JPod (44 page)

Mom made a snack run to Whole Foods, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd had so much fun, but then suddenly the amount of fun we were having made me suspicious—and only then did I figure out why they were being so jolly. My blood turned to Freon. I put down my wheat grass smoothie and glared at them: "You're all quitting the company—aren't you?
That's
why you're all being so nice to me."

Silence.

"It's
true.
Come on, now—tell me."

Everybody lowered their tools and looked at Kaitlin.

"Ethan, uhhh—"

"I
knew
it."

Kaitlin said, "Ethan, this has nothing to do with how any of us feel about you. Working for Doug is going to be the best gig ever. We'd be nuts not to move."

"Doug, Doug,
Doug.
Could you at least tell me what that fatuous prick's idea is?"

"Ethan, I've told you a thousand times already, we signed nondisclosure agreement forms. You know they're sacred. And let me state in public that I don't want Kam thinking I was the one who spilled the beans."

Curse Kaitlin.

"When are you leaving?"

"Effective today."

"I'm sure your friends will figure out a way to bring you along once they get settled in. Won't you?" Mom said.

The others nodded just a bit too agreeably. I felt like the last dog remaining at the SPCA.

"Don't be such a gloomy Gus, dear, and besides—" Mom was fishing around her brain for something, anything nice to say. "Learn to take pleasure in life's little accomplishments. Just look at how much progress you've made digging this hole!"

Kaitlin was heading to a tap to rinse off her hands. "Ethan, we'll discuss this tonight. Bree and I have to go get facials."

The guys bailed, too. "It's new shoe day. Some limited-edition Adidas coming in from Argentina. We have no free will here, Ethan—we have to leave. Sorry, buddy."

It was back to Mom and me.

"Dear, don't sulk. It gives you a second chin."

"Mom, for the love of God, why can't you just break the stupid NDA form and tell me what this—"

My words were cut short by a syrupy waft of decomposed flesh scent.

"Mom, I think we've just found Tim."

"I'll go get the Febreze."

. . .

Fifteen minutes and two bottles of Febreze later, we'd scraped enough dirt away to reveal a few square inches of the rolled-up carpet from Dad's den.

"Ethan, all you have to do is yank on the carpet and we're done. It couldn't be simpler."

"Mom, it's not going to come away in one little tug. The whole torso needs to be lifted."

"What's your point, Ethan?"

"Mom!
I'm
the one who has to do this, not you."

"That's right, Ethan, but /was in love with him."

I poked the carpet with the blunt end of my shovel. Mom asked why I was doing that. "I don't know—I suppose to see if he's crunchy or chewy."

"I suspect probably more on the chewy side, dear. Bones take a long time to decompose. Those steak bones I put in the azalea garden for calcium back in the 1980s are still hard as quartz."

I looked more closely at Tim's back. "He's not bloated, is he? It looks like the weight of all that dirt kept him quite slim."

"You know, Ethan, maybe if we thought of Tim as a science project we might move along a bit faster here. I think we're being too fussy."

Mom's purse farted. "Excuse me, dear—cellphone." She began rummaging, then checked the number of the incoming call. "It's the Vietnamese fertilizer dealer. I really have to answer this."

I prodded a bit more at Tim's cocoon. From out of the blue above us came an extended manga-like shriek from hell.

(Mother of God! What have you heathen pigs done to my beloved tree fern?)

Of course it was Kam—Kam and a short fire plug of a blonde-wigged woman in white go-go boots, Jackie O sunglasses and a tasselled white leather jacket who resembled a hooker I saw in Las Vegas a few years back. She was buying twenty-four boxes of Sudafed in the Albertsons on Sahara Boulevard.

"freedom?" I exclaimed.

"freedom?" Mom squeaked.

"Hello, Carol. Hello, Penis."

Kam's language became more intelligible as his first burst of rage died down. "What the fuck have you people done to my baby?"

