February 2022
4,201 Words
Klaus and Gavin are sitting in the back office waiting for Microsoft Office to finish installing on the restaurant computer. The manager, the lunch bartender, and a non-Anglophonic prep cook on his first day who was looking for a clock-in number from the aforementioned manager who hired him have all stuck their heads in at some point and, language barriers aside, clearly wanted to ask why exactly this restaurant is paying for on-demand tech support if it isn’t to fix computers until they looked at the screen and realized even the most technologically inept of them had seen this before.
An effective restaurant office minimizes floorspace so as to discourage idling waitstaff. In fact they’re probably the smallest rooms on Earth that are actually designed for human occupation. This one is no different and is an incredibly vertically-oriented space with a modem atop the highest level of bare-wood shelving that ribs the room and from the nails of which hang key rings on frayed mildewy lanyards all the way down to the literal desktop monitor whose namesake arches over the tower and a scribble of cables that taunt a fire hazard serious enough to give anyone who sees it the heebie jeebies. There is enough room for two people to be comfortable if they both lean back in their chairs and face opposite directions with their feet up, Klaus’s on the wall, Gavin’s on the desk, their knees lined up with the others’ ears, Gavin’s arms behind his head, Klaus’s crossed as he says “I was getting gas this morning watching all the laborers pull in before going to work outdoors, and this being the first really cold day and all I was just like, man, I’m really glad I’m not one of them today.”
“You know, plenty of people feel similarly about people who work at Wal-Mart.”
“Man, lemme tell you, if you knew some of the people I used to work with you wouldn’t feel bad for none of those fuckers. This one guy blew every paycheck on crack and spent the whole weekend smoking it. Every single payday. Everyone knew what he was doing and yet he still got scheduled the same days. I didn’t care what he was doing when he clocked out, but if they weren’t gonna fire him the least they could’ve done was schedule him for a different fucking day instead of leaving me to do all of his work and mine every Friday.”
#We decided on Pizza King before we left because it’s on the way to our next job. We split a large mushrooms-peppers-onions-sausage but really we’re here for the Williams Junk Yard since several Delaware members on pinballmap.com have asked Klaus to make sure it actually works like the site says it does. It’s no Addam’s Family, but it works, and Klaus quadruples my score in the first game just as a pinball forum admin should, and in my relative surplus of downtime decide to take up researching and regurgitating facts about this little universe we’ve found ourselves hunched over.
#Like Wal-Mart, restaurants are one of the last places of employment in the developed world where truly menial labor can sneak up on you, unless of course you lump all white-collar labor together under “menial” in the sense that it’s all staring at screens and pressing keyboard buttons, in which case restaurants at least have some variety in the monotony. In other words it will forever and always be exactly one time that we have to read three sets of numbers off of four thousand credit card receipts because when we bought new readers two weeks ago the company we got them from never told us they require a couple extra button presses to enter tips. So now we have to compile them into a spreadsheet to send to the other company that processes them. From paper receipts. They need the last four digits on the card, the total amount of the order, and the tip. Gavin reads, I type.
“Five nine eight seven, nine, two. Thirty two nine, eleven-fifty, two. Eight twenty-two three, nine-fifty, five.”
“Nice.”
“Four twos, thirty-two fifty, one.”
“What the fuck.”
“Yeah, fuck that guy. Elevenelvenen twelve two. Sixtwoninethree fivefifty five.”
#The estimated time to install has transcended the phase of displaying “4 DAYS 11 HOURS” and has now been reduced to a more reasonable two hours.
“Honestly probably the craziest thing I saw was the inventory guys who would always come in and run up and down the isles in the back with these like keypad things on their belts like pagers used to be, and they could just punch in serial numbers and quantities without even looking at the keypads. Their fingers were moving like they were playing piano and they did not stop running ever. Usually they had headphones in playing some techno that I couldn’t tell the difference between the drums and the, like, techno parts.”
“Like Wal-Mart was thinking for them.”
“Honestly, yeah. And let me tell you, it gets to turning your soul real fucking black when you spend a decade around people like that who talk like they have scripted dialogue and repeat actions like they’re coded to.”
“It’s not their fault, really. It’s because of Soros. He’s trying to get us more reliant on China by making hard-working people hate their lives in anti-China industries so there’s ultimately a labor shortage and we stop producing what little materials we still do and it’s therefore seen as Sinophobic to accuse China of creating this pandemic.”
“Look, whoever you’re talking about, they certainly aren’t in this world. Anyone worth their salt at controlling anything wouldn’t make their physical presence know. They’re behind the scenes, adjusting the code of this simulation. We’re programmed.”
