Christopher Bernard 

A Kiss on the Screen

“i luv u”
Carmen flinched as if touched by a hot brand, then stared hard at the screen. What had the subject been?
“hope eternal”
She was such a fool! Was that why she’d clicked on it, because she still needed to believe in that? 
Just this week she’d made associate attorney: she believed in smarts, sweat, energy, intimidation~and luck. What did hope have to do with it? 
The message had a typically opaque sender: TJX037X2@msn.com.
	Spam. Scam. Or internet stalker. And an IM illit-erate to boot! Just what I need tonight.
	Whatever. Someone who had sent, expressly to Carmen Vilar, to taunt her, wound her, those short, mocking, meaningless words. 
	She stuck her tongue out at the screen.
	Where had she left her email address? MySpace, YouTube, PayPal, RedFish, craigslist, BizRate, eBay, her blog, her firm, her acupuncturist . . . where had she not left it?
	She hit the Reply button, and an empty email box appeared.
	“Who are you? How do you know me? How did you find me?” she typed quickly, with brief pauses after each question, to think again about those three little words, now hidden under the box on her screen. She almost typed, “Where are you?”
Might be just a little too close for comfort, this guy: better not know too much too soon.
	If it is a guy. Just what I really need: a lesbian geek after my booty!
	She snorted, thinking about Skye at the office.
	I love you too, sweetie. But please . . . !
	She clicked on Drafts and her message disap-peared.
	“i luv u” stared back at her, in jet-black Arial on electric white.
	Abruptly she scrolled down: there was nothing at the bottom of the message, no giveaway, no electronic signature. The white screen gaped at her, blank and a little intimidating, and she scrolled back up to the teasing, deceptively direct, incomprehensible message.
	Don’t seem too eager. Play a little hard to get, like in high school. Maybe not reply at all~no, he may go away.
	Ahh, you really must be desperate! said an evil little voice inside her head.
	Carmen shook herself.
	Reply with “Who is this?” or “Do I know you?” or “And I love New York!” or, best of all, “I love you too, Sam!” Mortify him. Or her.
	Suddenly she slumped in her chair.
	I’m such an idiot. One more smart-aleck cor-porate jerk getting off by getting me to buy something that will just make me look fat, feel ugly, and destroy the planet. It’s a god damn ad campaign! She had been online for half her life, and the first rule of cyberspace she had ever learned was, “Never believe anything you see on the web unless you know the sender.”
	“i luv u,” the words said to her, mockingly.
	And I don’t “luv u”! she felt like shouting at the screen.
	But she couldn’t~not yet, anyway~shoot those cruel words, even in moronic IM speak, on the cyber express back to TJX037X2, whoever he/she was.
	Oh no! It’s not Jack Kushner! She had caught him staring at her in the office kitchen and once or twice down a long, lonely corridor. The saddest desire in his huge brown eyes. As though looking at something completely out of his league. He looked like the kind who would invent a dorky email name and send her a secret declaration.
	No. It wasn’t Jack Kushner. That would be too good to be true.
	A box popped up: “You have an Instant Mes-sage. Do you want to receive it now?”
	She clicked on the Yes box.
	“TJX037X2: r u there?” appeared in the white oblong.
	Carmen stared. The two texts sat on the screen: “i luv u” in the geeky email message box and, in the smaller, pert, off-center IM box, “r u there?”
	She stared in irritation at the new message~how that illiterate nonspelling annoyed her!
	In the little oblong box designed for her reply (a cute little thing~oddly protective, she decided), Carmen typed: “Yes. I am here.” Then, thinking she might as well humor him, her, it, she changed it to “yes i m here.”
	Suddenly she felt a void plunging, down, down, at her feet.
	She stared at the message. She moved the cursor back and forth over the Send button that would move the text into the box where both she and her mystery seducer could see it. 
	“r u there?” and “yes i m here” and “i luv u” stared at Carmen, black on white, with, between them, bars of gray and pale blue that kept them apart, each in its own box, in limbo, in cyberspace, waiting for some-thing to happen. She could do it~she could make something happen~or  she could just sit there, or she could go offline; could run away.
Carmen sat, clinging to her chair as to a cliff over empty space . . .
	She closed her eyes as she moved the cursor back and forth over the Send button, back and forth . . . Then she stopped, sucked in her breath. Clicked.
	And opened her eyes.
	“Carmen: yes i m here.” looked back at her in the IM box under “TJX037X2: r u there?”
	They looked kind of cute together: they almost rhymed.
	A message appeared directly beneath hers.
	“don’t go way”
	She typed: “ok.”
	Silence. She suddenly became aware of the fan belt whirring hoarsely in the old CPU.
	“it hard 2 do this”
	Carmen felt a twinge of pity.
	“i know.”
	Then: “i been waiting long time 2 do this”
	She typed: “how long?”
	“2 long”
	A pause, then “how long?” she typed again, insistently.
	“long as u have own me”
	She broke out in a giggle, despite herself. They really should spellcheck these things. She pulled herself together and typed: “i don’t ‘own’ u!”
	“oh yes u do”
	“don’t be silly, people don’t own people today. you mean known me.”
	She laughed at the unconscious presumption she had put into that last phrase.
	Another pause. Suddenly she was frightened he might have gone away: “r u still there?”
	A punishingly long pause. Then: “yes i m still here”
	She felt light-headed: she didn’t realize she had stopped breathing, waiting for his reply.
	“i was afraid u had gone away.”
	“i won’t go way” 
Then a pause.
“i promise”
	Carmen hesitated, and then, glowing with some-thing she had not felt in a long time~something like trust~typed: “i believe u.”
	A moment after her response popped into the IM box, the machine crashed. It did this regularly, and always at the worst possible times. She might need to call Barry, her geek friend and cyber savior at the office. He’d stop by after work tomorrow: he was always will-ing to do her a special favor.

