The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  And really, what more did I want him to do? It’s not like they live in the middle of Los Angeles. A little too close to a medium-sized city for comfort, but Santa Fe might be safer than a lot of other places. People there don’t lack the self-sufficiency gene like they do in the major metropolises. So maybe what I really want is for them to catch a dose of my anxiety, to feel my pain, as our fearless leader might put it. Selfish. But also I want them mentally ready for a huge and ugly global reversal of fortune. The sheer shock will make it so much worse for everyone, and I can’t stand the thought that my mother will be one of the millions of stunned sheep whose panicked bleats will herald the millennium.

  rkracc00n: mom

  shelly_knight1953: I had mahi-mahi.

  rkracc00n: please don’t be one of the millions of stunned sheep whose panicked bleats will herald the millennium

  shelly_knight1953: Have you ever tried it?

  It’s somewhat like swordfish.

  Oh boy. Thought I had the hangover in remission, but here it comes back for one last cold-sweat hurrah. Gotta go, Mom. Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone. Deep breaths. I log off, pay the barista, and seek fresh air.

  With a few hours to kill before I see Hannah, I wander from my hotel in the general direction of the South of Market bar near her office where she told me to meet her, consulting my map every few minutes, basing my route on each block’s picturesqueness. The ludicrous hills make this more exercise than I’ve had in weeks. Good way to shake off the post-hangover malaise. Just as well I left the car near the hotel, where I’ve signed on for another night (but not another decanter of sherry—for the love of God!), because the Oldsmobile’s brakes haven’t been looked at in ages. When Hannah first moved here she bought a Toyota with manual transmission, but she found it so nerve-racking to put the car into gear while stopped on one of these hills that she traded it in for an automatic after a month. Hannah was never a great driver, especially on stick. I remember lots of lurching around Boston in the Mitsubishi she shared with her sister Peggy. Her habit of slowing down to find and light a cigarette always made me floor my imaginary passenger-side gas pedal. And made Peggy shout from the backseat: “What’s wrong with you? Hey, you want me to light that thing for you? Hannah! Keep moving or pull over!” And Hannah would neither respond nor speed up. She always had a knack for absorbing criticism without a flinch. Brutally annoying when you were trying to have a fight with her. The most cutting remarks provoked no more than that benevolent, almost pitying look of hers, which could be read as “I know your comment says more about you than it does about me.”

  Not that it happened often. I can count the major arguments we had in our year and a half together. Things were smooth between us, maybe to a fault. We didn’t even fight when she decided to take the job out here, with a well-funded Internet startup that needed designers. Should I have demanded that she stay in Boston, languishing in a junior art director job, laying out brochures for the marketing department of an investment bank, and turn down the San Francisco opportunity? They have dot-coms in New England too, I might have said, you could look around. But after the interview she was so aglow about the company, the website, the prospect of doing fun work at a stupendous salary, I couldn’t bring myself to point out that this turn of events reflected poorly on our relationship. We deferred any decision about our future together, mumbled that we’d make the long-distance thing work until further notice. But at the airport on New Year’s Day, saying a hasty out-of-breath goodbye because we’d had a party and overslept and she was about to miss her flight, I announced that I wanted to join her in California as soon as the school year ended. So for hour after rapt hour that giddy semester I listened over the phone to her tales of San Francisco life. New friends, office politics, soaring stock options, T-shirts worn in January. During Ogden’s spring break at the end of February, I flew out here and we spent an idyllic week touristing lovebirdwise around the city.

  And then that night in May. The phone rang just as I was looking around my apartment thinking about how to pack and transport everything. Hannah calling to tell me something had been on her mind. “There’s something that’s been on my mind,” she said.

  A cross-country breakup is a pretty anticlimactic thing. Nobody has to move out or return each other’s hairbrushes and sweatshirts. No worries about running into each other or divvying up your social circle. The outward trappings of your day-to-day life don’t change radically. Things are pretty much like they were before, but with much lower phone bills.

