Internecine (25 page)

NORCO (NORTH AMERICAN CONSULTANCY, 1990– 98) WELCOME, NAKEDAPE21

A long homepage menu flowered beneath this. Corporate overview. Business plan. Profit history by quarter. Awards and commendations. Resources.

“All bullshit,” said Zetts. “Designed to bore you to death if you actually poke in and read it.”

I thought of the labyrinthine language of contracts the thickness of a phone book and weight of a dead Rottweiler. Of clauses and codicils, riders and warranties. I thought of people whose tax returns ran to 670 bound pages per year (not
me,
but I did know a few), none of it good subway reading. After the first few lines, you just naturally glaze over. On our planet, Earth, everyone is usually so busy talking that no one actually pays real attention to anyone else. Each talker merely awaits the next lull in the tirade, so he or she can interpose with what they were talking about already, anyway. This catacomb of the Internet was like that—capable of being ignored in plain sight.

“People are dumb and lazy,” said Zetts. “They scream about their privacy being invaded, about Big Brother watching them, and the Internet comes along, and whaddaya know—those same people give up all their vital stats
voluntarily.
Which is the only way true surveillance could ever work, since there will never be enough warm bodies, or
man-hours, to keep track of everybody else in a meaningful way. Like, now the government can flag anybody they want by just using a keyword. People put their fucking
diaries
online, for god’s sake.”

“People who feel invisible want attention,” I said. I found that I wanted less, as my life wore on.

“Anywhoo, that’s the smoke,” he said. “Here’s the fire.” He hit the
FUNCTION/ESCAPE
keys together and I almost stopped him. All home computers need a key that reads
take it back
. Think of all the times you’ve hit the wrong thing at the right time and lost an hour of unsaved work, or all the times your machine took you someplace you did not wish to go, due to a mis-stroke.
Take it back
.

The screen read
SUBMIT INQUIRY
again.

“Look, Zee, we’re back where we started.”

Zetts shook his head, smug. No we weren’t.

The background window was different now. Active. Zetts typed in
MADDOX, CONRAD L.
and a whole lot of data began to reveal itself.

“There you are,” he said, grinning like a coyote.

This part is going to hurt.

Come along with me, as I review the highlights of my existence. You might stop to consider now and then what your own chart of ups and downs might look like; whether you fared better, or worse, or are continuing to lie to yourself.

I hunched my wheelless chair into Zetts’s pilot position, and began to scroll as indicated.

1966: I come squalling into the world on August 28, a breach birth, the sole genetic issue of Maddox, Carleton Coletrane (1932– 1988), and the former Joan Maurine McDermott (1939– 1972). My dad’s occupation is listed as
SALESPERSON
with a number of sub-headings under

Despite the fact that it was the sixties, my mom is summarily dismissed with the one-liner descriptive
house wife
. From my recollect, she loved me; I was planned. By the time I was four, my father had essayed a number of stopgap jobs to keep his compact family unit afloat—mail
carrier, car salesman, assistant manager at a department store. I think he even tried the door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales racket in the last heartbeats of time before that idiom was outmoded. Later he scored a secure position in a large Ford dealership and kept that job for nearly a decade, which is, I guess, why he was forever pegged as
salesperson
.

1971 (July): While horsing around in the yard, I accidentally clock a neighborhood crony named Buster in the head with a rake. Buster nearly dies. Blood—I had never seen so much. It freaked me out so badly that as I ran home, to find adults or someone who could help, I stepped into a chuckhole and broke my left ankle. I’m still in a cast when my fifth birthday rolls around.

See:
STRESS TOLERANCE, VIOLENT BEHAVIOR.

That was the only time I’d ever broken a bone in my life, and somebody thought it was important enough to record.

1972/April 1: Mother dies.

SEE: CONDITIONING BEHAVIORS, AUTHORITY FIGURES.

My mother died at age thirty-three of leukemia. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. When I turned thirty-three, I realized I had about as much clue or preparation as they did, which is to say, no useful training. I forgave my parents a lot after they were both dead, and I was older than they were.

1973/June 9: Father remarries Nathalie Mae Wicks—wicked stepmom—and I gain a teenaged stepbrother named Clay. I’m six and just beginning my first summer vacation, from first grade.

1976: Fifth grade. I square-dance with a girl for the first time, Suzie Tyler Morrison.

It went on like that in numbing detail, including most of the bruises and scrapes, cross-indexed to arcane referents like
RESENTMENT INDEX.
Facts and figures, sketching the life of an average nobody. The world’s most boring episode of A&E
Biography.
I did learn (to my surprise because the
evidence had been there all along) that the reason for my family’s abrupt 1976 move from Fort Worth to San Francisco had been due to my father declaring bankruptcy. Money arguments were the reason Nathalie divorced my father when I was twelve. So long, wicked stepmom; farewell, elder, bucolic, not-really-my-brother Clay.

I proceeded to flunk out of high school and rack up the usual misdemeanors for a surly teenager; nothing really toxic. At least I avoided becoming a crack addict, and I earned a driver’s license without mangling anyone in an automobile mishap. Academically, I bounced back with a halfhearted interest in becoming a draftsman or architect, mostly due to the brief but fatherly influence of Clay, who was always drawing things. Along came the SATs, and to everyone’s surprise I somehow managed to ace the English section of the test, a first for whatever high school I was in that year. (I’m sure if I click in the right place, I’ll find a complete listing.) I qualified for one of those entry-level scholarship/loan/grant packages and moved my ass to the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 1980s. I switched to Business Administration in my second year, which was also the first and only time I’ve ever paid for an abortion. My girlfriend at the time was a Graphic Arts major named Barbara Stanns, and we broke up soon after I babysat the “therapeutic” D&C. AIDS was still brand-new. I learned to love latex.

