by Kevin Shay
When I come back, Laurent has subbed into the game. He always plays as one of the female characters. Whether this has any deep psychosexual meaning or he just finds her the most efficient ass-kicker, I couldn’t say. Taking his place on the sidelines is Keith, a burly sweatshirted guy with a mop of Archie-orange hair. The wine has turned his face bright red. Keith would look as at home in a frat house as in this revolutionary hotbed, which, come to think of it, could pass for Delta Tau living quarters if you swapped Che for Pamela Anderson. He lights a cigarette and shakes out his Segacramped hand.
“You look bored,” he says. “You sure you don’t want to play?”
“No, no. I’m just thinking.”
“Aawwww, shit!” cries Laurent, punctuating a successful flying tackle.
“Hey, at your meetings, do you guys ever talk about the Y2K computer bug?”
Keith considers this. “Hmm. I don’t think it’s come up.”
“What a scam,” says Laurent, not swerving a single degree from the television.
“Scam, did you say?”
“Oh, come on, it’s such an overblown thing, right? I mean, the computer makers and the consultants just want to make money, so they go around telling companies, Pay us a million dollars to replace your system or it’ll be a disaster.”
“OK, but what if they’re right? Just because some people stand to make some money from fixing it doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem. What do you think will happen if it doesn’t get fixed in time?”
“Hey, they’ll fix it. If the bosses see this bug could cut into their profits? Just watch how fast they fix it then. Because they don’t care how much it costs. They’ll just pass it on to the consumer, or they’ll downsize a few thousand workers. You think they give a fuck?”
“I hear you.” I address the back of Laurent’s head as he continues his game. “But I just think a lot of companies are so behind that it’s too late to fix no matter how many resources they throw at it. And then they have to test it once it’s allegedly fixed. The city of Dublin was just in a traffic jam for a whole day because they put in a Y2K compliant traffic light system without testing it.” I read about it at Kinko’s this afternoon. I’m off my game, a little drunk, tossing out miscellaneous data points with no narrative coherence. “I mean, what do you think will happen once there are thousands of problems like that all over the place? It’s like, I don’t know, grains of sand in the gears of the system. If you throw enough in there, it stops eventually, right?” It stops! Is this getting through? Isn’t that what these people have been fighting for? For the system to stop?
Laurent wins his fight and finally turns toward me. “Look, whatever problems there are, the lower-echelon workers will bear the brunt of it. Like always.”
“I’m not talking about a few problems, or even a lot of problems. I’m talking about potentially a…a cataclysm! Listen, this unbreakable rule where the workers get screwed and the rich get richer—doesn’t that depend on the machines running?”
“Exactly. So the bosses will make sure the machines keep running.”
“Word,” Keith agrees. “They’ll send you into the gears to clean out the sand, even if you get chewed up.”
Man, we’re neck-deep in irony now. A coterie of alleged Marxists, so awed by the power of capitalism to perpetuate itself that they can’t see when it’s about to fail.
“My uncle’s, like, a born-again?” says Ron, who just lost to Laurent. “And he’s all convinced we’re in the end times? That shit freaks me out.” He cedes the controller to Keith.
“But no, no, wait,” I say. “Y2K has nothing to do with the millennium in any religious sense. Even though the media likes to—”
“Well, it’s all the same to my uncle. He’s, like, ready for the Rapture? But he’s also got all this firewood and bags of rice and medical supplies ready for 2000. Yeah, he’s a weird dude. My cousins are only allowed to listen to Christian rock.”
“You gotta love fundies,” Laurent says.
“Opiate of the masses,” Keith says.
I know a losing battle when I see one. I reach for the Gallo jug.
chapter 3
447
Days
What time is it? I blink until the digital clock comes into focus. OK, eight in the morning, that’s reasonable. Could be sunset or high noon for all the light that gets in here. These damn blackout curtains hotels and motels all have—a boon to the jetlagged, maybe, but shouldn’t they be optional? Hi, I’d like a nonsmoking single room with some sense of diurnal rhythm, please. I get up, treading squeamishly on wall-to-wall that’s absorbed the juices of countless bare feet. Just once I want to see a motel room with nice finished hardwood floors. Maybe a few tasteful throw rugs.
