They monitored his monitor. He created passwords. Data alarms and hidden doorways of information. But if they monitored his creating these security measures, how could he protect himself? They unleashed relentless, single-focused programs that worked all day and all night to defeat his codes. Or even if he disconnected from all networks, all on-line communiqués (which he did, because if information can come in, information can go out, his data sucked out into the World Wide Web, replicated, disseminated in a thousand ways, in seconds, without him knowing a thing), there was still the plug, which sent electrical waves to his computer. Suppose information could travel on those electronic pathways. He saw an endless stream of letters and words, periods and commas, dashes and hyphens, streaming through the walls, through outlets, into some mother monitoring computer.Then a printer spitting the reassembled bits out and into his file for everyone to scrutinize. No wonder they always said, Write, write. Stealing his secrets. Every time he deleted a word or a sentence or a paragraph, he would feel them vacuum through the cord, to the socket and the wall. He could hear a slight electronic whisper of usurped data. At night when he slept, or tried to sleep, he could hear the whir of words whispering through the wires in his walls. Everything he deleted lived on and on, every night whispering. It’s the open sockets, that’s why he can hear it. They think he’s odd for putting tape over the socket holes. He can’t stand all those electronic waves flowing into the room. Now they poured back into his computer.
One day he’ll find a document, a story, composed of nothing but all the deletions he ever made, every random mistype, every dead-ended thought, every mistaken step, every regretted turn. All of his forgotten failures, assembled together, there on the screen.
He would have to take care of their computer. He knew now. He would delete what he really wanted to keep, and only “save” his mistakes.
Ibidem, Ad Libitum, Idem.
I kept all his “letters.” For some unknown purpose.
At first it was a small heart-shaped bruise along the inside edge of forefinger and thumb. Mina noticed it as David sliced an apple, and then only in a certain light.
“How did you do that?” she asked. It was curious, the way she didn’t hesitate to ask, how injuries are public, how one never hesitates to ask, Hey, how’d you get that? — it seemed to Mina, at this moment, oddly intimate.
“This?” David said, shrugging and smiling. “I’m clumsy. I fell running and jammed my hand.”
Later she noticed on the far side of the bruised hand a thin red raised line. It was a cut, a red-pink-edged swell on his knuckle. She didn’t ask about the cut (but it’s more of a scratch, isn’t it) but spent a moment or two contemplating the physics of falls. She tried to determine the contact order, the single-bullet theory of bruises — one fall or two? Gravel or pavement? Thumb then knuckle, or the other way around, or both at once or what?
“Do we have to do this?” she said. She opened a bag of chips and a powdered cheese puff of air escaped. The smell alone made her thirsty.
“We always do this. This is what we do. This is the day we do this. Don’t act like Susan,” he said, invoking the stay-at-home, invisible, despised girlfriend of one of their regular guests. He slid day-old snow peas out of a cardboard carton. He opened the carton of congealed rice and upended it. It came out in a glutinous mass, carton shaped. He slapped at it with the back of a plastic serving spoon. Slipft, slipft, slipft. It molded down into lumpy crags.
“Maybe I won’t play tonight,” Mina said. Dumplings, wet-looking and misshapen, thunked onto another plate. “What meat is in those, do you think? It looks gross,” she said.
“You’ll play. You always play. Don’t do this every week. You always have fun, once you’re into it. I can’t always get you to get into it.”
“I could just watch and not play,” Mina said.
“It’s the same meat in there as last night when you ate two and loved it,” David said.
“I’ll play but not for long,” she said. He was dumping ice into the ice bucket. Getting out his cocktail shaker. The chilled martini glasses. Cutting twists.
“Gosh, you’re good at cutting twists,” she said. “Even with that scratch. I mean, the lemon might make the scratch sting.”
“We could get pizza, I mean if this isn’t good. Max could bring pizza.”
She left the kitchen and examined yesterday’s mail by the phone. There were two postcards. One was addressed to David:
“Wanton, Wary and Weary”
an episode ofEros and Others
teleplay by Max Mitchell
airing August 15 at 8pm on FOX
This card she threw in the garbage after tearing it into six equal pieces. The other card she did not read but put into her jeans pocket. It was addressed to her and she could feel the origin of it. Martinis, she really wanted one of David’s ice-cold martinis out of his etched-glass vintage cocktail shaker. She watched him pour as people arrived. He handed one to her and it pleased her, to be offered something by her husband, and she didn’t mind at all when he sat next to her and she could admire his smile and good spirits sideways, as he addressed his friends. He was nice to watch like this, perfectly OK. After she felt the cold heat of the thick, chilled vodka, she decided she would play. Poker, charades, Scrabble. Whatever game night entailed this week. Whatever sort of drunken ironic stupid excuse it took. Sometimes it was all just goofy calls in the poker ring, blind three-card stud with all ladies wild. Or baseball, at night, follow jacks, until they outdid one another with ridiculousness. Eventually, at some time during the evening — in the duration of the evening — you could slowly sense the serious shift in the game. Nearly undetectably, andsort of contagiously, people would start really trying to win, really wanting to win, and somebody would argue about somebody leaving, and somebody would tell someone they’re taking it too seriously, and then Mina would think if she didn’t live there, it certainly would be a nice time to leave. She would yawn, and start to clean up, and eventually go to bed, leaving them laughing and arguing. Tonight she couldn’t wait for Max to arrive, and then studiously avoided any conversation that might address or exclude him. He behaved the same as always. He looked sexy, unshaven but combed, and in good cheer. She left for her room at eleven and undressed for bed. The next day he would probably call her at work and tell her, “I wanted to follow you in there, wanted to get under your Sunday nightie, press at you through the cotton until you woke up, and I’d have to cover your mouth when you came so the others couldn’t hear us,” or something like that, and she would wonder whether she should believe him. But the point was just the phone call and talking about it, anyway. It would make the work night bearable.