Mom was taken aback by freedom's new look; she viewed Kam's temper as might a nursery school teacher a toddler's wail. "Now, Kam, don't be angry. There's a good explanation for this."

"There'd better be, and you'd better tell me right now."

Mom remained distracted, "freedom, I thought you were delivering a speech in Seattle today."

"I was going to—until Kam phoned."

"Carol!
What about my goddam tree fern!"

"Kam, cool down, I'll buy you a new one."

"What the hell are you doing digging up my front yard?"

Mom and I swapped glances. I wasn't going to be the one to break the news.

"Kam," said Mom, "last year I had a fling with this biker chap I did business with. And then he refused to pay me, and push came to shove, and he was accidentally electrocuted, and so I buried him here. Except I just realized he has a safety deposit box key in his pocket, and I need it rather badly."

There was a pause.

"Why didn't you say so?" Kam said. "I could have had some of my, uh, travel associates come here and dig it up for free in ten minutes."

Kam and freedom walked around to the other side of the hole. Mom said, "freedom, I barely recognize you."

freedom actually blushed and then giggled. It was a dreadful thing to see. "Kam told me that if I wanted to be a true radical, there was no point in fogging my bourgeois inertia under a mist of stillborn and archaic dialogues from the twentieth century."

"Did he?"

Kam smiled as if to say,
Look, fools! You thinkyou're so smart and politically
correct and all of that, but the Chinese mastered the art of jargon-twisting-to-
get-what-you-want back before your sweet Jesus was a holy yygote.

freedom went on. "Oh yes. A truly radical act on my part would be to infiltrate and hyperbolize the concepts I consider to be my opposite. Hence this new look."

What is it about lesbians and jargon?

freedom continued. "Next week we're off to Palm Desert for a brow lift, a nose softening, an eye lift, fat removal from the cheeks, a breast augmentation, tummy tuck, removal of fat from the thighs and calves . . ."

Kam completed the sentence: " . . . and fourteen Da Vinci porcelain veneers."

"Isn't that rebellious, Carol?" freedom had become a thirteen-year-old girl in search of approval. "Oh, and my new name is Kimberly."

Mom mouthed the word "Kimberly," but no noise escaped her throat.

Kam asked, "Ethan, have you reached that guy's body yet?"

I tamped the patch of carpet with my shovel. "Yup. I should have Mom's key within the hour."

Kam said, "Do me a favour. Just put a little bit of dirt on top of him once you're done. I have a few things I might as well put down there while there's a hole happening."

"What kind of things?"

"Don't you worry about that. I'll get one of my, uh, associates to fill in the hole after that."

"Thanks, Kam."

"Excellent."

Kam bowed to Kimberly/freedom, and then took her arm. "Very well, then. Kimberly, shall we go kick up our heels?"

Kimberly tittered. Small birds in the sky witnessed this and fell to the ground, dead.

Kam and his new girlfriend walked in the front door. Mom still stood in the hole, mute.

"Mom?"

No response.

"Mom?"

"Ethan—"

"Yes?"

"Ethan, I . . . I think I might be a lesbian."

"Mom—listen to me—Mom?
Mom?"
I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook. "Look me in the eye. Okay?"

She did.

"Here's the deal. You are not a lesbian. You do not have a crush on Kimberly. You will go home right now. You will cook Dad a hot, nutritious meal, and you will watch an episode of
Band of Brothers
on DVD with him, and you will enjoy that episode. And life will be just like it was a few months ago, and you will feel free and happy because of that. Okay?"

"Okay."

Mom teetered towards her car, bits of dove-grey soil trickling down the hole's edge in her wake. After she'd driven off, I remembered that she was my ride.

And so I toughened myself up and pretended Tim was a particularly well-designed gory website. I must agree that everything experts say about the Internet and violence and games is true—it
does
make you a little bit callous—the first gore makes the second gore easier. But the stench!

I retrieved Mom's key and tossed a bit of dirt back Tim's way. And then I simply sat at the hole's bottom, wondering about life, wondering about death and wondering about curious raccoons passing through the neighbourhood on their nightly rounds, snacking on Tim's remains.

