Attachments a novel, p.2
Attachments: A Novel,
p.2
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Besides, I don’t mind paying most of the bills now, and I won’t mind doing it after we’re married. (My dad has always paid my mom’s bills, and no one calls her a parasite.)
It isn’t the who-pays-the-bills issue that’s a problem. It’s the acting-like-an-adult issue. It’s acceptable in Chris’s world for a guy to live with his girlfriend while he works on a demo. It’s not as cool to chase your guitar fantasy while your wife’s at work.
If you have a wife, you’re an adult. That’s not who Chris wants to be. Maybe that’s not who I want him to be.
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CHAPTER 4
JUST FOR THE record—his own internal record—Lincoln never would have applied for this job if the classified ad had said, “Wanted: someone to read other people’s e-mail. Swing shift.”
The Courier ad had said, “Full-time opportunity for Internet security officer. $40K+ Health, dental.”
Internet security officer. Lincoln had pictured himself building firewalls and protecting the newspaper from dangerous hackers—not sending out memos every time somebody in Accounting forwarded an off-color joke to the person in the next cubicle.
The Courier was probably the last newspaper in America to give its reporters Internet access. At least that’s what Greg said. Greg was Lincoln’s boss, the head of the IT office. Greg could still remember when the reporters used electric typewriters. “And I can remember,” he said, “because it wasn’t that long ago—1992. We switched to computers because we couldn’t order the ribbon anymore, I shit you not.”
This whole online thing was happening against management’s will, Greg said. As far as the publisher was concerned, giving employees Internet access was like giving them the option to work if they felt like it, look at porn if they didn’t.
But not having the Internet was getting ridiculous.
When the newspaper launched its Web site last year, the reporters couldn’t even go online to read their stories. And most readers wanted to e-mail in their letters to the editor these days, even third-graders and World War II veterans.
By the time Lincoln started working at The Courier, the Internet experiment was in its third month. All employees had internal e-mail now. Key employees, and pretty much everyone in the news division, had some access to the World Wide Web.
If you asked Greg, it was all going pretty well.
If you asked anyone in upper management, it was chaos.
People were shopping and gossiping; they were joining online forums and fantasy football leagues. There was some gambling going on. And some dirty stuff. “But that isn’t such a bad thing,” Greg argued. “It helps us weed out the sickos.”
The worst thing about the Internet, as far as Greg’s bosses were concerned, was that it was now impossible to distinguish a roomful of people working diligently from a roomful of people taking the What-Kind-of-Dog-Am-I? online personality quiz.
And thus …Lincoln.
On his very first night, Lincoln helped Greg load a new program called WebFence on to the network. WebFence would monitor everything everyone was doing on the Internet and the Intranet. Every e-mail. Every Web site. Every word.
And Lincoln would monitor WebFence.
An especially filthy-minded person (maybe Greg) had defined the program’s mail filters. There was a whole list of red flags: nasty words, racial slurs, supervisors’ names, words like “secret” and “classified.”
That last one, “classified,” beached the entire network during WebFence’s first hour by flagging and storing each and every e-mail sent to or from the Classified Advertising department.
The software also flagged large attachments, suspiciously long messages, suspiciously frequent messages…. Every day, hundreds of possibly illicit e-mails were sent to a secure mailbox, and it was Lincoln’s job to follow up on every one. That meant reading them, so he read them. But he didn’t enjoy it.
He couldn’t admit this to his mother, but it did feel wrong, what he was doing, like eavesdropping. Maybe if he were the sort of person who liked that sort of thing …His girlfriend Sam—his ex-girlfriend—always used to peek in other people’s medicine cabinets. “Robitussin,” she’d report in the car on the way home. “And generic Band-Aids. And something that looked like a garlic press.”
Lincoln didn’t even like using other people’s bathrooms.
There was a whole complicated process he was supposed to follow if he caught someone actually breaking The Courier’s rules. But most offenses called for just a written warning, and most offenders got the message after that.
In fact, the first round of warnings worked so well, Lincoln started to run out of things to do. WebFence kept flagging e-mails, a few dozen a day, but they were almost all false alarms. Greg didn’t seem to care. “Don’t worry,” he said to Lincoln on the first day that WebFence didn’t snag a single legitimate violator. “You won’t get fired. The men upstairs love what you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Lincoln said.
“Sure, you are. You’re the guy who reads their e-mail. They’re all scared of you.”
“Who’s scared? Who’s they?”
“Everybody. Are you kidding? This whole building is talking about you.”
“They’re not scared of me. They’re scared of getting caught.”
“Getting caught by you. Just knowing that you’re snooping around their Sent folders every night is enough to keep them following the rules.”
“But I’m not snooping around.”
“You could,” Greg said.
“I could?”
Greg went back to what he was doing, some sort of laptop autopsy. “Look, Lincoln, I’ve told you. Somebody has to be here at night anyway. Somebody has to answer the phone and say, ‘Help desk.’ You’re just sitting around, I know. You don’t have enough work, I know. I don’t care. Do the crossword. Learn a foreign language. We had a gal who used to crochet …”
Lincoln didn’t crochet.
He read the newspaper. He brought in comic books and magazines and paperback novels. He called his sister sometimes, if it wasn’t too late and if he felt lonely.
Mostly, he surfed the Net.
CHAPTER 5
From: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
To: Beth Fremont
Sent: Wed, 08/25/1999 10:33 AM
Subject: This is only a test. In the case of an actual emergency …
It’s here. Return to your usual programming.
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Why are you talking like you’re in a feminine napkin commercial?
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Furthermore, I would have given Billy Madison six stars if they were mine to give. You know how I feel about Adam Sandler—and that I give bonus stars for Styx songs. (Two stars if it’s “Renegade.”)
