It was easy to fall in love in the V. Everyone was gorgeous, their bodies crafted to be in peak physical condition. There was no body odor, no hunger, no bathroom breaks, no death. Every moment belonged to you and the people you chose to share it with.
I saw him on the first day of one of my weekly years. An hour in here was a minute out there so entire lifetimes could be lived in just a few weeks Six hours per six days was the maximum a brain could handle, however. People who stayed longer without unplugging tended to end up drooling and immobile. I had too many responsibilities back in the Real for that.
Six hours at home with your head plugged in was a nice 360 days in the V, more than long enough to develop real feelings.
He smoked a cigarette across the bar from me. I liked the way the smoke hung in the air as he watched me, creating a fog through which I could barely see his hazel eyes. He said something to the bartender, our eyes never breaking the stare. A moment later a drink appeared before me. I raised my eyebrows in a thank you and watched him watch me take a sip. Like all the drinks here, it was the best Old Fashioned I ever tasted.
When I looked at the red doors that led to the auditorium where we would be part of the 1956 Academy Awards audience, he came to stand beside me. He wore a white tuxedo and fedora, a perfect match to my tight black dress.
“You seen this movie before?” he asked.
“Which? Lots of nominees.”
“The one that’s going to win. Marty.”
I nodded and took another sip of the drink. “It’s one of my favorites. About two ugly people who find love with each other. It’s very sweet.”
He took my free hand and held it for a second. “Based on a true story?”
“Not in this world.”
I watched his full lips return to the rim of the martini and felt a quiver in my own mouth.
We skipped the show and went straight to my hotel room. The V was designed for pleasure, and I had had my share of affairs, but none felt quite like this. When his hands were not on me my body yearned for his touch like a stump crying out for a missing limb.
360 days, 360 hours, 360 minutes. Time lost all meaning with him, replaced with a million wonderful moments. We ate sushi carved from fish plucked directly from the sea and served to us on silver platters on a cruise in the Sea of Japan. We skied naked from the top of Jade Dragon. We jumped off the Burj Khalifa and soared over Dubai.
There were plenty of people who would rightfully point out that it is easy to fall in with someone when all you do is have a good time. And to them I say, so? It felt good to catch feelings for someone while narrowly avoiding getting chomped to bits by wolves in the middle of a national park or during a shootout at the Long Branch Saloon. Even simulated near-death experiences had a way of sorting the chemicals in our body so that the heart, brain, and loins all fired up in the same way as in the Real.
This was different, though, and we both knew it. There was a primal nature to our feelings. I desired him with every fiber of my being like a person stabbed and bleeding out desired the sweet release of death: overwhelming, all-powerful, inescapable. Our souls were one, tethered through time and brought together by Fate to the V. The settings were fantastic, the bodies imaginary, but the feelings authentic.
“I’ve had good times with people I met in the V before, but never like this,” he told me toward the end of that year. We sat across from each other in a bathtub filled with pink champagne, our legs intertwined, our arms stretched around along the rim so the edges of our fingers touched. “It’s amazing, actually.”
“What is?” There was an unfamiliar sparkle in his eye. I had stared into those eyes for countless hours in the V and was stunned something about them could still surprise me.
He leaned forward as if to kiss me but paused when inches away. “Every time I look at you, you’re better looking at than the last time I looked at you.”
Another perfect line. “Optical illusion in the V,” I responded with a smirk. He laughed. I grabbed his face and kissed him as I felt the familiar burst of warmth in my chest. Life had become the Before and the After. Before Him I was little more than an animal wandering the world, surviving on whatever scraps I could scavenge. After Him I had discovered fire and was now fully a human being, fully a woman.
When our lips parted, I could not help but utter the words, “I wish-,”
He cut me off. “Come on now, you know this is this and that is that.”
It was an unspoken yet firm rule. Out there was to remain out there and in here, in here. The V was the pure, safe, sacred place. The Real was the dirty, unsafe land of obligations and responsibilities. The V was beautiful, the Real was ugly. To try to combine them would irreparably tarnish both. “When the timer’s up, we are strangers again.”
“But what if we didn’t have to be.”
