Chapter 6

A sense of doom was pervasive the next day. Or, no…

…was it just a cloud around yours truly? Erik canceled a morning meeting with me
and Lauren which I’d considered pivotal. When I asked her over Slack what gave, she sent a
shrug emoji. Was that not odd? And hadn’t Kristina Hernandez avoided eye contact as we
passed in the hall? I was dying for Pancho’s take on it all, but he was tied up with a
subcontractor in one of the conference rooms. Though it had been some months since we’d
last done so, Katerina and I’d had one of our famous all-nighters the night before. This was
an effort, known only to me, to take my mind off things. I’m not sure if it was nerves or the
hangover. At 10:30 I puked in the bathroom.
After lunch Pancho and I were playing foosball. He was working me pretty good. I
hate foosball. We were only playing because it’s in a secluded corner of The Hive, beside the
beanbags, where we could speak freely.
—Scary, isn’t it?
—The rumors yesterday?
—Yeah, I said.
—If I lost this contract I would be fucked.
—No you wouldn’t.
—I promise I would, he said.
The ball was stuck in a corner where I couldn’t get to it. I reached my hand in and
moved it. Don’t you have work from like five other companies?
—Cognznt is about 65 percent of my income, he said.
—Oh, I said.
—Oh.
Pancho was carefully lining up a shot. His tongue was out. He smashed the foosball
to my end of the table and just missed. Fuck, he whispered. Remembering me, he added:
You worried it’s going to be you?
—I’m certain it’s going to be.
—No way, he said. You’re good at what you do. They all know that.
—It won’t matter.
—Maybe it will be neither of us. How hard a load are we for them to carry? They
don’t pay us shit or give us benefits. They put is in another room. They don’t even have to
look at us if they don’t want to.
—So you’re saying they don’t care…
—I’m saying we’re not employees. We’re easy to keep on.
—We’re easy to fire, too.
—Now you’re making me think it’s me.
—I’m sure it isn’t you.
—I guess not, Pancho said. They need me right now. I’m absolutely swamped. You
see how much work I do. When was the last time I left before you?
—Bad example.
—Horrible example.
—And another reason they’ll fire me.

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 —They’re not going to fire you.
—They are, I know it.
—They’re not going to fire you.
—He is absolutely going to fire me.
Pancho trapped the ball with one of his shovel-footed soccer players and looked up
furtively from the table: Erik?
—It’s personal, I said.
—Why is it personal? It’s personal to you.
—Oh no, I said. He feels it, I promise. He puts out a big guy energy which goes
unchallenged by everyone else. Cognznt is his fiefdom and I am the only serf who does not
submit to his fiefery. No offense.
Pancho scored a goal and snapped another bead over on the abacus thingy. It was 5-
0. None taken big fella, he said.
—It’s just that you don’t care.
—I really don’t.
—You’re not competing with him.
—And you are. I can feel that. I can feel that you hate him. But that’s because I know
you. I hear the shit you say about him.
—He feels it too. I’m the yin to his yang.
—You’re also an idiot.
—How so?
—Because you feel some need, apparently, to grapple with Erik Shire’s…big guy
energy I believe you just called it.
—You hate who you hate, I said.
—The world is full of hatred, he said. You hate to see it.
—Lauren hasn’t been out to talk to me in a week.
—She hasn’t so much as acknowledged me.
—That sucks.
—Fuck, he said. Is Lauren the key to this?
—Lauren might be the key to this.
—Maybe they’re firing her.
—Ha.
—Good point.
—This world is a playground for Laurens.
—We are all just furniture and wall art in this world that is a playground for the Eriks
and Laurens, he said. I just got me the feeling it would be me again.
—It’s not going to be you.
—You don’t know that.
—I said that stuff about us being easy to fire, but you had a point too. You’re actually
the last person I’d pick.
—It wouldn’t make any sense, right? I just have so much going on. We’re like barely
ten percent done with the Lucidity rollout, and Erik is already talking about getting this Project
Four One Won thing going again. They’re going to need shit tons of help. They don’t use
anyone else for this shit.

