I had a little suitcase---a "ditch bag," rather---packed and in the front hall closet, just in case. In case of what? In case some smartass burned down Casa Deus? In case Sascha went on the lam and I decided to join him? In case he died and I was charged with his murder? But I really couldn’t kid myself; that little suitcase was ready to take off to San Francisco, along with Peter Greer.
Peter had done his job here, and it was time for him and his down-and-dirty journalistic sleaze to go. This only increased the allure of his proposition. He had pleaded with me several times for me to leave my prematurely aging marriage and live the clean-cut, outdoorsy West Coast life with him---we could be muckraking technical reporters together, or something.
To say that I was torn was a great oversimplification. Peter was definitely not above my contempt---his sleazoid tendencies had bubbled to the surface in his dealings with Deus Ex Machina, beginning with his lie about which publication he was reporting for. But he was totally transparent to me. I wouldn’t have to struggle to achieve his level. We could be, as Wendy had said about herself and Jonathan, a good team.
My little fantasies about the Bay Area were one of the few things that kept me emotionally buoyed during these hot, neurotic days. True, I had only been there once, and only for a few days, and a great deal of that time had been spent inside the meta-artificial world of Moscone Convention Center. But I could be allowed my illusions, couldn’t I? Peter and I would hike out to Point Reyes with our expensive backpacks and organic lunches. We’d go to late-night coffeehouses with our laptops, then dancing at some after-hours club. I’d stroll down to the Castro, and join some women’s collective poetry group...there’d be interesting parties in those glamorous townhouses afterwards...
More than likely, I’d regress to being a Gen Xer again. I’d live in a dump with too many cats who left crunchy trails of kitty litter all over the floor, and too many neurotic roommates who had fled to San Francisco to commune with the Inner Weirdo they had repressed all their lives in Kansas City or Grosse Point.
Actually, my thoughts about Peter were quite simple compared to my relationship with Sascha. Had I ever even been in love with him in the conventional sense? At his best, Sascha was something strange and magical, not quite human, who could wave his wand and have anything or anyone he desired appear on command. At his worst, he was a self-pitying Marcel Proust on speed, an aging, unrepentant undergraduate with too much money to throw around and the emotional maturity of a two-year-old. I didn’t want to be his patient little martyr. I wanted to see the good part of Sascha’s humanity and love him as a person. But he just wasn’t allowing me to do it.
In my actions, I had never given Peter Greer any kind of hope for an extended relationship, or even a physical one. My priorities and loyalties clearly didn’t include him. And even on the most superficial, self-serving level, I knew that it was a bad-gossip mongering move to be seen with him around Cambridge. Peter’s current reputation in our group was much worse than Sascha’s had ever been.
But tonight was different. I had to be willing to be seen with Peter in public if we were going to discuss our potential future. That morning, I had been pretty sure that going with him was the only option I had in the world that didn’t lead to utter misery. I spent most of the morning anxiously working through a program in the textbook Sascha had given me, figuring this was the last time I would have to subject myself to this particular shit. I’d finish the damn book, just to prove to him that I could. Then I’d email him from somewhere else to tell him so.
Afterwards, upset and unsettled, I went down to the Y with a canvas bag, ready to unload my locker and return my key. I opened up my locker and stared down into it, horrified. My laptop was at the bottom, near the locker’s corroded metal base. A wet bathing suit and an oozing bottle of shampoo had fallen on top of it. Its green sleep light blinked imperviously at me.
Who was I? What did I want, and who was I willing to hurt in order to get it?
*
Just around sunset, Peter and I sat in the new tea bar to talk. Peter ordered some very British-colony sounding tea, and poured lots of milk in it. I brought my own bag of ephedra leaves, and just asked for some hot water and a steeper.
"It makes me sad to see you so miserable," said Peter, looking at me with preppy concern. "This is not the life I would have chosen for you, you know. If I had met you earlier somehow...Or perhaps it’s not too late...isn’t this why we’re here to talk in the first place?" he added coyly.
"We haven’t talked specifics," I replied, ferociously dunking my infuser in the water. "We’ve never even named things as they are. OK, so let’s say I go out there with you. Where do I live?"
"You can stay with me until you find your own place. You’ll undoubtedly be going through some difficult times, and I’d like not to impose."
Sure thing, brother, I thought. "Where would I work?"
