Chapter 5
Opening the front door of his home, Peter was suddenly assaulted by a strange blaring voice and shouts of laughter. The cacophony grew louder and more vexing as he neared the computer lab.
Charging into the room he found Ivy sitting cross-legged on the floor and holding a joint to her lips. Her enraptured smile wavered when she registered Peter's expression.
Two other young people, both boys, were also in the room, both seemingly oblivious to Peter's arrival. One of the boys held a microphone with a thin cable that ran into a small black box, which was in turn attached to a Joey. The computer and a color monitor rested on a table in the center of the room, which was littered with beer cans, bottles, and junk food packages. On the monitor was a bright yellow smiley face, and as the boy spoke into the microphone the smiley face became animated and responded.
"Say cheese," the boy said.
"Say cheese," the smiley face replied, but with an unreal robotic tone rather than a natural human-sounding tone. Simultaneously, the words "Say cheese" appeared in a little balloon, like in a cartoon strip, beside the smiley face's mouth. Nicknamed "Myna Bird," the program, which Ivy had designed, was a crude demonstration of speech recognition and synthesis, which enabled the Joey to hear and speak plain English words. The microphone fed the sounds directly into the converter box and through the Joey, which interpreted them into actual text and spoken words, based on a library of words it had already learned.
"Goo goo," the boy said.
The smiley face did not reply.
"I said, `goo goo,'" the boy said again, breaking into gales of laughter.
"I said," the smiley face said, unfamiliar with the rest of the sentence.
"I said `goo' fucking `goo'!" the boy shouted.
"I said…fucking," the smiley face said.
The boy chuckled a trippy chuckle and glanced at the others - and saw that none were laughing. He turned around and saw Peter. Busted.
"What the fuck is going on?" Peter said loudly.
"What the fuck is going on?" the smiley face mimicked, deadpan, minus the fury.
The others guiltily bowed their heads, mindful of Peter's palpable anger - all except for Ivy who, turning to avoid looking at Peter directly, rubbed her nose to stifle a small giggle. In her attempt to contain her mirth, the situation worsened and her cheeks puffed and she burst out laughing.
Peter approached her with his hands on his hips.
"What's so fucking funny?"
The boy holding the microphone quickly switched it off, before the smiley face could say anymore.
"You are," Ivy said, bringing her knuckles to her face, sputtering out more giggles. "You are, love."
The boys chuckled nervously, like maybe this wasn't so bad after all.
At the sound of the sharp slap, all laughter ceased.
Peter stood there, eyes blazing at her, his hand still raised in the air.
With a vacant expression, Ivy absently brushed her cheek and tried to focus her vision on him.
"Get out," he said, turning to the others.
Ivy remained seated on the floor, stroking her face while the boys disconnected the equipment from the Joey and gathered their knapsacks.
"You can keep the beer, man," one of the boys said as he shouldered his pack. Then the pair was gone.
Alice padded softly into the room and began picking up the scattered litter. She stepped on an empty potato chip bag, which crackled noisily underfoot. Peter could see that it was an International Foods brand, one of Matthew's onetime goodies. Too bad he hadn't stayed in fucking soda pop. Any temporary remorse Peter felt for his behavior, for slapping Ivy, vanished, and his rage returned with greater force.
"Leave it, Alice. Ivy will clean up."
The housekeeper hesitated then returned the empty bottles to the table, her face flushed as she soundlessly exited the room.
Peter turned and faced Ivy from where he now stood, across the room.
"I'm sorry," she said, still sitting on the floor and now rocking back and forth with her arms wrapped around herself. "We were working on my program, and I wanted to surprise you tonight with a new dialect module I put together - "
"You have to go."
" - and I wanted to demonstrate it when you walked in, so you would be happy."
"I said leave."
Tears were dropping from her chin and she remained seated on the floor in a trance-like state. His eyes settled on the Joey's silent glowing screen, the smiley face staring at him with its stupid knowing grin. His jaw quaked as he fought back his hurt, his longing to run to her and have her hold him, to apologize and tell her about everything that had happened. He was torn.
No, not her.
