@Expectations Page 3

  “Historians! Of course I do.”

  He gives her a hug. “You’re the only one who does.”

  “You’re light-years ahead and they just don’t get it.”

  “Like Galileo.” In his field, Reverdy is a self-styled maverick. Erratic. Intuitive. Quick. “If you can’t organize history, how are you going to learn from it? Flexibility!”

  “They’re just slow, lover. They’ll catch up.”

  “I wish. You know as well as I do that you can code anything. I know how to subdue and order history and they’re too stupid to see. They don’t want to see and until they do, my hands are tied.”

  This daytime confidence is to make clear that on StElene Reverdy loves Zan, and in life away from here, he loves her too.

  She says, “If you could only meet with them. Sit down in the same room.”

  Then he surprises her. “That’s what I love about the project, I never have to see the bastards. It’s one of the great things about working online.”

  She catches the tune. “And you make your own hours.”

  It is an old litany. “And I’m my own person.”

  “And you can wear anything you want.”

  He laughs. “T-shirts. Bunny slippers. Underwear.”

  “One of those rubber bowties that lights up,” she says fondly, but she is thinking about Reverdy in his underwear.

  “No ties. Definitely no ties.”

  “But it must get lonely, working alone.”

  “I’m never lonely.” This is what Zan has been waiting for. This is the pledge. Reverdy finishes, “I have you.”

  Everything in her warms. “And I have you.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “We’re pathetic, both of us.” Zan is fishing and he knows it.

  He grins. “Terrible. We’re a matched set. A pair.”

  “Yes.” Satisfied, she moves on. “But this history committee chairman or whatever he calls himself says he doesn’t trust your findings?”

  “Only because the data I’m collecting will prove that there is no such thing as history. Everything’s subject to revision.”

  Zan of all people should know this. On StElene, entire lives are subject to revision. The physical present. The past. “True, but dates stay the same. Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor.”

  “But opinions on what happened differ. You see it, don’t you? Facts change from day to day; even the past is in flux.”

  “Of course,” Zan says. “Like this place.” Life on StElene has taught her that existence is fluid. Relieved of the exigencies, lives flex and change. Even the present is subject to revision. “That’s what I love about you. You make me think!”

  He says quickly, “Do we have time?”

  They don’t have to discuss it. “Even if we don’t.”

  They are in the middle, then, Zan and Reverdy; Zan is trembling and a flush cloaks her throat when there’s a noise in the room. A noise, right in this room where she and Reverdy are making love! Her lover senses the distraction even as she jerks to attention with a little gasp. His words stand as if written on the air in front of her. “What, my darling. What?”

  “N There isn’t time to type anything more.

  Somebody’s in the room! Wild with interrupted passion, shaken, Zan can’t even tell Rev goodbye. Pushing her hair back and pulling her robe around her neck to hide the flush spreading at her throat and along the collarbone, Jenny Wilder switches off the computer and stands, knocking over her chair. “What. What?”

  As Reverdy blinks out of existence. In this rushed atmosphere of daytime desires and clandestine nights, people drop out of sight in a flash. Virtual love is subject to interruptions and crashes. It’s like loving in a blackout, with no time for explanations or apologies. The difference is that all communication stops, love stops, the connection stops precisely when the power goes off.

  She has disconnected the man she loves most. With a flip of the switch, Jenny Wilder has extinguished Reverdy and deleted the evidence. She turns to the small, plump figure fidgeting in droopy pajamas. “Rusty! What are you doing up?”

  In spite of the heat Rusty is shivering, aren’t you cold? How long has he been standing there? “I couldn’t sleep!”

  “Sweetie, it’s the middle of the night! Go back to bed.”

  He’s craning at the darkened screen. “Are you playing Doom?”

  Cooling, she sighs. “It isn’t Doom. Now go back to sleep!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  Rusty’s wise look makes her squirm. “Because you’re making so much noise up here.”

  Guilty, Jenny says, “I wasn’t making any noise.”

  The little boy says, for Charlie, for all betrayed husbands everywhere, “Well, you’re up here typing.”

