Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  * * *

  Two pounds of solid rippling muscle gained this week! Maybe. It could have been my extended visit to the water fountain before the weigh-in that tilted the scales upward.

  * * *

  I had to drop off some diskettes at Todd and Dusty's tonight. I walked up to the house and through the main window I could see Todd slathering Dusty with barbecue-tinted goo as she was standing on a posing dais in front of a full-length mirror, happy as a clam. He was brushing Dusty's tummy; I peeked through the bougainvillea, thought twice about interrupting their ritual, and drove into the flower-scented, gasoline-powered California night.

  SATURDAY

  Karla and Dusty disappeared around ten this morning, returning around noon, with Dusty blubbering and her words spilling out of her - to Todd and to everybody else in the office - that she's pregnant.

  "Oh fuck," said Dusty, "I've done so much weird shit to my body that I'll birth a grapefruit." She was howling. She was a real mess.

  We made the usual "Version 2.0" jokes you have to make whenever a techie gets pregnant, and cooled her down. Ethan called a doctor friend on his cellular phone and bullied him out of his golf game and made him give Dusty a pep talk. And we all had to promise to come to the ultrasound with her. Todd bailed out and visited the gym all afternoon.

  It was actually a lovely, lovely day and the sun was hot and we walked down the streets, and the colors were so exotic and bright and the air so quiet and we felt alive and living.

  MONDAY

  ''The petty bourgeois ideal of withdrawal into Jeffersonian autonomy is no longer sustainable in a simultaneous, globalized environment with the asynchronous, instantaneous transfer of capital from one cashpoint to another."

  "Just piss off and get into the car, Dusty."

  Karla and I drove with Dusty to her clinic in Redwood City. She's so convinced her baby is going to be a grapefruit. I foresee seven and a half more months of extreme anxiety and ultrasounds. On the way out she said, "It's leaving me, you know."

  "What's leaving you, Dusty?"

  Dusty was looking out the back window of the van. "Ideology. Yes - I can feel it leaving my body. And I don't care. And I don't miss it."

  We drove a while - caught all the red lights - they were doing construction on Camino Real. At stoplight number seventeen, Dusty turned around, looked out the Microbus's rear window one final time, and whispered, "Bye."

  She then turned to Karla and roared, "Off to Burger King, now! Three fishwiches, double tartar sauce, large fries, and a Big Gulp-type beverage. Are you with me, kids? I'm rilly, rilly hungry, and if you tell Todd we went to Burger King, I'll grind you both into Chicken McNuggets."

  "Revolutionary, babe. We are there. Whalers ahoy!"

  * * *

  Poor Todd - "Pops" - he was in a daze all day, and vanished off to the gym around six. I went out the door to follow him because maybe he needed to talk, but instead of going to get into his Supra, he walked down the street, and so I walked behind him, wondering what it must be like to be hit with the notion of spawning. He then surprised me a few blocks later by entering a small Baptist church. I waited a minute and then I followed him into the church, feeling the small whoosh of cool interior air on my face, and I walked down the center of the aisle and sat next to Todd who was praying in a pew. He looked up at me and I said, "Hi," and sat down next to him.

  He wasn't sure what to do with his hands. I hummed, "Stopped into a church . . ."

  He said, "Huh?"

  I said, '"California Dreaming' . . . the song."

  He said, "Right."

  I said, "Here's a deal: I'm going to sit right here, right beside you, and I am going to dream. And you . . . well . . . why not continue praying?"

  "Right'' he said. And he prayed and I dreamed.

  * * *

  Oh - Ethan finished his freeway.

  6

  Chyx

  MONDAY

  (One week later)

  From behind the fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions of our office I heard Emmett mumble to Susan: "Hey, Sooz - want to go out tonight?"

  "I don't know, Emm . . ."

  "Hey, it'll be great. We can listen in on cellular calls with my Radio Shack Pro-46 scanner - I altered its megahertz range with a soldering gun - or maybe listen to some crank calls I have on tape - hack a few passwords. Grab some calzones . . ."

