by Daniel Price
She rolled her eyes.
She shook her head at me, drowning me in her warm chagrin.
I matched her look.
I let out a cracked laugh.
My head started throbbing again. I looked down at the keyboard.
I glanced up again.
Jean shrugged hopelessly.
Now I looked at the manuscript, the provocative sticky note on top. I didn’t like the way Harmony’s name looked in Jean’s handwriting. The lettering was elegant and artful, everything that Jean was and every thing that Harmony wasn’t.
She followed my gaze.
She reached an arm across the table.
I took her hand. For once I was way ahead of her.
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She didn’t care that I was coming down with something. I didn’t care that her car was a mess. If we wanted this to be a proper love scene, we would have gone to an upscale hotel suite with a roaring fireplace, a bottle of Chablis in a tin ice bucket, and Annie Lennox’s “Why?” playing in the background as we tumbled stylishly on the thousand-dollar carpet.
Jean and I were too clever to pursue the cinematic cliché. We were too clever to be good at sex anyway. We were both lousy lovers, by our own admission, and we were too clever to see intercourse as the salve to our current ills.
So we regressed. We stole away to the back of her SUV like a pair of fumbling virgins. In the light of the lamppost, in a handicapped spot near the sea end of Wilshire, we embraced, we kissed, we ran our hands all over each other with nervous excitement. We explored each other carefully. When my left hand moved up her shirt, all the way to the swell of her nipple, she let out a soft gasp, as if no one had ever touched her there before. When she gently nibbled my ear, I almost cried, as if I’d been waiting for years to have a girl do that to me.
We were so awkward and juvenile in our affections that for a wonderful time, I was simple again. My mind was filled with dumb and pleasant thoughts. I made a mental commitment to enroll in sign-language classes. I couldn’t wait for the day when we could stop relying on technology and Madison to talk to each other. As I moved my hands over her firm stomach, I made the decision to start exercising again. I wanted a body that would drive her crazy. And as she rested on top of me, as she pressed her hips against mine, I realized that despite our limitations, we could screw each other senseless someday. When circumstances were better, when we knew each other better, we’d be so comfortable that we could shut off all the noise in our heads and become two bodies working together in perfect instinct and perfect rhythm. God, how I wanted to make her scream with pleasure. God, what a thing to look forward to.
But for now, we were both in shambles. Once we stopped fooling around, the myriad complexities of our adult existence came back into focus. Dozens of unwelcome details flooded back into our field of vision.
I leaned against the passenger door and held her from behind. I could almost feel her powerful mind start up again, processing multiple streams of thought and worry. She retrieved her laptop from the floor and booted it up in front of us. She channeled her thoughts through SimpleText in eighteen-point Helvetica.
I reached my arms under hers, tapping the keyboard.
She squeezed my hands, then leaned her head back into me.
she typed.
I held her tight, planting slow and soft kisses on her neck. I kissed her faster and more intensely until she closed her eyes and moaned. Moving upward, I pressed my lips to the side of her face, cleaning away every last trace of lime. I wanted to devour her. I wanted to swallow her whole, like a snake. Then I’d have her all to myself.
The laptop chimed at midnight. Jean didn’t notice it until I stopped my affections. She glanced at the clock on the menu bar.
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In the future, at least Alonso’s version, there will be two ways to exist: physically and virtually. The physical world will be a giant urban ghetto for the working class, society gone to shit. But the virtual world will be a full-time paradise for all who can afford it. Not only can you customize your appearance, you can customize your senses. If you only wanted to see the world in springtime, you’d only see springtime. If you only wanted to see Baptists, you’d only see the fellow users who were registered as Baptists. Or leftists. Or jazz enthusiasts. There were a million flags you could attach to yourself, and a million types of people you could exclude from your perceptions. God no longer had to grant you the serenity to accept the things you could not change. With the right software, you could change anything.
Such is the premise of Godsend, at least the way Jean described it.
By a quarter to o
ne, she and I were back in our respective homes, back on our respective computers, back on EyeTalk, where it was safe. By then my electricity had returned, but I kept the lights off anyway. I stretched out on the couch and rested the laptop on my chest as if it were Jean herself.
At first we shared some of the wonderful things we hoped to do to each other, someday, when circumstances were better. We romanced each other speculatively, virtually, and in full lowercase. We finished ourselves. Then we curled up together as best we could, spooning on a bed of ones and zeroes.
The narrator of Godsend had no determinate identity, not any that he or she was willing to share with the reader. In the virtual world, s/he was a perpetual metamorph, a disenchanted cipher who changed everything about him/herself on an hourly basis. Name. Shape. Sex. Perceptions.
The trouble begins when s/he meets and falls in love with a fellow shifter. All they have in common are their capricious ways and a taste for pansexual debauchery. According to Jean, the two main characters spend half the book screwing in every form imaginable, even as lobsters. Unfortunately, after each blissful encounter, they spend days obsessively seeking each other out again, trying to reconnect through whatever new disguises they’ve adopted.
I blinked, stupefied.
I laughed.
she replied.
I grabbed a tissue from the coffee table and wiped my nose.
The cursor blinked steadily for a few silent seconds.
I didn’t mind her asking. I just didn’t know how to answer. In a few hours, the sun would come up. A few hours after that, either Harmony would confess or she wouldn’t. If she confessed, Miranda would sink me. If she didn’t, the audiotape would be released and would open up a world of shit for me, Harmony, and a whole lot of people.
All told, I was in for another bad day.
The more I thought about it, the more I wished I’d stayed in the car with Jean instead of fleeing at midnight like Cinderella. I should have taken her Hollywood-style, with blazing flames and wild passion. I should have screwed her into a new state of being. Instead I nibbled. I pecked. I brought her into me piece by piece when, goddamn it, I should have begged her to let me out.