Peter shrugged casually. "I know some very important people at the magazines out there. I can just imagine their sense of vindication at hiring Sascha Strathmore’s estranged wife. Those positions would just be temporary, anyway. Ideally, we’d circulate your writing around--"
"But I haven’t been writing! I’ve only been doing computer stuff!"
"So, you’ll get writing again. And you can get published someplace that matters."
"I don’t think you understand." Something bad was happening in my stomach. And, unexpectedly, my antipathy towards Peter was growing. This was not turning into the conversation I had planned for. "I belong to the hacker world now."
"Not after you leave your husband, you won’t belong. Real hackers won’t take you on your own."
"That’s not true," I insisted. "I’ve gotten in, and once you get in, you can’t leave. You’ve been interviewing everybody, getting their histories. You know how it happens. Wendy’s only in the company by virtue of her relationships with Sascha and Jonathan. And she’s one of them.
"Honestly," I added, changing the subject with unanticipated malice, "do you think that your little Rolling Stone exposé will really do us any good? Do you think that we feel good about you solving our mystery only to discover that one of us was trying to put the company out of business?"
"You were already going out of business. I don’t think that Frick’s departure made that much difference. Frankly, Deus Ex Machina Software Inc. probably would have folded, regardless of whether or not someone was putting an extra wrench in the works. It just would have taken a little more time.
"By the way, I find terribly amusing your recent fondness of the term ‘us’ to describe Deus Ex Machina. It doesn’t become you. You’re losing your credentials as a proper outsider. And I thought you were so keen on leaving all those glorified Trekkies behind."
Peter took a thin-lipped sip of tea. His legs were crossed like a woman’s. "Here’s another question. The story’s already in galleys, so you don’t have to worry about me printing your answer: Are you still sleeping with your husband?"
"Excuse me?" I made a move to push myself away from the table, then relented, remembering why I had come here in the first place. "It’s not that we’re not sleeping in the same bed. We sleep on different sides of the same bed," I admitted. "Sascha sleeps with his arms around his computer instead of me. But that’s when he sleeps, which isn’t often. He’s working frantically on his new program, or calling people frantically, or pacing around the house. He falls asleep at his desk, or wherever he ends up. I try to avoid talking to him, because he’s usually such an asshole even when I make myself be nice."
Peter leaned toward me. He was no longer playing at being a professional, inasmuch as he could drop his professional façade, which was not much more than Sascha could. "Listen to me very carefully, Sara. There’s no legitimate reason for me to hang around here any more. Except for you. On Tuesday---that’s two days from now---I have to be back in San Francisco for good, starting work on my next piece. RS liked my article on you guys so much they’re making it the cover story. I’m going to be doing the cover again in a few months."
Sorry to say, I actually gasped here. "We’re the cover story?"
Peter smiled smugly. "So here’s the scoop," he said intently. "Do you want to spend the night with me, tonight or maybe the next? Or do you just want to come straight out to San Francisco? I’ve got enough miles on my frequent flyer account to cover a one-way ticket for you.
"You never belonged with this crowd, Sara. To use their vernacular, they’re hobbits, and you’re an Elf. In a few years, all these guys who used to run the world out of their pockets and their egos will be company men or hand-to-mouthing it with consulting. It was a mistake for you to marry Sascha anyway.
"Think about it," he said softly. "I need to know tonight. I won’t be able to sleep otherwise."
I looked at him for a while, aware that I was lifting out of my body the way I sometimes did to get a better view of the situation. What did he mean I didn’t belong to Sascha? Didn’t I look just like a hacker girlfriend these days? Did Peter think he was going to change me back right away? Or change me into a third thing I hadn’t been yet?
"Let’s go," I said. "I don’t want to talk about this here."
"Certainly. I want to go to my place and finish packing. Will you come with me?" Peter slapped a $10 on the table, far more than I was sure our teas and tiramisu had come to. "The tea bar’s new. They need some extra capital." It was a show of masculine grandiosity, on a very small scale. Too small to be persuasive, for sure.
The evening was hot. At home, Sascha and Jonathan were probably crossing out the last of their exit options one by one. The atmosphere would be so tense there that even alone on the third floor I would be able to feel it. But in Harvard Square, everyone was laughing and eating ice cream in soft summery clothes, and I was relatively safe.
