The Monitor Page 6

  I was digging into the hot sourdough bread as Denise tried to defend her position on stiletto heels.

  “It’s all about costume, I think. There is a time and a place for this dress-up gear. And if I can’t wear sequins and three-inch heels to a gala, then when will I ever get the chance? Besides, I factor in the concept that it’s for a good cause. The only way to get money for the writer-in-­residency program is to make it appear glamorous to hordes of rich alumni. So, glamorous we go. I don’t think anyone ever said that feminism meant not being allowed to feel beautiful. I think the idea is to really examine our concepts of beauty, and live by our decisions. And, having examined them up the yin yang, I am getting dolled up on Thursday.”

  I grinned. I had nothing against the concept of looking like the belle of the ball, either, although Denise had a far better shot at pulling that sort of thing off than I ever would. Besides, she was going to be emceeing the gala. As Emma Goldman had once said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Not that anyone could dance long in those shoes.

  We were halfway through our meals when Denise got around to asking me about Steve. I told her we had seen each other recently, which seemed to make her happy. She then asked about my job.

  “So, how’s your cyber-peeping job going?” Maybe it was the glow of having found her dream shoes, or the mellowing effect of the food, but she seemed less condemnatory than before. I decided to risk it and gave her a more detailed rundown than I had planned.

  “So the concept is to be just a sort of guardian angel for the tribe, is that it?” She rolled a long noodle around her fork with the concentration of a Buddha.

  “Pretty much,” I allowed.

  “Well, if you like the people and the atmosphere, and you don’t have to dress up and go out in the cold to get to work, it sort of sounds like money for jam to me.” She shrugged. “You don’t even have to create a lesson plan or mark anything, and you still get paid. That makes me suspicious. But that’s just me.”

  Trust Denise to hit on the raw nerve every time.

  “Believe me, I think that as well. And I think my guard is always up. I talked to my bank manager, though, and there is nothing they can do with my account number except deposit money into it, which they are doing with efficient regularity, so honestly I can’t see where the snare might be. I really quite like the fellow I work with. Oh, did I tell you, there is a fellow from Edmonton in the room these days? I haven’t told him where I’m from, might be too, too awkward, you know.”

  “Ewwww, no kidding. I still cannot honestly see what the attraction is, Randy. Granted there is the language aspect of things, I can understand that part; but it ­doesn’t strike me that there are a whole lot of rocket scientists out there in chat rooms of an evening.”

  I laughed. “Actually, there are likely more rocket scientists than people interested in discussing the works of Trollope.”

  “No, I would figure the trollops on the ’Net were spelled slightly differently,” Denise intoned, batting her eyelashes and laughing.

  “Well, that’s true enough, but at least they can all afford computers and are somewhat literate.”

  “There is that. And speaking of literate, how is your Grant MacEwan distance teaching going?”

  We ended up over lattes, gossiping about the tenure-track folks at U of A, as per usual. Denise managed to guilt me into buying a ticket to the gala, which was to be held the next Thursday night. I was praying that Alchemist wouldn’t mind covering for me, although I was half-inclined just to write it off as a charitable deduction. Denise was urging me to be seen, however, just in case some more courses at the university turned up at the last minute.

  “It helps to be in their faces,” she said, “unless you want to marry one of them, that is, in which case you can be a sessional for life. Besides, there are a couple of nice new grad students whom you haven’t met. Women and men. You need to get out, after all. Oh, and Steve can get a ticket at the door, if he can come. Just a thought.” She smiled, catlike.

  Scratch a feminist, find a yenta.

  13

  There were two phone messages from Steve blinking for me when I got back from our girls’ day out, and several e-mails. I adore getting e-mail, and now there was one from Steve. Double happiness, as my friend Andrea Chong used to say. I chuckled, thinking that he was ­finally getting around his block of the new-fangled technology enough to send e-mail. It was a start. I opened the e-mail from Alchemist first, though; he’d never before sent me a high-priority note.

