BINARY BURLESQUE
At the beginning, she had so much hope. Her youth and good looks made it easy for her to get a job. After five years, she had had enough of being a secretary. After seven years, she was disgusted. The misery, boredom and weight just keep mounting. The first step was the first mistake, depending on your perspective. Her perspective was narrow, bound by the tiny apartment, small car and modest paycheck, all of which she had involuntarily chosen. She would change it, she thought, as she stood in front of the mirror, looking at her fifty extra pounds at twenty-five years of age. She found the pinnacle of her life in a pit of depression, the anxiety and despair sending her into a tailspin that corkscrewed into the bathroom bowl, her face flush against the cold porcelain.
“In front of the screen… …again,” she said to herself sarcastically, staring at the screen. The only light in the room, the computer screen glowed softly as her thoughts wandered in the dark. She continued, “a screen’s not a viewer but a filter, a sieve.” She sat looking at the sieve, at the end of a tube, a tube that brought forth a torrent of dancing signals. “Dots, dots, dots everywhere. Lots of dots. Dots all, folks,” she said with a small laugh.
She saw the new programmer at the office again. “This new programming language I’m working on is going to something revolutionary,” he told her. “It’s not like artificial intelligence. Besides, intelligence is never artificial. This program opens up your intelligence through recognizing patterns within free associational symbolic retrieval and data, mining the differentials in neuro-responsive milliseconds. The program amplifies your intelligence through unconscious clues. It’s self-propelled, using highly accurate, accelerated insights into the logic of interlocking quantum fields.” She laughed at the statement and the idea, though trying to make it seem she was laughing in wonderment.
“Too deep for me,” she said as she looked into the bottom of her just emptied wine glass that night at her apartment and put it back on the table.
“I call it symbolic memory management,” and that was just the beginning of an extended elaboration on the theories and influences his work encapsulated. The night got late and the glasses of wine went down more quickly and the tasty Cabernets became tasteless guzzles. She listened until dawn, wishing that he found her sexy but she knew better. She couldn’t decide whether it was a compliment to be with him or an insult to be taken for granted. Sometime after midnight, she had turned a corner in her life. Uncharacteristically intense and compelling, she talked him into sharing with her his research and preliminary modules.
“There are no secrets,” he said to himself as he walked around her apartment the next morning, “only mysteries.” She watched as he worked, his feverish intensity only broken by brief moments when he would get up, walk around, mutter to himself and then jot notes. It certainly seems strange, she thought, that the vibrant screen and the small metal box that powers it could be so revolutionary or so, maybe, dangerous. Later, as his energy and intensity began to ebb, they sat by the window, sipping wine. He startled her by repeatedly jamming his fingers against the glass as he spoke next. “The illusion of transparency is more damaging because it carries the impact of unexpected obstacles that we cannot see, only feel.”
She began to imagine it as an episode from “The Twilight Zone,” so the dream she had that night came as no surprise but it still scared her just the same. In her dream, as she walked down the hallway towards her bedroom, she told herself it wasn’t a dream, though she knew it was. The sound of the computer keyboard and the familiar electronic beeps seemed to give evidence to the reality. As she stood at the far end of the hall, she saw anther woman sitting at the computer, but more like felt the presence in front of the screen, her face lit by the dancing elections moving in spastic rhythms. In her dream it was her imagination who sat at the keyboard, naked by feel, not by sight. From her perspective as the one at the keyboard, she caught a fleeting glimpse from the corner of her eye and watched the pirouette performed by her long braided hair and flannel nightgown as she turned quickly to go down the hall, headed for the bedroom. One part of her climbed beneath the covers and went to sleep and the other part danced her fingers cross the plastic buttons as cryptic figures danced across the blue-gray screen. Each figure meant something, had something enigmatic to say, though what it was, she couldn’t be sure. She knew that some messages were meant for her, others weren’t.
She thought about the sweet and ambitious young programmer. She wanted him to be a part of her life and for him to want her but she didn’t want all of him. A part of her she didn’t understand had acquired a part of him and disregarded the rest. Pursuit overcame passivity and intellect became pointless as she became the warrior of pursuit. Beneath the warrior’s tan skin, smooth contours of muscle showed instead of dimpled fat and spiked hair jutted from her scalp, replacing the long braids she’d had since childhood. She could do more than feel the fire from the desire within her. She could feel it.
