================================================
InterText Vol. 6, No. 6 / November-December 1996
================================================

  Contents
  
    FirstText: Double Sixes... .......................Jason Snell
    
  Short Fiction

    When Something Goes...............................Neal Gordon

    Come With Me....................................Duane Simolke

    The Web.........................................Russell Butek

    Gone..............................................Craig Boyko

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@intertext.com                    geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
    Assistant Editor                     Send correspondence to 
    Susan Grossman                        editors@intertext.com
    susan@intertext.com              or intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
    Submissions Panelists:
    Brian Byrne, Susan Grossman, Rod Johnston, Pete Jones,
    Morten Lauritsen, Jason Snell, Paul Tekverk
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 6, No. 6. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this 
  magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold 
  (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire 
  text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1996, Jason Snell. 
  Individual stories Copyright 1996 their original authors. 
  For more information about InterText, send a message to
  info@intertext.com. For writers' guidelines, mail
  guidelines@intertext.com.
....................................................................



  FirstText: Double Sixes... and Lucky Seven?  by Jason Snell
=============================================================

  This issue marks the end of our sixth year publishing InterText, 
  dating back to a time when nobody had heard of the Web, let 
  alone had enough time to get sick of the phrase 
  www.something.com.

  In many ways, this has been the toughest year of InterText since 
  the first one. Everyone involved with the magazine has been 
  pulled in countless directions at once, and it's been a minor 
  miracle that we've managed to release our requisite six issues 
  during the calendar year of 1996 -- to which this issue, which 
  is being turned loose on the Internet on the penultimate day of 
  1996, can attest. We made it, but it's been a tougher struggle 
  than it's ever been before.

  That said, I also need to recognize that we couldn't have done 
  this without the help of our new volunteers, who have assisted 
  in evaluating story submissions and even proofreading advance 
  copies of issues. Without them, we might not have put out those 
  six issues, and even if we had, the quality level wouldn't have 
  been as high as it has been.

  In the coming year, it's still my intention to put out six 
  issues of InterText, and have them appear every two months as 
  we've been doing since 1991. But depending on how it all goes, 
  we may be forced to shift gears and look at a different 
  production schedule. In past years, each InterText issue has 
  provided five or six short stories, but this year we've been 
  hitting the bare minimum of four stories with regularity. If it 
  would make our jobs easier and improve the quality of InterText 
  to start putting out issues on a quarterly basis, that may be 
  what we have to do. I hope it doesn't come to that -- after all, 
  I used to dream of putting out eight or 12 issues of InterText 
  in a year, and never considered cutting back to four.

  But times have changed. I only have to look at the state of 
  Quanta, the fine Science Fiction magazine that in many ways led 
  to the creation of InterText. Dan Appelquist, Quanta's creator, 
  is still working on his magazine, but we haven't seen an issue 
  of Quanta since July of 1995. I sympathize with Dan, because I 
  know just how hard things have been for me. It was easier for us 
  all when the Internet was younger and we were all college 
  students.

  As I write this, 1996 is about to end. I know that 1997 will 
  bring more wonderful stories that InterText will be able to 
  bring to thousands of readers on the Internet. I don't know if 
  1997 will also mark a rebirth for the magazine, if we'll keep 
  plugging along like we have been, or if we may have to scale 
  back some. But we'll be here. And I'm glad that you're along for 
  the ride.

  --

  If you're interested in lending a hand with InterText -- whether 
  as a story evaluator or proofer -- drop a note to 
  jsnell@intertext.com.


  When Something Goes   by Neal Gordon
======================================
....................................................................
  People always talk about family being important. When a part of 
  it goes away, you realize what that really means.
....................................................................

  A spider's web floating in the air lands, ear-cheek-nose, across 
  my face. Instinctively, I close my eyes and reach for it. My 
  mother told me when I was seven that spiders put out the little 
  filaments like parachutes, lots of them, until the wind catches 
  them and the spider is picked up and transported. She called the 
  strands gossamers. "Angels collect the little strings and sew 
  them into wings," she said. "They're the thread of angels." We 
  were in the garden looking at her roses and azaleas and a silk 
  thread had drifted into us.

  She reached out with the steak knife and cut off a bachelor's 
  button for me. "Now you don't ever have to get married," she 
  said, calming my fears about being asked to a girl's birthday 
  party.

  I'm the first one home. Sarah won't get in until tomorrow. 
  Funeral's day after. I grew up in this house. Sarah grew up in 
  the old one in Des Moines. I still have a room here, somehow, 
  even after nine years. The front door's not even locked. Who's 
  got Sam? The place seems odd without her barking.

  I drop my bags inside the door, leaving it open to air the 
  house, turn and go back out. I should go by and see Mrs. John, 
  thank her for calling me. Ask about Sam. I walk out and across 
  the street, past Jerry and Alice Satory's big yard to the tiny 
  green house. I knock, loudly.

  "That you, Ty?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Come in, come in," Mrs. John calls from behind the front door 
  screen.

  "Nice to see you again," I say, walking into the living room, 
  touching her arm slightly as I pass. Her flesh is very soft. She 
  points to the wingback chair and I sit in it. The radio plays 
  the baseball game.

  She is a big German woman. Her vision is getting worse every 
  year -- I know from the writing in the birthday cards she still 
  sends me with two dollars in them. The same two dollars I've 
  gotten every year since we moved here when I was six. Now, at 
  twenty-nine, I wonder how many more years she'll be sending 
  them.

  "I wanted to say thanks for calling," I start, but she puts up a 
  hand to me. She was my mother's best friend.

  "I baked a pie for you. Don't let me forget it."

  "Thank you," I say, looking at the threadbare gray carpet of her 
  living room. This heat, without air conditioning, and she baked 
  something. I look up slightly, seeing her knee-high stockings 
  over those big legs that aren't very sturdy. "Would you like to 
  ride with us to the funeral?" I ask.

  "No, that's for you kids. Family, you know, just family," she 
  says leaning forward, her hand on her knee. She blushes a bit, 
  the old rose growing back into her cheeks as the fan sweeps the 
  air past her, moving her hair. She tucks the loose hair behind 
  her ear as delicately as if she were a girl of sixteen.

  "You're family," I say, quietly.

  "I'll go with Tom Brodie," she says. For a moment, no one speaks 
  and I'm struck with a memory of sitting on her back porch, 
  listening to her tell me about her late husband and how he used 
  to play baseball for the St. Louis Browns. Third base. She 
  showed me his old glove and let me put my hand inside. It was 
  hard and stiff, but it felt like baseball, and all my ideas of 
  it. He had big hands.

  She taught me how to throw a spitball. How to line up the seams 
  and scuff 'em with your glove and work spit into that place so 
  the ball would just sail.

  "Sarah's coming in tomorrow. It's just a drive for me, so I came 
  on right away after making arrangements."

  She settles back into her chair with a sigh. "I've been sitting 
  here all day, listening to the game and remembering. Pat had the 
  most beautiful hollyhocks in town, you know. We used to sit on 
  that little patio back there and have a drink and listen to the 
  locusts." I can remember leaning out the back door and asking 
  Mom if it was okay for me to go to the movies, or to the park, 
  or downtown. Watching the two of them split a beer. And that 
  electric noise of the cicadas in the trees.



  Later, I'm sitting in the bathtub. It's an old iron one, with 
  curled feet under it and a body about three feet deep. Full of 
  hot water. I'm reading the latest letter from Anne's lawyer. 
  Sarah's acting as mine. It's about division of marital property. 
  There are two lists; things she thinks are hers and things she 
  thinks are mine. Everything has a dollar amount next to it. The 
  rest of the stuff is up for grabs, I guess. I'm supposed to 
  decide what I want. I really haven't had much say in things so 
  far. She left, so she's handling everything. It's not her fault 
  that it won't, didn't, work out.

  I close my eyes and lean back, soaking. Mom would tell me to get 
  out of the tub -- it's thundering outside. "Water is a great 
  conductor," she'd say, leaning in the door, rolling her eyes. 
  I'd be embarrassed that I was talking to her from the bath, and 
  she'd laugh and come in and sit down on the toilet and keep 
  talking. Mom never saw me as anything but her youngest child. 
  None of us was very private. It's one of the things Anne had a 
  hard time adjusting to. I listen to the rain for a minute.

  I can remember standing on Sarah's balcony atop the back porch, 
  one night when I was fourteen. It was summer and Sarah was in 
  law school and I had taken over her room. I was wearing 
  headphones at about two-thirty in the morning, listening to a 
  radio station that doesn't come in during the day. There aren't 
  many good stations up here, but at night you get more of them. 
  It helps that we live on top of a hill.

  I was looking out over the backyard, past the fence and over 
  neighbors' backyards down our block and up the hill of the next. 
  All the yards were laid out under the moon. At first I could 
  barely see the heat lightning way off north. It grew slowly, and 
  I could only see the effect of the black clouds overtaking the 
  bright stars. It was like the stars were being turned off. When 
  I could hear the thunder over the music, I counted, under my 
  breath, between the sight and the sound. The storm came in and I 
  went back inside and lay in my bed watching the lightning, 
  hearing the storm's voice and thinking about Sarah's being gone.



  It's almost midnight when I call Annie.

  "Hello, Anne?"

  "Mmmm... Tyler?" I woke her up.

  "I shouldn't have called."

  "It's late. What's the matter?" Her sound is thick, syrup.

  "My mother died."

  "Where are you?" I know her eyes open in the dark, wide.

  "At Mom's house. Home."

  "Are you alone?"

  "Just me and the house. Even Sam's at the kennel."

  "You shouldn't be alone." Her voice is gentle.

  "It's okay. I just thought you should know."

  "You should have called me, I'd have gone with you."

  "Would you?"

  "Yes," she says, but it's a very quiet yes. A hard-to-admit yes, 
  a late-at-night-only yes. Like something that's covered with 
  tissue paper but you can still tell what it is. We both hear it.



  I climb into my old bed, the bed I grew up in. Twin beds are big 
  enough if there's only one person in them. I'm used to a 
  queen-sized, but the only queen-sized is Mom's. I'm okay in 
  here.



  When I get back with Sam from the kennel, Sarah is sitting in 
  the living room. Sam looks at her and turns towards the kitchen. 
  The dog never did like her. I start for a second realizing just 
  how much Sarah looks like Mom: thick black hair and deep laugh 
  lines. Mom was more relaxed, though; Sarah is stiffer. Mom would 
  be sitting back in the chair, but Sarah sits on the lip, with a 
  print cotton skirt over her knees. "The front door was open, so 
  I just came in," she says, getting up to hug me.

  "It's your house as much as mine." It feels nice to be hugged.

  "We need to talk about the house and everything, don't we?" She 
  pulls back some, like Dad always did when it was time for a 
  talk.

  "Yeah, I guess so. Mom wanted us to divide things ourselves if 
  we could. If not, she left a list."

  "Well, you're in charge, she never talked to me about it." She 
  begins to guide me toward the front door. "Let's go for a walk," 
  she says. "I don't want to be in here." Outside, she takes hold 
  of my arm and we cut across the yard, heading up the hill toward 
  the Presbyterian Church. We don't say anything for a few 
  minutes.

  "Do you want the house?" she begins.

  "Do you?"

