The Stringers, page 8
“That’s not true.”
“Take Prizms, for example. You hate them. It’s as if you have an aversion to technology.”
“I don’t abhor it. I need it to do my job. I just don’t worship it, either.”
“Worship?”
“People can’t go through a single meal without having that miserable thing on the side of their head. It’s like a sign of devotion.”
“We have to have water. Is that worshipping, too?”
“People don’t need to have a Prizm all the time. People lived without it.”
“We didn’t need airplanes and cars to survive, either, but what would happen if all the airplanes and cars disappeared, even if for a few minutes?”
“I’d say people would come to appreciate walking a bit more, which is sort of my point.”
Correen crossed her arms, a scowl falling over her face.
“And what’s your point?”
I moved closer to her, trying to take her eyes off the Prizm.
“Five minutes, Correen,” I said as I sighed. “That’s all I want. Five minutes with someone without having that damn thing interrupt us. I can’t have a decent conversation, because everyone has to stop to answer a message or take a call or check out something on the Net. Always something to divert their attention. They can bank, go shopping, order takeout, schedule appointments, all while someone is standing right there waiting to finally get their attention.”
“Roy, that’s just the way things are.”
Her voice was equally like the one Casey used on me earlier. I didn’t care for it.
“Forgive me if I sound accusatory,” I replied, “but I find that to be an excuse, not a justification.”
Correen looked at me and her tone grew stiff. “What do you want from me, Roy?”
“I want to actually feel like I’m with you when I’m with you, but you’re somewhere else.”
She tried to laugh off my concerns. “Funny. That’s usually what a girl says to a guy.”
“No. No. No. I mean, this is what everybody seems to do. It’s normal. But I can’t stand it.”
“Explain,” she said.
“I’ve only seen you three times, Correen,” I said. “Three times, and yet we’re supposed to be in a relationship.”
“We are, Roy. We talk all the time.”
“It’s like we’re in a long distance relationship, but we’re not. We work in the same building. It’s not just you, Correen. It’s everything. It’s everyone. I don’t get it. I don’t understand why everyone has to go about doing things the way they do.”
“I’m trying to understand you, Roy,” she said. “But you’re not making any sense to me. What do you want me to change?”
“It’s not about change,” I said. “It’s about thinking the same way.”
I reached out to touch her hand once again. I took hold of her fingers and pulled her arm toward me. She resisted, but then relented and allowed me to hold them, a discomforted look in her eye. I held her hand for a moment, let go, moving my chair over to her side of the table. I was violating her personal boundaries, which for most people was a large circumference that didn’t allow for many exceptions. Correen had permitted me to hold her hand for two special occasions, both of which had made us both feel self-conscious about afterward.
“Doesn’t it seem more real to be talking to me now, in person, than just hearing a voice in your ear or seeing messages I sent you?” I asked. “I feel like nothing compares to the real thing when it comes to these kinds of matters. I get to see you, but it’s not you. It’s a screen, a hologram. It’s not the same as looking into your eyes now, knowing that it isn’t just a digital replication of what really is, but real, authentic eyes. Just standing near you I feel your presence, the distinct air that is always there whenever we’re together, and I don’t ever feel that when we talk apart. I know this is abnormal compared to the expectations placed on us now. It’s commonplace now for couples to spend most of their relationship away from one another, and technology makes it easy to do so. But it also takes away something special, something you can’t replace or duplicate.”
I brought my face close to her, feeling her sweet, cool breath on my nose. I looked down at her blouse, watched her chest go up and down. I looked at her moist, quivering lips as they pressed together. Raising my hand, I touched her cheek. It was warm, flush from the bright light and our enthusiastic debate. I looked into her eyes, sensing a powerful, hungry desire in them. Was it her eyes emanating that, or did they act as a mirror into my own?
Closing my eyes, I pressed her against me and kissed her. Her lips opened, but I felt no reaction as I slid my hand over her shoulder. No hand touched me, and I couldn’t hear her, though I blamed some of that on the rock-and-roll music.
I kissed her one last time before I opened my eyes to look at her, and it was evident right away I might as well have just kissed a statue. Correen was looking away from me. No smile. No grin. No laughter or giggling. No joy or happiness or pleasure. It had meant nothing to her. I had blown her hundreds of kisses during our online conversations, and she had smiled at every one of them.
But not for this one, for the real one.
It was our first kiss. And it had meant nothing to her.
Looking down at the floor, Correen then gazed up at me, a rueful look about her.
“Look, Roy…”
I had no idea what she was going to say. There could have been a thousand possibilities. One of them might have been an apology.
But I knew it wasn’t.
Her tone told me everything I needed to know. Enough to give me the certainty to stand up, grab my coat and throw it on, put back on my Prizm to pay for the meal plus a tip, look Correen hard in the eye but not say a word to explain what was obvious to both of us, and then walk away, her Prizm still sitting on my side of the table. If she watched me leave her there, regretting her aloofness, or simply put her Prizm back on and resumed her conversation, I didn’t know. I refused to look back.
