I put my card into the bank's outdoor teller machine
and pushed the buttons to get $200 in cash out of our checking account. “UNABLE TO PERFORM THE REQUESTED TRANSACTION AT THIS TIME,” read the machine's little screen. “PLEASE REMOVE CARD.” I removed it and started over, this time trying to take the money out of the savings. Still no go. Had CarolâI reinserted the card and checked the balances of our checking and savings accounts. The balances were, respectively, $0.00 and $26.18. When our checking account runs short, money is transferred automatically from the savings. Carol had cleaned us out by writing too many checks. I seemed to remember her having mentioned something about having to pay the car insurance bill. I hadn't realized it would come to so much.
I took the last whole $20 out of our savings and put it in my wallet, which gave me $34 dollars in all. Today was Monday, April 27, which meant GoMotion wouldn't transfer my pay till like Friday. I was going to have to go all week on $34? And how was I going to get that pot from Queue? No way she'd take a check. Maybe I should pocket the weed and then pretend I'd forgotten my wallet? Being broke on top of being separated made me feel totally reckless. My mind flashed back to the bell-haired woman in the argyle sweater at the Roasting. I decided to hustle back there and try to talk to her before I did anything else.
I went down back streets the two blocks to the Roasting and yes, yes, the bell-haired woman was still there, sitting with the artsy-craftsy phone-toting woman I'd seen talking to Susan Poker before. But, despite her company, the bell-haired woman was definitely the type for me.
She had slightly stunned eyes and a plumpness in her neck beneath her chin. She was like someone's sexy Mom, and I was old enough to be Daddy. I got a coffee
with sugar and cream, sat down on a bench near her, and looked at her anew with each sip of my coffee. She noticed, she looked back at me, she looked again, our eyes met, and I smiled. Smoothly and deliberately, she stuck out her tongue and pressed it tight against her upper lip. Definitely a signal. In the past, women had occasionally given me such come-ons, but as a cautious married man I'd always passed them up. Today things would be different. I stood up and I walked over to her. I felt light-headed; my blood was pounding in my ears.
“Hi,” said I. “You're really pretty.”
She laughed softly. “I was hoping you'd talk to me. Where are you from?”
“I live right here in Los Perros. My name's Jerzy?” I stuck out my hand. She took it lightly. The touch of her hand was firm and warm.
“I'm Gretchen. And this is my friend Kay.” I nodded to stocky Kay and concentrated on Gretchen.
“What kind of work do you do?” asked Gretchen.
“I'm a computer programmer. I'm helping to design a personal robot. We're going to call it the Veep. Like vice president?”
“Oh.” Gretchen turned and said something to her friend, then turned back to me. “Do you work in an office?”
“No, I work at home. I'm all alone there. My wife left me six weeks ago.”
Gretchen looked very interested. “Are you planning to sell the property?”
“Don't tell me you're a Realtor!”
“I do a variety of things,” she said, her calm California eyes drilling into mine. Again she did that thing with her tongue.
“Would you like to come up to my house and look around?”
“Sure,” said Gretchen. “Why not.”
She talked some more with Kay, tying up loose ends, and then she walked slowly with me to my car and got in. Close up, she had tired eyes.
“Do you want anything?” I asked Gretchen.
She looked languidly greedy. “How about some fine wine? And two packs of Kents.”
The two crazy liquor store clerks were behind the counter, the thin giggling bearded one and the bowling pinâshaped one with the mustache. One of the nice things about California was how many workaday jobs were held by freaks. I got a bottle of good chardonnay and the Kents. It came to thirteen dollars and change. And then I was back in the car with Gretchen. This beautiful new woman was sitting in the bucket seat of my Animata, looking at her makeup in the mirror on the visor, fixing her face with the calm seriousness of a grown woman, her actual soft butt on the real leather of my car.
“I'm stoked,” said I. “I'm ready to party.”
Gretchen smiled. “I'm eager to see your house.” Again I studied her eyes. They were blue and . . . blank?
“I can show you my computer.”
“Yippee,” said Gretchen softly, and lit a cigarette. “I failed math in high school.”
