Children of the New World: Stories (9 page)

Soon he’d be back on a plane, surrounded by pressurized air and bland airline food. His parents would be upset with him when he returned home; they’d lecture him about dropping out of college and wasting his money. But they’d be happy to see him, and he could tell them about liberation. The line moved forward. Mostly, he’d just be happy for a soft bed. He thought of the guesthouse’s bedroom—how it had smelled of fryer oil and the sweat of previous guests—and then about his old dorm room, where Sandra and he had spent their nights. He would call her when he got home. It was likely she wouldn’t want to talk. If she did, she’d remind him how all he’d ever spoken about was Moksha. But if she let him, he’d tell her about the vision he’d had so many times after his enlightenment sessions. A memory of a late afternoon when they’d walked across campus to her dorm room to make love. They’d leaned against one another as they walked, and he’d noticed the sound of the leaves around their feet, and the air that was cold with winter, and he’d felt her love surrounding him. Abe would tell her about how he’d be happy just to be back on campus together with her, taking a walk. The line moved forward again. Who knew, maybe these fountains would liberate him from such desires, but maybe he’d simply be happy to be beneath the blankets in her dorm room, watching a movie and eating popcorn as they’d done back in the days when he was unenlightened. It was his turn. Abe closed his eyes and bowed his head and stepped forward.

The water, it turned out, was freezing.

CHILDREN OF THE NEW WORLD

SOMETIMES, WHEN EVENING
comes and the light hits our home in a way that reminds us of that other life, we’ll talk about them. What their faces looked like, the feeling of their weight in our arms, the way our youngest would crawl onto my back. I’ll see Mary sitting alone in our living room, the sun gone, just the reds of dusk outlining the trees, and I know she’s remembering them. I walk over, put my arms around her, or kneel by her and place my head in her lap, and we’ll stay like that, holding one another’s pain, wondering whether we are truly monsters.

They weren’t real, we say, looking for confirmation. Right?

Right.

Then we get up, start dinner, and move on with our childless lives.

*   *   *

FOR THOSE OF
us who became parents in those first years, we remember the awe and beauty of the New World. To lie down in the darkness of the compartment, adjust the pillow beneath our heads, and log on was tantalizing. The chamber’s darkness gave way to the light of the other world, the white walls of our online home appearing before us, filling our teeth with electric joy. We recall the first steps we took in our new house. To reach out and touch the world was to be illuminated, and we walked outside to see the homes lined up along our street shining and new, other users emerging from doorways, waving as they crossed their lawns to make introductions. Isn’t this incredible? Where are you using from? Las Cruces, Copenhagen, Austin. We were like babies. Like Adam and Eve, some said. We reached out toward each other to see how skin felt; we let our neighbors’ hands run across our arms. In this world, we seemed to understand, we were free to experience a physical connection that we’d always longed for in the real world but had never been able to achieve. Who can blame us for being reckless?

Perhaps such thoughts seem childish now, in light of all that happened; yet it’s often those first weeks of usage, when the world was still new, that Mary and I speak of most when we remind ourselves that life was good. It was just a beautiful illusion, we tell each other, a fantastic electronic diversion. Right? Right, we say.

*   *   *

MARY’S PREGNANCY TOOK
us both by surprise. She had gone through menopause a decade earlier and we’d resigned ourselves to living childless lives. We’d waited too long, had debated the pros and cons too many times, had placed our jobs first, and then it was too late. It was only when Mary’s belly began to swell that we accessed the FAQ tab. It was all there, no great mystery: pregnancy worked the same as in the real world, fully explained in the tutorial. We had planned to watch the walk-thru at some point, had gotten as far as the instruction to roll our thoughts to the left to select our tattoos and piercings, up and down for musculature and age, but then we began playing with landscapes and playlists, and before we knew it, we had the basics of navigation down. This is how you upload music to the home speakers; this is how you project your photos onto the living room wall; this is how you place one hand on your wife’s hips; this is how she puts her hand behind your neck; this is how you kiss. And then she was pregnant.

