“On the Fringes of the Physical World”

Meghan Daum

It started in cold weather; fall was drifting away into an intolerable chill. I was on the tail end of twenty-six, living in New York City and taking part in the kind of urban life that might be construed as glamorous were it to appear in a memoir in the distant future. At the time, however, my days felt more like a grind than an adventure: hours of work strung between the motions of waking up, getting the mail, watching TV with my roommates, and going to bed. One morning I logged on to my America Online account to find a message under the heading “is this the real meghan daum?” It came from someone with the screen name PFSlider. The body of the message consisted of five sentences, entirely in lowercase letters, of perfectly turned flattery, something about PFSlider’s admiration of some newspaper and magazine articles I had published over the last year and a half, something else about his resulting infatuation with me, and something about his being a sportswriter in California.

2 I was charmed for a moment or so, engaged for the thirty seconds it took me to read the message and fashion a reply. Though it felt strange to be in the position of confirming that I was indeed “the real meghan daum,” I managed to say, “Yes, it’s me. Thank you for writing.” I clicked the Send Now icon and shot my words into the void, where I forgot about PFSlider until the next day, when I received another message, this one labeled “eureka.” “wow, it is you,” he wrote, still in lowercase. He chronicled the various conditions under which he’d read my few and far between articles: a boardwalk in Laguna Beach, the spring training press room for the baseball team he covered for a Los Angeles newspaper. He confessed to having a “crazy crush” on me. He referred to me as “princess daum.” He said he wanted to propose marriage or at least have lunch with me during one of his two annual trips to New York. He managed to do all of this without sounding like a schmuck. As I read the note I smiled the kind of smile one tries to suppress, the kind of smile that arises during a sappy movie one never even admits to seeing. The letter was outrageous and endearingly pathetic, possibly the practical joke of a friend trying to rouse me out of a temporary writer’s block. But the kindness pouring forth from my computer screen was unprecedented, bizarrely exhilarating, and I logged off and thought about it for a few hours before writing back to express how flattered and touched—it was probably the first time I had ever used “touched” in earnest—I was by his message.

3 I had received e-mail messages from strangers before, most of them kind and friendly and courteous, all of those qualities that generally get checked with the coats at the cocktail parties that comprise what the information age has now forced us to call the “three-dimensional world.” I am always warmed by an unsolicited gesture of admiration or encouragement, amazed that anyone would bother, shocked that communication from a stranger could be fueled by anything other than an attempt to get a job or make what the professional world has come to call “a connection.”

4 I am not what most people would call a “computer person.” I have utterly no interest in chat rooms, news groups, or most Web sites. I derive a palpable thrill from sticking an actual letter in the U.S. mail. But e-mail, though I generally only send and receive a few messages a week, proves a useful forum for my particular communication anxieties. I have a constant, low-grade fear of the telephone. I often call people with the intention of getting their answering machines. There is something about a real voice that has become startling, unnervingly organic, as volatile as live television.

5 PFSlider and I tossed a few innocuous, smart-assed notes back and forth over the week following his first message. His name was Pete. He was twenty-nine and single. I revealed very little about myself, relying instead on the ironic commentary and forced witticisms that are the conceit of most e-mail messages. But I quickly developed an oblique affection for PFSlider. I was excited when there was a message from him, mildly depressed when there wasn’t. After a few weeks he gave me his phone number. I did not give him mine, but he looked me up anyway and called me one Friday night. I was home. I picked up the phone. His voice was jarring yet not unpleasant. He held up more than his end of the conversation for an hour, and when he asked permission to call me again, I accepted as though we were in a previous century.

6 Pete, as I was forced to call him on the phone—I never could wrap my mind around his actual name, privately referring to him as PFSlider, “e-mail guy” or even “baseball boy”—began calling me two or three times a week. He asked if he could meet me in person and I said that would be okay. Christmas was a few weeks away, and he would be returning east to see his family. From there, he would take the short flight to New York and have lunch with me. “It is my off-season mission to meet you,” he said. “There will probably be a snowstorm,” I said. “I’ll bring a team of sled dogs,” he answered. We talked about our work and our families, about baseball and Bill Clinton and Howard Stern and sex, about his hatred for Los Angeles and how much he wanted a new job. Other times we would find each other logged on to America Online at the same time and type back and forth for hours. For me, this was far superior to the phone. Through typos and misspellings, he flirted maniacally. “I have an absurd crush on you,” he said. “If I like you in person you must promise to marry me.” I was coy and conceited, telling him to get a life, baiting him into complimenting me further, teasing him in a way I would never have dared in the real world or even on the phone. I would stay up until 3:00 A.M. typing with him, smiling at the screen, getting so giddy that I couldn’t fall asleep. I was having difficulty recalling what I used to do at night. My phone was tied up for hours at a time. No one in the real world could reach me, and I didn’t really care.

