Here’s a little bit about me that might explain how I got to this point: Ten years ago, I didn’t get into Harvard. But I did get into Boston College, that beacon of Catholic Prepdom. BC even gave me a scholarship. I was the top backstroker in high school, and the college, thinking it could score some diversity points, got a Jewish swimmer for its varsity women’s team.
I hated virtually every second I was at BC, hated all the kelly green sweaters and sororities and the little heart-and-crown claddagh rings people wore when they were going steady. I shrunk from the pseudo-gothic spires and the administrators in their Jesuit robes. Nothing, not even being an adequate contribution to the Lady Eagles or running the campus literary magazine, or even being a close approximation to one of their cute, blond coeds, was enough to curb my overwhelming anthropological alienation. I had a couple of friends. Later on, I had a boyfriend who I went out with for a few years. I didn’t really like the beerfests so I switched to pot, which meant a crowd dressed in black instead of primary colors, except that at BC it was almost always the same crowd, just under different guises.
Thinking you want to be a writer because you can’t do much other than a fast butterfly or a pretty dive is not a big professional confidence-booster. So after some classic Generation X employment experiences, I ended up working for the BC alumni magazine (the irony!). And because I could get nice insurance and a permanent locker at the athletic center’s pool, I kept working there. I spent most of my free time either under water or on top of it, as an instructor at Boston Community Sailing.
Despite how much I love to routinely ditch everything having to do with my past, I never bothered moving out of the little Boston College enclave around Cleveland Circle. I tried living with a guy in Somerville one time, but that quickly fell flat, and back I was, calling my college friends who I sort of hated by that time anyway and begging for a room in one of their apartments.
I knew the neighborhood with a dysfunctional familiarity: the two-family houses packed with Chassidic Jewish families on one side and backwards-capped beer-swilling Jesuit students on the other; the Shim Gum Doh Zen Karate Center; the patients from the head injury hospital tootling along the sidewalk in their motorized wheelchairs and bicycle helmets; the constant racket of trolleys and church bells. Friday night you went to The Circle fern bar or the dirty townie bar across the street, usually in your work clothes, because they signified that you were not only gainfully employed but also that you held down a decent white-collar job. You got drunk with your fellow BC alums. Sometimes, if you were "unattached," you went home with someone to an apartment that was a carbon copy of yours. Saturday afternoon you took the trolley to Harvard Square, then came home to go to a party Saturday night. Same drinking scene ensued. Then on Sunday, penance day, you jogged around the reservoir, read the paper, and cleaned your apartment.
With the exception of going to Harvard Square and hitting a good stride outside the Chestnut Hill Pump Station, none of these activities really interested me. But I had gotten pretty used to being a slacker by that point, and I often followed the crowd out of default. I spent a lot more time in Cambridge than most of my peers, though; I knew what the real intellects did, and it wasn’t bar-hop.
For instance, little did my fellow bitter Harvard rejects know that the Crimson Megalith, it seemed, had been eclipsed by MIT as the dominant culture. Consider as proof all the cybercafes and over-espressoed nerds, who were suddenly just too chic. People without some kind of computer paraphernalia attached to their bodies were now in the minority; glasses and big dorky backpacks were stylish; even the venerable Wordsworth Books always had computer stuff in its front window.
I could usually pick out the real digerati in a minute, though. The skinny guy with the glasses and backpack, yelling at the cashier in Starbucks about how they had misprogrammed the cash register. (When they called out the manager, I heard that the guy had written the software that connects all the registers to one another and was immediately given an embarrassed apology and a free double.)
Passing by Hubba Hubba, the S&M shop, I gawked for a bit at two women and a guy. All were a little pale and pudgy in black computer-related T-shirts, jeans with rolled-up cuffs, and long stringy ponytails. They were trying on black leather goodies, snorting with laughter, and making references to Highlander (the TV show, not the movie), and something called "teledildonics."
In the mainstream bookstore, I stood in line as if to talk to the bearded guru, who was signing the latest edition of his book, Sendmail for the Initiate. I was surrounded by gurus-in-training who held this man’s book at their sides like javelins. A couple of them tried to make super-friendly conversation with me: "What’s an attractive woman like you doing at a book signing like this?". I smiled pleasantly and said, "I have no idea what sendmail is, and I’d like to find out." "Oh," they’d say, disappointed. "A newbie," and turn away. (Sendmail is, by the way, a program that receives and sends mail on Unix operating systems.)
And the hacker, whose angelic, slightly mad face I recognized from its occasional appearance on the pages of the Boston Globe’s Business section, who looked at me long and hard every time I came into the coffeehouse we both frequented, then sighed and turned back to his laptop in an orgy of typing, eyes rolled back in his head.
I wondered at my weird interest in these folks---not in the technology per se, but at the absolute difference of mind and lifestyle between them and me. I had a Mac at work, and my own email address, and I could zip around a desktop publishing program when I had to, but I was like a very smart trained animal imitating the actions of a human. I also knew that there were many fine majors at MIT that didn’t involve computers. The programmers and the Media Lab guys, though, were clearly the stars of MIT’s show. Judging by the way they swaggered down Mass. Ave. or cut in the bar line at the Miracle of Science café, they thought so too.