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I mean, I was relieved—because, on top of the Zima drinking, I don’t think I’ve eaten anything with folic acid in the last six months. I may even be eating things that leach folic acid from your system, so I was definitely relieved—but I wasn’t ecstatic.
I went downstairs to tell Mitch. He was working on marching band diagrams, which, normally, I wouldn’t interrupt, but this was important. “Just FYI,” I said, “I started my period.”
And he set down his pencil and said, “Oh.” (Just like that. “Oh.”)
When I asked him why he said it that way, he said he thought that maybe I really was pregnant this time—and that that would have been nice. “You know I want kids,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Someday.”
“Someday soon,” he said.
“Someday eventually. When we’re ready.”
And then he turned back to his diagrams. Not mad or impatient. Just sorrowful, which is much, much worse. So I said, “When we’re ready, right?” And he said …
“I’m ready now. I’m ready last year, Jenny, and I’m starting to think that maybe you never will be. You don’t even want to be ready. You act like getting pregnant is a disease you can catch from public toilets.”
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But I couldn’t picture myself married, either, until I met Mitch. I always thought the kid idea would grow on me, that all Mitch’s healthy desires would infect me, and one morning I’d wake up thinking, “What a beautiful world in which to bring a child.”
What if that never happens?
What if he decides to cut his losses and find some perfectly normal woman who—on top of being naturally thin and never having turned to prescription antidepressants—also wants to have his babies ASAP?
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(You know that I mean anytime after 10:30 a.m. or so, right?)
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CHAPTER 6
JENNIFER SCRIBNER-SNYDER, ACCORDING to the company directory, was a Features copy editor.
Beth Fremont, Lincoln knew. He knew of, anyway. He’d read her movie reviews. She was funny, and he usually agreed with her. She was the reason he’d gone to see Dark City and Flirting With Disaster and Babe.
By the time Lincoln realized that he hadn’t sent a warning to Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder—after who knew how many offenses, three? half a dozen?—he couldn’t remember why not. Maybe because he couldn’t always figure out what rule they were breaking. Maybe because they seemed completely harmless. And nice.
And now he couldn’t send them a warning, not tonight. Not when they were actually worried about getting a warning. That would be weird, wouldn’t it? Knowing someone had read an e-mail you’d written about whether someone was reading your e-mail? If you were an excessively paranoid person, it could make you wonder whether all the other things you were worried about were also true. It might make you think, “Maybe they are all out to get me.”
Lincoln didn’t want to be the bad guy from Tron.
And also …Also, he kind of liked Beth and Jennifer, as much as you can like people from reading their e-mail, only some of their e-mail.
He read through the exchange again. “Ass” was definitely a red-flagged word. So was “blackjack” and “porn.” He wasn’t sure about “perv” or “menstruation.”
He trashed the files and went home.
“YOU DON’T HAVE to pack me a lunch,” Lincoln told his mother. Even though he liked it when she did. He’d practically given up fast food since he moved back home. There was always something baking in his mother’s kitchen, or frying or simmering or cooling on a plate. She was always pushing Pyrex containers into his hands on his way out the door.
“I’m not packing you lunch,” she said. “I’m packing you dinner.”
“But you don’t have to,” he said. He didn’t mind living with his mother, but there are degrees of living with your mother. And he was pretty sure that letting her cook every meal for him was too many degrees. She’d started planning her days around feeding him.
“I don’t have to do anything,” she said, handing him a grocery bag with a heavy glass dish clinking inside.
“What’d you make?” he asked. It smelled like cinnamon.
“Tandoori chicken. I think. I mean, I don’t have a tandoori or a tandoor, one of those ovens, and I didn’t have enough yogurt, they use yogurt, don’t you think? I used sour cream. And paprika. Maybe it’s chicken paprikash …I know I don’t have to make you dinner, you know. I want to. I feel better when you eat—when you eat real food, not something that comes in a wrapper. I’m already so worried about you, the way you don’t sleep, and you’re never in the sun …”
“I sleep, Mom.”
“During the day. We’re meant to be awake with the sun, soaking up vitamin D, and sleeping at night, in the dark. When you were a little boy, I wouldn’t even let you sleep with a night-light, do you remember? It interferes with melatonin production.”
“Okay,” he said. He couldn’t think of a time he’d argued with her and won.
“Okay, what does ‘okay’ mean?”
“It means, okay, I hear you.”
“Oh. Well. Then that doesn’t mean anything at all. Take the chicken, would you? Eat it?”
“I will.” He held the bag against his chest and smiled. He tried to look like somebody she didn’t need to worry about so much. “Of course I will,” he said. “Thank you.”
GREG WAS WAITING for Lincoln when he walked into the IT office. It was always a few degrees colder in there, for the servers. You’d think that would be nice. Refreshing. But it was more of a clammy than a cool.
“Hey, Senator,” Greg said, “I got to thinking about what you were saying a few days ago, you know, about not having enough to do. So I found you something.”
“Great,” Lincoln said, meaning it.
“You can start archiving and compressing all the user-stored files from the last six months or so,” Greg said, clearly thinking this was an inspired idea.
Lincoln wasn’t so sure.
“Why would you want me to do that?” he said. “It’s a waste of time.”
“I thought that’s what you were looking for.”
“I was looking for …Well, I wasn’t looking for anything. I just felt bad getting paid to do nothing.”
“And now you don’t have to feel bad,” Greg said. “I just gave you something to do.”
“Yeah, but archiving and compressing …That could take years. And it doesn’t matter.”
Greg put on his Windbreaker and gathered up a stack of folders. He was leaving early to take his kid to the orthodontist. “There’s no pleasing you, is there, Lincoln? This is why you don’t have a woman.”
How does he know I don’t have a woman, Lincoln wondered.
