26) FIN
* * *
I asked Ethan in the Ferrari on the way back to the office, "What do you mean we're working without pay?" and he said, "Well, technically, yes."
I flipped out: "Yes ?!"
Then he said, "Well, technically, no."
"Ethan, what the fuck is going on?" I asked.
"Don't be so petty bourgeois, Dan. Look at the big picture."
The Ferrari passed about eight cars in one fell swoop. I didn't want to look petty. "I'm not petty, Ethan, " I said.
"And I am?''
"That's not the issue."
"Stop being so linear about money. Be horizontal. It's all cool."
* * *
I asked Mom what she thought of Karla and she said she thought she was "delightful." Sounded a bit forced.
* * *
No flu symptoms yet.
WEDNESDAY
Lunch today.
Karla was draggy with the flu, but she forced herself to come. She, Mom, and I went to lunch at the Empire Grill and Tap Room. As we entered, there were two seeing-eye dogs and two blind masters standing near to each other. Within seconds, Mom was down on the floor chatting with the dogs. She then interrogated the dogs' owners: "Do you two hang around together a lot? Do your dogs get to visit each other? They would make good company for each other, you know." (My mother the matchmaker.)
The two owners laughed and said, "I should think so - we're married."
Mom exclaimed, "Oh - how wonderful - they can discuss their jobs with each other!" (Mom's a true Silicon Valley girl - she grew up here, down in Sunnyvale.) "Oh my, you must meet Misty -" and she raced out to the car to fetch Misty, and the three dogs were soon sniffing each other.
I was aching to get to lunch, but Mom and the two blind people were deep in DogTalk. I went out to Mac's and bought a copy of the San Jose Mercury News. When I returned they were still there, laughing. They exchanged cards, and afterward I asked Mom what they were laughing about, and she said, "We tried to think of the worst seeing-eye breed imaginable and we came up with the idea of the 'seeing-eye whippet,' prancing into traffic . . . isn't that a riot? Perhaps you could make a video game out of it, like that Pong game that was so much fun that Christmas years ago."
Mom, like most people her age, will know Pong as their sole video game experience. It's tragic.
* * *
At lunch, Mom preempted all other conversation starts by discussing Michael. "Sometimes I think that Michael is ummm - autistic." She blushed. "Oh, of course, what I mean to say is -well - have you noticed?"
"Michael's not like other people," I said. "He goes off into his own
world - for days at a time sometime. A few months ago he locked himself into his office and we had to slide food under his door. And so he stopped eating any food that couldn't be slipped underneath a door."
"Oh, so that explains the Kraft cheese slices. Carton-loads."
Karla, still low energy from the flu, broke in: "You know, Mrs. Underwood, I think all tech people are slightly autistic. Have you ever heard about dyspraxia? Michael is an elective mute."
"No."
"Dyspraxia's like this: say I asked you to give me that newspaper. There's no reason on earth why you couldn't. But if you had dyspraxia, then you'd be blocked and you'd just sit there frozen. Dyspraxia is the condition where you become incapable of initiating an action."
"Then everybody is dyspraxic, dear. It's called procrastination."
"Exactly. It's just that geeks are slightly more so than most people. Autism's a good way of focusing out the world to exclude everything but the work at hand."
I added that Michael was also the opposite of a dyspraxic, too. "If he has an idea, he acts on it. But he has to put the idea into action immediately - like this company - or with an elegant strip of code. He's a blend of the two extremes."
Karla added, "The doors in Michael's brain are wide open to certain things, while simultaneously nailed shut to all others. And we must admit, he does get things done. He has no brakes on certain topics. He's a true techie geek."
Mom looked askance.
I said, "You can say geeks now, Mom."
"Yes, well, you geeks are an odd blend of doors and brakes."
* * *
The discussion changed to the (groan) information superhighway. "Do you think libraries are going to become obsolete?" she said stirring her coffee and fearing for her job. "Books?"