  “All right.” Love shatters and falls at Zan’s feet in shreds, like a ruined globe. Standing, she trails her fingers across the screen. Goodbye.

  He nudges like a reproachful sheepdog. “Tuck me in?”

  Poor kid, Jenny thinks. But she’s been shut up in the box alone with her lover. Poor me. She can’t smile for the child but she makes her voice soft. “Sure.”

  Because she’s standing here grieving and hasn’t exactly moved, Rusty presses. “Could we go to bed now?”

  “Oh hell, Rusty.” She means, why do you want me to put you to bed when you don’t even like me?

  He squints at her screen, as if trying to read the afterimages burned into it. “If it wasn’t Doom, what was it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tetris? Nope, it sure wasn’t Tetris. I mean when I came in it was all words.”

  Words. “Don’t be silly, I was…”

  You were kind of…” late night makes Rusty confidential, “weird.”

  “Working! I was working. I’m…” Jenny looks at the screen but she can peer into it until the sun comes up and Reverdy will be just as gone. “I’m sorry I kept you up, OK?” she says, taking his hand. “But next time, promise you’ll knock?”

  When she puts Rusty to bed in that tight little room cluttered with Star Wars models and monster models and comics and clandestine candy wrappers and Entemann’s cartons that Charlie so deplores, Jenny takes advantage of the moment and, in spite of the fact that Rusty’s teetering on the brink of eleven, kisses the top of his musty red hair. Then she goes out and closes the door.

  Most lovers shower before they get back in bed with the injured party, but like so much that Jenny is invested in, this love is ephemeral. Nothing. In material terms, she and Reverdy have done nothing. And yet.

  The flush at her throat, the aura are too pervasive to be erased by scrubbing. Physical love you finish and forget, but what Jenny has with Reverdy grows in the imagination. It fills rooms. No. The words that they exchange faster than thought—what they say and do, the expectation of what they will say and do next time and the anticipation—are lyric. Their love is tremendous.

  Paddling back to the raft where the sleeping Charlie waits, she thinks, Oh, Charlie, I really am sorry. Then she steps back from the marriage and studies the size and the shape of it, and thinks maybe Charlie brought this on himself. She says, almost loud enough to wake him, “If only you’d trusted me. You should have told me about the kids.”

  He stirs but does not wake. If he did wake up maybe they could talk about it. Sort this out. Sighing, she pulls back the covers and slips back into bed, only slightly assuaged by the warmth, the nice, clean, familiar Charlie smell. Charlie sighs and rolls over, throwing his arm wide; in the moonlight she sees into his curled hand, touches the cords in his upturned wrist. He doesn’t stir. She jostles him slightly; if she can rouse him maybe he’ll turn to her, half-awake; they can embrace and make love and change or at least finish what Reverdy started, but Charlie sleeps on.

  Never mind, she tells herself, and with the grace of complete recall, starts at the beginning and replays her tapes—everything she and Reverdy said and did tonight, thinking that tomorrow night can’t come soon enough, a
nd they can do wonderful things to each other in depth and at length. While Charlie sleeps.

  “We’re not hurting anybody,” she murmurs with a twinge of disloyalty. “It’s only words.”

  three

  JENNY

  The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do is making love to Charlie without letting him guess even for a second that my concentration is torn in two; it could be a sex-linked thing. If you’re a woman, maybe you always are distracted at first. It is his job to get your attention and it works best when you go into it knowing that he always will. In the meantime he has to share your consciousness with worries and fragmented images and old memories and bits of remembered dialog, comprehending your split concentration until everything else disappears in that instant when what you are doing and what he is doing become the same thing.

  By the end Charlie and I are practically the same person; for a second there he’s erased everything from my mind, even Reverdy, but the minute I am lucid, Reverdy comes stealing in. Don’t. I tell him. Stay back. I’m won’t be on StElene tonight, don’t wait for me. I won’t, I think, I can’t do this to Charlie any more.

