Microserfs

that), looking tired and scared, with big bags under his eyes, and a bit deranged.

He parked with a lurch right across the street from us. We sat and watched as he sucked in a breath and leaned back on the seat, his head slumped forward. He then turned his head toward us and through the open window said, a bit bashfully, “Hi.”

“Hi, Dad.”

He looked back down at his lap.

“Dad, this is Karla,” I said, still seated.

He looked at us again. “Hello, Karla.”

“Hi.”

We sat on our opposite sides of the road. Behind us, the house had become a thumping shadow box of festivity. Dad didn’t look up from his lap, so Karla and I stood up and walked over to him, and as we did, we saw that Dad was clutching something tight in his lap, and as we approached, he clutched it tighter. It seemed as though he was afraid we might take away whatever it was, and as we neared, I realized he was holding Jed’s old football helmet, a little boy’s helmet, in gold and green, the old school colors.

“Danny,” he said to me, not to my face, but into the helmet which he polished with his old man’s hands, “I still miss Jeddie. I can’t get him out of my mind.”

“I miss Jed, too, Daddy,” I said. “I think about him every day.”

He held the helmet tighter to his chest.

“Come on, Daddy — let’s get out of the car. Come on into the house. We can talk in there.”

“I can’t pretend I don’t think about him anymore. I think it’s killing me.”

“I feel the same way, too, Daddy. You know what? I feel as if he’s alive still, and that he’s always walking three steps ahead of me, just like a king.”

I opened the door and Karla and I both supported Dad on either side as he clutched the helmet to his chest, and we walked into the house, his appearance generating little interest in the overall crowd. We went into Michael’s room, where we placed him on the bed.

He was ranting a bit: “Funny how all those things you thought would never end turned out to be the first to vanish — IBM, the Reagans, Eastern bloc communism. As you get older, the bottom line becomes to survive as best you can.”

“We don’t know about that yet, Daddy.”

I pulled off his shoes, and for some time Karla and I sat beside him on two office chairs. Michael’s machines hummed around us and our only light source was a small bedside lamp. We sat and watched Dad filter in and out of consciousness.

He said to me, “You are my treasure, son. You are my first born. When the doctors removed their hands from your mother and lifted you up to the sky, it was as though they removed a trove of pearls and diamonds and rubies all covered in sticky blood.”

I said, “Daddy, don’t talk like that. Get some rest. You’ll find a job. I’ll always support you. Don’t feel bad. There’ll be lots of stuff available. You’ll see.”

“It’s your world now,” he said, his breathing deepening, as he turned to stare at the wall that thumped with music and shrieks of party-goers. “It’s yours.”

And shortly after that, he fell asleep on the bed — on Michael’s bed in Michael’s room.

And before we left the room, we turned out the light and we took one last look at the warm black form of my father lying on the bed, lit only by the constellation of red, yellow, and green LEDs from Michael’s sleeping, dreaming machines.

2 Oop

MONDAY

Rained all day (32mm according to Bug). Read a volume of Inside Mac. Drove over to Boeing Surplus and bought some zinc and some laminated air-safety cards.

TUESDAY

Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail.

Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald’s there.

There were soggy maple leaves all over the Hornet Sportabout this afternoon. The orange colors were dizzying and I must have looked like such a space case staring at the car for fifteen minutes. But it felt so relaxing.

Susan was talking about art today, about that surrealist guy who painted little businessmen floating through the sky and apples that fill up entire rooms — Magritte. She said that if Surrealism was around today, “It’d last ten minutes and be stolen by ad agencies to sell long-distance calls and aerosol cheese products.” Probably true.

Then Susan went on to say that Surrealism was exciting back whenever it happened, because society had just discovered the subconscious, and this was the first visual way people had found to express the way the human subconscious works.

Susan then said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, “really aren’t surrealistic, because they’re just random, and there’s no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images.”

So this got me to thinking … what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine’s subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?

So I stare at my MultiSync and my PowerBook and wonder … “What’s going through their heads?”

To this end, I’m creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labeled SUBCONSCIOUS.

Cleaned out the kitchen cupboards. Read the phone book for a while. Read a Wall Street Journal. Listened to the radio.

Karla’s been living here three weeks and I’m not sure I’m not going to screw things up. It’s all so new. She’s heaven. Imagine losing heaven!

* * *

Personal Computer

I am your personal computer

Hello

Stop

Being

Carbon

CNN

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