Karla lapsed into a discussion of the Dewey decimal system and the Library of Congress cataloging system, which was numbing to say the least. Mom found herself begrudgingly getting very into the discussion of cataloging. Librarians love order, logic, and linearity.
In the end lunch was like a balloon with not enough helium in it to
float - not enough helium in it to even puff it up, really. I think the dynamic of Mom and Karla's relationship has been set. At least they don't hate each other. Truthfully, I'm a little worried . . . why is Mom being like this?
* * *
Later on, I found myself being the only person working in the office. It was so strange, and I can't remember the last time this happened. Actually, I wasn't totally alone: Look and Feel were scurrying about inside their Habitrail. But other than that, I was alone. It was odd to be the only person in the office. I wished I could go to Kinko's and photocopy myself . . . be more productive.
* * *
Karla found this allergy medicine I've been taking and said, "This is what's been causing your nightmares." She could be right - I hope she is. I'm going to stop as of today.
THURSDAY
No nightmares last night.
FRIDAY
Again, no nightmares. Problem solved?
Misty came into our work space and barked at Look and Feel. Gerbils really stink. I'll be glad if we ever get out of this space.
SATURDAY
Karla and I were watching cartoons, and that old Warner Brothers cartoon came on with the frog that's buried in cement in the 1920s and comes alive and sings and dances, but only in front of one person. Karla looked at it and said, "That's me around your mother. I sit around and say 'ribbet' around her, but I'm the dancing, singing frog around you."
* * *
Everyone is getting a cold and sounds nasal and scary. Todd said, "Man, you don't want to see the stuff coming out of my nose into the Kleenex. Eggs Benedict."
Thanks, Todd.
* * *
Look and Feel had babies! We think there are five, pink and plump, so we're going to call them Lisa, Jazz, Classic, Point, and Click. We hope they don't get eaten by their parents. We put raw hamburger into the Habitrail tubes to keep Look and Feel away from "the kids." The Habitrail is actually rather like Lagan's Run. Imagine gerbils with little 1970s feathered hairdos!
* * *
I was up at Ethan's frighteningly chic house tonight (all those bank cameras) and told him about the other night, when I wished I could go to Kinko's and photocopy myself. He misunderstood me. I merely wanted to increase my productivity, but he thought I was getting all cosmic and wanted to discuss the universe, and this became a cue for Ethan to commandeer the conversation into his direction, as usual.
Ethan did the "Ethan Thing" and went off on a tangent about himself He said, "I've already photocopied myself!"
He explained: "People tend to assume that as we get older, years naturally start feeling shorter and shorter - that this is 'nature's way.' But this is crap. Maybe what's really happening is that we have increased the information density of our culture to the point where our perception of time has become all screwy.
"I began noticing long ago that years are beginning to shrink - that a year no longer felt like a year, and that one life was not one life anymore - that "life multiplication" was going to be necessary.
"You never heard about people 'not having lives' until about five years ago, just when all of the ' 80s technologies really penetrated our lives." He listed them off:
"VCRs
tape rentals
PCs
modems
answering machines
touch tone dialing
cellular phones
cordless phones
call screening
phone cards
ATMs
fax machines
Federal Express
bar coding
cable TV
satellite TV
CDs
calculators of almost other-worldly power that are so cheap that they practically come free with a tank of gas."
"In the information Dark Ages, before 1976, before all of this, relationships and television were the only forms of entertainment available. Now we have other things. Fortunately depression runs in my family."
"Fortunately ?" I asked.
"Absolutely, pal. I couldn't figure out a way of rigging my brain to work in parallel instead of linear mode - and then they invented Prozac and all the Prozac isomers and kablam! - my brain's been like an Oracle parallel processing server ever since."
"I'm not sure I get this, Ethan."
