by Joshua Cohen
Kor, who would ordinarily facilitate our meetings, had introduced a practice of docking the pay of any Tetrateer who interrupted him, prorating the sum by time lost to interruption weighted by employee number. So, as like he lumbered through the door leveling our concentration, we figgered he owed us, despite his position. He had on jorts so short they were as like nonexistent below a long pouchy baja emblazoned with the Tetgram. We hated that insignia, TT, and hated its font, Fellahin Serif, designed by, immaterial. We hated “Your Site Never Dies, It Just Loses Rank,” “Never Hesitate 2 Tetrate,” “We Work 4 Free,” and “Tetriffic,” and hated the office contests too, Best Varint Reduction, Best Alt Use of Staplers, both of which we would have won except, immaterial. All were Kor initiatives.
Our President sat straining against the pommel of his saddle. We tried to decide whether his ruminant gumchewing meant that he was, or was not, expecting a meal.
We ceded the floor, and the single dryerase wall, to our CoFos, who had reconsidered their recommendation of DCentering Celilo, apparently, and were now unanimously in support of DC. Rather Maryland/Virginia. Celilo would never be feasible, they explained. Even if the Columbia River would scale, hydroelectrically, if the Columbia Gorge would be scaled, anemoelectrically, and regardless of all subsidies and tax credits.
They were revising their projection of average DCent power consumption to exceed 20–22 megawatts/quarter, an amount unsustainable on renewables alone. An amount unsustainable even if American forces would annex and refine all the fossils in Iraq.
The goal for now, they said, had to be to serve our Beltway customers, whether from a base among the Amish farms of Mechanicsville, MD, equidistant to two Mirant coal plants, or Newport News, VA, by a Dominion Resources coal plant that supplied NASA Langley, which had granted them a tour.
Throughout this report of our CoFos, something was nagging at us, something was off. It was Heather who had just had the baby, not Salvatrice. Anyway they both had off. They were stuffed together with the rest of the Trapezzis making gravy.
All our other employees, even our employees who had only just pilgrimed to our coast on probationary visas, were away and giving their thanks.
Kor chewed as like he was mouthing grace. Outside our meetingroom the Tetplex was all barren open plan bullpen and deserted pods, halogen for no one, and the hum of things unused but still plugged in.
Which explains why he was not spotted, this courier, why he was not stopped, this rider from across the Bay.
Someone, Moe or someone, must have let him into the lobby.
He must have wheeled straight through. Taken the stairs. Stepped them with his bike. The elevators, biometric now, at the time would have required a swipecard.
Our door was ajar and he was dizzy skidding through. Hispanic, Latino. Indo. Chaingrease on his denim and the wrong cuff was rolled. The smell of his sweat was of frying. He tried to slot his bike between the hinges, then leaned against the handlebars and huffed.
Rather, he was struggling with his backpack. A cinch string backpack. He shrugged to get loose of it and twisted in his windbreaker, writhing the pack around to his front until its toggle was in his teeth and he was biting to slacken the strings, to extricate a clipboard. He shoved it at us with both hands but without a pen.
As like we had a pen, or would steady him.
But Kor snatched the clipboard away, read our name from its sheet and asked, “You order food delivery?” and asked the courier, “What do we owe?”
The courier though was bent over sucking air, delivering us a seizure, or tugging out what appeared to be the lining of his cincher, but was a trashbag. He tried to unziptie its ziptie and then just slashed through the black shiny plastic with his nails.
Kor waved the clipboard and yelled, “Oye ese, what are you doing? Quién te ha enviado?”
But the courier was oblivious, he was on his knees, wriggling partially out of the bag and dripping this slimy rank squircle, a device shaped as like a square circle. This panicked Kor, who wound up with the clipboard and smacked him on the back and everything just spewed. The device flew across the room amid an acidulous piñata confetti of huevos rancheros and arros con upchuck, semidigested plaintain rounds and frijole flak and cola. For serious unmelted chunks of cola ice soaking the carpet a darker fawn than we had paid for.
