My father walks into the kitchen, twenty-eight years old, unshaven, smoking a Camel unfiltered and scratching at his boxer shorts. He pats the head of the winged monkey that is perched, grinning and rustling, on the top of the refrigerator. He opens the fridge door and pulls out a Rolling Rock Extra Pale in a long neck bottle. The light from the refrigerator glints on his wedding ring. He has been married six years. I do not know where my mother is. I could not
remember that. I remember this place. The kitchen at the house on the lake, my father just rolling out of bed, his unkempt hair, the odor of sweat and something else that hovers around him. Alcohol, of course. But I did not know that then. He joins me at the kitchen table. He smiles at me. His face is bristly, yes, but unlined, less care-worn than my own is now.
"So," he says, "what's on tap for today?"
"I don't know," I say. I'm thirty-three years old and I'm blushing, struck near-dumb with
shyness. "Whatever you want. Anything you want."
He pops off the cap with an opener that hangs around his neck from a string. "Whatever I want," he says. He takes a pull from his beer. He sucks at his cigarette. I wait. I
want very much to hear what he says. I want that very much.
At that moment, I swear I hear it again, an echo swelling backwards (or forwards) through time: the shot amplified by bathroom acoustics, the reverberations, the silence, a ringing. But that can not be. I control every sound here. I only hear what I want to hear.
"Anything I want," he says. The monkey screeches from atop the refrigerator and unfurls its wings, shaking them out. Blue-gray feathers sail out into the still kitchen air. "What do
you want?" he says.
"A movie?" I say. "A double-feature at the Playhouse?"
He smiles. He takes another swallow. The cigarette has burned down to his knuckles, has begun to singe the fine blonde hairs there. He doesn't notice. The monkey lifts away from the
fridge with a tremendous clatter, hovers, darts away out of the room. A fine thin plume of smoke rises up from my father's knuckles.
"What's wrong?" my father says. "What's wrong?"
I am trying to bring my father back to life. I've been trying for years. Some dark nights I sit in front of a silent television, searching for old movies, the movies I remember seeing
with my father. I am ravenous for memories. They fade, washed away by the blank white smear of headlights and television and computer monitors, eroded by data, uncorked by code.
I've seen my future. I'm already there. It's scary as hell.
I had an acquaintance named Sully who used to be the best car thief in Boston. When he was busted the last time, the time that would have sent him away for close to forever, the cops made him a deal: work for us. It wasn't much of a deal, really, but Sully had been getting
bored anyway. So he started teaching tax-paying citizens how to prevent nasty people like him from breaking into their cars. He was on the city payroll and had his own security company on the side. He liked the challenge, the cops had him out of their hair and on their side besides, and car theft dropped by thirty per cent, no lie. All of this he told me later, after we'd gotten to know each other. I met Sully because he was looking for holograms. I didn't know, at first, how he got my address. The cops, I thought then. I didn't really want to think about it too much. He showed up at my apartment one Saturday afternoon in March. Gray snow twitched in the air. Dark clouds slammed down on the skyline like a lid. Sully was smoking a Marlboro Light and stamping on my doorstep. He had a long red and white Cat in the Hat scarf on. I have always remembered the details. "You don't know me," he said. "But I'm Sully. Have I got a deal for you."
He had this idea that you could rig up a hologram of a person sitting inside of a car, and any booster would take one look and see it occupied and keep walking. I told him it couldn't be done; and even if it could be done, the cost would be prohibitive. But it was an interesting idea.
"Cost," Sully said. "Cost is imaginary. Sooner or later, nothing costs anything. It all pays out. Prohibitive cost. No way. Sooner or later, it pays for itself."
He was pacing around my living room by then. He was still smoking. I smelled liquor on his breath. It smelled like Scotch to me, maybe Dewar's, though that was just a guess. My whole house is my work area, and there were boards and chips and wires and terminals and tools and monitors and disks scattered everywhere. I had the prototype VR on a workbench by the window. Sully picked up the headset.
"What's this?" he said.
"Headset," I said.
"Right," Sully said, and put it down, and looked out the window, and said, "Shit. We're due for more snow." It was then, when he pretended not to care, that I knew he was smarter than he seemed. I should have thrown him out. I should have seen him for what he was. But I said, "Holograms, huh?"
He turned and grinned.
I am doing this -- this -- because I loved my father, and I don't understand why he killed himself. I am doing this because each day I am more alone, and each day, my memories of my
father dim. I can not cling to the genuine forever. I can not cling to the thin skin of the world for all that much longer, and what then?
My father is thirty and clean-shaven and drinking coffee this morning. We are both of us quiet. I'm waiting for him to say something. I was seven when this happened. He is smoking a
cigarette and sipping at his coffee. I worked for two days on the cigarette. All of the variables. All of the vectors. He stubs out each cigarette carefully when it has burned down to exactly a half inch from the filter. Then he lights another, and so on. I shouldn't notice this. I try not to.
