I KNEW IT HAD been a mistake. Well, at least I knew now. Two months had passed and I still couldn’t believe that I had done it. It was incredible. I had had one or two drinks. I had loosened up, yes, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. But I had done it. I had had sex with an interviewee, the first time ever in a ten-year career in journalism. Right there, in a pastel-coloured hotel room on the twentieth floor of a monumental glass tower, at three o’clock in the afternoon.
We did it looking out over the Hudson River, with the hot breeze sucked up from the humid, New York streets rushing against my face. It was possible to see us through the huge tinted window, yet no one could. No one was watching us up there. But there was no “we” or “us”, really. There was just me and him, separate pieces in the same pie. It was a very lonely business.
I had flown to New York for the launch of a new high-powered computer and Dr David Jones was one of many accompanying sideshows set up to illustrate the potential of the new system. His expertise? Computer-generated virtual reality: a technology that creates three-dimensional electronic worlds, computer models that you can exist in and interact with. Computer models that can be any world you want, with you as the chief inhabitant, but you don’t have to be alone. I had to interview him for, Technology Week, find out about his company, Virtech – a sexy little start-up, Richard had called it.
For just over an hour, we’d sat facing each other discussing what I thought were the relevant issues. I wasn’t convinced that what I was hearing wasn’t a load of hype so I decided to wind up on a light note.
“Do you remember those special-effect disaster movies?” I said.
“I’m afraid I don’t,” he replied.
“Earthquake? You didn’t see that?”
“No. I rarely see films, I prefer to make my own.”
“Really? Well, this should interest you. You could actually feel the tremors as they happened onscreen. Virtual reality isn’t new, you see.”
“No, it isn’t. The difference is that what you had was, essentially, a passive experience.”
“I felt something though, from a place I wasn’t in. It was an illusion. The impact of your virtual world is also illusory. You can affect things, and effect them, but how much can they affect you?”
He leaned forward and placed his empty coffee cup next to my gently bubbling gin and tonic. He didn’t drink on duty, and he didn’t smoke, but the glass ashtray on the table was crammed with broken unburnt matchsticks, some in bent chevrons and others snapped in two. One fresh splinter was hanging over the edge. He picked it up and gently clamped his teeth on one end, chewing slowly at it and twisting it around with his fingers. He kept his eyes on me for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable. I pushed the skirt of my loose dress down a little and reached for my tumbler of gin. I threw my head back to drink and I could see him through the bottom of the glass, staring at my neck and the low scoop of my summer dress.
“Did you enjoy it?” he said.
“The film?”
“The passive experience.”
“I don’t remember. I think I screamed. It was fun.”
“A real earthquake isn’t fun.”
“I know that. I bought a ticket, remember? I felt the quake, all the same.”
“And touched it?”
“Feel is not the same as touch.”
“It can be,” he said.
I looked over my glass, unable to put it down. I wanted to finish it but he prevented me somehow, holding my gaze long enough to make me look away for my cigarettes.
“Ask the military. We don’t need to know everything in order to relate to something, just a few things with certainty,” he said.
“Like the sound and direction of an incoming bomb?” I said, relieved. Hypothetical weaponry was easier to handle than an intimate thought.
“Quite.”
“But not the smell or the taste of burning.”
“No.”
“Without the smell or taste of burning how do we understand the danger of the bomb?” I said.
“Instinct,” he said. “Pure instinct.”
He sat back in his pale pink chair, both hands casually resting on his thighs, his legs slightly splayed, and the light caught his glasses enough to white out his eyes. In a moment, the reflection of the sky had gone and I noticed his pale blue eyes were very steady, as if he had me in his sights. I put my glass down and folded my notebook, slotting my pencil through the spiral at the top. He’d ordered more drinks a while back, but I decided it was time to go. I looked up to say so and he smiled a little. His eyes were alight and I knew he was back on track.
“Everyone wants it, everyone,” he said.
“And why’s that?”
“Because everybody can think of at least one thing they’d like to do with it.”
