doctork/book/a_digital_affair_-_english.txt

/* Dr. Kernel (Chapter 1) */

At five in the morning, in the clean town of Stuttberg, Daemon the dog
is still asleep. And he, Dr. Kernel, has to wake him, just as he used to
wake his children, without any particular enthusiasm, when they were
still at school. Daemon finds it hard to adjust to the master's new
habits. For more than two weeks now their nocturnal promenades have
lingered longer and longer and even their morning is no more the slow,
lazy waking up it used to be.

While they are still on the stairs Dr. Kernel begins to talk to his dog.
"Come on, Daemon! Hurry up, let's go to the park."

What the devil am I doing talking to him in English? Dr. Kernel catches
himself for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks. Ever since the
first time he tapped out the words send, copy, edit, dir... on the
keyboard he has been changing his way of thinking. To the foreign language.

Why on earth is he talking to me in English? Daemon wonders. You only
hear English here when Tante Rachelle comes over from America. And that
hasn't happened for a long time. Like the aunt, the rshell command or,
to give it its full name, remote shell command runs business through
remote control systems. People like JJ sit at the other end of the world
manipulating distant computers with one brief key click.

When Kernel became aware of the existence of these communication systems
and was drawn into this strange dialogue with JJ and his own colleagues,
he imagined Freud and his letters to Feline and Jung. Would they have
enthused about the idea of a real time response?

"Last minute change, Daemon. Let's go to the market."

As if I didn't know... Daemon wrinkles his hairy brow and wags his tail
as a sign of dismissal and scorn. Ho, I'm beginning to think in English,
too. Strange, all the things that happen to people. All that happens to
a dog. We're obviously not going to the park, we've already spent a week
of mornings in the empty streets of the market, just a moment before the
action begins. The master seems to need to be closer to the 'matter', as
he calls it, not the pastoral poetry of wood and lake. "One goes to the
market at dawn to put life in the right proportions," the doctor says, ho.

 

And the market in its waking up gives little promise of the events to
come - a pyramid of polished tomatoes waits for the first ray of
sunlight and a row of young cucumbers is meticulously tidy, as though
they had quarreled earlier over which one would have a front row place
to represent its fellows and now the decision has already been made.
Daemon also has a tiny promise reserved for him, that one of the
pyramids will end up collapsing and falling apart, that always happens,
and a lemon or golden pepper will always end up rolling under the stall
where only he, the little puppy dog, can find it and play with it and
chase it as far as the slope of the hill on the way home. Daemon tries
to guess things about the stall-holders from their wares. An orderly
pile, what does that say? And the little eggplants in front, do they
conceal rottenness underneath or are they covering up for eggplants as
large and splendid as the rumps of the women who have wrapped squashed
sandwiches in newspaper and are now waiting in homes shrouded in the
odors of sausages and sauerkraut.

Dr. Kernel wanders around the market as though he is trying to answer
some sort of a conundrum, as though he is hunting for clues or even
ready-made solutions: I must focus. Direct my thoughts... why can't I
concentrate on the truly important questions? Quiet. Ssssh. There's that
terrifying whistling again, that rusty screech, like the beep of a
computer, breaking out from the back of his brain and penetrating each
and every ear. How many ears can a man sprout at an age when his body
cells are supposed to have stopped growing?

'Paradoxically,' so he had concluded his last article on the topic of
CONFUSION, 'It is wiser to recognize the confusion, not deny it. Thus
the consciousness will kindle the intellect which will see to repairing
the faulty mechanism.' "Ein moment," he appeals to Daemon for help,
"What were JJ's first words? Not at the age of one, when she learned to
speak, you silly thing, but two months ago, when it all began..." Did
she aim the correspondence route at me as far back as then, in order to
get personal psychiatric treatment? And how come I didn't sense it right
from the start? You remember how amazed I was when I learned that there
are daemons in her system, yes, 'a daemon is a process, a special
program, an entity permanently attending to events that occur in the
computer system and acting accordingly', that's how she explained it,
and I was carried away by interest and curiosity, by one topic after
another, by her intentions that are so clear to me now. "Let's see what
we have here, Daemon. What do we already know about her?" Nothing. After
all, she communicates with the world only through digital screens, no
other way, and that's also how she wants me to treat her and pull her
out of it. Just like that, all of a sudden, out of a whole world, it has
to be me? "Daemon, you're just not listening at all."

"Majestic nose..." the doctor murmurs, like Cyrano, clowning at the
drowsy faces of the market's first stall holders. The MEGAHIT key, that
little button that jumps computer screens and skips stages and jumps you
to the end, the winning screen, would have been better. That's the sort
of short cut he wants, not the recourse to classical and mythological
images to solve the problem for him. As is his wont when he is confused,
Kernel digs around his right nostril with the elegant turn of an
excavator, slowly and thoroughly, and the canine brain again wonders,
does the human urge to dig in the nose come from the nostril's need to
be excavated or the independent and uncontrollable desire of the digging
finger tip. And by now Daemon is almost convinced that his master has
lost his reason.

 

It all began when Johann brought his father the personal computer. Up to
then the psychiatrist had avoided mechanized progress, claiming that at
his advanced age he no longer wanted and was no longer capable of
adapting to the innovations of modernity. He regarded the computer as a
students' fad or, at most, a support tool for the faculty secretaries
who used to get a kick out of hearing him give the computer names,
'communer', let's say, instead of computer, and would crack up laughing
when he invented weird names for the different keys on the keyboard. The
'control' key, for example, the one marked with the letters <CTRL>, as
if we didn't know, he called that the 'critical button', and the
'insert' key marked <INS> was the 'interesting button' in his language
and what was the <CAPS LOCK> if not 'capsule' and so on.

"Well, and what have you brought this time, my dear son?" remembering
him little, coming home with the street treasures falling out of his
apple-open pockets...

"Look Papa, what a wonderful working environment you've got here, a
30-byte disk, a 30-megahertz chip..."

"That's enough, Johann, I can't bear that terminology."

Johann abandons the 'computer boys' language he has picked up from those
who surround him in his laboratory, discussing programming matters, and
switches to persuasion a la 'what's the big deal'.

"Listen Papa, there's nothing special or scary about it, just filing and
mail and statistics and calculations and a typewriter - and all in one
gray box."

Or maybe a black box. The son's persuasiveness won the day when he
demonstrated how, via modem and telephone, enormous information banks in
Germany and beyond could be contacted, exclaiming with amazement himself
and to himself. "So much information, Papa, just as you like. If you
just text your queries correctly, and you're good at texting, aren't
you? you can get answers here to any question that occurs to you!"

And convinced him of the machine's many advantages.

From that moment on Dr. Kernel was swept into the world of
communications that was revealing itself to him, became an enthusiast
and devoted more and more of his time to studying the inner mysteries of
the machine, even its most intimate parts. He spent hours sittingat the
screen, progreswith cautious steps through the labyrinths of the network
of forked connections and divisions, in which life happened and events
occurred. Just as he had imagined the water pipes spreading out under
the ground and living a full life of their own, so he discovered the
system of computer networks which documents and reflects everything that
happens in our world on the earth. There each and every detail is filed
in digital cells. If you only know how and where to seek. Moreover, he
recalled with satisfaction, when you are not happy you can shut that
box's mouth by pressing a button, turning it off, ON&OFF, just like the
radio, if only you could find the right button on it, too...

While making connections and setting up correspondence he began to
research the phenomenon of fear and anxiety caused by the machine. He
diagnosed a psychic symbiosis and a constant feeling of urgency in
computer users, particularly those who were addicts. They expect rapid
and accurate information, lose sensitivity to what is happening around
them and lack the ability to empathize. Think of one of them, who has
become accustomed to getting everything by pressing a button,
confronting some sort of a bureaucratic or institutionalized system. Let
him, for instance, try to publish an academic article or book he has
written, and you will see his impatience and his desire for an immediate
reply. Dr. Kernel himself has begun to exhibit impatience with his
patients' stories. They are long and ambiguous, and the pace is always
too slow.

He has found those same phenomena, but in a more extreme form, in JJ.
She is totally severed from reality and her entire world is channeled
through the computer and communication lines. And the game, the
ceaseless preoccupation with the game, what does it mean?

JJ began to hint, and later also to demand, that he take her on as one
of his regular patients. On the clear condition that the treatment would
be exclusively and solely via computer. This offer was incredibly
tempting since he had never had to face up to such a basic conflict, in
which the original concept of the psycho-therapeutic foundations, the
basic principles of therapist-patient relations, were repudiated. A
temptation which was both threat and opportunity.

At first his wife Tilda was delighted with her husband's new field of
interest. He had stopped disturbing her with the ramblings that
represented signs of his increasing age and fatigue with his profession.
"And anyway, that's how it is at our age...." her all-knowing neighbors
commiserated with her at the pharmacy. But within a few weeks this joy
turned into amazement and concern, since at some stage her husband
became quite carried away by the new preoccupation and his habits
changed, too; "He doesn't eat or sleep enough, his face has become as
gray as a rain cloud and I don't like it," she said to her daughter in
one of their daily telephone chats. He's pacing his room again like a
life prisoner outside, just as he paced when he left the institute, tzu
tzu tzu, and he's begun smoking again. She is gripped by nausea at
seeing the blue cigarette packet, the French Gitanes, where did it come
from if not his last visit to the Passovers, lying beside an ashtray
filled with stubs and emitting a sour, pungent odor of black tobacco. He
has changed, he's not the same, and it's all under the influence of the
new box - a gray electronic cube standing on his table, she was sure of
it, but did not know how to take it, what to do with his crazes, nor do
her knowitall friends have any helpful advice to give her.

 

Oh, Tilda, Tilda. Last night, after months of abstinence, he came to her
bed as though in a dream, all of a sudden breaking their habit of the
past years of getting together to make love only once a year. Her
amazement overshadowed her joy, intransigence overcame softness. It was
not to her he had come that night.

