The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  “My dad plays the guitar,” he informs me, then resumes sucking on his finger.

  “He does? That’s great.”

  “He has an electric one.”

  “I have one of those too, but I didn’t bring it in today.” In fact, I sold my Telecaster for $400 and my Japanese Les Paul copy for $250, but no need to confuse the lad.

  “Come on, Charlie.” His teacher comes to fetch him. Cute, right out of college, reminds me a little of Hannah. “Everyone’s gone upstairs.” She meets my eye through stylish pointy glasses. “Thank you, Mr. Knight. That was a lot of fun.” Hmm, hint of flirtation there?

  “Well, thanks. They’re great kids.”

  “I’m Stephanie, by the way. I loved the grasshopper.” Yep, she wants me. It’s funny—if I met this same girl in a bar and told her I played with puppets for a living, she’d run like hell. Something about seeing a man charm children charms women.

  Unfortunately, such situations, by definition, contain children. “Well, we better get this one back to class,” Stephanie says.

  Oh well. “It was nice to meet you, Charlie,” I say as she shepherds him out.

  “Stephanie’s a hot little number, isn’t she?” Here’s Harold, who has a real knack for stealth, lurking behind me once again.

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard “hot little number” said unironically before. “Hey there, Harold.”

  “Good job up there. The kids liked you.” Funny, I didn’t notice Harold in the audience. Maybe he has hidden cameras. He hands me an index card. I read, written on it in a childish scrawl:

  Harold

  What is this—he’s showing me he can write his name? Did I overlook that he’s mildly retarded? It’s so bizarre I almost laugh out loud. Then I think to look on the other side of the card. There, in reassuringly adult lettering, are his full name and an email address. He must have recycled the index card, probably from some perfunctory gift-giving from students to staff.

  “That’s my address,” Harold says in a conspiratorial whisper, although by now we’re the only ones in the room. “You ever want to follow up on the things we discussed, you can reach me there.” Anyone overhearing his weighty tone would think the things we discussed involved hard drugs or a hit man instead of a small investment in Krugerrands. Without waiting for a reply, he turns and walks out, apparently having forgotten his assigned task of helping carry my stuff. At the door he turns and winks at me. People actually wink?

  I look at the address more carefully: RememberWaco93@ mindspring.com.

  Hidden cameras, definitely.

  I find a place for lunch near the school, one of those diners that pretends not to be a diner by using red cabbage in the coleslaw and chalking little botanical filigrees around the edges of the specials blackboard. I bolt a tuna melt and soup and slump back against the booth, reading the paper, letting the performance adrenaline wear off.

  Newspapers are increasingly surreal to me. Day after day, the single most important issue facing humankind gets next to zero play in the press. Especially compared to the staggering amount of coverage of Miss Lewinsky’s fling with her employer. When someone does see fit to run the occasional half-assed Y2K article, the first half is pretty much boilerplate, reexplaining the basic nature of the problem before the reporter can manage to report anything new. And then they always couch the scarier possibilities in a look-at-the-freaks context: by the way, here’s what a few gun-toting paranoiacs who have fled to rural Montana think might happen. It’s like reading a newspaper from 1938 and the only article that mentions any sort of tension in Europe is a piece on the fashion page about Mussolini’s uniform.

  It’d be easier to swallow if reporters and editors were simply oblivious to technology. Far from it. Papers have entire sections now about computers, and what do they cover? A new web site that delivers fresh fish to your home! An up-and-coming vendor of digital melodies that will play whenever your cell phone rings! A community of devoted players of a networked game that lets you pretend to be an ax-wielding dwarf! And if the fish will rot when the refrigerators sputter and thaw—so? If nobody’s phone will be ringing after the switches crash irrevocably—who cares? If genuine flesh-and-blood marauders with honest-to-god axes will be kicking down your real-life door looking for actual food and water—what, me worry?

  I leave the Sun-Times on the table with my tip and set out to find some real news.

  On my way to the school I spotted a Kinko’s, and after a few wrong turns I find it again. I leave the bedraggled clerk my driver’s license as collateral, ensconce myself at one of the Macintosh terminals, open three browser windows, and wait for three Y2K sites to load. Multitasking, that’s me.

