Life Before X
By Angelo Rodriguez Lacuesta
In my young son’s world, desert sands shift to become windowpanes of water that dissipate into storm clouds roiling. He explained to me once that it was all merely texture mapping. He did not bother to explain it any further. It must involve some complicated procedure that allows him to pull protean pixels out of the void and stitch them into primordial matter. And from this, fabricate, by manipulating pure dumb light and mute numbers, a thousand different textures, a million colors: now vapor, now silica, now silk.
He sleeps heavy in his bed, quirkless, twitchless. His head looks almost too big and heavy for his body. That’s almost all he needs, anyway: that big head of his, lolling from side to side, thinking its heavy thoughts and performing quantum calculations. The eyes that dart about under thin eyelids are his only activity tonight, his brain’s twin pilot lights. I almost flinch when he turns towards me, eyes closed but sensing, pupils flitting about, following dream images, eyes like mine, but surely seeing more than mine have ever seen, even in dreams.
Gabby’s just finished Sixth Grade, and this is his twelfth summer. You would have thought seriously about how thin and scrawny he is, how anemic and undernourished-looking, almost unfinished, like some skyscraper’s skeleton, his body glimmering faintly from the computer’s light.
For this story, I’ve decided to abandon my typewriter. I’ve snuck into Gabby’s room, where I man his machine secretly as he sleeps, this great hulking computer matching my droopy coffee glaze with its constant state of alertness.
Turning the on, though, is as simple as punching the bright blue button on the tower unit, making the act seem anachronistic, an idiotic act quite separate from the whirrings and clickings that it sparks. Then the screen comes alive, bursting into the welcoming graphic. A bas-relief of his name: Gabby, amid a constantly shifting environment: deserts, oceans, blue-mountains-on-blue-skies. He’s showing off his magic, what I or anybody else I know can’t do on a computer. But he’s just flexing his fingers.
Then I’m in a Magritte painting, and the blue mountains magnify to become fields of blue flowers, which dissolve into little cranes, blue like the flowers, poised to disappear into the edges of the screen.
When I was young as my son, a cel-animated Penelope Pitstop flew across the screen in her yellow Sopwith Camel, and I flattened my face against the picture tube, trying to nose my way past its edge. The edge was negative TV territory, the undefined state of a light bulb in a just-closing refrigerator door. It was the edge of the cosmos. I was precocious too, you know, in my own way. And I knew only someone like Dick Dastardly could overstep that line, could, in the end, capture Penelope.
And now, what do I have? When Gabby’s programmed birds rocket across his created landscapes with escape velocity, the screen follows to keep them in video gravity. Feather-bound, svelte, and anatomically correct to the smallest feather, the cranes flock, migrate and separate with all their faculties alive, leaping through rainbows, swimming across the mirror of sky on bay, attacking horizons with ferocity. And at key points in their flight, a virtual camera takes over and gives us their point-of-view, following their line of vision to scan chasm walls, cave ceilings, ocean depths, all their complex surfaces made of crystal-pure polygons that curve into rocks, earth, trees, into a world. Gabby’s world.
But today is a quiet, cloudy day in Gabby’s world. When the last shadow of the cranes leaves, the leaves on the trees are quite still, and nothing disturbs the expanse of grass except little grey stones littered about.
But the stones magically lift into the air, buoyed by a slight breeze. They change shape — morph — into what looks like strange, twenty-first century origami, then unfurl into alien glyphs, strange symbols that represent programs, applications, document files. The screen refreshes itself, and the icons twitch.
Gabby shifts in his sleep. The icons flutter slightly, their colors fading into faint blue and white patches, until I realize they’ve become little nimbus clouds blown slowly across the screen by random digital breezes. I double-click on one such cloud, watermarked by an italicized letter W and the word processor comes up. My own world, the world of writing begins.
I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities. I could write a word, a prepositional phrase, the whole novel I have always promised to write, and erase everything with the slightest whip of my mouse’s tail.
I find it hard to accept that millions of lines of code have been written just to create my word processor, in itself part of an interlocking suite of programs intended to make short work out of even the most complex financial and business process. My meandering, almost random writings all seem to be petty data in the face of this landmark of technological evolution.