"Quiet, children. Don't make a noise. Grandfather is working," she
whispers to her grandchildren in the morning, just as she used to tell
her children, a sort of routine rite. As though those words had been
bequeathed to her by her foremothers, a legacy. Generations of East
European women, heavy-fleshed and broad-hipped, murmur to their children
coming in tumultuously from the back yard, "Quiet children. Quiet,
children. Quiet. Sssssh..." But anyway the doctor is sunk deep in his
confusion, "Pug-nosed, squash-faced object of ridicule..." he recites
again at the mirror, "Poetry, wisdom, but love?" JJ has never seen him,
so how did she develop an attraction through the letters? Is it not for
himself that she admires him? Does he even exist?

Tilda senses, Tilda knows. He has never fallen in love with his
patients, like Freud with 'Dora'. JJ, you are my Dora, from where have
you come to me in my old age? What a Pandora you are, opening locked
chests and coffers, and he sings to himself "Pandora Dora Dor Pardon,"
to the tune of 'Donna Donna Donna Don..."

 

Anyone who knows these Dr. Kernels knows how professional doubts can
disturb them, how more and more questions are chasing each other through
his brain. Can there be any substitute for the mother tongue? After all,
the treatment is conducted in English, which is not his mother tongue,
German, and not the mother tongue of Israeli JJ. And what if body
language is considered essential? Facial expressions and slips of the
tongue? What about the instant and unthoughtout reaction during
treatment? Indeed, Kernel admits, there is an advantage, too, in
treatment by 'remote control'. In it he is undoubtedly shielded and
screened, enveloped in that shielded protected comfort of analytical
silence, passive and neutral, that is at the classic therapist's
disposal while his patients are lying on the couch. Can they sign a
treatment contract that is based on the classic preconditions, you know
- date of treatment, terms of payment, agreement from the start not to
bluff, and all the other conventions?

Dr. Kernel goes back to his bothersome academic hesitations. He hurries
to the library again, as he has done every evening for the past few
weeks. The doorman at the entrance, the aging librarian, the familiar
smell there and the occasional rustle of books that have been roused
from their rest. An exact return to the days of his studies. By the
librarian's pleased-with-wrinkles smile one can see that she too is
going forty years back, welcoming the sudden memory of the past that Dr.
Kernel brings with him on his repeated visits. He is pulled as though by
a magnet to Freud's shelf. True, throughout his years of professional
adulthood it is Jung who has represented his sole authority, and perhaps
Bodenheimer would have given him more reinforcement, but it is in Freud
that he hunts for absolute legitimization, delving into heavy volumes of
his writings as in the days of his youth, when he used to specialize in
psychiatry, swept up by his image and deeds. Like him he would pace with
measured steps until he forgot his own identity. Sometimes it seemed to
him that he should have been born before the beginning of the century
and been part of the Viennese group. They had a paradigm, they had a
world view. The trouble is that 'psychological understandings' are not
passed down by legacy, and what Freud discovered in his time is not
obvious to the generation that followed.

The whistling, a vengeful cheep, focuses and sharpens. Sometimes he is
sure the whistling is talking to him, telling him what nobody else
dares. To go back to the feverish searches for facts, proofs, examples,
reinforcements. What is happening to him? Is he behaving like an
advocate, seeking precedents and judgments for a model?

What finally did convince him was actually an irrational claim. "Kernel
means the core of the operational system, its basic part, its innermost
heart. It is what extracts the power from the potential," JJ wrote to
him, "It is the sign. You shall be my kernel."

The decision that had seemed so fateful to him came with a pleasant
feeling of relief mixed with self-ridicule, and now everything is simple
again. Okay, JJ. It's a deal.


/* Tetris (Chapter 2) */

=====================================================================

TO : Dr. KERNEL @ SCHWARZWALD

FROM : JJ @ NEURON

SUBJECT: TETRIS. TET-RIS. TET-A-TET. TET-A-DED. LIVE-ON-DEAD. TRU-LY-SAD.

=====================================================================

Dear Doctor,

This is our fourth session and I am still excited and confused, I don't
know how to begin. You asked me what I do in between my desperate quests
through computer networks for my love NN who has disappeared - we have
discussed that enough - and hopeless attempts to go back to the picture
stand. In between, I play Tetris.

Tetris is a computer game invented by an Alexei Paszitnov, a Russian
scientist, and some people say it was his concealed intention to take
over the brains of the Western world and paralyze them, and I believe it.

The rules of the game are simple and few. You have to fill a row with
objects, different kinds of squares that fall at random to the bottom of
the screen. Have you completed a row? It then disappears and credits the
player with points, and if not - the cubes pile up, row on row, until
you reach the top, and that's the end. But why am I telling you all
this? It's also like the question that comes up in writing, how much of
it can be filled up with technical details, but I feel this is the
interesting part. It's a simple, clean game.

I do enjoy solo games and games for couples and I'm crazy about riddles
and conundrums, but I've never before been so drawn by other computer
games, even when they first appeared and became a general fad. To me
quest games always seemed less fascinating than life itself and
simulations of aircraft and cars always seemed unreal. I did not like
the violent games - I didn't go for Ninjas and Star Wars or even PacMan.

This game, Tetris, is so special and how I love to look at the world's
order through it and its dynamics. It demands concentration and
coordination, gives one a feeling of order, of things falling into their
correct places. The player has to plan and make rapid decisions, under
the pressure of the time that is set by the game level at which he has
opted to begin and this in itself is an interesting point in comparison
with manual games, and not just games, with them one never has exclusive
control over the speed. And nevertheless, there is such an enormous,
genuine feeling that there are no limits to success. The better I am at
the game, the longer it lasts and the more points I gain. Only the sky,
and that's a double entendre, is the limit.

You could say I've become addicted to that game. Because through it I
experience all those symptoms usually attributed to an addiction. In
free moments or times I free specially, I avidly wrap myself around the
computer and go on playing, on and on, until my fingers stiffen and my
head spins. And I can't stop, to the point where I'm afraid that even if
the wails of a siren were to rend the air, and even if my house were to
be shelled, I would still be stuck to the keyboard, quite unable to
break away from it. So my honor is split in two, playing the game of
masters and servants with itself, sometimes the master orders his slave
to stop playing and she, disobedient, carries on doing what she wants,
sometimes he will order his handmaid to play on and on and she lowers
her tortured gaze and plays unwillingly, the master will always win, and
in any event I carry on as though hypnotized.

You might think there is also something sexual in fitting in the cubes,
with my fingers dancing like the Spanish legs of a fiery Flamenco
dancer. Sometimes during the day when I'm busy with more existential
things, humdrum matters, I'm already fantasizing and planning and
longing for the moment when I can get down to the game, and if anything
stops me playing - I am furious, my fingers itch, my pupils race around
and my whole body is restless.

By day and by night I dream a great deal, of cubes that slowly pile up
into all sorts of shapes, marvelously arranged on artistic and pastel
colored screens.

=====================================================================

Interactive Talk - Program loaded and started

=====================================================================

 

Now the screen splits into two and it's time for the dialogue. More and
more JJ is learning to enjoy the interactive treatment conversation on
the screen and is releasing herself from the need to send one-way
letters. She still devotes herself to doing her 'homework', as Dr.
Kernel customarily calls the opening letters of the one-hour treatment
session in which she usually refers to the previous session and
questions that have come up in it, or anything else that is preoccupying
her. Oh, how she loves spending the entire week planning their next
conversation and, at the same time, is once more taken by surprise by
unexpected directions during the treatment, so surprised that sometimes
even the heading, the SUBJECT, at the top of the letter, is no longer at
all relevant to its conclusion. And why this insistence, anyway? Why
does the program always make her begin with FROM, TO and SUBJECT? Why
isn't it actually designed so that the subject heading is given at the
end, not the beginning of the writing process, it's as though it was
going on the assumption that the writer knows the topic and title of his
conversation in advance; but people who use the electronic mail program
have a simple trick. They prepare the letter in advance, using some sort
of word-processing program, and then send it in full, deciding on the
title at the end of the process. And this, as everyone knows, is a trick
that doesn't work in life.

There is some charity in any successful dialogue, Kernel explains,
especially when two worlds meet. After all, when everything is obvious
it doesn't mean anything, but when you are keeping up a correspondence
and you arrive at an unknown country, you need that glimmer. And JJ, who
had long since forgotten the lightning taste of composition and the
spark of contact, waits impatiently, with shredded nerves-nails, for
that charity. Yes, JJ has learned to value the doctor's insistence on
keeping up the dialogue, she also needs the conversation itself, even
though it is not informal, and awaits it.

 

====================================================================

Interactive Talk-Program loaded and started

====================================================================

JJ, you have already told me so much about the game of Tetris, don't you
feel you've gone somewhat overboard?

.........................................................................................................................................

On the contrary, everything I've told you so far is still restrained and
insufficient. You've no idea, Doctor, how many hours a day and how many
days and nights a week I spend on the game. A simple calculation of
averages, excuse my obsession, of at least three hours a day times 365
days times two years gives at least 2190 hours that are like 273 working
days that are considered to be more than a man's working year.

.........................................................................................................................................

And how many years of life? Doesn't it bore you?

.........................................................................................................................................

Are you out of your mind? Bore me? Sometimes, when the game has become
extremely complex and you have to make a very concentrated effort and
the tension is high and everything depends on brief moments to extricate
yourself from a crushing end and any wrong or superfluous move is
decisive, bringing a losing conclusion, there is nothing in the world
more fascinating.

As I've told you, ever since NN vanished into thin air, Tetris is the
only thing that interests me, I always go back to that simple, beloved
game. Doctor, it's not boring, it's terrifying!

.........................................................................................................................................

Aren't you like those children Kirkegaard observes who, without sor
becoming bored, with enormous gravity that verges on faith, play a game
for its own sake, without the common and inexplicable urge to go further
and further, and even further? So what is so terrifying?

.........................................................................................................................................

I'm scared because I have no control and there is a feeling of a bluff,
something not genuine, and anyway, it's 'not serious'.

.........................................................................................................................................