I approach the shower with high hopes. Yesterday morning I went without, unable to bear another encounter with Damien’s infernal facilities. I strip down and settle in for a good long fingertip-wrinkling shower. It doesn’t quite fulfill my dreams. Decent pressure but unnaturally soft and slippery water, artificially purged of all minerals, the kind where no amount of rinsing will remove the sensation of soapiness. But it’s better than the opposite, abrasively hard water like at that Motel 6 outside Greenville, South Carolina. When did I become such a connoisseur of the low end of the hospitality industry? Curtains, carpets, showers, vending machines. I should write a guidebook.
Most of yesterday is an undifferentiated blur of I-80. Illinois, Iowa, half of Nebraska. The last thing I remember distinctly is saying goodbye to Damien. As I was about to drive away, he asked me to “keep him posted about that Y2K.” I told him I’d send him some links, but he was pretty obviously humoring me. So now next year, if the cities implode and he’s still in Chicago, will it be my fault? Of course not, but every time I leave someone unconvinced, I can’t help feeling I could have been more persuasive, gotten through somehow with a different avenue of approach. The millennial fate of everyone on my list weighs on my conscience. Pretty grandiose for a puppeteer, Randall. I get out of the shower and towel off the slick water.
On TV, CNN buzzes with preimpeachment excitement. The anchorpeople glow with eager anticipation, like kids the week before Christmas. I find a cartoon that knows it’s a cartoon and leave it on while I dress. Then I open the nightstand drawer and make my trademark precheckout switch: Bible out, Time Bomb 2000 in. Nice edition of the Good Book, a classier binding than you usually find. Another one for my growing collection. And how do I get rid of them, once they start to take up too much room in my trunk? Hand them out on the street, maybe.
I think the Gideons originally intended for the Bibles to sit prominently on the dresser, but you always find them discreetly drawered. Interesting organization, the Gideons. I read up on them a little at an Internet café in Sarasota. Not only are their Bibles ubiquitous in by-the-night accommodations, but they dole them out by the hundreds of thousands to schoolchildren, the armed forces, prison inmates, hospital patients, and anyone else who can’t refuse. A cynical and scattershot method of proselytizing, ideal for busy “businessmen” who can’t be bothered with one-on-one witnessing. You’d think in this era of litigious political correctness, someone would have raised a stink about the Bible in the drawer—why the King James and not a Talmud or a Koran or the collected works of Madalyn Murray O’Hair?
A few desultory stretching exercises make no headway against the tightness in my hamstrings and shoulders. I should really be keeping up some sort of exercise regimen during these days of interminable driving. No reason I can’t jog a few laps around the motel or do calisthenics right here in the room. For the first week I tried jumping jacks, but stupidly did them in stocking feet and nearly gave myself a stress fracture. Well, forget it, I’ll just stiffen up until the West Coast and rectify it there. Time to get back on the road.
To kick off the drive I put on a tape of an old album by Rick Del Vecchio, my former guitar teacher. I’ve always thought of it as the Bronchitis Album. As Rick tells it, he had the flu but couldn
’t afford to cancel the session. He somehow manages to summon enough wind to punch out the vocal parts, but after every line you hear his labored, unhealthy wheezing almost as loud as the guitar. You can even hear it on the instrumental numbers. The recording is nearly as old as I am, his decades-ago flu obviously unconnected to his present maladies, but listening to it starts to get me nervous about what shape I’ll find Rick in when I see him in San Francisco in a few days.
Side one ends, and the stereo tries to autoreverse the cassette. Something in there clicks in an altogether different way than it’s supposed to. Then a whirring, then a flapping on top of the whirring and a few more clicks. Then silence.