To make matters worse, I’ve run out of ideas tonight. Their absence, as always, makes more commotion than their presence, so that my mind is now a poor imitation of negative video space, staticky and hopelessly random.
But like pixels, the possibilities are almost endless. My mind is alive, shifting with ideas, constantly changing. Writing is searching, someone once told me. You search for something and you don’t know what it is until you’ve found it. At the end of every sentence, every quantum of thought, the cursor blinks, the computer mocks my inaction by devoting its chip activity to some other menial task: checking for viruses, ferreting out “lost clusters”, and fluffing up feathery edges of clouds.
Gabby begins snoring gently, propelling me further into my solitude.
On the upper-right corner of my screen a little cloud appears, slowly growing darker and trembling with rain. Instinctively I double-click there, and a little window comes up. Now a little TV set dangles in the corner of my screen. There’s a shiny panel underneath it with buttons for channels, volume and color values, and I flip through channels and catch some breaking news on CNN. A female newscaster of mixed racial origin speaks soundlessly, with a facial expression that seems purposely meant to be alarming. There is an image of a map of Australia beside her head.
As she mouths words, the inset magnifies to fill up the screen. There’s a rippling body of water, with a single speedboat in the middle to give it some size reference. A red strip appears across the bottom of the feed, with “tumult in great barrier reef” in shiny capitals. Should I wake the wife and kid? As a helicopter comes into view, hovering over the growing waves, I let the cursor hover over the mute disable icon.
I really don’t know what is happening, since the volume is still switched off. All I see is shaky video of the Australian coastline, interspersed with shots of the choppers own moving shadow over the sea’s surface.
In a fit of boredom, I flip through Gabby’s subdirectories, by randomly clicking on passing clouds. They are marked by incomprehensible filenames, with long and cryptic extensions. Opening them up reveals the guts of programs that must take up gigabytes of disk space, filled with line after line of code that only Gabby can understand. Complex commands, which thunder in my head like the stupefying elements of schoolgirls’ secret codes, punctuate each line amid numbers and greek-letter variables.
No, this language cannot be compared to the snot-nosed secret languages of my childhood. When I was small we were so broke and idle, we created our own language — of concatenated syllables, inserted consonants, and reversed pronunciations. We spoke them as we huddled in corners, our backs turned to our enemies and our teachers.
No. Gabby himself has taken these words from the fabric of computer logic, solid and irrefutable. Grown men in labs would listen to him utter these commands and understand. And Gabby himself has spoken them, reinvented their purpose to create his own world. I am proud to be called his father.
Me? Despite everything, i’m a man for the times. Principled despite my flaws, not too bad-looking despite my age: I keep a mistress and sport a paunch. But there’s something about having a belly that even I can’t explain. I look at myself having late breakfast with Loren, in a restaurant, the gentle swell of my belly bibbed by the edge of the table linen, as though it were another mouth, another mistress to clothe and feed.
In motels my paunch challenges Loren’s slip of a body. It demands respect, it hangs, luxuriates and obnoxiously intrudes upon our meshing, as though it were another sexual organ to consider, to rub and to please. During lulls in my life it swells to considerable proportions, possibly matching my biorhythms, or perhaps my sperm count, or more probably invisible endocrine levels. Then, despite my monotonous diet, it goes soft without warning, out of season, retreats into my body space, and hibernates like a sleeping serpent.
When I sleep it is one of the treasures that I clutch close, proof and heft of my bittersweet blessings, unwished for, but ultimately accepted and expected, like the wife beside me, our only child Gabby in the other room, and Loren in her college apartment, waiting, precocious, too, in the way she bears my love for her.
There is a soft whirr; the disk lamp lights; I have done something that has made the computer react. Tripped by some digital tripwire, a little red box box unfolds in the center of the screenful of code and unintelligible text, demanding a password. The video window, currently showing a news correspondent in front of a huge radar structure, reacts to the new instruction stream by freezing picture, then jumps into real time, the correspondent’s mouth resuming synch with her voice. My mind reawakens. It bristles as the computer’s scolding red eye lights up again, signifying internal activity. “Enter word in one minute.” A clockface appears at one corner, a stopwatch set to one minute. It starts ticking backwards, imperceptibly changing hue every second, the worded command counting down with it.
