Authors: Clea Simon
‘I don’t know, Tris. I’ll try and come, if I can get some work done.’ Somewhere behind Trista, she could hear her petite colleague’s boyfriend beginning to chant: ‘One of us! One of us! One of us!’ She caught the reference –
Freaks
, 1932 – but, for a change, the film reference made her smile. Maybe she was getting over Jonah finally. ‘Better go feed Jerry, Tris. Sounds like he’s getting restless.’
‘OK, Dulcie. But I hope to see you later. And, either way, remember – softball tomorrow at one.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Don’t say it, kid. We’re all nerds, remember? We can take turns in the outfield.’
Cheered by the brief interaction, Dulcie returned to her computer with more energy than she’d felt thus far. She wouldn’t be lying if she actually did some research. A few keystrokes and she was back into a file she’d abandoned weeks before, a survey of critical papers on one of the most popular Gothics,
The Italian.
That novel was rife with the kind of imagery she and Trista had been talking about. Too much so, really. If Dulcie had to read one more reference to ‘tumultuous skies’ or a veil as a metaphor for concealment of just about anything, she’d be sick. Maybe that explained the appeal of
The Ravages.
For all its supernatural elements and improbable plot points – didn’t readers know right from the start that Hermetria would eventually regain her wealth? – it was, in some ways, underwritten. Well, maybe not Demetria’s overwrought speeches. But those weren’t what drew her, were they?
Dulcie closed the file and turned her mind to more contemporary concerns. She’d promised to look for phantom files on her computer. What Stacia had said had rung true; Tim had no sense of personal boundaries. Even though his sleek laptop was years younger and more powerful than her little budget system, if his was busy downloading some pirated Hong Kong flick, he’d have had no qualms about invading her space. She could easily picture him barging into her room – and her cyberspace. The idea that he might have done more than use her system; that he might have left something on her computer, like the dishes he routinely left on the table – or the rug – was both aggravating and vaguely creepy. The ghost of sleazy presence, she thought.
But where would such a file be? She’d flipped open her little laptop half an hour ago, and had already run a couple of ‘find’ functions, searching for anything under the name ‘Alana’, ‘nude’, and ‘hot’. When Trista had called she’d been browsing through the various photos in her computer, mostly opening up file after file of Mr Grey. God, she’d forgotten how cute he was, the way his green eyes seemed to see right into you. He could play the clown as well. She’d found several of the grey cat with his head twisted upside down, white chin up and wide ears flattened out on the carpet. ‘Yes, you look the same from this angle,’ he appeared to be saying. ‘You’re still my Dulcie, always will be.’
Truth was, she’d spent so much time with those photos, she could have gone down to the bar with Trista and had a beer. But it had been a day. Maybe she’d reconsider the softball game tomorrow. For now, she’d move on past the cat photos. Stacia had said that whatever Tim had gotten was embarrassing, but that didn’t mean it was a photo. She opened up her documents file, and was pleased to recognize all the labels; nothing untoward here. She went down the list, looking at stuff dated six months ago, a year. ‘Smollett notes’. Now, why hadn’t she done her thesis on the earlier, humorous writer? She opened the file and started reading: ‘Narrative experiments, the beginning of character-driven fiction’.
That started her thinking. Unlike her attendant Demetria, Hermetria was a great character. Even alone and broke she spoke her mind, standing up to the nobleman who came to woo her and to the various villains – the evil monk and that ambiguous ghost – who braved her mountain home. And she did it all with just one sketchily drawn sidekick.
Maybe it was time to take a larger perspective – the role of the heroine and all that. Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Women
had been published in 1792, a year or two before
The Ravages of Umbria
. Was the unknown author of
The Ravages
making a statement about women helping women? Someone had written about all of this, she vaguely recalled, and dug around till she found it. But the paper, written by a doctoral candidate in California, failed to ignite Dulcie’s own feelings of sisterhood.
‘How could someone write about sexual imagery and be so dull?’ Dulcie skimmed a few pages: characterization and the questioning of noble traits. She shook her head; maybe she was just a jealous spirit. If she’d written on this topic . . . well, if she had, she’d be halfway through her thesis, with no more worries about time – or money – running out. But maybe there’d be a loose end that Dulcie could grab on to; a stray thought that would unravel, giving Dulcie enough yarn to knit her own thesis – a study of the relationship between Hermetria and Demetria, for example. After her eyes had started to close for the fourth time she was ready to call it quits.