7 In off moments I heard echoes of things I’d said just weeks earlier: “The Internet is destroying the world. Human communication will be rendered obsolete. We will all develop carpal tunnel syndrome and die.” But curiously the Internet, at least in the limited form in which I was using it, was having the opposite effect. My interaction with PFSlider was more human than much of what I experienced in the daylight realm of live beings. I was certainly putting more energy into the relationship than I had put into any before, giving him attention that was by definition undivided, relishing the safety of the distance by opting to be truthful rather than doling out the white lies that have become the staple of real life. The outside world, the place where I walked around on the concrete, avoiding people I didn’t want to deal with, peppering the ground with half-truths, and applying my motto of “let the machine take it” to almost any scenario, was sliding into the periphery of my mind. I was a better person with PFSlider. I was someone I could live with.

8 This borrowed identity is, of course, the primary convention of Internet relationships. The false comfort of the cyberspace persona has been identified as one of the maladies of our time, another avenue for the remoteness that so famously plagues contemporary life. But the better person that I was to PFSlider was not a result of being a different person to him. It was simply that I was a desired person, the object of a blind man’s gaze. I may not have known my suitor, but for the first time in my life I knew the deal. I knew when I’d hear from him and how I’d hear from him. I knew he wanted me because he said he wanted me, because the distance and facelessness and lack of gravity of it all allowed him to be sweeter to me than most real-life people had ever managed. For the first time in my life, I was involved in an actual courtship ritual. Never before had I realized how much that kind of structure was missing from my everyday life.

9 And so PFSlider became my everyday life. All the tangible stuff—the trees outside, my friends, the weather—fell away. I could physically feel my brain. My body did not exist. I had no skin, no hair, no bones; all desire had converted itself into a cerebral current that reached nothing but my frontal lobe. Lust was something not felt but thought. My brain was devouring all of my other organs and gaining speed with each swallow. There was no outdoors, the sky and wind were irrelevant. There was only the computer screen and the phone, my chair, and maybe a glass of water. Pete started calling every day, sometimes twice, a few times three times. Most mornings I would wake up to find a message from PFSlider, composed in Pacific time while I slept in the wee hours. “I had a date last night,” he wrote. “And I am not ashamed to say it was doomed from the start because I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” Then, a few days later, “If you stood before me now I would plant the warmest kiss on your cheek that I could muster.”

10 I fired back a message slapping his hand. “We must be careful where we tread,” I said. This was true but not sincere. I wanted it, all of it. I wanted the deepest bow before me. I wanted my ego not merely massaged but kneaded. I wanted unfettered affection, soulmating, true romance. In the weeks that had elapsed since I picked up “is this the real meghan daum?” the real me underwent some kind of meltdown, a systemic rejection of all the savvy and independence I had worn for years like a grownup Girl Scout badge. Since graduating from college, I had spent three years in a serious relationship and two years in a state of neither looking for a boyfriend nor particularly avoiding one. I had had the requisite number of false starts and five-night stands, dates that I weren’t sure were dates, emphatically casual affairs that buckled under their own inertia even before dawn broke through the iron-guarded windows of stale, one-room city apartments. Even though I was heading into my late twenties I was still a child, ignorant of dance steps or health insurance, a prisoner of credit card debt and student loans and the nagging feeling that I didn’t want anyone to find me until I had pulled myself into some semblance of a grownup. I was a true believer in the urban dream, in years of struggle succumbing to brilliant success, in getting a break, in making it. Like most of my friends, I was selfish by design. To want was more virtuous than to need. I wanted someone to love me, but I certainly didn’t need it. I didn’t want to be alone, but as long as I was I had no choice but to wear my solitude as though it were haute couture. The worst sin imaginable was not cruelty or bitchiness or even professional failure but vulnerability. To admit to loneliness was to slap the face of progress. It was to betray the times in which we lived.

