The Enterprise - 67

Back when I lived in Connecticut thoughts of moving to the City expanded in my mind until it seemed inevitable and when it did I had a vision: slogging up a sidewalk at night after work, looking for a street sign to mark the yawning black path to my anonymous home around the corner. City Life. I was struck with depression at the thought of it and I figured whatever came, I'd have to fight it off. And it's true, I'd better.

I was seeing this girl Jenny now. Jenny Axtell. She was beautiful; dark hair and big, mascara’d eyes, and there was something wrong with her. The first night I stayed at her dark little apartment in Brooklyn she laid down some ground rules.

“I need you to promise me something,” she said. “I need you to promise to never, ever, come find me after we, you know, if we break up. After that. I need you to promise to never like, come looking for me.”

I told her I understood.

“This is very important to me,” she continued solemnly. I nodded. “Never, never—what are you never going to do?”

“I’ll never come looking for you.”

“You know where I live now. I don’t want someday to answer my door and—”

“I understand. I promise.”

“Also there’s a guy I fuck sometimes.”

“What?”

“An old friend. Brendan. He’s an old high school friend. We get together like once a year and we fuck. It’s kind of a goof really.”

“A goof?”

“Yeah but I’m telling you this. I’m telling you this now.”

Again I said I understood.

We did the normal things, bars in her neighborhood, parties. My sister referred to her as Jen X: “How’s it going with Jen X?” or “How’s Jen X doing?” The nickname was playful but there was something in it too. I don’t know. It seemed right.

There was a loft party one night in SoHo somewhere, a friend of my friend Joanna’s. Everyone piled their bags and winter coats in a bedroom and went into the vast main space to socialize. Jenny left for a while, to get some money or fresh air, I don’t know, we were drunk. Later we went back to my place and she left in the morning like normal.

Joanna called. Her voice was tense. Her friend’s credit card had gone missing and someone was pretty sure they’d seen Jenny pawing through the pile of belongings on the mattress on the floor. The malefactor had bought a MetroCard at eleven something something pm, according to the bank. Immediately I had a sense that she was right. Why didn’t I protest, come to her defense? Offer words of caution and reason? But I was carried off by Joanna’s cold, grim tone. It sounded true. And once it sounded true it all made sense. Jenny’s teasing, flirty quality. Her touchiness and unease at unexpected times. Of course. She was a thief. A what—a kleptomaniac, maybe. I felt I had the complete picture of her personality, the measure of her.

I called Jenny. I presented her with the facts, with what I thought were facts. She’d been seen. She had left for a time around eleven. She was dumbfounded by my accusation. She began to weep. I’ll show you it’s not true, she said. Her denial was earnest, as compelling as Joanna’s words had been before. Now I believed her. Did I? I didn’t know what I thought or who I was. We agreed to meet.

At a table at her local bar she again burst into tears. I can’t believe you’re saying this, she said. I could not believe it either. Tremblingly she showed me an ATM receipt from around the time the purchase had been made. See? See? I’m not lying. I was at a bodega. I wasn’t underground. More tears. The wilted, crumpled receipt lay on the table before me. Might it have been tear stained? Yes. Accusing me of wanton accusation.

I did not know what to think. I did not know what to believe. I thought I knew but I knew nothing.

The Enterprise - 66

Alan had made an arrangement with some guy who had a little ad sales business or something, maybe an old friend from a past career. He occupied a desk to the side of our main room, set apart but audible and visible in the spacious loft. You could hear him on the phone, his booming adman’s voice. Sometimes saying fuck. He’d make small talk about the Yankees to me.

Forty-nine Russian miners trapped as water enters mine.

Tom and I went to a new-tech telecom provider in an industrial park in Cranbury, New Jersey. The main artery to the parking lots with its thin, grassy median. Uniform shrubbery surrounding low-lying buildings with names like Building 7 and Building 9. We sat in a series of conference rooms. Met some people. Gave a training. It began to rain and by the time Tom dropped me off at the PATH station in Hoboken it was pouring down hard.

Josh had scored us a deal doing automated customer support for a major cable company. I spent days copy-pasting FAQs from their website into our output code, testing, tweaking. The endeavor had a cold, prosaic quality that I liked. Its essential dreariness made it seem practical, vital even. Everyone needs to reset their password sometimes.

We walked the same gray path to lunch each day, to the nearest outpost of the giant sandwich chain. Past monthly parking lots, service entrances and loading docks, through passages that tunneled under scaffolds.

