By Jenn Salcido
The DJ has just started a new job on a new radio station that plays Tori Amos and makes people in the small town very angry.
The reporter lives in the small town and has noticed that the radio is playing Tori Amos instead of oldies.
One of the things the DJ likes about the radio station is how he simply projects into cars and rooms he will never see if he doesn’t want to, which mostly he does not.
The reporter clandestinely listens to him in one of these rooms. It is the Computer Room. The reporter is 14.
#
The DJ lives in one of those townhome developments off the highway. He doesn’t yet know anybody in town, and his life is a vector between his townhome and the station. He is a little lonely but mostly fine.
The reporter lives in a different development on the other side of town, one that is lush with sodded bluegrass carpets and Bartlett pear trees that shower rubbery leaves all over the damp sidewalk on days like today.
The reporter’s parents have taken the modem from the Computer Room. I hate them, she thinks.
Across town the DJ is cozy at work in the studio, sipping herbal tea between the different little on-air bits he does. “Hey, I’m The Oracle and that was Tori Amos, of course, with ‘Crucify.’”
The DJ likes that record but honestly he’s a little pissed off about the new mandate he’s gotten from the media conglomerate who bought the station. He looks with disdain at the printout that lists the mandatory top 25 rotation, all of which he must fit in “organically” during his slot. “And next up? We’ve got Suzanne Vega with ‘Tom’s Diner.’”
The reporter comes home and stomps up to her room and turns on her radio and she is SO HAPPY when she hears “Tom’s Diner.”
The DJ looks at his watch and is worried that if he doesn’t have enough time left to get through the mandatory top 25 rotation, he’ll get put on DJ probation. This would not be good; it has happened to him once before. In that case he was simply reading a public service announcement and made some unfortunate flourishes with language that were not appropriate for the time of day.
The reporter is pacing around her room, thinking about all the instant messaging she could be doing were the modem not in modem jail. Recently, she has obtained an internet boyfriend and is now more eager even than usual to hear that clickity clack static and the “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”
Sometimes when her father wants to make her angry he teases her by announcing “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” whenever he enters a room.
#
After school the next day the reporter comes home to find that her parents have relented and the modem is plugged back in. No one is home to tell her otherwise so she logs in, finds no mail, clicks around a bit.
Inspired by her growing stack of SPIN magazines, she has started to make her own website, accessible via the World Wide Web. She has figured out that she can make Word documents and save them as .html files. She likes trying out different backgrounds. She has learned how to loop an image over and over and over. She can, for example, make a page with a background that looks like stars in an infinitely scrolling sky. It’s hard to read the writing on that particular background, though.
Once she has her home page arranged enough, she opens her email and writes the DJ. He is going to be the first interview for her new online magazine on the World Wide Web.
#
The DJ wakes up to start his Saturday, and feels the paunch of middle age sliding down his hips when he gets up from the couch. He thinks he should start exercising soon, probably. He lights a cigarette and gets coffee going.
He goes over to the computer and logs in. “WELCOME! YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”
TheOracle107@aol.com clicks on his inbox. He skims the subject lines, deletes some scams. There is a note from an address he hasn’t seen before. He opens the email.
Dear Mr. The Oracle, I am looking to interview respected figures in music culture for my magazine. I really enjoy listening to your show and have found a lot of my favorite artists because of you. Do you think I can interview you? We can do this over IM. Respectfully, Laurel M.”
He cackles. Dear Mr. The Oracle!
“Sure,” he writes the reporter. “Call me Dave, though. IM is fine. I’m around today.”
Sent. Whoosh.
“YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” comes the call to the reporter’s post in the computer room. After she opens her mailbox and reads the note, she checks and sees that TheOracle107 is online!
“Hey,” she types into the void.
“Hi,” the DJ answers back.
They get to talking. The morning zips by. The reporter’s questions are a bit timid. The DJ imagines she’s maybe just out of college, doing her first internship at a radio station somewhere.
The reporter cannot believe her luck. What a coup for the first issue.
They chat for a while, mostly about the music itself but a little about themselves, what they like, what movies they’re watching lately. The flow of their rapport makes the DJ relax a little bit too much and he catches himself complaining about work, about how that’s changed. He realizes he’s holding his breath when he thinks about that.
After the conversation winds down, the reporter copies and pastes the chat transcript into a Word doc, which she plans to edit later.
The reporter asks the DJ if he has a bio.
“Sure,” he types. “All celebrity DJs do.”
#
Later that night, the reporter is still situated in the Computer Room when she hears the shrill demand for her to appear at the dinner table “right this minute.” She complies.