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 —It’s not going to be you.
—Probably not.
Pancho scored again. It was 9-2 now. We stopped talking to concentrate on the
ending. I hit a decent shot from midfield but he stopped it with his goalie. He trapped the
ball in his corner, slid it laterally towards the center with one player and ripped it to my end
with another. It had traveled the length of the foosball table and not touched a single thing
except the back of the goal. It was like all of my guys had their legs cut off.
Pancho raised two fists in the air and took a short victory lap around the beanbags.
He cupped his hands to his mouth and made a crowd noise.
—Take it easy Pelé.
He stopped jogging and corrected me firmly: What have I told you? My name is
Mohamed Salah.
—Take it easy Mohamed Salah.
Pancho fell into a beanbag and gazed up at his phone. He spoke wistfully: I am
Mohamed Salah, the Lion of Egypt, and I’m taking it very easy.
—Are you tired from running like a real soccer player?
—I’ll answer that if you answer this, he said.
I dropped into the other beanbag. Answer what?
—What’s it like?
—What’s what like?
—Losing to me at everything.
—It sucks, I said.
—Thought so.
—What’s it like for you?
—What’s what like for me?
—Sitting in a beanbag.
—Sitting in a beanbag?
—Haha, yeah.
I could see he knew where I was going (something had deflated inside of him), and
this made me laugh.
—Are you tempted to tear it open and eat all the beans?
—If they do fire you please let me know ASAP, he said.
—And why is that?
—So I can run for cover.
—Oh yeah?
—A no-talent white dude like you will shoot up the place.
I repeated him verbatim in a goofy voice.
—Nice, he said.
—Like you wouldn’t load up your Corolla with explosives and botch some half-ass
amateur thing out front by the valet service.
—That’s funny.
—There is no God but God, I said.
—This is true, he said.
—It’s worse than true, I said. It’s a tautology.

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 —Truly.
—Your central fucking creed is a fucking tautology.
He repeated me verbatim in the same goofy voice I’d used earlier.
—Have you seriously never thought about that?
He did it again.
—You don’t know what that word means, do you.
—You’re impossible.
—Consider whether it’s me or my logic, I said.
—That’s only half of the shahada, anyway.
—Only half the what?
—The shahada, Pancho said.
—Oh Jesus Christ, I said. Speak English.
He was holding his phone above him, his head back on the beanbag. I don’t wanna
go back to work, he said.
—I feel like going in there and demanding answers.
—I wouldn’t stop you. I wasn’t worried about it before. Now I am.
—You have no reason to be.
—I don’t think so.
—It’s going to be me.
—Maybe it’ll be neither of us.
—Maybe.
Eventually we went back to The Drone Room. The afternoon seemed to drag on
interminably. The presence of Erik Shire and the rest of the full-time Cognznt employees
was heavy behind me. I leaned my phone against my computer monitor, like a rearview
mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of The Swarm. I couldn’t see anything.
I looked down the row at Pancho. He was leaned forward, his nose a foot from his
computer, already engrossed in the conditional logic and sterility of computer code (the true
Esperanto, he called it). His screen looked like the opening credits in the Matrix.
I too had work to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I opened a couple of
random Word documents and cleared some space in each of them to do some writing. I
couldn’t bring myself to do that either. I checked Instagram. Normally I would have done
this on my phone, in case Erik was watching. Who cared? He was going to fire me anyway.
A cleaning lady came in to empty the small trashcans that were scattered throughout The
Drone Room. I watched her working her way around. It occurred to me that I had never
actually spoken to any of the cleaning ladies. For some reason I found this realization in
combination with the memory of the fantasy I’d had that day after lunch hilarious. I had to
cover my mouth to keep from bursting into laughter.
When the cleaning lady replaced the trashcan beside my desk, just a few feet away, I
whispered to her: Gracias.
—Yes, she said.
My phone buzzed. The buzzing caused it to slide down from where I had leaned it
against the monitor and crash loudly onto the desk. I caught Pancho rolling his eyes. It was a
text message from Katerina.
—I cant stop thinking about last night

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 Irritation welled up inside me. I didn’t feel like engaging. But also I didn’t feel like
disappointing her. The dilemma was familiar. So too my capitulation.
—me neither baby, I said.
—There is one image I can’t get out of my head.
—Yea?
—Guess.
—Kitchen?
—uh huh, she said.
—Which part did u like?
The images came piecemeal, and suddenly I understood why she was reliving them.
We had incorporated a new athleticism into our positions. She was narrating in short bursts,
each a single text message. …and then when you lifted me…and how you were holding me…where your
finger went…. I was weary and exhausted from lack of sleep. This made it hard to focus. It
also made me relaxed and susceptible to arousal. I offered an image of my own and waited
anxiously for her to continue. But wasn’t this irresponsible? If a fire broke out, or an
earthquake started, would I be forced to sit there and count to ten?
—I’m going to get a snack. Do you want anything?
It was Pancho. He was standing behind me.
—Hold on I’ll go with you.
—Okay.
—Let me just…
I opened my email inbox and clicked on one of the archive folders. I opened an email
and closed it, then others, whispering out loud: Is this it? Is it this one?
—What are you doing?
—Nothing, I said. I’m just…one sec…okay.
I subtly adjusted myself and stood up. Pancho was looking at me like I’d just donned
a clown nose or held forth fluently in a foreign language of which I’d previously never
spoken a word.
—Don’t worry about it, I said. Let’s go.
We picked up snacks from The Flower Shop, a kiosk at the WorkAs1 where you can
take protein bars, potato chips, and soft drinks and pay for them from a self-help checkout
screen on the honor system. We stepped outside and sat down at a picnic table. The sun was
bright. Pancho put on sunglasses.
—I can’t take it, I said.
—You’ve got to relax man.
—I’m going to go in there and demand an answer.
—No you’re not.
—I’m going to knock on the door and open it without waiting for an answer, and I’m
going to ask Erik loudly, like I’m his father, if I can please have word with him, and then I’m
going to ask him just who the fuck he thinks he is where everyone can hear me.
—Can we make a bet?
—I am willing to do just about anything right now.
—I bet you lunch for a week they don’t fire you.
—And then what, when they do?