22
THE TWIST
At 6:54 on the morning of Valentine’s Day, a landline call shook me out of my slumber. I fumbled my way to the cordless receiver. It beeped in my ear, begging me to address its low battery issue.
“Hello?”
“Uh...Scott?”
Despite my languor, I had an easier time recognizing his voice than he did mine. “Hey. Doug.”
“Jesus. I thought I got the wrong number. You sound awful.”
I felt awful. My head pounded. My throat throbbed with misery. My sinuses might as well have been filled with cement. I was officially ailing.
My alarm clock blinked its digits at me, still confused from last night’s blackout.
“What time is it?”
“Early,” Doug replied. “Listen, you need to wake up, because we’ve got...Something very strange just happened.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody leaked the tape to the media.”
My receiver beeped again.
“What is that?” Doug asked.
“It’s my phone. What are you talking about?”
“The audiotape. Fox News somehow got their hands on a copy.”
“How did that happen?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
It began to dawn on me that this was actually happening. I sat up. “Wait a second. Wait! Someone leaked the tape to Fox News?”
“Yes. Good morning.”
“That’s crazy! Why would anyone do that? We had her.”
“I know.”
“She agreed to confess on video!”
“I know!”
“So who leaked the goddamn recording?”
“That I don’t know. I was hoping you’d have some clues.”
Beep. “I have no idea what the hell’s going on, Doug.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“I gave a copy to you and Maxina. That’s it.”
“Hey, mine’s been locked in my office safe since last Monday. Nobody’s touched it.”
“What about the Judge?”
“He may hate you, Scott, but he’s not stupid. He knows a video confession is a hundred times better than an audio implication.”
“Yeah, but does he have the combination to your safe?”
Beep! “It’s not him!”
“Well, someone leaked the tape!”
“Look, just get dressed and come to my house as soon as you can. We’re going to sort this thing—”
The cordless died. I chucked it at the hamper, then hunched forward, groaning. I had gotten only two hours of sleep and I was sick all over, but my mind was running on emergency power. That recording was ninety percent me. If Fox News had it, it would be playing nationwide in a matter of minutes. By noon my voice would be on every channel. By mid-afternoon Miranda would expose me as the mystery villain, and by tonight, Harmony would confirm it. Happy Valentine’s Day, Scott. You’re done. It’s over. Bye-bye.
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The morning belonged to News Corp. From the crack of dawn, the minions of Murdoch heralded their coup all over the airwaves. Holy crap! We’ve got a MAJOR twist in the Harmony Prince saga, and we’ve got it exclusively on Fox News! Bow to your masters, CNN! Bow to us!
The recording would premiere at noon Eastern, nine Pacific, but the network spilled enough details to get the nation’s juices flowing. CNN and MSNBC followed suit with their own pre-reactive chatter. Professor, do you think this alleged tape could be for real? Could Harmony Prince be lying? Could this whole thing be a sinister hoax? And if it is [slobber slobber], who does the other voice belong to?
I spent a good thirty minutes under the showerhead, staring down at my feet as hot steam cleared my nasal passages. I couldn’t hold on a thought for more than a second. By the time I shut off the water, all the panicked voices in my head united to scream one name: Madison. There was no way to prepare her for this, no way to make her understand. I feared that once the pain of my betrayal went away, and her hot tears dried up, she’d close herself forever. The walls would rise up ninety feet high, and there’d be no getting past her formidable defenses.
It was enough to make a grown man weep, but I couldn’t even seem to do that. Everything else was failing on me—my clock, my phone, my body, my schemes—but the practical engine inside of me just kept chugging along. It pushed me through the r
est of my morning routine: into my clothes, out of the apartment, into the car, onto the road. Always thinking, never reacting. Never, ever reacting.
________________
The moment I left the garage, I experienced the strong and sudden urge to drive to Madison’s school. I knew where it was. I could be there in ten minutes. I could scour the halls, peeking into every classroom until I found her. Then I’d kneel on the floor, gazing up at her as I squeezed her shoulders. Look, there are going to be some things on the news today. Things about me. Don’t believe them, okay? It’s not the way it looks. I can’t explain it just yet, but...God, just hold on, Madison. Don’t give up on me.
No, that would only freak her out, and it would yank her into the crisis sooner than necessary. The problem wasn’t the recording itself, it was me being identified as the second voice. There were only two women with the power and the incentive to rat me out: Miranda and Harmony. If I cut them both off at the pass somehow, I could survive this. There was just one woman with the power and the incentive to help me: Maxina. She would be at Doug’s house. Okay. Stick to the original plan. Go to Doug’s house and talk to Maxina. She’ll help you out of your jam.
Your jam?
Three lights later, I finally realized the horrible nature of my schemes. I was trying to cut the rope that Harmony had around me. She was falling hard, and I was desperately fighting to make sure I didn’t go down with her.
“Jesus Christ.”
I swerved into a loading zone and stopped the car. My eyes were wide and my breaths were quick shallow. My fingers clenched like steel hooks around the steering wheel.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay...”
It took a dozen more “okay”s to defuse me. I’d never been this close to a meltdown before. I was a man of few griefs but the few I had, I muddled through. When my father died. When my mother died. When Drea fell. When Gracie left. I always held myself together. Now I was just a stiff breeze away from structural collapse.
There’s no excuse. There’s no excuse for a man like you.
Except Harmony didn’t know what kind of man I was. She didn’t know that I tried. I tried to make everything work for everybody. I was a man who tried. I was a man who failed. At the very least…