11 But PFSlider derailed me. He gave me all of what I’d never even realized I wanted. He called not only when he said he would but unexpectedly, just to say hello. His guard was not merely down but nonexistent. He let his phone bill grow to towering proportions. He thought about me all the time and admitted it. He talked about me with his friends and admitted it. He arranged his holiday schedule around our impending date. He managed to charm me with sports analogies. He courted and wooed and romanced me. He didn’t hesitate. He was unblinking and unapologetic, all nerviness and balls to the wall. He wasn’t cheap. He went out of his way. I’d never seen anything like it.

12 Of all the troubling details of this story, the one that bothers me the most is the way I slurped up his attention like some kind of dying animal. My addiction to PFSlider’s messages indicated a monstrous narcissism. But it also revealed a subtler desire that I didn’t fully understand at the time. My need to experience an old-fashioned kind of courtship was stronger than I had ever imagined. The epistolary quality of our relationship put our communication closer to the eighteenth century than the uncertain millennium. For the first time in my life, I was not involved in a protracted “hang out” that would lead to a quasi-romance. I was involved in a well-defined structure, a neat little space in which we were both safe to express the panic and intrigue of our mutual affection. Our interaction was refreshingly orderly, noble in its vigor, dignified despite its shamelessness. We had an intimacy that seemed custom made for our strange, lonely times. It seemed custom made for me.

13 The day of our date was frigid and sunny. Pete was sitting at the bar of the restaurant when I arrived. We shook hands. For a split second he leaned toward me with his chin as if to kiss me. He was shorter than I had imagined, though he was not short. He registered with me as neither handsome nor unhandsome. He had very nice hands. He wore a very nice shirt. We were seated at a very nice table. I scanned the restaurant for people I knew, saw no one, and couldn’t decide how I felt about that.

14 He talked and I heard nothing he said. He talked and talked and talked. I stared at his profile and tried to figure out if I liked him. He seemed to be saying nothing in particular, though it went on forever. Later we went to the Museum of Natural History and watched a science film about storms. We walked around looking for the dinosaurs, and he talked so much that I wanted to cry. Outside, walking along Central Park West at dusk, through the leaves, past the horse-drawn carriages and yellow cabs and splendid lights of Manhattan at Christmas, he grabbed my hand to kiss me and I didn’t let him. I felt as if my brain had been stuffed with cotton. Then for some reason I invited him back to my apartment, gave him a few beers, and finally let him kiss me on the lumpy futon in my bedroom. The radiator clanked. The phone rang and the machine picked up. A car alarm blared outside. A key turned in the door as one of my roommates came home. I had no sensation at all, only the dull déjà vu of being back in some college dorm room, making out in a generic fashion on an Indian throw rug while Cat Stevens’s Greatest Hits played on the portable stereo. I wanted Pete out of my apartment. I wanted to hand him his coat, close the door behind him, and fight the ensuing emptiness by turning on the computer and taking comfort in PFSlider.

15 When Pete finally did leave I sulked. The ax had fallen. He’d talked way too much. He was hyper. He hadn’t let me talk, although I hadn’t tried very hard. I berated myself from every angle, for not kissing him on Central Park West, for letting him kiss me at all, for not liking him, for wanting to like him more than I had wanted anything in such a long time. I was horrified by the realization that I had invested so heavily in a made-up character, a character in whose creation I’d had a greater hand than even Pete himself. How could I, a person so self-congratulatingly reasonable, have gotten sucked into a scenario that was more like a television talk show than the relatively full and sophisticated life I was so convinced I lead? How could I have received a fan letter and allowed it to go this far? Then a huge bouquet of FTD flowers arrived from him. No one had ever sent me flowers before. I was sick with sadness. I hated either the world or myself, and probably both.

16 No one had ever forced me to forgive them before. But for some reason I forgave Pete. I cut him more slack than I ever had anyone. I granted him an official pardon, excused his failure for not living up to PFSlider. Instead of blaming him I blamed the earth itself, the invasion of tangible things into the immaculate communication PFSlider and I had created. With its roommates and ringing phones and subzero temperatures, the physical world came barreling in with all the obstreperousness of a major weather system, and I ignored it. As human beings with actual flesh and hand gestures and Gap clothing, Pete and I were utterly incompatible, but I pretended otherwise. In the weeks that followed I pictured him and saw the image of a plane lifting off over an overcast city. PFSlider was otherworldly, more a concept than a person. His romance lay in the notion of flight, the physics of gravity defiance. So when he offered to send me a plane ticket to spend the weekend with him in Los Angeles, I took it as an extension of our blissful remoteness, a three-dimensional e-mail lasting an entire weekend. I pretended it was a good idea.