Through it all I kept working on the Product. It was still wildly popular, the object of hate, scorn, ridicule and come-ons from every adolescent in the country. The raw numbers dictated we couldn’t shut it down. Repeat visits, session length, uniques—all the metrics remained garish. Start-up common wisdom says you can’t ignore such numbers; you must respect them, even if you have no idea how to convert them into money. In desperation Alan decided fuck it, we’ll make it subscription-only. For $9.99 a year, the kids or whoever the fuck it was out there could curse and threaten the Product all they want. Everyone else would get shut out after one free month. I worked closely with Jacques and Julien from out West to button everything up codewise; we’d set a timer per user and shunt them into a death loop if they didn’t cough up the cash by day thirty.

Every day I came in and checked the running total. Ten dollars here, ten dollars there. It was in the low hundreds after a few weeks. Maybe it would turn a corner, reach some kind of tipping point. An avalanche of users suddenly terrified of losing their digital punching bag, or nemesis, or lover. A couple months went by. We totaled just over a grand. The interactions with users who’d just been informed—some after using the Product for years—that they only had one month left for free were brutal, exceptionally abusive. We pulled the plug. One day the Product said nothing more about money or subscriptions and no one was ever locked out again and life went on.

The Enterprise - 65

Josh and Tom and I walked out drunk and dropped Tom off at the ferry for Jersey. Josh and I walked back uptown. The city was naked, unprotected from the dusk. A woman sat in Battery Park reading a paperback by the glow of a generator-powered searchlight, as though some breach in reality had beamed her from her couch. Posh Tribeca restaurants had been turned inside out onto the streets; the patrons standing with their wine, the workers playing cards by candlelight. In the tight maze of West Village streets cars rolled gingerly through intersections. They seemed human somehow, deferential, alive to the rights and needs of other cars and pedestrians especially. In my inebriation I wondered: had we, as a race, transcended traffic lights? Had the remorseless rhythm of green-orange-red, green-orange-red, beaten so deeply into our psyche that we’d finally developed the instinct to yield? People sat on stoops and drank, or stood outside of bars and drank. Josh was supposed to go to a party but what did that really mean anymore? He made some calls and plans were made to meet in Union Square. At Lafayette and Spring we came upon the darkened stairs to the subway, suddenly neglected and irrelevant. Yellow caution tape stretched across the entrance.

"Let's go in," Josh said brightly.

"OK."

It was hot down there, and quiet. Stupefyingly quiet, the way only a very noisy thing can ever be. Yet something beat gently at the silence. What was it? Something that hadn’t ever been heard. Water dripping somewhere, echoing out the tunnel. 

It was dark too, very dark, but for a faint glow: by some pointless quirk of backup power the green circles with the yellow arrows beside the turnstiles were lit and pointing, like it was the morning rush.

I took out my Metrocard and held it in the pale light. I looked at Josh for a beat. And I swiped it through the slot like any other day.

BING! went the machine. GO said the little screen. The punch line to a nonexistent joke. 

Josh went through and ran up and down the pitch-black platform, yelling to wake the dead.

The Enterprise - 64

I normally took the 1 or the 9 from Penn Station but they weren’t running so I took the C. When I walked by the 1-9 station on Canal the entrance was yellow-taped and surrounded by emergency vehicles and personnel: cops, firemen, EMTs, walkie-talkies babbling in static. An empty stretcher sat on the sidewalk. At work our new office manager, Caitlyn, instant messaged me to ask if I’d been on the train with the poison scare. She sent me an article about it. Evidently a passenger had reported a substance under the seats resembling wet sugar.

I was out with Steve, going from one bar to another, when Leeane called. She sounded like she’d been crying. She said she was in bed reading. We talked about getting together sometime and she said she’d been way busy with class. 

“And thing is, I’m sort of seeing someone now.”

“Oh OK.”

"I'm not sure how it's working out. He has a six-year-old girl."

She said this and that, she was ambivalent, he was always spending time with his kid. And plus she had drawing class all summer and it was a bitch. I said we could get together and just hang out sometime.

"That would be cool. I want the opinion of a third party," she said. She sniffled.

"Are you OK?"

"Yeah, just you know, a heavy day."

"Nothing really bad heavy?"

"No no. Not at all. Just my drawing class is so hard. And it occurred to me: I'm going to have to be dealing with this all my life."

