“So when are you gonna slip her the
D?” asked Chad, the tallest in the group, wisps of tonguesmoke
following his violent words into the cool air of Tuesday morning in
the late fall.
“Sometimes, I think your brain would
fit inside the head of your dick,” came Don's retort. “Then you
say something, and I'm sure that it already does.”
“Oh, good one!” laughed Herm, short
and thin with curly hair. “But seriously, she's hot! Or did you
somehow not notice?”
“She's hot for you,”
Jesse, the burly blond, added, “and you'd have to to be blind and
deaf and a complete
idiot to somehow not notice. She wants
you to slip her the D.”
“Stop
talking like that,” Don said, “Or else she's probably gonna hear,
and that will make it a lot harder to get to know her.”
“Forget
that 'getting to know her' crap,” Chad insisted. “Just slip her
the D.”
“You
are all hopeless,” Don chuckled, shaking his head and walking away
– he had just spotted 'her' working her way toward the side door of
the school.
“Hey,
Ada!” Don shouted, now walking quickly to overtake her. “Wait
up!”
“Why?”
Ada asked. “So you can 'slip me the D'?” There was an awkward
pause.
“You
heard that?” Don asked.
“How
could I not? Those guys talk like there's nobody else in the room to
hear them.”
“Yeah,”
Don said, “But we're outside right now.”
“Which
just makes it worse,” argued Ada. “They still talk like there's
nobody else in the room.”
“I'm
sorry for how my friends talk,” Don apologized, “volume-wise and
otherwise.”
“Why
do you talk to them anyway?” Ada wondered. “They're so stupid.”
“They're
teenagers,” Don answered. “They'll grow out of it. Besides,
I've known them for ten years,
and I
think they might be the only people I know how to talk to.”
“You're
not so terrible at talking to me,” Ada said with a sly smile,
“Unless I count your friends against you.”
“I
wouldn't want that,” Don said in mock horror, “because if you
did, there's no way you'd agree to study with me tonight.”
“Your
place or mine?” Ada asked suspiciously.
“Dealer's
choice,” Don answered.
“And
in this metaphor, I am...”
“The
one who gets to choose,” Don answered.
“I'll
think about it,” Ada agreed. “I'll text you after school.”
Ada was better than
her word. At lunch, Don got a text that said “meet me jr lot 340.”
More accurately, Don got a voicemail that said he had received a
text message from Ada that said “meet me junior lot three-hundred
forty,” which Don figured was a location and a time.
Don also figured he
had to be the only high schooler in the world whose phone and phone
plan did not allow text messaging, though that was the way he
preferred it. Text messages were just dysfunctional, crippled,
incomplete e-mails, as far as he was concerned. They lacked only
depth, screen size, and all of the important formal qualities of
writing. Still, he was happy enough to meet Ada in the parking lot.
“So,
I got the dirt on you,” Ada told him.
“How
dirty was it?” Don asked.
“Strangely
clean,” Ada said. “Word has it that whenever you study with a
girl, actual homework gets done.”
“And
her grades go up,” Don added.
“And
then she thanks you,” Ada continued, “and then she never sees you
again.”
“I
don't think you'll have to worry about that last part,” Don told
her.
“Why's
that?” Ada asked. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Not
exactly,” Don answered without answering.
“Are
you one of those guys who will do things for me because he thinks I'm
pretty?” Ada accused. “Please don't be one of those guys.”
“When
I think of you,” Don told her, “I think of your music.”
“I
write my own,” Ada told him, smiling proudly.
“That's
what I've heard,” Don said. “I got some of the dirt on you,
too.”
“So
this is not about my looks?” Ada asked again in different words.
“No,”
Don answered, not evading.
“So
you'll help me with my homework and never talk to me again,” Ada
asked.
“No,”
Don answered. “I'm too interested in talking to you to get much of
anything done.”
“That
may be the strangest, awkwardest, nerdiest way anyone has asked me
out,” Ada told Don. “Then again, I like strange, awkward and
nerdy. Let's go. Milkshakes?”
“On
me,” Don offered. “You're driving.”