Do you mean seriousness as it was defined for you at home? And in all
your games, haven't you yet realized that the glory of any act's
sanctity and importance does not conflict with the game trait it
contains? I would suggest you read the writings of Friedrich Schiller,
one of my people's poets and philosophers, who says 'Man plays only when
he is a man in the fullest sense of the word, and he is a complete man
only when he plays'. Note that the concept of the game is more powerful
and elevated than that of gravity because it removes the game from its
limitations, while the game certainly can also contain gravity.

.........................................................................................................................................

And what use is Schiller to me if I'm unable to concentrate on reading
or anything else, just play and play or, at most, endlessly detect and
delve and plod through electronic networks and computer junctions
seeking lost fates.

.........................................................................................................................................

I have the feeling, JJ, and you yourself hint at it, that you do indeed
use the game to satisfy the gambling and challenging instinct, also to
fill empty spaces, but mainly to make order. I will quote again, this
time Huizinga, a Dutch philosopher who said that the game - is the
order. It brings a limited and temporary perfection to an imperfect
world and confused life, in that it has a beginning and an end in
predetermined places and rules that are in no question and aesthetic
values. It is a world of perfect order and as man can detach himself
from the normal environment - he shrieks out his freedom.

.........................................................................................................................................

I don't know, Doctor. Now you're putting me back with the lenient
excuses and explanations I usually make to my conscience, that exists in
constant guilt.

Why don't you just tell me to erase the game from the hard disk and put
an end to it?

.........................................................................................................................................

No, I am not telling you to stop the game, but through it let us try to
understand what is going on in your psyche. Tell me, do you see your
life, too, as an ongoing game/riddle you have to solve?

.........................................................................................................................................

Answer in one word - yes.

Answer in two words - yes and no.

Full answer - I always feel I have to solve and strive and understand,
to analyze and only then believe. To play. But in the reality the room
for solutions is not final and the number of variables is unlimited. And
then I come up against insoluble situations and others that resolve
themselves by themselves.

.........................................................................................................................................

Understand, JJ, our soul is like a labyrinth with rules of its own. Do
not be confused if you find that the psyche acts differently when it is
alone and alters the rules of its game when we try to touch it. So it
can actually happen that just when we are sure we have understood its
rules, in the blink of an eye it will all change and disappear and we
will have to begin from the beginning.

I would say that the riddles and conundrums and games that you find so
attractive are the "Minotaur" which is half man and half beast and is in
the middle of the mythological, fateful labyrinth, and represents the
instincts lurking in the depths of the human psyche. Only someone as
courageous as Theseus will twist and turn to attain the center of the
dark of his psyche, the middle of the labyrinth and site of the
Minotaur, and only then will he be truly capable of liberating himself.

.........................................................................................................................................

Courage or runaway from reality? I like your mythological images, but
what I ask myself is, does my compulsive playing at Tetris really
indicate courage and daring, or weakness and evasiveness.

.........................................................................................................................................

Truly, experiencing obsession can sometimes be a form of depression
intended to replace a different emotional expression. You call it
flight. Perhaps for you an obsessive route of a return to simple,
routine actions represents an attempt to gain confidence by going back
to a familiar experience. You told me about your profession, computer
systems security. Could it be that you have specialized in protections,
walls and fortifications against computer crimes while actually
surrounding yourself with some sort of palatial prison of your own, one
that cannot be broken into?

.........................................................................................................................................

That hadn't occurred to me, but you may be sure there is no connection.
I came to my profession by chance, or maybe because of my father, or
maybe not, but anyway my defenses, if they actually exist... I don't
agree. I actually tell you of a crisis and you talk of defenses, as in
my work? No, definitely not, there is no connection.

.........................................................................................................................................

Oho! And what defenses. The most sophisticated of all. If you have
already reached the point of getting a treatment, I'm sure you will
agree to give them up, just a little. I can be a mirror for you only if
you lower those walls that are standing in our way, give this a little
thought. In any event, remember that dreams are good material for our
work. The dream resembles the game, it too contains a withdrawal from
the world and also role changes.

.........................................................................................................................................

But a dream can turn into a nightmare! Can the game, too?

.........................................................................................................................................

You are allowed to lose in both a dream and a game, you will always have
a genuine life to go back to. You should keep track of the dreams and
put them down in writing. Perhaps you could use the NOTEPAD program for
this, making your notes in the immediate windows you recommended to me
last time. I find it very convenient and efficient. Remember, dreams are
our key.

====================================================================

End of Talk

====================================================================

 

The beep of termination you hear when communications are severed, leaves
JJ again with the feeling that the treatment hour has ended too soon, as
though they had touched on only the very tip of the matter. Once more
she felt as though it had been an introduction to something bigger that
would come later.

There are no greater things that come later.

Only an automatic return to the Tetris screen.


/* Tetron (Chapter 3) */

At the end of a games-saturated evening, hoursof tapping five keys known
intimately to her practiced fingers and endless absorption with the
cubes falling rapidly intoplace and prolonged staring at the changing
screens, JJ was left with a feeling of such dazed paralysis that she
feared her eyes would pop out of their sockets, her neck muscles stiffen
and her guts spasm shamefully. Appalled at how much time and energy she
has invested here, at the computer, which now seems to her quite
idiotic. Total insanity, she mutters to herself over and over, here I
am, incapable of sending even one simple command from brain to fingers,
not to answer YES the next time a game ends and the fateful and alluring
question appears on the screen: 'Do you want another game Yes/No?'

Her nose fills with a scorched, sooty odor mingled with an unpleasant
smell of mold, since it is JJ's way with her feelings to translate them
into odors and tastes, pleasant and not. The time has come to force
herself to go out among mortals. And after a glance at the clock, why
not? The town is now just beginning its night life and in the past it
was at this sort of time that they often used to go out on the town.

JJ reached out for the telephone receiver, but withdrew it at once and
went over to the telephone appliance at the other end of the house, as
though threatened by the computer crouching squarely orphaned in the
work corner, lest it again tempt her to commit a crime and a game. The
voice that came from the other end of the line, that of the cab rank
clerk who has recognized her by the address and the hoarseness of her
nasal voice, shows his amazement at the unusual time of night, "No
problem, seven minutes," he announces. It's been a long time since she
called them so late, gone are the days of nocturnal merrymaking that
ended up with the computer chicks roving freely from their eagles' nest
spilling overflowing with flow charts. It has been an eternity since she
last left the house.

A minor delay by the driver enabled her to shower briskly, put on a
touch of makeup, hesitate between the patiently waiting flowered jersey
dress intended for late end-of-summer evenings and the sexy black dress,
or jeans and a tee shirt, sort of noncommittal. And maybe NN was right
after all when he used to dismiss the importance of clothes. Remember,
honey, he would laugh at her pose at the mirror, it's only when you go
for an interview somewhere new, only then does it matter what you wear.
This is a new and 'scientific' theory popular with young managers, he
scoffed, and he snatched the new hat off her head, tossed it up to the
ceiling and it came back to him like a boomerang. Nevertheless she
decided on the flowered dress.

She knew they would send bearded Nisso, who always wanted to drive her
to town and philosophize on the way about the world in general and taxi
drivers in particular. He is so anxious to talk that he doesn't notice
she hasn't even told him where to go. Not that she really cares, she
doesn't know where she wants to go anyway. Meanwhile they talk of the
traffic on the roads, his state of health and the question that has been
preoccupying him recently, global warming. He must have seen last week's
TV program that dealt over seriously with the issue and left the viewers
with the feeling of a catastrophe. They did not dare to mention
politics, they still remember the raised-voiced argument they got into
on the last trip, that made it obvious all over again just how far their
views differed.

 

"How's your father?" she asks him, affectionately recalling his father,
who was also a cab driver. In her childhood he used to take her to her
study circle and back. Father was busy and Mother never touched a wheel,
although they had chosen to live in a villa in a distant suburb,
anchored in the solitude of the wealthy, taken over by JJ since her
return to Israel.

"Father, Father passed away six months ago, blessed be his memory," he
lights a cigarette. "What happened? I didn't know he was sick," JJ
responded in genuine confusion.

"Who said sick? That man was never ever sick, he was as strong as a
bull, he was a bull of a man," and he pulls up at the side of the road
and half turns his face to the back seat and tells her Mr. Sabbath's sad
story.

"Father, you know, a few years ago he was already 87 and still went on
working and running the cab rank with a high hand and only gave us, his
sons, the night shifts, but nobody would give him 87, not even 80, not
even 70 in a night's dream when the stars come out. Father was a hot and
heated man, he was specially hot on sex and love and he went to Mother's
bed night after night, all through their 60 years of marriage. For a few
years already Mother used to come to us and complain about him, on
Fridays when she brought us her special Sabbath dishes, ah what a
wonderful smell, and she used to tell us and cry, I can't go on, get him
off me, I'm an old woman and don't have the strength for him any more.
And we laughing and exchanging glances of complicity and my wife winking
at me and thinking what will we be like when we are old. The complaints
went on and Father went on the same as always, doesn't give up, until
one fine day Mother puts her foot down, says no, no way, I'm not
prepared to raise my legs any more and I don't care if you do leave me
and take yourself a younger woman and leave me alone, and she didn't
give him any more.

 

"And Father began to wither and lose his spirit and he turned pale, you
wouldn't have recognized him, a great bull of a man who turned into a
dishrag, you hear, he faded away right under our eyes. And we, his sons,
would ask the doctors, who were ashamed to laugh but had no idea of how
to help, we used to bring him young girls, Father, it's not the end of
the world, go on enjoying life, but he said he had never ever two-timed
Mother and he wouldn't go with another woman, and she too, so he boasts,
all she knows in life is only Sabah, from the age of 18 she only knows
Sabah and he wasn't consoled and wasn't content with substitutes. So he
went on withering and sinking, his eyes turned into black circles, and
he couldn't find anything to live for, and he stopped smiling and his
voice got hoarse and he lost his strength, until he died."