"So," I say. "What do you want to do today?"
He looks at me. His eyes are bright bright blue with tiny floating flecks of green in them. They are slightly wet, red around the rims.
"Some days," he says, "everything in the world just breaks your heart."
Judy Garland walks in, breathlessly. Her breasts swell beneath blue gingham. Her lips are full. Her calves are muscled, tight. She smells like she just tumbled out of a gray, gray bed and into Oz. I am, quite suddenly, embarrassed. Her ruby slippers are too red; the whole kitchen takes on a dull smoldering glow. She looks at us both. My father does not look up. He does not even see her. "Now I'll never get home," she says. She looks at both of us. When we don't say anything, she walks out.
"Someday," my father says, "you'll know exactly what I mean."
He stubs out another cigarette and looks up at me, searchingly. "What's wrong?" he says.
I flicked off the switches by my left temple and the room sighed slurping away, and I took off the headset and stared at my blue walls.
That winter was cold, brutal. I was used to living alone. But every other day, every other weekend, there was a knock at my door, Sully. A chatty phone call. No reason to call, but. Just thought I'd drop by, bad time? Then, inevitably, another pitch of the hologram ("Okay, then how about house window holograms, figures moving past, scare off the burglars...two silhouettes in the shade, y'know?"). They were all good ideas.
"I don't get you," Sully said one day, sitting in my kitchen, a coffee steaming at his elbow. I sat across from him, my leg bobbing, anxious. Just having coffee with someone made me
anxious. Sully looked at me. He had deep blue eyes, dark, a storm at sea. He took a flask from an inside coat pocket and poured something into his coffee (I guessed whiskey, but never asked). "Why don't you go for any of this? The money could be great."
"I'm working on my own project," I said. "I'm kind of focused on that. I could refer you to some good people, maybe."
"I don't want good people," Sully said. "I want you." He looked at me, smiling. Unaccountably, I blushed. "What are you focused on?"
I told him then about virtual reality. I only said it because of my sudden discomfort. I can't explain why I told him. I shouldn't have. He was full of questions, then: how does it work?
could anyone use it? could anyone program it? could you modify the programs? could he try it? did I have a demo?
He leaned across the table, his eyes, I swear, lightening. I knew I'd never be rid of him.
It's a drag explaining the technology to non-users. Scanning photographs. Sampling sounds. Scanning movies. Animation programs. Morphing programs. New logic used for AI projects. "Learned" behavior. Simulators. Sounds and sights are easy, but painstaking, laborious. Over the course of weeks, in my kitchen, on the sofa, I explained it all to Sully. As if I'd been starving to hear my own voice and hadn't known it. There is not a single computer with enough memory for more than a few seconds of VR, I explained, so I've daisy-chained three dozen of the most powerful computers together. Hours and hours of coding. Days upon weeks upon months of coding. Voice synthesizers and body suits. Smells are impossible, though an interesting problem. Tactile stuff became easier, the more I did it.
Still, every time my father smoked a cigarette, the backs of his fingers began to melt. This is the one thing I never told Sully. This I kept to myself.
My facts are simple: I am a man about to turn thirty-three, skittering into my Christ year. I am unmarried. I am an only child. I work with my computers. That's really it. I live off
the interest of a trust fund my father set up for me. I could live off of the royalties for a microchip I invented, but that money goes to hardware. When I think about it, I realize I could live anywhere in the world but I still live in Boston, in the duplex my mother left me
when she died. I don't know what this says about me. She died of cancer. My father was a suicide, ten years earlier. He shot himself in the head when he was (also) thirty-three. I was ten years old. We were supposed to go to the movies. I was waiting for him by the front door, wearing a blue windbreaker and white sneakers. I heard the shot, and I ran to find him, and
I opened the door of the bathroom, and I saw his body. I saw the body, and that is my life.
My father is twenty-three and full of nervous energy. He sits in the living room of the house I do not remember, on the yellow and brown-striped couch I know only from pictures, the huge
waxy ficus beside him, a cigarette in his left hand, a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the low wooden coffee table. My mother sits uncomfortably on a rocker near him, perched forward, holding her very pregnant stomach. She's wearing a brown corduroy dress over a t-shirt, and no shoes, though it is winter outside. Her feet are too swollen. I am a wraith, a pattern on the
rug, a dust mote on the silent television that dominates the room, a silent observer.
"You should do what makes you happy," my mother says, worried, chewing on a strand of hair.
"I am happy," my father says, smoking nervously. "This makes me happy. You make me happy. This is what I want."
"The money is good," my mother says doubtfully.