Of course she went to the computer that morning and felt creepy when she saw it on. She bunched up her flannel nightgown and sat down in front of the login screen and waited, squeezing her plump hands between her thighs in dread anticipation. After staring for a while, a sense of irony and humor came to her and the risk of madness seemed less important than the stable, slow moving soul suicide that waited within the envelope of a secretary’s paycheck. Her mind scanned the electronic folders, searching for the answer to the dream. She went through her files, looking for the associations she could use to connect the dots and make sense of what seemed like hyperreal nonsense. Finding nothing that would help, it wasn’t until she turned the machine off that she spotted the clue. The peculiar image in the corner of the screen as the screen faded into black. The small character, part calligraphy and part doodle didn’t come to mind until mid-morning and plagued her thoughts at work for the rest of the day.
Days later she opened the mystery folder, emblazoned with that curious icon. “Secret, not to be shared,” she heard the computer’s voice say, in a way she’d never heard before. As the file came open, she realized it was an application for drawing, not writing. She’d never drawn before, except for scribbling some doodles as she waited for this, that and any other thing. She began to draw and and the odd shapes looked rather goofy until they started moving on their own. The characters, regardless of the size drawn, shrank down to the size of a credit card and began to wiggle, dance and contort in various ways that didn’t seem to make sense. Each time, in turn, after she’d done the initial drawing, the character would dance and gyrate, gaining speed and then slowing down and slowing some more until it froze. Each time a character froze, she looked at it and felt a reservoir of feeling open up, bringing tears to her eyes and long-suppressed memories to awareness. Though seemingly crude, the characters had undeniable power and as she kept drawing, watching and feeling, she could feel her sense of self shifting in ways she didn’t understand. Their lingering images and impact stayed with her and could not be denied. Some reminded her of the morbid fascination she had with car wrecks when she was in seventh grade, others reminded her of the photos of the scars from modern slavery seen in a German news magazine. Other figures, “rumpled foreskins,” she called them, reminded her of the dirty old men with oversize genitals her mother used to warn her about. She remembered, for the first time in years, standing by the highway as a teenager looking at the crumpled porn magazine thrown out the window by a libidinous tourist, the images filling her with a dread and fascination that sent great cracks through the Pollyanna facade she carefully nurtured.
As she walked down the dark suburban sidewalks that night, flaunting her fear of darkness and strangers, she thought of the drawings as matter of fact clues to reality, part of human nature, not the aberrant mental meanderings of someone who was born mentally ill.
That night, she dreamed of herself working quietly in the dark on the computer, interrupting her effort with forays through the apartment, looking… looking… looking. She looked at herself, lying in bed, with a checkered nightgown, characteristically buttoned up to the neck. In the dim light, she saw the plain skin of her arm as deathly, the thick flesh aged and blotchy. On a bare arm, uncovered by the blanket, she could see something weird on the skin and, as she began to look more closely, a bizarre sequence of physically morbid transformations took place, from a large scar on her forearm that morphed into an open wound that then exposed muscle and bone and began to open her flesh up and down her arm, stopping only when she felt a twinge in her tailbone and noticed the gut-wrenching fear. It all then faded away as she pulled away, seeing her face, sleeping peacefully on the pillow.
She didn’t remember the dream but by late afternoon the next day, she had gone through her second box of facial tissue, crying over strange and silly things, Saturday morning cartoons, she had missed, the dog she’d always wanted, the long empty apartment next door and the empty slots in the apartment house parking lot that hinted at somebody missing. For the first time in weeks, she didn’t turn on the computer.
With nothing important to do, she went shopping for clothes, which she hadn’t done in months, always feeling embarrassed by her weight gain. Her eyes were swollen and red from upset and she kept gently rubbing the sore spot on her arm. Uncharacteristically focused during her shopping, she dispensed with her usual fussing and disgust with the clothes selection. Not only did she take less time than normal, she was surprised by the smaller size and tighter fit she wanted.
Arrival back at her apartment brought a complete reversal of attitude. She found the new clothes disgusting and stared at herself in the mirror. “Whore,” she said, echoing someone else’s words, long ago etched deep into her psyche. She cried herself to sleep, a part of her realizing something inevitable. In her dream, the computer was on and a sort of binary burlesque wiggled across the screen. “Confetti and confusion, a celebration of chaos,” the electronic voice said, perfect in its programmed cadence. She saw another self sleeping, stretched across a primitive landscape, naked beneath the dancing sky as the dead past broke off and fell away. Someone’s funeral oration was spoken in a stranger’s language. Thinking she’d be dreaming too long in her dream, she turned off the computer and went down the hall. In her room, she pulled a t-shirt on over her nakedness and slid between the sheets.
The next day, she tore the flannel nightgown into strips, to use them for cleaning the computer screen. The overweight secretary was dead and there would be no funeral.