The Monitor Read online

  25

  Damn. Now I had three men, all in blue suits, all with a more than tenuous connection to the handle Sanders. An Alexander could easily be Sanders; Chick Anderson might be nicknamed Colonel Sanders, and Winston might “live under the name of Sanders” with literary aplomb. This wasn’t getting me any closer to a decision on who Sanders was.

  I decided I would just have to initiate some sort of discussion about nicknames and handles at Babel one evening and see if Sanders volunteered any information. The trouble was, if I did that, I would set myself up for some revelations, too. I had been very careful up until now about veering away from any sort of discussion that got too personal or focused too much on background information. If I were to start one, it would look odd if I didn’t join in.

  Of course, none of this was really all that problematic. It was no skin off my nose if I never discovered who Sanders was. If I could just keep aware enough of Sanders not to blow my cover of anonymity, I could make things tick along just fine. After all, aside from the occasional gambler and Venita the teenaged harlot, there wasn’t all that much to worry about there.

  I logged into Babel at 6:00, so that I could chat a bit with Alchemist about the night before. He wanted to know how my big date had gone, and I told him a little bit of it.

  He let me know that Tremor had been in, looking for Milan again early in the evening, and that Milan had been in shortly after but didn’t seem to be all that concerned with Tremor. He had PMed everyone about Thea, though, including several to Alvin. Alchemist was wondering whether this obsession was healthy. Maybe they’d had a fight and he was cyber-stalking Thea, or planning to. Alchemist had tracked back through the logs. She hadn’t been in for almost a month.

  I wasn’t all that worried about Milan or Thea. I had been watching relationships begin, rev up, and disintegrate on-line at the speed of light. As Alchemist had once said, a week in cyber-time was like half a year in real time. It made me feel vaguely like someone was designing some cosmic Alpo commercial around me, and the old joke of “in dog years, I’d be dead” echoed in the back of my mind, but I could sort of understand what he meant. Folks without the opportunity to hold hands or neck passionately, or even just wander through IKEA on a Saturday afternoon, tended to get a lot more into personal and emotional background quicker. I would bet I knew more about the inner workings of several people I would never meet in my lifetime than I did about most of the folks I went to grad school with. There was just something about the cyber-medium that pulled old dreams, neuroses, and memories onto the screen.

  So Milan couldn’t find his lady fair. Maybe real life had interfered with her on-line time. Life had a habit of doing that. I was betting we’d find out she’d had a rush order at work, or maybe she’d had to single-handedly manage the flea market at her church and just hadn’t had time to check her e-mail for the last few weeks.

  Hah, who was I kidding? I checked my e-mail every five minutes, to the chagrin of my service provider, who kept sending me little messages about setting my auto-check to half-hour intervals at the most frequent. So, if I —who wasn’t intimately involved with someone on-line—was that connected, how could I imagine Thea wasn’t?

  Because Thea did not want to be heard from. Simple as that. There were all sorts of reasons a woman might want to keep away from a man. I decided to keep a ­closer eye on Milan than I’d at first planned.

  Alchemist was going grocery shopping at an all-night grocery store. He was sure that this was the way to meet a dream date. I told him to hover in the organic vegetables where the more sincere people would be. He LOLed and signed off, leaving me in charge of Babel for my shift.

  26

  Kafir and Ghandhi were teasing Lea and Maia about the fact that they knew nothing about golf, from what I could gather on first entering the main chat area. Milan had left several more PMs for Alvin, asking about Thea, and Vixen had also left Alvin a note, telling him about Milan. Vixen saw herself as a friend of Alvin’s and would often imply that there was a closer relationship than she was willing to talk about when she discussed him on the open screen. I wasn’t sure what Alchemist or possibly Chatgod had ever fed her under the Alvin guise, but I was always very businesslike when replying as Alvin. Still, if she wanted to pretend she had a relationship with Alvin, it only helped our mythification. I would PM her back later in my shift. I didn’t want to have to parry a PM conversation with Vixen at the same time as having to watch over everything else. There was something happening in the room, I could feel a tension, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. I decided to make a tour of private rooms, to see if there was something murky making my spidey senses tingle, or if it was just a general edge to the tone folks were taking with each other. That could happen. It was as if every once in a while everyone woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided that, rather than punch a ­pillow or bite something, they would log in and spread the joy. If it was going to be that sort of an evening, I might as well pull out the ibuprofen now.

