Press Enter

by John Varley

  "I don't know, Lisa. But I'm worried the same thing could happen to you." ¦

  Surprisingly, she smiled at me.

  "Thank you so much, Victor. I wasn't going to admit it to Osborne, but I've been worried about that, too."

  "Well, what are you going to do?"

  "I want to stay here and keep working. So I gave some thought to what I could do to protect myself. I decided there wasn't anything."

  "Surely there's something."

  "Well, I got a gun, if that's what you mean. But think about it. Kluge was offed in the middle of the day. Nobody saw anybody enter or leave the house. So I asked myself, who can walk into a house in broad daylight, shoot Kluge, program that suicide note, and walk away, leaving no traces he'd ever been there?"

  "Somebody very good."

  "Goddam good. So good there's not much chance one little gook's gonna be able to stop him if he decides to waste her."

  She shocked me, both by her words and by her apparent lack of concern for her own fate. But she had said she was worried.

  "Then you have to stop this. Get out of here."

  "I won't be pushed around that way," she said. There was a tone of finality to it. I thought of things I might say, and rejected them all.

  "You could at least… lock your front door," I con­cluded, lamely.

  She laughed, and kissed my cheek.

  "I'll do that, Yank. And I appreciate your concern. I really do."

  I watched her close the door behind me, listened to her lock it, then trudged through the moonlight toward my house. Halfway there I stopped. I could suggest she stay in my spare bedroom. I could offer to stay with her at Kluge's.

  No, I decided. She would probably take that the wrong way.

  I was back in bed before I realized, with a touch of chagrin and more than a little disgust at myself, that she had every reason to take it the wrong way.

  And me exactly twice her age.

  I spent the morning in the garden, planning the evening's menu. I have always liked to cook, but dinner with Lisa had rapidly become the high point of my day. Not only that, I was already taking it for granted. So it hit me hard, around noon, when I looked out the front and saw her car gone.

  I hurried to Kluge's front door. It was standing open. I made a quick search of the house. I found nothing until the master bedroom, where her clothes were stacked neatly on the floor.

  Shivering, I pounded on the Laniers' front door. Betty answered, and immediately saw my agitation.

  "The girl at Kluge's house," I said. "I'm afraid some­thing's wrong. Maybe we'd better call the police."

  "What happened?" Betty asked, looking over my shoul­der. "Did she call you? I see she's not back yet."

  "Back?"

  "I saw her drive away about an hour ago. That's quite a car she has."

  Feeling like a fool, I tried to make nothing of it, but I caught a look in Betty's eye. I think she'd have liked to pat me on the head. It made me furious.

  But she'd left her clothes, so surely she was coming back.

  I kept telling myself that, then went to run a bath, as hot as I could stand it.

  When I answered the door she was standing there with a grocery bag in each arm and her usual blinding smile on her face.

  "I wanted to do this yesterday but I forgot until you came over, and I know I should have asked first, but then I wanted to surprise you, so I just went to get one or two items you didn't have in your garden and a couple of things that weren't in your spice rack…"

  She kept talking as we unloaded the bags in the kitchen. I said nothing. She was wearing a new T-shirt. There was a big V, and under it a picture of a screw, followed by a hyphen and a small case "p." I thought it over as she babbled on. V, screw-p. I was determined not to ask what it meant.

  "Do you like Vietnamese cooking?"

  I looked at her, and finally realized she was very nervous.

  "I don't know," I said. "I've never had it. But I like Chinese, and Japanese, and Indian. I like to try new things." The last part was a lie, but not as bad as it might have been. I do try new recipes, and my tastes in food are catholic. I didn't expect to have much trouble with southeast Asian cuisine.

  "Well, when I get through you still won't know," she laughed. "My momma was half-Chinese. So what you're gonna get here is a mongrel meal." She glanced up, saw my face, and laughed.

  "I forgot. You've been to Asia. No, Yank, I ain't gonna serve any dog meat."

