Cables

Once out of desperation I offered to get naked if Mo would read from his diary which was on the computer. He did hesitate before saying no, which I thought was interesting. His diary was in the basement and plugged in through a gap in the brown wallpaper. He wrote it on an opaque grey plastic block which made his face look grey too, because he never turned the lights on down there, just sat with his face illuminated by the electricity that was inside of it, in his perfect military posture endlessly writing and clicking, while rubbing his socked feet back and forward over the carpet. When my cousin had come to install the carpet, decades ago, the roll of it was slumped against the wall, and Mo had gone over to it, ran his hands over the short threads of it, and simply said: buzzcut.

Mo always vacuumed the carpet in the basement himself in an attempt to keep me away from the internet. I never saw him pressing his hands into the carpet like that again, after the day it arrived. Instead he pressed his fingers into the plastic of the keyboard only while I was upstairs making dinner, pinching the corners of fresh dough into different patterns, flour creeping up my wrists. We made love with increasing frequency from the day we met to the day he died, and every time we did I saw all of his cells at once, knew that every fibre of his being was wiped clean just from looking at me, that he and I would be changed after. Refreshed. He knew my hunger for it, which is probably why he didn’t barter his privacy for my nakedness. I was never anything but naked with him. Usually, straight after making love, my desire to read his diary dissipated. I felt as if there wasn’t a single thing more that I could know about my husband, more than the feeling of every piece of his DNA being in my arms and his skin on my skin as we aged together. But it always crept back, with time, my desire to know what was in his diary.

Once out of desperation I offered to get naked if Mo would read from his diary which was on the computer.

I went down to stare at the face of the computer every few years, under the pretence of dusting or letting some air in. Each time I darted into the corner to look at it, I saw a washed out black colour behind a piece of glass, and my own face looking emptily back at me, uninterested by my own small act of rebellion or betrayal. Each time my face looked more skull-like in the dark reflection. Each time my eyeball cavities were deeper, my cheekbones seemed to protrude forward more. It was like a timelapse of me ageing whenever I looked into that machine, and I hoped my husband’s diary would be the same. Scenes of me growing old, staring into him at intervals. I hoped it wasn’t things from before, things he did as a young soldier that I didn’t know about. I rubbed my feet on the carpet and pressed a finger to the dead screen, willing the static to make my skin snap or a strand of my hair float up slowly like it was saying hi. I gathered the chubby plastic cables that sucked on the machine and ran them through my hands like a thick braid of hair. I followed them into the wall and wondered where my husband’s secrets went. I held a feather duster the whole time, in case he discovered me there.

/

Dear Internet Provider,

My husband’s just died and before that he never let me use the computer. I don’t have any money and or know what the internet is for so stop taking his money which is my money now and it’s all I have until I also die.

This is my cousin’s email address thankyou.

/

His name badge said Johnny even though nobody in our country was called Johnny, and Johnny was slick. His hair was not long, in the traditional style of our men, it was a cartoonish bouffant with shaved sides, which reminded me of some pop star I couldn’t recall. Underneath Johnny on the badge it said ‘Digital Literacy Coach’. Later, after Johnny had taught me for 14 classes and 14 weeks I would google all by myself photos of the pop star, last year’s winner on Neaniloupe’s Got Talent. I called Johnny over proudly: see I knew I knew what you reminded me of and now I know for sure.

I smiled at the comparison, but Johnny was affronted, which I thought was interesting.

The class was full of ladies like me, who were offered free things because our husbands had been soldiers. Most of the husbands were dead but some were alive especially the ones from my husband’s war which started around the same time as the internet. In the first class Johnny asked us to introduce ourselves and say what we’d like to get out of the class. One woman said she had just lost her third husband and she wanted to find a fourth, using the online dating, and I thought that was interesting. One woman wanted help talking to her children and grandchildren who lived in other countries and couldn’t come back, for a reason she wouldn’t name but from her tone I guessed it was personal and not political. In Neaniloupe, people were mostly separated from their families for political reasons, unless they seemed like really painful personalities, like this woman, who generally behaved like a wet blanket. When it was my turn I got excited and said I wanted to read my husband’s diary. I was planning on saying I had just come here on the advice of the young person at the internet service provider, who said I might have fun on the internet, that I should not be so quick to cancel the service.

Dear Internet Provider, My husband’s just died and before that he never let me use the computer.

I didn’t like the name Johnny so I called out ‘young man’ when I had a question. He turned out to be a teacher who volunteered at the centre and so not really that young. Even though I made Johhny very tired I learnt so much from him and started talking just like a young man after all those days with him. All the punchlines on the internet were in English so I was learning that too.