“I will take this to go,” she says, grabbing the Schwann’s breaded chicken patty with rice pilaf accoutrement. “I am working.”
Back in the Computer Room, enraptured by the sallow light of the cathode ray tube, the reporter can feel a piece of herself float up from the top of her head and dissipate into a realm that knows neither time nor space. This piece bears little relation to the crepuscular creature in the chair.
She opens the 30 second sample clip of “I’ll Be There For You” by the Rembrandts that she downloaded and plays it a few times in a row.
The DJ is alone again in his apartment. I should try harder to make friends, he thinks. Instead, he makes his way to his desktop and clicks the icon.
“WELCOME!”
There is always a little pause between the welcome and the announcement of mail. In this pause, hopes and dreams are made and crushed; the reporter knows this as well, if not better, than the DJ. The reporter is in the throes of a full-blown internet addiction, whereas the DJ is just a bit bored.
The DJ has no mail, but sees the reporter’s handle in the chat box.
The reporter is busily typing a very long-winded fiction to her internet boyfriend about her daily activities. In the fiction, she has been invited to a party, and she’s going to the mall with some friends to pick out an outfit. It’s hard sometimes to keep the reality from straining into the fiction, especially when she’s nearing the time of day when she has to shut everything down and prepare for the next morning. The mornings are firmly grounded in a horrible reality, with no room for the fiction.
Because she is no dummy, she also includes a critique of a long, old book she has not read.
Satisfied and clicking “send,” she is surprised when she sees a new window, an invitation to converse with Mr. The Oracle.
“Hey!” she writes.
“Sorry to bug.”
“Not bugging.”
“Wondering if you needed anything else. For the magazine.”
“Hmmm I haven’t really finished the article just yet. Been really busy at work.”
The reporter re-enters her body. Her eyes flash around the room, as if some source of information could possibly leak details of her appearance or her life through IM.
“Oh yeah cool cool,” he says.
The DJ thinks he sounds dull. Why does he care?
“I’m really close though, like going to finish it soon. It’ll be great.”
“Yeah.”
“How are you? Are you doing well, or are you also staring directly into the meaningless nothing?”
He laughs, out loud, at that, and starts typing again.
#
For a few days in a row now, the reporter has been corresponding with the DJ in short bursts on instant message. They haven’t gone too deep on any one thing; mostly she talks to him about music she likes. She gets some recommendations from him and tells him a few lies to make her reading life sound smart.
She tells him about how, at Circuit City, she sometimes hides CDs in the wrong alphabetical order so that they will be there the next time she comes, and that is when he asks her: “Do you want to grab a drink?”
She blinks.
Her cheeks redden. Even though she knows the doors are closed, she looks over her shoulder. She is smart! She is desirable! She is, as her internet boyfriend told her while they were having “cyber” yesterday, “so sexy.” The DJ wants to go get a drink with her.
Don’t worry. This is not that kind of story.
Her mind doesn’t go to the after school special place where older men take advantage of girls, kidnapping them from sleepy midwestern towns and making them their slaves in some creepy cabin in the woods. She’s not even thinking about age at all, or questioning the DJ’s motives, or remembering that she’s been frequently told she comes off as older and more mature in her writing.
Instead, her thoughts go to a different place, a softer place. There is heat there, and she feels some possibilities opening up to her that she’d never before considered. In her life, there is an unbreakable wall that separates her from the notions of desire, and from being desired. In her internet life, she is the recipient of genuine feelings from her internet boyfriend, and also she begins to inhabit the life that she projects to him. When she wakes up in the morning, there is a small, clouded window of time when she is no longer inhabiting her life, but her other life, and her other life is exactly how she wants it.
When her internet boyfriend ::leans in and plays gently with hair::, she feels the flutters in her heart that all the adult contemporary radio programming has promised there would be.
She feels that finally, here in the other space, she has become desired, desirable.
“Soooo ummmm” she types, and adds a smiley face with a nose, which seems less flirtatious than the smiley face without the nose. “I have a boyfriend actually, sorry.”
Across town, the DJ is listening to the new Soundgarden record and flipping between windows of his web browser when he registers the sound of her response. He had gotten deep into a Usenet forum rabbit hole and had totally forgotten he had offered the reporter a date.
It bloops again. “Sorry, r u mad?”
“Oh no haha all good,” he assures her, then closes the window.
Jenn Salcido is a writer from Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in Vlad Mag, Zac Smith’s Chrismzine, X-R-A-Y, JAKE, and Back Patio Press. You can read her work at www.jennsalcido.com.
X: @jenneralist