Ada ordered a
strawberry milkshake, and Don vanilla. Putting their backpacks on
either seat of a corner booth and sliding in after them, they emptied
an array of books and notes onto the table. This proved merely to be
a stalling action, born of nervousness. True to Don's word, neither
one got any studying done. Instead, Don asked Ada about her music,
her ambitions, her post-graduation plans. “Music is a passion, but
it's a passionate hobby,” She told him. “I don't need to go to a
conservatory to make music.”
“So
what will you do instead?” Don wondered.
“Well,
to start out, I'm going to double-major in marine biology and
microbiology.” Ada told him.
“Why
both?”
“When
I was almost too young to read or remember, I stumbled onto these
books about some kids who were fighting aliens by turning into
animals,” Ada started.
“Juvenile,
derivative dreck,” Don interrupted to opine. Ada gave him an
indefinable look. “I've run across them, too,” Don explained.
“Sure
they're childish, if you read them when you're not a kid,” Ada said
a little defensively. Then, regaining a more confident tone, she
continued. “They were entertaining enough when I was. Anyway,
reading those books got me interested in the idea of life on other
planets. But I was equally fascinated by how amazing, and varied,
and strange some of the life right here on earth can be. Since then,
I've read so much more, and begun to grasp how little we know about
aquatic and microscopic life, about worlds right here on Earth that
we can't see. “A person could discover plenty of very alien life
for one lifetime of study without ever leaving the planet–if she
had the right degrees, of course.”
“So
you've given up on other worlds?” Don asked
“Not
entirely,” Ada said. “A lot of colleges are starting to offer
some exobiology courses, and I'll probably take those as electives.
I just don't think it's realistic that we will ever find life in
outer space during my lifetime. If we're lucky, there might be
something on Europa. If there is, they'll need the expertise of a
microbiologist and a marine biologist to study it.” Here, Ada
broke into a grin. “And why take two if they only need one?”
Ada liked the way
Don listened; Don liked what he heard. The pair agreed to meet again
soon.
Don called Ada at
lunch on Thursday, and Friday evening, he picked her up and drove her
to the museum. Ada admired the beauty of many of the pieces there.
Some, she could explain or elaborate upon. Don had nothing to say
about the paintings, nor anything about most of the sculptures. The
small section of ancient art and the display of medieval
craftsmanship did not exhaust Don's knowledge on those subjects, and
he didn't go out of the way to sound these depths further for her
benefit. The outing was pleasant enough, but there was no hint of
any passion to match Ada's declarations over milkshakes.
“If
I didn't know better,” she observed, “I'd think you were just
hanging around and waiting for something better to do.”
“I
am just marking time,” Don confirmed.
“Until
what?” Ada asked.
“Until
I think it's dark enough.”
“Dark
enough for what?” Ada asked suspiciously.
“It
would take me weeks to explain it,” Don answered suspiciously, “And
that would neither suffice nor do justice, but I can tell you that
whatever you're thinking, it isn't that.”
“How
do you know what I'm thinking?” Ada's suspicions were far from
allayed.
“I
don't know what you're thinking,” Don stated obviously. “I just
know one thing you aren't. It's nearly brand new. I made it, and I
haven't shown anyone else; you would be first.”
“How
can I be sure you won't hurt me?” Ada wondered.
“You
can't.” Don admitted. “You can either trust me or ask me to
drop you off at home. I would prefer it if you do the first, but I
would go along with either of them, without holding either choice
against you.”
“Well,
you did a pretty good job of building up the mystery,” Ada
observed, “And you didn't give me some lame, skeevy justification
for why I ought to trust you, and I do have pepper spray in my
purse.”
“I
promise that you won't need it,” Don told her, “Whatever that's
worth.”
“You
better hope I don't,” Ada promised him.
They hadn't driven
far when Ada recognized their route. “Are we driving back to
school?” She asked.
“You're
good,” Don said, leaving the answer a casual implication.
“Why
the hell would you want to go back to school on a perfectly good
Friday night?” Ada wondered aloud.
“You'd
be surprised what you can learn when there are no teachers around to
stop you,” Don said cryptically.
