Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

George’s mother became a successful attorney and had money, and his father became a successful painter and had fame. George had access to every privilege and every advantage. He was handsome, and life was easy. As a teen, he began to have sex with pretty girls who wrapped their limbs around him in a way that was comforting. They would smile and guide him straight into themselves, and that was very inviting. None of them were the one—how could they be?

In George’s mind, the faery grew up, as he did. And in the midst of sex, with the rhythm of going in and out quite overcoming any other thoughts in his head, he felt he was always pushing through to her, to the one he was missing. Each dewy sternum under his chest, each firm pair of legs tucked around his waist, each hot envelope he pushed himself into, a little better, a little better. Sometimes he bit at them with his teeth, sometimes he pushed himself in so slow and so deep that the girls would cry, Don’t stop, don’t ever ever stop. But he was always trying to make these bodies fall away, trying to pin that one transcendent spot.

And when it eluded him, he began to pursue another girl, a different girl. All he had to say was “Mom, I miss her,” and any obstacle that could be toppled with money immediately vanished. His mother gave him everything she could give him. He became the most eligible bachelor in Toledo. Yet he was always scraping away, chafing against the lack, against the wanting, and never quite sinking in.

Was he his father’s son? Did he have his mother’s blood? Or did he not belong to another partnership, a past-life twin, a different scheme of things, beyond the predictable sequence of genealogy. Was he crazy? Were the gods real? Should he ever, ever tell? By the time he got back to Toledo to teach and work at the Institute of Astronomy, he was still empty. Still lost. Maybe the other side of his partnership was still out there. Perhaps it was purely hypothetical, like a plane of symmetry in the universe, or the density of a black hole, or love.

George addressed the goddess of the race, sitting in his Volvo on the side of the highway. He chose his words carefully. She seemed on edge.

“I don’t want to disappoint you, but I’m working as fast as I can.”

“That is something that everyone says,” she quipped. “It’s never been more false.”

“Can you tell me where the Gateway is then?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know.”

She almost smiled.

George’s head began to pound.

“I have to go pick up my mother,” he said to the goddess of the race. “She’s waiting at the jail.”

“I’m not leaving,” said the goddess. “I don’t have to and I’m not. And when you turn around, and you see me, you’ll know that I’m saying go. You haven’t got a lot of time.”

When he pulled up outside the jail, his mother was chatting with one of the cops. As she pulled away from the conversation, she left her card in his palm, curled his fingers shut around it, and patted him on the shoulder. Good to meet you, she would be saying. She tapped across the pavement to George’s car, slid the door open, and dropped into the front seat.

“Alright?” he asked. He looked nervously over his shoulder and the goddess of the race mimicked him silently, “Alright?”

Belion was in the apartment. Irene had gone. He was deciding whether he would join her in Toledo. He felt that he probably would. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn’t. While he looked forward to the strenuous physical work of moving, he did not look forward to change. He sat in his chair at his terminal and played his game and worked. In the absence of Irene, not a lot had changed. In some ways, it was like she had never been there at all.

Over the twenty-four hours after Irene left for Toledo, it became hard for Belion to deny the fact that he was stalking Silvergirl, the player who had renamed the bears on his game. He didn’t want to be stalking her. That was stupid. At first he told himself that he was acting responsibly as a game administrator, keeping watch over a player who was possibly unstable or suicidal. But the reality was that he was not the kind of admin who had any reason to be in touch with players at all.

He was a world creator, not an interactive deity. However, there was something about Silvergirl that had provoked his slumbering sensibilities. She was plaintive; she was sorrowful, and somehow seductive. At first he felt angry, because he had never known anyone to leave such strange and illogical marks on his world. Renaming bears. Leaving unexplained piles of fish arranged like standing stones. Putting mulberries into the pockets of every goblin in the forest. He began looking for her signatures, blaming her whenever anything was out of order, whether she had been there or not. There was a bag abandoned in a mine shaft. It contained only silver coins. Was it hers?

With each new discovery, he became more interested. He, Belion, Archmage of the Underdark, found himself tracking the movements of a midlevel player, her stats and position filling him with excitement. Every time he learned something new, he would shut his screen down, turn away from the monitors, and lift some weights on his bench. At first he only did what he could do behind the scenes. He only looked at data he could read in his coding language, interpret according to the meanings he knew.

Then, late at night, he found he had been drinking a lot of pink lemonade. While Irene was living there, she drank it all the time. He had not drunk any pink lemonade in front of her. In fact, when she offered it to him, he had said, “Irene, that’s kind of a woman drink.” But he was wanting some, even as the words of refusal came out his mouth. Once she was gone, there was no reason not to drink it, and he found it went down so easily, he could drink the entire gallon she had left in the fridge without stopping to breathe. So late that night, in a cloud of pink sugar, he remembered Irene having asked about Silvergirl’s looks. “What does she look like?” Irene had said.

If Irene suggested it, he should do it. Irene might want to know, next time they talked. So he searched for her name in a different interface, and her avatar came up on his screen. Silvergirl was long and lean like almost every other pretend woman in this virtual world. But she was covered head to toe in a metallic slip, pointy on her head and draping over her toes. With a flick of his mouse, he could remove this metallic slip and look at her character’s naked body, but that would have been pointless. They all look basically the same. Did she choose darker nipples or lighter? Did she place her belly button nearer to her rib cage or her hips? If he wanted to spend all day looking at players’ avatars without their clothes, he could, but that was stupid. He wouldn’t do that. For one thing, he could be fired.

Belion had not really said to himself, “My girlfriend and I broke up.” He had not addressed the fact that Irene had gone to live in another state. For one thing, Irene hadn’t really wanted to talk about it. Several times she said, “You can do what you want.” If that meant coming to Toledo, she did not specify that this would be wrong or unwelcome.

Belion took a long, refreshing pull of pink lemonade straight from the jug. He took off Silvergirl’s metallic slip. Peach nipples, small. Round breasts, flat hips. Surprise, there was no belly button at all. As Silvergirl stood there on a dais in the creation screen in front of him, he turned her left and right and looked over her in every position. With her hood off, he could see she had long dark hair, standard for a druid. No tattoos or piercings. He told himself not to be such a dirndl. Silvergirl could be the avatar of a three-hundred-pound male, or a thirteen-year-old girl, or a golden retriever. He did not have access to the real-life details in her character file.