woodenrocketpress

THE SUNDAY PAPER
by Richard Harris
Part 3

Read Part 1 or Part 2 of this story.

Julie and Henry played eight games in total that night. Each won four games. By the end of the eighth game, neither of them had the energy or the desire to play a tie-breaker. Instead, they talked on the site’s private chatboard.

That night Julie learned that Henry was nine years younger than her. He was a freelance set designer for movies and had never been to university. Henry assumed that the “77” in Julie’s screen name was the year of her birth, and she did nothing to dispel this misconstrued belief. Telling someone as young and carefree as Henry that she was a 40-something divorcée with two daughters was anathema to her.

For her part, Julie talked about books and movies she had recently seen. To her pleasant surprise, Henry proved more mature than the 30-year-olds she knew. When she went off about this or that character in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, for example, he read what she wrote patiently and offered comments that made her think.

She also opened up about her personal life. When Henry asked why she had majored in Russian Literature at university, she briefly considered telling him the same story she had been telling people for years (“I’ve always loved the Russians and couldn’t have imagined majoring in anything else!”). But there was comfort in the anonymity of the Internet. It was an intangible comfort, a kind of force field that allowed her to tell Henry <I actually majored in Russian Literature to infuriate my parents.> She had never spoken or written those words before, not even to her ex-husband. <My whole life,> Julie went on, <my parents tried to mold me into some manufactured, cookie-cutter-like human being. They demanded the highest grades. Anything but an A was met with the back of my father’s hand. By high school he made it clear there were only two paths open to me: law or medicine. Ideally, he wanted me to have graduated, married and had my first son by the time I was 30.>

The cursor blinked unapologetically on Julie’s screen. She was only now aware that she was breathing very loudly, almost panting. Before that night, if someone had asked if she had any baggage in her life, she would have laughed and responded, “I haven’t lived an interesting enough life to have any baggage!”  But this one man she had never met in person made her see that a huge weight was indeed resting atop her life and stunting her growth. It had taken her 43 years to acknowledge what very well could have been the most important truism in her life. All the decisions she had made up until then, from her major in university to the man she married to the names she had given her children (she refused to give them the names her parents had suggested), had in some way been a malignant protest against the wishes of her parents.

<seabreeze? u still there?>

It took a moment for Julie to realize she was still chatting with Henry.

<Yes. Sorry. Phone call came in. Sorry about that.>

<np…all good?>

<Oh, yes. Just hold on one moment, please.>

Julie suddenly felt poisoned by the invisible walls of cyberspace. She needed to extricate herself as fast as possible. She felt exposed in a way she could not describe, even to herself. It was not that she had revealed something embarrassing or shameful; it was the fact that someone sitting at a computer was interpreting her thoughts and she had no way to see him. It made her think of the time she saw all those prostitutes in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. They presented themselves in their shop windows while strangers passed by and judged them without ever getting to know them. Julie had felt guilty that day, like she was violating their humanity.  Now, thinking back on that day, she wishes she had stopped to talk to at least one of those women and introduced herself properly.

Something stirred inside Julie. She felt inspired to now introduce herself to Henry. She wanted to move one step closer to humanizing this sterile, aseptic relationship. With a perfectly straight back and both feet flat on the floor, Julie readied her fingers and prepared to type. But as she considered how best to introduce herself honestly to this person whom she had shared a revelation with, the power went out on Julie’s iBook. She had forgotten to charge it and now the battery was dead. By the time she got back on, Henry could very well be gone.

Julie stared at her mute reflection in the empty canvas of her laptop screen. A bevy of emotions passed through her. Should I plug in and try and get back on the Internet? Should I wait until tomorrow? Should I change my user name? The only thing that really crystallized for her was one eight-letter word that would score her an immense of points on a Scrabble board: empyreal.

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