“Remember
what I said,” Ada told him, leaving the threat a casual
implication. “No funny stuff.”
“No
funny stuff,” Don promised again.
Near one end of the
school, the varsity team was playing a football game on a well-kept
field. Don drove around the opposite end of the building, into a
parking lot in an alcove by a loading dock. He got out of the car,
pulled a backpack out of the back seat, and looked back at Ada only
for a second. Not waiting to see if she followed, he climbed the
stairs to the garage-style door on the loading dock.
Against her better
judgment, Ada followed. Don was just zipping up one of the pockets
on his backpack when Ada caught up to him. He was holding what
looked like two small, dark boxes of about equal size. “Catch,”
he commanded before tossing one of them to Ada. It looked and felt
like a remote control for a garage-door opener that had been broken
open, disassembled, reassembled, and held together with duct tape.
“Should
I press it?”
“Not
yet,” Don answered. “No reason to do it yet.”
Don opened the
second box and pulled out a couple of small tools, then squatted in
front of the garage door. He worked quickly and put his tools away.
“Are
you breaking into the school right now?” Ada demanded.
“Don't
worry,” Don reassured Ada, turning to face her as he did. “Nobody
expects teenagers to break into the school. Why the hell would we
waste a perfectly good Friday night?”
“We
can't do this,” Ada insisted. “I could lose any chance at a
scholarship if we get caught.”
“We
won't get caught,” Don promised. “I've done this before. None
of the neighbors have a good view of this entrance. That's why I
picked it.”
Ada
was still uncomfortable; logically, Don's arguments for going along
with him were weak, and the risk to her own future was very real. At
the same time, and against her own conscious inclinations, she found
the risk exciting. To her surprise, she said nothing else. Don
turned around again. He squatted down and opened the garage door
nonchalantly. Ada was surprised to see him do it. The door was big,
and looked heavy. It had three handles at the bottom, but Don could
only reach one at a time. In the past, Ada had walked past the
loading dock and seen the custodians grunt and strain to lift the
door with one working at each end. Don's wide, thick, boxy form had
never struck Ada as intimidating, but as steadily and effortlessly as
he lifted that steel garage door, she found herself rethinking that
assessment. Don turned back toward her. “There's a wall to your
left,” he said. “Point the end of the remote at it and press the
button.”
Ada did as she was
asked. As she did, she saw Don reach up and tug on a small chain
hanging down from the ceiling. Then he walked over to the opposite
side of the garage door and pressed a button. The garage began to
shut on its own..
“Why
didn't you build a remote to open that?” Ada asked over the grind
of metal wheels in metal tracks.
“No
reason to,” Don said. Ada made no acknowledgment, so he
continued. “I spent considerable time on a project, creating
something which I intend to show you tonight. The project consisted
of many problems, each of which needed a solution and the time to
find it. The problem of the garage door was easy; my friend Herm had
already taught me how to pick a lock, and I could open the door
manually; the custodians usually remember to disable the motor arm at
night anyway. The ease of solving this problem meant that if I
treated it like it was not a problem at all, then I could spend the
time elsewhere. Building a garage-door remote for this garage door
would have been a matter of tuning its signal to a slightly different
frequency, based on trial and error, and then I would have to plan
ahead to sneak in and engage the arm for the garage door opener every
time I wanted in. Hardly even an interesting conversion, and not a
good use of time.”
“If
you say so,” Ada said. “But then what's the garage door opener
for?”
“It
turns off the alarm system,” Don said.”
Don took Ada's hand
and led her to a door she hadn't seen at the back of the room. He
then led her down a dark hallway, through another door she hadn't
seen, and down a poorly-lit stairwell. “You'd better call now and
set up any excuses you need to with your parents,” Don told her.
“This will take all night, and you won't notice the time fly.”
“How
come everything you say just makes this idea seem worse and worse?”
Ada asked him.
“Because
you have to break some eggs to make an omelet,” Don offered, “Or
because the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or because
I'm just really weird. You pick whichever answer will make you
happiest. You can also decide to ask me to take you back home, or to
drop you off someplace, and I'll do that instead. All I can tell you
is that if you go back, you'll be missing out.
