Spoonbenders

She didn’t know if she’d subconsciously taught Lev to speak to her like this, or if he’d known instinctively that it was the best method of slipping under her radar. Either way, his fluency in this mirror dialect made him the only boyfriend she could tolerate, and for a while, the only man she trusted. Maybe she was led astray by the few times he’d expressed his feelings directly, in the early days of their relationship. Only when they were making love did he allow himself to be swept away by declaratives. “I want you,” he said to her, his hand slipping up her shirt. “I need you.” And then, when he was about to come: “I love you.”

Irene’s power gave her no access to absolute truth; she could only know whether or not the speaker believed what he was saying. In that moment, Lev was telling the truth. And that allowed Irene to lie to herself.

—

Her fourth night behind the screen, she was asked to join her first private chat.

She wasn’t in the Romance room when it happened, thank God. That’s where she’d started on her second night. In minutes, two different people had asked her, “A/S/L?” She had no idea what that meant; American Sign Language? The next day, after work, she stopped at the Waldenbooks and thumbed through America Online for Dummies, looking for definitions, and realized they were asking for Age/Sex/Location. It seemed incredibly rude, until she realized that if she were at a bar, a man would instantly know her Location, and could make reasonable guesses about her Age and Sex. Likewise, she’d be able to tell if she was talking to a man or a twelve-year-old wearing a trench coat and a fake mustache. That second night in the Romance chat room, she was having a perfectly nice, if erratically spelled, conversation with RICHARD LONG when he typed, “SO NOW YOU WAN TO SUCK MY DICK?????”

She didn’t go back to the Romance chat room.

Eventually she found an area for single parents that seemed to be inhabited by real adults, because they talked about things no teenager would find interesting: divorce settlements; insurance premiums; whether grounding a child was more punishing for the parent; insomnia. Yet after her experiences in other chat rooms, she kept waiting for, say, BUCKEYEFAN21 to ask her to touch her nipples.

For the first time in her life, she was unable to tell if someone was intentionally lying to her. In this 2-D world of text, these “people connections” were little more than paper dolls with screen names scrawled on their faces.

Yet. As much as she tried not to be drawn in by the creatures of Flatland, after just a few days it was hard not to think of a select few of them as flesh and blood. LAST DAD STANDING, for example, sounded convincingly like a divorced, slightly lonely man who worked at some kind of white-collar job and took care of a grade-school-age daughter. He lived in the Mountain Time Zone, and so usually came online around the same time of night as she did. She looked forward to him showing up, because he was one of the few people who both typed in complete sentences and got her jokes. It was such a relief to not have to type “:)” after every jab of sarcasm—and she liked to jab a lot.

Then tonight, after she’d mentioned that she was feeling stressed, he suggested they start a private chat. It was a bit like being asked to sneak behind the bleachers. Was she the kind of girl who had private chats? How did one even begin such a thing? Literally, how did one start a private chat?

IRENE T: You’ll have to tell me what to do. I’ve never done that before.

LAST DAD STANDING: I’ll be gentle.

No smiley faces—yet she understood that he was joking. Only joking.

In a few clicks, nothing had changed except the title of the chat window, but she was surprised to find that the basement felt cozier, like a private booth in a crowded restaurant. America was online all around them, but Irene and her new friend were huddled together, talking in low voices.

She decided to tell him about the wreck she’d made of her life in Pittsburgh.

LAST DAD STANDING: Yes, but what KIND of clusterfuck?

IRENE T: Like all the great ones, it begins with “It was all going great, and then…”

LAST DAD STANDING: Ha! I know that story.

IRENE T: I had a pretty good job. Better money than I’d ever had.

LAST DAD STANDING: Doing what?

IRENE T: I worked for a financial services company.

LAST DAD STANDING: I’m guessing that’s a company that provides financial services.