Getting back

CHAPTER THREE

In the mornings he ran to run free. His favorite time was the stillness of predawn, when the city lights were fading and the sky was luminescent pearl before being bleached by full morning. The air was still stale from urban inversion but had always cooled by night's end, and the rhythmic pounding of his feet down the urban canyons put him in a trancelike state that lifted him out of his surroundings and into a different, imagined world: empty, clean, uncomplicated. It was the same fantasy world he chased in his hasty vacations and urgent weekends. He ran because he was calmed by the thump of his own pulse. He ran because exhaustion replenished him. He ran because sweat made him clean. He dreamed of running so far that someday he would reach an edge, an ending, and a new beginning, but he never did. The city just went on and on and at the end of the longest runs- when he was bent, heaving, his droplets of perspiration striking to make stars on the pavement- he was always where he had begun: in the grid, the community, the perfect inescapable world of United Corporations. Breathless, wrung out, trapped, alone.

Then three mornings after his challenge from the cyber underground, she ran by him.

She wore her dark hair under a cap that day so that in the dimness he thought she was a man at first, given her easy lope and tall confidence. Women usually stuck to the security of the clubs to avoid unfiltered air and urban grit and the sullen stares of the drug-dazed groundlings who lay listless in the shadows. This woman did not. At first Daniel used her passing simply as an incentive to quicken his own pace, keeping up but hanging back fifty feet. Only slowly did the details of the runner's gait and figure make him realize he was following a female. He was intrigued but concerned. She was not just outside, but alone- and thus courting risk that couldn't be calculated, danger that couldn't be calibrated. In a world of ever-improving safety, longer lives, and cradle-to-grave security, what rare dangers remained created in ordinary people an ever-rising anxiety. Life had become a series of guarantees, and to abandon actuarial certainty for the sake of an outside run seemed brazen. Because of that he was intrigued. Who would take such a risk? He followed her, the beat of their footsteps making a synchronous echo against the enclosing steel and glass, studying the nape of her neck and willing her to turn around. She ignored him.

The woman took a bridge across the concrete chute of a dry river and on past the rust of decaying freight yards. Daniel had never come this way. Weeds had rooted in the cinders of the tracks and he noticed white and yellow blossoms on their stalks, a sign of life's tenacity. She darted across a spray of broken glass, ducked through a gap in the fence, and jogged by the rust-reddened wall of a warehouse. She trespassed where whim took her, as if boundaries were something to be ignored. She ran across an overpass, through a wilted square of park, and down an avenue of gray and chipped apartment blocks. Then she abruptly stopped.

"Why are you following me?"

Daniel pulled up panting. She hardly seemed winded. Her face was slightly flushed and the exercise had put a sheen to it, he saw, her skin caramel, her eyes large, luminous, and dark. Her figure was formless beneath loose clothing but her face was quite arresting: not just pretty but intelligent, with a stamp of character, or at least self-assurance. High cheekbones, a sensuous mouth. A knockout, really. She looked at him curiously, wary, watchful. He swallowed, using his forearm to wipe his brow of sweat.

"I was worried," he tried to explain, not really certain what the explanation was himself.

"Worried?"

"About you."

"Do I know you?"

"No… No, of course not. I just rarely see other runners, and a woman…"

"So?"

"Just that you might meet someone…"

"The only other person out here is you."

He raised his hands to show they were empty. "I just…"

"Are you some kind of pervert?"

"No! No. But you should be careful…"

"Do you think I can't take care of myself?"

He smiled at that. "I get the feeling you can."

She seemed slightly mollified. "You shouldn't follow people. Not women. It's frightening." Her look flickered away a moment, distracted by a thought, and then came back boldly. She didn't seem very frightened.

They were silent, eyeing each other.

"Look, I apologize if I made you uncomfortable. My name is Daniel. I saw you and I was intrigued. Women don't run alone at this time. It might be dangerous to be outside."

"It's mentally dangerous to stay inside."

He paused. Daniel felt the same way, but he hadn't met a woman who shared the sense of being caged. The ones he knew seemed to enjoy their security. "The streets can be a maze. I run a lot. I thought maybe I could help you find your way."

"I'm trying to lose my way."

