She used to feel things so intensely. And she supposed she still did. But what she felt was now. The relief of being clean again. The warmth of the tea. The chance to relax for a moment, instead of having to be focused on her safety in dangerous surroundings.
She couldn’t feel her past in the same way.
She didn’t like Darryl, but she didn’t experience that residue flash of anger or hatred when she thought about him. She didn’t even feel the fear anymore. She believed that her parents and Marie had treated her unfairly, but the hurt she felt was intellectual, not in her gut.
How could all of that have just faded?
Sighing again, Suzi tried to put all of this out of her mind and focused on the computer screen in front of her. She deleted the spam unread, then composed her usual message for her sister.
I miss you, Marie. Please write.
She sent it and was about to close the browser when a small window popped up in the middle of the screen. She expected an ad and was already moving the cursor to click on the little “X” in its corner when the image registered.
It was a grainy, black-and-white photo of a young, good-looking black man standing in some kind of forest that looked like it had been built out of old circuit boards, wire, and other electronic litter. His face was tilted up so that she felt as though she was looking down at him from a higher perspective.
She waited to see if anything was going to happen, finger hesitating on the mouse button that would make the window disappear. But the message, when it started to scroll across the bottom of the window, wasn’t an ad.
… aaran … help … me … aaran … help … me …
For a long moment she stared at the words as they continued to scroll across the bottom of the small window. Finally she raised her gaze to the kitchen door.
“Aaran,” she called.
He popped his head out the door.
“You better come see this,” she said.
She got out of the chair to make room for him in front of the computer.
“What is it?” he asked as he took her place.
But then he looked at the screen, took in the picture, read the words scrolling under it. His face drained of colour. He turned to her.
“How did … what did you …”
“I didn’t do anything,” Suzi said. “Honest. That window just popped up.”
She bit at her lower lip, trying to figure out what she’d done, why this was freaking him out so much. He looked like he was about to have a stroke.
“Do … do you know that guy?” she asked.
Aaran gave a slow nod, his gaze returning to the screen.
“His name’s Jackson Hart,” he said. “He works at the paper and … he’s one of the disappeared.”
“I don’t get you. What are ‘the disappeared’?”
Aaran started to answer, but then shook his head. He got out of the chair and picked up the TV remote. He switched on the TV, and CNN came up on the screen. Suzi came and sat beside him on the sofa and tried to make sense out of the bizarre story that the anchorwoman was reporting.
Christy
I’ve come out onto the fire escape for another smoke, but it’s mostly just to get away from all the planning and conversation going on inside.
It’s quiet out here, almost peaceful, if it wasn’t for the anxieties pressing on my heart. The city’s just beginning to wake up—Sunday mornings it always takes its time. Even most of the stores don’t open until noon. I lean on the railing and look down the alley that runs behind Holly’s building. Nothing’s moving here, only a cat sniffing at the base of the dumpster behind Joe’s cafe, a few buildings down.
I start to take another drag from my cigarette, but pause, my gaze caught by the red ember burning at its end. It’s funny, how quickly you get back into these things. And what do you get? A momentary calm. Something to do with your hands. But mostly it leaves your mouth tasting like crap and you get to carry the stink of the smoke around with you. Lovely. I can almost see Saskia wrinkling her nose, the frown marks forming between her eyebrows.
I flick the butt away, watch as it explodes in a shower of sparks on the pavement below.
I miss Saskia so much it’s a constant pain in my chest.
I’ve never had a lot of luck in my relationships—at least not the romantic ones. I always pick the women who are different, I mean really different. Spirits and ghosts and those that are just other. But it’s not the same with Saskia, for all her otherness. I mean, we’re all mysteries to each other anyway, aren’t we? So, she’s a little more mysterious, that’s all.
What I do know is that we’ve made a good life with one another, snugly fitting together the separate pieces of who we are, but remaining individual at the same time. How often do you get that in a relationship?
I can’t bear the idea of her being gone forever.
Whoever or whatever’s responsible—man, woman, or some damned spirit in the wires—they’ll pay.
Funny, I’m beginning to sound like my older brother Paddy. Violence was the way he solved most of his problems. Me, I prefer to find more peaceful solutions. Usually. But right now …
I guess it’s true that most anybody can go over the edge, if you push them far enough. If you push them hard enough. Because right now, I just want to hit something. If I had whoever took Saskia away from me in front of me right now, and there was no way to bring her back, I think I could kill them. I could …
I shake my head. She’s not gone forever, I tell myself. We’ll get her back, one way or another. We have to.
I find myself remembering a dream I once had. I was at a book signing, opening a book to sign it for a reader, and all the words slid off the page and fell onto the floor. A couple of people were standing to one side—one of them was Aaran Goldstein, The Daily Journal’s book editor. He turned to whoever he was with and said, “I’ve always said that his words don’t really have any staying power.”