He looked away from me and stood up, his chiseled nude body shiny with droplets of bubbly. He stepped out of the tub. “No.” His demeanor chilled. He walked to the bedroom of our suite in Rio. I could hear people outside celebrating Carnival. I reached over the edge of the tub and grabbed my champagne flute. I scooped a full glass from the tub and threw it back. The bubbles tickled my throat.
I got up to apologize. He was right. This is this and that is that. Nothing in the V was really real, no matter how it felt. “Hey, look, I’m sorry-,” I dropped the glass on the carpet. The cold liquid splashed my feet.
He was gone.
I clapped three times and said my password aloud.
The worst part of returning to the Real was the diaper.
As soon as I removed the V-Hat, a black motorcycle helmet with no visor, I felt the wetness and smelled the remnants of meals past. While my mind was fully plugged into the V, I was able to ignore my physical body. No matter where my brain went, my bodily functions continued while central command was distracted. Sometimes a one-hour session left me clean but a five hour one like what I just finished left a terrible mess.
I recalled the way his muscled chest felt against mine and thought, Worth it, as the rank stink of digested pizza and salad attacked my face.
“How was it?” my husband, Fred, asked. A lumpy man in with a too-thin mustache, he looked like he was just getting back from taking the kids to a park: tan shorts and red polo with dark sweat stains around the crotch and pits, respectively. Unlike me, he was the outdoorsy type in the Real and shunned the V. “I just don’t trust it,” he told me once. “It’s putting all this information and stimulus in your brain, but at what cost? What is it taking out?”
My ability to deal with your crap, I thought when I remembered that question. Allegedly they took nothing, but tech companies had lied for generations about what they did with user data and information. This could not be any different.
Take what you want. The V was worth any price.
He was worth any price.
“Mommy!” my five-year-old, Sherise, exclaimed while squeezing my legs. With a head that reached my waist, she was in the perfect position to catch a whiff. “What’s that smell?” She pinched her nose and leaned her face away from my body.
“That’s just Mommy’s peepee and poopoo from helmet vacation,” my seven-year-old, Sharonda, said.
“Ew, Mommy. You need a shower.”
“Indeed, I do,” I said. My husband gave me a knowing wink, as if he had any idea of what went on during my time away. I wondered sometimes what he would do if he knew the truth about what I was up to in the V.
Probably tell me he was happy I was having fun.
In the shower I thought of him. He had told me his name was Derrick, an alias (mine was “Bernadette”) for the V, but I heard someone call him Joseph in Egypt, at the bar at the foot of the Sphinx. His face changed and he rushed off to talk to the guy whom I never met. He came back with a wide-eyed, twitchy smile. “Who was that?” I asked him.
“Just an old friend from out there. We went to high school together.”
“Why don’t you ask him to join us?”
“Because I don’t want him to join us.”
A new round of drinks appeared and that was that. It was early on in our time together, easier to let things slip.
Joseph in the Real, Derrick in the V, where are you? My hands slid down under my belly as I pondered the question while memories of his face and body rushed at me like the rain from the showerhead.
“Back so soon?” my husband asked when I returned from the V after barely a half an hour. “Everything okay?
“I think I need a few more days off,” I told him before going to the bathroom to change.
I went back a week later to find my Derrick/Joseph, or DJ as I began to call him in my imagination. If I knew his full name or User ID I could do a search, assuming he had not blocked me, but I never caught them. We had too much fun with our bodies joined like puzzle pieces I gave no thought to tomorrow. Our connection felt eternal so why couldn’t it be eternal?
I started my search back at the 1956 Oscars. He was not there. I browsed through every Oscar ceremony but could not find his face in the crowd. I knew he was a fan of celebrity awards shows so I tried the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys. Nothing.
Year after year, nothing.
He could have changed the way he looked and smelled, but I believed it would not be enough to fool me. I would recognize that stare that sent a shudder neck to knees. I could not rest until I felt that gaze again.
Other men approached me, of course. One man had hair so thick and shiny I imagined chopping it off with a dull blade and making an incredible wig out of it. There were places in the V where you could do that sort of thing, for a fee . . .