  There were only three private rooms going. Vixen was in one of them with Bean, a relatively new fellow who liked to post lines of self-indulgent poetry. I had been watching him for a few days, not sure if he was being deliberately obscure to hide a rather libidinous nature, or if he really was as obtuse and dreamy as he seemed at first glance. It looked like Vixen was wondering the same thing. She was dangling a very flirtatious line, as she often did, hoping to add him to her harem, I supposed. As far as cyber-sex went, this was nothing more than petting, so I left them to it and clicked onto another virtual room where I could be a virtual fly on a virtual wall.

  Jackal and Virago and Eros were telling some off-color jokes. I popped in as Alvin, thanking them for taking the vulgarity out of the main room without having to be asked. Mainly, I just wanted them to know I was around and watching. I didn’t trust Jackal, but we could only toss him after he had posted porn. If he knew I was hovering, maybe he would behave himself while on my shift. I moved on before I had to read the punchline of what gynecologists drank at weddings.

  Tremor and Milan were in the third room. This was where the tension was coming from. I could feel it the minute I clicked into the room.

  Milan: Have you heard from Thea? I haven’t heard a word from her. Even without a computer at home, I should have heard from her.

  Tremor: Well, I wouldn’t call her if I were you. Now is the time to be careful.

  Milan: There are libraries, though. Cyber-cafés. If she wanted to, she could get hold of me.

  Tremor: Then think about it. Maybe she doesn’t want to get hold of you. That doesn’t matter. What matters is the check, and it’s time to settle up.

  Milan: But until I hear from Thea, how can I be sure?

  Tremor: Read the paper. Check your facts. And then remember your side of the contract.

  Milan: But.

  Tremor: No buts. I know where you live. I obviously know where she lives. That’s all you need to think about.

  Tremor left the building, and I quickly made a screen capture of the room before Milan could pop an erase on it. Even erased, it would be stored somewhere in Chatgod’s backlogs, but I thought this might warrant a dated screen capture just in case.

  What the heck were they on about? What had Milan and Thea hired Tremor to do? What was he asking to be paid for? Why indeed wasn’t Thea on-line? Milan seemed to be implying that one of their computers wasn’t functioning, and surely he meant hers, since he’d been on-line every day, but with the level of on-line canoodling they’d been up to, I would have thought they’d have exchanged phone numbers by now. Perhaps not, though. If Thea’s husband had a call-monitoring device on the phone line, they’d be crazy to let him see a large number of calls coming from the same number.

  Thea’s husband. Now, there was a wild card in the hand. Something gnawed at me when I tried to put the thoughts of Thea’s disappearance, Thea’s lousy marriage, and the Thea-and-Milan cyber-romance together with the conversation I’d just read between Milan a
nd Tremor. Where was Thea, anyway?

  I moved back through the main room where Gerri and Carlin were riffing on book and movie titles to maintain a conversation. It looked like Sanders, who had just strolled in, was getting involved, too. Maia was always ready for a word game, and was bouncing about, laughing and thwacking folks. There was no tension here.

  I went back through the private rooms. Interestingly, Sanders was in there before me, and they were no longer telling racy jokes. I couldn’t catch the gist of all of it, but I didn’t like what I did see. This was the night for screen captures, I guess. I would send a copy to Alchemist and see what he made of this:

  Virago: I dunno, man, what if you got caught?

  Eros: Then you’re dead, man. Simple.

  Sanders: The trick is to not get caught. But you have to realize there is always someone after you, even when you are getting a bead on your target, you are in someone else’s sights.

  Virago: Is this sort of thing allowed?