I have but less than a minute to read Gabby’s mind. What is the word? In my own sharp but less-than-perfect logic I wonder what words might mean to one like him. In any given string of his programming, I catch precious few statements that resemble real words: int presumably stands for integer, char surely for character, stdout probably for standard output. Even then, these might not take the form of words in Gabby’s mind. They might more likely take the nature of mere affixes, punctuation marks, discreet strings of numbers, or perhaps even dumb directional arrows. Words no longer exist in Gabby’s world. And yet. “Enter word in thirty four seconds.”
Do I remember seeing him scribble something desperately, furtively, over and over again in his programmer’s notebook? Did I notice a secret name in the configuration of the grains of sand, some hidden arrangement in the flocks of blue-feathered cranes, or phantom shapes in the wisps and curlicues of cloud vapor, noticeable only if one took a step back and peered at the screen from the corner of one eye? That was how one peered at digitized genitalia in Japanese void porn. I look at Gabby’s mouth as he sleeps: half open, his little teeth showing through. Do I remember him whispering a name while he slept, through all these nights of my intrusions?
The clock ticks away. I do not know the consequence of a wrong answer. Perhaps a system shutdown. Perhaps an electronic note — when he next opens the secret file — that an attempt has been made. The exact date and time will be given. In fact, I might have already triggered that program-within-a-program, just by accessing this query.
With barely five seconds to go, I press the reset button and the screen blacks out. The red eye gives me a livid glare before it retreats into darkness and sends me back to my own world.
In a moment of inspiration I christen the word ‘X’. As in undefined, infinitely variable, the intercept of an equation that eludes me.
In the morning I again abandon my unfinished story, slip into our bedroom where my wife sleeps, whisper a brief and hurried explanation about a weekend crisis in the office, pick up my briefcase and drive to Loren’s place.
Loren laughs at the sight of me, an overweight man carrying a briefcase containing random work papers and a change of clothes on a sleepy Saturday morning. She knows the ruse is useless. I tell her I have decided that we set out for Tagaytay, where the country is wide and open. I feel cooped up, I feel confined, I confess to her, writing night in, night out, in Gabby’s room. The world is moving at an inexorable pace, I say, remembering the muted TV image and the vast, unexplored ocean in the corner of the computer screen. The world could be ending, and I don’t know it, I can’t feel it.
This is our first trip out of town in our four-and-a-half years together. Soon, many empty miles after we hit the coastal road, we are stunned by the clear and far distances. Loren has been hushed, her young cluttered mind has expanded. Seeing countryside makes her giddy, unsure. I imagine that the things in her mind have spread apart too thinly, loosening frail chains of chronology and association, washed out by the midmorning sun and faces.
After all, here footsteps are projected into strides and stretches, stretches into long drives, each distance an afternoon shadow of the last. Our words are therefore spaced out, like milestones, and the silences between remarks and counterremarks measured by rows of trees and tracts of grass.
It is almost unnerving, it is almost too relaxing. Our bottles, spoons, and tupperware rattle against each other in protest. We drive into the picnic grove, led by some unseen force to seek out the normal, the citylike. Cars and vans are spread out haphazardly on the scraggly, sunbeaten grass, the people emerging from them all picnickers from the city.
Loren pulls me toward the fence at the edge of the field, where all the people are headed. We walk past flocks of families, young couples, carrying cameras and cell phones and picnic baskets. I feel like I’m part of some suicide ritual.
What do we witness at the fence? What I’ve always seen, in all my visits to this place, this very same tired grove. The white wooden fence, many times repainted, is waist-high, and is broken at many places. It is decoration, not a safety-measure, at best a psychological barrier. Beyond the fence the grass plunges wildly, roots and vines scrambling willy-nilly for hold. The ravine is covered with thick brush and pine trees, softdrink cans and foil wrappers. And beyond that, the lake-within-an-island-within-a-lake that has lately been threatening to blow. For the past few years, warnings have sounded and escalated, people have been evacuated from the island, and innumerable eruption dates set and reset. Someone beside me points to a small plume of smoke, rising from a barely visible vent on the island. “There it is, that’s where it’ll start.” Loren is listening to him furtively, cocking her ear.
“No,” I whisper. “It’s going to happen in Australia.”