17 The temperature on the runway at JFK was seven degrees Fahrenheit. We sat for three hours waiting for de-icing. Finally we took off over the frozen city, the DC-10 hurling itself against the wind. The ground below shrank into a drawing of itself. Laptop computers were plopped onto tray tables, cell phones were whipped out of pockets, the air recirculated and dried out my contact lenses. I watched movies without the sound and thought to myself that they were probably better that way. Something about the plastic interior of the fuselage and the plastic forks and the din of the air and the engines was soothing and strangely sexy, as fabricated and seductive as PFSlider. I thought about Pete and wondered if I could ever turn him into an actual human, if I could even want to. I knew so many people in real life, people to whom I spoke face to face, people who made me laugh or made me frustrated or happy or bored. But I’d never given any of them as much as I’d given PFSlider. I’d never forgiven their spasms and their speeches, never tied up my phone for hours in order to talk to them. I’d never bestowed such senseless tenderness on anyone.

18 We descended into LAX. We hit the tarmac and the seat belt signs blinked off. I hadn’t moved my body in eight hours, and now I was walking up the jetbridge to the gate, my clothes wrinkled, my hair matted, my hands shaking. When I saw Pete in the terminal, his face registered to me as blank and impossible to process as the first time I’d met him. He kissed me chastely. On the way out to the parking lot he told me that he was being seriously considered for a job in New York. He was flying back there next week, and if he got the job, he’d be moving within the month. I looked at him in astonishment. Something silent and invisible seemed to fall on us. Outside, the wind was warm, and the Avis and Hertz buses ambled alongside the curb of Terminal 5. The palm trees shook, and the air seemed as heavy and earthly as Pete’s hand, which held mine for a few seconds before dropping it to get his car keys out of his pocket. The leaves on the trees were unmanageably real. He stood before me, all flesh and preoccupation. The physical world had invaded our space. For this I could not forgive him.

19 Everything now was for the touching. Everything was buildings and bushes, parking meters and screen doors and sofas. Gone was the computer, the erotic darkness of the telephone, the clean, single dimension of Pete’s voice at one A.M. It was nighttime, yet the combination of sight and sound was blinding. We went to a restaurant and ate outside on the sidewalk. We were strained for conversation and I tried not to care. We drove to his apartment and stood under the ceiling light, not really looking at each other. Something was happening that we needed to snap out of. Any moment now, I thought. Any moment and we’ll be all right. These moments were crowded with elements, with carpet fibers and direct light and the smells of everything that had a smell. They left marks as they passed. It was all wrong. Gravity was all there was.

20 For three days we crawled along the ground and tried to pull ourselves up. We talked about things I can no longer remember. We read the L.A. Times over breakfast. We drove north past Santa Barbara to tour the wine country. I stomped around in my clunky shoes and black leather jacket, a killer of ants and earthworms and any hope in our abilities to speak and be understood. Not until studying myself in the bathroom mirror of a highway rest stop did I fully realize the preposterousness of my uniform. I felt like a human shot put, an object that could not be lifted, something that secretly weighed more than the world itself. We ate an expensive dinner. We checked into a hotel and watched television. Pete talked at me and through me and past me. I tried to listen. I tried to talk. But I bored myself and irritated him. Our conversation was a needle that could not be threaded. Still, we played nice. We tried to care and pretended to keep trying long after we had given up. In the car on the way home he told me I was cynical and I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him how many cynics he had met who would travel three thousand miles to see someone they barely knew. Just for a chance. Just because the depths of my hope exceeded the thickness of my leather jacket and the thickness of my skin and the wisdom of a million times that I had released myself into the sharp knowledge that communication had once again eliminated itself as a possibility.

21 Pete drove me to the airport at 7:00 A.M. so I could make my eight o’clock flight home. He kissed me good-bye, another chaste peck I recognized from countless dinner parties and dud dates from real life. He said he’d call me in a few days when he got to New York for his job interview, which we had discussed only in passing and with no reference to the fact that New York was where I happened to live. I returned home to a frozen January. A few days later he came to New York and we didn’t see each other. He called me from the plane back to Los Angeles to tell me, through the static, that he had gotten the job. He was moving to my city.