“Yeah, programmed. By nanobots in the vaccines. Because Bill Gates made a deal with Hillary on Epstein’s Island to use the same technology from his Malaria vaccines to get us all under his spell. Meanwhile the radiation from the Facebook VR goggles, which slipped right past the FDA without any of the normal testing, you can look into it, is what activates the nanobots to make us keep buying more Metaverse shit while we use the goggles.”
“Sometimes I wonder if they built it this way as a punishment. Like imagine you’re home alone and some cops just bust in and say ‘our database says you’re going to commit federal tax fraud within a decade with a likelihood above the legal limit and are sentenced to five years house arrest,’ and they strap goggles on you with their ‘prison’ software, which is this world, and before you can fight back you are so deeply immersed in it you forgot where you came from to the point that you think this is what’s real. You can’t prove to me that’s not what I’m going to wake up to when I die. So my question is, what is it about this world that made them believe it was fit to be a punishment?”
“I’m just so over it man. How is it possible that some people are literally God and can absent mindedly change the entire course of my life while they’re eating breakfast? And I’m stuck oiling this capitalist machine every day and killing my soul for it? And sometimes I’m mad I’m trapped in this cycle and sometimes I’m just jealous that some people get to know in their souls what it’s like to be God and all I have to look forward to is what’s on my Netflix ‘For You’ screen when I get home. I wish I felt like this back before the Capital shit happened. Now that I feel like I need to go rip the heads off of the people that made my life this fucking way, the chance has already passed.”
“You know actually I was there for that.”
#Klaus has about twenty pinball machines at home for the thrice-yearly league he hosts which meets biweekly in the basement where he keeps said machines. One of those machines is a Guns N’ Roses which he’s rigged to play basically any other guitar-fronted band that played in American stadiums in seventies since he despises the titular band but loves the machine. It’s reserved exclusively for the league finals every year. The only person who regularly beats him is in the top 100 globally. The ranking system is ordered by a point value, Klaus’s being, 89.7, his nemesis’ being 250.2. I don’t even have a value so I’m effectively playing against myself today, and in the waning competitive atmosphere we start to enjoy the game’s esoterica I’m discovering.
“Dude, it says if you hit double flippers three times when the Time Machine™ shows all threes then you get a secret mode.”
Klaus is deep into a multi ball. The only reason he can spare any attention at all is because he’s holding two balls on the left flipper and racking up multipliers with the remaining ball using only the right flipper.
Gavin continues: “But if you get to outer space first it locks out the time machine. . . but apparently that does make it easier to get to the other adventure modes like ‘Submerged’ and ‘The Great Toilet Adventure.’”
“Games within games within games man. And I’m working real fucking hard to be the only damn one in charge of this one here.”
Hence our respective scores.
#We’re sitting in wheeled office chairs while we’re sifting through receipts, and there’s enough space for Gavin to sit hunched to the side with his legs splayed to keep from rolling around on the greasy uneven floor while I’m punching away at my keyboard about a step behind the relayed information but holding it in my head ahead of my fingers, almost typing towards it.
“Twothreezero two, three-fifty, one hundred. One hundred?”
“One hundred?”
“Shit, yeah. And look, the guy even signed with a dollar sign and nothing else.”
“Do you think that’s on his license?”
“Fucking probably.”
“Is that legal?”
It’s there.
#An hour has gone by with no change on the screen and they may grow antsy if the stasis continues.
“Yeah, I mean don’t tell anyone, not even my wife knows, and I’m past it now, but when you put it that way yes I do know exactly what it feels like and yes it’s a very dark place. I mean basically I went from barely graduating from high school to getting an IT degree at a community college and then I got a job making sixty kay when I was twenty which to me was like, is this even real? And instead of rolling with it and building on it and saving money I was just blowing through paychecks on stupid shit like cars and guns and jewelry. It got to me I guess. And in a year I was broke and jobless and that’s how I ended up at Wal-Mart in complete denial about it being my fault. And then I started meeting people on the internet who knew exactly who to blame, and once I knew who they were then everything made so much sense about how they had built a country and a world that made it impossible for people like me to ever have anything. You have no idea how angry I was at them. It felt so good to be angry and do nothing but vape weed and pop adderall and dig through hidden pages on the internet. It felt so good. It was like, everything that made me angry was also what was proving me right. It didn’t matter if it was true or not. And I was so high I could just make a million connections a second and go so much deeper than anyone and it all made so much sense and I was the only one who could see it and it built up so much pain that I had to let it out once I saw the chance to confront the people who I thought’d ruined my life and then I sort of looked around at the people there with me in the Capitol who’d told me about this in the first place and it hit me that I wasn’t one of them, that this would never end for them, that they could murder all of congress and the global elite and they would still be looking for someone to oust and blame for their own loneliness and shortcomings instead of realizing that where they were really trapped was their own heads. And so that’s when I decided to acknowledge the enormous hole I’d dug for myself and accept that if I was going to climb out of it then it would have to be me who did the climbing, and even if I only ever made it a fraction of the way out it was going to feel a lot better to climb than to keep coming up with new people to blame for the hole’s existence.”