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 —They’re not going to.
—After I get fired you’re going to make me drive up here to the epicenter of my
shame and buy you lunch for a week?
—No, he said.
—That’s some sociopathic shit my guy.
—You’ve got to relax, he said.
—Well you’re no help in that department.
—You seem beyond help.
—Whatever, I said. I’m going back inside.
I left him sitting at the picnic table. As I opened the door I stole a quick backward
glance. I think he knew I was watching him. He popped a chip in his mouth and turned his
face up to the sunshine. With the sunglasses, and the way he tilted his head and smiled a
little, it made me think of Ray Charles.
Back inside, I had seven new messages from Katerina. Three of these were explicit,
and then the last four were:
—U there?
—Hello?
—Typical!
—I have NO IDEA why I do this!
I pulled her messages to the left to check the timestamps: there were barely fifteen
minutes between my last message and hers. My irritation now felt like rage. It was impossible
to carry on a casual relationship with a woman. It didn’t matter how clear you were about
your intentions, or lack of them. Men traded love for sex. Women traded sex for love. This
was the bargain, no matter what else was stated, no matter how many disclaimers, and you
had to hold up your end of it or else you were a perpetrator.
I decided to lean into it. “NO IDEA” why you do what? I asked her.
—This!
—It took me 15 minutes to respond! Scary!
—Scary! familiar!
—Woman, I’m at work!
—It doesnt mean anything to u, she said.
—it does, I said.
—It doesn’t!
—It really does. There’s just a lot going on here rn. I’m sorry, i really am
—I put a lot into this and get almost nothing out.
—U get plenty out!
—I get almost nuthing out!
—Let me make it up to u.
—How? she said.
—I don’t know, I said. I just will.
—No tell me how.
In retrospect I probably missed an opportunity. Here, at this naked and shameless
demand (following this window of honesty in which we spoke openly to one another in
banker’s language), had been a chance to explain that this just wasn’t working, that I had too

6
much going on right now, that she wanted something I simply couldn’t give. Perhaps I was
thinking instead of the crimes against nature we had committed in my kitchen, or the Petrine
Cross on her iliac crest.
—I’ll take you to dinner on friday.
—Okay, she said.
—OK, I said. Good.
—Good! she said.
I set my phone down and wondered, explicitly, almost aloud, whether I would really
do it. It seemed like the right thing to do, facially, a simple matter of needing to keep my
word. But it was more complicated if you dug just two inches under the surface, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t I just burying the hook deeper? Wouldn’t it only hurt more, traverse more flesh,
when I was inevitably forced to extract it?
Shouldn’t I be asking what course of action would, starting from this moment, whatever
I had said or done in the past, cause her the least amount of pain? Wasn’t keeping my word
more about my integrity than her happiness?
I looked at the clock. I had been back at my desk seven minutes. I remembered
Morgan Freeman’s image from Shawshank Redemption, about time in prison seeming to “draw
out, like a blade.” I heard his voice saying it, over and over. After a few repetitions I realized
it was not Morgan Freeman’s voice I was hearing but Frank Caliendo’s.
Nothing happened all afternoon. At 5:30 I decided to pack up and leave. Pancho
must have heard me. A new message popped up on my computer: Told you!
I turned off my monitor, stood up, and answered him audibly.
—They’re just waiting until tomorrow.
I had spoken as if we were the only two people in the room, though there were still
10 or 12 others who hadn’t left yet. No one ever spoke that way in The Drone Room. It was
always like a library. I could see Pancho blushing.
—You working late?
—Yeah, he said quietly.
—Sayonara to you, dear friend.
—Alright man, Pancho said. Take care.
I looked around the room: Sayonara to every last one of you for that matter, I said.
And then I looked at the Cognznt employees on the other side of the glass wall in The
Swarm: Sayonara to the nerds in there, too.
But as I walked out I was angry with myself for having spoken this last line more
softly, and directed my eyes and muted my expression so that, if any one of them happened
to look up and see me, they would not think I was acting strange.
On the way home I left the radio off. I rolled the windows down, and let the wind
and the sunshine rush in. I was so tired I felt achy and sick. When I got home I cranked
down the air conditioner, drew the blinds and went to bed.
That night I had a vivid, horrible dream. It opened this way: with me looking down
the long, bobbing neck of a horse, its long mane flapping in the wind, and the half-coconut
sound of clopping hooves. I knew this place. I was riding south along the Pacific Coast
Highway, where it makes a left turn at the shore after leaving Oxnard, just north of Point
Mugu, that stretch of road where you can see the Seabees shooting range. Up ahead of me I

