Men dominate my world: geeks and freaks, autodidacts, social misfits, polymaths with their MIT degrees, drab starched collars and white athletic socks, pen case tucked in the left shirt pocket. How did I wind up here? Start with a perfect score on the SAT, answering all the questions in forty-five minutes, not requiring a bathroom break for my nervous bladder. Then add high school valedictorian, president of the Science Club, and a full scholarship to Georgia Tech for which I was poorly prepared. Not academia but the social scene—late night pairings and what to do when your roommate has a guest, the Do Not Disturbed sign on the doorknob clear as a lit marquee and you have to sleep all night in the hall, enduring the constant cannabis induced giggles of dorm mates. Between Calculus II and Organic Chemistry, I struggled with such concerns as should I hookup and accept the rules of engagement—no strings attached, no promises of love or even remembering my name in the morning, or should I dump the dating scene for a barren third floor carrel at the library?
My love life BC—before College, consisted of Harvey Spain and Wilbur Trevor, vice president and secretary of the Science Club respectively. Harvey with his tarmac haircut and opaque lenses and Wilbur who refused to pee in the butt strewn urinals in the high school, instead relieving himself behind the red tips at the far end of the running track. While most male teens longed for a 426cc dual barrel carburetor, performance-modified Turbo Hydra-matic with console-shifted Hurst, H&W argued over the best calculator—operating speeds, co-sine and sine functions, ROM vs RAM, multivariate equations, closed versus open universes, the proof of Fermat’s last theorem, hyperbolic as opposed to Euclidean geometry.
They fought over me. Harvey bought me a two year subscription to Scientific America while Wilbur wooed me with a framed equation scribbled on a piece of torn graph paper allegedly from Stephen Hawking. Neither asked me out until my senior year when Harvey invited me to an Astronomy Club meeting.
Harvey suffered from an overactive thyroid. Blackheads and pimple eruptions exacerbated by sunlight. As a guard against melanoma, he slavered himself with handfuls of forty SPF sunblock. A brush against his skin was like palpating an eel. When he picked me up in his dad’s Corvair, he couldn’t figure out which button to push to unlock the door—the classic genius who could solve Rubik’s cubes blindfolded but couldn’t change a tire if his life depended upon it. Sitting beside him I thought of the dispersion rates of his chapped Aqua Velva splashed cheeks which had me pleading for a cracked window.
“You’re not wearing your glasses,” I said.
“Contact lenses.”
“You don’t wear contacts at school.”
“They make my eyes water.”
“But you’re driving.”
“It’s not a problem at night.”
“I’d hate for you to wreck your dad’s car.”
His father was a failed inventor who once had worked for 3M. He licked a toad out in the Sonoran desert as part of a personal experiment and claimed it had ruined the thinking regions of his cortex. After the experience, he was vulnerable to flashbacks, once breaking his nose while taking a shortcut through a wall. He taught physics at the local community college and continued to tinker with his inventions, his latest, a tubing device one could attach to the tap to see how much the public reservoir was contaminated. He planned to market it nationally. With the constant emphasis on R&D—his most recent acquisition being a quadropole mass spectrometer—and the departure of his wife, money was tight. What most upset Mr. Spain about his divorce was that his wife split for an Edward Jones stockbroker who drank his water straight from the spigot.
The Astronomy Club met in a cow pasture thirty miles outside of town, far enough from ambient light that second-magnitude stars could poke through the scrim. Harvey followed the sinewy road, heading into the foothills, the FM radio station stuttering on the curves. In those days I wore little makeup—a dash of mascara and highlighter, teasing my hair into a frizzle, sweatshirts and camouflage pants large enough for a pup tent. It was an ideal night for stargazing, moonless, near freezing, with low humidity. The Milky Way, a chest of diamond dust, sparkled just out of reach. “Is that the Little Dipper?” I asked, looking through the side window.
“No. The Pleiades. It’s a star cluster. People often make that mistake.”
