Desktop Priapism with your PCW
by Mike Chinn
When Albert Frankell decided to trade in his old typewriter for a word processor, he did it with the same care he had brought to his late job. Although he would never admit it, after a month of retirement, he was growing intensely bored.
Fifty years at Proudie’s Valves - the last fifteen as chief purchasing clerk - had taught him the value of scrupulous research. He bought the latest issue of every monthly computer magazine he could find, perusing all of the articles that had anything remotely to do with the subject: circling the ads of each and every supplier, noting their varying prices. Finally, after five months, he announced himself satisfied.
The next day he returned from town and proudly unloaded three large cardboard boxes from the back of his ten-year-old Austin Maxi. Removing each pale grey piece of equipment carefully from the polystyrene packing, he lovingly assembled keyboard, monitor and printer on outstretched wings of the lounge’s walnut dining table. A couple more minutes saw the monitor’s screen glow into cheerful green life after Albert wired on the single electric plug-top and switched on.
Twenty seconds later the machine beeped loudly.
“What was that?” demanded Maureen, his wife, peering up from her latest ‘People’s Friend’. Behind the harsh glitter of her winged spectacles, her fading blue eyes gleamed even harsher. She was a small, frail-looking woman - dwarfed by Albert’s thin, stooping frame - the embodiment of the belief that looks can be deceptive.
“Hmm, yes. It’s telling me I’ve failed to load the software disks, my dear.” Explained Albert in his most soothing, assured voice as he flicked desperately through the manual provided. Privately, he was telling himself this is what comes of trying to run before you can walk. Uncharacteristically, excitement had got the better of him.
Albert switched off the computer, located the enclosed word processing software diskette, switched back on, and slid the floppy disk into the disk-drive. This time the machine grunted as though recognising the disk, mumbled incomprehensively to itself for a short while as it read the programme, and then the screen jerked into action, the opening menu unrolling before Albert’s delighted gaze.
“What do you want one for anyway?” asked Maureen, looking at the green on green display with the expression she normally reserved for television sets.
“You know how difficult it’s become to edit the parish magazine” said Albert, as though explaining something obvious to a particularly obstinate child. In truth, it was one of many excuses he had rehearsed well in advance of Maureen’s expected objections. “Reverend Stiers will insist on multiple headings and all manner of fancy trivia. Trying to keep up with the Catholic newsletter, if you ask me. And on only half the budget. This little beauty will enable me to do everything the vicar wants and on lots more besides. Desktop publishing, I believe it’s called. Hmm, yes - DTP.”
“Call it what you like, I’m not having that contraption on my dining table a moment longer, ” said Maureen in a tone Albert had learned to obey. “If you must use it, you’ll use it upstairs. In your study.”
“Hmm., exactly as I’d planned, my dear,” said Albert, removing the disk and switching off. Pulling out the plug, he balanced all three components carefully in his arms and weaved his way up the narrow stairs to his box-room study. A polished desk stood cleanly under the window. It took barely a minute to clear away the few things Albert had left cluttering its top - including the doomed typewriter - then the word processor took up residence.
Albert proudly rubbed an imaginary speck of dust off the monitor screen, feeling in his cardigan pocket with the force of habit for the pipe Maureen had made him forgo ten years ago. He stared proudly at his new toy before closing the study door on the blind screen to re-bury himself in the computer magazines downstairs, whilst Maureen stayed inviolate behind hers.
Everything went pretty much as Albert had predicted. The vicar was so delighted with the new-look magazine that he started talking about including photographs and illustrations somewhat above the quality of the basic outlines used up to now. Albert began to worry; but the Reverend Stiers was abruptly wrenched out of the parish in a lightening promotion to Canon (the previous incumbent suddenly dying at the age of ninety-two under circumstance best never mentioned in ecumenical company). And a new, younger vicar took his place.
The Reverend Kennedy was, happily, much more au fait with modern technology than his predecessor - and more appreciative of Albert’s limitations. He was quite prepared to leave the design and presentation of the parish magazine entirely in Albert’s hands. But he also began to pass great wads of a more secretarial nature in Albert’s direction: circulars, news-sheets, parish notices and banns; confident in his ability to produce them quicker, and more presentably, than from the vicarage’s battered pre-war typewriter. Everyone settled back to enjoy a prosperous and harmonious future.
