Microserfs (18 page)

Shortly after, over near the model train mock-up of the Wild West "Canyon City" was when I suddenly saw this kid who looked just like my dear departed brother Jed. And that's when I, well, freaked out.

I stood frozen, and Karla was saying, "Dan, are you okay?" Then Todd walked by, and looked over toward where I was staring, and blurted out, "Hey, Dan - that kid looks just like the kid in the pictures in your Dad's den."

Karla then understood, and moved to stand in front of me, and Todd said, "Uh oh . . ." and headed off to the CD player aisle. Karla said, "Dan, come on. Let's go."

But I said, "That's him, Karla. I'm okay. But look at him. That's what he looked like."

We followed this doppel-Jed around, but it felt too weird stalking some one, so we stopped ourselves. I forgot my EPROMs, and we went and sat on a parking island outside.

Todd came out and said, "Sorry about that."

I said it didn't matter, but you know what Todd said? He said, "I think it does matter. And I do care. So can you please tell me? Sometimes I think you underestimate me, Underwood. So just give me a chance, okay?"

So we went to The Good Earth for turkey burgers and Smoothies (Todd's gym food) and I explained Jed to Todd. I think I do underestimate people. I don't know why I keep these things cramped up inside me. And I think Todd is a friend to call me on it.

Afterward I quietly went into Dad's den, closed the door behind me, and looked at Jed's old photo, in an oval frame, lost amid Dad's knicks and knacks. There he was as he always will be, slightly yellowed, forever twelve and forever smarter than me.

I guess I feel dumb in the same way Karla feels dumb. Except Karla really is smart compared to her family, and I really am dumb - compared to Jed. He wrote such lovely things when he was here - stories about air pilots working with scientists fighting to protect Earth from being stolen.

Imaginative.

You just can't compete with the dead. It would be easier if I had another brother or a sister, but I was born after the Pill.

Anyway, this is all to say I went into the worst head space all afternoon, as though I'd taken eleven of those cold tablets containing both an upper and a downer to cancel out the mutual side effects. So I merely felt buzzed. Just like after too much coding.

Abe's e-mail is getting more frequent and more personal. I think he's losing it up at Microsoft. He doesn't like his new roommates and would seem to be missing us.

The 2 new roomates are both engaged to partner units and don't want to hang out. They're NEVER here.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with my not having a life. So many people no longer have lives that you raeally have to wonder if some new mode of existence is being created which is going to become so huge that it is no longer on the moral scale - simply the way people ARE.

Myabe thinking you're supposed to "have a life" is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be.

How do we know that all of these people with "no lives" aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and perceptions?

I only need 2 hours of people a day. I can; get by on that amount. 2 hours of FaceTime.

I replied:

2 hours of FaceTime is not good enough Abe.

YOU are not a productmanager, and life is not a product . . . though wouldn't it be SO MUCH CLEANER AND EASIER were that so.

Nonetheless, this line of thinking reminds me of the URBAN LEGEND of a Japanese exchange student who thought he was saving money by eating nothing but Top Ramen noodles every day for a year, but he died of malnutrition before he graduatd.

After sundown, Karla and I went out to the garage to see Dad's model train world. Mom says he hasn't been in there at all since he began working with Michael - after returning from "his episode" up in Redmond. I guess this is a good sign - that he's stopped obsessing and is out in the world and doing new things.

Todd and Michael had plonked down two monitors right in the middle of the landscape directly atop a farm. They had arranged the small animals in small herds atop the monitors, which are coaxial'ed into the Habitrail. The monitors were displaying some Gouraud-shaded Oop! bricks, rotating them in 3D space. Oop! is looking really good, by the way. It looks fresh and modern, as if the future is being squeezed out of the monitor screens like meat from a hamburger grinder. Todd taped a note to one monitor saying,

PLEASE GOD, LET RENDERING TIME GET CHEAPER AND FASTER.

Karla had brought along a feather duster and she dusted off the mountains and the village and the little white house Dad built where Jed is supposed to live. I turned on the trains, and we watched them drive around, through the towns, over the mountains, past the rotating building blocks, and then we turned the trains off, and turned the lights out and left. Dad doesn't seem to mind "us kids" stealing his world.

We call the two systems in the garage "Cabernet" and "Chardonnay."

Three other system units (two Quadras and a Pentium) are called "Ogre," "Hobgoblin," and "Kestrel." Two file servers are called "Tootie" and "Blair."

Our two printers are called "Siegfried" and "Roy," because they're all shiny and plastic.

Our SGI Iris workstation running an old version of Vertigo software is named, of course, "HAL."

I'm trying to end this day on an up note, but it's hard.

Mom was cleaning out the spice rack in the kitchen. I watered her philodendron plant. She was really funny. She said she eats ripple chips for breakfast now. She says it's a bad habit and she's trying to break it and she blames "us kids"! She always says, "You kids." We like it, even though I think I slopped thinking of myself as a kid about four years ago. I don't mind responsibility. I guess that's why I don't mind the repetitive nature of computer work.

Boy did I get a response to my Net question about the organisms that lurk inside the human body. My Pig Pen theory was indeed confirmed: the average human body contains 1 x 10^13 cells, yet hosts 1 x 10^14 bacterial cells. Long, scary names:

Escherichia coli

Candida albicans

S. aureus

Klebsiella

Actinomyces

Staphylococcus

It really makes you take seriously all these articles in the news about old diseases becoming new diseases. I took so many antibiotics and sulfas for zits in my teens that I'm going to be felled by the first postmodern virus to walk down Camino Real. Doomed.

I mentioned all these microbes to Susan and I think she's going to become germ phobic. I could see it in her eyes. Fear.

