Adam glanced over the sad and empty expanse of his monitor and laughed to himself. Twenty-four inches by twelve inches of pathetic nothingness. His entire social life, his entire real romantic life, could be contained in one small chat window in a lonely fraction of that abyss.
Griffey575: I wish.
He typed the response, then held down the backspace key to erase the truth before he could send it.
Griffey575: Work stuff.
He decided that was better. Adam wondered if it counted as a lie if the untruth was as boring as reality.
lonelyTraveler1: what kinda stuff? for a class you’re teaching? are you writing anything? anything you can share?
Adam saw how lies could spawn more lies, each offspring bigger than its parent. The truth was, he’d been neglecting his work and his writing. Possibly, in no small part, because of Amanda’s constant badgering to read more. She was—if not his online girlfriend—at least his anti-muse, the woman whose insistence quenched all motivation. Adam had known this of himself since he was an undergrad: he couldn’t think when being told to.
lonelyTraveler1: you still haven’t answered my other question…
Which one? Adam thought.
Griffey575: Which one?
He hit enter before he could regret asking. He knew which question. He didn’t want to know, but he did. His stomach lurched with the audaciousness of her suggestion. And what did that say about him? How could he have a fake relationship with the real, and a real one with the fake? Which relationship was more real? Which was sicker? And who was the victim? Was anyone really being betrayed?
lonelyTraveler1: don’t you think it’s time we meet up?
There it was again. It was crazy.
Griffey575: In person?
lonelyTraveler1: how else?
Adam watched the cursor blink where he was expected to respond. The glowing bee radiated stored sunlight in his peripheral. In the utter darkness around him, he sensed the piles of clutter everywhere. He kept meaning to get to it. He kept the lights off in his apartment, kept the blinds drawn, so he couldn’t see the reminders of his laziness. The bee dimly betrayed him with its steady glow.
Griffey575: This way seems nice.
After the barest of pauses, he added a smiley face:
Griffey575: :)
It wasn’t sarcasm. It wasn’t real humor. It was an apology, something to soften the blow of what he knew to be the wrong answer. Adam had replied incorrectly; Amanda’s silence confirmed it. An icon came up to let him know she was typing something. It disappeared for a moment, reappeared, then disappeared again. He was watching her think. He wondered what things had been erased, if it was anger or disappointment she was refraining from sending.
Griffey575: I think I’m just not ready.
He wondered if that sounded better. It at least filled the silence.
lonelyTraveler1: I’m gonna find out you’re married, aren’t I?
Griffey575: I’m not married.
Such lies were not in him. Such a life, perhaps, was not in him.
lonelyTraveler1: but there’s someone else.
Griffey575: There’s no person else.
Clumsy. The sentence sounded stilted, but it kept his response, strictly speaking, from being an outright lie.
lonelyTraveler1: I won’t push you. just think about it. or at least write me something, write me something about why you’d want to or not want to.
A pause.
lonelyTraveler1: I feel like we’re living in 2 separate worlds lately.
Adam laughed nervously. His fingers left the keyboard and moved to rub his sore temples. For a brief moment, just an insane instant, he considered telling Amanda the truth. He pictured typing all the craziness of his life out in one uninterrupted, suicidal message. He imagined her sitting there, staring at the icon that let her know he was typing for hours and hours while he crafted a biopic admission of how scary and surreal and demented his life had become…
He deleted the thought.
Griffey575: I do have a piece I haven’t shared.
His mind was suddenly in a spilling mood—as long as it was spilling other things. It sought release of some cryptic truth. There were thousands of haiku that Adam kept to himself. They lived in his head, swirling beneath the layered façades, keeping him company. The impulse to let one out became great. He figured he could trade it for the impossible thing Amanda was asking, this meeting each other in person. Perhaps a bartered poem could delay the inevitable.
lonelyTraveler1: oh. PLEASE!!
Griffey575: Just one, then I really need to get some sleep. I have an early class.
lonelyTraveler1: is this a new one? when did you write it?
When did he write it? He couldn’t exactly remember. All his life, Adam had wanted to be a writer. The problem was: he was too good at reading. He had too many of Shakespeare’s sonnets memorized. Too much Blake and Shelley and Proust. All that good stuff was crammed up in his brainstem, pooled in his pons, dripping down his spine, now a part of his very fiber. Trying to sneak a sham of his own writing past such a gang of real McCoys was impossible. Adam’s great gift—knowing the good from the bad—was also his failing. The only words of his own that he could sneak through his literature-stuffed brain were his little haiku, unassuming and light on their feet. They were like neutrinos streaming out from the dense center of a star, cruising across the cosmos invisible and unknowable.
Griffey575: About a year ago I think.
He hit enter, let the words come to him from memory.
Griffey575: Here it goes; then I need to get away from this screen:
Adam logged off, but the chat window remained open. It held another uncomfortable conversation he could scroll through and regret. He read over the poem and realized that at that very moment, Amanda was reading it as well. They were both seeing it for the first time. It was as if some part of him had been excised. Released. Set free and exposed.
He wondered how much of him she would see in the poem. Could it be read in any way other than the obvious? Full of regrets? A loser continuing to lose?
Not for the first time, he tried to imagine what Amanda looked like. Not that it mattered, but the human brain seemed to need to know. Eyes were used to engaging with other eyes while voices crossed. They were too accustomed to scanning faces for revealing twitches, the curl of lips, the flare of nostrils. Speaking in nothing but font was unnatural and stifling.
Adam gave the webcam above the psychedelic bee a nervous glance. It wasn’t plugged in, never had been; it came with the monitor. Still, it felt like people could see him sometimes, see the real him stripped of his avatars. Not Amanda, not his mother or sister or anyone he knew—he felt like millions of strangers could see him in his dark and filthy room, like they spent hours watching him, like they knew him better than he knew himself.