Peter tried to take my hand, but I wouldn’t let him. I saw too many people I knew. They waved, I waved back, but they wouldn’t approach me. Why should they? I was smiling at---albeit fakely---and in close conversation with the current Enemy.
We ducked into an alley behind Mass. Ave., away from most public observation. I checked to see how far I had returned into my body: not very. There was a faint buzzing where my limbs should have been.
"Sara, I need to know," said Peter petulantly, backing me up against a painted brick wall. "Come home with me. It’s so easy. Sascha won’t even know you’re gone."
"I can’t. Sascha might not know I’m gone right now, but he will. Peter, he’s really fragile right now. I don’t want to have to take care of a fragile person, but he’s so exceptional, and so powerful, and he’s so sad..."
"Just kiss me. That’s all I’m asking. Let me feel you close to me."
So I did. In every way that Sascha was warm and squirmy and impatient, Peter was stiff and elegant. It was like kissing a race horse after being used to kissing a puppy. My back was against the brick wall. Peter leaned over me. His body was heavy on mine, but his hands were pressed against the wall around the top of my head, as if he were being arrested and strip-searched.
He was not erotic, especially when he took his mouth away from mine and started licking behind my ear, pausing only to say dirty things into it. In fact, the whole situation felt very contrived. At some point, a director would yell "Cut!", the cameras would stop rolling, and he would come up to us for a lecture: Yes, we had the Romance at Harvard thing down well---we both looked the part---but could we do it again, this time with more feeling?
"Peter," I said, breaking away from him, "I can’t do this." His eyes were closed and he was still puckered up. I was disgusted.
"Peter," I said again, "this is just not going to work out. I thought I was attracted to you, but I was wrong. You’re cute, and you’re the only person I know right now with an English degree, but that’s not enough. I feel weird. I think I need to go home now, and you do, too. I mean, home, as in San Francisco. Without me."
"Sara! We’ve gotten so deep into this already! You haven’t given me a chance! I want to be your lover---just let me prove it to you. Once is all I’m asking. Then you’ll see."
He grabbed me and started kissing me again. He bent me over backwards like some movie goddess from the 1930s. You get one more minute of this, you pathetic cup of milky WASP tea, I thought, and then I sock you and bolt.
A minute passed. I opened my eyes, ready for the dénouement, imagining what Peter Greer would look like doubled up and puking with pain on the pavement. What I saw was much, much worse: Ian and Frick were coming towards us in the alley. They were in the midst of some intense conversation, and apparently hadn’t seen us. I pushed Peter away in desperation. But he was heavy and latched on, and I wasn’t in time. My eyes met Ian’s and Frick’s. They took one long, dispassionate look at me, and discreetly entered someone’s back door so they wouldn’t go past us. I saw the pay phone on the inside of the door as it slammed shut. Frick was reaching for it.
"That’s fucking it!" I growled, finally shoving Peter as hard as I wanted to. He staggered backwards, confused. "I swear, this is totally fucking it. Don’t call me. Don’t get in touch with me. If I don’t have a marriage when I get home, I’m going to fucking sue you, you sorry, manipulative publicity hound. There! Put that on the record!"
Peter’s movie star dejection continued unabated. "Sara, darling..."
But I was already gone. I ran out of the alley onto Mass. Ave., bumping blindly into sweaty summer revelers. I had to go home. If I ran, I could make it home in less than 10 minutes, maybe in enough time to beat the bad news. This was, I realized as I panted along the street in my unwieldy sandals, the first time I had really thought of Casa Deus as "home."
*
When I got to Casa Deus, I begged the voiceprint lock to let me in. No response. I punched in my backup numerical combination three or four times, and still the big front door held fast against me. Sascha’s rotting truck was parked in the driveway. I rang the bell. No one answered.
He had changed the settings on the lock so I couldn’t get in.
I had not brought my house keys. I had a pair for emergencies; not once in the year since I had moved in had I ever needed them. I hadn’t brought my cell phone either, so I ran back down the three blocks to Mass. Ave. to use the payphone on the street. I called our home line, then the Deus Ex business line, then Sascha’s cell phone. No one answered anywhere. I left a series of messages, each progressively more concerned. But we had voice mail, which records silently, and he’d never know it was me.
Dammit, I thought, I know he’s at home. Why won’t he answer? What the hell kind of stunt is he concocting?
