The flat surface run of his invisible keyboard felt electrified as he typed his gmail confession to her. How he'd fallen in love with her long before the first game of cribbage. How he'd successfully broken into the website to give her a birthday greeting for Bill's one hundreth birthday, which was coming up in just two months. For some reason he also confessed his emptiness towards his mother, his confusion over her leaving the family, and his fears that having kids of his own may one day lead his own life down that same path. He wrote of how logic pushed him to figure out what could be hacked, how it could be opened up to him, how being inside a website's core area helped him to feel more in control of himself. What made a website function helped him feel more able to review his own methods of functioning.
His fingers moved at a dancer's pace and rythym, his mind was so connected to his fingers that there didn't seem to be any body parts between them. He enjoyed this aspect of cyberspace, when he connected at that level. When he felt as easy to figure out as a machine. When even his sense of touch and feel was understandable and even beautiful in the way it connected mind to fingers and heart to mind. He could feel inside the box, he could love inside the box, and he could feel and love outside the box, and sometimes the two combined for a most powerful emotion that combined every aspect of his being and the being of the box itself.
His computer suddenly, for no reason, shut off. Looking outside, he noticed the entire block in his area had shut down. No lights at all.
He followed the cord from the minigen and saw that it was not taken off the adapter from last month's recharge. He'd bought the pint sized computer generator for the occsional power outages and surges that were part of the revamping of a system to wireless, but he'd forgotten to put it back on the computer's plug. It sat, fully charged, but disconnected and unable to save anything.
And his confession to her, pages and pages long, may or may not be retrievable. The lights outside came on all at once, and then his system began to reload, but staring at the monitor's emptiness as he listened to the crackles and static of life going back into it, he knew that evey word of what he typed most likely was gone.
But having thought it, having put it into tangible form, having letters and words designate it as more than just a thought or feeling but as something real that could have effect, he knew there wasn't much of a choice when he found that it was erased. He began to type it all out again.
Elizabeth gazed out the store window as the cars passed by in late Sunday slowness. An ambulance went by, lights flashing and siren sounding, but it also went at a somewhat casual pace. The store shelves were orderly and coffee was still filtering through, into a fresh pot. With all her duties done and still hours of her shift left, she looked around the counter area for anything to organize. Spotting a stack of old magazines, she clicked the computer to the non-sold section and began typing in each title and quantity for each pile.
The door opened slowly and two men walked in disturbingly slow. The hairs went up on the back of her neck before she even had a chance to turn around to greet them inside. As her eyes met the first man's eyes, she knew this was to be no ordinary night at the store. He held the small, shiny object in front of his body, watching her reaction to it. "Stop," she said, but he wouldn't stop.
"I'm not kidding, stop, this is illegal and I want no part of it," she said loudly to the second man, but he appeared to be taking survelience of the store for other women to phone-film. "This is not allowed in this store, we have a sign," Elizabeth warned them again. As she took in a deep breath, and having no other choice at this point, she took out a small pen-shaped utensil and aimed it at the phone in the first man's hand. "Shit!" he screamed in an almost feminine voice as the phone went flying from his hand, the electrical charge sending sparks flying everywhere.
"I warned you," Elizabeth said flatly.
"You didn't have to ruin my phone!" the man yelled as he bent down to pick up his smouldering tiny machine.
"You didn't have to continue filming me when I said to stop," Elizabeth said, twice as flatly as she'd said she'd warned him. "I know what you use those for and I want no part of it," she added.
"Cunt," the second man said as he took out another film-phone and pointed it at her. She reached inside to grab her potent pen, but he quickly put his phone away and both men headed towards the door to leave.
Bill walked in as the two men brushed by him whispering directly at him "damn nigger," to which Bill replied "dang, haven't heard that in a good decade."
Elizabeth started to cry. "Bill, I'm so, so sorry. I apologize for them calling you that."
Bill leaned over the counter and took her chin in his hand. "Don't apologize for them, have pity on them. That kind of thing went out with gas operated cars. Society exhausted racism long ago, those boys just don't know how to keep up with the times and styles. Besides, I am sure they have no idea, but they hurt themselves by using that term such as they did when the word itself is nothing more than sounds, letters, and mouth opening and tongue swirls. They can let all that verbally out, but the hate of it stays within them, it can't reproduce itself, it eventually only destroys the harborer."
Elizabeth stood still and wondered what it must have been like growing up during the times that Bill had, when racism was more prevalent, when computers weren't even around as they were now. It must have been so hard to understand the mind aspect of things back then.