@Expectations Read online

  It’s sad. No. It’s terrible. Here, IRL, he’s like one of those big bugs that when you turn them over on their back, they’re powerless. And they’re fixing to drive in the pin. What words the senior Pinkneys exchange will be not so much overheard by Lark as known.

  If life on StElene is pure thought, Lark is the genius of extrapolation. He doesn’t have to see the spit bubbling on Marjorie’s sad bear muzzle or inadvertent tears running down the round bear nose. He knows what she’s saying.—Howard, did you speak to him?

  Father bear exposing broken fangs.—I spoke to him good.

  Mother: choke-sniffle, hesitate. She doesn’t want to feel guilty, but she does because she is, after all, a mother. Still a mother, like it or not.—Well, when is he going?

  Sighing, Lark slinks to the foot of the basement stairs.

  The father says,—As soon as he’s packed.

  Lark creeps to the top step so he can hear better.

  —Oh God, Howard, packed!

  Lark leans his forehead against the door. What’ll I do?

  —It’s past time. Father bear with the belly and the loose, wet mouth. Glasses too tight on his fat nose. Howard condescends. Makes a fucking point of being bigger, like Lark is a damn bird with a broken wing that he can stomp on. Well, fuck him. He doesn’t know that I can fucking fly. Howard says,—He’s got to go.

  Lark groans. Where? Can he get through the glass screen of his terminal and disappear into the ether? Climb inside the box and move to StElene for good? He may be crazy, but he’s not that crazy.

  —But Howard, what will he do?

  —That fool computer I bought for him. He can damn well make a living with that high-end electronic crap of his. Five thousand dollars, and look! He can damn well run figures for some finance company. A bank. They use those things in banks. But I tell you this. That boy won’t lift a finger as long as he can get a free ride here.

  The mother cries,—How can he make a living when he can’t even make his bed?

  Yeah, how?

  —That’s his problem. He’ll thank us for it later, I promise. After he goes.

  After he goes. Something deep inside Lark founders. How will I connect? Where will I keep all my things?

  He hates them so much! He hates himself for not being able to go up there and tell them to fuck themselves. He wishes he could just stomp up these stairs and walk out, slam the door and leave them all behind, along with his junk that he has to have just to keep going, cartons that he can’t live without. Things he needs. Collection of comics. Baseball hats. Character mugs and rock group T-shirts. Books he bought and can’t let go because they’re still unread. He isn’t free! Worse, he is financially dependent here. Lark has zero income, he has only debts.

  And he’s about to lose it all. Once the father yanks the plugs and jerks the surge protector out of the wall for good, once Howard jams the computer components back in the labeled cartons he’s so thoughtfully provided, he’ll lug them upstairs and set them out on the curb and Hubert with them. Lark will be disconnected! Cut off from his friends and everything that matters. It’s too horrible to think about. He’ll have to turn tricks or panhandle just to connect from some crowded, terrifying internet cafe. Strangers looking over your shoulder. Reading the intimate things you type. He’d die.

  He hears the mother hum-humming. Hey, if she’s wavering …—Oh Howard, maybe we shouldn’t.

  Steely dad:—We have no choice.

  —But he’s so young!

  —Your safety, Marjorie.

  —Safety! Howard, he’s my son.

  The father says,—The fire in the kitchen, Marjorie.

  —It was an accident.

  —He set it. Who knows what he was trying to burn away?

  Below stairs, Lark dies. The fire in the kitchen is nothing.

  You keep this up and you’ll see what Lark can do.

  It isn’t really the fire anyway. It isn’t even the hours he keeps. They are just sick of him. Sick of him bopping around nights until he crashes and crawls into bed after dawn, coughing and shivering until he thinks he’s slept and it’s OK to get up and connect to StElene because being away is like being dead. Sick of him screaming when one of them tries to make a phone call and he gets disconnected. Sick of the extra wash because Lark has to scrub himself raw twice a day and change all his clothes and the sheets too. He just has to, OK? Plus that he won’t eat with them because he can’t stand being watched. Like he would explain? He just sneaks upstairs when they’re sleeping and steals food. Plus, OK, the discomfort of having a third person not exactly there but always present. They fret: What is he doing down there? Make a midnight food run and accidentally run into one of them: Oh, are you still here? Plus the bills. The bottom line is financial. With Howard, it always is. He’s pissed about the phone bill because Lark is always online. It’s his connection. The best one is his account at the college he dropped out of. Trouble is, it’s in Colorado. His computer has to phone up Colorado every time he logs on and so he stays logged on. Hundreds of dollars.