“Oh, you fuck,” I tell the device. I hit play, then eject a few times, then all the other buttons, singly and in various combinations. Nothing. No more tape deck.
“And he later discovered…that at that very moment…Rick Del Vecchio had passed away,” I say in a soporific NPR voice. Well, if that’s the worst that goes wrong with the Custom Cruiser this month, I’ll be lucky. I pat the dashboard affectionately, consoling my station wagon on its flesh wound. Just hang in there for a few more weeks, old pal. Jesus, I’m having enough trouble on this trip even with the logistics going smoothly. I don’t even want to contemplate what I’d do if my car died.
All right, then, the radio. But after ten minutes I have to shut it off. Top 40 is vacuous, talk unbearable, classical alternately inaudible and bombastic. With the stereo off, though, my brain decides to fill the silence with a flurry of unwholesome Y2K ruminations. Everything I pass becomes portentous. That power station, that farm, the three towns listed on that exit sign. I can’t begin to guess how many towns I’ve passed, how many businesses and water towers and gas stations and telephone switches, every one of them with chips and programs that must—must—be tested and repaired in the next fourteen months. Even here in a half-populated state. And this is just one highway. When you begin to grasp the sheer magnitude of this country, of this computerized continent, how can you hold out even a glimmer of hope for remediation?
For the sound of a human voice, I try my own. I sing. I sing my way through western Nebraska. I sing old folk songs, new folk songs, Bob Dylan and John Prine and the Beatles and Billy Joel (his old stuff, before he got it into his head he could rock). From Kearney to Lexington I sing the original obscene lyrics to songs that have been bowdlerized into children’s songs. From Lexington to North Platte I make up new obscene lyrics about our oversexed president and his intern. I recite the Gettysburg Address in the voice of R. K. Raccoon. I sing Cyndi Lauper’s greatest hits in the voice of my bucktoothed puppet Jehosophat Jones, a grizzled ’49er who’s never found any gold but keeps looking with undimmed optimism—sort of the Trix Rabbit of the Gold Rush. I work on the voice for a new puppet I’ve been mulling over. He’s a patrician Southern senator, but I can’t decide what animal to make him. Senator Snake is too obvious, Senator Shrew sounds female, and Senator Sloth doesn’t fit the character, who’s corrupt but not necessarily lazy. If I weren’t constrained by propriety, I’d love to render him as Senator Scumbag (in the form of a giant condom) or Senator Screw, which would allow for endless Phillips-head one-liners. But that would never fly with the PTA.
Well, that was a fun few hours of vocal self-indulgence. It’s carried me deep into the prairie, the road signs few and far between now, nothing on either side of the highway but grassland punctuated by stands of trees and clumps of shrubs, with here and there a house, a barn, a field of baled hay. For a few minutes I can’t see a single car either ahead of or behind me, and suddenly I feel like an interloper in an alien world, as if the highway might be a relic from an extinct tribe, an insignificant scar across the plain. If the shit truly hits the fan, how long until the unmaintained asphalt cracks and the unimpeded grass reclaims the land?
There I go again. Better keep singing.
From the prairies to the mountains. My ears pop a couple of times during the ascent into Denver on 76, and I find myself acutely conscious of my breathing, wondering if I can really feel the thinner air or if it’s all in my head. This always used to happen on our visits to Uncle Frank’s family. Tell an impressionable kid he’s a mile high and the air has less oxygen than back home, and he starts to think maybe he’s short of breath all the time. Of course I only dwelled on it when we were just sitting around, not at the times when oxygen might have made a difference—skiing when we came for Christmas, hiking and ball-tossing when we came for Labor Day—because during those activities I was too preoccupied with trying to impress my cousin Derek. My childhood hero, five years older than me and a gifted athlete, which in suburban Colorado is something like being a reincarnated Tibetan lama, at least until you blow a big game and then they shun your family for generations. Derek’s star faded about halfway through high school—he was too short for colleges to scout him for basketball, and he found he couldn’t hit varsity-speed baseball pitching. I’d outgrown idolizing him by then anyway, and we came out here less often after the divorce, because we had to stay in Boston to divvy up Christmas—twenty-fourth with Dad, twenty-fifth with Mom. But I still associate Denver with the nervous thrill of fielding grounders with what I took for a future major leaguer.
