The Unknowns (12 page)

“Nothing!” I said much too loudly. “Nothing. Just looking around.” I tried to slip Bronwen’s underwear into my pocket, but it got snagged and dangled halfway out.

He peered at me narrowly. Over his shoulder, his friend strained to see what was going on.

“Are you guys done playing G.I. Joe?” I said.

“We’re in the middle,” he said suspiciously.

“All right!” I said. “I just came in here to use the bathroom. Is this it over here?”

“Yeah,” Pete said.

“Thanks,” I said, and headed into the bathroom, leaving Bronwen’s underwear drawer open behind me.

We left right after the ball dropped over Times Square. My mom had had a few drinks, and although she was a seasoned drinker she had a little trouble unlocking the car door. “So,” she said as we pulled away from Stacey and Gary’s house. “Did you have a good time?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Eric,” she said, making a left turn, “do you wish you had friends?”

I had imagined that my mother was somehow oblivious to my loneliness, that by splitting my time between school and her house and my dad’s I gave the impression of a full and busy life. Of course, we lived together in a small bungalow where I’d just spent winter break teaching myself C and reading Chris Claremont’s run on
X-Men
from the beginning.

“Yeah, sometimes,” I said. “But, you know, I really like programming.”

“I know,” she said. “And that’s great. But—” There were sirens,
and she pulled over to let a cop car pass. The flashing lights turned her hands on the wheel red and blue. As she glanced over her shoulder and pulled out, she said, “You just don’t seem very happy.”

Graham Neale noticed me sitting at the back of the classroom and wandered over. “Hey Eric!” he said. “You have a good vacation, dude?” It was the first thing anyone had said to me since we’d arrived back at school that morning. He put a soft hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I knew this was a trap, but my heart reflexively opened a few degrees anyway.

“Pretty good,” I said, looking up at him from my chair.

“Cool, cool,” he said. “Something I wanted to ask you, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

“What’s it like to be such a loser?”

“Good one,” I said, trying to pull my shoulder away. Graham held on.

“No, I asked you a question,” he said, sounding offended. “What’s it like?” He was going to watch me squirm on the point of this unanswerable presumptive question. I stared past him at the classroom door, the fire extinguisher, the map showing the emergency evacuation route, until Mrs. Blankenship came in with a stack of copies of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

As soon as class was done I hurried out of the room and down to the basement, wanting only the warm, stale air of the bathroom. I would wait out the lunch period with the comics I had slipped into my backpack that morning: hundreds of pages of anti-mutant prejudice, terrifying possible futures, and psychic struggles against mind-controlling sadists, protected by Mylar bags and stiff sheets of cardboard. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, though, the door, with its ancient wooden B
OYS
sign, was propped open by a yellow cone, and a heavy Mexican woman in a smock was pushing an industrial mop across the floor. From above I heard the throb of
footsteps, the buzz of voices, the entire school heading toward the cafeteria over our heads. Farther down the scruffy hallway, past the huge room where cafeteria workers fed plates and trays into massive dishwashers, was the computer room. Keeping the promise I had made to myself at Wilson, I had never been inside. But things had changed, and a girlfriend was not on the horizon, and
computer nerd
was a more appealing identity than
kid who hangs out in the toilets in the basement
, barely.

I peered through the narrow window in the door. Guy Learmont, who was tiny and in my Spanish class, was watching a kid I didn’t know play Toxic Ravine at a terminal on the far side of the room. In the months before I’d started at MLK I had imagined the inside of the building, the other students, the adult life I would finally achieve there. This fantasy, vague as to details but emotionally vivid and specific, had withdrawn from my consciousness the minute I stepped through the doors of the real place. But it had survived, undiminished, as though sealed in an airtight compartment in my brain, and now, in a gust of nostalgia for a world that would never exist, it returned. I mourned it for a second, and then I said goodbye and pushed open the door to the computer room.

“Fuck, it’s Muller,” Guy Learmont said as I walked in. Near the beginning of the year, Learmont had made the mistake of confiding in Jerry Osteen, and now the entire school knew he had only one testicle. Bill Fleig, typing rapidly at a terminal in the corner, didn’t look up.

