The Remote Island by Bryan Christian The burning question of the day: Life on Mars or Eleventh Hour? Plus: Britney goes on the record, USA may not renew Monk, and our Grey's Anatomy recap.
When you've got a good thing going, history feels secondary. There's a hot number in your arms, who cares where he was the night before? And yet, in the silence after, you remember that each body has a story, a hidden map of chances and ecstasies just under the surface of what looks like skin.
The Internet feels smooth like that right now, but I'm into nostalgia, into letting the fingertips of my mind slip back over my first cybercoming, into remembering the Wild West of it, the days when the Internet was halfway between a secret and a pipe dream, a future waiting to realize itself. The information superhighway, its ground newly broken, was dotted with cheap motels: couples virtualized on cathode ray mattresses, and I was doing twenty strangers a day. I was helping invent a new sin.
People thought I was making it up.
The time was 1982; the setting, Riverdale, the Bronx. I was a twenty-five-year-old graduate of NYU's rickety English Department. And the best thing was, I had this guy. He was six months younger than I was, and at twenty-five, it was remarkable to feel those six months and nurse power from them, to visualize being a six-month-old baby while his mother was sweating him out in some Grand Concourse hospital. Those six months gave me the upper hand. He was a gadget freak, my lover was, a man in love with machines. He had an electric shoe buffer, an automatic toilet-seat opener, a Personal Digital Assistant, a verbal telephone dialer, a bread maker, a water purifier, a paper shredder, a humidifier, an air cleaner, tape-head refresher, coffee grinder, watch calculator, watch compass, heart monitor, cherry pitter, knife sharpener, key finder, radar detector, g-meter; practically a fake orgasm detector. (Which would have detected nothing, FYI.)
I was working nights back then, and I came home one morning to an eerie scene. My machine-man was off to work and the minute I walked into the apartment something was different; the sound, the room tone was different. I entered the living room, and it was empty and alive. There was a plate with something delicious but half-eaten on a table next to a keyboard: not a typewriter, just a keyboard. From the keyboard a cord extended, dangerous and inviting as a tightrope, all the way across the room to the television set, where it plugged into a mystical port in the back. The television seemed to be in some kind of shock. It was black, articulate. Across the screen, in white type, were the disembodied symbols:
--
I stared at the display for a really long time; I'd never been exposed to miscegeny between a keyboard and a television before. Then I instinctively pressed the ENTER key, and slowly, the words lisped across the screen:
To me — a person who zips a jacket with great difficulty — a statement that bare and sophisticated verged on science fiction. Only then did I notice some sort of a tape player plugged into the keyboard, which looped back to the television. The mixture of all these media made me giddy, and the silence in all this weirdness was terrifying and demented. I pressed PLAY on this cassette box, and the tape, making a tiny hissing sound, began to move. The television screen went black again, a very fertile black. Just a cursor, a small white light, pulsing in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Then the word:
READY
and all its provocations. I thought of the novel Peyton Place and the words: and when she was ready ready more than ready
and Hamlet rhapsodizing
the readiness is all
then nothing.
I sat staring at that word for a long time, dealing with the truth in it. It occurred to me to call my gadget-man at work and ask him what the next step was, but that would have violated our Unspoken Gadget Code, which was: when a new machine came into the house, it wasn't even referred to for a period of months. It was every man for himself, and you learned to use it on your own, you struggled and cursed and made your own kind of love, and your relationship with this machine was your own pride and your own problem. Silence surrounded these gadgets. We used these machines separately and silently as if we were cheating on each other with the same person.
I tore through the house looking for instructions. An hour's work turned up three relevant documents, one about a company called Compuserve, one about something called a MOdulator-DEModulator, which suddenly involved the phone and which operated at something called 300 baud, a word which made me think of a whorehouse and represented a unit of speed I'd never heard of, and a torn piece of notepaper in my lover's writing with secret codes and identifications and things. So these were my clues. Returning to the keyboard, with its READYness, I typed in:
ATDT and then a phone number, then the machine whispered ENTER CODE, and I entered the Compuserve code; then some more time with the blinking cursor, then the TV lit up with ENTER USER ID, and I got sexed just looking at my gadget-man's furtive writing, it was six numbers separated in the middle by a comma, and then ENTER PASSWORD, and then two words separated by a plus sign, something like HOT+DOG or COAT+HAT. Then I broke through, and I was suddenly on the mountaintop. I could feel I had arrived somewhere I was never going to want to leave. A booping sound came out of the television, and I saw:
WELCOME TO COMPUSERVE. ENTER COMMAND.
It was like that moment you rub a lamp and a genie appears, the stuff of jokes and dreams. Welcome to Compuserve. Enter command. Indeed.