The kid at the coffeeshouse had caught my particular attention. I admired his bearing, which was dignified in spite of itself, and how driven he looked. Also, he was a little bit cute, in a boyish way that left me clueless about his age. So a couple of months later, when another small article about him appeared in the Globe, I took note. I found out that his name was Sascha Strathmore, and that he had graduated from MIT two years before I graduated from BC. Most important to the press, he was the president of a Cambridge company called Deus Ex Machina Software Inc. DEM sold a product, apparently Strathmore’s brainchild, called ExCommunicate. ExCommunicate, as far as I could piece together, was a first-of-its kind program for high-end computers. It was something called "groupware": you and your work team could write to, look at, and talk to one another all at the same time, or some variation thereof, no matter where your bodies were located. (Many of my definitions for these words were laboriously gleaned from a purloined copy of The Hackers Dictionary, since I didn’t have anyone to ask for help.)
ExCommunicate, about to be released in Version 3.0, could apparently handle both live ("real-time") and recorded audio and video, along with standard groupware functions like text-sharing, calendaring, and conferencing. The product didn’t need a server, or central machine, so all the computers on the network had equal control over the shared applications. The computer screens could be split in half to allow, for instance, text on one side, and real-time video on the other. You could videoconference with remote sites. And it had a lot of nifty bells and whistles, like an automatic database, that made it the most sophisticated groupware product on the market. If you were a Unix workstation user, ExCommunicate was the ultimate in never having to leave your desk, no matter where you went. At least that’s what I understood with my limited knowledge.
I had access to the Internet at work, so I spent some time poking through the search engines on the World Wide Web, looking for references to Deus Ex Machina Software and Sascha Strathmore. I found the company’s home page on the Web, silver on black, with all kinds of neat demos I couldn’t try because my computer didn’t have the right equipment. Displayed prominently was a still photograph of the company. They looked a handful of typical computer jocks, I thought, with Mr. Strathmore himself lying like an odalisque in the center of a long table, resplendent in black pants and a silver dinner jacket. When you clicked on it, the photo would, apparently, come to life, and the Deus Exers, as they called themselves, would introduce themselves and their product by uploading a little tour onto your machine---and if your network was open, to everybody else’s machine on your Ethernet. (Their price, I noticed, was too high to mention online.)
I clicked on the links to some of the company members’ home pages. Sascha didn’t have one. The VP, Jonathan Marshall, who was also around my age, had included a picture of himself and his wife, Wendy. Both had dark straight ponytails, heavy eyebrows, and overdeveloped legs. They were standing on a mountain and holding their baby, Tuathà Starchild, who also had overdeveloped legs and a little black Mohawk. Some of Jonathan’s links, in addition to "Multimedia Resources" and "Real-Time Panoramic View of MIT from the Top of Building 54," included "Pagan/Wicca Pages," "The Polyamory Hiking Club," "MITSFS (MIT Science Fiction Society)," and "Gallery of LSD Blotter Art." Wow, I thought, I’ve never experienced so much alternative lifestyle in one place, even virtually.
The Usenet groups comp.unix.multimedia and comp.multimedia.unix (ideological rivals, apparently, although I couldn’t tell the difference between them) seemed to have no great love for Sascha Strathmore, although they did grant him some grudging respect. Actually, the most interesting reference to him I came across was in the header of a message in the Usenet group alt.sex.bondage: "Re: Wimps and Whips (was: Re: Crystal Sez: Sascha Strathmore Won’t Be Tied Down!)." Alas, the post now seemed to be about making your own crops out of data cords, with no mention of the people in question. I couldn’t find the original post---not even in the Usenet archives. It was as if someone had deliberately taken it off.
Overall Sascha was, I read, "arrogant," "single-minded," and had "delusions of grandeur." Someone called him a "whiny, self-absorbed autocrat...one of the most cordially despised members of the Unix community since 1983." Almost no one had anything but praise for his product, though.
Oddly enough, all this negative commentary only increased my curiosity and vicarious pity for poor old Sascha, who I had come to think of on a first-name basis. Maybe he was a prick, but postings on Usenet were supposed to be particularly vituperative. Maybe he was just one of those misunderstood geniuses I had always wanted, unsuccessfully, to be surrounded by.
So I took it upon myself to meet Sascha face-to-face.
*
I hasten to add here that, although boyfriendless for some time, I was not particularly horny. Sex, I always felt, was not something to be avoided, but certainly not something to be pursued for its own sake. It wasn’t a big deal if I slept with a guy on the first date---or the tenth. Usually I gave in closer to the first, because I knew I probably wouldn’t like it no matter what, and the poor guy was usually so desperate for me. Nor was I (I thought) especially eager for male companionship.
I had some well-meaning souls say to me: "Sara, maybe you’re just not that into relationships because you really like girls instead." It was a piquant idea, but I looked back at the innumerable times I had been so modest in the locker room and decided: No, I’m just a prude. It was possible I would be aroused by a woman’s body if I were in love with her; in my experience, there was nothing doing with a man’s body unless I was crazy about him. Which wasn’t too often. I therefore concluded that the problem with me and sex wasn’t that I was bisexual; in fact, I was just sort of asexual.
So I felt I had nothing but pristine intentions when I plopped down next to Sascha Strathmore at one of Mondo Espresso’s little butcher-block tables, where he was just then taking a break from his flurried typing to stare wearily out the window. He turned his head to see who had joined him. He gaped. I opened my mouth, shut it again, and opened it one more time.
"Hi," I said coolly. "My name’s Sara Abrams. You’re Sascha Strathmore. I’ve been doing some reading about you. I wanted to meet you in person since I’ve seen you around a lot."
