Men Seeking Women Read online

  “I really can’t answer these questions. It’s office policy, you know. But good luck to you.”

  Warren returned to the office. He felt like he’d been caught shoplifting. There was no mistaking this situation. Heather had hired State-Licensed to track down Jake. How had she gotten as far as she had? Warren then remembered calling Heather from the department, the one time he’d slipped up. The PI had obviously managed to track down Heather’s incoming calls.

  Warren couldn’t just let her alone. He couldn’t have her wandering around the English department asking questions. Sure, it would make Rick look bad, but if the situation were to continue, who knew what State-Licensed might find out. He had to take action.

  “Something wrong?” Edgardo asked him.

  Warren had been leaning against the wall and panting. “Call security,” he said. “I think Rick’s stalker is in the hall.”

  Security on the South Florida State campus mainly concerned itself with chasing off local thieves, ensuring that no one violated the parking code, and protecting sorority girls who’d been drinking from fraternity boys who’d been drinking. The interrogation, Warren realized pretty quickly, was not going to look like a scene from Law & Order. Two meat-headed security guys escorted the PI, whose named was Jane Heart, into the departmental conference room. As department chair, Tucker figured he should be present, and they called in Rick, who had been in the middle of office hours. His door had been closed and locked, and Warren thought it took him a while for him and his pretty little student to emerge, but Rick had been okay to Warren. “Good work. You thought quick on your feet.” And, for reasons Warren could not quite understand, no one seemed to object to Warren sitting in the conference room while they haphazardly tossed questions at Jane Heart.

  “Am I under arrest?” Jane asked no one in particular when Rick, Tucker, and Warren walked into the room. “Or do I just have to serve detention?”

  “Don’t be cute,” Rick said, wanting to play the tough-guy cop. Maybe this was some kind of fantasy for him.

  “Can’t help it,” she said. “Neither can you, I see. Which is why I don’t get why you want to go around breaking hearts on the World Wide Web. What gives, prof?”

  Jane had volunteered her state license already, and it was lying on the conference table. Rick picked it up and stared at it. “I’m going to guess that you’re not the stalker, but you want to tell me who hired you?”

  “You know I can’t do that. Besides, you probably have a pretty good guess, unless you make a habit of this sort of thing. And the way I hear it, you haven’t exactly been stalked. You have a relationship with someone and then just drop out, and the person looks for you—I don’t see it as stalking. My client, first and foremost, wanted to make sure you hadn’t been killed, which she thought might be the case. She thought you’d been in a car accident or drowned in some posh Hollywood swimming pool or something. She didn’t even want to listen when I introduced the asshole hypothesis.”

  “Your client is out of her mind,” Rick said. “She’s been sending me threatening notes and packages for months. And to the best of my knowledge I’ve never laid eyes on her or spoken with her.” He picked up the print of his pic. “I don’t have the first idea of how she got this picture. Whatever she’s told you is a fantasy and a lie.”

  “To be honest, I think you’re the one who’s into fantasies and lies, prof. You haven’t exactly been on the level with her. You lied about where you live and what you do. That’s not exactly honest Internet dating, now is it?”

  Rick blushed. He had never told anyone that his stalker had emerged from an Internet dating ad. “Look, I never said anything that wasn’t true to her. We exchanged a few e-mails, and then she flipped. If she’s telling you anything else, she’s a liar. And what the hell is she doing in Missouri, anyhow? She told me she lived around here, and I’d be willing to bet that her name is not really Tina.”

  Jane Heart quietly licked her lips. Warren could see her assessing the situation. Maybe her client was crazy. This Rick guy seemed like a pretty stand-up citizen with a real job, no wife, and no obvious need for Internet shenanigans. Suppose her client had sent her on a wild goose chase? Well, Rick imagined Jane Heart deciding, she’d get paid no matter who turned out to be crazy. Case closed. No point in dragging this out.

  “Okay,” Jane said after a minute. “We clearly have some crossed wires going on here. I don’t think my client is stalking you, but who knows? Anything is possible, and I’ve done my job, so how about we just call this whole thing quits and I hightail it off campus? Sound good?”