There was a knock on the door before I could reply. A young black man, trim in his green uniform with shiny brass buttons, entered with our third and final tray of drinks. When he’d gone, I raised my glass to my companion but as I lifted it up to drink, the ice clung to the bottom and then slid down, banging my lip. I pressed a napkin to my face and dabbed a drip or two off my chin and the thin material of my dress. I looked up and David shifted his glasses on his face as ice water trickled down my belly.
“Mind if I smoke?” I said, laying the damp napkin over the arm of my chair. I stuck an unlit cigarette in my mouth.
“What would you like to do?” he said.
“Me? Nothing.”
“You could do whatever you wanted.”
“I do now.”
“Without suffering the consequences.”
That last statement was going to play on my mind. I’d never got away with anything, never ever. If I didn’t pick up the whole bill, I got to pay more than a few instalments. He was looking at me for some sort of reaction. I didn’t give it. I didn’t light my cigarette either. I took it out of my mouth and he handed me a box of matches.
“Did you get to play?” he said.
“Downstairs? No. There was a queue. The boys got there first.”
“In that case, you can ride my machine,” he said.
That surprised me. His voice betrayed the innuendo but he didn’t look like the sort of man that would make one. He wasn’t the sort of man who was unaware of what he said either. I played it straight.
“Thank you. Tell me, is your reality more real than theirs?” I said.
“Of course it is. It’s more expensive. VR is about affecting perceptions. You can do this with simple equipment and relatively unsophisticated graphics because the human sensory system is remarkably tolerant to pathetically sparse audiovisual stimulation. For more realism you need a system that can solve extensive sets of equations at speed. You need processors working in parallel. The more you need, the more you have to pay. Reality costs.”
I still hadn’t lit the cigarette. It was stuck to my lip. He leaned over, gently took the wooden matchbox from my hands and stroked a match along the side. It crackled and flared and I sucked in the flame, keeping myself from looking up until I needed to puff smoke into the air. It was time to smack his wrists.
“All right. Conceptually, it sounds very different, but what are we really talking about here? A sophisticated display with interesting peripherals, that’s all, a pretentious box,” I said.
He picked a fresh match from the box, snapped it till it almost broke, put one end in his mouth and flicked the other with his thumb so that it twirled around. I took a few triumphant puffs of my cigarette until he flicked the twisted match into the ashtray with the others and got up, gesturing to the window. He waited by the table for me and guided me towards it, one hand pressing the cotton of my dress against the small of my back.
The window stretched from one wall to the other. There was the wide, grey Hudson River and the wake of a cargo ship curved round the distant bulk of the Statue of Liberty. I imagined the river to be noisy with traffic, but we couldn’t hear it. I could hear him breathing softly. He tapped the thick, smoky glass with his knuckle.
“Think of this as the screen. All that you see would be digitized, within the computer. And you? You could be what you want, do what you want. You could be a bird or a plane. Alice through the Looking Glass. Look, over there. You could be Liberty. Reach down and drag your fingers through the water. Push the clouds wide apart.”
I stared ahead, peering through the glass until all I could see was his reflection. He was slightly taller than me and as spare. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up to expose intermittent fair hairs on his lightly tanned arm. I could see he wasn’t looking at the view, imagining what he could be. He was looking at me.
“Look, I feel a bit cold,” I said, trying to turn.
He looked back to where the dials were fixed to the opposite wall. “I could regulate the air conditioning . . .” he replied. “Or . . .”
His arm moved over my shoulder and he tugged hard at the handle, swinging the huge window before us open a couple of inches. The hot summer wind whistled in over my face and down my body. It puffed out my thin dress and shook my dark hair. He took one strand from his lip and put both hands gently on my shoulders. We stood unbearably close together, looking out across the grey water, listening to the breeze until he took my wrists tightly and placed my hands a little above my head, palms flat against the thick glass.
“Look out. You can see everything except what is directly below. Now look down. See? It’s a long way, isn’t it? You could be flying, imagine that, up and down, in and out . . . why don’t you do it, now?” he said.
