by Daniel Price
[mrvl_girl] See, this is why I keep my nose buried in comic books and fantasy novels. Every time I look up at reality, I get depressed. Or repulsed. Or just plain pissed. I don’t even like fiction that takes place on Earth. Earth sucks.
[pr_demon] How do you know?
[mrvl_girl] Because I’ve lived here all my life.
[pr_demon] It’s just that the people who complain about the state of the world typically base their opinion on what they see in the news. That’s a big mistake.
[mrvl_girl] I’m not one of those people, but I’ll bite. Why is it a mistake?
[pr_demon] Because the news is all emotion-based propaganda. It’s all about showing you the worst of humanity. Not the common worst, the SHOCKING worst. And then they spin the shocking worst to make it look like it’s common. School shootings! Rap assaults! It could happen to YOUR child! It could happen to YOU!
[mrvl_girl] You’re talking about the tabloids.
[pr_demon] I’m talking about all the news.
[mrvl_girl] They can’t ALL do that.
[pr_demon] Now who’s being naŨve?
[mrvl_girl] God, I am so far removed from this. For good reason, it seems.
[pr_demon] It’s all just part of the business.
[mrvl_girl] Yes, and apparently so are you.
[pr_demon] I never denied it. And I never said I was above it.
[mrvl_girl] So you like what you do.
[pr_demon] I love it.
[mrvl_girl] You love planting hidden inflammatory messages in the news.
[pr_demon] Yup. I think I’m good at it, too.
[mrvl_girl] And I think you’re trying to get an inflammatory reaction out of me. That’s what I think.
[pr_demon] Yeah, I probably am. And I should probably stop. I don’t want you pulling my assistant out of her job.
[mrvl_girl] No. God, no. That’d be like pulling her heart out of her chest.
[pr_demon] Good, because I’ve come to rely on her. The girl’s got talent.
[mrvl_girl] For planting subtext?
[pr_demon] For digging it up.
[mrvl_girl] Think she has potential to plant it?
[pr_demon] Like a mad farmer.
[mrvl_girl] See, that’s the part that makes me cringe.
[pr_demon] Don’t worry. You’re particularly safe from our evil mojo.
[mrvl_girl] Me? Why me?
[pr_demon] Because we mostly work with noise, and you’re immune to noise.
The cursor blinked twelve times before she responded.
[mrvl_girl] You’re very interesting.
[pr_demon] Ha ha ha.
[mrvl_girl] What?
[pr_demon] You did this once before. You took a really long time to give me just a little bit of text. I sit here expecting twelve paragraphs and then I get three or four measly words.
[mrvl_girl] I was censoring myself.
[pr_demon] Don’t worry. I can take an insult.
[mrvl_girl] Actually, it was a compliment.
[pr_demon] You censor your compliments?
[mrvl_girl] I censored this one. It was pretty harsh.
[pr_demon] I have no idea what to make of that.
[mrvl_girl] Look, it was a good decision. I don’t make them very often. Let’s just skip it and move on.
We moved on. When I finally finished my chat with her at 4:30 a.m. (if seven straight hours of dialogue could be considered a “chat”), her censored compliment lingered in the back of my tired mind. As much as I hated to be teased, something told me that a compliment from Jean, even a harsh one, would be a uniquely gratifying experience.
Before I fell asleep, I spent another half hour playing back our exchange. In my thoughts, she spoke with the sharp, quirky panache of an actress in a 1940s comedy. Maybe the lead from a Preston Sturges film. Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels. Or better yet, Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. Her character was also named Jean. She was a card sharp: a sexy, quick-witted flimflam girl who ran circles around poor, hapless Henry Fonda.
Jean, my Jean, seemed too much of a pleasant wreck to be a hustler. But she was still a dangerous woman to let inside of me, much more dangerous than Madison or Harmony. Even now I could hear her in that damn Stanwyck voice, teasing me about being a typical man, pegging me as a guy who’d rather surround himself with fawning, admiring young women than take on someone his own age and cranial capacity.
All right, Jean. Maybe I will take you on, just to spite you. Maybe I’ll let you in, despite my own better judgment. Over the moat, through the gate, and past the sentries. Welcome to my neurotic high esteem. I may be sorry, but at least I won’t be typical.
17
HIGH TECHNOLOGY
On Saturday morning, Maxina drew Harmony a nice poster-sized illustration of my shortcomings.
Their rap session began at 9 a.m., while I was still in deep, recuperative slumber. Once again Harmony bemoaned her increasing feelings of isolation, but this time she complained to the right person. Maxina immediately demanded, in that definitive but tender way of hers, that Harmony call her long-lost roommates and invite them up for a visit.
Naturally, Harmony was stunned. To her it was like learning the shortcut out of Oz. Wait, you mean all I had to do was tap my damn slippers three times? I can do that?