The barnacles of my life accreted, slowly, steadily, uninterestingly. Remember, this is the part where we’re all supposed to be white-hot with youthful potential, steely-eyed and revolutionary, world-beaters.

Kroeger Concepts was a funky start-up company then, run out of Burt Kroeger’s rented house in Venice, back when Venice Beach was still hanging on to its last dregs of coolness. Now Santa Monica is mostly overrun by feckless TV executives with pattern baldness, nuclear families, and leprous overtanning.

Are you nodding off, yet?

It took me the better part of an hour to wade owlishly through my life in black and white, blinking cursor optional. There is something about verification wiping away suspicion; it makes you feel naked and vulnerable, as though the world has not been fooled by your posturing. It
makes you afraid to dare. Perhaps that is the rationale for all those tiny forms of surveillance we accept as inevitable or necessary—those nagging instances of prying and disclosure that, ultimately, don’t seem as bad as the more horrifying concept of inconvenience. If you don’t buy the attitude I’m shoveling here, then check out your hard drive sometime and see how many cookies it has accumulated. All those companies and individuals have a line on you, oh yes they do.

Zetts resumed his command position and rolled through my data. He extended his hand back to me. “Here,” he said. “Eyedrops.”

It was a small black disc that looked like a key fob. Its middle was a plastic bag of fluid—imagine a Life Saver with a filling—and a lot of microscopic text in Japanese. The logo, in a ragged skatepunk font, read
FX NEO.
Obviously, you held the flat end of the disc near your eye and squeezed.

“Your eyes are like super-red, dude,” he said. I don’t know whether I was having a reaction to some allergen in the air, or I was on the verge of tears, weeping as my father had at approximately the same age. For better reasons.

My method has always been to tilt my head back, shut my eye, deposit drops in the shallow depression thus created, open eye to flood, repeat with other eye. I tried to make my face horizontal and did my best. The back of my head bumped the wall; it was still tender from its encounter with the
DON’T WALK
button. I managed to coax a few drops from the odd little device, and opened my eye.

“
Wow
—holy shit!” I jolted forward almost hard enough to bounce my face off the desk. At first my bare eyeball felt napalmed, then I realized the burning sensation . . . wasn’t. It was more as if I’d put an ice cube against it.

“It’s a rush, ain’t it?” said Zetts. “It’s mentholated. Japanese stuff is tit, dude.”

“Tit?”

He nodded like a convert. “Tit—good for hangovers, too.”

After the initial shock, my dosed eye receded into chilly, relieved bliss. My other, untreated eye was jealous of how this one now felt, so I rapidly dealt out another hit. Once you were used to the bang, this stuff worked superlatively.

“That feels . . .
great,
” I said, still amazed. My eyes were tingling.

“It’s a rush—like coke without the migraines or the paranoia. Like espresso for your eyeballs.”

“I want a gallon of this.”

“What’d you think of your dossier?”

“It makes me want to turn to the index in the back of the Book of My Life, to see where all the racy stuff is.”

“This is just keyhole data,” said Zetts. “The surface probe. The links will have more. Anything jump out at you?”

I was at a loss for something trenchant to say. “Nothing much.”

“Very bad for you, yo,” he said, without looking back. “Looks to me like your whole existence adds up to zero, which means you have no threat potential at all.”

“Which is bad . . . right?”

“Bad for you. Remember whose files you’re stealthing. If you were no threat to them, they’d just purge you, man—simpler, easier, nobody kicks a stench.”

My life, as a fart. “But they haven’t purged me, Zee.” I shrugged helplessly. “I’m still here.”

“Thank Dandine. Here’s what I think: They would have demoted you at your apartment, except for Mr. D. Because unless you have leverage on them, you like
sooo
don’t matter.”

Unless I had leverage on them I didn’t know about, or had not figured out yet. “You’re talking about
NORCO
,” I said.

“Mm-hm. I know what you’re thinking: the heat’ll blow over. And for sure, if you were to go public right now, rejoin all the citizens, nothing would happen to you. They’d let you go back to your job, lay your ladies, and make a few more payments on your credit cards. Then, like two months later—blammo. You die in some unfortunate mishap. You slip in your tub. You accidentally drink Drano. Whoops, a ‘vehicular incident.’ Or they gauge your likelihood of a heart attack and proceed accordingly. Who inherits, when you bite the big one?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Kroeger has my power of attorney.”

“Wives, kids, parents?”

“Divorced, none, and dead.”

He turned to face me, constantly reevaluating me. “Like, no relatives?”

I shook my head. “Well, there’s always you and Dandine.”

Zetts grinned. “Cool. Leave me enough to buy a big-screen TV, wouldja?” I presumed he meant
bigger.

“Sure. If I ever get out of here.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea, dude—you’re not a prisoner. You want to go, you go. But if I was you, I’d hang tight, like Mr. D says. Just a couple of hours. Give him time to work some angles. Then he shows up and you’re either a lot happier, or a lot more depressed. Better than just wandering the streets, right, waiting for the clock on you to start?”

He pointed at the computer. “Let’s consider the freak-out scenario, right? Sure, like, we coulda made all this shit up. Nobody who knows nothing about computers might buy it—all these switchbacks and ghost sites, right? This could be a total fake; most of the walking dead wouldn’t blink. But there’s like an alternate possibility, right?” He got that odd twinkle in his sharp blue eyes. “It might all be for real; what then?”

I felt an invisible anvil lift off my shoulders. I wanted this to be real; I needed it to be real. Everyone assumes they more or less recognize their own endings, and the terminus of their stories always comes as a surprise. For the first time in my apparently colorless life, I had lost that backstop, that surety of how I might wind up.