  It’s sundown by the time I reach SoMa. Hannah’s company used to be over by the waterfront, but their breakneck expansion led them to seek new digs here a few months ago. I find the bar and walk on by. Need to compose myself and cool down from the long walk before going in there. A couple of blocks away, I stop in a seedy corner store to get a Coke and hit the ATM. A wiry liquor-ruined man with matted hair and a greasy hunting jacket lurks in the corner of the store, gives me a predatory stare. I transact quickly and look back as I leave to make sure he’s not coming out in pursuit. I remember this area from my last visit—a couple of blocks of Market Street that smolder with the friction of the New Economy wealth on one side rubbing up against the unreconstructed Tenderloin on the other. And the denizens of the wrong side, like that guy in the store, see these swarms of cavalier hipsters suddenly sauntering along the border of their world, and years of downtrodden resentment threaten to break loose in an ugly way. And on New Year’s Evil, with the lights out and the cops busy elsewhere? What will this block turn into then? Don’t let’s dwell on that. It’s happy hour.

  Refreshed, my hair hand-brushed in a tinted SUV window, I go into the bar. Popular spot. A jukebox playing swing music with ironic intent. Several dozen people my age or younger clutching pints of pricy beer, standing in clumps at the bar or seated at tables around the perimeter of the room. Two guys by the bar stand out like sore thumbs in shirts and ties—the rest is a sea of flannel and denim. In any other city, any other industry, you’d never guess these dressed-down kids just came from the office, but there are probably more stock options in this room than in a power-lunch steakhouse on Wall Street.

  “Randall!” An unfamiliar female voice. I look around, my eyes adjusting to the dimness, and spot Hannah at a table with four other dot-com clones. “Randall!” the same voice yells again. It’s the woman next to Hannah, evidently the group’s designated yeller. She and Hannah beckon me to the table. The two of them look like color-corrected versions of each other. Hooded sweatshirts in slightly different shades of dark gray. Hannah has grown out her brown hair and tied it back into a ponytail, while her friend’s hair, also ponytailed, is dyed a deep red. There are also three guys at the table, two in baseball caps, and without breaking conversational rhythm they shuffle around to make room for me.

  So Hannah has invited me out with her after-work cocktail crew. I figured she’d contrive not to meet me alone. Because she thinks I’m here to try to get back together. Which she has good reason to think. I shudder to recall the first couple of weeks after she dumped me, my childish cajoling and guilt-tripping. Then she hinted she was about to change her phone number, and I suddenly looked in the mirror and saw a stalker in the making, and forced myself to knock it off. But I’d made my anti-breaking-up position clear enough. So when I called her four months later to say I’d be in San Francisco in a couple of weeks, she had every right to assume torch-carrying motives.

  “Everyone, this is Randall.” Hannah rises to hug me, studiously refraining from a kiss on the cheek. “Randall, this is everyone.”

  Brent, Yoon, and Seth are talking about eyeballs. Does one person looking at a web page mean one eyeball or two? I’ve always wondered. I don’t even quite understand what their company’s site does—something about comparison shopping for interest rates. It might be great or it might be bullshit, for all I know. But the stock price is through the roof.

  This is
what Hannah dumped me for, it occurs to me. Not the men but the scene. Of course I always suspected there was another guy, but now I think my rival wasn’t Brent or Yoon or Seth specifically, it was the hypothetical Other Guy she’d inevitably encounter in a thriving romantic city teeming with hip young digital innovators. Her expansive new world dazzled her, made her long for the freedom to live it to the hilt. And for that, you have to be single when you go to the singles bar. Can’t really blame her, now that I have some perspective on it. Nice town. I was looking forward to moving here myself, until Hannah pulled the plug.

  After a couple of reconfigurations when people have gotten up for the bathroom, I’m sitting between Hannah and Gina. Hannah has done a nice job of avoiding one-on-one interaction with me. Gina sees me struggling to follow the jargon-rich shop talk and strikes up a conversation.

  “Hannah says you do puppet shows for kids?”

  “Yep, and music.” I shoot the former love of my life a look. Puppet shows for kids, that’s how Hannah describes me? She knows perfectly well that among adults I try to emphasize the singer-guitarist side of things and treat the puppets as an incidental enhancement. She doesn’t meet my eye.