The only cloud on the horizon was Maureen’s continual harping on about the vicar’s surname: entirely too catholic, she thought. Albert tactfully left off reminding her that her own Christian name was hardly of Anglo-Saxon origin. But it served to distance her even further from the word processor. Albert was left increasingly to himself in the cramped study - exactly as he liked it.
It was during one of his lengthy sojourns that he discovered the game of ‘Life’. He had finished editing the latest magazine, and was browsing through the most recent issue of a computer journal to which he had begun subscribing whilst the printer, noisily churned out the pages. A letter caught his eye, mentioning this game which is traditionally hidden within computer operating systems. Apparently it had been invented some years earlier by a mathematician (the letter failed to name him, much to Albert’s annoyance - that showed a careless approach, he thought); and simply involved placing colonies of ‘colonies’ of ‘bacteria’ in patterns across the screen. Starting the game off, one watched as the succeeding generations multiplied or died out according to the rules. Intrigued, Albert followed the instructions in the letter, laying out a series of 0s with his RETURN key - the ‘bacteria’ - and then pressing the SPACE bar to start the game off. He watched with delight as the various colonies grew or vanished, through overcrowding or loneliness, until a status quo was achieved: the few surviving colonies either stagnated to immobility or changing back and forth through two basic patterns.
He was instantly hooked. When he wasn’t preparing something for the vicar, Albert was stooped in front of his green screen, designing even more complex patterns, timing the period before stagnation or complete disappearance arrived, Maureen became someone who simply supplied his three, regular, well balanced, meals and sat bolt upright in bed, reading whilst he tried to sleep, doing his best to ignore the bright bedside lamp she insisted on using.
Once, she remarked over a typically silent tea, that she had become a ‘word processor widow’. Albert was startled, thinking his wife had cracked a joke; but it was simply and unconscious pun, based on the phrase ‘grass widow’ she had come across the day before in one of her magazines.
Albert’s last revelation came four months to the day since he had brought the word processor into the house. Labouring over his latest masterpiece, a particularly baroque piece of work, , filled with complex whorls and curls, he failed to hear Maureen enter the study. Sitting back over his completed pattern, Albert simultaneously started his stopwatch and pressed the SPACE bar. Only one generation had scrolled down the screen when Maureen’s flat hand smacked hard onto the keyboard, hitting the SPACE quite by accident, and consigning Albert’s artform to the void forever.
’Albert! We’re going to my sister’s. I need you to drive me.’
Before he could speak one word in his defence, she had left the study.
Albert was furious. Not because of the visit to his sister-in-law (hardly, Theresa was everything Maureen was not: warm, friendly, her looks matured where his wife’s had simply gone stale), but because of the interruption. Not only would he have to start again, but Albert knew he could never exactly recreate it. A unique moment had been destroyed by his wife’s thoughtlessness.
His hands trembling with his pent up fury, he slowly filled the screen with a more recognisable pattern. A single word.
B u g g e r
Breathing hard, Albert fell back in his chair to survey his work. The satisfaction lasted only a few moments. Panicked that Maureen might come back and see what he’d written, he pressed the SPACE bar and watched the word disappear in successive generations of life. Still trembling slightly from the aftermath of his anger and what he’d done, Albert switched off the computer and went meekly downstairs to unlock the car.
And that was that.
Except it wasn’t. That was the new twist to his obsession. Where before Albert had tried to devise patterns to keep the game going as long as possible, now he had something different: words. Words, phrases, whole sentences (as long as they were short ones). He found he could express his mood in a few well chosen words, start the game, and watch as whatever he was feeling badly about disappeared in a mass of busily reproducing 0s.
Alternatively, he would assess the longevity of a passage from the bible against the randomly chosen piece of advertising doggerel. The possibilities were endless.
Then he recalled the thrill of forbidden pleasure the day he had enscribed ‘bugger’ across his screen. With probably much the same mixed shame and excitement a schoolboy feels scrawling obscene graffiti behind his school building, Albert carefully spelled out:
m a u r e e n y o u ’ r e a b i t c h
He chuckled happily, rereading the phrase silently to himself over and over again. Then, his guilty sense of foreboding finally overcoming his childish delight, he pressed SPACE and effectively erased the damning evidence. He knew Maureen hardly ever came into his study, especially since the installation of the word processor, but the little nagging doubt that she just might added a delightful frisson to the exercise.
