“Officer, we’re in a hurry,” he called, flourishing his warrant card. “Someone from your police force should be here to meet us.”
The officer’s English was good, not perfect. “Oh yes, Sir. Over zhere,” he said, pointing toward a dark blue Saab parked against the custom house wall with two men in black leather coats idly blowing smoke rings at each other. Bliss leapt out of the car, warrant card in hand, and ran over to the men.
“What did they say?” asked Wilson as he returned, breathless.
“Everything’s arranged,” replied Bliss. “They’ve really gone to town. They’ve got four units to pick him up as soon as he comes out of Customs.
“Shit,” said Wilson, “The Dutch must’ve money to burn. Four double-manned cars to follow a fat geezer in a poxy Renault, and we only had one.”
“Well,” responded Bliss, “Maybe they’re not as good as us.”
They laughed in relief, their task finally over and, with Roger’s car emerging from the Custom’s shed with the Saab in tow, Wilson mused, “I wonder if anyone did fall off the ship.”
“Don’t know,” replied Bliss, his eye on the departing Renault. “But thank God it wasn’t LeClarc.”
Trudy, in Roger’s house, in Roger’s bed, instructed herself to go back to the beginning, to her first words with Roger on the Internet. Reasoning that he must, at some time, have said, or done, something to give her a clue about the user I.D. and password she now needed to access his Internet server.
They’d “met” four months earlier—Easter weekend—in a chat room—an ethereal cyber-venue where weightless messages pass simultaneously between any number of correspondents; people who have never met, have little in common and, in most cases, nothing better to do.
“Your dinner’s getting cold. What on earth are you doing?” her mother bawled up the stairs as she left for work that evening.
“Won’t be long—just browsing,” Trudy replied, mesmerized by the tiny black and white screen. An hour later she was still there, her foil wrapped dinner balanced precariously in the fridge, on top of a chicken’s carcase.
The chat room emptied as guests drifted away in search of greater stimulation—like an entire fleet of Flying Dutchmen destined to endlessly surf the vastness of cyber-space, destined never to be satisfied—leaving Trudy and Roger almost alone.
“SO, ROGER, DO YOU THINK ONE DAY COMPUTERS WILL CLONE THEMSELVES,” she typed.
“THEY ALREADY DO. WE CAN’T MAKE COMPUTERS WITHOUT COMPUTERS,” he replied. “ITS LIKE PEOPLE. YOU CAN’T MAKE PEOPLE WITHOUT PEOPLE.”
“LIKE—SOMEONE’S GOT TO GET BONKED,” added the only other contributor, a man with the unlikely name of CyberBob, who’d added sexual innuendo all afternoon.
“THANK YOU CYBERBOB AND GOODNIGHT,” flashed onto Trudy’s screen as Roger gave him a hint.
CyberBob didn’t give up and, after a few more exchanges, Roger and Trudy crept out of the chat room to communicate through a private chat client. One-to-one private messages supposedly inaccessible by anyone else.
“I’ve met this really super guy, Marg,” she stage-whispered to Margery, her best, best friend, in social science class the following day. “He’s gorgeous and he’s twenty-seven.”
“Bit old for you, Trude. More my age.”
“Yeah, but I told him I was nineteen, so he reckons that’s O.K.”
“And … when he finds out?”
“I ain’t going to tell him am I? And it’s not like we’re going to meet or anything.”
“Well what’s he like? You know: How tall is he? What’s his hair like? His eyes? Hey, what’s his star sign? My mum reckons you can always tell what a bloke’s like from his star sign. She says Sagittarius is best. My dad’s a Pisces, that’s why she reckons he’s so wet.”
Trudy had no answers, but anticipated each evening’s “meeting” with Roger with the heart stopping palpitations of a waif dragged out of a screaming pack of groupies to have dinner with a teen-star. Dashing home from school, frequently brushing off Margery in her haste so that by six o’clock, or a quarter after at the latest, she was made-up and ready for her date. But Roger never came on-line before seven-thirty, even eight-thirty—she’d wait. Her e-mail message, “HI ROGER—GIVE ME A CALL,” would sit, unopened, in his inbox until he could escape to his room, switch on his computer, and wait for the three most important words of the day: “You’ve got mail.”
A crease in the filthy sheet on Roger’s bed irritated her aching left shoulder but, as she manoeuvred into a more comfortable position, pressure on her blistered hand made her cry out in pain. Once settled, she went back to her thoughts and recalled the evening, just a week after their original meeting, when “love” first appeared.
Coming home from school, she’d surrounded herself with a tide of cookies, crunchies and chocolate, which flooded the table and swept over the cereal bowl, still containing a few soggy cornflakes, which she’d abandoned in order to check her messages before school that morning. A sheet of writing paper, wrenched from an exercise book, had been brushed off the bowl by a pack of pretzels and now lay on the floor. The lipstick message, a random mix of upper and lower case letters, looked more like a suicide or ransom note than a mother’s message to her daughter. “I’n NOT clearing up AGAIN—I’ve WARNED you. You left the MILK out again. the cat got it. I’ll be back at ten—MAYBE.”
Their messages flew back and forth that evening. “At lightning speed,” according to Roger.
“HOW FAST IS THAT?” she enquired, but found little interest in the possibility of her written thoughts zipping round the world six times a second.
“WOW,” she wrote—who cares, she thought.
“I DID MY HAIR RED,” she wrote
“WOW,” he replied—who cares, he thought.
Hard-drives, soft movies; gigabytes, teen-TV; RAMs and ROMs, music and make-up. Their words crossed though never met.
“I GOT A NEW Z360,” he wrote.
“WOW,” she wrote.
“I’M GETTING A WATCH FOR MY BIRTHDAY,” she typed.
“WOW,” he replied.
The stilted conversation continued, the cut and thrust of debate, perfected by Senators before Christ, now blunted by the lightning speed of twentieth century technology—what truly masterful advertising genius had persuaded people that progress was to turn a thirty second phone call into an hour-long marathon of typing and reading?
Later, much later, in their exchanges, with all meaningful information exposed, she fished for his thoughts, his feelings.
“I THINK YOUR REALLY NICE,” she typed, her misspelling unnoticed by either. “WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME?”
“U ARE REALLY SUPER TRUDE. I’VE NEVER MET ANYONE AS NICE AS YOU. I WISH I COULD SEE U. I BET U LOOK LOVELY. I THINK I’M FALLING IN LOVE.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed, feeling a warmth as the words sank in. What would Margery think of that? Margery with her string of admirers; Margery always knowing the right thing to say to a boy; Margery with her cool clothes, “in” lipstick and the right footwear. “Height matters,” she’d said, flaunting her new fourinch chunky heeled boots.
Trudy saved the message log on her hard drive, would have printed a copy but was out of paper. “I think I’m falling in love,” she read, and re-read, luxuriating in the words; listening