The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  But lukewarm interest from one friend won’t quite get the job done. The simple fact is that my pipe dream of setting up a Y2K retreat with friends and relatives has crumbled. Out of all my potential allies, with only Nicole left unpitched, Grandma alone showed any willingness to hop aboard the lifeboat. And she lives on dwindling savings and Social Security. Meanwhile, we’re on the verge of 1999, when the system failures will start. They have already, but under the radar so far. In a month or two they’ll begin to surface, leak out onto the front page. And I still have no idea how or where I’ll survive the dark times.

  So I realized I may need to hook up with some preexisting family or enclave, folks already preparing who might benefit from my skills. Which are what? I’m not averse to manual labor, I can sew, I know my way around power tools, and I can entertain the kids after the TV goes dead, plus give music lessons. OK, it’s a long shot, but something to pursue. But I had no idea where in North America to start looking for such a setup. FlockWatcher struck me as a good person to ask about the pros and cons of various localities. He’s always harping on how he moved to a rural area in the late eighties, so he’s no survivalist-come-lately like most Y2Kers.

  I glance through the emails I’ve exchanged with him. The first one I sent, which I don’t quite remember composing. Drunk in a Kinko’s in Madison, Wisconsin, and I probably wouldn’t have sent it sober. But I was desperate for advice. And here’s his reply, which came two days later. None of the scathing insults I feared he’d respond with, but a long discourse on the suitability of almost a dozen different areas. Climate, population, demographics, proximity to cities, state gun and tax laws, and more. He recommended against the part of Virginia where he himself had settled, now a popular Y2K destination:

  You probably don’t want to end up here in charming Floyd County unless you’re a big Jesus Christ fan. I wouldn’t have come here myself if I’d known the evangelicals would be swarming in. There goes the neighborhood.

  We continued trading sporadic emails over the next few days. At one point I mentioned I was writing from a public library because I had no computer. He hadn’t batted an eye at my lack of home and car, but my PC-lessness appalled him. And he has computers to spare, of course. So we somehow managed to arrange this meeting in Roanoke. Which turns out to be an adorable little city. It makes me wish I’d gotten around to seeing more of the South before the nation goes belly-up. The town is right on top of a river, lush with foliage, birdsongy, skyscraper-free, and with just enough bustle but very little hustle. Outside the coffee shop’s picture window, people on the street, a good mix of ages if not of races, smile and hold their heads up high, out for a Sunday stroll. I could see myself living here, if I expected to live.

  And here he is. A man in his late forties walks in, carrying a laptop case, eyes darting to every occupied table, and quickly zeroes in on me. Shorter than I imagined, and chubby, with a neatly trimmed beard and a dark rim of crew-cut hair. I can’t get a reading on ethnicity—nose suggests Mediterranean, but fair skin hints otherwise. The haircut and a camouflage jacket give a vague impression of a would-be warrior, but I’d have to say the geek vibe predominates—the jacket is unwrinkled and covers a fuzzy sweater, and the hairstyle could be a baldness thing rather than a military thing.

  “Mr. Raccoon, I presume?” He switches the case to his left hand so he can shake my right. Firm grip, stubby fingers. “I’m Tom.”

  “Tom, Randall. Thanks for coming.”

  He gets himself a coffee. Takes the computer with him to the counter, of course—I’d be disappointed if he left it with me.

  Seated across from me, he unzips the case. “So, Randall, what do you say we get this deal out of the way and then we can enjoy our coffee?”

  “Works for me.”

  He boots up the laptop and runs me through its specifications, more like a proud parent than a salesman. “You bought this off the shelf, it’d be three times what I’m charging you. You’re getting quite a deal.”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, thank government auctions. I used to have Linux on here, but I figured you’d want Windows.”

  “Yeah, I’m not so adventurous about that stuff.”

