The Hacker and the Ants (8 page)

“Who's that screaming?”

It was Gretchen! I ran full tilt to the bedroom. Gretchen was clawing at the air, unsuccessfully trying to get the headset off. The desk monitor showed a voodoo blur of seething ants, and the skritchy ant sound percolated faintly out of the headset's earphones. The ants completely blocked the view through the screen; they moved about in the self-similar patterns of turbulence—like the smoke of an explosion, like the florets of a cauliflower—three—dimensional patterns of fractal lace, dark patterns veined with thin dotted lines of color. There was no way to see in past the ants to wherever Gretchen had been when they'd come.

Despite Gretchen's terror, the ant patterns were so fascinating that I decided not to turn off the machine. I pulled the headset and gloves off Gretchen and helped her out of the chair and onto my rumpled bed. She was shaking her head and moaning. Tom and Ida were at the bedroom door, looking terribly upset and worried.

“It's okay, kids,” I called. “I was showing cyberspace to this lady and it made her feel sick.”

“She's naked,” said Ida.

“It's okay. Go down to the kitchen and get a snack. Everything's okay.”

“Nothing's okay,” yelled Ida. “I'm going to tell Ma!” She slammed my door shut.

Gretchen was curled up on her side, facing away from the sun porch and staring at the wall. She'd stopped sobbing and was taking low, steady breaths.

“What can I get you?”

“Get away from me,” she said quietly. “You creep. You sick creep.”

“I didn't know the ants would come out at you,” I said. “I'm sorry it happened. It's not my fault. I really like you, Gretchen, I wouldn't want to hurt you.”

Heartened by rage, she sat up and began to dress. “I
ought to sue you,” she said. “And what are you doing bringing your kids in here to stare at me? Call me a cab.”

“I don't think they have cabs in Los Perros, Gretchen. Let me drive you.”

“I want a cab, and I want cab fare. I want four hundred dollars.”

“Is it money you're after? Is that why you came home with me? I hate to tell you, Gretchen, but all I have is a twenty.”

She took a lipstick and compact out of her purse and made up her mouth. “Then write me a check. And, no, I didn't come up here for money, and I resent your implications. But after putting those sick bugs on me, you owe me something. How would you like it if I went to the police?”

“And told them what? That you got scared by something you saw on my computer?”

“No, Jerzy, what if I told them that you got your children to watch us being sexually intimate together? How do you think that would play?”

“Hey, come on now, don't be ridiculous,” I said, meanwhile thinking
Heeeelp!

If you get involved with any kind of charge combining sex and children in the courts, you're totally screwed forever, especially in California. I needed to get Gretchen back on my side, but if I wrote her a check, I'd lose my deniability.
Deniability;
Christ, she had me thinking like a lawyer. All this hassle just to get laid? Maybe feely-blank love-dolls
were
the way to go. I sighed and started talking.

“I won't write you a check because, first of all, I'm not going to be blackmailed on bullshit charges, and, second of all, if I wrote a check it would bounce. I don't get paid till Friday.” I hunkered down beside the bed to put my face at her level. “Be reasonable, honey. We like each
other. Remember how good we made each other feel? Calm down, Gretchen, give me your phone number, and this weekend I'II take you out wherever you want.”

“San Francisco?”

“No problem. We'll get a room at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill. Shopping in Union Square, dinner in North Beach, hit some music clubs—it'll be my pleasure, Gretchen. I
like
you!”

Abruptly she pushed her face forward and gave me a peck on the cheek. “I like you, too, Jerzy. But now take me back to the Roasting. I'm too embarrassed to stay here just now.”

So I ferried her back down the hill, she gave me her number, and I told her I'd call later in the week to fix our plans.

W
HEN I GOT HOME, THE CHILDREN CAME up from the kitchen.

“Okay,” I said to them. “So I had a girlfriend over.”

“You didn't even introduce us,” said Ida.

“Her name is Gretchen. She was mad because I tried to show her cyberspace and it was full of ants. And then she was embarrassed because you saw her naked. Mommy has a boyfriend, doesn't she? Why can't I have a friend over?”

