Strange Flesh (23 page)

What strikes me about that idea is that if you read ahead in the book, you quickly get into some horrible behavior. Right now we’re still in the first month, and already the stories gleefully violate a number of state and federal laws, to say nothing of the dictates of hygiene. Once into the month of February, we’re talking about mutilations and murder. And so the question becomes:

Where does it stop?

Maybe that’s exactly what Billy wants to find out.

T
hat afternoon, I remind Xan of the interview she owes me, and we end up in the back corner of a busy French bistro in Alphabet City.

“So for this documentary I’m working on,” I say, “I wanted to get a better sense of Gina Delaney. You were already teaching when she enrolled at PiMP. But weren’t you two both ’03 at MIT also?”

“That’s right.”

“Were you friends?”

Xan stirs the martini she’s drinking and sets aside the olives before tasting it. “Yeah, we were friends. Especially our freshman year.”

“Did you have a falling out?”

“Not really. That spring she withdrew from school near the end of the semester.”

“She was depressed?”

“Quite.”

“Something specific bring it on?”

Xan nods vacantly. Then she recovers herself and looks at me sharply. “James, I’ll tell you this if I must, but you can’t go putting it in your docudrama.”

“Okay. Deep background helps.”

She takes a slow breath. “So Gina was raised as some kind of religious nutter. This hellfire church her parents belonged to. Not just strict . . . weird. There are more of them in Boston than you might think. But she claws her way out of their local slum and goes to MIT. She’s a
brilliant engineer. Not just smart, but someone even we Beavers think is a
freak
. But college isn’t all work. Anyone who’s raised that way is going to experiment a bit once they’re at liberty. She doesn’t take it
too
far, so things are just ducky.” Xan takes an olive off her cocktail spear. “That is, until she meets the
boy of her dreams
.”

“And who was that?”

“One of your lot actually. Maybe you know Blake Randall?”

I pride myself on my poker face, but I guess Xan is able to read the word “holyfuckingshit” in my eyes.

“You do know him,” she says.

I put on a thoughtful expression. “Yeah. Two years above me. I saw him at parties.”

“Hmm . . . ,” she says, still observing me.

“So, ah, I take it something happened between him and Gina?”

“Right, so we get hauled over to one of those inane Porcellian parties—everyone wearing rep ties and talking shite about sailing and hunting.” This makes me wince inwardly since I’d enjoyed many such occasions. The Beavers always have been barbarians.

She continues. “So Blake is there, and someone introduces him to Gina. She was a very pretty girl as you might know, and so they’re quite taken with each other. Maybe he thinks he’s going to score, but Gina doesn’t really play that way. Fine. So this bloke starts to woo her. Boat rides up the Charles. Picnics at his country house, if you can imagine such bollocks. Treating her like they’re in a Jane Austen novel. But that’s just how she believes it’s supposed to be. He’s hot and rich, and probably has a whole line of girls, but he’s putting in time with Gina.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad.”

“No, it doesn’t. Not until he gets impatient.” She leans back, quiet now.

“Did she press charges?”

Xan waves away the idea. “It wasn’t like that. She comes back to the dorm in a party dress and tears. One of those big black-tie dinners you all seem to insist upon. So she has a little too much champagne. Then a lot too much cognac. And then a fat cosmo for dessert. Wakes up without her knickers next to a Somewhat Distant Boyfriend.”

Hearing this as an indictment of my gender, I try frowning to convey
that I would never, ever even think of being involved in such an episode. Xan tsks at my display.

“Anyway, it’s pretty typical. Gina is exactly the type of girl to get buyer’s remorse. Little sophisticates that we are, her friends try to convince her that it’s not a big deal. But she’s different. For her it
is
a big deal. She doesn’t blame him or anything, probably never told him she was a virgin. Anyway, he should have known. But what do you expect?”

I can only shake my head at the predatory nature of my brethren. I don’t pull this off well, and Xan kicks me under the table.

“Oh, I know you’re a pig just like the rest of them.”

“So this messed her up enough to make her drop?”

“I don’t think so. The problem was that her friends didn’t understand. So she got the bright idea to talk things over with her mother.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah. Her father showed up at the dorm that day, and she didn’t come back. I guess some real fire and brimstone shite went down in the Delaney house that spring.”

“And then she was back the next fall?”

“Yeah. Commuting from home. But I was in Barcelona my sophomore year. So we basically lost touch. I guess she lost touch with most of her friends. She went virtual.”

“It sounds like she had some success with it.”

“Oh yeah. Gina was troubled, but still a complete genius. That first start-up she joined, Ichidna Interface, was a one-woman show, wasn’t it? But I’d have thought her greatest success would be getting out of that awful house and coming here.”

“So she seemed better at PiMP?”