Neither of them say anything for a while.
“So what about you then. We at least gotta be on the same page now.”
Gavin is still sort of staring at the floor for and continues to for a bit, and Klaus being the understanding fellow he is seems to be respecting the processing of one answer and the developing of another.
“I lived for the better part of a year developing an involuntary conviction that my consciousness was a simulation controlled by some teenager in another universe playing a video game. I mean of course I was smoking a shit ton of weed at this point too which didn’t help but it’s not like that was the entire problem, I wasn’t an alcoholic or anything as serious as that, but it didn’t help. It was like using a nail gun to bolt down my nihilism instead of a hammer. I mean it was just classic rich-kid shit, hedonistic Roman emperor type stuff. Like, why bother? Not like I’m gonna die from any consequences of my inactions or anything. My dad owns this big company now and I’m getting monthly payouts just for being a relative, but you lie to yourself an insane amount man, I think at one point I was telling myself it was like I was on a UBI, and soon enough we’re all gonna be on one anyway so I might as well do what I’ll do when that happens, which is smoke endless legal weed in front of algorithmically tailored media. And so in that isolated little room of mine my brain was churning away, finding things to survive against that weren’t there, making connections out of thin air. It was like, never-ending deja vu. What really did me in was I was driving towards Atlantic City one day to go surf and I was stupendously high, obviously, and this song came on that had been in my Spotify recommended playlist for a while called ‘The Mirror,’ and the lyrics kick in about thirty seconds into the song with ‘It was on the thirteenth revolution of Blueberry Hill that I decided the needle had had enough.’ And the song starts and I know these words are coming and I happen to glance to the left across this dead cornfield and see a warehouse about half a mile away that, I shit you not, in gigantic blue letters across the front, says ‘Blueberry Bill.’ And at that point I knew I was being watched and I haven’t been able to shake it since. But I also realized that there was nothing I could do to track down whatever was capable of pulling some shit like that. And so after I flipped my truck I crawled out and was staring at that warehouse waiting for someone to come and take me away and I decided that it is what it is. I’m stuck in a giant net that my stupid fish teeth can’t bite through. And whether it’s God or quantum physics or some teenager that’s reeling it in is immaterial because I’m still the one in the net.”
“But doesn’t it ever bother you that some people do get out of the net? People like Bezos or Putin or Michael Jackson? Didn’t they confront this same thing as normal people before they became Godlike?”
“Maybe, but I actually think they’re deeper into the net than you or I would ever want to be. But sure, maybe they’re one of the ones reeling our net in. Even so, they still have to be back to shore by a certain time for someone else to collect their fish, but it doesn’t matter who that is just like it doesn’t matter who’s reeling in our net. The point is that it’s happening.”
“And you’re saying people like that exist but that we shouldn’t hate them? Shouldn’t fight them? That they’re too powerful to beat? Just give up?”
“That’s the opposite of what I’m saying. It’s just that the right way to fight doesn’t seem like the right way. Figuring out who to fight and exactly how much you hate them is a waste of time. Train yourself to see the effects and resist them at even the smallest opportunity. Over time it adds up. Over large numbers of people it adds up.”
“And what does that look like exactly?”
“Recognizing real beauty when you see it. A chance encounter. A complex pattern from something you didn’t think was conscious. A connection to your past self or to someone else through art and emotion. If you spend your time on that type of stuff then you’re not really in the net even if you are.”
“See, I feel like I’m pretty good at that. I feel like I see that type of stuff every day. But it just feels like there’s something clogging a fountain inside me that’s supposed to be spraying everywhere. Is something wrong with me? Or is the stuff just not as beautiful as I think it is?”
#I have no intensions of ending my current multiball prematurely. Gavin got one earlier and was just frantically hitting the flippers as fast as he could to keep everything in play as long as possible. Needless to say it was short lived. The key is to be patient enough to not jump the gun and hit a flipper too early and miss a ball. It helps if you can anticipate and account for balls colliding upstream of the flippers and thus tilt the table properly to get the balls back on course to the flippers, and usually these collisions lead to the balls hitting more bumpers or ramps or in a rare case the Wrecking Ball™ or in a cataclysmic case a Triple-Drano like it does about thirty million points later, the last of the consecutively draining balls even teetering long enough on the edge of the flipper/drain divider to tease me into thinking about another tilt that ultimately isn’t worth it.
