JPod, Page 3

  Mom looked a bit dizzy as we walked back to the car. When we drove away, she sat like a preteen caught shoplifting at Wal-Mart. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her head was down. She sniffled once, twice, and then came the tears, in floods.

  "Mom?"

  "Ethan, could you pull over?"

  I did.

  She turned to me, red-eyed. "I didn't tell you everything."

  "Oh?"

  "I'm telling you because I can't tell your father."

  "Tell him what?"

  "I quite liked Tim. He was a troubled soul. I thought I could help him."

  This was a conversation I wasn't prepared to continue. I said, "Mom, let's turn on the radio. We can discuss this later." I turned on the AM radio, and the music that came on was French. "Mom, you listen to the French station?"

  "Out. Sometimes."

  From the speakers came the sound of accordions.

  "Mom, what's with French music? All the songs have the same tide." As we drove home, I composed a mental French song list that went like this:

  ça va, ça va

  On quipeut

  Ma vie

  Le Metro, c'est ou?

  Cest ça

  Uamour, cyest bien

  Le bon cowboy

  De bon Métro

  Oest comme ça

  fat un réve

  Quelle heure est-il?

  Nous nous allons

  Dit done!

  Chanson des Métros perdus

  Amour des reves

  Où?

  J'ai mal á la tête

  Nous sommes perdus (Avez -vous une carte?)

  J'ai une carte

  Passé composé

  Le pamplemousse et la grenouille

  Le ça

  Greetings to you. I am Mr. Macaulay A. Of urhie from the office of the Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR, Nigeria. I write to solicit your cooperation in the execution of this entreaty.

  Without any prejudice to the foregoing, the DPR is the presidium petroleum Inspectorate and directorate of the Nigerian oil and gas industry vested with the following responsibilities: supervising all petroleum industry operations; enforcing safety and environmental regulations and ensuring that those operations conform to national and international industry practices and standards; keeping and updating records on Nigerian petroleum industry operations as well as rendering regular reports on them to Government and relevant agencies; verifying and processing all applications for payment/debt claims and licenses so as to ensure compliance with laid-down guidelines before making recommendations to Government and relevant Agencies as well as providing estimates and projections for work plans, scheduling methodology, bid documents and to prioritize, distribute and award contracts for the development of oil and gas projects.

  To the main purpose of writing you, following a summarized break down of the fiscal expenditure by the DPR for the past four years and as reported to the government and relevant agencies, show ed that the total project contracts awarded to both local and foreign firms amounted to over five billion US dollars and 52% were awarded to foreign firms/multinationals. The crux of this letter is that along with contracts cleared for pay-off is an acclaimed sum of US$38.6million US dollars which has been approved for pay-off by the Federal Ministry of Finance (FMF) alongside with other beneficiaries whose applications are been process. The finance/contract department of the DPR deliberately over-invoiced most of the contracted projected and DPR motivated projects. Consequently in the course of disbursements, the department was been able to accumulate US$38.6mi!lion US dollars, as contained in its records and that of the FMF's suspense account with the Debt reconciliation committee (DRC). Respective application for payment will not last more than two weeks. Hence, as the Coordinator of this project is to solicit your unalloyed cooperation and assistance to enable us pullout $3.6m into acclaimed foreign beneficiary account owned by your good-self and covered by a foreign company/business name to beused. This business is 100% fool proof, genuine and risk-free. Hence the need for strict arid absolute confidentiality till the end is all important because members of the office the office of the DPRinvolved in this business are personalities who have attained impeccable track records of probity in the Civil Service of Nigeria and as such are not permitted to operate Foreign Account in discharging their functions as members of the DPR. Furthermore, sharing of this fund after remittance into your provided bank account will be doneas follows: 70% for us, 25% for you the account owner and 5% to cover contingencies expenses and to be reimbursed immediately. Confirming your faithfulness to this entreaty and your unalloyed cooperation to consolidate this transaction as proposed to you, please endeavor to reply immediately with your contact/postal address; telephone and fax lines for further briefing.