  “That’s what I figured.” A patronizing smile, sensei addressing hopeless newbie. So much to learn, Grasshopper. “Well, it’s fully loaded. You’ve got your—” He lowers his voice. “You’ve got your MS Office, your Photoshop, your Quark. Games, you’re on your own. I prefer outdoor sports. What else? Oh, it’s all set up for PPP. You’ll just need a provider. Guess that about covers it.”

  “Great. Well…” I pull a bank deposit envelope out of my pocket and hand it to him. “Here you go.”

  He opens the flap and reaches in with a dainty index finger to leaf through the thirty-five twenties. Which I had to carry on the bus, because with a three-hundred-dollar daily ATM limit I wouldn’t be able to get it once I got here. Nothing like packing lots of cash to heighten the tension of interstate travel. It’s a healthy bite out of my checking account, but I can stop paying five dollars here, twelve dollars there to rent computer time (public libraries and I don’t keep the same hours these days).

  He shuts down the computer, zips it into the case, and hands it over. “She’s all yours.” The deal done, he unlids his coffee, wipes off the rim of the cup with a napkin. A little more anal than I’d expect from the owner of a Bushmaster Dissipator, but what do I know?

  “So what’s the word from the trenches?” I ask, knowing he’ll know I mean the frantic efforts to fix software for 2000. FlockWatcher (I can’t think of him as Tom) is well connected in the programming community, although not on the remediation front lines himself. Some Y2K-aware programmers feel a duty to help stem the havoc, but he thinks it’s futile, and the height of suicidal folly not to move out of the cities where most of the coding jobs are.

  “The word is bad. The way I hear it from the grapevine, deadlines are slipping far and fast. Remember, everyone promised they’d be done by the end of ’98, with a year for testing. Well, now that we’re almost there they can’t pretend they can meet that anymore. One guy I know at a big company, I’m talking Fortune 50, he says his CIO and half his managers are about to resign so they won’t be held liable. You bet it’s bad.”

  “Wow.”

  “Also the media’s starting to hype it. I’ve gotten three emails from newspaper reporters in the last couple of weeks. Must’ve found me online—they’re suddenly under deadline and scrambling for any interview they can get.”

  “So did you talk to them?”

  “Fuck, no. I’m not about to be their sideshow in some bleeding-heart polly story about how you should keep your money in the bank. And by the way, Y2K isn’t gonna affect your VCR—because it’s already blinking twelve o’clock, har de har! Idiots. I told them to call Nathan Polk.” Another prominent doomer, with a kinder and gentler online demeanor than FlockWatcher but an even grimmer outlook.

  “Have you met him?”

  “Yeah, I was out West for a client and Nathan and I had lunch. Good man, very good man. He was all up in arms about that whole flamewar with, what was that bitch’s name, Winnie or Whitney?” So weird to hear these names, this jargon, spoken aloud. A couple of weeks ago a reporter on 20/20 or some other show led off a survivalist-crackpots segment with “They call it tee-oh-tah-waw-kee” and my short hairs stood to attention. I’ve typed TEOTWAWKI dozens of times, read it on-screen hundreds, but had never considered how to pronounce it. That same tingle of recognition hits me now, the unnerving sense of pixels on a computer screen bursting out into the physical world.

  “Easier to keep up with the flamewars now that I have this.” I pat the computer case.

  “Hey, I’m glad I could help out. Wish I had a line on a car for you too, but…”

  “No, I think I’m good on a car. But thanks.” I had started pricing beaters in San Francisco when Nicole told me she and Boyd had an Isuzu neither of them used anymore and I could b
orrow it for a while if I could get to their place.

  “So where you heading now? Up to D.C., you said?”

  “Yep. I have family there.”

  He whistles. “Better get ’em out by next year.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Not the place to be when, you know, the African-Americans start setting fires.” He draws out the phrase in a brutal sarcastic drawl that makes it sound worse than an actual epithet. OK, maybe less crypto in his racism than I thought. I say nothing. “Well, no offense to your family, but I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see Washington burn. Chickens coming home to roost, right? Course, they’ll get Slick Willie out to a bunker somewhere. Probably have his hookers waiting for him there.”