  "No, but I thought we could sell it." We're walking past the 
  Dean's house. Its blue Victorian trim looks freshly painted. 
  It's a fine house.

  "I don't want to," I say without looking at her. There's been 
  some work done around the eaves.

  "What are you going to do with it? I mean, especially now that 
  you're divorced?" I wince and my eyes move down the house.

  "I'm not divorced..." The basement windows haven't been painted.

  "And I know you could use the money." A green hose snakes away 
  from the water spigot.

  "It's my house..." It moves through the grass, coiling around 
  the Japanese maple.

  "I know, but let's try to be reasonable. You need to think about 
  what you want." She tugs on my arm, but I can't seem to pull my 
  eyes from the garden hose. It ends in the flower bed. The water 
  is running over johnny-jump-ups and peonies and mums. You 
  shouldn't water flowers in direct sunlight. It can kill them. 
  You've got to be careful with things like that. "Now that the 
  restaurant is popular, you can't live here, and you can't keep 
  the place up otherwise."



  We sit on the hill of the Presbyterian church. it's the highest 
  point on our end of town. We used to come here when we were kids 
  and watch the fireworks. They always mowed the lawn just before, 
  and you could smell the freshly cut grass, feel it poking the 
  back of your legs through the blanket. The sky would be full 
  with exploding stars and M-80s that you felt in your chest a 
  split second before you heard them in your ears. When it was 
  over, the sky looked out-of-proportion big and the stars were 
  dull as you waited for one more volley. The sky was huge. I lean 
  back in the grass.

  "So you want the silver and the china?" I say, feeling like a 
  game-show host instead of a grieving son. And the rest of that 
  on a Spiegel gift certificate, Ron. I chuckle at the thought, 
  and Sarah looks at me.

  "I think we should keep them together." She spreads her skirt 
  over her knees.

  "I'll take the round table, and the chairs." I feel a little 
  queasy.

  "Do you want the sideboard?"

  "Not particularly," I say, getting up. "Let's go back."



  From a block away I see the car in the street and stop dead. I 
  helped her pick it out a year ago; I should recognize it. Anne's 
  here. It takes a moment for Sarah to figure it out. "What's she 
  doing here?" she asks.

  The front door is still open when we get there. "Annie?" I yell 
  out. No answer. Her stuff is on the stairs, though. She brought 
  an overnight and there is a clothing bag hanging from the 
  railing. I go upstairs, expecting the bathroom to be closed. 
  It's not. "Check the back patio," I yell down to Sarah. I turn 
  into my room and there are American Beauties on my neatly made 
  little bed.

  I walk back downstairs just in time to see Anne coming out of 
  Alice Satory's backyard, azaleas in hand, still talking and 
  waving back. I'm struck by how good she looks, her strawberry 
  blond hair loose and a yellow skirt flowing around her legs. 
  Alice's yard is lined with dark evergreens along the back and 
  Anne seems highlighted against them. Alice and my mom would take 
  a wheelbarrow out there with buckets and gardening tools and 
  pick the raspberries and strawberries and huckleberries that 
  grew between the trunks of the trees. I can remember seeing 
  Mom's backside sticking out between the trees.

  Anne gives me a hug and a small kiss and I squeeze her a moment, 
  remembering how nice she feels. It's been a couple of months 
  since we've seen each other. The only real separation since we 
  met nine years ago. "Where's Sarah?"

  "Out back," I say, starting to let go, but she pulls me closer. 
  Into her neck, I mumble, "Thanks for--"

  "Sssshhhh. You're still my husband." Sarah comes back in and she 
  and Anne exchange nods. They used to be close, like sisters 
  maybe. Sarah's my lawyer now, though, and she turns up the 
  stairs.

  "Can you give me a hand a moment, Anne?" she says over her 
  shoulder.

  "Sure," Annie says, backing away from me without looking away. 
  Her free hand catches the banister perfectly, and she slowly 
  turns up the stairs. The azaleas are for Sarah's bed, I guess.

  I stand, listening at the bottom of the stairs as they walk down 
  the hall. "I didn't think you'd be coming," Sarah says.

  "I thought I should."

  "For him or for Mom?" I hear Sarah as she closes the door to 
  Mom's room. Without really thinking, I walk into the living 
  room, losing the conversation for a moment. The house used to 
  have steam heat and there are these round grates between all of 
  the floors. We're not a very private family. I stand under the 
  one to the bedroom, looking out the front window at the street 
  and listening to them upstairs.

  "Well, I don't think it's very decent of you to come here, 
  knowing he's upset about the divorce," Sarah says.

  "We're not divorced," Anne says. A green pick-up truck passes. 
  Looks like Moraine's.

  "Then what are all of those letters I keep getting from your 
  lawyer about?"

  "I'm not sure about the whole thing." I look up, wanting to read 
  Annie's face. There are silver cobwebs in the grate.

  "This is a damn good time to be unsure, after you've screwed 
  him."

  "Why are you suddenly acting like you care about him?" I hear 
  Anne's voice rise like when we fought about having children and 
  when she told me she'd slept with my ex-friend Dodge.

  "Because he's my brother and my client, and I won't have you 
  come here and upset him any more." I feel sick with the memory 
  of Sarah protecting me. When I was ten she pulled two boys off 
  of me in a fight. I started crying, not because I was hurt but 
  because I was so mad.

  "He called me and wanted me to come."

  "When?" She couldn't understand that it was okay to be mad and 
  fighting and ten years old, and I was too mad to speak.

  "Last night, late." There is a long silence.

  "I hear you've got another lover." Sarah can be very 
  condescending. She is much older than Anne in some ways.

  "I left him. It wasn't right." Annie's voice cracks. Someone 
  sits down on the big bed. I can hear it.

  "Well, good. I hope it was awful," Sarah says quickly.

  "I don't have to listen to this." The begonias in the living 
  room are blooming, I notice.

  "What makes you think you can come here after you've pulled all 
  this crap?" One of them moves across the room and I look up 
  again.

  "He called."

  "Of course he called. He loves you. And you'd better understand 
  the responsibility of that." A shoe steps on the grate. It's 
  Sarah's shoe, and I step out of view.

  "I do."

  There is some quiet talk that I can't hear, as I think about who 
  is responsible for what. She had said that I'd lost myself in 
  the restaurant. That I'd let go of the things she wanted from 
  me. I didn't let go; I just got too busy to live.

  "He's going to be very successful, now that the restaurant is 
  getting good reviews," Sarah says, after some time. She sounds a 
  little softer. I think Annie's been crying. I go out to the 
  front porch.



  At dinner time, I'm in the kitchen with Anne. She's taking the 
  peeled sections out of oranges for a salad. I showed her how to 
  take the peel off and then the individual sections out of their 
  skins.

  "I hear you're dating," I say. I don't think she knows that I 
  listened earlier.

  "No, I'm not," she says, picking up another orange.

  "Oh." I start to pick the cooked chicken meat from the bone for 
  the chicken-walnut sandwiches. There are lots of tendons and 
  small bones that you have to watch out for. I throw a piece of 
  the chicken meat to Sam, who snaps it out of the air. Her thick 
  tail slaps the ground.

  "Are you?"

  "No," I say without looking up. This is a very complicated task 
  that requires attention.

  "I did see someone for awhile," she says. "What else do you want 
  in this?"

  "Do some of those pears. What happened?" I say, looking over at 
  her. I have to stop what I'm doing to do this.

  She looks straight at me. "I had to tell him everything. We 
  didn't have anything between us."

  "Oh."

  "He didn't know me."



  After dark, the three of us are sitting on the back patio. It is 
  so dark that I can see only outlines, shadows. The crickets have 
  replaced the cicadas' rhythmic whir. I feel much better than 
  last night.

  "This was a lot worse for me when Dad died," Sarah says.

  "I was just there with Mom, mostly. I couldn't break down until 
  it was over."

  "What was he really like?" Annie asks Sarah.

  I hear Sarah's ice cubes clink in her glass as she sits back. 
  "Firm but very fair. Like when I got hit by a car--"

  "When did you get hit by a car?" I've never heard about it.

  "Way before you were born. A lot happened before you were born, 
  Newt. Dad spanked me the next day. I know he didn't want to, but 
  I think he really felt like he was supposed to. I think he did a 
  lot of things because he thought he was supposed to." She takes 
  a small sip of her drink. She hasn't called me Newt in ten years 
  or so. It was Dad's name for me.

  "That's not the way I remember him. I remember that he always 
  knew exactly what he was doing." I look at Annie; she's heard my 
  side.

  "He just acted that way around you. He used to call me in 
  college and ask me how he should handle things with you."

  "You're kidding."

  "No, he really worried about how you and he were. Everyone knew 
  you were Mom's. I used to be mad at you that he died first. 
  Isn't that stupid?" I shift a bit in my seat and so does Anne. 
  It's funny to think of my family talking about me. And Sarah 
  getting upset. We all sit still for a minute.

  "He used to wash his feet in the bathroom sink," I say, more for 
  myself than for anyone.

  "With Ivory soap. I used to sit there, talking, while he stood 
  on one foot, washing the other," Sarah adds. Anne laughs.

  "Why did he do that?"

  "I never thought to ask at the time, but I found out from Mom 
  that when he was in the war he didn't want to catch anything and 
  he really didn't get a chance to bathe too often so he washed 
  his feet in his helmet instead," Sarah says and sets her empty 
  drink on the ground.

  "I tried to wash my feet like that a few times, but I had to sit 
  on the sink ledge because I was too short, and Mom had a fit."

  "I'm going up to bed." Sarah says and stands. The crickets stop 
  chirping and I hear Sam stretch and get up.

  When the back porch screen bangs closed, Anne puts a hand out to 
  me. "I've really missed you," she says. The top of my chest 
  feels tight. I can't say anything. The crickets start their 
  chorus again, reassured by my silence.

  "I'm not going through with the divorce, unless you want me to 
  because of what I did," she says.

  "It's history. I never wanted you to leave in the first place."

  "I'm going to bed. Coming?"

  "Yes," I barely say, standing. My knees are a little shaky.



  Lying in bed, Annie's arm across my stomach, her head on my 
  shoulder, I stare out the window of my room. This is the same 
  window I have looked out for years. I've seen the seasons change 
  here enough times to know exactly what they look like. I know 
  the way the backyards look under the blue streetlight in winter, 
  when everything is asleep. I know that our yard gets more leaves 
  on it than Brodie's. I know it perfectly.

  "I think we should try dating first," she says into my neck. I 
  can feel her breath on me.

  "You sure?" I can hear Sam's legs move; she's dreaming.

  "More than I was when I left." I feel her kiss my shoulder.

  "You'll have to get used to a dog," I laugh.

  "Okay."

  Twin beds are too small for two people, but for right now, it's 
  fine.



  Mom is shaking me. "You're wasting the day," she whispers into 
  my ear. I hunch my shoulders and giggle, pulling the covers up 
  around me. I know the blankets are untucked at the bottom of the 
  bed but my feet don't reach down there yet, anyway. "Do you want 
  to go to the store with me?"

  "Yeah." I sit up.

  "Then get cleaned up quick. I'm going in ten minutes."

  At the grocery, she pushes the cart. "Get a cantaloupe," she 
  directs me and I go over and begin to pick them up, one by one, 
  until I find the heaviest.

  I hand it to her. "This one?"