My brother emailed me to inform me in solemn and oddly formal terms that our grandmother had died. He described the event as “no doubt a blessing,” she having declined the way grandmothers do. I thought of Doctor Robertson, her shrink for many decades, the primary relationship in her life since the premature death of her husband. What they talked about nobody knew. Now nobody would. Nothing ever seemed to change in her psyche—her passive aggression, her neediness, her state of denial. Yet with her kids grown up and gone her treatment at his hands became her life’s work. Her masterpiece. His too, maybe. An invisible legacy. Wonder how he took the news.

When the power went out I thought this is it, they got us again. But deeper this time, not in office buildings but in the place where electrons move through copper wire. We got beers and hung out on the fire escape to watch the sun go down into a rosy haze. I called my mom in Paris. It wasn’t terrorism, she laughed. Just a fuckup somewhere that blacked out the Eastern Seaboard.

The Enterprise - 63

The United States embarked on a foolish war in the Middle East that would have horrific consequences for untold millions living there and for the men and women sent away to fight. A nightmare world emerged, formed of brutal setbacks, perverse alliances, and collateral damage. Back in New York City I went out with a lawyer who’d been representing Martha Stewart in some civil litigation. We met after work, she in her proper attire, and shared a bottle of red wine on the Park Avenue median, which she referred to as the “meridian.” She told me she used to be a lesbian. I went out with a woman with short, dark hair who was going to school for construction site management. In the cab on the way home she told me about her art installation at the Limelight, an expanse of cotton balls pressed to the stained-glass with wire mesh. Something to do with clouds. The Haitian cabbie’s radio crackled with French news about young Algerians joining the fight against America. I went out with a woman my sister set me up with, the daughter of a fashion designer she did some PR for. She was a summer associate at a law firm. She wore frosted lip gloss. She asked me questions all in a row without a trace of curiosity as to the answers. I accompanied her to the Midtown supermarket where she needed to buy some things and we parted forever with a peck on the cheek.

Sometimes at night I heard what sounded like a giant whirring and clacking machine outside the bathroom window.

Shock and awe, I’d sometimes think to myself like a mantra. Shock and awe.

The Enterprise - 62

Leanne was an art student at Pratt. We met up in a studio where she was working on a massive project, a maze of undulating wood and PVC. She explained how the boards were softened and shaped, a thing that seemed impossible to me. Her sculpture was beautiful and utterly impractical. It was unclear to me how it might be displayed, let alone consumed. I ran my fingers along the smooth, curved plywood. Later we went to her dorm on Dekalb and drank and ordered out and watched an Italian art film on VHS set in a desolate industrial hellscape.

Every day at about five o’clock cars would line up along Canal to leave Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel. The drivers honked and cursed along the way. If it started to sound crazy we’d get up and peer out the window. I saw an enraged man leave his car with something in his hand and stride with purpose.

“What’s he got? What’s he holding?” I said.

“I don’t know. Something that fits nicely in his fist,” said Tom.

The man hurled the object at the car ahead of him. It made a dull sound against the rear windshield and disintegrated pitiably into foamy little fragments that fell into the street.

“It’s a muffin,” I declared. “It’s a blueberry muffin.”

Sooner or later the traffic cops appeared with bullhorns, bellowing commands like “You! Pull over!” Once I heard the squawking voice say, “I don’t care.” The honks went quiet after that.

The Enterprise - 61

Brett and Tom and I had been playing tunes, Brett on drums even though he’s not a drummer, Tom on bass even though he doesn’t play bass. I felt guilty playing guitar. Brett had a room in a storage facility in Chelsea where he rehearsed with his band. Climate controlled and powered. I didn’t know such a thing existed. I thought storage rooms were dark, dusty and cramped, a place for things not people. In this building the hallways were bright and clean and the spaces big enough to live in.

Brett had made a carpeted space for a set of drums, two amps, and a mic stand, ringed by miscellaneous belongings, furniture maybe, some clothes, appliances. Maybe they were his. Maybe not. Maybe this was all his bandmate’s shit, his bandmate’s space. I took advantage unthinkingly, ungratefully. Here we were. We could plug right in and play.

We played weirdo covers, a hard rock version of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” We played one or two of my tunes and Tom’s. Was there a point? We had fun. One time we thought, we have enough to play a set somewhere. We should play a show, one show only, start and end in a blaze of glory. But we never did.

After playing we’d go to a bar. Maybe that was the point.