  * * *

  There was only one intolerable thing, and that was the chopsticks. I used them for as long as I could, then put them aside and got a fork.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "Chopsticks happen to be a problem for me."

  "You use them very well."

  "I had plenty of time to learn how."

  It was very good, and I told her so. Each dish was a revelation, not quite like anything I had ever had. Toward the end, I broke down halfway.

  "Does the V stand for victory?" I asked.

  "Maybe."

  "Beethoven? Churchill? World War Two?"

  She just smiled.

  "Think of it as a challenge, Yank."

  "Do I frighten you, Victor?"

  "You did at first."

  "It's my face, isn't it?"

  "It's a generalized phobia of Orientals. I suppose I'm a racist. Not because I want to be."

  She nodded slowly, there in the dark. We were on the patio again, but the sun had gone down a long time ago. I can't recall what we had talked about for all those hours. It had kept us busy, anyway.

  "I have the same problem," she said.

  "Fear of Orientals?" I had meant it as a joke.

  "Of Cambodians." She let me take that in for a while, then went on. "When Saigon fell, I fled to Cambodia. It took me two years with stops when the Khmer Rouge put me in labor camps. I'm lucky to be alive, really."

  "I thought they called it Kampuchea now."

  She spat. I'm not even sure she was aware she had done it.

  "It's the People's Republic of Syphilitic Dogs. The North Koreans treated you very badly, didn't they, Victor?"

  "That's right."

  "Koreans are pus suckers." I must have looked surprised, because she chuckled.

  "You Americans feel so guilty about racism. As if you had invented it and nobody else--except maybe the South Afri­cans and the Nazis-had ever practiced it as heinously as you. And you can't tell one yellow face from another, so you think of the yellow races as one homogeneous block. When in fact Orientals are among the most racist peoples on the earth. The Vietnamese have hated the Cambodians for a thousand years. The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Koreans hate everybody. And everybody hates the 'ethnic Chinese.' The Chinese are the Jews of the east."

  "I've heard that."

  She nodded, lost in her own thoughts.

  "And I hate all Cambodians," she said, at last. "Like you, I don't wish to. Most of the people who suffered in the camps were Cambodians. It was the genocidal leaders, the Pol Pot scum, who I should hate." She looked at me. "But some­times we don't get a lot of choice about things like that, do we, Yank?"

  The next day I visited her at noon. It had cooled down, but was still warm in her dark den. She had not changed her shirt.

  She told me a few things about computers. When she let me try some things on the keyboard I quickly got lost. We decided I needn't plan on a career as a computer programmer.

  One of the things she showed me was called a telephone modem, whereby she could reach other computers all over the world. She "interfaced" with someone at Stanford who she had never met, and who she knew only as "Bubble Sorter." They typed things back and forth at each other.

  At the end, Bubble Sorter wrote "bye-p." Lisa typed T.

  "What's T?" I asked.

  "True. Means yes, but yes would be too straightforward for a hacker.''

  "You told me what a byte is. What's a byep?"

  She looked up at me seriously.

  "It's a question. Add p
to a word, and make it a question. So bye-p means Bubble Sorter was asking if I wanted to log out. Sign off."

  I thought that over.

  "So how would you translate 'osculate posterior-p'?"

  " 'You wanna kiss my ass?' But remember, that was for Osborne."

  I looked at her T-shirt again, then up to her eyes, which were quite serious and serene. She waited, hands folded in her lap.

  Intercourse-p.

  "Yes," I said. "I would."

  She put her glasses on the table and pulled her shirt over her head.

  We made love in Kluge's big waterbed.

  I had a certain amount of performance anxiety-it had been a long, long time. After that, I was so caught up in the touch and smell and taste of her that I went a little crazy. She didn't seem to mind.

  At last we were done, and bathed in sweat. She rolled over, stood, and went to the window. She opened it, and a breath of air blew over me. Then she put one knee on the bed, leaned over me, and got a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table. She lit one.

  "I hope you're not allergic to smoke," she said.