  TO: rcraig@uofalberta.ca

  FROM: alchemist@babel.com

  Hey Chimera,

  Have you seen Thea in the room recently? I have been getting several distraught sounding PMs from Milan, asking if I’ve seen her. Looks to me like he’s canvasing everyone. Just thought I’d check. Hope your day is good. See you later. *hugs*

  Al

  It sounded like Milan was getting frantic. I knew he’d been asking after her, and I hadn’t seen Thea in almost a week, but that sort of thing had not really troubled me. If anything, I guess I had just thought they’d had a tiff. People operate in divergent rhythms in any given chat site. Some folks stay loyal to one place and frequent it daily for a time, then move on. Others hit various places and only stay to chat if the spirit moves them. And there were always the “tourists,” who happened in and left, never to be seen again.

  I made a quick note on some scratch paper to keep an eye out for Thea, thinking I should transfer it to her cue card later, when I was on duty. That was one thing I had taken to heart from an article I’d read on telecommuting to the office place. The boss tends to consider you accessible and “on” at any time, given that he can e-mail you with requests and orders. You have to remain firm to your hourly workload to avoid being overloaded with duties during your downtime.

  I busied myself with clearing out the papers and bottles for the recycle pickup. I had more than usual this week, given my splurge at HUB Cigar earlier in the week. I’d read through the various papers I’d bought, and, besides coveting the production of Carmen at the San Francisco Opera, which sounded magnificent in the review, there was not much there that interested me. News was news everywhere. Or maybe it was just that it all seemed so pasteurized, given the few truly independent papers these days. I piled up the papers for the collection box in the laundry room and bagged the rest for the back curb. One of the neighbors saved newspapers for a local church fundraiser, and most of us added to his stock.

  When I came back in from taking the papers to the laundry room and the blue bag to the back alley curb where we all put our recyclables, I stood for a minute in my postage-stamp kitchen, trying to decide if I was hungry or not. I’d eaten with Denise, but that had been a good four hours before. I decided to forego an evening meal and just snack on a bagel during my shift if the need arose. That was another good thing about Internet work, you could get a lot done during lag time. I very rarely announced to a chat room that I’d BRB, or be right back. Most folks thought the acronym stood for bathroom break, and I didn’t think the world needed to know my every little biological rhythm. Besides, I had rarely ever been caught out with an “Are you still there?” query. Either my plumbing was very efficient, or their modems were slower than mine.

  I called Steve back on his pager, and he rang a few minutes later. His reason for calling was to invite me to a matinee movie on Sunday, which sounded fine to me. I flew the idea of Denise’s gala past him and, to my surprise, he sounded interested. It occurred to me that he might actually have liked and be missing some of the friends he had met through me. He promised to check his week’s assignments and get back to me. I made ­another note to ask Alchemist to cover for me on Thursday. I guess Cinderella was going to go to the ball, after all.

  14

  I logged into Babel about an hour early, partially to let Alchemist off early, thus softening him up for the Thursday appeal, and partially to find out what the ­skinny was on the se
arch for Thea. Sure enough, there were a couple of PMs from Milan addressed to Chimera as well, asking if I’d seen his lady. If he was asking me, he was likely swamping everyone.

  The place was hopping, which is sort of unusual for a weekend. A lot of people seemed to have only weekday access, or make other plans for weekends, but tonight there were names I hadn’t seen in a long time dotting the screen. I hauled out the list of To Watch For names as a precaution, though I was pretty sure I had them ­memorized.

  Alchemist seemed pretty jolly. He was in the open chat bantering with Lea, Carlin, and Jackal. Vixen was in fine form, hitting folks with the duster as the need arose. Maia came sauntering in, and Vixen gave her massive hugs. I gathered from a quick look at their PMs that Maia had been on a blind date and Vixen wanted all the details. The lull in Vixen’s duster attacks was all that Carlin seemed to have been waiting for. He began waltzing Lea around the room, and then began some sort of tango. Jackal was laughing it up with Teena and Ophelia. The atmosphere seemed pretty highly charged, sexually. The innuendo was flying, and it was just 7:00 p.m. by my watch.

