@Expectations Page 17
So instead of shoving this, like, embarrassment to him, this perpetual inconvenience, out of his life and onto the street, Howard Pinkney got wedged in his own front doorway, frustrated and puffing hard. He couldn’t even get the door open because Lark slumped against it until Howard gave him a kick in the soft part under his ribs and he slid to one side and fell over. Lark grunted in pain because he could hear the mother sniffling and he had the sense that this was right. “Ez-eff!”
Behind them, Marjorie gave a little shriek.
“Marjorie, you stay out of this!”
Howard got the door open.
Outside loomed.
It was terrifying.
Lark froze.
They were in stasis.
Message
30 on *Lark
Date:
Fri. May 4 17:05:01 199-PDT
From:
Jazzy (#08930)
To:
*Lark (#4030)
Subject:
Patience and Fortitude
We all love you, Lark baby. Hang in!
Lark flattened like a postage stamp while Howard banged on his own chest, trying to get his breath and in the background, Marjorie failed to muffle a sob. Moving with great caution Lark shifted until he was composed with feet crossed and arms folded and his hair streaming, just like the statue of a drowned knight. When he caught Marjorie looking, he did the last thing. Cleverly, he smiled.
When your son smiles at you like that, for the first time since he left for college, what are you going to do? How can you let a third party throw him into the street?
Lark has never really been sure if Marjorie likes him much, but she is a mother. Typing to his friends on StElene, some of whom are mothers, Lark’s learned how to use the mother thing, use it for all it’s worth. He murmured what Domnita told him to say, “If anything bad happens, it’s on you.”
This shook her.
The father made a terrible tactical mistake. He barked, “Get up.” He gave Lark another little kick. “I said, get up.”
“Eh-z!”
Marjorie snatched the father’s arm. “No, Howard. We can’t.”
“But we agreed!”
“Not like this.”
“He’s had his deadline, Marjorie. He’s past it.”
“Look at the poor kid, he’s shivering.”
He was; it was true. Howard had wrestled the door open wider. Outside, the truck was waiting. Too many people out there! Lark wanted to roll onto his belly and wriggle back toward the kitchen. All he wanted in the world was to snake back down to the basement, but he couldn’t. Not yet. He had to stay in place and hold his breath and wait for this to play itself out, praying hard for the grace to hold perfectly still with his arms crossed over his chest.
Marjorie said, “Please. Just give him a little more time.”
“Time for what?” The father was furious and breathing hard; Lark’s frail but he’s tough and the struggle took it out of Howard, dragging him up the stairs. He glowered. “Time for what?”
That’s one fucking hard question. Lark squinched up his eyes. I don’t know.
The mother said it for him; she showed her husband empty palms but her voice was sliding around in entreaty. “I don’t know.”
“We can’t just let the little…”
“Howard, look at him!”
“It’s disgusting.”
You think Lark’s been wasting time MOOing? No way. Lark lay still and let this happen just like his friends told him to; clever Lark.
Message
39 on *Lark
Date:
Fri. May 4 17:32:30 199-PDT
From:
FloridaMae (#109030)
To:
*Lark (#4030)
Subject:
Mothers Unite
Oh, sweetie, if you were mine I’d bake pies for you all day every day and let you stay logged on forever, if you’d promise to spend it talking to me, you are the best and the funniest! I totally feel for you and what I have to say right now is, look to the mother. She’s probably the source of all your troubles, mothers are the enemy and they can not be trusted, I should know. Moms have their hearts in the right places OK and they probably want to be strong but they’re really very week. ***oh, my typing and no backspace*** WEAK. When I was nine my stepfather tried to have sex with me. When I told her she just said I had a dirty mouth, so you just hang in there sweetie, OK? Hang in and trust no one and takecaretakecaretakecare.
“Howard, there’s no point throwing him out in the street if he’s just going to lie there,” the mother said reasonably. “The police will only bring him back inside.”
“Nobody’s going to just lie out in the street like a goddamn refugee. Not even Hubert. He’ll move.”
“Don’t be so sure. Remember what he was like when we got him back from college.”
Lark opened one eye: I wasn’t that bad. Or was I? OK, he wasn’t exactly fine. He hated college, his soul naked and quivering out where everybody could see it was too much; all those strangers, it was like being peeled and dropped onto a griddle, the heat was killing him! Then he crawled into his computer one night and it was OK. He went netsurfing and lucked into StElene. Fell into this life. Who wouldn’t want to stay here, connected to a place where he could value and be valued, where he could talk his head off when real-life encounters make his lungs so tight he can’t breathe and he dies a dozen times and his head explodes with unspoken words. On StElene even at the beginning he was eloquent, witty. They think he’s debonair. He stayed up nights and into the days ignoring entreaties from his roommates; when they kept bothering him he locked the door and left them hammering in the hall outside …
Message
43 on *Lark
Date:
Fri. May 4 17:50:30 199-PDT
From:
Jimbo (#302036)
To:
*Lark (#4030)
Subject:
Asking For It
FloridaMae, don’t blame your mom for what happened. Us guys know you are one succulent, come-hither babe. Ha ha.