Reluctantly, Ada
pulled out her cellphone and called one of her speed-dial numbers,
putting the phone to her ear just as they left the stairwell and
entered another unlit hallway. “Dianna rented a couple movies for
the night,” she said into her phone. After pausing for only a
second, she said “of course I'm invited.” Another pause, then
“just a couple other girls from orchestra,” and at last, after a
final pause, “Love you too, mom.”
“Do
you need to call Dianna now?” Don asked as he reached back into
the backpack for his little bag of tools.
“Dianna
and I have a system,” Ada replied. “If someone calls one of us
looking for the other, she's automatically with us, but temporarily
unavailable
to take the phone. Unless, of course, we're actually together.
Then, we hand off the phone no matter the circumstances or what it
interrupts. That way, the number of times one of us is indisposed
averages out closer to normal.” By the time Ada was done telling
Don about her system, Don had the door open and was walking into a
room that was unlit aside from tiny, blinking lights going on and off
everywhere.
“Good
system,” he said. Ada followed him in, and Don turned on a light,
revealing row upon row of big server towers connected by a maze of
wires. “This is where it happens,” he told Ada.
“I
don't have the slightest idea what 'it' is,” Ada complained, “other
than the school network and school server.”
Don walked over to
one of the servers and started playing with the wires. Some he
unplugged, and others he plugged into different spots. He turned to
an adjacent server and repeated the process. Finally, he pulled a
very old bicycle helmet and an unused skateboarding helmet from a
different compartment in his backpack. Ada could see inside the
skateboarding helmet; its padding had been gutted and replaced with a
maze of wires and electronics. A thick cable stuck out the back of
each helmet, so Ada assumed the insides of the bicycle helmet looked
the same way. Don plugged each helmet into one of the servers he had
fiddled with. Then he placed the skateboarding helmet on her head,
very slowly, taking great pains.
“You're
going to do this with me?” Ada asked as he worked.
“Of
course,” Don answered. “If you had asked me to drop you off, I
would have come back to do it alone.”
“If
neither one of us notices the time passing, how will we get out of
here in time?”
“I
have set this up to alert me,” Don answered. “I could easily
teach you to do the same, but without showing you what it can do, you
have no incentive to learn. Without the connection,” Don told Ada,
“this helmet is nothing more than a really bad video game. With a
bad connection, it's like a pretty bad video game, only far more
frustrating. Here, it will change your life.”
For a minute or so,
Don worked in silence, before speaking, adopting an unusually formal
tone of voice. “I'm not sure how your long hair will affect this,”
Don warned Ada. “I made it, and I understand all of the basic
principles behind it, as well as most of the advanced ones, so I am
unerringly confident that having long hair will not hurt you. It
might lesson the effect, though. If it does, I'm sorry.”
“What
effect?” Ada asked.
“Be
patient,” Don advised. “You'll know soon enough.”
“So
is it like virtual reality?” Ada asked.
“For
me it is,” Don answered. “For a lot of people, it would be
closer to the opposite.”
Ada had no idea how
long it took, but the effect was inimitable and unmistakable. Under
the influence of the helmet, Ada had absolutely no sense of the
physical world around her. There was nothing to hear, nothing to
see, nothing to smell, taste or touch. In place of these things was
a sensation of all the world's knowledge bearing down in a deluge, a
torrent of torrents, unstoppable and towering and almost lovingly
gentle. It would have felt like wave after wave of information and
learning, had Ada been capable of perceiving time as anything but a
series of advanced mathematical equations, had she been able to feel
such a thing as 'after.' Instead, Ada was wholly inundated by a
rotating storm of studies, by infinite great waves of ideas stacked
upon each other. They forced her under and pulled her higher all at
once, filling her with the pride of courage and the shame of having
known so little, inflating her until she was bloated with the heavy
nectar of flowering erudition. Ada felt the extraordinarily
extrasensory experience in parts of her brain she didn't realize she
had.