  "Well, it's pretty good, but it's not ready. You see the little 
  veins on it?" she says, tracing one with her pinkie.

  "Yeah." I trace one too.

  "When the color between the little veins is orange, then it's 
  ripe. Otherwise they're still green, and you have to wait."

  "Okay," and I start to look for another one. When I find it we 
  buy both; the other one will be ripe in a few days.



  When I wake up, Annie is gone and I smell the air outside 
  through the open window. The Satorys are mowing their lawn. I 
  look out the window at the two of them. Jerry pushes the mower 
  in diagonal stripes over the yard while Alice works along the 
  edge of the sidewalk. The lawn is different colors of green 
  depending on which way the mower went over it, like velour. I'm 
  nine blocks away from my mother's body, but she is still in this 
  house. Out back by the gate fertilizing her hollies, tying Sam 
  to the run, or digging grass out from between the bricks of the 
  patio like Alice is doing. Today, I put my mother in the ground 
  that she loves, that I love, so much. I wish we could bury her 
  in her own garden or back under the evergreens and strawberries 
  across the street. That's where she belongs.



  "We're going to try to work things out," I say to Sarah, sitting 
  together while people come by to shake my hand and say, "Hello. 
  Your mother was..." Annie is talking to Pastor Lucas. I can see 
  them.

  "I know."

  "Mom would be happy, don't you think?"

  "Mom's happy regardless of what you do."

  "What do you think?"

  "I don't think this is the place," Sarah says, leaning forward 
  to hug Mrs. Paterson, whom she doesn't know. Then she leans over 
  to me and hugs me tight, just for a moment, and I know she's 
  happy from the hitch in her throat. She protects me because she 
  loves me.



  When we get back to the house, there is a sort of reception. 
  People come by. I know almost all of them, Sarah knows less, 
  Anne knows most of the ones I do. In the afternoon, I go out in 
  the backyard. I sit down next to the garden and let the tears 
  come up. Mom's flowers are better than the ones at the church, I 
  decide, and somehow this stops the crying. Then I see the steak 
  knife in the dirt. I pick it up and go over to cut a bachelor 
  button to put it in my lapel, but then I think better of it and 
  cut an azalea instead. I put the knife in my pocket. I need to 
  tell Sarah that, more than anything, I want this.


  Neal Gordon (gordon@ea.pvt.k12.pa.us)
---------------------------------------
  Neal Gordon studied writing at the University of Iowa and 
  completed his graduate work at Temple University, during which 
  time he published several stories, including an excerpt from his 
  unpublished novel. He currently teaches at the Episcopal Academy 
  in Philadelphia and works with the Working Writers Group, a 
  long-running critical group.



  Come With Me   by Duane Simolke
=================================
...................................................................
  What one person sees as a cross to bear, another can see as a 
  tremendous gift.
...................................................................

  Faster, louder, faster, louder, the alarm clock beeped. Becky, 
  again regretting her New Year's resolution to never leave the 
  alarm clock close enough to reach without getting out of bed, 
  grabbed the lamp stand by its closest leg and pulled it towards 
  herself. After stopping the lamp stand from tipping over, she 
  turned off the tiny siren.

  The bed's other occupant remained undisturbed. Becky looked at 
  the man she had eloped with four months earlier; a hint of a 
  smile creased his face into dimples, making him look even more 
  boyish than usual. Seeing this twenty-year-old as a child made 
  her think of her own childhood, staring out the school bus 
  window, into her dreams. The other children, who rarely talked 
  to her but often talked about her, thought she stared only at 
  the dismal houses and roadsides of their tiny Louisiana town, as 
  if nothing else could exist there.

  "Is everything the same as yesterday?" one of the children once 
  asked her. "Are there any new blades of grass?"

  As Becky got out of bed, Kyle rolled over and mumbled something 
  about his pickup. "Okay, honey," Becky whispered, in case he 
  wasn't just talking in his sleep. Kyle kept fixing everything -- 
  her car, his truck, the broken refrigerator shelf, the bathtub 
  faucets with _hot_ and _cold_ on the wrong knobs. He even tried 
  to fix the washing machine, which kept stashing their socks in 
  some secret hiding place.

  She told him they could both use her car if they set up 
  carpooling schedules with their co-workers, but what he mostly 
  needed was for the three-month lay-off to end so he and the 
  other newer workers could go back to the factory.

  The older workers cherished the same job they had complained 
  about for years, from what Kyle told her, cherished it as deeply 
  as Becky's sister had cherished her status as the only child for 
  the eight years before Becky's birth, then cherished her 
  position as "the older one." Becky couldn't see why the factory 
  managers wouldn't want to hire Kyle back; he always worked so 
  hard and got so excited about his projects.

  The phone rang. She ran into the living room to get it before it 
  could wake Kyle.

  "Good morning, Rebecca Wilma."

  Becky cringed at the sound of her middle name.

  "Good morning, Regina." She tried not to yawn while she spoke, 
  but her sister's name came out as _Ruuuhjeeennnuh._

  "I know it's early, but I've been with Dirk every night, and I 
  just haven't had a chance to see how your little job is doing."

  "Which one?" Becky wanted to point out how much Regina's big 
  mouth got on her _little_ nerves, but she resisted, as always. 
  She just thanked God that Regina and Dirk had gotten back 
  together, so Dirk could keep Regina occupied.

  "The new one, at the Japanese restaurant."

  "Chinese."

  Regina grunted. "Who can tell the difference? Those places get 
  closed down all the time. I hope your husband's planning to go 
  back to work soon."

  "Yes, he is," said Becky, stressing each word to the point of 
  sounding like a bad typist, speaking while hitting one key at a 
  time. "I have to get ready for work. Did you need something?"

  "No. Just seeing how my little sister is doing."

  "Your little sister is doing just fine and dandy. I have to get 
  my shower. Bye." She hung up the phone before Regina could 
  remind her to take her medicine; she hated the way Regina always 
  brought up her condition.

  Her mind drifted into the past, where a ten-year-old girl with 
  blonde pony tails stared at a basic skills exam. "Becky's unable 
  to concentrate," she heard one of her teachers tell the 
  principal. "Unwilling." Her teachers never understood how a 
  bluejay's song from outside the window could ignite her 
  imagination, sending her dreaming away while still awake. Then 
  came test after test and Regina's teasing and her parents 
  telling her they loved her, no matter what was wrong with her.

  Wrong? She never felt wrong. Why would her parents call her 
  wrong? She stayed out of trouble and never hurt anyone.

  Then she went to special education classes, in her principal's 
  words, "for a little while, to see how you do." A little while 
  became a semester and a year and an endless list of simplistic 
  classes that bored her even more than her old classes. She tried 
  to improve, but none of the work interested her, until the 
  school hired a special-ed teacher who used creativity in her 
  teaching style and the assignments.

  At thirteen, Becky "assimilated" (a word mostly said with pride) 
  into lower-level classes with the "normal" kids. She soon missed 
  her special-ed teacher, a sweet woman who loved her students 
  without ever calling them "wrong." She even told Becky, "there's 
  nothing wrong with you. If anything, you're exceptionally 
  gifted." Later, she moved into honors classes, where she made 
  straight A's. Nothing wrong.



  "What's wrong?" asked Kyle, wearing the polka-dotted bathrobe 
  she had bought him as a wedding gift. He wore it every morning, 
  never voicing the repulsion his face had revealed when he first 
  unwrapped it.

  "Regina was on the phone, being... herself." Becky touched the 
  top of his long, thick brown hair, after noticing how it stood 
  up on one side and lay flat on the other. "I like your new 
  hairstyle."

  "Hey, some people pay fifty bucks to get their hair to look like 
  mine does in the morning."

  "I can't imagine you spending fifty dollars for a haircut."

  "No way. You didn't make breakfast, did you? I wanted to take 
  you out for breakfast."

  "That's sweet," she said, rubbing one of the orange polka-dots 
  on his chest. She wondered if she had ordered the wrong robe, 
  but she couldn't remember what the others looked like. Why would 
  she buy him something so frightening? "But I don't have time. 
  We're marking all the men's shoes down for a sale, so I'm 
  supposed to be in early."

  "You should've told me. I would've made breakfast."

  "I'm sorry. I thought I told you. I know I told someone. Anyway, 
  you don't have to make me breakfast. If you don't stop being so 
  nice to me, I'm never going to run off with the mailman."

  "Oh well." He kissed her.

  "I have to get ready." Becky lightly pushed away from her 
  husband, like the way she reluctantly put down a novel when she 
  would rather read all night than sleep.

  "I'll scramble some eggs real quick, while you're in the 
  shower," he said. "Too bad we don't have a microwave. Then I 
  could cook up a big breakfast in just a few seconds."

  "Maybe when we get our tax refunds."

  "We already spent those."

  "Oh yeah." Becky wandered into the bathroom, trying to remember 
  what they had bought, but she soon lost herself in the pressure 
  and coolness of the shower. She always loved cold showers -- 
  they reminded her of a fall rain. She saw herself dancing on a 
  stage with the children from her special-ed classes. And they 
  sang, perfectly. Neither the dancing nor the singing embarrassed 
  them, though they sang before hundreds of people.

  Then one of them spoke, his tongue barely moving as he mumbled 
  his lines. No one could understand; everyone left. "No," said 
  Becky. "It shouldn't end that way." She used to control her 
  fantasies, always granting happy endings.

  "Breakfast is served." Kyle's fake Cajun accent rang through the 
  bathroom door. Becky had met him when he went to visit his 
  relatives in her Louisiana hometown. Her parents loved him and 
  kept saying what a good man she had finally found, but Regina 
  never liked him at all. Regina never liked anyone Becky liked, 
  and she made sure everyone knew it. But Regina still followed 
  them to West Texas and kept checking up on them.

  Becky dried off and dressed, omitting the sparse lipstick and 
  eye shadow she usually wore. She stopped at the mirror only to 
  brush her wavy blonde hair and to put on the earrings she had 
  made in twelfth-grade art class, tiny replicas of the elflike 
  creatures she created for one of her fantasy paintings, _Come 
  With Me_. Her art teacher wanted her to enter the painting in a 
  state-wide contest, but Becky convinced herself she couldn't 
  win. Still, she showed it to her parents, who said "How cute," 
  and pointed out that she shouldn't travel to Baton Rouge or 
  anywhere else without them.

  She had gone into the living room but stood outside the door to 
  hear what they really thought. Instead of their voices, she 
  heard Regina's: "Most of those modern artists take drugs to get 
  their ideas. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they tried 
  to get Becky to take drugs. And you know how naive she is." When 
  Becky heard that, she knew they wouldn't change their minds 
  about letting her go. Regina had spoken.

  Becky opened the door to see Kyle reaching for the doorknob.

  "Hey, you're wearing the earrings," he said, pushing her hair 
  behind her eyes so he could admire the intricate details she had 
  also stopped to see: olive-like eyes, flat noses, harmless 
  smiles, star-shaped buttons. Kyle always showed interest in her 
  art, unlike anyone else -- other than her high school art 
  teacher. "Aren't those from the painting I like?" he asked, 
  stroking her hair.

  "_Come With Me_. Yes." She smiled. He always knew what to 
  remember, what to say.