He was pushing against me so my hips pressed against the sill. I caught my breath as my eyes took in the giddying, twenty-floor drop. There was no glass before me, just air. I could see little coloured cars like kiddies’ bricks on the street. My fingers pressed hard and flat against the glass like a lizard’s on a high, dry wall. He tugged the skirt of my dress and twined the hem around and around his fingers until it tightened around my thighs. He pulled it up slowly, dragging it over my cotton-knickered hips, up to my waist. His other hand held the back of my neck, while he pulled the pants down, and the dress up higher to expose my naked breasts. We were standing right in front of the window, where nothing but the birds could see us. He kneaded my flesh in his hands and my legs trembled against his while my brain worked desperately to stabilize the distance from the ground up and find the word – no.
The sudden, hard pressure behind crushed my stomach against the wood and metal of the window sill. All that seemed to keep me on solid ground were the tips of my sandalled toes. My face slid uncomfortably against the glass between my outspread arms. He pulled me back, held my neck again, squeezing tightly, pressing down on the bones of my spine, keeping my face against the dry wind and above the drop. The distant street below began to judder back and forth until I shut my eyes tight. I felt as if I were flying blind on a warm, red edge, swelling and thickening like a thermistor in a tight vial, my voice nothing but an idiot’s hum locked in my head. He quickened with my heartbeat and with the final push came a short sigh and a rough shove against my shoulders. My weight jerked the window violently outwards and my eyes stretched open in shock as I tumbled forward and down.
The street came towards me fast. I had an idea that I was screaming as the hot air blasted with renewed force against my face. I could hear nothing, nothing but the increased roar of the wind drying the moisture from my tongue and teeth. I was falling, alone and afraid of falling, falling all the way to the ground. A shaft of ecstasy and a pinching sensation of fear prickled up through me like boiling sand, spilling over my scalp like needled splinters. I shuddered against the impact which never came. I had gone nowhere. I stood leaning against the window, gasping and staring downwards. All was still, but for the little coloured bricks stopping and starting, whizzing and braking, way down on the street.
Two more inches. The window had moved out two more inches, that’s all. It had seemed like two feet, maybe a metre. The hotels fix them like that. The gap has to be too small to drop a TV set or your head through. Two inches or two feet, I was shaking as if I had truly been snatched back from the sky.
By the time I turned around, he had already straightened his clothes. He looked neat and calm, as if he had just walked into the room. I pulled my dress down and went to the bathroom. To be sick, I thought, but all I did was smooth my dress against me and flick at my hair before leaving the suite. There was someone in the corridor waiting for his interview. I heard David say, in his polite, English way, “Good afternoon. Sorry to have kept you.”
Just like he had said to me.
Of course, I turned up. The room in Victoria wasn’t like the others. It was in one of those large, sad houses in a square where you’d imagine a carriage drawing up with a well-dressed family of mama, papa and delightfully dressed children aboard. The house, with its creamy pillars and marbled steps, had lately been pressed into service. The porter in the dim lobby gave me a key with a number and I made my way up the stairs to a narrow, musty corridor and a hastily painted plasterboard door. Behind it was a single room with its long, yellowish curtains drawn and most of the space taken up by a narrow lumpy bed, square white sink and brown veneered wardrobe. I wiped my clammy palms on my dress. I had no plan, no reason to come, just compulsion. I looked around the walls, expecting spiders, but there were none. I started at a knocking, like a wooden brush against a skirting board. It was cool in the room, and quiet but for cars whirring in the street below. I stood as still as a mouse in a cold cave of air, waiting for an earth in the static. I could hear my blood drumming hotly past my ears. Time to leave, run, run, run. I turned but the door clicked shut. He didn’t say anything.
“You made me jump,” I said.
“How high?”
“I don’t want to stay. Let me out.”
“Scream,” he said.
I just stared at him.
“Scream. Someone will come running. There’s a traveller on either side, a whore across the way, the porter downstairs. They’ll come.”
“I’m not going to scream. Let me pass,” I said.
He didn’t, of course; he walked me backwards until my back pressed against the side of the wardrobe. It was cold and slightly damp against the scoop of skin between my shoulder blades. He dragged his hands over my shoulders and pressed my covered breasts.
“Are you drunk?” he said.
“No more than usual,” I replied.
“Are you afraid?”
“What do you think?”
“Then we can find out about each other,” he said and took his glasses off.