  Susan played it cool: "Uh huh - I'll, umm, think on it."

  But the moment Emmett was out of sight, Susan instant-mailed Karla and they scurried down to the street for a debriefing, Susan's hoop earrings jangling like Veronica Lodge's tambourine. Karla told me afterward that Susan said it was the best date proposal she'd ever had. "Dream date!"

  * * *

  No conversation is private in our small office, and every day I listen in on what is becoming a female bond-o-thon.

  Today, however, Karla, Susan, and Dusty really broke through a wall into a new level. It started out simply enough, with all of us discussing the way that food products in recent years have been cloning themselves out into eighteen versions of themselves. For example, old Coke, new Coke, diet Coke, old Coke without caffeine, new Coke without caffeine, Coke with pulpy bits, Coke with cheese . . . We tried to figure out the roots of product multiplication and we decided it was peanut butter manufacturers who decades ago invented chunky and smooth versions of themselves.

  Then things went out of control. Karla suddenly remembered to tell Susan about how Fry's doesn't sell tampons, and Susan got angrier and angrier, and the conversation became entirely tamponic.

  "I don't know why they don't sell them. If nothing else, they're so damned expensive the profit margin must be like 1,000 percent."

  She phoned to fact-check that Fry's indeed did not sell them.

  Karla said, "This woman Lindy that I met at last week's geek party works at Apple, and she told me that in all of the women's bathrooms there they have these clear Lucite dispensers of tampons that are free. Now that's corporate intrusion into employee's lives that I could live with."

  They all agreed tampons gratis are the acme of hip.

  "Apple must be run by a woman," said Dusty. "Maybe it is and they're hiding it to stay on good terms with the Japanese."

  Karla said, "Wha . . . ?" and Dusty replied, " Oh, come on, babe, Japanese businessmen are notoriously adverse to accepting authority from women, no matter how powerful they are in their American companies."

  Conversation lapsed into a discussion of Apple's charisma deficit crisis, but then soon enough returned to tampons, and for me it was so embarrassing, like watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with your mom, and suddenly a Summer's Eve commercial comes on, and Mom scurries out of the room and you're not sure why you're supposed to be embarrassed, only that everybody is.

  Karla said, "But the bad thing about the free tampons at Apple is that

  they're Playtex, not O.B."

  All three in unison: "Designed by a woman gynecologist..."

  Susan said, "Playtex suck because they just get longer, not wider . . . When I bleed, it's not a vertical thing . . . it's 360 degrees. And it's so freaky because when you put it in, it's this innocuous little lipstick size, and then when you take it out there's this long cotton rope at the end of the string! I'm afraid it's going to hook my uterus and I'll accidentally drag it out!"

  Todd sent me an instant mail, which blinked on my screen, saying, I can't believe what I'm hearing.

  Dusty said, "O.B.'s rock! But I guess not every powerful female executive is comfortable enough with her body to put her finger (fake '50s housewife voice) you know where."

  They all laughed ironically.

  Susan said, "I think that the lamest excuse women use about why they don't use O.B. is because they don't want their index finger to get dirty . . . I mean whenever you pay for something with a dollar bill your hand gets filthy, but does that stop them from making purchases with dollar bills?"

  "They need to make tampons for those '
chunky' days . . . 'light' days panty-liners blow!" said Karla.

  This is obviously a universal tampon concern judging by the enthusiasm that ensued.

  Todd instant-mailed me, Women have *chunky* days? Are guys supposed to know this stuff? I am experiencing fear.

  I was trying to think of a "guy" equivalent of chunkiness, but I couldn't, and meanwhile, the three of them just kept rocking on, and Todd, Bug, and I just buried our heads deeper into our work areas.

  Dusty said, "Gawd . . . I was rilly, rilly freaked out the first time I had chunks. No one ever tells you about that in, like, school or at home or anything. You see those Playtex commercials and they've got this watery blue liquid and that's what you're expecting, and then one day you look at your pad and there are . . . chunks there. Grotacious."