  Unless the bottom line is that they grit their teeth and look away because they can’t bear the sight of him. It’s like he’s something wrong they did, that they can’t bear to face.

  Upstairs:—Do you want to speak to him or shall I?

  Oh yes I am afraid.

  If Howard comes down here and finds out Hubert has unpacked his stuff and reconnected, God knows what he’ll do. Sinking to the bottom step, curling around his misery, Lark begins to rock. But he’s not a stupid person, he’s a smart one, and wacked as he is, he knows he can’t just sit here, waiting for Reverdy to come rescue him. Slowly, he unfolds. When his feet stop feeling like dead sponges, he tiptoes over pins and needles to his desk.

  Sobbing, he types:

  stelene.moo.mud.org 8888

  The minute he does, he feels better. Then he types:

  co (you don’t have to type the whole word to connect)

  lark (the program is not case sensitive)

  and last, he types his password, which he guards with his life. Nobody is going to sneak into Lark’s place pretending to be Lark; the Directors on StElene have made it clear to all players. NEVER GIVE YOUR PASSWORD TO ANYONE. They’ll never guess his:

  bfltzpyk

  The StElene display comes up but Lark knows it by heart. Sometimes it scrolls up the screen in his dreams. He goes to the hot plate and makes instant coffee. When he comes back to the terminal he is sitting in:

  Lark’s Place. Where he can be safe.

  You are in a light, bright library, the outer chamber of the sphere where Lark lives and works. It is his alone. He is writing his novel here. On the curved walls are Lark’s art collection, Lark’s Morocco and gold-bound books. Light comes from an unknown source and the sphere is lined with gray velvet sofas that invite you to sit but note this. There is more to Lark’s place than is immediately evident. The scroll: READ ME; the smaller sphere glowing in the center of the room suggest that there is more here, even as there is more to Lark. Much, much more. Find your way into the next sphere and discover. Look on his works and admire.

  His face relaxes into a smile. Home at last. Then he types:

  @find reverdy, thinking: be here, please be here.

  The display comes up:

  Reverdy last disconnect 5 a.m. PST The Dak Bungalow

  Oh hell, Reverdy isn’t here. Neither is Zan, but he knows how to reach Zan, a.k.a Genna Wilder, she’s a psychologist RL, she’ll know what to do.

  We have to talk, we have to talk! Everything hurts. We have to talk. And Reverdy? No matter when he comes in we’ll talk and I can tell him everything.

  eight

  JENNY

  Bad feelings gnaw at you from the inside out, whatever’s eating you feeds until it’s so big that there’s no getting rid of it. Pain has a way of scrambling your synapses. You start to say one thing and something else comes out.

  I’ve got to tell somebody.

  Nice Martha is sitting i
n my big chair with late sunlight striking her gray frizz. She’s relaxed and wide open; this would be a good time to run the baby thing past her—am I overreacting here, or was that a mortal hurt? Charlie and Reverdy and Charlie revolve in my mind like tigers biting each other’s tails and all I can talk about is StElene. “Martha, I’ve gotten into this new place, this virtual community? It’s a whole new world.”

  “You’re in a … what?”

  I can’t tell her about Reverdy but I’m desperate to tell her something. Sure it’s crazy. In a way StElene is like good sex. If the person you’re telling hasn’t been there, there’s no way you can explain. The more I tell Martha, the more she doesn’t get it, and even when her eyes glaze over, I have to explain. “Martha, I have these amazing friends there!”

  This gets her attention. “My God, you don’t give these weirdos your name!”

  Another of those things I’d better not tell. “Relax, we all take character names. Besides, you can tell a lot of things about people from their descriptions.”

  “Descriptions?”

  “What they write about themselves.” I keep mine simple.

  ZAN stands for considerably more than what you read here.

