Microserfs

Federal Express

bar coding

cable TV

satellite TV

CDs

calculators of almost other-worldly power that are so cheap that they practically come free with a tank of gas.”

“In the information Dark Ages, before 1976, before all of this, relationships and television were the only forms of entertainment available. Now we have other things. Fortunately depression runs in my family.”

“Fortunately?” I asked.

“Absolutely, pal. I couldn’t figure out a way of rigging my brain to work in parallel instead of linear mode — and then they invented Prozac and all the Prozac isomers and kablam!—my brain’s been like an Oracle parallel processing server ever since.”

“I’m not sure I get this, Ethan.”

“Prozac is great — and I think it goes beyond seratonin and uptake receptors and that kind of thing. I think these chemicals physically rewire your brain to think in parallel. It literally converts your brain from Macintosh or IBM into a Cray C3 or a Thinking Machines CM5. Prozac-type chemicals don’t suppress feelings — they break them down into smaller ‘feeling units,’ which are more quickly computationally processed by the new, parallel brain.”

“I think I need a second to digest this, Eth—”

“I don‘t. Linear thinking is out. Parallel is in.”

“Explain to me more clearly—how does whatever you take affect your time?”

“I remember once when I was majorly depressed for, like, six months. When it ended, I felt like I had to make up for those six ‘lost’ months. Man, depression sucks. So my logic is, as long as I’m not bummed, I’m not wasting time. So I make sure I’m never bummed.” He seemed quite happy to be telling his theory.

“You know how when somebody says, ‘Remember that party at the beach last year?’ and you say, ‘Oh God, was that last year? It feels like last month‘? If I’m going to live a year, I want my whole year’s worth of year. I don’t want it feeling like only one month. Everything I do is an attempt to make time ‘feel’ like time again — to make it feel longer. I get my time in bulk.”

I left Ethan’s thoroughly depressed, and not sure whether I still disliked Ethan or just felt sorry for him. I e-mailed Abe with a synopsis of Ethan’s time theory, and he was online and answered me right away:

»What would happen if TV caracters continued their theoretical lives in our linear time … Bob and Emily Hartley, in their early 70s now, would be living in their brown apartment, wrinkled and childless. Or Mary Tyler Moore, now 60 … surely bitter, alone, sterile …

Prozac!

* * *

SpaghettiOs

Aspirin

invasion

What's My Line

Jell-O simulator

Russian winter

Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal?

A: You already are an animal

SUNDAY

Ethan phoned me and asked me to come over to San Carlos. When I arrived, he was on a cordless phone in his kitchen, leaving me in his ultra-monitored living room reading his copies of Cellular Buyer’s Guide, Dr. Dobbs Journal LAN Times—and Game Pro (#1 Video Game Magazine).

He came out of the kitchen wearing an Intel T-shirt — rare, as I’ve never seen him in anything but a shirt and tie in all the time I’ve known him. He was wearing jeans, too. “It’s Friday—’jeans day,’ pal,” he said.

He then sat down on the couch beside me and there was this silence as he shuffled his coffee table magazines back into geometric orderliness after my perusal, and then he sat back on the white leather with his arm behind my back.

I pointed out that his copy of Binary File Transfer Monthly was possibly the most boring document I’d ever seen in my life. He said, “Well, what if it were actually a copy of Penthouse Forum letters encrypted as something so dull and opaque, that nobody would realize that it was something else. Imagine an encryption system that could reconfigure the words, 7 am a sophomore at a small midwestern college‘ into ‘Does not conform to ITCU Convention specifications for frequency ranges.“’ It’d be the biggest stroke of encryption genius since the U.S. military used Navajo Indians to speak freely over the radio about top secret operations.”

He then became quiet and still, and the presence of his arm behind me was eerily warm. I stiffened my posture. The scenario felt so charged — the whole situation. I felt like a Yankee schoolteacher on a Hollywood casting couch. He said to me, “I have something important I have to ask of you, pal,” and I thought, “Oh God — here it is … I’m going to get hit on.”

He then removed his T-shirt, and I was trying to be cool about the situation, and I was truly freaking out as Ethan’s not really my, err, cup o’ tea. He was reading my mind and said to me, “Don’t be a prig — I’m not gonna jump you, but I am going to ask you a favor.”

“Oh?”

“Chill out, it’s not that kind of favor.” His missing T-shirt revealed a torso of average buffitude, “You can see, I’m no Todd,” he said, and then he turned around, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I gasped. His rotation revealed his back covered in a matrix of bandages, dried blood and micropore tape, and it looked as if several soiled disposable diapers had been taped to his skin all higgledy-piggledy. “It’s this … these”

I said, “Ethan, what the fuck is this all about? Did you have an accident? Jesus!”

“Accident? Who gives a shit … ozone … a bologna sandwich I ate in third grade … one hour too many in front of a Russian-built VDT. But it’s a part of me, Dan … the damage … the whateverthefuck it is. It’s moles gone bad. Maybe they’re gone forever and, well, maybe they’re not.”

I was trying to look away, but he said, “That is so fucking insulting,” and he jumped up and sat on the coffee table facing away from me, sticking the bandages in my face. I then looked and was mesmerized by this bio-mash of cotton, plastic, and body fluids barnacled to his skin. I didn’t say anything.

“Dan?” he asked.

“Yeah …”

“You gotta remove them for me.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s nobody else who’ll do it for me. You know that, Dan?”

“There’s nobody?”

“Nobody.”

I looked some more and he said, “Doc hacked ‘em out of me like they were divots on the thirteenth fairway a week ago. And not one of you dumb bastards ever even bothered to ask why I was going to the dermatologist. Nobody asked and I had nobody to tell.”