“I wish you and Ma would try to get back together,” said Tom softly.

“You shouldn't feel like it's your responsibility, Tom,” I told him. “If you feel responsible, you'll make yourself unhappy.” I was starting to feel bad and sinful and dirty all over. “Did you children have a snack?”

“There's nothing in the icebox but a half-empty bottle of wine,” said Ida bitterly.

“There's sardines and crackers in the cupboard.”

“I think we'll jam on over to Ma's,” said Tom. “Before rush hour.”

“Well, okay. I've still got to figure out why cyberspace is full of ants. I promise I'll have food for you tomorrow. And no naked women.”

“Of all the outrage,” said Ida half-jestingly, then giving a stagy sigh and shaking her head. “Our so-called father.” Her sad clowning showed that she still loved me. I hugged her and Tom and gave them each a kiss.

“I'm sorry about today. Things got mixed up about Gretchen. She's really very nice. I might have a date with her this weekend.”

“Okay, Da,” said Tom. “Good luck getting rid of your ants!” They drove off in the old Honda. Tom's car now.

I took the rest of the chardonnay out in the backyard and drank it; two glasses worth. It had taken me a while to get the hang of liking chardonnay. Chardonnay wasn't fruity or tangy like the wines I'd had back East. It had a smoky, oily, metallic taste that bloomed at the base of your tongue. You only knew it was better than other wines because it cost more. After the second glass, I could feel the alcohol in my blood: relaxation, euphoria, increased circulation. It was the tail end of a nice spring day.

There had been some rain—for once—last week, and my yard had put forth a green carpet of cloverlike plants with yellow flowers. Before the rain, the ground had been cracked clay with a few lank yellow tufts, and now it was a fairyland. I'd used my computer data base to learn that the plants were called
sorrel
, just like our older daughter, Sorrel, a sophomore in college back East. The leaves of the sorrel plant are pleasantly sour if you chew them.

I started walking around the yard tasting things: nibbling buds off the bushes and trees. Our dog always used to eat grass in the spring. His name was Fluff; Ida had picked the name. When we moved to California, I consigned Fluff to the Humane Society so we could rent Mr.
Nutt's house. No pets allowed! Maybe if we'd kept Fluff and found a different house, Carol wouldn't have left me.

Carol and I stayed married twenty-three years. During that time she often said she'd leave me as soon as she was self-supporting. I'd never believed her, but now she had her own job and she was gone, the bitch. She said I'd stopped loving her, and maybe I had.

Part of the problem was that I hacked too much, and part of the problem was that, over the years, Carol had lost interest in me. Nearly every night, she fell asleep on the couch in front of our digital TV, so why shouldn't I be with my computer? Daytimes weren't so good either, because we never seemed to want to talk about the same things. Science and fantasies interested me, but the little ordinary human things—the kinds of things Carol cared about—I couldn't focus on them.

Now the phone was ringing. Had I reconnected it? Oh, yeah. I shambled into the house and picked it up. It was Carol.

“Jerzy! What did you do to the children today?” Her voice was hard.

“Nothing. What's your problem? I thought we weren't going to talk on the phone anymore!” The last couple of times we'd talked, it had been me who placed the call, angling for her to come back, and Carol had been quite discouraging.

Instead of me, she had her boyfriend, the guy she'd left me for, a thirty-four-year-old sushi chef named Hiroshi. Hiroshi worked at Yong's, a restaurant near the eastside San Jose college where Carol taught. I actually met Hiroshi one time when I accompanied Carol to Yong's. He was a tall, hip guy with a long ponytail that he untucked from his chef's hat when he joined us at our table for a cup of tea. A native-born Californian, Hiroshi spoke perfect English.

I'd sensed Hiroshi and Carol's attraction for each other right away, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. They'd gotten to know each other because Carol was such a glutton for sushi that she came to Yong's for lunch nearly every day. For his part, Hiroshi seemed to find Carol both intellectually fascinating and exotically desirable.

