The Moment of Everything (2 page)

“I was so looking at jobs. I needed a break,” I said, punching Dizzy in the arm. Dizzy worked more than eighty hours a week. His hobbies were developing open source software, trying to get his car to run on French fry grease, and providing tech support for a group of astronomy students in Brazil who thought they’d discovered a comet. For Dizzy, time was a unit to be traded in for output. Not using it efficiently didn’t make a whole lot of sense to a software engineer whose job it was to make things faster with fewer resources.

“But you looked this morning, right? Did you see that Martin Wong gave you a recommendation on LinkedIn? He just landed at WebEx.”

I hadn’t seen it because I’d been too busy reading about tawny lasses and virile lads. What could Martin, a sales rep at ArGoNet I’d worked with for two seconds last year, have to say about me?

As I fired up the LinkedIn app on my phone, Dizzy reached into a canvas Apollo bag stuffed with technical books with pencil drawings of animals on the front covers: a baby elk for HTML 5, a fox for iOS. I also saw
World War II: The Definitive Visual History
. Once, at an ArGoNet company meeting, Dizzy had screened the first twenty minutes of
Saving Private Ryan
to inspire the troops. “Beachheads!” he screamed. “We need beachheads!” Everyone put their heads between their knees to keep from throwing up. Dizzy said it was the best quarterly meeting we’d ever had.

The book he pulled out of the bag, though, was a novel, a trade paperback in earthy tones with sharp corners and a stiff, steady spine. I could even smell it from where I sat, the pine bark scent of freshly cut paper. My fingertips tingled, thinking of the unblemished cover. It was a small, delicate thing, a newly hatched bird. Unlike the books that lived in the Dragonfly, it was unweathered by overstuffed purses, spills from morning coffees, and teething puppies. It was
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

“You’ve read it, haven’t you?” Dizzy asked. “I mean they don’t give you an English degree unless you’ve read D. H. Lawrence, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve read it. Our freshman English lit survey. You were in the same class.”

“Well, who the fuck remembers? Listen, I’ve got pure gold for you. We’re getting another round of funding from Wander Fish. Remember Avi Narayan?”

“Sure.” I didn’t really, but it was easier to just pretend.

“She’s got this book club and wants the two of us to saddle up,” Dizzy said, holding up another copy of the novel. “We’re all supposed to have the same edition.”

“I don’t do book clubs. My mother’s in a book club.”

“Yeah, the same one as mine. But we’re doing
this
book club. Silicon Valley Lesbians with Advanced Degrees or some shit like that.”

“We’re not lesbians, jackass.”

“I’m texting you the URL for their blog.”

Christ on a cracker. Mama’s book club couldn’t even agree on how much sugar to put in the iced tea, but this group had a blog? I opened the text message and tapped on the link. Silicon Valley Women Executives Association Book Club, the SVWEABC for short. They had a logo.

“Uh, Dizz, you’re not a woman.”

“Yeah, I know. They’re expanding, just haven’t rebranded yet. I’m their first dude.”

“They’re starting with you?”

“Yeah, can you believe it? I’m totally saving her ass. I’m in her office today and she’s got this
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
on her desk, and she starts telling me about this book club like I give a fuck and how two people just dropped out and there’s only eighteen of them now. So anyway, I saddle up for this thing. Then I remind her of you. How you were this hotshot English lit major and how she should invite you to her jamboree. They meet up at Avi’s place in Woodside. We’ll probably need a sherpa to get up there. They do this every month. Nothing modern. Only dead writers.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah, that’s their criteria. That and your shit can’t stink.”

“Why am I supposed to want to do this?”

“I’m not jumping ship anytime soon, Mags. We’ve got a chance at ArGoNet with the new funding. And Avi’s on the board now. She can bring you back in.”