And then I sat thinking about nothing.

Finally I heard a car pull up, a door slam, and someone approaching.

His face appeared above the hole, his dead eyes and his cruel mouth. Coupland. "Well, if it isn't the happy wanderer. Trying to dig your way back to China?"

"Fuck off and die."

"Temper." He was dressed like a 1960s TV father—glen plaid jacket and matching wool pants. He was holding, of all things, a pipe.

I said, "Kam's inside."

"That's nice. So, tell me, Ethan, why are you digging a hole, and why have you trashed Kam's tree fern?"

"That's not your business."

"Isn't it?"

I picked up a shovel, realizing that there was a part of me that wanted to whack this guy on the skull. "Just go inside."

"Maybe
you're
the one I want to speak to."

"Huh?"

"Come on. Ask yourself if there's some practical reason why I might be here to see you."

"You've lost me."

"Why don't we go for a ride?"

I did need a ride. "Okay."

I got into his Jaguar XJ12 ("Take your shoes off first, and don't touch any of the knobs or dials! Jesus Christ, you've got ants crawling off you"), and we drove down the mountain. I was tired and just wanted some peace and quiet.

"Where are we going?"

"North Van."

"Why?"

"There's something there you need to see."

Term

Type

Bsh

Cmd

Sound made when CD ejects from burner

Execle

Fct

Discontinued Popsicle flavour

.osc

Cmd

C++ (indicates that file contents have received an Academy Award)

Diff

Cmd

Rhymes with piff

PPP

Prot

Larger than normal urination

Qdaemon

Cmd

Nomeadq spelled backwards

Scanf

Fct

Misspelling of skank

Eval

Cmd

Opposite of goad

Glob

Misc

Biannual Windexing of monitor screen

.i

Ext

Low self-esteem version of "I"

ARP

Prot

Your seal needs a herring

. . .

We ended up at a building near the Second Narrows Bridge that, until recent currency fluctuations, had been a film studio used primarily for TV movies. The signage near the roof had been removed, leaving an off-white rectangle behind it. The offices up front had the stripped-to-the-bone feel of commercial space undergoing a total overhaul.

"Welcome to the offices of Dglobe."

"Dglobe? Can you spell that?"

"Capital D, lower case g, 1, o, b, e."

"What does the D stand for?"

"Doug, you dumb shit. Dglobe is where your friends are coming to work."

"Some friends they are."

"Tsh, tsh.
Nobody gets rich on software in the twenty-first century. The only money remaining is in hardware, and only hardware made offshore at that, preferably in some unregulated, uninvestigated Asian backwater where you can get a day's labour and a hand job for the cost of a bag of Skittles."

"So, then, what happens here in Vancouver?"

"Here is where the Dglobe gets its
soul."

"All I see is a big empty heap of a building. Show me something real."

"With pleasure. Come this way."

We stepped over a pile of removed drywall and a tangle of beige phone cables. The carpeting was stained and lying in piles—bright orange steak restaurant carpeting from the 1970s. The rooms smelled like a cold, dank used bookstore.

"This way, if you will." Coupland opened up a set of double doors leading into what was once a fair-size sound stage. In the centre of the room was one small light, enough to illuminate veritable kelp beds of abandoned electrical cords on the concrete floor. Leaning against the wall across the space were dozens of pieces of scenery, stacked like toast slices.

Coupland turned to me. "There, in the centre of the room—that's the Dglobe."

We walked towards it: a beach-ball-sized globe lit from within. "Big deal."

"Fair enough. But watch this."

Coupland pulled a key fob from his pocket and clicked it at the globe. Suddenly the continents vanished, and in a blink the globe reconfigured as one big land mass. "Look closely at—"

"That's Pangaea . . . continental drift."

"Yes, it is."