We drove to Baltimore one weekend to see their friend Jim, the drummer in their old band, play a gig. It rained hard on the way and Brett was driving fast, peering below the windshield fog. This was DC Sniper time and we were heading into his territory. He’d shot eight people already, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven. I imagined him laying in wait in a perch overlooking the freeway. Maybe we’d be next.

We stopped at a rest stop just over the border in Maryland. There were teenagers hanging out, like this was the place to be in whatever fucking town this was. Racing through the main hall, twisting the knobs of gumball machines for something to come out. Two boys wrestled as they walked, smirking insolently, getting in people’s way and not caring. This is how they interacted, with arms and hands. How they communicated.

At the table next to us a girl gushed to her friends, “I heard he shot five people in a single day!”

We went out in the streets of Baltimore, bar to bar and down some ruined streets with the houses boarded up. Slept on a couch in Jim’s house. On Saturday night we watched his band play fusiony prog rock at a hipster bar crowded with young guys in beards. A confederate flag hung on the wall with no apparent irony.

The Entreprise - 60

At night more than ever I sought oblivion. At the time I would have called it freedom. 

Pam had a late-summer roof party and I got wasted and went to McDonald’s and got on the bus back uptown, drifted off and woke up at 120th and Adam Clayton Boulevard. Walking back down in the streetlights and the moonlight was like a dream of old New York. Beautiful buildings seemingly intact, preserved not by renovation but by some benign force. Walls bathed in yellow glow. Street life here and there, people on stoops, on the sidewalk in little groups.

Before long the steam pipes hissed and gurgled to signal the changing of the seasons. Alan said he got a deal on a new office space downtown by the river. We assumed this really meant the end. A skeleton crew to guide the enterprise into a quiet, thrifty failure in a cramped space in a bad part of town. Except it wasn’t a bad part of town when you think about it. The top of Tribeca, on the corner of Greenwich and Canal. In any other city the blocks and blocks of warehouses and secondhand shops would mean you got lost on the wrong side of the tracks. Here it was where movie stars renovated industrial spaces into massive homes. The kind of real estate that rich people buy even though it’s in a weird old building that was configured for button sewing or shoe manufacture. They pay whatever for it, they put up with the raw walls and haphazardly situated columns. The hideously high ceilings. The rich have the alchemical ability to transform these very drawbacks and inconveniences into symbols of status and privilege. Look at my gigantic loft with the renovated period flooring. The floor above us was the home of a jeweler. I recognized the name of my ophthalmologist on the buzzer in the lobby. He occupied the floor below us with his young family. Our space too was vast. Everyone got a desk by a window. There was a kitchen and a separate room with a mattress on the floor should anyone have a need for one reason or another. Andre set to work repairing ethernet cables and setting up the modem. Almost like we had a purpose.

Each morning I walked west down Canal from the station. Through Chinatown, past the watercolor calligraphers, the shops of knockoffs. The street was intimate; a distinct, self-sustaining community. A woman swept dust out of her store and returned the dustpan and broom to a store a few doors down. Businesses on top of each other and you don’t know what to buy or who to buy it from but hang around a while and someone’ll sell you something. Shops with “electronics” and “audio” in their names appeared to have nothing but fake shoes and bags.

Mostly we hung out and went out for long, drinky lunches, the Argentine place down Greenwich or the Ear Bar most of the time, somewhere else if we got bored. If Alan wasn’t around we’d play guitar and sing. Erupt in mad fits of cursing. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he was around. One day I made a point to remember this time forever, to realize life would never be the same again, so weird and wonderful. It was hard, maybe impossible, to grasp it in the moment. But there’d come a day I’d look back and know.

The Enterprise - 59

Alan flew out West, the new king consolidating power across the farthest reaches of his realm. He organized a video link to address the entire company with Bill by his side. The images were grainy and the audio cut in and out but the job was done: a show of unity, of authority. He’d extended a bridge loan to cover expenses, he explained. Someone who shall not be named, but didn’t need to be, had, according to Alan, suggested asking us to forgo our pay. Alan intimated that he was arrogant enough to assume we’d all comply. There’s no way I’d ask any of you to do that. The winner writes the story.

Still changes had to be made. The bloodbath swept away my boss Ed and Mr. Fun. Julie, Peter, Steve and Jimmy. David. Anyone in any kind of soft role like marketing—gone. In Sunnyvale the hard skilled were not exempt. Some stayed, some went. Many of these people had qualifications and expertise far beyond my own. That’s what I thought anyway.

