Children of the New World: Stories (13 page)

My computer chimes: an instant message.

Where’d you go?

Sorry,
I type,
family stuff. Can we meet online tonight? I can rent a hotel room. Ten o’ clock?

Want 2 fuck u in classroom.

I pause over the keys.
I can set up a site with a king bed. Jacuzzi?

Nix. Classroom or nogo.

I let out a sigh.
Make it 11.
The room’s closed, but I can log us in.

C-ya.

I log off and wonder what the hell I’m doing. If I were smart, I’d pay an avatar for a night, rent a pre-made space, and not worry about sleeping with a student. Of course, then it wouldn’t be Kira—which, I suppose, means I’m not yet too old to get excited by the forbidden. I remove my bodysuit, hang it over the back of the chair, and put on jeans and a T-shirt. Then I go see my wife in her office.

“I can’t stand that fucking music,” I say, closing the door behind me.

She turns away from her computer and lifts her goggles. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Come here and give me a kiss.”

I cross the room and lean down toward her. The goggles are in the way, so our lips barely brush before we make a kissing sound. She puts her hand on mine, and I feel connected to her. Then I think about Max and the warmth frosts over. Ann feels the change right away. “What is it?”

“Max is on drugs again. His eyes were flickering and he said he wanted to go bicycling.”

“You mean those bikes your parents gave us? That’s ridiculous. We haven’t been outside in years.”

“I know. He’s probably meeting someone to get drugs.”

The reality of the situation leaves us silent. When we first had the suspicion Max was doing drugs, I’d snooped into his search history and stumbled onto one of the sites he’d visited. On the screen a red dot flashed, upper left-hand corner then lower right, blinking three times, large then tiny, before switching to blue. Simply following the dot with my eyes, I felt my mind unhinge. Colors bloomed on the back sides of my eyelids and I had the fleeting thought:
There are limitless hues within the human heart
. My fingers began tingling as though my veins were connected to a larger network of neurons crisscrossing cyberspace, and I had the sudden and inexplicable urge to double-click an object that didn’t exist. I removed the goggles, my pupils spasming left, right, left, right, as the spectrum of colors receded into the eggshell of our bedroom walls. After that we put blocks on our home connections, but Max still managed to find a way around them.

“Well, he’s here with us,” Ann says. “And he’s not going to leave without us knowing it.” She’s always been the rational one. She gives my hand a squeeze and extends her goggles. “I’m almost done with the Whole Foods account; tell me what you think.”

Ann’s landscaped their online corporate office with a carpet of green grass. Patches of violets and buttercups brighten the unused corners, and flat hovering stones create a staircase between the upper and lower levels. The floor-to-ceiling windows have been tinted so the light streaming through is the eternal hue of late afternoon: not too bright to squint, not too dim to read, a perfect radiance that highlights the natural colors of human skin. Outside, a tropical coastline spans the horizon, palm trees stretching over the waves.

“Hawaii?” I ask.

“Philippines.”

“Nice touch.” I take off the goggles. As stunning as Ann’s landscaping is, her work always depresses me. Her worlds make the white walls of our home seem all the more drab. We stenciled lilacs around the perimeter, but it really can’t compare.

I cross the room and sit down on the office bed. Ann’s got her goggles back on and is dragging and clicking her fingertips across the design pad. “So?” she asks from over her shoulder. “Did you do Kira today?”

“No,” I admit. “We’ve got plans for tonight.”

“What time?”

“Eleven.”

“Maybe Rick can meet me then.”

Rick is Ann’s gardener, a muscular twenty-eight-year-old Latino avatar who sells her palm trees. She introduced me to him once while showing me the Whole Foods office. He was shirtless when I’d met him and was carrying a palm tree under his arm. He said, “What’s up, bro?” as a greeting.

“You know he’s probably some hairy guy in Kalamazoo, right?”

“And Kira’s not?”

“Kira’s definitely not,” I answer, though I have no clue. I picture a balding middle-aged man sitting in an apartment, his floor littered with chips and Coke bottles as he crafts Kira’s avatar. For all I know, my wife is right—the university no longer gives us gender, age, or birth names, just a class list based on my students’ chosen identities. “Are you really okay with this?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? I’ve been okay from the start. You’re the one who calls it cheating.”

It’s true. I’m from the generation who had hookups through Tinder and erased websites from browsers, a generation who, for a short while, still had time to be idealistic about what the future held. Ann’s eight years younger; her generation lost their online virginity in middle school.