  Sanders: Are you kidding? It’s an assassination.

  Eros: I wouldn’t think so, man. That’s why you have to find out where people live, instead of doing it out in the open. But you’d have to have a witness, right?

  Sanders: Indubitably. Without it, how would you get credited with the kill?

  They could have been talking about video games, but I was spooked enough to attribute all sorts of other meanings to that conversation. I was still focused on finding out what had happened to Thea. I would start by finding out where she lived.

  I pulled down the menu list and clicked on to member details. While nothing more than a handle appeared in the chat room itself, all users had to register initially, giving their names and e-mail address. Captured at that time was the IP address they were logging in from. Sometimes that address shifted, and whenever a person logged in, the IP address showed in a box Alchemist and I had lit in the upper right corner of our monitor screens. Chatgod tried, in his opening salvo, to impress on people the need for disclosure in registration. The more information folks were willing to release, the feeling went, the likelier they were to behave themselves on-line. The registration form asked for real name, e-mail address, age, telephone number for emergency contact, and there was an optional area for snail mail addresses, since at one point I think Chatgod had been thinking of creating a magazine subscription list.

  Thea’s registration had her listed as Thea Banyon, with a phone number area code of 512. She hadn’t filled in the snail mail address, but her e-mail address was [email protected]. Trouble was, anyone could get a Houyhnhnm address. I would have to dig a bit deeper to find out where she was from. She didn’t have a web site connected to her registration, either.

  On a whim, I popped Milan’s name into the search box. He was listed as [email protected]. I was assuming that this placed him in Wisconsin, as I couldn’t imagine someone from anywhere else being proud to be a cheesehead. He did have a web site, and I clicked it to open in another browser window. I was hoping it wasn’t too graphic-happy. With all of Babel open in front of me, it wouldn’t take too much to crash me, and then we had to fill out reports detailing the amount of time Babel had remained unmonitored until we were up and running again.

  I breathed easier as Milan’s page opened. I couldn’t be too sure about it, but I was betting that this site was up completely for the benefit of Thea. There was a poem to Thea, a picture of Thea, a picture of Thea and him, a description of his love for her, and a couple of links to sites they liked. I noted with proprietory pride that Babel was the top of the list of links.

  So, if the pictures were anything to go by, Thea and Milan had met IRL. I wondered if they had mentioned it on Babel, or if it was a deep, dark secret. I would have to nose about a bit. Surely someone would recall their arrival, or perhaps what the movie writers would call their “meet cute.” I clicked my way back into the Babel-­protected files to see who some of the oldest netizens were. My money was on Vixen and Leah, and I was half right. Vixen was the woman to engage in gossip for sure. If she had hung Bean out to dry by now, maybe we could dish a little dirt and I could find out the answers to a few burning questions.

  It occurred to me that I was going to have to get a bit more easy with my own privacy if I was to receive any of the confidences I might need. So be it. As long as Sanders was an okay fellow, I guess it wouldn’t matter too much that he eventually discovered that we shared a city. On the other hand, with all that talk of assassinations, I still wasn’t sure how close I wanted to get to Sanders.

  27

  There was something gnawing at me, something unpleasant, but I couldn’t quite make it come into focus. I thought that, if I could find out where Thea lived, the picture would somehow be more clear. Lucky for me, Tremor had left and Milan was nowhere to be found. The boisterous boys were back out of the private room and joining in the main room fun and games. Several folks were playing a modified version of hangman, and I caught Vixen in a slow moment.

  She was an interesting character and I couldn’t quite get a handle on her. I knew she was married and that she flirted quite heavily on-line, but I didn’t sense any marital woes in her background. Maybe the Internet would be to the bored housewives of today what Valium had been for the women of the 1960s. Much of Vixen’s daily joy came from minding everyone’s business in Babel. I was hoping she had been watching the romance of Thea and Milan with interest.

  PM from Chimera to Vixen: Hi there! Have you been getting loads of PMs from Milan lately?

  PM from Vixen to Chimera: Hi doll. *LOL* Have I ever. And I thought our dog looked bereft when we left him in the kennel last summer vacation!