  Alchemist agreed to cover for me again the next Thursday as long as I took his Monday afternoon shift, since he said he wanted to get out to a lecture. He left me to the rabble with a laugh and the offer of some virtual saltpeter.

  PM from Alchemist to Chimera: I think you’re going to need to hose this lot down a couple of times tonight. *grin*

  PM from Chimera to Alchemist: Sure looks that way. I’ll make the coffee extra strong. *LOL*

  PM from Alchemist to Chimera: You can do it. *poof*

  Oh boy. Vixen had started a game of Truth or Dare. Maia had demanded that Carlin detail the strangest place he’d ever made love. After relating a tale of an elevator stopped between floors, he then dared Vixen to print the last PM she’d received. Laughingly, she posted a rather innocuous flirtation, without the sender’s name attached.

  I found myself wondering who was cozying up to Vixen these days. With sheer idle curiosity, I flicked into her PMs, and discovered that the PM she had just posted to the room had come from Sanders. I was a little shocked, not at the posting, but at my reaction to the discovery. Could I be jealous of attentions in a cyber-chat room? It seemed preposterous. I rubbed the skin between my eyebrows to erase the furrow. Good thing I was a monitor and above all this, I told myself firmly. Yeah, right.

  I found myself hovering in the background instead of joining in. I told myself I was just being prudent, since, with the atmosphere the way it was tonight, anything could happen. Every now and then, I can almost fool myself. I shrugged mentally. It wasn’t as if I’d given Sanders any reason to hope for anything from me, anyhow. And it certainly wasn’t that I was jealous or ­interested in him myself. I think I was just annoyed with myself for assuming he was being exclusive in his charms when he was talking with me.

  Alchemist had been right. I was glad I’d put on regular coffee. About midnight, after Vixen and Carlin had both disappeared and Sanders hadn’t been in sight for a while, I noticed that Jackal and Gopher had gone into a private room. The thing that intrigued me about this was that they were both purported males.

  While private rooms can often be used for business meetings and areas to discuss computer games and play with HTML, usually folks tended to take those into other open areas of the chat. The truth was, private rooms were mostly used for sexual liaisons, no matter how people tried to whitewash the vision of the Internet. I didn’t necessarily agree with those who believed that the Internet was destroying families and ruining marriages and was inherently evil; however, I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that everyone was there just to visit and play word games.

  When folks went private, I usually respected their wishes, especially as cyber-sex wasn’t something I cared to read. However, when two men went private, in a room that was tolerant but not openly welcoming of homosexuality, I was curious. Who has a business meeting at midnight, after all? I checked the private list and found one that was just numerals: 482840. I decided to have a peek.

  I am so relieved I never had an urge to become a ­gynecologist. There is, to me, nothing really attractive about the urethra or vulva, not even their names. Gopher seemed to have a different esthetic sensibility, though. He was salivating over all the pictures Jackal was posting, especially the ones involving more than one woman.

  That is something else I have never understood about heterosexual men. So many of them have this absolute antipathy toward gay men, and yet the pornography they subscribe to often depicts two or more women wandering over each other’s bodies. Of course, when it comes right down to it, I’ve never understood the lure of pornography at all. One thing was certain. There were strict rules against porn in Babel, and it was part of my job to enforce them. I logged in as Alvin, cleared the room completely, and sent both Gopher and Jackal their warning. Folks get one warning, then they are blocked completely. Alchemist told me he sometimes didn’t bother with the warning, since he judged some people to be more difficult to deal with once they’d been caught out, and more likely to cause bigger trouble.

  This was my first situation, however, so I decided to run it by the books. I made a note of each of their IP addresses on cue cards, just in case they decided to pull the same stunt under a different handle. I also made a note that it wasn’t kiddie porn. We had a number to contact if any of that showed up. INTERPOL had a ’Net watch on those creeps and would trace an IP address to the ­perpetrators.

  Gopher ran. Jackal made a half-hearted attempt at an apologetic, man-to-man justification to Alvin, who ­merely posted back: “Read the rules. Get with the program and be welcome, or get out.”