Kor tossed the clipboard at the courier, lifted him by the pits as like he yelled, “Lo siento, lo siento, no se lo digas a mi jefe, no hacer que me despidan,” but we do not speak Spanish. Kor crashed him into his bike, which he crashed into the door, frontwheel bucking, rearing through, pedals scraping processors already slated for service toward the stairs.
Barf treadmarks down two flights to the lobby.
Qui had tipped his chair into a fort and huddled behind it. Cull was atop the table on his mobilephone with 911, which kept asking the Tetplex addy, and he kept shrieking the answer, Tetration.com. The only addys he ever retained were online. In frustration he threw the unit, clunky and weighty and totally state of the art then with its extra sharp retractable antenna fully out, not at anyone specifically, but at the ceiling, which scattered it down the hall as like components.
Even now that nick is there. Up on the ceiling between mediate track fixtures since replaced, and though all the furnishings are different too. We told Super Sal to tell his migrants not to touch it, and Kor just let it pass. We can praise him for that at least.
Now, the delivery. The bloodcolored package in the corner.
This was the STrapp, the y2Kreeper, the only model that existed or that we had ever encountered and yet we recognized it, which in other circumstances would have been the certification of smart design. But this was just a sloppy handpacked brick, contouring at its extremities into hooded vents influenced by snakes. Its middle was split, though the split was ragged as like it had been done manually and not manufacturally standard. This midunit gash exposed a motor, rotor, stator windings, readwrite headstack and magnet, spinless disk. Two stray sopping coils were centered. A slick conjoined pair of wiry wrinkly spheroids.
Then Kor was just next to us flicking the dense retch from his hands, wiping his face with his baja. He leaned over and bared a patch of his ass, white, round, reddening. But the sodden orbs were redder, rounder, and hairy. He picked them up and let them dangle.
By December the Tetplex had contracts with every able vet of Gulf War I as like security guards, and we had gone on leave. Discussing this meeting was never discussed. Except, through the US Postal Service again, c/o M-Unit and Aunt Nance again, Kor sent us the results of the analysis. Courtesy of the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. It was bull scrotum, they concluded. Gouged into the circuitry were two balls in a sack.
://
[You get yourself all crazed about office politics, Moe’s been hijacked to put this drive together and then what he turns in has a penis inside? Am I with you? Because if I am, then I don’t understand.]
Not penis, the testes.
Please, we did not understand it either. Rather we did, but wrongly, on the novitiate plane. In the way we can understand that all humanity is inviolably one but still not realize who our friends are. Or that the guy carting his recyclables down La Cienaga is God.
The suddenness with which life can scale expectation. How the most essential secret is how to live among lesser secrets never disclosed. How what we hide best from ourselves is not our own ignorance but how that ignorance sustains us. How trust can become another method of control, how even the future of openness is closed.
We were swiveling around in a postlaunch tizzy pretending we had transcended Beta and attained nirvana. But then Moe went and changed the OS on us, he changed the platform. As like to say, you think you have passed through all the realms already, Buddha boy, think again. You think you have broken the cycle of rebirth and redeath and are now exempt from its traumas, think again.
Moe was showing us that no one was pure, because he was showing us the sign of Kali. Of Kali Yuga.
Meaning the final phase. The very last. Extinction, the postscript. Which makes all that karma and feedback loop of the soul stuff fairly moot.
For Hindus, the world goes through four stages. In the first stage, the world was ruled by gods, and in the second, the gods fought, in the third, the world was ruled by humans, and in the fourth, ours, the humans are fighting, terminally. In the beginning, purity is signified by a fourlegged bull. With each subsequent stage, the bull loses a leg. The time of demon Kali is the time of the onelegged bull, which will never again chase its own tail. At the end, the bull with only one leg to stand on will be slaughtered, and along with it, the world.
[You got all that from Moe shoving bull testicles into a searchequipped storage device?]
Confirmative. We wish we had kept it. The STrapp, not the scrotum. But by the time that had occurred to us it was gone.
[Kor?]
But we certainly kept the post. Though Kor must have a copy of it too.
Here. This memcard. Here. Just a STrapp on a chain.
