JPod (23 page)

. . .

When I taped the prime numbers to my cubicle wall and looked at them from a distance, I could see darker and lighter patches within the body of the text that formed interesting shapes and patterns. I bet if I took the time to format the numbers correctly, I could see some sort of hitherto never-before-noticed magical numerical pattern that would allow me to solve the formula for generating prime numbers once and for all. I mentioned this to Cowboy. All he said was, "Maybe, but what if it turns out that the numbers form a kind of Magic Eye image, and when your brain resolves it, you see a goat walking on its hind legs, drinking from a horn full of blood?" Scotch
that
idea.

. . .

. . .

The night of Kam Fong's housewarming I was in a testy mood. I'd been inside my head all day—some days that just happens. You get lost doing just one task, and suddenly you look up and it's dark out, but you still don't want to leave your headspace, and then Kaitlin comes up behind you with a 150 KHz marine emergency blow horn and lets off one big parp that has you shitting out your eyes, ears and nostrils, and when you turn around, you discover that your evil coworkers were videoing the entire prank, and you get furious and you scream for everybody to fuck off and die.
Aw shucks, it was only a joke,
but the fact remains that because of that one loud parp you'll never be able to parse C++ code again because you fried those dendrites that dictate logic patterns, and in a flash you see yourself as a future object of pity, forced to work at a TacoTime outlet, feeding disrespectful larvae of the middle classes while taking soiled orange PVC trash bags out to the back alley, where you see a grease storage drum and wistfully remember that earlier, more charmed portion of your life when you once knew the chemicals and procedures necessary to convert restaurant grease into clean-burning planet-friendly ethanol, and that was just one of the many feats your brain was capable of, back before the parping, back before people whispered when they saw you walking their way, hoping they wouldn't have to make small talk with you, back before they dumbed themselves down to the verbal level of Pebbles Flintstone to make you understand them.

"Jesus, Ethan, it was just a practical joke," Kaitlin said, as we drove to Kam's housewarming.

"You're not the one who can't do long division any more."

"Get over it. What's the address number again?"

"1388. It ought to be up around this corner."

And it was: a stuccoed candy pink gargoyled fantasia land designed by a committee of fourteen-year-old girls, a handful of Smurfs and whoever creates carpeted claw-scratching environments for cats. It did have a stunning view of the city, Vancouver Island, the Olympic Peninsula and Mount Baker. Most importantly, flanking the front doors were a pair of New Zealand tree ferns of a type even I knew were expensive and finicky. Underneath the tree fern on the right, beneath leftover Tyvek sheets, pink insulation scraps, several scoops of clay and a foot of mushroom manure soil, rested the body of Tim the biker.

I was hesitant to knock. Kaitlin looked in the front window. To the muffled sounds of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," Dad was dancing with a chair, and Kam Fong was dancing with a ski. Now
she
was the speechless one.

"They're chairjacking," I explained.

"What?"

"It's a ballroom dancing exercise. You have to dance with an inanimate object and imbue it with the sense that the object is alive. It's hard to do. Dad rents Disney cartoons all the time to see how teapots and flying carpets express themselves."

Kaitlin was re-evaluating my possible use as genetic material for any future child of hers. She rang the doorbell, and Kam Fong seamlessly opened it and returned to the main room for the song's climax. Then he bowed and said, "Am I not grand?"

Dad said, "You're an hour early."

Kam said, "Not to worry, I can put them both to work. Come to the kitchen."

"Hey, we're supposed to be guests here."

"And I was supposed to have housekeepers until I fired them this afternoon."

"Why?" Kaitlin asked.

"I caught them eating."

Kam waved around a kitchen in which hundreds of hors d'oeuvres sat half finished. "Here. Make some canapes. Jim and I have to practise."

We stood at the counter and tried to figure out what to make, but we couldn't think of what to do with all the cheeses and vegetables. We went to the Dell beside the phone and put the word "canape" into Google Images. This generated a predictable deluge of porn, as well as some retro 1950s canape photos.

"Do we have radishes?" Kaitlin asked.

"Yes, but nobody likes radishes."

"I know. Has anybody in the history of humanity ever sat down one day and said to themselves,
You know, Td like nothing more right now
than to eat a crisp yummy radish}"

We lurked for a while in a radish chat room. Snoozeville.

Kaitlin continued her rant. "Carrots coast through life. If they were any colour other than orange, they'd be extinct by now." She adopted her carrot voice:
"Hi, Tm a carrot and have a bland nothing
flavour, but because Tm attractive and because Tmjust about the only orange
vegetable that can be eaten in raw form, you keep me in your kitchen. I mock
you for your weakness"

"Look at the canape sofas." Kaitlin and I quickly learned that a canape sofa is a sofa designed to seat two people.

"Boring."

Two clicks later we ended up on the Cunnilingus Web Ring.

"Ethan, I want to go home. This is the worst housewarming ever."

Just then Mom, showing no sign that she remembered Tim decomposing mere feet away, walked in and said, "Canapes! What fun!" Tying her apron, she said, "You know how boring I find ballroom dancing. It's a side of him I've never understood." With a paring knife she began whittling radishes into rosebuds. "He and Kam Fong are entered in a competition called 'Canteen.'"

"Canteen? What's it about?"

"'The Greatest Generation Goes to War—A Ballroom Tribute.'" Yet again, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" pulsed from the living room.

