Blueprints of the Afterlife

Come on, Luke, be reasonable.

[crying]

Here. A tissue. I know this is hard for you.

You have no idea.

Can we get you anything? Better food? More books?

[crying]

We can continue tomorrow if you prefer.

No. Let’s keep going.

Why don’t we take a half hour, get our bearings, and come back.

Okay.

All right, we’re back. We were talking about your early days in the tech boom.

Yeah, so after I cleaned up my personal appearance I started talking to Wyatt and Erika about all these little companies that seemed to be sprouting up around the city. Netscape launched. AOL was rising. We started going to smart-drug parties and talking a lot about virtual reality. You could get swept up in these convergent zones of Bay Area freakishness and technology and money. Someone would get a weird idea that someone else made happen with technology and then capital started flowing. It struck me that those who understood the languages of technology were those who attracted the most money. So I bought a computer and set out to learn HTML and C++ and Perl at community colleges. I’d hang out at Wyatt and Erika’s and we’d drink copious amounts of coffee and take ginkgo biloba and write code all night. Soon Wyatt and I quit the reprographics company and I started working for a company called Netversive while he joined something called Boing Dot.

You gave up trying to find the proof for the brochure?

We did. I was a little disappointed in myself at first but, at the same time, throwing in the towel liberated me. Not that it mattered one way or the other. A week after we quit our jobs at the reprographics place the whole building burned to the ground. The official reason was faulty wiring. Wyatt and I suspected that something malevolent was at our heels but we didn’t have much time to ponder the situation. Our new jobs demanded our complete attention and all of our time.

What did Boing Dot and Netversive do?

Good question. I still couldn’t tell you. Really it all boiled down to making Web pages and developing the back-end systems to support them. That’s what everyone was actually doing. But everything was pitched as “internetworking solutions for revolutionary crossfunctional database management” blah blah blah. Boing Dot had something to do with those annoying pop-up ads. Netversive’s product was more like a suite of analytics tools. I lasted there five months then accepted a job at a start-up called iPeanut. An online peanut-butter store. But more than just peanut butter. Other nut butters as well. While I was there I successfully oversaw the launch of our jams tab. My base salary was $150,000.

How long did you last at iPeanut?

Not long. Six months, maybe? Because the company was bought out by—okay, you’re not going to believe this but I swear it happened—an online bread company. The vision of eBread was to be the market leader in online sandwich ordering. I hung around the merged company long enough to attend an all- hands meeting with the founder. Nice enough guy named Ray. Completely delusional, obviously, a real Kool-Aid drinker. His goal was to provide a way for people to order sandwiches on the Internet and have them delivered within the hour in major metropolitan areas. I remember a heated discussion breaking out in a conference room about whether we should offer free pickles. One time Ray put up a PowerPoint with all this market research about how many people in America routinely eat sandwiches. The numbers were astronomical, as you can imagine. He argued that if eBread were to snag just one-half of 1 percent of the national market in sandwiches, we’d be a $1 billion company within a year. The company went public, I cashed out my stock, and walked away with $500,000 more in my savings account. I was sick of eating sandwiches every day. Meanwhile, Wyatt tired of Boing Dot and went to work for Skinwiggle. They developed virtual mannequins for online clothing stores. I got a new job as director of customer solutions at Iceberg Software. The obsessiveness with which I had tried to track down Nick transferred easily to my new work ethic. I would get up at six, stop by my favorite cafe for a triple latte, be at my desk by quarter to seven, work until nine at night, and come home or sleep in a sleeping bag under my desk. I don’t think I took a crap in my apartment’s toilet for a year.

What did Iceberg Software do?

Firewalls, mostly. Security for high schools, filtering software. I cashed out my stock there for three-quarters of a million. Then I went to join Wyatt at Skinwiggle. I developed a customer relationship management system there from scratch. Insane the stuff we cranked out by hand when there were dozens of companies churning out products that did the same thing only better. The good thing about working at Skinwiggle was I got to spend more time with Wyatt. He wasn’t in the best of shape. The Internet aged him. He was chronically sleep-deprived and overworked. He started complaining about his chakras and the troubling condition of his stool. He bitched constantly about the company, responding to every perceived slight with biting sarcasm. The thing about Web companies is there’s always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going off-line. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they’re not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you’re a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you’re on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code. Then, on top of the technical fucked-upness, you add the human emotions of an office environment. People feel undervalued, hold grudges, get snagged into little vendettas, fantasize about shoving their bosses off the roof. At Skinwiggle, where I was making $250 grand, there were constant turf wars. The CEO was this colossal prick named Vikram Ramakrishnan. He’d come up through the brutal Indian university system, and was unanimously reviled by his employees. Every morning he’d tell his assistant, “I’m ready for my breakfast,” and she’d go prepare him a bowl of oatmeal, cubed mangoes, orange juice, and coffee and bring it to him on a tray. Vikram believed the best way to motivate his employees was to either quote from the Upanishads or ask them, “How’s it feel to be a fucking failure?” in front of everybody at department meetings. He hired a bunch of his misogynist cousins to run the development team. Big-time nepotism. I recognized right away that I needed to get the fuck out of there as soon as I could. This was the spring of 2000. Then one day I woke up and all the start-ups were dying. One by one they started to wither. Massive layoffs all over the Bay Area. I quickly sold what Skinwiggle stock had vested and braced myself. A few weeks later the ax fell and Wyatt and I lost our jobs. I had been prescient and purchased a town house near Coit Tower, which was where we found ourselves the day after the layoffs. We got really, really fucking high and ate nachos and talked about what the hell had just happened to us. Not just in terms of the layoffs but in a more metaphysical sense. We’d veered off the path in our search for Nick, Squid, Bickle, and Kirkpatrick. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and discovered that I could live my modest lifestyle for thirty or so years without having to work again. Now, I felt, I had to wait for something. It was like my life had entered a lobby, somewhere I was supposed to sit and read old magazines. Which is just what I proceeded to do, more or less. My days were simple. I’d exercise, read, watch a movie, read some more, eat in restaurants, go on walks. It was a life so exotically different from the cubicle-bound existence I’d led for years, and in many ways it felt charmed and fantastic. I started dating, had a string of amusing relationships that didn’t last longer than a couple months each. I had no idea at the time the kind of bomb Erika was going to drop on us.

She and Wyatt were still together?

Yeah. I had plenty of room, so I invited them to live with me, rent-free. Erika’s career was starting to pick up steam. In her line of work, fantasy and science fiction writing, it was all about building brand awareness around the name and ensuring repeat readers through a series or trilogies. She could crank out a trilogy in a year. And not thin, wimpy little books. Big-ass doorstoppers. Often I could hear her writing upstairs, bashing the hell out of her keyboard. She typed like a prizefighter. Extraordinarily disciplined about her work. Wrote solid from nine to four every day.