No. That’s not the kind of guy he was. What kind of guy is he, then? Smooth as silk. Hilarious as the best comedians in the world. Gorgeous as the ocean under the full moon.
The ocean.
He loved the open sea. He loved the way saltwater caressed his skin. He adored swimming with all manner of creatures, from giant Blue Whales the size of buildings to sharks with dagger-like teeth. One trip, to see colossal squid at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, came with a tour guide and required a reservation with a guide. Most who did guide work were AI-generated, but DJ insisted we work with a real person. “Gives it a sense of authenticity,” he said.
I headed to the guide, praying for a clue.
The guide’s office was decorated like a travel agency from the 1980s: Pan American Airlines ads, a 24-7 1-800 number for travel-related inquiries, and large posters of gorgeous beaches with neon text that asked questions like, Isn’t it time for some you-time?
The guide’s name was Art and he wore a neon green visor and chain-smoked cigarettes at the desk, though the place smelled like tropical breezes and suntan lotion.
“Can I help you?” he asked, not looking up from the Sports pages of a Post from the 1980s proclaiming Mets Win!
“Do you remember me?” I asked. “I was here last week in the real world but maybe like a decade ago in this place? I can’t keep track of the math.”
He looked over the top of the newspaper. “I don’t know. I see a lot of beautiful women come through here . . . and a lot of average-looking ones.” He closed the newspaper. “What do you need?”
“I was with someone. He said his name was Derrick, but it might be Joseph or someone else entirely. I need to find him.” It felt weird to utter those words out loud, to hear myself need a man.
Since when have you ever needed a man?
A memory flickered of the two of us down in the trench, peeling off our suits and embracing in the darkness, my legs wrapped around his waist, his lips on my neck.
Since now.
He shook his head. “If a guy runs away from you in the V, there’s probably a good reason. I can’t help you.”
I took a deep breath. There had to be something. “Please, it’s important. Can you send him a message?”
“I don’t think so. I think you should leave.”
“Just tell him I will be watching the rockets in exactly one V year from this moment.” I grabbed a pen from the counter. On the edge of the newspaper, I wrote down the location code.
I paused to read a comic strip next to my urgent, scribbled handwriting. It was one of those old single panel comics of an absurd scene: two bulls, dressed in medieval outfits, standing over a field, preparing to fight. A cow in a dress watched them with an anxious look on her face. The caption read, “This milk better be worth it.”
Another week of soccer practice, ballet practice, teacher-parent meetings, sitting in traffic, sitting in drive-thrus, drifting through the supermarket, laying on my back as the man I married pounded away while my mind drifted elsewhere. Another week of nursing minor cuts and bruises and breaking up fights between the two piles of toothpicks that were my daughters.
Plugging into the V was freedom. One minute I was awash in obligations and restrictions and the next, unbound and unrestrained, a being of limitless potential in an unlimited world. I could walk on the moon or the sun. Nothing mattered. Everything felt good and nothing hurt.
Nothing, except other people. In a world like the V where everyone was invincible and omnipotent, the power people had over one another grew exponentially. I did not believe that until I felt this.
I sipped a margarita poolside at the Cocoa Beach Hilton while the rockets took off from Cape Canaveral a few miles away. I came to see Apollo 11, the one that took our people to the moon. I read once it was supposed to be the dawn of a new era for humanity, but it was decades before humans considered returning before ultimately abandoning space exploration when the V came along. Much simpler to put on the helmet and pretend than to invest in a trillion-dollar project that only a handful of people would ever get to experience.
“Are you her?” The voice was stern and commanding; I would not have been surprised if her next words were an order to drop and give her twenty. She was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a green tunic and carrying a sharp spear with a golden point. Her hair was up in a bright purple mohawk. Her yellow, star-shaped pupils twinkled in the hot summer sun.
“I don’t know. Who are you looking for?”
“Art sent me. You need to leave him alone.”
“Who are you?”
Wife?
Girlfriend?
Bodyguard?
“Doesn’t matter.” Her gruff exterior seemed to crack a moment as she sized me up. How I must have looked to her: lovelorn and sunburned, half-buzzed and desperate, though I could change most of these details with the snap of a finger.
