JPod (19 page)

"Oh, Greg," Mom said. "First the table, and now you're spraying blood all over the beautiful carpeting."

Dad went to get his coat, but Greg plugged the TV back in. "You're not leaving until you clean up the mess you made."

I said, "It's my house, Greg.
I'll
decide."

"Well, you agree with me, right?"

"Of course I do. Dad, you're not leaving here until you fix what you screwed up."

Mom decided to rescue Dad, and used her silent-but-deadly voice. "We're leaving. You're awful, all of you. We're leaving." She stormed out the door, and Dad followed her. Greg limped off to the bathroom in pursuit of a Band-Aid or a tourniquet or a cauterizing tool.

The room was suddenly appallingly quiet.

Kaitlin said, "I keep forgetting that your family runs on Microsoft software."

Evil Mark walked over to the TV and touched one button, just as my segment on
White Ghost
was ending to thundering audience applause. I ended up finishing second to some guy in Arizona who was juggling five kittens, but then, when they threw in the sixth kitten, it went horribly wrong.

. . .

Bree was at her desk and briefly forgot to mute her audio, so we all heard a few seconds of that old Morrissey song, "Everyday Is Like Sunday." This set Kaitlin off. "That song always puts me in a crappy mood because Sundays are actually the worst day of the week. Nobody's answering the phones or dressed properly or doing anything productive. If I ruled the world, every day would be a Thursday."

"Huh?"

"Look at it this way: Mondays suck because you're resentful that you can't sleep in, and it's also the day on which sixty percent of life-sucking meetings occur. Tuesdays suck because the week has four more workdays left; you hate yourself and the world because you're trapped in this wage-slave hamster wheel called life. Wednesdays are bad because you realize around noon that the work week is half over, but the fact that you're viewing your life in this manner means that you're nothing more or less than the third panel of that old, unfunny comic strip
Cathy,
where she realizes she's a fat lonely spinster and her hair flies out and she makes the
augghhhhhh!
noise. Fridays are bad because you feel like a rat waiting for a food pellet to come down the chute, the food pellet being the weekend. Saturdays are okay, but only barely. And Sundays, as mentioned before, are like the day that time forgot, when nothing happens and when, perversely, you start wishing for Monday again. So give me a week of Thursdays any time. Everyone's in a good mood, people actually get stuff done, and a glint of Saturday puts a sparkle in your step."

. . .

I just realized that us jPodders are becoming quite different from other workers here. Our quirks are increasing, while non-jPodders seem to be more and more . . .
normal.
I realized that other employees our age have hobbies, legally wedded mates and, more eerily,
children.
Instead of pulling all-nighters, they leave the premises, ride a bike, eat wholesome food, discuss non-work-related activities, have a nap and then return to work the next day
. . . not that same night!
Older staffers don't even bother coming in on weekends. Where is the sleep-crazed, Pepsi-fuelled one-point-oh tech environment that can only be created by having no green vegetables, no sex and no life?

Cowboy said, "I miss the greed of the 1990s bubble."

John Doe said, "I miss the possibility of unearned wealth."

Bree said, "I miss the possibility of doing something Apple, something one-point-oh."

Evil Mark said, "I miss people having Hot Wheels tracks set up in their cubicles." (Evil Mark is nostalgic for a stint he did at ILM in the Bay Area two years ago.)

Gord-O walked into the pod. 'You can't miss the nineties, because you weren't there. They were great. Too bad you screwed-up twits missed out on the party."

I asked, "What was it like—all that money out there just waiting to rain down on you?"

"It wasn't merely
all that money,
Ethan. It was a Fort-Knox-is-hemorrhaging cash geyser. But forget that. This is the Wretched Decade, and here in the Wretched Decade, you drive to Costco to buy Honey Nut Cheerios for my team and me. Oh, and while you're at it, I need six Stouffer's breaded white-meat chicken filet dinners with mashed potatoes. They put a microwave in our coffee station, and I want to try it out." Welcome to my life.

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. . .

Three days ago I had to drive John Doe to his house in South Van so he could pick up some car keys, and in his kitchen I was looking around, and there was a jumbo four-slice toaster.