‘Enough,’ Dulcie muttered. If this kept up, she’d be seeing the weather as a manifestation of her own mood. With another shake of her curls to wake herself up, she maneuvered the mouse. A bigger page would be easier to read. But just as she clicked down to grab it, something else caught her eye: a file, right by the edge of the desktop, almost buried beneath the icon for the trash.
Dulcie clicked on it and waited for it to open. Was this going to be something from Tim; a compromising photo of Alana or some heavy-metal blog post? Or was it something she herself had meant to discard? Just as in life, sometimes one didn’t hit the basket. But no, it was another picture of Mr Grey, and a glorious one at that. As the pixels resolved, she saw him as he’d been in his prime, posed as if for a formal portrait, sitting up and staring straight at the camera. His silver-grey ruff looked freshly brushed, his long whiskers spread wide. Between the alert, upright pose of his ears and the intense stare of his green eyes, the cat appeared to be staring straight at Dulcie; willing her to concentrate.
‘How could I have meant to trash this?’ She clicked to enlarge. With no room-mate around to make fun of her, she could make this her screen saver; a portrait to remember. But what could that stare be trying to tell her? She shook off the fancy, and was struck by another: what else was poking around the edges of her desktop?
Although the portrait now filled most of her screen, she wiggled the cursor underneath it, next to the trash and the icon that linked her through to the university library. Yes, there was another file. She clicked twice and suddenly her screen flashed. Blank – and then, as she held her breath in a moment’s agony – on again. She let herself breathe again, and then bit her lip. Had anything been lost?
This was a corrupted file. It was damaged somehow, or improperly stored – she’d dealt with those often enough to recognize the garbled icons at its top. If Tim had put it there, he’d probably not bothered to look to see if her aging computer could handle it, or even if her small share of software had the right tools to make it work. She scrolled down its margin. It was some kind of a spreadsheet; once the initial nonsense coding was past, its page split into neat little boxes. Two pages in, she was ready to give up. Whatever the file had held originally, it was worthless now.
Then she saw something, far over on the right. Dulcie shifted the margin and there was a series of numbers. They looked like phone numbers, although some had extra digits. If Tim had been selling drugs, maybe he’d been more organized about his business than he had been about his personal life. But no, if these were phone numbers, the area codes were wrong. He couldn’t have been selling to 718, could he? Or 919. Wasn’t that in North Carolina? Several more columns stretched to the right. Some were blank, but most had been filled out with long strings of numbers and letters. Tim had been taking statistics. Could this be a project? A homework assignment that Luisa had given him, and that they had shared – here, in her room?
The thought repulsed her. That pretty young woman and –
Tim.
She turned and looked at her bed.
Ick.
Swinging back around, she went to close the file. But she must have been moving, the swing of her chair carrying over to her right hand, because whatever she had clicked – something wasn’t right. Instead of that one file closing, everything flashed again, blank, and then back on. But this time, the desktop looked different.
‘Hell, hell, hell.’ The enlarged portrait of Mr Grey was gone. ‘What’d I do?’
She found the oddly named file and clicked on it. ‘ERROR’, the screen read. ‘CORRUPTED FILE/UNABLE TO OPEN’.
‘I
know
it’s corrupted,’ she yelled at the screen as she clicked again. The same message flashed before her. ‘But you opened before . . . Come on!’ She had started talking to machinery; Dulcie knew she was losing it.
‘Calm down, girl.’ She sat back, put her hands in her lap. Tim’s old file – if that’s what it was – was no loss. But could she somehow salvage that lovely portrait of Mr Grey? Dulcie had been working on her old iBook long enough to know its quirks. Picking up the mouse again, she started sliding the cursor around the edges of her desktop.
Something flashed. There! Tentatively, she dragged the icon out from behind the trash. It
looked
like the cat jpeg. She realized she was holding her breath as she clicked it open.
‘Damn!’ What had only minutes before been a glorious photo was now – another spreadsheet. Somehow, that accursed corrupted file had gotten into the only other file she’d had open on her desktop. ‘Damn, damn, damn. Damn you, Tim.’ A flash of guilt ran through Dulcie as she remembered how, in fact, Tim had come to his end. But if he’d been fooling around on her computer, if he was responsible for her losing material – losing a gorgeous photo of Mr Grey in particular – almost, almost he deserved it.
