Dionysus Logged Out

By James David King

The eighties. Online chat. Suicide. Theres never been a coming-of-age novel like this. On ChatNet, the online hangout for teenagers, nobody uses their real names. Calvin AKA Iron Man is best friends with Gabriel AKA Dionysus, and they both fall for Brooke AKA Sister of Mercy. Gabriel kills himself and Calvin takes it upon himself to figure out what drove Gabe over the edge. Dionysus Logged Out is A Separate Peace fast-forwarded into the information age. Its literature for geeks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 7, 2004
• ISBN: 9781462836697

James David King

James David King was born in Berkeley, California in 1969. He was addicted to online chat in 1986. He recovered in 1987. He began writing Dionysus Logged Out in 1994, and finished it in 2004. In 2001, he led the Beyond Baroque Fiction Workshop in Venice. King has lived in berkeely, Szeged, Sydney, and San Diego. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two cats.

Book preview

Dionysus

Logged Out

James David King

Copyright © 2004 by James David King.

Cover art by Greg Simkins

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

23098

Contents

AKA

Part 1

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Part 2

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Part 3

Acknowledgments

For Tony Osterman and Darren Pascual

AKA

PART 1

You know, I could write a whole story set at a party. Possibly something could have happened to the world outside—a holocaust of some kind… these people are partying against the darkness.

Neil Gaiman

Saturday

You were still alive in 1986.

In 1986, Halley’s comet was a bust, barely even visible, just another dot in the sky. In 1986, Ferdinand Marcos fled the Philippines. In 1986, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States and Clint Eastwood was the mayor of Carmel. The Challenger went up in smoke in January and Chernobyl melted down in May. Microsoft went public. AIDS was new. CD players were new. Bon Jovi was new. There was war in Afghanistan. There was war in Nicaragua, which the CIA was supporting. There was a war on drugs. There was a hole in the ozone layer.

Platoon won multiple Oscars. You and I hadn’t seen it. We saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the worst movie of the year according to Newsweek. But we loved it. We saw Top Gun, where Bradley got his online handle: Iceman. We saw Aliens, which was my vote for best picture.

The Macintosh Plus was the cool new computer to get, but it couldn’t play games. For that you stuck with your Apple IIe or Commodore 64. There was no World Wide Web. There were five thousand internet hosts but nobody cared. In Walnut Creek, California, this guy we knew only as Freud had a multi-line Bulletin Board System called ChatNet: locals would dial in and chat online and play computer games. It was colonized by dozens of teenagers. I was one of them. You, my best friend for as long as I could remember, were another.

You wouldn’t make it to 1987.

You can never find a root cause. Maybe it began with Brooke. Maybe it began with Paul Avery. Maybe it began with birth. You have to start somewhere. I’ll start with Brooke, when Brooke came into our lives. What a cliché. We were playing Dungeons & Dragons at my place while my dad was away at a math conference. You, me, Bradley AKA Iceman, Freud AKA Freud.

I couldn’t believe I’d talked you into playing D & D. I thought you’d never play again after the time you flipped out and quit on us, the time I cornered you in the backyard and you told me your big secret. But you’d gotten over it, or something, and we were back in business again. I set up a dungeon that would be perfect for three adventurers.

But Freud brought this girl. A girl playing D & D? Unheard of.

She was new online. Her handle was Sister of Mercy. I was in love.

She was sexy and geeky at the same time. Chinese. Half-Chinese, she liked to point out. Her last name was Ferdon. A white girl’s name. With glasses and braces, long black hair, so small and thin and fragile, dressed as if she was ready to go to a nightclub, rouged cheeks and black skirt, black vinyl jacket. Only fourteen.

I did the numbers. Since I was seventeen it wouldn’t be considered statutory until my next birthday. Although the freshman-senior thing was frowned upon.

Her paleness. The goth thing. Her face was almost as pale as mine, ghostly, porcelain. I’d never seen a Chinese girl so pale. Her ethnicity came through in the eyes, the stereotype slant, the black pearl iris, shrouded in eye shadow, framed by her steel rim glasses. She was broadcasting mixed messages, the slut clothes on her thin body fighting with the nerd glasses, a stoplight burning green and red at the same time. Walk Now. Don’t Walk.

I thought the important thing was not to look interested, to not let her know I was attracted to her. Play hard to get. Which I pulled off. I said all of three words to her before Freud decided that what would really make the D & D game fun was if everyone got baked. I refused and insisted that you guys do it in the garage. I hoped that Brooke would refuse also. She didn’t. Bradley and I stayed upstairs in the living room, watching television. I felt like we were martyrs.