We’d been through this before, me and Dizz, since that day ten years ago when we skipped grad school commencement and drove his ’86 CRX from Columbia to Palo Alto. It was the late nineties, Dizzy wanted to tap into the vein of Internet gold before it dried up, and I wanted to be with Dizzy. So we packed up our freshly minted master’s degrees—his in computer science, mine in library science—and headed to Silicon Valley. I figured I could work in a coffee shop while I looked for a library job. But Dizzy got me in at his first start-up company as the admin at a ridiculously high salary, twice what I’d make as a librarian. And in start-ups you’re never just one thing. The next thing I knew, I was in front of a customer being introduced as the head of Professional Services. I didn’t write code, but I understood how information fit together and how to make it pretty. Engineers loved me because I made them look good. The execs loved me because I could make the tech talk sound like
The Velveteen Rabbit
. I felt like a comic book orphan who’d just learned that all of her oddities were really signs of her superpowers and that there was a bunk reserved for her at the Hall of Justice. Then the tech bubble burst and planes flew into buildings. The bottom fell out of everything. Dizzy and I took a hit, but we sucked it up for a couple of years at the only companies that were hiring. Then the next wave came and it was called social media. VC funding bounced around the valley again, like a pinball lighting up little companies all over the San Francisco peninsula. Dizzy met some angel funders at a Meetup for entrepreneurs and came up with the idea for ArGoNet.

You could think of ArGoNet as Facebook and Twitter meets corporate intranet. The idea was that we would create a secure hosted environment where employees could communicate and connect with one another and the company could serve up internal communications to everyone, safe and secure from the outside world. Dizzy and I cashed out everything, hired a Stanford MBA as our CEO, then rented a six-hundred-square-foot windowless office space over a Chinese travel agency just down the block on Castro Street. Four years, six hundred hires, three CEOs, and five rounds of layoffs later, the board sent my position to India. On TV, people tearfully leave a job with hugs and good-byes, carrying a box with a plant sticking out of it. In reality, you show up one morning to find a check for two weeks’ salary with your name spelled wrong and a security guard waiting to inspect your purse on the way out.

“Are you serious about getting me back in?” I asked.

“Was Erwin Rommel the Desert Fox?”

I had no idea, but I figured that was a “yes” because he didn’t look at me when he said it. That usually meant he was serious. And worried. We were in uncharted waters. We knew what to do at ArGoNet, where to sit and who to talk to when we needed something. I knew the code Dizzy and his team had written as if it were a book I’d read so many times the cover would fan open whenever I laid it on the table. I understood the logic and illogic of it, the quirky behaviors that frustrated and delighted me, the little workarounds I’d discovered that made it do things even Dizzy didn’t know about.

“You can do this,” Dizzy said. “You show, you wear something nice, you say something brilliant. Bam! You’re back in the game, sugarbritches.”

“When is the book club meeting?” I asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

I unfurled copious amounts of curse words.

“You’ll be fine,” Dizzy said. “You can talk the flowers down off wallpaper when you want to.”

I pictured my copy of
The Defiant
sitting on Gloria’s countertop, probably next to a bag of fat-free cookies and last month’s
Redbook
with the Lifetime network playing in the background. There was a chance I may have lost my touch.

“Wait, weren’t you going to Napa with that Apple hardware engineer tomorrow?”

“Nah, we broke up at that sushi place in Cupertino night before last. Didn’t you read my Yelp review?”

Reviews were Dizzy’s personal diary. Reviews of movies, restaurants, crap he bought on Amazon. And Dizzy didn’t just leave his thoughts on the thing he was reviewing, but wrote long narratives about what happened at the place or with the thing and why it happened and who it happened with. I used to love reading Dizzy’s reviews. Sometimes I’d comment on them, pretending like I didn’t know him but hated what he had to say, and we’d get into a fake rant that usually got us escorted out of whatever site we were on, like kids ramming too hard on the bumper cars. I hadn’t looked at his reviews for a long time. It wasn’t as much fun when I didn’t have the money to share in whatever he was evaluating.

Dizzy downed the rest of his wine, looking like it was causing him pain. Then he held the glass away from him, examining its emptiness. “Bear piss,” he said. He grabbed the back of my head and kissed me on the part in my hair. “Gotta run. I’m meeting the code monkeys down the street at Finnegans Wake for drinks. Wanna come? I’m buying.”

Dizzy always paid for the drinks. It was his best leadership quality.

Finnegans Wake was a faux Irish pub that was big with the Orson Scott Card and
Red Dwarf
crowds. I truly used to love going to the FW with the gang from work after another fourteen-hour day. We’d eat jalapeño poppers, drink Guinness, and quote
Real Genius
into the early hours of the morning. Then I’d stumble the few blocks home, sleep a couple of hours, then get up and do it all over again. It was my place of triumph, my reward for turning bellowing customers into fluffy bunny rabbits. If things were still the same as they were this time last year, I’d be the person everyone would order drinks for, the one they all wanted to talk to. But tonight I would just be the boss’s unemployed friend.

