‘You belong to Obi-Wan Kenobi?’ to ‘Oh, you must mean Old Ben’?”
“Uh … yeah,” Erik nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Okay then,” Bobby said. “That’s officially the most retarded thing that I’ve ever heard.”
Although they’d had their share of differences over the years, there was one thing that Bobby and Erik had always had in common.
They were geeks.
Geekhood surrounded them and penetrated them. It bound their galaxy together. As was typical for a weekday afternoon, the two friends were making themselves at home: lounging on Bobby’s couch and watching Bobby’s TV in a tiny living room that was not, in fact, Bobby’s.
This living room was part of a simple one-bedroom apartment that was typical of Stillwater’s unfashionable inland neighborhoods. The building was little more than a few barely habitable cubes of thin drywall bound together with a coat of crumbling pink stucco and capped with mossy Spanish tile.
The claustrophobic atmosphere of the room was exaggerated by a clutter of secondhand furniture shoved into its fringes. In one corner of the room, a battered coffee table sat upended with a sweaty Microsucks T-shirt and a Free Kevin baseball cap hanging flaccidly from one of its outstretched legs. In another, a small white TV/VCR combo sat neglected, unplugged, and nearly hidden under a dog-eared stack of Wired magazines. As if to highlight its plight, somebody had drawn a “sad Mac” face on its dusty screen.
While these simple furnishings cowered in the corners, a gigantic titanium-colored wide-screen television asserted its total dominance over the space, extending out from the living room and penetrating the hallway by a good seven inches. The booming bass of its surround-sound speakers drowned out the whine of an air conditioner struggling to cool the room as fast as the behemoth picture tube could heat it.
In front of the television was a makeshift coffee table composed of a life-sized resin cast of Han Solo frozen in carbonite lying down across four chipped cinder blocks. Although it had once been a valuable collector’s item, the battered sculpture’s nooks and crannies were now filled with crumbled bits of Texas Grill Fritos. In the flat space between Han’s feet sat a few incongruous documents in cheap wooden frames. One was a membership certificate to MENSA, the other an award reading “Perfect Attendance 1997 - Boltzmann’s Market.” Both were inscribed with the name “Vivian Gray.”
Bobby Gray drained the last foamy remains from his warm bottle of Dos Equis and set the empty vessel on Han’s forehead. He slowly rolled back his head, tipped open his mouth, and released a low, thundering belch from the deepest regions of his gut.
“BrrrrAAAaaaAaaAaaaAaaaaawwwp!”
“Jeez, Bobby,” Erik sighed.
“There is no Bobby, only Zuul,” Bobby belched.
Bobby was Vivian’s fraternal twin brother, but he had definitely received the short end of the genetic stick. In stark contrast to Vivian’s tall, slender body, Bobby’s physique was short and pudgy, and it appeared overfed and underutilized far beyond its years. He made no effort to make up for his physical shortcomings through wardrobe, rarely wearing more than a pair of unlaundered cargo shorts, a guacamole-stained T-shirt, and a pair of disintegrating Teva sandals. Bobby’s facial features bore a passing family resemblance to those of his sister. He had the same pointy nose and the same freckled cheeks. He also shared his twin’s fiercely red hair, although his was long, stringy, and perpetually pulled back into a straight, limp ponytail. A matching orange goatee hung from his chin, looking as if it may have evolved purely to hide the telltale stain of Cheeto consumption. Although they were technically twins, the one thing that made Bobby and Vivian look most alike were the thick black frames of their identical Buddy-Holly-style eyeglasses.
Bobby’s beady green eyes blinked at the TV as gently spiraling broadcast graphics swooped around Christina Applegate and Dave Foley dancing like idiots in a featureless white void.
NewsRadio is on the air and Jesse ‘s looking really fine! This summer NBC is gonna party like it’s nineteen ninety-nine! The boys both groaned.
“When will this godforsaken year of marketing be over? ” Erik whined. “Y2K
can’t be worse than hearing that song massacred fifty times a day.” Bobby shook his head.
“At least we’ll have a year to recuperate before they dust off the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. ”
He separated his massive backside from the crater it had formed in the overused couch.
“I’m getting another beer. You want one?”
