Opening the front door of his home, Peter was suddenly assaulted
by a strange blaring voice and shouts of laughter. The cacophony
grew louder and more vexing as he neared the computer lab.
Charging into the room he found Ivy sitting cross-legged on the
floor and holding a joint to her lips. Her enraptured smile
wavered when she registered Peter's expression.
Two other young people, both boys, were also in the room, both
seemingly oblivious to Peter's arrival. One of the boys held a
microphone with a thin cable that ran into a small black box,
which was in turn attached to a Joey. The computer and a color
monitor rested on a table in the center of the room, which was
littered with beer cans, bottles, and junk food packages. On the
monitor was a bright yellow smiley face, and as the boy spoke
into the microphone the smiley face became animated and
responded.
"Say cheese," the boy said.
"Say cheese," the smiley face replied, but with an unreal robotic
tone rather than a natural human-sounding tone. Simultaneously,
the words "Say cheese" appeared in a little balloon, like in a
cartoon strip, beside the smiley face's mouth. Nicknamed "Myna
Bird," the program, which Ivy had designed, was a crude
demonstration of speech recognition and synthesis, which enabled
the Joey to hear and speak plain English words. The microphone
fed the sounds directly into the converter box and through the
Joey, which interpreted them into actual text and spoken words,
based on a library of words it had already learned.
"Goo goo," the boy said.
The smiley face did not reply.
"I said, `goo goo,'" the boy said again, breaking into gales of
laughter.
"I said," the smiley face said, unfamiliar with the rest of the
sentence.
"I said `goo' fucking `goo'!" the boy shouted.
"I said...fucking," the smiley face said.
The boy chuckled a trippy chuckle and glanced at the others -
and saw that none were laughing. He turned around and saw Peter.
Busted.
"What the fuck is going on?" Peter said loudly.
"What the fuck is going on?" the smiley face mimicked, deadpan,
minus the fury.
The others guiltily bowed their heads, mindful of Peter's
palpable anger - all except for Ivy who, turning to avoid looking
at Peter directly, rubbed her nose to stifle a small giggle. In
her attempt to contain her mirth, the situation worsened and her
cheeks puffed and she burst out laughing.
Peter approached her with his hands on his hips.
"What's so fucking funny?"
The boy holding the microphone quickly switched it off, before
the smiley face could say anymore.
"You are," Ivy said, bringing her knuckles to her face,
sputtering out more giggles. "You are, love."
The boys chuckled nervously, like maybe this wasn't so bad after
all.
At the sound of the sharp slap, all laughter ceased.
Peter stood there, eyes blazing at her, his hand still raised in
the air.
With a vacant expression, Ivy absently brushed her cheek and
tried to focus her vision on him.
"Get out," he said, turning to the others.
Ivy remained seated on the floor, stroking her face while the
boys disconnected the equipment from the Joey and gathered their
knapsacks.
"You can keep the beer, man," one of the boys said as he
shouldered his pack. Then the pair was gone.
Alice padded softly into the room and began picking up the
scattered litter. She stepped on an empty potato chip bag, which
crackled noisily underfoot. Peter could see that it was an
International Foods brand, one of Matthew's onetime goodies. Too
bad he hadn't stayed in fucking soda pop. Any temporary remorse
Peter felt for his behavior, for slapping Ivy, vanished, and his
rage returned with greater force.
"Leave it, Alice. Ivy will clean up."
The housekeeper hesitated then returned the empty bottles to the
table, her face flushed as she soundlessly exited the room.
Peter turned and faced Ivy from where he now stood, across the
room.
"I'm sorry," she said, still sitting on the floor and now rocking
back and forth with her arms wrapped around herself. "We were
working on my program, and I wanted to surprise you tonight with
a new dialect module I put together - "
"You have to go."
" - and I wanted to demonstrate it when you walked in, so you
would be happy."
"I said leave."
Tears were dropping from her chin and she remained seated on the
floor in a trance-like state. His eyes settled on the Joey's
silent glowing screen, the smiley face staring at him with its
stupid knowing grin. His jaw quaked as he fought back his hurt,
his longing to run to her and have her hold him, to apologize and
tell her about everything that had happened. He was torn.
No, not her.