The perfect view tires me. From here, the now-reactivated volcano looks dead, lifted from a postcard. It all seems rehearsed, like the ritual of going to the edge of the field.
I wait patiently, letting her have her fill. Then she takes my hand and we go back to the car.
It’s almost noon. The sun’s heat is sharp, biting. It’s changed. When I was Gabby’s age, the sun was warm, the heat was gentle even when it beat straight down in summer. Now you can almost feel the ultraviolet light pierce your skin, claws unsheathed like a cat’s. It’s a gradual thing, I guess. Now sunlight doesn’t feel too good anymore.
For our picnic she has prepared a basket that smells of steamed rice and adobo, staple of all picnics, and a Coleman. We choose to eat in the car, with the front seats reclined and our suddenly feet tucked under us. Opening her plasticware becomes an enjoyable task, like opening gifts at Christmas. In my mind I see myself in my T-shirt and cut-offs, sitting Indian-style in the driver’s seat, opening offerings one by one, setting each one down gingerly, as though I were appeasing a sun god who might end the world any moment. In the background, the attendant white glare and the rumble of a sleeping volcano.
The picnic ends. Loren and I pack up, erecting our seats and smoothening our clothes for the long drive home. More picnickers arrive. We have trouble starting our car. It won’t even make a churning sound. I look at the dash and there’s nothing there that tells me something is wrong. The tank is half-full. The temperature is normal and no warning lights have lit up. My belly grazes the bottom of the steering wheel. That didn’t happen when I bought it, or at least paid what downpayment I could afford for it, five years ago.
I end up having to open the hood, checking the battery contacts to see if they’re loose. I take a wrench and bang at the contacts, which a taxi driver once taught me to do because, according to him, it loosens the salt encrustations. I see Loren through the windshield, her face screwed up by heat and apprehension. My first blows startle her, but after a while her eyes gloss over. It’s the only sound we both hear now: the dull, inconsequential banging of my wrench, trying to hit the invisible mark that will mend the battery, mend Loren, mend us all. The other picnickers seem so far away, on another island, another volcano.
After a while I try starting the car again. Nothing. Loren starts panicking, tells me she has to be home by five so her boyfriend won’t find out. She asks me if she has to push.
After a half-hour of shuttling back and forth between the engine and the wheel, the ignition finally works. As I get in I mumble something about an alternator problem, but it is Loren who has shut herself off now. She wants to say what the fuck is wrong with this car. But she won’t say it out loud. Her way of saying it is being all quiet and screwed up.
I mumble again to myself, this time about going to the dealership and finally taking a look at those new four by fours everybody seems to have. Secretly, it’s a mystery to me how I would ever be able to afford one. Being a writer pays me nothing more than backache, depression, and a damaged view of the world.
We taunt each other, daring each other to step past our freshly reconstructed boundaries. Why? To test our trust, to test our faith. We build silence upon silence, to see who will break and , so we can be sweet again, so I can drive back with Loren dangerously draped across my lap, like vacationing preppies do in American movies, only they drive convertibles and are young enough to not have wives and not need secret lovers.
To ease my pain and emptiness, I tell Loren about X. I ask her questions she isn’t meant to answer. “What secrets could it unlock? What must Gabby hide from me, his own father?”
Without a hug, a kiss or a wave, Loren alights from the car and sticks a ready key into her lock.
Back in Gabby’s room I try to forget the mystery by immersing myself in more live news footage. The cameras have been there, it seems, for days. And the scientists, as we are expected to believe, have been there since the beginning. All along the great underwater wall of coral, the fish have only increased in number and in kind. Now, besides the small, dainty angelfish and parrotfish that are native to the reef, huge tuna and mackerel have arrived, jumping and barreling through the froth. The choppers, too, have multiplied. There are now three, sometimes four of them, hovering over the great commotion in the water.
The only marine vessels allowed near the site are the scientists’ yellow rubber boats. They are loaded with all sorts of expensive equipment, and shuttle back and forth between the site and a large research vessel moored close to the shore. The people on the boats look frantic, even from this distance.
