JPod Read online

  Oof.

  I'm tired and a little bit lonely. What a no-hope statement from a twenty-six-year-old woman. I suppose next it's ten cats and my head in the oven.

  Call me.

  Your little tease,

  X

  Bree

  . . .

  Dear Ronald McDonald,

  I'm Mark. I can't believe I'm actually writing this letter, but I talked to this guy downstairs in HR, and he says it's part of the lifestyle here, and I should take part, since it can't hurt me and will help me bond with the others. I'm supposed to ask you (oh God, this is stupid) to choose me over the others to be your mate. And I've been thinking about it, but it's maybe not a good idea we get together, since you seem to kill everything you touch. In all your old commercials, you were romping through french-fry patches with your fellow spokes-mascots, but you think I haven't noticed that the french-fry characters vanished a decade ago? Or that nobody's seen that website with JPEGs of the Evil Grimace weighing nine hundred pounds, wearing a diaper and living in a failing mobile home community north of the Mexico-Arizona border? What about Mayor McCheese, unrecognizably bearded and detoxing from pickles in a Las Vegas homeless shelter? Every day, when he prowls the city's alleys, crows and jackdaws bite away at his bun face. How could you allow these creatures to just vanish like that? Don't tell me that it wasn't your decision to make, because I know you have clout with the people there. I once saw a video of you golfing with Ray Kroc, so don't go pulling the "No Clout" stunt with me. Maybe you were jealous of those characters sharing your limelight, but I don't think so.

  As I'm supposed to be winning your matehood here, I ought to be more cheerful. Okay, here's something: I think it was really brave of you to invest so heavily in purple restaurant furniture in the 1970s. You go, clown! Sex would be a problem because, sorry, I'm not into you. Maybe it's a clown issue. Maybe it's me never knowing whose party you've been attending. How about if I offer to be your friend instead?

  Mark

  . . .

  Hi Ronald.

  I'm John Doe, and I think I could help change your life in good ways. I come from a freaky upbringing myself, so I know how it must feel to always be the different one. The thing is, I was stuck being in the family I was in, but what about you? How does it work with clowns—are you born with your face made up? Did you get your mother's red nose and your father's Raggedy Ann hairdo? Is clowning something that is thrust on you at birth? Do other clowns hate you because of your fame and success? Do you have friends?

  Let me be your friend. I'll bring over a loofah and a bottle of Noxzema, and we'll take off your paint. If it turns out that you're really Liv Tyler, we can even make it, too.

  But otherwise, the sex thing? Look, it's not like I have trouble with same-sex relationships—my mother is the biggest raging dyke on the planet, and I love her to death. When I was growing up, she made this big stink about how I had to call her a dyke, and nothing else—even in high school—and because of it I was always being sent home. She really liked that, though, because she relished the fights she had with school staff. It was only after I escaped from home that I discovered, thanks to the miracle of satellite TV, that the real mother I always wanted was, in fact, Lindsay Wagner of The Bionic Woman—not as she appeared in her TV series, but rather as she appears in car commercials two decades later: calm and confident; the sort of mother who'd buy you Count Chocula without even being asked to do so.

  No, I got the scary, crazed dyke mama, plus—over the course of seventeen years at home—Joan, Nancy, elan (all lower case), Georgia and Sunn, more often than not overlapping.

  So, if there's something you want to tell me, I'm the one with ears. Have you considered gender reassignment procedures? You have to take hormones for years, and then they gradually "regenderize" you. Georgia was regendered.

  As for me, I want to look as average as possible. I'm difficult to locate in a crowd because I wear only khakis and a solid-colour buttoned shirt that, scanned in Photoshop and desaturated, lies between twenty-five and thirty percent on the grey scale. I keep myself nine pounds overweight and drive a white Taurus, which everyone says looks like a rental car, which makes me happy. I'd never eaten any of your narrow but tasty range of burger-type products until I was seventeen, in the McD's outlet on the other side of town. I ordered a cheeseburger—it was also my first non-vegetarian experience—and it was wonderful. I didn't even puke. Thanks for turning me on to cow.

