I try to progress through the airport in the optimal way, with a minimum of graceless, superfluous motions. Boarding passes in respective passports, bookmarking the photo page, all three together in the leather document pouch in my messenger bag. Are they there? Yes they are. One two three. Close the flap with the weakly magnetic snaps. Are they there? Open the flap. Yes they are. One two three. Security is problematic. Will they be checking passports on the way in? I think they do at JFK. But what about Heathrow? If they don’t I’m holding mine like an asshole, nakedly American. Does it go in the gray tray alongside my bag, electronic devices, belt and loose change? Or do I carry it through the detection portal, holding it out as I stand in the full-body scanner and make myself into the shape of a stick figure man? Sometimes they say take off your shoes. Sometimes they don’t. Maybe we’re now past the ritual as a civilization, the shoe bomber’s name having finally been eclipsed from the last of our brains. Richard something. I had only just learned to properly navigate this step, slipping on my sneakers quickly after retrieving them and then, so as not to hold up the line, gathering everything and walking to the nearest row of chairs to put it all back down, step on the seat to tie my laces, then put my jacket back on, then my bag, then my hat, are the passports there? Open the flap. Yes they are. One two three.

Adeline the AirBnB manager showed us around briskly, garbage is through that door over there, someone left a popsicle in the freezer and you can have it. Keys, shower, towels. The washer’s here and the dryer’s there. She said a woman thought the dryer was the washer and put in soap, wide eye roll, what a disaster that was. Try to clean soap from a dryer, I am telling you. I’m here for you entirely, je suis entièrement à votre disposition, she said before leaving in that way French people say things and you know they don’t mean it.

We ate at our favorite place that night, the two sisters, and clumsily I asked if they have ice when there was ice obviously in the drinks so the younger sister looked at me and smiled and said of course we have ice, exclamation mark.

The air conditioner appeared to work and then it didn’t and I stood below it for half an hour, working the remote, putting it on fan only and back again, turning it off, turning it on, dialing the temperature down in desperation, Googling the force reset and the meaning of a blinking green light. I futzed with the vent by hand, knowing it was a bad idea. Finally I gave up and went to bed. In the early morning I had a happy dream I was somewhere that an AC worked. When I awoke Sara told me she got up at two o’clock when it was way too hot to sleep and pressed the button and it worked and it never stopped working after that.

I was inattentive and unadventurous for most of the trip, losing at online chess, leaving the freezer door wide open. I tended toward the uncolorful gelatos, the salted caramels, the chocolate family, though I knew the fruity ones were better, the mango and the passion fruit. But maybe this is what vacation is. A respite from trying.

Sometimes it just feels good to be in a different jurisdiction, a place where copyright laws prevent the playing of your favorite streamable media.

I discovered an email I’d received seventeen years ago, from a CD buyer, with a tally of what it was paying me for my entire collection—a dollar here, two there, sometimes $8.50 for some obscure reason. As I scrolled down the list there were titles I recognized, some I’d completely forgotten. The artists, even. But I realized this was music I loved, that I listened to again and again—physical objects in my possession, occupying space in my home. Necessarily I played them. Necessarily I loved them. But since I’d sold them—impulsively, heedlessly, but not unwisely after all—they were out of my life.

So much has been lost. And maybe, realizing this, something might be regained.

Damn American flag with its stars arrayed like cheerleaders, specifically Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders except fuck the Cowboys.

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.

Things That Are Mysterious

The number of rows of shingles on the south-facing side of a roof in France and the spider web of cracks in the windshield of a car struck by a branch and the song that’s playing at a party when someone spills their drink.

Sitting in the office, obsessively refreshing the workstream. Empty, empty, empty. Trying to waste time. The same old, bank balances, stock quotes, tired pointless shit. Even the news God forbid. And now this. Walking up and down the hallways, the tight-lipped smile at those you don’t know, the hey and knowing look to those you do. I go to the fridge in the kitchen area and take a Diet Pepsi from the rows upon rows of them. Like in a corner store you have to reach in back for the cold ones. Downstairs right by the door workmen are jackhammering, little chips of sidewalk fly past the flimsy safety tape to sully the pants and skirts of passersby.

Took the train from a different station, 15th Street. As I descended onto the platform I wondered how much of a different scene it was. People getting high and fucking maybe. It did feel different though. It seemed like you’d be less likely to get pushed in front of a train by the mentally ill. But these things can be deceiving.