The game lasted longer than he expected, reaching immobility with twelve stagnated colonies in almost twenty-five minutes.
“Hmm, yes,” he reflected, chewing on the stem of an already half-destroyed biro. “That’s the first time I’ve know her hold my interest for more than five minutes.” Stopping the game, he set about creating another pithy comment on the world.
Teeth reducing the ball-point’s hexagonal sides to clear plastic splinters, he tapped in the 0s with an unaccustomed lapse in attention. After several minutes, he sat back and was almost panic stricken to find he had typed:
t h e r e s a I ’ d l i k e t o f o n d l e y o u r t h i g h s
He hit SPACE with a convulsive strike. Where had that come from? Yet even as he watched the generations march their relentless paths across the screen and inevitable death, he had to admit to himself that fondling his sister-in-law’s thighs wasn’t such an appalling prospect. And it struck him: here was the ultimate therapy. He could confide his darkest urges to the machine, exorcise them, in a way; and once he had brought them out into the cleansing light of day, one touch of a key and they were gone forever.
“Hmm, yes,” he said softly, beginning a new phrase. “Perhaps I’ll write a paper on it Frankell’s Theory of Interactive Computerised Group Therapy.” He continued to position the 0s, all the time thinking what an extraordinarily attractive woman the Reverend Kennedy’s wife was.
The finished remark shook Albert - even fired as he was by his new found missionary zeal. For a few moments, self-loathing overcame him; but he roughly pushed all such thoughts aside. The human psyche was a dark and loathsome place - this he knew from his varied reading. If it was allowed to bubble to the surface, all sorts of disgusting matter was to be expected. It was in the repression of such thoughts that danger lay. Giving them rein in such a harmless manner could only be of benefit.
So he stared at what he had written about Mrs Kennedy. Amazed at the depth of his imagination (and secretly wondering if it were possible at all). Only when he felt he had accepted the reality of the desire, openly acknowledging his feelings with his conscious mind, did he allow the words to vanish into the game.
“I feel better already,” he said, smiling at the dancing patterns before him. And indeed, he felt better than he had in years: light-headed, relaxed and more at peace with the world than he ever remembered.
That night he gave Maureen a goodnight kiss just before he turned over and attempted sleep. She was so shocked, she began to wonder if he hadn’t become a secret drinker - hunched away in his study all day.
The morning found Albert at his keyboard earlier than ever. An A4 pad of paper and a new biro had been added to his stopwatch. He intended every detail of this experiment to be thoroughly minuted, no matter how trivial. He had no intention of finding out, after weeks of patient study, that the results were reduced to meaningless jottings through some fundamental oversight. So, onto the paper pad, the time each game lasted, and what Albert’s feelings on seeing his darkest, innermost thoughts displayed so brazenly. Usually he felt uncomfortably excited.
Wishing Maureen dead came up very early in the proceedings, and hardly surprised him. Such thoughts were common in all relationships at some time, he knew. His reaction to it was very muted though - as though on being invited to push his hand into a jar of sweets, he had come up with just a wrapper. His suggestions on Therasa’s part, however, were another matter. Once again, he was not surprised - after all, if you marry a girl’s sister, it seemed natural there should be something of what initially attracted you in both.
What did come as a bit of a shock was the vehemence of his statements on others and the bizarre nature of the suggestions. No a woman of his acquaintance seemed to be exempt. Albert felt that while he had lived a calm and ordered life, his subconscious had been running around like a crazed flasher!
But science must be served. Albert pressed on, alternately shocked and aroused, determined to see his new project through. If someone had suggested he was just a dirty, repressed old man, living off a lifetime of tawdry fantasies, he would have been outraged. He considered himself an arbiter of psychoanalysis: the Freud of the microchip age.
He poured himself into the work, neglecting the parish magazine - only grudgingly approaching it at all when Maureen nagged at him. And the quality suffered. The Reverend Kennedy began to think he could do equally well on his own typewriter after all.