It has nothing to do with my life right at this moment, except for the helplessness I felt in the dream.
I stand and stare down the alley, watching Joe from the cafe down the street step out his back door to throw a garbage bag in the dumpster. The cat that was there earlier is long gone. The door closes with a bang behind Joe as he goes back inside.
I listen to the other sounds of the city, the traffic over on Williamson, a distant siren, but it hardly registers.
I think of Saskia.
The world of hurt I carry twists inside my chest again.
Eventually, I light up another smoke.
Aaran
“So what does any or this have to do with you?” Suzi asked, finally turning away from the screen to face Aaran where he sat on the other end of the sofa.
Aaran muted the sound on the TV and regarded her for a long moment. Sometimes when he looked at her—surreptitiously, when her attention was focused on something else, rather than like this—an unaccountable feeling rose up to collide with the other, more earthy, hunger of his libido.
He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he could feel it now. There was this subtle something different about her that set her apart from the other people he knew. Something that rose from her like an almost visible aura. If he had to describe what it felt like, the first word that came to mind was blue—a warm, electric blue, if that was possible with such an inherently cool colour.
Maybe it had something to do with him seeing her through this growing infatuation he had for her. Maybe it was her living the way she did. He couldn’t remember ever really talking to a street person before, never mind spending this much time with one. But whatever it was, she seemed to have a different take on everything, a different way of looking at the most simple thing. Like with this business on CNN.
She didn’t seem to be in the least perturbed by what she’d just seen on the TV screen. Maybe once you were homeless, events beyond the ragged borders of your street life didn’t really register anymore. Or matter. But it mattered to him. And
the longer he sat here thinking about it, thinking of the enormity of what he’d gotten himself involved with, the more of a need he had to talk to someone about it.
Suzi was here. She was also so divorced from any other part of his life, that talking with her felt like it would be easier than with someone he actually knew. And it wasn’t like there was anyone else he could turn to. But he had to talk about it.
“It’s all my fault,” he said.
“I don’t get it.”
“That guy in the computer,” Aaran said, jerking his head to the desk. “I got him to run a virus to bring down this Web site called the Wordwood.”
“I still don’t follow you.”
“Something must have gone wrong. Don’t you see? All those people got sucked into their computers. I knew this was connected to the virus the first time I heard about it. I just knew it. Jackson sitting there in my notebook only confirms it.”
“That’s not a person,” Suzi said. “It’s just an image—and not a very good one, either.”
“No. He’s in there. Maybe not in my notebook, per se, but somewhere in the Internet. They all are. Jackson told me about these, I don’t know, things that live in the wires. They’re like voodoo gods or spirits or something. And they don’t like people messing around with them. They don’t even like people talking about them.”
He could see what she was thinking, how she thought he was crazy. She was probably seriously regretting that her clothes were still in the dryer and she couldn’t just bolt from the apartment. He didn’t blame her. He felt a little crazy himself.
“Hold on a minute,” Suzi said. “First of all, nothing lives on the Internet. That’s just impossible. And secondly—” She pointed to the muted TV screen. “Nobody’s saying anything about computers on the news. When you cut through all the bullshit, they’re not really saying much of anything.”
“And you know what makes me feel the worst about all of this?” Aaran went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “His landlady told me that he used to admire me. I’m such a shit.”
“Listen to me,” Suzi said. “Computers don’t swallow people.”
“Then where did they go?”
“I have no idea. But they’re not on the Internet.”
“But these spirits …”
“Web sites are set up by people,” Suzi said. “Living, breathing people, no different from you or me.”
Aaran shook his head. “I don’t know …”
Neither of them said anything for a time. They sat on the sofa, watching the talking heads on the silent TV screen. The dryer stopped its cycle in the laundry room and Suzi got up. She took her clean, dry clothes into the bedroom and closed the door. A few minutes later she came back out again. Aaran noted that she was still wearing the T-shirt he’d give her under a zip-pered fleece jersey.
“Okay,” Suzi said as she sat down beside him again. “Let’s not talk about where these people have gone or spooky Web sites because we’re never going to agree on that. Instead, let’s deal with where you’re at. You feel responsible. So what are you going to do?”
“What can I do?”
“Well … you could go the police and tell them what you’ve told me.”
Aaran nodded. “And they’d believe me as much as you do. I know how crazy it sounds. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I even believe what I’ve been saying.”
“No,” Suzi said. “You don’t talk about boogiemen on the Internet. You talk about the site. How this guy—”
“Jackson Hart.”
“How Jackson Hart brought it down with a virus. How maybe the people running the site have found some weird way to take their revenge on him,”
“Not to mention how many hundreds of other people.”
She shook her head. “No, just stay focused with this. Talk about what you do know. Nothing more. Let them make connections and try to sort it out.”
“I’ll probably spend the rest of my life in jail by admitting to any kind of involvement. This is a big deal now. Way bigger than anything I was really trying to do.”