At this point who knows what dreams go through my father's mind? I never knew what they were. If he was a writer, no work survived him. If he dreamed of making movies, he never discussed
them. There is no canvas extant, no written record, no data to unearth. My mother never
spoke of such things. I did not think to ask while she was alive. It was only later that I realized there must have been some dream, some dream deferred, something that ate and ate and ate at him. What happens to a dream deferred? I watch.
"The money is good," he says. Behind him, in the dark shadows of the bedroom, I see a glint of light on sharp metal, something creaking. "The benefits are great. We'll be happy. This is what I want. I wouldn't do it if I didn't really want to." He smokes. My mother rocks. Flesh begins to burn.
"I got an addictive personality," Sully said one night while we sat on my couch drinking beer and watching some semi-blue movie on Cinemax. I wasn't in the habit of doing either. The light flickered, went light and dim. Under his voice there were moans and gasps.
"Boostin' cars, god damn, it was just a high that kept going and going. I never came down. Until jail. Before that, though. Adding up the numbers. Cruising for that perfect score, that perfect boost. Like sex. Exactly." He nodded at the screen. "Me, I'm a sex addict. I'd screw anything. You know? Anyone."
He didn't look at me when he said, "But I guess you're above that sort of thing."
I was bleary with beer. "I'm not above that sort of thing," I said.
"Living like you do. I've seen. A monk. Right. That's cool. I've seen the way you are."
"I'm not above anything," I said.
"Right," he said. The walls, blue, the glow of the television blue, a blue light flickering on his face as he turned to look at me.
"Right."
It was a mistake to make the software user-friendly. Sully began to work on a program of his own. It had something to do with Marilyn Monroe, John Holmes, and Jackie O. He was not
terribly embarrassed about it. He spent a few hours a week in the VR room. I don't know why I let him. I didn't like him. I didn't like him at all.
"Heaven, man," he said one day, coming out of the room. He smoothed his hair back. "Heaven."
"It's not a toy, Sully," I said.
He grinned at me. "You joker. It's the world's greatest toy. We have got to talk. I've got some ideas for this stuff."
How lonely must I have been to let this go on? Even now I don't understand it. "No way, Sully," I said.
"Man, this will make us rich."
"I don't care about money. See you later, Sully."
"Hmm," he said. "How can I change your mind?"
"Good-bye, Sully."
Later, after he was gone, I ran his program. Slipped on the headset and the gloves and the body suit. Flicked on the computer. Punched in.
On a large water bed in a clean white room, Marilyn and Jackie O. tongue-kiss each other furiously while John Holmes watches, stroking a full erection. They all look up at me
expectantly.
I scrabbled for the headset switches.
There are always Sullys out there. It's the Sullys that destroyed my father. It's the Sullys you read about in the paper. Had I cared at all about money I could have ridden my small inventions, my chips and software, up to Sullydom somewhere. I say this honestly. And this:
The only thing I care about in this world is my dead father.
I came home on a great windy day in March from a scavenging excursion (burnt chips, copper wire, video tubes) and the screen door was unlatched, bangbanging in the wind. The front door itself was closed, and locked. Inside, everything was as it should be. I checked under the beds, in the closets. There was no one there.
"Sex leads every communications revolution," Sully said. I was surprised. This was smart. I wonder where he got it. What news show was this smart?
"I don't care about sex," I said.
"Above it all. Right."
"Don't start --"
"Okay," he said, "so you don't want to be called some porno king, some sleazeball. You've got a reputation. I understand that. So maybe we should use my name. To protect your reputation."
This was pure Sully. Who couldn't see through this? Sully grinned, brazen, gleeful. He was fascinating, he was so shameless. It occurred to me slowly that this was the secret
of Sully. He didn't care that people could see through him. He wanted them to see through him. He wanted people to think he was a sleazebag, to feel superior to him, to condescend to him. Because if they did that they were fascinated, and if they were fascinated they'd eventually bite. This was how he got the cops to hire him, I remember thinking. This was how he'd made his first fortune, by playing on his slimy reputation, by forcing people to see him as calculating. Wheels and wheels. And it was working on me, too, I realized.
"No," I said. "You don't understand. I don't care about sex. At all. In any way."
"Not at all," Sully said. He shook his head. "Bullshit," he said. "That's bullshit."
"That's the truth," I said.
"You and I know it's not. You and I know that's rank bullshit, and I can prove it to you: you try to do the program for me."
"What?"
"Do the program. Find out the truth. Prove me wrong. If you don't care, do it. It won't matter."
I knew what he was thinking, and I knew I shouldn't do it. It was like I was trying to prove my fidelity by going to a pickup bar. Still, I thought I knew where my faith was. I knew
what mattered to me. I said yes even though I knew that I was playing into Sully's hands.