He ran his tongue over his lips. "I’ve seen you around too. I didn’t know your name. Otherwise I would have looked you up on the Net." He smiled a faint pink smile. "Want to see what I’m working on?" he asked hopefully. He pushed his laptop over to me. I saw screenfuls of computer gibberish.
"I’ve consulted my Tarot deck," he said solemnly. "Terrible things lie ahead for me. I need to be prepared. So this is the program I’m writing to prepare myself. Although the cards didn’t say anything about there being a woman...But anyway. This is the best project I’ve ever worked on. It’s so simple, so stylish, and still so powerful. I’m calling it SWorld---after me, of course. It’s an Artificial Intelligence-based multilevel personal database."
I noticed that Sascha Strathmore had asked nothing about me. That was OK for the moment; he didn’t need to know anything just yet. I watched his impassioned computer-related gesticulations and made what I hoped were appropriate noises of approval.
Sascha was stubby but strong, not that much taller than me, and very pale---pale blond curly hair badly in need of a cut or a comb-out or something, round pale blue eyes with purple shadows underneath them, pale flawless skin with a few pale curly hairs he missed that morning---and very jumpy, biting his cuticles and looking around as if something were after him. He was wearing Levis that, I noticed, were not evenly buttoned along the fly, a white shirt, and Birkenstocks. He was also wearing an earring, a crystal around his neck, and a couple of rings. He smelled of Ivory soap and patchouli, and jingled faintly every time he moved.
"So, Sara," he said finally, "what do you do?"
"I work for Boston College Magazine, the glossy one for alumni."
He looked like I had hurt him. "So...you’re Catholic? I thought you might be Jewish."
"I am. I just went to a Catholic school. Jewish women can be blond and jocky too, you know," I added, annoyed. "Are you?"
"Oh my God." His eyes were getting larger. "I’m so lucky to have met you. My family’s name used to be Shapiro---my father changed it because he thought it would be better for business. In the long run it didn’t help, but that’s a long story and we have better things to talk about. So what do you do at the magazine? Write? Edit? I’m not sure what goes on at one."
"Some of both. I like to write for fun. Fiction, mostly."
"Are your stories published?"
"Yeah...why do you care?" I said defensively. "You don’t strike me as a big fiction fan."
"In another life I might be. In another life I might even be a writer myself. But I’m pragmatic. I’m just a hacker. I admire people who are successful in their chosen fields, though. Where can I read what you’ve written?"
"Noplace big. Actually---" was I about to tell him a big embarrassing secret of my past, right off?--- "when I was 15 I won the annual Avon/Flare Award for teenage writers. I had a novel published with them."
"Wow." I guessed he didn’t know too many English majors over there at MIT. "What was your book called? What’s it about?"
"It was called Halls of Shame," I said, now more than a little embarrassed, but what the hell. "It was about this pot-smoking clique of football players and cheerleaders and what happened to them."
"I went to private school," Sascha said thoughtfully. "We didn’t have things like that there.
"Actually I’m mostly into watersports," I said, trying to change the subject.
"Pissing on people?" asked Sascha, taken aback. "I’ve had women who wanted to do that with me, but I always thought it was too gross. Crystal especially was into that shit. But with the right person I guess I could do it, especially if I were tripping hard enough..."
I tried not to laugh. I also remembered the name "Crystal" from the bondage newsgroup, and figured she had to be one perverted chick. "No! I mean like swimming and sailing and scuba diving and stuff. Do you sail?"
"Oh sure! All the time! I mean---well, we used to vacation in the Caribbean when I was a kid, and I learned how to sail by myself. And I took sailing for PE credit. But I still have a membership at the MIT boathouse. I try to make it there a couple times a year. Do you want to go tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow’s Monday."
"So work late."
"I have a regular office job."
"So sign up for some flex time."
"I have to wear a skirt. I work until 5:30 every day. Things are pretty rigid. Haven’t you ever worked in an office like that?"
"No," said Sascha, perplexed. "Why would I?"
"How about next weekend?"
Sascha jumped up. "Great! I’m looking forward to it! Here, take my business card. It has all the places you can find me. Do you have email?"
He fumbled around in the pockets of his Levis looking for his card. Instead, he pulled out a crystal the size of a golf ball strung on a black silk cord; an Ethernet terminator; a condom; a $100 bill; a miniature screwdriver; an origami swan; and a tiny plastic baggie, which he quickly thrust back into his jeans.
"Damn, they have to be here somewhere," he muttered. His backpack was no more helpful, although it did turn up a miniature Boston phone book, a deck of Tarot cards, a cell phone, a DAT tape, 2 oz. of saffron, several cables, and a copy of Doing Business on the Internet--- "Don’t read this book," he said. "It sucks." I told him I wasn’t planning on it.
It was actually time for me to start heading home, although to do what I wasn’t sure. "Can you come home with me?" asked Sascha. "You can see my house---it’s right nearby, and I have a lot of cool stuff in it. The company actually runs out of it, although we have a brand-new show office on Broadway near MIT, for sales and product demonstrations and stuff."
"Look, you don’t have to lure me," I said. "I’m sure your house is great. I’ll take a look at it next time we see each other, OK?"
"But I can still call you? Send you email? By the way, why do you live in Brighton and not in Cambridge? Isn’t Brighton sort of blue-collar and anti-intellectual? No good restaurants there as far as I know, either. And no hackers."
"It’s cheap. I know people there. Work is nearby. Aren’t those the same reasons you live in Cambridge?"
"Look, I have a lot of room in my house," Sascha said firmly. "You’re welcome to break your lease and come stay with me. A lot of women have, you know."
