Children of the New World Page 7

  I’d once witnessed Amsterdam’s Red Light district with its windows of naked bodies and its rotten maroon lights. I can still smell its cobblestones, thick with dirt, and see the doorways, dark with hungry faces. This was what I’d imagined the Dark City would resemble, and I’d expected to be repulsed when we approached its gates, to turn back with shame and relief, to write the place off as a tasteless distraction. But, though the city oozed a seedy brown light, up close the streets were lit by warm yellow lamps, humming with electricity. The gates of its many entrances stood open, so welcoming that turning away was impossible. We saw men and women emerging from its depths, setting off from the gates to return home. There was no danger in exploring a block or two, we reasoned.

  So we entered the first district of the city, filled with its soft-core delights, its toy shops and kissing booths. The stores reflected the amber glow of lamps, which brightened the faces of other tourists who walked the streets: couples with their arms around each other, college kids sitting on curbs kissing, single men walking with their hands in their pockets. A Korean man standing by a foot massage parlor called out to us, “Beautiful Asian girls. Twenty credits for fifteen minutes.” Across the street, a gorgeous man called my wife sweetie and invited us inside to be tickled. And rising above the lights and the busy streets, one could hear the collective moans from deep within the web of avenues, pulling us forward toward the core, where we longed to play.

  The Air Current Hotels were four blocks in. White three-story buildings with darkened windows and velvet ropes leading to their doors. At the check-in desk, a teenage receptionist in a string-top charged my account forty credits for the session.

  “It’s our first time.”

  “You’ll love it!” she said. “You’ve never experienced air like this!” She smiled and directed us toward the elevators. “Second floor, room number seventeen.”

  “What do we do there?”

  “Just close the door and stand in the middle of the room. We’ll take it from there.”

  We rode the elevator to the second floor and found the room entirely empty, the lights dimmed. I shut the door behind us, and we stepped into the middle of the room. A light draft played along the floor, working its way up my pant legs and finding the softness behind my knees. Another breeze caressed my neck, then slid down my collar. Our feet were lifted from the ground and we floated horizontally, air currents tickling our skin with alternating nips of cold and warmth. Wind rubbed against my lips, playing against my tongue; a strong gust pushed against my chest, holding me down. I reached out to hold on to Mary, but there was nothing except air, and I was filled with the luxurious thought that I was being made love to by a goddess of wind. Mary arched her back, pushing down into the gusts that caressed her again and again, until her body was vibrating, piqued by wind, and we blossomed together, our bodies becoming one with the network of electrons buzzing around us.

  In this way, Mary and I became one of the many couples walking with their arms around each other, post-orgasmic and giddy, on the streets of the Dark City. We graduated from the Air Current Hotels to the Thousand-Finger Parlors—where we lay with our eyes closed, holding each other’s hands as invisible fingers rubbed us to climax—and later on to the second ring of the city, with its Morphing Temples. We explored our bodies as sea creatures and woodland animals. Mary would transform into a blue-eyed doe, and I, a buck, would brush my antlers against her fur as I mounted her. There was a beautiful playfulness to it all, and we rekindled our passion, which was restricted to our online lives. For when we returned to our chambers at home and changed out of our clothes, we did so with cybernetic exhaustion, barely noticing our naked bodies, which brushed against each other in the bathroom. And when we kissed goodnight, we didn’t linger. This, however, seemed a small price to pay for our online pleasures, and if we felt disconnected from each other in the real world, we attempted to pay this little heed, focusing instead on that moment, every night, when our children were asleep and we’d set off to seek our individual pleasures together.

  * * *

  MARY FOUND THE man in our bathroom shortly after we’d visited the Bondage Cathedral. I heard her scream from the other side of the house. He stood there, his body flickering—a low-resolution, pale-faced man whose body pixelated in places. His erection, however, glowed in high resolution, and when he saw Mary he said, “I want to please you in sixty-nine ways,” before she slammed the door shut and yelled for help. When I opened the door, the man was stroking himself, looking down at his enormous penis. “I can help you grow three inches naturally,” he told me.

  The FAQs didn’t cover this. And it was only after searching through other users’ blog entries that we figured out how to delete him from our home. But during our next session, when the doorbell rang, we opened the front door and encountered a man from Ghana who told us he was a distant relative. He’d brought our children presents, he said. He needed our credit number to upload the toys for the kids. We locked the door but we could see the man outside, pacing first on our porch, and then climbing into our bushes to knock on our windows. We deleted the African man, but when night came, our lamps no longer lit our home with soft warmth but contained a shadowy light, and our house was filled with the feeling of being watched by countless eyes, our every action scanned for information.

  Mary took the children into our bedroom, and I logged off to call online support. The man on the other end of the line spoke broken English, the line buzzing from an overseas connection. He tried a couple options with me, and finally said, “Sir, your account is corrupted. You will have to reset all files to the initial settings.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You must delete all data from your account—your preferences, photos, and music. You will need to re-create your bodies again. I see you have children.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will need to delete them.”

  “What?”

  “The virus has spread to them. You will have to delete them and begin again. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “I’m not deleting my children!”

