Crossed Wires: Prologue

Traffic shishes past on a darkening street, early in an autumn evening; the streets are slick with wet brown leaves; overhead, a thin scimitar of a crescent moon is just poking through the clouds, barely illuminating the tumbled-blocks structures of an apartment complex in the suburbs of a large city. Telephone lines shiver and gleam in the wet; death is perched there at first, then effortlessly soars aloft for a moment, stoops, and comes to rest, silently, on the landing outside the door of one apartment.

Through the curtains in the window of this apartment seeps a pale yellow light, echoing the moonlight above, and on the other side of the window, at a desk in a corner of her bedroom, sits a young woman. If we could peek inside this young woman’s mind, we might observe that she is both young enough and old enough to be both always confident with men and always surprised by them; that she has in fact loved many men, with just this mixture of pleasure and confusion, been head-over-heels with a few, even; but that she has never loved any of them in quite the way that she loves what she sees on the glowing green screen of the computer parked here on her desk.

Across the surface of this screen, two, three, or more times a day, dances an ensemble of words written by people whom she has never met and never will meet (none of them, that is, except for one: very briefly, and very soon), people who, like her, sit as though hypnotized before an unblinking glowing rectangle, a green or white or multi-colored eye, their thousand fingers clicking across their keyboards like the chattering of teeth. Meanwhile, spouses and lovers go ignored, children and pets unfed, jobs uncompleted — all put on hold, for now, all for the sake of faraway, invisible friends.

Invisible, yes, but neither nameless nor without substance. Some of her friends’ names are real (a John, a Liz, a Sharon, and others) and a handful are patently fictitious (Butterfly, AntMan, and so on). One friend makes a joke out of everything; one friend is always ill-tempered and discourteous unless you need advice; one friend seems always caught helplessly in some life-tangle or another, and can suffocate you with his dependence if you let him. Minnesota, New Mexico, Georgia, Japan, Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, California, England, New York, Virginia, France, Saudi Arabia: yes, they reside in all these places and many more. But they sense one another only through their machines, as if only there do they truly live, inhaling and exhaling — taking life in and expelling it — through a little box attached to each machine, a little box from which snakes a wire umbilicus to the telephone network.

You might say it is love that the little box and the wire deliver: the young woman loves all these friends as revealed in their words that whisper across her screen. She loves their playfulness, their occasional spite, all the shifting emotional chiaroscuro of their tangled webs of relationships and electrons. Sitting there in the twilight in her room, the only sound the whir of the computer’s fan, the click of its keys, a rare beep, she can sense the love running out and the love running back in, endlessly, in a silent electronic tide.

She sits there reading their words and smiling, or sometimes with her brow furrowed in perplexity or her eyes flashing with the intensity of her feeling. Once, she laughs out loud, covering the sound of a faint click from the other room. She presses a button on the keyboard and the screen flashes clear, then re-fills with new words, and the flashing on the screen obscures from her the reflection of a shadowy form in the doorway behind her. She chuckles again, and then types out a few more words; she sips from a can of diet soda, sighs, and presses a final, very special key. She places the can back on the desktop.

Then there is a thump, and a soft, slow scraping sound, and the bubbling away of her life onto the carpet is obscured by the faintest of noises coming from the little box attached to her machine: a buzz and a series of seven beeps followed, as always, by a click and a brief, high-pitched cartoon scream. And her final message goes flying out over the wire, that more-than-eloquent message which will flash across the screens and into the hearts of all her dear, distant friends when next they check:

Good night, everybody!!!