I called the Marshalls’. I got the babysitter. Wendy was in labor, she said. Jonathan had taken Wendy to the hospital. Had the babysitter seen Sascha? She hadn’t, she said; in fact, no one had, and Jonathan had expressed his concern about it before he left.
All this made me irrationally anxious. It was around ten at night, and I was emotionally drained and jittery. I wanted to be in my house and sleep in my bed, preferably with my husband. But something was wrong, and all the doors of Casa Deus had been shut against me.
I stood on the front walk and tilted my head back to look at the top of the house. I saw light---not a bulb, but what looked like candles. I didn’t see any windows open; the night was so hot that Sascha was probably running the air conditioning. I thought I would try yelling anyway.
"Sascha! Sascha! It’s me! Please come downstairs and open the door! Please! I’m sorry!"
I folded my arms and waited. Nothing. I thought I glimpsed something that looked like movement, but I wasn’t sure. I waited some more. A silhouette rose slowly from the floor to the window. I saw a mound of pale curly hair, a hard-set morose face looking directly at me, and then the figure slid down again below the sill like the Loch Ness Monster slipping back under water.
There was no way that anyone---either Deus Ex Machina or Sascha himself---could ever afford to finish the restoration of Casa Deus before it sold. But the house was still covered with scaffolding, and, pumped by ephedra and fear, I hoisted myself onto it.
No lights were on in the main part of the house except for a few computer monitors. So I had to rely on the streetlights---because this was a "marginal neighborhood" they were pretty bright---and lights from the house next door to guide my climb. The scaffolding was clearly designed for six-foot-tall men, not me, and sometimes I had to pretend I was on an elementary school jungle gym. I hung like a lemur by my crossed ankles and sweaty palms until I could get a better grip. I would have a rough time explaining this to the police if they caught me. But if the police came, they’d have to climb up here and catch me first.
Sascha always left one of our third-floor windows unlocked, for just these kinds of emergencies. I hoped that whatever sort of psychosis had overtaken him would not have compelled him to lock it also.
The window was locked. It was here that I felt my first moment of genuine, heart-stopping, sickening panic. The window was locked, and the shade was down.
"Fuck you," I begged the window. I sat precariously on the scaffolding, 35 feet or so above the ground, with nothing to kick open one of the old ripply panes of glass except for my ineffectual peacenik Birks. Help me Goddess, I thought. I don’t want to live this way anymore.
But my husband might already be dead or dying or something. So I tensed up all my leg muscles, the ones I had been honing in the water for more than 20 years, and slammed my foot against the glass right where I wanted it to break. The pane shuddered and came out in two pieces. I braced one of my feet against the side of the house, and yanked up the sash enough for me to slither inside. There was only about an 18-inch gap between the scaffolding and the window, but it was enough for me to be scared. I trusted that fear hadn’t done funny things to my arm muscles, and then I crawled through the window, kicking my legs for leverage and hoping I didn’t fall into the broken glass.
I dropped down, head first, onto the little Persian rug. My hair caught in my eyes and mouth, and I had to spit it out. Just in time: I noticed that my flailing legs had knocked over a row of candles that were placed along the baseboard. I didn’t want to set either the floor or the rug on fire. I propped the candles back up carefully, and looked around me.
I was surrounded by candles in the dark room: squat votives, long, elegant tapers, thick scented trunks. The mingled smell of vanilla, lavender, various fruits, and joss sticks was overpowering. Some kind of horrible, sacred scene was unfolding here, and I hadn’t been invited to participate.
Sascha was on his knees with his back to me. He was dressed in some ceremonial, drugged-out tunic, silver and shot with a hundred rainbow colors that shifted and glittered in the light. Near his bare feet was a large unsheathed saber. He knelt before a chair. Sitting in the chair was Crystal. She wore a long black embroidered dress, and her long dark hair was around her face. Her expression was closed, infinitely patient, madonna-like. For once she looked like Elia’s fantasy of her.
Sascha, still not turning around, buried his head in Crystal’s lap and sobbed silently. Crystal rested her hands on his head and gazed at me, just as silently. A smaller circle of candles flickered around their bare feet.
I watched this little pietà for a while. The candles guttered. No one moved. Wax dripped onto the beautiful carpet like rain.
Was Crystal helping him head towards his desired destination, or trying to keep him from it? Had they been having sex? What other kinds of secrets were being withheld from my ingenuous gaze? I was paralyzed.
Eventually Sascha turned his head to look at me with the same despairing expression I had seen through the window.