  "Well, then, come with me." He threw his muscular arms outward, 
  then lifted his hands, motioning toward the kitchen. "I think 
  I've perfected the scrambled egg."

  Staring at the Bathrobe from Hell and the man inside it, she 
  walked into the kitchen, buttoning her work clothes. The 
  all-blue shirt and slacks of Sam's Shoe Store cried out for a 
  patch, a stain, anything to break the monotony -- anything but 
  orange polka dots. _Poor guy_, she thought, eating the 
  over-spiced eggs and smiling contentedly.

  "When are you going to get all your paintings from your parents' 
  house?" he asked, again examining the earrings. She had asked 
  him one night if he daydreamed like she did, though she feared 
  bringing up the subject, letting him see the side of herself 
  that everyone despised and wanted to destroy. He replied, "Of 
  course," then rolled over and began snoring, as if the subject 
  held no controversy.

  "One day. Maybe the next time we visit."

  "When will that be?"

  "I'm not sure." She never told anyone the next thing she had 
  heard Regina saying to her parents, as she leaned against the 
  door, losing all hope of entering the contest. Regina said they 
  should take the paintings to that horrid family therapist they 
  visited every month. Becky left the paintings in Louisiana, left 
  them to rot like Skydown.

  She could just hear his likely reactions: "Yes, yes, very 
  special -- unhealthy repressions -- what's wrong with her?" But 
  he never said anything about the paintings. Instead, after two 
  years of sessions, he read them part of an article and said, 
  "Becky has Attention Deficit Disorder." Becky got up and walked 
  out, saying, "You're the one with the disorder." They never went 
  back to counseling.

  "Well," said Kyle, yanking her from her thoughts and pointing at 
  his five-dollar watch. "You'd better go if you're going to be 
  early."

  "Kyle, am I crazy?"

  "No more than the rest of us." He kept staring at her earrings. 
  "You shouldn't listen to Regina, especially not after that 
  speech she gave us last week about the hazards of ADD. She 
  sounded like a public service announcement."

  "You hate that robe," said Becky. "Why don't you go right out 
  and say it?" Her voice became louder as the words leapt from her 
  mouth.

  "I've gotten used to it. Weren't we talking about Regina?"

  "I don't wanna talk about Regina." She saw that annoyed look, 
  when his eyes get big. "I'm sorry, honey. Having two jobs is 
  wearing me out."

  "Having no job isn't exactly a thrill for me."

  She took one of his rough hands between hers, squeezed gently. 
  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. I have to go."



  Becky spent most of the next five hours staring at feet: thin 
  feet, fat feet, feet shaped like dog bones. With the attention 
  of an artist, she noticed every detail. Even the toes varied in 
  width and length. Some people's small toes surpassed their big 
  toes. She liked the children and college students who wore no 
  socks, allowing her to see every scar, wrinkle, callus, or 
  whatever else socks might conceal.

  One young man asked her if she'd even seen a foot before. "Not 
  yours," she replied. He shook his head, put his shoe back on, 
  and marched to the manager's desk. Becky worried about customer 
  complaints, afraid of losing one of her jobs before Kyle got his 
  job back. He needed her. Someone actually needed her!

  The manager, an older woman with hair like white cotton candy, 
  called her aside during their lunch in the break room to warn 
  her about this latest complaint.

  "I know you've been working too hard. You can take a few days 
  off if you need to."

  "I can't quit. My--"

  "Becky, honey, I don't want you to quit. You're too popular with 
  the children who try on shoes just so you'll tell them a story. 
  Besides, who would make all the posters? I'd have to go back to 
  those generic ones we get in the mail, with square letters and a 
  white background."

  Becky smiled. "I'm all right. I'll get some extra rest this 
  weekend."

  "That's a great idea. Still, I'd rather you cut back to twenty 
  hours a week for the rest of March. We'll be slow anyway."

  "No. I can't do that. I mean, I don't wanna do that."

  "You're a special girl, Becky."

  Becky went back to work, trying to convince herself that her 
  boss knew nothing about her past. Special, after all, usually 
  meant something good.

  Clock-out time soon came, and Becky walked three doors away, to 
  Chuck's China Town, a building painted with green and red 
  stripes. Regina called it Chuck's Culture Shock Express and said 
  just looking at the place could make Santa Claus hate Christmas. 
  "Regina. I hope she isn't planning a visit," said Becky.

  A chubby man with a cigar, walking out as she walked in, asked, 
  "Who's Regina?"

  Becky felt her cheeks redden as she realized she was talking to 
  herself. "Regina's my big sister."

  He blew cigar smoke in her face and said, "Well, if she wants a 
  decent serving for lunch, she won't come here." He walked away 
  as Becky walked inside.

  Chuck's China Town used a steam line set up cafeteria-style, 
  where the customers pointed at what they wanted and could see 
  the employees prepare their plates. Becky didn't like it. 
  Several times each day, she'd hear: "Put some more meat in 
  there; I'm not a vegetarian!," "Is that all you get for a 
  dollar?" and "You're going to give me more than that or I'm not 
  coming back."

  The idea of not coming back appealed to her. She liked most of 
  the customers, but the mean ones reminded her of Skydown, where 
  everyone made her feel wrong, abnormal, unacceptable. Chuck, a 
  self-proclaimed cowboy, said to her from behind the cash 
  register, "Hey, Becky, wanna quit giving everyone double 
  servings?" Just before time to clock out, someone dropped a 
  glass of papaya juice, in keeping with the secret rule that 
  something must spill before Becky's shift could end.



  When Becky got home, she found Kyle wearing his traditional 
  black T-shirt and blue jeans combination and smiling like the 
  Cheshire Cat.

  "What have you been up to, Kyle Blake?" she asked, pointing at 
  him.

  "Good news."

  "Your job?"

  He nodded. "Not full-time yet, but it's a start."

  "Honey, that's great." She hugged him; instead of the expected 
  smell of Kyle's sweat from all his work around the house, she 
  smelled the cologne he wore whenever they went out.

  "I wanted to do something special, since this is Good News Day 
  _aannnndd_... it's also March the fifth. You remember what March 
  the fifth is, don't you?"

  "The day I dropped the phone in the blender?"

  Kyle laughed. "You're joking."

  "Never mind. Could it be my birthday?" Becky never mentioned her 
  birthday, because her family never really celebrated birthdays 
  or anniversaries.

  "Could be. I caught a ride uptown with one of the guys from work 
  to pick up some things. Come with me." He grabbed her hand and 
  pulled her forward, as if he were ready to lead her through 
  Wonderland.

  She found newspapers spread out on the kitchen table, with a 
  stack of paints and canvases in the middle, and she touched the 
  paint tubes as if touching the charred remains of some treasure 
  lost in an invader's arson. "Why did you buy all this?"

  "For you. It's what you wanted, isn't it?"

  "No. Yes. I don't know. I don't have time."

  "Becky, I think your artwork could make you happy, just like 
  having my job back makes me happy. When I saw your work at your 
  parents' house, I felt like I was seeing inside you. And when 
  you left all your paintings and supplies there, you left a part 
  of yourself."

  She shook her head. "I'm not an artist, Kyle. That was just 
  something I did when I was bored."

  He tossed up his hands. "Whatever. Why don't you go change? We 
  can at least go out and eat."

  "Kyle..."

  "Let's not talk about it. If you don't change your mind, I'll 
  take it all back tomorrow. God knows we could use the money."

  Becky stared at the supplies for a second, then went to the 
  bedroom and changed clothes. She could see how much it hurt Kyle 
  for her to refuse his gift, but why bring back something that 
  made people call her crazy?



  At 3 a.m., Becky grew tired of laying awake, so she got out of 
  bed, slipping from the accepted weight of Kyle's encircling arm. 
  She couldn't stop thinking about the blank canvases.

  Pulling the paints and a canvas closer, she sat down at the 
  table. She would work on a painting, only for Kyle and for 
  herself. He would keep her secret, that she had to paint. No one 
  would see her work and call it cute or dumb or psychotic. She 
  would sit at her kitchen table every night. If Regina called, 
  Becky would continue working while listening to Regina rave, 
  continue creating worlds that only Kyle would see.

  Her hands moved, unbound, across the page, releasing an image 
  she held captive in her mind.


  Duane Simolke
---------------
  Duane Simolke has had his work published in Midwest Poetry 
  Review, Mesquite, the New Voice of Nebraska, International 
  Journal On World Peace, and others. His electronic publications 
  include Ydrasil, The Bridge, and Poetry Exchange. An English 
  major, he received his B.A. at Belmont University, M.A. at 
  Hardin-Simmons University, and Ph.D. at Texas Tech University.



  The Web   by Russell Butek
============================
....................................................................
  One person's lifestyle is another one's crime. It's all a matter 
  of perspective.
....................................................................

  My meals often talk with me, though rarely with such clarity as 
  your conversation possesses. Typically, if they talk at all, 
  it's with whining entreaties. They lack intelligence, and I do 
  them a favor by consuming them quickly. But even these I 
  shouldn't fault. They weren't designed for depth, and they do 
  often impart some bits of information.

  I'll devour anything that comes my way, but your kind are rare 
  gems, so full of thought. My great desire in life is to pass my 
  time in endless idle discourse such as this, but, alas, as no 
  doubt even you feel at this moment, my livelihood incessantly 
  intrudes. You'll pardon me while I go and tie down my next meal 
  before it shreds that quadrant of my web.



  It is one of the nearly silent ones; an occasional whimper is 
  all that it passes on to me. But it may serve to extend my time 
  with you; a bit of lucky sustenance will prolong our idle 
  discourse. I only hope the breezes stay as quiet as they've 
  been, else I will be called off to mending. When the winds 
  arise, I have no time for idleness, and since the work takes a 
  furious amount of my energy, I must consume whatever is about 
  without consideration of my finer desires.

  One of your kind once asked me why I don't build my web lower, 
  out of the wind. The suggestion seemed a wonderful idea at the 
  time, so I tried it. The anticipation of a more leisurely life 
  was quite exciting. I built an elaborate lattice in a corner 
  near the floor far from any draft. It had as much beauty as 
  function. I almost starved. Very few meals wandered into my new 
  corner. It was a terribly naive experiment, but it taught me 
  many things. One of which is a distrust of your kind. I still 
  hunger for your ideas, but I treat them with more caution.

  Oh, dear, I feel a storm approaching. Can you not feel the sway 
  as the wind nibbles at the anchor points? I'm afraid I'll have 
  to desert you for a few moments. The web needs reinforcing... 
  perhaps a snack...



  The clover is now blossoming. My snack had partaken of its 
  nectar.

  Yes, I've strengthened the web in the past. Don't think me a 
  fool for living in such a precarious condition. I've 
  strengthened the web: I've doubled the thickness of the lines, 
  doubled again and tripled the primary threads and increased the 
  number of anchor points. It took a much stronger draft to shake 
  the web then, and the usual fare took longer to fray it, but 
  then more than the usual fare came my way. Meals I couldn't 
  handle began to threaten me before they escaped, and they would 
  completely shred the web in the process. Today's web wouldn't 
  even slow one of them down. They would destroy a couple of 
  threads in passing, but I would still have a home.

  I was slowly dying in those days, trying to keep my Great Web 
  intact. I talked not at all. I still don't have time for the 
  conversations I desire, but at least now a greeting passes 
  between my meals and myself.