“Are you from around here?”
“No, I'm from the Southland. Buena Park?”
“That's near LA?”
“Not far from Disneyland. That used to be my summer job.”
“You worked in
Disneyland
? Wow. Talk about a real Californian. What did you do?”
“My last summer there I got to be Alice in Wonderland. In the parades?”
“God, Gretchen, that's heavy. Did the men ever hit on you?”
“The single Dads. You had to look out for them. If they got too insistent, I'd look at Baloo Bear a special way, and he'd talk to them.”
“I'm a single Dad, Gretchen.” I laid my hand on her leg above the knee. She regarded me calmly, not moving my hand away.
A few minutes later I was back in my driveway. It was quarter past one. Though my oldest daughter Sorrel was off at college, son Tom and daughter Ida were still students at Los Perros High. They usually stopped by around three-thirty to regroup before heading across town to Carol's. That gave Gretchen and me two clear hours.
“Nice big place,” said Gretchen. “Do you own it?”
“I rent.” A wrong answer. I was tracking Gretchen's interest level as closely as an over-leveraged speculator watching a stock price. I hurried to get the door open. Gretchen ambled in slowly.
“Where's the powder room?”
“Right over there. I'll open the wine.”
I went down to the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine. Glasses which Carol had bought in Mexico two years ago. I tore my thoughts away from that.
Don't stop to think, Jerzy, just do!
Gretchen was pacing around the living room, looking unexpectedly dynamic. “I love your things, Jerzy. All those seashells. Want to show me around the rest of the place?”
“Sure, Gretchen, I'd love to.” Graciously she took her wineglass, clinked it with mine, and gave a simpering, slightly naughty giggle. Who said middle-aged people couldn't still have fun? I led her off on the house tour.
Our big old two-level house had a linoleum kitchen and dining area downstairs. At one end of the upstairs was a low-ceilinged living room with redwood paneling.
A long hall ran along the front of the house from the living room to the other end of the house. The kids' three bedrooms were off the long hall, and at the end of the hall was my (and formerly Carol's) bedroom, a nice space that boasted a sun porch and a working fireplace, no less.
“What are those gloves and goggles,” Gretchen asked me when we reached the sun porch. “Were you and the wife into bondage?” She laughed softly and took a sip of her wine.
“I work in virtual reality,” I told her. “Cyberspace?”
Gretchen looked enthusiastic. Cyberspace was big again, getting more popular every day. “That's great! Can I try?”
A wave of hominess engulfed me. I stepped forward and put my arms around her. “Sure you can try it,” said I. “Everything I own is yours, Gretchen in Wonderland.”
“How sweet.”
We put down our wineglasses and I took her in my arms. Gretchen cocked her head and kissed me full on. Her mouth tasted cool and good. We made our way to the bed and lay down. Her sweater and skirt came off easily. She wore silky skin-colored underwear, and that came off easily too. I kissed her breasts and then I put on a rubber and we fucked. She wrapped her legs around my waist and moaned really loud, which made me feel great. She even said my name: “Jerzy, Jerzy, oh Jerzy!” All right.
After we came, we wandered naked into the sun porch. My windows looked out on pure nature: the live oaks and eucalypti of the dry gully behind the house. There were squirrels and birds. Standing there naked with Gretchen it felt like we were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sometimes Carol and I had stood here like this.
“I still want to see cyberspace,” said Gretchen, brushing my arm with the tip of a tit.
“One thing,” I cautioned. “I got a kind of infection in my machine this morning, a thing like a computer virus. We call them ants. It's possible they might make it . . . malfunction.”
“Are you going to show me cyberspace or not?” demanded Gretchen.
“Oh, sure, I guess it's okay,” said I, unable to resist finding out if this were true.
I turned on the computer and Gretchen watched me type in my cyberspace access code. Then I helped her don the gloves and headset. She sat in my desk chair, turning her head this way and that, while my desk monitor showed what she was seeing. I was ready to pull the plug if anything was weird, but so far everything looked normal. Gretchen was in my virtual office with Roarworld in the background.