He spoke. "I wanted my life to have a happy ending," he said. "Nothing will ever be happy again. This is the second time Crystal won’t let me end my pain. Will you, Sara? Will you kiss me goodbye and let me go?"
So Sascha was going to kill himself. Considering his elaborate, ritualistic preparations, he must have been thinking about it for a long time. But if he hadn’t picked up my phone messages, he probably hadn’t listened to the message from Ian and Frick, either, if in fact they had called.
"The second time? You and Crystal here have been through this before?"
Crystal kept her eyes fixed on mine, as if she were making up for all the times she had refused to look at me. "You still don’t know, do you."
Sascha sat cross-legged at Crystal’s bare feet. He picked up a candle and ran his hand back and forth through the flame. "I was here, just like this," he said in a soft, sing-song voice. "Crystal was living here too. I was lonely. Wendy was pregnant. She and Jonathan were getting married. We didn’t know if we could keep the company running.
"You’ve heard all this before. What you haven’t heard is how I borrowed a gun from Hank and bought a length of white rope. I came up here, tied myself up and tied the gun to one end. Then I put the gun in my mouth. I had designed it flawlessly; one tug on my end of the rope and the gun would go off.
"I waited for the right moment to pull the trigger. In my mind, I said goodbye to all the women I had loved, and to all my friends I had hacked with. I tried to remember if I had all my papers in order, if I had set aside the money I had planned on giving to MIT.
"Then Crystal came upstairs. She was about to go to bed. Instead she found me. She tried to tell me that I was doing the wrong thing, that I had plenty to live for---all the platitudes you serve up to a suicidal person. I wouldn’t listen. In fact, if I hadn’t tied myself up so tightly, I would have stopped my ears with my fingers.
"She took the gun out of my mouth and cut me down. She held me and stroked me all night. She whispered faerie promises in my ears: I was wonderful. I was free. I was worthy of being on the planet. It was fine that I was just a person, like she was, not Sascha Strathmore, millionaire boy genius. The next day she drove me in my truck to McLean Hospital, and I spent a week there, until I learned to live with myself again. I can never owe her enough. Without her, I would never have met you, Sara."
Crystal smiled her turned-inward smile.
This was all too much for me to take in at one time. Their bond was older and deeper than anything I could hope to achieve with Sascha for many years. In their knowledge of one another were the oldest and darkest passions, eros and thanatos and agape, all of which I continually failed at understanding.
"Tell me your real name, Crystal," I said, inexplicably even to myself.
"I don’t have a real name any more. I gave it up. You can call me Crystal Waters, if you’re looking for a last name. But I don’t like last names, either. Means you belong to somebody."
"What did your parents call you when you were born?"
"An accident. Sascha knows what my name was. I ask him, and everyone else, not to speak it."
I reached inside my backpack. "Write it down for me then."
Crystal took the pen and paper from me. Sascha stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. She wrote something for a long time, much longer than a name should have taken, folded the paper, and gave it back to me. I opened it up.
The paper said "Patricia D’Agnostino." The name was surrounded by Wiccan symbols of protection and renewal.
"Thanks, Crystal." I smiled at her. It was the first genuine smile I had ever given her.
"Please burn it," she said. I nodded and thrust the slip of paper into a candle flame, where it quickly blackened into nothing.
Under ordinary circumstances, Sascha would have been fascinated by our exchange. But he was too deep in his own head now to notice. His face was shadowed above his bright ritual tunic, and now he was passing flame over his hands and his feet and his legs like a yogi.
"OK, Sascha," I said, "what’s your real name?"
"Alexander Henry Strathmore," he said peevishly. "You know that. Leave me alone."
"What about your other names?"
"Sascha@ex.com."
"And?"
"Ahcsas Obsidian. For rituals and building hacking."
"And? What did they call you at your Bar Mitzvah?"
"Simcha. Simcha---Shapiro. They said I couldn’t hide from who I really was."
"What name do you want to be called back by?"
"I don’t want to be called back. I want to die."
I didn’t have the faintest idea how to call someone back from suicide. I had spent so much time making fun of Pagan ritual that I hadn’t paid attention to what anybody did. And I wasn’t going to ask Crystal---Patricia---for any help. This was between Sascha of the many names, and me.