But I didn’t want to talk to Harvey about stars. I wanted to ask him, Have you ever kissed someone who didn’t contain 99.9 percent of your DNA?
I would have paid Harvey half my bank account to see how far our elastic would go before snapping. I thought about laying my hand in his crotch to gauge his response but we were ascending, the flickering lights of the farms below fading, and no guardrails to protect us from a three-hundred-foot rollover.
We looked at the stars with the other club members through an eight-inch refractor telescope with GoTo capability and then he drove me home without a hug or a handshake. That was the only date I had during high school.
I am not a true geek. I go out with men who are addicted to sport scores on their cell phones. I lift weights at a gym. Darwin studied giant tortoises on the Galapagos. I observe the mating rituals of the blessed and beautiful. A man and woman ride side by side on elliptical trainers in front of a television hanging from the ceiling. Both sport dark unseasonable tans, bodies toned enough to be commercialized, in fact, are commercialized, their before and after membership photos pinned to a corkboard by the entrance. Their skins breathe through space-age polymers, the man in shorts, the woman in Spandex. Brand new Nikes cushion their steps. Oakley sunglasses protect the man’s eyes from harsh pulsating fluorescent lights. A cell phone wraps around his left bicep leading to two concealed ear buds. A tattoo on the nape of his neck depicts a green dragon, its spine covered with pointy scales. The woman sports a swallowtail butterfly tattoo sunning in the small of her back.
I pedal on the elliptical beside them. They talk about Love Island. Curious, I ask them questions about the show. The more I talk the more I feel they are coding me as geek. Worst of all, the woman who wears her Spandex so tight her pudenda protrudes when she does deep knee bends, doesn’t see me as a threat. My geekness trumps my femininity.
I admit I have issues. The data recovery company where I work provides a support group, founded after a former employee who went berserk one Saturday morning at the Houston office. For four hours he held hostages with a bomb taped to his chest. CNN covered it all the way to his surrender—on his knees, hands raised, hobbling out following a remote control robot into sunlight. The bomb turned out to be a dud: eight volt battery, a couple of pounds of Playdough and four flares, wrapped in soldered wire.
I lay awake at night worrying about what I’ve seen. Unlike the brain, The Cloud forgets nothing. Scratch your initials in wet cement or on the trunk of a tree and years later they remain, same as data in The Cloud. A School Superintendent glimpses once at Forbidden Teens, The Cloud captures his curiosity. A truck driver learns to flay human flesh: a mailman watches S&M. A fifty-nine-year-old grandmother copies a guide for cunnilingus. A youth director makes ninety-one VOP calls to a dominatrix. The mayor of a nearby town applies to be a Wiccan priest. Once done, it’s there.
My company provides counseling. Ken, our group leader, is a master’s level social worker. Six foot seven, he struggles to relax in the padded metal chair. He wears a mustache-goatee combination. Underweight, his pants cinched tightly, hands and feet bulge out of his long sleeves. Oddly, they are about the same size. One of the programmers told me Ken had his fifteen minutes of fame a few years ago on Oprah. He flies around the country meeting with Fortune 500 companies.
Not knowing what to expect, we’re all nervous. The programmers and the recovery specialists are housed on different floors. The programmers work on a lower floor meaning we have priority. But neither of us has windows, reserved for management.
I’m the only female in the group. Ken asks, “Does this make you uncomfortable?” Is it supposed to make me uncomfortable? Before we started, Ken had assured us nothing we said could be used against us by the Company.
“No. It doesn’t,” I say. “I’ve gotten used to it.”
“So there was a period of adjustment.”
“Yes.”
“Can you talk about that?”
If I ever write a manual about surviving a mandated self-help group, the cardinal rule would be, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT. And secondly, never make eye contact with the therapist. That’s why everyone else bores into the ground, inspecting the whorls on their fingertips, the laces of their shoes. Ken’s got to justify his pay. Like a seasoned big game hunter, he’s detected a scent and now tracks his prey—me.