Nisso changes gear with contained anger and goes on driving as though
declaring, look what happens at the end, is it worth it? Only when they
reached the lights at the town's junctions did he remember to ask her
where she wanted to go. The French chanson playing on the radio was
interrupted by a news flash. JJ took her time answering. An affair had
been exposed, one that involved a senior police officer's addiction to
hard drugs and involvement with criminals. They always think they are
protected against that sort of a fall. The news takes Nisso's mind off
his irritability. The blinking traffic lights flood JJ all over again
with a feeling of 'Tetrisness', until the town center appears before
them. It seems she has made up her mind, "Stop here".

She pays and parts from Nisso with the usual rite, "Look, it'll all come
out right in the end," he winds up and she looks here and there,
thinking that she, too, is a cripple, life-neutralized, like Nisso's
father, a love trunk that has been lopped to death, hesitating over
whether to cross the road to the cafe where jazz is played for most of
the day and night or walk back a few steps, go into a bar where she will
meet old friends she has not seen for a long time and spark off such
reactions as, well, well, and who do we have here? Where've you been
hiding out? And meanwhile, as though it had nothing to do with her, her
feet are standing at the entrance to the 'Fantasy Club' - the
electronics games hall, she has never been there but has always noticed
the loud sign flashing over its entrance. How funny, she says to
herself, but not laughing, to actually land up here, and she walks in
firmly.

There is sensation and sensuality in the air of places like this.
Digital eroticism. A smell of smoke and beer, gloom and the murmuring of
human voices combined with old music and the shrilling of machines from
which only those rapt in a game manage to cut themselves off. Dim and
facelesfigures pass her by, giving off unclear murmurs. She too murmurs
something into the empty space and looks around hesitantly before
entethe main hall, through the painted door, and finds herself being led
by an anonymous hand straight to the games machine set in the far corner.

JJ does not pause at the chattering roulette machines or the shooting
machines where two pairs of skin-tight jeans that are actually one young
couple are standing, and it is already hard to make out whether they are
aiming at the target or shooting at each other. And, a-propos skintight
jeans, she has only just noticed how her way of looking at strangers'
faces in an attempt to interpret them from their rumps has changed. Yes,
that is how NN taught her - not to believe in her disappointing senses,
odor and taste and eye level, and she has begun to guess, even to make
things up about people by the tightness of their jeans, like Daemon, who
does exactly the same thing with the vegetable stall in the market. Nor
does she pause at the snooker table in the corner or the horse race
machines that gather around them only cowboys and aging attorneys, or
are they the same thing, but goes over determinedly to the Tetron
machine, the commercial version of the home-brew Tetris. As though she
too was at home there, knowing exactly why she has come and what she
wants. Nervously she hunts in the depths of her purse for the right
coins for the machine. Her pockets are always weighed down with small
change, except when it is needed.

The first two rounds have gone by too fast for her to get used to the
new joystick and different point system. By the third round - where did
the extra coins come from when the few she was given as change in the
cab have gone - she already feels as though she was playing on a
familiar court, invaded by a sudden craze and a strange and unfamiliar
ambition to prove her achievements in the game to the local
professionals. And indeed, as the screens change and move up to a higher
level and she accumulates points more and more youths gather behind her
back, boring into her neck with their eyes, their expressions changing
from pretended scorn and calm to respect and flattering encouragement
and a look that says, Hey, man! maybe she is worth something after all,
this Bimbo who has sprung up among them from nowhere.

The game becomes fast, hard and even surprising. Satisfied smiles
accompany every row that fills up and whistles and disappears with a
happy beep, pursed lips when the cubes pile up and it is not clear what
their fate will be and everything depends on the bit of luck that will
drop from the top the next minute. A nervous drumming of heels
accompanies the music in the background, this, too seems to be
accelerating the tempo and increasing its volume, Laurie Anderson sings
In the House of the Brave, I wanted to say house of the gay but
remembered that was a cage, zero and one zero and one, there is rhythm.

At some stage, unlike the game at home, the situation begins to become
more complicated when obstructive cubes pop up at the bottom of the
screen whenever she makes a mistake. How does the program actually
notice and define what her mistake is? And how difficult or easy will it
be to add this sophistication, too, to the game program she runs on her
own computer? This is not the time to err with thoughts of new
'options', tension is high and now the movements of her fingers are
showing loss of control, the danger from above is coming closer, JJ sees
she has only a minute more before she will have no more room to
maneuver, all levels of the cubes' freedom to move will be eliminated,
and realizes that she has to put all her concentration into the game
itself that is becoming more difficult and dragging her in with all its
strength. Too late, despair, her fingers have lost control, the cubes'
positions and their proximity to the top make it impossible for her to
carry on, like a rockfall that is rolling down and happening and coming
toward her from a high mountain, and with a loud bang a heavy iron door
is slammed in her face.

A sigh of despair and relief bursts out from her and the parched throats
of the uninvited observers surrounding her in a decreasing circle. Then
she instinctively turns to the audience gathered around her with a sort
of sportsman's finishing line bow. The meaning of the amazement that
breaks out all around is immediately made clear when she turns to the
Tetron machine again. Her name appears second in the list of the game's
points champions, that is, the list that is maintained and updated only
when a new player succeeds in breaking his way through to it, sparkling
and glittering, the prize for the best, equal in value to the brightness
of the coins ringing and mounting up in piles in the betting machines.
She looks back at the crowd. One searching glance instantly makes it
clear to her whose name it is at the top of the list. It is not hard to
identify his glance, that expresses the companionship of medal-sharers
on the one hand and, on the other, the envy and suspicion of competitors
for the first place.

Nor was there any need for words. Judd. His name is etched in her
memory, blinking at the top of the list. He wore a black leather coat
and offered her the helmet that was lying on the hat shelf. As though it
was self-evident and without any superfluous movements, she walked after
him, hiking up her dress to climb beside him on the splendid motorbike,
which she had noticed even before she went into the club.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

/

The Dream of Marbles (Chapter 4)

/

 

*

=====================================================================

TO : Dr. KERNEL @ SCHWARZWALD

FROM : JJ @ NEURON

SUBJECT : THE DREAM OF MARBLES

=====================================================================

Doctor, here's the dream you asked for. First I'm on a desert island, I
watch the sheep, marbles of all colors shatter the sun's rays into vivid
splinters as in my new kaleidoscope. Suddenly I'm wearing a wine colored
dress, tight around the hips and full at the skirt. Then I'm picking up
all the marbles that are rolling around, all the people here must have
been playing with them, it certainly wasn't the sheep, and now they're
sitting in twos and threes on the stone benches, chatting, absorbed in
each other. I, too, seem to have been one of a pair before this, gravely
discussing very prosaic matters, reaching up to put my hat on, it's wine
colored, too, it's also got a broad brim, then I notice it isn't my hat
at all but belongs to a stranger, I don't remember who, I kneel and pick
up all the marbles and gather them into my skirt and clutch them in both
hands and go on walking over the fresh spears of grass, hunched over
like a clacking goose, I'm not wearing any panties, even before that I
had noticed the smell of fresh vegetation, spiced with the last drops of
still wet rain, glistening, but sensual and chilly tickling my nudity
that is fired by the fluttery caresses, even while writing down the
dream I get really horny, and go on moving away. Suddenly I'm naked
again, once more the marbles are scattered all around me, where's the
dress? Where are all the people? I roll around among them, in the forest
clearing, in the wintry sun, it's like being at sea, and then it really
is a big sea, it pounds toward the land sweeping over anything that lies
in its path, and I'm on a desert island again, in a sweet and endless
oblivion. There are a few last lonely marbles still rolling around. And
that's it.

=====================================================================

Interactive Talk-Program loaded and started

=====================================================================

Let's begin with the hat. The dress. That's fine, JJ. I see it as yet
another sign that you're ready for treatment. There's some progress.
There's a hint here, and following the exchange of hats we can
anticipate some sort of development, a change, and the subconscious will
surface and dare to show itself from the corner where it is now hiding.

.........................................................................................................................................

You're optimistic, Doctor. And I actually thought the hat, that belongs
to someone else, giveme an alien character. As though I wasn't actually
me, but once more some sort of game.

.........................................................................................................................................

Look, the hat covers the entire personality, gives you significance, and
who is the stranger, the other, the hat's owner whose experiences you
opt to undergo, if not your subconscious? For me it also ties up with
the sea. The sea is the symbol of the collective unconscious because the
mirror-smooth surface conceals beneath it abysses and chasms. And it
also contains a hint of penetration, of a flooding of the unconscious of
the awareness. Meanwhile it is so threatening to you, maybe
embarrassing, too, like a solemn, private secret, that you distance
yourself to your desert island.

.........................................................................................................................................

I also think of the hat as a symbol of mastery. I remember how I had a
sort of nice, good feeling when I put it on my head. As though just for
a moment I had taken over the role of master and that's something I've
missed for a long time.

.........................................................................................................................................

Do you remember telling me about the game of masters and servants you
played with your lover? How did you feel then? What parts did you
yourself play?

.........................................................................................................................................

Well, then I felt the game was perfectly balanced, I was alternately
mistress and servant, that's how I liked the up-and-down between us. It
was the separation that actually turned me into a slave. NN's
inexplicable disappearance. I couldn't bear the not knowing, the
severance, and I gave up the hat altogether, I just gave up and turned
myself into a sort of body without vitality or structure and this time
I'm speaking your language, Doctor, and I can no longer feel what I
want, apart from connecting myself to some sort of digital infusion of
obsessions at this damned computer, seeking and winkling out any scrap
of information. Oh yes, and playing Tetris, too.

.........................................................................................................................................

Go on.

.........................................................................................................................................

No, I want to go back to the dream. The grass. The marijuana plants,
maybe. But, after all, I haven't touched that for years now, ever since
NN disappeared. So how did they get into the dream? What is that sweet
oblivion doing to me? The feeling is familiar, from the game, and also
from the smoking sessions in Sansetiko, the glance from the outside, the
oblivion.

.......................................................................................................................................