Satellites have been reoriented, retracked, so that the scientists receive a steady stream of aerial shots and updated atmospheric information. A reporter patches in, and does an interview with a researcher in his late fifties. He sports a grey beard, round wireframe glasses and a ponytail. He starts blaming everything from the hole in the ozone layer to toxic dumping in Australasia. It’s a tired old subject. Then the cam zooms in, so that his head fills the TV window.
“Or,” he mumbles, his wireframes catching a glint of light from the cameraman, “there could be another reason.”
The reason that dissolves into the screen is a picture I’ve seen maybe two dozen times before, in books, in Internet Websites and TV shows. It’s a frozen image of a flying saucer in a blue sky. On the bottom of the screen, there’s a strip of fine print: “Stock footage courtesy of 20th Century Fox.”
As Gabby sleeps I write and revise, add or subtract details as I see fit. When the ideas tire me out with their repetitiveness and all my poorly hidden meanings, I start scouring his directory listings for any clue: a curious passage, a lost text string, a dubious-looking fragment of code.
After work I feel restless. Uninvited and unexpected, I make an unplanned visit to Loren’s house.
She hops into the car, full of energy, hair wet and smelling of sex. Her boyfriend is some college boy she met at one of her fashion pictorials. He’s as unreal as they come: strong and well-built, a perfect match for her body.
It’s me that tries to feed into their energy, I realize, as I mount and impinge upon the cusp of her ecstacy minutes later, at our favorite motel. Her hips move with a rhythm that is her own, too quickly and too easily. For a moment I feel as though I’m looking at her and her boyfriend doing it on TV, and I’m having to match their timing while jacking off on my own, as many aging men do. I am also forced to pull back, in the middle of the dissipating curve of my energy, and watch as she breathes and mumbles and opens her soul for a very brief moment, and I know she is thinking of him as she looks at me and mouths my name silently, as though it hid another name in the depths of that breath.
Then her eyes light up. “X is a woman,” Loren says, laughing that laugh.
“Writing is stealing.” Or maybe they said ‘writers steal’? Writers are jackals, lone wolves. We smell the merest hint of rotting flesh dropping from the bone and we strike, feeding nightly upon the half-digested, wormy carcasses. In the midst of all this we imagine that we have hunted our prey down.
OK, so let’s solve for X, such that X is a woman’s name. A girl’s name. The next question is, what’s in this single secret file, anyway? In other words, isolate Y. Isolate Why. This file probably contains secret proceedings between friends, or secret lists of childhood concerns. Or a day-to-day journal, or pretentious stories about everyday life, the stuff of which my files, which are open for anyone to read or alter or perhaps delete, are made of. I struggle to remember the secret lists and writings I myself must have made as a boy, but I can remember nothing. My frustration prompts me to purchase a little book on the Essentials of Programming, if only to understand the situation further.
Gabby’s other hidden programs are pretty simple to identify, even if they’re in code. I know now that opening assembly-language files is like opening a series of doors in a castle, as in Kafka. You go deeper and deeper, opening program after program, and soon all files written in open themselves up for you, routines and subroutines deflowered in your path.
The first important thing I do is try to locate the query program, so I can open it up. As I have come to expect, there are more ruses: baffling linkages of commands and programs that will easily throw any amateur code reader off the track. Names and numbers spill across the screen, fruits of his brilliant, excessive, and careless talent. The names are gibberish; it seems no references have been made to anything, and there is no apparent naming system to them. There are literally hundreds of executable programs, and trying them all out might take days, weeks. There are programs within these programs, that, when activated, will surely open other programs within.
I study the names one by one. I take note of arrangement. I take note of chronology. I take note of phonetics, and mumble the alien words to myself, waiting to catch something that might sound like a name, her name.
Monday. 0600 hrs. The sea by the Great Barrier Reef is in a tumult. Close to a hundred humpback whales have arrived, in a great grey herd from the North, stretching for miles.
The whales have barricaded the congregation of fish from the North. To the helicopter cameras it seems that they are milling around, without any semblance of order. But then, a scientist adds, what is order? This brings up a host of special reports — even on other channels — on chaos theory and the mathematics of fractals. The reports are punctuated with breathtaking visuals of Mandelbrot Equations, all uncannily resembling Gabby’s graphics of grass and other greenery.