When the company first hired me, I had to submit to the typical office pranks. Someone stuck my toolkit in the ceiling. The nut on my work chair got stripped, forcing me to sit at an angle where my butt kept sliding. Fake doggie poo showed up on my desk wrapped in cellophane with a Union Jack sticking out the top. The jokes were silly, adolescent and sadly non-sexual. I had watched North Country. I understood how demeaning sexual harassment could be. In that movie the miners were threatened by many things but most of all that Charlize Theron was a woman. Still, in my array of practical jokes, I wish a sex toy could be one of them.
Ken bridges his fingers, stretches his legs, crossing his ankles. A wad of pink chewing gum sticks to the underside of his Docksider. I wonder what he would do if I licked it off. He’d probably fantasize about me for years. He rolls his wedding ring around his finger. His creased, oily jeans are a poor attempt to express his commonality, to deny that his salary is 6 to 10 times anyone’s in the group. I’m sure when he meets with Corporate he’s spit and polish, herringbone suit, trimmed nails and nose hairs. I wonder if Ken is lights on or lights off in the bedroom.
“You seem tense,” he says.
“It’s the job. The secrets.”
Others stir. I would like to tell Ken about my next door neighbor. On her hard drive recovery was a copycat video of the Meiwes cannibalism. It involved a nineteen-year-old who replied to an Internet query and asked to be eaten. Meiwes, who happened to be a card-carrying man-eater, eagerly obliged, videotaping the whole gory enterprise. How did a retired schoolteacher obtain a video not released to the public? Maybe her grandkids hid it there, and if they did, wouldn’t she want to know? Should I violate company policy and confront her about it? It had nothing to do with her crashed Hitachi drive. Someone was seriously bent, but what if it was she?
The Company forbids us to talk about such things. We are sworn to confidentiality.
“How about it fellas?” I ask. No one speaks, glum as apples, waiting to fall. Maybe it doesn’t disturb them. Maybe they are automatons, seeing the jpg, bitmap images, and JPEG videos for what they are, encoded binary strings of zeros and ones, stops and starts, immune to the forbidden desires and choices and fantasies that destroy lives and families. We look at the face of the shadow and like all composites it contains something familiar, which we easily can confuse as normality. And this confusion terrifies us.
How do I explain to Ken that when I hear the President, or Oprah, the Pope or the cashier at Wal-Mart, the first thing I think is, what’s on their hard drive?
“What about the secrets?” Ken asks.
“We aren’t allowed to discuss them,” Dennis cuts in. God bless you Dennis. He leans in on his elbows. His bald spot round and gleaming. He has seven children, one for every two years of marriage. Sartorially challenged with color blindness, he dons the same outfit: bleached white shirts, black slacks, navy blue socks and red block ties. Neither a smoker or drinker, married to one wife, he is a traditionalist, and admired for his pragmatism.
“How does such secrecy make you feel?” Ken asks.
“I know,” says Griffin. His eyes bug out behind coke bottle lenses. “Like a voyeur.”
Others nod in agreement. The group bubbles with relief. I was wrong. These men aren’t automatons, they’re just overwhelmed by what they’ve seen.
”I miss Mr. Johnson,” I say. “Mr. Johnson was my mailman. He looked like Mr. Rogers. Always smiling. Sometimes he’d bring me a sugary cowtail. He was married. I know Mr. Johnson went home every night to his wife. Whatever they did, they did in the dark and they didn’t post pictures online. They didn’t abuse animals or children. If they had sex it was good and honest and if one or both of them came, that was a bonus for they were content just to be held.”
I don’t know why I’m crying but I decline Ken’s offer of a tissue.
“You miss your childhood,” Ken says.
“I miss believing in the goodness of people.”
“Even if it’s a myth.”
“If it gives me hope, yes,” I say. “What good is the truth if all it causes is pain?”
“You can’t base your life on fantasy,” says Dennis.