Pitiful.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this or what you got going out in the Real, but your life will be better off if you face your problems instead of chasing strange in the V to avoid them.”
I stood up and threw my drink to the ground. The glass shattered with a loud crash before the mess vanished without a trace and a new drink appeared on the table next to my lounge chair. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She smirked. “You’d be surprised.”
She vanished.
The yellow star-shaped pupils meant the mystery woman was an Adult Verified Account, one of millions able to monetize their interactions across the darker corners of the V. I only had to find which corner.
Adult World looked a lot like the old pictures of Times Square in the 1970s: sex workers in feather boas promising the night of your life; movie theaters with marquees advertising every fetish imaginable; leering creeps in alleys with shady promises of fulfilling one’s deepest, darkest, most private fantasies. The sky was perpetually black and starless, with the only light coming from billboards advertising things like “Discount Body Part Indulgences” next to suggestive photos of armpits. The air smelled of rugged musk and cheap flowery perfume.
I walked to the Information Booth, where a man in a blue suit and conductor hat sat in a tiny glass room amidst the heightened-hormonal chaos. “How I may I help you?” he asked with a bright, white smile. His skin and teeth had a certain synthetic sheen, the oily complexion that AI assistants wore to differentiate them from real humans.
“I’m looking for a woman.”
A floating screen popped up alongside the AI assistant’s face. “Can you be more specific? We have many millions.”
“She was tall, with red hair and green eyes. She carried a spear and wore a green tunic.”
The floating screen looked like a rolodex as the number of possible candidates dropped. “Can you be more specific? We have many thousands.”
“Native English speaker?” It was impossible to tell where someone was from because of the V’s universal translator, but something told me she and DJ were both Americans like me. He had no reason to change his accent, and she probably figured that she was so deeply buried in this directory that it did not matter if I saw the “actual” her or heard her “actual” voice.
The screen flipped like a rolodex again. “Can you be more specific? We have thousands.”
I scrolled through the headshots lined up in little boxes on the floating screen. It could take hours but if she was here, I would find her.
Smalltown was a part of the V I had never heard of before. Everyone was shrunk to about an inch tall. Rats like dinosaurs chased a group of people using needles as swords to fight them off. A group of screaming children zoomed past me, desperately holding on to the hairs on the neck of a Boston terrier. A group of drunks shared a thimble of vodka dispensed from a bottle the size of a school bus outside of Gargantua’s, a neon-tinted brick building. A tiny door with its own tiny knob nestled in the center-bottom of the front door.
I walked inside and entered a black square room with a high ceiling illuminated by a pink light that shone like the sun. A man in a black and white striped suit and top hat approached me. Shirtless under his suit, his torso was straight out of an underwear catalog: shredded and hairless. “May I help you?” His teeth were large and spread apart, jutting out like broken piano keys. I wondered what they were like in the Real and why he chose to have these in the V.
“I’m looking for Stacy?”
“Who?”
“Stacy McCammon?”
“There’s no Stacy McCammon here.”
I was confused. I spent hours searching through the profiles and went back and reviewed my own footage from that conversation. The faces matched. Stacy was-
“I’m sorry. Goddess Gargantua. I am looking for Goddess Gargantua.”
He beamed. “Of course! The Goddess is here. Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes.” If it meant finding him and feeling him close to me again, any price was worth paying. Stacy had information I needed and I did not want her to run away because of some impatient client.
He pulled a tiny spiral notebook from a back pocket and leafed through the pages. “Ah, yes, right this way. The Tuesday Special. Good choice. Very popular.” I followed him to a far corner. He parted a red velvet curtain and gestured for me to walk through. “Enjoy.”
The room was a typical kitchen: wood table with four chairs, kitchen counter, sink, old-fashioned yellow refrigerator, cheap white cabinets with curved bottoms instead of handles. If I were not so tiny it might not be a bad place to fix a meal.
An earthquake knocked me off my feet. As I pushed myself up from the floor, a deep voice bellowed, “Where’s Mommy’s tiny baby?”
What in the what-?