I have a question for you, JJ, it comes from Chuang-Tzu's famous
question. If you are fording the river in a boat and an empty boat
coming from the other side rams you, are you angry with it?

.........................................................................................................................................

No.

.........................................................................................................................................

And if there's somebody in the other boat?

.........................................................................................................................................

Then of course I'd yell and curse and be furious.

.........................................................................................................................................

Quite right. And that explains the longing for oblivion. In the first
case you weren't angry at all and in the second case - absolutely
furious, because at first you were up against emptiness and then the
word. If someone voided himself and wandered the world like that, who
could hurt him?

.........................................................................................................................................

If you say so. And what are the marbles, in your opinion?

.........................................................................................................................................

Well, what do you think. Chilly porcelain, little secrets? Glittering?
Teasing?

.........................................................................................................................................

And that's why I gather all the marbles into the skirt of my dress?
Hugging them close to me?

.........................................................................................................................................

Perhaps. But what secrets do you bear with you? Have you ever thought of
the term 'secret' in connection with mystery--->holy fear--->game?

.........................................................................................................................................

I haven't, but it sounds interesting.

.........................................................................................................................................

JJ, what experiences have you had recently, in the non digital world?

.........................................................................................................................................

Total failure. If you mean my connection with myself, what could be
worse than the fact that whenever I come near the picture stand I get an
unpleasant shiver, feelings of guilt and evasion. And if you're asking
about an external connection - there, too, there's total, crushing
failure. I have gone out of the house, twice, at night, under cover of
the, as it were, protective darkness. And I found myself in a totally
imaginary scenario, in situations of high drama and theater, and only
Judd rescues me.

.........................................................................................................................................

JJ, who is Judd? Is he also part of the dream?

.........................................................................................................................................

A good question. It's one I also ask myself.

.........................................................................................................................................

And what do you answer?

.........................................................................................................................................

To you, or to myself?

.........................................................................................................................................

Isn't it the same thing?

.........................................................................................................................................

Well, between you and me, just between the two of us, Judd is a
genuinely good friend. He's the one who gets me out of trouble, provides
situations of emotional degradation with dignity and nobility. Provides
significance when it has disappeared in the wastelands of dreariness and
alienation. And I'm crazy about his motor bike.

=====================================================================

End of Talk

=====================================================================


/* Jolly Beggars (Chapter 6) */

Meanwhile the rain has begun to fall. Not in a shower presaging a late
fruitfulness, not the first drops of the first rain of winter of a
deceitful rainbow, but as though all at once it was answering the
prayers of those terrified of drought, and the waters prevailed anwere
increased greatly upon the earth, and the waters of heaven fell upon the
earth a day and a night and another two days and more. That's how the
flood began, too, it occurred to JJ, and at first Noah and his frmight
also have believed they were being blessed with healing rains. When did
they begin to realize it was the terrible and final flood from which
there is no way back and the face of the earth was destroyed? One day,
two, forty?

The rain anchors my loneliness and puts a seal of approval on warm
seclusion. If the deluge continues, I am already planning, I'll be able
to build myself a raft out of the wooden bench and armchairs, and a
spreading mast from the easel of the painting that stands shy and
orphaned and bare without canvas and paint, a lifesaving ark to set off
to sea, to the mountains of Ararat. Two, two of all you shall bring into
the ark to live with you, male and female. So he said, but I have no mate.

During the deluge that flooded the earth I too was swept by a sort of
private hurricane. It was just when I had begun to break myself of my
previous habits of long stays in distant computers aimed at seeking and
delving for NN's last tracks. Somehow or other I felt it wasn't right to
provoke fate and spend so much time there. I also began to be scared and
consider the response times that were becoming slower, not to mention
that to get to my target destination, a computer in South America, my
love's country of birth, I would have to go through a major
communication junction, a fairly loaded computer named Oxymoron, located
somewhere and transmitting messages in all directions. Instead of being
hosted in strange living rooms, I decided to send queries, to find and
collect any files that looked 'interesting', that is, as though they
contained relevant information, and transfer them to myself, to my home
computer, via the networked communication lines, to comb and rip them
apart into very fine threads until I found what was hiding among them.
Somehow or other, like criminals on their way to a fall, I did not
consider the dangers involved in transferring all that data and keeping
it in my possession, even if only temporarily.

What didn't I seek there? From names and dates to passwords, wild
associations for anything connected with NN, the more the time went by
and I failed to come across any significant detail, the more I expanded
my searches, that is to say, the range of subjects I delved into. That's
how it happened that same day I received too many answers to my queries
and all coming in rivers of files rushing and overflowing on all sides.
The branched junction, the computer on the way, couldn't stand up to the
communication overload. Drained to the depths of its soul, it guided and
contributed all its resources to my postal activities, until they were
used up and it gave up and collapsed.

There were only a few mini seconds left to the moment of the PANIC
itself when everything would be destroyed. In those last milliseconds I
fearfully watched the competition taking place under my very eyes,
between my search program that was trying to get in one last command to
delete the last remaining and superfluous traces, and the system
process, that is, the captain, who is used to being the last to abandon
the sinking ship, who is trying to get to the memory and make the disk
go through the last motions of closing down the business, such as for
instance at least to write the reason for the collapse in ERROR-LOG.
Before the general paralysis, in the blink of an eye, while I'm watching
the war of the mighty from the sidelines and my program hasn't even
managed to discover whether it has succeeded in covering its tracks, a
third process suddenly comes to light, its identity is hidden, and it
takes over the rights of the first two that are fighting among
themselves, and uses the last remaining memory housings to get at the
file that is concealed from all eyes and updates it. My program takes
its hat off to the winner and melts away, along with the entire system,
that gives up the ghost.

God help me, what have I done. I've beaten it. My neck hurts,
particularly the left side. At moments as tense as these it gives me a
hard time, goes into really bad spasms. I have to go out and stretch.
And nevertheless, that fall did make two good things happen to me.
First, to my amazement I discovered a truly clever system, although for
a long time yet I would have qualms about going back to it in the fear
that not all my tracks had been deleted, and secondly, I've left the
house again.

Clean fresh air with an odor of new shoes is blowing at me and I go to
the general store. Am I going out to seek and find an olive leaf? No.
I'm off to buy the one thing I forgot to order, even though I had
thought up a detailed list and made a mental note of it that same day.
Something always gets forgotten, it has to be the most important of all,
and of course it has to be the one thing because of which I had to do
the shopping in the first place.

People get attached to their general stores, they develop seemingly
intimate relations with them, even when we're talking about nothing more
than ordering and delivering basic commodities. And what do they know
about me, judging by what I buy, what goes into my belly, what comes out
of my pocket.

I always feel I'm being cheated in the general store and especially
today, after the embarrassing failure. The goods are not fresh enough,
the prices are out of sight, there are errors in the check and
altogether, they have no idea who I really am. But why should they have
any idea who I really am, anyway?

I came out of the store with a baguette loaf and a block of goat cheese
and a box of Kleenex, I crossed over the road walking with plodding,
ungainly steps like a scarecrow that doesn't quite fit together with the
different scraps of clothing that have been tossed onto it and the
sharpened canes that have been threaded between its limbs, crude as they
are. And unlike my normal habit of going straight home, I crossed at the
lights, on the red light, naturally, breaking rules, kicking out at the
conventions that are like a mother tongue accepted by young and old,
Japanese and Turks, fat and thin, obey and do not deviate, even when
there isn't a cop in sight, right-of-way by the rules, walking toward
the local photography store in the square, at the next lights, the other
side of the garage. There, like the general store, they know a lot about
the tenants of the area, even what positions they like. The shots I sent
to be developed must have been ready long ago.

Everyone I pass in the street reminds me of someone else, someone
familiar. And honestly, how many types and combinations of faces can
there be in the world? How many ways of walking and showing expression?
There must be people going around the universe who have doubles in other
places, and in a sort of natural distribution you'll find a square in
every town with people who look like people I know wandering around it.
My mother was like that, an expert at finding lines of resemblance
between people and their doubles, and we would walk down the boulevard
together, she laughing all the time, there's Auntie Golda, she's always
lugging heavy baskets, poor thing, and look, there's Mr. Solomon, and I
would point at the other side of the road and respond, and there's
Einstein. And altogether, I find myself acting like mother more and
more, always adding boiled water to an emptied glass of tea, dividing a
slice of bread into two halves, spending hours waiting at the window for
something that never comes. Actually, when you think about it, it's not
just faces that look alike, thoughts do, too. How many thoughts and
ideas take place in the world in a single minute? It must be that the
same combinations exist, that is that there are people around me at this
very minute who look like a bunch of other people, somewhere else, and
are thinking the same things and doing the same things...

Box after box, their houses rise up in three-dimensional Tetris cubes
and their cars are laid out along the roadside like metal drums that
have been rolled here, gleaming in the sunliand conspicuous in the
twilight. And people are walking about the street, in the early evening,
as though this was something normal and only to me does it seems quite
strange. All these images, I think, my head quivers like a system in
accelerated movement, a sensor that goes into an endless loop from lack
of understanding, my jeans cling even tighter around my hips,
reinforcement for my self-confidence that has been in need of defense
right from the start. I feel a bit like a porcupine. Climbing onto the
edge of the sidewalk, noticing the regular couple, homeless
down-and-outs, their lodgings are the bus stop over the road,
long-haired and nevertheless not just beggars with their hands out. If
somebody gave them a house, hot water, clean, cooked food, would they
still opt to go back to the street? They look quite content, stooping
over their only sack of belongings. Nor would I have any difficulty in
opting out, it would be easy for me to give up everything I have except,
possibly, for the diskette containing the most exclusive programs I have
written, a few collections of letters, identification papers, dollars,
personal snaps and the kaleidoscope I am particularly attached to, and
that's all.

"Leave it alone, you don't have to put in a new cylinder. That engine's
not yet finished. Take my advice, don't replace it now."

