bank_holiday_07.txt

He’s dead asleep for four hours, then he just skids along sleep’s surface, until he decides to get up in order to walk himself tired. Michael detours for a brief round of the roofs, a span of five houses is accessible to him, unsecured. Drops of four, five storeys, back in Rostock it was seven, but the ceilings were lower and lawns, perhaps maintained as a precautionary measure, would have cushioned the fall. Down on the street, pedestrian traffic seems to have increased with nightfall. A, people cannot sleep, are plagued with sorrows, or B, people work in offset timezones now that there’s hardly a buck to be made around here, or C, what is a sunbeam compared to moonlight, nobody will notice a missing night’s sleep these days, anyway. Might as well call customer service, although there’s the risk that resulting anger will deprive him of the remaining night’s rest. A familiar voice answers. 
“Akash? Is that you?” 
“How can I be of your service today, Michael, it’s good to hear from you.” 
“No shit. Since when do you work at Freddy’s?” 
“I’m pleased to say that it’s already been more than a week that I’ve been a part of the Freddy F family.” 
“Geez. You on some conversation guide?” 
“I’m glad that you’re asking that, seriously. I stumbled upon the head of conversational AI’s thesis, and apparently I’ll score high as long as I keep it polite in tone and wording and answer every question I’m confronted with. Supposedly, analyzing substance doesn’t scale so well. So just ask me whatever and never mind the schmooze.” 
“I don’t think ‘schmooze’ will fare well as a choice of word.”
“Fuck off.” 
“Anyway, I didn’t call to lead you into temptation or deliver you from evil but, believe it or not, I would like to appeal against my recent evaluation.” 
Silence. 
“This is, I believe, your cue to thank me for having approached you and present available options.” 
Akash clears his throat. 
“Well, I’m certainly pleased that you turned to us with this issue, since, otherwise, you have proven to be solution-oriented as common livestock and barely capable of locating the settings button of an interface that doesn’t follow your twisted logic of UX. If you would be so kind as to let me know which of your, wow, a whole of one, I repeat, one gig in a week, which one of, I’m doing air quotes here, those does your issue pertain to?” 
“Yeah, that one.” 
“Alright. What seems to be the problem? He tells me that you were sent on a 10-mile fetch-and-retrieve gig with subsequent non-skilled, guided manual labor requiring a min height of one-eighty and an upward pull strength of plus 140 Newton, equipment provided, four hours time.” 
“Right.” 
“And what aspect would you like to contest? Because, let me level with you, Michael, my hands are pretty much tied on this one. He gives me a ninety plus probability that you’re a fraud, which, hold your horses, I know you aren’t, but, you know, first gig, poor employer review, you gotta give me something I can work with here. Something substantial.” 
“Deficient equipment.” 
“Could be a lead. Elaborate, please.” 
“The scooter I was given conked out on me every other crossing and I had to wait for it to cool down.” 
“There you go. Let’s see.” 
Michael waits. 
“Do me a favor and keep asking me questions while I check. Good for the numbers, you know.” 
“Know of any well paying jobs beyond surveillance capitalism?” 
“Chrissakes, Mike, easy questions, I’m not a multitasker.” 
“Oh, come on, with your diction your numbers are ruined anyway on this one.” 
“Whatever. So, anyway, you're putting me in a pickle. He’s giving me three stops you made along your route. Two of which display times and movement patterns that suggest a smoking brake, although I know you don’t smoke. Don’t tell me you took up smoking. Gotta admit that I, too, gave it a thought these days.” 
“I didn’t.” 
“Good. I mean, whatever floats your boat and all, but good. The third stop, which was actually the second, chronologically speaking, took you to a bodega.” 
“All bodegas are closed, Akash.” 
“I know but that’s what he tells me.” 
“Why do you keep saying he?” 
“Oh, just like that. It’s just this interface. Remember that annoying MS Office paper clip? They have a little Freddy F doing the same.” 
“Akash, please, can you do something for me or not?” 
“Okay. To be honest, I’d recommend for you to just leave it be. Ratings and reviews only become public once you have six of them, so you still got a chance to make things right on your next gigs. You could file an appeal but your chances are slim, as I said.” 