Felt out of sorts most of the day as is often the case with Mondays. And this despite episodes of good fortune, such as finding that the obstruction in the vacuum cleaner hose was near the nozzle and easy to remove. You have to grab what you can get in this life.

In the early afternoon it poured for no apparent reason, and stopped. One of those summer storms when the rain comes in silvery strands and nothing gets wet.

We went to the Red Hook pool where the lifeguards sit across from each other in their tall chairs and fiddle with their whistles and signal to each other in some made-up sign language, or maybe it’s real sign language, I don’t know. City pools might be the last place on earth where everyone follows the rules. No phones, no hats. Only bottled water to drink. They wouldn’t know if it was full of vodka, I thought when I walked by the locker room guard with mine.

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.

Time stretched out in my early morning dreams to the point that I was sure I was oversleeping by hours; it had to be past noon. But I opened my eyes and it was seven something. When I opened them again it was a little past nine.

It was a day of mundane tasks: head shaving, box opening, taking out the trash. The take a book leave a book. I perused the titles and opened up an anthology by school kids called “Growing Up in Park Slope.” In the middle of the page was a sort of prose poem about Grandma having a stroke. I superstitiously thought of reading something else before closing the book, something happy, but I didn’t. I left Raggedy Ann and Andy and Grisham and something else, taking nothing.

We didn’t talk too long about it. S. thinks a woman can’t win in America. Maybe but we have to try. 

How I love to watch the Tour de France, not for the racing but the scenery, the nothing restaurants in the middle of little towns, the glorious mountains and waterfalls, people perched on steep hills, almost tumbling into the road that’s painted with riders’ names, a family of five wearing polka dot jerseys, the details.

Just as we left the roof the first drops were falling and it rained hard and stopped again for the fireworks, as though on schedule. The explosions were near and far but always obstructed by buildings and trees. Our next door neighbor or the one next to that set off some bottle rockets, whistling and popping and nothing. Tentative, spectral silhouettes suddenly appeared on roofs where you never saw people before, and then they went away again.

I switched to the crowded A heading back from work, at Canal. I could tell from the platform already that there was a weird situation inside the car, a space not properly occupied by bodies. When I entered I saw it was a Citibike with two teens sitting on it, one on the front wheel, one straddling the seat, the one on the wheel younger, maybe fifteen. They smelled of smoke like they’d just been getting high. I brushed by the younger one to the left with a little difficulty and stood in the little space that was left between them and the end of the car, the seats occupied and a couple other people standing.

It was hard to ignore the inappropriateness of this massive object, the heavy, clumsy Citibike, in this context. It could only have been found or stolen by these guys—there’s no other reason for it to be here. Yet I watched everyone ignore it, so I did too. Then I perceived the young kid trying to get my attention. I pulled a wired earbud out of my right ear, warily, and nodded at him.

“Are you listening to me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“If you want, I can make your earbuds wireless,” he declared, making a snip-snip gesture with his fingers. “Just cut ‘em off.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Nah, I’m good,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

At this point I expected I don’t know what. Laughter. From him, from both of them—derisive laughter. It was funny after all. Here I am, the only person left in the world wearing dumbass wired earbuds. The kid says, lemme help you out. I can make ‘em wireless. Snip snip. It was funny what he said and I waited for him to laugh. He did not.

“OK,” he said airily, and looked away. As though he’d I dunno, just offered me a stick of gum. Nothing in his demeanor indicated that he was the least bit insincere. His friend didn’t react, or wasn’t paying attention. At the next stop the older kid threw an empty plastic bottle out onto the platform just as the doors were closing. It just missed a woman walking by and clattered around on the concrete. A small insolent gesture. The younger kid didn’t seem to watch or care.

At Jay Street I said excuse me as I got back out and that was all, I was out on the platform with everybody else, just switching to another train.

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.

My Week

I burned myself on Monday, pouring water from the kettle down the bathtub drain. Hurt like a motherfucker but I didn't care. On Tuesday I sat before the camera for someone’s documentary. On Wednesday when I rode the train back home from work I tried to steal a sentence or two from what the woman next to me was reading. It was some kind of religious self-help nonsense, possibly a chapter on loss and grieving, banalities deflecting attention. Thursday J put the keyboard on the living room floor and picked out the melody from “Doctor Who.” We played guess that note and I started on dinner. And Friday is today. I had a vivid dream, what was it? Carrying something. The responsibility to carry. J’s looking through Magic cards, humming “Message in a Bottle.”