The PowerBook Read Online Free PDF Page B

beer.
    Push.
    Stella or Bud?
    Harder.
    Do you want nuts?
    Make me come. Make me.
    Ring her after midnight your time, she said.
    Just fuck me.
    Got the number?
    Fuck me.
    The next morning I woke late and turned over to kiss her.
    She had gone. The sheet was still warm but she had gone. I lay there, my growing agitation of mind beginning to fight with the gentle heaviness of my body. I had no idea what to do, so I did the obvious—got dressed and ran round the corner to our other hotel.
    At the Relais de Louvre my own room was empty. Not surprising. There were my clothes and travel bag, and one ticket home. Well, I had given up any right to company.
    I went down the corridor to Room 29. The door was open. The maid was cleaning up.
    ‘
Où est la Mademoiselle?
’
    The maid shrugged and switched on her Hoover. Paris is full of mademoiselles.
    I rang the front desk.
    Rien.
    Room 29 had checked out and there was no forwarding address.
    I walked to a little café on the river and ordered some coffee and croissants. No difficulties. No complications. Not even goodbye. So that’s the end of it then.
    I felt as if I had blundered into someone else’slife by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.
    Who was I last night? Who was she?

virtual road
    Night.
    I logged on to the Net. There were no e-mails for me. You had run out on the story. Run out on me. Vanished.
    I typed in your address.
    Nothing.
    I set one of the search engines to find you.
    Nothing.
    Here I am like a penitent in a confessional. I want to tell you how I feel, but there’s nobody on the other side of the screen.
    What did I expect?
    This is a virtual world. This is a world inventing itself. Daily, new landmasses form and then submerge. New continents of thought break off from the mainland. Some benefit from a trade wind, some sink without trace. Others are like Atlantis—fabulous, talked about, but never found.
    Found objects wash up on the shores of my computer. Tin cans and old tyres mix with the pirate’s stuff. The buried treasure is really there, but caulked and outlandish. Hard to spot becauseunfamiliar, and few of us can see what has never been named.
    I’m looking for something, it’s true.
    I’m looking for the meaning inside the data.
    That’s why I trawl my screen like a beach-comber—looking for you, looking for me, trying to see through the disguise. I guess I’ve been looking for us both all my life.

SEARCH
    It began with a promise:
    ‘While I am living I shall rescue you.’
    That dark night I took a ladder and propped it against the window where I knew you slept. You would not be sleeping.
    The window was barred with iron, and you were like an anchorite behind your grille, and I was more like a penitent than a knight, as I whispered to you and touched your fingers. You said you would rather have me with you that night than see the sun rise on another day.
    You were sun and moon to me.
    I took the iron bars in my hands and tore them out of the stone, and though I cut my hand through to the bone I never felt it, but came to you and lay with you in the darkness, in the silence, your body as white and soft as moonlight.
    In the morning, when I had long since gone, and you slept late, your servant drew back the bed curtains and saw the sheets and pillows soaked in blood. It was soon known that someone must havebeen with you in your room and the hissing started.
    You were faithless. You were treacherous. You would be burnt.
    Many times has your lord and my King, with a heavy heart, committed you to burning. Many times have I rescued you, through combat with your accuser, for the King, who is judge of all, cannot fight for his own wife.
    My name is Lancelot.
    ‘Lancelot du Lac,’ you said, rowing your body over me.
    I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You