  “Where do you perform?”

  “Elementary schools, mostly. I’m on sort of a tour right now.”

  The hatless guy—Brent, I think—overhears this. “Yeah? That’s great, dude. I’d love to work with kids. Or maybe even do, like, a website for kids.”

  “Sure!” I encourage him.

  “My brother’s wife just had a baby girl.”

  “Aawww!” the table coos sardonically.

  Gina, I discover, is also a designer. Specializes in typography, currently carrying out a mandate from the company’s founders to develop a distinctive new font to be used throughout the site and all their marketing materials.

  “Yeah, I’m sort of scared,” she tells me. “Because they’re pinning a lot of their branding strategy on, like, this fucking font which doesn’t exist yet.”

  “What kind of font, um…”

  “Dude, they don’t have a clue what they’re looking for. They’re like, ‘We’ll know it when we see it.’ I mean, what would you picture if someone asked for a typeface that says ‘financial services’ but also ‘young and fun’?” She finger-quotes the phrases.

  “Young, fun, financial services. Interesting. Maybe, like, letters that look like…dollar signs or…I really don’t know.”

  “It makes no sense, right?” She rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”

  We order a round of beers. I leap into the ensuing lull. If Hannah won’t engage me directly, I might as well hijack the table talk, make my presence felt. “So, I just did an interesting show at this school near here,” I say.

  I spin out the story of the Los Altos fiasco. I take my time, exaggerating details and personalities for comic effect. The protesters’ fervor swells to rabid mania, Mrs. Pease’s illness becomes nearly terminal. By the time I get to Mikey the raccoonophobe—nobody actually called him Mikey, but it works better that way—Hannah’s friends are rolling in the aisles. Hannah laughs along with them but gives me a deflating eyebrow-raise, as if to say, Funny stories won’t win me back. She never liked it when I flipped on my entertainer switch in a social setting, and she found my life-of-the-party storytelling mode unseemly, class-clownish. “You seemed to be having a good time,” she’d remark later, with just a dash of disapproval.

  “Anyway, I’d think twice about sending my kids to school in Los Altos,” I conclude.

  “That is some crazy shit,” says Yoon. Yoon, I’ve learned, is an “information architect.”

  “Hey, are we going to the full-bore launch party on Tuesday?” Brent asks.

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “FullBore dot com,” Hannah explains. “It’s another company in our building.”

  “Nice name, right?” says Gina. “They’re just asking for people to call them FullyBoring dot com.”

  “I’ve been calling them FullWhore dot com,” Seth advises us.

  “That’s good, Seth, very mature.”

  “Dude, are they actually launching that shit?” Yoon says. “Carlos told me it’s buggy as hell.”

  “They can’t exactly not launch. I heard a hundred thousand dollars, this party.”

  “Oh, at least! You kidding?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Ruby Sky, where else.”

  “Ooh, that’s original.”

  “I was there last week,” Gina says.

  “For ChopFare?”

  “No, for MaxiMix.” I can only guess at the spelling of these names, but they generally like to stick a capital letter in the middle.

  I ask what the FullBore site does. Everyone thinks for a second.

  “Some kind of portal…”

  “Entertainment listings, or, like—”

  “There’s an animation showcase, I think.”

  “Portal, maybe?”

  As one, they shrug.

  The waitress glides by and asks if we need another round.

  “I’m hungry, dude,” Seth says.

  “Word. I want some falafel,” Yoon says.

  “I’m not feeling falafel. Though I could go chicken kebab.”

  “Ooh, chicken kebab! Good call.”

  We settle the tab. Nobody wants to let me pay, since I’m from out of town. But it makes me feel like some impoverished itinerant minstrel amusing the landed gentry to earn my mead, so I throw in a twenty over their objections.

  Outside the bar, Brent and Seth have a short dialogue I can’t follow about the pros and cons of certain Middle Eastern restaurants and public-transit alternatives for reaching them. “You guys coming?” Yoon asks Hannah.

  “No, I think we’re gonna pass.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Gina says.