*
Sascha’s last tacky and provocative comment aside, I did look forward to the sudden daily stream of email missives. In between telling me how thrilled he was to have met me and how he was really looking forward to our sailing excursion that weekend, he asked me a lot of presumptuous questions and answered a lot more unsolicited ones. He asked me why I had bothered going to Boston College ("Did you really need a scholarship that badly?"---the answer, unfortunately, was "yes,"); whether I was seeing anybody right now ("ha!"); comparing notes about what it was like to grow up even nominally Jewish in two particularly WASPy cultures (Pepper Pike, Ohio in his case; Rochester, NY, in mine---both of us thought we had been treated better just for being blond).
I asked Sascha if he were into drugs; he certainly seemed to mention them more than once during our first meeting, and I couldn’t help noticing the suspicious Baggie in his pocket. (His response: "Don’t EVER discuss drugs over the Internet. It’s like sending a POSTCARD! And by the way, don’t ever discuss them over the phone with me, either. Our phones are tapped.") He had no problem asking me, though, whether I had ever had sex with a woman. ("Why does everyone keep asking me that?" Sascha: "I dunno. I just thought it was something all intelligent women did.")
I heard about his Diamond-as-Big-as-the-Ritz childhood in a preppy Cleveland suburb---and the end of its excesses in the early 1980s recession. I heard how Sascha had gone dumpster-diving to resuscitate a neighbor’s old computer; how he had hand-coded all the software to go with it because it wasn’t in the trash ("Couldn’t your parents with their big bucks just have bought you a new one?" "Yeah, but I had *done* that already. The thrill would be gone. I wanted to be like Bill Gates and the other pioneers who went dumpster diving at engineering firms and built their computers from scratch. Youthful naïveté, though---I wouldn’t want to be anything like Bill Gates now. I don’t think.") I found out about the first computer program he had sold, a rudimentary example of the Artificial-Intelligence-based database he was working on now, which had nevertheless netted him more than 50 grand before he graduated high school.
But life as an enfant terrible was not easy, apparently. "My partner, Jonathan Marshall [my mind swooped back to his home page] is married to my ex-girlfriend, Wendy Sweeney [memory of excellent but hairy legs; baby in tow], who I went out with for almost six years," he wrote. "They have a baby. They don’t know whether it’s Jonathan’s or mine. It almost killed the company. I almost killed myself. BTW, I get very depressed. You ought to know that."
After all Sascha’s posturing and confessing, I felt I had nothing to add. I had led a boring, sheltered life. I hadn’t done anything, gone anywhere, suffered or accomplished nearly enough. I told this to Sascha. ("This too will change," he sent back.)
All of our belles lettres occurred during business hours, and I had to sneak around a bit to write as much as I wanted. Sascha was worried about that too---not so much because our secrets would be revealed, but because Boston College officially owned the permanent records of our email conversations. In other words, Sascha said, if my boss felt like firing me one day, he could, simply by saying that I used university equipment for personal correspondence. "We *must* do something about this," he wrote to me finally. "I’ll get a suitable system set up for you."
Our date was Saturday afternoon. The Thursday night before, I came back to my apartment to discover that the super had brought three large boxes into the living room. Inside them was a Macintosh PowerPC, with a note from Sascha: "I feel terrible for you that you don’t have a home computer. So I’m giving you one. I hope you like it. XXOO, S.S."
I was mortified at his excess. I called him up to tell him I couldn’t possibly accept a $2,000 present from someone I barely knew.
"Oh, it didn’t cost me $2,000," he said breezily. "It was just something we had lying around the office. We collect way too much computer paraphernalia anyway. You needed a home computer. I’d prefer to give you a workstation with ExCom on it, but you don’t know anything about Unix, and I know you know about Macs. I’ll teach you Unix commands; you’re smart, it’s easy. Besides, ExCom 3.0, which we have out in Beta testing right now, has a great interface. You’ll pick it up in a second. Anyway, do you have an extra phone line? You can dial into our modem bank for free. I’ve already built you an account; the machine is programmed to call our modems. The Mac has a built-in modem. And if you move in with me, of course you’ll have the whole package, with a T1 connection. But you’ll be able to keep your Mac if you want; we’ll just give you an Ethernet card to jack into the system."
My housemate, Kathy, thought my situation was a hoot. "You’re going out with a computer nerd?"
"I’m not going out with him, yet. We haven’t even had a date."
"But Sara, computer people are so dirty and yucky! Does he shower? Does he pick his nose?"
"Sascha owns a seven-figure company. You’re in marketing; you can appreciate that. He’s a little eccentric and egotistical, yeah, but he’s very sweet. I like him."
I left the computer in the box while Kathy was still awake. After she went to sleep, I furtively dragged the boxes into my bedroom, unpacked them, and put the machine on my desk. The big monitor was heavy, but setting up the computer was a lot easier than I expected. I found the email program right away. "Thanks a bunch, Sascha," I wrote. "I’m not sure if I deserve a present this exorbitant." I zapped out the message and got up to brush my teeth.
When I got back from the bathroom, there was a message from Sascha awaiting on the screen: "I’ve been waiting to hear from you. And no, nothing is too exorbitant for you. This is only the beginning."
*
Nevertheless, I was a little nervous when I went to meet Sascha at the MIT boathouse Saturday afternoon. What if he turned out to be a colossal jerk? What if he was so desperate he asked me to marry him right there? What if, after all our email conversations, we had nothing to talk about? What if he wanted his computer back?
