Cosmo

Author:Spencer Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2012-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

WIDE AND BLUE AND EMPTY

June slips into her refurbished office room at 10:49 p.m., full mug of decaf steaming in her hand, and logs in to ICQ Messenger. Finding Chris offline, she minimizes the ICQ Messenger window (heart sinking slightly, but only just – their ICQ date is set for 11:00) and begins a game of e-solitaire, promising herself she won’t wait for more than fifteen minutes before logging off and heading to bed.

It is silent on the second floor of June’s 2,000-square-foot, semi-detached, four-bedroom home – a property of nine-foot ceilings and deep-set cold cellar, two-car garage and oak floors, gourmet kitchen and walk-in pantry – as she waits for her son, Christopher, living across the province in a tiny apartment in Ottawa, to log in to ICQ and to chat with her. June mouths the word warily – chat – feeling a delicious tingle of anticipation. Having bought the internet only three months prior, June still approaches the web as a wild and newfangled landscape, still tinged with the risks of danger and provocation. Every time she logs on she feels bold and daring, strangely and surreally modern. She feels especially sophisticated considering that she, fifty-four years old and feeling absolutely ancient, could actually be in a chat room, and that soon her son might join her and write her text messages in real time, his written phrases appearing in a cute pc window with its accompanying Uh-oh! sound bite. It wasn’t exactly how she envisioned the future, but it was certainly exciting.

Now at 11:33 p.m., June stares into the ghostly illumination of the monitor, her hands bleached and spectral as she sips a second mug of coffee and her eyes leap from card to card, from hearts to clubs to kings, feeling strained and irradiated by the garish forest green of the card table, the bright light in the dark room. She minimizes the window mid-game and restores ICQ: Chris’s name still offline, written in the red italics of ex-communication. June tsks, lifting the mug of coffee with her left hand while using her right to battle with the mouse that she bought (stupidly, she thinks) from a local Dollar Saver. Due to some malfunction in the mouse’s ball, she is forced to repeatedly brush her wrist across her mouse pad (featuring a reproduction of van Gogh’s Starry Night). She takes extra care with every left-handed sip, worried that she might dribble hot coffee across the keyboard: frying circuits, spoiling controls, corrupting mystery.

She tenses. Somewhere close – on her pie-shaped lot, perhaps, or near the cedar hedges of her yard – an animal begins to yelp. A raccoon, she guesses, listening to its high-pitched cries pierce the deep quiet of the Forest Hill night. She holds still, waiting for it to stop. When it doesn’t, she closes the ICQ window, opens e-solitaire and resumes her game.

After Chris’s most recent and rather disastrous visit home, June dared only a kind of laissez-faire motherhood – a most careful dabbling with ‘his life’ that was ‘not hers’ to order and correct.

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