Microserfs

around it. My parents drove him crazy expecting him to be a particle physicist. All Karl wants to do is manage a Lucky Mart and watch football. They’ve always refused to see us as we are.

Karla was off and running:

“Here’s an example — once I went home to visit and the phone was broken, so I began fixing it, and Dad took it away and said, ‘Karl should give that a try,’ and Karl just wanted to watch TV and couldn’t fix a phone if it spat on him and so I was screaming at my Dad, Karl was screaming at my Dad, and my Mom came in and tried to discuss ‘women’s things’ and drag me into the kitchen. Meatloaffuckingrecipes.”

Karla was just fuming. She can’t bring herself to forgive her parents for trying to brainwash her into thinking she was dumb all her life.

Later, we got too bagged to drive, so we pulled into a Days Inn in Yreka. During a pre- bedtime shiatsu break we started talking about Spy vs. Spy, that old comic in Mad magazine, and how the very first time you read it, you arbitrarily chose either the black Spy or the white Spy and you voted for your color choice unflinchingly for the remaining period of your Mad magazine-reading phase.

I always voted for the black Spy; Karla voted for the white. Silly, but for a moment we had a note of genuine tension.

Karla broke the tension. She said, “Well, it’s at least binary, right?” And I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Are we geeks, or what?”

(Insert one more foot massage here.)

Even later on, Karla spoke to me again. “There’s more, Dan. About the stupid business. About the sunstroke.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear this. “I figured as much. So … you want to tell me?”

The stars outside the window were sort of creamy, and I couldn’t tell if I was seeing clouds or the Milky Way.

“There was a reason I was back at the house a few years ago … the time I had the sunstroke episode.”

“Yeah?”

“Let me put this another way. Remember back up at Microsoft when you brought me the cucumber roll … just out of the blue like that?”

“I remember.”

“Well—” (she kissed my eyebrow) “—it’s the first time I can remember ever wanting to really eat, in like ten years.” I was quiet. She continued talking: “Back when I had my sunstroke episode, I hadn’t eaten in so long and I weighed about as much as a Franklin Mint figurine. My body was starting to die inside and my parents were worried that I’d gone too far, and I think I even scared my self You think I’m small now, Buster, you’d better see … well you won’t because I destroyed all photos … pictures of myself taken during my ‘phase’ as my parents call it.”

She was fetal and I had my left hand underneath her feet and my right on top of her head. I cupped her closer and pressed her against my stomach and said, “You’re my baby now: you’re a thousand diamonds — a handful of lovers’ rings — chalk for a million hopscotch games.”

“I didn’t want to do what I was doing, Dan — it just happened. My body was the only way I could get my message across and it was such a bad message. I crashed myself. In the end, it was work that saved my life. But then work became my life — I was technically living but without a life. And I was so scared. I thought that work was all there was ever going to be. And oh, God, I was so mean to everybody. But I was just running so scared. My parents. They just won’t accept what was going on with me. I see them and I want to starve. I can’t let myself see them.”

I put my forearm in the crook of her knees and pulled her as tightly together as she could go. Her neck rested on my other arm. I pulled the blankets over us, and her breath was hot and tiny, in little bursts like NutraSweet packets.

“There’s just so much I want to forget, Dan. I thought I was going to be a READ ONLY file. I never thought I’d be … interactive.”

I said, “Don’t worry about it, Karla. Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We’re human; we’re amnesia machines.”

It’s late and Karla’s asleep and blue by the light of the PowerBook.

I’m thinking of her as I input these words, my poor little girl who grew up in a small town with a family that did nothing to encourage her to use her miraculous brain, that thwarted her attempts at intelligence — this frail thing who reached out to the world in the only way she knew, through numbers and lines of code in the hope that from there she would find sensation and expression. I felt this jolt of energy and this sense of honor to be allowed entrance into her world — to be with a soul so hungry and powerful and needful to go forth into the universe. I want to feed her.

I …

There’s this term used in computers, where you try and squish something into another operating system holus-bolus, and the results are not always effective. The term is called “spooging.” An example might be, “Consumer don’t know it, yet, but Microsoft is going to spooge a lot of the interface of Word for Windows into the Word for Mac 6.0 version, and rumor has it the new Mac version will operate slow as a glacier, too, because of it — it’s too nonintuitive for the Mac-user.”

I say this because I think I’m about to spooge here, but I can’t think of any other way to express what I feel.

For starters, it was funny, but after Karla told me about her and her family some more, about her eating problems, now a thing of the past, we got into a discussion of what may be the ultimate question: Is our universe ultimately digital or analog?

After this, as I said, Karla fell asleep, but I couldn’t sleep myself. What else is new?

I remembered something Antonella from Nintendo once told me about her job at a day-care center, about storytelling to kids — about how the stories the children liked the best were the ones in which the characters fled their old planets amid great explosions, leaving everything behind them to start a new world.

And then I remembered this book-writing program my mom told me about from someone in her library. The big deal in book writing is to quickly establish at the very beginning what it is that the characters want.

But I think that the books I really enjoy are the ones in which the characters realize, only in the end, what it was that they secretly wanted all along, but never even knew. And maybe this is what life is really like.

Any way, I have spooged. Good night little PowerBook — my world will shortly end for today, as will the universe, whether digital or analog — with sleep.

* * *

Personal

Computer

Stars

drinking glasses

wrapped in tissue paper

burnt arborite

dial telephones

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