7
could just make out the great rock which was left when they cut the highway through the
mountain. The sky was dark and foreboding. The sea was a deep red. Lightning jumped to
and fro out in the distance, above the wine-colored waters. (The aesthetic, in retrospect, was
very 300.) As I rode further along the highway, a clamor which had reached me dully rose
and gained features. I heard the clash of swords, and the shouts of men. Black smoke was
rising from the gap in the highway. All around me, on either side of the road, others were
ferrying away and tending to the wounded.
An old peasant woman ran alongside my horse and tugged at my boot. Is it you? she
asked me. Are you the grass cutter’s son?
—Yes, I said.
—It’s him! she shouted. It’s the grass cutter’s son!
For the first time I realized I was wearing a suit of armor. I held up my arm in
awestruck admiration and whispered, Damn. Apparently a fighting force, our fighting force,
those of us from The Land North of Mugu, was engaged in a heavy clash with invaders from
the south. I’m not sure how I came to understand this “big picture.” Obviously I’m having
to stitch bits of the dream together. My memory of it is patchy, and does not form a
coherent sequence. For example, though I cannot place him on either side of the conflict, or
anywhere in the narrative, Justin Bieber was there.
I rode on. The battle was fierce at the front. Everywhere men (and women) were
screaming and yelling, their faces contorted in Dantean passion and agony, flying at one
another with abandon like animals. Never had I dreamed in such hellish colors. Still, I could
see, from an elevated vantage on the shoreside of the road, that to appease their palates the
gods had seasoned this awful stew with dashes of the absurd. One of our knights
decapitated, with a single swing of his sword, a pair of homosexuals clad in speedos and
feather boas. Nearby, a skinny man in a director’s beret swiped at one of our less-armored
soldiers with a Samurai sword, and innards crawled from a slit in his midsection like some
kind of alien newborn. Two midgets, one dressed as a jester and the other as a dominatrix,
were biting and tearing at one another beneath the frame of a catapult. (By virtue of the
dream-world’s suspension of physical laws, I could hear them: they were growling like dogs.)
This particular bend in the Pacific Coast Highway has been in about 100 car commercials.
Normally a portrait of rugged tranquility, on this day it was a chokepoint as nightmarish as
any psychedelic Agincourt or Thermopylae.
Later, I found a cavalry regiment regrouping on an empty beach. Though, as far as I
knew, I had not so much as thrown a rock at anybody, they greeted me with a hero’s
welcome. Urged to give a speech, I stood on the seat of my saddle. I lifted the visor on my
helmet (I was relieved that it still hid my mole) and began to address the soldiers and horses
gathered around me:
—Men and beasts! Who will pull me down from this Rocinante? Will any of them
wield against us the weapons of relativism and epistemology? You see, little Billy Quixote is
not only a delightful knight but a coroner! Aloft on wings of YouTube lecturers he
pronounces the death of the modern era, and reminds you that this takes no great skill, only
a nose, for postmodernism was merely the stench of a dead philosophy rotting!
Below me in the crowd someone’s cell phone began ringing.

8
 —What is history? I continued, unflustered. A line or a series of circles? They would
have us believe we march onward and upward, forever, not a single thing after the same as
what came before. I say phooey! Let us raise again the crests of our foreparents!
—Hear hear! someone shouted.
The cell phone was still ringing.
—Come! Mount your Buraq, a creature which Muslim iconography approximates as
Pegasus with the head of a better-fed Mona Lisa, and return nightwise through the star-filled
centuries to the Holy Hill of Jerusalem!
—Hear hear! someone shouted again.
It rang.
—Come! I said. Let us double back to drink once more from the fountains that
watered the prophets, the Shakespeares and the Cervanteses!
It rang one more time.
—Could someone please mute that fucking thing!
I woke up as the soldiers, embarrassed to have interrupted me, were patting their
pockets and murmuring to one another. It was my own phone, of course, next to me on the
nightstand. Once more it exploded with chimes and vibrations. What time was it? 9:30. I
answered: Pancho?
—Billy?
He sounded strange.
—Yes, I’m here.
—They fired me.
—Oh man.
I realized he was crying.
—They fired me bro, he said.