Of course Akash could simply override the automated assessment of Michael’s case, but favoritism may lead to substantial penalties. 
“He’s also telling me to tell you that in order to prevent future misassessment, you should grant Freddy F access to your phone’s microphone. You already did that, apparently, so I don’t know why he says that.”
Michael does file a complaint in the end, but only to shelve his discontent along with it. As if that would work. Nice talking with Akash, though. Can’t pull off that corporate talk, poor guy, he’ll probably have the same rating as Michael in a week. A dog with respiratory problems is being led, dragged, past Michael, who has sat down on a no-loitering stoop. Dark blonde, sleek hair, he can loiter wherever he wishes. Freddy F makes him an offer he cannot refuse. One of three jobs holds another couple of days of rent and hopefully a better rating for Michael. Will it be A, driving for an ambulant dry cleaning service, or B, food delivery? All things vehicle-based are out of the question after last time, plus Michael is not yet desperate enough to ride a bike downtown and bankroll Sergej’s remaining stay with the proceeds from his life insurance. So it’s gotta be C, that one anyway touches a chord within Michael. The warehouse night watchman is a curious form of an outlaw, a figure that has seen the true face of capitalism and has retreated to his hermitage. He emerges only when everyone else has left and leaves no trace but for a faint scent of his gas lamp and spat-out chewed tobacco. Not technically a night shift, just late, Sergej will have to put himself to bed again, but he seems to respect their dental hygiene deal. They can be on the phone again. The job site is closer this time, a defunct mall barely two miles away, he can walk and save five dollars on his salary, that’s a bank holiday DLC for Sergej, or a mall map from one of his obscure shops. 
Sergej stands at the bedside and shakes him awake. It’s past his alarm, overheard, but still reasonably early, in the single digit hours. “Dad, I found someone to procreate.” There’s a buttery smell of popcorn that fills Michael with nausea. Sergej is allowed to make popcorn as long as he stays at the stove, he wouldn’t miss the carnage of the frying kernels exploding like boomer zombies, anyway. This is the only violent content he gets to watch back home in Berlin and his imagination fills in the gaps, as the popping bodies leave smudgy marks on the pan’s glass cover. “Can I mate already? I don’t know how long she’s gonna be there.” Michael puts his son off until after shower and breakfast and would you please air the apartment, it smells like a Julia Child set in here. He seeks refuge in the shower gel’s odors of toxic masculinity. Sergej didn’t ventilate, but the scent of fatty acids has given way to that of fresh coffee. “You can make coffee?” “Sure.” Passable, except for the missing filter. “Can I procreate, she’s still in the barn.” Michael grabs two bars and some fruit, no plate to have his hands free in case Sergej loses his nerves and tosses him the controller. There’s no urgency yet to mate, although Michael, too, noted the increased inertia of the viewport, and also running has felt faster during past skirmish games. Plus they seem to have hit a sweet spot indeed, Sergej and his mate, which turns out to be the aunt of Paul, his artsy friend. Their avatars are similar in age and complementary in their stats, and if their mating is successful it would give both their progenitors a sizable boost in skirmish games.