It wasn’t hard to imagine her real questions. “Why didn’t Scott tell me? Why did he make me think it was so dangerous to talk to them?”
No doubt Maxina, artful as she was, merely shrugged and kept her mouth shut, but she knew the answer as well as I did: it was dangerous. I didn’t trust Harmony to keep her friends out of the loop and I didn’t trust them in the loop, especially when the news rags were offering cash for dirt to anyone even remotely connected to the story. Hell, by Friday no fewer than six of Hunta’s former contemporaries had sold him out for a four-figure payoff. It’d be careless to assume that Harmony’s friends would be any different.
Yet apparently, they were. As of Saturday not a single one of them had grabbed the tabloid carrot, even the Enquirer’s twenty-thousand dollar carrot. That was pretty damn impressive considering the amount of conflicting testimony they could have already offered.
Okay, so I had underestimated their integrity. My real mistake was not realizing how little it mattered. By Friday, Harmony was so bulletproof that even if one of her roommates ran to the scandal sheets with tales of false claims and shady dealings, it would have barely put a dent in her credibility. If anything, it would have given me the foreshadowing that Alonso was all too unwilling to provide.
By the time I woke up, at a quarter after eleven, the reunion was well under way. I could hear them all partying in the background, blasting rap music. Harmony had to shout to be heard.
“What?”
“I said I’m sorry for not suggesting it myself!”
“That’s okay!” she yelled back. “Even you can’t think of everything!”
“So you’re not mad?”
“I ain’t mad at all! I’m too glad to be mad!”
Everyone in the background cheered. That was a lot of noise for five people. Where the hell were the bodyguards? Probably partying with them. Jesus. That was reckless. There were still a number of journalists skulking around, posing as guests. If even one of them got wind, or worse, got footage of this shindig, it would come back to hurt Harmony. She wouldn’t be bulletproof after her guilty confession. A shot like that could kill her.
My first instinct was to warn her, to tell her to at least turn down the music, but the last thing I wanted to do was rain on her parade. I was on thin enough ice, despite her assurances.
“Was there anything else, Scott?”
“What? No. I’ll let you go. Have a good time.”
“Don’t worry,” she replied with a touch of frost, “I won’t say nothing about you.”
Five minutes later, I was cursing in the shower. Goddamn it, I was losing her. I was losing her, all because I could think of everything. I’m sorry, Harmony. It’s just
the way I am. I don’t know how to err except deep on the side of caution. I don’t know how to exist besides very, very carefully.
________________
On Saturday afternoon I channeled all my energy into a personal productivity blitz. I drove off in a dented black Saturn and came back five hours later in a rented white Buick, filled to the top with overdue purchases. By six o’clock, my chore list was a thing of the past, a period piece. For the first time in what felt like ages, I got a taste of my old, comfortable existence before Hunta and Harmony, Jean and Madison, Annabelle, Maxina, Miranda (the adulterous version), Keoki Atoll, all the crazy things that February had thrown my way. It was as if my life had been plotted out for sweeps. Everything was louder, more pronounced. More intense. There was even more nudity.
That was why I appreciated Ira.
If ever there was a stable presence in my world, it was him. I hadn’t heard a peep out of him since last Sunday, but even his absence was stable. It was just the way he operated. Sometimes he’d disappear from my life for weeks on end. Other times he’d bug me so often I considered cutting my phone line. It all depended on whether or not he had an interesting project to work on.
He must have had something good, because he never called to give me grief about Harmony. I decided to pay him a visit before I did something crazy, like miss him.
At 7:30, I boarded the Ishtar and was immediately hit by an eerie sense of sameness. All of Ira’s clutter, his clothes, his empty take-out boxes, seemed molecularly unchanged from my last visit. Even Ira was the same. He was still wrapped up in his ratty blue robe, conjuring up some sort of virtual house on his PC.
“Hey,” he said, affording me only a moment’s glance. “I thought I heard footsteps.”
I kept looking around. “Jesus, Ira.”
“What?”
“This is exactly how I left you last week.”
“What’d you expect me to become? A butterfly?”
“No, but I expected you to move a little bit. You’re even working on the same 3-D house thing.”
He glanced at his monitor, then laughed. “Oh, that. Yeah. You seem to have caught me in construction mode again.”
“What, you’re developing something else now?”
“This isn’t mine. I’m just beta-testing it.”
“Yeah, but what is it? Some kind of game?”
He finally spun toward me, his face filled with rapturous awe. “Holy crap, Scott. This is more than a game. This is the future. And I don’t just mean the future of gaming. I mean this is the future of being.”