"Prozac is great - and I think it goes beyond seratonin and uptake receptors and that kind of thing. I think these chemicals physically rewire your brain to think in parallel. It literally converts your brain from Macintosh or IBM into a Cray C3 or a Thinking Machines CM5. Prozac-type chemicals don't suppress feelings - they break them down into smaller 'feeling units,' which are more quickly computationally processed by the new, parallel brain."
"I think I need a second to digest this, Eth-"
"I don't. Linear thinking is out. Parallel is in."
"Explain to me more clearly - how does whatever you take affect your time?"
"I remember once when I was majorly depressed for, like, six months. When it ended, I felt like I had to make up for those six 'lost' months. Man, depression sucks. So my logic is, as long as I'm not bummed, I'm not wasting time. So I make sure I'm never bummed." He seemed quite happy to be telling his theory.
"You know how when somebody says, 'Remember that party at the beach last year?' and you say, 'Oh God, was that last year? It feels like last month'? If I'm going to live a year, I want my whole year's worth of year. I don't want it feeling like only one month. Everything I do is an attempt to make time 'feel' like time again - to make It feel longer. I get my time in bulk."
* * *
I left Ethan's thoroughly depressed, and not sure whether I still disliked Ethan or just felt sorry for him. I e-mailed Abe with a synopsis of Ethan's time theory, and he was online and answered me right away:
>What would happen if TV caracters continued their theoretical lives in our linear time . . . Bob and Emily Hartley, in their early 70s now, would be living in their brown apartment, wrinkled and childless. Or Mary Tyler Moore, now 68 . . . surely bitter, alone, sterile . . .
Prozac!
* * *
SpaghettiOs
Aspirin
invasion
What's My Line
Jell-O simulator
Russian winter
Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal?
A: You already are an animal
SUNDAY
Ethan phoned me and asked me to come over to San Carlos. When I arrived, he was on a cordless phone in his kitchen, leaving me in his ultra-monitored living room reading his copies of Cellular Buyer's Guide, Dr. Dobbs Journal, LAN Times - and Game Pro (#1 Video Game Magazine).
He came out of the kitchen wearing an Intel T-shirt - rare, as I've never seen him in anything but a shirt and tie in all the time I've known him. He was wearing jeans, too. "It's Friday - 'jeans day,' pal," he said.
He then sat down on the couch beside me and there was this silence as he shuffled his coffee table magazines back into geometric orderliness after my perusal, and then he sat back on the white leather with his arm behind my back.
I pointed out that his copy of Binary File Transfer Monthly was possibly the most boring document I'd ever seen in my life. He said, "Well, what if it were actually a copy of Penthouse Forum letters encrypted as something so dull and opaque, that nobody would realize that it was something else. Imagine an encryption system that could reconfigure the words, 'I am a sophomore at a small midwestern college' into 'Does not conform to ITCU Convention specifications for frequency ranges.' It'd be the biggest stroke of encryption genius since the U.S. military used Navajo Indians to speak freely over the radio about top secret operations."
He then became quiet and still, and the presence of his arm behind me was eerily warm. I stiffened my posture. The scenario felt so charged - the whole situation. I felt like a Yankee schoolteacher on a Hollywood casting couch. He said to me, "I have something important I have to ask of you, pal," and I thought, "Oh God - here it is . . . I'm going to get hit on."
He then removed his T-shirt, and I was trying to be cool about the situation, and I was truly freaking out as Ethan's not really my, err, cup o' tea. He was reading my mind and said to me, "Don't be a prig - I'm not gonna jump you, but I am going to ask you a favor."
"Oh?"
"Chill out, it's not that kind of favor."
His missing T-shirt revealed a torso of average buffitude, "You can see, I'm no Todd," he said, and then he turned around, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I gasped. His rotation revealed his back covered in a matrix of bandages, dried blood and micro-pore tape, and it looked as if several soiled disposable diapers had been taped to his skin all higgledy-piggledy. "It's this . . . these."
I said, "Ethan, what the fuck is this all about? Did you have an accident? Jesus!"