Brilliant white paint coated the walls, the pipes, the light fixtures, thick enough to give the room an alkaline scent. There were seven free computers, each with twelve times as much memory as the Packard Bell in my bedroom. Learmont’s friend’s machine emitted happy music and occasional shouts of “I’m hungry!” Thickets of code ran down Bill Fleig’s screen.

“It’s a test generator,” Bill said, although I hadn’t asked. “People
were cheating in Gestetner’s class, copying each other’s homework and stuff, so he asked me to write a program that generates a different test for everybody. It just varies up the quantities and shuffles the order of the questions, and then it generates an answer key for each one.”

“Gestetner couldn’t do this himself?” I asked.

“No, he could,” Bill said. “But he has to give me some kind of homework if I’m going to get AP credit for learning C++.” Then he stopped typing and turned to look at me. “Is it true you were keeping a notebook on girls?” If the story had made it to Bill, who was earning extra credit constructing cheat-proof tests for a math teacher, everyone in the school had heard it.

“Fuck you,” I said. Bill observed this display of emotion curiously. “OK, yes. Yeah, it’s true. I was keeping a notebook.”

“I was just wondering,” Bill said. “I can see why you might do that.”

Something hateful in my gut rose up against him: of course the only person in the school with any sympathy for me was Bill Fleig, he of the overbite and the giant calculator. “I’m really glad I’ve got your support,” I said.

A muffled stampede shook the ceiling: lunch was over. Bill saved his program to a floppy disk, Learmont and his friend shut down their game, and I followed them out. In the first-floor hallway, on my way to world history, someone called my name and started to cheer. It spread, and soon dozens of kids had turned from their lockers and started to applaud, as though I was the hero at a parade. It wasn’t about anything, just the crowd enjoying its capacity for spontaneous mass irony. I tried to play along, raising my hand to acknowledge the tribute, until someone behind me gave me a shove and I went down, stinging my palms on the linoleum.

I went back to the computer room the next day, and Bill showed me how the test generator worked. Then he announced that he’d
started building a spreadsheet program. “Every few years a new one comes along and demolishes the old one,” he said. “VisiCalc got creamed by Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus got eaten by Excel, now I’m going to beat Excel.”

I looked at his designs: he had some clever ideas for macro functions that Excel wouldn’t have for three or four years, but he hadn’t thought much about user experience. I made some tentative suggestions, careful to show respect for the work he’d put in. Like most people who are confident of their genius, Bill accepts thoughtful criticism eagerly, and so I spent a few days thinking through the interface for him, mapping it out on paper in classes and at night. I could already tell it was the only area in which I might improve on Bill’s work. Most software makes people struggle, and so when they notice it they see it as an enemy. But if the designer can anticipate not only the user’s goals but the user’s instincts and assumptions, users will feel that the software cares about them, pays attention to their needs—loves them. And they’ll start to love the software back. All feelings of love toward technology are this kind of reciprocal love, I think.

I designed the user experience model and most of the front end for the spreadsheet program, and watched as Bill built it. That’s how I learned how good Bill Fleig was. Faced with a troublesome bug, he didn’t scroll through the program’s text to follow a variable’s path but stared blankly ahead, nodding, unspooling hundreds of lines of code in his mind, as though the only processor he needed was his own cerebral cortex. At the lowest point in my life I had found a friend to explore this new territory with, although it wasn’t the friend or the territory I would have chosen.

(We finished the program eight months later. Bill sent demos to software publishers, all of whom said the spreadsheet market was oversaturated. I happen to know that a copy of the demo made it to Redmond about two years before features we’d designed showed up in Excel, with the interface completely botched.)

Outside the computer room things changed without getting better or worse. The applause thing became a daily occurrence, then gave way to a variant in which people I passed in the halls slapped me on the back. It was as though they were congratulating me, but painfully hard and with sarcastic intent. Everyone who attends high school has seen this kind of thing happen, but little in the adult world resembles it, and so for most adults the cruelty of adolescence is a half-remembered dream, a vague and tumultuous carnival with no associative triggers to connect it to present experience.