  You ask why, if I enjoy your conversation so, why I catch you 
  and poison you and consume you. First I must say that I take 
  offense at you calling it poison -- stop twitching so, all 
  you'll do is tear the web and I'll have no time to chat; hold 
  still, I'll tie your errant wing down -- poison implies pain, 
  but what I do takes away all pain. In time I will simply fade 
  away. That is all.

  But there is the catching and consuming. The catching is pure 
  serendipity. If I could control it, I would catch more of your 
  kind and less of the others. And the consuming? Well, that is my 
  nature. Just as it is your nature not to be neighborly to my 
  kind. Would you greet me cheerfully if I would wander from my 
  web and discover your nest? You see? You wouldn't tolerate my 
  presence, so I must take what conversation I can, however I can, 
  whenever my tangled web permits. I would much prefer that my 
  nature were other than it is, perhaps that I were one of your 
  kind. My time would be much freer of toil and fuller in thought. 
  But my nature merely allows me to chat momentarily before 
  feeding.

  I see that you are fading. I will tire you no longer. Your kind 
  is full of wisdom, but it is also full of the most delectable of 
  juices.


  Russell Butek (butek@rconnect.com)
------------------------------------
  Russell Butek has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from 
  the University of Wisconsin, but finds computers dull enough to 
  have taken up writing in his spare time in an attempt to avoid 
  geekhood. (His wife doesn't think it's working.) He currently 
  lives in Minnesota. His home on the World Wide Web is 
  http://homepage.rconnect.com/butek/.





  Gone   by Craig Boyko
=======================
...................................................................
  People have different ways of dealing with loneliness: some seek 
  comfort outward, and some retreat inward. And sometimes it's 
  hard to tell the difference.
...................................................................

  One.
------

  He walked in with a bag of groceries, locking the door behind 
  him -- an ingrained habit. There was really nothing here worth 
  stealing, and no one with so much as an intention to steal got 
  in the building anyway. But it was habit, and habits rarely die; 
  they can only be repressed.

  He walked through the darkness, avoiding the light switch. They 
  had voice rec here, not like the last place he had been, and for 
  the first week or so he had found it handy. "Light," light. 
  "Light," no light. "Television," television. Handy. But the 
  lights here were harsh, and there was no dimmer option, so in 
  that sense he faintly missed the old place.

  A string of old places, like faded photographs, only more 
  potent: photographs of the mind. Images he didn't want to recall 
  but that came unbidden. The past did that. Plagued you. Even if 
  it was just a past of vacancies and nothingness. You had to look 
  back. Too simple to live obliviously in the present. At night, 
  and at quiet times, whenever the world burned around him, it 
  turned into six o'clock attack-mode drama-news. The crackling 
  newsreel of his life, coated with sugar-candy sweetness so the 
  present would do an even harsher fade-over.

  He realized he was standing a few feet inside the door of his 
  apartment, in darkness, thinking about nothing at all, except 
  maybe the past. He shut that down, hard, and walked to the 
  kitchen nook.

  Put the paper bag down on the counter. Paper bags, like from his 
  past. When that had been so much vogue. Use paper, use paper, 
  recycle, recycle, make the world free and clean and beautiful 
  again. Something people in general didn't much understand was 
  the phrase _Point of No Return_.

  He emptied the contents of the bag. A six-pack of Coke. Pina 
  Colada-flavored Crest. Condoms. Kleenex.

  He stared past the darkness of his apartment and out to the 
  dust-filtered flickering twilight that was setting down on the 
  city.

  What city was this? he wondered. Something with a _C_, he 
  thought, and midwestern. Maybe Cleveland, or Chicago, but in the 
  end it didn't really matter.

  He didn't really need to go shopping. In this building, all you 
  had to do was make a list through the idiot-proof television 
  menus and your order would appear magically the next day at nine 
  in your food tube. Unless you were paranoid, afraid of 
  technology -- which usually meant _old_. Then you could get 
  someone to bring it up to your door every morning. He didn't 
  think there were any old people in this building, anyway. They 
  had other buildings for them.

  He put the Cokes in the fridge and left the rest scattered on 
  the counter. He folded the paper bag carefully and dropped it 
  into the incinerator tube. Latched it, fired it. Listened to the 
  whir of the interior vacuum as it sucked the bag away through 
  walls and floors, past pipes and wires, into an implicit fire 
  that burned perpetually, miles below ground.

  He sat down on the couch with a Coke and looked out the 
  wall-window, out at the cityscape, the world. His little corner 
  of it, anyway.

  Not really seeing anything, but knowing there were people out 
  there, behind the steel and the smog and beneath the cement and 
  streetlights, hidden away behind reflectorized glass. People 
  loving, people thinking, people watching TV.

  But the image was distant to him, forlorn, and he abandoned it.



  He left the apartment. In the hallway, he stole a furtive glance 
  around. No one to ask him about the weather, or the pollution 
  index this week, or television, or the illicit poodle that was 
  pissing in the hallway and seemed to belong to no one.

  He locked his door with the key they gave out mostly because it 
  was a reference point, a symbol of false security, a hallmark 
  from the past that was also ingrained. The keybox on the door 
  beeped sonorously and lit up red. He turned and walked down the 
  hall, hands in his pockets.

  The elevator, empty. Until it reached level four, and then a 
  woman of about his age got on. They were all his age. All 
  heterosexual, too. The communes made sure of that. He nodded at 
  her solemnly. After she asked if the elevator was going down, he 
  nodded and looked away.

  She got off on ground level, but he rode it further, down to the 
  first sub-basement. He stepped from the elevator into cool 
  temperature control. It was hot, very hot, and very loud, but it 
  was also very crisp and cool down here. One thing he could say 
  about this building was that they had a hell of an environment 
  simulator. Like walking through a cool breeze on a warm summer 
  day, or relishing the first soft telltale caresses of distant 
  summer on a late winter day, with the snow melting beneath your 
  feet, puddles everywhere, the effervescent purl of water 
  dripping hollowly through rusting eave troughs.

  Seasons, he thought. Were those a dream?

  He walked past the burly bouncers who were almost undoubtedly 
  there just for ornamentation, as he'd seen girls thirteen, 
  fourteen, maybe younger, in the club numerous times. But when he 
  asked them they all said they were nineteen, sometimes twenty, 
  and the bouncers didn't care, and neither did the management, 
  nor the tenants, so why should he?

  The music was too loud. The lights were too dim. The flashball 
  hanging from the ceiling and the numerous spasm bulbs that lined 
  the walls almost made up for the darkness, but it was an uneven, 
  convulsive light they shed.

  He sat at the bar and ordered a drink, the special they had 
  advertised on a chalkboard out beside the elevator. Something 
  called Hedonist Frenzy, and he wasn't sure what that meant, but 
  he ordered it anyway. He signed his name on the magnetic strip 
  that the bartender handed him after he said he would be charging 
  the tab to his room. The bartender took it back, frowned at him, 
  and frowned at his signature, as if trying to discern if it was 
  a fake, as if he could tell by powers of vision alone. Then it 
  beeped, and he could hear it beep, even over the deafening, 
  ubiquitous thud of the music. A little corner of the slab lit up 
  green, and the bartender handed him his drink.

  He sipped it, liked it, and spun around slowly on his stool, all 
  charm and boredom and scintillating indifference. Half imagining 
  he was being watched, or maybe filmed. He smiled apathetically 
  at the dance floor, at all the people, and imagined they smiled 
  back.

  A woman sat down next to him and his heart shuddered. He caught 
  a glimpse of her left breast, a sidelong glance, as she talked 
  to the bartender. He couldn't hear her words. Then she was 
  looking at him. He forced his eyes to meet hers. She was 
  smiling. A complex smile. She said something to him.

  "What?" he said, too quiet.

  "What?" she said.

  He shook his head. She shrugged and smiled. She followed his 
  glance, out to the dance floor and the thrash of the crowd. Then 
  she looked back at him.

  "What are you doing this weekend?" she asked.

  So blunt. Just like that. His face flushed.

  "No plans yet," he said, too loud.

  She smiled. "Want to have sex?"

  He choked on his tongue a little, trying to swallow what was in 
  his mouth. It burned his throat and coated his stomach with 
  heat.

  "Do you go around asking everyone like that? Just up front? Do 
  you just--"

  He stopped himself. Jesus, what was he saying?

  But she kept smiling, although the smile faded somehow, if only 
  in her eyes.

  "It's just a test," she said, and looked away.

  "What?"

  She looked back. Her eyes were black, he thought. Like the 
  leather she was wearing. But it wasn't leather either, some sort 
  of plastic, which was pretty bold, both because it was revealing 
  as hell and because it was, after all, real plastic. No, he 
  thought, he didn't know that for sure. But he liked the idea.

  "It's a test. I just say that to guys, sometimes, you know, to 
  see their reaction. If I don't like their reaction then I laugh 
  in their face and tell them to fuck off."

  He sipped some more of his drink and tried to avoid looking at 
  her cleavage, but the drink was gone. He placed the glass on the 
  bar. His hand shook slightly. Looked at her breasts. Then her 
  face.

  "Why?"

  She laughed, but the smile faded further. "Fuck, I don't know." 
  She was yelling, enough to be heard, he supposed, but he was 
  afraid everyone in the club could hear. Before long, they'd all 
  be looking at him, watching his reaction, and it would become a 
  global test, an initiation, a joke. "A lot of people are 
  assholes. I think it's good to start with a really blunt 
  question that's on everyone's mind anyway, but they're usually 
  too chickenshit to say it or even hint at it, right? And it's a 
  theory, sort of, that people will act most like themselves under 
  pressure, and that's probably all wrong, way off, but I at least 
  know what they're like under pressure, how they can cope, what 
  they can take, and sometimes, you know," she said with a sly 
  smile, "I need to know that."

  She turned toward him and moved closer, sliding one black -- 
  plastic-clad leg over the edge of her stool.

  "So, I ask you, you wanna fuck?" She smiled.

  He asked for her room number and promised to call her. She 
  shrugged indifferently and let her chest fall a little as he 
  walked away.

  Walked past the people, around the people, through the people, 
  out the door, into the elevator. Finally, the doors slid shut 
  with a pneumatic purr and he was alone with the pounding of his 
  heart.



  He met three people on his way back to his apartment. Two women 
  and a man. None of them together. He avoided their glances. None 
  said a word. They all got off on different floors than he did.

  He stopped in front of his door, searching his pocket for his 
  key. He found it, punched it through, then jerked it back. The 
  box bleeped INCORRECT READING -- TRY AGAIN.

  He stared at his door number for a minute. Then he returned to 
  the elevator, silvery threads of thoughts straining his mind.



  The lobby was empty.

  He walked across the vastness of marble-patterned linoleum to 
  the pictures. There was no one around, except for the 
  receptionist/security guard, who was watching local baseball on 
  a plain cathode screen behind the front desk.

  The pictures were lined up on the wall by floor, with the room 
  number stapled below the face. The photos were just cheap 
  security-pass duplicates, as there had been a move just a couple 
  weeks ago and they hadn't gotten around to the professional 
  treatment yet.

  He found the face of the woman in the bar and committed her room 
  number to memory. She'd told him in the bar, but he hadn't 
  really been listening. She wasn't all that pretty. Her body 
  wasn't ideal, not magazine-cutout perfect. Her eyes were a 
  little too large, much like a cartoon, and she was a little too 
  short.