I was among the lucky ones.

Alan hired a bright young man named Josh to handle biz dev. He’d been at Goldman Sachs but hated it. Even with the piles of money he hated it. He was that sort of person. Earnest, idealistic. Looking for a purpose. Eager for a challenge. He was exactly the sort of tireless and dedicated worker you’d want if you needed to save your company.

It was rumored that part of his compensation consisted of extraneous office furniture.

Josh had been given a specific task: cold call giant corporations and try to sell the Product as a customer service solution. If there was no money in the curses and insults of twelve-year-olds, maybe there was in online shoppers whose packages were delayed or cable subscribers who’d forgotten their passwords. This made sense to me. The prosaic nature of the proposition, the dreariness of it, stood in contrast to the world-changing dreams of transforming humankind’s relationship to information. This is how money is made, I thought. This is how jobs are kept and retirement accounts funded: by selling enterprise customers on potential reductions to their overhead of tenths, maybe hundredths, of one percent. Not by declaring victory and throwing candy in the air. Of course. Of course it isn’t easy. Of course it isn’t fun. There was cold, grim satisfaction in this new direction. Except for one thing: no one was buying.

The Enterprise - 58

The following morning an office-wide email awaited us in our inboxes. It might have been titled About last night. The moment you saw it there you knew it had to be there. Though a moment ago you had no idea. Of course. There it was. In the workplace context such a disturbance had to be noted, explained, atoned for even. Mommy and Daddy had a fight and the kids had to be reassured, even if with lies. Hindsight helps me note that the author of such an email must be the loser of the fight. The one who’s reassuring himself as much as anybody else. Things were said last night. Unfortunately many of you heard them. We apologize for this. We. We apologize. The loser adopting the first person plural, doing the dirty work of contrition on behalf of both. You could imagine an unspoken understanding, a sort of telepathy arising from the strange intimacy of a bitter and furious dispute: You’re going to send the email, motherfucker. And so he did.

And so who was the loser? Sam. Could you guess?

Alan and I may have disagreements about day-to-day decisions but that’s only because we are both so passionate about the Product and the future of the Enterprise. Blah-blah-blah, said the voice in our heads. You could almost hear it in unison as we all read the same words. Blah-blah-blah. The kids know when they’re being patronized. Rest assured we are on solid ground and exploring opportunities to grow our business. We are on shaky ground. There are no opportunities.

And that was the end of Sam.

The Enterprise - 57

Alan was among those spectral figures who are spoken of in deferential, even fearful tones, who see you as a box in the org chart with a salary below your name though you don’t see them at all, unless you did that one day they left the elevator and you were going in, you’ll never know, but they’re always hovering, watching, paying the bill for the candy, paying the bill for the heat: the VC guys.

For years I’d heard of him like a rumor. Now he was here.

Like a conquering king, he gathered us round the back of the office to declare himself the new CEO. He paced a little back and forth and spoke with a lisp that made him spit a little. In people like me such an impediment would make us tremble with shame and self-loathing; in him it seemed a mark of authority. He introduced himself, saying some of you know me, some of you don’t. He was from the VC firm, he said—SkyClimber.

“You’ve all been pretty patient and I think you’ve put up with a lot, really, honestly I do,” he said. “I think you deserve for some changes to be made.”

Alan delivered a kind of cynic’s motivational speech—one that took into account the absurdity of our industry, the fruitlessness of our efforts to date, the uncertainty of success. Promises remained vague and threats unspoken. But somehow at the end of it we didn’t feel too bad. Maybe even better.

In the days and weeks thereafter things did change. Gradually, without fanfare. I overheard Dennis and Peter chatting at Peter’s desk as I walked by. Dennis seemed shorter to me than usual.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s just, it’s time, you know,” said Dennis.

“Ah, OK,” Peter replied awkwardly.

“Things are just getting. Yeah.”

“OK.”

“You know, too…”

“Yeah, too…”

“Too… too. Too too!” Dennis concluded with a wan smile.

And that was the end of Dennis.

One evening at about six or seven, the office half empty, I sat working on code when shouting erupted from the conference room. Alan and Sam. It was about priorities, the future of the company, big-picture stuff. But they insulted each other venomously. One would assert and the other would protest NO! NO! NO! As though something deeply, personally offensive had been proposed. They went around in circles like this, stepping all over each other with ever louder interjections.

It was still going on when I left.