Stacy, aka the Goddess Gargantua, emerged from around the edge of the kitchen counter, this time in a red tunic and a ruby crown. She carried a bright red trident. She looked down at me and lifted a bare foot. “Does my little lady want to get stomped?” She wiggled her toes. “Or does my little lady want to get-,” She stopped suddenly, dropping character with a groan. “What are you doing here?” She picked me up and held me in the palm of her hand.
“Hi,” I said, nervous, wishing I had thought this through a little more and prepared something. “What is this place?”
She put me down on the counter. “You’re into this? I did not think Dad-er-um-Joseph was into this.”
“Dad?”
Dad?
DAD!
I wanted to dance. A clue, a clue, a real-life bonafide clue. Stacy McCammon’s father was the man I was looking for. Victory. It felt so good I could almost taste it, like his minty breath blowing a cool chill down my throat.
“Pretend you didn’t hear that.” Her face reddened to match the tunic and trident. “You need to get out of here. I have real customers.”
“What do you do here exactly? Just threaten them?”
“Do you know what ‘vore’ is?” I shook my head. “It’s short for carnivore. You should look it up.” Before I could respond, she tossed me into her mouth with a flick of a finger I slid down her tongue and esophagus, landing in a hot, smelly liquid.
Stomach acid.
I screamed as I pulled off the helmet. I looked at my arms. The flesh had begun to melt almost instantly, but when I looked at my body there were no burns or scars. It’s just the V, crazy. Relax.
My husband ran into the room. “Is everything okay?” He was in a Kiss the Cook apron and carried a dirty spatula. I smelled grilled meat and gagged.
“It’s fine,” I said, bringing a hand up to my mouth as I marched to the bathroom.
“Something weird happen in the V?” He sounded genuinely concerned. Poor guy could never in a million years guess I got eaten while looking for the man I wanted to leave him for.
“You could say that, but it’s nothing, honest. When’s dinner?”
Dad. She called him dad. How old is she? How old is he? She had to be at least 18, which would put him at least around my age of forty. Everyone looked twenty-one in the V, though. Could they be younger? Or older?
Joseph McCammon. Assuming her last name was not from marriage and the Joseph name was true, that was my guy. A quick online search found over 10,000 men over the age of 18. I needed to narrow it down. Through Stacy I could do that.
There was not much online about Stacy McCammon but Goddess Gargantua had a ton of fan sites across the web. There were pictures and videos of her squeezing her fans between her Volkswagen-sized toes and mansion-sized breasts. People raved about being consumed by her, how the esophagus felt like a warm, comforting waterslide that led directly to a flesh-melting hot tub where one’s body could become part of Gargantua’s.
After a few days down that rabbit hole, I found an old video of someone called “Stacey Mac”, a mukbang artist who once a week ate a 20,000 calorie meal before thousands of fans in an old Roman colosseum. In the video, a man who I quickly recognized as my DJ, her dad, wheeled carts of pizzas, burgers, and fruit pies to the dining table where she did her work.
Old videos included metadata that helped identify the people in them, an early problem in the V that allowed for people to more easily track others. Simpler days. From this video I was able to pull old user IP information and get myself an address.
Bingo.
His home was a trailer surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence and a decrepit lawn that seemed to have been neglected for a generation. The mailbox was open. Inside I found an electric bill addressed to “Joseph McCammon”.
Who still gets their bills sent via the snail?
The front door creaked open and out stepped an ancient man in torn, faded dungarees and a straw hat. “Hello,” he called to me. “Surprise.”
He was at least twice my age, maybe older. In his left hand was a cane and his right the handle of an oxygen tank on wheels.
“Derrick?” I asked, confounded. A sinking feeling crept in my stomach. This was the root of all my desires, all my wet dreams and waking nightmares? This was the man who dominated my thoughts for so many weeks out in the Real, years in the V? The man I fantasized leaving my family for?
This?
He let out a little heh-heh-cough-cough-heh-heh laugh. “My closest friends call me Joe.” He crept down the stone path that led to me at the gate. The journey seemed to exhaust him; he stopped to catch his breath halfway. When we were inches apart, he raised his hand from the oxygen tank to stroke my cheek. “You are even more beautiful in person.”