I was worried about making it to our meeting spot on time. There was a terrific traffic tie-up around the Mass. Ave./Memorial Drive intersection, right in front of MIT. I quickly saw why.
Every time the traffic light turned green, many thousands of shiny soap bubbles, the kind you blow with a kid’s bubble-blower except bigger, spilled down in the sunlight from some unidentifiable source onto the street. Everyone wanted to watch. No one wanted to move. It was a wreck, if a lovely one: It was as if the bubblefest had been planned exactly for this kind of day and this kind of weather.
Stuck on the MBTA bus, behind a produce truck, I considered with amazement that someone or someones---MIT students no doubt---had clearly spent a lot of time thinking up and setting this prank. And yet there didn’t seem to be any real reason for it, other than reveling in the power to stop traffic in a novel way on a weekend afternoon. It was nothing like rival frats painting a rock on the BC campus over and over, which to me was reminiscent of dogs marking the same territory every time they take a walk. I’d have to ask Sascha about it---if they ever let me off this damn bus to find him.
When I saw him (I was almost on time) sitting on the boathouse steps dressed in some Grateful-Dead-meets-yachtsman getup, I was charmed. He ran to the curb, waving both his arms wildly.
I dashed across the street, maneuvering carefully between the idling cars.
"Hi!" I said.
Sascha ran up to me. "Sara! I am so happy to see you!" I could tell he wanted to kiss me, but I respected him for keeping his hands to himself.
He was bouncing-off-the-wall excited. "Did you see the bubble parade?" he asked.
"It took me ten minutes to drive three blocks through that stuff. What’s it for?"
Sascha seemed to like my precise description of time and space. "A bunch of graduating MIT seniors thought this’d be an interesting way to end the school year. Isn’t it beautiful?"
"Sure. Is this the same---phenomenon?---as putting a police car on top of the roof?"
"That hack was great. Pranks like that are called hacks, by the way. So you can be a computer hacker writing a new program, a building hacker who crawls around looking for hidden doors and abandoned rooms, and either a practical joking or malicious hacker who pulls stunts like the bubbles---all at the same time. Many of us are all three. Just to set you straight. Anyway, the police car thing was great---they had a blow-up cop doll inside the car, who was eating donuts. But I wasn’t involved in that hack."
"I guess that means you know more about this one than you’re saying."
Sascha grinned.
"That’s OK. I won’t tell anybody," I reassured him. "We’d better get our boat so that we have at least a puddle to play in. It’s getting pretty crowded out there."
"Let’s go then! The only problem with sailing is that I won’t be able to see your face so well."
The Charles River was a parking lot of sailboats, but we were both decent enough sailors to get our own, calm space. Mostly we were quiet, whispering directions to one another. The afternoon was beautiful, windy but warm.
I told him I had been reading The Hackers Dictionary. Sascha found this extremely charming. Problem was, he took the whole thing more seriously than I did.
"Be careful if you’re reading the 1991 edition," he warned. "A lot of it is already obsolete. Some terminology is a deep part of the hacker culture. Other terms fade away with the hardware. You’re much better off reading the online version, if you don’t mind all the superfluous cultural commentary. Talking about our sex and drug and religion habits! It’s reprehensible! I respect Eric Raymond, who edited it, but he’s disgusting. Crystal didn’t seem to think so, though, hee hee."
Hmmph, Crystal again, I thought. Who was she? She sounded like some kinked-out hacker groupie, with a special predilection for Sascha. I got bad vibes at every mention of her name. But I didn’t want to spoil my nice time by asking about her, and the late afternoon sun and Sascha’s companionship were all so supremely pleasant.
After we docked the boat, we grabbed slices of pizza at an outdoor truck and walked along the Charles. He was so into me, it was really funny.
"Do you like to dance?" he asked me.
"Yeah---do you?"
"It’s great. I’m not too bad for a technoweenie, either. Do you know that my parents actually sent me to that most obsolete of institutions, dancing school, when I was a kid? In other words, do you know how to waltz?"
He grabbed my hand---his were quite hard and strong---and we waltzed in the setting sun on the grassy edge of the Charles.
"We need a good metronome," I said. Let’s try some hacker lingo---FOO, bar, baz, FOO, bar, baz. How’s that?"
Sascha collapsed on the grass, laughing. "Stop!" he gasped. "I’m going to piss my pants." But eventually he got up and we started dancing again, first waltzing to the tune of "FOO, bar, baz," then attempting to tango to the Unix commands he was shouting at me: "Cat! Awk! Ex! Biff! Make! Man! Rupp!," and then "CD!" to turn us around. (CD is short for "Change Directory," which puts you in a different part of the Unix or Windows file system than you were before.)
"You must come home with me," Sascha panted.
"Yes. I agree with you. I must."
At dusk, we walked down Mass. Ave. to Central Square, the grubby, slightly funky, slightly menacing neighborhood halfway between MIT and Harvard. Like many other homes in the vicinity, Sascha Strathmore’s house, at 86 Magazine Street, was a magnificent wreck---three floors of cracked ceiling moldings, mansard windows, elegant, wobbly banisters, and stained glass in the bathrooms. The exterior, peeling grey paint with a once-colorful trim, was covered with scaffolding. This had been the norm for the last few years, Sascha told me. Something was always getting overhauled.
Sascha explained that Casa Deus had once been a grand single-family house. Some years ago, it had been chopped into three apartments. Sascha had moved into the third-story apartment a year or two after graduation, then bought it, then bought the second floor for the company and the first floor for "mixed use." The first floor was the "public living" quarters for Sascha and his guests: living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, sitting room. The second floor had been renovated to accommodate the company offices. On the third floor was Sascha’s small private apartment. The public was not welcome there.
