk that left him mortified and mute. She didn’t want to go further. That’s what dads were for.

  Except Matty’s. Lev Petrovski was somewhere in Colorado, she’d heard, living in the woods where the postal system was so primitive that child support payments could not make their way out. Evidently.

  Sometimes she worried that her son had inherited some of Lev’s weasel DNA. As Matty had grown up, he was learning to dodge her questions, just like his father, who was practically a Jeopardy! champion in his skill at phrasing every answer in the form of a question. When she asked Lev about getting married, he replied with, “Cool! When do you want to do it?” If she expressed doubt about his commitment, he’d bounce back with, “Hey, babe, don’t you know I’m your guy?” Then later, he’d touch her belly and say, “Aren’t you psyched about this baby?”

  She didn’t know if she’d subconsciously taught Lev to speak to her like this, or if he’d known instinctively that it was the best method of slipping under her radar. Either way, his fluency in this mirror dialect made him the only boyfriend she could tolerate, and for a while, the only man she trusted. Maybe she was led astray by the few times he’d expressed his feelings directly, in the early days of their relationship. Only when they were making love did he allow himself to be swept away by declaratives. “I want you,” he said to her, his hand slipping up her shirt. “I need you.” And then, when he was about to come: “I love you.”

  Irene’s power gave her no access to absolute truth; she could only know whether or not the speaker believed what he was saying. In that moment, Lev was telling the truth. And that allowed Irene to lie to herself.

  —

  Her fourth night behind the screen, she was asked to join her first private chat.

  She wasn’t in the Romance room when it happened, thank God. That’s where she’d started on her second night. In minutes, two different people had asked her, “A/S/L?” She had no idea what that meant; American Sign Language? The next day, after work, she stopped at the Waldenbooks and thumbed through America Online for Dummies, looking for definitions, and realized they were asking for Age/Sex/Location. It seemed incredibly rude, until she realized that if she were at a bar, a man would instantly know her Location, and could make reasonable guesses about her Age and Sex. Likewise, she’d be able to tell if she was talking to a man or a twelve-year-old wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache. That second night in the Romance chat room, she was having a perfectly nice, if erratically spelled, conversation with RICHARD LONG when he typed, “SO NOW YOU WAN TO SUCK MY DICK?????”

  She didn’t go back to the Romance chat room.

  Eventually she found an area for single parents that seemed to be inhabited by real adults, because they talked about things no teenager would find interesting: divorce settlements; insurance premiums; whether grounding a child was more punishing for the parent; insomnia. Yet after her experiences in other chat rooms, she kept waiting for, say, BUCKEYEFAN21 to ask her to touch her nipples.

  For the first time in her life, she was unable to tell if someone was intentionally lying to her. In this 2-D world of text, these “people connections” were little more than paper dolls with screen names scrawled on their faces.

  Yet. As much as she tried not to be drawn in by the creatures of Flatland, after just a few days it was hard not to think of a select few of them as flesh and blood. LAST DAD STANDING, for example, sounded convincingly like a divorced, slightly lonely man who worked at some kind of white-collar job and took care of a grade-school-age daughter. He lived in the Mountain Time Zone, and so usually came online around the same time of night as she did. She looked forward to him showing up, because he was one of the few people who both typed in complete sentences and got her jokes. It was such a relief to not have to type “:)” after every jab of sarcasm—and she liked to jab a lot.

  Then tonight, after she’d mentioned that she was feeling stressed, he suggested they start a private chat. It was a bit like being asked to sneak behind the bleachers. Was she the kind of girl who had private chats? How did one even begin such a thing? Literally, how did one start a private chat?

  IRENE T: You’ll have to tell me what to do. I’ve never done that before.

  LAST DAD STANDING: I’ll be gentle.

  No smiley faces—yet she understood that he was joking. Only joking.

  In a few clicks, nothing had changed except the title of the chat window, but she was surprised to find that the basement felt cozier, like a private booth in a crowded restaurant. America was online all around them, but Irene and her new friend were huddled together, talking in low voices.

  She decided to tell him about the wreck she’d made of her life in Pittsburgh.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Yes, but what KIND of clusterfuck?

  IRENE T: Like all the great ones, it begins with “It was all going great, and then…”

  LAST DAD STANDING: Ha! I know that story.

  IRENE T: I had a pretty good job. Better money than I’d ever had.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Doing what?

  IRENE T: I worked for a financial services company.

  LAST DAD STANDING: I’m guessing that’s a company that provides financial services.

  IRENE: Change the word “services” to “screwing” and you’ve got it.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Oh. That’s…what’s the word I’m looking for? “Bad.”

  She laughed. Out loud. Did that mean she should type “LOL”? Some kind of punctuation smiley face?

  IRENE T: So, so bad. I didn’t realize it, though, because everywhere else I’d worked was worse.