Regardless of what had happened last night, he needed Kate. Not
this girl, who, he reminded himself, like everyone else, was
using him.
"Get out!" he shouted.
"But I love you!"
"No!" He turned and raised his hands to his head to subdue the
pounding that was growing angrier the longer he stayed in this
polluted room. "You used me. You even stole my clothes."
"I'm in love with you. Peter, please. I almost died when I heard
you were coming to speak at the commencement. I had to sneak into
the reception, just so I could see you. And then when I met you
and you invited me here, I knew it was because you felt it too,
the way we connected when we saw each other." She came from
behind him and attempted to take him in her arms.
"Don't touch me," he said, shaking her off. He crossed the room
and positioned himself on the other side, a chaise lounge between
them.
She stayed where she was, hands at her sides and face all red and
puffy. "Peter, I need you. I've changed my life because of you."
He looked in her direction, but his eyes were unseeing. "If you
don't get out of here right now with everything that's yours,
I'll carry you outside myself and throw you down the hill." His
face was unmoving and placid, almost like the smiley face.
She took a step toward him, her hands twisting together,
pleading. "But last night. Peter. What about last night?"
He closed his eyes and clamped his jaw. Nothing.
"Fuck you, then," she spat. But she made no motion to leave.
Instead, she crossed her arms over her breasts and stood there. A
sound that was both a laugh and a cry burst from her lips. "Don't
you see? I did this for you, because I care about Joey, and you.
Why don't you want to believe that. That's why I changed my
studies, because I knew this was something important." She
smacked the monitor. "You know you care about it." She pointed at
him accusingly. "You said so yesterday, when I showed you how far
I'd come." She made a disgusted face. She fought to hold back her
tears. "But you don't give a damn. Not about anyone but
yourself."
He did not respond. As she collected her things, his attention
remained fixed on the computer's screen. He heard her climb the
stairs and enter the guest room. There were sounds of drawers
opening, the closet door sliding on its tracks. A few minutes
later she came downstairs. He did not look at her.
She crossed the room and ejected a floppy diskette from the Joey,
and picked up a box of floppies sitting on the table. She placed
the items in her knapsack, hoisted the bag onto her shoulder, and
collected her small duffel bag at the doorway. Straightening
herself for a moment with her back to him, she spoke. "You're
gonna regret you did this, Peter." Then she was gone.
He sat down and glared at the smiley face. It returned his gaze,
passive, obedient, waiting for input. Just like everyone else, he
thought morosely, it wanted something from him.
At his side he felt the neck of a bottle protruding from between
the sofa cushions. He lifted it. A nearly empty bottle of wine.
Red wine.
And then it hit him. The bottle was the special Cabernet
Sauvignon Kate had given him on their first date, which they had
vowed to drink together when Wallaby turned ten years old.
"No!" he cried, and hurled the empty bottle at the evil smiley
face with its leering, shit-eating grin.
The monitor exploded in sparks and smoke, the smiley face gone
forever, and the room fell into silence and he was all alone.
* * *
"Greta?" Matthew called, stepping from room to room on the lower
floor of the house. He climbed the stairs. Soft, pleasant music
drifted out from the bedroom. He closed in on the bathroom, and
found his wife in the tub. She raised her face from some sort of
picture book or atlas propped on a silver bath tray table.
He lowered himself to the closed toilet seat. "It's over," he
said.
"Thank God," Greta said. She closed her eyes and stretched her
right arm out of the tub. Bubbles and soapy water dripped from
her perfect hand onto the floor. "Darling, would you pass me the
oil please?"
He handed her a bottle of spiced bath oil. She held it there, out
of the tub, until she caught his eye. She led his vision to the
bottle's cap and he uncapped it and held it while she squeezed
the red liquid into the water. It spurted from the bottle and he
was suddenly mesmerized by the mixture as it bled into the water.
He studied his wife with sullen fascination as she lay there with
her eyes closed, gently oscillating her shoulders and legs,
mixing up the oil and water. With her eyes still closed, she held
out the bottle to him again. Accepting it, his hand touched hers
for an instant. He shivered, and felt a sudden need to urinate.