Pangaea began separating into continental chunks, all of which began moving away from each other. Over the course of sixty seconds, I witnessed the creation of the world as the land masses dragged across long-vanished oceans. Some of them collided, some of them barely moved. South America and Africa crept away from each other. After two minutes the Dglobe showed Earth as we currently know it. And then—and then—the continents
kept
moving. And moving. California touched Alaska; India smushed itself into oblivion into the concertina'd ridges of the Himalayas; South America rested in the middle of the Pacific.

Coupland said, "That's Earth three billion years from now. Hey—let's look at it again in fast motion!" He clicked the fob, and we watched the continents form across a thirty-second span.

I said, "Again."

We watched it again.

Doug said, "Gee, Ethan—I wonder what Earth would look like if Antarctica melted completely? Why, let's find out! And let's do it in sixty seconds."

Before me Earth's land masses lost their familiarity. Florida vanished, as did much of Asia and all the planet's coastlines.

"Do it again!"

"With pleasure."

The continents submerged once more.

"Show me more stuff!"

"Hmmmm
. . . I wonder what the most recent Ice Age looked like from start to finish."

"Show me the Ice Age!" I shouted.

"With pleasure."

Bingo! Fifty thousand years squished into sixty seconds.

Coupland said, "Gee, Ethan—how about an instantaneous realtime picture of all the weather on Earth at this moment?"

"You can do that?"

"Watch me." With a click, the Dglobe turned into Earth as seen from thirty-two geosynchronous weather satellites. It was stunning.

"Let's go back thirty days and see a whole month's worth of weather leading up to the present moment." With a click, the Dglobe showed thirty days of weather, with the planet rotating to show night and day, the cities of Earth twinkling when cloud cover permitted.

He said, "Let's see what happens if we throw a class 5 hurricane towards Florida . . . yeehaw! Disaster! Better still, what does Mars look like?"

Earth became Mars.

"What does the moon look like?"

I saw the moon.

"The sun? Flame on!"

Next came a succession of morphings: a glitterball; a mirror image of Earth; a graphics light show; political maps of the planet in various languages; a colour-coded slow-speed mapping of human populations on the planet since 5000 BC.

I looked at the Dglobe up close. "How does it work?" "By using a spherical liquid crystal screen programmed with proprietary 3-D cartographic algorithms. They're going to be made in China . . . obviously. And your friends are writing and designing the globe's various uses."

"How does this particular model here work?"

"It's a mock-up with internal projectors. It cost me a bomb."

I asked, "How come you're hiring jPodders? Why not get eggheads from Yale or Stanford or India?"

"Because it's not that hard to program, so I might as well have fun people doing it instead of robotic geeks."

"And you really
can
make these globes?"

"Yes, I can. And every school on earth is going to want one. And anyone with a kid is going to want one. What am I saying—everyone in the
world is
going to want one."

"I want in."

"I knew you would."

"I also know you're evil, Coupland, so what's the catch?"

"There's no catch, but there
is
a price."

"I knew it."

"I want your new laptop, the one you bought after you returned from China. No erasing allowed—if you mail-ordered a DVD of
Sandra, the Living Chunnel,
I want to know about it. And I also want all of your files from work.
All of
them. Business and personal."

"Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?"

"Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's easier just to steal your life than to make something up. So I need to find out what happened in your life after China."

My life a story?
"Really?"

"You have ten seconds to make up your mind. One, two, three—wait! I think I hear marketing phoning with a new idea on how to dilute your latest game ideas with crap—four, five, six—wait, none of your friends are working there any more. You're alone in jPod—seven, eight, nine—"

"It's a deal."

"Good. You're living in Doug's world now."

"Not yet. I want your word on paper."

"Fine. No problem." In the parking lot Coupland hand-wrote an appropriate document, then handed it to me. "By the way," he added, "you're going to be filling in that hole tonight, aren't you?"

"Kam's people are doing it tomorrow morning."

"Do you think Kam would mind if I threw in a couple of things of my own?"

"Not at all. Just chuck them in and cover them with a tarp or a bedsheet so nobody can see what they are."

"Marvellous."