Daniel Price - Slick

she wrote.

She sighed.

She grimaced sheepishly.

All I could do was blink at her as I put the pieces together.

She shrugged.

God. With that razor-sharp mind of hers, she could shred a man to pieces. And at the rate we were going, it would only be a matter of months, weeks, days, before she’d crack the flaws in my defenses. Soon enough, she’d have the power to break me with just one tap of the chisel.

she continued.

The rage on her face made her an entirely different woman to me. Selfishly, I was relieved to be an innocent bystander, but the dark voice inside wondered how long it would take for me to earn my own share. Nine days was all it took to bring the hatred out of Harmony, and she wasn’t one who hated easily.

On reading my expression, Jean breathed out a quiet groan.

She briefly held up her left hand, flashing me her white-gold wedding band.

She rolled her eyes.

I confessed.

She shook her head at me, drowning me in her warm chagrin.

I matched her look.

she replied with a tight smirk.

I let out a cracked laugh.

she wrote.

My head started throbbing again. I looked down at the keyboard.

she wrote back.

I glanced up again.

Jean shrugged hopelessly.

she replied wearily. < I’m running out of ways to distrust you.>

Now I looked at the manuscript, the provocative sticky note on top. I didn’t like the way Harmony’s name looked in Jean’s handwriting. The lettering was elegant and artful, everything that Jean was and every thing that Harmony wasn’t.

She followed my gaze.

I admitted.

She reached an arm across the table.

I took her hand. For once I was way ahead of her.

________________

She didn’t care that I was coming down with something. I didn’t care that her car was a mess. If we wanted this to be a proper love scene, we would have gone to an upscale hotel suite with a roaring fireplace, a bottle of Chablis in a tin ice bucket, and Annie Lennox’s “Why?” playing in the background as we tumbled stylishly on the thousand-dollar carpet.

Jean and I were too clever to pursue the cinematic cliché. We were too clever to be good at sex anyway. We were both lousy lovers, by our own admission, and we were too clever to see intercourse as the salve to our current ills.

So we regressed. We stole away to the back of her SUV like a pair of fumbling virgins. In the light of the lamppost, in a handicapped spot near the sea end of Wilshire, we embraced, we kissed, we ran our hands all over each other with nervous excitement. We explored each other carefully. When my left hand moved up her shirt, all the way to the swell of her nipple, she let out a soft gasp, as if no one had ever touched her there before. When she gently nibbled my ear, I almost cried, as if I’d been waiting for years to have a girl do that to me.

We were so awkward and juvenile in our affections that for a wonderful time, I was simple again. My mind was filled with dumb and pleasant thoughts. I made a mental commitment to enroll in sign-language classes. I couldn’t wait for the day when we could stop relying on technology and Madison to talk to each other. As I moved my hands over her firm stomach, I made the decision to start exercising again. I wanted a body that would drive her crazy. And as she rested on top of me, as she pressed her hips against mine, I realized that despite our limitations, we could screw each other senseless someday. When circumstances were better, when we knew each other better, we’d be so comfortable that we could shut off all the noise in our heads and become two bodies working together in perfect instinct and perfect rhythm. God, how I wanted to make her scream with pleasure. God, what a thing to look forward to.

But for now, we were both in shambles. Once we stopped fooling around, the myriad complexities of our adult existence came back into focus. Dozens of unwelcome details flooded back into our field of vision.

I leaned against the passenger door and held her from behind. I could almost feel her powerful mind start up again, processing multiple streams of thought and worry. She retrieved her laptop from the floor and booted it up in front of us. She channeled her thoughts through SimpleText in eighteen-point Helvetica.

I reached my arms under hers, tapping the keyboard.

She squeezed my hands, then leaned her head back into me.

she typed.

I held her tight, planting slow and soft kisses on her neck. I kissed her faster and more intensely until she closed her eyes and moaned. Moving upward, I pressed my lips to the side of her face, cleaning away every last trace of lime. I wanted to devour her. I wanted to swallow her whole, like a snake. Then I’d have her all to myself.

The laptop chimed at midnight. Jean didn’t notice it until I stopped my affections. She glanced at the clock on the menu bar.

she wrote.

she replied.

________________

In the future, at least Alonso’s version, there will be two ways to exist: physically and virtually. The physical world will be a giant urban ghetto for the working class, society gone to shit. But the virtual world will be a full-time paradise for all who can afford it. Not only can you customize your appearance, you can customize your senses. If you only wanted to see the world in springtime, you’d only see springtime. If you only wanted to see Baptists, you’d only see the fellow users who were registered as Baptists. Or leftists. Or jazz enthusiasts. There were a million flags you could attach to yourself, and a million types of people you could exclude from your perceptions. God no longer had to grant you the serenity to accept the things you could not change. With the right software, you could change anything.

Such is the premise of Godsend , at least the way Jean described it.

By a quarter to one, she and I were back in our respective homes, back on our respective computers, back on EyeTalk, where it was safe. By then my electricity had returned, but I kept the lights off anyway. I stretched out on the couch and rested the laptop on my chest as if it were Jean herself.

At first we shared some of the wonderful things we hoped to do to each other, someday, when circumstances were better. We romanced each other speculatively, virtually, and in full lowercase. We finished ourselves. Then we curled up together as best we could, spooning on a bed of ones and zeroes.

The narrator of Godsend had no determinate identity, not any that he or she was willing to share with the reader. In the virtual world, s/he was a perpetual metamorph, a disenchanted cipher who changed everything about him/herself on an hourly basis. Name. Shape. Sex. Perceptions.

The trouble begins when s/he meets and falls in love with a fellow shifter. All they have in common are their capricious ways and a taste for pansexual debauchery. According to Jean, the two main characters spend half the book screwing in every form imaginable, even as lobsters. Unfortunately, after each blissful encounter, they spend days obsessively seeking each other out again, trying to reconnect through whatever new disguises they’ve adopted.

I asked.

I blinked, stupefied.

I laughed.

she replied.

I typed, with encoded gloom.

I grabbed a tissue from the coffee table and wiped my nose.

The cursor blinked steadily for a few silent seconds.