	From then on, every night, if her machine were working and Barry didn’t have to come in for an emer-gency save, Carmen would find a new email from TJX037X2. And as time went on, she found herself answering with increasing freedom. He (she was sure it was a “he”~he never asked the sorts of questions her girlfriends did) would ask her about her day, and she’d tell him about the firm, curious incidents, her psycho landlord. Sometimes he sent her an Instant Message, and they chatted about nothing for hours before she sud-denly looked at the time~always long after midnight~ and signed off with a breathless, “i have to work tomor-row :( good night!”
	She had tried to get him to give her his name – but he always put her off with a “later - i promise” or “not yet.” She at first wondered at his coyness, but soon got used to it and stopped “nagging” him (her word). She even found herself rather liking the mystery: she often found herself daydreaming during the day: just who is he? And she would glance around her at the office or imagine one or another of the men she knew who might just be her mystery cyber lover. Definitely not Jack Kushner! And she realized that not knowing was in a way sweeter than knowing: she could imagine him as anything she wanted.
	It went on like this for weeks. But then one evening, before turning on her home computer, she felt a wave of unease over what she was doing: it was starting to feel more unsettling than romantic, more weird than mysterious. So she decided it was time to have it out with Mr. TJX037X2.

	There it was, in her Inbox, an email from him. 
“i been thinking about u today”
	She smiled and hit Reply.
	“and i’ve been thinking about you!” she typed. Then thought better of it and changed the exclamation point to a period followed by a smiley.
	She went to the next line.
	“we have to discuss something. i have the hard-est time pronouncing TJX037X2. just try it yourself sometime! how about telling me your real name? i promise i won’t tell anyone, and you’ll be doing my vocal chords a distinct favor. so: how about it? what is your real, full, true, complete, and legal name, mr. Tijixoh Threesevenekstchoo?”
	She sent the email and sat back with her mug of herbal tea and a cheeky grin on her face, opening his email again and reading the words over and over, playing different male voices in her head, wondering what his voice sounded like: Harrison Ford? Sean Connery? Snoop-Dog? Don Knotts? She giggled.
	The IM box flicked on.
	“sorry,” it read, “i cant tell u”
	She almost dropped her tea and typed furiously:
	“why not?!”
	“i just cant it wouldnt be right”
	She replied even more furiously, with a wave of righteous triumph. “wouldn’t be right! need i remind you, sir, that you know *my* name!! it’s only right that i should also be allowed to know yours - full, complete, and real.”
	That should get him. 
	There was no reply. This made her feel very uneasy.
	“may i guess at least?” she typed after a long pause.
	Still no reply.
	“will you let me know if i get it right?”
	No reply.
	“hmmmmm?”
	The little IM box stared at her with its under-score flashing on the electric white.
	“jack kushner?” she typed. Then “bob ashton? brian lieu? bill winters? bruce sakura? mark filippi? orhan . . . jawad . . . ?” and Carmen listed the names of all the men she could remember she had worked or socialized with over the last year~it was not a long list.
	There was still no reply.
	Then she reached back to old classmates, old boyfriends, the boyfriends, even husbands, of girlfriends, old teachers, old crushes, old lovers~and the list grew, until it filled the box and disappeared behind the box’s upper bar: a long list of men’s names followed by question marks, quivering in the flickering pixels of the glowing screen.
	“paolo? ted? enrique? . . .” she finally typed, remembering her first boyfriend, her first kiss, her first date, the first guy who had ever asked her out.
	And still there was no answer.
	“r u still there?” she typed, using those awful IM abbreviations he so liked, suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of loss~all those . . .  boys really, hardly men, that she had known, a few she had loved or who had loved her~faces, eyes, hands, arms, torsos, dim in memory however intense they had been, once~who had all but disappeared in the night of memory, of forget-fulness.
	But . . . whatever his name was, was there no longer.
	Carmen turned off the machine and, later, cried herself to sleep, whispering over and over, “I promise I won’t ask again, I promise I won’t ask again, I promise I won’t ask again,” not saying what she thought: please don’t go away.