  This moment always gives me a surge of anxiety, partly over what bad news I’m about to find and partly a flashback to my initial revelation. Hard to believe so little time has passed since the beginning of July, my first horrified hours of discovery. I knew vaguely of some sort of computer snafu related to the turn of the century but gave it no more thought than I did the existence of downloadable ring tones. I can’t quite call that frame of mind to mind—what must it have been like, to know such a thing was out there but not care? Sometimes I wish I could return to that unenlightened state, even at the cost of being consigned to the same fatal surprise that awaits everyone else. In the nation of the blind, the one-eyed man has too damn much responsibility. What if I’d never come across that magazine article online, never clicked on the Related Links at the end of it? But I was on summer vacation, single, and at loose ends, doing a lot of aimless web surfing for lack of a better activity. I clicked.

  At first I couldn’t quite make sense of what I saw. Starvation, cholera, depopulation? Looting, anarchy, martial law? These terms belonged in a history textbook or an Amnesty International report, not in discussions of a software bug. But the first site led to others, and as I dug deeper it started to sink in. Hundreds of sober-minded, articulate people—programmers, engineers—had talked among themselves and decided the computerized systems of the world were on the verge of collapse. The only questions were how hard, fast, and lasting the collapse would be and how to get ready for it. This was not idle speculation. You expect computer nerds to toss around a lot of acronyms, but the most common one on these sites was TEOTWAWKI, for The End Of The World As We Know It. And they weren’t kidding. These people were scared, and I got scared too, and cracked open a bottle of scotch. The whole thing seemed less menacing after my fourth or fifth scotch, and I turned from the Internet to the television. If this Y2K thing were real, shouldn’t everyone be talking about it all the time? With such a shitstorm pending, would anyone still be showing music videos and sitcom reruns? But not a word on the network news, on CNN. Must be something wrong with all those panicky programmers. I fell asleep.

  Through the next morning’s headache, I logged on again.

  This time I spent the better part of the day searching for proof that it was all a hoax, a fantasy. There must be some evidence out there, right? For each catastrophist, a lucid naysayer with a compelling case for why all would be well? I found none. Not a single cogent argument that Y2K would not be an Old Testament–sized disaster. Oh, plenty of pollyannas insisted that everyone’s concerns were overblown. People will fix things, they said, because things need to be fixed. Circular logic, wishful thinking. No time, no time, the pessimists replied. And even without understanding all the technical jargon, I could see there was not nearly enough time. I opened the bottle of scotch again.

  I went on like that for two or three more days, speaking to nobody, leaving the apartment only to go down the block for sandwiches, amassing gut-wrenching data by day and blotting it out with liquor by night. By the time my booze ran out, my denial did too.

  My pages finish loading. I browse the headlines, the latest links culled by the dedicated souls who have taken it upon themselves to piece together this nightmarish puzzle. Pretty light week for hard news. The U.S. Postal Service is in big trouble, if you read betw
een the lines of a story in the Washington Post. And in Wisconsin, a power company’s indiscreet lawyer let it slip that customers might do well to have gas-powered generators on hand, just in case—a statement the company of course disowned within seconds.

  I turn to the message boards. One is still up in arms over a dumb incident from a few weeks ago. An unexceptional polly-doomer shouting match escalated into a firestorm when someone dredged up and posted the real-life identity of his pseudonymous opponent. A moderator quickly deleted that message, and then the deletion became a controversy of its own. The place has seethed ever since with dozens of scathing threads, florid accusations of censorship and collusion, bluster about line-crossing and lawyers. I skim some of it out of curiosity, but I can’t be bothered to keep up with all this shit. By now whatever anyone posts is eight generations removed from the original beef, which had nothing to do with Y2K in the first place. The boards do harbor scraps of useful information—how to store diesel fuel safely, where to buy cheap grain—and a heartening dose of camaraderie, a much-needed sense that I’m not making all this up. But it’s a tough slog to read between the rancorfests, personality clashes, and who-said-what-when hairsplitting.