  He and I lie there watching the morning light on the ceiling. It’s sweet the way he can’t let go of my fingers; it’s Saturday and we’re lying close with our hands linked. I hear the kids thudding down to the kitchen. I hear the TV and the low snarl that means they are fighting. In a minute we’re going to have to get up and go downstairs and deal, but ever since Reverdy fell into my life and shattered my concentration I’ve been pressed. I have to cram too many things into not enough space: Charlie, Reverdy; Brevert, StElene, long work days and the needs of those miserable kids—too much to think about on not enough sleep. Life in overdrive. I try to stay cool, I want us to be happy but I have to start.

  “Charlie, there are things we have to say.”

  Next to me, Charlie stirs dreamily. “Mmmm?”

  I am trying to figure out how to tell him what’s happening. I have to figure out how to do it without hurting him. It won’t be a confession. If only it could be like the talks I used to have with my father when I still had my father. If something was wrong I could fix it by telling Daddy. Just saying the words made it all right. If I can only tell Charlie about this weird other life of mine, maybe he’ll say the right things and I won’t need StElene. I’ll just walk out on Reverdy and come back to him for good. The trouble is, I can’t figure out how to sum it up. I don’t know where to start or how to start. I choke. “Important things.”

  “Shh.” He tightens his fingers in mine. “I’m afraid we’ll end up saying the wrong things.”

  “It’s…” I can pretty much hear Reverdy’s cynical laugh. He wants to hang on to his baby sitter, that’s all. It stops me cold.

  “Babe, what’s the matter?” Charlie rolls closer; his warm breath fills my ear. Even though the nickname diminishes me I don’t move away. I lie close but Charlie knows something’s wrong; he always knows. I can hear his heart breaking. “Is it something I did?”

  Yes. No. I don’t know! I can feel Reverdy pushing me. He wants me to tell Charlie that I don’t love him and it’s over between us, but neither of these things is true. If I did tell him would Reverdy come for me?

  I do love Charlie and it can’t be over, we’re just getting started. Yes I love two men but I’m only sleeping with one of them, is that so terrible?

  “Jen?”

  I love two men and I need them both. Charlie’s warmth, Reverdy’s soul.

  When I first told Reverdy what Charlie did to me, he got furious. I’d been telling myself it was a loving deception, but … you know? On our first long night together on StElene I let it all out—how Charlie snared me, heart and body, without ever telling me what I was getting into. How he waited until the last minute to spring the kids. In a way, when I told Reverdy, I was testing the information the way abuse victims do, thinking maybe I had misread something and men lied to their women this way all the time. The poor guy! (“I was afraid you wouldn’t marry me!”) Protecting me. It felt good to get it all out and the whole time I was telling Reverdy I was secretly thinking, maybe it isn’t as bad as I thought.

  Reverdy blew up. His passion told me it was even worse than I thought. I could kill him for what he did to you.

  I still can’t be sure if I’m more angry at Charlie than I am hurt. I love him too much to reproach him with the lie. As injured party, who happens to be a little bit ambivalent herself, as in—not technically unfaithful, but—I don’t look so good. I love Charlie and I want to tell him everything, but I can’t. I say what I can say. “I just wish you didn’t have to be gone all the time.”

  Charlie’s laugh bubbles with relief. “Oh, babe, is that all it is! I was afraid you were pissed at me about the kids.”

  And so we end up at cross purposes. I hear a thud downstairs and Patsy starts mizzling, one of those long kid whines that curls up the stairwell like smoke. “It isn’t that, I wish. I just wish.”

  There is the sound of a smack. Now Rusty is screaming too. As I get up to go deal, Charlie gets out of his side of the bed to go deal. We exchange looks. His voice overflows with love. “I do too!”

  @four

  REVERDY

  What does it take to move into a conceptual space like StElene and comprehend it so fully that you become part of it? What skills do you need to control the new world so completely that it becomes your element? To find lovers and close friends and make enemies bent on destroying you?

  It’s a rhetorical question, Reverdy thinks, grinning in the triumph of the survivor. It’s all rhetoric. Lingering in the Dak Bungalow with Zan gone and Lark away and the Directors conspiring against him, he frames answers.