The FAQs informed us we could remove an unwanted pregnancy as easily as dragging a file to the recycle bin, but we were curious. Here would be another being formed from the combination of our genome preferences. The birth promised to be as quick and painless as a download. So we held each other, scrolled through online baby names, and agreed to bring new life into this world.

In the New World, Mary and I proved to be a completely different couple. Our bodies became freed from habit, independent of hormonal changes. We grew hungry for the electric hum of each other. Mary soon became pregnant again and our lives were illuminated in a way we’d thought impossible in the physical world. Online, with our new family, we had found joy.

*   *   *

JUNE HAD JUST
turned three, Oscar two, when Mary and I began to explore the borders of the New World. By then most everyone had heard of the Dark City. It was there on the horizon, out over the tree line of our neighborhood, a brown glow in the distance. It was common knowledge you could travel to the city to spend a few hours, days even, among its pleasure domes and massage parlors. When I’d log off and go to work, the other men at the office made jokes about their weekends, a delicious guilt within their laughter. Smoothest bodies you’ll ever feel, they confided. It was said there were parlors where air currents tickled the body to the edge of orgasm. There were morphing temples where skin became ecstatic mounds of quivering jelly. We were intrigued. I’d go if you went, we agreed. So, one night late in January, after the children had fallen asleep, we left them with an online babysitter and headed for the Dark City.

I’d once witnessed Amsterdam’s Red Light district with its windows of naked bodies and its rotten maroon lights. I can still smell its cobblestones, thick with dirt, and see the doorways, dark with hungry faces. This was what I’d imagined the Dark City would resemble, and I’d expected to be repulsed when we approached its gates, to turn back with shame and relief, to write the place off as a tasteless distraction. But, though the city oozed a seedy brown light, up close the streets were lit by warm yellow lamps, humming with electricity. The gates of its many entrances stood open, so welcoming that turning away was impossible. We saw men and women emerging from its depths, setting off from the gates to return home. There was no danger in exploring a block or two, we reasoned.

So we entered the first district of the city, filled with its soft-core delights, its toy shops and kissing booths. The stores reflected the amber glow of lamps, which brightened the faces of other tourists who walked the streets: couples with their arms around each other, college kids sitting on curbs kissing, single men walking with their hands in their pockets. A Korean man standing by a foot massage parlor called out to us, “Beautiful Asian girls. Twenty credits for fifteen minutes.” Across the street, a gorgeous man called my wife sweetie and invited us inside to be tickled. And rising above the lights and the busy streets, one could hear the collective moans from deep within the web of avenues, pulling us forward toward the core, where we longed to play.

The Air Current Hotels were four blocks in. White three-story buildings with darkened windows and velvet ropes leading to their doors. At the check-in desk, a teenage receptionist in a string-top charged my account forty credits for the session.

“It’s our first time.”

“You’ll love it!” she said. “You’ve never experienced air like this!” She smiled and directed us toward the elevators. “Second floor, room number seventeen.”

“What do we do there?”

“Just close the door and stand in the middle of the room. We’ll take it from there.”

We rode the elevator to the second floor and found the room entirely empty, the lights dimmed. I shut the door behind us, and we stepped into the middle of the room. A light draft played along the floor, working its way up my pant legs and finding the softness behind my knees. Another breeze caressed my neck, then slid down my collar. Our feet were lifted from the ground and we floated horizontally, air currents tickling our skin with alternating nips of cold and warmth. Wind rubbed against my lips, playing against my tongue; a strong gust pushed against my chest, holding me down. I reached out to hold on to Mary, but there was nothing except air, and I was filled with the luxurious thought that I was being made love to by a goddess of wind. Mary arched her back, pushing down into the gusts that caressed her again and again, until her body was vibrating, piqued by wind, and we blossomed together, our bodies becoming one with the network of electrons buzzing around us.

