MY GOOD FRIEND BARRY
A young adult novel
By
Jeff Provine
Episode Five: The Chatroom
We rode quietly back to Barry’s house, or at least I did. When we were younger, Barry and I used to chat freely in his mother’s presence, but that was a long time ago, when having an imaginary friend was cute. Now Barry was supposed to be a “sane” member of modern society: mindless, obedient, and perfect for a dehumanizing job that gave him enough money to buy all of the things he did not need and did not even want, but that commercials assured him that he should have. Talking to someone who was not there was simply out of the question for him, and so his mother told him again and again as he steadily grew up. Eventually it got to the point where she would ground him if she found us conversing, and soon we were forced to work out a system of slight gestures for Barry to make. I could shout at the top of my lungs, and she would never hear me, but it was indeed very awkward for Barry.
One time, I had found it rather entertaining to mock Barry’s mom in such an invisible way. While she was lecturing him on the importance of looking nice and wearing new clothes, like she did, and of not wearing his favorite, ratty, gray-and-green flannel shirt that had several strings fraying at the cuffs and a button missing. I had pranced behind her, mimicking her movements and facial expressions with enough silliness that Barry could not help but tumble into laughter. Thanks to my ridicule, we were banned from watching television for three weeks.
Barry’s mother was very much his opposite, and the two were yet oddly similar. Both yearned for the acceptance of those around them, though Barry seemed to fail at that his whole young life, while his mother’s youth had been filled with days basking in the glory of being among the popular kids. She had been homecoming queen of her tiny rural high school, a cheerleader, student council office-filler, and, most importantly, she never embarrassed herself or her parents by having to go to a psychiatrist. All through school, she had always worn the right clothes, done her hair correctly, and delicately manipulated those around her so that she was certain to be liked (or at least the center of jealousy). Barry was very different: infamous, unpopular, very much on the outside the mainstream of hectic high school living. It was strange how the two could have been genetically related at all.
So I now sat in the back of the minivan, thinking idly and staring out the window at the picturesque houses and carefully manicured lawns here on the good side of town. Meanwhile, Barry and his mother chatted with brief sentences, trading the typical parent-teenager dialogue as well as a few mutterings that were certain to be limited to Barry’s bizarre life.
“What were you and Dr. Jungman talking about?” Barry asked.
“He was saying that it was good for you finally to be involved in something,” his mother told him. “And it’s true. You’ve spent far too much of your life sitting up in your room.”
Barry did not reply. Instead, his gaze slipped downward woefully, then at last out toward the window, staring out at the same scenery I was. We were already turning across the gas-guzzler-filled street into the housing division Barry called home. Throughout the neighborhood, winding, traffic-controlled streets flowed between nearly identical houses each with lawns expertly manicured by immigrants who barely understood English. It was pretty, but one felt like one could not touch anything, like being in a museum with cheesy classical music pumped into your ears to cover up the echoes of ancient docents coughing.
“You do like school, don’t you?” his mother asked, jumping awkwardly into a conversation that had already begun in her head.
Barry cleared his throat, barely retaining a snide laugh. “It’s okay.”
“But you’ve done so well,” she told him, shaking her head sadly.
“Yeah, I guess,” Barry said with a shrug.
“There’s more to life than grades,” I at last piped up, frowning at Barry’s passiveness. Barry did his best to ignore me.
“I just don’t understand why you keep yourself alone like you do,” Barry’s mother said, again shaking her head sadly at Barry’s life.
“You’re not alone,” I said, musically raising my voice with each syllable.
“Yeah, I’m not really alone,” Barry replied.
His mother nodded. “But you’re so distant.”
I knew what she meant, but I could not resist pointing out, “You’re right here in the car!”
Barry turned his head slightly, shushing me with a sound that quickly evolved into a playful whistle. He then turned back to face forward, glancing out of the corner of his eye to make certain his mother did not see through the disguised sound. She all but ignored him as it was, and so she continued ignorant of my indignant comments.