Regardless of what had happened last night, he needed Kate. Not this girl, who, he reminded himself, like everyone else, was using him.
"Get out!" he shouted.
"But I love you!"
"No!" He turned and raised his hands to his head to subdue the pounding that was growing angrier the longer he stayed in this polluted room. "You used me. You even stole my clothes."
"I'm in love with you. Peter, please. I almost died when I heard you were coming to speak at the commencement. I had to sneak into the reception, just so I could see you. And then when I met you and you invited me here, I knew it was because you felt it too, the way we connected when we saw each other." She came from behind him and attempted to take him in her arms.
"Don't touch me," he said, shaking her off. He crossed the room and positioned himself on the other side, a chaise lounge between them.
She stayed where she was, hands at her sides and face all red and puffy. "Peter, I need you. I've changed my life because of you."
He looked in her direction, but his eyes were unseeing. "If you don't get out of here right now with everything that's yours, I'll carry you outside myself and throw you down the hill." His face was unmoving and placid, almost like the smiley face.
She took a step toward him, her hands twisting together, pleading. "But last night. Peter. What about last night?"
He closed his eyes and clamped his jaw. Nothing.
"Fuck you, then," she spat. But she made no motion to leave. Instead, she crossed her arms over her breasts and stood there. A sound that was both a laugh and a cry burst from her lips. "Don't you see? I did this for you, because I care about Joey, and you. Why don't you want to believe that. That's why I changed my studies, because I knew this was something important." She smacked the monitor. "You know you care about it." She pointed at him accusingly. "You said so yesterday, when I showed you how far I'd come." She made a disgusted face. She fought to hold back her tears. "But you don't give a damn. Not about anyone but yourself."
He did not respond. As she collected her things, his attention remained fixed on the computer's screen. He heard her climb the stairs and enter the guest room. There were sounds of drawers opening, the closet door sliding on its tracks. A few minutes later she came downstairs. He did not look at her.
She crossed the room and ejected a floppy diskette from the Joey, and picked up a box of floppies sitting on the table. She placed the items in her knapsack, hoisted the bag onto her shoulder, and collected her small duffel bag at the doorway. Straightening herself for a moment with her back to him, she spoke. "You're gonna regret you did this, Peter." Then she was gone.
He sat down and glared at the smiley face. It returned his gaze, passive, obedient, waiting for input. Just like everyone else, he thought morosely, it wanted something from him.
At his side he felt the neck of a bottle protruding from between the sofa cushions. He lifted it. A nearly empty bottle of wine. Red wine.
And then it hit him. The bottle was the special Cabernet Sauvignon Kate had given him on their first date, which they had vowed to drink together when Wallaby turned ten years old.
"No!" he cried, and hurled the empty bottle at the evil smiley face with its leering, shit-eating grin.
The monitor exploded in sparks and smoke, the smiley face gone forever, and the room fell into silence and he was all alone.
* * *
"Greta?" Matthew called, stepping from room to room on the lower floor of the house. He climbed the stairs. Soft, pleasant music drifted out from the bedroom. He closed in on the bathroom, and found his wife in the tub. She raised her face from some sort of picture book or atlas propped on a silver bath tray table.
He lowered himself to the closed toilet seat. "It's over," he said.
"Thank God," Greta said. She closed her eyes and stretched her right arm out of the tub. Bubbles and soapy water dripped from her perfect hand onto the floor. "Darling, would you pass me the oil please?"
He handed her a bottle of spiced bath oil. She held it there, out of the tub, until she caught his eye. She led his vision to the bottle's cap and he uncapped it and held it while she squeezed the red liquid into the water. It spurted from the bottle and he was suddenly mesmerized by the mixture as it bled into the water. He studied his wife with sullen fascination as she lay there with her eyes closed, gently oscillating her shoulders and legs, mixing up the oil and water. With her eyes still closed, she held out the bottle to him again. Accepting it, his hand touched hers for an instant. He shivered, and felt a sudden need to urinate. He could not remember the last time he had seen her other hand naked, which was presently hidden somewhere under the water in the tub. Nor could he remember the last time they had made love, though he was pretty certain it was the evening before International Foods had thrown the yacht party for him to celebrate the success of Orange Fresh. Thinking of these things, he was momentarily hypnotized by the sight of her there in the tub, moving in the frothy pink water. His mind roared with the horrific image of her as she had appeared when the accident had occurred. Underwater. Stillness. Then her eyes bulging as her head splashed up out of the sea's redness. The screaming. The flailing. The blood. Splashing -
She was flicking bath water at him. "Matthew, are you here? I said I'm happy for you. Did everything work out okay?"
