Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  * * *

  McDonald's: "Paying homage to Ronald," said Amy, pulling into the driveway beneath the golden arches.

  Everybody tried to remember the last time they ate a real vegetable.

  "Pickles or iceberg lettuce don't count."

  We were all stumped.

  This McDonald's was offering a free 16-oz. soft drink if a student brings in a report card with an A. If they have two As, they get a drink and a small fries - three As, and they toss in a cheeseburger to boot. Amy said, "Look out, Japan!" But then she realized, "Las Vegas doesn't have schoolchildren, does it?"

  * * *

  Halfway through the meal, Michael said, over his Filet-o-Fish, "Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems."

  "Huh?"

  "Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself - which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species - food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy: animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers."

  "Oh."

  "Nonetheless, chaos will ultimately prevail, just as one day, all of this will be dust, rubble, and sagebrush once more."

  "Oh."

  "But you know, the good chaos."

  I felt like my IQ had shrunk to one digit.

  Amy and Michael began making out right there next to the McDonald's-world play station.

  * * *

  Oop!, I might add, is going to be a hit. I think this has been lost on everybody in the Las Vegan blur, but it would appear that we're all still employed, and that our risk has become solid equity, but you know what? All I care about is that we're all still together as friends, that we're not enemies, and that we can continue to do cool stuff together. I thought the money would mean something, but it doesn't. It's there, but it's not emotional. It's simply there.

  * * *

  After dark Karla revealed to me that she, too, was fascinated by the laser beam, so we told everybody we were returning to the Hacienda next door, and instead drove our rented Altima sedan northeastward on Highway 15, to see how far away we could drive and still see the pyramid's laser beam. I had heard that air pilots reported seeing it from LAX. I wondered if astronauts could see the beam from outer space.

  It was an overcast night. We drove and drove, and at forty miles out we realized that we hadn't been paying attention, and the laser beam was gone. We stopped in at a diner for hamburgers and video poker, and we won $2.25, so we were "a cheeseburger ahead for the evening."

  We then got back into the car and drove back toward Las Vegas, and around twenty-six miles outside of Las Vegas we were able to see the

  Luxor's beam of light up in the sky again. We pulled the car over onto the highway shoulder and gazed at it. It was awe-inspiring and romantic.

  I felt so close to her.

  Later, back at the hotel, I was PowerBooking my journal entry and I could feel Karla watching me, and I got a little self-concious. I said, "I guess it's sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories . . ."

  She said, "Not at all . . . because we use so many machines, it's not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory - first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power."

  Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history's pace feels faster, it is "accelerating" at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster. "Soon enough all human knowledge will be squished into small nubbins the size of pencil erasers that you can pea-shoot at the stars."

  I asked, "And . . . what then - when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?"

  She said that this is not a frightening question. "It is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably, I imagine, use these new memory pebbles to build new paths." Like I said . . . it was romantic.

  SUNDAY

  What happened was this: I was looking out the window and Todd was fighting with his parents out on the Strip, down below the Hacienda's sign. How long was this going to go on? I decided I had to help Todd and so I went down to see if I could '"Stop the Insanity!" Just as I joined them, Karla came running out. We all turned, and I saw her coming, and I could tell something was very, very wrong.

  She collected her breath and said, "Dan, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, but there's been an accident."

  I said, "An accident?"

  She said that she had just spoken with Ethan in Palo Alto. Mom had had a stroke at her swim class, that she was paralyzed, and no one knew what would happen next.

  Right there and then, Todd and his parents fell down on their knees and prayed on the Strip, and I wondered if they had scraped their knees in their fall, and I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling, something I have talked about, and something I was now doing.

  * * *

  plane window

  towers

  telephone lines

  green squares

  lights

  baggage

  The New World dream

  The extended arm

  The caravan traversing a million miles of prairie

  Cross the uncrossable

  Make that journey and build the road along the way.

  You succeeded at memory-creation beyond all wildest dreams.

  Two Weeks Later

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 17,1995

  Hanshin

  Expressway

  Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things you've never seen before.

  Mitsukoshi department store, Kobe, Japan, at a 45-degree angle, its contents smashed against walls

  Western Washington State, minus Seattle's metro region, is assigned a new area code, 360, effective January 15, 1995

  R U Japanese?

  thin blood

  Nirvana Unplugged

  what I wanted

  Nikkei Index

  Cerebrovascular event

  rear-view mirror

  Hawaii

  what really happened

  Embolus

  Possible reversibility

  Monsterbreaker

  Mothermaker

  System-beater

  Sharkprincess

  Skywalker

  Kidnapper

  Codebreaker

  Keypadburner

  clot

  Godseeker

  Braineater

  * * *

  This is the day of days, and so the telling begins.