By that point my notebook wasn’t mentioned much—the schoolwide conversation had moved on. (There were exceptions: once, on the stairway, Barry Cushman said, “Hey Eric, is Monica in your notebook?” and Monica Hintz said, “Shut up, jerk!” and pushed Barry into the wall, but she was smiling while she said it, and I realized that this was how flirting worked.) But it was freshman year, and the class of 1996 needed a pariah, and I had stepped forward to volunteer.

I spent weekends in my room, hacking away on my computer, wishing I had more RAM or some friends. Around me people were starting to sleep together, and to talk about it, and I spent more and more time and energy imagining sex, guessing at what it might be like, wondering if I’d ever find out.

THE SECOND DATE WITH
Maya is a daytime triumph in which we sit side by side in lawn chairs on the roof of my building, looking out at other people’s roofs, passing a bottle of wine. The gravel crunches beneath our sneakers. In the thorny zone of potential disillusion that follows a first kiss, we effortlessly sustain our conversational momentum, right up until I ask what her parents do.

“Uh, my dad’s an art dealer,” she says, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her jacket. “My mom died when I was six.”

The imperatives here are multiple and contradictory: I don’t want to drag her into self-exposure, or spoil the afternoon with grief, but I can’t allow myself to appear cowardly in the face of tragedy. “How did she die?”

“She had cancer,” Maya says, nestling the wine bottle into the pebbles. “Two kinds of cancer at once. She was being treated for lung cancer when they found the stomach cancer.”

“Do you remember her?”

“I have this strong sense of, like,
mom
. But when I think about what she looked like all I can see are photographs.”

The smell of roasting coffee beans blows over us, a smell that bears no relation to the flavor of coffee itself. I take a risk. “Where were you when you found out she died?”

“I was in my room,” she says. “I was playing with my Etch A Sketch, and my dad came in and told me she was dead. He wasn’t crying, and I said,
Why aren’t you crying
? and he said,
I’ve been crying, honey. I’ve been crying for half an hour
. He’d waited to tell me—he wanted to compose himself first. I was so furious. I’d been drawing on my Etch A Sketch like an idiot while my mom was dead. I kept screaming,
Why didn’t you tell me
?”

After this there’s a sense that we’ve navigated something tricky together. Soon we go downstairs, rubbing our cold hands, and fall kissing onto my bed. We pin each other by the wrists; we wrestle like kids; we grind like teenagers. And then I start to unbutton her shirt, and she resists with a quick shake of her head. We go back to kissing for a while, but we’ve lost focus, and soon we’re lying on our backs looking up at the rafters.

“All right if we wait a while on the sex thing?” she says. It’s not quite a question.

“Sure, yeah, no problem,” I say. “Take it slow.” She smiles, and we kiss some more. In a way it’s worse but in a way it’s better. I do want to have sex with her—for the obvious reasons, and to seal the deal. But more than that I want to avoid wrecking everything.

For the next few weeks we see each other almost every night, which makes me feel as though I’ve passed into another world with different laws. I start to discover how her ordinary life functions, although obviously you can never discount the impact of the observer on the phenomenon under observation. I quiz her on her history, which she presents as a series of phases passed through like railway stations. The binge-drinking phase started at fifteen and was over by the time she went to college. She characterizes it as a response to her difficult relationship with her father, about whom she says little. College saw the advent of the radical activism phase. Since moving to San Francisco she’s become open to the possibility of ambition, although in her case the desideratum is not money but prestige,
which is currency among journalists. For the past year she’s been appearing on the local public radio station once a month. At the paper she pushes every deadline, and because she’s a star she gets away with it. This inspires resentment in her coworkers, particularly the editor who has to stay late to wait for her copy. She’s apologetic but not fearful, because as long as she brings in good stories, no one will fire her for making the editor work late. She comes to my house in the evenings, and we eat dinner and kiss and fall asleep together, and those two hours justify everything that has ever happened to me.