  Carrying:

  Ring from Reverdy Official Lark Friend Badge

  Oh God this is hopeless; I grin. “I guess you had to be there.” When I disconnect from StElene the program adds: Zan (sleeping) is here. My description stays behind to stand for me. If Reverdy comes in while I am asleep he can still trace my outlines, like a man in love with a ghost.

  But Martha’s freaking. “My God, you’re in a chat room!”

  “Is that all you think of me? That I’d do something that little and stupid and cheap?” Yes I am shouting. “Think of a gigantic virtual building, with hundreds of rooms. Imagine thousands of people all living together in a really big small town…”

  “Just tell me you’re not in a chat room. Foxy Lady. Sexy Man. Please. Jenny, it’s so not you!”

  “Don’t condescend to something you don’t understand!” I don’t really want her following me onto StElene but she looks so hurt that I say, to make up for yelling, “If you knew them. If you could only meet my friends.”

  “You mean if you could meet them,” she says; her look says, this is for your own good.

  “They aren’t just anybody, Mart, they’re logging on from universities and corporations, not just…” I start over. “Professionals, most of them. Lawyers, writers,” I leave out the randy teenagers and a couple of other categories she doesn’t need to know about. “I met this great doctor from Australia…”

  “Doctor, yeah right.” Martha gives me that look. “He says.”

  “He is a doctor!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Believe me, I know.” How can I explain how you learn to identify people you can’t see or hear or touch, or how you in your bones know which ones you can trust. It’s like swimming or riding a bicycle; once you know, you know. Martha’s so skeptical that I keep numbering them: philosopher-politician in Canada. Artist in Oakland, friend doing social semiotics in London, anthropologist, physical therapist. Programmers, students, scientists, I tell her it takes brains to hang out in ephemeral space, OK I spare her the crazier ones, like Harrald, and Lark …

  But now Martha’s worried. She grabs my hands. “Jen. Jenny. Tell me you don’t give these people your real name or say where you live. Swear.”

  No. It would be lying. I say, “Only my closest…”

  “You’re out there in this made-up computer thingy with a bunch of creeps and weirdos that you can’t see and you don’t know about, and you’ve told them your real name?”

  I’ve told them a hell of a lot more than that. “Only the ones I trust.”

  “For God’s sake Jenny, be careful! You hear terrible things about stuff that happens on the Internet. Terrible things.” This from Martha, who can’t open her email without help. “Women get murdered because they trust some guy they’ve never seen, they go to meet some guy they picked up in some sleazy, anonymous…”

  “Martha…”

  To her credit, she doesn’t say, chat room. She sighs. “You don’t know who these people are, Jenny, or what they really want from you!”

  “I know what I want, Mart. Something a little bit bigger than Brevert.”

  Her eyes are crossing slightly with incomprehension. “This is sick, Jenny. How did you get so tied up in something you can’t see? You think you’re in a movie or something? Or is it more like a game? Are we talking imaginary playmates, or what?”

  “It’s as real as you and me sitting here.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s all typing in the dark to me.”

  “We type, and things exist.”

  Bang, she’s all over me; she snaps, “Performative utterance.”

  Reverdy’s exact words drop into my heart like a stone in a well. “Yes.”

  “Like, say it and it’s so?” Martha is leading me.

  I am too upset to care. “Yes!”

  “Well, it isn’t. It isn’t so. There’s a thin line between that and wish fulfillment.”

  “Do you really think I’m that stupid? Do you have any idea what it’s like to get to the level of pure thought? StElene is like that; people getting past the superficial, meeting on the plane of pure thought.” I am not about to tell her there is a hell of a lot more to life on StElene than that. I say, “Look at us. You. Me, here in this room. Eight thousand distractions. Interruptions. Physical static. The fax, the phone. Broken fan on the AC. Dust in the room. Visual cues—what we’re wearing, who’s thinner and how that makes us feel and am I boring you, and did you just stifle a yawn? How can we possibly get to the truth? Think of the freedom!”

  “You mean freedom from responsibility.”

  “Freedom from all this crap.”

  It’s all wasted. My friend. My friend Martha, Martha finishes me off with that sweet, uncomprehending smile. “And this chat room. Is it a hobby with you?”

  “It’s not a chat room!” I smack my hand down on the desk. “It’s a world.”

