Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath
recall almost nothing.
The events of the year spanning ’67 and ’68 when I was three passed me by. While the Paris uprisings raged, Woodstock rocked, Vietnam was plundered, my generation was regardless, too busy being fed and formed by our mothers and – maybe – our fathers too. Too busy with Alphabetti Spaghetti and Top of the Pops, the TV and David Cassidy and all our clockwork ducks and toffee apples.
So I wonder what Alex will remember of now, of this week, this month, this year, of this day even, in twenty years from now?
Somewhere in Palo Alto I take a wrong turn and end up driving around the suburbs before finding myself by some miracle back at Page Mill Road from where my directions begin again. With the map spread out on my lap I head west towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. Up at 6000 ft on Skyline Road a wispy grey foam appears to have crept back over the Valley, hinting at rain, but the radio weather reports continue to promise a dry day. I wonder if the mist might be a smog cloud spilled over from San Francisco or San Jose, if such a thing ever happens. By the time I reach Boulder Creek my head feels as thick as a plate of dumplings left to boil too long.
I explain to the man in the Boulder Creek General Store that I have a migraine coming on.
‘That’ll be a thunderstorm, I expect,’ he replies, wrapping a packet of painkillers in a brown paper bag with a missing persons message on it, then dumping the change on the counter. I mention that the weather reports are insisting it’s going to stay dry.
‘The two most unpredictable things in this world are weather and women,’ the man says, turning away.
Boulder Creek was a logging town until the Silicon Valley suits started moving in, and though it still has some of the tarry conservatism and pine-needle neighbourliness left over from those days, the racketing confidence of new money runs through its veins.
In the driveway where Alex lives a woman is loading bags into a station wagon. She looks up at me, wary, and gestures with her arm towards the porch but before I’ve reached the door a man has already opened it and ushers me in, muttering, ‘My wife is running into town to pick up some supplies because friends of theirs think there’s going to be a storm.’
Alex’s father, Peter, is one of those gently cumbersome, ursine men peculiar to North America; a biter on life, a big-eating, big-earning human Panzer tank. According to Nancy, he develops virtual reality software for financiers and the US military, through which connection they are on waving terms at industry parties. His job is to write code so complex that it can trick a person into imagining he’s moving through a stock exchange, or crouching in a bunker and surveying the horizon, when all he is really doing is processing data projected on to a screen and held fast in front of his eyes by a helmet.
Wasting no time on niceties, the human Panzer waves me into an armchair, surges over to a cupboard by the kitchen, dives in and comes up for air minutes later with a black strip of a thing trailing cables from its sides. Plugs it into a computer on the table.
‘This,’ he announces, ‘is a total immersion VR helmet.’
The thing in his hands shines like a black ball of insect eyes. He urges me to put it on. Inside the helmet a blue room rises. For a moment it feels as though I’m in a deep sea diving bell, listening to the steady purr of my breath and drinking in the first view of a newly discovered territory.
‘It’s great isn’t it?’ Peter tips me very gently with the ridged track of his palm. ‘Look, when you move your head, the computerized world of images inside the helmet moves with you.’ I glance down at the depths, and look up at the heights. All blue. Too blue to belong to for long. I lift the helmet from my face to find a little boy watching impassively, marking time in the way that children often do. This is Alex. A regular-looking three-year-old. Matt brown hair, Bermudas and a sweat shirt, nothing like the grinning future-creature I’d envisaged at the weekend. I’m shamefully disappointed.
‘So, Alex, buddy,’ says the father to his son, ‘say hello.’ He gestures towards me.
‘Hello,’ obeys Alex, inching forward. We cross gazes for a moment then I open with a question.
‘What’s your favourite colour, Alex?’ I’m imagining that it must be blue. VR blue. But Alex merely looks at me, turns tail and toddles back to his room. He returns with a Bart Simpson doll.
‘Bart Simpson, great,’ say I, taking the doll, ‘but you play with computers, too, don’t you Alex?’
The boy scampers back to his room. Returns with a Bugs Bunny wind-up toy. Winds it, sets it pacing and begins squealing in time with the clockwork.
‘Do you have any electronic toys you could show me, Alex?’
Alex contemplates, snatches Bart Simpson, flees back to his room. Five minutes later he comes running out clutching a Power Ranger.
‘Look,’ says Alex, sprawling on the carpet and using the Power Ranger’s face to shovel out some of the shag pile. ‘Cool.’
‘So it is,’ I chirp, then more sly, leaning down to whisper in the boy’s ear, ‘but I bet it’s not as cool as the games you play with Dad’s computers.’
Alex pushes my head away in disgust. The head incidentally which is booming along the temples in time with my breath and pulse.
Peter returns from putting away the VR helmet. ‘Alex first wore one of those things on the fourth of July 1992, when he was just over a year old. The youngest kid ever. He loves it. Navigates through buildings, whole star systems in virtual reality. Doesn’t even know the alphabet yet. Now, Buddy.’ Peter turns his attention to his son and lifting the boy onto his knee, silencing the squeals, whispers ‘tell us what you put on when you’re playing special games.’
‘A head-mounted display,’ returns the boy, unimpressed.
‘And what does that do, Bud?’ Peter backs up into his seat, then manoeuvres his body forward again at a different angle, as though he were the driver of some intractable piece of plant.
‘Oh, you know,’ the boy follows Bugs Bunny crawling across the carpet. ‘You get to see things, and when you move …’ Tails off.
‘Yeah,’ says Peter. ‘And what happens when you move, Bud?’
‘Uh, you get to see more things,’ confirms Alex, clambering down from his father’s lap and running away. He returns from his bedroom with a Tonka toy.
‘This is heavy,’ he says, holding it out for me to feel.
Peter shoots me a look of mock despair, mixed in with a chesty heave of involuntary pride.
‘I was thinking. A while ago a German film-maker guy came over and took some film of Alex wearing his virtual reality helmet. He was a baby then. We’ve got it somewhere in the den if you’d like to see it.’ He motors off, tagging Alex, who has discovered a bamboo cane and is waving it to make whizzing noises in the air. Peter finds the tape and fast forwards it to a shot of a baby, naked except for duvet-diaper and VR helmet, blind to reality, grappling with his hands for something in the virtual world behind his eyes. Peter giggles with recollected affection for the Alex that was, while the Alex that is prowls about the room, as yet a shadow of a person made bright with temporary definition.
Just then the wife bursts into the room, registers the video, smiles to herself and at Alex and shakes some dampness from her hair.
‘It’s raining already. I think it’s going to be some big storm. The forecasters are going crazy.’ She stares at me with a doubtful eye. I feel myself returning the look, and we catch each other’s eye, exchanging hints of competitive pride and a resistance to the other’s unoffered pity. Rain begins ticking on the window panes.
Alex, oblivious to all this, toddles about happily brandishing his bamboo cane. His father pulls him close, thundering into his ear.
‘Tell