Bradley and I watched all of Saturday Night Live and then I told him I was going to bed. He stretched out on the couch and told me he’d see me in the morning.

When I opened the door to my bedroom, there she was: lying on her side on my bed, skirt riding up on her thigh to create a delicious triangle of shadow between her legs. This is starting to sound like a letter to Penthouse. No such luck: she was passed out cold, her breath sighing through her nose.

Robots don’t have free will.

I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I reconstructed what must have happened: she got too drunk, or too stoned, and needed somewhere to lie down.

That sick song by the Mentors popped into my head, the one about raping drunk girls. Why that song? Because I was thinking about stealing a kiss? Do you blame me? Here I am, seventeen, never even touched a girl, my purity test score in the high nineties. One kiss wouldn’t hurt her. She’d never even know.

The room was softly lit by the green and amber glow from my computer monitors. I could make out the dim shapes of my posters: Iron Man, Blade Runner, Elle McPherson. I could see the windows, covered with aluminum foil. I could pick out a path through the dirty laundry and capsized Nikes to the bed.

From somewhere in the house I heard laughter.

She had taken her glasses off, which was disappointing, because it erased the geek girl look. I smelled whiskey on her breath, another thing which killed the fantasy. I kneeled beside her, brought my face close to hers, closed my eyes—I knew from that song in Top Gun that closing your eyes was something you were supposed to do—and touched lips.

Her sighing breath stopped. I opened my eyes and looked into hers. They were open.

I swear this is the truth: she grabbed the back of my head and pulled me back to her and kissed me again. Her tongue was between my teeth and I was so stunned I forgot to close my eyes.

She pulled me onto the bed with her and I tasted her braces. I was suddenly self-conscious about my retainer and wanted to take it out but didn’t know how to do it politely. She started kissing my neck and I tried kissing hers. This was called necking. I couldn’t believe I was necking.

For the first time, I felt something too good to be true. The feeling has a physical component, a pressure, like your potential energy is trying to push its way out through your skin, through your pores, your face and neck. Your hair stands on end, you get goose bumps, you feel flushed and hot, you wish you could stop time in this one moment.

I began to think I’d get laid, that maybe this is how it happens, just like a letter in Penthouse. I worried that I didn’t have any condoms. I’d never even seen a condom.

But she fell asleep while I was kissing her throat.

Brooke, I said in her ear, shaking her by the shoulder.

Sister of Mercy. Corny, but we choose our online handles for a reason. I thought her chosen name would get through in a way her given name couldn’t. Still nothing.

I shook her roughly.

I clenched my fists and groaned behind gritted teeth. This was so unfair. I lay there paralyzed, muscles rigid, for I don’t know how long before I managed to relax, to say to myself, there’s always tomorrow. Get some sleep.

But I couldn’t sleep. You told me that joke in fourth grade: what’s the difference between light and hard? It’s possible to sleep with a light on. I didn’t get it at the time. Unlike you, I only masturbated once a day, at night before I went to sleep, lately talking dirty to Blonde Goddess online as I did it, filled with guilt because a robot shouldn’t have to answer to hormones.

I rolled on my stomach and felt the comfortable pressure. I slowly humped the mattress on instinct, as if my pelvis was being run by a different co-processor. All the time afraid Brooke might wake up even though she was out cold.

Maybe part of me knew that come morning Brooke was going to be lost to me and this was my last chance to shed the robot skin. Except I didn’t do anything so much human as animal, rolling onto my back and wriggling my corduroy and jockey shorts down around my knees and taking hold and pumping. Animal and yet mechanical: rod bearing, connecting rod, piston. I wasn’t joining humanity at all. But I didn’t think about that. I thought about Brooke, about her skirt riding up on her thigh and about what a creep I was but at least there was a line I didn’t cross: it would have been so easy for me to slide the hem of her skirt up her thigh, over her hip, and gaze at an actual pair of women’s underpants.

But I didn’t do it. I thought of myself as a person who doesn’t cross lines. No relative morality for me. Absolutes. Black and whites. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink. I didn’t swear. I didn’t do drugs. We’ve had this conversation before, sitting on the bench under the fir trees by the school parking lot.

Why? you asked me. Because your dad doesn’t do any of those things?

My dad’s a smart guy. He knows where to draw lines.

Masturbating is okay; violating someone is not.

