Shoulder the Sky Page 13

  Deep down, Darrell was still the eight-year-old nerd who had long ago been my best friend when we used to perform smelly experiments or put obnoxious concoctions on the road for cars to run over. He had more to tell but I was annoyed that he thought this so important. Little boy games. I took a bite out of the sandwich he had brought. Classic Darrell egg salad with paprika. I added that to my list of things I didn’t hate about the world. So far it was a small list of two items.

  “Why did they offer you a job?”

  “Only a handful of hackers — five to be exact — have ever gotten that far into Microsoft. The virtual site was set up to deceive hackers into thinking they we were in. But it was set up so that only the best of the best could succeed. And if you are that good, they want you on their team. Or at least they want your brain.”

  “Did you tell them it was a package deal, they can’t have your brain without your body attached?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far with our negotiations. But it’s looking like great things are ahead. Salut.”

  We bumped egg salad sandwiches.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  (New heading) Self-Definition

  We are memory; we are emotions. We are each worth about ninety-seven cents if reduced to our basic chemicals. It used to be sixty-two cents but the price of everything has gone up. If we dwell on our own insignificance then I suppose everything could seem pretty pointless but I’m not about to tell you that here. We all come into the world more or less the same. And the end of everyone’s story is the pretty much the same.

  We are not much more than bugs smashed on the windshield of life — don’t think that is profound or anything because I’m borrowing from that Mark Knopfler song.

  You think you have problems, I think I have problems. But take a scoop of any history and you’ll discover that it mostly comes up turds. If my memory serves me well (and it does), I could tell you that Galveston,Texas had a hurricane in 1900 and six thousand people drowned.

  That was the same year Sigmund Freud published his book Interpretation of Dreams. Extrapolate that on your Texas Instrument. The next year Queen Victoria died, which may be seen by some as a blessing — not so much because of her but what she represented. She had no choice in who she was because of the blood she was born with. In her name, the English terrorized anyone who was not English — barbarism in the name of civilization, that sort of thing. (An old sad song, a wailing.)

  President McKinley was assassinated that year and later someone named a mountain in Alaska after him. (Alaska had been bought at a kind of yard sale of real estate from the Russians for spare change in 1867.) McKinley’s assassin, Leon Colugos, had Russian blood in him and he claimed to be an anarchist — a guy who doesn’t believe in anything organized. In reality, he was not much different from the American soldiers or the British riflemen who all agreed it was okay to kill a person who represented something you didn’t approve of. Nobody named a mountain after Colugos, not even the Society of American Anarchists who had a hard time agreeing on anything except that no government is good government.

  This history lesson is not in vain, however. I just want to point out that we are gum on a shoe, you and I as individuals. If you don’t think this is important, go watch a rerun of Beverly Hills 90210, or better yet, read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Boy, that would cheer you up.

  So I’m on a rant. Enjoy it or bug out of the zone. Where was I? Up to 1902. You get gramophone recordings of people like Enrico Caruso who sang opera. A bunch of silly little wars, tribal battles, nothing global to really get your gobs into. Just infighting, small civil wars, attempts at revolution, mudslides on villages, viruses, smallpox, religious persecution, and so forth. Your average year.

  1903 is kind of interesting, though, because Wilbur and Orville (fine names for cartoon characters) Wright put themselves aloft on a machine from those sand dunes down at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Technology would continue to improve and commercial airlines would one day flush the contents of their toilets outside while flying over your town and people would wonder about these odd little summer showers. 1903 was also the year Henry Ford started his company and a million or so people down though the years would have incredibly boring jobs working on assembly lines. Those assembly lines switched over from Model A’s to tanks and other military vehicles when the big wars heated up a few years later.

  The Russians and the Japanese were killing each other over who owned Korea in 1904. The Russians went nuts in 1905 and there was lots of blood in the streets, people trampled by horses, mutiny on the Potemkin like in that old black and white film they showed you in school, baby carriages rolling down steps while soldiers shot weapons. Screaming mothers. And so forth.

  San Francisco had an earthquake in 1906 followed by a fire that pretty well burned the city down, but only 500 people died, not like in 1908 when an earthquake in southern Italy killed 150,000. (Notice I skipped 1907 where the usual run of bad luck happened but memory fails me except to note there was a “financial panic” where only a handful of rich cats lost fur and jumped to their deaths from buildings. It wasn’t quite the human freefall of 1929 but a kind of dry run, so to speak.)

  I’m going to try to end this decade on an upbeat note and remind you that Robert Peary made it to the North Pole in 1909 and discovered to everyone’s amazement that it was cold and that there was no Santa Claus. And in 1910 the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated and nearly a century later, Boy Scouts would still be asking their mothers to sew “Personal Hygiene” merit badges onto their uniforms.

  That’s my random decade. My hope is that it cheers you up somewhat in thinking that your own little moans and groans (you didn’t get the Play Station for Christmas, your investment in HDTV didn’t double your money, your dreams of becoming a skeletal fashion model were crushed by the girth of your thighs — etc., etc.) don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, who probably didn’t even realize that smoking was bad for his health at that point in his life and so he could actually enjoy a cigarette without guilt.