After opening the elaborately carved front door with the voice-activated lock, Sascha gave me a quick but proud tour of the first floor. I got a sense of dark carved wood, bay windows, luxurious blue furniture and carpets, and a giant black home media center. The kitchen was a high-tech cook’s fantasy, soaring ceilings with expensive pots dangling from them and lots of electronic culinary toys. "I’ll cook you a fabulous dinner soon," he said excitedly.
We went upstairs to the second floor, the working offices of Deus Ex Machina Software Inc. While the architecture was still haunted-house baroque, what I noticed most were the numbers of wires I saw everywhere. There were more electrical and data cords than I had ever seen in one place. Wires dangled from the ceiling, looped around the walls and sat in little puddles in the corners. Some cords looked like they belonged on phones. Some were whitish or grey and looked sort of like electrical cord. Some were blue and as thick as a magic markers.
"Like the rat’s nest? It’s our T1 connection," Sascha said proudly, as we passed by a clump of cable. "Fast Ethernet. Twisted-pair copper. Fiber. We’ve got it all."
Sascha led me into the large, gothic "machine room." Stacked floor to ceiling, hanging from giant moveable cables, dismembered on the floor, were computers. I heard the hum and grind of equipment everywhere. A few halogen desk lamps were propped in the corners, but the light---and the vibrating dry heat---came from the machines’ cathode rays. Big fans circulated the air.
"Sascha," said a voice from behind a bank of monitors.
"Ian!" said Sascha. "How are you! I brought someone home!"
The person rose from the corner: blond ponytail, aviator glasses, scrawny thin in jeans, T-shirt, and scrubby little beard. He radiated a kind of offended rigidity.
Typical hacker, I thought. He didn’t look at me with any great favor, either.
"Needing some Tosci’s," said the person named Ian.
"Ian, this is Sara. Sara’s a writer. Isn’t she great?"
"Hi," I said. Like this guy really gave a shit.
"Hi," said Ian the Hacker, stiffly. He melted back into the floor behind the computer bank. "No Grapenut flavor this time, Sascha."
Sascha put his hand on my shoulder. He looked flushed. "Here. Let me show you. This is my program, ExCommunicate. ExCom let me buy this house."
He clicked on an icon on one of the screens, which immediately flicked off its text prompts. A silver "Welcome to ExCommunicate 3.0" popped up on a black background, followed by a friendly-looking opening menu.
Sascha typed T-O-S.
On the screen was a live picture of the inside of the Toscanini’s Ice Cream store in Central Square, a few blocks from the house. Superimposed over the picture was a kind of database: it showed the last time someone called, what they ordered, how much it cost, flavors of the week.
A woman’s voice answered over a speakerphone somewhere.
"Hi, this is Sascha," he said, talking into the computer’s little microphone. "We’d like two pints of Burnt Caramel, two of Colombian Chocolate, a quart of espresso, a quart of vanilla, and a half-gallon of hot fudge. Oh yeah, and some spoons."
He typed in the order, which then flashed onto the screen. "Ian will pick them up in 10 minutes," he said.
When the woman hung up, Sascha turned to me. "Have you ever eaten Toscanini’s ice cream?"
"I’ve had it packaged at Bread & Circus. Not in a cone or anything."
"Tosci’s is an MIT institution," sighed Sascha ecstatically. "It’s the best ice cream in the world, practically. Some big computer companies have gotten their start there, also. I can’t believe you haven’t been to the store. You’ve been so---deprived out there in Brighton."
"I seem to be getting that idea."
"One of the advantages of Deus Ex’s being a successful local company," Sascha continued, "is that we can pull shit like this. We gave Tosci’s the workstation and the connection. In return, we get all our ice cream and whatnot for free. Considering how much money our time is worth, and how much ice cream we eat, we’re actually saving dough this way. And they can be on the Internet. As long as they have a link to us on their home page, of course."
He clicked on an icon that looked like a tape recorder. "Hey everybody!" he shouted into the speaker again. "Tosci’s, my place, 15 minutes." He clicked Send.
"Now all the Deus Exers who are online right now will get my message. In audio. People who aren’t will get it when they log in, unless they log in after the ice cream is gone. It’s much more compelling than email, isn’t it?"
But once the ice cream showed up, Sascha didn’t want to be social anymore. "Let’s go upstairs," he whispered, grabbing a pint of Burnt Caramel.
We walked up three flights of curving half-stairs. Here the air was different---heavier with attic heat despite the air conditioning, but removed from the traffic and exhaust on the street. I felt we were entering a place where the last century still held presence.
When we reached the very top of the house, a moonlit little suite of rooms, Sascha walked up to the floor-to-ceiling window and pressed his forehead against it. "Here," he said. "Look out."
I stood next to him, pressing my forehead and nose against the window as well. The window was cool to touch. The view was virtually unobstructed all the way to the Charles and across the river to the tall lighted buildings beyond.
"Let’s not turn the lights on," he said.
Instead, he pointed to a wooden ladder leading up to a loft that held, I guessed, his bed. "C’mon. Let me show you."
So I climbed up ahead of him. Why not?, I thought.