  It takes time. The willingness to tinker with code and trust strangers you can’t see or hear but come to know better than any of the people you live with. It takes equal measures of persistence, intelligence and folly, because only idealists or fools would spend their nights colonizing territories they can’t plunder or profit from. StElene is not of the physical world. It is beyond it. And in this new world—the world according to Reverdy, he can transcend everyday life with its pain and terrible exigencies.

  Cyber—no, what Reverdy prefers to think of simply of space is his element. He is master here. This universe of electronic connections spreads like infinity, apparently boundless. Wonderful and daunting. At first. We are the pioneers of the millennium, Reverdy thinks, setting out without benefit of maps or compass.

  Awesome! Striking imaginary trails across the noosphere like an armature for dreams, technocrats and hackers colonized. Now player-programmers have thrown a net around this bit of the unseeable and brought it down to human scale. In their way, they’re like the early settlers, who laid out grids of streets as if mapping would tame the endless prairie, putting up shelters to keep out night terrors and protect them against the prodigious unknown.

  No. We’re like Adam, naming names to bring things into being.

  Claiming the territory, StElene’s pioneers created an island, lovingly coding every detail down to the functions of carnivorous plants and the fish that dart in the uncharted waters. They built the vast hotel, with its lavishly furnished public rooms and crypts and cul de sacs. Describing, they shaped the unknown. Start putting names to things you’ve never seen before in a strange, unfamiliar place and immediately you’re less afraid. You have begun to subdue it.

  StElene beggars any spa or resort in the physical world.

  It would overflow the physical world. Mathematicians say you can add an infinite number of rooms to a hotel registry—new numbers fit between the extant numbers. On the same principle, colonists have designed so many rooms here, so many intricate settings that no blueprint or map could contain them. From here Reverdy sees the beach curving to embrace the bay—his work. Bungalows sit like glittering satellites in the encroaching jungle and at the perimeter, the rest waits. Everything is potential, text opening on text with no images to direct or limit the ima
gination.

  Clumsier designers would have put up graphics, using pictures for backgrounds, scanning in paintings or landscape drawings, even scanning in crude “avatars” to represent players, not caring that the mind usually stops short at the image. If pictures limit the imagination, words expand it. Meanings get huge in the mind. A world made out of words is whatever you want to make of it.

  Welcome to the world of performative utterance, where you are what you type. The potential makes Reverdy shiver with excitement.

  He is surrounded by restless souls. Typing from outposts at the four points of the earth, thousands meet here, in the territory of the imagination. In a miracle of synchronicity, disparate souls collide and in the emotional compression that marks life in such places, fall into instant friendship. Or love.

  Zan. Or out of love. “Like Mireya,” he murmurs. He has one ex-lover who will never forgive him.

  Or into hate. Mireya has turned her tough new man into his worst enemy. “Fuck you, Azeath.”

  If somebody in the hall outside the room where he is typing calls, “Are you all right?” Reverdy won’t hear her.

  Mireya and Azeath aren’t their real names. Pretending anonymity here, where they are already unseeable, players take new names to seal the difference. On StElene, names don’t define or limit. They enable. Off StElene Reverdy is shackled to his given name with its built-in expectations; he is like a wild animal dragging a trap. He can’t gnaw his leg off, so he escapes this way. Here, he can be whatever he wants. Gorgeous, if he chooses. Powerful.

  The naming of names creates control, or the illusion of control. This is control through rhetoric. Unless it’s control through illusion.

  But there is a flip side to life here. Even though Reverdy burned himself out campaigning against it, Suntum International, the corporation that put up StElene, has appointed a board of directors. Thirteen of them. The thirteen have been in control for the last three years, meddling here, punishing there, trying to regulate life in what should be free space.

  Reverdy hates any limitation of freedom. He also knows better than anybody: whoever controls the rhetoric has the power. It’s their sandbox, he thinks angrily, they can do anything they want here. Until I find a way to change things.