In this way, Mary and I became one of the many couples walking with their arms around each other, post-orgasmic and giddy, on the streets of the Dark City. We graduated from the Air Current Hotels to the Thousand-Finger Parlors—where we lay with our eyes closed, holding each other’s hands as invisible fingers rubbed us to climax—and later on to the second ring of the city, with its Morphing Temples. We explored our bodies as sea creatures and woodland animals. Mary would transform into a blue-eyed doe, and I, a buck, would brush my antlers against her fur as I mounted her. There was a beautiful playfulness to it all, and we rekindled our passion, which was restricted to our online lives. For when we returned to our chambers at home and changed out of our clothes, we did so with cybernetic exhaustion, barely noticing our naked bodies, which brushed against each other in the bathroom. And when we kissed goodnight, we didn’t linger. This, however, seemed a small price to pay for our online pleasures, and if we felt disconnected from each other in the real world, we attempted to pay this little heed, focusing instead on that moment, every night, when our children were asleep and we’d set off to seek our individual pleasures together.

*   *   *

MARY FOUND THE
man in our bathroom shortly after we’d visited the Bondage Cathedral. I heard her scream from the other side of the house. He stood there, his body flickering—a low-resolution, pale-faced man whose body pixelated in places. His erection, however, glowed in high resolution, and when he saw Mary he said, “I want to please you in sixty-nine ways,” before she slammed the door shut and yelled for help. When I opened the door, the man was stroking himself, looking down at his enormous penis. “I can help you grow three inches naturally,” he told me.

The FAQs didn’t cover this. And it was only after searching through other users’ blog entries that we figured out how to delete him from our home. But during our next session, when the doorbell rang, we opened the front door and encountered a man from Ghana who told us he was a distant relative. He’d brought our children presents, he said. He needed our credit number to upload the toys for the kids. We locked the door but we could see the man outside, pacing first on our porch, and then climbing into our bushes to knock on our windows. We deleted the African man, but when night came, our lamps no longer lit our home with soft warmth but contained a shadowy light, and our house was filled with the feeling of being watched by countless eyes, our every action scanned for information.

Mary took the children into our bedroom, and I logged off to call online support. The man on the other end of the line spoke broken English, the line buzzing from an overseas connection. He tried a couple options with me, and finally said, “Sir, your account is corrupted. You will have to reset all files to the initial settings.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You must delete all data from your account—your preferences, photos, and music. You will need to re-create your bodies again. I see you have children.”

“Yes.”

“You will need to delete them.”

“What?”

“The virus has spread to them. You will have to delete them and begin again. I’m sorry, sir.”

“I’m not deleting my children!”

“Yes, sir, I understand. It is your choice. But the system has a fatal error; it will only get worse. Your account is filled with viruses. You will not want your children in that house soon.”

“Put your supervisor on.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said. Then I was put on hold for ten minutes of light jazz until a supervisor, and later her supervisor, told me the same information: that we should have installed an anti-virus protection plan. Without it, there was little left to do but return our system to factory settings.

“What if we move to a new house?”

“I’m afraid all of your family is corrupted,” the supervisor told me. “You’ll just end up bringing the virus with you. It’s an easy process to reboot. Simply hold down the power button on your console for twenty seconds and—”

“These are my children!”
I yelled.

“If it’s any consolation, they won’t feel a thing; they’re just data.”

I hung up the phone and told Mary the news. There was no way, we agreed, that we would reboot. We’d have to be vigilant, delete each and every file when they appeared. The kids could sleep in our room; we’d take shifts keeping watch over them. I called in sick to work and Mary used her vacation days, but within a week nowhere was safe. A bronze-skinned man with spiky hair appeared in our bedroom, telling Mary there were guys like him waiting to connect with her. A woman who looked like my mother transmogrified in the living room, saying she’d been robbed and needed our help to pay for groceries. We had to restrain our children from running to her when she called out their names. Toys began appearing around the house; to touch a single one was to transmit all our information across an unsecure interface. We hid the children beneath blankets, telling them this was all a game we were playing. And then, one evening, we found ourselves surrounded, every room of the house filled with cartoon characters hawking downloadable games and attractive women selling vibrators and wrinkle cream.