Microserfs

TUESDAY, JANUARY 17,1995

Hanshin

Expressway

Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things you've never seen before.

Mitsukoshi department store, Kobe, Japan, at a 45-degree angle, its contents smashed against walls

Western Washington State, minus Seattle's metro region, is assigned a new area code, 360, effective January 15, 1995

R U Japanese?

thin blood

Nirvana Unplugged

what I wanted

Nikkei Index

Cerebrovascular event

rear-view mirror

Hawaii

what really happened

Embolus

Possible reversibility

Monsterbreaker

Mothermaker

System-beater

Sharkprincess

Skywalker

Kidnapper

Codebreaker

Keypadburner

clot

Godseeker

Braineater

* * *

This is the day of days, and so the telling begins.

Karla massaged Mom's back in Mom's new room beside the kitchen, a room that we filled with her rocks and photos and potpourri and Misty. Misty, buffered by dumbness, unaware of the traffic jams in the blood flow of her master's brain: carbon freeways of cracked cement and flattened Camrys and Isuzus and F-lOOs; neural survivors as well as those neural victims, all as yet unretrieved from within the overpasses of her Self. Mom's brain is crashed and inert, her limbs as stationary as lemon tree branches on an August afternoon, occasionally twitching limbs appended by a wedding ring and a Chyx wristband from Amy. Images of a crashed Japan on every channel, the newscaster's voice floating in the background. At least Japan can be rebuilt.

Karla spent the morning massaging the lax folds of Mom's skin. I wonder, is she there? It is what I . . . we have lived with for weeks, we who look into Mom's eyes and say, Hello in there, thinking, We are here. Where are you, Mom? Where did you go? How did you disappear? How did the world steal you? How did you vanish?

Actually, Karla was the first to cross the frontier between words and skin; speech and flesh.

Karla invaded Mom's body. Last week Karla removed her Nikes, took a plastic squeeze bottle of mineral oil from the bathroom, cut it with sesame oil, and crawled atop Mom's prone form on the foldaway rental bed. She told Dad to watch, told him that he was next, and so Dad watched.

Karla dug and sculpted into my mom's body, stretching it as only she knows how to do, willing sensation into her flesh, into her rhomboids, her triceps, her rotor cuffs and spaces where probing generated no reaction; Karla, laser-beaming her faith into the body of this woman.

Last week was the beginning, the Confusion, when everything seemed lost, the image of Mom lying frozen and starved of oxygen in the Rinconada swimming pool haunting us. Ethan meeting us at the hospital, his own skin the color of white fatty bacon embedded with an IV drip; Dusty and Lindsay, Dusty sucking in her breath with fear, and turning her head from ours, then returning her gaze and offering us Lindsay as consolation.

* * *

There had been discussions, a prognosis, pamphlets and counselors, workshops and experts. Mom's functions may one day be complete and may be one day partial, but as of today there's nothing but the twitches and the knowledge that fear is locked inside the body. Her eyes can be opened and closed, but not enough to semaphore messages. She's all wired up and gizmo'ed; her outside looks like the inside of a Bell switchbox.

What is her side of the story? The password has been deleted.

* * *

Karla would take Dad's hand over the last week and make it touch Mom, saying, "She is there and she has never left."

And it was Karla who started us talking to Mom, Mom's eyes fishy, blank, lost and found, requiring an act of faith to presuppose vivid interior dimensions still intact. Karla who made me stare into these faraway eyes and say, Speak to her, Dan: She can hear you and how can you not look into these eyes that once loved you when you were a baby, and not tell her of your day. Talk to her, Dan: tell her . . . today was a day like any other day. We worked. We coded. Our product is doing well, and isn't that just fine?

And so I told Mom these things.

And so every day, I hold the hand that once held me, so long ago.

And Karla gently guided Dad up onto the foldaway, saying, Mr. Underwood, roll up your sleeves. Mr. Underwood, your wife is still here, and she has never needed you more.

* * *

And there's Bug, reading Sunday's color comics to Mom, trying hard to make The Lockhorns sound funny, then saying to his unresponsive audience, "Oh, Mrs. Underwood, I understand your reaction completely. It's like I'm reading 1970s cocktail napkins out loud to you. I must admit, I've never liked this strip," and then discussing the politics of syndication, and which comic strips he finds unfunny: The Family Circus, Peanuts, Ziggy, Garfield, and Sally Forth. He's actually more animated than he is in conversations with us.

There is the image of Amy telling rude jokes to Mom and Michael trying to curb the ribaldry, but being swept away by the filth, and Michael responding with Pentium jokes.