I glanced up at Crystal. She probably wouldn’t have been any help at this point anyway; she had closed herself off to the outside world entirely. Under her hair, she looked like an exceptionally beautiful Easter Island statue.
Some friend who was in couples therapy had told me that in order to bring your spaced-out partner back to you, you merely needed to put your hand on their forehead, look in their eyes, and call their name. Sascha flinched like a cat at first, but finally let me touch him.
"Sascha," I whispered, "are you ready to come back? Are you ready to come back to your life yet? It’s not so bad, really. Can I talk to you?"
Sascha sat stubbornly for a while, then put down his candle and took my other hand. His grip was crushing. I couldn’t tell how long we sat this way; five minutes, maybe, or half an hour. Some of the candles sputtered out. But the moon had started to pass over the porthole at the top of the house, and the room was brighter than it had been before. Some of the sickeningly sweet waxy smell had dissipated.
"I need to make a sacrifice," he said finally, as if he had come to a momentous decision.
"What kind of sacrifices are you into? Disemboweling a lamb? Casting bread on the waters? Swinging a chicken around your neck?"
"Don’t make fun of me. Please come downstairs. Both of you. I need your help."
Sascha stood up unsteadily. He took my hand again. "Please. Downstairs."
"What about all these candles? We can’t leave them here."
"I’ll blow them out," whispered Crystal. "And I’ll take the sword and put it away someplace safe."
Sascha started dragging me down the stairs to the Deus Ex offices. I couldn’t tell if he was on something. I didn’t think so. His pupils were the right size, his skin didn’t smell funny, and his aura inasmuch as I credit auras seemed to belong only to him. But he had clearly tranced himself into some kind of deranged state. And even if he weren’t acting quite this extreme, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight for a minute.
In his private office, Sascha methodically began to unplug the dock and monitor for his laptop. I asked him if I could turn on the light, but he shook his head. He unhooked the Ethernet, and all the machine parts from one another. "Here," he said, handing me the dock. "Take this."
So somehow the three of us were walking processionally down the quiet dark broadway of Magazine Street, each carrying a piece of the sacrificial computer. It was now after 1 a.m., and the buses and subway had stopped running. No one was out anymore. A couple of gang kids swaggered towards us. When they got closer, they looked at us then one another, shrugged their shoulders like we were crazies, and walked off in another direction.
Sascha carried the monitor; I carried the dock; Crystal carried the laptop itself. Both were still wearing their ritual outfits and were barefoot. Nobody spoke. The leaves on the big trees were green on black, and I heard all of them move.
It was a mile to the Mass. Ave. bridge, and I was tired and the computer stuff was heavy. We padded through the back streets, past the new housing development and the converted factories and the pale green MIT nuclear reactor. The MIT student center was dark. A few Techies scurried by us, eyes down, consumed by whatever was in their heads.
The moon’s reflection was bright on the mucky, dense Charles. Sascha caressed his monitor. Then he put it down and leapt onto the Mass. Ave. bridge’s cement railing at its arc, right above the painted sign that reads "Halfway to Hell." "I am so fepped out," he said to no one in particular.
A few people were crossing the bridge, but they wisely stayed away from us. Sascha crouched forever in his glittery costume, poised like a gargoyle. Finally he grabbed his laptop’s dock and gracefully threw it over his head like a basketball player making a free-throw shot. The dock plunged down for two or three seconds, sat on the surface for just a bit, then sank whitely into the sludge.
Sascha stood up and paced on top of the bridge railing, holding his hand over his eyes. I guessed he was checking for any boats that might be flowing with the current into the East. I hoped to God he wouldn’t throw himself in.
Simultaneously, I was eyeing the bridge’s dimensions. I imagined following him the 30 feet down and swimming through the muck to rescue him. A person of rational mind jumping into the water for a lark might be winded by the impact, but could surely swim to shore. But Sascha was not rational. He was also wise enough in the ways of suicide that he, and many Techies before him, had probably considered and calculated the effectiveness of this plunge.
I must have taken my eyes away from him for just a second too long, because I heard a terrific smashing smack and I froze. That’s it, I thought wildly. I’ve failed. I whirled around, and Sascha was still standing on the bridge, gazing down serenely into the dark water. I peeped over the edge and saw the tiniest bit of the big monitor disappearing under the waves.
