Microserfs

>What would happen if TV caracters continued their theoretical lives in our linear time . . . Bob and Emily Hartley, in their early 70s now, would be living in their brown apartment, wrinkled and childless. Or Mary Tyler Moore, now 68 . . . surely bitter, alone, sterile . . .

Prozac!

* * *

SpaghettiOs

Aspirin

invasion

What's My Line

Jell-O simulator

Russian winter

Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal?

A: You already are an animal

SUNDAY

Ethan phoned me and asked me to come over to San Carlos. When I arrived, he was on a cordless phone in his kitchen, leaving me in his ultra-monitored living room reading his copies of Cellular Buyer's Guide, Dr. Dobbs Journal, LAN Times - and Game Pro (#1 Video Game Magazine).

He came out of the kitchen wearing an Intel T-shirt - rare, as I've never seen him in anything but a shirt and tie in all the time I've known him. He was wearing jeans, too. "It's Friday - 'jeans day,' pal," he said.

He then sat down on the couch beside me and there was this silence as he shuffled his coffee table magazines back into geometric orderliness after my perusal, and then he sat back on the white leather with his arm behind my back.

I pointed out that his copy of Binary File Transfer Monthly was possibly the most boring document I'd ever seen in my life. He said, "Well, what if it were actually a copy of Penthouse Forum letters encrypted as something so dull and opaque, that nobody would realize that it was something else. Imagine an encryption system that could reconfigure the words, 'I am a sophomore at a small midwestern college' into 'Does not conform to ITCU Convention specifications for frequency ranges.' It'd be the biggest stroke of encryption genius since the U.S. military used Navajo Indians to speak freely over the radio about top secret operations."

He then became quiet and still, and the presence of his arm behind me was eerily warm. I stiffened my posture. The scenario felt so charged - the whole situation. I felt like a Yankee schoolteacher on a Hollywood casting couch. He said to me, "I have something important I have to ask of you, pal," and I thought, "Oh God - here it is . . . I'm going to get hit on."

He then removed his T-shirt, and I was trying to be cool about the situation, and I was truly freaking out as Ethan's not really my, err, cup o' tea. He was reading my mind and said to me, "Don't be a prig - I'm not gonna jump you, but I am going to ask you a favor."

"Oh?"

"Chill out, it's not that kind of favor."

His missing T-shirt revealed a torso of average buffitude, "You can see, I'm no Todd," he said, and then he turned around, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I gasped. His rotation revealed his back covered in a matrix of bandages, dried blood and micro-pore tape, and it looked as if several soiled disposable diapers had been taped to his skin all higgledy-piggledy. "It's this . . . these."

I said, "Ethan, what the fuck is this all about? Did you have an accident? Jesus!"

"Accident? Who gives a shit . . . ozone . . . a bologna sandwich I ate in third grade . . . one hour too many in front of a Russian-built VDT. But it's a part of me, Dan . . . the damage . . . the whateverthefuck it is. It's moles gone bad. Maybe they're gone forever and, well, maybe they're not."

I was trying to look away, but he said, "That is so fucking insulting," and he jumped up and sat on the coffee table facing away from me, sticking the bandages in my face. I then looked and was mesmerized by this bio-mash of cotton, plastic, and body fluids barnacled to his skin. I didn't say anything.

"Dan?" he asked.

"Yeah . . ."

"You gotta remove them for me."

"Yeah?"

"There's nobody else who'll do it for me. You know that, Dan?"

"There's nobody?"

"Nobody."

I looked some more and he said, "Doc hacked 'em out of me like they were divots on the thirteenth fairway a week ago. And not one of you dumb bastards ever even bothered to ask why I was going to the dermatologist. Nobody asked and I had nobody to tell."

"Jesus, Ethan - we thought you were going to the dermatologist about your dandruff."

"I have dandruff?"

"It's, ummm, nothing out of the ordinary." I touched the bandages and they felt crackly, like Corn Flakes.

"You said I had dandruff?"

"Ethan. Discussing body malfunctions is like discussing salaries. You don't do it."

"Fine. Can you just remove them? They itch. They hurt."

"Yeah, of course."

He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide solution, rubbing alcohol, and old shirts cut into strips for rags. And so with him on the coffee table I removed chunk after bloody chunk, snipping away at his back and pulling scraps away, horrified at exactly how much of him had been removed.

We were talking. He said he can't believe how far dermatology has advanced in the past ten years. "They can practically put a small video camera inside your body and the doctor says to you, 'This is how your zit sees the world,' and they have a camera looking out from inside the zit."