[What post? What’s the deal with this memcard? I’m just trying to make sure you don’t lose me.]
To take content down from online is almost impossible now and anyway even if taken down in terms of accessibility the content itself almost always remains, it just stays clouded. Nubified. Nephed. But back then it was possible to destroy it.
By comptrast, to take a person down has always been easy. People take down themselves.
For example, the itching. For instance, the scratching. We basically spent all our time disambiguating whether we were scratching at itches or itching at scratches, our migraines extended to seize even our abdominals, our skin tasted as like salt. We had come down with a bad case of psychosomia. Though after tetrating for our symptoms of rashes, fevers, chills, and fatigue, we found that we had ringworm, shingles, scabies, and mule lymphangitis. Comorbid cutaneous infections fungal, bacterial, viral, mule. Chronic circadian rhythm disorder. Tendonitis. Carpal tunnel. Our fingers would go numb and then our hands would go numb and then our entire arms would flail as like rashy dying parasites.
The prime salience was, we were home again, though not at Muralla Way or even Sierra Vista. Rather this had been the home of Ma and Pa Le Vay, the elders I, whose generation had been able to afford two floors with a baud of yard, Claremont Hills, Berkeley. M-Unit and Aunt Nance had moved in after moving them to that assisted living facility close by and even resembling the university. To be clear, neither Ilona nor Imre Le Vay were dead yet, but now one is, though we have never determined which.
It did not help that the relationship between M-Unit and Aunt Nance was healthy. We were unhealthy while they thrived. They cuddled in the lounger covered with shawls reading conlang morphologies and the Asian syllabaries used only by women as like hiragana and nüshu. They had friends, academic friends, gardening group friends, LGBTQ youth counseling center friends. We just had them, and their shared study the Jamaican eldercare aides had used for changing into and out of their scrubs, second floor. Propped along the bookcases were photos of two Hungarians we barely felt any relation to being amicably restrained by middleaged husky Jamaicans. Aunt Nance had hung her diplomas on the wall along with a gonfalon that explained all the different types of dispute resolution. One type was legally binding settlement, another type was also settlement but not legally binding, the third was about getting each party to understand the other emotionally, while the fourth was just about getting each party to recognize the existence of the other.
We lay on the foldout sofa and refused all fuel and hydration and so lost weight and were convinced also our mind. Aunt Nance asked us whether our actions or inactions were a protest for or against any particular cause, and we yelled that she had asked us that already, but she had not, she said, and M-Unit said that it had not been her either, and we believed them.
We stayed offline completely. Qui and Cull visited and talked about investments they were considering and offered us tips because we had no investments. They had purchased for us a Muppet at auction. A rare authenticated Elmo.
They took turns operating it as like to cheer us but we just turned the talk to Moe and so ultimately it was a puppet telling us he had gone missing but that Kor was pulling every string to have him found. Kor would pull everything unraveled.
El Moe. We believed in losing our mind.
M-Unit left small plastic UFOs of salad and small tetrapak milks outside the door. Aunt Nance slid under it a book, The Little Adventurer Atlas of Sexual Orientation. They kept calling us to deck the tree with dreidels. They had never gotten a tree before. We never got up from the foldout. Merry Chanukah and Christmas.
New Year. Remember the New Year. Cull had apparently met his father and stepstepmother playmate at a reception Timex was holding for the Hong Kong Secretariat. Qui had apparently at the suggestion of his brothers chartered the USS Chesapeake to take all the delinquents who had beaten him up in the Philadelphia schools and strand them in Rehoboth. JBates had purchased a former US military bunker sunk under the Mojave Desert and refurbished it to withstand polarity shifts, comet impacts, 50 megaton nuclear blasts. All Carbonites and friends of Carbon had been invited to hunker down.
M-Unit and Aunt Nance were having a party. A scholastic coven bash. They were busy unfolding rental tables and chairs on the fully enclosed, fully heated glass porch out back, which was a renovation we had paid for to mark no occasion, and also they had put in a request. $28735 had seemed a fortune then. M-Unit and Aunt Nance were rearranging the market greens so intricately it was as like they had not only marketed and mixed them but had grown them too. They were clattering platters and chasing chestnuts across the talavera. At 20:00 or so half the Berkeley feminist department showed. The half that M-Unit was still friendly with. We cracked our window to snoop, let the cold in. Cracked into the conversation.