"Accident? Who gives a shit . . . ozone . . . a bologna sandwich I ate in third grade . . . one hour too many in front of a Russian-built VDT. But it's a part of me, Dan . . . the damage . . . the whateverthefuck it is. It's moles gone bad. Maybe they're gone forever and, well, maybe they're not."
I was trying to look away, but he said, "That is so fucking insulting," and he jumped up and sat on the coffee table facing away from me, sticking the bandages in my face. I then looked and was mesmerized by this bio-mash of cotton, plastic, and body fluids barnacled to his skin. I didn't say anything.
"Dan?" he asked.
"Yeah . . ."
"You gotta remove them for me."
"Yeah?"
"There's nobody else who'll do it for me. You know that, Dan?"
"There's nobody?"
"Nobody."
I looked some more and he said, "Doc hacked 'em out of me like they were divots on the thirteenth fairway a week ago. And not one of you dumb bastards ever even bothered to ask why I was going to the dermatologist. Nobody asked and I had nobody to tell."
"Jesus, Ethan - we thought you were going to the dermatologist about your dandruff."
"I have dandruff?"
"It's, ummm, nothing out of the ordinary." I touched the bandages and they felt crackly, like Corn Flakes.
"You said I had dandruff?"
"Ethan. Discussing body malfunctions is like discussing salaries. You don't do it."
"Fine. Can you just remove them? They itch. They hurt."
"Yeah, of course."
He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide solution, rubbing alcohol, and old shirts cut into strips for rags. And so with him on the coffee table I removed chunk after bloody chunk, snipping away at his back and pulling scraps away, horrified at exactly how much of him had been removed.
We were talking. He said he can't believe how far dermatology has advanced in the past ten years. "They can practically put a small video camera inside your body and the doctor says to you, 'This is how your zit sees the world,' and they have a camera looking out from inside the zit."
I asked him what his prognosis was, and he said, "Shhh, pal - it's just the devil in me, but let's hope he's gone."
* * *
In the end, after all of the plastic, cotton, and dried blood and rags were gone, his back looked as though craters of the moon had been stitche
d together, violet and swollen. I used a small hair dryer and dried off the stitches, and when I turned off the hair dryer, the noise was somehow shocking, and Ethan still sat there, hunched and breathing, and I felt sorry for him, which is something I would never have thought imaginable toward Ethan. I said, "The devil in you, the devil in me," and I grabbed him as gingerly as I could from behind and he moaned, but it wasn't a sex moan, just the moan of someone who has found something valuable that they had thought was lost forever.
We lay down on the couch, me clasping his chest from behind, his breathing becoming deeper and slower, and he said, "You and Karla do that shiatsu stuff, right?"
"Yeah. We do. But you've got a few too many stitches for that at the moment." I told him a bit of Karla's theories of the body and memory storage. He laughed and said, "Ow! - Christ, stitches hurt," and then he said, "Well, if that's the case then think of me as a PowerBook dropped onto a marble floor from a tenth-story balcony."
I said, "Don't laugh at yourself. Your body is you, too." I felt like I had to heal here, or else something would leave Ethan forever, so I held him a bit tighter. "Karla told me that in other cultures, the chest is often thought of as being the seat of thought. Instead of slapping yourself on the forehead when you forget something, like a V-8, instead you slap yourself on the chest."
Ethan said, "I guess that if you start young enough, you could actually consider your toes as the seat of your thought. If you tried to remember something, you'd scratch your toe."
I said this is possible.
And then I simply held him. And then we both fell asleep, and that was six hours ago. And I have been thinking about it, and I realize that Ethan has fallen prey to The Vacuum. He mistakes the reward for the goal; he does not realize that there is a deeper aim and an altruistic realm of technology's desire. He is lost. He does not connect privilege with responsibility; wealth with morality. I feel it is up to me to help him become found. It is my work, it is my task; it is my burden.
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