He nodded towards me. I guess I knew what he wanted, so I handed him his laptop. He held it up in the air, examining it, like those kitschy pictures of Moses delivering the Ten Commandments. I knew that if he threw it in it would be technically cheating; Sascha had a daily tape backup made of all his work. But the untimely end of his $4,000 machine, the womb of his hacker’s mind, was probably symbolic enough.
The computer spun through the air on its way down. The impact of the water cracked the case apart at its hinges. My last glimpse of it was the dark hard drive and shiny microprocessors being covered with ooze before it sank.
Sascha sat on the bridge, dangling his legs high above the Charles. I jumped up next to him. I miscalculated a little, though, and one of my Birkenstocks fell into the water. I watched it fall, complacently. Crystal hitched up her witchy dress and hoisted herself up on Sascha’s other side. She sat with her hand on the little embroidered bag around her neck, then with a shrug pulled it off and tossed it in the water.
Sascha sang from the last song on Dark Side of the Moon: "...All that you give/All that you deal/All that you buy beg borrow or steal/All you create/All you destroy.../All that is now/All that is gone/All that’s to come/and everything under the sun is in tune/but the sun is eclipsed by the moon..."
Bells somewhere rang two. We all sat, looking at the moon over the water.
"I guess that’s it," Sascha said finally. "I think we should go home now."
Crystal yawned. "Yeah. I think it’s about time for me to be going too. I did some divination, and they said my time in town is over. Besides, Lady Kira is getting sick of me, I think."
We walked Crystal back to Lady Kira’s. Even this late on a Sunday night, the dominatrix’s house was still lit up by a glittery light, and a couple of cars were parked in the driveway.
"Do you want to come in?" asked Crystal.
"I don’t think so. Thanks, though. My wife and I have a lot to discuss."
"Look, this might be the last time you guys see me for a while. I have an invitation at a commune in Oregon, and I think I need to get out of here as soon as I can. I’ll stop by if I have a chance. But don’t expect it or anything. Look, Sascha, you’re going to be OK, right? Your wife can take better care of you than I ever could."
Sascha smiled. "Thanks," he said, kissing her on the cheek.
"Oh, by the way," said Crystal, "I got mail from Daphne. She’s coming back to the US, at least for a while. You’re not supposed to know it yet, but she wants to talk to you. And meet Sara."
"Yeah? Why’d she suddenly decide this?"
"We’re in touch," said Crystal. "In more ways than you think."
I dangled my remaining Birkenstock in one hand and put my other arm around Sascha’s shimmering waist. "Hey Crystal?---Thanks a lot. I really mean it. Sorry I’ve been such a bitch to you."
She looked me in the face. She was wondrously beautiful under the streetlights, a woman in the chiaroscuro of an Italian Renaissance painting. "No problem," she said, then swung towards Lady Kira’s door and let herself in.
"C’mon," I said to Sascha. "You’ve got a long day tomorrow. We need to go to bed. We’ll clean up all the junk you left lying around the bedroom in the morning."
"Let’s sit on the roofdeck and watch the sun rise," he said. "I think I’d like that."
Inside the dark kitchen we made coffee by feel and took it up to the roof. I peered into Casa Deus’ luxurious shadows and felt a tremendous sense of nostalgia and loss. It was, I knew, nostalgia for a world I had never experienced in its flowering, could never have joined on my own merits, and wouldn’t have wanted to belong to at its inception anyway. But the sadness was no less poignant because of it.
On the roofdeck, Sascha and I took off all our clothes and made love on the redwood planks that were only now starting to cool down from the heat of the day. It took a long time, and we both enjoyed it, touching one another delicately as if our bodies were new to both of us. Then, still undressed, we lay on the wood, and, dozing, waited for dawn. Finally, the sun rose harshly across the Hancock Tower and onto the Charles. It was going to be another hot day.
We heard the impatient tooting of horns over by the river. Sascha stood up and laughed, pointing towards it. "Look at this!" he said. A long line of laden cars was starting to pile up on Memorial Drive and Mass. Ave. "Tomorrow’s the first day of MIT freshman orientation. The Frosh are coming!"
"Yeah, and I bet Wendy had her baby, too. You know what else? We missed your birthday. And it’s almost our first wedding anniversary. I had forgotten in all this michegas."
The season was turning again. Early-morning sailors and joggers were beginning to mass up on the Charles. It was heartbreakingly beautiful and golden, back-to-school time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But I knew that, like Crystal, our stay here was up, and it was time to move on.
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