After six months in Johnny’s class I ‘Wikipedia-ed’ a list of wars that happened in the last century and said out loud ‘lollll’ like Johnny did because I saw our country’s flag in a column that was titled ‘Victorious Party (if applicable)’ and the idea that Mo was having a victorious party ever in his life was just so lol. Then I spent a few hours learning all the flags, because I had only recognised two.

/

In the first class Johnny had said: okay we’re going to start with setting up an email.

And I had said: young man, I’m going to need you to take a step back.

I needed to know where the cables went first. Johnny said well, by definition the internet is just a lot of computers that are connected by cables. So in essence the cables are just going out to other people, like first your neighbour, but then, underground, and then, under the ocean. Everyone thinks it’s all in the cloud, they look up and gesture to the air, but it’s really underneath them, it comes from the ground up, he said. I said it was like war too, people who write movies think war always happens in the air, it’s men getting in a plane and going somewhere else. But we know that when war arrives in your country, it comes from the ground up, it starts with the earth shaking, and cracking open while you watch, swallowing up life as you know it. It’s only in the air if you’re the ones that leave on a plane afterward. Johnny seemed annoyed or sad or fatigued by me bringing up our husbands from the earth for a moment, and I thought that was interesting. A few of the women smiled at me, a few looked absently down at the carpet.

He put a picture up on a big machine for us all to see, a map of the world where all the big cables ran under the ocean, connecting each continent. I imagined the cables that ran through my hand like locks of alien hair. So my husband’s secrets were out there, in the whole world, just never in our home, except in the space between his fingers and his computer in the basement? The lady who just wanted to do online dating started to complain but I really liked the direction class was going in. We spent the rest of the class talking about how the internet was really just a cable. The very ones I had held in my hands in the basement, chubby and soft and seemingly sweet.

Some nights after Johnny’s class I’d be high off the things people did. Most wars happened on the internet now, no combat, just weapons that fired remotely like synapses. Most spies simply stayed at home and read secret blogs. On the internet, it doesn’t matter where anyone actually is, no-one’s location is real. I’m on the internet now, and it doesn’t matter what country I’m in, it wouldn’t change anything if you knew.

When war arrives in your country, it comes from the ground up, it starts with the earth shaking, and cracking open while you watch.

Some nights I couldn’t sleep, thinking about all those cables running through the wet mud like snakes. The way stories travelled through them, springing out of the ground and taking a hold of us, at the heart, at the neck, at the throat. The stories became like parasites, surviving off the living body parts they entered, our gut reactions, our triggered fingers pressing feverishly into letters, our eyeballs flickering across words, giving ideas momentum as they grabbed and dragged, grabbed and dragged, pulling and pushing text to and fro.

/

After 10 months in Johnny’s class I asked him why it might be that I had been kept away from the internet by my husband. Johnny hesitated to comment on our personal lives, even though he couldn’t keep a straight face when he had to help that woman reply to all her online dating messages. I thought that was interesting. But this day he conceded: maybe it made my husband feel powerful, to be in control of it all.

Then I googled pictures of buzzcuts and Johnny asked me why. I said, my husband was always saying the word ‘buzzcut’ in certain sensory moments, and I wanted to know what it was. Johnny explained that Mo probably learned it from the soldiers that came, they all wore their hair that way. It has a particular feel that is hard to forget, especially in heightened interactions of war. Mo was never in combat, I said, he sat behind a desk. He told me he did the war on a computer. He was one of the first. He never would have touched a man with that haircut.

Johnny looked at me kindly then and said, about what I said before: maybe he was just trying to protect you, from things you wouldn’t want to know.

I looked at Johnny’s hair, how it was so unfashionably short at the sides that it was shaved. He invited me to feel it, if it would help me understand. I ran my fingers over it, uncomfortable but grateful, and imagined the intimacy required to get close enough to your enemy to know the touch of his hair under your fingers, to remember it for your lifetime afterwards, to recall it so often it became a foreign word your wife knew. I wondered if he’d spent the whole time scared, thinking he was going to die. I wonder if he’d felt for the other man, the one he was wrestling with, before he pressed him into the ground that was opening up beneath them, laid him down like a cable, sending a message across the ocean.

I asked Johnny if he would come and get my husband’s diary from the basement. Pull it out of the wall. Take it away.

This story was shortlisted for the 2021 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, this year judged by Ottessa Moshfegh, Derek Owusu and Isabel Waidner, for which KYD is a publishing partner. Buy the full collection of winning and shortlisted titles, Eleven Stories 2021, here.