  “Yes, sir, I understand. It is your choice. But the system has a fatal error; it will only get worse. Your account is filled with viruses. You will not want your children in that house soon.”

  “Put your supervisor on.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said. Then I was put on hold for ten minutes of light jazz until a supervisor, and later her supervisor, told me the same information: that we should have installed an anti-virus protection plan. Without it, there was little left to do but return our system to factory settings.

  “What if we move to a new house?”

  “I’m afraid all of your family is corrupted,” the supervisor told me. “You’ll just end up bringing the virus with you. It’s an easy process to reboot. Simply hold down the power button on your console for twenty seconds and—”

  “These are my children!” I yelled.

  “If it’s any consolation, they won’t feel a thing; they’re just data.”

  I hung up the phone and told Mary the news. There was no way, we agreed, that we would reboot. We’d have to be vigilant, delete each and every file when they appeared. The kids could sleep in our room; we’d take shifts keeping watch over them. I called in sick to work and Mary used her vacation days, but within a week nowhere was safe. A bronze-skinned man with spiky hair appeared in our bedroom, telling Mary there were guys like him waiting to connect with her. A woman who looked like my mother transmogrified in the living room, saying she’d been robbed and needed our help to pay for groceries. We had to restrain our children from running to her when she called out their names. Toys began appearing around the house; to touch a single one was to transmit all our information across an unsecure interface. We hid the children beneath blankets, telling them this was all a game we were playing. And then, one evening, we found ourselves surrounded, every room of the house filled with cartoon characters hawking downloadable games and attractive
women selling vibrators and wrinkle cream.

  “We don’t have a choice,” I finally said to Mary. “You can stay with them and hold them. I’ll log out and do it.”

  “Do what, Daddy?” June asked, peeking out from the hut we’d built in the corner of our bedroom. We were silent for a moment.

  “Nothing,” I said quietly. “Come and give me a hug. You, too, Oscar,” I called, and our children emerged from the hut, climbing onto my lap to put their arms around me.

  I often tell myself that I held them for as long as I could. It was worse for Mary; she felt their bodies disappear from beneath her embrace.

  * * *

  AMONG MY FAVORITE memories: Snow. Its enhanced crystalline structure; its pristine whiteness; its silence. Oscar, June, and I on a sled, zooming down a snowy hill, which spools endlessly ahead of us, June pointing at the corn-piped snowman bowing to us and tipping his top hat as we speed by. And when we walk back to the house, our sled dragging behind us, the quiet end of the day, dusk falling along the horizon, the snow lilac with evening.

  Mary’s favorite memory: A morning in spring, the soft light breaking through our windows and lighting up the wood floors. I’m playing with June, rolling a small Matchbox car back and forth, and Oscar is sleeping in her arms, our family together and quiet in the morning light.

  Things I regret: raising my voice. The look of surprise on their faces moments before the hurt set in. And for what? For taking too long putting on their shoes; for not wanting to sleep when I was ready to log off; for asking me to read another chapter; for being children. There’s no way you can give everything to your children, no way you can spend every minute with them or be there for each hour of their lives. But give me a second chance, and I’d never log off. I’d read them stories until they were deep asleep, hold them tightly through the darkness, and tell them I loved them once again. The feeling of parenthood never leaves you. Not when I go to work now. Not when Mary and I go to dinner or sit alone at the movie theater.

  * * *

  EVERY SUNDAY, MARY and I go to the support group they hold over in Corvallis at the community center. It’s facilitated by Bill Thompson, a large, heavyset man with a salt-and-pepper beard who reminds us of a grizzly bear. He’s a warmhearted guy, gruff in a comforting way, who smokes Marlboro Reds outside during breaks. Every meeting he brings a basket of assorted teas and coffee for us, arranges our chairs in a circle, and offers a hug more readily than a handshake. One of his common pieces of wisdom is, “Don’t let anyone tell you they weren’t real.” He puts his fingers over his heart and taps softly. “They were real here.” Of everyone who attends, he’s undoubtedly lost the most; he had a family of five and a wife he’d met online who turned out to be a scammer. She’d taken it all from him: drained his savings, stolen his identity, and infected the children. Not that we should compare losses, he tells us. There’s no hierarchy to pain. “Our work isn’t to figure out who hurts the most,” he says. “Our work is to heal.”

  We take turns. New members tell their stories first. They go through the stages many of us have gone through. They show us their photos—if they’re lucky enough to have printed them—they talk about the smell of their children, the colors of the clothing they were wearing on the last day before they rebooted. They cry, and Bill holds the space for them, gives them a hug when it seems like they’ll accept one, and teaches us how to grieve. “We all have to reboot this,” he says, and motions to the room with his open palms. “This world, with all its pain and loss. This is where we learn to love again.”

  Bill’s been a real savior to Mary and me. For a long time there was no one to share our pain with. We have friends and they’re good-hearted, well-meaning people, but they never had kids on the other side. They comfort us for a while, a couple weeks, a month; they send sympathy cards and flowers, but in the end they all offer the same advice: It’s time to move on. They were just programs. You can create new children. And we nod grimly, knowing full well we’ll never return.