He could not remember the last time he had seen her other hand
naked, which was presently hidden somewhere under the water in
the tub. Nor could he remember the last time they had made love,
though he was pretty certain it was the evening before
International Foods had thrown the yacht party for him to
celebrate the success of Orange Fresh. Thinking of these things,
he was momentarily hypnotized by the sight of her there in the
tub, moving in the frothy pink water. His mind roared with the
horrific image of her as she had appeared when the accident had
occurred. Underwater. Stillness. Then her eyes bulging as her
head splashed up out of the sea's redness. The screaming. The
flailing. The blood. Splashing -
She was flicking bath water at him. "Matthew, are you here? I
said I'm happy for you. Did everything work out okay?"
"Yes. Yes," he said, blinking. A few droplets had landed on his
trousers. He brushed them away and said, "He's gone. It's over.
They all chose me over Peter."
"There," she said, "you see. I told you everything would work out
just fine."
He thought about how she saw things. A few months ago, when he
had felt doubt, she had helped him regain his focus and set the
stage for today's meeting. Her persistent belief in him had
finally won out, and ultimately he had believed in himself enough
to begin the painstaking maneuvers necessary to topple Jones
after he'd balked at Matthew's suggestion to make the Joey more
compatible with ICP's computers. That, he understood now, was
when it must have happened, when he had begun to live in his
wife's presence without really noticing her anymore, focusing
wholly on his work. The first stage of detachment had been after
the accident. The second was after he had gotten his plan
underway. He had finally and completely shut her out, without
ever really meaning to. In both cases he had told himself that it
was temporary, that things would eventually return to the way
they had been. But now he understood that those times would never
return. They couldn't, for it seemed all was lost on that day of
the accident. He thought of the object - that was precisely how
he thought of it, an object of his lost affection - which he kept
hidden in the inside pocket of his briefcase. Lost. What was he
going to do? How would he end up? How would they end up? He knew
what she was thinking, what her own hopes were. That now that
Peter Jones was out of the way, he'd spend more time with her.
Turning his wedding band round and round on his finger in his
lap, hidden from her sight, he spoke. "This is just the
beginning, honey," he said, cautious. "Now, slowly and carefully,
I have to reveal my plan for engineering our products to connect
with ICP's systems to the board and executive staff so that they
believe I'm doing it to increase sales and market share." He
watched her expression.
Sponging her neck, she said, "Well darling, now that that pest is
out of your way, I'm sure you'll have no problem." There was an
edge of warning in her delivery.
"Yes," he paused. "But there are many people in the company who
still carry Peter's belief that ICP is bad and that Wallaby
should concentrate on competing more firmly rather than yield to
them."
"Darling, you've come this far, and you'll make it to the
glorious end of your plan just fine. I just know it. Have you
contacted William yet?"
"I sent him a message," Matthew said. He realized that he needed
to check to see if William had received the memo and replied to
it. His concern asserted itself. "William's not going to be
pleased. He wanted me to exhaust every possibility to keep Peter
onboard. But after seeing the way he reacted I doubt he'll stick
around." Matthew stood. He had to use the toilet...but rather
than use this one he wanted to use the one downstairs. "I better
go check my e-mail," he said, excusing himself.
He hurried downstairs to his library office. He turned on his
computer and hung his jacket over the chair. His Joey was
outfitted with every add-on option, including a color monitor, a
CD-ROM drive, a laser printer, and a mouse. Seeing the mouse
lying there, he abruptly remembered Laurence and the thoughts
he'd had of her yesterday in his car; he recalled too the image
of her lovely hand clutching the manila folder less than an hour
ago in his office. While the computer started up, he went into
the library's small toilet. He stood before the toilet and opened
his fly. At the same time he closed his eyes, concentrating.
There came no flow. Instead, he felt himself hardening in his own
hand. He locked the door, dropped his trousers to the floor, and
seated himself. At the age of ten, Matthew Locke had had the good
fortune of discovering masturbation. It had altered the course of
his life forever. For whenever he became distracted from his
studies, thinking about girls instead of geometry, he had simply
relieved himself. It was to this dedication that he owed his
success. It had enabled him to focus all of his energies on
important things. He had achieved autonomous coupling - a boy and
his hand. Even in college he favored this method. Of course there
had been girls, but none of them ever proved worth the time or
effort. Though this was the price he paid in order to come so far
so fast, he had never seemed to fully grasp its relevance until
the day he'd met Greta. The instant he'd laid eyes on her, her
hands, he determined it was time to think about marrying. It was
important to his career, and if he was going to do it, then why
not with a woman who's hands were more alluring than his own?