22 PFSlider was dead. Pete had killed him. I had killed him. I’d killed my own persona too, the girl on the phone and on-line, the character created by some writer who’d captured him one morning long ago as he read the newspaper. There would be no meeting him in distant hotel lobbies during the baseball season. There would be no more phone calls or e-mails. In a single moment, Pete had completed his journey out of our mating dance and officially stepped into the regular world, the world that gnawed at me daily, the world that fed those five-night stands, the world where romance could not be sustained because we simply did not know how to do it. Here we were all chit-chat and leather jackets, bold proclaimers of all that we did not need. But what struck me most about this affair was the unpredictable nature of our demise. Unlike most cyber romances, which seem to come fully equipped with the inevitable set of misrepresentations and false expectations, PFSlider and I had played it fairly straight. Neither of us had lied. We’d done the best we could. We were dead from natural causes rather than virtual ones.

23 Within a two-week period after I returned from Los Angeles, at least seven people confessed to me the vagaries of their own e-mail affairs. The topic arose, unprompted, over the course of normal conversation. Four of these people had gotten on planes and met their correspondents, traveling from New Haven to Baltimore, New York to Montana, Texas to Virginia, and New York to Johannesburg. These were normal people, writers and lawyers and scientists I knew from the real world. They were all smart, attractive and a more than a little sheepish about admitting just how deep they had been sucked in. Very few had met in chat rooms. Instead, the messages had started after chance meetings at parties and on planes; some, like me, had received notes in response to things they’d written on-line or elsewhere. Two of these people had fallen in love, the others chalked it up to strange, uniquely postmodern experience. They all did things they would never do in the real world: they sent flowers, they took chances, they forgave. I heard most of these stories in the close confines of smoky bars and crowded restaurants, and we would all shake our heads in bewilderment as we told our tales, our eyes focused on some distant point that could never be reined in to the surface of the earth. Mostly it was the courtship ritual that had drawn us in. We had finally wooed and been wooed, given an old-fashioned structure through which to attempt the process of romance. E-mail had become an electronic epistle, a yearned-for rule book. The black and white of the type, the welcome respite from the distractions of smells and weather and other people, had in effect allowed us to be vulnerable and passionate enough to actually care about something. It allowed us to do what was necessary to experience love. It was not the Internet that contributed to our remote, fragmented lives. The problem was life itself.

24 The story of PFSlider still makes me sad, not so much because we no longer have anything to do with each other but because it forces me to grapple with all three dimensions of daily life with greater awareness than I used to. After it became clear that our relationship would never transcend the screen and the phone, after the painful realization that our face-to-face knowledge of each other had in fact permanently contaminated the screen and the phone, I hit the pavement again, went through the motions of real life, said hello and good-bye to people in the regular way. If Pete and I had met at a party, we probably wouldn’t have spoken to each other for more than ten minutes, and that would have made life easier but also less interesting. At the same time, it terrifies me to admit a firsthand understanding of the way the heart and the ego are snarled and entwined. Like diseased trees that have folded in on one another, our need to worship fuses with our need to be worshiped. Love eventually becomes only about how much mystique can be maintained. It upsets me even more to see how this entanglement is made so much more intense, so unhampered and intoxicating, by a remote access like e-mail. But I’m also thankful that I was forced to unpack the raw truth of my need and stare at it for a while. This was a dare I wouldn’t have taken in three dimensions.

25 The last time I saw Pete he was in New York, three thousand miles away from what had been his home and a million miles away from PFSlider. In a final gesture of decency, in what I later realized was the most ordinary kind of closure, he took me out to dinner. As the few remaining traces of affection turned into embarrassed regret, we talked about nothing. He paid the bill. He drove me home in his rental car, the smell and sound of which was as arbitrary and impersonal as what we now were to each other. Then he disappeared forever. He became part of the muddy earth, as unmysterious as anything located next door. I stood on my stoop and felt that familiar rush of indifference. Pete had joined the angry and exhausted living. He drifted into my chaos, joined me down in reality, where even if we met on the street we’d never see each other again, our faces obscured by the branches and bodies and falling debris that make up the ether of the physical world.