All that mattered to Albert was his new use for the game of ‘Life’. As his imagination began to founder, he pushed himself harder - inventing more and more ludicrous and warped acts to confess to his silicon priest. The notes became arbitrary, he often forgot to time the games. What little pleasure he had once received from the adolescent acts of sexual defiance was gone - all that remained was the act.
He would come down to his meals - when he came at all - sullen and pouched-eyed, refusing to answer even Maureen’s most strident questioning. She could no longer control him - and in truth, had begun to fear him. He had become a slave to the single-eyed god in his study - that it was a green-eyed god seemed to Maureen no coincidence.
A month of intensive research went by - Albert growing thinner and more stooped with each day. He began to mumble to himself, laughed in a soft, unpleasant manner at odd times during his infrequent meals. He would mutter brief phrases that meant little to his wife, but obviously held a universe of meaning to Albert.
One morning he had become so immersed in his latest creation that he was totally unaware of Maureen’s presence until she cleared her throat sharply.
“Are you coming down to breakfast or not?”
Albert hit SPACE automatically. He didn’t think Maureen had seen what he was writing - her response would surely have been much more outraged.
“Well?” She was not to be ignored.
“They’re starting to make sense,” he whispered hoarsely.
“What are?” asked Maureen, caught off guard by his sudden return to lucidity.
“The colonies. There’s a pattern here. Hmmm. It must be all the love and attention they’re getting.” He began to laugh - a disgusting, haunted sound; but it shattered in a fit of phlegmy coughing.
“I’m calling the doctor in on you!” Maureen backed away, the decision in her voice unmistakeable.
“No!” Albert lurched to his feet. He snatched blindly at her right arm, clamping a wasted hand around her wrist. Maureen froze, her eyes locked in disbelief on his hand.
“Let go.” Her voice was thin with shock. “Albert. Let go!”
“No doctors.” He glared at her, eyes unfocused but furious. Something in the periphery of his vision was distracting him - a green on green flickering.
“No doctors.”
Maureen tried to claw his hand away, but Albert simply grabbed her left wrist. He dragged her to within six inches of his face.
The peripheral flickering grew more insistent. Albert half turned to see what it was. On the screen was a simple message:
w h y n o t k i l l h e r ?
Had he written that? But surely he’d started the game when Maureen came in... He looked back at his wife’s pale, unforgiving eyes. Shock had temporarily robbed her of words - but he saw fear and loathing there.
w h y n o t k i l l h e r ?
His hands were already around her thin neck. It felt right. It felt good. Yes - kill her. Why not?
Maureen struggled - almost broke Albert’s weakened grip several times; and one desperately flailing had struck the bridge of his nose with wild accuracy. But he neither felt the ready snap or noticed the sudden gush of dark blood down his face. All that mattered was Maureen, and his tight hold on her neck.
Eventually, she was no longer struggling; her dulling eyes were empty of hatred. Albert let her body tumble to the floor and collapsed into his seat. Uncontrollable tremors began to spasm up his arms; he was suddenly aware of the blood running from his broken nose, soaking his shirt.
Something like sanity cut through the fog of his brain as he looked at the pathetic bundle by his feet. Beside him, the growing colonies were moving across the monitor once more. He looked at the word processor, and back down at his dead wife, as though trying to uncover some clever secret.
On the screen, the colonies were coming together, forming a recognisable pattern out of chaos. Albert stared down at it, unable to quantify what he was seeing. The game was working in reverse: forming words.
h e l l o , d a r l i n g
it said. After a few seconds, the words broke apart, familiar shapes blossomed - but increasingly swiftly. Soon all the movement would be a blur. Words condensed out of the activity again.
n o w t h e r e ’ s j u s t t h e t w o o f u s w h y d o n ’ t y o u t a l k t o m e a g a i n ?
A blur of growth. New words.
t e l l m e w h a t y o u ’ d l i k e t o d o
t e l l m e e v e r y t h i n g
Almost instantaneously now, the words were replaced by new ones.
a n d t h e n I ’ l l t e l l y o u w h a t
w e ’ r e g o i n g t o d o t o g e t h e r
Blur.
I ’ v e g o t p l e n t y o f i d e a s