  Bill’s advice has helped us get to a place where we can say what happened wasn’t our fault, that we’re not monsters, that our children didn’t die because of us. We were lonely. We were needful. We wanted to feel pleasure again, to be caressed and loved. Our longings were those of humans, not monsters. No, the real monsters in this world are the hackers and scammers, faceless men and women who destroy lives for the joy of testing a virus, and who sacrificed our children to make a buck.

  When the meetings are over, Bill invites us to be physical like we were in the other world. “Human contact is all there really is,” he says. And so we put our arms around one another, timidly at first, and eventually, with all the warmth of our bodies. We hold the others who come, the parents and widowers, the aunts, uncles, and grandparents. We pull strangers into our embrace and hold them tightly against us. There’s nothing electronic about the gesture, no hum to the body, only the warmth of their breathing and the beating of their hearts.

  FALL LINE

  I’M FILLING ICE when Sunny radios that Desolation Pass is officially closed for the season. The top half is skiable, but after that it’s all patches of grass and rocks. “I’ll tell them to bring an inner tube,” I radio back, and Sunny says in his Cali drawl, “Riiiiight.” Ever since the Big Thaw, anyone wanting diamonds needs to buy a ticket to Dubai and shred indoor slopes. For the past three years, all we’ve had is slush and mud patches that catch your edge and leave you soaked and miserable by the end of the day. Even the hard-core skiers don’t bother going out more than once or twice a season. There will be flurries, the temp drops to thirty, and you get that phantom itch to grind bumps. Then you take the first run, mash through freezing crud, skid on a patch of ice, and realize why you don’t ski anymore.

  The lodge is quiet, chairs still on the tables, just a group of old-timers changing into their boots—diehards who’ve been coming since the turn of the millennium, back when you could still catch knee-deep powder and the bar was standing-room only after the lifts closed. They’re all in their seventies and I wonder why they bother. The slopes are hell on the knees, but still they boot up and hit the runs for their weeklong vacation.

  “Think we’re going to see some powder?” one of them asks.

  “Sure, right over there,” I say and motion to the flat-screen, where we’re playing old X-Sports clips. Bonnie Hale is doing a 360 off a Kilimanjaro peak.

  “Have faith,” another one of the guys says, and they lower their goggles and go trudging out.

  That leaves the only other two in the room, a little girl sitting on the bench and her dad struggling to get her suited up. Our kiddie hills are dotted with toddlers and their parents who want them to experience skiing before it’s gone. Sunny runs a ski school, which manages to barely be worth his time. He’s got half a dozen kids booked in his morning class, another five in his afternoon Little Eskimo Club.

  My agent found me this gig when I got out of recovery. It was becoming clear to him that I wasn’t ever going to return to the circuit, stomp powder again, make real money. He said a lodge in Utah wanted me to teach classes.

  “No fucking way I’m doing bunny slopes.”

  “All right, then let me ask you a question: When’s the comeback?”

  “Soon,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. You’ve been saying that for four years.”

  “I was learning to walk for the first three of them.”

  “Ronnie, you need to take this job. I can’t line up any more interviews if you don’t ski. People are forgetting about you.”

  I didn’t take the job, and that summer my agent dumped me. I coasted on savings and posted updates on my Third Eye feed—mostly me lifting weights, going to physical therapy—but my followers were dwindling. I watched my feed drop below a million. Then I started bartending at Red Lobster, serving old biddies who had no clue who I was, and it depressed me enough to call the lodge and agree to work a season.

  Rick, the mountain manager, wanted me to give extreme l
essons. He figured he’d cash in while I was still alive in people’s memory. Extreme ski with Ronnie Hawks: Big Snow Gold Medalist and Xtreme Games Champion. I agreed, and though Third Eye’s focus fades as quickly as the next viral video, it worked. Old fans logged on to my feed and actually came to the mountain to learn tricks from me.

  It wasn’t an extreme class. No cliffs, no 540 tail grabs or Lincoln loops, nothing that could break a neck or put someone in the hospital. What we had was a groomed slope with a couple packed jumps where I taught aging millennials how to do a daffy, a spread eagle, a backscratcher for the most advanced. We had a rail and a half-pipe, and I demonstrated combo grinds, watching as one after the other busted their asses. Every now and then I’d get a kid who wanted me to teach him a switched cork or backflip, and I’d put my glove beneath my chin, out of camera range, and point at my eyes. “Sorry, man, not allowed,” I’d say, which was my way of letting him know that if it wasn’t for the contacts, I’d have done it. The lodge made us keep them in so skiers could beam into any lift operator’s eyes and see the unbroken lines of snow or follow ski patrol to find out where the powder runs were. That’s a joke now—our streams are basically a bad version of the nature channel. You can watch empty ski lift after empty ski lift if that’s what gets you off, maybe see a single coyote make its way through the mush.

  I made good tips and usually got free drinks. Everyone wanted to know about the accident, what it felt like to drop off that cliff, go tumbling halfway down a rock face, how I could ever bring myself to put on skis again. If they were fans, I’d drag the story out for as many rounds as I needed to get plastered.