Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath

about two years. It’s one of the things you do if you live in Marin, along with hot-tubbing and baking biscotti. She left brief instructions plus a list of WELL gods, the network VIPs, pinned up on the wall beside the computer, saying, ‘When a WELL god posts, people listen. Show respect, OK? But nothing tacky.’ So I passed the day – yesterday – typing out my respectful thoughts and considered pearls in the hope that others would read them and type their pearls and thoughts back in return. I dipped in and out of politics, music, the future. After a time I gathered sufficient confidence to begin my own discussion topic in the future conference, and by the end of the day there were twenty-three replies, twenty-three earnest, considered, respectful responses. There we all were, sitting at our keyboards, unknown to each other in any real-life way, chattering into our screens and feeling that each new word meant something beyond itself.

      Too tightly wound to go to bed, I dozed for a while on the sofa and woke just as the light was beginning to break through the cedars outside. A pot of cold coffee was sitting on the table next to the computer, so I warmed the bitter brown liquid in the microwave and toasted a couple of muffins and ate my breakfast waiting for the computer to boot up and pass me back out into the dark space of the network, which was beginning to feel more substantial to me than the room around, and as full of enchantment and tricks as a fast-hand conjuror.

      In the early hours of the morning, I circled the globe. A listing of stock prices in Singapore, software files in Rome, the welcome screen of the University of Pretoria information service, a dissertation archive in Hong Kong, four tourist guides to Queensland and New South Wales, some incomprehensible jargon housed at Lawrence Livermore, a list of new releases from EMI in London. And on around the world again, with the same perfect, fearful freedom a lone sailor must feel when out of sight of land, my only navigation tools a keyboard, a mouse and a set of instincts.

      Eventually, I fell onto the sofa and slept without dreaming until nine, when I got up and made some more coffee. In a few minutes from now, I shall pull out the plug on Nancy’s computer and lock myself in the spare bedroom and sleep until the weekend. Otherwise, I’ll still be sitting at this table when Nancy returns, eyes buggled and stiff as a piece of metal soldered to the screen.

      SATURDAY

      Nancy says I should get in touch with a boy called Isaac, who runs the conference for children at the WELL. The word is that he’s the kind of person our kids – if we ever get around to having kids – might turn out to be. Another futuristic prototype, like Alex.

      I’m relieved to say she has returned from COMDEX in fine spirits, having met everyone of any importance in software plus an old (male) friend to boot, who just happens to be living in the area and just happens to be swinging by for lunch tomorrow. Nancy emerges from her bedroom some time late in the afternoon, with a casual kind of air, humming some old James Taylor number. Neither of us remarks on the fact that she’s been locked up in there for four hours testing her outfits and teasing her hair into different shapes. Following a short inspection of the living room, she wanders into the kitchen and begins rearranging the jars of antipasti, the squid ink pappardelle someone gave her for a birthday present and sun-dried tomatoes in front of all the instant soup and chocolate pop tarts. Suspecting that three might be a crowd, I mail a message off to Isaac, asking if he’d mind a visit. A response arrives almost instantly.

      >I’ll have to ask my mom.

      And then a few hours later:

      >Mom says it’s OK. We live in Long Beach.

      ‘How far is Long Beach from Marin?’ I ask Nancy, when the worst of the clatter is done.

      ‘Oh, a ways, about ten hours’ drive,’ she says, disappearing into her room and re-emerging with a brochure.

      ‘I just remembered. I picked this up at the trade show. The Fifth Annual Digital Hollywood Exhibition. “The Media Market- Place where Deals are Done™.” Thought it might interest you.’

      So I flip through the first couple of pages and read:

      ‘Somewhere between the zirconia-obsessed and the hackers on the Net with electronic credit to burn, there is a mega world of virtual shopping and marketing in the ethernet. Some day there may be more retail dollars to be spent in the virtual marketplace than in the domain of the current retailing mall culture …’

      ‘It doesn’t even make sense,’ I protest, hurling the thing onto the coffee table, from where Nancy rescues it, saying in a firmer voice than ever she intends:

      ‘That’s why I thought you’d be interested in going, sweetie. Say, tomorrow?’

      SUNDAY

      The foyer of the ten-screen multiplex in Culver City, Los Angeles, is already full of teenagers just out of school, waiting for the late afternoon showing of Streetfighter – the Ultimate Battle.

      I wander back into the mall, pick up a root beer and an apple pie in McDonald’s and sit myself next to an off-duty security guard with a face full of freckles and hands all knotted up like vine stems. We make awkward small talk for a while. He mentions that Culver City was recently voted the second most desirable neighbourhood inside Los Angeles city limits.

      ‘It just looks like a hatch of freeways joined by shopping malls to me.’

      ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ returns the guard, offended. ‘You should see this place for example, first thing in the morning. The folks from the Culver City senior citizens’ mall-walking club come in around ten. Perfect behaviour. It’s clean and quiet till lunchtime and then these mall rats –’ He gestures towards a group of teenagers lounging round McDonald’s drinking Coke. Two tough-eyed girls glower back – ‘begin drifting in and the whole atmosphere of the place …’ He holds his hands up to the heavens, then begins to twist a waxed burger paper into a candle, forcing it inside an empty carton of french fries. ‘I just wish they’d find someplace else to go.’

      ‘Like where?’ I say, trying to catch his eye. He looks up from his carton crunching and there’s meanness written on his face.

      ‘I don’t know, Tallahassee for all I care.’

      I was seventeen when I first saw Los Angeles. Staying in a borrowed apartment in Venice, I spent my days boogie-boarding and watching TV and playing beach volleyball with Nancy. I thought everyone in California lived that way then. I was naive and I wanted to believe it.

      

      A pay phone outside Footlocker.

      ‘Is Isaac there?’

      ‘Uh uh.’

      I check my watch and see there is nearly an hour and a half before we’re due to meet. An almost inaudible sigh trickles down the phone line.

      ‘Are you his father by any chance?’

      ‘Stepfather, why?’ I explain that I’ve arranged to see Isaac later on.

      ‘That can’t be. Isaac had his mother drive him up to San Francisco last night on a business matter.’

      I hang up. What the hell kind of fourteen-year-old makes last-minute twelve hundred mile round-trips on business?

      WEDNESDAY

      Isaac mails to say he’s very sorry not to have kept our appointment, but if I’m ever down in the Los Angeles area again …

      SATURDAY

       Brain machine

      Nancy’s COMDEX friend Dave brings his brain machine and an ounce of crystal caffeine around. He says that crystal caff is the drug du jour among programming types, and I suppose he should know, since he is one, all the way from the Dead Kennedys T-shirt to the lightly sprinkled dandruff. After spending Sunday in his company, Nancy told him as sweetly as she could that in spite of the fact that his qualities