Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

‘Oh well,’ I say, blandly, ‘it’s early days yet.’

Nancy wheels round, looks through my eyes into the dark recesses of my head.

‘Why the hell are you trying to defend them?’ she says, voice suddenly dark with anger. I adopt an ameliorating smile. Them? Us? Them? By her own account. Nancy is one of them.

‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ I say, determined to protect my new-found future.

‘But the networks will be,’ cries Nancy in return. ‘They already are. In a year’s time you’ll hardly remember life without them.’

I’ve never seen her in this mood before, so hellbent on sabotaging her own bullish optimism, so bent on spoiling the game. It’s so unlike her. So un-American.

Nancy has flown off to COMDEX, taking her mood swings with her, and leaving me in charge of the house at Strawberry Point. Yesterday, a tomcat came in through the open window and sprayed the kitchen herbs. Mint, flat-leafed parsley, chives all died, thyme survived. Driving out this morning to the plant nursery to replace them before the weekend I realized I hadn’t left the house since taking Nancy to the airport early on Monday. Not once. Three days and nights have passed without my collecting the mail from the mail box, or the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times from the driveway. Three days and nights without opening the door out onto the deck to watch the city across the Bay, without removing the trash, picking up the phone, taking a shower, sleeping in a bed. Three days oblivious to the squabbling din of the redwings in the cypress trees outside, oblivious to the breeze of traffic on the freeway, to the lazy slap of water on the pebble beach below, to the barks of the neighbour’s children, or the tickled hum of the air conditioning. Three days and three nights floating about in the weightless breadth of the network, almost a century of hours with only the owlish whine of the modem, the rushing of lights and the glow of growing words for company.

The first night after Nancy left, it must have been Monday, I pored through the Net manual but didn’t get very far. Towards dawn, though, I found a dissertation on a computer at Duke University in North Carolina and managed to download it to Nancy’s hard disk. It turned out to be someone’s thesis on genetic reprogramming, which made little sense to me, but the point was that I’d ventured out on the wires and captured something strange and brought it back undamaged and I felt the same satisfaction in that feat as I had in collecting caterpillars twenty years ago. Afterwards I slept for a while on the sofa, then rose again on Tuesday afternoon and made a pot of coffee. I must have been dozing on and off through most of that night, and by the morning I hadn’t accomplished much more than the previous day. A few more files added to the hard disk was all.

I passed Wednesday on the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, the WELL, a bulletin board and computer conferencing setup based in Sausalito. Nancy’s been a member since the electronic Pleistocene, about two years. It’s one of the things you do if you live in Marin, along with hot-tubbing and baking biscotti. She left brief instructions plus a list of WELL gods, the network VIPs, pinned up on the wall beside the computer, saying, ‘When a WELL god posts, people listen. Show respect, OK? But nothing tacky.’ So I passed the day – yesterday – typing out my respectful thoughts and considered pearls in the hope that others would read them and type their pearls and thoughts back in return. I dipped in and out of politics, music, the future. After a time I gathered sufficient confidence to begin my own discussion topic in the future conference, and by the end of the day there were twenty-three replies, twenty-three earnest, considered, respectful responses. There we all were, sitting at our keyboards, unknown to each other in any real-life way, chattering into our screens and feeling that each new word meant something beyond itself.

Too tightly wound to go to bed, I dozed for a while on the sofa and woke just as the light was beginning to break through the cedars outside. A pot of cold coffee was sitting on the table next to the computer, so I warmed the bitter brown liquid in the microwave and toasted a couple of muffins and ate my breakfast waiting for the computer to boot up and pass me back out into the dark space of the network, which was beginning to feel more substantial to me than the room around, and as full of enchantment and tricks as a fast-hand conjuror.

In the early hours of the morning, I circled the globe. A listing of stock prices in Singapore, software files in Rome, the welcome screen of the University of Pretoria information service, a dissertation archive in Hong Kong, four tourist guides to Queensland and New South Wales, some incomprehensible jargon housed at Lawrence Livermore, a list of new releases from EMI in London. And on around the world again, with the same perfect, fearful freedom a lone sailor must feel when out of sight of land, my only navigation tools a keyboard, a mouse and a set of instincts.

Eventually, I fell onto the sofa and slept without dreaming until nine, when I got up and made some more coffee. In a few minutes from now, I shall pull out the plug on Nancy’s computer and lock myself in the spare bedroom and sleep until the weekend. Otherwise, I’ll still be sitting at this table when Nancy returns, eyes buggled and stiff as a piece of metal soldered to the screen.

Nancy says I should get in touch with a boy called Isaac, who runs the conference for children at the WELL. The word is that he’s the kind of person our kids – if we ever get around to having kids – might turn out to be. Another futuristic prototype, like Alex.

I’m relieved to say she has returned from COMDEX in fine spirits, having met everyone of any importance in software plus an old (male) friend to boot, who just happens to be living in the area and just happens to be swinging by for lunch tomorrow. Nancy emerges from her bedroom some time late in the afternoon, with a casual kind of air, humming some old James Taylor number. Neither of us remarks on the fact that she’s been locked up in there for four hours testing her outfits and teasing her hair into different shapes. Following a short inspection of the living room, she wanders into the kitchen and begins rearranging the jars of antipasti, the squid ink pappardelle someone gave her for a birthday present and sun-dried tomatoes in front of all the instant soup and chocolate pop tarts. Suspecting that three might be a crowd, I mail a message off to Isaac, asking if he’d mind a visit. A response arrives almost instantly.

>I’ll have to ask my mom.

And then a few hours later:

>Mom says it’s OK. We live in Long Beach.

‘How far is Long Beach from Marin?’ I ask Nancy, when the worst of the clatter is done.

‘Oh, a ways, about ten hours’ drive,’ she says, disappearing into her room and re-emerging with a brochure.

‘I just remembered. I picked this up at the trade show. The Fifth Annual Digital Hollywood Exhibition. “The Media Market- Place where Deals are Done™.” Thought it might interest you.’

So I flip through the first couple of pages and read:

‘Somewhere between the zirconia-obsessed and the hackers on the Net with electronic credit to burn, there is a mega world of virtual shopping and marketing in the ethernet. Some day there may be more retail dollars to be spent in the virtual marketplace than in the domain of the current retailing mall culture …’