Coming off the highway a little after four—no, wait, it’s three, I crossed a time zone somewhere in there—I consult the directions my uncle sent me. This is Frank and Lela’s fourth house in the suburbs south of Denver, each move taking them to a slightly bigger property with a less obstructed mountain view in a more Cleaverish neighborhood. Now their address is in Englewood, but according to Frank they technically reside in Unincorporated Whatever County. No need to worry about school districts anymore—this is their empty-nest house, the one where they’ll retire a few years from now, unless they decide to migrate south. Or, say, they end up in a FEMA resettlement camp eating government cheese. But anyway.
I find the house, turn into the driveway, uncork myself from the driver’s seat. The street is silent. They must have heard my car, but I see no lights or activity through the front windows. Well, they’re not expecting me until dinner, so I’m a couple of hours early. Ringing the doorbell for the third time, I notice a piece of paper between the door and the bottom pane of the storm door. A note, with a piece of tape on it that didn’t hold, in Lela’s handwriting:
Hi Randall—
Sorry if we’re not here yet when you arrive! Went to a function for the weekend, should be back late afternoon. Key in garage—code same as your dad’s. You can put your things in the study—make yourself at home—help yourself to anything.
See you soon!
Study? I don’t rate the guest room? And what kind of function? I go to the garage door and punch in the four digits my father and Frank invariably use whenever in life a four-digit code is called for (Derek’s birthday, backwards). My birthright, the family PIN. The brothers Knight may not be particularly close, but in case of emergency they can access each other’s voice mail.
I let myself into the house. Across the pile-carpeted living room, the Rocky Mountains loom through two picture windows that flank a big brick fireplace. Except for the neighboring houses that inconsiderately block the bottom third of the vista, it could be a postcard. But the view evidently wasn’t enough for my aunt and uncle, because on the side walls hang two large oil paintings of…the Rocky Mountains. I’ve never quite understood this.
On the way to the bathroom I pass the guest bedroom and see why I wasn’t invited to stay in it. Someone’s living there. Two people, it looks like, and not just overnight. A rack of clothes in the corner, a man’s clothes on half of it and a woman’s on the other, with a row of shoes beneath. Jewelry strewn on the dresser. A water glass on each nightstand next to the unmade bed. Derek and Marcie? No, couldn’t be. Last I knew, they had a nice apartment in downtown Denver. And Marcie’s five months pregnant. Maybe some friends of Frank and Lela’s are having their house fumigated or something.
I bring my bags in from the car.
In the study I find a folding bed, folded in its wheeled metal frame, a set of sheets and towels piled on top. I sit down in Uncle Frank’s faux-leather executive chair and swivel for a moment. A group of books on a shelf to the left of the desk catches my eye. My father’s collected oeuvre, all five books of it. Including his first, the one that now threatens to send his career over the guardrail.
Then I notice the tapes.
Four of the six shelves of this sizable bookcase are filled not with books but with audiocassettes and VHS tapes, a few CDs mixed in, each shelf stacked two rows high and two layers deep. But no music, no movies. The labels on many of the spines have a homemade laser-printed look. And the titles—what is this? They all relate to business, management, marketing, ambition, achievement, goal-reaching. Some are straightforward: Planning a Successful Meeting, Accounting Principles, Advanced Accounting Principles. Others are metaphorical: No More Red Lights! and Who Cares How Deep the Water Is If You Know How to Swim? And a few use strange terms from some special lexicon. The Path to Pearl. Diamond Lifestyles. Your PV—Times Three! I gape at the motivational cornucopia before me. This is not your ordinary household complement of self-help and how-to material. And here’s a four-volume series, Freedom from Negative People—