When I lay on my back on Sascha’s waterbed (how did I get up here? I wondered), I saw a window, a perfect circle, cut into the very top of the house. Sascha Strathmore lit incense and played strange tribal music through crisp little Bose speakers on the walls and fed me Burnt Caramel ice cream from a tiny spoon with an opalescent handle. And when the ice cream was finished, I lay there for many hours, fully clothed and staring up through that circle at the sky as it turned from one part of the night into the other.
At dawn Sascha politely sat outside the door while I showered in the claw-foot bathtub. I washed myself with black perfumed Spanish soap, while green, yellow, and purple stained-glass light filtered down on my skin. He gave me a pair of his old Levis and a black Deus Ex Machina T-shirt to wear home with me. We walked down the big staircase, past the room with all the computers, past some kind of conference room, with more computers and a magnificent walnut table with room for 12 or so. Sascha was on his way to the kitchen, about to whip up some breakfast for his all-nighter employees.
The hackers seemed to be changing shifts. All of them looked me over as I passed by. They thought, understandably so, that I had already bedded Sascha Strathmore. I guessed I looked like one of many, the latest fleshware upgrade, Girlfriend Version 5.0.1 Beta. Except I already knew that I wasn’t.
And so I began my strange life at 86 Magazine Street, known to the initiated as Casa Deus.
*
The summer of my courtship with Sascha was ephemeral and peculiar. It was hard for him to find time for a girlfriend. He did his best, though, in between meetings and programming sessions and brief forays with the press, at which he acted like a small dog, alternately yipping and snapping, and sitting on his haunches begging for attention. I had an especially privileged view of Sascha’s nonstop activities. The was because I had become the most favored member of his entourage: in other words, his fiancée.
Let’s face it: I was Sascha’s girlfriend for about two weeks, maybe three if I wanted to flatter myself. He had been sure after our first date that he wanted to marry me. I was not big on commitment of any kind, to anyone. But Sascha was a magnificent lover, in the old-fashioned sense. When we talked, he never took his pale, luminescent-blue gaze off me, as if I were some exotic wild animal that might flee and run if he weren’t paying absolute and delicate attention. He placed extravagant regard in the things I talked about. Luckily I was wise enough to talk mostly about the subjects we had in common. He struck me as someone who was already set enough in his interests that a venture to something outside his domain---let’s say, a trip to an exhibit of 19th-century American folk painters---might cause him to literally yawn and sit down in a corner with his laptop somewhere.
But we did have enough in common, and outings with him were wild, magical experiences. On one of those rich golden summer evenings, we’d ride our bikes at top speed down the crowded Cambridge side of the Charles River Esplanade. Sascha’d be going 25 miles an hour, easy, deftly and unapologetically swinging his bike about dogs and joggers and parents with strollers, doing additional spins around the trees just for effect. Then we’d get to the Boston University Bridge, which connects Cambridge with Boston, and he’d screech to a halt and say, "Shit! Let’s climb this!" So we’d Kryptonite our bikes to something solid, and start scaling the thirty feet of arching metal girder hoping no police would see us. We heaved ourselves to the top, inside the curve of the big green metal arch, and watched the reddish sunset light pass over MIT, then wash over Harvard, and then presumably bless Boston College, although BC was too far away for us to see it.
Greasy, bruised, and giggling, we’d get back on our bikes and ride to a restaurant for dinner, preferably a slightly overpriced one that didn’t insist on proper dress but would have preferred it. The hosts always knew who Sascha was, but he was hard to miss. He’d trot in with in his hundred-dollar bike helmet strapped to his head. His pale Botticelli curls were tumbling out of it, and his safari shorts were so loaded down with equipment it looked like he had just gotten back from a trip to the Himalayas.
Besides, he had been caught hacking some prominent Cambridge kitchens, taken out bodily as he fiddled with the monster ovens, interrogated the chefs, or sniffed the fish.
"Sascha," they’d say. "How nice to see you again. And this is your...?"
God only knew how many women he had taken to dinner at these places. "This is Sara Abrams, my fiancée," he’d say authoritatively, and the hosts were so used to all kinds of Cambridge eccentricities that they had learned how to hide their facial expressions well.
Sascha would ask for the table with the best cell phone reception. Most of the time they wouldn’t know. So he’d have to turn on his phone and walk around the restaurant with it pointing outward like a dowsing rod, inspecting the signal strength. It was a terribly embarrassing ritual, but it usually guaranteed us a good table.
Once we ordered, Sascha would unclip his alphanumeric pager to check his email, and use his cell phone to call Casa Deus and find out how everyone was doing. We’d sit next to each other to eat, scrounging off one another’s plates: black-and-blue sushi tuna with mango-habañero chutney on the side; cold avocado-garlic soup; and for dessert, Mexican vanilla ice cream with praline biscotti and strawberries, and lots of coffee.
We’d ride back to Casa Deus, which would mostly be emptying out for the night. Sascha and a couple of the Deus Ex crew would sit down in the shadowy, opulent living room. With the near-darkness obscuring the blue Oriental rug, leather chairs, and massive stereo equipment, they’d touch base about the few hours he had missed. I’d say hello politely, suddenly feeling like an alien again. They’d twitch their ponytails impatiently or give me a long, impartial once-over, I guess trying to weigh the stand-offish blonde pageboy against the muscular, sweaty thighs.
I’d go upstairs to Sascha’s little third-floor suite, run the bath water in the ancient bathtub-for-two, and crack open the mini-fridge for a bottle of Perrier, or even more special, some Calistoga water, shipped over from California. Sometimes I’d pour something in the bath water; a particular favorite was this weird green Japanese powder that relaxed your muscles on contact.