The humpback whales display their great backs and flanks to the helicopters and the TV audience. The scratches and scars, the voice-over adds, are from errant Japanese harpoons and from propellers of ships wandering into migration trails.
The rubber boats have limited themselves to the South side of the reef now. Scientists are still discussing what to do about the whales. Satellite images are spread across the TV screen. They are sharp enough to look like any instamatic picture, although the colors look a bit artificial. The news special serves up several aspects: Earth’s topography, infrared map, and atmospheric conditions, which are soon joined by simulations of lunar paths, planetary positions, and supernova activity.
Again, the anchorman reminds us that the possibility of alien involvement cannot be ruled out, as we are reminded by feature after feature showing artists’ renditions of short gray humanoids that many believe hold the secret to man’s and, therefore, even the universe’s existence.
As another dark shadow of collected marine shapes disrupts the underwater blanket of ultrasound, Gabby stirs and begins to wake. I snap the file windows shut, hurriedly switch the system off.
“Wake up, son. You’ll be late for school.”
“It’s a Sunday,” he mumbles, his head turning suddenly to look at me with freshly opened and instantly vigilant eyes, his eyelids flashing like nictitating membranes.
X, you must be beautiful. Gabby’s pupils flit randomly under his eyelids, like the fish in the Australian sea. All along, he has been dreaming about you, your shadowy figure in a billowy, translucent school dress, smooth calves gleaming, fleetingly glimpsed between the hem of a yellow skirt and knitted white socks. Your swan neck, white and somewhat flushed, gleams incandescent above your collar. Your hair is hazy, thin, almost curly, windblown — all but insignificant for the face it frames, unequivocally beautiful and superintelligent. You are the stuff of all our schoolday imaginings.
Gabby’s spoken with you, once or twice, in some school affair — a fair or a flea market, maybe. Perhaps he’s spoken to you many times. There might have been secret meetings, entire afternoons together, talking, laughing, and sharing whatever childhood delicacy his meager allowance could afford. Ice cream. Popcorn. Fishballs. A Ring Pop.
He’s held your hand in his, to confess, to implore, or to beg your trust. And you, in return, have weaved your tiny, slender fingers through his bad haircut and tenderly touched his blotched face. Your skin is white but sunned by the heat of the new, hurtful sun, and rich and sweet with the unmistakeable smells of earth and girlhood.
There might have been things said. Real things, like the things you really meant and spent your whole life pretending, or believing not to have meant. So that one day, the entire episode might seem savage, dreamlike, like lost days of youth, or for me, the ever unfound, ever unattainable old age at which all my mysteries would have been answered. I know all about you, X. No, make that, I know you.
And yes, best and worst of all, he’s shared his talent with you, pulled you into his world as though he were rescuing Penelope Pitstop, and made you the holder of the darkest, most wonderful secret in his arsenal of codes and colors.
In exchange, what cruel, senseless thing did you tell him, that he now must guard from the world with a one minute code, retrievable only by a password?
This spurs me to open his personal files without hesitation. His programming notes, his letters to friends and relatives, the nude pictures he downloads from the net. I look for clues, hints, careless utterances. There are none.
The story so far: romance, philosophy, adventure. A techno-thriller, a mathematical treatise. But it’s a mystery story, really. Half of the time, my readers might be wondering, Who the Fuck is X? Why is X so important? Or even, could aliens be behind that feeding frenzy? — Which, as many of us know, is based on real actual fact.
And looking at you, Gabby, peacefully withholding the most terrible secret of your heart in your deep and untroubled sleep, I wonder, why must you give your heart away so young in your life? You had your maths, your assembly language, your palimpsest of programs. You were happy, you were complete!
And so the dark shadows emerge, in a white explosion of water and blood and bloody flesh, to reveal delta fins and great silver backs. Chopper cam comes in for a close up and gives us multiple rows of teeth, gnashing and tearing tuna into pieces.
Sharks are always consumed by hunger, Dr. Ponytail explains. Should we believe it? There are rows and rows of books behind him. Sharks, he adds, can smell bloody flesh miles away.
There are no more rubber boats, only shadows of helicopters hovering lower and lower. The news correspondent’s voice is ragged, tired, like that reporter in Kuwait under siege. The chopper lifts, the camera view opens up: although the weather is clear, the water is choppy with fish movement. Everywhere, the surface is cut by clumps of delta fins, stationary, or circling, or cutting arrowlike swaths towards their targets.
