Dusty Covers, Late Lunches

The burning red light sears the inside of my eyelids. Even with my brain still half asleep, I know it’s been daylight for hours. During mornings in the winter, the sun doesn’t clear building two of Parc Place until the early afternoon. I draw the comforter over my head, the darkness embracing me, the horizons of sleep just out of reach, and I breathe the warm, wet air uncomfortably, the oxygen not flowing well under the heavy sheets. I rearrange the comforter until just my eyes are covered, but this supplies little relief; the light leaks through the hilly seal. When the sun slips behind a dark cloud, I use the opportunity to flip the pillow cool-side up, curl up on my side in a fetal position facing away from the window, and jog briskly toward the horizon, slipping and eventually falling off the flat edge of the earth.

I’ve noticed that the best of dreams end abruptly, or so it seems. By the time consciousness fully returned, the last fragments of the dream slip away. I remember only the adulation people felt toward me. I don’t remember who I was—since it’s pretty obvious I wasn’t me, so far few people feel even tolerance toward me—or who was adoring me, but it was pleasant. I remain in bed, my eyes still closed, basking in the remembered feeling. By now, the sun has climbed over the top of my window and the room was bright, but not retina-burning bright.

The red numbers on the alarm clock are flashing four-thirty—I think back to when we lost power yesterday and do some quick calculations: it’s either two-thirty in the afternoon or five-thirty. Either way, I’m hungry. I kick the covers, eventually unwinding myself from the twisted sheet.

I press the answering machine and erase the first message from my mother. The date stamp reminds me that it must be Wednesday already. The second message is from Brett.

“Hey, Brian, we missed you in school. Give me a call when you get this.” The machine beeps and I press the erase button, reassuring the machine twice more that I really want to delete the messages.

I take my micowaved coffee to the computer and sit down, looking through my notes from last night to remember where I left off. The computer’s clock says four-forty in the evening, I can’t remember if that was close to my calculations or not. I lean back against the springs of the black, executive chair and stare at the flickering monitor. According to my notes, I had not found the elusive programming bug I had been searching for yesterday. I ask for a full rebuild and take a sip of coffee.

As the hard drive churns, I watch an ant crawl over a pile of scribbled notepads covering the desk. I’d seen my first ant in the apartment three days ago, while watching television and sharing a bowl of Rice Krispies with Spongebob Squarepants. I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the front of the couch, when I noticed movement on the rug by the television. When I saw the ant, I had been angling my spoon to catch the last few Krispies, swirling the milk until the Krispies’ milk-fed gravitational pull had lumped them together. A muted commercial had been flickering on the screen. After finding the first ant, I had scanned the rug and found three more. At this I stood up, losing the carefully arranged spoonful of milky- and sugary-goodness, and began looking for other ants.

In the last two days, my vacuum had sucked up hundreds more. I sometimes felt my anti-ant procedures were not effective, imaging that the ants crawled down the vacuum tube at night and continued their lives, unaffected by their brief incarceration. I even started promising myself that I would empty the vacuum bag to ensure this wouldn’t happen, but somehow the vacuum, with its overflowing body bag, sat in the living room, the furniture arranged haphazardly around it to allow for optimal vacuum-pushing room.

I reach out and catch the ant crawling on the desk between my forefinger and thumb, and squash it, bringing the ant close for inspection. The ant unrolls itself and begins crawling down my finger. I again pincer the ant and this time squash and roll the bug into an unmoving blob. My desk is covered with crumbs from the many meals I had taken while working. While it is possible that this might contribute to the ant infestation, it’s probably best if I just vacuum the floor later. A Discovery channel show had taught me that ants remembered their paths by leaving behind some sort of scent trails. My theory is that the sucking power of the vacuum should be enough to remove the trail and confuse the ants. Even if they do find the crumbs, they’ll never find their way to tell their brethren. It’s a brilliant plan.

I watch the lines of code dance across the screen, switching between the different files that make up the Program. Where expected, the Program stops execution. I step through the lines of code from the breakpoint until I find the offending line. Something is wrong. I glance at the code, jumping to a few calling functions, and find the mistake: the subtraction is backwards. I quickly correct it and continue. Baby steps: correct the mistake, recompile, rework the code, recompile, experiment, work.

It’s always been like. From when I first learned to program, when I was ***

By the time I check off three more bugs from my notes, it is dark outside and my stomach is growling.

As he hits the compile key combination, he lifts himself off the sticky chair, peeling his shorts away from the leather, and realigns himself with the back of the chair, his back not quite flat, his legs at an angle, and the chair leaning at an angle to relieve the strain on his neck from his slouched posture.