"Yes. Yes," he said, blinking. A few droplets had landed on his trousers. He brushed them away and said, "He's gone. It's over. They all chose me over Peter."
"There," she said, "you see. I told you everything would work out just fine."
He thought about how she saw things. A few months ago, when he had felt doubt, she had helped him regain his focus and set the stage for today's meeting. Her persistent belief in him had finally won out, and ultimately he had believed in himself enough to begin the painstaking maneuvers necessary to topple Jones after he'd balked at Matthew's suggestion to make the Joey more compatible with ICP's computers. That, he understood now, was when it must have happened, when he had begun to live in his wife's presence without really noticing her anymore, focusing wholly on his work. The first stage of detachment had been after the accident. The second was after he had gotten his plan underway. He had finally and completely shut her out, without ever really meaning to. In both cases he had told himself that it was temporary, that things would eventually return to the way they had been. But now he understood that those times would never return. They couldn't, for it seemed all was lost on that day of the accident. He thought of the object - that was precisely how he thought of it, an object of his lost affection - which he kept hidden in the inside pocket of his briefcase. Lost. What was he going to do? How would he end up? How would they end up? He knew what she was thinking, what her own hopes were. That now that Peter Jones was out of the way, he'd spend more time with her.
Turning his wedding band round and round on his finger in his lap, hidden from her sight, he spoke. "This is just the beginning, honey," he said, cautious. "Now, slowly and carefully, I have to reveal my plan for engineering our products to connect with ICP's systems to the board and executive staff so that they believe I'm doing it to increase sales and market share." He watched her expression.
Sponging her neck, she said, "Well darling, now that that pest is out of your way, I'm sure you'll have no problem." There was an edge of warning in her delivery.
"Yes," he paused. "But there are many people in the company who still carry Peter's belief that ICP is bad and that Wallaby should concentrate on competing more firmly rather than yield to them."
"Darling, you've come this far, and you'll make it to the glorious end of your plan just fine. I just know it. Have you contacted William yet?"
"I sent him a message," Matthew said. He realized that he needed to check to see if William had received the memo and replied to it. His concern asserted itself. "William's not going to be pleased. He wanted me to exhaust every possibility to keep Peter onboard. But after seeing the way he reacted I doubt he'll stick around." Matthew stood. He had to use the toilet…but rather than use this one he wanted to use the one downstairs. "I better go check my e-mail," he said, excusing himself.
He hurried downstairs to his library office. He turned on his computer and hung his jacket over the chair. His Joey was outfitted with every add-on option, including a color monitor, a CD-ROM drive, a laser printer, and a mouse. Seeing the mouse lying there, he abruptly remembered Laurence and the thoughts he'd had of her yesterday in his car; he recalled too the image of her lovely hand clutching the manila folder less than an hour ago in his office. While the computer started up, he went into the library's small toilet. He stood before the toilet and opened his fly. At the same time he closed his eyes, concentrating. There came no flow. Instead, he felt himself hardening in his own hand. He locked the door, dropped his trousers to the floor, and seated himself. At the age of ten, Matthew Locke had had the good fortune of discovering masturbation. It had altered the course of his life forever. For whenever he became distracted from his studies, thinking about girls instead of geometry, he had simply relieved himself. It was to this dedication that he owed his success. It had enabled him to focus all of his energies on important things. He had achieved autonomous coupling - a boy and his hand. Even in college he favored this method. Of course there had been girls, but none of them ever proved worth the time or effort. Though this was the price he paid in order to come so far so fast, he had never seemed to fully grasp its relevance until the day he'd met Greta. The instant he'd laid eyes on her, her hands, he determined it was time to think about marrying. It was important to his career, and if he was going to do it, then why not with a woman who's hands were more alluring than his own?