  I sent a PM to Alchemist to let him know about the two names to watch, and what I had done. Tracy from Singapore had just logged in on the open screen, as had Ivories, a blues musician from la. Since I liked them both, I decided it was time Chimera made another appearance. We chatted about Korean food and dim sum for a pleasant while, making me ravenously hungry. I grabbed a handful of graham wafers with my next cup of coffee, which this time I made decaf. It was almost quitting time, and I wanted to be able to get to sleep. I was going to the movies tomorrow.

  15

  I have to admit there is nothing quite like a Jackie Chan movie. He has got to be the most charming man on celluloid since Cary Grant. This one involved some missing jewels, a beautiful woman who was deadly with her hands and feet, the ruination of a major restaurant, and plenty of great gags, too. Steve and I laughed our way through a large bag of popcorn and were still laughing as we wandered out to the car.

  “I’m the good guy, I should get the girl!”

  “Hard to see that happening in movies any more, isn’t it? It always seems as if the hero is incredibly flawed these days, or he’s seventeen. Maybe that’s why I like Jackie Chan movies; he still believes in the fairy-tale way of making movies.”

  “Isn’t it true, though, that women go after bad boys?” asked Steve. “I mean, look at all the women who correspond with murderers in prison. What about that writer who married the convict?”

  “Well, not everyone likes a bad boy. After all, look at us. You’re as good as they get.”

  “Well, you, my dear, have exquisite taste. There is no denying.”

  By this time we were back at my apartment, and Steve followed me in and hung his jacket up on my brass coat tree next to the door. I headed to the kitchen to put the kettle on the stove. When I came out of the kitchen with cups and the milk pitcher, I found Steve standing in front of my desk, surveying the set-up.

  “It looks like Command Central here,” he remarked. “Is all this for the monitoring job?”

  “Well, this stuff over here is my distance course. I have twenty-five students who are working relatively at their own speed through English 111, which is basically an essay-writing course. While I was bummed out by not getting courses at the university this year, I have to admit that doing this work for Grant MacEwan is very satisfying. I’ve b
een to two staff meetings so far, and I really like the atmosphere of the department. And teaching in your sweats is a bonus,” I grinned. “Actually, the chair has said I might get some real-time classes next term, which would be great.”

  Steve smiled at me. “I’m glad to hear it. I think you need to be in front of a class, Randy. I sure think the class benefits, at any rate.”

  I curtsied with mock flourish to make the moment pass, but I was touched by Steve’s endorsement of my teaching skills. He had seen me in action once or twice, so I knew it wasn’t mere sideline cheering. Truth was, I did miss standing up in front of the class, as much as I was enjoying e-mails with my distance students, ­especially Annette Standing Bull from up near Redearth, who wrote the most gloriously descriptive essays of her early life on the traplines with her father.

  Steve was now pointing to the other side of the desk, where I’d put up a new set of cork tiles along the window’s side for a bulletin board.

  “What about this stuff? Is this your Internet job?”

  I followed his glance. There were two or three lists of names. One was the To Watch For list Alchemist had given me. Another was the list of regulars on my shift, folks who were likely to be there five nights out of six; and the third was my list of folks I had to watch out for since I’d bumped or banned them.

  As well, I had Alchemist’s phone number on a pink card tacked to the corner, a couple of HTML lines of code to remember (I always forgot which way the numbers went to increase font size), and a funny cartoon of a woman in sweats at a computer ordering in pizza and ­coffee.

  “Yep, pretty much. It’s funny. This Internet job, which was intended just to augment the college stuff, is ­actually paying much more than the distance ed classes. It does mean I have to punch a clock more regularly, but I can’t really complain about that. Lots of people in the world have worse schedules. I can see matinée movies, keep my days free, and still get the occasional night off. Oh,” I broke off, “that reminds me. Did you really want to come to this writer-in-residence benefit that Denise has roped me into? I’ve got the night off, and she says there are bound to be tickets at the door. I want to go mainly to see her glitter, but it’s a good cause, and a night out.…”