  I thank you for your attention and anticipated co-operation as I am looking forward to hearing from you.

  Kind regards,

  Mr. M. A. Ofurhie

  Office of the Director, Department of Petroleum Resources.

  . . .

  Back in jPod, Mark accidentally tipped over John Doe's stack of Tom Clancy novels, and it was one of those things that got slighdy ugly.

  "Look, John, I said I was sorry."

  "You should treat books with more reverence."

  "You've actually read all of those?"

  "Yes. So? What was the last book you read?"

  "Book? As in paper and ink and everything?"

  "Yes."

  "Hmmm . . . it was the manual that came with my microwave oven. I was trying to figure out how to make it tell me the time in the European mode. You know, 18:00 instead of 6:00."

  "Could you do it?"

  ' Yeah, but I used up three sick days nailing it."

  "What about fiction?"

  "Novels?"

  "Yeah."

  "Ummmm . . ."

  "Just as I thought. You're an emotional blank."

  "Oh, please."

  "Too close for comfort?"

  "This is stupid."

  Mark went to his desk, but John started heckling him from the other side of the wall baffle. "Mark's an emotional blaaaaank. Mark's an emotional blaaaaank."

  This was driving me nuts. "Both of you stop it. Neither of you are emotional blanks."

  Harrumphs from both cubicles.

  "And to prove it," I said, "I'm going to draw up a standardized list that itemizes everything that's special and unique about all of us here in jPod."

  "I can't imagine Mark's will be too long," said John.

  "Manners, please."

  And so I made up a quick template and standardized our personalities on paper. Anything to get out of doing my actual job.

  Living Cartoon Profile No. 1

  Name: Casper Jesperson

  Name people actually use: Cancer Cowboy, or simply Cowboy

  Reason for unusual name people actually use: Grew up in an agricultural region and was told by well-meaning mother who didn't want him to smoke that the local cowboys were all dying of lung cancer. him to smoke that

  Smokes: Yes

  Non-work e-name(s): [email protected]

  Preferred room temperature: 71 °F

  Favourite game: Doom 3

  Preferred Simpsons character: Duff Man

  Preferred karaoke song: "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas

  Food group most prevalent within work cubicle: Skittles, with the green ones removed

  Most disturbing trait: Is not suicidal, but really enjoys thinking about death, and, to be frank, is actually kind of looking forward to it.

  Living Cartoon Profile No. 2

  Name: Brianna Jyang

  Name people actually use: Bree

  Most evident pathology: Makes no bones about the fact that she wants to sleep with almost every guy she meets, but only once.

  Does she actually do this?: We're not sure

  Non-work e-name(s): [email protected]

  Preferred room temperature: 65°F

  Favourite
game: The original PlayStation Tomb Raider

  Preferred Simpsons character: Edna Krabappel

  Preferred karaoke song: "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion

  Does this song make her mushy?: Yes

  Does this mean she's a crying drunk?: Yes

  Food group most prevalent within work cubicle: A low-fat oat muffin that she eats, one molecule at a time, over the course of an eighteen-hour workday.

  Does this frighten and annoy her co-workers?: Yes

  Living Cartoon Profile No. 3

  Name: John Doe (yes, legally, as of three months ago)

  Birth name: crow well mountain juniper (all lower case)

  Name people actually use: John Doe

  Reason for spooky birth name and subsequent selection of JohnDoe as a real name: Grew up in a lesbian commune and was home-schooled until the age of twelve. Never saw a TV set until age fifteen. Wants to be statistically normal to counteract his wacko upbringing.