“Not at first. When I saw her at the welcome party, she was like a totally different person. Shaky, nervous . . . like she’d been too long in a space station and wasn’t used to people.”

Xan tells me how she reintroduced herself, and while Gina had remained as sweet as ever, she couldn’t really look her in the eye. Xan asked about some of her well-known professional triumphs, but Gina seemed like she was yearning to escape her former work, or at least the isolation she self-imposed while doing it.

Gina said to her, “I looked up my new classmates, and they all seem
so creative and interesting. I’m—I’m just excited to be here where I can maybe make some new . . . things. Ah, you know, work on my own ideas.”

Recalling that pitiful sentence makes Xan stop her narration and squeeze her eyes shut for a second.

Xan stayed with her a bit more, but eventually she got pulled away to welcome other new students. But she kept an eye on Gina.

“The poor girl just stood there, fairly shaking with terror. She kept checking her phone like she had a preemie in the neonatal ward. I could tell she was mortified by her awkwardness. One of our friendlier lads tried to chat her up, but he didn’t get past one-word answers. I could see Gina’s eyes start to well up. Obviously she’d made some kind of death pact with herself to resist her shyness. So she just stood there rooted in place. Alone and miserable.”

Xan tells me she couldn’t bear watching it anymore and moved to rescue her old friend. But before she got there, she saw Billy stomp his way over to Gina’s side. He put his fist up in her face and said something in a hostile tone. Xan couldn’t make it out at first and rushed toward them to stop any kind of trauma this little kook might inflict. But she pulled up short when she saw Gina smile for the first time that night. Later she figured out what Billy said to her:

“Best of seven. Bet I crush you in four. I’m throwing rock.”

As Xan tells it, Gina’s eyes lit up, and she said, “Bring it.”

Rock Paper Scissors. The child’s amusement that obsesses geeks the world over, since it forms the conceptual underpinning for certain types of video games. Contests can become mental duels requiring Jedi-like powers of perception and dissimulation.

Billy came with scissors. Gina threw rock. Xan was relieved to hear her giggle. She decided to leave her in the hands of her unlikely savior.

A while later, Xan witnessed Gina actually drinking a beer and laughing with a group of her new classmates who had started a mini Rocham-beau tournament. She noticed her exchange a secret smile of thanks with Billy. For his part, he seemed utterly in awe that fortune had blessed him with such a moment.

“So playing a kid’s game isn’t exactly the kind of brilliant wit that’s going to get you invited to meet the queen. But any game is a sort of conversation. And I mean, the lingua franca of PiMP is Klingon, for Christ’s
sake. Anyway, because of Billy, Gina’s suddenly no longer this schizoid loser on the verge of tears. She’s
winning
. Both of them love games, and because of that, along with some luck, I think they won a little love for each other too. In Billy’s case, a lot. Things got better for Genes after that. She seemed more comfortable eventually . . . When you could catch her offline.”

“Offline?”

“Yeah, she was working a lot with NOD. Playing there too, I guess. That’s where she and Billy would hang out.” I flash to Nash’s description of the pictures in her apartment. The family photos of avatars.

“Sounds like the makings of quite a romance.”

“Yeah, we all thought so. But it seems Gina’s mind was elsewhere.”

“Really? Where?”

“Well, nowhere at first. But then, after a while . . .”

“What?”

“She started fucking Olya.”

“You mean . . .?”

“Yes, James. Hot girl-on-girl action. Close your mouth, dear, you look retarded.”

“So—”

“Yeah, software aside, the main thing Gina developed upon graduating was Sapphic tendencies. It’s not that unusual. The women here in New York are amazing.”

“And Olya?”

“Her sexual persuasion? I’d say it’s carnivorous.”

“Like Catherine the Great?”

“More like a praying mantis.”

“I guess an aggressive interest in sex is only appropriate considering our project.”

“That’s not really what I mean. But forget it. We can’t be gossiping about our partners in crime, can we?”

“Were they, ah,
dating
when . . .”

“I don’t really know much about it. I was in Hong Kong when it happened. Before I left, I heard they’d had a couple fairly public blowups. The rumor was that the relationship was flaming out. Gina was devastated. Olya can be cold as winter in Moscow—”

“And Russian campaigns don’t end in parades.”

“Exactly. Anyway, I came back early for the funeral.”

“So did people blame Olya for pushing her over the edge?”

“No. We all knew Gina was a bit of a head case. There was talk, but you can’t really blame a person for someone else’s suicide, can you?”

“I’m sure it happens.”

“Yeah, now that you mention it, I guess that’s what started her famous row with Billy. But then he was a head case as well.”

“Does Olya blame herself?”

“I wouldn’t mention it to her.”

B
ack at GAME, things do not go smoothly.