  “No. This.” And Martha smacks her hand down on the desk. Harder. “This is the world.”

  “Stuff in this room, in Brevert, it’s extraneous, Mart. I’m talking about getting to the center.”

  And my only friend in Brevert asks carefully, “What do you think is the center?”

  My life in the South backs up in me like the contents of a faulty drain and I can hear my voice beginning to crack. “Whatever it is, it isn’t here and it probably isn’t now.”

  “Oh, I get it. Escapism.”

  “No,” I say hopelessly. If I can’t make even Martha understand, maybe my time on StElene really is wasted. “I. Agh. Imagine a society where everybody can know everything. And all at once.”

  “Isn’t that what the devil promised Adam?”

  “It was Eve.” Oh shit, is she going to make me cry?

  Then—just like that—my good friend comes down on me out of nowhere like a SCUD missile. WHAM. “Are you and Charlie all right?”

  There is this terrible pause; I see my whole life flash before my eyes and it is over. Oh Charlie, we started so well, how did we end up here?

  My friend Martha just smiles and waits.

  “All right?” I want to tell her and I can’t tell her; if I start crying, I’m fucked; instead, I flee. Even though it is my office, not Martha’s, I grab my shoulder bag and go, stopping just long enough to reassure her, unless she’s a bomb I am trying to defuse. “We’re fine! Why wouldn’t we be all right?”

  * * *

  Then on Front Street, I hear somebody hurrying to catch up with me—Martha, I think, but it isn’t, it’s my obsessive-compulsive patient Rick Berringer, a local lawyer who is keeping things together with my help. In the chair in my office, Rick Berringer is one thing. Out here in the street, he is another. As tall as Charlie, dark-haired and slightly driven, like Reverdy. Now that we are out in the open, he has
an off-center smile that I like. Something is flickering at the periphery of my imagination; I turn and wait.

  “I saw you walking and I wondered if you’d like a ride.”

  “Thanks, but I need the time to unwind.”

  “OK if I walk along with you?” Nice-looking guy, I probably know too much about Rick for us to be friends but if it doesn’t bother him it shouldn’t bother me, and it doesn’t seem to be bothering him. He says easily, “I’m done for the day and I need to stretch out.”

  Sometimes going along Front Street I see other officers’ wives eying me from late model cars with base tags. They all hang together and turn out for official gatherings; I don’t and Charlie tells me I am missed by which he means, he is judged. I think it wouldn’t hurt to have Charlie find out that I’ve been seen walking along the bay road with some nice guy he doesn’t know about. “Sure, I have to go home and get supper for the kids.”

  “No problem.” Rick’s quick, rumpled grin lets me know that he is something waiting to happen. “It’s cool.”

  “You know I’m married, right?”

  Then my patient astounds me. “I know you’re unhappy, right?”

  Reverdy? Don’t be ridiculous, he … “Rick, I don’t know if we should…”

  “It’s just a walk, Ms. Wilder. Just a walk.”

  And not for the last time today my synapses tangle; I am so on the verge of asking Rick if he’s ever heard of StElene that I manage to stop. In my present confused state it would be too much like trolling for sex. Still, I can’t stop suspicion jumping inside me like a silver fish—unless it’s an attack of wish fulfillment, Jenny, cut it out, lay back. I say quickly, “I’m sorry, I forgot something and I have to go back to the office, but next time, OK?”

  * * *

  Near dawn I am caught short in my sleep, rigid with terror; my breath stops. It may be a dream but I can’t be sure. If it’s a dream, then I am submerged in it, I am drowning somewhere off StElene, swimming against an undertow to a place I’ll never reach, and it is as real as StElene has ever been real—I’m swimming through letters that bob like phosphorescents in a black ocean, microorganisms glittering in the night, the water I am inhaling is line after line of scrolling text; the island and the offshore currents and this undertow are made of text; I try to grab a string of words like a lifeline to pull myself out but the words have fragmented into hundreds of sparkling letters and the letters themselves implode like dying stars. I am sobbing, halfway between terror and delight when the surface shatters and I reel with shock; like God or some huge child reaching into a dollhouse or maybe a lifeguard rescuing a drowning swimmer, strong hands break the surface and take hold of me, relentlessly pulling me out.