  “Mm.”

  “But I’ll settle for watching the Justice Department go up in smoke. With Janet Reno inside, hopefully. And the IRS. Bye-bye, income tax! Which is unconstitutional, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Is it?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  And he proceeds to explain why, in great detail.

  Well, I can’t say I didn’t know who I was dealing with. Wonder how long I’m required to sit here. He should have listed this as part of the price of the computer. Seven hundred, plus you have to listen to me spew bile for half an hour. My thoughts drift to my next move. Due in Bethesda on Friday. Should I just tell Nicole and Boyd I’m coming a few days ahead of schedule? No, I want some time to dig deeper into the facts, marshal my arguments before I talk to them. Boyd’s a producer at CNN, well informed about the world, and hysteria won’t win him over, but the inexorable logic of it all just might, if I can present it clearly enough. This encounter has loomed large in my mind for weeks. They’re last on my list, and with them on my side we might be able to turn Mom or Dad around. And as FlockWatcher pointed out, they live much too close to a combustible city. And then there’s Morgan, who’s too young to fathom what’s about to happen, let alone defend himself against it. But above and beyond all that, Boyd could actually have an impact on awareness. A sympathizer on the inside at CNN might make a difference, get some good stories out there, wake some citizens up. Got to wake Boyd up first, though. So I’ll take a couple of days here to get my ducks in a row.

  Eventually FlockWatcher has ranted himself to the bottom of his coffee. “Well, I ought to get back,” he says.

  “Yep, I’m gonna go put this baby through her paces.” Please tell me I didn’t just say that.

  “Use it in good health.” He stands up and offers his hand. I take it, immediately wanting to wash mine.

  “Pleasure doing business with you, Tom.”

  “Likewise. Keep in touch.”

  “Absolutely.”

  And he leaves, looking around nervously to make sure nobody follows him out of the coffeeshop.

  Well, that’s over. Now to hole up in the motor lodge with my new toy and hit the books.

  All my cash left town with that nutjob, so I go into a bank, an old-fashioned local branch, the tellers not even behind bulletproof glass. As always when I enter a bank, my mind turns to bank runs. The manager racing to bolt the door as the frenzied crowd outside demands their money. And panic is the least of this particular bank’s problems. The ATM presents me with a user interface out of the IBM era, chunky uppercase letters on a screen burned in with the ghosts of ancient transactions. Sometime next year all of these machines, and probably the rest of the bank’s computers, will become worthless, scrap, doorstops. The trouble won’t start at the huge conglomerate banks spending hundreds of millions on remediation. It’ll start at mom-and-pop operations like this one and ripple through the system. Deadlines slipping far and fast. I’ll pull out my remaining funds in January, I decide. For the moment, I settle for eighty bucks.

  I pass a bookstore and decide to stop in. No longer able to haul my supply of Time Bomb 2000 with me, I’ve been picking up copies as needed. “Oh, we just got this back in stock,” says the clerk who rings me up. “We’ve had a lot of requests for it. Is it supposed to be good?”

  “It’s really good,” I tell her. “Definitely worth a read.”

  chapter 9

  423

  Days

  “Near…far…whereeeeee-ver you are, I believe…that the lights…will stay on.”

  Simultaneously channeling Celine Dion and a Y2K pollyanna, I croon toward the television, drowning out my brother-in-law’s employer and their horse-flogging midterm election coverage. I pick up my joint, relight it, take a deep drag. Cough slightly, remedy that with a sip of bourbon and ginger ale. Getting a little cloying, this cocktail. Next time I venture out for ice I’ll hop down to the store and pick up some tonic, switch to vodka, which I have a full bottle of. Tonic’s good, not too sweet, nicely bitter. Bitter’s the most underrated of the taste groups. You never sit down in a restaurant and say, “Hey, I could go for something bitter,” but it’s always a nice change from all the sugar and salt.

