Microserfs

Another “Oh”—Susan complains that Bug stays up all night shredding paper and the whirring of the rotors is driving her nuts.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS Me: to penetrate the Apple complex Karla: undisclosed (doesn’t want to jinx) Ethan: to slow down time Todd: visit junkyards more often, to bench 420, and to have a relationship Susan: to hack into the DMV and to have a relationship Bug: to overhaul his image and to have a relationship

  680X0 a burning Lego Los Angeles moon 880 Nimitz Freeway Premium Saltine crackers Control and the feeling of mastery I Robot

The Apollo rocket designers and the NASA engineers of Houston and Sunnyvale grew up in the 1930s and 1940s dreaming of Buck Rogers and the exoterrestrial meanderings of Amazing Stories. When this aerospace generation grew old enough, they chose to make those dreams in metal.

TUESDAY January 4, 1994

Woke up sick this morning — finally got the flu. I thought it might be a hangover, but no. In spite of the fact that I think I feel like death-on-a-stick, I want to write down what happened today.

First, Michael bounced through the sliding doors around noon in a shiny happy mood, and invited us all out to see our (game show tone of voice) … new office! Ethan sold his Ferrari to do the lease. “Farewell 1980s!” he said. (He drives a 1987 Honda Civic now. “I feel like I’m in high school.”)

Uncharacteristically brash, he yelled, “Convoy! Everybody … down to our new office. You, too, Mrs. Underwood … we’ve been liberated from the Habitrail.”

We stuffed ourselves into two cars and drove through the vine-covered suburbs and carefully mowed, Frisbee-free lawns of Palo Alto’s tech parks, to Hamilton Street, a block south of University Street downtown. And it was there that we learned what Dad has actually been doing all this time.

As Michael opened a second-floor oak door, he said to me, in a voice intended to be heard by everybody, “I figured your father’s talents as a model railroader might have translatable applications into our world here …”

The wet paint smelled like cucumbers and sour cream and made me a bit pukey, but the feeling passed as I saw what lay before us … the most sculptured environment I’ve ever seen — an entire world of Lego — hundreds of 50 ? 50-stud gray pads on the floors and on the walls, all held in place with tiny brass screws. Onto these pads were built skyscrapers and animals and mazes and Lego railroads, sticking out of the walls, rounding corners, passing through holes. The colors were shocking; Lego-pure. A skeleton lay down beside a platoon of robots; cubic flowers grew beside boxcars loaded with nickels that rounded the blue railroad bends. There was a Palo Alto City Hall — a ‘70s Wilshire modernist box — and there was a 747 and a smoking pipe … and … everything in the world! Pylons and towers of color, and dogs and chalets …

“I think your father should take a bow, don’t you, Daniel?”

Dad, who was in the back tinkering with a castle, looked flustered but proud, and fidgeted with a stack of two-stud yellow bricks. This universe he had built was a Guggenheim and a Toys-R-Us squished into one. We were having seizures, all of us. Susan was livid. She said, “You spent my vested stock money on … Lego?” She was purple.

Ethan looked at me: “Michael’s addiction.”

I, too, was flubbered. In the magic of the moment I looked up into the corner — and I caught Mom looking, too — at a small white house in the far back corner, sprouting from a wall, with a little white picket fence around it, the occupant inside no doubt surveying all that transpired beneath its windows, and I said, “Oh, Dad, this is — the most real thing I’ve ever seen.”

And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?

What follows I will write only because it’s what happened, and I’m sick, and I don’t want to lose it — I might accidentally erase the memory. I want a backup.

What happened was that while everyone was oohing and ahhing over the Lego sculptures (and staking out their new work spaces) the colors in front of my eyes began to swim, and everybody’s words stopped connecting in my head, and I had to go down to the street for fresh air, and I wobbled out the door.

It was a hot sunny day — oh California!—and I walked at random and ended up standing on the blazing piazza of the Palo Alto City Hall, baked in white light from the suntanning cement, the civil servants around me buzzing in all directions, efficiently heading off to lunch. I heard cars go by.

My body was losing its ability to regulate its temperature and I was going cold and hot, and I wasn’t sure if I was hungry or whether the virus had deactivated my stomach, and I felt like my system was getting ready to shut down.

I sat in this heat and light on the low-slung steps of the hall, feeling dizzy, and not quite knowing where I was, and then I realized there was somebody sitting next to me, and it was Dad. And he said, “You’re not feeling very well, are you, son.”

And I said, “Nnn … no.”

And he said, “I was following you down the streets. I was right behind you the whole time. It’s the flu, isn’t it? But it’s more than just the flu.”

I was silent.

“Right?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’m a young man, Daniel, but I’m stuck inside this old sack of bones. I can’t help it.”

“Dad …”

“Let me finish. And so you think I’m old. You think that I don’t understand things. That I never notice what goes on around me — but I do notice. And I’ve noticed that I’m maybe too distant with you — and that maybe I don’t spend enough time with you.”

“FaceTime,” I said, regretting my bad joke as the words slipped out.

“Yes. FaceTime.”

Two secretaries walked by laughing at some joke they were telling, and a yuppie guy with a stack of documents walked past us.

The inside of my head did a dip, like on a ride at Knott’s Berry Farm. I found myself saying, “Michael’s not Jed, Dad. He just isn’t. And neither am I. And I just can’t keep trying to keep up with him. Because no matter how hard I run, I’m never going to catch up.”

“Oh, my boy …”

My head was between my legs at this point, and I had to keep my eyes closed, because the light from the piazza was hurting me, and I wondered if this was how Ethan’s eyes felt on his antidepressant chemicals, and then I started thinking of a small plastic swimming pool Jed and I used to play in when we were babies, and I think my mind was misfiring. And then I felt my father’s arms around my shoulders, and I shivered, and he pulled me close to him.

I was too sick, and Dad’s words weren’t registering. “You and your friends helped me once when I was lost. The whole crew of you — your casual love and help — saved me at a time when no one else could save me. And now I can help you. I was lost, Daniel. If it weren’t for you and your friends, I would never have found the green spaces or the still waters. My mind would not now be calm …”

But I don’t remember what I said next. I have faint memories — my arms touching the warm cement — of a stop sign — of a sago palm branch brushing my cheek; my father’s worried face looking forward right above my own; the clouds above his head; birds in the trees; my father’s arms beneath me; depositing me within the Lego garden; my mother saying, “Dear?” and my father’s voice saying, “Its okay, honey. He just needs to sleep for a long, long time.”