The minivan turned into the driveway in front of Barry’s house, and I quickly unbuckled the seatbelt, eager to escape the tin can of angst.
“It’s just not normal,” Barry’s mother said at the climax of the exchange, cutting the engine as she did. The dying cylinders mimicked the dying communication.
“But I’m getting better,” Barry assured her with a hopeful smile.
“I should hope so,” was all his mother would say in return.
Barry and I leaped out of the car and headed for the front door. His mother paused to look at the new iris their neighbors had planted, rubbing her chin with her hand as she gazed in thought with jealous eyes. In a moment, she was behind us, and we had successfully fled to the sanctity of Barry’s poster-covered room. I shut the door behind me, and at last we were out of earshot of his mother and free to speak.
“Seriously, you should stop going to see that guy,” I told Barry, who was busy flipping switches to power up his computer. “You’re really wasting a lot of our time. I mean, you’ve got, what, eighty or so years on this planet? And here you are, spending some of your most intellectually and creatively productive…”
I trailed off as I realized that he was not paying any attention at all. A sudden seizure ran through my heart, dark and unfathomable terror boiling up as I felt he was suddenly not noticing me. Of course Barry had ignored my rantings before, but this was different, this was unintentional. Visions of dark abyss and the cessation of my existence flooded my mind’s eye. In my fright, I lunged across the room and grabbed Barry by the shoulders.
“Dude!” Barry said, wide-eyed as he tumbled out of his computer chair onto the floor. “What’s with you?”
“I, I,” I began, stuttering with the feeling of frightful adrenaline leaving my imaginary veins and the sudden relief of having Barry’s eyes, as perplexed as they were, fixed upon me. With a quick, gasping sigh, I recovered myself. “I thought I saw a spider.”
“A spider?” Barry asked.
“Yeah, huge one.” I swallowed nervously. “I got it, though.”
The poor, insane boy shrugged slightly and nodded his gratitude. He pulled himself back into his chair, and I eagerly sidled next to him, sitting on the footstool that I usually used when watching him interact with the mighty Internet. My jaw was clenched in anxiety as I stared worriedly at the screen, a monstrous mirror that was swallowing up Barry’s attention. Wielding his years of computer expertise, Barry quickly leaped onto the superhighway of communication and found the way to his precious chat room.
The room was titled “Interactive Chatting of Justice”, a fittingly nerdy name for a place dedicated to fans discussing the plausibility of an electromagnetic description of The Force. Barry typed his handle into the preliminary form and logged into the white cavern of messaging. The room was empty, save for an advertisement about cheap computer hardware. As the blank whiteness filled my eyes, a slow exhalation of relief slipped between my lips.
“I’m glad you hurried,” I snorted, feeling a bit of happy sarcasm replace my terror. “Wouldn’t want to keep nothing waiting.”
“They’ll be here,” Barry assured me. “Just wait a minute or two.”
I breathed long and deeply, trying to be patient. After only ten seconds, my tolerance ran out, and a sudden thought filled my head. “You know, we could be accomplishing something right now instead of sitting around.”
“Yeah, probably,” Barry admitted.
A smile (or perhaps more of a smirk) crept onto my lips, and hope filled me with ideas of pulling Barry away from the computer and back into his realm of fantasy. All I had to do was preoccupy Barry with something else, something that had to do with me, and then he would forget this chatroom business. My life was quickly becoming a constant battle of fighting for attention and survival, and defeat meant that I would tumble into a nightmare of nothingness.
Just as I leaned to grab a notebook that held the few notes we had made about the infamous Ninja Football League, there was a beep and a blip as someone else entered the chat room and dashed my hopes of stealing back some of Barry’s attention. This “Stargurl” was quick to leap into action destroying my more satisfactory afternoon. “Stargurl: Hello.”
Something snapped inside of me. Adrenaline mixed with thick blood, my subconscious made a discovery, and I leaned forward eagerly. I had to impress myself deeper into the chat, perhaps if only to preserve me as just a fragment of some other speck of life.