  Rick looked confused. “Just tell her to leave me alone, okay? I don’t care who she is or what her beef is. I just want her to leave me alone. That’s it.”

  “I’ll certainly tell her,” Jane said. She picked up the picture of him and handed it back. “You hold on to this. I don’t need it anymore.”

  One week later, Heather showed up in the English office. Warren had been playing Minesweeper on the computer when he saw her walk through the door, and thought for a moment to hide, but he then realized she didn’t know him. She had no way of knowing what he looked like. Besides, Rick had just walked through the door only minutes before. The timing could not have been better.

  Heather appeared to him even more attractive in person. She was slim, with breasts larger than her picture suggested and great-looking lips that were pressed together in grim determination. Her hair had grown out since the pictures had been taken, and she wore it up in a bun, which gave her a kind of sexy, matronly quality.

  Warren unconsciously looked over to Tucker’s office. The door was open and inside Rick chatted casually with the chair. Heather looked around, as if to ask someone where she might find Rick, but then spotted him herself.

  “I see you, you bastard!” she shouted.

  Edgardo, who had not yet noticed Heather, now turned and stared.

  Rick and Tucker both looked out of the office. “Get out here, Jake,” she said. “Or Rick or whatever your name really is.”

  Rick stood up. He and Tucker whispered a few words. The chair tried to hold him back, but Rick shook his head.

  “Based on your completely inappropriate behavior, I think I can guess who you are,” Rick said as he emerged. “Maybe you’ll tell me what you want.”

  “What do I want? What do you think I want?” Heather now started to cry. “I want an explanation.”

  “An explanation for what?” He turned to Warren. “Call security.” He then looked back at Heather. “You’re going to be escorted out of here in a few minutes. I intend to have you detained until the police can deal with you. Stalking is a crime, and I just don’t want to have to deal with this anymore. I guarantee you that once security gets here, I will never exchange another word with you again, so if you have something to say, I think you had better say it now.”

  Heather continued to cry. “I don’t know why I came here,” she said. “I don’t know what I expected, but I can’t believe you would treat me like this. Why did you tell me you loved me? Why did you say that if you were only going to disappear? And why did you tell all those lies about yourself?”

  Rick shrugged. He held himself straight, smiled a little, displayed a curious confidence. “We can’t have a conversation if you are going to spout fantasy. All we did was exchange a few e-mails. I never told you I loved you. I never lied to you about anything.”

  “What about our phone conversations, Jake?”

  “My name’s not Jake. You know, I think you have me confused with someone else—someone who lives in the land of make-believe. But soon the magic choo-choo will come to take you to a happy place.”

  “You are such a bastard,” she screamed. “You think you can stand there and pretend that I’m crazy? You think you can have me arrested? For what? For wanting to talk to you? Is it a crime to find out why you tortured me?”

  Warren looked at Heather with admiration. She gave a very strong performance. If he had known nothing a
bout the situation, he surely would have believed her impassioned crying over Rick’s cool indifference.

  Maybe at first Rick had been a little scared. He feared she might have a gun or a knife or a hand grenade strapped to her, but now he began to sense her weakness, and he began to have a little fun. Here was this woman who had been making his life miserable for months. Maybe he thought she had it coming. “Nobody tortured you but yourself. You’re pathetic. Look at you. You’re a nice-looking woman. You could meet someone and have a normal life. But you go off into la-la land and make up some crazy drama that has nothing to do with anything. Before I met you, I admit you made me pretty uneasy, but now I just think you’re sad. Let’s see if you get a thrill stalking someone who laughs at you.”

  Just then two different meat-headed security guards came through the door.

  “This is the woman who has been threatening me,” Rick announced. “Please escort her to the security office and then call the police. I’ll meet you there in a couple of minutes. I want to get the file of letters she sent to me.”

  “You think those letters will convict me of anything?” Heather asked. “Only if trusting a liar is a crime.”