Six weeks after I met Hiroshi, he and Carol were living together. In her parting speech, Carol had said that Hiroshi made her feel young and loved for the first time in years, that Hiroshi listened to her, and that Hiroshi cared about her feelings. “Not like you, Jerzy! You have a heart of stone!” Carol could chatter on endlessly in that vein, babbling out the most hurtful things imaginable, seemingly quite unaware that the despised white middle-aged middle-class male she was addressing was a person with feelings too.

“I saw poor Ida's face at supper,” Carol was saying now. “You can't tell me nothing's wrong. What did you do to them? It's hard enough for me to keep them cheerful now that you've
wrecked
our marriage. You have no idea how it feels for . . .”

It occurred to me that I had nothing whatsoever to gain by listening to yet another of Carol's self-indulgent tirades. “Leave me alone,” I said, and hung up.

It was too cold to go back outside. I was, in fact, shivering. The house was dead quiet; there was no sound but the chattering of my teeth and the distant hum of my computer. I wandered into the living room. There was one of Carol's paintings right over the fireplace. It was a hard-edged cartoonlike landscape with a woman in it. What if I were to slash a big X in the canvas? I was cold, empty, and mean—a man nobody could ever love.

I looked through my CDs and S-cubes, but I couldn't find one I wanted to hear. In the old days—in my thirties—I
liked playing music, but Carol pretty well cured me of that. For some reason she was technically incapable of putting on an S-cube or a CD. Our receiver is, admittedly, kind of funky, with confusing controls and a reset button in back that you have to hit every time the wall plug wiggles in its socket. Even so, Carol could have learned how to use it. But why should she, when it could be something else to bug me about. “Play that old CD I like,” she'd say, depending on me to remember its name. “Or play the new blue S-cube.” Always those same two recordings. Christ.

I was probably better off with Carol out of my life, but Lord the house was empty. Especially once it got dark. Nobody home but me and—Studly! I'd forgotten good old Studly! I found my car keys and went out to the car and opened the trunk.

“Okay, boy, time to get out.”

“Are we at Queue's?”

“No, I didn't go there. I couldn't get any money. I was going to try to get her to sell me some pot.”

“What is pot?” asked Studly as he carefully extricated himself from the trunk. He hoisted himself partly out of the trunk with his arms, put one leg out and extended it to reach the ground, then swung around and got his other leg out too.

“Pot is a special plant leaf which I roll into thin cigarettes to smoke.” A thought hit me. “The butts of the pot cigarettes are thin and little. They're called roaches. Have you happened to find any roaches when you cleaned the house recently?”

“I do not know,” said Studly. “But we can look in my nest. I have an accumulation of seventeen small unclassified objects. Perhaps one or several of them is a roach.”

Studly's nest was a corner of a basement room off the
kitchen. There was a wall socket where he recharged his batteries; and there were tools, parts, and lubricants so he could routinely service himself. Studly plugged in and topped up his power supply while I looked things over. There was a little shelf in Studly's nest where he put unusual things that he picked up around the house. Buttons, a hairpin, a ticket stub, a baby tooth, but no roaches.
Oh well!

“Hey, Studly, let's go upstairs and look at the ants.”

“I can dig it.”

I led Studly up to my computer room. My display screen was still dark with images of ants, busy GoMotion ants weaving the figures of their asymmetrical rounds. Were they waiting for me?

The noise drifting out of the speakers in the headset was sweeter than it had been before, almost musical.

“Why did you try to keep me in there?” I rhetorically asked the ants. “What do you want to show me?”

I picked up the headset.

“Studly, will you stay here and keep an eye on me while I'm wearing the phones?”

“I will watch you.”

“Sit near the plug to the computer there, and if I say ‘Help', then you pull the plug out of the wall and take the goggles off of my head, okay?”

“No problem, Jerzy.”

I put on the gloves and headset and reentered cyberspace. The cloud of ants surrounded me, thick as smoke and shot with twisting lines of color. Instead of trying to back out, I pointed my finger and flew forward. Bingo. I was out of the ant cloud and able to see that Gretchen had moved my viewpoint to the sportswear section of the virtual Nordstrom's department store—a fabulous structure CAD-crafted to resemble a huge Victorian crystal palace of lacy ironwork and frosted glass.