Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

‘A head-mounted display,’ returns the boy, unimpressed.

‘And what does that do, Bud?’ Peter backs up into his seat, then manoeuvres his body forward again at a different angle, as though he were the driver of some intractable piece of plant.

‘Oh, you know,’ the boy follows Bugs Bunny crawling across the carpet. ‘You get to see things, and when you move …’ Tails off.

‘Yeah,’ says Peter. ‘And what happens when you move, Bud?’

‘Uh, you get to see more things,’ confirms Alex, clambering down from his father’s lap and running away. He returns from his bedroom with a Tonka toy.

‘This is heavy,’ he says, holding it out for me to feel.

Peter shoots me a look of mock despair, mixed in with a chesty heave of involuntary pride.

‘I was thinking. A while ago a German film-maker guy came over and took some film of Alex wearing his virtual reality helmet. He was a baby then. We’ve got it somewhere in the den if you’d like to see it.’ He motors off, tagging Alex, who has discovered a bamboo cane and is waving it to make whizzing noises in the air. Peter finds the tape and fast forwards it to a shot of a baby, naked except for duvet-diaper and VR helmet, blind to reality, grappling with his hands for something in the virtual world behind his eyes. Peter giggles with recollected affection for the Alex that was, while the Alex that is prowls about the room, as yet a shadow of a person made bright with temporary definition.

Just then the wife bursts into the room, registers the video, smiles to herself and at Alex and shakes some dampness from her hair.

‘It’s raining already. I think it’s going to be some big storm. The forecasters are going crazy.’ She stares at me with a doubtful eye. I feel myself returning the look, and we catch each other’s eye, exchanging hints of competitive pride and a resistance to the other’s unoffered pity. Rain begins ticking on the window panes.

Alex, oblivious to all this, toddles about happily brandishing his bamboo cane. His father pulls him close, thundering into his ear.

‘Tell us how you use a computer mouse, Bud.’

‘I click and something happens. I click and something turns on.’ The mother retreats from the room and switches on a radio somewhere. Peter ignores the music and rumbles ahead:

‘Alex has been playing this game I wrote for VR, called Neo-Tokyo. Actually, we play together. You’re the renegade pilot of a high-speed police hovercraft, and you have to steer your vehicle through the city, shooting out billboard advertisements. It’s cute.’

‘Everything breaks,’ remarks Alex, unasked. ‘I shot a window and I shot a sign.’ He dismisses the light stick and climbs up into his father’s lap.

‘You were going everywhere, Dad, and you were shooting.’

‘Yeah,’ says the father.

‘And there were some bad guys and I got them.’ He looks up at his father for a reiteration but the father merely smiles and raises an indulgent eyebrow.

‘No you didn’t, Bud, there aren’t any bad guys in NeoTokyo, remember?’

‘ Yes there are,’ says Alex, emphatically. ‘I shot them.’

I suddenly realize that my little game is going to be harder to play than I had first imagined.

Out on the road leading back east to Palo Alto, the rain is punching fierce cold fists, drumming at the windscreen and emerging in dirty great geysers at the side of each wing mirror. The radio hisses in and out of non-stop country hits, overlaying Kenny, Tammy, Dolly, Garth and the rest with the dim waves of a news flash from some other station announcing that a state of emergency has been declared around San Jose.

It’s times like these that an alternate reality would be really handy. And not just a blue VR room, either, but a place with substance, in other colours. You could plug into a beach there and wait until it’s all over. On the other hand, there is something so absolutely American about blustering, muscular weather like this that you’d have to be a fool to want to escape it. Great, roaring weather it is, as big as the forty-eight.

A captive stick begins to whirr its way round the front nearside wheel arch, spinning rainbowed water onto the bonnet. Underneath the chassis, the four low tread tyres skate along on a meniscus of grease and every so often the suspension bumps over fallen branches and other dead things, sending the car sidling towards the silt-laden river by the side of the road. I’m wondering whether I should stop at the first big town, find myself a pay phone and call Nancy, but I can’t make out any exits off the highway.

The police have set up a road block at Mountain View. I pull up and leave my headlights burning. A cop with a torch runs over, hunched against the rain. Leans into the car.

‘We’re about to close 101. There are some nasty holes opened up five miles north of here. Is your journey absolutely necessary, ma’am?’ Shouting against the beat of water on the blacktop.

‘I’m going home.’

‘And where is that?’ I consider how to answer this, think of Nancy.

‘Marin County.’ The cop lifts his hand to cut me short, shouts something into his cop phone, then leans back in again. A rope of rainwater bungees from his hat, blackening the upholstery.

‘When did you begin your journey, ma’am?’

‘At nine o’clock this morning, give or take.’

The cop checks in over the phone, waves me forward.

‘We’d have turned you back if you’d known there was going to be a storm, but we’re gonna let you go through this time ’cause no one saw this thing coming. Stick to the far lane and you’ll miss the holes. Go slow, now.’ I nod, and switch the window up. Only the weather seems to know its own future.

Nancy is sitting at her computer reading off her e-mail.

‘Some storm,’ she says, checking to see I’ve taken my shoes off. ‘Erica was saying that quite a few folks in Marin don’t have any electricity.’

Naturally I’ve no idea who Erica is, but in this case, it doesn’t matter.

‘How was Alex?’

‘Sweet. Normal. I mean, I don’t know, I haven’t really had time to think about it.’

‘I tell you,’ says Nancy, ‘Silicon Valley is like one big prototype-farm right now. Some kind of mutant factory. They’re turning out new patents down there fast as McDonald’s turn out burgers. Software prototypes, business prototypes, chip prototypes, even prototype kids.’

I snicker, expecting Nancy to join in the joke, but she surprises me by tossing out one of her super-serious looks:

‘You’d better believe it, Sweetheart.’

The sun is back this morning, burning off the rainwater and leaving a crust of dried mud, twigs and storm debris on the blacktop of the 101 freeway running south from Marin. In the queue for the post office in Sausalito the talk is of the neighbours’ broken shingles and the sleepless night, and the air down at the houseboat pier fronting onto San Francisco Bay still smells as strongly of static cling as the upholstery on rental cars. And all this some four or five hours after the final lightning strike.

Nancy has given me a list of groceries to buy at Mollie Stone’s and a book – the first published guide to the Net, signed by the author, an acquaintance of Nancy’s from her college days. She makes me swear on a carton of Ben & Jerry’s not to lose it.

The inside of Mollie Stone’s feels more like a provisions cathedral than a supermarket. Along either side of the aisles sweet indulgences dazzle the nose and promises of edible heaven line the shelves. At the fish counter the whole of the sea bed from San Francisco to Patagonia lies outstretched and odourless upon its icy lilo. Trial titbits of this and that lie in wait round each corner to assault your senses and dizzy you into a purchase. A sales clerk lurks about to take your money while your eyes are still in reflex action. There are six varieties of sun-dried tomato, twenty-four styles of chocolate biscuit, spaghetti in seven flavours. In the fruit and veg section organic Guatemalan mange tout fight for space with Napa Valley chanterelles and things I’ve never heard of. There’s no lettuce, as such, only Batavia, Butternut, Beet leaf, Romaine, Radicchio, Rocket and Stone’s special selection, all ready to go. The whole store reeks of money. Northern California reeks of it.