Ada
realized that if she concentrated, she could feel something in place
of Don's material absence. I hope she likes I like it who
wouldn't like it maybe she doesn't but she's so dang smart she loves
to know but who knows nobody knows when nobody knows this way of
knowing I would be so ashamed it would be such a shame I missed and
she would miss out out out there so much things to read archeology to
read of ancient things and then minifigs...Ada
concluded that these were Don's thoughts.
All at once, Ada
could see again. The light was every bit as blinding as its absence
had been, but regaining it seemed a devastating loss. Ada blushed
with embarrassment when she realized that the light so hurting her
eyes was no more than the blinking lights on the servers, which had
not been enough for her to navigate by earlier in the evening.
“Did
it hurt this bad for you?” Ada asked Don.
“You
mean to take off the helmet?” Don answered with a question. Ada
nodded once, so Don continued. “Yes and no. It actually hurt
more, because I had the lights on, but it was okay. I'm used to it.”
“Was
I hearing your thoughts?” Ada wondered.
“People
in the helmets don't hear; they only know,” Don reminded Ada. “I
don't know what you were knowing, anyway, but there's no reason you
couldn't have picked up what I thought. With enough practice, you
can even put words to another person's wordless feelings. For
instance, I knew your mocking, childish disappointment that you could
not blog about this because any words would be unmeaningful,
insufficient, and potentially unsafe from criminal prosecution. I
also knew your chagrined amusement at having worries of that sort in
the midst of such an experience.”
“You
can read my mind?” Ada continued questioning, for the moment too
intrigued to be upset.
“I
could have,” Don answered “had I wished. In this case, I
understood what you were feeling because you externalized those
emotions.”
“That
was the most amazing thing,” Ada gushed. “There's nothing
remotely like that.”
“The
closest is speed-reading James Joyce,” Don told her.
“Nobody
speed-reads James Joyce,” Ada argued. “You have to read it
painstakingly slow.”
“Students
of literature read it that way so as not to miss anything,” Don
debated, “and in doing so, they miss the forest of consciousness
for counting the trees of the stream. Nevertheless, I do speed-read
Joyce, usually on weeks with a lot of nighttime events at the school,
when I can't get down here as often.”
“So
you don't like the orchestra concerts?” Ada teased.
“They
have their redeeming moments,” Don answered in the intended spirit.
Ada realized that
in the space of their conversation, Don had returned everything he
brought to his backpack and, presumably, set the servers back to the
way they had been before, and thus that it was time to go.
“How
did you think those things up?” Ada asked Don as they left.
“Has
your body ever done something completely without your input or
permission, and you were completely at a loss as to why you would do
something without wanting to do so, to the point that you felt you
hadn't really done it, even though it was an obvious physical reality
that you had?”
“I
guess.” Ada answered. “It's sort of like that when I sneeze or
cough or hiccup. There was also this one time after spending nearly
forty hours in airplanes and airports, with hardly a wink of sleep.
This was about two years ago, and I always got my hair cut real
boyish back then. Anyway, when my parents finally got us checked
into the hotel, I went into the bathroom, and when I turned and
looked in the mirror, I wondered what the person looking back at me
was thinking, and why she was just standing there, and why she kept
her hair short when it would look so much better long. I realized
what had happened, and it felt as if my body might be attached to me,
but it still wasn't really part of me, or even me at all.”
“Exactly!”
Said Don. “Well, I don't need international travel to feel that
way. I feel like that all the time. Like I have this weird meat car
that I try to drive around, only it steers itself on occasion, and
sometimes it argues with me about what I really want, as though it
has any idea or authority about what a person should want, when it's
clearly other than and less than a person. And until I built myself
the helmet, I had no way to open the door and unbuckle the seatbelt
to get out and go home, because inside the meat car is definitely not
home.”
“And
visiting the server?” Ada asked.
“That
is more like home,” Don told her. “It's not Cotard's where I
know the body's mine, but I mistakenly believe it's dead. It's not
GID, where I think my body is slightly misshapen. It's not BDD,
where I think my body is grossly misshapen, and it's not Alien Hand
syndrome, where I think one or more of my limbs belongs to somebody
else and should not be on my body. I was given an entire body by
mistake, though I never wanted, needed, or asked for one, regardless
of how many limbs it has, and how they're shaped. I have yet to
discover a way to give it back while keeping that which is mine–the
mind.”
