Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

Karla and Dusty disappeared around ten this morning, returning around noon, with Dusty blubbering and her words spilling out of her – to Todd and to everybody else in the office – that she's pregnant.

"Oh fuck," said Dusty, "I've done so much weird shit to my body that I'll birth a grapefruit." She was howling. She was a real mess.

We made the usual "Version 2.0" jokes you have to make whenever a techie gets pregnant, and cooled her down. Ethan called a doctor friend on his cellular phone and bullied him out of his golf game and made him give Dusty a pep talk. And we all had to promise to come to the ultrasound with her. Todd bailed out and visited the gym all afternoon.

It was actually a lovely, lovely day and the sun was hot and we walked down the streets, and the colors were so exotic and bright and the air so quiet and we felt alive and living.

''The petty bourgeois ideal of withdrawal into Jeffersonian autonomy is no longer sustainable in a simultaneous, globalized environment with the asynchronous, instantaneous transfer of capital from one cashpoint to another."

"Just piss off and get into the car, Dusty."

Karla and I drove with Dusty to her clinic in Redwood City. She's so convinced her baby is going to be a grapefruit. I foresee seven and a half more months of extreme anxiety and ultrasounds. On the way out she said, "It's leaving me, you know."

"What's leaving you, Dusty?"

Dusty was looking out the back window of the van. "Ideology. Yes – I can feel it leaving my body. And I don't care. And I don't miss it."

We drove a while – caught all the red lights – they were doing construction on Camino Real. At stoplight number seventeen, Dusty turned around, looked out the Microbus's rear window one final time, and whispered, "Bye."

She then turned to Karla and roared, "Off to Burger King, now! Three fishwiches, double tartar sauce, large fries, and a Big Gulp-type beverage. Are you with me, kids? I'm rilly, rilly hungry, and if you tell Todd we went to Burger King, I'll grind you both into Chicken McNuggets."

"Revolutionary, babe. We are there. Whalers ahoy!"

Poor Todd – "Pops" – he was in a daze all day, and vanished off to the gym around six. I went out the door to follow him because maybe he needed to talk, but instead of going to get into his Supra, he walked down the street, and so I walked behind him, wondering what it must be like to be hit with the notion of spawning. He then surprised me a few blocks later by entering a small Baptist church. I waited a minute and then I followed him into the church, feeling the small whoosh of cool interior air on my face, and I walked down the center of the aisle and sat next to Todd who was praying in a pew. He looked up at me and I said, "Hi," and sat down next to him.

He wasn't sure what to do with his hands. I hummed, "Stopped into a church ..."

He said, "Huh?"

I said, '"California Dreaming' ... the song."

He said, "Right."

I said, "Here's a deal: I'm going to sit right here, right beside you, and I am going to dream. And you ... well ... why not continue praying?"

"Right'' he said. And he prayed and I dreamed.

Oh – Ethan finished his freeway.

From behind the fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions of our office I heard Emmett mumble to Susan: "Hey, Sooz – want to go out tonight?"

"I don't know, Emm ..."

"Hey, it'll be great. We can listen in on cellular calls with my Radio Shack Pro-46 scanner – I altered its megahertz range with a soldering gun – or maybe listen to some crank calls I have on tape – hack a few passwords. Grab some calzones ..."

Susan played it cool: "Uh huh – I'll, umm, think on it."

But the moment Emmett was out of sight, Susan instant-mailed Karla and they scurried down to the street for a debriefing, Susan's hoop earrings jangling like Veronica Lodge's tambourine. Karla told me afterward that Susan said it was the best date proposal she'd ever had. "Dream date!"

No conversation is private in our small office, and every day I listen in on what is becoming a female bond-o-thon.

Today, however, Karla, Susan, and Dusty really broke through a wall into a new level. It started out simply enough, with all of us discussing the way that food products in recent years have been cloning themselves out into eighteen versions of themselves. For example, old Coke, new Coke, diet Coke, old Coke without caffeine, new Coke without caffeine, Coke with pulpy bits, Coke with cheese ... We tried to figure out the roots of product multiplication and we decided it was peanut butter manufacturers who decades ago invented chunky and smooth versions of themselves.

Then things went out of control. Karla suddenly remembered to tell Susan about how Fry's doesn't sell tampons, and Susan got angrier and angrier, and the conversation became entirely tamponic.

"I don't know why they don't sell them. If nothing else, they're so damned expensive the profit margin must be like 1,000 percent."

She phoned to fact-check that Fry's indeed did not sell them.

Karla said, "This woman Lindy that I met at last week's geek party works at Apple, and she told me that in all of the women's bathrooms there they have these clear Lucite dispensers of tampons that are free. Now that's corporate intrusion into employee's lives that I could live with."

They all agreed tampons gratis are the acme of hip.

"Apple must be run by a woman," said Dusty. "Maybe it is and they're hiding it to stay on good terms with the Japanese."

Karla said, "Wha ... ?" and Dusty replied, "Oh, come on, babe, Japanese businessmen are notoriously adverse to accepting authority from women, no matter how powerful they are in their American companies."

Conversation lapsed into a discussion of Apple's charisma deficit crisis, but then soon enough returned to tampons, and for me it was so embarrassing, like watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with your mom, and suddenly a Summer's Eve commercial comes on, and Mom scurries out of the room and you're not sure why you're supposed to be embarrassed, only that everybody is.

Karla said, "But the bad thing about the free tampons at Apple is that they're Playtex, not O.B."

All three in unison: "Designed by a woman gynecologist ..."

Susan said, "Playtex suck because they just get longer, not wider ... When I bleed, it's not a vertical thing ... it's 360 degrees. And it's so freaky because when you put it in, it's this innocuous little lipstick size, and then when you take it out there's this long cotton rope at the end of the string! I'm afraid it's going to hook my uterus and I'll accidentally drag it out!"

Todd sent me an instant mail, which blinked on my screen, saying, I can't believe what I'm hearing.

Dusty said, "O.B.'s rock! But I guess not every powerful female executive is comfortable enough with her body to put her finger (fake '50s housewife voice) you know where."

They all laughed ironically.

Susan said, "I think that the lamest excuse women use about why they don't use O.B. is because they don't want their index finger to get dirty ... I mean whenever you pay for something with a dollar bill your hand gets filthy, but does that stop them from making purchases with dollar bills?"

"They need to make tampons for those 'chunky' days ... 'light' days panty-liners blow!" said Karla.

This is obviously a universal tampon concern judging by the enthusiasm that ensued.