  Endless parade of percentages across the bottom of the screen, red versus blue. The Democrats kicked some ass, is the upshot. Showing, say the pundits, that the bulk of the electorate forgives, not to say envies, the sly dog in the Oval Office. I listen to the TV with one ear at most, my attention on my laptop. Typing furiously, composing the final installment of my multipart opus, “One Raccoon’s Prognosis.” The first three parts have already traveled out into the ether, for my fellow Y2K newsgroupies to lavish with praise or flame.

  I take time out from the Prognosis to throw together a reply to another simpering optimist. Long gone are my old qualms about getting dragged into the message-board fray. The hell with that. I’ve been posting two or three times an hour, turning my fury and fear into thousands of words of scalding invective. So many pollies, so little time. Their claims laughably easy to refute:

  George, let me see if I have this straight. You’re claiming they can run the rail system manually, well enough to haul a significant amount of freight, for any length of time? I’d like to see you try out your [snicker] well-reasoned argument on my uncle. He’s a retired Amtrak conductor. He was telling me a couple of years ago how the new crop of railroad workers are so reliant on computerized switching, they don’t have the slightest clue how the mechanical procedures used to work. So you think a bunch of old men will come out of retirement, limp down to the switches, and save the day? Sorry, my money’s on little to nothing getting transported by rail in 2000.

  Of course the uncle is a fiction, but I did once sit next to a retired Amtrak conductor on a sold-out Metroliner and he told me something like that. I post the message.

  What day is it? Been online pretty much nonstop since I got back from meeting FlockWatcher. The motel charges seventy-five cents for a local call from the room—highway robbery—but there’s no time limit on the call, so ha! Joke’s on the Jefferson Court Motor Lodge.

  The collapse of Plan A didn’t truly sink in while I was traveling, preoccupied with maps and schedules, but once I went to ground it hit me like a ton of bricks. I ramped up my Neuhardt score:

  I’ve reluctantly gone from 8 to 9 this month. People just do not get it. Maybe most people aren’t equipped to absorb facts this disturbing. I once read a psychology study that concluded that clinically depressed patients had more accurate perceptions of reality than the nondepressed, who erred on the side of optimism. Depressive Realism, the researchers called it. So maybe you need to be a polly to get up in the morning. Regardless of the causes, with the willful oblivion of 99 percent of the populace, I can’t see how we can hope for anything less than a 9.

  As soon as I posted that, I knew it was time to gaze into the abyss. Speculating on bits and pieces hasn’t helped me face this thing. Need a fully fleshed-out narrative, from now through zero hour and beyond. So, “One Raccoon’s Prognosis.” My personal best-guess scenario, in all its gory glory. Agonizing to write, but it’s helped me stabilize a little. A concrete image, speculative maybe, and ugly as hell, but something to hold on to. So this is what the world will lo
ok like. This is what the fucking done-for world will look like. I glance over part one:

  And what will Uncle Sam do when he finally smells the coffee, realizes once and for all that the Y2K projects are a failure, the systems will go down? It won’t be pretty. Some here have raised the possibility of conscription, that the government will try to draft a legion of codeheads in a last-ditch effort to fix enough in time. I don’t buy it. Too much bureaucracy involved—the wheels could never turn fast enough to get the geeks into the pipeline. No, instead they’ll deny until they disintegrate. As far as the functioning of the government, 1999 will be a slow grinding to a halt. Programmers walk off the job and go home to prepare. Those mission-critical systems they’re now telling us were never mission-critical in the first place? We’ll find out whether they were lying as the systems fall over one by one. The problems will start small but still be occasionally lethal. How many ways do you depend on all those little things they’ve stealthily reclassified as “non-mission-critical”? An old man starves to death because the Social Security check didn’t come. A woman is murdered by her ex because the paperwork for the restraining order got lost in the machine. You’re drinking toxic tapwater because the EPA’s monitoring devices malfunctioned. Will these “anomalies” be called Y2K problems or explained away? It hardly matters. They’re just a tiny foretaste of what’s to come.