  When her son was born, she’d been trapped in her father’s house, working jobs that barely covered the cost of child care. Burger King assistant manager. Shift manager at Hot Topic. Night manager/cashier at the Dollar General. Lev had long since bolted, so no help there. It wasn’t until Matty was about to enter first grade that she glimpsed daylight and made her escape. Pittsburgh became her destination solely because a friend of a friend was willing to sublet a room to her. She took a series of low-level jobs. She was good with money, as every boss she worked for eventually figured out. She learned how to keep a ledger and, when PCs entered the picture, picked up Lotus 1-2-3 and databases like Paradox.

  She liked the honesty of numbers. The zeroing out of debits and credits, the black-and-white judgment of reconciliation. A balanced ledger was a thing of beauty.

  Matty turned twelve the year she finally wedged a foot into a white-collar door. At Haven Financial Planning she became a receptionist with “light bookkeeping duties.” It was a tiny firm on the edge of the city, and when she signed on as employee number
five she didn’t know anything about finance, or about any of the instruments by which money could be hidden, put to work, shielded, and redirected. By the time Haven fired her and initiated legal action against her, she knew not only how those instruments could be wielded, but exactly how the company used them to separate clients from their cash.

  It was the lying, of course, that tipped her off and tripped her up. Not the casual fibs; she wasn’t surprised at the way the company’s partners, Jim and Jack, told aging clients how wonderful they looked, complimented ugly women on their hair, flattered fools on their business acumen. It was the deeper, down-to-the-money lies that got to her. One of Irene’s jobs was to help with signings, managing the stack of documents with their dozens of yellow SIGN HERE stickies. While the clients signed, the partners ushered them along on a wave of encouragement, talk of future returns, confident-sounding advice. And it was clear to Irene that Jim and Jack were lying their asses off.

  LAST DAD STANDING: How did you know they were lying?

  IRENE T: Women’s intuition.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Heh. Did the numbers not add up or something?

  IRENE T: I didn’t know enough to know what the numbers were supposed to be. So I started studying the paperwork.

  That limited power of attorney, for example. Jim and Jack always made it sound like a formality, but in actuality it was the key to the kingdom, because it allowed Haven to put clients’ money into “special situation investments.” The primary SSI, which could take up to 40 percent of the money, was itself an investment company that funded other corporations, which were usually described as tech companies that were about to “explode” in value. (“Have you heard of the Internet, Mrs. Hanselman? It’s huge.”) Every time Haven transferred money into the primary SSI, Haven took a portion as a fee. The “technology” firms that SSI invested in were in fact nothing but investment firms, which were also controlled by Haven.

  LAST DAD STANDING: So what does that get Haven?

  IRENE T: Jim and Jack got another cut every time they moved money from one puppet partnership to another.

  LAST DAD STANDING: OH.

  IRENE T: It was a vampire machine. Every time they made a transfer, a little more money got siphoned from the client account—until it all evaporated.

  LAST DAD STANDING: But how did they explain to the customer when they tried to withdraw their money?

  IRENE T: They just told them, Oh, geez, sorry about that, I guess that investment didn’t work out. But we have these OTHERS that are still perfectly fine.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Which were also puppets?

  IRENE T: You catch on quick.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Tell me that you told off those jerkwads.

  IRENE T: That was my first mistake.

  She went to Jack, the marginally more approachable of the two partners, and laid out the documentation on the partnerships and transfers they’d pushed onto their biggest customers. Jack explained to her that of course she was confused, this was complicated stuff, and gosh, she didn’t even have a college degree, did she? The important thing was to not worry, that Haven was of course doing the best for its clients.

  LAST DAD STANDING: What a dick. He just lied to your face?

  IRENE T: You know those Roman fountains, with the face of Neptune, and the water gushing out their mouths?

  LAST DAD STANDING: Okay…

  IRENE T: Like that, but with lies.

  Irene failed to disguise her disgust, because suddenly Jack’s eyes turned flat and glittery. It was a stare she’d seen before in men, in the faces of assistant principals and shift supervisors and tin badges of all types: Do you really want to call me on this? Are you ready to take me on, bitch?

  She’d replay this moment during the All-Star Tour over and over, and try to get her former self to smile and say, “Thanks for taking the time to explain that, Jack,” and keep her well-paying job until she could move on.

  LAST DAD STANDING: So what did you say to him?

  IRENE T: Something along the lines of Fuck you, you lying piece of shit.

  LAST DAD STANDING: You are my hero!

  IRENE T: I should have stopped there.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Wait, there’s more?

  IRENE T: Well, he called me a cunt, and yadda yadda I slapped him.

  LAST DAD STANDING: WOW! That is so freaking cool.

  IRENE T: That’s where I really should have stopped.

  LAST DAD STANDING: There’s MORE?