  PM from Chimera to Vixen: So you think Thea is just on a vacation? Or has she dumped Milan?

  PM from Vixen to Chimera: Well, I saw her in here just before she left. She PMed me and told me she might be gone for a little while. I just thought she and hubby were going off on a cruise or something.

  PM from Chimera to Vixen: Is that what she told you? I’ve never been on a cruise.

  PM from Vixen to Chimera: Me either. *sigh* I wish old FD would get his act in gear and take a hint.

  It took me a minute to recall that FoxyDog was how Vixen referred to her husband, a fellow who never appeared on-line, although Vixen was a little worried sometimes that he might sneak on in disguise to spy on her. Alchemist had promised to keep an eye on IP addresses for her, and, unless hubby was logging in from work and routing it through Patagonia, he had never done so.

  PM from Chimera to Vixen: But Thea’s on a cruise? Have you told Milan that?

  PM from Vixen to Chimera: Well, I’m not sure she is. I just figured, given the time of year, you know. And I think her husband is older. *shrug*

  PM from Chimera to Vixen: Did she meet Milan here? Or did they come here together?

  PM from Vixen to Chimera: I think they must have met somewhere else, y’know. But they pretended to meet here. Thea arrived shortly after school started last fall. I remember because my kid’s teacher’s name is Thea, and I thought it might be her at first. That would have been one for the books, doncha know? *grin* All I know is that Thea was looking for something she wasn’t getting at home, and Milan had been divorced, what, maybe two months? It was bound to happen. At first I thought she was desperate, then I figured they knew each other because she pretty well pounced on him the moment he walked through the virtual door. *LOL*

  I figure that Vixen might have tried the same move herself, but that was being catty. With some folks, flirting was as natural and as necessary as breathing, and Vixen was one of those people.

  I wondered if Thea’s husband had ever seen Milan’s web site. If he had put his wife’s name into a search engine, mightn’t it have taken him right to her picture and the shrine Milan had created?

  Unless Thea wasn’t actually her name, of course. Holy epiphany, Batman.

  PM from Vixen to Chimera: You still there?

  PM from Chimera to Vixen: Sorry, a bit of lag on this end.
So, where is Thea from, anyhow? Are she and Milan in the same town?

  PM from Vixen to Chimera: No, he’s racking up the frequent flyer points, from what I hear. I think he’s in Milwaukee or somewhere near the Great Lakes, and Thea’s from somewhere in Texas. Haven’t you ever heard her go on about it? What the heck is it about Texans, anyhow? Did you ever hear the joke about the cowboy funeral? The minister asks the congregation to stand and offer their memories of the dead man. No one moves a muscle. Finally, from out of the back, a long lanky drink of water stands up and hitches his thumbs in his belt loops and drawls, “Well, if there ain’t no one who has anything to say about the dearly departed, would y’all mind if I said a few words about Texas?” *roflmao*

  PM from Chimera to Vixen: *rotfl*

  Texas. Thea was from Texas. I continued to kibbitz with Vixen about various couples who had met and left each other in Babel, and I came to see that she really did envision the place as her own virtual soap opera. Well, I guess we all create what we need. For me it was a lunchroom filled with interesting people and occasionally a lively cocktail party. The banter and discussions were what drew me. For Vixen, who loved the intrigue and the flirting, it was The Days of our General Restless Children, a living, breathing soap opera. I wished her a good evening and took my public leave of the room, switching back into complete monitor mode. The gnawing feeling grew stronger.

  On impulse, I slipped into my clogs and crossed the hall to the laundry room. I had brought my newspapers for recycling just yesterday and I knew there wouldn’t be a collection for at least three or four days. Yes. There were my papers. I walked back across the hall, bringing them back into the apartment. As soon as I had the door shut, I dumped them on the coffee table and sat on the edge of the sofa, pawing through the pile. Finally I found what I was looking for: the Austin American-Statesman. I flipped through until I found what I recalled reading before.