Before I finished, on the other side of the room, something rattled and clicked. A latch slid, and light fell across us. I turned to the door, squinting, and saw two silhouettes in the doorway. A punch in the gut. I curled away from the door into a fetal position. I am not here.

Oh shit, from the door. Bradley’s voice.

Turn the camera off. Your voice.

Eyes shut tight—I am not here, I am not here. Still, some part of me was functioning, my hands found their way to my belt loops and pulled my corduroys up over my thighs, which were misted with sweat. I was oily. I was Waldo from Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher video, hair slicked, sweating, masturbating in the back of the school bus.

Sorry, Calvin. Your voice.

We thought you were getting it on. Bradley’s voice. We thought it would be funny.

Tape the historic moment.

I turned to look at the two of you and after my eyes adjusted to the light I understood what you were talking about: Bradley held his bulky video camera limply at his side. Bradley, black and filling the doorway so that you seemed like an afterthought, an annex, a smaller, white human—backlit, your face looked like a skull—squeezed into the doorway next to him. Although Bradley had all the size, you had all the hair Bradley shaved nearly bald and you with black coils cascading down to your shoulders. Rich Bradley with his expensive toys.

You nudged Bradley’s shoulder. Give him the tape.

Bradley took a step back. I can’t. I’ve got two completions on this tape. Don’t worry, I’ll erase this part.

I felt like I was choking. I closed my eyes and hoped you’d go away. Why couldn’t I be Iron Man, right now?

I could be. I felt his strength well up in me, the steel mesh armor, the repulsor rays, the power supply that kept his heart beating. I stood up and took measured paces to the door and looked Bradley square in the face. Tall, muscle-bound Bradley and I was not afraid.

Give me the tape, I said, and held out my hand.

He cradled the video camera against his chest like a football.

Come on, give him the tape, you said, shuffling your feet, hands in your pockets, looking at the floor.

Forget it, Bradley said. Sorry.

I put my hands on the video camera and he wrenched it away and walked down the hall towards the stairs. You followed.

"You better erase it," I said, uselessly, unable to step into the hallway after him, into the light. Because what could I do? Attack Bradley? One punch and I’d be down. Iron Man faded. I closed the door and locked it, wondering how you guys got in. You must have carded the lock. I sunk to my knees, and pressed my face against the cool painted wood of the door.

I don’t know how long I sat there before I returned to bed. I pushed Brooke over to one side. Still no sign of consciousness. I tried to go to sleep but it was useless. Things I should have said to you, schemes for getting the tape back, half-baked explanations. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look Bradley in the eyes again. I wasn’t worried about you; you’d done worse things. You’d always be my friend.

I counted prime numbers to get the whirling thoughts out of my head. One, three, five, seven, eleven. Just like your parents’ autistic subjects. I remembered that time we were hanging out in your dad’s office at Berkeley and your dad was all, check this out Calvin, you’ll be interested in this. He introduced us to a seven-year-old in a football helmet. Your dad recited a series of huge prime numbers to the kid, in the tens of thousands, and the kid picked up where your dad left off. I’m good with primes, I can go into the hundreds without stopping to think, and this kid blew me away. I asked your dad, are all autistic kids this good at math? He said no. It must suck to be autistic and not have special powers.

Lying in bed next to Brooke, reciting prime numbers, I wished I was that kid. He was a pure, idealized version of myself, the way I know the high-resolution video memory on the Apple II runs from address 2000 to 4000 hex, but I don’t know how to talk to a girl. The difference is the autistic kid doesn’t know he’s weird.

I think I was in the two hundreds when I fell asleep. When I woke Brooke was gone.

Sunday

Iceman has logged in

hey Brad. where’d everybody go? when I woke up the house was empty except for Freud

just squealed and ran into the house to get a foot stool and a plastic baggie

Brooke was freaking out, said her mom would ground her, so Gabe took her home. And I had no idea when you’d get your sorry ass out of bed so I went home too.

you guys had a party last night and didn’t invite me?

It wasn’t a party. We were just playing D&D

Jane needs some Ice, pass it on

is there a plan for tonite?

we could go see rocky horor

anybody seen Brooke? Sister of Mercy?

you alays suggest that

maybe Brooke has something better to do than kill a beautiful Saturday afternoon sitting at her computer

what are you saying?

Is Freud still there?

he left thirty minutes ago. he slept in my dad’s bed. don’t think I’ll tell dad about that one

You better wash the sheets.

Freud has logged in

speak of the devil

hello everybody