  The security guards led her out the door. Warren watched her go, and then settled back into his chair, relieved. Soon it would be all over. No one had linked him to Heather and no one ever would.

  Rick stood around for a minute after she had gone. Maybe he had begun to regret taunting her. It might have been satisfying at the time, but he now found himself left with the burden of having psychologically dismembered a fragile woman in public. Tucker and Edgardo and a pair of graduate students who had wandered in all half-stared at him. Rick looked away and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him.

  “It really makes you wonder,” Edgardo whispered to Warren. “I mean, how do we really know that Rick isn’t the one who’s crazy?”

  Warren just grunted. He had already started playing Minesweeper again.

  DANTE VISITS INFERNO MEDIA’S ONLINE TECHNICAL-SUPPORT FORUM

  Richard Dooling

  The Dark Wood of Error Messages

  Midway on my life’s journey, I went astray while watching a Macromedia Flash video of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model named Beatrice Portinari. When it was over, I wanted more, so I meta-searched, looking for stills and videos of her not wearing a swimsuit, and I finally found some on Inferno Media’s Celebrity Skin website, where a hyperlink under the video player caught my eye. It said, “!!!Click Here for Real-Time Hot Chat with Beatrice!!!”

  Right. Beatrice Portinari was probably slinking around a dance club in Cozumel with her Italian actor boyfriend, not holed up in a Silicon Alley cube farm instant-messaging with solitary cyber perverts. But I was devil-may-care, so I clicked on it anyway, and instead of caring, the devil just hosed my entire system; everything locked up—keyboard, browser, e-mail client, word processor—even the Task Manager was unreachable.

  A freeze-frame of Beatrice lingered on the screen, missing a few swaths of pixels. I still had a mouse, so I clicked HELP on the menu bar and promptly got lost in a dark forest of indexed hypertext. I wandered aimlessly in the opaque, infernal syntax of the Help Underworld, where every question was answered except mine. My spirit grew heavy and I almost gave up.

  Finally, the keyboard came back to life, and I used it to summon the Natural Language Answer Wizard: “This is Hell on earth! Eternal meaningless instructions leading nowhere! How do I get out of this program?”

  The screen blinked and the computer had the technical equivalent of petit mal or a transient ischemic attack—flashing random commands and alerts on the screen. Then the monitor clicked, and faded to black. A split second later, it hummed like an oracle and displayed the blue screen of death strewn with white text, where terrifying hieroglyphics and cuneiform error messages spelled out the codes of doom and system fatality. My blood froze and so did my machine.

  I pressed F1 on the keyboard, and a presence appeared in a small window at the lower right of my screen and hovered there in the discolored air. It was a dancing paper clip, an animated cartoon, who winked at me, made faces, and spoke to me in dialogue bubbles: “How can I help you?” “I-am-your-slave”-type stuff. I was put off by its medieval eagerness to serve me at any cost.

  The paper clip did one more ta-da! and tendered more urgent, pointless offers of assistance. If the Israelites had been an ancient race of technology addicts with information sickness, they probably would have worshiped icons like this officious, hyperactive paper clip. And Moses would have banned the thing as a false idol when he came back down from Mount Server carrying the Ten Frequently Asked Questions and the Technical Support Manual.

  “Whether you are shade or living man,” I cried, “have pity on me!”

  The paper clip wagged its tail and formed itself into antic shapes trying to draw attention to itself: “My name is Virgil,” said the bubble text.

  I summoned the Media Player, and Virgil the Talking Paper Clip spoke to me in streaming audio: “I’ve been sent by a Higher Power to be your guide. Please select a communication style from the drop-down menu of your grammar checker.”

  Virgil proffered a variety of style selections: casual, standard, formal, technical, or custom, with a sample of each. I clicked on “casual” and Virgil previewed my selection by reading some sample text in casual style: “I was thirty-something; I went for a walk in meatspace and got lost in a real forest. I couldn’t find my ass with both hands and a pack of bloodhounds, and then a tech-support geek named Virgil showed up saying the Help Desk had sent him.”