  Karla massaged Mom's back in Mom's new room beside the kitchen, a room that we filled with her rocks and photos and potpourri and Misty. Misty, buffered by dumbness, unaware of the traffic jams in the blood flow of her master's brain: carbon freeways of cracked cement and flattened Camrys and Isuzus and F-lOOs; neural survivors as well as those neural victims, all as yet unretrieved from within the overpasses of her Self. Mom's brain is crashed and inert, her limbs as stationary as lemon tree branches on an August afternoon, occasionally twitching limbs appended by a wedding ring and a Chyx wristband from Amy. Images of a crashed Japan on every channel, the newscaster's voice floating in the background. At least Japan can be rebuilt.

  Karla spent the morning massaging the lax folds of Mom's skin. I wonder, is she there? It is what I . . . we have lived with for weeks, we who look into Mom's eyes and say, Hello in there, thinking, We are here. Where are you, Mom? Where did you go? How did you disappear?
How did the world steal you? How did you vanish?

  Actually, Karla was the first to cross the frontier between words and skin; speech and flesh.

  Karla invaded Mom's body. Last week Karla removed her Nikes, took a plastic squeeze bottle of mineral oil from the bathroom, cut it with sesame oil, and crawled atop Mom's prone form on the foldaway rental bed. She told Dad to watch, told him that he was next, and so Dad watched.

  Karla dug and sculpted into my mom's body, stretching it as only she knows how to do, willing sensation into her flesh, into her rhomboids, her triceps, her rotor cuffs and spaces where probing generated no reaction; Karla, laser-beaming her faith into the body of this woman.

  Last week was the beginning, the Confusion, when everything seemed lost, the image of Mom lying frozen and starved of oxygen in the Rinconada swimming pool haunting us. Ethan meeting us at the hospital, his own skin the color of white fatty bacon embedded with an IV drip; Dusty and Lindsay, Dusty sucking in her breath with fear, and turning her head from ours, then returning her gaze and offering us Lindsay as consolation.

  * * *

  There had been discussions, a prognosis, pamphlets and counselors, workshops and experts. Mom's functions may one day be complete and may be one day partial, but as of today there's nothing but the twitches and the knowledge that fear is locked inside the body. Her eyes can be opened and closed, but not enough to semaphore messages. She's all wired up and gizmo'ed; her outside looks like the inside of a Bell switchbox.

  What is her side of the story? The password has been deleted.

  * * *

  Karla would take Dad's hand over the last week and make it touch Mom, saying, "She is there and she has never left."

  And it was Karla who started us talking to Mom, Mom's eyes fishy, blank, lost and found, requiring an act of faith to presuppose vivid interior dimensions still intact. Karla who made me stare into these faraway eyes and say, Speak to her, Dan: She can hear you and how can you not look into these eyes that once loved you when you were a baby, and not tell her of your day. Talk to her, Dan: tell her . . . today was a day like any other day. We worked. We coded. Our product is doing well, and isn't that just fine?

  And so I told Mom these things.

  And so every day, I hold the hand that once held me, so long ago.

  And Karla gently guided Dad up onto the foldaway, saying, Mr. Underwood, roll up your sleeves. Mr. Underwood, your wife is still here, and she has never needed you more.

  * * *

  And there's Bug, reading Sunday's color comics to Mom, trying hard to make The Lockhorns sound funny, then saying to his unresponsive audience, "Oh, Mrs. Underwood, I understand your reaction completely. It's like I'm reading 1970s cocktail napkins out loud to you. I must admit, I've never liked this strip," and then discussing the politics of syndication, and which comic strips he finds unfunny: The Family Circus, Peanuts, Ziggy, Garfield, and Sally Forth. He's actually more animated than he is in conversations with us.

  There is the image of Amy telling rude jokes to Mom and Michael trying to curb the ribaldry, but being swept away by the filth, and Michael responding with Pentium jokes.

  There is Susan, washing and cutting my Mom's hair, saying, "You'll look just like Mary Tyler Moore, Mrs. U. You'll be a doll," and discussing new postings on the Chyx page.

  There is Ethan, Ethan on the brink of erasure himself, saying, "Well, Mrs. U, who'd have thought that I'd be the one to monitor you. Don't tell me

  it isn't funny. Because it is, and you know it. I'd change your bandages for you, but you don't have any and that's a big issue here."

  There are Dusty and Todd, demonstrating leg-stretching exercises, discussing physiotherapy and how to keep her muscles in tone for the day they once again receive their commands.

  And there is Abe, who brought in a tub of money, a tub full of coins, and said, "Time to sort some change, Mrs. U. Not much fun for you, but I'll try and be talkative while I sort . . . oh look . . . it's a peso. Woo!"

  * * *

  Last week there was a jolt. Last week Karla said, "You have to go further, Dan, you have to hold her body."

  I looked at Mom's body - so long in not holding - and I thought of families who have had to watch a member die slowly and who have said all that can possibly be said to each other - and so all that remains is for them to sit and lie there and nitpick over trivialities or talk about what's on TV - and so I held Mom's body, and told her how my day had gone. I talked about stoplights on Camino Real, line-ups at Fry's, rude telephone operators, traffic on the 101, the price of cheese singles at Costco.