I scanned the Compuserve document. It talked of features like message boards and listings. My eye landed upon the CB feature. A discussion room, they called it, or a Party Line. Fashioned after Citizen's Band radio, the document instructed would-be users to take a "handle," or special name, for themselves, by the use of which they would always be both clearly identifiable and deeply anonymous, and enter a stream of conversation, which came before them and went on after them.
ENTER COMMAND
and I typed GOCB
ENTER HANDLE
DDD
(booping sound) . . . (DDD HAS LOGGED ON)
thanks
:o
I love you so much
if only you knew:
what?
what . . .
knew what . . .
how bad I am
I like it bad
You don't know
I do
Meet me
I can't
Why not
Cuz
I'll whip you senseless make you scream
You wish
when can I see you
you're seeing me now
y'know?
Would you two just get it on just fuck
They won't jesus it's so early who else is here, is that you, Jade?
Yes
Talk alone?
(JADE HAS LOGGED OFF)
(NILE HAS LOGGED OFF)
So . . .
Say it . . .
They've gone
Wonder what . . .
Double D let's go too . . .
Triple D
So much the better . . .
hmm . . .
But what will I do with all that
Hide and go seek
right now then . . . come away with me . . .
I don't know how . . .
I'll show you press CNTRL and Star
Christ those go together
I'll take you with me do it now
Shall I
Yes
(DDD HAS LOGGED OFF)
(SAMTHEMAN HAS LOGGED OFF)
And then I was "alone" with him. No other voices. Alone. There was a raw, brand new fear. I swear the whole screen went gelatinous, undulated like some kind of oil. I was a cybervirgin, terrified, desperate. My wrists froze above the keyboard. His words unfurled letter by letter the way men go from soft to hard in small pulses:
Is it true?
Is what true . . .
You . . .
Me?
Triple D
What is truth?
Give it to me, don't tease, is it true
It's true
Tell me
Tell you
Now, do it, tell me
They're huge, they're my burden, my announcement my ecstasy when the wind
touches my nipples I come right in the street, on the train, wherever I am
just stop in the cold they contract and take ravishing shape through my
clothes they betray me
And what do you want
Want . . . ?
How do you want me to betray you . . . what can I do to you
You can't touch me
I'm all over you
Put your mouth on them
How
Your teeth
My teeth
Gently, your teeth
I can't be gentle for long
You're not a gentleman . . . ?
That's not what you want
How did you know
I know, you're here
Yes
Tell me
Bite them
Yeah
Slowly
Yeah
Make me try to stop you make me moan
Yeah . . . more
Pull my hips down with your hands elongate my body devour it all with anything
you want to use
What do you want me to use
Anything anything
I'll make you wait
Don't
I will I'll make you w . . .
No
Then say it
Fuck me
Say it again
but I can't say it again I'm coming and I've never said it there's been no voice no sound but the click
of keys in that room and I'm half-undressed, breathless, my long hair is in my mouth, halfway down
my throat, my breasts are uncovered, my skirt is up and I have given myself to my first lover in the black sky of cyberspace.
Later, after a log-off cigarette and a long rapture, I reflected on how gorgeous it was that there were never any graphics; it was graphic in the deeper way. There in that room, altar of all quotidian worship, I lived with constant sexual semiosis; looking down, I saw my breasts, from chest to pink nipple all fullness and resonance; looking up, I saw the ceiling with its image of a shattered star etched in falling paint, an image which limned the realm of orgasm for me, lying locked in every possible embrace under that latex constellation; to the left the door, to the right the window, wounds in the wall, points of entry, of penetration by bodies, by shafts of light; now this new easel, white on black, sound on silence, and that anguish again. Pulling sex out of the darkness with my fingers. A stranger's body leaning back against my mind, tying my hands to his. Silence. Anonymity. Pure language. In the absence, in the void, is always the burn, the light that comes from desire. The ultimate Rorschach: letters white on black. On that soft black I hallucinated the words fuck me . . . nothing but denotation, no connotation, no responsibility, just pure meaning. Fuck me. At any given moment, that's what I'd say if only I could.
People define Heaven in lots of different terms. Heaven is a cliché, and so is cyberspace; it's some vast expanding sky ruled by Men where the gratification of sexual desire is no longer a function of the body. That's a piece of Heaven to me. Bodies are a dime a dozen, but minds, except when lost, are for keeps. I found Heaven on a TV screen in the Bronx, where I lived monogamously with a poet of machines while being brought to the outer edges of sexual ecstasy by strangers.
I finally told my gadget-boy about it and he didn't say anything at all. Just did me, held me down all night, no words.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
