Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Wasn’t it?

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

BIG ROOM, THE.n. World found outside computer installations.

GREP.vt. To rapidly scan a file looking for a particular string or pattern. By extension, to look for something by pattern.

HEISENBUG.n. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.

KNOTHOLE EFFECT.n. In which you can see more if you don’t look directly.

MEAT.n. The stuff that stays behind when one enters cyberspace.

NEOPHILIA.n. The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. Common trait of most hackers.

WAVE A DEAD CHICKEN.vt. To perform a ritual over crashed software in the hopes of reviving it.

WORM.n. A computer virus that replicates itself across a network.

ONE HUNDRED GAMES OF SOLITAIRE

And so it was time to move on. Time to put this phase of her life behind her. Time to be mature, responsible, and all that stuff. She thus did what any self-respecting person in her position would do. She bobbed her hair, shaved a swath above her left ear, and dyed the resulting skewed mop from candy-apple red to wine purple. She bought a pair of olive-plaid Keds and packed up her futon, tv, pots, pans, bedding, silverware, fake tattoos (Alexis sometimes wore a black press-on skull-and-crossbones above her small right breast, three black press-on tears spilling from the corner of her breadmold-gray left eye), and art supplies, and she moved to a tinier and cheaper multi-latched third-floor apartment three blocks away with this excellent view of dumpsters, phone lines, and warehouse rooftops bristling with antennae and translucent skylights.

Not long afterward, she raised her head and realized she was deep into a new series of triptychs based on Barbie’s buddy, Ken ( Ken Sails into Hell, Ken Creates Barbiestein in His Own Image, Ken Is a Serial Killer ), working sometimes till three in the morning, no longer having to worry much about disturbing a mate’s dreams or television viewing habits, breakfasting at four a.m. and sleeping till two the next afternoon, keen on the fresh direction her art was carrying her, and, not long after that , she surprised herself by enrolling (just for the hell of it, really) in this computer-design course she’d been thinking about taking for years and years at the nearby university, penetratingly aware of how breathtakingly close to the ebony edge of twenty-three she currently teetered, how intricate life had suddenly become, how fast she sped, like an out-of-control Amtrak toward the rotten bridge that marked a quarter of a century of living on earth. A quarter. Of. A century .

There she met Grayson, an exceedingly mellow guy with waist-length usually unwashed animal-cracker-brown hair, a cool beatnikish crook in his neck, tummy muscles taut as the rubber skin on a trampoline, and a monosyllabic vocabulary. As well as this large stash of ecstasy, which candy lured her into this near-stranger’s apartment late one night (or actually early one morning) after this totally awesome moshing session at Club Foot, and then sent her scrambling into the gray-and-brick streets at six a.m. (without the benefit of her army-surplus jacket) under a dangerously low winter sky when she awoke with this distinct impression she had just performed sex with Mr. Death himself only to discover an unused condom on the pillow by her head and a couple of bloody fingerprints on the nearby off-white wall. At which point (remembering too godawfully well the nightmarish day she’d learned from Flynn that he’d been simultaneously boffing the underfed bassist for Blackwater Scabies named Renna, the cheesy-skinned mutant of a waitress at the local IHOP named Lida, and the Venus-of-Willendorf-chested groupy with those myriad haunting coldsores named Pia: “Hey,” he’d said, “if it bothers you so much I’ll quit”) she swore off human relationships all together, cold turkey, opting instead for the kind of concentrated and single-minded celibacy that a Buddhist monk might honestly envy, and plunged headlong into her new series of triptychs, as well as into this addictive virtual community of down-and-outers not unlike herself she uncovered on this subversive chat space based somewhere in British Columbia that Grayson had introduced her to just before he scared himself right out of the picture.

It was called Mansion of the Maniacal Mesons, or M 3for short, and it worked like this. You read a little neatly fonted paragraph sliding down your screen about the pros and cons (but mostly pros) of anarchy, chaos, and general decenteredness in the cosmos, and then through a series of virtual directions entered various virtual rooms in the virtual mansion dedicated to various virtual bizarrenesses. In one environment, for instance, you could talk to people committed to building a tactical nuclear device which would then be used to bully governments around the world into peace. In another, you could exchange ideas with folks who maintained that the human species had for all intents and purposes run its course and that someday the planet would be inhabited by artificial intelligences that viewed humans as a necessary if messy rung on the laborious ladder of evolution. And in yet another you could gossip with a tribe who dubbed themselves Paranoids Anonymous and maintained that the universe was just one vast conspiracy aimed against none other than the PA system itself, the JFK assassination only the most commonly cited example, but others including everything from the spread of AIDS to the choice of Superfund sites, the apparent smart drugs hoax to the inorganic compounds used in certain brands of fertilizer, the Jesse Ventura candidacy to the multifoliate cover-ups involved with this and that southwestern UFO visitation.

Alexis, however, always returned to the Cybersex Cell. Here people with such monikers as French Kiss, Blowtorch, and Whiplash congregated and carried on conversations that would probably sometimes make Linda Lovelace blush if she’d been privy to them. The CC was a dazzlingly dark and kinky space that often caught Alexis’s breath in her throat, widened her eyes, made her body sink back in her chair in astonishment, not because of the rampantly uncommon obscenities that transpired there, jeez no, although there were plenty of those, but because of the sheer force of creativity, honesty, and the ability on Alexis’s part to become anyone she wanted at the click of an ENTER key, someone she couldn’t be anywhere else in the whole world, to slip on alternate identities in the same way another might slip on a negligee, or maybe a really nice pair of pre-washed 501’s — and do so as safely as if she were taking a little after-dinner stroll through a silly set from Sesame Street which, in a cybernetic sense, was just what she was doing.

And so one night, a handful of snowy feathers bobbing outside her window among a cubist painting of warehouse roofs, Alexis became Digital Matrix as easily as Clark Kent became Superman. Her Mac was her phonebooth, her keyboard her cape. She grew to be the five-ten she’d always wanted to be. She dyed her hair in ten-minute intervals, spiking it spider-black, razoring it down to pumpkin-orange fuzz, cultivating it into a long pistachio-green or yolk-yellow tress that tickled all the way to the muscled curves of her buttocks. She tattooed a bloodshot eyeball onto her left shoulder blade, an emerald-and-blue planet onto the back of her neck, a fat golden phallic cobra (hood distended, fangs dripping venom) winding up her right leg, and she donned a tight leather flightsuit, silver-and-black platform boots, glossy crimson nail polish, diamond tongue-stud, three nose rings, cartoon treasure chest of hoops and bracelets and necklaces. She spoke in a husky voice, became bright and bold and sassily ironic, smoked the occasional unfiltered cigarette, changed her eye-color from breadmold gray to methyl violet, no, Wedgwood blue, no, café-noir brown, and, as a final present to herself, uncovered a mysterious and complex ancestry that fed her features, replaced her bland blond-leading-the-blond Midwestern one, and included some royal Eastern European genes, a couple of very pure German ones, and, needless to say, a healthy ninjaed dose of Japanese. Before long she was spending two, three hours a night at her console, mostly teasing compu-nerds across north America who were, it seemed, pretty much lining up to fantasize with Alexis. Until, that is, she jacked into her Mac one particularly cold evening, remnants of a dry Domino’s pizza (predictable veggie combo) crinkled and curled in its box on the table beside her keyboard.