“Quick!” I said, pointing to the keyboard. “Pretend to be some thirty-year-old guy from Manchester!”
Barry frowned and shook his head at me.
“Aw, come on!” I told him with an excited grin. The grin was forced. My face should have been covered in wrinkles of terror. “It’d be hilarious.”
“Maybe some other time.” With that, Barry fell into typing his own thoughts, and I made a frustrated grimace.
“Barry: heya”
For all his imagination, the best nickname he with which he could come up was “Barry.” Sometimes I really worried about that kid.
“Stargurl: What’s up?”
“Barry: not much, just hanging around”
He did not even mention me. With a sneer, I mumbled, “Thanks.”
“It’s nothing against you,” Barry said defensively, blinking behind his glasses. “‘Not much’ is just the expected thing to say. Like saying, ‘fine,’ when someone asks how you are doing.”
“Oh, don’t get me started on sociology,” I warned. As much as I loved to rant and deride modern customs, I needed to focus on wedging myself into the chat.
Stargurl interrupted us. “Stargurl: So, there’s this thing I’ve been wondering about: what’s faster, hyperdrives in Star Wars or warpdrives in Star Trek?”
Barry sat up suddenly in his chair, squeezing his hands into fists to crack his knuckles excitedly as he did. We had spent long hours when we were younger learning to crack our knuckles in such a manner. Coincidentally, our decision to learn the trick came after watching a massive marathon of kung fu movies. Those were the days.
After waving his fingers like a conductor before an orchestra, Barry leaped into typing. “Barry: i’ve thought about this a lot. it’s definitely hyperdrive.”
“No kidding that you thought about it,” I half-shouted. “We sat down with every tech manual we could dig up and calculated it. You weren’t satisfied till we had an accurate prediction of how fast the Millennium Falcon would go.”
“And it turns out that it’s faster than warpdrive,” Barry replied with a nod, still typing nonsense about the importance of hyperspace on interstellar travel.
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug and nodded in unthinking thought for a moment. I opened my mouth to continue our side-conversation, but Barry was engrossed in describing his, our, investigation of fictional space travel. With a dejected sigh, I turned to help even though I could feel my grip on the chat slipping like muddy sand between my fingers.
“Stargurl: I guess that settles that. You must be pretty smart.”
“Barry: it may not look like much, but it’s got it where it counts.”
I rolled my eyes at Barry and slapped his hands away from the keyboard. This was my chance, my last chance. “Don’t hurt yourself trying to be clever.”
“What’re you doing?” Barry asked as I quickly ran my fingertips over the plastic keys. It was not often that I would have stolen a keyboard away from him, but my desperation called for desperate measures.
I did not reply and let him catch on as my words appeared on the screen. “Barry: Seriously, though, I think a much faster reasonable transportation method would be a combination of the two. With hyperspace, the laws of physics are bent in a similar method to those of the warp field. If the field could be modified (as could easily be done by Scotty or perhaps Geordi), we could have ships swinging between stars quicker than I’ll get out.”
“‘I’ll get out’?” Barry sneered. “What does that even mean?”
The other chatter, however, ignored my cliché. “Stargurl: Sounds very reasonable. Still, it wouldn’t be as fast as some kind of wormhole like in Stargate.”
“Wormholes, that’s a whole new can of worms,” I said, raising an eyebrow and trying to imagine a universe in which interplanetary travel took only a matter of minutes, most of which was getting in and out of the respective atmospheres. A moment of distraction routed me.
“Actually, it’d be very simple,” Barry said. He brushed me out of the way and resumed command of the computer. I fell back, motionless, shocked at how I had taken my final stand, my charge of a light brigade, and it was not enough.
“Barry: what kind of wormholes are we talking about? natural or artificial?”
“Stargurl: They’d have to be artificial to be of any use.”