“But all those people …”
Aaran bent over, his hands against his face.
“I know,” he said, his voice muffled.
How had it come to this? It had seemed so simple a week or so ago— just a way to get back at Saskia and her too-cool crowd.
“Well,” Suzi said. “I guess the other thing you could do is contact the people who run the site. Do you know who they are?”
“Not really …”
“You must know something about them to have enough of a grudge to have your friend write a virus that would take down their Web site.”
Aaran sighed. He really didn’t want to get into any of this. But he felt committed now, having told Suzi as much as he had. Besides, what would it matter? It wasn’t like they knew anybody in common. What made him hesitate was that he didn’t just want to get into her pants anymore. However improbable it might seem to anyone who knew him—including himself— he was beginning to care about what she thought of him. But he was into this too far to hold back now.
“It wasn’t with them, per se,” he said. “There’s just this woman. She treated me like shit and then she got all her friends to do the same.”
Suzi gave him a funny look. “I know how that feels.”
“You do?”
“Maybe we’ll have time to exchange war stories later, seeing how we’re sharing all these confidences. Right now let’s focus on the problem at hand.”
Aaran sighed again. “God, I feel like such a shit. When I think of all those people … it makes me feel like a monster.”
“Did you ever hit a woman or a kid?” Suzi asked. “Did you ever beat on someone not as strong as you? Someone you should have been protecting?”
He shook his head.
“Then you’re not so bad.” She smiled. “Or at least not entirely bad. So tell me what this ex-girlfriend of yours—I’m assuming she’s an ex?—”
Aaran nodded.
“What do she and her friends have to do with what’s happening now?”
“They were all really into this Wordwood site,” Aaran explained. “So I thought a way to get back at them would be to have Jackson take the site down with a virus. I wasn’t planning anything permanent—and certainly not on this scale. It was just supposed to be an inconvenience.”
“But you don’t know any of the people who actually own the site?”
“I’m not sure who’s running it now, but one of the people who started it up lives here in town.”
“Then start with him.”
“It’s a her. She owns a bookstore up on the north side.”
“Then we should start with her.”
“I guess …”
Suzi stood up. “So come on.”
“What, now?”
“Why put it off? Is it okay if I leave my stuff here till we get back?”
Aaran pushed himself up from the sofa and gave her a puzzled look.
“You’re coming with me?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Why?”
She smiled. “I’ve got a bunch of reasons. The first is, well, you seem to be a pretty good guy. I know you’d like to jump my bones—oh, don’t deny it. You don’t think I can tell from the way you’ve been looking at me? But the thing is, you’ve been polite and you haven’t pushed or anything. After what my life’s been like for the past few months, I appreciate that.”
Aaran was going to protest, but then he simply shrugged. He’d started out with the truth when they started talking about Jackson. He might as well stick with it.
“Secondly,” Suzi went on, “I get the feeling you don’t have a whole lot of friends, and I know what that’s like, as well. Especially when people you thought were your friends turn on you.”
Aaran caught something, not so much in her voice, as passing over her features, that told him there was more to it than that. A world of more. He wanted to ask her about it. He w
anted to know why this whole conversation, why everything about Suzi was making him the feel the way he did. He’d never talked to anyone the way he was talking to her.
“I wasn’t all that nice to her, either,” he said instead. “To Saskia, I mean. The woman I was trying to get back at when I started all of this.”
“But we’ve already established that you weren’t hitting her or anything, right?”
“Words can be almost as hurtful,” Aaran said.
Suzi’s eyes clouded. “Yeah, don’t I know that. But you regret it now, don’t you?”
Aaran nodded. Surprisingly, he actually did. Not because of the trouble it had ended up getting him into, but because it had been wrong.
“Who are you anyway?” he said. “You’ve got me saying things and feeling things no one else ever has.”
She smiled. “Maybe I’m your guardian angel. I mean, we’re all supposed to have them, right? But who says they have to be these celestial beings floating around with harps and halos? Maybe they’re just someone you happen to meet by chance and that meeting changes your life. Hell, if that’s the case, maybe you’re my guardian angel because I’m sure feeling a lot more human than I have in a long time. You know, being able to have a conversation like this where the other person doesn’t think you’re just some loser or freak.”
Aaran could only shake his head.
“Which brings me to my last reason,” she said. “I’ve been living on the streets for three months now. I know that’s not a long time in the overall scheme of things, but when you’re actually doing it, it feels like forever. Every damn day feels like forever. And the worst of it is how you just feel so worthless. But I don’t feel like that right now. I feel like I’m helping you, that you appreciate my support, and that makes me feel like maybe I’m not as useless as people make me feel when I’m trying to get a job or panhandling.”
She paused. “I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”
“No. And you’re right on all accounts. But let’s eat first and then I’ll call a cab.”