“Spud, I don’t think it’s ‘I left my brains down in Africa.’”
“Huh? But that’s what it says on the screen.” Where if you were expecting herds on the Serengeti, instead here’s silent clips from the second season of the Korean TV hit Gag Concert. Mugging, studio-audience laughter. Enough smoke in the room now that images on the screen are pleasantly smeared.
Maxine has been in a lengthy though inconclusive discussion with one of the strayed Korean bus passengers about the number 18 in the name of this noraebang.
“Bad number,” leers the Korean. “Sip pal. Means ‘sell pussy.’”
“Yes, but if you’re Jewish,” Maxine unperturbed, “it’s good luck. Bar mitzvah money, for instance, you should always give it in multiples of 18.”
“Sell pussy? for bar mitzvah?”
“No, no, in gematria, kind of… Jewish code? 18 computes to chai or life.”
“Same thing with pussy!”
This intercultural dialogue is disrupted by commotion from the men’s room. “Excuse me a moment.” She has a look in and finds Lester Traipse in the thick of some Web-design discussion, or actually insane screaming match, with an oversize nerd impersonator who may actually, Maxine fears, be in some quite different line of work. Drowning out even the piped-in karaoke music, the row ostensibly has to do with tables versus CSS, a controversial issue of the time, which has always, given its level of passion, struck Maxine as somehow religious. She imagines it will be difficult, no matter which side prevails, to appreciate, ten years from now, the all-consuming nature of the dispute. But here, tonight, it isn’t exactly what’s going on. Content is not, in this toilet at the moment, king. The fake nerd, for one thing, shows too much criminal potential.
Naturally Maxine has brought only an evening purse tonight, with no room for a Beretta Tomcat, hoping for the soiree to pass pleasantly enough to keep everybody off of the front page of the Daily News with a headline such as NORAE-BANGBANG. Packing or not, her duty is clear. She goes wading into the tempest of testosterone and manages to drag Lester to safety by a peculiar necktie with multiple images of Scrooge McDuck color-separated into burnt orange and electric orchid.
“One of Gabriel Ice’s badass entourage,” Lester breathing heavily, “mutual history. Sorry. Felix is supposed to be keeping me out of trouble.”
“Where’d he get to?”
“That’s him singing ‘September.’”
After politely allowing eight more bars of Earth, Wind, Fire and Felix, whom you could call Fog, to occur, as if casually, “Known Felix long?”
“Not long. We kept showing up in the same outer offices to pitch the same VCs, found we had a common interest in phantomware, or more like I was at loose ends and got fascinated and Felix was looking for somebody with search-engine-promotion skills, so we figured we’d team up. Better than my old arrangement anyway.”
“Sorry about hwgaahwgh.com.”
“Me too, but the partners were all morphing into CSS nazis like that specimen in the toilet, and I’m just an old die-hard tables person, as you see—gray, left-justified, no apologies, there have to be dinosaurs or the little kids won’t have nothing to look at in the museum, right?”
“So you’re happy to be out of Web design for a while?”
“Why linger? On to whatever’s next in the queue, just got to remember to keep clear of Gabriel Ice—unless of course he’s a dear friend of yours, in which case oops.”
“Never met him, but I hear very little good spoken. What’d he do, try to get cute with the term sheet?”
“No, strangely enough, that was all legit.”
“The money was good?”
“Maybe too good.” With some telltale fidgeting of the Florsheims indicating there’s more, much more. “That was always a puzzler. We were way too narrowband, too slow, even you could say too Third World, for hashslingrz. CSS or whatever, bandwidth never came up as much of an issue with us. Whereas Ice, he’s a bandwidth hog. Buying up all the budget-priced infrastructure he can find. Dotcoms that overbuilt their fiber networks, went broke doing it, their loss, Ice’s gain.”
Somebody who isn’t Felix is now channeling Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes,” and several people in the room are singing along. In this festive setting, the subtext of bitterness Maxine’s hearing in Lester’s story is so noticeable that her post-CFE/ESP alarm begins to beep. What can this mean?
“So your job for Ice…”
“Old-school HTML pages, in this case ‘He’s Taking More Lithium,’ everything encrypted, nothin any of us knew how to read. Ice wanted robot meta tags on everything. NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, no nothin. It’s supposed to be for keeping pages away from Web crawlers, stashed deep enough down to be safe. But anybody could’ve done that in-house, there was more nerd delinquents hanging around that place than a Quake server.”
“Yeah, I heard Ice was also running a sort of rehab clinic for ankle-biters. You’ve physically been to visit the hashslingrz HQ?”
“Shortly after he bought hwgaahwgh, Ice summoned me in for an audience. I thought at least I’d get lunch, which instead turns out to be instant coffee and health-food tortilla chips in a bowl. No salsa. No salt, even. All he does is sit there and eyeball me. We must have talked, but I can’t remember about what. I still have nightmares. Not about Ice so much as his posse. Some of them ex-jailbirds. I’d bet on it.”
“And I guess they made you sign some nondisclosure agreement.”
“Not that anything was ever gonna be disclosed around there, nobody was exactly opening their kimono, even now, with hwgaahwgh .com liquidated, the NDA stays in force till the foreseeable end of the Universe or Daikatana finally comes out, whichever happens first. Totally their call—having a bad day, little stomach episode, they can come take it out on me whenever they want.”
“And so… that discussion in the gentlemen’s lounge… may not have really been about Web design?”
He gives her one of those eyes-up glances that find enough light in the near distance to flash a specular warning. Like, I can’t go there, and you better not either.
“Only,” noodging, “that that guy in there doesn’t fit the usual nerd profile.”
“You’d think Ice would show more confidence, wouldn’t you?” with a look both faraway and fearful, as if seeing something approach from a close-enough perimeter. “Him with his high-level connections. Instead here he is insecure, anxious, angry, like some loan shark or pimp who’s just learned he can’t depend for help on the cops he’s paying off, or even on the higher levels he has to report to—no SEC to hear his sad complaint, no Fraud Unit, he’s alone.”
“So what you guys were really arguing about in there was somebody leaking information?”
“I should be so lucky. When information wants to be free, blabbing never counts as worse than a misdemeanor.”
With something else then in the next sentence, just about to drop, which is when Felix shows up, just short of suspicious, as if he and Lester might have their own nondisclosure arrangements.
Lester has been trying to compose his face into an innocent blank, but some tell must’ve slipped through, because Felix now throws Maxine one of those “You better not be fucking anything up, here, eh?” sorts of look, grabs Lester, and hustles him off.
She is once again, as with the make-believe nerd in the men’s toilet, visited by a strong hint of secret intention. As if customizing cash registers may all along have been a cover story for what Felix is really up to.
While for some the night is growing blurry, for Maxine it’s turning staccato, breaking up into small microepisodes separated by pulses of forgetting. She remembers looking at the sign-up sheet and seeing she has apparently, not fully knowing why, called Steely Dan’s up-tempo ballad of memory and regret, “Are You with Me Dr. Wu.” Next thing she knows she’s up at the mike, with Lester unexpectedly stepping in to sing harmony on the hook. During the saxophone break while Koreans holler “Pass the mike,” they find themselves doing disco moves. “Paradise Garage,” Maxine sez. “You?”