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If you'll pardon the expression, I should have seen this coming.

It's been a dozen years now since I moved the bulk of my social interactions to cyberspace, and for the most part I never had any reason to regret so doing. People in Real Life™ are so much harder to deal with. Give me a screenful of ASCII any day.

Of course, there was always the question of actually meeting some of these net.people, a question I never worried much about answering, since most of them were in some far-off land like Cleveland. Well, okay, Cleveland isn't so far off, but it might as well have been Glocca Morra, for all I cared.

So when she first suggested that she visit, I was more than a trifle surprised; I hadn't thought I had made that much of an impression on anyone. At least, not a favorable one. I had plenty of misgivings — who wouldn't? But I figured I was probably suspicious enough by nature to avoid going totally overboard, and should she turn out to be a gold-digger or something, well, she'd go back to Glocca Morra or wherever with an empty pan.

One lingering question remained, and I stuck it at the end of my last piece of E-mail to her: "So how will I know it's you? I mean, what do you look like?"

Her reply was somewhat cryptic: "Oh, I don't look like much of anything, but you'll definitely know it's me."

I read the message over again. "What does she mean by that?" I said to myself.

"She means," said a voice at my shoulder, "that she's here."

A chair never designed to swivel nonetheless did about a 160-degree turn, and I stared at — nothing.

"Remember me?"

Desperate to sound something other than scared, I opted for wisecrackery. "I, uh, didn't recognize your face."

"Very funny," she said. "Actually, I don't normally make an entrance like that, but you had your nose stuck so far into the screen that I couldn't resist. And besides, you forgot to latch the deadbolt."

I turned toward the door; it was shut, and the deadbolt was indeed unlocked.

A few eons passed, and finally I cleared my throat and said, "I am not in the habit of conversing with my hallucinations. Unless, of course, they can explain why they're occurring despite the fact that I don't take anything stronger than Tylenol."

"There's a bottle of Aventyl in your medicine cabinet," she said.

"Never been opened. And just who the hell are you, anyway?"

Pause. "You just read mail from me."

"Oh, yeah, right." I read off her name and address. "Is there anything in here that explains just what is going on?"

The mouse jumped about an inch. "Click on that one," she said.

I did so, and found a message I had sent her about two weeks ago. "Actually, for all the difference it makes, I'd almost rather you were invisible. At least I'd know I wasn't going after you for your looks."

This took a minute or two to sink in, and when it did, I did my best to push it back out again. "Now wait a minute. You're not seriously suggesting that —"

"Or maybe it's already been suggested. You've read H. G. Wells. You've seen all those movies. Is it too much to believe that just maybe some of this could actually happen?"

"Oh, sure," I snarled. "Like there's a chance in hell I'm going to believe I'm being visited by an invisible woman."

Another pause. "I've seen this before. For you, there's only one thing worse than unfulfilled dreams: fulfilled ones. Sorry to disturb you."

The door opened, very wide, and then closed, very loudly, and I knew she was gone.

That was last night. I'm still sitting here in this same chair. I've decided that part of this experience was real, and part of it merely metaphor.

And I damned sure don't want to find out which was which.

Posted 5 July 1996