	The next night she opened her email with some nervousness. But she needn’t have worried: there was, as usual, an email from him. She clicked on it, after giving herself a moment to pull herself together and get back her self-respect.
	“i am veryveryvery sorry about last night,” it read. “i couldnt face it i ran away i feel so ashamed please forgive me
“u deserve SO MUCH BETTER than this 
“this has been so hard for me i hope u can believe that if not completely understand it even i dont understand it how can i expect u to how can anyone 
“there are so many things i cant do”
	She drew in her breath and stared at the screen, caught between frustration, anger, bewilderment, pity. Not understand? Can’t do? Like tell me his name? Well! If he’s taking it so hard, I’ll just have to live with it, if I want this.
	She stared into space for a moment: Do I want this?
	Not having answered her own question (it could wait, it would have to wait), she wrote him a long, gentle, consoling reply, telling him it was all right, it wasn’t important (even though it was)~after all, she must find out who he was someday~and how did she know it wasn’t better not to know? How often has enchantment been spoiled by knowledge, either too much of it, or gotten too soon? This might be the best it ever gets. The fantasy that reality is not allowed to threaten. Maybe he was, in his strange way, protecting her. 
	He replied almost immediately: with those simple, three, wonderful, incomprehensible words that he had first sent her: “i luv u” 
	Carmen smiled ecstatically at the words on the screen, leaned forward, and kissed them.
		      .	     .	    .
	The desktop computer she used at home had been behaving even more erratically than usual, and the next evening it crashed so badly she couldn’t even boot it up again. The following day she took it, with Barry’s help, by taxi to the shop for overnight servicing. Back home again, after waving Barry with a warm smile off into the night, she used her business laptop to go online. There was, as usual, an email from him.
	It was a cute drawing of a sunflower, using par-entheses and slashes and periods and other punctuation marks. She giggled with surprised delight and sighed, glowing, and sent him a romantic reply. For some reason he didn’t reply at once, or even later that evening, but she didn’t mind it at the time. Maybe they both needed a little space right now~and anyway, she had gotten what she wanted, for the moment. 
	Next day, again with Barry’s help, she picked up the desktop and brought it home, and all evening she spent exchanging emails and, later, messages with him till it was past midnight and she had to type, “i have to work tomorrow :( good night!”
	But her desktop machine (an old, battered IBM clone she hadn’t upgraded in years) began behaving even worse~hanging up and crashing at the strangest mo-ments~though never when she was online with him, thank heaven. Eventually it got so bad she decided to trash it and buy a new machine.
	The day the flashy Compaq Presario arrived, Carmen took her old computer~ugly monitor, boxy CPU, clunky keyboard, sticky mouse and all~with Barry’s help to the Good Will downtown. When she got back, she set up the new machine, also with Barry’s help cabling, fitting the components together, until between them they got it to work smoothly enough through the basics. There were still glitches with the old printer, and she wasn’t so sure about the installed spyware: it slowed the machine down really badly. But at least the thing didn’t crash. 
	Carmen thanked Barry warmly for his help, gave him a peck on the cheek, and pointed him toward the door. He gave her a sheepish look.
	“You wouldn’t have a beer, Carmen, would you?”
	“No, Barry,” Carmen said sweetly but firmly, “no beer tonight. But I’ll buy you lunch next week?”
	He smiled back, sadly (for a brief moment re-minding Carmen, uncannily, of Jack Kushner), and left.
	Carmen spent the next hour or so checking the applications she regularly used. Only then did she settle down to checking her personal email. There, as always, was an email from him, but she decided to tease herself and him for a bit by answering all of her other email first~of which she had an unusually high volume that day~there were even several tempting spam offers~ before indulging herself in the day’s supreme pleasure.
	His email, when she finally opened it, read: “something has me very worried please reply as soon as u can”
	Carmen flushed with guilt~she had kept him waiting unconscionably, irresponsibly playing with her idiotic “power,” it was now almost eleven~and she quickly jotted a reply: “what’s the matter? i’m here.”
	No answer.
	She typed another message: “IM me, i’m at home.”
	Still no reply.
	She waited several minutes, then sent another email: “hello? r u there?”
	Still no response.
	“i’m sorry i waited so long to get back to u, i just got a new computer and had to set it up and check it out before checking my email.” – Better not mention Barry, she thought, why cause problems. And she didn’t mention answering all those other emails before even opening his. – “but i’m here now. just send me a reply or IM me.” Then she added a smiley, sent it, and waited.
	There was no answer to this either.
	She sat up till almost three in the morning, staring at her Inbox, refreshing it regularly, checking the Junk folder, her other folders, the Recycle bin, in case his reply had been sent to one of them by mistake. Was the new machine screwing with her email? She had never heard of such thing, but there was always a first time. She thought of calling Barry, but it was too late for that. She went to bed, feeling very uneasy, kept the computer on, and got up twice before her alarm clock buzzed to check the Inbox. Only two new spams had been received by the dawn.
	That was the last email Carmen ever received from TJX037X2. Every night for the next week she checked her email, then emailed him, but there was none from him, and there were no responses to hers. After two days of this, she cried for an hour, then pulled herself together and told herself it was temporary~he was busy; after all, he had a life besides Carmen, she just had to be patient. After all, he’d said he had something important he needed to discuss with her, he would get back to her when he had time.
	It took another week for her to realize that this was not going to happen; around midnight, after four hours of fruitless emailing and waiting, she realized that he was not going to communicate with her again. This was it. It was over.
	Carmen folded her arms over the top of her sleek new monitor, buried her face in her arms, and sobbed for an hour before staggering, exhausted with bewilderment and grief, to bed.
	“But you said you wouldn’t go away,” she said in an agonized whisper before being overcome by sleep, despising herself for her gullibility even as she wept over the loss of her love.
	Carmen found herself almost unable to check her personal email for weeks afterwards. But eventually she did and clicked through 387 spam messages and dozens of emails from family and friends without seeing (and her heart seared with pain the moment she realized it) a single email from him whose words on the computer screen she had once kissed.
	Eventually, after months had passed~moving through life like a zombie, between her apartment, her office, the grocery store, and the video store, where she increased her regular movie watching fourfold~she got over it; “forget” would be too strong a word. Then one day the fear and nausea that just looking at her com-puter had caused her for so long vanished, and she went back to her usual evenings of checking email, surfing the web, checking online dating sites for the member profiles, and so on. She still wondered who had been her “online paramour” (as she thought of him now, with a little arch sarcasm to protect the wound that was still healing, with infinite slowness, in her heart), and she met her male friends and colleagues with a hint of suspicion and hostility, wondering which one of them might have been him.
	