“Sometimes it just happens, but I swear it seems like those things decide when it’s time,” I say to Gavin.
“Do you notice it happens more often during a multiball?”
“Most definitely. But you’ll never touch the high score without it.”
“I feel like that’s when it gets fun too. For me anyway.”
“Oh absolutely, makes it real easy to disappear into it. Just gotta hope they don’t decide to ruin your game right before you beat your old high score.”
Gavin lets the plunger run out of his hand and it looks like he’s releasing an undersized fish back into the wild, immediately beginning to set up the multiball in his final foray into this world.
#“Eighteen twenty, sixteen, cash? Fuck!”
#“You know how you can make a feedback loop by holding a microphone right in front of an amp when you say something into it? And at the beginning, even though it’s speeding up, you can still understand it? But soon it just turns into this awful mechanical screech? I’m convinced this era of humanity is that screech. We are at the end of the game and are running in circles over everything that’s been done before and are going mad with the boredom of having nothing new to do and just staring head on at the horror of our existence.”
“I think we just know too much. We first started searching for truth as a way to fight the terror of the unknown. I’m talking like, the terror that motivates a couple of Inuit families in Greenland to create their own mythology out of the arrangements of stars. Sometimes I feel like the entire point of that stuff is the creation of it. Like, that what’s more important is that it takes focus and effort to construct them together and maintain their beauty together. That’s the real defense. Now we have no reason to build anything like that. The terror has been subdued out of us by media saturation and now we don’t want to do anything besides maintain our saturation.”
“I think we do still have a reason to build something. The terror hasn’t gone anywhere, but we’ve dismissed and demonized so many meaningful retaliations that now we’re building conspiracy theories and, like, two grunts like us can have a serious conversation about if this is all a simulation, and this conversation will probably happen thousands of times today in this country alone, in normal places like offices and family dinner tables. That’s our religion right now, that’s our defense. And we practice worship by retreating into our rooms to build monstrosities through screens with people we’ll never meet. I don’t understand why people seem to be trying to make a bad situation worse, but at least people are doing it with other people, technically.”
“Perhaps that’s what appeals to them. To us. The illusion of togetherness with all the alluring parts of being alone.”
Office is finally wrapping up and all that’s left to do is address the implicit understanding that lunch is to immediately follow this. Klaus has one hand on the mouse and his lips folded inward a little bit, eyes looking slightly downward at the screen. He gives the faintest double-nod.
Klaus looks at Gavin. “Pizza okay?” he says.
#By now I have settled into a routine well enough that my mind can drift away and occupy itself with something more entertaining while some other piece of me continues typing out the numbers Gavin is reading to me. I am here but I am somewhere else, and in between those two places is a sort of numbness that buzzes loudly enough to override my present boredom.
“All ones, eleven one. All twos, fifteentwenty, three. All threes, nine five. Sevenseveneightseven six five. Fivesixthreefour eleven one. Fivesixfourseven, one thirty-seven, five. Oh two nine oh, sevenfifty two. Twentythreeohtwo, sev-"
“Wait, did you say ‘one thirty-seven?’ For the total? As in, a dollar and thirty-seven cents? That’s nothing like any of the other ones.”
Gavin looked back at it. “Yep, it does. Was about a week ago.”
“Lemme see. Oh shit this is mine! I remember: discounted coffee. They gave me an honorary employee discount. Shit’s cool man, what are the odds of that?”
He chuckles, and then we both laugh, and we laugh and laugh until we start laughing at our own laughter until we stop abruptly.
#Klaus puts his initials on the machine’s leader board right before we have to finish our pizza and get going. In the booth I catch a glimpse of The Simpsons on the TV over his shoulder. It’s Treehouse of Horror and they’re in Hell but the TV is muted and they cut to Satan on his throne underneath a flaming arch with “Arby’s” spelled out in lightbulbs at the exact moment Klaus says “Arby’s” in the story he’s telling with such impeccable timing that it only flashes on the screen for the exact amount of time it takes him to say it before the episode continues on its way. I am too awestruck to hear the rest of what Klaus says. I want to tell him what I just witnessed but I don’t want him to know that I find this plastic replica of cosmic interconnection as beautiful as I do. We walk outside to go handle our next job at some bagel place. It has something to do with their receipts. When we get into our cars it’s that time of day when it makes sense to drive with the headlights on even though you need sunglasses, and through that hazy glow I wonder what the odds are that all of the people in traffic with me, who are all slumping their head into their left palm against the driver-side window, who are all staring ahead with the same slightly-below-neutral expression and half-closed eyes, are all listening to the same song and will never know it.