Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

During a roadside break I asked Karla why she didn't want to go visit her parents in McMinnville, but she said it was because they were psychotic, and so I didn't press the matter.

The Microbus is covered in gray bondo with orange bondo spots all over it. We call it The Carp.

We found Bug south of Eugene. He didn't even know about the ditch, so now all of us have a dark secret between us.

Along 1-5, just outside a suburb of Eugene, Oregon, there were all of these houses for sale next to the freeway, and they were putting these desperate signs up to flog them: if you lived here, you would be home right now. Karla honked the horn, waved out the window of the Microbus and pointed at the sign. Convoy humor.

We made this rule that we had to honk every time we spotted road kill, and we nearly burned out our horns.

On a diner TV set we saw that in Arizona, the eight men and women of Biosphere 2 emerged into the real world after spending two years in a hermetically sealed, self-referential, self-sufficient environment. I certainly empathized with them. And their uniforms were like Star Trek.

We switched vehicles and I drove Karla's Microbus for a while, but the Panasonic rice cooker in the rear filled with rattling cassette tapes drove me nuts. It was buried too deeply inside the mounds o' stuff to move, so around Klamath Falls we switched vehicles again.

We crossed the California border and had dinner in a cafe. We talked about society's accelerating rate of change. Karla said, "We live in an era of no historical precedents – this is to say, history is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes. You can't look at, say, the War of 1709 (I made this date up, although no doubt there probably was a War of 1709) and draw parallels between then and now. They didn't have Federal Express, SkyTel paging, 1-800 numbers, or hip replacement surgery in 1709 – or a picture of the entire planet inside their heads."

She glurped a milkshake. "The cards are being shuffled; new games are being invented. And we're actually driving to the actual card factory."

Psychosis! We were discussing Susan's new image at dinner, when I told Karla about this really neat thing Susan's mother did when Susan was young. Susan's mother told Susan that she had an enormous IQ so that Susan could never try and pretend she was dumb when she got older. So because of this, Susan never did feign stupidity – she never had any fear of science or math. Maybe this is the roots of her whole Riot Grrrl transformation.

On hearing this news, Karla went nuts. It turns out that Karla's parents always told her that she was stupid. Everything in life Karla had ever achieved – her degrees and her ability to work with numbers and code, had always been against a gradient of her parents saying, "Now why'd you want to go filling your head with that kind of thing – that's for your brother Karl to do."

"Karl's nice, and we like each other," Karla said, "but he's a total 100-center of the bell curve and no way around it. My parents drove him crazy expecting him to be a particle physicist. All Karl wants to do is manage a Lucky Mart and watch football. They've always refused to see us as we are."

Karla was off and running:

"Here's an example – once I went home to visit and the phone was broken, so I began fixing it, and Dad took it away and said, 'Karl should give that a try,' and Karl just wanted to watch TV and couldn't fix a phone if it spat on him and so I was screaming at my Dad, Karl was screaming at my Dad, and my Mom came in and tried to discuss 'women's things' and drag me into the kitchen. Meatloaffuckingrecipes."

Karla was just fuming. She can't bring herself to forgive her parents for trying to brainwash her into thinking she was dumb all her life.

Later, we got too bagged to drive, so we pulled into a Days Inn in Yreka. During a pre-bedtime shiatsu break we started talking about Spy vs. Spy, that old comic in Mad magazine, and how the very first time you read it, you arbitrarily chose either the black Spy or the white Spy and you voted for your color choice unflinchingly for the remaining period of your Mad magazine-reading phase.

I always voted for the black Spy; Karla voted for the white. Silly, but for a moment we had a note of genuine tension.

Karla broke the tension. She said, "Well, it's at least binary, right?" And I said, "Yes," and she said, "Are we geeks, or what?"

(Insert one more foot massage here.)

Even later on, Karla spoke to me again. "There's more, Dan. About the stupid business. About the sunstroke."

I wasn't surprised to hear this. "I figured as much. So ... you want to tell me?"

The stars outside the window were sort of creamy, and I couldn't tell if I was seeing clouds or the Milky Way.

"There was a reason I was back at the house a few years ago ... the time I had the sunstroke episode."

"Yeah?"

"Let me put this another way. Remember back up at Microsoft when you brought me the cucumber roll ... just out of the blue like that?"

"I remember."

"Well -" (she kissed my eyebrow) "– it's the first time I can remember ever wanting to really eat, in like ten years." I was quiet. She continued talking: "Back when I had my sunstroke episode, I hadn't eaten in so long and I weighed about as much as a Franklin Mint figurine. My body was starting to die inside and my parents were worried that I'd gone too far, and I think I even scared myself. You think I'm small now, Buster, you'd better see ... well you won't because I destroyed all photos ... pictures of myself taken during my 'phase' as my parents call it."

She was fetal and I had my left hand underneath her feet and my right on top of her head. I cupped her closer and pressed her against my stomach and said, "You're my baby now: you're a thousand diamonds – a handful of lovers' rings – chalk for a million hopscotch games."

"I didn't want to do what I was doing, Dan – it just happened. My body was the only way I could get my message across and it was such a bad message. I crashed myself. In the end, it was work that saved my life. But then work became my life – I was technically living but without a life. And I was so scared. I thought that work was all there was ever going to be. And oh, God, I was so mean to everybody. But I was just running so scared. My parents. They just won't accept what was going on with me. I see them and I want to starve. I can't let myself see them."

I put my forearm in the crook of her knees and pulled her as tightly together as she could go. Her neck rested on my other arm. I pulled the blankets over us, and her breath was hot and tiny, in little bursts like NutraSweet packets.

"There's just so much I want to forget, Dan. I thought I was going to be a READ ONLY file. I never thought I'd be ... interactive."

I said, "Don't worry about it, Karla. Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines."

It's late and Karla's asleep and blue by the light of the PowerBook.

I'm thinking of her as I input these words, my poor little girl who grew up in a small town with a family that did nothing to encourage her to use her miraculous brain, that thwarted her attempts at intelligence – this frail thing who reached out to the world in the only way she knew, through numbers and lines of code in the hope that from there she would find sensation and expression. I felt this jolt of energy and this sense of honor to be allowed entrance into her world – to be with a soul so hungry and powerful and needful to go forth into the universe. I want to feed her.