Robin, Red and the Wayfarer

A postmodern fairy-tale of science-fiction, love in a Macintosh, farewells in a bookstore ...

Summer evening’s usual squadron of owls falls mute outside just as one Robin Leigh-Cheri, alone in the storage room after-hours and appropriately upset, blinks into the teal fluorescence of the vintage iMac screen and tries hard to feel as drunk as possible. Mr. Sannes’ workbench, bloodied with generations of malfunctioned computer hardware, creaks with some fear and some astonishment under quaking forearms, which she avows, embarrassingly, to shave between now and class next Monday. That man in the video – perhaps he was a man, it was so far away – he couldn’t have done what he just did. It was too nuanced. Coincidental. Robin clamps her mouth down over the strobing breaths in the biting manner that her father used to employ after one of his tantrums, unclamps it to swear and whisper the name of God, then shuts it again, tightly, challenged to recount just how things got so bizarre.

Here is everything she knows:

Father was a kind of engineer who used to put cameras in tiny little planes to help the people flying them by remote control see what was going on behind a certain mountain ridge or something.  His company must have really annoyed him, sending him to Iraq for a spring, but Robin never appreciated politics so she stayed out of his way. She was used to staying out of the way.

It was Father then, as it turned out, who had a way to stay out of. The half-dozen bombs that exploded were scattered in different places on the road, and were detonated, cowardly and dishonorably, by a remote control not unlike one her father would have designed. That wasn’t true, she remembered telling the lieutenant. The bombs were exploded by those raggy things that wave rifles and burn American flags. He died in an explosion caused by other people, which was wrong for a way to die today.

Mom found out first and dropped her coffee. The stain was pretty horrific, under where the brass barometer was in the old house, and stayed for nearly a week. Robin started doing the groceries herself once Mom had retreated upstairs to nurse a new Facebook account – her status was listed as complicated – but by that point it was pretty clear that college would be out of the question for a while, and Mom had already come up with the big idea of scooting from red brick Chicago to corn yellow Fort Wayne, Indiana where do you remember the Sanneses would help them get settled down and happy again. Sheila handles all the real estate and Rich still has the family computer repair store a few more minutes deeper towards town, which still hums as summer slowly starts cooling off. And they’ve got their son Spencer, a year younger than her and still obnoxiously redheaded, who works there in the shop for his dad – that would be where she would work too, for at least a little while.

Tricky Dick’s Computer Fix was its own squat parlor shop built to protrude over the only hill in Indiana, and the rear of the building had to stumble over little short legs on the slope just to keep it level. The owls of Fort Wayne had universally decided to roost like bats within the artificial cave and would occasionally assault Spencer and any other customers who for whatever reason smelled like or resembled a barn mouse. They also fancied jewelry. On the first day of work a woman who could only have been a schoolteacher sauntered through the laser-activated electronic doorchime with the intention of uninstalling AOL once and for all from her PowerMac only to have one magenta flower-power earring and a bit of cartilage forcibly traded for a few ruddy tail feathers. Spencer was quick to sooth things over and probably deserved a hearty attaboy from Mr. Sannes for precluding any litigation. But other than for craziness like the owl attacks, Spencer’s presence in the shop was pretty low-key. She stationed herself up front where she answered the phone while he tinkered back in the storage room, invisibly compiling Java and upgrading RAM deep into the night, every night.

Spencer looked awake enough for weekday morning summer school though, but that was only when she saw him wade upwards through the parking lot after the bell, Mr. Sannes crunching closed the passenger door of the wash-me brown company pickup behind him. She had to go to summer school to make up some Spanish credit that she came far short of earning when she dropped out of PS 104 back in Chicago. Spencer went to get ahead. Agarre el día.

Before enduring one particularly nasty prueba she recalled nearly passing Spencer shoulder-to-shoulder in a hallway without spotting him, which would ordinarily constitute the ultimate crime against perception, but in this instance his usually gallant copper hair had been substituted for a mulch of Barneyesque purple velvet.

