He paused and looked across the restaurant.
"Sometimes when I'm loneliest, life looks the most dreadful and I don't want to be here. On earth, I mean. I want to be ... out there." He pointed to the sun coming in a window, a beam coming down, and the sky over the Bay. "The thought of BarCode is the only thing that keeps me tethered to earth."
"So what are you going to do about it, Michael?"
He sighed and looked at the other businessmen in the restaurant.
"But what are you going to do about it?" I asked again. He looked up at
me. "Is that why I'm here, Michael? Am I getting involved in this?"
"Can you do me a favor, Daniel?"
I knew it. "What."
"Look at me."
"I'm looking."
"No, look."
Michael put himself under the microscope lens: pudgy; eyeglassed; ill-clad; short-sleeve shirt the color of yellow invoice paper; pale complexion; Weedwacker hairdo-the nerd stereotype that almost doesn't even really exist anymore-a Lockheed junior draftsman circa the McCarthy era. But for his almost Cerenkovian glow of intelligence, he might be mistaken for a halfwit or, as Ethan would say, a fuck-wit. I said, "Is there something I should be seeing?"
"Look at me, Daniel-how could anyone be in love with me!"
"That's ridiculous, Michael. Love has almost nothing to do with looks. It's about two people's insides mixing together."
"Nothing to do with looks? That's easy for all of you to say. / have to work everyday inside our body-freak world of an Aaron Spelling production. You think I don't notice?"
"Point being . . . ? From what I can see, if one person is feeling something, there's usually a pretty good chance the other is feeling the same thing, too. So looks are moot."
"But then they see me-my body- and it's over."
In a way I was losing my patience, but then who am I to be an expert in love? "I think you're perfectly lovable. Our office is a freak show and no indication of the world at large."
"You say that like a father whose son just got braces and headgear."
"What do you want me to do, Michael."
He paused and looked both ways and then to me: "I want you to visit Waterloo for me. Meet BarCode. Offer ... it ... a job. BarCode's the smartest programmer I've ever conversed with."
"Why don't you go, Michael?"
He looked down at himself and clamped his arms around his chest and said. "I can't. I'll be ... rejected."
Well, if there's one thing I know, it's Michael and his unbudgeability. "Michael, if I were to do this, under no circumstances would I be willing to pretend, even for one microsecond, that I were you."
"No! You wouldn't have to! Just say that I couldn't make it and you came in my stead."
"What if BarCode turns out to be a 48-year-old man wearing a diaper- a diaper with spaghetti straps?"
"Such is love-though I hope that wouldn't be the case."
"How long have you and BarCode been e-mailing each other?"
"Almost a year."
"Does BarCode know who you are? What you are?"
"No. You know the joke: On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog."
"Oh God."
"You'll do it!"
"BarCode could be anybody, Michael."
"I love their insides already, Daniel. We've already blended. I'll take what fate throws me."
"But tell me one thing-how can you talk to somebody for over a year and not even know their age or sex?"
"Oh, Daniel-that's part of the thrill."
Back at the office I went on a walk with Karla and told her about it right away and she said it was the most romantic thing she's ever heard of and she smooched me right there in the middle of a downtown street. "Michael is so brave to love so blindly."
When I told her that it was private and that Michael would prefer Dusty and Susan didn't know, her face expressed slight peevedness, but she understood. They can be merciless.
Susan showed me a dozen boxes of "Glitter Hair refill packs" she'd bought from the Barbie aisle at Toys-R-Us. It was so creepy-this dead fake hair inside a pink box. All Chyx are receiving an Official Chyx Wristband made of Pentium-grade knotted, liberated Barbie hair garnished with a small sliver of silicon lattice ingot made by a friend of Emmett's down in Sunnyvale. "Cool or what?" Susan already has over 3,500 Chyx "happening" on-line. So it looks as if Chyx is real. CNN really changed her world.
Time warp: it's been months since I've arrived here. How long have I been here? I can't tell. I leave for Waterloo in three days.
TUESDAY
I was with Mom in the car somewhere in Menlo Park and suddenly we were surrounded by, like, nine Porsches. It was just ridiculous. And Mom said, "When your father and I first moved here back in ' 86, and I saw all these cars, I said to myself, 'My, there's a lot of drug dealers here in this area.'"
"Mom, did you buy drugs for Dad's IBM parties?"
It's fun teasing Mom. She smiled, "Oh, you know ... I clip news clippings."
This quick chat served to remind me that while car status here is different than at Microsoft, it is no less hierarchical and fetishistic.
Ethan knows nothing of my matchmaking mission. He thinks I'm going to Waterloo to haggle over purchasing some subroutines and possibly to hire a new recruit. He came over to the house to tell me that he'll be accompanying me to Ontario-he has to speak with the people at CorelDraw in Ottawa. They're paying for him to go, so it's a different gig entirely.
I said that this was a truly random coincidence, except Ethan said I was not only being redundant ("random coincidence"), but that he didn't believe in randomness, which is, I imagine, a tacit admission of religiousness.
Ethan.
Odd.
He said he'd prove it tonight.
We then got into a discussion of Nerd Schools and the end of the era of "single-dose" education-and of course this led to a listing of schools that had the best nerd reputations.
• Cal-Tec (Extreme nerds; the Jet Propulsion Lab is just up the hill and around the corner. The big rumor is that they had to institute pass-or-fail grading because there were too many GPA-related suicides.)
•CMU
•MIT
• Stanford
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (for undergrads)
• Waterloo
• UC Berkeley
• Dartmouth
• Brown-"Hipster nerd school with a good undergrad comp-sci program."
We drove up to Redwood City and played electronic darts at a bodega there . . . Karla, Ethan, and I. Ethan and I grew up in suburbia, and we're both pretty good dart players (those nutty rumpus rooms). Karla's never played darts before tonight.
Anyway, it was three darts per person, per round. Ethan put in four quarters and selected a four-player round. We asked him why, and he said, "You'll see."
Karla went first, me second, Ethan third, and then for the fourth round we had what Ethan called, the "Random Round" where instead of any of us trying, we'd each huck a dart standing on one foot, gulping a beer, throw it backwards ... as silly as possible. Ministry of Silly Walks.
Needless to say, the Random Round won every single game, and always by a minimum of 100 points. It was scary.
Ethan said randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that's bigger than anything we can hold in our minds. "Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make."
Ethan!
Identity. I go by the Tootsie theory: that if you concoct a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you. With so few things around nowadays to loan a person identity, the palette of identities you create for yourself in the vacuum of the Net-your menu of alternative "you's"-actually IS you. Or an isotope of you. Or a photocopy of you.