“Boy howdy,” Erik replied. “Thanks.”
“You want a real beer, or another queer beer?”
Erik smirked and clutched his half-finished bottle of lime-flavored Tequiza.
“Shut up. It’s real beer,” he muttered. “Plus they say it tastes just like going down on a beautiful Mexican señorita. ”
Bobby paused.
“Okay, you know what? Now that’s officially the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.”
Erik pouted as Bobby lumbered into the tiny kitchen.
Erik Sievert was Bobby’s best friend and, not surprisingly, was also bestowed with a less than ideal physique. He was tall and skinny, but his average weight seemed unevenly distributed over his frail skeleton. His appendages were fragile-looking stalks of skin and bone accented with awkward, bulbous knobs of knee, elbow, and Adam’s apple. A clean, sea-foam blue, Atari-branded polo shirt masked both the humiliating xylophone of a visible ribcage and the doughy pouch of a sedentary midsection.
Erik’s hairless face was long and soft, and his troubled blue eyes always made him look as if somebody was laughing at him and he had no idea why. From the top of his head sprouted a flyaway mass of brown hair so thick and wavy that it would have impressed the Greatest American Hero’s hairdresser.
He finished his Tequiza and leaned back on the couch, lethargically watching the endless parade of commercials. A disquieting, rapid-fire disclaimer concluded an ad for menopause drugs, quickly dissolving the scene to that of a living room decorated in football paraphernalia. A dumpy character actor in a backward-turned baseball cap sat behind a coffee table full of large, empty bowls. Hungry-looking muscleheads closed in all around him, pounding their meaty fists together in a crude caricature of intimidation.
“It’s five … minutes … to the Super Bowl, and all you’ve … got … is empty bowls!”
The scene cut to an exterior ambulance bay and onto the lumpy countenance of an extremely poor William Shatner impersonator.
“This … is … a Grocery911!”
Erik threw a nervous glance at the kitchen and began a frenzied search for the remote control.
On the screen, the unconvincingly infuriated jocks backed their host into a corner and up against a computer. With something vaguely akin to terror in his eyes, he sat down and began clicking away at a conveniently pre-loaded website on the screen.
“When you have … a grocery … emergency, log on to Grocery911.com!” Erik spotted the oversized remote control and yanked it free of the couch cushions. It was an intimidating rectangle of titanium with a hundred electro-luminescent buttons and a small LCD screen staring unblinkingly from its face. He stabbed it toward the television and pushed the “channel up” button. The tiny digital screen scrolled the words “INSUFFICIENT ARGUMENTS.” He pushed the “channel down” button. The screen replied, “SYNTAX ERROR.” The staccato voice-over continued prattling from the television as the visuals cut to an ambulance squealing away from a grocery store.
“Just place your order on the World … Wide … Web … and our Emergency Meal Technicians will … deliver … in thirty minutes or … less! Guaranteed!” Bobby came back from the kitchen empty-handed.
“We’re all out of-”
His sentence was cut short by the guillotine of his falling eyebrows.
“Change it!” he barked.
“I’m trying!” Erik squeaked.
On the TV, the ambulance screeched to a stop in front of a suburba
n house. The driver kicked open the car door, leapt from the vehicle with two full paper bags of groceries, and bolted for the front porch.
“Oh, now look at that,” Bobby smirked, pointing at the screen. “I had to go through five levels of firewall to log in, and that idiot just leaves the door open and the keys in the ignition. Talk about a security breach.”
Erik sighed.
“Bobby, you do realize that this is all staged, right?” he asked. “That guy is just an actor.”
“Whatever,” Bobby grumbled. “The drivers really do that shit. They’re that stupid.”
He snatched the remote control away from Erik and continued resentfully.
“The only people stupider than the drivers at that company are the suits.” Bobby glared at the televised deliveryman distributing sodas and snack chips to the hungry jocks, rescuing the hapless host from a parody of a beat-down. He changed the channel, erasing the commercial from the screen but leaving a palpable bitterness in the air. Erik tried to change the subject.
“Hey, where’s the beer?”
“We’re all out of beer,” Bobby snapped. “We’re having a Grocery911!” Before Erik could offer his shopworn consolations, the front door swung open, throwing a hot, moist gust of air swirling through the chilly living room. Vivian stood pathetically in the open doorway, a handful of soggy mail in one hand, a six-pack of Fusion Fuel in the other, and a drooping sombrero on her head. She was soaked to the skin with rainwater, and her face and arms were streaked with black grease and rusty grime.
“Damn, Viv,” Bobby muttered. “You look like you’ve been making out with the thing that killed Tasha Yar.”
“I had a flat tire,” Vivian sighed. “Thanks for asking.” Her wet skin immediately erupted into goose bumps as she entered the frosty air of the apartment. Erik launched from the couch and leapt to her side.
“Let me take that off your hands for you, Viv.”
He pulled the six-pack from Vivian’s dripping fist.
“Thanks, Erik. That’s very consider-”
“Hey, what’s this stuff?” Erik whined. “I thought you brought us some beer!” A drop of cold, dirty water fell from the tip of Vivian’s nose.
“Go home, Erik.”
Countless repetitions had turned this phrase purely rhetorical to Erik’s ears. He slumped back down on the couch and popped open a bottle of the orange energy drink. Vivian dropped her mail on Han Solo’s groin and did a lap around the room, collecting an assortment of fast-food containers and dirty dishes along the way.
“Oh, come on, you guys,” she moaned. “Look at this place! It’s a dump!”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Bobby shrugged. “It’s your apartment.” Vivian stumbled over a stack of Nintendo 64 cartridges and unlabeled VHS tapes that had accumulated next to the television, sending a horde of startled roaches fleeing for cover. She turned to Bobby with a fire in her eyes.
“Bobby, there are roaches in my apartment,” she said icily. “There were never roaches in my apartment when I lived alone. ”
“What, you think the roaches are my fault?” Bobby said defensively. “They just showed up! What am I supposed to do? Reason with them?”
“They showed up because you keep feeding them! ” Vivian snapped, holding up the dirty dishes. “Their instincts are not exactly a great scientific mystery! All they do is look for free food and a dark place to sleep. Come on, Bobby, you should be able to relate to them!”
“Oh, buuurn! ” Erik grinned. “Good one, Viv.”
“Go home, Erik,” Vivian repeated.
She deposited her armload of crusty dishes in the kitchen before retreating to her bedroom. The boys continued watching TV as if their encounter with Vivian had been nothing more than another surfed channel. Bobby lifted a casual eyebrow toward Erik’s drink.
“That stuff any good?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” Erik replied. “It tastes like Ecto Cooler mixed with turpentine.” Bobby nodded.
“Gimme one.”
Somewhere the Spirit of Marketing smiled as Erik and Bobby contentedly watched television commercials and drank free promotional beverages. Images of Matt LeBlanc, Heather Graham, and a giant plastic robot flashed aggressively across the screen to the strains of a driving techno theme.
“Next on WGON,” the TV announcer enthused, “the network television premiere of Lost in Space. ”
“Oh, sweet, ” Bobby smiled, cranking up the surround sound to an earsplitting level. “This movie rules! ”
“No, oh no. No, no, no,” Erik said, wrinkling his nose. “We are not watching this. As a fan of the real Lost in Space, the television show Lost in Space, I call foul on this blasphemy. Lost in Space was finished in 1968. This … thing does not exist. End of story.”
“Oh, keep your pants on,” Bobby said. “The movie has got so much more going for it than the TV show ever did.”
“Name one thing.”
“First of all, it’s got color.”
“Oh please, the show had color after the first season!” Erik interrupted.
“And the new robot is not only bad-ass,” Bobby continued, “but it is actually a real robot, not some freaky midget in a suit made out of Christmas lights and dryer hose.”
“You can’t be serious,” Erik whined. “The original Robot B-9 was a work of art designed by Robert Kinoshita! The real B-9 had a distinctive retro-futuristic atomic-age styling. This new one looks like the bastard love child of ED-209 and Number 5 from Short Circuit. ”
“And last but certainly not least,” Bobby persevered, “the movie is unquestionably the superior incarnation due to its outstanding achievements in visual effects. This isn’t some chintzy crap with plywood spaceships and the same three rubber monster suits in every episode.”
“Oh, don’t even get me started on monsters,” Erik seethed. “The whole thing with Dr. Smith mutating into a giant killer spider monster at the end is completely ludicrous. A spider bites him and it makes him transform into one of them? Last time I checked, that was the vampire’s shtick. Not the spider’s. ”
“It doesn’t bite him,” Bobby noted. “It scratches him and infects his DNA.”
“Oh yeah, that’s much more believable,” Erik scowled. “All I’m saying is, it’s stupid because spiders don’t spread their traits by infecting others like they’re the freakin’ Wolfman or something. I defy you to name one other time ever when somebody was stung by a spider and then suddenly evolved into some sort of superhuman mutant. It just never happe-”
“Peter Parker.”
Erik quietly took a sip of his drink and fumed.
A toweled-off and pajama-clad Vivian returned and dropped with exhaustion into the only available seat. It was a small, uncomfortable wicker lawn chair that creaked and pinched at her skin. She leaned forward between Han Solo’s boots and retrieved the mail from his lap. It was all junk and bills. She dropped it sleepily in her own lap.
“Oh, man,” she yawned. “I am definitely quitting my job. For real this time. You guys don’t even want to hear about the day I had today.”
Bobby and Erik didn’t look away from the epic opening space battle on the television.
“Nope,” Bobby agreed. “We don’t.”
Vivian blinked and stared at Bobby for a long, empty minute before returning her tired eyes to the mail. She opened the moist newspaper to the classifieds and smoothed it out over the bills in her lap.
“So, Bob, did you find a job today?” she asked pointedly.
Bobby rolled his eyes.
“Man, it’s never ‘Hey, Bobby, how are you doing?’ or ‘Did anything interesting happen to you today?’ It’s always ‘Did you find a job today?’ Am I right, Erik?”
“Don’t look at me,” Erik said defensively. “I have a job.” Vivian blew a long breath into her damp bangs.
“Hey, Bobby, how are you doing?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Did anything interesting happen to you today?”
“Not really.”
“So did you find a job?”
“Hey, Chatty Patty, can we do this later?” Bobby bristled. “We’re trying to watch a movie here.”
Somewhere deep in her subconscious, Vivian punched Bobby in the mouth. In reality, she flicked through the stack of bills in her lap, found the one she was looking for, and stuffed it between Han Solo’s outstretched fingers between Bobby and the television.
“Well, enjoy it while it lasts, sofa spud, because I can’t afford to pay your cable bill this month. I’m sorry, but the electricity bill is just too high from you running the AC full-tilt all day, and with your beer tab added in on top of that, I just don’t have the money to-”
Bobby grimaced.
“Jeez, Viv, let’s stay civilized, alright? You know that it won’t be long until I’m payin’ the bills with my mad programmin’ skills. I mean, this is a wonderful age we’re living in. This is 1999. We’re almost exactly halfway between Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II. The dot-com economy can only get stronger from here.”
“Bobby, you’ve been saying that since last fall!” Vivian snapped. “I thought we had an unspoken agreement since birth that we’d never share a living space that cramped again!”
Bobby picked up the translucent keyboard of a Bondi Blue iMac sitting on a narrow end table to the side of the couch.
“Relax, Viv. The offers should be pouring in,” he said, patting the top of the eggshell lovingly. “I posted my résumé online.”
“Oh joy,” Vivian deadpanned. “Our troubles are over.” In Bobby’s mind, any career worth having could only be found, and executed, via the World Wide Web. His last, and best, job had been in online database management for a little upstart company by the name of Grocery911.com. The concept behind the business wasn’t terribly original. At its core it was little more than another grocery delivery service that had been branded with an
“emergency” theme and an ad campaign directly ripped off from Rescue 911. The thing that made Grocery911’s system unique was the fact that it was only accessible via the Internet. There were no telephone numbers, no switchboards, and no operators. Just a low-overhead digital network transmitting orders directly from the fingertips of agoraphobic computer nerds to the teamsters at the warehouse. As the popularity of the website spread like digital wildfire, new distribution centers began springing up all along the East Coast. Government auctions were soon saturated with young entrepreneurs buying up obsolete ambulances and pressing their disintegrating hulks into service as delivery trucks.
The Oblivion Society Page 6