He stopped again, uncertain how to respond. Tiny beads of sweat had appeared on her forehead and she took off her cap, shaking her hair. It was thick and jet black, lustrous. Who was this woman?

"What's your name?" he asked.

She considered. "Is that important?"

He thought a moment. She was expecting an intelligent reply. "Some cultures named people for what they were, like Smith or Baker," he said. "Some thought you became your name. Some were named for things observed at birth."

She shrugged. "It's Raven."

"Raven…?"

Her caution was understandable. "That's all you need to know."

"Okay. Named for your hair?"

She smiled. "If I was named for what I looked like at birth my name would be Prune. Raven was a creature of legend. Smart, elusive."

"Like you?"

"Maybe. You said we become our names."

He nodded. "And what do you do?"

"I think a better question is why do you do."

"Why?"

"Think about it." She turned to begin running again.

"Wait!"

She glanced over her shoulder. "Yes?"

"I want to see you again."

"So run. Maybe we'll meet."

"No, see you where we can talk."

She turned to face him. "Are you asking me on a date?"

The question was so challenging he thought she was about to say no. "There's a good new restaurant…"

"Date restaurants are overpriced and pretentious."

Jesus. This was a hard one. "Well, I know a club…"

"I don't like clubs. It's too loud to hear, and when the music stops there's nothing worth hearing."

He took a breath. "What do you like?"

She looked at him, judging in a way he didn't entirely like, and for a moment something in her eyes passed like a shadow. "I like cyberspace," she finally said. "People have time to think before they communicate, and they have the anonymity to be themselves."

"I have to talk to you by e-mail?"

She laughed. "I like exploring."

"I do too. The cyber underground."

"The what?"

"Free thinkers on the net. They question things. Lead you to new places." His offer was implicit: I can show you.

"Ah." She nodded but seemed unimpressed. "I've heard of that, I think. Unhappy people."

"Independent people."

She studied him again, his clothes stained with sweat, his manner betraying an underlying frustration, and came to a decision. "How about a different underground?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you know the Pitney Tube stop?"

"Yes…"

"Meet me there tonight at nine."

"Tonight?"

"Yes." She smiled encouragingly. "Come hungry. Bring a light."

"A light? For what?"

But she was already sprinting for a corner before he had a chance to consider or change his mind. "Bring a sense of adventure!"

A sense of adventure. Daniel slipped off his opti-glasses, rocked back in his cubicle chair, and stared up at the acoustical cones which jutted like stubby beige stalactites from the ceiling of Level 31. When had he lost his? When he realized the planet was so thoroughly mapped that a palmtop and satellite could pinpoint your location to within a few feet of every rock and tree? When he was cut from enough teams that he went from playing sports to watching them? When he was bruised in enough relationships that he went from looking for commitment to avoiding it?

Adventure happened to other people. He'd realized by age fourteen that he was never going to be an astronaut or mineral aquanaut. Those anointed were special, their talent and selection by means mysterious and exclusive. How had their lives taken such turns? He was repeatedly urged to be ordinary, to fit in, to join groups. So he'd earned grades that were good but not special, made friends who were fun but not close, bought toys that were expensive but not meaningful. Taught that the universe was trillions of miles across and billions of years old, he came to the private conclusion that it probably really didn't matter then whether he, Daniel Dyson, dust mote of Creation, turned left or right. He went to school because you were supposed to, and got a job because you were supposed to do that: it was not that he wouldn't consider an alternative but simply that he had trouble conceiving of one. Everyone did what he did, and took more pleasure than he could in dressing to the latest fashion, embracing the latest fad, and being hip to the latest stars, food experiments, and electronic gadgets. In a mammoth world of migratory careers and anonymous neighborhoods, conformity was the route to community: it was how one belonged. All this left him feeling detached instead of included: the crowd would cheer when he would have preferred to observe in contemplative silence. Daniel had learned he could frighten himself with a thrill ride, excite himself with erotica, dare himself with adventure vacations, and exhaust himself in a gymnasium workout. But life? That, it seemed, eluded him. He was living his life waiting for life to show up.