“Come on,” Ann says, “it’s going to be fun. We’ll be next to each other when we get off.”

“Explain to me again how this isn’t cheating?”

Ann takes off her headset and crosses the room to sit by me. “They’re just avatars,” she says and kisses me. It feels good. Even though real lips can’t bring you to orgasm, there’s something nice about them all the same. We kiss again, a short one this time; then Ann returns to her work, and I go back down the hallway—past Max’s music of groaning car engines and screeching violins—to my office. I put my bodysuit back on for a walk.

Ann created
Autumn
for us when Max was five, a Father’s Day gift. As a little boy, Max and I would walk the landscape together, he in his bodysuit and I in mine, but nowadays I just bring up a saved avatar of Max and reach down to take his hand. The air is crisp and startling, a day that hints toward the coming winter. The leaves have begun turning, and they fall from large oaks, covering the ground in yellow and orange.

“Hi, Daddy,” Max says. The simulator gives his child’s sweetness a disturbing digital timbre, but it’s close enough.

“Hey,” I say and squeeze his hand. Above us, a couple planes cut white trails across the sky, and I hold my son’s hand as we step from the sidewalk into a sea of golden leaves.

*   *   *

MAX WEARS HIS
hockey mask through dinner. He lifts it only to take bites of the lemongrass tilapia Ann has prepared. We’ve asked him to take the mask off when we eat. We’ve punished him, grounded him, taken away his video-game time, but there’s no victory in having a mask-less boy who hates us. So, Ann and I talk to each other while our son silently tends goal at the end of the table. The mask isn’t his invention. Some teenager somewhere found their grandparents’ B-grade horror films and decided the mask was the new vogue for angry anti-tech youth. Indeed, the mask is chilling. The hard, emotionless white fiberglass covers our son’s features, and the hollow, perpetually sunken eyes create a furious expression. The triangles of red above the cheeks resemble streaks of blood. When you add in his clothing—a costume based entirely on either hazmat suits or straitjackets—our son looks essentially like a mass murderer.

It pains Ann and me to see Max like this, knowing that beneath the darkness of the mask his eyes are still spinning, his mind is high on cybernetics, and his heart is full of some pain neither of us understands. Max wasn’t always like this. Until he was eleven, he was a sweet child with a downy head of hair and cheeks that lifted in smiles. He played online games like
Club Koala,
where he clung to eucalyptus trees and traded in bamboo shoots for fur upgrades. Then he entered middle school. We’d bought his school avatar a
Club Koala
shirt. The other students made fun of him, and a group of tech-savvy assholes hacked into his
Club Koala
account and spray-painted his bear pink. They made his koala say obscene things to the other bears, which left Max permanently expelled from the site. That’s when he bought the hockey mask and straitjacket and teamed up with the slasher-punk kids at school, a group that refuses to streamline their avatars. They wear patches that read
NO DIFFERENCE!
and appear online in the same gruesome costumes they wear at home.

“I’m done eating,” Max says. “Can I be excused?”

We let him leave the table, even though Ann and I are only halfway through our fish, and Max disappears upstairs.

“That was pleasant,” Ann says. Machine-gun noises cut her off, followed by the sound of jackhammers on a keyboard.

“Max!” I yell. No answer. “Max!”

“What?”

“Turn it down. And it’s going off in half an hour.”

His reply is to slam the door, but the music does lower.

Ann washes the dishes and I order another shipment of groceries. Beets, milk, honey; Chesapeake mussels are on sale. I click them into my cart. I think of the people working out there, transporting seafood across the country, driving mile after mile of empty highways. There are weekly reports of truck attacks by refugees living outside. I click my cart and check out.

By ten the slasher-punk is turned off, and by a quarter to eleven Max is asleep. The house is quiet again. I sit on our bed as Ann gets her equipment ready. She pulls off her sweater, then unhooks her bra. Her body looks good. It’s not as slim as her avatar. Around the hips she’s gained some weight but, then again, so have I. She’s at least better at going to online yoga.

I try to mentally prepare myself for Kira, but all I can think about is how Ann and I have a good love life. After fifteen years of marriage we still manage to have sex with each other’s avatars two to three times a week. We’ve swapped genders, created a third programmed avatar to have three-ways with, placed genitalia on every inch of our bodies and had simultaneous multiple-appendage orgasms. It’s not for a lack of experimentation. If that were the case, Ann could design a version of herself that looks exactly like Kira. But somehow that’s not the same. Ann shifts her hips back and forth to slip out of her jeans, then pulls down her panties. I reach out and place my hand against her legs. Her skin feels soft.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask.