  It was actually my love of cow that made me leave home. I kept tasting it in my dreams. My mother had some weird voodoo dream scanner, and she could tell I was being non-vegetarian even while I slept, and come morning it was wheat germ and stern lectures on slaughterhouse procedures. Did you know that a cow enters a meat-processing facility at the top of a seven-storey building and that, as it gets more and more processed, it goes down the building floor by floor? Not only that, but there's a thing in abattoirs called the Chute. Every time they find a diseased lung or something, it goes into one of a succession of seven funnels in the building's centre. By the time you're on the first floor, the Chute is filled with this monsoon of inedible cow remnants, which are then blenderized into pet food smoothies. I mention this because, here at work, we call our in-house memo system the Chute. So, you see, Ronald, even when you don't think you're giving to society as a whole, you continue to do so—when you cause us to reformulate our personal relationships to carnivorism and the Chain of Meat—a distant cousin of the food chain.

  BTW, what's the deal with these salads you're selling now? It kind of rubs me the wrong way. You're about cow, dammit, not leaf. Anyway, send me an email or even phone me. It's area code 604, and the number itself is a seven-digit prime which, when squared, is two digits short of being a factorial. Are you up to that challenge? Let me help you become the Power Clown you know you can be.

  John Doe

  . . .

  Just before the turtle meeting, I went on eBay and bought a Benelux keyboard. Belgian keyboards are totally from hell. For whatever reason, they scramble the character keys even more randomly than a QWERTY keyboard. Thanks to UPS, it ought to be here the day after tomorrow, and Kaitlin shall meet her match. God, I love the twenty-first century.

  I just heard her on the phone with someone in HR, trying to get out of jPod. Good luck.

  "What do you mean it's not possible?"

  [HR staffer]

  "Do you mean not possible now, or not possible ever}"

  [HR staffer]

  "I'm a super-experienced character animator, and I've worked at two other big companies, and none of them would ever have stuck me in this chunk of Siberia with a clump of whacked-out freaks."

  [HR staffer]

  "Okay, that was harsh, but look at my position."

  [HR staffer]

  "Call Allan Rothstein. He hired me. There's no way he'd have hired me and then stuck me in jPod."

  [HR staffer]

  "I know Allan Rothstein is busy, but he wasn't too busy to hire me, so I'm sure you can speak to him and clear this up."

  [HR staffer]

  "When does he get back from the Orlando studio?"

  [HR staffer]

  "Who else can I speak with?"

  [HR staffer]

  "They can't all be in Orlando. There's a meeting here soon, and some of them have to be here for that."

  [HR staffer]

  "You don't understand. The people in this place you stuck me in perform tasks completely unrelated to mine. I'm a character animator; I have to be with my team."

  [HR staffer]

  "Oh. How did people ever get out of jPod in the past, then?"

  [HR staffer]

  "They don't?"

  [HR staffer]

  "What do you mean, just be quiet and try to make peace with it?"

  [HR staffer]

  "My last name actually begins with the letter B. I'm Kaitlin Boyd."

  [HR staffer]

  "Boyd is my stepfather's name. Well, yes, on official fo
rms, it's Joyce."

  [HR staffer]

  Kaitlin hangs up.

  [Sound of phone keypad buttons being pushed.]

  "Hello, Allan? It's Kaitlin Joyce calling. Sorry to call your cell number when you're away. But your cell number was on your card, and . . ."

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "I'm going into a meeting soon, myself, sir."

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "I'll be quick, then. Your HR people put me in a place called jPod. Can you please call them and have me moved to the team's character-animating pod so that. . ."

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "What was that noise you just made?"

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "No. You distincdy said something like, uh-oh."

