Dark Places

Part II: California 8. Slave To The Grind

The return to the real world is always traumatic. When traveling every day is fraught with intensity, every meal and bus trip and squalid hostel room an adventure, every new place a fresh assault on the mind and senses; whereas in the real world you can go weeks without raising your head from whatever rut you have dug for yourself. I called the transition from one to the other 'decompression'. In this case, moving from two months in high-intensity South Asia back to low-intensity San Francisco. And like decompression from scuba diving, if I didn't do it carefully, I just might get the bends.
   Still, it was nice to see my old haunts again, even if they were coupled with the bewildering did-the-last-two-months-really-happen? sense that absolutely nothing had changed since I had gone, that my two months of Asian travel equated to a single California day. It was good to eat breakfast at the Pork Store, to have coffee and play chess at the Horseshoe Cafe, to wander aimlessly up and down the west-coast beach, to lie back in my own bed and listen to my favourite music, to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge into the hills of Marin. And San Francisco is a beautiful city, a wonderful place to return to, even if it had been overrun of late by too much money and too many people and dot-com dreams of avarice.
   Thankfully that particular house of cards was in mid-collapse when I returned. "This town needs a recession," I had snorted more than once in the previous year, and it looked like I was getting my wish. Many of the hundreds of dot-com companies in the area had been founded on little more than a wing and a prayer and an astonishingly stupid idea, and every day more of them shut their doors or laid off half their staff. While in Asia I had received a half-dozen emails from friends or acquaintances informing me, often with curious jubilation, that they were newly unemployed. And while apartment prices weren't yet descending from the stratosphere, they were in a holding pattern for the first time in years.
   I wasn't worried about my job, even though I was a programmer for an Internet consulting company. I knew times were going to get leaner as the dot-coms that had flung ridiculous sums of money at us for the last year were winnowed out, but we had a pretty good portfolio of real customers as well, and I was very good at what I did. Even if all fell apart I had a pretty good nest egg saved up thanks to my decision to accept a cash bonus in lieu of stock options during the previous year, a decision that was much-mocked by my friends at the time but seemed prescient now that the company's stock had dropped 80% in six months. The lease on my pleasant Cole Valley apartment expired in three months and the landlord had already let me know that I could renew it if I wanted to. Life was comfortable.
   Comfortable. Not the same thing as good. I can't say that life was good, or that I was happy. I had friends in the city, but no close friends. My work was diverting and paid ridiculously well, but I didn't really enjoy it. More and more I got the feeling that life was somehow drifting away from me just as I should be ready, in my late twenties and established at last, to reach out and grab it.
   The truth was that I traveled so much, that I insisted my employers give me four months unpaid leave a year, because even though on paper I was one of the most fortunate people on this earth, healthy and wealthy and privileged, I was unhappy in the real world, and I did not know how to make myself happy. The truth was that the last time I was happy, really happy, was in Africa.

* * *

   Two and a half years before I went to Asia I joined an overland truck trip with the audacious goal of driving all the way from Morocco to Kenya in five months. We went a long way, we went across the Sahara and along the Gold Coast to Cameroon, but we did not drive all the way across Africa. This was in part because a large war broke out in the Congo, and in part because one of our number was murdered on a black sand beach in Cameroon. Laura Mason. My girl.
   Until then it was a weird and wonderful experience. There were twenty of us on the truck, all of us complete strangers traveling independently. It was no catered, guided tour. The company had hired a driver, a mechanic, and a courier to go with us, but within a few weeks they too were just part of the group. Everybody cooked, everybody cleaned, everybody went to the local markets for supplies, everybody worked, everybody got filthy digging the battered old truck out when it got stuck in soft sand and mud, which happened more than I care to remember. We met in Morocco, which is a tourist trap in a good way, and after a few giddy drunken get-to-know-you weeks there, we went south, where nobody goes. And we drove across the Sahara Desert.
   Twenty perfect strangers, thrown together in a gruelling and hyperintense situation. We had a major breakdown in the middle of a minefield in the no-man's-land between Morocco and Mauritania. We huddled together on the floor of the truck as we drove through forests of trees bristling with razor-sharp eight-inch thorns in southern Mauritania, clawing at us through the open sides of the truck like that scene from the Wizard Of Oz. We watched all of our tents and possessions pounded flat by a freak near-hurricane in Mali and spent two days recovering what we could. We suffered the attentions of Bamako's street hustlers. We trekked through Dogon Country just as it was hit by a heat wave, carrying our packs twenty kilometers a day in 130-degree heat. We endured through the eight hours and seven different inspections of the Nigerian border crossing, dealt politely but firmly with the drunken men with guns who demanded outrageous bribes. We took three days to travel the forty kilometers of the Ekok-Mamfe road, a swamp of mud with potholes as large as our truck.
   Everyone got sick. Everyone got fed up, everyone got angry, everyone snapped. And we spent every waking hour together whether we liked it or not. And I know it doesn't sound it, but looking back, it was fantastic. We were either going to fragment into screaming hostility or gel into one tight group, and, miraculously, we gelled. We had our squabbles, had our screaming matches; had our irritable black sheep; but somehow we became a kind of family.
   And then one of our sisters was killed.

* * *

   I returned to California on a Thursday and returned to work on the following Monday. Long experience had taught me to give myself a few days to deal with the jet lag, and the decompression. The bends, like I said. I'd gotten them in a big way when I had come back from Africa to Toronto and gone to work the next day. After two hours in the office I had quit my job on the spot.
   I swiped my security card at the door and walked into work, past vaguely familiar faces, and sat down at my desk in the hipper-than-thou, open-floor-plan office. It was a good desk, near to the fridge and foozball table. I felt like I had never left, like my entire trip had been a Sunday night's dream.
   I sat down before my laptop and cleared the screensaver. The to-do-before-travel list I had left open two months previously was still on the screen. I had 743 new e-mail messages in my work inbox. I dumped the first six hundred and fifty into a read-later folder and worked my way through the most recent. The project I had been working on, which had been "almost complete" when I had left, was still in beta testing. They wanted me to add a small collection of new features which wouldn't take long. There was another project "almost out of the sales pipeline" and once the specs were written I would be its lead developer. And there was a patronizing buzzword-laden email from the CEO, dated last week, informing us that he keenly regretted laying off twenty people but had great faith in the company's vision and execution. Also, the company was embarking on a cost-cutting plan and cans of Mountain Dew would now cost fifty cents instead of nothing. Snapple, seventy-five cents.
   "Paul!" Rob McNeil said, clapping me on the shoulder, and I brightened up almost immediately. He had that effect on people. "You're back! How was your trip, man?"
   "Yeah," I said. "Pretty good. How's things here?"
   "Interesting question, cogently put. Read the Principal's email?"
   "Yeah. Can you loan me seventy-five cents for a Snapple?"
   "First sign of the apocalypse, boyo. Twenty down, four hundred to go. This is official Resume Burnishing Week for everyone in the office. Mark my words, forty percent of today's web traffic will be to Monster.com." He sat down and shook his head ruefully. "You know, I don't really mind that management has made more incredibly stupid decisions than fleas on a St. Bernard. It goes with the tie, you know? Lack of oxygen to the brain. What I mind is that they think we're even stupider. He writes like he's writing to fucking children."
   "But they think we are children," I said. "Idiot savants anyways. Me know language of magic machines, you draw pretty pictures. Daddy, can I have a Snapple? Mommy, you promised me my stock options would vest today!"
   He grinned. "That's right. And I don't know about you, but I'm thinking about taking my toys and going home."