Throwing the front doors open, I stepped out onto the street. The sky was covered by darkened nimbus clouds and thick, heavy rain. The ground was now wet and murky as I stepped onto the sidewalk.
I checked the time and saw I had another half hour before my train would show up and take me back home on the other side of I-405. Standing outside the bus stop, I paced up and down like my father often did in the hallway while considering an important decision. But the pacing reminded me of why I wasn’t still in the diner having a nice meal with Correen, and when I looked around me everyone shared the same lifeless, vacant expression as they peered into nothingness.
I buttoned my coat up to my neck, pulled up the collar, and walked off, stepping over a large puddle that had formed in the middle of the sidewalk as I shoved my hands in my pockets.
I could feel my Prizm on the side of my head. I thought of crushing it. It wouldn’t be too hard. A child could do it. All it required was the willingness to wreck an expensive piece of technology necessary to do just about anything in life.
That fact alone made me want to break it. I hated its monopoly on me, on my life. It had taken Correen from me, or so I thought, until it dawned on me while staring into her eyes after kissing her that I had never had her to begin with. She was addicted to it, hooked on it like it was her life-support system. I was agreeable to her, as long as I fit in with her true love and object of affection.
Taking it off my head, I held it between my fingers like an eagle would clutch a mouse with its claw, ready for the kill. I tightened my grip, felt its fragile material on my fingertips. The tiniest amount of exertion on my part, and it’d crack.
Just before that happened, however, something prevented me from doing so. I dropped the Prizm in my pocket and ripped my hand away like I had been holding a burning coal. I stopped and stared at my hand. I then looked over at the window to a Hmong restaurant on my right, seeing a terrified expression staring back at me. I reached back down into my pocket again, took out my Prizm, and brought it up to my head. I fought to keep it away, but it seemed to have a will of its own. Like a magnet, it was naturally attracted to the small depression on the side of my head.
I closed my eyes, grimacing as I set it into place, and an instant later a full screen exploded in front of my eyes, overwhelming me with a vortex of information. Within the confines of several minutes I had received dozens of messages—none from my father: multiple updates to my friends’ IGPs, whom I kept myself informed on, as well as the Record’s site. The copious amounts of data, however, felt comforting to me, and I read the messages, replied to several of them, then checked my friends’ IGPs, and finally saw the new story the Record had published.
I held my breath when I read the headline. I didn’t have to read the rest of the story, knowing what it said in advance, but I did anyways to justify my outrage. When I got to the last sentence, I could barely contain my outrage.
The ISA had run their own version of the Chang piece, and they had done everything opposite to what I had considered to be ethical. The story, beneath the formal wording, was full of his praise for “foreseeing” the complications of demolishing the bridge. Nowhere in the story had they mentioned or quoted the City Council minutes or provided a link to the video transcript, which they had to have a copy of in their possession.
Enraged, I stormed down the sidewalk with my head peering down at the slippery ground ahead of me. My jaw felt like a vise grip as I tried to rationalize their decision. My father had warned me against doing that. All it did, he said, was inflame one’s emotions to the point where you were incapable of rational thought, and since there was no one to answer the questions, you would end up filling in your own explanations. And most of the time they were wrong.
With my eyes staring at the gray pavement, the rain dripping down my face and soaking into my hair, I lost track of where I was going after several turns at the intersection, and when some time had passed I realized I might have gone too far from where I soon needed to be. I stopped and searched for a sign, not recognizing the street I was on.
The multitude of skyscrapers acted like constellations for navigation. The Lee Tower was south of me, which meant I had to go back down Bellevue Way. The heavy rain left me with murky visibility, unable to read the street signs until I stood in front of them. At 112th Avenue, I knew I needed to follow it parallel to Bellevue Way until I reached Main Street, where the train station was located. I kept off Bellevue Way because of the crowds that flooded the sidewalk and stayed on 112th Avenue, where people seemed to avoid. Walking there for a minute, I couldn’t blame them. Apart from the streetlights, a line of darkness ran across the avenue, caused by the skyscrapers that loomed over it, hiding the sun for most of the day, even during the summer.
I stuck close to the streetlights, though I had no worries about running into bad company there, or anywhere else in Bellevue. Although there had been a serious crime wave a few years ago, an effective police strategy and a refitted fleet of drones had crushed most of the gangs, forcing them out and into Seattle, where a minuscule city budget left their law enforcement officers with a problem too big for them.
As I was passing by one of the alleys, I looked over into it and saw a man leaning against the side of the building. He had one knee bent, his foot kicked up against the wall. His head was tilted down so that it nearly rested on his chest. In his hands he held a thin paper object that crinkled as it flapped like a sail in the wind. He turned the page and read it, and then repeated the motion again.
Intrigued, I walked up to the alley, my hand held up over my eyes to ward off the rain. I squinted as I tried to make out what he held. It was strange to see someone holding a physical object so large.
The man was turning a page when he froze, looked at me, and then dropped the object as he stumbled farther down into the alley, disappearing from sight. I stood still for a while, uncertain of what to do. Finally, I took a step forward, but before I did I looked to my left and right to see if anyone was watching me. I took another step, then another. One more step.