"Jesus, John—four slices—are you on breakfast duty at Rikers?"

"Is it so wrong to like toast?"

"I guess not."

His living room looked like a Radisson Suites hotel room in somewhere blank like Des Plaines, Illinois. "John, have you considered maybe taping up a poster or something?"

"Yes, but I decided not to. I like the room's air of calculated neutrality. And poster colours might fade in the sunlight."

"That's possibly the most depressing thing I've ever heard."

"Nonsense. Hey, look at these—" From beneath the kitchen counter he pulled out a yellow plastic dairy crate filled with arcade game motherboards from the late 1980s, all of them wrapped in bubble-pack. He'd converted some crap Ikea furniture into a full-scale, economically correct arcade game simulator. We ended up spending the entire afternoon playing Konami's The Simpsons Power Test, which was primitive but cool. We both agreed we couldn't watch the super-early
Simpsons
episodes where the voices are wrong—especially Homer's—and the line quality is thin and slighdy scary.

. . .

The day after I visited John's house, I dropped Bree off at her place because her car was in the shop. Right outside her window was this huge exhaust vent from a fried chicken restaurant, spewing oily participates at her apartment.

"Bree—what the hell
is
that thing? How can you live with it?"

"Oh, that."

"Yes,
that."

"I call it the trans-fatty acid vapour funnel."

"It doesn't scare the crap out of you? The smell doesn't keep you up at night?"

"I grew up with frying-chicken smell. My father the urologist also ran an illicit gambling parlour, and my mom made snacks until five a.m. every night. I find it comforting."

Who am I to argue?

. . .

I just sat through possibly the longest meeting I've ever been in, and possibly the dullest. Let me go through the four hours point by point. Okay, I'm kidding—I wouldn't have sent my worst enemy to today's meeting. The upshot is that, now that Steve is gone, a political batde has given rise to Steve's replacement:
Alistair.
Today Alistair told us our new mandate for BoardX: "Its new title is SpriteQuest. SpriteQuest is a warm, heartfelt journey into magical and fantastic lands, where our hero, Prince Amulon, allows children to rediscover life's joys as he teaches us all to laugh and dream again."

Something died inside us as we heard this proclamation. Senior management, though, interpreted the ensuing silence as tacit agreement.

Alistair carried on. "We decided that a skateboard was too constraining a vehicle for storytelling. If we convert the skateboard into Prince Amulon's magic carpet, on which kids can ride along, we can create more options for learning and growth for the players."

Learning? Growth?

Kaitlin raised her hand.

Alistair short-circuited her query. "I can read your mind, and let me answer your question. We all felt that Jeff the Turde might ultimately be interpreted as too derivative of the TMNT franchise. We want to be industry leaders, and SpriteQuest will take us all to a new place—a place of excitement and challenge. While Jeff the Turde is, unfortunately, no longer with us, his mesh, utilities and properties will live on as we repurpose him into Prince Amulon—a bold twist that will create many more opportunities to explore him as a character. How does Prince Amulon
think}
What are his
motivations}
What
drives
him through the game? With just a few extra polygons, we ought to be able to convert BoardX's inner-city environment frameworks into dungeons. Ditto the rest of the game. Think magic. Think challenge. Think
possibilities]
And now I think it would be appropriate to have a minute of silence in memory of Steve, wherever he may be."

After the meeting ended, we shuffled, zombie-like, back to jPod. Fortunately, I had to make Gord-O's Cheerios run, which allowed me to space out for a few hours in traffic.

. . .

I've come to the conclusion that documents are thirty-four percent more boring when presented in the Courier font. Please see the following examples:

. . .

I went to get some skin tone at Tanfastic, and was lying in the sunbed, enjoying its dull lavender hum, when somebody in the bed one room over put on Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" at full volume. My six minutes instandy began to feel like three hundred.

. . .

We just invented a cubicle game called Baffle. It's a hot potato clone. Everyone sits in his or her cubicle as we toss a loaded stapler over the fabric wall baffles between us. You never know who's going to throw it to whom, and you'd be surprised at how much fun it is. For technical reasons, the game made us assign a code name to each dis-assemblable fabric-covered wall baffle in the pod. We decided to assign them non-specific food flavours:

Regular

Original

Classic

Alpine

Ranch

Frost

Extreme

Fresh

Arctic

Blast

. . .