“Homework,” I said, holding up
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. And with that he left me, on my own, with only three hundred pages of post-Victorian literature standing between me and gainful employment.

“I see you have a new book,” Hugo said when I went back to the Dragonfly to collect my things.

“Don’t freak out. I can explain.” I told him about the book club while I zipped up
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
in my leather backpack with the ArGoNet logo. I also threw in my unfinished
A Devil’s Heart
along with
The Fortune Hunter
and
Daughter of the Game
just for grins.

“I’m sure we could find you a copy here,” Hugo said, scurrying toward the stacks. “I think I remember seeing one just the other day.”

The Dragonfly was about as neat as a trailer park after a tornado. I’d be there all night waiting for him to find the book he thought he remembered.

“I think I saw one in Sports and Recreation!” Jason shouted after him. A lady looking through coffee table books glared at him and put her finger to her lips. “What!? It’s a bookstore, not a library.”

“Hugo!” I called. “I think we’re supposed to all read the same edition!”

“Fascists!” I heard him yell as I walked out the door.

If you thought of your hand as the peninsula, San Francisco at the tip of your middle finger and San Jose at your wrist, Mountain View would be in the center of your palm. Unlike San Francisco, we didn’t have hipsters in granny glasses and turtlenecks coding in refurbished warehouses. And even with Google as a resident, the Mountain View address didn’t carry the same cachet as Palo Alto or Menlo Park. If Silicon Valley brimmed with carpet or paper mills instead of computer companies, Mountain View would be where all the line workers and their middle managers lived. Only the 1,500-square-foot houses from the fifties had solar panels and structured wiring and went for just over a million.

Despite the cost of living, I loved many things about Mountain View, like the old-fashioned iron lamps that lined the streets. They were right out of Dickens, except for the electricity and all, and allowed me to read on my walk home. It usually took me between seven and eight pages to get home from the Dragonfly, which was two less than it took to get a Savage Hammerhead Mocha at Cuppa Joe and three more than it took to get a to-go order of moo shu pork from the cheap Chinese place around the corner. And the walk home was quiet, uninterrupted reading time when I didn’t have to fight Jason for a chair. The only sounds on the tree-lined streets were of families tucking themselves in for the night: the clinking of dishes in the sink, the missed piano notes from one more practice round of “On Top of Old Smoky,” the unmistakable fit of giggles that can come only from a toddler being tickled.

I’d spent most of the last three hours at Cuppa Joe determined to conquer
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. I was just going to finish my chapter in
The Devil’s Heart
before getting to it. But when I left Cuppa Joe, I was done with
The Devil’s Heart
and sixty pages into
The Fortune Hunter
. For once, Lady Chatterley was going home untouched.

With the twenty-dollar bill I had to get me through the weekend, I stopped by the Asian grocery for a couple of packs of soup and a lottery ticket. Then it was just a few blocks to the duplex Hugo and I shared. The smell of a backyard grill made my stomach rumble. Hugo’s dinner date appeared to have turned into a party. I could hear laughter from behind our duplex and the rubber-fingered guitar chords of a Fleetwood Mac song.

I clomped up the four steps to the porch that connected my apartment with Hugo’s and saw that my screen door was ajar. Between it and my front door, I found a paper plate covered in tin foil with a note taped to the top.

I looked down again in the dark corner behind the screen door. There was indeed what could be described as a book. It was not a twin of the book Dizzy had given me. This one looked like it’d been kicked into doomsday and spit back out again. The spine was missing its cover, exposing open weave and glue beneath. Waxy cloth, frayed at the corners and stiff from the sun, stretched over boards warped with water damage. The yellowed pages creaked when I turned them, like they were registering complaints at having to move in their decrepit condition. It was the book version of the rusted-out ’62 Rambler that Dizzy used to drive in high school, the one I refused to ride in out of fear for my life. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the book, too, belched black clouds of exhaust. I took the poor thing inside. If I could have given it warm milk and a bed of its own, I would have.