  For my own part, I steer clear of the bloodbaths and limit myself to the occasional jesterish quip. Someone has started a thread pointing out how fast traffic jams or banditry could choke off Manhattan’s few bridges and tunnels and how soon New York City will run out of food without a steady inflow of trucks. I chime in:

  I see a simple solution to the problem of urban food shortages. After all, what’s one thing you’re certain to find in the basements and tunnels beneath every big city? Millions of pounds of tasty rat meat! Enough to sustain the citizenry for months.

  Only problem with this plan is, the rats will only come out if it’s dark. Hmm, if only we had some way of making the lights go out…

  —r. k. racc00n (dontspam@onme.com)

  The double zeroes are a nice touch, I think. They can be read either as raccoon eyes or as the hateful pair of digits that got us into this mess.

  Now for the newsgroup. I bring up Netscape’s newsreader and peruse the titles of hundreds of fresh messages, way too many to catch up on when I’m paying by the hour. Maybe tomorrow night in Denver I can get on Uncle Frank’s computer for a chunk of quality Usenet time. But I see the October survey has been posted. Every month the denizens of comp.software.year-2000 have a chance to stand up and be counted, putting hard numbers to our predictions and preparations. For this we use the 1-to-10 Neuhardt scale, named for the guy who first suggested that each poster, whether polly or hardcore survivalist, quantify his estimate of just how bad Y2K’s outcome will be. I started as an optimistic 6.

  Please make sure the first line of your reply is in the following format:

  name, Neuhardt, years of programming experience

  Add as much explanation as you want below this, but failure to format the first line properly may result in your responses being omitted from the summary totals.

  For newcomers, an overview of the Neuhardt scale (check DejaNews for full details):

  1-bump in the road, few problems, what were we worried about?

  5-global depression, we muddle through, return to normalcy after 2–3 years

  10-TEOTWAWKI, buh-bye Western Civilization, order your coffin now

  As I’ve done the last two months, I add my voice to the choir:

  r. k. racc00n, 8, 0

  My Neuhardt score is up from 7 last month. Still optimistic that enough people will see the light in time for us to avoid the worst consequences, but my personal experience trying to get the message through is starting to make me wonder.

  Making the programming statistic part of the survey was a good call. It lets you separate the people with some real perspective on this thing from the laypeople like me who are just trying to figure it all out. The scariest survey answers are the ones from the guys with thirty years of hacking mainframes under their belts who are locked in at 10 and unlikely to budge. You get a lot of those.

  I tear myself away and check my email, where I find a note from my sister. Who I wish would stop using the subject line to begin the first sentence of every message.

  Subject: Randall, are you still

  coming in November? Let me know. Morgan wants to say hello.

  This is him typing (with a little help): hi uncle Randall!!!

  Okay, me again. He’s doing a little better in school. Knock wood.

  My nephew had a traumatic first couple of weeks of kindergarten, which anyone who knows Nicole could have predicted. The boy is scared of his own shadow, because he expects Mom to jump out of the bushes screaming Morgan! Don’t you know shadows have carcinogens? You take a toddler, ignore his own natural inclinations about what to approach and what to avoid, and graft in their place a bewildering array of special-report-that-could-save-your-life scare stories, and you end up with a kindergartener with some seriously off-kilter instincts. At Ogden we had a girl who was petrified of eggs. If another kid had a hard-boiled egg in his lunchbox, she’d gravitate tearfully to the far edge of the room. “I can’t go near eggs,” she explained somberly, alarming her teacher—an allergy? Why wasn’t the school told? But no, her parents said, no allergy, it’s a mystery to us what she’s talking about. It wasn’t such a mystery when you considered the svelte go-getters she had for parents, and a likely scenario emerged: over brunch one day, in a fit of cholesterol-conscious righteousness, Mom or Dad pronounces to a friend, “Eggs? I wouldn’t go near a plate of eggs!” and the seed is sown. You have to be careful with your eccentricities around kids—they’ll refract them back at you in weird magnified ways. And my sister’s got eccentricities to spare.

  Dad keeps asking about you. He says e-mail to your old school address gets sent back. I haven’t given him this address, but I feel guilty. On the investigation front, it looks like he’ll be formally censured but keep his job and tenure. Give him a call. Where are you, anyway? Love, Nicole.