Their conversation
had taken them all the way back to the garage. Ada's thoughts
returned for a moment to the fear of getting caught. “Did you lock
everything back up?” she asked.
“I
always do,” Don promised. He pressed a button on the alarm
keypad–apparently re-arming the security system was another
easily-solved problem that could be treated like a non-problem. Ada
pressed the button to open the garage.
It wasn't until the
sunlight streamed in underneath the door that she realized it was
already morning. The sun had just risen. Unaccustomed to the light,
Ada walked unsteadily to the car. She looked back and saw Don reach
up to pull the chain that disabled the garage door opener again, then
shut it slowly and softly. He took out his toolkit and fiddled with
the lock for a minute, and then, satisfied, joined Ada.
In the car, when
she wasn't giving Don directions to Dianna's house, Ada thanked Don
for sharing something so personal, and so cerebral, on a second date.
“Most guys would have just taken me to a movie and tried to cop a
feel.”
“Most
girls would have expected that,” Don responded, “and maybe even
been a little insulted if it didn't happen.”
“Maybe,”
Ada said, “But it's not all their fault. From a very early age,
they're taught that how they look is the most interesting and
important thing about them. It starts with animated movies, where
the hero might be any kind of person, but the most important thing
the princess is, is beautiful.”
“The
most important thing the Beast was, was ugly,” Don pointed out.
“And
yet...” Ada concluded.
“And
yet,” Don agreed.
Ada looked forward
to spending afternoons or evenings with Don. In the helmet, Ada was
learning to remember more and more of what the helmet taught her,
though Don warned her that electronic access to information would
always outstrip the human capacity to learn it. Even he encountered
far more knowledge than he retained. Outside of the helmet, Ada
found that she could talk to Don about almost anything. Though he
was an atheist-leaning agnostic, religion was in no way off-limits.
“Gnosticism always appealed to me,” She told him. “I like the
idea of a human Jesus, and even an experienced one, at that. If
you're asking me to follow a strange, sinless god-thing, why not just
go straight to the source and follow God? But if Jesus knows from
firsthand experience the temptations, the punishments, and the
pleasures of sin, then his forgiveness actually means something,
because he would actually know how much God asks of us.” Don
listened at attention, his unconditional thirst for intellect, and
his earned respect for hers, readily evident on his face.
Instead, the things
Don struggled to discuss or respect were the most basic. He was
convinced that the question “how does these jeans make me look?”
had no honest–or even possible–answer: that she was she, that the
jeans were just jeans, and that her looks were he looks, and that
each was discrete and unchanging, with none bearing the least
relation to or exerting the least influence on any other. Finally,
she asked him, “what do you see when you look at me?”
Don answered as
only he could. “I see a name for the meeting of diverse and
divergent knowledges, which grow without dousing the potential or
thirst for more. The name is written in some bizarre, analog script
devised by nature to fulfill some unrelated purpose.”
“Do
you think I'm pretty?” She asked.
“I
think you're the kind of beautiful that will attract a long line of
people who never even notice your kindness, your brilliance, the joy
that shares the atmosphere with you.”
That answer seemed
good enough for the time being.
In the succeeding
weeks, Ada spent more afternoons and evenings with Don, until they
reached the point where they were getting together most days. Yet,
she felt that they were hardly together at all. He always wanted to
take her back to the servers. Sometimes, she wanted to go, and they
went together. If she didn't want to go, he would leave or take her
home at whatever time their parents agreed was age-appropriate, so
that he could go sneak off to don the helmet on his own. Either way,
she could share a couch with him for hours and not get the impression
that he felt any closeness to her. She often did.
Curled up and
leaning against him, as she peered down at a microbiology textbook
and he stared ahead at his laptop screen, she asked, “why don't you
ever look at me?”
“I
have,” he answered, scrolling down to the next entry on her blog.
“I do. I am right now.”