Post-quiz she took Spencer out to his choice of Taco Bell or Falafel Grill, the only possible culinary ultimatum without crossing under the 27, an awkward luncheon where she was able to glean without much persuasive effort that the original plan had been to color it black with black cherry Kool-Aid. The Internet had called it the poor man’s hair dye. Somewhere in the elaborate chemistry at work an equation failed to balance rightly, resulting in what scientists call a purple shift. She made that up to make him laugh and still felt a sting of surprise when no laughter came. Had she ever heard Spencer laugh at all?

But she swore she heard an errant chuckle today, which actually starts to lead up to how the evening became so damn strange. The massive devolved iMac responsible for broadcasting tonight’s sorcery arrived wedged face-up in the candy-apple red cockpit of a child’s toy fire engine, which whined like a French machine gun firing unlubricated German mice as it wheeled up the ADA ramp, trailing submissively behind a balding set of bunny slippers. The whole setup was propelled by a nearsighted octogenarian who declared to Spencer in a cement voice that her son-in-law had suddenly and mysteriously eloped to Europe with his office secretary and had left the machine behind along with all his other possessions. The darned son-in-law, she continued, had filled the iMac’s brain up to the brim with the dirtiest smut imaginable – he liked to spy on strangers in public with hidden cameras! – and she needed the big ugly thing cleaned off before her girlfriends at the retirement home find out.

She swore she heard Spencer laugh.

Well, somehow he managed to stammer out that it’d be ready for pick-up tomorrow evening, but by then the octogenarian was already well on her way back to wherever she came from, the unloaded fire engine squeaking bitterly into the distance. Spencer took a very long time carrying the machine to the storage room and gave her a deadpan grimace on his return. He didn’t think he could do this one, Robin.

Fortunately, she had already percolated the idea of perhaps utilizing the computer and one of the detached spacebars buried on the workbench for the purpose of self-gratification later in the evening. So of course Spencer could take the night off. She’d be happy to cover this last job. No sweat.

Alright, maybe he hadn’t laughed.

After a very relieved Spencer went home, the smell of black cherry Kool-Aid somehow mixing with the slightly flat meow of the electronic doorchime and lingering for a few moments, she kicked out the plug on the neon OPEN sign and sashayed her way to the storage room, pausing over a mortally wounded Vista machine in the hallway and saluting to a badly jammed Canon printer that just might pull through before skipping to where Spencer set up the iMac and creaked closed the door behind her.

It was taking forever to boot up, and after a few minutes she had begun the game of unzipping her jeans a bit further with each passing revolution of the pixilated hourglass. All of it – the harsh glow of the screen, the corroded hum from within the machine, the agonizing spin of the hourglass, all in anticipation of a fairly routine ritual – had the delicious self-punishing essence of sado-masochism. She moistened appropriately.

When the desktop came into view and the modem dialed in and the hourglass finally materialized into the precise instrument of man/machine intercourse it was born to be, it became profoundly clear that whatever the senile octogenarian had thought plagued the machine was not the buried pornographic treasure chest of the century; the only folder of any kind of significance in the whole system was plainly titled ‘Research’ and when she gave it a single deliberate uniclick with the round little mouse she saw it contained …

There must have been thousands. She hadn’t the faintest clue what they were or how they worked, and they were all similarly named and serialized. B403Ankara and J327Padang and S909Veracruz and R511Reykjavik topped a list that seemed liable to extend all the way down to G666Hell. Still unzipped and ready for anything, she blindly played the scroll wheel as Russians play roulette and uniclicked a mystery file at random, cracking open her eyelids in time to see –

White summer sunbeams scorched into the murky storage room, glinting crisply off oxidized copper spires or blurring through the exhalations of the marketgoers below. The scene of a bright cold morning in C124Tartu filled the screen, and from her newfound perch on a rooftop she peered down like God unto Israel in 16 frames per second. After a trip to Google and back, she hypothesized that she was spying through a security camera over a modest outdoor market in Tartu, Estonia, the second largest city and cultural pinnacle in the frosty Soviet amputation. Even in Estonia, she was briefly entertained to see, people still did things like shop for groceries and hold the hands of small children through the stands. Near a fountain in the background, two men played chess.