Despite my protests, Ira spent the next twenty minutes guiding me through his new passion. The yet-to-be-titled program was just one entry in an emerging form of nerd entertainment known as the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. In short, it was a new type of diversion: a 3-D networked environment in which users from all over the world could interact with one another as anything or anyone they wanted to be. Tall or short. Young or old. Human or otherwise. They could reinvent themselves in ways that reality had proved most inflexible. Ira showed me his own rendered incarnation: a trim and WASPy fellow who was nice-looking in every sense of the term. He reminded me of ER’s Noah Wyle. He certainly didn’t remind me of Ira.
Whereas most of these games were mired deep in the fantasy and sci-fi realms, this one was based in the here and now. It was designed to be a spin-off nation, a utopian refuge for today’s jaded pilgrims. By signing on as a beta tester, Ira was toiling among the country’s first settlers. By Monday, he had his own business selling custom texture maps for walls and floors. By Wednesday, he had enough virtual money to start his own township. By Thursday, he had thirty loyal Netizens, and by Friday he was married to two of them. And I thought I had a busy week.
Ever since he started, he’d dedicated an average of sixteen hours a day to his digital life. He swore that was the norm among his friends and spouses.
“It’s definitely a commitment,” he said. “I mean this isn’t just a glorified chat room. We’re building a whole new society here. An alternate America.”
I fought to keep my eyes from rolling. Ira was a sci-fi nut. He couldn’t get enough of those silly parallel Earth stories.
“That’s pretty cool,” I sighed.
“Yeah, right.”
“What?”
“I can already feel the intervention coming.”
“I’m not intervening. I’m just quietly hoping that this won’t impact our progress with Move My Cheese.”
“It won’t. Jesus. When did you get so maternal?”
“I didn’t come over here to nag you,” I insisted. “This was a purely social visit. In fact, I was hoping I could pull you off this boat for an evening. I say we do something fun in the real world. After you shower.”
He resumed work on his computer. “Can’t.”
“Can’t shower?”
“Can’t go out. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.”
“What? Here?”
He pointed to the virtual house he was renovating. “There.”
“You’re talking about the game. You’ve got a meeting in the game.”
“Yes, but I’m meeting with real people. It’s very important. I’d like to finish the roof before they get here.”
Now I could feel an intervention coming, but I wasn’t in the mood for heavy discussion. The engine was off today. I was coasting on sail power.
I stood up. “Okay. Fine. It’s your choice. I guess next time I’ll call ahead.”
“Yeah. Definitely. I’ll clear a night.”
“Hope things continue to prosper in Iraville.”
He laughed. “It’s not called Iraville. I’m not even called Ira.”
“Well, whatever your name is, stay healthy, all right?”
He didn’t acknowledge me until I was halfway out the door.
“Oh, wait. Scott.”
I turned around at the door. He swiveled in his chair.
“If someone e-mails you a JPEG of Anna Kournikova, don’t open it. It’s a virus.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Ira and I were never two peas in a pod, but now we weren’t even sharing the same planet. No wonder he never called to bug me about Harmony. The news of her had yet to reach the shores of Altamerica. It seemed a little bizarre and pathetic to me, but then who was I to judge? Ira had a whole new nation to explore on his Saturday nights. My social options were down to virtually one person.
[mrvl_girl] You think we have a problem?
[pr_demon] What, you mean like a 12-step problem?
[mrvl_girl] I don’t know.
I didn’t know either. I’d returned home at a quarter to nine with the express intention of not opening my laptop. Not opening up EyeTalk. Not checking to see if Jean was online and, if she was, not ringing her up for another marathon chat. It did seem a tad unsound, especially after coming from Ira’s place. But I took some comfort in the fact that she and I came as we were. At least we were playing ourselves.
[pr_demon] If you weren’t talking to me right now, what would you be doing?
[mrvl_girl] Probably re-reading a Terry Pratchett book.
[pr_demon] I’d just be watching cable.
[mrvl_girl] Yeah. The girl watches a lot of TV. Drives me nuts.
[pr_demon] Is that what the girl is doing right now?
[mrvl_girl] No. The girl is out with the man. They’re seeing “Hannibal.”
[pr_demon] WHAT?!
[mrvl_girl] WHAT?!
[pr_demon] You let your husband take an impressionable 13-year-old to see that corrosive R-rated filth?!
[mrvl_girl] I sense and hope you’re kidding.
[pr_demon] I am. But if your daughter eats my brains on Monday, I’ll have a legitimate grievance.
[mrvl_girl] Don’t bother suing us. We’re broke.
[pr_demon] You are?
[mrvl_girl] Not really.
[pr_demon] In other words, yes, but you regret telling me.
&n
bsp; [mrvl_girl] In other words, yes, but you damn well better take my check for that auto damage.
[pr_demon] Hey, not a problem.
[mrvl_girl] AND you better cash it.
[pr_demon] . o 0 (Damn!)
[mrvl_girl] Seriously.