Karla asked me what I thought of modern yuppie parents who smother their kids with attention and affection - those households where the kid rules and everything in the universe revolves around making sure they get touched enough by their parents.

I paused and tried to be honest and the answer blurted out: "Jealous." Susan overheard and started singing "Cars," by Gary Numan, and we all

started singing it. Here in my car, I can only receive, I can lock up my doors . . .

And then the moment passed. I e-mailed Abe on the subject, and he was online, so the response came back immediately:

I come from one of those "zero-kidney" families . . . we all made this agreement once . . . that if anybody else in the family needed a kidney it was going to be, "Well, sorry . . . Been nice knowing you."

I think that's why it's so hard for me to understand my body. Becauze our family was so zero-touch.

As I type, I'm bouncing my 11 pound ball of rubber bands contructed form my daily Wall Street Journal. It grows.

I learned a great new word today: "deletia." When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write:

[deletia]

It stands for everything that's been lost.

Dad bought a P/S2 Model 70 computer just before he got fired. He stores it out in the garage with the train world. Locked deep inside the P/S2's brains memory are WordPerfect, a golf application, and some genealogical data he tried to assemble about our family, but which he abandoned after he finally realized that our family erased itself as it moved across the country.

Dad mouthed a Michaelism today: "If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than the human brain at some point, then, BINGO, you're a de facto believer in Progress."

My ears were burning when I heard him say this, and it was all I could do to not say, "That's Michael's quote." My ears were red.

E-mail from Abe:

Im re-reading all my old TinTin books, and I'm noticing that there are all of these things absent in the Boy Detective's life . . . religion, parents, politics, relationship, communion with nature, class, love, death, birth . . . it's a long list. And I find that while I still love TinTin, I'm getting currious about all of its invisible content.

The Valley is so career-o-centric. So much career energy! There must be a 65-ton crystal of osmium hexachloride buried 220 feet below the surface of Menlo Park, sucking in all of the career energy in the Bay Area and shooting it back down the Peninsula at twice light speed. It's science fiction here.

Mom's signed up for a ladies 50-to-60 swim meet. It's next week.

Susan bought a case load of premoistened towelettes at Price-Costco. She's mad at the rest of the Habitrail because it's such a pigsty. She daintily wipes off her

keyboard and screen and as she does so she says, "Man, I need a date, bad."

Karla's hair is down past her shoulders now. And she bought a dress with pink wildflowers on it, and it's funny, the way she's the same as ever, yet also reformatted, and it makes me look at her with a new fascination.

She's eating all sorts of food like a total person now and I've noticed that when I work on her body, she's just not as tense anymore. Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, the up-and-down muscles of her spine, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

Daydream: today the traffic was locked on the 101. I saw visions of the Valley and snapped out of my daydream jealous of the future. I saw germanium in the groundwater and dead careers. I saw venture capitalists with their eyes burned out in their sockets by visions of money, crashing their Nissans on the 101 - past the big blue cube of NASA's Onizuka Air Force Base, their windows spurting fluorescent orange blood.

Bug's dream came true today. He got to visit Xerox PARC with a friend of a friend from Seattle. Back with us in the Habitrail, while arranging a handful of purple iceplant flowers nipped from the PARC's groundcover, he filled us in on details: "It's set in a purposefully blank location - they cover up all outside traces of civilization with berms and landscaping devices so you feel as if you're nowhere. Feeling like you're somewhere must be bad for ideas.

"Anyway, there's nothing but chaparral and oak trees on the hill to the west, and you feel like you're on a virgin planet, like the planets they visit on Star Trek. It feels really 'outposty.' But not scary, like you're in Antarctica. And the lobby - it's like a really successful orthodontist's waiting room in the year 2004. And guess what . . . I got to sit in the Bean Bag Chairs!"

An hour later we were all back at work, when apropos of nothing, Bug said, "Ahem," called our attention, and announced that he's gay. How random!

"I've been 'inning' myself for too long," he said, "and now it's time to out myself. It's something you'll all have to deal with, but believe me, I've been dealing with it a lot longer than you."

It never even entered our heads to think Bug was anything except a sexually frustrated, bitter crank, which is not unusual up at Microsoft, or in tech in general. I think we all felt guilty because we don't think about Bug enough, and he does work hard, and his ideas really are good. But we're just so used to him being cranky it never occurred to us he had an interior life, too.

I asked him, "But what about the Elle MacPherson shrine, Bug?"

"Replaced. Marky Mark for the time being, but he's only a phase."

"Oh, Bug . . ." said Karla, "how long have you been deciding this?"

"Always."

"Why now?", I asked. "So late."

"Because now is when we all explode. We're like those seeds you used

to plant on top of sterile goop in petri dishes in third grade, waiting to sprout or explode. Susan's exploding. Todd's going to explode. Karla's germinating gently. Michael's altering, too. It's like we're all seeds just waiting to grow into trees or orchids or houseplants. You never know. It was too sterile up north. I didn't sprout. Aren't you curious to know what you really are, Dan?"

I thought about it. It's not really something you think about.

"Now I can be me - I think," Bug said. "This is not easy for me. Let me repeat that - this is not easy for me."

"Does this mean you'll start dressing better? " asked Ethan.

"Yes, Ethan. Probably."

So that was that.

Maybe he'll be less cranky now. Karla and Susan said they were proud of Bug. I guess it did take guts. He's a late bloomer - that's for sure. And me? Am I curious to know what I really am? Or am I just so grateful to not be a full-scale, zero-life loser that it doesn't matter?

Bean bag chairs: how odd it is that they're still . . . I don't know . . . a part of the world.

Dad signed up for a night course in C++. He's going to make himself relevant.

Susan's sister sent her a bag of pot via FedEx. She wrapped it in magazine scent strips to foil FedEx dope dogs. What a good way to make those things do something useful.