Eventually---sometimes much more eventually than I liked, like an hour---Sascha would come in with a couple of pleasantly obnoxious scented candles, and join me in the bath, all that strong pale hair under his sweaty clothes. We’d sit foot-to-foot, sharing the water bottle and reading choice parts of the newspaper to one another. And for a while I’d forget that I was by no means the first woman to get the Courtship Treatment, or that, not more than a couple of years ago, four people had sat naked in this same bathtub while hallucinogens had careened it around like an amusement park ride.
After we got soggy, we’d climb, either laughing and naked, or in matching silk kimonos, up the ladder to Sascha’s waterbed, where we’d dive into the cool sheets and go, quite chastely, to sleep.
For here was one of the secrets of our conjugal success: Neither one of us really liked having sex. Sex was sloppy, undignified---and in Sascha’s mind at least, a colossal waste of time and energy. This was why, I guess, he liked to hurry through it and then fall asleep seconds afterwards. It was also why, even at the beginning, we seldom did it sober.
*
Probably the biggest thing I had done to shock my parents (that they knew about anyway) was my high-speed marriage into the Strathmore clan. They had barely heard about this eccentric wonderboy I was dating, when all of a sudden I was calling them up, saying, "Get out here right now if you don’t want me to elope without you."
So it was a dinky, awkward, slapdash little wedding on the Charles, very different, I’m sure, than what either Sascha or his parents would have imagined for him. I think that my parents repressed their expectations, because that was the groovy, nonjudgemental thing to do.
Team Abrams and Team Strathmore didn’t seem to think much of one another. My father: U. Rochester History professor, fond of Garrison Keillor and trail mix. My mother: high school guidance counselor, fan of The Joy of Sex and quilting. My younger brother, Mike, speeding towards an advanced degree in Deconstructing the New York Times Bestseller List While Stoned.
Sascha’s father: pale, warmed-over failed businessman. Short. Wore double-breasted suit, tie with little bottles of Heinz mustard on it. Listened to things like Henry Mancini. Didn’t read fiction. Sascha’s mother: tall, ‘80s clothes and makeup. Top society fundraiser in Cleveland. Permanently glazed-over look. Liked big expensive dogs and gave them names like "Cha Cha." Sascha’s sister Daphne: 40-year-old lesbian teaching calculus and digging sewer lines in Botswana. Not discussed at wedding.
About 10 people, half of them family, patiently sat through some lame watered-down excuse for a Jewish ceremony. Nor were there any of the Pagan influences Sascha had initially begged for. Afterwards, we limped off to brunch at expensive, preppy/hippie Harvest Restaurant.
No one in either family seemed to notice the large, curly-haired woman dressed in white, who hid behind a tree during the ceremony swinging a sensor filled with incense, waving her arms and chanting to herself. Sascha glanced behind him once to look at her, and smiled familiarly. I was starting to panic.
At brunch, some of the conversation between the parents, rife with mutual subcultural distrust, went as follows:
George Strathmore to Carl Abrams: "So, how’re you doing on the stock market?"
C.A. to G.S.: "Stocks? Well, we just finished paying off our house---we had a graduate student living on the first floor to cover the mortgage. But if I were going to buy some, I wouldn’t anglicize my name to get a better deal."
Nancy Abrams to Helen Strathmore: "You know, I just enjoyed raising my children so much. It’s so nice to see them doing so well. I taught Sara and Michael how to swim, and they both swam varsity in high school and college."
H.S. (in vintage 1989 Valentino dress, Valiumed to the gills) to N.A.: "Sascha had such a lovely Brazilian nanny. She taught him to do everything before we he started prep school kindergarten. She even taught him to tie his shoes. I didn’t need to lift a finger."
Mike Abrams (squinty-eyed in corner, eating pile of deviled eggs and reading paperback copy of The Satanic Verses).
At the end of the harrowing day, Sascha and I jumped into his truck for a long Labor Day weekend at some computer executive’s cottage in Vermont. (Deus Ex Machina shareholder meeting Tuesday---had to get back for that.) I was ready to tear off my little Laura Ashley wedding dress in despair and toss it to the winds. I was convinced that I had made a big mistake: Sascha and I didn’t know each other. We had nothing in common. Our parents didn’t get along. He was a freak. He drove this ancient, rust-riddled excuse for a pickup truck when he could have afforded a BMW, because it was once the same shiny black Toyota he had bought with his own royalties when he went to MIT. I was locked tight inside a box o’commitment with this little weirdo, forever.
But as we waited for the light to change at the corner of JFK Park and Memorial Drive, the wide, white figure lurking around our wedding ceremony ran madly over the grass towards us, holding a big sloshing goblet at arm’s length. "Pull over!" she shouted.
"Congratulations, you two!" she said, kissing Sascha on both cheeks, then me. "You can’t leave without drinking this."
Sascha’s face was pink. "Thanks, Elia," he said. "I knew I couldn’t survive that wedding without a little help from my friends."
She thrust the cup out at him. "Here. Both of you. Drink."
Sascha greedily drank down half of what was in the goblet, then held the cup for me while I carefully sipped the rest. The flavor was sweet and herby and alcoholic, but I couldn’t place it as anything I had ever tried before.
"What did I just do?" I asked the woman Elia suspiciously as cars honked in the heat behind us.
"Ritual magic. Fertility rite. You’re bound together forever." She snapped the cup out of my hand. "You’ll see. Trust me." And she lumbered back off into the trees like a bear in dryad drag, as Sascha, grinning, put the truck in gear and shot off toward the highway.
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