Like a passive resister, Lark lay still, but unlike a passive resister, he would not cover his head. Crazy as he was to get back to the computer and report on this outrage, he kept his arms folded across his breast and let his eyes follow the mother as she paced, trilling in entreaty.
“Consider, Howard, you thought people would be good for him. Just look. Look what college did to him!”
Message
50 on *Lark
Date:
Fri. May 4 17:54:10 199-PDT
From:
Cheribelle (#025033)
To:
*Lark (#4030)
Subject:
Jimbo’s egregious post
This may be a laughing matter to some of you fools out there, but Jimbo should be ashamed of himself.
This is serious business and we need to pull together to help Lark through.
Well, FloridaMae, you think you’re right about mothers, but I’m a mother and I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. Lark’s mom has a perfectly good right to be trusted because there are more good moms in the barrel than bad ones. I think Lark’s lucky to have a mom at all. Just think. What would happen if you woke up one day and your mother was dead?
Howard snapped, “I can’t help it if he’s an emotional cripple. Besides, that was before the hospital. It was before the drugs. I put out a fortune for those drugs.”
OK, so what if he really was disconnected and raving when they broke down the door to his dorm room and paramedics dragged him out? That was a long time ago. Last year; hell, he was only a kid. Eighteen, and if he had to do some time in the hospital and they wouldn’t let him out until he promised to take the drugs, so what?
About the drugs. Howard doesn’t know it, folks, but Lark has definitely left off taking stupid drugs. Goofballs and la la pills may mellow you out but they also slow your reflexes beyond dreadful, and there’s no place for slow players
on StElene.
“He’ll get himself together,” Marjorie said, like she really believed it. “He’ll get going on his own.”
On his own. The words chilled Lark’s bones.
“No he won’t.”
“Just a week,” Marjorie said and to Lark it seemed like the eternity he needed. “Just one more tiny little week.” She looked down. “You promise you’ll get it together, don’t you, dear? If those are the terms?”
And Lark opened both eyes for the mother and he smiled his best baby brother smile.
“See, Howard, he’s promising.”
Message
92 on *Lark
Date:
Fri. May 4 19:30:02 199-PDT
From:
Baggins
To:
*Lark
Subject:
Patience and Fortitude
Lark, baby. Are you OK? You haven’t posted in more than an hour. Do you need the StElene Raiders to come and rescue you?
“OK,” Howard said finally. “OK.”
So here he is, and he has another week. A week. And such outpourings of love! Never mind that the mail’s piled up eight ways to Sunday, Lark will answer every single post if it takes the rest of his life. It’s easier than jump-starting a life outside the house.
Hey, anything can happen in a week. Reverdy could come back and fix everything. Howard could drop dead, or change his mind. The world could turn over for Lark and open up like an Easter egg. He could turn over and open up like an Easter egg. He could make it upstairs for dinner tomorrow and sit at the table talking to the mother and dad and the next day he could go out and get a job … and meanwhile there’s the list. He has to keep up with the list.
Look, in a week Reverdy could come home to StElene. Apologize. Get him back into college because Reverdy’s so slick. Plus Reverdy is well-connected; he could sort it out with Lark’s dean or whatever, and if he can’t, his friend Zan is working on a plan. Lark has called her office in South Carolina and they’ve talked on the phone RL. She’ll think of something or Lark will, but meanwhile the sky is blue and the birds are singing on StElene and posts are piling up on *lark so he’s got that. They are his public and he owes it to them to give back as good as he got. At this very moment people are crowding the grand Ballroom waiting to talk to him, Lark is this week’s MOOcelebrity so he might as well get up and smell the flowers while they’re still growing in his life.
@twenty-three
ZAN
In her months on StElene, Zan has run into dozens of social scientists and communications researchers examining players like so many specimens on a lab table. Exploring motives. Dissecting relationships. Unless they’re driven to quantify something Zan perceives as easy to analyze but impossible to explain, or to study the phenomenon precisely because they don’t understand it. Some are longtime players who launch projects so they’ll feel less guilty about being here all the time. Others came in from the outside and they come in cold, complete with preconceptions. Or to generate confessions they can sell for profit: My Life as a Virtual Sex Symbol. More scholarly researchers drop surveys into players’ queues or approach them in the grand ballroom, solemnly asking questions. To nobody’s surprise they get answers, because there is a central fact about life in this space created out of the unknown and mediated by text: people love to talk about themselves.
Zan used to think researchers had to be condescending academics or, worse, closet voyeurs who got off on passing the magnifying glass: “Behold the natives. Aren’t they quaint.”
Now she is deep in a survey of her own. Lost without Reverdy, who simply has not logged on since she tried so hard to say goodbye forever, she’s like an astronaut in free fall. It’s late and, as good as her word to Charlie, she’s compiling interviews. Adrift without Reverdy, she has only the project to anchor her.