Kaitlin said, "I'm so sick of that 'Greatest Generation' crap. We finally drive a silver nail through the heart of Generation X, only to have this new monster rear its head. And I'm
sooooooooo
sick of Tom Hanks looking earnest all the time. They should make a Tom Hanks movie where Tom kills off Greatest Generation figureheads one by one."

Bree arrived on cue: "And then he starts killing other generations. He becomes this supernova of hate—all he wants to do is destroy."

"He starts killing the surviving members of the Sex Pistols."

"Hate clings to him like a rich, lathery shampoo. His lungs secrete it like anthrax foam."

Mom lost it. "Stop it! All of you! Tom Hanks is a fine actor who would never hurt anybody. At least not onscreen."

I thought,
Hey, didn't Tom Hanks mow down half of Chicago in
Road to Perdition? Well, whatever.

"You young people stop your prattling and help me out here. Kaitlin and Bree, peel these cucumbers. Ethan, fill me in on your secret plan to sabotage the videogame you're working on now."

"What!
Who told you about it?"

"Your friend Mark."

"You were talking to Mark?"

"He's getting me some bootleg gardening software, and he told me that you've begun collectively designing a secret slasher character named Ronald, a birthday clown who lives in a secret lair within SpriteQuest."

"He told you about Ronald?"

"He did."

I'll spare the world Mom's translation. Basically, we're concealing the coding files used to generate Ronald inside a folder called MOAT WATER TEXTURES that nobody's particularly in charge of nor interested in. There's going to be a switch inside the configuration files that allows a player with the secret password to go from one mode to another, including Ronald's Lair of Death, releasing him on a spree of carnage and terror within the SpriteQuest realm. But because this secret file can be found and unlocked by a debugger, the jPod development team needs to covertly insert Ronald into the game's coding during the final stage—after the debugging is done. Just before the master gold disk is shipped to the factory, Bree has to have an affair with the FedEx deliveryman. She'll demand that her FedEx boyfriend give her the disk before it goes on the plane. Ronald's complete files will be inserted into the game at this final moment.

Mom asked, "Bree, what if the FedEx delivery guy is a gal?"

"Well, there's a first time for everything."

Mom asked, "Bree, why are you speaking with an English accent?"

"To speed up my career."

"A sensible decision. English women are so bossy-sounding, and they love giving orders. Men are too lazy to bother fighting back. That Thatcher woman really knew how to crack the whip."

Other guests started arriving, most of them ballroom dancers or thugs. Over the next four hours, smokers lit up outside by the glistening fronds of the New Zealand tree fern above Tim's grave. I popped out, if only to convince myself that Tim's bony forearms weren't punching their way out of the topsoil like in the final scene of
Carrie.
I then wondered if some future civilization would ever dig up Tim's bones and wonder what his life was like, or if his last cheeseburger would remain mummified within his gut. About half of the smokers were on their cellphones. Kaitlin came out, ready to go home. She said, "Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now."

Dad came out with John Doe and Cowboy. I asked them what they were doing, and Dad said they were headed down to the rail yard to tag grain cars.

"Dad! John
and Cowboy are too old to be doing that, let alone you."

"I'm getting in character for a role I'm playing."

"What role is that?"

"It's for a bank commercial. I have to roll my eyes when young hip-hoppy people come in to open savings accounts."

"For that you have to go tagging?"

"If I'm supposed to hate the little fuckers, I might as well have a fresh memory in my head to make me do so. It's method. Why are you always so harsh with me about my craft?"

He's still traumatized because his speaking role was axed from the SUV commercial. He needs a bit of joy in his life.

"Just go," I said.

After Dad left, Mom came out to the front step area outside the main doorway.

"What a lovely home. Kam is so lucky to live here."

She went back inside.

. . .

Part of my job in subverting SpriteQuest is to provide Ronald's creation myth—his backstory that tells players how he ended up in his secret lair, dedicated to mayhem. Here it is:

Ronald was attending his one-billionth birthday party in a suburban basement, handing out little cups of orange drink to churlish brats. He looked up the stairs briefly and saw the kids' mothers in the kitchen, drinking martinis and making jokes at his expense. He abandoned the kids to confront them. "If you've got something to say, then say it to my face." The mothers giggled. I mean, this was a living Pez dispenser suddenly in their faces.

"Relax. We were just having fun."

"Fun is my business, lady. I know fun. Those cracks you were making aren't fun. There's a sensitive soul beneath this greasepaint."

"Were you born with all of that shit on?"

Another mother asked, "What do you do when you get home—leave your makeup on and eat TV dinners and make prank phone calls?"

"As a licensed mascot for a multinational corporation, nondisclosure agreements prevent me from telling you what I do in a noncommercial situation."

"Chickenshit. I bet you eat at Wendy's."

Ronald stuck out his finger and pointed into her face. "Wendy is a
whore"

As this conversation took place in an American house inhabited by Americans, lots of guns were handy. One of the mothers—let's call her Alpha-Mom—reached into her knitting basket and withdrew a .44. She couldn't believe it—she was turned on by her ability to choose whether the clown lived or died. She pointed it at Ronald. "Okay, clowny-wowny, time for you to go."

Ronald said, "No way. Not until you apologize."

"For what?"

"For mocking clowns."

One of the mothers was about to dial 911, but the gun mother said, "Sheila, no. Not until we have some fun." She motioned to the others. "Nell, lock the kids in the basement." She turned to Ronald. "Okay, bun boy. Strip."

"Huh?"

"You heard me. Strip. We all want to see what's under all that yellow fabric."

One of the mothers whacked him behind the knees with a folded-up aluminum mini-scooter and he fell to the kitchen floor.