Google'd, Not Forgotten

Alice didn't mean to lose touch with them all. It just happened, over time, the kind of thing that happens when you're not really thinking about it, when your mind is a million miles away trying to cope with yet another day. Alice felt like lately there were always lots of little things on her mind, like how she was almost out of black plastic garbage bags at her condo, how expensive her heat bill was this season, and how her horoscopes had been getting more and more depressing.

Keeping track of her friends seemed a little less important to Alice, because after all, dammit, she had bills to pay, and her firm was in a real crunch right now, with so many companies trying to ride out the recession by relying on their own in-house lawyers. Why, just last week they'd even had to fire a half dozen paralegals, including poor little Susie Sloan, and Susie was a real nice person, she'd always talked to Alice, and gossiped with her about who was screwing who in their building, all fourteen floors of it, which opened up a lot of possibilities for office cross-pollination. Plus she'd always worked her ass off.

She had never felt like this before, having to struggle just to get through the day, but now it seemed as if it wasn't one thing, it was another. Something was always breaking down in her life, some new obstacle, a fresh hoop for her to jump through. Just after Christmas, Alice had gotten sick, really sick, probably from something rotten she ate at the office party, which wasn't nearly as out of control as last year's, because the firm had finally gotten serious about liability concerns, and insisted on an alcohol free event. It just wasn't the same without the fancy martini bar staffed by a couple of cute young bartenders from the energy trading concern on the eighth floor, serving up Cosmopolitans, and Tom Collinses, and chocolate scotches, and all the butter rum punch you could drink.

Alice hated getting sick, because then she got behind, fell further and further off track from her schedule until she sometimes felt she was at the bottom of a big pit, frantically trying to dig herself out, but fearing deep down she'd probably never make it. Alice's schedule was important to her, it was something rock solid she could grab onto in her life and keep from going away. She didn't like it when things went away. Somebody was always going away, it seemed, starting with her parents, who got divorced when she was barely out of grade school. Her ex-boyfriends were next on the list. The latest one, Sal, had been with her for two years, a record for her, but finally she'd broken up with him because he lacked drive. Sal had been content to let life carry him along on the currents, and probably thought he'd hit the jackpot dating a lawyer. Christ, he didn't even have car insurance.

He wasn't at all like Stephen, who she'd dated in law school, and still had a soft spot for, even though she'd broken up with him, too. Stephen was responsible, and smart, and sensitive, but she'd caught him cheating on her with Donna Holtz, who sat in the next row ahead of them in their third year Constitutional Law seminar. She still felt a flash of anger when she remembered all those times she'd seen him staring forward so intently during that class, and how she'd been proud of him for being so studious, when really all he'd been doing was gazing lustfully at Donna's slutty little behind. Alice was turning thirty next year, but still felt Stairmaster trim, thanks to workouts every Tuesday and Thursday nights at the gym nearest her condo, just off Bancroft Parkway, a routine she felt she owed herself. She bet Donna didn't look half as good as she did anymore.

Alice hadn't spoken to Stephen in several years, but he wasn't the only one. She couldn't remember when she'd starting losing track of people, but sure enough, it had happened. Right out of college, she used to send out Christmas cards to all her friends, her pals from Bowman, the girls she'd hung around with in Philly when she lived in an apartment high rise on South Street for a year before coming to law school, even her high school buddies from way back when in Wendysville. They were full of her hopes and dreams for the future, about how wonderful it was to be dating Stephen, how close she was to having her law degree in hand, how exciting it was to be studying the arcane statutes governing trusts and estates. Every year, when she took them all to the post office at least two weeks before Christmas and stood in line to mail them first class, hand canceled and postmarked, she felt like she had everything under control.

But then she and Stephen broke up, and she graduated, and almost immediately took a job with Fineman, Bosely and Waterbury in the gleaming fourteen story building overlooking Wilmington's bustling downtown, with more corporate headquarters within spitting distance than she could count. They were right next door to the MBNA building, on a corner important enough to always merit a city-sponsored sculpture. One year it had been bears, then bunnies, and this past year there were dinosaurs, over one hundred of them spread throughout the downtown area, brightly colored with day glo paints that appeared to glow in the dark if you looked at them long enough.

That first year, Alice threw herself into her work so fast she hardly realized she'd forgotten to send out the Christmas cards until the morning of December 20th, almost too late. She considered taking the day off from work to throw them together and rush down to the main post office before closing time, but realized it was Tuesday, and Christmas fell on a Sunday, so they probably wouldn't even get there until the following week. So she thought it was better to just skip a year, rather then have everybody see how behind schedule she was when they opened up their mailboxes around New Year's and belatedly found her season's greetings.

Alice never sent out the Christmas cards again. But right around that time, her firm invested lots of money in a brand new, high-tech computer network, and everybody got this great new thing called e-mail. At first Alice didn't like it, it felt like a very informal way to conduct business, but gradually, she got used to it, and started using e-mail a lot. And when she discovered lots of her friends had it too, this e-mail thing, she really fell in love with it. It seemed the perfect way to stay in touch with everybody, and soon she set up an ever-growing address book of everyone she knew was on-line, with the notable exception of Stephen, who she didn't even have an e-mail address for, although Alice wouldn't have minded speaking to him again, she had decided, if he happened to call her first.