For what might have been hours, she basked in the complacency of as many faraway places as she could spy upon. She watched a zoo in Dallas, a parking garage in Tokyo, a middle school in Vancouver, a used book store in Durban, and a crowded airport terminal in Shanghai; she had managed to display those last two in split-screen just in time to witness the strangest sort of metaphysical anomaly.

The man stood on the busy sidewalk outside the picture window to the South African bookstore with what had to be the ultimate human nonchalance. Never before had she observed someone of such palpable plainness that he could only be characterized by a cigarette and flawless anonymity. True, the South African shoppers, perhaps distracted in braving their hemisphere’s winter, seemed to regard the man’s presence the way Americans regard lawn gnomes or soccer. She leaned in, studying how his white shirt flowed underneath a precisely disheveled tweed trench, how his black hair shined – though it may be that she was looking at him from the other side of the window – with a tinge of yellow sunshine. When her nose met the crisp glass screen, the man knew. He kissed away the cigarette. He turned. He looked for a hard second straight into her eyes, green and glassy to his brown and metallic. And he laughed.

Then in the time it took for her to stop breathing, the man shrugged on his overcoat and strolled tenderly off-camera in Durban, South Africa … and on-camera in Shanghai, China. He lit another cigarette. She screamed.

And now Robin’s standing – the rolly chair skates to a quick halt behind her – and breathing better and calming down. She retrieves the chair. Rezips. Returns her attention to the perfectly belonging figure in the Chinese terminal. A trio of pilots dressed more like postmen briskly roll their luggage within inches of his shoes without so much as a glance of acknowledgement. Something about him seems not so scary or ethereal, chastely loitering wherever he is. He’s like a traveler, or maybe an observer just like herself, or perhaps he’s just a remarkably mild scratch of the paranormal. Hell, he’s far less bizarre and threatening than aliens or Bigfoot. If anything, he’d be more like, and she is starting to believe this quite passionately, a piece of artwork. The ultimate anonymous, he might be, unconstricted by even the laws of the universe … it’s kinda beautiful.

By the time the owls resume their staccatos, she’s followed him from Shanghai to a hotel in Mexico City and from there to a casino in Amsterdam, which he departs from inside a very opaque limousine, rolling gracefully over his dropped cigarette and again off-camera. Robin’s lost him this time, however, and while it seems that he may practice his brand of teleportation well into the night without sleep, she most certainly cannot follow without some looming psychotic episode. The iMac, translucent teal and oblique for its late 90’s glory, always spells out a message when it powers down: goodbye!

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The next afternoon, and Spencer doesn’t believe her until he sees the videos himself. Eager to abandon her post at the telephone, Robin sits him down on the rolly chair and offers directions to Florence. They vagabond throughout the list, stopping occasionally to get their bearings and enjoy the view, much in the way a bewildered tourist might, sans the necessity of physically existing at their vacation spot. Nevertheless, the experience must feel rather identical. Robin’s so tired of standing after ambling through the Louvre and Uffizi, and has poached her way onto a ledge of the chair; given the plausible deniability of resting her legs, it feels perfectly congruous to intertwine them about Spencer’s as they watch a pair of skiers trace a lazy double helix down Mt. Ruapehu. Spencer says that the DNA can’t be very smart, given the recent eruption and all the GNS warnings. Robin takes it that he feels a tad nervous.

Should she tell him about her teleporter? Not that the current situation has any sort of romance, but still. Spencer gets upset easily. And speaking to him usually doesn’t go far. But looking at him right now, familiar red hair beginning to bleed through the strange purple mistake and the images of their mysterious global espionage reflected in his gifted eyes, Robin suspects there’s a grander complexity to Spencer’s ego, that all the red hair deigns to release an inner Byronic hero. Do some people just prefer not to be noticed?