“Dinosaurs!” exclaimed Gretchen in the too-loud voice of a person wearing earphones. “This is wonderful, Jerzy. Can I move around?”
I took her hand in mine and pushed the fingers into a pointing position. With my other hand I nodded her head to make her start flying. The screen images zoomed among the dinosaurs. I closed her fingers into a fist to make the motion stop. Gretchen understood and began flying around at will. Roarworld is quite shallow: its depth axis wraps after forty feet, meaning that if you fly forty feet deep into Roarworld, you find yourself back where you started. After she'd figured this out, Gretchen focused back on my virtual office.
It was fun to stand back and watch this naked, goggled woman sitting in my desk chair and moving her hands and head so oddly as she explored the invisible office that is layered over my sun porch. I kept a close eye on the screen, watching for any return of the antsâbut there was no sign of them. Maybe the ant explosion
was confined to the room at the end of the hall at GoMotion. But why had the ants put me on the dark dream; and how had they done it so easily?
As well as a door to GoMotion, my virtual office had a door to the Bay Area Netport. The Netport door was round and was patterned with the light gray-and-green yin-yang that was the Bay Area Netport logo. Gretchen flew on in there as I watched along on my computer's screen.
Some nostalgic, displaced hacker had designed the Bay Area Netport to look like the waiting room of Grand Central Station in New York City. This cavernous simmie was programmed to be gravity-free, and you would see people's body images floating around all over the mock steam-age space. Collision detection was usually turned off in these public spaces, so that if you bumped into someone else's tuxedo, you would pass right through it. Ranged all along the walls, floor, and ceiling were hyperjump nodes: the gates, or magic doors, that opened into the different cyberspace worlds accessible in one jump from the Bay Area Netport. The nodes were shaped like spheres, so that you could dive into a node from any direction.
Set here and there in the walls were square portals marked “REST ROOM.” These were places for meeting people and for tweaking your tuxedo. Gretchen flew into the closest rest room and looked into the mirror.
“God, I look like
you
, Jerzy,” shouted Gretchen. “Can't you get me a female tux?” I did in fact have a tux patterned after Carol, but I didn't want Gretchen to wear it.
I leaned close to her headset so she could hear me. “Maybe later. Why don't you go ahead and stay in my tux for now? There's still a lot to see.”
“All right,” said Gretchen, drifting back out into the Netport. “Which way to Magic Shell Mall? I read an article about Magic Shell Mall just last week.”
“It's right over there on the wall to your left. The extra big node that's flashing pink and light blue?”
Just as Gretchen pointed her finger to fly into the cyberspace mall, my doorbell rang. Shit! Already quarter to four! It was one of the kids!
“Gretchen, I gotta get the door. Don't worry. I'll keep them out of here. Have fun.”
I threw on some clothes and left my bedroom, closing the door. I'd say hi to the kids and come right back.
Tom was at the door, tall and full of beans. He had bracesâthe main reason I'd quit teaching and moved to California was to get enough money to pay for the children's braces and college. Tom had grown something like six inches in the last year, and now he was taller than me. He was wonderfully enthusiastic about life.
“Hi, Da!” He poked me playfully in the side, right under my ribs. “Let's play suckling pigs on Daddy!”
“Stop it!” I cried, clamping my elbows against my side in self-defense. Tom kept poking, rotating his fist back and forth to achieve a grinding motion. “Get your hands off me, Tom, or I'll beat you! Stop it!” I deepened my voice to sound more authoritative. Tom was whooping and laughing. I made fists, stuck out the knuckles of my middle fingers, and pushed against Tom's hard-muscled stomach, trying to give as good as I got.
There was a squeal as wide-faced, grinning Ida entered the fray as well. “Get Da!” she hollered, and set her fists to rooting against my abdomen. Ida was always ready to join in wild fun.
I fell to the floor with the two kids on top of me. I rapped on Tom's shin hard enough to give him pause, and managed to squirm free, though Ida still hung onto one foot. Tom was just about to start back in on me when Ida sat up, looking puzzled.