Cyberpunk

meet someone with a real beating heart, someone who matters to you, who knows what it’s all worth. Rarer than you might think, unfortunately. Reg is the only thing that kept me going on that show as long as I did.”
    “I’m surprised to hear you say that. Because his character was usually seen as the crab’s tormentor.”
    “I’ve taken my licks. That’s the business, that’s the character. Don’t confuse show business for real life, Lethem. Compared to some licks I’ve taken, that show was all cake and candy and ice cream.”
    “He flooded your room with sulfur oxide in an attempt to cause you to molt six months early,” I said.
    “Heh heh. Yeah, that was a good one. One hundred percent the kid’s idea, too. Good head on his shoulders. You know, a lot of the best bits came from him and me working together, batting stuff to the writers, free of charge. We’d improv in rehearsals—he was always cutting up, making me pee my pants. Talk about bitter, Loud never got credit for any of that stuff. Head writer walked off with two Emmys. Reg deserved better, much better.”
    “It’s an incredible story. Does he know how you feel about it?” I couldn’t recall the last turns in Reg Loud’s quite miserable tabloid spiral, except that five or six years earlier he’d resurfaced in a brief stint as a local morning talk show host, spewing right-wing survivalist bilge over the airwaves of some medium-sized Midwestern city, Indianapolis or Cedar Rapids.
    “Fuck you trying to imply? Of course he does.”
    “No offense. I’m glad to hear it.”
    “None taken.”
    “I wonder if I could get a chance to talk with him for my story. Do you know how I could get in touch with him?”
    The crab fell momentarily silent, but cinched the glistening stump of his amputated leg deep under his lower shell, as if he’d now been involuntarily made to recall some particular hurt.
    “He wouldn’t care to talk about Crab House Days,” said the crab. “He’s moved on.”
    “What about Delia Watertree?”
    “That bitch.”
    Delia Watertree, launched to fame as the coarse but irresistible Pansy Foorcum, was the only member of the cast who’d ascended to greater heights since the show’s cancellation. The entirety of her subsequent career seemed a kind of long renunciation of the broad and overtly sexual appeal of the Pansy Foorcum character; in her stage and screen roles (she’d never glanced back at television work) she relentlessly played against her natural, peaches-and-cream beauty, favoring roles in glasses or bruise makeup or pants suits or buckskin, playing lawyers, frontier settlers, sexual-assault victims, suicidal writers, vanished aviators, and the like. Nevertheless, a measure of Pansy Foorcum’s innocent lustiness thrived almost subliminally within the shell of her prestigious career, confirmed by its apparent absence, as though she and her audience were together rising above prurient thoughts in rewarding her with Oscar and Tony nominations for her nobler roles. Too, her quiet, reflective mannerisms still recalled the poignancy she’d evoked in spells of gentleness toward her sitcom sibling, the housebound crab.
    “She was lovely to your character,” I said, speaking softly now. “A viewer would have thought you and Pansy were full of feeling for one another. You often seemed united against the others—Feary and your parents. As if you two alone shared a sense of dreamy possibility about what might lay outside the space of the house—beyond the circumscribed sensibility of the Foorcum family.”
    “You go on telling yourself what you want to hear,” said the crab. “Meanwhile I’ll bet you watched her like the rest of America’s teenage boys, with one hand in your pants and your tongue pressed to the screen.”
    I chose not to point out the impossibility of the physical arrangement he proposed. It occurred to me that it might, in fact, be possible to watch a television screen while lapping at it with one’s antennae. “I remember when you asked her not to go to the prom, since you couldn’t go—”
    “Listen. You want the skinny on Delia? That little floozy used to cavort around the set with no underwear on, just to drive me crazy, knowing nobody else could see, knowing I’d never say anything. Believe me, the carpet did not match the drapes. She’d put her foot up on a chair and start re-lacing her high-tops, right in my face, trying to get me to flub lines.”
    “That’s