  "No. My father smoked. But I didn't know you did."

  "Only afterwards," she said, with a quick smile. She took a deep drag. "Everybody in Saigon smoked, I think." She stretched out on her back beside me and we lay like that, soaking wet, holding hands. She opened her legs so one of her bare feet touched mine. It seemed enough contact. I watched the smoke rise from her right hand.

  "I haven't felt warm in thirty years," I said. "I've been hot, but I've never been warm. I feel warm now."

  "Tell me about it," she said.

  So I did, as much as I could, wondering if it would work this time. At thirty years remove, my story does not sound so horrible. We've seen so much in that time. There were people in jails at that very moment, enduring conditions as bad as any I encountered. The paraphernalia of oppression is still pretty much the same. Nothing physical happened to me that would account for thirty years lived as a recluse.

  "I was badly injured," I told her. "My skull was frac­tured, I still have… problems from that. Korea can get very cold, and I was never warm enough. But it was the other stuff. What they call brainwashing now.

  "We didn't know what it was. We couldn't understand that even after a man had told them all he knew they'd keep on at us. Keeping us awake. Disorienting us. Some guys signed confessions, made up all sorts of stuff, but even that wasn't enough. They'd just keep on at you.

  "I never did figure it out. I guess I couldn't understand an evil that big. But when they were sending us back and some of the prisoners wouldn't go… they really didn't want to go, they really believed…"

  I had to pause there. Lisa sat up, moved quietly to the end of the bed, and began massaging my feet.

  "We got a taste of what the Vietnam guys got, later. Only for us it was reversed. The GJ.'s were heroes, and the prisoners were…"

  "You didn't break," she said. It wasn't a question.

  "No, I didn't."

  "That would be worse."

  I looked at her. She had my foot pressed against her flat belly, holding me by the heel while her other hand massaged my toes.

  "The country was shocked," I said. "They didn't under­stand what brainwashing was. I tried telling people how it was. I thought they were looking at me funny. After a while, I stopped talking about it. And I didn't have anything else to talk about.

  "A few years back the Army changed its policy. Now they don't expect you to withstand psychological conditioning. It's understood you can say anything or sign anything."

  She just looked at me, kept massaging my foot, and nod­ded slowly. Finally she spoke.

  "Cambodia was hot," she said. "I kept telling myself when I finally got to the U.S. I'd live in Maine or someplace, where it snowed. And I did go to Cambridge, but I found out I didn't like snow."

  She told me about it. The last I heard, a million people had died over there. It was a whole country frothing at the mouth and snapping at anything that moved. Or like one of those sharks you read about that, when its guts are ripped out, bends in a circle and starts devouring itself.

  She told me about being forced to build a pyramid of severed heads. Twenty of them working all day in the hot sun finally got it ten feet high before it collapsed. If any of them stopped working, their own heads were added to the pile.

  "It didn't mean anything to me. It was just another job. I was pretty crazy by then. I didn't start to come out of it until I got across the Thai border."

  That she had survived it at all seemed a miracle. She had gone through more horror than I could imagine. And she had come through it in much better shape. It made me feel small. When I was her age, I was well on my way to building the prison I have lived in ever since. I told her that.

  "Part of it is preparation," she said, wryly. "What you expect out of life, what your life has been so far. You said it yourself. Korea was new to you. I'm not saying I was ready for Cambodia, but my life up to that point hadn't been what you'd call sheltered. I hope you haven't been thinking I made a living in the streets by selling apples."

  She kept rubbing my feet, staring off into scenes I could not see.

  "How old were you when your mother died?"

  "She was killed during Tet, 1968. I was ten."

  "By the Viet Cong?"

  "Who knows? Lot of bullets flying, lot of grenades being thrown."

  She sighed, dropped my foot, and sat there, a scrawny Buddha without a robe.

  "You ready to do it again, Yank?"

  "I don't think I can, Lisa. I'm an old man."

  She moved over me and lowered herself with her chin just below my sternum, settling her breasts in the most delicious place possible.