A survey. Zan isn’t crazy in love. Look, she isn’t even crazy. She’s doing a survey. My God, he’s only been gone three days! What’s the matter with me?
This morning Martha said, “Charlie’s only been gone three days. What’s the matter with you? Or did you spend the whole weekend inside that computer?”
“So what if I did? I have to be there.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Jenny, look at yourself!”
“There’s nothing the matter with me.”
“You look terrible, all woolly and distracted. It’s that St. Helen thing.”
“It’s not St. Helen, Mart, it’s StElene!”
“Whatever.”
“I’m interviewing people for a paper. The place is a microcosm, OK?” She thinks she sounded clinical, maybe even competent and in control. “It’s time somebody analyzed what makes these people tick. I’m there on a research project.”
“Well,” Martha said in a dead level tone. “Are you.”
She can handle Martha’s sarcasm. If Charlie catches her logged on in the middle of the night she has a ready answer now, one that makes sense even to her. Product, she tells herself. I’m going to come out of this with product. She is wasting nobody’s time.
Maybe we all have to do something to dignify our efforts here.
Zan’s survey is considerably less organized than the others, consisting as it does of conversations conducted over the interminable weekend with Reverdy gone and Charlie out of town. It’s helped her get through. She’s made it safely through to Monday in one piece. She’s retreated to Zan’s Tower to reread the logs. First she has to edit out repetitions the StElene program dishes up. She saves the interviews under Phase One. Next, the questionnaire.
She scrolls through the logs with her head tilted, half-listening for Reverdy. Because she can’t help herself she types, @find reverdy
And again and again, gets the time of his last disconnect.
Reverdy Thursday 23:50 PST The Dak Bungalow
Never mind. Having a project consolidates her. Zan isn’t hanging in space in a lovelorn fog, she has work to do. She tried to frame a question that wouldn’t influence the answers, but rereading, she sees that she slipped and let herself show. Still, it’s a start.
Zan asks, “What do you think we’re doing here?”
The answers tell her everything. Or they don’t tell her anything. She started with Jazzy, her first friend on StElene. She had him meet her at the Gazebo Reverdy built, and the log begins with Reverdy’s words. Reading the description he wrote is like taking out a snapshot of him. It warms her every time.
The Gazebo is a Victorian fantasy built to match the architecture of the hotel. It is the seat of emotions for some. For others, it is the site of dreams. To the north the bay spreads like a glittering net cast by a magician to catch starts. At your back the hotel is ablaze with lights. The long dock leading back to the shore stretches like a link between solitude and the joy and confusion of life.
Zan and Jazzy are here.
hug jazzy
You hug Jazzy
Jazzy hugs you
Zan [to Jazzy] So Jazz, we all have so much invested in StElene.
What do you think we’re doing here?
Jazzy [to Zan] I can only talk a minute; I’m on call.
Zan [to Jazzy] I’m trying to find out whether people think the MOO is a great enterprise that we’re all in together or a terrible addiction. I guess my question is, is there something wonderfully right about StElene that we keep coming back to it? Or is it because there’s something terribly wrong with us?
OK, if she really is writing a paper on the psychology of the population in virtual communities, she already knows her approach is questionable. As interviewer, Zan is in too deep to be impartial. Martha would point out that pouring yourself into the questions this way pollutes the answers, but then Martha’s never been here; she’s never done this. There’s no way she can understand. Besides, Martha’s never ached as much as Zan does tonight.
Jazzy [to Zan] Wrong, as in…?
Zan [to Jazzy] As in lacking. StElene. Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
:scratches her head.
Zan scratches her head.
Zan [to Jazzy] I’m *thinking.* Maybe that’s it.
Jazzy hugs you.
hug jazzy
You hug Jazzy
Jazzy [to Zan] OK, put me down as saying it’s a good thing. How else could you and I meet and be friends?
In a funny, colleaguely way, she and Jazzy are close even though she’s in South Carolina and he is typing from Australia. Jazzy is smart; he asks questions and he thinks; the marvel is that he has time for StElene because he’s a neurologist RL.
Botero [to Zan] What’s all this with the stupid questions? Have you got head problems or something? Get out of my face.
OK, Botero. Botero’s a flake, brilliant programmer, she’s told, just eighteen, weighs close to four hundred pounds. But the others? Everybody on StElene has thought about it. They think about it all the time. If the object of the game is to determine what is the object of the game, what’s the object of the game? Everybody asks the question. Everybody comes up with a different answer.
Zan picked up Saturday night’s interviews in the grand ballroom; the floor was filled with players who didn’t have a Saturday night date RL, or a mate to take them away from all this.
Rosemary-Thyme [to Zan] StElene? It’s the best party anywhere!
LavaKing [to Zan] If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
Merce [to Zan] StElene to me, anyway, is about having interesting conversations with people from anywhere. If you make a friend so much the better. Draco [to Zan] Interesting question. I’ve been wondering myself!
Zan [to Draco] That isn’t an answer.
Draco [to Zan] Could I get back to you on that?