My father is thirty-three. Three days later he will be dead. He is driving me home from the movies. It is unusual that we would be at the movies so many times in a single week. He will
offer to take me again in three days. The Wizard of Oz, a Saturday matinee. This winter night the roads are slick. We hit a patch of ice, fishtail.
"Woo," he says, grimly exultant.
The lights from passing cars fill the front seat, vanish. My father clutches the wheel.
He says, "You know I love you, sport."
We hit more ice. He drives faster. The dark road glows yellow in the passing headlights.
"What a mess," he says.
In the glove compartment (I will only discover much later) is the gun, a pint of Scotch, speeding tickets, an IOU, a motel receipt.
We do a three-sixty and come to rest in a snowbank. Outside it is quiet. Very far away, I hear a lion roar. "You know I'll always love you," my father says, while he waits for a passing car, a tow truck, something to happen.
There is no cigarette in this scene.
When I turned off the headsets and looked out my real living room window, it was May, and it was snowing outside, a freak blizzard. Nothing was real anymore. I thought about what Sully had said. My hands were shaking. Just like Dad.
Sully had underestimated me. It took me an hour of hacking to find out what I needed to know: there was no Sully. No prison record. No arrest record. There was no Sully the thief. Strike
that: there was no Sully the car thief. Nothing is real.
Good God, how could I have been so stupid? Sully was a snoop, industrial. Christ, it happens all the time. Probably a hacker. I wondered who he really was. How else could he have gotten
the VR to work so easily, so well? If I hadn't been so...so grief-addled, I'd have never even let him in my front door. To this day, it bothers me, that I could have been so stupid. So alone.
Something in me cooled, congealed. A terrible calm descended.
So I wrote a terrible program.
When Sully came, brushing snow from his jacket, his scarf wound tight around his neck, his smile smug, I feigned shame, nodded, acquiescent, told him I'd done it. Didn't feel a thing. He knew I would do it, he said. Knew I could, he said he meant to say. He took the headset from me -- so arrogant! -- slipped on the gloves, asked for some privacy while he donned the suit, attached certain electrodes.
I gave him privacy.
I sat at the kitchen table and had a Rolling Rock and lit up a Camel unfiltered. My hands were still shaking.
Some time later I heard Sully cry out.
Contrary to what you might think, I can not write a program to fry someone's brain, or melt his ears, or blow him into some psycho ward. And I couldn't kill Sully. I mean, I knew
exactly where my father's gun was, but I couldn't just kill him while he was in VR. Though that would have been easy. And I confess I thought about it. I thought so many things.
I have a terrible imagination, and I know how to write a loop, and I know how to end each loop with the VR feedback telling him that he was taking off the headset when in fact he wasn't.
I have a terrible imagination, and when I released him, sweating and straining, Sully feared it more than he feared anything. He could not even look at me. He stood there trembling while I unhooked him, stripped the suit off. He walked out into the snow in his underwear and his scarf. I never saw or heard from him again.
I will never tell you what I made him see.
What I made him do.
When he was gone, I rebooted the system and loaded up my own last program, and slipped on the headset, the gloves, the electrodes, the bodysuit, still wet with his sweat, still warm.
I hear the shot and the thump. Again, I am too late. I run to the bathroom. I open the door. My father's body is sitting naked on the toilet. The top of his head is gone. Winged monkeys
are picking at his brain pan restlessly, nibbling. The scarecrow is sitting in the sink. "I know just how he feels," the scarecrow says. Marilyn Monroe gets out of the shower, slick and dripping. She goes over to the scarecrow and starts pulling straw out of him in a frenzy. His
painted eyes roll with pleasure. I hear the tin man clanking down the hall. In the kitchen, Dorothy says, "Now I'll never get home." She says it over and over again. A glitch in the software. Glitches. Or Sully. It could just be Sully, his last revenge, not me, no programming errors on my part, no loose impulses working their way into the software. Sully. Except
there is no Sully. The wings of the monkeys thrum like thunder. I take the gun from my father's hand. I point it at my temple. I don't know what will happen in here. I don't know what would happen to me if I pulled the trigger.
I look at the bathroom one last time, the scarecrow and Marilyn Monroe going at it in the sink, the winged monkeys picking at my poor father's head, and I think of Sully, and all of
a sudden, I can't help myself:
I start laughing.
My poor father.
If he could have seen this, the things I've done, I think he would have put his gun away forever. How varied and stuffed and open this and every world is! No matter how much
you think you're in control, the Sullys of the world terrify and delight you. I give
up. I give up pretending to understand anything: my father, my computers, my life. I put down the gun and slap the monkeys away, and I go off in search of Dorothy. Or maybe the tin man.
Why not? It's my program.
I can do whatever the hell I want.