Robin explains what happened the previous evening, and even though the anonymous man is currently gone the way of Carmen Sandiego, Spencer believes the story and retraces the path of this mystery figure and his limousine. When Robin returns to the storage room after a brief repose to tell the likewise returned nearsighted octogenarian with the firetruck that her son-in-law’s iMac contains even more dirty smut than previously hypothesized and will likely require an additional week of delicate depornification before it may be handled safely by mortals, she finds Spencer alert and hunched over a rescued slice of grid paper, scribbling frenetic numerals with a crude fountain pen fashioned from a capacitor shell and a toner cartridge. He wants to see if there exists an algorithm for the man’s location somewhere in the list of serials or in geographic coordinates or in the duration of his visits or in a decomposed matrix of all of the above that could be used to predict his transit vector.

Oh. Get on that, then, Spencer.

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They catch up with the limousine in three days.

Spencer is keen to explain it to her, but Robin would almost rather play with his now fully rusted hair or connect his freckles if it time affords it. It has something to do with the nature of the video feed itself; the list of locations that Robin definitely witnessed the smoking figure each transmit their secret video slightly slower than they ought to, given their resolutions and capabilities in whatever secluded part of the world they stream from. It’s possible – and it’s incredibly important for her to understand how closely ‘possible’ estimates a snowball’s chance in Hell – that by sending over the Internet two pings – Robin doesn’t have to understand what that means in order to get the big picture – with one to the exact source of one of the camera feeds on the list and the other to a similar network source in the area, Spencer might catch a delay in response times at the places where the man is likely to pay a visit.

And so be it that he tiptoes to besides a closed-eyed Robin’s stool at the telephone, deposits a grainy printout on her lap with one hand while removing an earphone from its home with the other, and softly inquires if this is the man she saw. She pauses and removes the other phone, examining with a slow smile the picture of the figure’s emergence from the unmarked limousine outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv, and cranes to whisper the affirmative into Spencer’s own ear. They stare for a second, part, and then they’re running – Spencer has something else to show her! – back to the enchanted iMac, where the anonymous man seems very close to finishing his anonymous cigarette outside the Israeli night club. A stray cat vectors under his legs in its search for snacks.

Now it seems Spencer has actually rescued an egg timer from somewhere in the rubble of the workbench and winds to the beginning of a countdown from twenty, and she’s never seen him this excited. Guess where he’s supposed to be going to next, Robin? Here! He’s coming to Fort Wayne! Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

Fifteen. What? Spencer, that’s ridiculous; Fort Wayne isn’t even on the list. Unless, as it turns out, he’s uploaded the feed from the security camera that Mr. Sannes had installed to provide testimony to the insurance companies of any and all owl-related damages to materials or personnel.

Ten. A dull orange light paints over the face of the man in the video, his cigarette glimmering in its last glorious breath. Spencer’s found the source of the delayed video feeds, but don’t worry, Robin. There’s nothing to be scared of.

Nine. Spencer, how are you doing this? He must have figured it out, he must have cracked it! Is this for real?

Eight. Robin feels like she’s suddenly been punched by hot wet sea lion, and leaps to close and lock the door from the hallway to the storage room.

Seven. Spencer holds that she’s overreacting. Nothing’s going to happen.

Six. Robin wishes she’d never even discovered the cursed videos or the man in the overcoat, who now takes great care to drop the cigarette on the sidewalk and tamp it out with a single deliberate step.

Five. The crazy old woman with the firetruck … was she the devil?

Four. Robin abruptly feels very much like holding Spencer’s hands.

Three. Spencer pulls her in close and promises nothing is going to happen to her.

Two. The man looks straight up at the camera and sneers his Cheshire-cat grin.

One. He turns away, shrugs on his overcoat, and promptly steps out of frame.

Left-handedly, Spencer flips over the feed to Tricky Dick’s own security camera … just in time for the two of them to witness the man materialize in the foyer.