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "I know you're busy, Allan, and, like you, I want to get to work, but I . . ."

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "When are you back, then?"

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "Okay. I'm sorry to have called you on a semi-holiday."

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "I'll make the best of the situation until then."

  [Allan Rothstein]

  "Goodbye."

  Kaitlin hangs up.

  . . .

  Ronald,

  This is Casper Jesperson, a.k.a. the Cancer Cowboy, and I have to ask you, mister, what do you think happens to you after you die? Which is a way of asking, do you believe in something specific, or a warm cosmic glow, followed by the total extinction of your being? Do you go to church? It's hard to imagine you there, no offence, and if you went, you'd probably be thinking about life and death in the Clown Universe, that great balloon-twist in the sky.

  I come from a farm community, and when I was maybe seven I went to a party at a friend's place. There was a clown there, juggling navel oranges, and while he was doing it, I went out and looked inside his car by the dog kennel, and there was McDonald's trash all over the floor, front and back, and fifty aluminum beer can empties on the floor of the passenger seat. On the dashboard was a Tom Clancy novel (that's how I turned on to him) with all of the yellow ink sun-faded out of the cover (but not the cyan or magenta), as well as the wet, pulpy stump of a cheap and recently extinguished stogie. There was other crap, too—pizza flyers, a copy of Oui magazine opened to a woman sitting spread-eagled, wearing a bandolier of machine gun bullets. It's kind of haunted me my whole life, that car.

  So imagine you've just finished scaring kids at a birthday party—you're still in your clown makeup and you get in your car, and maybe it doesn't start right away, so you say fuck fuck fuck a few times, which is like a magic phrase that starts it. You pull out of the driveway in reverse, way too quickly, and once you're on the main road you floor it because you have to get to your favourite cocktail lounge to put your birthday party money on a greyhound race. But when you get there, the bar is closed because some pipes burst, and suddenly you can't place your bet, which gives you Clown Rage. You need a drink, but you're a clown, and you can't go into just any bar. Nonetheless, a bet is a bet, so you decide to drive over to the next town and put your money down there. In between the two towns, you stop the car, get out and go to the trunk, where you get your de-clowning makeup remover. Your stomach lurches because you're hungover, and you haven't eaten in a day, and there you are, scraping off the white guck with nothing around you but the sound of the wind whistling over the alfalfa stubble, and maybe a crow on a fence that's curious as to whether your paper towel is edible.

  You hear a car approaching, but you pretend you're too busy to look because, from experience, you've learned that making eye contact with adults when you're in clown drag is risky. So your head is in the trunk, and you're scraping away, when without you even knowing what it is, a baseball bat held by a sixteen-year-old kid on meth clubs you on the head and you die. Where do you go from there?

  Yours from Planet Earth,

  The Cancer Cowboy

  . . .

  When Mark asked Kaitlin where her letter to Ronald was, she said, "Don't you people have anything better to do with your lives?"

  I poked my head up and said, "I can think of no better thing to do."

  She said, "Here's what I think. Mark and you"—she almost spat out my name—"Ethan, are the same person. To read your letters, there's no difference between you, no shred of individuality." (NOTE: I deleted the passage on Kaitlin from my publicly released letter.)

  "Well, Kaitlin, if you're such an individual," I shot back, "put your words where your mouth is."

  "What a witty comeback. Even John Doe's letter had more edge than yours."

  John Doe's head popped up: "Then I have failed. I strive for aver-ageness in everything I do."

  "I have an idea," Bree offered. "If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.'"

  "Why do I have to be the evil one?"

  "Because your email address is so dull—[email protected]? We really have to zap your brain with defibrillator paddles to get you up and running."

  "If I'm evil, then what's Ethan?"

  "Ethan is good."

  "This is so 'Spy vs. Spy' arbitrary."

  "Which spy did you vote for?"

  "The black one."

  "There you go. Evil. You are pure evil."