There were no tricks this time. My dread retreated into passion. His hands were tender with my flesh and his mouth soft and strong on mine. I wanted him, believed in him and when it was over, I fell asleep in his arms. Deep asleep from afternoon light until summer darkness, until the rhythmic movement of his body against mine woke me. With my eyes half open, I looked across the pillow and saw his metal-framed glasses folded by an empty tumbler beside the bed. I wasn’t sure at first that I was awake. My senses were sluggish, weighted by the lunchtime Camparis and wine. The room was in darkness but for the gloomy half-light of a lamp in the street. He felt me stirring but didn’t stop; instead, he moved more languidly as if not to wake me. I chose to close my eyes again and let him rock but the half-glimpse of his chalk-whitened hand, gripping my chalk-whitened wrist, startled me. I lay watching it until, with eyes opened wide, I looked straight up at his face.
He was staring right back, his eyes stark in a dusty mask. I looked down over my dusted body, It was paler than moonlight, a strong, sickly perfume rising from it to catch my breath. My mouth was dry as glass paper, my lips moist and sticky. I could taste plums and bitter almonds. His hands loosened their grip, smoothed softly up to my shoulders, then touched my neck. He stroked my skin gently with pallid fingers that stretched around and under my hair, spreading it out over the pillow before they came back to hold my throat, gently first like a child holding a bird, but then too tightly, far too tightly to breathe.
“David?”
“Ssh.”
“David?”
He slowly began to squeeze the breath from me until my instincts kicked in and I pushed violently upwards. He loosened his grip a little.
“Close your eyes. Keep still,” he said. His darkened lips glistened in the half-light and I found my half-strangled voice.
“For Christ’s sake. What are you doing?”
“Don’t talk. Keep still.”
“Get off me. Please. Please.”
“Ssh. It’s all right.”
“Don’t, David. You’re choking me.”
“Don’t talk. It’s all right.”
It didn’t feel all right. It didn’t feel all right at all. Panic made me struggle but as I jerked up again, his hands pressed harder. He squeezed slowly and relentlessly until I couldn’t take in the slightest whistle of air. My eyes seemed to bulge outwards like a bullfrog’s neck, stretching like a bubble-gum ball. A terrible pain surged through my head and I could hear myself grunting, feel myself passing out. Then the pressure eased off and the air wheezed down my throat. I gulped and gulped like a drowning swimmer breaking surface. But he squeezed again and I could do nothing but stare up at his crazy, ecstatic face and pray to a God I’d forgotten long ago. I prayed, but the person who came to mind was my mother, sitting on a red tartan blanket pouring tea from a flask. I could hear it and her calling to me as the midday sun beat down upon my head. The tide was going out and the pressure in my skull pumped up and up. The pain grew again like a tumour. He squeezed and released, squeezed and released, on and on, until I lay limp and he shook soundlessly, like a man drenched in melting ice. I’ll never forget his face. It was the wan, untroubled face of a man at peace; the face of a dead man.
“We have an understanding, don’t we?” he said.
I nodded meekly.
“You understand what I want. I understand what you want.”
I said nothing.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
His dry temperate hands stroked my body and the white dust moved around in swirls.
“What is it?” I asked, my voice thick with fear and pain. He licked his finger and drew a wet circle broken by an arrow on the ivory curve of my hip.
“Oriental face powder. Like chalk, only finer, and perfumed. See, you’re as smooth as a bone.”
His mouth was close, his face was as pale as bleached linen.
“Why me?” I said.
“You let me.”
“You said there were others.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“It’s the look. You never wear colours, do you?”
“No?”
“Just black or white.”
“Oh.”
“And underneath, you’re the same. White skin. Dark hair. Bruised eyes, lips.”
“It’s a hard life as a fashion victim,” I said, turning quickly to move off the bed, but he was quicker. He pulled me back towards him, stained lips stretching over his creamy teeth in a rare, magnetic smile. I put a finger to my face to wipe away a tear and the pale powder came away on to my hand. He leaned over my shoulder and kissed me. I could taste the sweet lipstick and feel the meaty roll of his tongue. He kissed me softly, at first, and then hard, very, very hard.