All I wanted was to see what it was he had dropped.
I placed my foot cautiously on the ground, testing to see if my approaching it would trigger a response from the person who had dropped it. Now at the entrance to the alleyway, I peered down at the paper, its obscure shaped formed by the weak light coming from the streetlamp.
I didn’t have to step closer to know what it was, for I had seen enough newspapers in museums and in our lectures to recognize it when I saw it. A terrible chill crawled across my skin, like waking up to find yourself inches away from a cliff and one bad step meant death. The newspaper, crumbled and now speckled with gray spots due to the rain, seemed like an innocuous object, but that inanimate object had the power to destroy my life. If someone were to discover me looking at it, they could arrest me, file felony charges against me, and ruin whatever prospects of a career I now nurtured and tended like a flower in its early blossom.
Yet, all this did not stop me from continuing to study it. I wanted to understand its influence, what made it so dangerous for us to see. Surely it had to have some subversive control over the mind. Why else would the ISA be so stringent about it?
I clutched the edge of the building, my right foot standing on the borderline between the alleyway and the sidewalk. From there I couldn’t read the newspaper, but I was unwilling to venture farther to look at it. I held on to the wall like it was the only thing keeping me from falling off that cliff. I leaned forward and stared at the newspaper, wishing my vision was strong enough to catch a glimpse of its headlines. Not from there. I could only do it if I took that last step inside the alley.
One step. What harm could from it?
I lifted up my foot and put it out in front of me. My heel scarcely touched the ground when I jerked back at the sound of a car’s horn honking behind me. I leapt away, turned around, and walked briskly south to the Main Street Train Station. At first I thought someone had seen me and was at that moment reporting it in to the ISA or the Bellevue Police, but after several minutes of walking, my head low and my arms folded in front of me, I heard no sirens roaring or voices calling out for me to stop and put my hands up. At the station just in time for its arrival, I hopped onto my train, and as it pulled away from the platform I dropped myself into an empty seat and sighed in relief.
Although I felt relieved, I was also angry for putting myself into such a compromising position without any logical reason for it other than a curiosity.
By fate, I had not been caught looking at the newspaper. But I had managed to get a briefest of looks at the large headline, a single word that silently roared across the columns.
Scandal.
Rather than satisfy my curiosity, it only inflamed it. Scandal? What scandal? Bellevue didn’t have scandals. Not for decades. The city had been purged of those kinds of people long ago, and our system of oversight and regulation protected us from such types from ever taking office. The only scandal was to claim there was one when it was obvious there wasn’t.
What kinds of lies did these gangsters write?
It didn’t matter. They were like the tabloids and the alternative media in the past, the unethical writers willing to say anything their readers wanted to hear. They catered to the delusional and the paranoid, who believed whatever they read as long as it fit within their ideologies and political convictions. They couldn’t stomach the truth, so they had to pay someone else to fabricate a false reality for them.
But then I wondered; what was the difference between that and a novel? A novel was a work of fiction, and authors often claimed to promote the truth in their work, even when it was clear what they had written hadn’t occurred, and some of the most inspiring works in history had been fiction like Shakespeare and Hemingway and Poe and McCarthy.
Perhaps novels weren’t the same, but nevertheless I started to question why it was so imperative that newspapers be banned and their publishers prosecuted, not for the deaths they caused but the information they circulated. Certainly one could see legitimate qualms to do so, evidenced by the violence that threatened to tear Seattle apart. If newspapers were legal again, there was no doubt they would print the same filth that they did already. But I couldn’t see it getting worse than it was already, and if that were the case, what good did it do for us as a society?
I kept returning to the same question: What did these newspapers say that was so dangerous we had to be protected from it for our own good? We had been provided a good education in school, trained to be law-abiding citizens, and for the most part it stuck to us as we went about in life. I couldn’t see how our upbringing made us unprepared or unfit to read it, and if it did maybe that meant we needed to be taught to differentiate.
Chapter Five
I came home late in the evening, still mulling over the disastrous dinner with Correen. It had been over an hour since I had left and she still hadn’t attempted to contact me. Had I meant so little to her? Or had she found something else to occupy her time?
The mood in the house felt strange as I entered the foyer. I stopped and listened for the sound of music or Father’s subdued breathing as he read in the living room, but instead there was a faint sound, like a murmur. I took off my coat as I walked through the foyer, catching another murmur, except I realized it wasn’t a murmur. I walked near the living room, which was separated from the kitchen only by a difference in the floors, and then turned toward my father’s study.
The door was slightly ajar, allowing a small line of visibility inside. I didn’t want to violate his solitude, as I knew Father cherished the privacy the room provided him in a world where privacy was all but dead, yet I knew the murmurs were actually soft cries, and I could count on one hand the number of things that could distress Father like that.
I looked into the study, and from the small glimpse I got I saw Father sitting in his chair by his desk, a framed picture in one hand and a handwritten letter in the other. His head was lowered as he cried so that his whole body shook. He grew quiet, as if to recover, then resumed when he regained the emotional strength to do so.