His parents didn't sympathize with this dissatisfaction. "Life?" his father had responded scornfully to his complaints of aimlessness. "Life? Real life is getting kicked in the goddamned teeth. Life- for most of that goddamned history you study without seeming to learn a goddamned thing- was beating your brains out without reward: coming home so damned tired you can hardly sleep because of the way your body ached, and then getting up the next day to do it all over again. Life was getting sore and sick and old and passed over, or dying young. That was what real life was about. Life was losing. So now we have a system where you don't have to lose, where people are comfortable, where things don't blow up or break down or go off in unpredictable directions- and you're complaining you're missing something? What you're missing is sorrow. What you're missing is despair." When his father proclaimed this, repeating something scripted, his habitual quiet desperation would give way to the kind of choleric excitement that eventually killed him. Life? Who needs it? And then his father had dropped dead.

Daniel stood up from his desk, stretching his back. The room was dim, the flickering of his colleagues' opti-glasses illuminating it like the cold firelight of an old television. There was the ambient hum of the hive. The head of a supervisor, round and featureless behind the smoked glass of one of the periphery offices, rose briefly in curiosity at his movement and then went down again, as placid as a grazing cow. Balloons floated above one cubicle, marking a birthday for Cynthia Eaton. Life's passages. On a table by the water cooler was a half-eaten cake.

What was missing, Daniel should have answered, was purpose. He'd succeeded in every task scheduled for him- school, a job, a homeexcept deciding for himself what success was. His father claimed to have suffered no such misgiving, accepting his corporation's goals. He'd lived anxious, died young, and seemingly been proud of the whole sorry progression of it. At least he'd defended typical existence with exasperated doggedness, believing it the path to the least pain. In actuality, Daniel envied his father's sense of belonging. But he didn't share that sense. He'd been excited by his first days at Microcore like any new employee, relieved that the trauma of job interviewing was over and anxious to get on with the business of finding an apartment, acquiring possessions, and maybe even hunting for a wife. Yet it seemed to him that the more the company spoke about opportunity, the less it offered, and the more it preached unity and profit goals, the more he felt alienated by its desire to absorb him and all his energies- to suck his life, whatever it should be, into the greater life of its pyramid.

Maybe he was too selfish. Maybe the others saw something he couldn't perceive. Perhaps that explained their enthusiasm. He didn't know.

Like many people, Daniel was a voyeur of lives that seemed more interesting than his own. He enjoyed cyber videos, movies, books, and music. He'd been bored by any practical course of study at university and so indulged himself with a pursuit of history: what his father called "the irrelevant weight of the past." There he could go back to a time when the world was still unmapped, and wit and skill were requirements for advancement. It seemed to him that choices were simpler then: to bend sail onto spars, blaze a trail, fight a battle. Life was more romantic, with a clearer trajectory of youthful ambition and mature accomplishment. At Microcore, things were backward. The young were promoted over the old. Enthusiasm was valued more than experience, provided loyalty was sufficiently demonstrated. The key to success was unity toward corporate goals and social cultivation. Daniel resented these requirements because he wasn't any good at them. He mocked the system because of his own lack of confidence at ever being able to succeed in it. He constantly betrayed himself.

For a break from the monotony of code debugging, he walked to the supply room. He didn't need any supplies but he liked the smells of paper and glue in the room, a musty contrast to the antiseptic plastics of Microcore's corridors. He felt comforted by the accumulation of bulk products, like sheaves of arrows kept in a castle armory against attack by an enemy. Reams of colored paper were aligned like the ranks of Napoleonic soldiers, a bright and proud symmetry made glorious by the certainty it would be shattered- not by battle, he conceded, but rather by the more mundane sacrifice of memo and brochure. Glory! That's what life lacks, Daniel thought. The chance of sacrifice for a doomed ideal, or to run to a new world to create ideals for yourself. There was no room for glory in the modern world, he thought. No room for catapults.

Raven had said to bring a light, and he liked that. How often in the city did you have to provide your own illumination? Or heat? It was so bright you could never see the stars. He liked the serendipity of their encounter, a chance meeting that was now to lead to a rendezvous in a subway station. "Bring a sense of adventure!" He'd thought it wasn't needed. Maybe tonight, with this intriguing new woman, it would be.