She would mostly forward little jokes, and funny things that other people e-mailed her. Usually at least one of her friends would write her back, and say they'd been thinking about her, and wasn't it so great how e-mail could keep them so connected without even having to take the time to write a letter or pick up the phone! Alice felt like everything was under control again.

Before long, she noticed it was getting harder and harder to find the time to send out those little e-mails, and besides, her inbox didn't fill up with funny little things as much anymore, lately it was mostly just worthless spam, lots of get-rich-quick schemes, invitations to buy black market Viagra, and vitamins made from seaweed, and penis extensions, and deals she couldn't pass up on supplies for her inkjet printer, or fax machine, or come-ons to try out amazing, new and improved porn sites featuring all the GIRLS! GIRLS! LIVE GIRLS! she might want.

Around this time, Alice discovered Google. She used it for the first time one day when she was trying to find Karen Carpenter's astrological sign. She was hoping it'd be Gemini, or maybe Pisces, because she wanted to make sure Karen would have fit well with John Lennon, who was a Libra. Sure enough, Karen was a Pisces, symbolized by the two fish, which kind of made sense in light of the double life she led, her public, happy face hiding her anorexia and her perpetually broken heart. Alice loved the Carpenters, especially Karen. Alice also loved John Lennon. She would lie awake at night listening to the loneliness in both their songs, wondering why John felt so trapped, and why Karen could never find someone sensitive enough to appreciate her, and wouldn't it have been great if Karen could have met John, and rescued him from Yoko, then the two of them would have saved each other through love.

Then Alice began using Google to keep track of her friends who she hadn't e-mailed the longest, just to make sure nothing major was going on with them she ought to know about, but didn't. It was fun, at first, and she found out all kinds of things about them that she worked into witty opening lines the next time she forced herself to send out a batch of e-mails, short notes, nothing too needy, only wanting to check in and make sure everybody was doing okay. She told herself she was still on top of things, but wondered where the time seemed to go, and why it got harder and harder for her to do something as simple as staying in touch with her friends, for Chrissakes, something she shouldn't even have to think about, what you'd expect to happen effortlessly, with holiday get-togethers, and phone calls about the dwindling single members of their circle finally getting hitched, or friends in town for the weekend taking her out to smoky bars and getting drunk, laughing 'til closing time over funny things that happened to them a long, long time ago.

It worked for awhile, and she gradually found herself turning to it more and more. Alice started feeling the same way about Google she'd felt about e-mail. It was a life saver, the only way she could find the time to keep in touch. She reasoned even if she couldn't be in contact with her friends all the time, she could at least keep up to date on their lives, so she'd be ready the next time they all caught up, armed with a handful of jokes about the different things they'd all been doing. Alice could share them over drinks, then they'd all have a good laugh about what a clever on-line sleuth she was.

Still, Alice had never Google'd Stephen. One day, she woke with a sudden start at four in the morning, two hours earlier than usual, looked bleary eyed at the big red numbers on her digital alarm clock, and realized she'd been dreaming about him. It was a familiar dream, about how they used to take walks through the deserted U Penn campus at night and tell each other they'd be together forever. But forever's a long time, she'd always say, and Stephen would pull her closer while the crisp, fall winds blew leaves down from the trees around them, and swear he'd be there if she wanted him.

Then, in her dream, Alice would look up, and on the steps of the Law Library up ahead was sitting Donna Holtz, and she was reading a dirty magazine, peering over the top at them. Alice could see Donna laughing at her, and that's when she always woke up. She took a deep breath, laid back down on her bed with the warm, flannel sheets and two thick comforters, still fighting remains of the bug from New Year's, and told herself today would be the day she'd find him.

At work, Alice waited until lunchtime, after she'd put in a full morning of working on the Neimers trust, which was controlled by a Dupont second cousin, once removed, but was still enough of a fortune to buy a good chunk of Wilmington, if the trustees ever wanted to. She was very excited about the thought of finding Stephen's e-mail address, and seeing what law firm he'd ended up with, probably one in the Philly area. Stephen had grown up in a little row house on the North Side, and always said he wanted to settle in the city, to give something back to Philadelphia, because it had been good to him.

She brought up the web site, typed in Stephen's name, in quotes, of course, Google always did better when you used quotes, then hit return and sat back to wait for a response. Damn dial-up service sure was slow, but she heard the firm was about to spring for something faster, some new cable-based hookup. She thought about what she'd say in the e-mail she would send him, something suitably bright, and cordial, just to let him know she'd been thinking about him and hoped he was doing well.

Her browser blinked, and finally returned her search results. Alice sucked in her breath and leaned forward, peering eagerly at her computer screen. There, at the top of the page, was the most relevant hit Google had thought to pull up using its patented mega search engine powers, combing through three billion web pages to find exactly what best matched her query. It was from the police report in the Wednesday edition of the on-line Philadelphia Daily News, and as Alice read she realized exactly one week before, her lost love Stephen had sat down in a motel room across the river from Philly, just south of the Trenton, New Jersey city limits, and used a cheap revolver to put a bullet in his head.