  Non-work e-name(s): [email protected] Preferred room temperature: 62°F ("I may have grown up in a lesbian commune, but I think we truly are overdependent on climate control systems in our society")

  Favourite game: The Simpsons Hit & Run

  Preferred Simpsons character: Groundskeeper Willie OR Lard Lad

  Does he watch too much TV, specifically The Simpsons, to compensate for his media-free upbringing?: Yes

  Preferred karaoke song: None

  Reason for having no preferred karaoke song: Grew up without pop culture or music: "I just don't get it—but I'm trying, I really am."

  Food group most prevalent within work cubicle: M&M's (which is based on statistics on items most commonly eaten out of hotel mini-bars).

  Living Cartoon Profile No. 4

  Name: Brandon Mark Jackson

  Name people actually use: Mark

  Reason for boring name people actually use: Entered jPod only three weeks ago

  Non-work e-name(s): [email protected]

  Preferred room temperature: Haven't yet discussed this, but I'm guessing 72°F

  Favourite game: Baldur's Gate

  Preferred Simpsons character: Fast-food guy with cracking voice OR Moe Szyslak: opposite ends of the food-and-beverage industry labour cycle

  Preferred karaoke song: Has yet to show any musical verve

  Food group most prevalent within work cubicle: None

  Does he think we don't notice this?: Yes

  Is his office freakishly clean with no evidence whatsoever of an interior life—not even so much as a snapshot or anime knick-knackery?: Yes

  Living Cartoon Profile No. 5

  Name: Kaitlin Anna Boyd Joyce

  Name people actually use: Kaitlin

  Was she at the meeting today with Steve Who Turned AroundToblerone in Two Years? Yes

  Do we know much about her yet?: No. She joined jPod yesterday.

  Non-work e-name(s): [email protected]

  Preferred room temperature: Haven't discussed it, but I'm guessing 72°F

  Favourite game: Yahoo! Games.com's text twist (spied on her)

  Preferred Simpsons character: I'm guessing Lisa

  Preferred karaoke song: I'm hoping it's one I really like

  Food group most prevalent within work cubicle: Gum

  Does she notice me?: To be honest, I think not

  Will I let her see this particular character report?: No way

  Living Cartoon Profile No. 6

  Name: Me

  Name on birth certificate: Ethan Harrison Jarlewski

  Name people actually use: Ethan

  Non-work e-name(s): [email protected]

  Preferred room temperature: 68°F, and I hate hate hate humidity

  Most creative thing ever done: An old operating system I invented when I was in high school. I called it Mentos.

  Favourite game: Chrono Trigger on Sony PlayStation, a delectable console RPG with art by Akira Toriyama, sound by Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu

  Preferred Simpsons character: Kang and Kodos, the aliens

  Preferred karaoke song: None

  Reason for not having a preferred karaoke song: I live in fear of karaoke. Even thinking of it in this detached neutral listing format causes me to worry that I might somehow even unintentionally lure karaoke into my life.

  Food group most prevalent within work cubicle: Kettle Chips with cracked pepper and lime, even though I suspect they give me bad dreams. Went through a Jell-0 Pudding Snacks phase last fall, but now can't even look at the stuff.

  Does he consider himself normal?: I used to, but now I wonder. Or rather, I think I'm still normal, but everyone around me is going random. Now I look at most people like recently lit Roman candles, unsure if they're about to go off, or if they're merely duds.

  Does he enjoy his job?: The greatest challenge is to have a job without actually doing work, which is really hard to pull off in a company where workspace productivity is measured with just about every conceivable form of metrics.

  Does he take satisfaction in his approach to work?: Yes

  . . .

  "Ethan, your description of me makes me look like a goof."

  "Mark, all I did was collect the data and present it."

  Mark was peeved. "Ethan, there has to be more to my life than this."

  "Why can't you just be happy as a shallow cartoon glyph of a human like everybody else here?"

  "You don't understand—I'm me—I have a soul"

  "Mark, I think you're obsessing on this whole individuality thing. Revel in your averageness the way John Doe does."

  On the other side of my wallboard, John Doe gave a muffled, "Amen."

  "No. I want to improve my profile now. I demand to be more than just a cartoon character."

