See, it was like this: Cody was at the keyboard and Luanne and I were on each side of him, drinking cheap red wine from paper cups and watching that mad doomed hero navigate the web and try to get that Netscape file downloaded, decompressed, and installed before the online service shut down for maintenance at 4:30AM.

Now you and I, we would have needed a direct T3 link into the back of that Compaq, or maybe a band of Angels circling the machine, willing to forgive our sins and make miracles happen, but Cody, well, Cody was Cody after all, spawned from the seedy back streets of Silicon Valley, he’d stolen 50 computers before he was twelve and so had a kind of way with them, as he had with women.

Cody could make a 2400 baud modem push bits over the pipe like it was ISDN, but if the hardware wasn’t up to it, that was okay too because Cody would just ditch the PC, find another system, and fire it up, remorseless, without repentance -- part ham-fisted hacker and part hydrogen bomb, no sign of fatigue after days of sitting at that box, punching those keys, fingers moving like forged-steel pistons on some vast, frightening industrial machine.

We thought Cody was pushing his luck ‘cause he’d put "Real Audio 1.1" on his system and liked to play Charlie Parker Audio Clips while he surfed the web, and you know we all worshipped the Bird but hey Cody it’s 4:28AM and you’re only sixty-three percent through that download according to the thermometer bar and you’ve seen that final warning message box flash in front of your eyes three times like a vision of God and how are you gonna get that Netscape file with all those wave files stealing your CPU cycles?

"Like All The Great Sages and Bums"

Cody didn’t care, he was beyond caring, like the Buddah, like Wordsworth and Thoreau, like all the great Sages and Bums, because he knew, like all of us know deep inside our old punctured hearts, he knew that he’d failed and he knew that all that was left for him, for us, for ANY of us, was failure, failure and death, the death Cody wanted more than life as he slammed that keyboard while Bird and Babs Gonzales filled the air with mysterious melodies, hot steaming sound from those multimedia speakers passing through our tenement window and out, out, out into the dark depths of the Sad American Night.

Luanne, Back In Westport,
Connecticut, 1998

But just as we’d all given up hope and Luanne was talking about going back to her parents in Westport and I too was ashamed as I reached for the railroad schedule in my back pocket, why, something strange happened, something I’d never seen, something Cody’d never seen, something none of us had ever seen, in all our lost years on this lonely ruined planet.

As I stand here, I swear on my mother’s grave, that blue horizontal thermometer bar just jumped, leaped, leapt from 63 to 100 percent, all at once, a cold blue spark jumping the gap on some forgotten electrical gadget from the Frankenstein films, and by God the deed was done now and sure even Cody looked pleased with himself as we backed up the file just to be safe and headed out on Columbus, looking for some place that was still open, some place whose owner didn’t object to serving people like us, drunks, sure, but drunk with the vitality and promise of life; sinners, sure, but sinning for pleasure and not for gain; hackers, sure; but hackers who hack with the hope of making these machines work and saving everyone time, because God and us both know that time is all we’ve got and all we ever had.

 

THE END

 

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