  “That’s cool.”

  The three men say goodbye and amble off to the bus or the Muni or whatever they decided to take. Gina looks at Hannah and me, hesitant. “I’m kinda beat,” she says. “Maybe I’ll just cab it home.”

  Yes, do, I encourage her telepathically. You’re very nice and all, and quite fetching, but please leave us alone. Lives may be at stake.

  “No, come out with us!” Hannah says. “I was thinking we’d go to the brewpub.” They exchange a look, and I realize they’ve already colluded about this. Hannah’s told Gina she might need a buffer for the evening.

  “You sure?” Gina asks. Checking that they’re on the same page of the playbook. The Brewpub Blitz. “I don’t want to be, you know…”

  “You should totally come,” Hannah says.

  “Definitely,” I say.

  At the brewpub, a friendly hostess seats us in a booth right next to the jazz trio, then reseats us at a less deafening table. Hannah and Gina each order a Caesar salad with grilled chicken. Just to be different, I order a grilled chicken sandwich with a side Caesar salad. When Gina goes to the ladies’ room, I’m finally left unchaperoned with Hannah.

  Her eyes are fixed on the drink menu in its Lucite holder, even though we already have drinks in front of us. “So,” I say. “How are things?”

  Her brow furrows. She raises her head to look at me. I didn’t see it before, but she looks older. Might be the hairstyle, or my imagination. I try to remember needing this person, wanting to spend every moment with this person, the heart-pulled-out hollowness of losing this person. I can’t find any of it. It’s been crowded out of my head by reams of survivalist Usenet postings.

  Hannah takes a deep breath. “Randall, here’s the thing. When you called, I really thought about asking you to stay with me while you were here. But then I realized that was just selfish, because I’d only be, like, leading you on.” This sounds rehearsed. “You know, I mean, long-term, I don’t think the East Coast–West Coast thing can really work out. You know? I’ve seen some bad situations.”

  She makes us sound like rival rappers. “I was about to move, remember?” No, stop
that. No time to get sidetracked into a he-said-she-said fest. “But Hannah, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  She raises her eyebrows in concern. “You’re not sick or anything?”

  “No, no. What it is, is this computer problem. The Y2K bug.”

  She exhales, relieved. “Yeah, what’s up with that?”

  “A lot is up with it. It’s not getting fixed. Unless someone—”

  “Wait, before she comes back.” Hannah lowers her voice, leans forward. “Isn’t she great?”

  “Who’s great? Gina?”

  “Gina, yeah!” A hopeful smile. “I thought you two would get along.”

  Whoa. OK, that’s a new wrinkle. Just changing the subject? Or could she truly intend to set me up with her coworker? Damn, give me a little credit.

  “Sure, she seems cool. But listen, there are these embedded systems—”

  “Shh, here she is.” Gina, back from the bathroom.

  Her cards on the table, Hannah drops her guard and stops tiptoeing around me. I catch her up on a few people we knew in Boston. She and Gina let me in on some office gossip. The HR woman who had a nervous breakdown. The egregious antics of the company’s egomaniacal founder. We’re talking in the same superficial, low-impact way as at the bar. But Hannah’s hint about Gina has put a different color on things. I find myself reflexively flirting, tuning my words, my facial expressions, my table manners for maximum charm. And fixating on Gina’s endearing idiosyncrasies. A slight nostril asymmetry, a habit of rubbing her lips together from side to side in idle moments, a cute one-shouldered shrug. I’m even getting a kick out of her frequent “Whatevers,” a verbal tic that usually grates on me. She says it just self-knowingly enough to pull it off. And of course since she’s next to Hannah I can’t help but compare and contrast. Similar bodies and faces—Gina a little taller and slimmer—but they carry themselves very differently. Hannah has a way of holding herself nearly still until she’s made up her mind to do something, and then once she’s ready she reaches for the salt, or stands up, or takes a sip of her drink, with a quick, clearly defined move. Versus Gina’s constant gentle motion, hands drifting slowly around her personal space as she interacts with things on the table almost in passing. I like Gina.