Okay, I'm procrastinating about the meeting's fallout.

. . .

When I got back to the pod after Gord-O's Cheerios run, Kaitlin was gone. Bree said she had gone to my parents' place. "Your mom needed help harvesting."

"Oh jeez, I forgot."

"Ethan, you did
not
forget. I can tell because you just used your fake voice. How come you're not there helping her?"

"Because my mother makes a huge pot of curry every time she harvests—it's to cover up the pot smell—and the curry smells even worse."

"Oh."

"What did you mean, my 'fake' voice?"

"The voice you use when you're not telling the truth. We talk about it all the time. Cowboy does a really good impression of it. You're a terrible liar."

"Where is everybody?"

"We're all in denial. Cowboy went to sniff magic markers and watch planes land at the airport, and John Doe's out having his weekly mouse-brown hair tinting."

"Evil Mark?"

"Some bug tester downstairs has some NFL cards he wants to buy for his collection."

"So why are you still here?"

"I played Freecell for two hours. Now I'm off to a downtown wine-tasting seminar. Zinfandels."

"You're still determined to be chic for Mr. French Guy?"

"Absolutely."

"Do you feel like discussing SpriteQuest?"

"Not yet."

"I know what you mean."

Bree left. I was considering the sixty-seven unopened emails at the end of the Chute when the phone rang: Kaitlin. "Ethan, can you come over here?"

"Kaitlin, you know how I feel about that curry smell—"

"Your mom isn't making a curry this time, and besides, this is about something else. I found something."

"What?"

"I can't say. Come over."

When I got to my parents' place, Mom was dithering about in the front hallway, wearing a safari suit. "Hi, dear. Glad you could find the time to help out."

"Mom, what's with the outfit? You look like the host of a faltering Japanese game show."

"Well, dear, I suppose one might say the same about your ragamuffin outfits, but
some
people have manners. Kaitlin's downstairs separating and sorting buds for me. Could you go help her?"

"Sure."

"I'm making spaghetti tonight, not curry."

"Praise the Lord."

Downstairs, Kaitlin whispered, "Can she hear us?"

"What's going on?"

I sat down and started to pluck seeds from the buds and trim out the stalky bits.

"An hour ago I cut myself, so I went upstairs to get a Band-Aid from the guest bathroom drawer."

"And?"

"I found Steve's tie in the drawer, along with some guest soaps."

"His tie?"

"You know the one—the Tm kooky' tie with litde penguins wearing sunglasses on it."

"Uh-oh."

"Ethan, I'm looking at your face, and I
know
there's something you're not telling me. Spill."

I looked across the room to make sure I'd have enough time to shut up if Mom came down. "I think Steve and my mom were having a fling," I whispered.

"What!"
Kaitlin shrieked.

"Shhhh!"

"No way. Your mother's at least fifteen years older than him."

'Your point being? My mother's always been a major guy magnet. Oh God, it feels so weird talking about her like this."

"Like she has sex? Grow up. But with
Steve}"

"Imagine how I feel. A few months ago, I came by the house to drop off some magazines at four in the morning, and he was at the bottom of the driveway, shaving with an electric razor."

"Yughh."

During the awkward silence that fell, we shucked seeds into a steel salad bowl.

Kaitlin said, "Do you think there's a connection between your mom and Steve's, you know, Steve's disappearance?"

"I doubt it," I said, trying hard not to use my easily detected fake/lying voice.

"What should we do?"

"No idea."

Mom was chopping mushrooms when I walked into the kitchen. She seemed cheerful. "Mushrooms have come a long way from those beige buttons I ate growing up. Shiitake, inoki and morels—such flavour."

"Mom, I was in the guest bathroom looking for a Band-Aid and found Steve's penguin tie in the drawer."

Mom put down her knife.
"Did you?"

"Yes, I did."

Mom picked up the knife and began chopping mushrooms again. "Well, he's not dead, if that's what you're wondering."