  Karla, ever logical, said, "I knew intellectually it had to be uterine lining, but I envisioned the lining as being thin, wispy . . . not like chunks of liver."

  Dusty figured, "We, as women, also need to invent some alternative to that adhesive they use on pads. I wouldn't even wear them if it weren't for chunks. It rilly bothers me to think of these chunks that want to migrate south, but they can't because of this Tampon Roadblock. So I always wear pads on like the second day, but I hate them. It's like getting a drive-by waxing."

  Karla suggested, "If they ever made 'chunky-style' tampons, we wouldn't need to ever wear pads."

  Susan said, "I'll bet you anything Fry's doesn't carry tampons because they're misogynist and afraid of adult, bleeding women . . . they can't accept the non-Barbie, fully-functional female!"

  Karla and Dusty: "Right on, Sister!"

  Susan said, "Yet again men win: with condom hysteria and semen they monopolize the notion of sacred body fluids. Women lose again. I want pads to be to the 1990s what condoms were to the 1980s. Destigmatize the flow!"

  * * *

  Susan had the idea to start up a support group for Valley women who code. She's calling it Chyx and has put word out on the Net. She said, "I was going to spell it 'Chycks' but then 'Chyx' sounds more like a bioengineering firm, and that's kind of cool."

  Prerequisites for joining Chyx (which makes you a "Chyk") are "fluency in two or more computer languages, a vagina, and a belief that Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards in a slinky pantsuit is the worldly embodiment of God."

  Susan will probably be swamped. Karla and Dusty have Chyx member numbers 0002 and 0003 respectively. They have been given a full set of photocopied writings of Brenda Laurel.

  * * *

  This reminds me, the lower your employee number down here, the higher your status - and the more likely you are to hold equity.

  * * *

  Later on in the day, our lives devolved into an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. We all decided we needed sunlight - we've all been working so hard lately and our internal clocks are somewhere in the Eastern Bloc nations - so we went for a drive in the Microbus up through Stanford, up to the linear particle accelerator that passes underneath the 280 by the Sand Hill Road exit.

  It was the core team from the old Redmond geek house: Karla, Michael, Todd, Bug, and Susan - as well as Ethan. Dusty didn't come because everything makes her sick these days. She's set her workstation up by the bathroom door. She craves instant "Mr. Noodles," and is constantly sending Todd out for food runs to Burger King. Michael gave her his collection of international airline sickness bags as a "fertilization present."

  Emmett left early, no doubt to groom himself. Anatole came by, but left. We're mad at him because he still hasn't organized an Apple tour for us, and he said he would, weeks ago.

  Anyway, Bug and Susan and Todd and Ethan got in this arcane discussion on the relative merits of QWERTY versus Dvorak keyboards and it got U-G-L-Y. They were screaming, and I swear, the four of them were going to strangle each other with seat belts and burn each other's eyes out with the cigarette lighter and drag each other raw on the pavement, making sick red smudges along the neat and clean California State white lines.

  Finally I booted them out at Pasteur and Sand Hill Drive, then drove a

  quarter mile up, letting them feel stupid and walk it off. I screamed out the window, "Stop the madness!"

  Anyway, after "our coders" had their little walk, they were much better behaved. Then Todd yelled "Shogun," not "shotgun," to claim the front passenger seat, but then Susan said only the word "shotgun" counted, and it turned all Itchy & Scratchy again, and Bug ended up nabbing the shotgun seat.

  * * *

  We drove to the Sand Hill Road exit (location of the dreaded venture capital mall) west off the 280, into the paddocks and oaks and horsey area, parked the bus, and walked across a Christmas tree farm to a Cyclone fence surrounding the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a structure that resembles a mile-long rear side of a 7-Eleven - sandstone-tinted aluminum siding with tasteful landscaping. Not much to look at, but let me say, extremity of shape certainly does imply extremity of function. And whenever you see no windows, there's something scary or beguiling going on inside. No humans. Stepford.