	A year and a half later, Carmen was audited by the IRS. It came out of the blue, and she wondered what the red flag might have been that caused it.
	“No red flag,” the auditor had said, sympa-thetically. “Just your unlucky day. We audit a certain percentage of returns each year. We choose them at random,” he simpered. “To be fair.” Carmen gave him her death glare, but he survived, miraculously. “By the way,” he said, looking over her list of deductions, “what’s this computer you donated to Good Will? We’ll need to see the records for all donations of more than $500.” He simpered again.
	Carmen groaned: she had gotten $600 for her old computer and thought it was a deal.
	Her records were badly scattered and, as luck would have it, she had lost the receipt. So she went down to Good Will, hoping against hope they might have kept a record for such as herself. This sort of thing must happen all the time.
	“Sure, I remember that machine,” the clerk said after she explained her plight. “It drove us crazy~it was really fast, but so erratic. It was sulky, and then it would crash six times in an hour. It was like it was having a nervous breakdown. It seemed to have a mind of its own!”
	“That’s it,” Carmen sighed.
	“We cannibalized it for parts. Oh, here’s the record. Got all the info you should need~I’ll make  copies if you want. It’s got your name, the make, the model, the donation figure, even the serial number . . .”
	Carmen looked over the record, nodding ab-sently, then stopped, the color draining from her face, and she felt faint.
	The clerk came back with the copies.
“You all right?” He touched her elbow, with a startled look.
	“I’m fine, really,” Carmen said quickly. “I’m just fighting a bug.” She turned to him and said, her voice shaky, “You wouldn’t have any of it left, would you? It had . . . a lot of sentimental value.”
	“Well, as for any relics, I think we just may,” he continued. He opened a drawer and rummaged a bit. “Here we go.” And he withdrew a small square of shiny, glass-like metal inscribed with a tiny tree-like diagram of lines branching out to form connections, a tiny web of them. “It’s the chip it ran on. The brain of the machine! A little beat up, but it would make a cool ring.”
	“And the heart,” Carmen said in a small voice.
	“’Scuse me?” asked the clerk.
	“Nothing . . . Can I have it?”
	The clerk shrugged, and Carmen, almost without thinking, raised the chip to her lips and kissed it, the way she used to kiss the cross she still sometimes wore around her neck, then slipped the chip into her purse, tucked the copies under her arm, on one of which read the old computer’s serial number, TJX037X2, and quickly left the store.
_____

Christopher Bernard is the founder and a principal of Caveat Lector. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins, several chapbooks of poetry and prose, plays, and philosophical essays.