Hard, Soft and Wet - Melanie McGrath

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ward off the air conditioning, and position three of the fingers of my right hand on the green, orange and yellow buttons of the joystick in front to get the feel of it. Each button gives to pressure with a handsome poot and a wiggle of resistance.

      ‘Maybe it’s like the orange button is BLAM, and it offs the bad guy and the green just puts him in jail for life,’ speculates one of the boys, pounding his joystick.

      ‘Like, who, man?’

      ‘The bad guy, asshole.’

      And the row of boys begins clicking as if their thumbs had evolved precisely for the purpose.

      Voice-over and a red Testarossa on the screen: ‘The world is digital, fibre optic, cellular, but still there are assholes, jerks and scumbags around.’ Dissolves into the Title Sequence. The voice-over says ‘When you see the “VOTE NOW” message press the orange, yellow or green button on your joystick to make your selection. The film will then follow whichever selection wins the largest number of votes.’

      Barely a minute in, before the stain left by the opening credits has fully faded from my eyes, the words ‘vote now’ appear in flashing dayglo, and an involuntary surge of adrenaline darts through my right hand speeding the fingers into a rise and fall. A multitude of clicks. I’m caught short by how much it matters to press down and win.

      ‘Vote orange, orange, orange.’ One of the Chinese boys in the row ahead is shouting. I can taste the concentration carried on his breath, the thrashing excitement, can feel the throb of clicks coming up through the fabric of the walls like some universal pulse.

      The film slips seamlessly beyond the vote into the next act. A familiar smell of static rises from the seats. I’ve no idea exactly how I’ve voted, but it hardly matters, since it wasn’t so much a vote in any case as a series of miniature acts of incursion. Press, press, press, tap, tap, tap, click, click, click, the will of the flesh bearing down onto a lifeless ring of green and yellow buttons.

      The high of the moment quickly passes and I’m left staring through the gloaming at the row of stiffened necks and knotted hands belonging to the boys in front. Whatever thin narrative is flickering across the screen is irrelevant. Only when the next ‘VOTE NOW’, the insistent call to arms, appears will our heads rock and our fingers bounce and the spells leak out from our bodies and animate for a few seconds the dead passage of the square of light ahead of us.

      We don’t have long to wait, for within a matter of a few moments the words ‘VOTE NOW’ are flashing on the screen and my lungs begin to demand their breath in shallow shots, tapping out the rhythm of the next click, the next hammering vote, the clueless choice, the next small pulse of power that will electrify the web of nerves running along my arm and pull at the muscles of my right hand and finally set off the cushion of cells along my fingertips.

      Thirty minutes after it first began, seven brain-dead people stagger out of theatre five into the foyer in a kind of ragged trance.

      One of the boys says it was cool. Another says it was galactic.

      

      Back at Nancy’s house I unpack the shopping in a daze, reminding myself to squirrel away a few of my more creative impulse purchases such as the slab of dried Greenland halibut and the packet of cream of tartar behind the tins in Nancy’s store cupboard. I’ll confess to my product promiscuity the next time I find her in a particularly good mood. Meanwhile, a few remaining extras will have to be consigned forever to a dark spot under the bed in the spare room. I’m not sure even Nancy would be able to forgive Japanese pickled strawberries and black finger fungus.

      With an hour to kill before she’s due back I flip through Nancy’s manual of the Net, but soon find myself struggling for comprehension through the pile of abstract, dreary jargon: ftp, tcp, pop, ppp. I mean, what is all that? It sounds like radio interference.

      FRIDAY

      As she’s leaving for work, Nancy invites me to a talk on education and technology being held this evening in the Valley.

      ‘You’re interested in the future, right?’ she says.

      ‘Well, yeah.’ I look up, uncertain of her tone, but the expression on her face has already moved on.

      ‘Sweetie, education and technology are the ways the future gets made,’ she says.

      And with that she jumps up from the table, swings back that clot of brown hair and transforms immediately into Nancy the software marketer.

      ‘Why don’t you go browse my clippings box? Also there’s a big crate of articles and whatnot in the garage.’

      

      In the garage it looks as though the San Andreas fault exploded over everything. Where the clippings crate might be among the heap of basketball nets, broken toasters, project files, back issues of Cosmopolitan and Wired, and beaten-up old software packages is anyone’s guess. Eventually, following a half-hour excavation I dig out the box from under a fortress of old Vanity Fairs and flipping through the disintegrating leaves of newsprint read the following:

      28% of teenagers are screen addicts, 24% grey conformists. Annual US spend on entertainment and recreation reaches $34obn, only $27obn for elementary and secondary education. $800m spent every year in US on TV ads to children. Deyna Vesey, Kidvertisers’ Creative Director, says ‘the general rule of thumb is, once a kid is three, you can go after them on TV.’

      American kids under twelve spend $8.6bn, 13–18 year olds spend $57bn.

      And so it goes on, an avalanche of abstracted facts, public opinion surveys, vox pop statistics, flow charts, graphic predictions, trend tables.

      

      The Sausalito Library’s catalogue of books lists a handful of titles under the category ‘adolescence’, including:

      The Power of Ritalin: Attention Deficit Disorder among Teenagers

      Educating the Disturbed Adolescent

      Suicide Among Adolescents

      Coping with Teens

      The Handbook of Adolescence, Psychopathology and Anti-Social Deviancy

      It seems adolescence is treated as some kind of disease rather than a normal part of the human life cycle these days, but we feed on images of it still, like a flock of ageing carrion birds.

      

      Nancy picks me up at six and we drive down to Mountain View for the education and technology talk. Inside the conference room at the Hilton a couple of hundred people in power suits with full shoulder extensions, sprayed hair and pigskin attaché cases flutter about with their business cards like tickertapers on VJ day. It’s all so eighties, somehow.

      ‘Where are the teachers, Nance?’ I ask, looking through the suits.

      ‘This meet is more for Valley types,’ says Nancy, fingering an Evian spritzer. ‘You know, software providers, consultants, techno-visionaries, wizards, that kind of thing.’

      I flash Nancy one of my disgruntled looks.

      ‘I thought it was supposed to be about education.’

      ‘It is, but so what? We’re talking about a whole new technological revolution in the classroom. Kids won’t need teachers any more. They’ll need software supervisors.’

      ‘Jesus, Nancy.’

      ‘Look, Sweetie,’ Nancy is already moving off into the crowd, ‘I have to keep ahead, OK? It’s my job, if that’s all right with you.’

      

      Nancy finds me after the talk.

      ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘I had to network. What did you think?’

      We spin through the smoked-glass doors and out into the evening.

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