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To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Hello. My name is Robin Leigh-Cheri. I’m sitting at my desk in the computer shop where I work. Spencer is sitting next to me, doing his calculus for summer school. I think he’s my new boyfriend. We both live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA. It’s sunny out today.

I’m 18 years old. A few months ago my father died in an explosion in Iraq. It messed up a few of the plans in my life, but things are getting a bit more normal now. Except last week I found a computer that showed videos of the same man all over the world. He could walk from video to video, even though they were thousands of miles apart. At first I was scared, but then I realized that it felt a lot like art, if that makes sense.

Spencer figured out where he would move to next, and it surprised us that he was heading to this shop! I suppose the man did that to show us he wasn’t real. I guess we were silly for believing it in the first place.

At this point in her letter, Robin quiets her keys for a moment to lean leftwards and kiss a short red sideburn. Spencer chuckles, accidently snapping off a tiny piece of mechanical pencil lead midway through the curling of an integral. He smirks at her. Robin decides to let him finish up in peace before resuming that game. She recalls how he performed during that strange situation she’s just cited in the email. While the man appeared on the security camera, very much as Spencer expected, he did not appear on the feed from the second video camera that Spencer had set up in the foyer and had secretly wired back to another monitor in the storage room. Robin hadn’t noticed it during the frenzy. Whoever had been tampering with all those video feeds over the Internet would not have been able to do it to the second feed.

After making every human effort to calm Robin down in the aftermath, Spencer had traced – again with more of these pings – the direct intrusion into the store’s security camera to a domain in Kiev, Ukraine, where it was registered under the email address to which she was writing now. Ana-Ketrina? One woman? Two?

I guess I’m left believing that all the places shown in those video feeds were real, but the mystery man is some sort of creation. I don’t even know why I’m writing this to you, other than for the small chance that somebody over there in Kiev still has an eye on us over here in Fort Wayne. And maybe you could answer some of my questions …

Who are you?  Why do you do this? How?                                     

Are you really there? The way me and Spencer are?

Sincerely,

            Robin Leigh-Cheri

She looks up, hovering over SEND, and turns again to Spencer. Anything to add?

P.S. You can come visit us in Fort Wayne someday! For real this time!

Send. Robin can’t say if she expects any sort of reply or answers to come of an impulsive email fired off blindly to a domain in Kiev. Plus it feels as though a method to tie together all the loose ends is already right in front of  her, hanging in the air by a very light thread. She asks Spencer if he too wonders if the whole point of the anonymous figure was a challenge to get people to notice him. It’s all very subtle, true, but every one of those videos is accessible to the public and it would be incredibly unlikely that Spencer and she are the only ones to witness the phenomenon.

Spencer puts down the mechanical pencil, stares at it briefly in thought, and turns to borrow one of Robin’s hands, kissing it the way a fifteenth century nobleman might greet his queen. He thinks it’s funny now, but right from the getup he too wondered if it was all a devious experiment, the journeyman testing his strange disguise. Like a taunt that goes back to the days of leprechauns and wayfarers, perhaps it was indeed a test of the ability to notice one particular face in the crowd, the ultimate game of spy/counterspy played out across the entire globe.

But by the denouement of the whole ordeal, Spencer and Robin can hardly look at one another, going about the menial tasks of Tricky Dick’s Computer Fix as summer slips away, without contemplating the other’s eyes and seriously considering kissing in the foyer until customers complain. Perhaps the mysterious figure, if anything little more than a virtual cigarette model gifted with teleportation, performs his magic – from what they can tell, he continues to stroll from locale to locale – not so people may witness his art but rather so that two persons may notice one another. Perhaps what keeps him walking and smoking and limousining around the world truly is a force of art, love and empathy from who-knows-what in Kiev. But who cares? They are together.

Certainly the occasion merits a song. Robin, devising a primitive snare drum from a busted CPU fan and a few sticks of RAM, skips back to the storage room where Spencer tinkers at the work bench and taps out a measure. A one and a two and a one two three –

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