  IRENE T: I walked out of his office, went to my desk, and started calling clients. I told them to get a lawyer.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Oh.

  IRENE T: Yeah. Another big mistake—not getting one myself.

  She told him the rest of the story: the first letter from Jack and Jim’s lawyer documenting her “assault,” the failed attempts to find a competent attorney to defend her, the rapid evaporation of her tiny savings. The day she became homeless.

  She detailed every sad, humiliating turn, but there was one detail she was too embarrassed to mention: her last name. She couldn’t bear it if he typed back, “Telemachus? That rings a bell. You aren’t any relation to that crazy psychic family, are you? Ha ha!”

  No. No ringing. No bells. Even the “T” in her screen name made her nervous.

  Because she dared not tell him her name, she felt she had no right to ask him his. That felt strangely pure. They were creatures made of words, reaching through the wires to each other, without the distraction of names or faces or bad breath or unfashionable clothes. Without bodies.

  IRENE T: I’ve got to go to bed.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Oh God! It’s so late there. I’m sorry.

  IRENE T: Thanks for listening.

  LAST DAD STANDING: Good night, Irene. I’ll see you in my dreams.

  Oh. Something fluttered in her chest.

  Then he exited the chat room, and she was left in the dark, staring at that final message, as cryptic as a fortune cookie’s. Had he been flirting with her? Just making a musical reference? What did he intend?

  She had no idea. She kept rereading it, looking for clues. The computer, with its much-vaunted Pentium chip, was no help; she’d have had better luck interrogating a carrier pigeon. All her usual tools for managing people, men especially, had been taken from her.

  It was exhilarating.

  4

  Frankie

  Where the hell was the sock?

  He pulled the dresser drawer all the way open. Ran his hand along the back. The drawer was full of white tube socks and a few colored dress ones, the pairs rolled up into balls. He was looking for a solo white sock tinged pink from a washing machine run-in with the twins’ outfits, folded over itself. He kept it right there, in the back right corner. And now it was gone.

  He started unrolling socks and tossing them to the carpet.

  “What are you doing?”

  Loretta, suddenly in the doorway, making him jump.

  “I’m looking for socks,” he said.

  “You’re wearing socks.” Eyeing him half dressed in his tighty-whities.

  “Other socks,” he said testily. “Have the kids been in my stuff?”

  “Your stuff?” Her eyes narrowed. Did she know about the stash? Or was it just Loretta being Loretta? She could do that, go cold. Like she was reconsidering the whole enterprise—marriage, kids, mortgage, everything.

  He lifted a hand. “I’m just saying—”

  “No one’s interested in your underwear,” she said. “Your sister’s here.”

  “What?”

  “She’s in the living room. With Matty?” She stared at him. “First day of the new job?”

  “Tell ’em I’ll be right there,” Frankie said.

  “Don’t forget your pants,” she said.

  He pushed the door closed, then yanked the drawer free of the dresser and dumped the contents onto the bed. Finally he spotted the pale pink sock—but it was unfolded. And suspiciously flat.

  He pulled open the neck and fishe
d out the bills. Mostly twenties, but a handful of fifties, and a couple of hundreds. Quickly he counted the stash, and came up a hundred bucks short of the three thousand he’d hidden there. Frantically he started counting again.

  From the living room Loretta yelled, “Frankie! You coming?”

  “Just a minute!” Now he’d lost count. But did it matter? He was drastically short of what he needed today—another hundred wouldn’t have made him any less screwed. He pulled on his yellow work polo and his pants, and then folded the cash and pushed it into a front pocket.

  Before he left the bedroom he confronted himself in the full-length mirror hanging on the door. Mirror Frank was a mess. Sweat dotted his forehead.

  “Embrace life,” he said to his reflection. He tried to say this every day. “Embrace the UltraLife.”

  In the living room, the twins were bouncing around, competing for Matty’s attention. Loretta and Irene conspired in the corner. Frankie shook Matty’s hand, making sure Irene saw that. “You ready to work?” he asked the boy.

  “I guess,” Matty said. “I mean, yes, I am.”

  “You sure this is okay?” Irene asked Frankie. That skeptical tone. “You checked with your supervisor?”

  “I say who rides in my truck,” Frankie said.

  “Because if he’s not allowed—”

  “I said it’s fine, Irene.” He put a hand on Matty’s shoulder. “And if you work hard, I can see about keeping you on part-time through the year.”

  “Really?” Matty asked. Loretta and Irene were looking at him with two flavors of disbelief.

  Frankie considered backpedaling, then thought: Why not? Frankie would pay the kid out of his own pocket if need be. It sure as hell would do Matty some good. The kid needed a man in his life. A male role model.

  “If you work hard,” Frankie said. “I guarantee it.” The twins hung on Matty’s arms, trying to tell him things. Frankie knelt and pulled the girls in to him.