The Enterprise - 56

It took me hundreds of elevator trips to realize. I’d share a ride up with a dad and his twelve-year-old son, wide-eyed, beside himself with anticipation. The door would open on the third floor and the boy would race into what appeared to be a harshly lit, rundown showroom. I’d glimpse paunchy men in their fifties chatting up customers over display cases that ran along the perimeter. I perceived the scene as less than ordinary. I was on my way to the floor above.

Finally I heard the word. Don’t you know what that is down there? No. That place downstairs? It’s a magic shop.

Turns out people came from all over the world to see the place. It was one of those old-timey New York things that you can’t believe is still around, like the watch repair guys above Grand Central, the bric-a-brac dealers on Canal, the peking duck places with the white tablecloths. And yet there it was the whole time, unchanged since 1937 or 1951 or whenever the fuck. Same old magic guys shooting the shit with each other, blowing kids’ minds with the same old tricks.

We went down there one time to have a look around, me and Steve and a couple others. It was exactly what you’d expect it to be. A place where you could buy a pop-out snake or a top hat with a false bottom. It was utterly unmysterious.

I had a feeling it would be there long after we were gone.

The Enterprise - 55

In my dream Bill was still in charge of the office out west, all these years later. The place was dilapidated now, the chairs ratty, computer parts and cables disordered everywhere.

But he was still running the Product. And some of the French guys were still around, tweaking the algorithms. Their determination was poignant—heroic, even. Still there was no plan. No viable path to profitability. But there was hope.

And I wanted to help. I wished I could help.

The Enterprise - 54

There might have been a malaise in the office. I don’t know. Couldn’t quite feel it myself. Days would go by when a hush would fall upon the space. Everyone with their headphones on. Staring at whatever on their screen—maybe some tired old code, maybe The Times, Yahoo!, Fucked Company. When you got up and looked around, you could almost hear the click of a mouse.

“Neil, Alan’s in your office,” Robyn called out one day as Neil emerged from the elevator after lunch.

Neil stopped and turned to her. “Alan?”

“Alan.”

“Alan Block?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in my office?” Neil asked, pointing at his opened door.

“He’s at your desk.”

“He’s at my desk?”

“I think so,” Robyn replied airily.

Neil shook his head in bewilderment. I watched as he entered his office. Alan was standing behind the desk, poking through whatever was on it like you would a pile of magazines at a doctor’s office. Neil shut the door. It was the first time I’d ever seen Alan. It was the last time I ever saw Neil.

The Enterprise - 53

There was a place I always took my online dates. You walked through a door along the wall of a cacophonous, blaring, second-floor sushi restaurant in the East Village to enter a hushed, dim realm where black-and-white clad bartenders solemnly worked their craft, fussing with jiggers and bar fruit, ever so lightly rattling the sides of shakers as they stirred with slender silver spoons. There was an ornate artwork on the wall above the mirror, as I recall. Perhaps a hunting scene. I don’t think there was music. Or there was. If there was music, its style and volume were precisely calculated so you’d hear it only if you tried.

I met a lovely, young Japanese woman there. She said her roommate, a guy, a white guy, had once left a pile of Asian-fetish pornography on the coffee table, as some kind of provocation. It wasn’t clear what had motivated him. Desire, obsession? Rage? I tried to imagine what brought him to that point, what he expected. She wasn’t telling the story flirtatiously. She wasn’t even telling it for laughs. She was scared. She was scared and bewildered, and nervous. As though she’d just fallen into this incomprehensible world of angry American lust, and had nowhere to go, no one to talk to but a stranger from a dating site. Me. She really was very nice. I never saw her again.

I got stood up once. I think I gave her forty-five minutes. Lots of leeway. But I was happy. Drinking, observing. There were couples here and there. Probably some first dates. People who’d arrived at the appointed time, whether they really wanted to or not, no matter how trepidatious. I was relieved to not be engaging in forced conversation, to feel that desperate pressure to be funny, to be interesting, to not say something strange. It was like I got a reprieve. Then again, some of these guys would likely be ejaculating inside their companion’s vagina tonight, after a few more drinks, then dinner, then some drinks after that, then a cab ride in which they paw and grope and bite each others’ lips. It’ll all be worth it then, for sure. I shook what was left of the ice cubes in my glass, took a couple in my mouth. They tasted a little bit of whisky. But mostly water. Mostly nothing.