Were.
But hers were not the hands he thought of now, holding him,
stroking him. No, the hand he imagined in place of his own
belonged to another woman, a girl, really, who he told himself he
must resist.
He came, and she went.
* * *
It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and Peter was in bed.
He lay there staring at the ceiling. Time didn't matter anymore.
Every now and then he took a gulp of Scotch from the bottle he
had opened after Ivy left. Normally he never drank hard liquor.
But today it seemed like the most natural thing to do. He needed
something to help him escape from his own mind, something that
would inevitably force him into sleep, where he could hide, even
if just for a couple of hours, from his dilemma. It was too soon
to try and think things through. Through? How, he wondered, does
one think through being through? With every swallow from the
bottle the reality of it all slipped a little farther away.
What he wanted to know was, what would they do for the future?
His instinctive reaction to anything that threatened Wallaby - in
this case, his being flung from the company - provoked fear and
anxiety for its future, beyond the potential misery of his
personal fate.
He had given nearly ten years of his life to Wallaby. The time
when it all began seemed like a lifetime ago.
He drifted.
Never socializing with the jocks, pot-heads, or any other group,
Peter Jones was considered an oddball student. He had been an
orphan most of his life, living in a Los Gatos home governed by
an elderly couple. He was used to spending time alone, reading or
going for walks in the nearby woods, imagining he was Henry David
Thoreau, observing nature, lost in his own thoughts. Whenever he
was forced to spend a few trial days with potential foster
parents, he affected a sullen and despondent mood, saving a
tantrum or explosive outburst for the last day of the test
period. He had gotten by just fine on his own, and he didn't need
anyone, or anything, except maybe his science fiction novels.
Clayton and Clara Dodson, the owners of the orphanage, had had
their hands full with Peter. Eventually they stopped sending him
off to potential homes. The youngster pretty much took care of
himself and was always willing to help out around the orphanage.
One day the Dodsons's acceptance of Peter went from resigned to
delighted when he burst into the house and told them he had
invented the world's first truly portable computer. Peter had
recently begun to hang around with the "gear heads," students who
were involved in clubs fostering fans of rockets, automobile
engines, and electronics. At the club meetings he met several
kids like himself - bright, introverted; some of them would
eventually become his first employees at Wallaby, right out of
high school. During his senior year, while checking out some of
the other student projects an hour before the science fair, Peter
met two gawky fellows who had built a device they called the
All-In-One Computer. The invention was primitive at best, but all
the right parts were there: keyboard, screen, disk drive.
Captivated, and without a project of his own, Peter persuaded the
boys to include him in their project which, five minutes before
the show began, he renamed the Portable Personal Computer.
The project won first prize, and after the show an older
gentleman named Mr. Towers introduced himself. He told the boys
that they were on to something and that they should give him a
call sometime if they advanced the design of the box. Peter
shoved the man's business card in his pocket.
Peter became more and more intrigued with the concept of a
computer you could take with you wherever you went. Theirs came
close, but it required a wall socket to power it so the only
place you could really take it was from room to room. During the
summer after his high school graduation he reread all of his
science fiction books featuring robots and computers as their
main characters. In his mind's eye he fashioned a small computer
that could be his friend, like the ones in the books. He imagined
taking his computer with him for walks in the woods, telling the
computer about the things he saw, and what he thought. His
computer would keep these things in its memory, and the more it
learned about him and the world, the more loyal and dependable a
friend it would become. He would make a lot of them,
inexpensively, so that everyone could afford one and use it for
whatever they wanted. He envisioned the computer and how it would
work, how people would approach it and work with it. When he felt
he had realized the computer as clearly as if he already owned
one, he sat down to start designing. But when he picked up his
pen, he could do little more than sketch crude boxes with screens
and keyboards. He realized that he didn't know how to design the
circuits and parts necessary to actually fabricate the machine.
He called the two boys from the science fair, Paul Trueblood and
Rick Boardman, and invited them over to the orphanage one
afternoon. When he described his idea, the boys grew excited.