We switch to computer imagery. This is quieter, more controlled. We are calmed by the enhanced colors, the digitized matter. Sonar feed is superimposed over the perfect seascape. Clusters of dots tell the story of the largest feeding frenzy ever recorded in history. The fish have almost numbered a million. The sharks, up to two thousand, circling, attacking, repositioning. I learn more about the Great White than I ever have in my entire life. The sharks are a vision of the future: their torpedo-shaped body is perfectly streamlined, their tissue impervious to cancer, and their physiology a stranger to satiation.
The next time I drop by Loren’s uninvited, it’s her boyfriend who opens the door. A head taller than me, he is wearing a muscle shirt and boxer shorts, and brushing his teeth with hard, solid up-and-down strokes.
“Who the fuck’s this guy?” he says.
I remember this episode as though it were a funny thing that happened to someone else, what with me standing there with a briefcase full of phony things, with a hunger in my loins and a lost look in my eyes.
Loren says nothing as she sits on the couch in her robe. She’s thinking. I can almost hear her mind whirring towards her next move, as it does whenever we argue. At that moment, looking past the angry man, at Loren, sitting in the couch, still wondering whether to recognize my face, my paunch, my aching shoulders — my nondescript clothes bulging at the seams with familiar nakedness feverishly lurking underneath — or to dismiss me as a lost neighbor, an old professor, an uncle, I realized that even our lovemaking is like an argument, lying in her bed locked in our stalemate, moshing and meshing and grunting. And whenever it happened, whenever we made love, there would be a silent countdown, like Gabby’s one minute clock, in the face of which I would grunt and pump like a madman, trying to beat the time.
The man throws a fantastic curve at me, his fist forming its advancing point, to connect with jaw at unmatchable, youthful speed. It’s what Gabby’s video games refer to as an “unblockable move”. And at that crucial moment, as his knuckles strike to complete our equation (she the divisor, he the dividend and me, the quotient, foolishly simple answer to a laughably simple proof), I imagine X to be the asymptote of a graph of a calculus equation, that crucial point, eternally elusive, which all my graceful, infinite curves, like the gentle swell of my belly, will never reach.
Loren, my only love, my only semblance of a secret, lost forever to the happiness, the catastrophic rapture I shall never attain.
“The Myth is not safe,” someone told me once — and while the capital M is mine, I do maintain that we live in a world of diminishing mystery. Diminishing in relevance, diminishing in mysteriousness. Why, even writers have to steal material now, not unlike magicians stealing sleight-of-hand tricks. You see, unlike colors or numbers or particles in the known universe, there are only twenty-six letters for me to sift among, fit and fix. As I grow older I often find myself coming up empty-handed.
My own electronic search, too, has ended similarly. I have discovered only a tantalizing proximity to you, X. And then, nothing more. You are a myth. An imaginary friend of my egghead son, made more real than any phantom playmate from my boyhood might have been. There is no X.
By the time this is published, of course — if it ever will — even if it will be seven years from now or a year from now, everything will have changed. There will be more catastrophes around us. Perhaps the volcano will finally erupt, perhaps the sharks will eat the whales, perhaps the sun will be covered with a strange cosmic dust, or perhaps our souls will awaken and be one. Or perhaps not.
Already the little clock ticks ever backwards. In the future Gabby will no longer be the prodigy he is now. I imagine him as a scientist bypassed by the Nobel, a news reporter on the field who never made Pulitzer, a bitmapped clip of a volcano hanging in the air beside his head, in the background a newsroom filled with people trying to look busy.
And all above him, behind him, all around him, the volcano threatening to blow but never really exploding, the smoking omen of its own undoing a permanent, unrelenting possibility against which all of us are infinitely small and mortal.
Now, as he sleeps on, I close electronic doors one by one, upon the TV satellite feed, upon the wasted efforts of his genius, upon the gradual, but inevitable dissipation of his youth. And as I close the door on you, X, failed phenomenon, aborted catastrophe, unreachable love, I imagine myself as a shark, nursing an ancient, eternal hunger in an eternally dying sea.