  There was the woman who was from floor four, the blond who had 
  ridden down in the elevator with him. She'd said only a word or 
  two to him, but she wasn't ugly, and they _had_ ridden in the 
  elevator together, so maybe he had a shot.

  He found the face of the woman who lived on his floor -- right 
  next door, in fact. The one who listened to that terrible music 
  and watched a lot of pornography. He was often torn, late at 
  night, between punching his hand through the wall and 
  masturbating. Most nights, he did neither.

  Well, he hardly needed her number, but he made a mental note of 
  it anyway. Three numbers. It would surely do. Then, as a final 
  safeguard, he memorized the number of a pretty brunette from 
  floor twenty. It was completely random and probably utterly 
  futile, but she _was_ beautiful. Then he turned and walked 
  towards the front doors.



  The night was warm and black. As he stepped from the shadow of 
  his building, he was born, a blind fetus emerging into the 
  stinging putrescence of neon and graffiti, the undead commercial 
  night. He almost turned back.

  He passed by numerous receding doorways, all washing the 
  sidewalk with voices, synthetic music, boisterous rainbow light. 
  Hot stumbling bodies entering and exiting, narrowly avoiding 
  tripping over their own feet. He followed none of them, and 
  eventually their laughter dissipated somewhere behind him.

  The tumult of bastardized daylight slowly receded to true night, 
  the streets fading away to the warmth and desuetude that he 
  longed for. Cracking pavement, shallow streetlight.

  But he couldn't escape it. Not even here in the slums. The 
  distant hum of engines, music, electricity, even voices. He felt 
  small, all of a sudden, like a toy in a box.

  He kicked something. He stopped walking, enraptured by its 
  movement as it skidded across blacktop. He sat down on a nearby 
  bench, leaned over, and picked it up.

  He held it for awhile, not looking at it, not looking at much at 
  all. He liked the feel of it in his hand, smooth and one. Hard, 
  complete, old. He slipped it into his jacket pocket without a 
  thought and sat there for a little while longer before getting 
  up. The night was cooling, and he zippered his jacket up to his 
  neck.


  Two.
------

  Late at night, with dawn encroaching beyond a rosy pavement 
  horizon.

  Unable to sleep, he rolled over and kicked the covers from the 
  bed. He got up and walked over to the generic building-supplied 
  deck, which was mounted on the television. He goggled.

  He tried to remember the names and the numbers. No, the names 
  didn't matter. The woman in the bar, however, was Rita Ess, 
  something like that, and the woman next door he knew as Jennifer 
  Rourque. But the numbers. The numbers were eluding him.

  A cartoon dwarf with egregious cartoon breasts stood in the 
  bottom right hand corner of his vision, patiently tapping one 
  foot. "Need any help?" she breathed.

  He goggled out and entered the numbers manually. He remembered 
  all four, finally, but left out the woman at the bar. She was a 
  bit strange. That whole test thing. Some kind of joke. A game. 
  He could do without.

  She wasn't that pretty, anyway. Not really. Not really.

  He fell asleep minutes before the sun began to filter past 
  soot-stained building tops.



  Awoke the next day. he rubbed his eyes with dry, peeling hands. 
  He hated the soap here. He blinked through the sleep in his eyes 
  and focused on the clock. God, it was bright. But the sun was 
  receding. 5:15. P.M.? It felt late. Too much sun. The woman next 
  door had her television way up again, some pre-evening soap. 
  Cheesy instrumental music and overly dramatic monologues. He 
  hated the fucking soaps.

  Thursday today, he thought. Fuck night.

  He gargled salt water from the tap and spit it down the 
  suck-drain. He turned on the disposal and heard it whoosh away.

  He put on yesterday's clothes and ate some cheese. On a sudden 
  yet oddly demanding whim, he walked over to the deck. He punched 
  through menus, watching the words morph and scroll on the 
  screen. He entered the number. The woman from the bar.

  He didn't feel any better, but it was almost six, and the 
  cut-off was at six, every Thursday. Still, hardly gave you much 
  time. Results would be uploaded by seven. Dates were arranged 
  for eight, always, unless one of the parties needed a half-hour 
  extension, or needed to get started earlier, or whatever. It 
  didn't matter. He wouldn't wait around, holding his breath.

  He went out to get breakfast.



  The television blinked when he returned. He walked inside, 
  locked the door, and looked.

  Blue on red was a match: A date has been arranged for you this 
  evening. Please dial this room number and confirm the 
  arrangement. Have fun.

  Red on white was failure. He'd seen it enough. But usually it 
  was okay; it wasn't cause for any underlying psychological 
  insecurity or anything. No inferiority complex. He could always 
  blame it on himself, or on the bitches he chose, or something 
  else. Usually himself. Better to blame himself, his personal 
  choice, his unsociability, whatever. Sometimes he didn't even 
  enter any applications at all. Then the screen didn't blink at 
  all. It remained silent and black and unassuming. Peaceful.

  But tonight it blinked green on black.



  Good evening, Holden M. Decker.

  A confirmative match has been found for you this Thursday 
  evening.

  However, due to scheduling conflictions, the following potential 
  matches for you were rescheduled or aborted.

  Match one(1): Rita Ess, (F), at room number 1734. Status: 
  Aborted. Explanation forwarded: Not found.

  Match two(2): Not found.

  Try rescheduling!

  Have a nice day!



  He felt tired, suddenly. Nearly twelve hours of sleep and he was 
  still tired. He decided he didn't care. He turned off the box 
  and walked around it, past the kitchen alcove, and around the 
  poorly-positioned clothes chute, which was little more than a 
  trap door over a hole in the floor. You dropped something down 
  there, it would be gone forever. Unless, of course, it was 
  clothing, and properly bagged and tagged. Then it came back the 
  next business day, right to your door, in the fleshy hands of a 
  semilegal alien, working under strict visa for the right to stay 
  in this wonderful land of opportunity.

  He fell to the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time.

  "Lights," he called to the gently and precisely oscillating air. 
  "Window," he yelled, and all light from the city and the sun was 
  cut off, without a millisecond of pause. The light trapped 
  within the apartment flickered and burned slowly away, dancing 
  across his retinas, until all that remained was a shifting void 
  of blackness and the undulating electric voices from next door.



  He didn't sleep. Some time later he sat up in bed, staring at 
  the cartridge.

  He didn't realize he was staring at it. He wasn't even fully 
  aware of being awake. It was sheer coincidence that he found 
  himself looking at it.

  He'd taken it out of his pocket last night, and tossed it onto 
  the overturned stacking crate that served as a coffee table. His 
  jacket lay nearby, on the floor. He stared at it for some time, 
  not seeing it, not seeing anything. But then he did see it, 
  suddenly, and his mind strained to find significance and meaning 
  in it. For long blank minutes he could not recall what it was.

  Then, finally, something clicked, and his thoughts turned sour. 
  He frowned in the half-darkness, feeling vaguely nauseated. He 
  had been searching for its identity for long minutes, minutes 
  that mutated within him into hours, hours filled to the rim with 
  longing and hope and need. So much time spent pondering that 
  little object, which he was almost undoubtedly _positive_ was 
  something important, something supernal. But then he remembered 
  it was just junk from the street, and he wanted to spit.

  He got out of bed and walked to the wall panel. Turned on the 
  lights. Extreme white light. He turned them off again. But it 
  was too late, he was blinded, his night vision obliterated. He 
  turned the lights back on, squinting painfully. He sat down on 
  the desiccated old couch and picked the object up. He rotated it 
  slowly in his hands, pensively. As his eyes gradually adjusted 
  to the light, he realized what it was. A sim.

  Like from his childhood. There were still sims around, 
  everywhere, in abundance. But usually you wanted a sim these 
  days, you downloaded it. That was the only legal way, anymore, 
  since it ensured against copyright infringement and illicit 
  exhibition. It didn't really, nothing was ever foolproof, but 
  usually it made the dealer breathe easier. Even the pushers 
  downloaded, unless they wanted to distribute and make it 
  surreptitious, untraceable. Then they used standard coin. You 
  didn't see a sim in cart format like this anywhere, ever, not 
  anymore.

  He found the deck wrapped in an old sweater on the top shelf in 
  the closet. He knew it'd be there. The deck had both cart and 
  coin slots, so it was pretty old, but when he'd bought it, it 
  had been edge-biting. He hadn't used it in over a year, when he 
  had given up sims, leaving them to the masses, because at the 
  time, he considered himself better than all that. Getting the 
  old deck out felt natural, though, and the old cellular fear 
  resurfaced. The fear of losing identity.

  And another fear began to rise, more potent than the other. Even 
  as he unpackaged the deck and its gear, as he uncoiled the fiber 
  optic, as he cleaned off the tongue-piece with a paper towel, as 
  he blew dust off the new-found cart, as he plugged it in and 
  prepared to jack.

  Fear like bile, rising in his throat, but he pushed it down and 
  ignored it.

  You didn't punch deck on some cheap-ass cartridge sim that you 
  found out in the street. Bad enough that rainwater and engine 
  oil and dog piss could corrode the goddamn contacts. That was 
  bad enough, because serious corrosion made a bad connection and 
  could fuck you up, plain and simple.

  Not only that, but you _never_ punched deck on a sim you just 
  found. That was insanity. `Specially a goddamn cart that was 
  just lying on the street. No doubt it was probably heavily laced 
  with bugs, if it wasn't a downright snuff job. The deck itself 
  had viral screens, but they were just rudimentary. They didn't 
  pick out the new stuff, the street breed of any virus.

  He wasn't thinking any of this, not consciously, but he was, 
  too. It sparked in his mind, somewhere deep down, ever so dimly, 
  in a fraction of a second, before he could choke it off. There 
  was fear underlying what he was about to do, but the 
  determination overrode it.

  Kneeling on the floor, the deck between his legs. He lifted the 
  cable, eyeing it cautiously. It was clean. He attached the 
  mouth-mod. A clean, wholesome, use-me-I'm-sterilized type click. 
  He opened his mouth.

  Placed the jack softly on the back of his tongue. Closed his 
  mouth.

  Bent over. Flipped it on.

  Synthesized endorphins released at the speed of light, down his 
  throat, into his stomach, his lungs, his bloodstream. 
  Metastasis.



  No intro screen. just the sudden brightness of importunate 
  sunlight, clean and brisk air, crisp and wet, working through 
  his lungs.

  A beach.

  Or maybe this was the intro. Didn't feel like it, though. 
  Nothing was happening. This was response-based, and all the 
  intro clips he'd ever seen were fast-paced, sharp, colorful, 
  extreme and inexorable. Totally stand-by-and-watch, and try not 
  to piss your pants. They were put in to grab your attention and 
  give you heart palpitations off the tip, so you stayed jacked, 
  so you played it out.

  There was a woman down the beach. Waving. Beckoning. The 
  crystal-blue water lapping at her legs, licking her knees.

  He ran toward her.

  She needed his help. Her leg was broken, or something. She said 
  no words; it didn't matter. The message was relayed directly to 
  his brain in dreamspeak.

  _Help me_.