Were.
But hers were not the hands he thought of now, holding him, stroking him. No, the hand he imagined in place of his own belonged to another woman, a girl, really, who he told himself he must resist.
He came, and she went.
* * *
It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and Peter was in bed.
He lay there staring at the ceiling. Time didn't matter anymore. Every now and then he took a gulp of Scotch from the bottle he had opened after Ivy left. Normally he never drank hard liquor. But today it seemed like the most natural thing to do. He needed something to help him escape from his own mind, something that would inevitably force him into sleep, where he could hide, even if just for a couple of hours, from his dilemma. It was too soon to try and think things through. Through? How, he wondered, does one think through being through? With every swallow from the bottle the reality of it all slipped a little farther away.
What he wanted to know was, what would they do for the future? His instinctive reaction to anything that threatened Wallaby - in this case, his being flung from the company - provoked fear and anxiety for its future, beyond the potential misery of his personal fate.
He had given nearly ten years of his life to Wallaby. The time when it all began seemed like a lifetime ago.
He drifted.
Never socializing with the jocks, pot-heads, or any other group, Peter Jones was considered an oddball student. He had been an orphan most of his life, living in a Los Gatos home governed by an elderly couple. He was used to spending time alone, reading or going for walks in the nearby woods, imagining he was Henry David Thoreau, observing nature, lost in his own thoughts. Whenever he was forced to spend a few trial days with potential foster parents, he affected a sullen and despondent mood, saving a tantrum or explosive outburst for the last day of the test period. He had gotten by just fine on his own, and he didn't need anyone, or anything, except maybe his science fiction novels.
Clayton and Clara Dodson, the owners of the orphanage, had had their hands full with Peter. Eventually they stopped sending him off to potential homes. The youngster pretty much took care of himself and was always willing to help out around the orphanage. One day the Dodsons's acceptance of Peter went from resigned to delighted when he burst into the house and told them he had invented the world's first truly portable computer. Peter had recently begun to hang around with the "gear heads," students who were involved in clubs fostering fans of rockets, automobile engines, and electronics. At the club meetings he met several kids like himself - bright, introverted; some of them would eventually become his first employees at Wallaby, right out of high school. During his senior year, while checking out some of the other student projects an hour before the science fair, Peter met two gawky fellows who had built a device they called the All-In-One Computer. The invention was primitive at best, but all the right parts were there: keyboard, screen, disk drive. Captivated, and without a project of his own, Peter persuaded the boys to include him in their project which, five minutes before the show began, he renamed the Portable Personal Computer.
The project won first prize, and after the show an older gentleman named Mr. Towers introduced himself. He told the boys that they were on to something and that they should give him a call sometime if they advanced the design of the box. Peter shoved the man's business card in his pocket.
Peter became more and more intrigued with the concept of a computer you could take with you wherever you went. Theirs came close, but it required a wall socket to power it so the only place you could really take it was from room to room. During the summer after his high school graduation he reread all of his science fiction books featuring robots and computers as their main characters. In his mind's eye he fashioned a small computer that could be his friend, like the ones in the books. He imagined taking his computer with him for walks in the woods, telling the computer about the things he saw, and what he thought. His computer would keep these things in its memory, and the more it learned about him and the world, the more loyal and dependable a friend it would become. He would make a lot of them, inexpensively, so that everyone could afford one and use it for whatever they wanted. He envisioned the computer and how it would work, how people would approach it and work with it. When he felt he had realized the computer as clearly as if he already owned one, he sat down to start designing. But when he picked up his pen, he could do little more than sketch crude boxes with screens and keyboards. He realized that he didn't know how to design the circuits and parts necessary to actually fabricate the machine. He called the two boys from the science fair, Paul Trueblood and Rick Boardman, and invited them over to the orphanage one afternoon. When he described his idea, the boys grew excited. Pushing his eyeglasses up on his nose, Paul began rambling about how he could do the hardware part, maybe even squeeze in a modem for calling up other computers, and Rick described how he could write a integrated program for the computer so that it could do real work for people, like keep track of important names and addresses, right out of the box.