I wept. I wanted to turn away from his foggy blue eyes but could not because through the cataract film and surrounding wrinkles and liver spots, there was the guy, my love, my same kind of lame.
We were on the Trans-Atlantic highway, racing in our red convertible from Quoddy Head in Maine all the way to the cliffs of El Beddouza in Morocco. At a hundred miles per hour across the vast expanse of the ocean, the air was fresh and salty and tasted impossibly clean. We took turns driving, climbing over each other without stopping whenever one of us felt like taking a turn at the wheel. We were never hungry, but we loved the savory taste and sticky texture of Pete’s Best Peanut Butter Crackers, a brand out of business in the Real for over twenty years. As I sat in the passenger seat feeding them to him, we shared memories of eating them as a child, alone, our nose in a book.
“My family was military so we moved around a lot and I never had any friends,” he told me. “I was so alone for so many years I had no choice but to bury myself in horror movies and comic books.”
“I’m the youngest of five. By the time I was born, my parents had basically retired from paying attention to their children. Left to my own devices, I drifted to scary movies and comics.”
“Do you think that’s why we get along so well? Two lost and lonely souls drifting through the wind, consuming trash alone until we found each other in this strange space?”
“I don’t think it’s that complicated. I just think we’re both the same kind of lame.”
“Same kind of lame,” he laughed and nodded. “Same lame.”
“Same lame.”
Same lame. It was not just movies and books and solitary childhood. It was the music we danced to and the jokes we laughed at. It was the way we liked being touched and talked to in our most private moments. It was the way we snorted when we laughed and screamed when we were scared, screamed when we were thrilled, screamed when our bodies collided and became one. I saw in him a reflection of the person I wanted to be. He looked at me in the way I always wished the person I loved would look at me.
Same lame.
“You see why I didn’t want to do this?” he asked me.
I nodded, unsure of what else to do. How could I be so stupid? What was I chasing? How would I have felt if this man showed up at my house and my husband saw him?
My husband.
What would my daughters say if a strange, lovelorn man showed up?
My daughters.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just needed to see you again. You disappeared . . .”
He placed a bony finger under my chin and lifted my face so we could lock eyes. “I feel what you feel, but there’s no future for us. What’s there stays there for a reason.”
I pulled away from him and stepped back, aware of the mistake I had made. I allowed the V and all its pleasures and temptations, all its thrills and illusions, to trick me into thinking that what happened in there meant something out here. I looked up at the orange-tinted sky, ravaged by decades of wildfires, and regretted every action that led up to this moment, all the way back to the Oscar ceremony I did not even watch.
Same lame.
He looked pained. “What now?”
I said nothing. I turned and walked back to my rental car and headed back to the airport to go home to my husband, to my family, to the Real. I could no longer live in the V. I had a life to live. I had to stop chasing fantasy and embrace reality.
As soon as I got home, I buried the helmet in the back of our attic.
It would be fifteen years before I saw it again, under a pile of old clothes set aside for charitable donations and ignored. It was part of a pile of memories that I would attend to one day, just not that day.
I plugged in to see what it felt like to be back in there. Why not? In the years since, I devoted myself to motherhood, to my husband, my job, and found a new happiness in the Real. I was no longer dependent on the V, no longer needing an escape from reality to find my bliss. I discovered it inside myself, in the million tiny moments between sleep: my children’s laughter, a well-prepared meal, a comforting word to my husband.
But I never did get to see one my favorite movies win Best Picture, so I returned to the show I never got to see. I was welcomed to the 1956 Academy Awards by a smile uttering the question, “You seen this movie before?”
I smiled and nodded. I had seen this movie, but this time it would end differently.
Alex J. Barrio is a political consultant and progressive advocate living in Washington, DC. He is a Cuban-American who grew up in New Jersey and spent most of his adult life in Florida. He can be found onTwitter for poetry (@1001Tanka) and fiction (@AlexJBarrio). His stories have been published by Four Palaces Press, Roi Faineant, Bullshit Lit, Hearth and Coffin and Unstamatic.