  She was beautiful. He tried to focus on her body, but none of it 
  mattered. He tried to memorize her face, her beautiful 
  immaculate features. He tried, but it wouldn't come. It was 
  strange, not being able to really truly see her, but all he 
  could focus on was the knowledge of her consummate beauty. She 
  was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen, ever known, 
  ever dreamt of. Yet he couldn't even discern the color of her 
  eyes, the tint of her hair.

  He lifted her in two bulging, capable arms. Her gratitude 
  emanated from her in a cogent, nearly overpowering radiance. His 
  heart swelled and his blood ran warm. He smiled benevolently 
  down at her and carried her away.



  "Are you all right?"

  Whether he spoke the words or merely felt them was immaterial. 
  She answered.

  "Yes, I think, could you just..." Her voice slightly strained, 
  perfect pink lips pulled taut through the pain. He quickly 
  dashed across the room to her. He made a swift motion with his 
  hands across her knee. Her face softened and her eyes fluttered. 
  He wasn't sure what he had done, but it had been the right 
  thing. She would be all right, if he was here, to watch over 
  her.

  "Oh, God, thank you. That's so much better." She smiled at him.

  "I love you," he whispered.

  Holy fuck, what the hell are you saying?

  Back out, slide out, retreat, deny.



  He yanked the trode from his mouth and spat. He looked at the 
  sleek deck accusingly, horrified.

  "Those weren't my words," he said quietly to the still air.

  He could smell his own stale sweat. His back was still arched 
  over, his knees and lower legs were completely numb. He tried to 
  shift his weight and fell to the floor.

  "Not my words," he whispered, grimacing through two simultaneous 
  muscle spasms in his legs. "I wasn't in there that fucking long, 
  maybe an hour, but I hate those fucking cheap-shit wares that 
  place fucking dialogue in your own goddamn mouth, makes you 
  start to wonder if you're losing your mind, godammit, stupid 
  shit, falling in love with a goddamn personality construct."

  He furiously kneaded the constricted knots of muscle in his 
  legs. One, then the other. His feet and legs began to tingle, 
  ghosts of nerves promising to return.

  He lay on the floor then, for a long time.

  The woman next door was either having sex or watching it. Moans 
  and flesh-muted screams buzzed through the wall.

  He didn't remember falling asleep.



  A flare of pain in his back awoke him to dark silence. The 
  hardwood against his cheek was cold and confusing. Where was his 
  bed?

  Then he got up, clenching his teeth against the pain in his back 
  and neck, and started limping slowly towards his best guess at 
  the location of the bed. He kicked the sim deck with his left 
  foot, sending it skidding across linoleum. It clacked hard 
  against some table leg or counter base. His knee collided with 
  his nightstand and sparks jolted up his leg. He swore. He fell 
  to the bed, cursing at the darkness. He near-screamed for the 
  window. Hypnagogic, light-red sunrise flickered in and stung his 
  eyes. Night gone, already.

  "Window," he said softly. Then louder. Then again. Finally, 
  darkness returned.

  A warm, electric, pleasantly distorted image flashed behind his 
  eyes. Of a beach, and a woman, and beauty.

  He didn't sleep.



  A week passed. spent in his apartment. Avoiding the people in 
  the building. Going out only at night. Then sitting for long 
  hours in bars, narrowly avoiding drunkenness. Watching the 
  subtle organic dance of the frequents, the unspoken gestalt of 
  business and professionalism, manifesting itself in 
  twenty-dollar cloned hookers, fresh from the flesh tank. Silence 
  and laughter intertwined; the smell of alcohol and perfume and 
  sweat.

  Avoiding meaningful glances from heavily blushed faces, avoiding 
  surreptitious nods from hustlers on the street, druggies 
  procuring their wares from under brittle skeletons of storefront 
  awnings.

  The night sucked him up without distinction, giving him 
  anonymity and peace of body.

  Peace of mind, another matter.



  Thursday came. Through equivocation, he pretty much managed to 
  avoid thinking about fuck night at all.

  He woke up at three, yawning stiffly. Gray sunlight stinging his 
  eyes. He offed the windows and stumbled to the kitchen. Gulped 
  warm orange juice that he had left out on the counter. Walked to 
  the television.

  He didn't even bother with the headset. Just flicked through 
  menus. The screen buzzed, the bluish light cloaked his naked 
  legs.

  He called in a wildcard.

  Then he dialed downstairs for movie listings. Instantaneous text 
  appeared on the screen. He scrolled down through it and finally 
  ordered a year-old Playboy-funded pseudo-porno.

  He sat on his bed and watched. He fell asleep ten minutes into 
  it.



  He awoke with a thought: _time_.

  He looked at the clock. A bad feeling already growing in his 
  stomach. Because sometimes he awoke, like this, just knowing he 
  was late, knowing he had slept too long. 9:37, flashed the 
  numbers. Too fucking late.

  A disastrous scenario pounding around in his skull. His match 
  for tonight, whoever she might have turned out to be, had come 
  up to his room. Or maybe she'd sat at home, on the edge of her 
  bed, a chill glass of champagne going flat between her thighs, 
  waiting for him. Yearning. Or knocking on his door. Or phoning. 
  Letting it ring fifteen times. And he hadn't awoken. And she had 
  either been stood up, screwed out of a date for tonight by his 
  lassitude, or had submitted for a rematch.

  He jumped out of bed and ran to the television. His heart 
  thudding and reverberating within his ribcage.

  An amorphous cube of dusty floor and blank wall flickered 
  somnolently with red and white television light.

  He didn't bother reading the words. Knew what they'd say.

  No matches.

  He stood there a long time before turning off the television, 
  and a long time afterward.



  Walking through blackness, reveling in his stealth, his blind 
  dexterity. He stepped into the closet. Pulled the deck from the 
  shelf. Cool and hard to his heated touch. Already gathering a 
  film of dust across its sleek surface. Tossed the jack and the 
  wire across his shoulder.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. He listened to his own 
  breathing for a long moment. His body began to shiver. The back 
  of his throat trembled a little.

  He plugged the wire into the deck by touch. He sat the icy box 
  on his lap. He stuffed the jack into his mouth quickly, defying 
  hesitation. The instinctive motion of a hungry child.



  She lay supine on the bed, gazing up at him. Her perfect white 
  body listless, her eyes gray and demure, resplendent with carnal 
  diffidence. He felt his own body shudder, the muscles in his 
  neck rigid with delightful tension.

  It was where he had left her. Only slightly different. If he 
  remembered. Her leg seemed healed, if it had ever in fact been 
  injured, not just a game or a trick. But it was all a game, all 
  a trick. He knew that. He knew that. If he accepted that, he 
  could pull out at any time.

  Yet how was it possible that she lay here, convalescing or 
  otherwise, in the same position he had left her? And he could 
  sense, could _feel_ that she remembered him, too. It was all a 
  trick. A fancy memory bank filtered through a gracious smile and 
  waves of near-tangible desire. Coming from her.

  Stupid, he told himself. So what? It had a resident memory in 
  the chip, to save progress, and maybe an individual DNA scan, or 
  something, because surely there had been others before him, 
  others who had used it. Used her. And he hadn't left off where 
  they had gotten. The wear on the label of the cart. Previous 
  ownership. Indubitable.

  She whispered his name.

  It was a cheap trick. Cheap. He knew she wasn't actually 
  speaking his name, knew she wasn't a she at all but a complex 
  personality structure hardwired into a visual illusion. The drug 
  rampaging through his body merely made him believe she spoke his 
  name. Direct brain plant, using existing information. A cheap 
  trick. Effective. Uncommon. Frightening.

  She spoke his name and he tingled.

  A distant, recessive part of his brain pondered if he was really 
  responding so strongly to her words, to her body and her lips 
  and her voice, or if it wasn't just the sim telling him he was. 
  If it wasn't another cheap trick.

  A dominant, longing part of his brain ultimately decided it 
  didn't matter. His body joined hers on the bed.



  Her more palpable features slowly accreted under his touch. The 
  only thing that could possibly make her more beautiful was 
  detail. Her voice become more personal, filled with warmth and 
  character. Maybe even love, and that wasn't so impossible; it 
  was easier to accept love when it was behind the guise of a 
  cheap street sim.

  Her body and face solidified. Her body supernal, eliciting a 
  simple cellular rush within him. Her hair now blond, soft, 
  smelling of honey and fresh rain. Her eyes dark gray, glimmering 
  with the intricacy of reflected sunlight on deep coagulating 
  puddles. Her voice like water. Thick red wine, her white cheeks 
  flush with blood. Her face not completely unblemished, which 
  added to the amalgam of depth and realism.

  Her body warm on his skin. Naked or not, it didn't matter. The 
  mystery of her body nearly insufferable in its proximity. Her 
  love in her lips, brushing his neck and chin. His love in his 
  fingertips, brushing infinitely fine strands of blond from her 
  cheek.

  They made love. Or they did not.

  It transcended the sexual.



  "Do you love me?" she asked of him, propped up on one elbow, 
  studying his face meticulously as the air conditioning kicked in 
  across the hotel room.

  "I love you, unconditionally."

  "Will you ever leave me?" she asked, fixing a drink for him from 
  the small cooler set in the sand, her naked body sprawled on a 
  bamboo-twine lawn chair, the tropical sun heating and lightly 
  tanning her soft skin.

  "I may part, but not for long. I will never leave you. Not 
  intentionally."

  Walking through a thunderstorm in a deserted European bazaar at 
  night, holding hands.

  "Do you remember anyone before me?" he asked her.

  "I have never known anyone but you. Through you, I think, I am 
  complete."

  Lying together in thick green grass, a canopy of verdant foliage 
  overhead masking the sun.

  "Do you feel?" he asked.

  The corner of her mouth faltered. She kissed him.

  "I know that I love you," she said.


  Three.
--------

  When he pulled out, it was because of a voracity that even a sim 
  couldn't hide. Not legally, anyway. It was against the law to 
  make a sim where you could consume food or drink that actually 
  seemed to replenish you.

  Otherwise, you might just forget it was, after all, a sim. And 
  die from thirst, within a few days.

  He dialed down for room service. Next month, for his work term, 
  it might mean working an extra two hours or so, but he didn't 
  much care. Everything cost hours. And there was only so much you 
  could do within a work term. But he knew if you started running 
  up debts they demoted you to less enjoyable tasks, come next 
  term. Like going from short order grill cook to midtown 
  streetsweep, or sewer basin detail.

  Fuck it. He could always call in his holiday time.

  The knock at the door came, and he called for them to leave it. 
  The bar of light beneath the door flickered briefly, returned. 
  He left the lights off in the room. Too bright. Just wavering 
  blue television light, so easy on the eyes.

  He unlatched the door, opened it a foot, and grabbed the warm 
  paper bags. A smell of heated Styrofoam and charred grease and 
  moist dough wafted up to him. He closed and relatched the door.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the bags between his 
  legs. He ate the two vegetable burgers, and then the deep-fried 
  chicken sticks. He drank half the Coke. Couldn't stand it 
  without the caffeine. He slotted the paper and plastic into the 
  incinerator tube and fired it.

  He fell heavily to the couch and spiked the sim.



  I sometimes think we've talked about everything.

  Everything?

  Everything there is to talk about. Everything there is to 
  believe. Everything to feel.

  It doesn't matter. Words are inconsequential. We've got each 
  other. We've got our love.