“Yeah, baby.” She steps into her suit and pulls the zipper up past her navel.

“You look hot,” I say.

“You do, too,” she says, pointing at my boxers. “Aren’t you going to get dressed?” She pulls on her head mask and lowers her goggles.

“I’ll be right there.” I remove my boxers, slip my bare legs into my suit, secure my penis in the catheter, then zip in. The clock by the bed reads 10:57. I put on my mask and goggles and lie down next to Ann.

“I’m right here,” she says, taking my hand.

Then we log on.

*   *   *

KIRA IS WAITING
for me by the door of the classroom. Her hair is dark brown tonight, and it falls past her shoulders, loose and wild against her trench coat, in constant motion, as though blown by a breeze. She lifts a hand to her face and brushes the hair from her eyes.

“Hey, there,” she says. She places her hand behind my neck and pulls me toward her, our tongues rubbing across each other’s lip receptors again and again. I unlock the door, and once inside, Kira pushes me against it, closing the door behind us. My shirt is already bulging and Kira rubs her hand along the buttons, then rips the collar around my shoulders, exposing the erection in the middle of my chest.

“Get on the desk,” she says.

She unties her own trench coat, and in the dim light of the room I see the vagina beneath her right breast. She places her rib cage against mine. “Oh, God,” I say as she pushes me inside and begins to rock. I take her hand, looking for the vagina on her palm.

“Not there anymore,” she says, grinding back and forth.

“What did you do with it?”

“I’ve got something better for you.” She pulls her hair aside to reveal the puckered lips on the side of her throat.

“You’re so beautiful,” I say, and push my fingers into her neck. Already I can feel the hum in her body. She grabs the back of my head and pulls me toward her. “You’ve got one, too, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say, moving my fingers in and out of her neck.

“I want it,” Kira says, her voice suddenly harsher. “Tell me where it is.”

“My leg.”

Kira unbuttons my pants and yanks them around my knees, fully exposing the vulva on my right thigh. She lifts her leg from the floor, her own erection protruding from her kneecap, and pushes into me. She grunts, lifts her leg into a horse kick, and drives her knee down again. I moan.

“Don’t stop fucking me,” she says. I push my fingers deeper into her neck as she jackhammers her knee into me. She’s rocking up and down, her leg kicking back and forth, her neck nodding in unison as her rib cage begins shaking. “Keep going!” And I want to, but she has me pinned against the desk and I can barely lift my leg. “This is it!” she yells. Her neck clenches tightly around my fingers and her rib cage spasms as she collapses on top of me. Then her weight is gone, her avatar popping from above with the sound of a computer logging off. The room is quiet, the desks and chairs all lined up in perfect rows, and the moon outside casts a silver light across the floor. I’m alone on my desk, my shirt torn, the silk ruined, and my pants are around my ankles. I pull my trousers back on and try to button my ruined shirt—it’s no use—then I slide off the desk and shut down the classroom.

My wife is still lying on the bed beside me. Her lips are parted and she’s letting out a slow moan. I take a couple breaths, staring at the lilacs stenciled around the ceiling. I count them: twenty-one … twenty-two … twenty-three … I tap my wife’s shoulder. “Hey?” I say. There’s no response, except her lips open slightly wider. “Hey,” I say again, but she’s too far gone.

What I want to do is lie down with Ann, hold her, and go to sleep. But that’s not what’s happening. She’s kicking her foot up and down on the bed with no indication of stopping anytime soon. I think about logging back on and finishing myself off with a programmed avatar, but it feels too pathetic. So, I strip off my headgear and peel down the bodysuit, my leg hairs sticking to the rubber as I remove it. Then I go to the bathroom and turn on the water. In the mirror, my pupils are dilated as though in shock and my hands are shaking. I sit on the toilet and take a deep breath. The tiles are yellow beneath my bare feet, and my body smells sour from the suit. In the other room, I hear a drawn-out moan. There’s nothing to do except log on, watch something on Virtuview, check my email, or buy my avatar a new shirt—none of which sounds interesting. So, I take a shower. Then I put on my robe, close the bedroom door behind me, and head downstairs to find something to eat.