Those voices sound close, they're coming from the two bikers hunched
over their vehicles and not, as might have been guessed, from the corner
with the two down-and-outs my gaze first fell on. They don't talk
anyway, it's as though their eyes do the speaking, they're saying, what
can we possibly say about this world that you can't see for yourselves
from the corner where you're standing right now?

"Are you sure it can be repaired?" his look gives his thoughts away,
it's familiar with people who like to crawl under the engine, puffing,
making themselves dirty, and finally coming out and spreading their
hands in a gesture of stupid helplessness and an apologetic smile.

"Sure. You can fix it yourself, no sweat. Shame to throw away the money."

"Here's JJ coming by," Judd straightens up and tells his friend, "I know
that ass by now," and with a slow, aristocratic gesture nods his head in
greeting, with a smile to match.

"Your beggars are happy," he quotes at me and his hand indicates the
down-and-out pair at the stop as though he had read my thoughts even
before I crossed the road. What else does he know about me, Judd?

Judd knows where I live. That same night of the Tetron he took me, with
the engine's roar and total confidence, to the entry path of my fortress
on the shore. Without saying a word, without a glance, I got off the
motor bike, cutting myself off from the warmth of his body flowing to me
from his back, as though without his knowledge, unintentionally, and
moved lightly, no, it was actually heavily, into the house, the morning
chill greeting my decolletage.

What else does he, Judd, know about me? From his restraint he seems to
have known even my loneliness, and the "ban" on the entry of strangers I
had imposed on my home.

I neither stop nor show as much as a blink of surprise. But why did the
baguette fall out of my hand? I pick it up as though it was a heavy
weight, feeling tight pants, I thought I had pockets, where shall I put
my free hand until it goes back to clutching the bread, all this takes
place in a split second but seems long and exhausting. I straighten up,
lift my head high and aim my legs as though I'm just off, getting moving
on my way to the photo store, as though right now when I'm moving toward
them the doors will shut in my face a moment before I get there. That
happens sometimes. I already knew on my way back that I would stop.

Judd glanced at his watch, as though measuring the time for me, there
and back. I lost my watch back then, three years ago. Time stopped,
maybe you call that time out, and I think to myself - time out - time
outage - judgement time, for something that could have been true. And I
don't need a watch, that stubborn item, any more, I often think about
time and how to play with it, stretching and compressing, putting it in
and taking it out like a dimension of my life. Judd stooped to peek at
the cheese I was holding, it smelt like olive oil, he put out his
fingers to pinch a bit of it, "Mmm...what a beautiful cheese," he
scoffed to himself; calling the cheese beautiful is like saying bread is
wise. "Can I have a taste?" "Sure."

Judd looks at the pictures in my other hand with the same interest as
though he was saying how do you do, let's have a look at what you've got
there? and nods his head as though he knew our beach in Sansetiko as it
looks in the picture over the cliff and the atmosphere I tried to
capture in a photo, an old picture, and, to cover up the pang I feel in
my heart, I say "Beggars would ride" as a followon to 'your happy
beggars' and he is pleased with the understanding that has sprung up
between us through a few words and a smile and the reproving finger of
the literature teacher, he teases, "Oxymoron, eh? Oxymoron," as though
how terrific that you've got my meaning. And with the same gesture of
assent he looks at the next picture, a grey corner building seen at the
end of a European street, that too is an old picture and I don't even
know where or when it was taken, I scan my memories, open cells, peep
into them to find the origin of the picture in my hand, try to lay my
internal confusion to rest, remember, not too clearly, the time NN took
the camera on one of his trips. How can I explain my lack of wisdom in
this case? How come it never occurred to me before that that old film
could reveal something to me. The camera was gathering dust on the top
shelf of the library, where NN's finger print from the time he explained
the theory of computers's influence on man's life to me in one very
simple graph was becoming more and more conspicuous. And I had been kept
absorbed and endlessly preoccupied with an obsessive search through
barren computer networks and hadn't even noticed the hints and signposts
right there in the house.

Whether Judd really did know the building in the picture or was just
expressing fellow-feeling and solidarity was not clear, after all that's
what people do in a fairly boring conversation when they're not really
listening but still want to maintain contact. Anyway, as I went on
turning the pictures over, and by now we had got to my nephew, playing
in the back yard, a much later picture, he suddenly said "Paris," as
though picking up quite naturally on a conversation from the picture
before, "Paris, a genuine country of beauty."

"Are you sure?" Oops, all the same I'd given away my surprise and
embarrassment over that picture, one that was strange to me. Ding-dong,
yet another of Judd's secret, repressed nods, yes and no. Angrily I
straighten the pictures punctiliously, put them back in their original
order and move away.

So, whether I like it or not, it doesn't matter, he's pulling the
strings and I'm tied to his fingers, no choice but to be a puppet, but
there is also pleasure there, in being led, supreme force, let's say
Judd is my apostle-messenger, but what does he want from me? An apostle,
a messenger from the dark?

And looking at it from the literary aspect, too, you might think, he is
on a special mission. Does Judd himself know he's a messenger?

Judd follows me, he is not alone, his bike is beside him, until we find
ourselves facing the sea and the path leading to the house. Respecting
my privacy, he disappears again and I am alone confronting the
threatening and tempting sunset that overwhelms me, NN steered toward me
from every possible angle, and our years of knowing each other pass
before my eyes in a tangle of old films. After all we never went to
Continent together, and we've never been in Paris.


/* Joystick (Chapter 22) */

============================================================

TO :LAYLY @ AXON

FROM : SHU @ UCLA.EDU.BITNET

SUBJECT : JOYSTICK, JOYSEX

============================================================

LAYLY my love,

They say love letters are banal, bumy entire being is a poem inspired by
you. My peanut, I'll feel you with my tongue like a pistachio, I'll
revolve in you in rotations, round and round, until I shell you to taste
your kernel, I can already taste the salt and I have not yet cracthe
shell, what else will I do to my pistachio? Gaze and sniff around its
orifices, my teeth ache to bite.

My love, promise me that right now you're taking your delicate fingers
off the keyboard and putting them between hip and thigh. Only your sweet
tongue will slide between the arrow keys and greet my lines of love on
your computer screen. Come give yourself up to our acts of digital love,
loosen your body's tense limbs and reach out with them, one after the
other, with great and electrified languor, to touch the edges of the
cellophane envelope under which you have put yourself.

Take off the fine silk blouse you wrapped yourself in this morning and
let the sun that is watching you from on high warm and soften your firm
shoulders. Your nipples brush the computer, teasingly fluttering against
it. Your neck, too, needs to be touched, it feels the rythm of the
revolving diskette.

Come play with the joystick for a while, after all why is it called that
if not to pleasure you and spread joy through and throughout your body.
A basic instrument, the discovery of sensation, neverending delights.
You deserve it my dear. Enough of going deep into philosophy and
exploratory talking. The time has come for joy. SHU

==========================================================

End of message.

==========================================================

 

==========================================================

TO : SHU @ UCLA.EDU.BITNET

FROM : LAYLY @ AXON

SUBJECT : Reply to: JOYSTICK, JOYSEX

==========================================================

SHU, my love,

I watch from the sidelines, incredulous of the marvellous beauty
enveloping and caressing and even there I have words of poetry in my
heart. No more belongings surrounding me, insignificant and radiating
alienation. And it is all thanks to you. This joystick that I hold in my
hand, it is a hymn of thanksgiving, blessed be he and blessed be the
name of he who took love from the object and carnality from plastic, and
yearning from a somnolent soul, and joi de vivre from the wells of pain.
Let him be blessed and his heart be made glad for he deserves it. Amen amen.

You give me effects and I want to flood you with delights, at the end of
a day of electronic work we are HIGH, the adrenaline of zeros and ones
and oxygen of silicone vapor flow in our veins.

Nectar and ambrosia you dripped on me, I was left speechless and
breathless, owing you my gratitude, knowing my body renewed. My voice
came back to me only after I was able to imagine your voice that relaxes
and caresses me, all of me. Is our love doomed to blossom in darkness,
in secret? I realized that long ago, but, how can I deny it, I long for
a sign and a signal, a divine voice to caress my ears and smooth away
the lines of my care.

You asked what will you do to your pistachio? Let me hear your voice.
Sometimes I seek you. Dial as though to information, get a reply, and relax.

LAYLY

==========================================================

End of Message

==========================================================

 

The telephone rings. JJ freezes, tries to guess whether the ringing is
coming from her phone or the neighbors'. Now she's altered the rules of
the game, is not content with what there is, has asked SHU to bring ease
to her longing soul with his voice. How strange is the hysterical
anticipation beside the banal instrument that to her now represents the
end of the wall from which she has already agreed to part. The phone
rings. In the first days after NN's disappearance she would still sit at
the instrument for hours waiting for the redemptive ring, checking every
now and then to see whether there was a dialling tone - lest the phone
was out of order and that was why he did not call her, making her leap
from her spot - remembering adolescence, waiting for the wooing ringing
from boys from her class or the boy friend in the army. But it didn't ring.

And now the phone rings, she bestirs herself, runs to the instrument as
though her life depended on it. A deep breath before the fateful moment
and she picks up the receiver. Again she doesn't manage to hide her
disappointment, SHU is taking his time about answering her, rejectionist
that he is. On the other end of the line she hears the voice of an

elderly woman, a Post Office clerk, confusedly telling her some strange
story about a parcel that has come in without an accurate address, just
a telephone number on the label and clear instructions how to contact
her. It took JJ a moment to grasp that it was meant for her and recall
that she had indeed given an address for standard post on the invitation
to the exhibition, in coordination with her friend who works as a
student in the poste-restante in New York, to collect and send her
letters to Israel. It was just that articles and essays by Robert and
his friends had accumulated and were now waiting for her in her local
post office.

"Please come tomorrow to pick up the parcel," says the clerk.

"Why not right now? I'll come over at once."

"No, today's early closing and you can only come to collect it tomorrow
morning."

A sigh. "I'll be at the post office tomorrow, first thing in the morning."