  I write back and say my November visit is still on. I refrain from telling her to give my address to Dad, but thank her for updating me on his case. She probably assumes the plagiarism flap is why I’m not speaking to him. I couldn’t care less if my father lifted some sentences from another historian twenty years ago, but I don’t want to bring up Y2K with Nicole until I can give her the whole story face-to-face.

  There’s also a terse email from my friend Carson, whom I’m supposed to visit at the end of October. In fact he’s only a few hours away from here, and it’d make more sense for me to go up to Minneapolis right now, but he’s a busy guy and we couldn’t work it out with my gig schedule. I’ll catch him on the return trip. And last in my inbox, something from Hannah—my heart gives a reflexive flutter when I see her name in the Sender column, but it’s just the latest set of Clinton jokes, forwarded to everyone in her address book. (What gives you a blow job for eight days in a row? Hanukkah Lewinsky!) Is it normal to keep your ex-boyfriend on your group email list? Well, is it normal to drive clear across the United States to tell your ex-girlfriend we’re all doomed? Point, counterpoint.

  The hand dryer in the bathroom of Kinko’s has the obligatory Wipe hands on pants scratched in at the end of the instructions. Wonder if these things have any date-sensitive computer chips? Before long, as we shiver in front of wood-stoves, burning paper towels for fuel, we’ll wonder how we could have gazed upon the miracle of plentiful hot air at the push of a button and been so blasé as to mock it with Wipe hands on pants. I treat myself to a second round of drying. Might as well get it while the getting’s good.

  Damien has gone to the library for a few hours, and his roommates have chipped in for a couple of gallon jugs of bad red wine. Having contributed five dollars to the cause (from each according to his ability), I’m now enjoying a plastic cup of the astringent stuff, watching the permanent floating Sega Genesis tournament, making small talk with whoever’s not engrossed in the onscreen action. After a couple of
cups of Gallo, I don’t even mind the mess anymore. In fact, the place’s encrustations are taking on a sort of homey appeal. Nice not to have to worry about spilling. Who’d notice?

  Laurent, thinking I might be bored, hands me a copy of the socialist newspaper. Laurent was born in France but retains only a trace of an accent, a little more once he’s started drinking. He has a spidery build, strikingly long fingers, and a black ponytail he wears draped forward over one shoulder or the other. You can never quite catch him in the act of switching shoulders. Damien told me he’s descended from some famous writer, Rimbaud maybe, although wasn’t Rimbaud gay? I wonder how a Frenchman can tolerate, let alone enjoy, this sorry excuse for a Burgundy, but Laurent sucks it down as avidly as the rest of us.

  I leaf through the paper. I’ve seen it before, probably even bought a copy or two from assorted earnest hawkers in and around Harvard Square. The articles are short, written with the same breezy brevity you’d find in a mainstream tabloid. I guess depth and subtlety have to fall by the wayside when you’re trying to address all the world’s ills in sixteen pages a month and still leave room for event listings. In this issue they’re concerned with police brutality, a revolt in Indonesia, a Teamsters election, corporate megamergers, and health insurance. What’s always struck me about contemporary socialists is that I’m inclined to agree with a lot of what they say until they actually say it, at which point they annoy the hell out of me and make me want to take the opposite side out of spite. It shouldn’t have to be that way. Their basic goals—equality, human rights, freedom from want and war—ought to be an easy sell. But the trappings! The Lenin-era iconography, the color red, the century-old terminology. Don’t they realize how offputting these things are to millions of people who should be their natural allies? And Karl Marx, my god. How you can look at the writings of someone who never saw a telephone, a movie, a car, or a transistor, let alone a computer, and claim his analysis of society is anything but sheer anachronism—I mean, isn’t it time for the next Marx? Someone to come up with a new grand unified theory instead of working overtime to shoehorn the modern world into the old theory? Well, that someone isn’t in this loft, that’s for sure. This gang is too busy selling red newspapers and gorging on the digital fruits of the economy they abhor. Which is about to fall to its knees because of a phenomenon that merits not a single word in their newspaper. I toss it aside. “Dude, do that backflip thing,” Laurent kibitzes. I have to use the bathroom.