“Why not,” I reply. “We don’t have to know everything.”
Now I understand the fundamental difference between Dennis and me. When Morpheus offered Keanu Reeves the pills, I would have taken the one that returns me to the Matrix, Dennis, the other.
“Which one of us do you agree with?” asks Dennis.
Ken rolls up his sleeves. He’s too experienced to take sides. “Anyone else?” he asks.
The session sputters to a close. Reality gradually sucks the energy from the room. Some things are just too personal. I don’t go back to the group. If the company fires me, so be it.
Two weeks later, Ken calls. He says, “I’ve never done this before but would you have dinner with me?” When he says I’ve never done this before, I wonder what he means? Dating a client, cheating on his wife, or is the wedding ring just for show like the way some movie stars wear plano lenses? He sends an Uber for me; I don’t drive in Marketown. The streets are damp, the trash never gets picked up and the sewers have become canals for flatulence.
The Iranian driver tells me he’s been in America for three months. Fearful of saying too much, his sentences trail off, losing their grip. I ask him to repeat himself. “Sorry. Very new at this. Map no good.” He pinches wide the digital map on his console. He’s missing the tips of both thumbs. I do not ask. We try to figure out the street address. We circle a block, then down an alley. When we come back around, Ken stands at the curb. His six foot plus frame appears daunting and so out of place, a flagpole planted in the middle of Lilliput. He smiles and waves. We are the only Uber in Marketown.
An odor of fried fish wafts from the restaurant. What few people are out, hurry about like in a war zone, hunched over, trying to appear small, not a target. The haphazard storefronts look like a neon maze as if the lights have mutated into a flashing cornucopia of despair. Paper lanterns hang between two telephone poles, bisecting the street, praying for a whiff of wind.
Ken busses me on the cheek and slips the driver a fifty-dollar bill, dismissing him in a foreign language that he tells me later is Farsi. Impressive. The driver laughs, glances at me and nods. I expect a thumbs up boys to boys sign but the Uber drives off, the exhaust unfurling.
Could Ken be a predator? He’s chosen a desolate, word of mouth kind of place where any private detective hired by a suspicious wife would have trouble hiding. A cerebral orange glow thrums from the restaurant, which turns out to be modern, open, and clean.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Starved.”
At dinner, he brags about himself: adjunct professor at Berkeley, a book in the works as well as a syndicated column in the Northeast. He drops the name of his top-notch Manhattan agent but I know nothing about agents and have to trust him on this. He asks me nothing about myself. I suspect he’s perused my file, gotten the info he needs. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it with a gold plated lighter, smoking despite the posted notice on the wall. Since we are the only couple, there’s no one around to complain. I realize this is a man who likes to brazenly defy rules and at that moment know not to trust him. He’s too assured, too graceful, not to have fooled around before. I vow not to sleep with him. I steel myself. I imagine his Cloud: women, bound and gagged, about to be tortured, trapped in dark underground cellars, their screams echoing off mildewed stone walls. I’ve seen his type: men who take pleasure not so much in providing pain but rather in the anticipation and preparation of administering it. His hand slides across the table and taps my knuckles. My hand recoils. He’s too self-absorbed to notice. “I’m staying at the Marriot, room 417.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” I say.
“Does that surprise you?”
“Nothing surprises me. Except this.”
Cold water leaps from my glass, cohesive, amoebic like the inside of a lava lamp, splattering across the bridge of his nose, saturating his shoulders and silk cravat, ice cubes cascading. “That’s a no, I take it,” he says, patting himself with a napkin with James Bond cool. If he were a general, he would take no prisoners. Ken’s an all or none kind of guy.
I hail a cab. I hear him explaining to the stooping manager picking up the ice cubes, “She misunderstood, that’s all.” Then on his cell phone lining up prospect number two. The night’s still young.
In the morning, when I awake all seems the same except this: a budding sexual confidence surrounds me and for once, uncovering another dishonesty, I feel no regret.