Leaving the house is always an adventure. Who knows what will happen to
you in an encounter with civilization, with the rythm and forces working
on a collection of people who are trying to attain various objectives
with varied means. Actually we all become sales persons with multiple
techniques, trying to sell anything, particularly ourselves, for a
maximum profit. But this time, more than ever, it bore the nature of a
mystery. Maybe, she did not dare to dream, only maybe, if only, SHU too
has used the poste restante address. She began to get ready early in the
morning, making up and dressing herself as befitted the trip awaiting
her - to collect the mysterious parcel from the post office. She
arranges purse and papers meticulously, just as though she was preparing
for a trip abroad, even more. It is a fine morning and she is
overflowing with energy, so she decides to leave early and have a
morning cup of coffee at Sokolovsky's beside the municipality.

In the town center she no longer, as once, sensed foreigness in
everything that crossed her path. The people crossing the road at a run
no longer look to her like puppets moved by strings from above and the
cars parked neatly at the roadsides looked like esthetic objets d'art,
not those ridiculous tin boxes. The prosaic conversation she picks up
from the two men sitting at a table in the cafe has also stopped
sounding like babble in a foreign, meaningless tongue and she listens to it.

A hoarse hangover voice comes from behind the curtain: "Nada, bish-gada,
I'll tell you what to do...." Oh, how happy she would be now for the
story to be speeded up, for a turning point that would remove the
question marks and shorten the time, if the voice, for instance,
belonged to none other than Dr. Kernel who would interpret her dreams
and come up with solutions, a striped gown, to bring SHU closer, here at
her side. But no, those are only the hidden secrets of her heart that is
longing for short cuts, instructions from on high and easy solutions,
and already the curtain is pushed aside and she can hear the voice of
his table companion, "The world is filled with many beautiful things..."
he sings, it's Judd, signalling to her with his hat, his precise
appearance is like a well-practised comedy act, as though he had been
waiting behind the scenes for the right moment.

As we have said, everyone in this town is a sales person and Judd, what
does he want to sell her now? No, definitely not, sugar, you've already
interfered enough in NN's revelations and now there's SHU, a new love, a
new painting, a new life, and you don't belong in them. A pungent trail
of fresh coffee odor accompanies the waitress and JJ wakes up, just a
mi, it's already time, the cup of coffee is left half full and she gets
up to walk impatiently to the post office, with steps that turn into a
light run and a rapid run and leaps and bounds. Her skirt billows, a
pleasing gust of wind filters between her excited thighs, what will the
office clerk say if he knows she's not wearing panties?

Shifting from foot to foot and biting her nails, all guesses about the
contents of the parcel waiting for her are rejected as too ordinary and
give way to guesses that are even more ordinary. The minutes crawl by
and the post office clerk who has just arrived and is trying to open the
door seems slow and clumsy. The key does not fit the lock, she'll have
to wait for another clerk to get the spare key from the neighbors. By
the time she gets back a small and irritable morning line has already
collected. The third in line looks like the son of the fifth and JJ
tries to catch their eyes to understand why they are not standing in
line together. He looks up, seeking answers on the horizon line, and she
looks down at the baskets and polythene bags. The old woman waiting in
line behind the assumed mother seems to have made a mistake, thinking
this is the line for the Sick Fund. Finally, when they are called in,
those waiting are dispersed among the counters, the assumed son and
mother standing at the same counter but still not exchanging a word with
each other, the clerk tells the Yemenite beside him a joke he heard
yesterday evening, in what looks like a deliberate move to infuriate he
drags out his preparations to open the counter. Of course the clerks
have to choose this very minute to listen to the news, discuss the
deadlock in the political process among themselves, insisting on
embarking on a vapid morning conversation, even though the customers are
emitting clear signals of noncooperation. No wonder, who sends parcels
to clerks?

At long last. The parcel is in her hands. The identification and
signature process is over and she herself is free, to run and discover
what it contains. She clutches the parcel to her chest and walks briskly
to the exit before anyone here can have second thoughts. On the way the
process of guessing the parcel's contents continues, this time based on
data about weight, wrapping and type of label. Nothing to give the great
secret away and she is longing to be already back between her own four
walls, in privacy.

A first glance at the entrance rug, after carelessly tossing sweaty
clothes onto the chair beside it, and she tore the wrapping with the
untidyness and impatience of a child opening gifts on his birthday who
disobeys his mother who wants to keep the wrapping paper for other
presents. Under the brown wrapping paper, which also carries a couple of
words of greeting from her girl friend who sent the parcel on from an
anonymous pigeon hole in the poste restante to foreign post going to
Israel, the original 'Kortzville Company, New York' is revealed and in
it is an electronic instrument she is unfamiliar with, nothing personal,
not even another sign of identification. Sitting on the floor, leaning
against the wall, she takes out the book of instructions and begins to
read carefully.

It is an instrument that can be connected to a computer to translate
written to spoken text. It is one of the most innovative of the
intelligent products on the market, something known as "the crowning
jewel". It has been a long time since she had anything to do with the
various types of talking computers and there have clearly been many
developments in the meantime. Technologically, in sound research and
also in the possibilities of producing it in synthesis. This creature
'understands and knows' much more than those computers she played with
years ago in attempts to produce a 'human voice' from a gray box.

But still not a hint of SHU, just commercial packing and commercial numbers.


/* Analog Deja-Vu (Chapter 25) */

The feeling of the end of a book, does it depend on nothing more than
the story and its dynamics? Or is it touch, and the sensation of
heaviness in our right hand, and in the left hand the pages between us
and the binding becoming a little lighter? Like the question -- which is
better, to know when you will die and plan your life accordingly, or be
taken by surprise? In any event, the more the pages left decrease,
presaging the end of the story, the more I feel like dealing with the
statistics of endings. I hazard a guess based on the number of letters
and symbols in SHU's last letter, how many times the name JJ appears, or
the total lines housed in the magnetic tracks of the disk in the
DIRECTORY containing the Section B files. 1500. Nothing could be easier.
It's just a matter of running the WC (WordCount) program that counts
words lines and letters in one or all the files and checking whether my
guess was right. It turns out that I was wrong. 1893.

What with the trip coming up I had to keep a closer watch on JJ. It is
one thing to watch from the sidelines, at ease, during the protagonists'
exchange of letters and the long hours spent on games, or send her
deliberate clues, and something else to know that she is going to take a
trip on which significant events are about to occur. Now I must tail her
and be especially careful to note every single detail, otherwise I will
lose my credibility vis-a-vis you, the readers, who may already have
feared for my image as a tall tale teller and legend-maker.
 

*_ JJ _*

We are flying to New York as planned, with a stopover in Paris. As soon
as I caught a glimpse of JJ at the ticket counter out of the corner of
my eye, I guessed we were indeed boarding the same flight and opted to
keep my distance, as

only right and proper considering the tailing and surveillance situation
confronting us. I went through the familiar preflight routine of
wandering around the duty-free shops and it was only there, at the
cigarette stand, that for the first time I noticed the passport I had
taken out of the drawer in a hurry. In that passport, the third, my
name, Judd, does not appear at all. How come I didn't think of this
before? I stole a glance at the face of the cashier, fearing to find
some hint of suspicion in her eyes. And it was a good thing I had not
thought of it earlier, since my already split personality would have
multiplied on realising that I was not just a double but a triple agent,
since I was also the Dark Messenger sent to relate the story of the plot.

I stood at the head of the line to board the plane, knowing that JJ
would undoubtedly be one of the last to arrive. I spent the flight fast
asleep, from the moment of takeoff to the landing in Paris, recovering
from the fatigue accompanying the preliminary travel arrangements and
the tension involved in coordinating all factors, since all the figures
and times and places had had to be synchronized and it hadn't been all
that easy to do.

The arrangements have been made for the stopover in Paris, the time is
precisely 11:11 and JJ unexpectedly leaves the field and gets into a
cab. I must have missed something in her letters to Dr. Kernel and maybe
thay have arranged to meet somewhere else, not the airfield. In
retrospect it would turn out that she has opted to spend the extra time
looking for the square you can see in that missing snapshot that
revealed Oxymoron's link to Paris to her. There are no more 'jolly
beggars' sitting there in the square, just a pair of lovers embracing,
cut off from the world, JJ fantasizes her impending meeting with her
love; the fragile outline of his image fills up with content and color
and he is drawn all in wonderful shades of tangibility and sensations of
anticipation. JJ, if you walk around the square you will see Renaissance
roofs and silhouettes; if you peep through the house gates your eyes may
meet those of the concierge who gave NN the keys of the room when he
used to live there on his lightning stops in Paris. If and if and if,
but no, she stares at the couple on the bench, absorbed in the promise
of the soon to become tangible image of NN.

As I said, I stayed in the 'Transit' area. France was one of the first
countries to make use of communfor the masses. They have computerized
all the data banks and as far back as the beginning of the eighties they
distributed 'Minitel' - a miniature yellow terminal connected to the
telephone, through which you do all your checking and seeking, book your
train tickets and seats for events and communicate withcomputer
junctions - to every home and institution. It was a move that came
before its time, education for the masses. There isn't an old woman or
youngster who doesn't use the 'Minitel'. They are also scattered around
the airfield, and I go over to play with and examine the charming toy.

But I do not understand French, after all, and to me the options up for
choice on the Minitel's screen menus look like the names of complicated
dishes from a gourmet Francais' cuisine, not like simple computer
operations of knowing your way around the menu. I must have looked
bothered or, at least, confused, because that was when a middle-aged man
in a conservative European suit came over and offered to help me in an
accent and with a friendliness not typical of the French. He asks me
politely, would I like to see what this thing can do? "Sure, thanks a
lot," I am taken aback at the courtesy. "Think nothing of it," he says,
"We are both waiting, after all."

First he shows me the screen for airfield familiarization. Takeoff and
landing times, a map of all the field levels and 'Minitel' sites -
yellow lights blinking - and the weather forecast and police and first
aid. Then he goes on to dial the telephone and shows me how to call the
bank and check one's balance, even how to make financial transfers. I
feel a bit like a village child on an outing, going to the funfair with
his uncle who is telling him about the wonderful gambling machines. "And
the printer," I ask, "What is that for?"