  Needless to say, there were fuck off and die warning signs from the Department of Energy bolted onto the wire fencing around the accelerator's perimeter. Ethan said, "Why is it that everything I'm truly interested in has the words 'Warning: U.S. Department of Energy' stamped all over it?"

  * * *

  Today was one of those anything's-possible days: blue skies and fluffy clouds; smooth-flowing freeways; all plant life on 24-hour chlorophyll shift after three days of rain. So alive! Two Cooper's hawks circled in the winds above, wings immobile for ten minutes on end (we timed, of course) hunting mice and gophers and squirrels. Serene.

  And then we went into the mountains, into the greenery, so dense, with the sun dappling through, walking across a small wooden bridge and we had to remind ourselves we weren't dead and not in heaven. We came away from it feeling that life really is good, and with our circadian rhythms somewhat restored to Pacific Standard Time.

  On the way back we drove past Xerox PARC on Coyote Hill Road, and Bug swooned only mildly. He now no longer foams when he imagines how Xerox could be the biggest company on Earth if they'd only understood what they had back in the 1970s.

  After that, we pulled into the Stanford Shopping Center mall to cool off and shop for short pants. Amid the Neiman Marcus, the Williams and Sonoma, the NordicTrack, and the Crabtree & Evelyn franchises we discussed subatomic particles. At Stanford Laboratory they're hunting down the magic particles that hold together the universe. There's one particle that's still unfound. I asked the carload if anyone knew what it was.

  "The Top Quark," answered Michael.

  "Duct tape," answered Susan, scowling at Todd.

  * * *

  Stanford is so weird. They have bumper stickers like:

  "I LUV ANTARCTICA," "I love Cellos," and "Calligraphy love for letter or

  verse."

  * * *

  The day taught us one thing: We all agreed we need to take a bit more time out for personal development and simple rest. Even Ethan conceded this necessity, albeit by asking us if we could take shifts to do it. We had to tell him that leisure, like intelligence, doesn't scale.

  Everyone immediately bailed out of work, but I headed to the office to play with Oop! for a while to work on my space station. Karla drove up to San Francisco to help Laura from Interval paint her apartment the same color yellow as Mary Tyler Moore's Mustang convertible. Bug was going to go help, too.

  * * *

  Around 1:30 a.m. the door opened and I thought it was Karla, but it was Bug, saying Karla and Laura had gone out for a stag night after they ran out of paint.

  Bug came in and sat down in the chair next to me and we had a conversation. The lights were low - just a few monitors and a light by the coffee | machine. Bug said - not even to me, I think, but to himself, "I was just in this nightclub downtown, Dan. I felt awkward. I'm not used to nightclubs and I don't like cigarette smoke or the way people pose and get phony in clubs."

>   I realized that Bug had dressed up for the night, or rather, had made an effort to coordinate his wardrobe. Also, Dusty has him signed up with a trainer at a gym, and he's not looking so much like he was assembled from the leftover bits of the Lego box as he used to. For that matter, Karla and I are both looking better assembled ourselves, these days. The gym.

  "And so anyway," Bug continued, "there was this picture frame - shaped thing hanging from the ceiling - part of the club's decoration - and I thought I was looking into a mirror and so I reached up my hand to move my hair, and of course, my image on the other side was doing the same thing. And then suddenly I realized - we realized - at the same moment, that we were two different people and both went 'Whoa!"

  "And?"

  "And I realized that maybe it's even possible, however briefly, and without even much say in the matter, to become someone else, or to be handed another body, in a blink of an eye. Is that called 'body invasion'? Karla would know."

  There was a quiet patch here - just

  the hums of the computers; a blink sound from someone's system receiving e-mail. Bug continued: "And so I met Jeremy."

  "Well good for you."

  "It's not love," he added quickly. "But we are going to see each other again. But tell me, Daniel - I mean, I knew you before you knew Karla. Did you ever think then that love was never going to happen to you?"

  "Pretty much."

  "And when it did happen, how did you feel?"

  "Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental - that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends."