Bree:
Things my new French boyfriend does that are making me beginto wonder about him
1)
Tucks his sweaters into his pants.
2)
Eats Play-Doh fragments.
3)
Wears yellow-lensed Fendi eyeglasses that make him resemble a repeat sex offender.
4)
Sold all of his Fred Perry shirts on eBay because I told him they make him look pregnant (he should have given them to charity).
5)
Refuses to capitalize the letter "I" when writing about himself in emails.
6)
Is a selfish and incoherent lover.
Cowboy:
Faggy colour names (alphabetized)
bisque
cerise
chartreuse
conch
cornflower
corn silk
fern
goldenrod
honeydew
leather
lichen
lox
mica
moccasin
opal
plum
saddle brown
shiraz
snow
thistle
yolk
John Doe:
Why buying lottery tickets is simply wrong
1)
Would you ever go into a lottery booth and buy a 6/49 with the following numbers: 1,2,3, 4, 5, 6 and a bonus of 7? Of course you wouldn't. But that number has just as ludicrously small a chance of winning as do some idiotic numbers you pulled out of the air.
2)
When you buy lottery tickets, your lifestyle elevator travels only down. Buy enough tickets over a long period of time and, before you realize it, you'll find yourself living in a listing mobile home. Its linoleum kitchenette counters will be constellated with crystal meth pipe burns. Its throw cushions will be caked in DNA best left unexplored. There will be a Domino's pizza boy bound and gagged beneath the main living area beside the cinder blocks.
3)
Oh, for God's sake, how many more reasons do you need?
Kaitlin:
Things Ethan doesn't know I know about him
1)
Three weeks ago he was suntanning on the back stoop using an old Supertramp double album covered in tin foil to concentrate the rays onto his face.
2)
He knows the technically correct word for the act of playing music using the rims of wine glasses.
3)
He has dextrous toes and uses them to pick socks off the bedroom floor when he thinks I'm still sleeping.
Evil Mark:
Starch discs from around the world
pizza
naan
pancakes
tortillas
waffles
crepes
communion wafers
Bree won.
. . .
About once every three years I get a craving for a Coca-Cola, and only a Coca-Cola—no cheeseburgers or fries. Shordy after Bree won, I had my triennial craving. I went to the kitchen area to get a can, and on a table beneath a stacked totem of plastic coffee creamers was an abandoned car magazine open to a spread on the Volkswagen Touareg's fuel economy. This got me thinking about Steve and his abandoned car and Mom and Kam Fong and all. I thought, "Oh well," and took my Coke back to my desk, and when I did, John and Evil Mark were arguing about Coke versus Pepsi. John was convinced that Coke has a valid reason for being the top cola, that, "Even though we're haggling about the difference between catshit and dogshit, Coke is technically more delicious." To prove it, he pulled out mini-bar cola consumption statistics that showed Coke to be number one. Mini-bars—and of course, mini-bars mean Toblerone, the signature mini-bar snack of all time—another Steve indicator. So I tried getting on with my work, but then I heard Cowboy pacifying some fartcatcher from the facilities department who claimed they'd found cigarette butts in an air filter and thought the butts might be coming from jPod. Cowboy was doing his thirtieth Sudoku of the day and was feeding the facilities people the rich, nourishing crap they deserved. He ended it all with "Okey-diddily-dokey" . . . just like Ned Flanders—and so yet again I was reminded of Steve. My conscience began getting the worst of me.
Well, at least he's not dead.
Oh God. I felt so guilty. So in the mid-afternoon I drove over to Kam Fong's. How strange that all you have to do sometimes to meet somebody is walk up to their house and ring a doorbell, and magically they appear as if from nowhere.
With x-ray eyes I saw the maggots scouring Tim's corpse in pursuit of Tim Jerky.
Kam opened the door. "Ethan."
"Hi, Kam."
He was covered with maybe a hundred acupuncture needles.
"Sorry to interrupt your session."
"No worry. What's up? Come in."
Kam's acupuncturist was futzing about with the contents of his suitcase and wasn't introduced to me.
"Kam, I need to find Steve."
He didn't blink as he back-hopped onto the acupuncture table. "I thought he was a jerk and was ruining your skateboard game. Why are you asking me about him?"
"Believe it or not, we need him at the company to override a recent decision to make our new game even stupider. Mom told me that you—"
"Yes?"
"That you helped her out on the Steve issue."
"He's not dead or anything."
"That's what she said."
More needles went into Kam's calves. I couldn't look, and Kam said, "Ethan, stop being such a pussy. Acupuncture's one of the few Chinese things that actually works. Unlike feng shui."
Tim's nearby carcass amplified my unease. Kam asked, "How badly do you want to see Steve, then?"
Good question. "Well, I think Steve might be just powerful enough to reverse the company's decision on the latest botch-up with the game. And I feel kind of rotten hearing that he's . . ."
"That he's what?"
"Ummm . . . being detained somewhere."
"He was hassling your mother."
"Mom can take care of herself just fine. Can you tell me if he's okay or not?"
"He's not in pain, if that's what you mean."
"That's a good start."
"And he's now happy in his own way."
Coming from Kam, this suggested the most gruesome of fates. "Just tell me where he is, and I'll go get him—no questions asked. I doubt he's going to hassle Mom any more."
"Give me a week or so to figure out a thing or two."
"Thanks."
. . .
While I waited for Kam to get back to me, in jPod we carried on with the generating of Ronald's Lair. We're doing the most basic levels of coding, which is kind of boring, and we also had to do it on top of our regular jobs—and our regular jobs are made even worse because of eye candy. Just when you think you're meeting a schedule, your team has to generate weekly eye candy for marketing so that they don't think the project's tanking, and thus allow it to live until the next milestone. On the good side, so much ill will and torture surrounds the SpriteQuest project in-house that we can get away with doing amazingly little and yet still give the illusion of being team players. Mostly this means walking around, acting pumped and saying things like "Man, this is going to be one rocking game!" with a straight face, thus inflating the egos of superiors while creating a protective bulletproof coating of enthusiasm. It's so easy it's scary. Even for me, with my fake voice. It's all so stupid that the fake/real part of my brain doesn't tickle even the slightest bit.
. . .
I've noticed that, as we ramp up on our game-building skills and generalized knowledge about Ronald, we're googling every ten minutes. The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we've started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.
. . .
A small cold passed through the pod, and we suf
fered a seventeen percent health loss, even though we zinc'ed up like crazy. And Cowboy kept saying, "Remember everybody: limb-specific gunshot damage" to the point where we felt slightly spooked.
Amid all of this, Bree was moping out of concern that, in her quest to make a corporate success of herself, she might become unattractive to her French beau. John Doe told Bree that if she were artier she'd be more of a catch for her French paramour. As a result, Bree has canned the business attire in favour of an all-black look. To take this new lifestyle philosophy further, she and John ended up driving to Brentwood Mall to do performance art. Bree walked down the main atrium area, shaving her neck with an electric razor, and met John Doe, who applied lipstick in the middle of a crowded restaurant. I tried to imagine the public's response and John's counter-response: "Is it so wrong for a man to wear MAC Brick-O-La? Are your gender ideas that limited?" Afterwards he said, "Maybe it's just my dykey upbringing, but lipstick really does taste gross. How do you women do it?"
He inspired Kaitlin to confess: "Sometimes I get too lazy to wear makeup. To compensate for it, I simply dress like a slut."
. . .
Cowboy's signed on to a site called chokingforit.com, where people all across the city put in their name, a photo of their body, their address and a numerical rating from one to ten of how horny they are. Depending on how entries mesh, Cowboy simply vanishes for seventy-five minutes and then comes back saying nothing. I've gotten so used to this kind of behaviour with Cowboy that it no longer registers. The upside for me is that his trysts now happen during the day, so he never has to be rescued after ODing on Robitussin.
Also: Evil Mark is an evil genius, and Ronald's Lair's core code could never exist without him. But he also has yet to adorn the walls of his cubicle, which is really spooky. It just is. And the other day I secretly ate one of his novelty lemon-flavoured Post-its. It was really quite tasty. Tangy—with a hint of dust.
. . .
The next day the big drama was that John cast a spell on Evil Mark after Evil Mark ate a packet of Handi-Snacks John had left on his desk. Like anything weird in life, it began small and escalated.
"Evil Mark, did you eat my Handi-Snacks?"
"You mean that small plastic tray of shitty crackers that comes with a blob of cheese spread you can dip the crackers into?"
"Yes. Exactly."
"I did."
John got up. 'You didn't ask for permission. You know how seriously I take my snacking rituals."
"John, it was only a fucking plastic tublet with some crackers and a cheese-like orange substance. Big deal. I'll get you another one."
"Big deal? That was my snack, Mark. And now it's not, because you ate it."
"I'll get you another one. I'll even let you eat my stapler if it makes you feel better."
"I don't want to eat your stapler, and I don't want another Handi-Snacks. That's not my point. You took it without asking, and then you act like private property is meaningless."
"You're overreacting."
John Doe said, "Apologize." John was getting fierce. I began to wonder if this would erupt into cubicle rage.
"I don't like the way you're saying that."
"It was my property, Mark. And you just stole it like you were some global corporation absorbing a small African nation into its balance sheet. Evil Mark, I am officially casting a spell on you." John waved his hand in a circle and then threw invisible gnome dandruff at Mark. "I hereby strip you of the ability to perceive cartoons."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Just what I said. Until you apologize for what you did, your eyes may look at cartoons, and your ears may listen to them, but they will make no sense to you. Cartoons will be nothing more to you than abstract shapes bouncing about to garbled noises."
"That's so stupid, John."
"Is it really? You won't think so when you come crawling to me, begging to be able to apprehend cartoons again."
"This is fucked up. I'm going back to work."
"You do that."
We could hear John simmering.
. . .
I have to say, it's a blast making SpriteQuest as we simultaneously secretly sabotage it. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I'd felt-pen doors and windows onto Ritz Cracker boxes and then set fire to them while providing colour commentary. Oh no, the wedding party of fifty and thejunior lacrosse team on the seventh floorare trapped! Somebody forgot to replace the smoke detector batteries!
Every time we do something to make SpriteQuest "sparkle" (Management's term), such as building an interesting mesh frame for a turret, we build leaks and vulnerabilities into that turret so that Ronald can use them as a means of generating carnage.
Gord-O has been so impressed by the jPod enthusiasm level that he's taken me off Cheerios duty and has grudgingly had to admit that I'm assistant production assistant material after all.
. . .
A week later, out of nowhere, Cowboy said, "Isn't time weird? I'm already forgetting about Steve."
Time to go back to Kam and his exclusive alpine hideaway. I rang the bell and the acupuncturist opened the door and nodded me inside. In the living room, a sweatshop-like crew of six women, seated at folding bingo-hall tables, were busily weighing and bagging white powder that came from a Road-Runner-cartoon-FREE-BlRDSEED-like mound in the centre of the floor.
"Kam."
"Ethan."
Kam had an Ikea desk set up in the corner, and he paused a game of AmmuNation. "AmmuNation!" I said. "All right! What do you think of it?"
"It's the best. It allows me to park my evil in one place so I can be a better person in the real world."
"That's thoughtful of you."
The sound of little scales clicking and the rustling of ziplock bags amplified the silence. Kam said, 'You're here about Steve."
'Yup."
'You're in luck. I heard this morning that he's fine. Do you want to go get him?"
"Sure. Where is he?"
"China."
"What?"
"Too late. You said you'd go. You can't back out now."
"What's he doing in China?"
"Having the experience of a lifetime. He'll thank me for it."
"I don't have the money to go to China."
"Relax." He reached into a desk drawer and removed a wad of twenties. "Done. Do you need a passport? I can get one made for you in a few minutes."
"No. I got one three years ago for my trip to Mexico."
"I'll put you on a China Airlines flight tonight. You'd better pack, and for God's sake, don't wear any of your dorky outfits. You wouldn't believe what my ..."—he looked over at the women—" . .. helpers have been saying about you in Chinese. Go to a fucking Gap and stock up."
"I don't know anything about China."
"I'll take care of all that. I'll courier the ticket to your office, and there'll be people helping you all over the place in Shanghai. Just be at the gate and ready to go."
A woman across the room made a hissing sound.
Kam, returning to his game, said, "Who says I'm not a kind soul?"
. . .
Late that afternoon Kaitlin and I combed the net for basic information about China, and somehow we ended up yet again on the Cunnilingus Web Ring. Kaitlin said, "What a weird coincidence. I should go out and buy a lottery ticket."
"How come?"
"Any time you have a coincidence happen to you, it means you've entered a luck warp—for the next short while everything you do will be touched by it."
John Doe gave a snort from behind his cubicle wall and left it at that.
"Kaitlin, you know what? Let's stop this search for info. I'm simply going to show up for the plane, like when you go see a movie without having seen the trailer."
"Good idea."
I went home, looked at my clothing from the Kam Fong point of view and then went out to a Gap. I stocked up on new duds and packed. I'm not proud to say it, but when I looked at my new waffle-knit T's, my washable merino wool swe
aters, my groovy herringbone blazers, my unpleated olive khakis and my low-ironing stress-free shirts, it made me feel, you know . . .freshhhhh.
. . .
A lumber delivery for Kaitlin's hugging machine arrived just as Kam's car came to get me. When I kissed her goodbye, she smelled like a house under construction.
At the airport, it turned out Kam had booked me into first class— woohoo!
It was a brilliant early evening, with magic light beaming in through the windows of the silent, thick-carpeted first-class lounge. I sipped Veuve Clicquot and surveyed the airport, appreciating its wonderful made-of-Lego quality—high-tech brightly coloured ramps and cones and poles and carts and movable stairways. Walking onto the plane, I felt like I was entering the world of Lego in a way I hadn't since I was eleven.
The flight took off without any complications, and I lolled in my sprawling 180-degree reclining seat, wishing I could live in a house that was just like a first-class cabin.
But then, while I was trying to decide which of many sumptuous meals to order, I looked over to the seat opposite mine, and I couldn't believe my eyes—it was Douglas Coupland in 3K. What a bringdown. I saw that he was tapping some sort of crap into a laptop, and suddenly I wasn't hungry any more. I ordered tri-coloured penne pasta with Italian funghi in a lemongrass reduction and spent an hour optimizing my laptop's animation pipeline, but my heart wasn't in it. So I ordered a Scotch because it seemed like a first-classy drink to order, and tried to choose which Hitchcock classic to watch on the in-flight video service—but I couldn't help obsessing about Coupland. What bad luck that he was on this flight. And what was he typing? I may never have flown in first class before, but I do know it's the one place on earth where you shouldn't be working. I figured that if I went to the bathroom and walked back past him, I could get a clear glimpse of what he was working on. My eyesight is good.
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