  We've got our love.



  On a tuesday, a move was called. Black on white words blinked 
  complacently on the television screen.

  He looked at the words, his body itching, for a long time. His 
  neck so sore. Calling a move. His throat dry.

  He drank a liter of warm cola and returned to the television. He 
  scanned through menus. New menu item. He punched it. He called 
  in a suspension.

  He took a shower.



  Late one night, taking a brief leave of her. Necessary for food 
  and drink and hygiene. And sanity, he thought, with a soft 
  giggle.

  Outside, beyond his door and behind the walls, people were 
  moving. Shouts and laughter and muted talk and televisions being 
  switched off. Doors shutting. Weak thuds of lightly-packed 
  suitcases hitting hallway carpet. The distant chime of the 
  elevator, the oil-swept hiss of the doors sliding open, then 
  shut. The voices fading away into the darkness around him. All 
  sounds disintegrating until he was alone.

  But it was a temporary solitude. More would come. Soon.



  He disjacked. he left her to take a piss. After apologizing to 
  her profusely.

  Distant televisions buzzed and voices murmured, to themselves or 
  to others. The sound of feet on linoleum, glass on glass, and 
  springs and hinges creaking. The overwhelming smell of dust, 
  sweat, climate-controlled Freon, frying hamburger, floor wax.

  Like they had never left, he thought.

  He wondered vaguely if it was Thursday.



  Laying back in bed. The deck on his chest. Eyes closed against 
  the oppressive black. Slow-lapse time freeze, the mouthpiece 
  sliding smooth against his wrist, into his hand, cutting the 
  air, arcing invisibly. His involuntary, primal grin at the 
  aesthetics of it. Down his throat.

  Her love and passion and heat consuming him from within.



  Timeless.

  Only when he came out did time exist. Then his body would ache 
  and his stomach would growl. His skin would itch and the 
  electricity humming through the walls would grind at his bones.

  And the pasts of this darkness, this life, this apartment and 
  the many before, would consolidate into a silver line, tangible 
  and intense. His childhood and his adulthood and all the times 
  of pain and disgust would coalesce into a tight hot lump in his 
  stomach. Bile rose in his throat. His anger flared through dry 
  fingertips.

  He came out, raging at the irreverence of leaving her.

  He almost put his fist through the wall that day.

  Instead, he showered, put on clean clothes. Ate all the food 
  left in his fridge, which amounted to a couple of shrink-wrapped 
  pickles and a rigid crust of cinnamon bread. Combed his hair 
  neatly. Looked for a long time into the mirror, the rage 
  threatening softly to resurface. He left the apartment, locking 
  the door twice, and left the building.



  It was night and he was glad. Instead of a busy, overcrowded 
  deli or supermarket, he turned into the first twenty-four hour 
  neon-encased superdrugstore.

  They had little for food. So he bought fifty dollars worth of 
  the junk food that so brightly lined the front counter. Six more 
  liters of Coke. More aspirin. His nerves were singing. From 
  exhaustion, lack of sleep, or lack of activity. He didn't care. 
  Walked back through stacks of glossy magazines and baby products 
  and sexual aids. Asked the corporate pharmacist for Demerol. The 
  woman shook her head, launched into the Drug Legality Act 
  speech. He cut her off, asked for morphine. Anything legal. She 
  traded him a small bottle for a hundred-bill, some change, his 
  health card. He paid for it at the front.

  Rifling through his wallet, his vision blurring. Peripheral 
  movement. He looked up. Outside, through the caged glass and 
  neon advertising logos. Into the night, the street.

  He blinked.

  She was gone.

  He shook away the image. He hadn't seen her. This was life. She 
  was dream. Fantasy.

  He paid the cash and hefted his bag in one hand. He exited 
  finally, out into the street, the bright illicit business of the 
  city and its many emblazoned slogans sizzling against his 
  retinas.



  He locked the door, twice, behind him, and clamped his eyelids 
  down. He could smell himself here. The smell of warmth and bed 
  sheets and carpet and garbage. And something else.

  He opened his eyes.

  She smiled at him.

  The blue static of her eyes soporific and melancholy. Her skin 
  glowed radiantly. Her teeth shining gray despite the darkness. 
  Her hair, fine as sand.

  Despite the complete darkness of his room, he could see her. And 
  then, somehow, he could not.

  He fumbled feverishly for the lightswitch. Tripping over garbage 
  and his bag of food.

  "Fuck!" he screamed. "Lights!"

  Apocalyptic white drenched the room. His eyes shuddering against 
  the differential, pupils quickly shrinking.

  He finally opened them. She was gone. His apartment, nothing 
  more. As always.

  "Wait," he whispered, too late.



  Inside. She beamed at him.

  "Was that you? Were you out there?"

  A quizzical grin. "Out where, love?"

  "Out of here, out there, in my goddamn apartment!"

  The grin fading behind subtle folds of pale skin. "I don't know 
  what you're saying. I can't be there. You know that."

  "I just saw you. In my fucking apartment. On the street, too, by 
  the sidewalk, outside, in front of the drugstore, you were there 
  too. I swear to God I just saw you in my apartment, and I wasn't 
  even stimmed. Were you there? How did you do it?"

  A solitary tear slid down her cheek, leaving the faintest pink 
  trace. "I can't leave here. Here is the only place we can be 
  together. I don't exist out there."

  He stared. A long moment. Eternity held in a moment. He 
  comforted her.



  Out again, being born to light. "Lights," he spoke falteringly. 
  The depth and comfort of dark returned.

  He popped morphine tablets, slept.

  When he awoke, if he awoke, she stroked his cheek, lovingly, and 
  caressed his arm. Her tongue slipping between his lips.

  He was drugged. He took his consolation in that fact. And tired. 
  And sick. Very unhealthy. He was drugged, and he succumbed.



  He awoke in the sim. She smiled, pleasant, innocent, oblivious.

  Still drugged, probably, because her form shifted and shuddered 
  and focused. The walls and the sands and the sky fragmented, 
  focused, melted, reshaped, and petrified.

  The smell of papaya, mango, dish-cleaning liquid, damp socks, 
  fresh air, burning leaves, laundry detergent, sweet feminine 
  perfume. The taste of her tongue and her skin and saltwater.

  His actuality was spiraling, refracting, dissolving. He 
  screamed, or dreamt that he did, and pulled out.



  In the glow of the television she stood.

  "I'll love you forever," she said.

  "I know," he said, but his voice was silent.

  He stood. His legs nearly collapsed. Stars and cracks of white 
  darting light swept across his vision. The morphine was dying, 
  and maybe his rationality with it.

  "You're real," he said, his voice cracking, his throat parched. 
  "Will you stay? Or will I wake up?"

  She smiled, reached out to him.

  Gone.

  Gone.

  "Motherfucker!" he screamed, his throat scorching. Through the 
  walls, he knew they could hear him. But they were not real. Not 
  real. Maybe none of them. Maybe not he himself.

  "Motherfucker," he whispered. Tears began to stream down his 
  cheeks, and it took him a long desperate moment to recognize the 
  sensation. Salt on his lips. A wrenching synesthesia.

  And then it came. Less like a bolt of lightning, more like a hot 
  wet rag being slowly wrapped around his cerebrum. Within his 
  very skull a dull warmth spread, hot and chlorine-rich, his mind 
  wading into the shallow bubbling effervescence of some esoteric 
  whirlpool.

  His eyes and thoughts thickly coated in cotton. His head 
  ringing. Sound erupting. And then a black plane behind his eyes 
  began to crack, until the shards were expanding with a muted, 
  slow-motion dissiliency.

  The thought came. It was pure:

  I'm in the sim.

  He tried to pull out. Panic and reaction. He stuffed his fingers 
  into his mouth, feeling around for the mouthpiece. He coughed 
  and spat and flexed his throat. His fingers triggered his gag 
  reflex, and he couldn't stop; suddenly he was vomiting all over 
  the floor, his stomach heaving with vacuous tremors.

  There were knives, and forks, and knives, and maybe even an 
  icepick. Supplied with the room. In the cupboards, in the 
  drawers...

  He nearly slipped on his own vomit. His mind was buzzing with 
  white light. Distortion. White noise, feverish, high, infinite, 
  vibrating through his skull, focusing in on the backs of his 
  eyeballs.

  He bit down on a scream.

  Fumbled towards the kitchen. Fumbled through a drawer. Another. 
  A knife. He held it with unsteady fingers.

  He walked to the bed with renewed calm. Greased gears within his 
  very flesh seemed to glide into position. All systems go. It was 
  very close to being clear, despite the fog of confusion and 
  pain.

  He stabbed through the deck. Three, four, ten times. A single 
  clear drop of battery acid sliding across sheer black plastic, 
  singeing a hole in the bedsheet.

  The thought of tears permeating the fog. A tear on immaculate 
  flesh. Memory...

  He stabbed the cartridge. Once. Cracked casing. Two thin 
  fragments of dull and finger-worn black plastic. Sudden contrast 
  of gray-black shards against gray-white sheets.

  Then silence. An inertia.

  Behind him, beyond him, in the darkness, outside his apartment, 
  yet so close that he could taste it. Girl's voice, and the slow, 
  muted sound of crying. Her voice, her tears on his lips, her 
  soft weeping.

  Dying.

  He screamed then, and threw the knife with every twitching 
  muscle in his body.

  A dull crack, a flicker of blue spastic light. The knife 
  collided and stuck in the window-wall. A pained hiss. The slow, 
  lugubrious fall of white sparks, television tears.

  Then the sunlight erupted all about him, flooding in through and 
  around the concentric freeze-framed black lightning.



  In a small foam-enclosed sleep casket, fifty dollars a night. 
  Nothing but a clothes-filled suitcase to prop his head on.

  A receipt for the wall-window repair, seven hundred dollars. An 
  official eviction notice. An Inappropriate Conduct written 
  reprimand. A form to apply for transfer; basically a mandatory 
  move. Another city, new faces, new life. But always the same, 
  inside.

  He'd stay. The communes weren't for him. Not anymore.

  A street pistol, twenty years old, bought from a kid on a 
  corner, ten blocks from the apartment, twelve dollars.

  A fake passport, wholly superfluous, three hundred dollars. He 
  didn't feel like going anywhere. A prosaic street ID, under the 
  name Gregory F. Gardener, two hundred.

  No new face.

  No new life.

  He walked at night, garbaged all the papers. Defied the past to 
  haunt or plague. Dared any of it to reach him.

  But it did, slowly, eventually. As he walked at night. As he 
  killed, or stole, or ate, or drank.

  Sometimes, beyond him, from the dark, came her voice.

  Mollifying, soft and smooth, feminine and voluptuous.

  His only comfort. He would smile, or cry. And then, without 
  warning or pause, she would be gone. And for a short while, he 
  could almost convince himself it was as if she had never been.


  Craig Boyko (boykocc@meena.cc.uregina.ca)
-------------------------------------------

  Craig Boyko lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, the coolest 
  city 50 kilometers northeast of Moose Jaw. Craig sleeps alone, 
  has no cats, and avoids all direct eye contact. He can be 
  further researched at http://www.geocities.com/paris/3308/.


  FYI
=====

...................................................................
  InterText's next issue will be released in early 1997.
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 In a previous life, Reginald was a sea cucumber. You can just tell.
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