  "Just because I didn't root for the white one?"

  "It's more complex than that."

  Chorus: "Mark is evil! Mark is evil!"

  Kaitlin said, "This is so stupid."

  I said, "Kaitlin, before you go name-calling, pony up. Send us all a letter to Ronald that says 'Kaitlin,' and only Kaitlin."

  "If it gets you off my back, I'll do it."

  . . .

  It's weird, but every time I visit the Drudge Report website, I'm the fifty-millionth person to visit it, so there must be a software error on their part, because how could they possibly have more than one fifty-millionth visitor? And I can't wait to see what my prize will be.

  . . .

  Dirk, who's a friend of mine from Hewlett-Packard, sent me photos from his trip to Nagoya, using the Kodak Easy Share photo display system. Using its interface, I felt like I was time-travelling to 1999. I half expected a pop-up window to tell me to submit my mailing address so that they could snail-mail me a 56K floppy. And then I got to thinking about it . . . Kodak still exists} Even seeing its name makes me feel like I'm at a garage sale. I bet they stopped hiring young people in 1997.

  . . .

  While Kaitlin was writing her letter, my phone rang. 'Your father is acting weird around me," Mom said. "Did you tell him about Tim?"

  "Of course not."

  "Why is he acting so strangely, then?"

  "Maybeyou're the one acting weird, and he's just feeding it back to you."

  "I just drove up the hill to make sure Tim's body was still covered up."

  "And . . . ?"

  "They've already backfilled the area."

  "That's a relief."

  "I miss him."

  "Mom, not here, not now."

  "Can I come see you?"

  "At work?"

  "Why are you so surprised?"

  "Mom, you never even came to elementary school or high school. . ."

  "I always thought you should have a space in the world that was entirely your own."

  "I always thought you didn't care."

  "Nonsense. What time should I come visit?"

  'You can't. I have meetings."

  "Meetings? Who are you—Darren Stevens? I'll pop by. It'll be fun."

  "Mom—"

  She hung up.

  . . .

  Dad phoned a minute later, his voice kind of distant and calling-from-a-tin-can-y.

  "Dad, you sound all funny."

  "I'm dying my eyebrows black, so I have to hold the receiver away from me."

  "Why?"

  "I'm auditioning again."

  "What movie this time?
"

  "Something about a radioactive teddy bear that saves Halloween."

  "How do black eyebrows fit in?"

  "If I get the part, I get to be a father taking his kid trick-or-treating dressed as Abraham Lincoln."

  "So what's up?"

  "Your mother is acting weird."

  "Maybe you're the one acting weird, and she's just feeding it back to you."

  'You're not going to mention Ellen, are you?"

  "No."

  "She's hot, isn't she? Ellen, that is."

  "Dad! Do not talk like that to me. She was too young for me to dance with at the Z95 noon-hour Beat Breaks in high school."

  "Discussing women makes you feel weird?"

  "Discussing women with my father? Yes. It does. Dad, is there anything else? I've got this meeting . . ."

  "Gee. You have a job and I don't."

  "Dad, let's not go there again."

  "Just kidding. You couldn't get me back into an office chair for a million bucks. I should have been an actor all along."

  "Dad, I really have to go."

  "Hasta luego, cubicle boy."

  . . .

  Ronald Darling,

  I've just been transferred into a new game development pod, which is truly the pod of the corn. Part of their tribal lore is that I have to write you this degrading letter, which is so stupid, because how many times have you and I already had online sex—three hundred? They don't even think you're real, which pisses me off no end. And I know if I try to discuss our forbidden love, we'll both be mocked and shunned.

  All I want to be is in a living room with the lights on low, and the battery in my laptop hot and aroused, with you and me talking smutty across the ether. Tonight I'm yours, and yours always. But Ronald, darling, next time don't let the Hamburglar into the dialogue box. He totally kills the mood. Three-ways are for tramps.

  Your

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