  "Okay, then, please tell us, what is the single event that most changed you as a person?"

  "That's easy. Six years ago I was doing the please-my-parents thing, landing a degree in biological sciences. I had a part-time job in the beetling pit."

  "What's that?"

  "It's where they take a dead animal and put it into this big stainless steel cone-shaped pit full of starving beetles, and after a few days, there's nothing left except bone-dry bones."

  I thought of Tim the Biker's graceless burial. Where are these beetling pits when you need them?

  Bree's head was above the wall partition. "You never told me about any beetling pit."

  "Bree, by the time we got to your place, we'd only said eleven words."

  I said, "Bree, please, I'm doing an interview here. Mark, how was the beetling pit the event that changed you most as a person?"

  Mark turned to me. "It was the part of my life that made me realize something had to change in my universe. I was studying biology, as I was saying, to please my parents, and I don't think there's ever been a happy person on earth who chose an education and a job to please their parents. Then, one day, I got notice that the building I lived in was being torn down for condos, so I tried to find a place to live, but I screwed up and didn't find a place in time. When I asked my folks if I could live in the basement, they said no way."

  "You were a problem child?"

  "No. They turned the house into a B & B, and my room was gone."

  "What happened then?"

  "I was going to crash on a friend's couch, but first I had to put all of my stuff in a U-Store-It place over by the Second Narrows Bridge. It was late on a Friday afternoon, and I was the first client in this new patch of mini-units they'd built. I was glad, because it meant the place was clean, and I didn't have to worry if Jeffrey Dahmer had ever stored his boyfriends in my unit. But then the lights went out, and when I went to check the switch I accidentally clicked shut the big roll-down door; it locked, and because the place was new, they hadn't properly installed the fail-safe unlocking switch. I was stuck in there with no lights. When I tried pounding on the door, there was no one to hear me. It was pretty bad."

  I stole a line from my mother: "Boo hoo. What then?"<
br />
  "I tried to be all Boy Scout-y and positive, but after about nine p.m., I realized I was screwed."

  "Can we speed this up?"

  "Okay. I was in there for four days without light. The only thing I had to drink was a bottle of Gatorade autographed by John Madden. I had to eat the gum from my sacred collection of twelve factory-sealed boxes of 2003 Upper Deck SP authentic NFL cards, with one autographed and sequentially numbered rookie card per box, including autographed cards from Bart Starr, Donovan McNabb, Jerry Rice and Joe Montana. I was going to use them to fund my retirement."

  "How long did the Gatorade last?"

  "Almost fifty hours."

  "And the gum?"

  "Almost seventy-two hours. It was a long weekend."

  At this point, all the heads in jPod gophered upwards, making

  ooooohhhhhh sounds.

  "Mark," I asked, "so how has that changed you as a human?"

  "It's kind of weird."

  "We wouldn't possibly want to hear something weird, Mark."

  "Since then, I need as many edible objects around me as possible."

  "Huh?"

  "Like my futon. It's from this place in Finland. Cost me $2,500, but the entire futon is edible. They market them to Japanese people who are worried about earthquakes and being trapped alive under rubble."

  "Go on."

  "My apartment is like Willy Wonka's factory. You can eat my chairs."

  "But, Mark, your cubicle is entirely devoid of stuff, let alone edible stuff."

  "So it would appear, but you see this stapler?" Mark held up a generic stapler. "It's made of marzipan. I bought it online from this geek shop based in Palo Alto. And these pencils here? Chocolate."

  Silence passed over us. We could never look at the world the same way ever again.

  "Mark, I think you can safely consider yourself a member of jPod."

  . . .

  Sidetrack: Cowboy was cleaning out his hard drive and found some old penis enlargement spams he'd saved from 2003. All of us got sentimental for that brief historical moment when a fresh young Internet promised us a better tomorrow with all of the free Viagra, Ambien, Vicodin, OxyContin and enlarged members we were willing to accept.