The Enterprise - 52

Tom was showing me how to do more code. He didn’t have to, but he did. We’d spend a few hours over by his desk. I’d watch as he typed into his command window, that black, forbidding realm once so far out of reach. Abbreviations instead of words. Sometimes just letters. C. P. It was cold, that’s for sure. I came from the comforting world of elaborate exposition, of explanation. Words, words, words. Words when you really didn’t need them. A reality insulated by language. But here was a reality stripped down close to its core, distilled to basic syntax. Symbols. The prompt.

What was weirder was that even this language was a compromise, an accommodation of human needs. There were levels to it. When you’re done writing code, Tom said, a compiler took it and turned it into machine language. The language machines understand. Therefore, the language humans don’t. I got the sense of us tossing our vain and sweaty efforts across some kind of screen, or through a looking glass, beyond which something took place that was essentially mysterious and may or may not suit our needs.

If the compiler didn’t like what it saw it choked on the code and threw up all kinds of warnings and errors, messages of reproach from the other side.

Life at work proceeded in this manner, a few hours at Tom’s desk, the rest of the day at mine; writing little scripts for the Product, trying things, failing, trying again a different way, failing a different way. Of course I didn’t realize how good I had it at the time. Life was still full of aggravations great and small. Mostly small.

We’d grown tired again of our lunchtime options. By now we were going to the closest deli, to minimize exposure to the cold. It was an excruciatingly generic place: the hot food bar, the cold; the rows and rows of protein bars, the gourmet chips; sun streaming through the smudgy storefront window to illuminate the floating dust.

I was in the habit of buying the Italian hero. And it wasn’t bad.

The Enterprise - 51

After work one night Sean told me a story.

“Hands down, the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me happened to me today.”

“Really?” I asked, a little worried.

“Hands down!”

“What?”

“This new girl in the office, hot girl. She came over to my desk because I was supposed to show her something, a fucking presentation I was working on for Artie. So she was looking at my computer and I was looking for the thing and I clicked on my browser by mistake and there was that shit play site I told you about. Front and center.”

“The shit play site,” I repeated numbly.

“I died of embarrassment, man. I died. I said, ‘You probably weren’t supposed to see that.’” Sean cringed as though it were happening all over again. “Probably?!” he yelped.

“What was specifically on the site? On your screen?”

Sean composed himself and said: “It was a picture of a woman taking a shit into a dude’s mouth.”

I nodded solemnly, trying to get a full grasp of the situation.

“How did she react?”

“It was weird. She didn’t really do anything. She just stood there. Over my shoulder”

“Pretended it wasn’t happening?”

“I guess.”

“Good fucking Christ.”

“The worst thing was, now I had to show her the fucking PowerPoint I was supposed to be showing her. I had to act like I was OK. My heart was pounding. My hands were literally shaking.”

“And there she is, standing there,” I remarked. “After seeing a photograph of a man eat shit.”

“Right out of a woman’s ass. Squatting. Squatting over his face.”

I felt a shiver, a faint echo of the mortification he must have felt. The difference between looking over a ledge and being plunged into the void.

“That’s horrible,” I declared, shaking my head. “I’m sorry, man, that’s just…”

He looked at me and gave a little guffaw. He actually seemed OK. How odd that one could experience—cause, in fact—such an extreme breach of decorum and then continue with one’s life: to chew gum, read the paper. Order pork fried rice. Whatever life consists of. But how could life ever be the same? Still, I supposed it could have been worse.

“At least you didn’t have your cock in your hand,” I pointed out.

“To the shit play? I wouldn’t. I do not find it sexually stimulating.”

“Right, right.”

“I find it completely fascinating. But not erotic.”

It was funny he said he wouldn’t take out his cock and jerk it because it didn’t turn him on. Instead of: because he was at work. Still, I understood.

“It’s less embarrassing that way, right? It’d be worse if it was just some normal porn and she thought you might be jerking yourself off under your fucking desk.”

“Yes,” Sean agreed. “Exactly. At least this way it was revolting and bizarre. That’s better than sexy.”

“Revolting, bizarre, horrifying, unconscionable. This is all fine compared to like, a pair of titties.”

He nodded. “If you have boner in the office,” he declared with a wave of his hand, “you’re sunk.”

I sat back and reflected on all this. I was happy I wasn’t him. Sure. Then again, I took certain precautions to not be him. I did not view pornography nor extreme grotesquerie on my workstation. Then I wondered: Do I take too many precautions? Am I too afraid? Sometimes I’m embarrassed when I walk out the elevator door. Sometimes I can’t look a coworker in the eye when we’re discussing where to go to lunch. The thought of his experience made me dizzy. Would I die, would I have a heart attack and collapse? If an attractive coworker scrutinized a shit-eating scene on my desktop?