  * * *

  This afternoon, this afternoon of the day of days.

  I, in this mood where this earthly kingdom was beautiful in spite of life's cruel bite, took the CalTrain and BART over to Oakland just to get out of the house, to thwart cabin fever. Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to encourage that amnesia.

  Along a roadside I saw an unwound cassette tape, its brown lines shimmying in the sun - sound converted to light. I felt a warm wind's gust on the Oakland BART platform. I suddenly wanted to be home, to be with my family, my friends.

  I was met by Michael, who opened the front door of the house. He told me about a story he had once seen on the news, a story about a boy with cerebral palsy who had been hooked up to a computer, and the first thing he said, when they asked him what he would like to do, was "to be a pilot."

  Michael said to me, "It got me thinking, that maybe your mother could be linked into a computer, too, and maybe the touch of her fingers could be connected to a keypad. So then she could speak to us." And then he saw my face and said, "She could speak to you, Dan. I've been doing some reading on the subject."

  We entered the kitchen, where Bug and Amy were discussing an idea of Bug's, that "humans don't exist as actual individual 'selves' - rather, there is only the 'probability' of you being you at any given moment. While you're alive and healthy, the probability remains pretty high, but when you're sick or when you're old, the probability of you being yourself shrinks. The chance of your 'being all there' becomes less and less. When you die, the probability of being 'you' drops to zero."

  Amy saw me and said, "Close your eyes right now, this very instant. Try to remember the shirt you're wearing."

  I tried, and couldn't remember.

  She said it would probably take me a lot longer than I'd think. "It's a cruel trick of nature that personal memory seems to be the first to go. You'll remember Alka-Seltzer long past the point where you've forgotten your children."

  She then said to me, "Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives."

  I walked onto the back patio, and looked over Silicon Valley, clear, but vanishing into a late afternoon fog, unexpected, fanning in from the west. Karla was wearing a sweater, and her breath was like the swimming pool's wafting heat, there in the coolness. I told her that it was always in the fall when the crops were in, that the wars were called.

  She said to me, "We all fall down some day. We all fall down. You've fallen and we'll all pick each other up."

  In the distance I saw the Contra Costa Mountains, and their silhouette was blurred as I confused the mountains for clouds, and Karla dried my eyes with fallen leaves and her sweater's hem. I told Karla about a Lego TV commercial I saw twenty years ago . . . a yellow castle and the camera went higher and higher and higher and the castle never ended. She said she had seen it, too.

  Dad came by with Misty, and we all went for a walk. Down La Cresta we went, and Dad had brought along the electric garage-door opener, and we pushed its red ridged button, randomly trying to open strangers' doors.

  * * *

  When we returned to the house, my friends were gathered around Mom, in front of a monitor, their faces lit sky blue; they had forgotten to turn on the lights in the kitchen. Mom'
s body was upheld by Bug and Abe inside a kitchen chair, with Michael clasping her arms. On the screen, in 36 point Helvetica on the screen of a Mac Classic were written the words:

  i am here

  Dad caressed Mom's forehead and said, "We're here, too, honey." He said, "Michael, can she speak . . ."

  Michael put his arms over Mom's arms, his fingers upon her fingers and assisted her hands above the keyboard. Dad said, "Honey, can you hear us?"

  yes

  He said to her, "Honey, how are you? How do you feel?"

  ;=)

  Michael broke in. He said, "Mr. Underwood, ask your wife a question that only she and you would know the answer to. Make me sure that this isn't me doing the talking."

  Dad asked, "Honey, what was your name for me, when we went on our honeymoon on Mt. Hood. Can you remember?"

  There was a pause and a word emerged:

  reindeer

  Dad collapsed and cried and fell to his knees at Mom's feet and Michael said, "Let's push the caps-lock button. Capitals make easier words; consider license plates. You're a State of California vanity license plate now, Mrs. U."

  The caps were locked and the point size lowered. The fingers tapped:

  BEEP BEEP

  Dad said, "Tell us how you feel . . . tell us what we can do . . ." The fingers tapped:

  I FEEL U

  I cut through the crowd. I said, "Mom, Mom . . . tell me it's you. Tell me something I never liked in my lunch bag at school . . . " The fingers tapped:

  PNUT BUTR

  Oh, to speak with the lost! Karla broke in and said, "Mrs. U., our massage . . . is it okay? Is it helping you?"

  The fingers tapped:

  GR8

  I LK MY BDY

  Karla looked at the words and, hesitating a second, declared, "I like my body now, too, Mrs. U."

  Mom's assisted hands tapped out:

  MY DOTTR

  Karla lost it and started to cry, and then, well, I started to cry. And then Dad, and then, well, everybody, and at the center of it all was Mom, part woman/part machine, emanating blue Macintosh light.