  "We'll see," she said, and giggled. "There's an alterna­tive sex act I'm pretty good at, and I'm pretty sure it would make you a young man again. But I haven't been able to do it for about a year on account of these." She tapped her braces. "It'd be sort of like sticking it in a buzz saw. So now I do this instead. I call it 'touring the silicone valley.' " She started moving her body up and down, just a few inches at a time. She blinked innocently a couple times, then laughed.

  "At last, I can see you," she said. "I'm awfully myopic."

  I let her do that for a while, then lifted my head.

  "Did you say silicone?"

  "Uh-huh. You didn't think they were real, did you?"

  I confessed that I had.

  "I don't think I've ever been so happy with anything I ever bought. Not even the car."

  "Why did you?"

  "Does it bother you?"

  It didn't, and I told her so. But I couldn't conceal my curiosity.

  "Because it was safe to. In Saigon I was always angry that I never developed. I could have made a good living as a prostitute, but I was always too tall, too skinny, and too ugly. Then in Cambodia I was lucky. I managed to pass for a boy some of the time. If not for that I'd have been raped a lot more than I was. And in Thailand I knew I'd get to the West one way or another, and when I got there, I'd get the best car there was, eat anything I wanted any time I wanted to, and purchase the best tits money could buy. You can't imagine what the West looks like from the camps. A place where you can buy tits!"

  She looked down between them, then back at my face.

  "Looks like it was a good investment," she said.

  "They do seem to work okay," I had to admit.

  We agreed that she would spend the nights at my house. There were certain things she had to do at Kluge's, involving equipment that had to be physically loaded, but many things she could do with a remote terminal and an armload of software. So we selected one of Kluge's best computers and about a dozen peripherals and installed her at a cafeteria table in my bedroom.

  I guess we both knew it wasn't much protection if the people who got Kluge decided to get her. But I know I felt better about it, and I think she did, too.

  The second day she was there a delivery van pul
led up outside, and two guys started unloading a king-size waterbed. She laughed and laughed when she saw my face.

  "Listen, you're not using Kluge's computers to-"

  "Relax, Yank. How'd you think I could afford a Ferrari?"

  "I've been curious."

  "If you're really good at writing software you can make a lot of money. I own my own company. But every hacker picks up tricks here and there. I used to run a few Kluge scams, myself."

  "But not anymore?"

  She shrugged. "Once a thief, always a thief, Victor. I told you I couldn't make ends meet selling my bod."

  Lisa didn't need much sleep.

  We got up at seven, and I made breakfast every morning. Then we would spend an hour or two working in the garden.

  She would go to Kluge's and I'd bring her a sandwich at noon, then drop in on her several times during the day. That was for my own peace of mind; I never stayed more than a minute. Sometime during the afternoon I would shop or do household chores, then at seven one of us would cook dinner. We alternated. I taught her "American" cooking, and she taught me a little of everything. She complained about the lack of vital ingredients in American markets. No dogs, of course, but she claimed to know great ways of preparing monkey, snake, and rat. I never knew how hard she was pulling my leg, and didn't ask.

  After dinner she stayed at my house. We would talk, make love, bathe.

  She loved my tub. It is about the only alteration I have made in the house, and my only real luxury. I put it in- having to expand the bathroom to do so-in 1975, and never regretted it. We would soak for twenty minutes or an hour, turning the jets and bubblers on and off, washing each other; giggling like kids. Once we used bubble bath and made a mountain of suds four feet high, then destroyed it, splashing water all over the place. Most nights she let me wash her long black hair.

  She didn't have any bad habits-or at least none that clashed with mine. She was neat and clean, changing her clothes twice a day and never so much as leaving a dirty glass on the sink. She never left a mess in the bathroom. Two glasses of wine was her limit.

  I felt like Lazarus.

  Osborne came by three times in the next two weeks. Lisa met him at Kluge's and gave him what she had learned. It was getting to be quite a list.