I suspected that I would not. Maybe that’s what I needed. I always tried so hard to say the right thing, seem the right way. To sit at the conference table in a posture of relaxed alertness. Of course the more I thought about it the harder it was to pull off. Did I seem to others like some crazy automaton? I could only be a freak, really. Sean’s experience was the expression of a truth I felt about myself somehow. It was almost heroic, making something like that happen, enduring the consequences, and telling the story.

Right: Telling the story.

Might it not be liberating to do something perfectly humiliating, and to survive? Because you do survive. There’s always another breath to take.

The Enterprise - 50

Blam blam blam blam blam blam blam blam!

Just like that. Pointed. Utterly emphatic.

“That was scary,” said Sean from his easy chair.

I was eating rice and beans, sunk deep in the ass-welt of my faux Eames, feet propped up on its spinny, matching ottoman.

“S’long as they’re not aiming at us.”

“Eight shots,” he declared. As though the number might mean something.

“Yeah?” I wasn’t sure he was right. The count seemed high. But he probably was. They did come in an awful hurry.

When witnesses hear shots, do they report more than occurred or fewer? I guess more, usually. What with people prone to exaggeration. But then you hear these crazy numbers, cop shot the suspect 68 times. Doesn’t seem possible but it is. We tend to think one’s enough. Except if you’re the shooter, I guess.

It wasn’t the first time we’d heard shots in our neighborhood. But still, this seemed particularly dark. Those were purposeful bangs. And no sporadic, extra ones after. There had to be a body at the other end of them. I lifted my wine glass to my lips. In my mind I saw the arm, the hand, the gun; the body falling and the killer run.

Sean had found a poem on the street and brought it home:

DON'T

WALK

WALK

It was the knockout screen from a crossing light. You know, the top two words light up and then the bottom one. But all at once, propped on the living room wall, the words together had a jarring effect. The instant contradiction was brutal, stark.

But at least it started with a negative and ended with a positive.

Made me think of the song:

Don’t you know that you can count me out, in

The Enterprise - 49

Bob, Fun and I were on our way to Sunshine for lunch when Bob kicked a can into the street.

“You’ve been doing more work with Tom,” he remarked. “How’s that going?”

“It’s going well,” I replied uncertainly.

“I have strong objections to resources with a given skill set drifting into unrelated roles.”

I told him I could see what he meant.

“I don’t think it’s healthy. It isn’t good for the company. It isn’t good for people.”

We continued wordlessly down Fifth Avenue, hands plunged into pockets at the cold, belching plumes of breath like car exhaust. Was that it? I wondered. Did he expect me to prattle on in response? Would he escalate this topic somehow? To Neil?

It was true my role was drifting. Toward product development, toward coding—not real programming of course but coding with the user-friendly interface the engineers out west had created—and away from whatever dubious thing I was originally engaged to do. Actually maybe I was still doing what I was supposed to do, but really doing it now, instead of typing up some dumb paragraphs in a Word document and attaching it to an Outlook e-mail for someone else to laboriously download, open, copy-paste from, reformat into the gizmo, check for errors, and commit to the repository. Now I was using the gizmo. It was inevitable. It saved me time and it saved everyone else time.

We got our falafel. Walked back up Fifth in silence. Then Bob and Lowell started talking about something. Joking around. And that was it. Bob never said a word about it again.

The Enterprise - 48

It is with great shame that I recount not only that I wanted her in the first place but that after it was all over I wanted her back. In that pitiful state of sex-withdrawal (it wasn’t love-withdrawal; it wasn’t heartbreak—there had been no love) I did what a thousand million men and boys have done before me and what God knows how many more will do again: I asked her out. To talk. To explain. To fuck—I hoped. Fantasized. But come to think of it, I wasn’t even dying to fuck her anymore. What was it I was addicted to all this time? Fucking her? No. Fucking me. I’d gotten used to using her to fuck myself. It was me I was heartbroken for. Me, me, me.

We met on the Ides of March. We walked along Madison Avenue, staring at things in the window we didn’t even want. I believe she allowed me to hold her hand. Mercifully, I never saw her again after that. Except that one time on the train. There’s always that one time on the train. Like it or not, we’re all going to meet again someday.