Three months later the three boys stood in front of their first prototype, the Mate, and ran their first program, an all-in-one organizer and word processor and communications program that they dubbed Easy Does It.
When the Mates development was well underway, Peter contacted Mr. Towers, the man he had met a few months before at the science fair. Towers invited him to his nearby office. Two hours later, Towers had become the primary investor in the Mate's development, and overseer of the startup of a new company.
Within a year the boys were building as many computers as they could in Peter's garage. Towers remained in the background, working deals with parts suppliers through his electronic instrument company to provide the boys with what they needed for production. Eventually they had so many orders that they had to relocate to real offices in nearby Sunnyvale. Peter moved out of the orphanage and created a minimal living space for himself in one of the building's corner offices. Together, Hank Towers and Peter, then twenty-two, founded their new company, which Peter named Wallaby, which everyone knew was an animal that had a pocket in which it carried its joey…the little friend that Peter had always dreamed of having, and knew someday he would create.
He snapped awake to a high-pitched warble. The telephone. Reaching for it, he knocked over the bottle of Scotch, spilling its contents onto the hardwood floor.
"Hello?" The voice on the other end was anxious.
"Yeah," Peter said, pressing his fingers to his eyelids.
"Peter? Are you all right? Petey?"
"Kate." This came out as a moan.
She spoke very fast. "What's happened? I caught the tail end of something about Wallaby on the CNN, something about a reorganization, and called your office, Peter, and they said they had not seen you. Peggy put me on hold and called the boardroom and they told her you had bolted and that something happened but she wouldn't tell me what. What the hell is going on?"
"It's over," he slurred.
"What's over?"
"Me. Wallaby. Everything."
"Petey, talk to me. Are you there? Petey?"
"I've been fired. From my own company."
"I can hardly hear you. I don't understand. What do you mean fired?"
"Fired," he shouted, and immediately regretted it. The sting in his head and heart diverged, spread. As if on cue, the secret thing in his heart asserted itself again. With its arrival, an abstraction formed in his drunken mind. He thought of the word "mate." It represented the start of his life. Because of the Mate, he had met Kate. She was his soul mate, and with her he had experienced his coming of age. And wasn't she, in some ways, the inspiration behind the Joey? Wasn't their nomadic relationship what had inspired him to design a computer you could take with you when you went away? Now it had been taken from him. How long, he wondered, before Kate was gone too? The more aware he was of this feeling, of losing the things close to his heart, the more aware he became of his newest mate, the disagreeable feeling that had burrowed inside him. At this moment it was troubled, like a tiny caged creature suffering from hunger spasms, nourishment lying within its line of sight, in its owner's hand, beyond its reach, so close, yet so far away.
Kate shouted his name into the phone, breaking him out of his stupor. "Tell me what happened."
"Matthew's in control. They want me to sit in an office. Be a thinker." He became outraged by his own account. "A fucking thinker."
"Then you're not fired, right, Peter. Then you're not fired?"
"Good as. Nothin' left for me to do there."
"Baby, I'm in LA at the studio. I'm leaving right now. I'll be there as fast as I can. No more than a couple hours."
"Okay," he said softly.
"I love you."
"You too." Chest pains. He hung up the phone and picked up the bottle.
"It was the Scotch," he said to the empty room, then uttered a painful chuckle that bordered on hysteria and threatened to overtake him if he didn't get a grip. He busied himself looking for the bottle's cap, but saw that he wouldn't need it. The bottle was empty.
And so was he.
Wallaby. Kate. These things came to a man only once in his lifetime. Had become his lifetime. Once you've lost them, he reckoned as he began to drift off to sleep, you never again get, or deserve, anything as good.
Teetering on the edge of consciousness, he struggled to remember the lyrics of an old song he used to listen to, something about you can't always get what you want, but if you cry sometimes, you get what you need.
Not quite, but close enough.
And so he cried.