  If you are still with me, you realize that a kind of grey pall hangs over the Emerso.com site today. It’s an attempt to weed out the mere passersby on this potholed information highway, to discourage those who are not totally loyal to the cause — the mere hitchhikers and hangabouts. In an effort to streamline and serve our target audience, we want to weed out anyone who is not hard-core.

  And for those hard-core, hard-ass fans still with me (and I know you are there even though I will never, ever answer fan mail), I should leave you with brief reports about what happened right after the North Pole and Boy Scouts. Once again, there was the usual run of bloodbaths, head-lopping, and death by fungus on all continents. Also, in 1911, aircraft were first used as a military weapons in the Turkish-Italian War, which you may not have ever heard of unless you were a Turk or an Italian. A lot of people died in China bringing about a revolution that ended the Manchu dynasty, but then Chinese emperors were not exactly legendary for their kindness to peasants and blood was just waiting to be spilled. Mexico had a revolution. Fires in factories were big that year (I almost said “hot”), a notable one being at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York where 145 workers were killed.A few were Italian immigrants who had survived the earthquake of 1908.

  After that, it’s pretty much a gruesome road leading to WWI. It starts off with a whole lot of cruelty and suffering that takes place in small wars involving Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia,Turkey, and Romania. This is 1912 I’m talking about, quite the year for tragedy if you toss into the mix the Titanic sinking and fifteen hundred drowning because they didn’t have enough lifeboats. But you knew about that one because you saw the movie, and the upside is that near the tail-end of the century investors in the movie would make scads and scads of money. Yahoo.

  But that’s another website.

  Emerso

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The question driving the blinding confusion th
at was in my brain had no easy answer. I spent hours at my keyboard writing rants about anything I could get into my head. The destruction of the codfish in the North Atlantic, the decline of the right whales, the barefaced bozo-ness of restarting the arms race with new missiles in space, genetically modified foods, drug companies more interested in profits than cures for disease.

  I had stopped showing off what I knew about existentialism and German philosophers. I could tell from the postings on the bulletin board and the e-mails I would not answer that my old clientele was drifting away. I was down to cynics, hard heads, hard-asses, hard cases. My kind of people.

  Thanks to Darrell’s ultra-clever web mastering, my site drew spiders and forged automatic links. Punch in “revolution” or “anarchy” at Google and you’d end up with Emerso.com as maybe number three on your list. Some of my tribe were fascists; some were disenfranchised down-and-out homeless people tapping into my head-space from the computer in the downtown public library.

  I forged diatribes about the meaninglessness of the universe and the corruption of the human spirit; I denounced right-wingers, and when I grew weary of that, I denounced left-wingers. I despised the status quo in such eloquent terms that I drew kudos from weirdos who claimed to be making bombs in their basements.

  My hatred of humanity, I argued, was based on my love of humanity. I raged because I wanted to change the world as it so pitifully existed. My website was my lever and the web itself was the fulcrum. I don’t know what strange alien turf I was standing on, but I was still trying to lift a gargantuan weight. And I was trying to do it with words.

  My father, on the other hand, had become enamoured with food and cooking. Our kitchen was crowded with cans and boxes of unusual and exotic forms of sustenance. The refrigerator was stuffed with organic vegetables. I was not opposed to eating what he cooked. Lilly made faces and stuck out her pierced and baubled tongue but she ate what he prepared nonetheless.

  I liked the way our house smelled when he made his own spaghetti sauce. That was not the case at first. But the wafting aroma of tomato, garlic, oregano, cumin, and all the rest was something I grew to appreciate. It was number three on my list of the things I liked about the world. It was still a small but growing list and I’d averaged one likeable new thing per week. But it was not enough to sustain me. The anger was not going away.

  I sucked it in during school. I concentrated on invisibility, positioned myself behind Kathy. Looked at her hair. But began to realize this was getting pretty looped.

  Corporate scalpers heard about Darrell from a mole inside Microsoft and he had a few other job offers. No one knew yet he was only fifteen and a kid who had received a modest C+ in health class. Darrell claimed that his mind wandered and he just wasn’t interested in the human reproductive system.

  Every once in a while I broke my own rules and actually read the e-mail people sent to my site. I was beginning to think that Emerso.com was headed into its final days. I was attracting too many weird fans. Mostly embittered people like me trying desperately to find someone to blame. Not long ago, people would write asking me for advice (even though I never, ever answered their mail) and they would imagine I was responding to them personally when they read my postings — say, my short thesis on Darwinism and deism — and then assume it was a pretty good answer to a personal query about what to do about a husband who ignores his wife in favour of fixing his ’57 Chevy.

  But now that I was attracting the let’s-make-bombs-in-our-basement crowd, I was being asked if I wanted to join a neo-Nazi party or an organization called ICHTHOS that wanted to free the fish from all the world’s aquariums. I was asked to be a spokesperson for better living conditions for chickens about to be slaughtered for KFC. A fringe political bunch called the Blue Party wanted to know if I would run in a federal election. One woman in an unnamed correctional institution asked me if I would marry her and father her child. And so forth.