‘Bother.’ Dulcie was feeling a little embarrassed now. Maybe she was overattached to her late pet. Still . . . she scrolled down through the file. How could that beautiful image be gone? Her cursor was flying but all she was seeing were those little rectangular boxes, waiting for data. Three, maybe four pages in, some gibberish started to show up and she slowed her search. Maybe, somewhere in here, she’d find a version of that image.
**)#$**¶•••¶host_i™¢¢¢achi)(••§¢¢™¢¡¡atcho_(ªºæ¬
Were those words? She slowed further and tried to make out the fragments.
©.østint•ªºmac_(§¶Dul•ªª
There! What was that? Was someone spelling out her name? A wave of irritation swept over her. Tim! Wasn’t it enough that his document had somehow gotten into her photo? Had he been gossiping about her, too?
She moved the cursor to the far right, exposing more long strings of gibberish. There was nothing here. Thanks to Tim, the photo of her pet was gone. Even from beyond the grave, he was—
Wait . . . she slowed further. There it was, the ‘Dul’ again; the beginning of her name. Had she been a topic of conversation between Tim and Luisa? Between Tim and who knew who else? She opened the window to its limit, dragging the file to its far edges. The letters kept repeating and then, right as the file reached its end, buried in nonsense, she saw it: lkª8g*(&•¶ghos¡)*i@#he*machi&. ‘Ghost in the machine?’ A literary term showing up in something Tim had written? Maybe he’d learned it from a sci-fi book or something. But there it was again: (•ª¶ghost¶•uuintheººº¶achine. Hadn’t someone else used that expression recently?
She was thinking it through, trying to trace back the reference, when she stopped cold. Two lines later, there it was: •™£§DULCIEWATCHOUT)º∞.
‘Dulce, honey, you’ve had a really stressful day.’ She’d had no choice but to call Suze back, even though by this time, she knew her studious friend would be in bed. ‘I mean, come on, messages in your computer?’
‘I’m not imagining what I read, Suze. I can email it to you, if you like.’
‘No, no, thanks.’ Suze grunted to clear her head. ‘I don’t need a corrupted file messing up my system, too.’
‘But that’s just it, Suze. This file wasn’t corrupted at first. It was a photo of Mr Grey. And then I thought that somehow Tim’s file had gotten into it. But what if that’s not it? I mean, what if this is a warning?’
She could hear Suze yawn and pictured her running her hand through her short, thick hair. ‘A warning from – oh, you mean, from Mr Grey? Your ghost cat version of Mr Grey?’
‘You don’t believe me, I know, Suze. But—’ She was about to argue. She’d seen the file; Suze hadn’t.
‘No, no, Dulcie. I believe that
you
believe. And, hey, cats always do seem a little like they’re in their own alternative universe anyway. I’m just, well, I’m worried about you. Like, why are you home on the computer on a Saturday? Doesn’t your department hang out at the People’s Republik anymore?’
‘Yeah, Trista called a while ago. I just thought I’d do some work instead. I’m thinking that maybe I can do something with female friendships in
The Ravages of Umbria
.’ Suze had minored in women’s studies.
‘Are you telling me I’m not being supportive?’ There was a touch of humor in her voice. ‘The spirit of sisterhood and all that?’
‘No, Suze, I just wish – well, did I tell you about the fish? The fish was gone today. It had become too frantic, they said. And it was just yesterday that my mom said something about “crossing water”, and I was wondering—’
‘Dulcie!’ Suze interrupted her, speaking loudly to be heard. ‘Dulcie, stop it! Listen to yourself. Or, no, even better – do me a favor, will you, hon? Turn off your computer, Dulcie. I think you’re seeing things. I think you’re making connections where there aren’t any, and I think your mother’s craziness is creeping into the spaces where sleep should be. It’s stress, Dulcie. You’ve been through a lot. Now’s not the time to do more work. Go to sleep – and please try to get out of the house tomorrow. Go somewhere there are people – live people. Have some fun.’
Suze didn’t believe her. But what else could Dulcie say? Here she was, reading about friendship and yet in real life she was alienating her closest buddy with all this talk about magic and ghosts. ‘OK, Suze, I’ll try.’ The pause was awkward. Dulcie thought she heard a soft snore. ‘Sorry to have woken you. Go back to sleep, Suze. And, thank you.’ There was a mumble and then the line went dead. Dulcie was alone, once more, with a mystery she couldn’t begin to interpret.