This Blue Ball | Page 9

is directed to you the individual, or in this blog, should I choose to respond to all. Be patient; I will delay any response in order to avoid inadvertent patterns that might otherwise emerge from my behavior.
I do expect that the majority of the messages I will receive will be from plants and pursuers of various stripes. I admit that I'm looking forward to the excitement -- no doubt a fatal flaw, but without excitement your nerves can dull. For you the pursuer, let me just point out that I am already prepared to deal with your posting specific variants on servers across the country in order to cause me to reveal my location. I am prepared for a scripted message intended to trigger a connection directly from my computer to your server. I also fully expect that you will do your best to enrage me, in the hopes that anger will make me slip up, expose something about my location or myself to you. Please consider these and the other obvious options already eliminated and move on to something more creative, something more bold.
Gary. We left him rather awkwardly kneeling in Andrew's bedroom, staring at an artifact of experiential quantum mechanics. He had the sensation, in a way that we all might, that there was something monumental facing him. At the same time, he knew how easy it is to be fooled; how seldom the monumental appears; and how foolish someone appears at the moment they dream of the one and are confronted by the other.
"Wow," he said. "I'm not sure what would have caused this." He looked back over his shoulder. Despite a lingering heat and oppressive humidity, Alice had put her arm around Andrew and pulled him tight, as if a chill had taken hold of her body. Gary would later assert that he could already sense something growing in Alice's self-representation, her demeanor and actions, something akin to pride -- a feeling of having been chosen. This feeling was in direct conflict with her flight instinct, and gave her a flustered appearance in the following, which Gary found unavoidably and incredibly alluring.
"Is it dangerous?" she asked.
Gary said: "The monitor isn't, I don't think, but I couldn't tell you about whatever it is that caused this."
She pulled Andrew tighter to her and said, "You're sleeping in my bedroom tonight." Then: "Should we get rid of the monitor?"
Gary looked back at it. "I can take it; maybe there's something inside that would help me understand what happened."
"Just be careful," she said. A concern, not for him per se, but for the service man whose specialty she does not understand.
He smiled his careful church smile, one which he had not used for quite a while. He did not want to say this right away, but he knew it was the crux: "Do you want to know what I find?"
Alice had a number of options. She could resolve that this whole incident had never happened, remove any sign that it had, and act the unknowing. If it was a freak of nature, this course could be the best. But if it was an act of will, as it seemed to be, this might be a risky course of action. Perhaps, the force that had willed contact would accept such a break and undo contact from that point forward; you might even assume that contact as secretive as this could not be sustained against someone's will. Or she could ask for the monitor back after Gary had done whatever analysis he could -- establishing, for example, its anti- quotidian nature -- and live this mystery for herself and Andrew. This would avoid the complication of Gary's non-entity kneeling in her son's bedroom. Or she could continue to interact with Gary for the sake of finding out more about what happened here. There was also her promise to Andrew to find out what had happened. But perhaps most importantly, there was the truth that this represented: that the world did surprise, did create new stories, did open gates where there had been none.
By contacting Gary she had already started down a particular path. But the uncertainty in his eyes might have made this a different path from the one she had imagined. And even if she had no way of knowing about the ill-fated society with which we began this narrative, she could assess that this mystery might open onto vistas with completely unanticipated vectors of force. She would be taking a risk, with her life and Andrew's, if she did anything other than wash her hands of the whole thing.
While her mind worked, Alice was alternately flushing and hemming and hawing, with Andrew looking up at her, wishing to remind her of her promise, without giving her an opportunity to argue