“Obviously,” I muttered. Feeling as beleaguered as anyone in the Battle of
the Bulge, I pressed onward, exhausted but determined to keep my place within
the chat. “Unless it was naturalistic in that there was some kind of ancient
super peoples that made the universe coincidentally outline a great network of
wormholes to all inhabitable planets. Oh, wait, that’s what happened.”
Barry did not even glance at me as I spoke. His attention was fixed wholly on the screen in front of him, and I could do nothing but slump on my footstool. I winced at his disregard, and, after resting enough to regain my courage, I looked again at the computer screen.
“Barry: artificial then. it’d take a tremendous amount of energy to activate it, plus it’d dissipate.”
“Maybe you could recycle a dissipated wormhole?” I suggested.
“Stargurl: Perhaps a method of recycling the energy as a wormhole collapses?”
My jaw tumbled wide in shock and fear that I could so easily be replaced. Barry simply went on typing.
“Barry: hmm, that would be hard, but awesome.” He sat back in his chair with his fingertips pressing against one another in the stereotypical steepled hand gesture of a megalomaniac. His vision went dark as he focused deeply on the hypothetical problem of collecting fictive energy. After a few seconds of patience, a muse suddenly struck him, and he leaped to the keyboard. I began to ask what was going on, but before I could even form an entire sound, he shushed me with a demeaning wave of his hand.
As his fingers flashed in front of my face and then scurried back to the keyboard, an unholy sense of fury rose up within me. He had said that he would never want to write me off of anything, and now he was doing just that. Barry lied, and not a typical, happiness-bearing falsehood like the time he had told me that his mom was allergic to imaginary friends. It was a genuine, failing-of-character lie. Glaring through tiny slits between my eyelids, I did my best to control myself. I hunched forward, clasping my arms together and squeezed them beneath my folded stomach. I seethed, my hot breath hissing between my tight teeth.
As I watched, he and Stargurl tumbled into a huge discussion of interspatial travel, comparing methods and trying to minimize time and maximize distance. It was a discussion that we should have had, something that Barry and I could have argued, investigated, and created into a work of science fiction art that would inspire generations of weird kids. But now, my place was being usurped by some strange collection of bytes that may have been an artificial intelligence program gone awry in a computer laboratory for all we knew.
The two prattled on for thirty-two minutes, throwing out idea after idea and critiquing them with as much expertise as brainy teenagers could muster. It was thirty-two exactly as I was counting each change of the little clock in the corner of the screen with my heart squeezing in rage at each flip of black digits. Each electronic exchange drove a dagger deeper between my ribs.
First it had been Barry’s mom and Dr. Jungman trying to get rid of me, but that was years ago and easily deflected since he never took me seriously. But now, everything was crumbling. Barry was constantly perusing college documents, sending applications and e-mails to possible future professors. The trivia bowl came next and was swallowing up more and more of his time as he went to practices when he should have been playing video games with me. It grew even worse as he spent hours scanning the Internet for factoids to further his useless knowledge and trivia expertise. And now, brought on by that terrible force known as the World Wide Web, he was finding someone else with whom he could discuss all of his ideas. Worst of all, it was a girl. This was the last straw.
I leaped up from the stool, kicking it over as I did. My foot slipped (at least I thought it was an accidental slip) and tugged the power cord out of the socket. With horrid electronic moans of despair, the computer died.
“What in the name of Einstein’s frizzy hair?” Barry gasped as his monitor went black. He looked up at me helplessly, trying to figure out what had happened.
I said nothing, only turned and headed for the door. There was fumbling as Barry searched for the problem that had killed his discussion.
“Where are you going?” he called from behind me.
“Out.” A moment later, the door slammed behind me.
Stamping down the stairs and out the front door of Barry’s house, I disappeared into the wide uniformity of the suburbs. I was sick of it all. I did not even care if Barry really did wipe me out of his mind and out of existence. Frankly, even defeat sounded better than putting up with the constant battle for attention and survival. Maybe we all feel suicidal sometimes, even imaginary friends.