Pushing his eyeglasses up on his nose, Paul began rambling about
how he could do the hardware part, maybe even squeeze in a modem
for calling up other computers, and Rick described how he could
write a integrated program for the computer so that it could do
real work for people, like keep track of important names and
addresses, right out of the box.
Three months later the three boys stood in front of their first
prototype, the Mate, and ran their first program, an all-in-one
organizer and word processor and communications program that they
dubbed Easy Does It.
When the Mates development was well underway, Peter contacted Mr.
Towers, the man he had met a few months before at the science
fair. Towers invited him to his nearby office. Two hours later,
Towers had become the primary investor in the Mate's development,
and overseer of the startup of a new company.
Within a year the boys were building as many computers as they
could in Peter's garage. Towers remained in the background,
working deals with parts suppliers through his electronic
instrument company to provide the boys with what they needed for
production. Eventually they had so many orders that they had to
relocate to real offices in nearby Sunnyvale. Peter moved out of
the orphanage and created a minimal living space for himself in
one of the building's corner offices. Together, Hank Towers and
Peter, then twenty-two, founded their new company, which Peter
named Wallaby, which everyone knew was an animal that had a
pocket in which it carried its joey...the little friend that
Peter had always dreamed of having, and knew someday he would
create.
He snapped awake to a high-pitched warble. The telephone.
Reaching for it, he knocked over the bottle of Scotch, spilling
its contents onto the hardwood floor.
"Hello?" The voice on the other end was anxious.
"Yeah," Peter said, pressing his fingers to his eyelids.
"Peter? Are you all right? Petey?"
"Kate." This came out as a moan.
She spoke very fast. "What's happened? I caught the tail end of
something about Wallaby on the CNN, something about a
reorganization, and called your office, Peter, and they said they
had not seen you. Peggy put me on hold and called the boardroom
and they told her you had bolted and that something happened but
she wouldn't tell me what. What the hell is going on?"
"It's over," he slurred.
"What's over?"
"Me. Wallaby. Everything."
"Petey, talk to me. Are you there? Petey?"
"I've been fired. From my own company."
"I can hardly hear you. I don't understand. What do you mean
fired?"
"Fired," he shouted, and immediately regretted it. The sting in
his head and heart diverged, spread. As if on cue, the secret
thing in his heart asserted itself again. With its arrival, an
abstraction formed in his drunken mind. He thought of the word
"mate." It represented the start of his life. Because of the
Mate, he had met Kate. She was his soul mate, and with her he had
experienced his coming of age. And wasn't she, in some ways, the
inspiration behind the Joey? Wasn't their nomadic relationship
what had inspired him to design a computer you could take with
you when you went away? Now it had been taken from him. How long,
he wondered, before Kate was gone too? The more aware he was of
this feeling, of losing the things close to his heart, the more
aware he became of his newest mate, the disagreeable feeling that
had burrowed inside him. At this moment it was troubled, like a
tiny caged creature suffering from hunger spasms, nourishment
lying within its line of sight, in its owner's hand, beyond its
reach, so close, yet so far away.
Kate shouted his name into the phone, breaking him out of his
stupor. "Tell me what happened."
"Matthew's in control. They want me to sit in an office. Be a
thinker." He became outraged by his own account. "A fucking
thinker."
"Then you're not fired, right, Peter. Then you're not fired?"
"Good as. Nothin' left for me to do there."
"Baby, I'm in LA at the studio. I'm leaving right now. I'll be
there as fast as I can. No more than a couple hours."
"Okay," he said softly.
"I love you."
"You too." Chest pains. He hung up the phone and picked up the
bottle.
"It was the Scotch," he said to the empty room, then uttered a
painful chuckle that bordered on hysteria and threatened to
overtake him if he didn't get a grip. He busied himself looking
for the bottle's cap, but saw that he wouldn't need it. The
bottle was empty.
And so was he.
Wallaby. Kate. These things came to a man only once in his
lifetime. Had become his lifetime. Once you've lost them, he
reckoned as he began to drift off to sleep, you never again get,
or deserve, anything as good.
Teetering on the edge of consciousness, he struggled to remember
the lyrics of an old song he used to listen to, something about
you can't always get what you want, but if you cry sometimes, you
get what you need.
Not quite, but close enough.
And so he cried.