  I chose “standard” and let Virgil take over.

  Several Flash add-ins and dynamic Web pages loaded, after which I heard audio clips of damned souls wailing in sixty different languages. My guide explained to me that these were souls in Limbo or Purgatory on hold and waiting for technical support. The Help Desk jockey’s name was Charon, and he advised that my hold time would be more than twenty minutes, but to please stay in the online queue and my call would be answered in the order received, and that meanwhile I should select the webcam option if I wanted to visit with other lost souls on hold, or sample some of Inferno Media Software’s new Total Touch multimedia environments.

  The cookies in my browser must have clued them in, because first up on the screen were some 3-D digital clips of Beatrice modeling on location in Maui for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Beach Babe City. Then I was forwarded to the First Circle Support Forum, where I went interactive with a technical-support geek named Minos, who told me to click and drag my user errors from the dialogue box and drop them on his cartoon avatar. Then he used his tail to assign me a trouble-ticket number and a slot in the Second Circle Support Forum for cybersex addicts who use their machines for carnal purposes.

  Sinners of the Flesh

  I joined the Sinners of the Flesh in the Second Circle Hot Chat Forum, where the carnal and the lusty betray reason to insatiable, earthbound appetites. A pop-up menu displayed a list of sinners available for private conferencing: (1) wanton Cleopatra; (2) faithless Dido; (3) lusty Francesca.

  I moved my cursor over the lush Beyond True Color digital photo of Francesca in a Lycra G-string and a see-through satin slip, holding a hair dryer in her lap, just so. A .wav file opened, and a breathy woman’s voice said, “I’m Francesca. I said no to eternal happiness in heaven, because I could not resist the smoldering cravings of my hungry loins. Now I’m all alone down here. Please come visit me.”

  I clicked hell for leather all over Francesca’s icon, but another rotating banner ad kept getting in the way. Then Virgil the talking paper clip came back and told me to type my request in natural language and a virtual expert would answer it.

  I typed: “I want hot chat with Francesca, or else just get me out of here and back to my desktop.”

  Before Virgil could answer, my time in the help queue ended and a soothing young woman’s voice said: “Welcome to Inferno Media Technical Support
. My name is Beatrice, and I can help you.”

  Unbelievable audio. Inferno Media was showing off its pride-of-the-industry 3-D Surround Palpable audio for NetHeadPhones. Stunning aural texture effects. I had Koss Quiet Zone 2000 Personal Sound System headphones with antinoise technology rigged to the latest nose-bleeding Soundblaster card, and I could feel the woman’s voice, like she was sitting right next to me, or maybe she was cuddled in my lap in a red velvet sound booth.

  “C’mon,” I said into my headset mic, “you’re not Beatrice Portinari?”

  “We’re not allowed to give out our last names,” she said, “but my first name is Beatrice. I promise,” and she threw in a throaty giggle. “Inferno Media’s servers examine your cookies and search your user profile to see if you have any favorite celebrities selected, then we route you to an appropriately named tech-support person. In your case, a Beatrice. We’re spread all over the country, the world actually, so we have four or five Beatrices at least, and they’ll probably hire more soon because we service a lot of Beatrice Portinari fans like you. What seems to be the problem?”

  I just wanted her to keep talking so I could revel in the high-end vocal audio.

  “I was on one of your sites,” I said, “and . . .”

  “Your help options are set to auto enable,” she said, “so I am retrieving our product ID number from your system registry using Inferno Media’s live-update software.”

  Banner ads appeared in all four corners of the screen for Inferno Media products and Underworld accessories. The word Orpheus flashed in one of the ads, and I’d recently bought the Black Orpheus soundtrack online, so I had the usual curiosity about whether I’d found the best price.

  Then the banner ad rotated and said “!!!Click Here!!!—If you want to hear Orpheus, the most famous musician in all of antiquity, give the performance of his life to free his wife, Eurydice, from the lascivious grasp of Bill Gates.”