  I would have to talk to Darrell about pulling the plug on Emerso and we’d have to do a pretty clean wipe. I don’t think I’d want it wandering around cyberspace as some websites have been known to do — like a commercial fishermen’s plastic filament driftnet cut loose and travelling with the currents causing endless death and destruction to thousands of fish for God knows how long.

  The thought of cutting myself off from my Emerso persona, however, gave me another pang. I had set myself up as some kind of surrogate parent to a family — a bizarre assortment of humanity for sure, people I’d be afraid to be in the same room with. But a family nonetheless. My own crippled real family was one thing but I needed more. And if I cut off Emerso, it might be like lopping off my right foot to save me from the gangrene that would seep into the rest of my body and kill me. It was going to hurt like hell.

  I scrolled through the pithy, the posturing, and the paranoia-filled e-mails until I came to this one:

  “What is Emerso angry about?” was the entire contents of the unsigned message that came from the address axletwister@hotmail.com.

  Screw you, I responded in my head, but my fingers would not tap the keys.

  I scrolled on to other messages. Some idiot had downloaded the entire contents of Mein Kampf and sent it to me as an attachment. One I would not open.

  Another marriage proposal. This one was from a seventy-year-old woman in a nursing home who claimed to be political prisoner.

  And then this one came yet again, but in a more personal form.

  “What is Martin angry about?” It came from the same source as the earlier anger question.

  Only two real options, I figured: Dave or Darrell. Either one, messing with my head. I phoned Dave first. He said he was between clients.

  “Not me. Someone else has found you out. What were they asking?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “How are you doing? You skipped your last appointment.”

  “Things are working out. I’m cured, maybe.”

  “Doesn’t work like that. ‘Here, kid. Take a pill. Fix your head.’”

  “How come I didn’t get the machine?” I asked. “I always get your machine.” Dave’s message was always the same. Dave’s voice: “Hi, you’ve reached the machine. Leave a message after the bleep.” He called it a bleep.

  “I’m going to take some time off. A kind of sabbatical. I’ve got some travelling I want to do. I’m referring my clients on to other professionals. One by one.”

  “Then?”

  “I’ll do a disappearing act.”

  “You bastard. You’re running away.”

  “I think of it as running to.”

  I felt rage. “I should never have trusted you in the first place.”

  “Martin, I’m not leaving until you say it’s okay to leave.”

  “Like I said, I’m cured.”

  “Convince me. Come over some time. We’ll talk.”

  “Nah. That’s okay. Just refer me on to someone else.”

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you and I are a lot alike.” Darrell swore that he had not sent me the e-mail questions either. It was somebody else. I read the origin of the mail to him over the phone.

  “I can trace it. A little program I borrowed while snooping around. Stay on the line.”

  I scrolled backward through old messages on my screen from a while back. I had almost forgotten about my promo package predicting extraordinary things in the lives of my good followers. Guys had made up with girlfriends, a couple of UFO stories, religious experiences, someone remembered a past life while eating frozen yogurt, nobody reported anything negative — all good stuff, some of it pretty boring, but my old fans were impressed. Emerso had set off scads of small miracles.

  And then Emerso had changed. Hard-core, hard-ass. A more comfortable identity in some ways. I liked to rant, to vent, to extrapolate new cynical meanings from history. The new-age flakes had no doubt moved on to loftier sites than mine. Now it was just me, the fascists, and
the committee to prevent penguins from being exposed to television.

  “Got an answer for you, Martini,” Darrell said. “You’re good.”

  “No, Martin, I’m bad. Bad is good in this biz.”

  “So who is it?”

  “Kensington Miller.”

  “Heavy Metal Math.”

  “Whodathunkit?” One of Darrell’s favourite expressions from when we were little kids.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was really strange seeing Mr. Miller again. He had bags under his eyes and he was still unshaven — a beard now, partly grey, covered his chin. He tugged at it as he looked at me.

  “Martin.”

  “Mr. Miller, it’s been a while.”

  He shrugged. “I’m into this new lifestyle thing.” He opened the door wider and I walked in. His new lifestyle was pretty much like the one Lilly and Darrell and I had encountered before. It involved closed blinds and a cornucopia of multi-coloured beer cans strewn about the living room, some crushed, some not. Mr. Miller flicked off the TV. Oprah faded off the tube.

  “It’s recycling day. I was just trying to get things organized,” he said, knocking a couple of empty Moosehead beer cans off a chair for me to sit down.

  “You thinking about going back to teaching?”

  “Nah. I don’t think they’ll let me back.”

  “Why not try?”

  “I’ve been kind of busy.” He swept his arm round the room as if to suggest he’d been at work at something.

  “How’d you know Emerso was me?”

  “I didn’t at first. Dave must have told me to check out the site. I was into killing time. The Internet can be a great place to go if you don’t have anything you want to do.”

  “He promised not to tell anyone.”