Islands in the Net

"I guess not...." She was wearing an engagement ring.

"My abuela will be glad to see you-I'm glad too."

Laura nodded toward the crowd from behind her sun- glasses. "Don't tell them I'm here-everyone makes such a big deal of it."

"Okay, Laura." Inez was embarrassed. People got that way when you were a global celebrity. Tongue-tied and worshipful-this, from little Inez, who used to see her chang- ing diapers and knocking around in her bathing suit. "I'll see you later huh?"

"Sure." Laura ducked behind the bar, went through the kitchen. No sign of Mrs. Delrosario, but the smell of her cooking was there, a rush of memory. She walked past copper-bottomed pans and griddles, into the dining room.

Rizome guests talking politics-you could tell it by the strained looks on their faces, the aggression.

It wasn't just the fear. The world had changed. They had eaten up the Islands and it had settled in their belly like a drug. That Island strangeness was everywhere now, diluted, muted, and tingly... .

She couldn't face them, not yet. She went up the tower stair,--the door wouldn't open for her. She almost walked into it headlong. Codes must have changed-no, she was wearing a new watchphone, not programmed for the Lodge.

She touched it. "David?"

"Laura," he said. "You at the airport?"

"No. I'm right here at the top of the stairs."

Silence. Through the door, across the few feet that still separated them, she could feel him, bracing himself. "Come on in...."

"It's the door, I can't get it open."

"Oh! Yeah, okay, I can get it." It shunted. She put her sunglasses away.

She came up through the floor and threw the hat onto a table, into a round column of sunlight from a tower window.

All the furniture was different. David rose from his favorite console-but no, it wasn't his, not anymore.

A Worldrun game was on. Africa was a mess. He came to greet her-a tall, gaunt black man, with short hair and read- ing glasses. They gripped each other's hands for a moment.

Then hugged hard, saying nothing. He'd lost weight-she could feel the bones in him;

She pulled back. "You look good."

"So do you." Lies. He took off the glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. "I don't really need these."

She wondered when she was going to cry. She could feel the need for it coming on. She sat down on a couch. He sat on a chair across the new coffee table.

"The place looks good, David. Really good."

"Webster and Webster, we build to last."

That did it. She began crying, hard. He fetched her some tissue and joined her on the couch and put his arm over her shoulders. She let him do it.

"The first weeks," he said, "about the first six months, I dreamed about this meeting. Laura, I couldn't believe you were dead. I thought, in jail somewhere. Singapore. She's a political, I told people, somebody's holding her, they'll let her go when things straighten out. Then they started talking about your being on the Ali Khamenei, and I knew that was it. That they'd finally gotten you, that they'd killed my wife.

And I'd been half the world away. And hadn't helped." He put his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. "I'd wake up at night and think of you drowning."

"It wasn't your fault," she said. "It wasn't our fault, was it? What we had was good, it was really going to last, to last forever. "

"I .really loved you," he said. "When I lost you, it just destroyed me."

"I want you to know, David-I don't blame you for not waiting." Long silence. "I wouldn't have waited either, not if it was like that. What you and Emily did, it was right for you, both of you."

He stared at her, his eyes bloodshot. Her gesture, her forgiveness, had humiliated him. "There's just no end to what you're willing to sacrifice, is there?"

"Don't blame me!" she said. "I didn't sacrifice anything,

I didn't want this to happen to us! It was stolen from us-they stole our life.

"We didn't have to do it. We chose to do it. We could have left the company, run off somewhere, just been happy."

He was shaking. "I would have been happy-I didn't need anything but you."

"We can't help it if we have to live in the world! We had bad luck. Bad luck happens. We stumbled over something buried, and it tore us up. " No answer. "David, at least we're alive. "

He gave a sharp bark of laughter. "Hell, you're more than alive, Laura. You're goddamn famous. The whole world knows. It's a fucking scandal, a soap opera. We don't 'live in the world'-the world lives in us now. We went out to fight for the Net and the Net just stretched us to pieces. Not our fault-oh hell no! All the fucking money and politics and multinationals just grabbed us and pulled us apart!"

He slammed his knee with his fist. "Even if Emily hadn't come in-and I don't love Emily, Laura, not like I loved you-how the hell could we have ever gone back to a real human life? Our little marriage, our little baby, our little house?"

He laughed, a high-pitched unhappy sound. "Back when I was a widower, there was a lot of rage and pain in that, but

Rizome tried to take care of me, they thought it was ... dra- matic. I still hated their guts for what they led us into, but I thought, Loretta needs me, Emily cares, maybe I can make a go of it. Go on living."

He was as taut as strung wire. "But I'm just a little person, a private person. I'm not Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I'm not

God. I just wanted my wife and my baby and my work, and a few pals to drink beer with, and a nice place to live."

"Well they wouldn't let us have that. But at least we made them pay for what they did."

"You made them pay."

"I was fighting for us!"

"Yeah, and you won the battle-but for the Net, not for you and me." He knotted his hands. "I know it's a selfish thing. I feel ashamed sometimes, worthless. Those little bas- tards out in their submarine, they're still out there with their four precious home-made A-bombs, and if they fire one, it's go

But I can't see on that scale, I'm small, I can only see you and me."

She touched his hands. "David, we still have Loretta.

We're not strangers. I was your wife, I'm the mother of your child. I didn't want to be what I've become. now. If I'd had a choice I'd have chosen you:"

He wiped his eyes. He was fighting the feelings back, becoming distant. Polite. "Well, we'll see each other some- times, won't we? Holidays-that sort of thing. Even though

I'm in Mexico now, and you're still in the company."

"I always liked Mexico."

"You can come down and see what we're working on. The

Yucatan project .. some of those guys from Grenada ... their ideas weren't all bad. "

"We'll be good friends. When the hurt passes. We don't hate each other-we didn't mean to hurt each other. It only hurts this bad because it was so good when we had it."

"It was good, wasn't it? Back when we had each other.

When we were still the same size." He looked at her through his tear-streaked dark face. Suddenly she could see the David she had lost in there, somewhere. He was like a little boy.

They had a reception for her downstairs. It was like the other receptions in her honor, in Azania, in Atlanta, though the room was full of people she had loved. They had made her a cake. She cut it, and everyone sang. No journalists, thank God. A Rizome gathering.

She gave them a little speech that she'd written for them on the plane, coming in. About the Lodge-how the enemy had killed a guest, insulted their house and their company. About how they had fought back, not with machine guns, but with truth and solidarity. They had paid a price for resistance, in trouble and tragedy.