"Ach, it's extremely simple," he says, "To keep a copy of actions, such
as a fax, for instance. Here, I'll send the end of my article to my
office colleague for proofreading and editing." And he taps it out, and
the printer prints, and the fax is sent to him from the other end of the
line. I move aside so as not to be in the way.

"Come along, young man," he calls me. "I've finished, let me show you
another trick. You can also use the printer to print splendid visiting
cards, you choose from the pictures on the screen, it's an ideal
solution for businessmen in a hurry who have left their visiting cards
at home, and they are their insurance and self-confidence cards, after all."

He consults with me, "What do you think, should I choose the thick frame
or the thin one, print or script letters," and as soon as he has
finished his planning he hands me some coins to put into the machine so
that it will instantaneously generate the cards from within itself and
print them. Click, click, and they are thrown out into the collector
shelf at the side, one after the other, like banknotes going through a
rapid sorting machine. He gathers them up into his bag, flaps his hand
at me, "It's been a pleasure, young man, and now it's your turn. Play as
much as you like, just don't miss the flight."

My eyes went back to the miraculous box, one card that had been late in
falling out was still there, as an after-thought I picked it up and had
a look at it. Good Lord! Dr. Kernel, it says, with Klinischer
Psychologie underneath. Just a minute, I immediately ran after him, "You
are Dr. Kernel," I gabbled after him, "There are some things I have to
ask you, you could give me some more help in interpreting dreams, also
how to interpret and understand JJ's incident with her father, hey, Dr.
Kernel!" But he and his respectable walk have already been swallowed up
in the herd of travellers who have just come off the plane, with the
crown of his head in the lead and his eyes focused on the floor. My eyes
are still following him when I see JJ approaching him, hurrying, her
glance seeking, when she loses her grip on her bag. Dr. Kernel, I want
to call to him, look, she is right in front of you, but he is far away,
he has already passed her. JJ's skirt swirls around as she picks up the
bag and I try to guess whether she has gone to that meeting, too, minus
her panties, and each of them just keeps going. I lower my hand that had
been flapping with emotion and look around me, alone again, in the first
person singular, my protagonists are not speaking any more, it's only me
and my voice.

Dear Lord. Don't do this to me and don't say you really wanted the
meeting between you to take place. Only disappointment can come of it.
Cyrano did not reveal the secret of the love letters to Roxanne; after
she has actually met Eros, Psyche is no longer the same helpless
innocent. But I know, ladies and gentlemen, that you will be divided
into two types, those who think a meeting with the doctor is essential
and those who are convinced it is unnecessary. I go back again to the
Minitel terminal, and there beside it in the printer tray lies the
forgotten copy of the fax Dr. Kernel sent to Dr. Green, his colleague in
the institute, only a few minutes ago. And here is its end for you:

"....The last problem facing me the

therapist on arrival at the finishing

line, the safe haven, is the decision to

terminate treatment, but I have been

spared this problem since circumstances

have led me to a missed meeting. Once

more the patient takes command of her

life and the initiative to fulfil her

wishes. When surgery is over and the

patient has remained without visible

scars - it is a sign that the operation

has succeeded. Better this sort of

ending than any proclamation and praise

for the process itself.

The treatment cannot suffer a happy end.

Any end leaves a taste of ashes, of death.

Any end - is tasteless death."


*_ NN _*

New York. The clock smiles 11:11 from over halls, the flight times have
been obliterated and replaced by the time differences between Paris and
New York, swallowed up in a sea of lost hours that have fled from life.
NN leaves the plane treading lightly, his eyes searching for Platform
2B, a flower on his lapel as promised, how banal. He looks like a
bridegroom. He hums an over-sweet tune to himself, one he heard during
touch-down, walks toward the passengers reception hall and dresses his
face in the smile he already practised putting on at the mirror before
setting out, just as he wanted to look at his first meeting with LAYLY.
And the tune of the landing music walks toward her with him.

The sniper's shot was inaudible but the body dropped at once, holding up
the travellers galloping to the passport control counters. Airfields are
undoubtedly a classic place for terrorists, they are the battlefields of
the twentieth century. He just managed to think this as he fell, and for
a moment he was not sure it was he, he himself and no other, who was
about to give up his life. Since after all he has already died from time
to time, a zombie as we have said, ask in Paris, even check Oxymoron's
register of beggars. But to hell with it, why is it that idiotic tune
that is going round his head, ah how absurd it is, it's not a melody
with a significant message, just any old tune of planes and elevators
and supermarkets, it was certainly not this music he would have wished
for himself in his wildest plans for death...

And still he managed to wonder, while the security staff were gathering
and rushing around with walkie-talkies, what is the answer to the
riddle, are there more live or dead people in the world. While he was
still amazed at how long it took to drop and how many thoughts were
flooding him, in movies it seems like an instant, enough for a dying
sigh or at most a significant sentence about the nature of man. A simple
rapid calculation shows that up to now the dead outnumber the living,
but an exponential increase in the population of the earth (340 million
in the year one th, 3 billion in 1960 and 6 billion in 1990) proves that
very soon this ratio will change. If so, what a pity - by joining the
numbers of the dead he is not making the slightest difference to the
riddle that preoccupied the Sansetiko gang.

The airfield was instantly and hermetically sealed off. The policemen
and security boys dressed up in suits-and-ties exhibit great efficiency.
JJ is a long way away from the actions arena, shut into the waiting
hall, watching the events from the sidelines, beyond the glass doors.
The sirens of the ambulances and patrol cars empty her thoughts of all
but stupid astonishment. Policemen and officials cluster at the passport
controlcounter, passing information from the communications instruments
that broadcast from the arena to the clerk who inputs and removes data
from the border terminal.

Personal details encoding:

Body build - thus and thus,

Facial characteristics - these and those,

Dress - CASUAL,

Special identification signs - A flower on the lapel

of the upper garment

- Tattoo on the thigh

That was inexplicably defaced by the flow of blood

from the body.

- Identification papers - none - Code 29

- Other documents - none - Code 34

And the clerk does not restrain herself with a hint of a smile: are we
all sentenced to be born, live and die as a computer data entry? And
since when does a tattoo get washed away and dissolved?
 

*_ SHU _*

The airfield in New York stayed closed and sealed off for many hours,
theater of the absurd. New passengers were stopped from boarding and the
flight returns empty to Israel. Or rather, not altogether empty. JJ is
in the passenger class and I, with a passport that does not even mention
my name, Judd, am in the business class. Each of us sitting at the end
of a row of seats with room to spare. JJ is sunk in a dazed doze while I
guess endings and invent last thoughts. In her years of work the only
stewardess available to us, tired but diverted by the situation, has
already seen businessmen who went abroad for a single meeting and
returned the next day, but to return at once without even leaving the
airfield area? She winds up "Strange things happen in this job".

It is a routine landing.

JJ takes the No. 90 bus home from the airfield, she apparently needs a
drive through garbage dumps and orchard scents to complete the landing.
And I hurry and precede her, take a taxi to her home. One thing more I
owe myself - an uninvited guest in her home, where I have never been but
it is not entirely foreign to me. I find JJ's kingdom just as I had
imagined and described to myself, go over at once to the computer, to
the genuine arena. Like her I, too, have to experience communication
with Oxymoron before the story ends and this is something I have not yet
had. I run the communication program, Oxymoron's number is on the
precoded table to which the modem dials and through it I get to the
Cobra and Tiger computers immediately after JJ and of course I hunt for
any sort of updatings in NN's registers. Not a trace, no memory. He is
neither dead nor alive. And the notes have disappeared as though they
had never been, vanished into the mists of the future.

You who believed it is a dream's duty to come true and that the
simulation is destined to occur - tell me, have Palestinians already met
with Israelis, Germans with French, Georgians with Russians,
grasshoppers with butterflies? Go home and look into your dear ones'
eyes and ask: Who are you anyway? Do we know each other? Pleased to meet
you. And then go on to ask whether there is any such thing as another
chance. Was it there from the beginning? Or, in other words, is the hope
that accompanies a painful parting real, roll on the day we meet, and
our world will confidently join the afterworld and everything will be
just fine. As you believed when summer camp ended and you parted from
your first love and exchanged vows to be true and promises to write and
send presents and read those books and tell everything everything and
meet again and then you would surely get married. Everything would be
fine. Or are we sentenced to take part in that giant game of simulation,
like mythological figures with superb graphics and high resolution.

When JJ arrives, and I hardly managed to turn off lights and appliances
and get out without even being able to shut the gate behind me, just
hide behind the fence under the cover of darkness and she, JJ, is coming
and surprised to find the gate open and looking around her, meanwhile I
see that irritating neighbor, La Goldenberg, going over to JJ with leaps
and bounds and little unclear cries, waving some sort of envelope. She
must have been sitting at her window in her usual state of alert until
she saw her returning home.

"Miss," she shouts to JJ, dying to stick her nose into her immoral
neighbor's affairs. "Miss, somebody has been here and left something for
you. I told him you were sure to have just gone to the beach, that's
what you always do, you never leave the house for long. But he didn't
want to wait. And he left this."

"Who was it? What did he look like?"

"Don't know, sort of dark, maybe Latin American. I think so. By the
smell. You know, my husband's from there too, ever since we were
children I've recognized them by their smell. Maybe a new immigrant, by
the accent. He

called you 'Layly' but I knew he meant you. A good-looking boy,
actually. Well? Well?"

JJ takes the envelope and goes into her house. She has no more patience
for her neighbor's babbling. There is a number drawn on the envelope,
reproduced many times, with a diskette inside, a new labyrinth game.
Going through the labyrinth is like writing a story, you choose a path
and follow it to a cul-de-sac, then you go back and start again, there
is always an end, but not necessarily a solution. JJ does not copy it,
goodness no, onto the permanent hard disk in the computer, but runs it
from the diskette, and begins to play.

Do not trust the smells of childhood.