Some shrink from Stanford, who might only have been the spouse of someone, wanted to talk to us. Everyone else wanted to talk disaster. They were drinking as like everything was going to y2Krash and so were convinced that everything was going to y2Krash even though the aughts were already being lived in Lahore. In Karachi. Delhi, Mumbai. On the darkside of the dateline, light not from fission or fusion rising over a new event horizon. They drank port and Aunt Nance passed a joint and M-Unit abstained not because we were around but because it was hash. Which, she said, always confused her libido and destrudo.
Though M-Unit and Aunt Nance had liberalized in this house to the point of finally owning a TV, they kept it off in favor of the hearth clock. They did not want to witness the carnage, but they still might have wanted others to experience it. Newt Gingrich, Exxon and Mobil, which had just become ExxonMobil, the WTO, HMOs, supporters of Prop 187, President Clinton even though he was against Prop 187. Time measured nothing but a failure to change. Someone told Aunt Nance her son was destroying the culture and someone else said he was destroying the human and Aunt Nance replied it was M-Unit who deserved the compliment. The shrink said he would talk to us about it. His was the only male presence, and someone said only males would confront in that way, and someone else said that historically psychoanalysis itself was nothing but the sublimation of masculine confrontation. But neither this nor the waist squeezes of his spouse were stopping him from hauling in from the porch. It was the clock that was stopping him. A crowd of tenured feminists counting, 4, 3, 2, 1. Icons of the triumph of the male orgasm, signifying the cessation of coitus and the onset of death. Popped corks, the froth, the smoke, the fireworks in the sky toward the Bay.
But as like everyone was still alive at a Pacific Standard hour into the first day of the year 2000 they had no way to avoid clearing dishes. They cleared and we lost them from our window. Then M-Unit was at our door. We did not want scraps. But she was offering the phone instead. We had a call from Russia, Soviet Russia. We did not want to take any calls, but Gushkov and Lebdev were insistent. M-Unit thrust the phone at us and paced hiccupping in the hall as like we were getting doom
sday news from the Kremlin, and Aunt Nance waddlingly joined her and steadied her wobble against her and burped.
The Soviets had volunteered to work prowl for the Eve, to maintain site vigilance, expecting nothing, but poised. y2K itself was not the threat, it was whether or how it would rally the hackers. Denial of service attacks so broadly distributed they had to be Martian, Venusian, ping surfeit of a stratospheric bandwidth, untraceable, or fribbly to trace. But the Soviets had none of that to report, all they were wondering was the last time we ourselves had visited.
“Do you mean visited the u or checked in tetside?”
“Either,” they said. “Both.”
“A month, six weeks, way back in 99—why?”
“Get online,” they said.
We got up and grogged past M-Unit and Aunt Nance and down the hall to the Mistress Bedroom, eased down onto the physioball and powered the IBM clone. A crappy bullshitty unit, constipated processor, swollen registry, bloated drives, just fragged. Loaded every program ever at booting, a tertillion .docs on the desktop, and half of them named Test. Our patience tested as like the Soviets jittered. M-Unit drifted up and shrugged a robe around us. We had, we neglected to mention, never dressed.
The computer finally booted but could not find its modem, the modem could not find a signal and the helpscreen automatically loaded. Diagnostic scan in progress. Rotating hourglass, grains in the queue. Quit everything, restart. Quit everything, shut down, unplug, burn the house, build another house, replug, restart. Aunt Nance said she was glad we were feeling better, and wondered whether we would give her a brief tutorial, did not have to be now, it was just that she had never been able to get online.
The Soviets, though, the Soviets said that if we had no access we had to come oncampus.
“Tell Kor,” we basically told them.
“With respect,” we will not try the accent but maybe the vocab and syntax, “with for your situation, respect, we come only because is crucial.”