It’s the first time for all of them. Michael cannot believe he just asked that question. The tacit recollections of the two adults creates an awkwardness that even over voice chat is only tolerable because Sergej is completely oblivious of the game mechanism’s connotations, yet. They have met in the neighboring hangar that Sergej calls a barn, between a fire engine and an ice cream van lying on its side, showing its crude image of an underbody. Theory goes they have to run into each other for five seconds to trigger the mating scene. It’s all there, the embarrassment, the operations vaguely known, the clumsiness as they slip past each other running. They interlock and move rhythmically with the mirrored animation of their hermaphrodite avatars running, faces appearing and disappearing as their frustrums dip through the tiniest skins into the models’ insides. The mating scene is a white boundless space. Ten seconds of progenitor handling before the parents arrive and the bloodshed starts. Sergej’s tongue shows between the lips, but Michael misses the sight of the little red slug that could have reminded him of the first sight of his son as a breech-birth foot emerging from Fee’s vagina. If Michael would only pay attention to those little details testifying to the blood bond between them, but his eye is that of an overseer, he’s looking after a pet that for god’s sakes he must keep alive until its owner returns. Acts like a father but spent more time on last year’s Child Tax Credit than on planning activities with his son these days, despite the endless lists of promising leisure activities he compiles when Sergej’s not with him. Now that his son is here, all flesh and ears, he merely manages Sergej, keeps him barely distracted in between job(s), chores, meals, sleep. Admittedly his management is effective, and it yields several hours he has to himself, playing, masturbating, watching people that he can manage even better with the play-pause button. Employers love it, thumbs up and employee of the month for being on call and available twenty-four seven, however it didn’t help in the end, did it? To be fair, it helps them make rent now, who else would leave an eleven-year old in an apartment with knives (see above) and hard alcohol (see below) for hours on end. Now it does help to be somebody that can gauge risks and weigh them against each other. Being a raven dad leaving your pre-teen by itself is frowned upon, but certainly less than being one letting both of you end up on the streets. Better a kiss and a cardboard Cadillac for your twelfth birthday in a disused back alley dumpster, or corner store hecho-en-china with a scribbled birthday note on the table of a brownstone kitchen? Sergej lets out a long belch and giggles. “Run and jump, Serge, get a feel for him.” The parent he has to fight on screen is a genderless, pitch-black humanoid without facial features: their progenitor. Two seconds until the ancestors show up, which is way too little time to explore the move and combos of half a beat ‘em up hidden within the mating scene. Towering they spawn, more than triple the height of their offspring. Sergej escapes a shriek, might just be his excitement, and he tries to put a distance between him and the ancestors, which is a bad idea because two of his steps is an arm’s length for the parents. And the arm comes down before he’s out of reach, missing his head but hitting his left shoulder. Crushing coconuts and walnuts, breaking block chocolate, foley artists have mastered the hollow crack of young bone. GPU coolers rev in a far-away data center as physics computes the dangling left with astonishing, stomach-turning detail. If their avatars are screaming in pain they cannot hear it over their own uncoordinated yelling. Sergej is quicker to escape the sweeping limbs of his progenitor than his mate, whose avatar hangs from its progenitor’s fist by its leg, and as Sergej steers towards the towering npc to come to his companion’s help, her avatar’s hip joint cedes to the centrifugal forces as the giant’s fist comes down, and only its leg smashes on the white ground, now stained with the bloody outline of the leg. ESBR-Teen. The rest of the avatar has slid far from the two progenitors, leaving Sergej’s character between the two parent figures. Somebody should call this, this is five years from age-appropriate. Michael’s hands fumble for the TV remote that’s far from reach on the window sill but how could he know, seeing that his eyes are captured by the adumbration of carnage. Four hands, four limbs, four tractive forces at ninety-degree angles. The avatars’ insides are only lacking details because the missing anatomical particulars are easily masked by fountains of blood. The camera zooms out to fit the red X between the four parts of Sergej’s remains. His mate’s avatar dies shortly after, they’re not spared the gory details.
Sergej should be frustrated but he bounces around the room in excitement, pumped up from the buzz of blood and breakfast sugar. His mate’s overdriven laughing sounds over VoIP. Innocently, their avatars, the recolored merciless brutes they just fought, get up from the floor between the cars where they awakened after the battle. “There’s no way I will let you do that again.” His son stops in mid-air. “What?” No discussions. Teen is teen, eleven is eleven. “Not fair! Not fair! You can’t be serious!” Michael tries to bring in Sergej’s mate, what’s her face, to back up his parental authority. Surely there is no way that she will even consider drawing a child into this violence-glorifying fantasy once more. “Actually, Michael, I do not agree with you.” What a wonk knowing his name. “As much as it may be violent, and, Serge, forgive me for supposing that you have seen worse before, it’s quite valuable that your son sees this. And further, I do believe that it’s valuable for you, too, to experience this violence together.” Elaborate. “Serge, let me tell you from experience, giving birth, and in the end, that’s what we’re doing here, is one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in your life. Beats everything.” Don’t need to be a woman to know that. “But at the same time, it is pure violence, and it’s really like in here, the blood, the tearing.” “I’m sorry but do we really need to get into specifics? This kid’s just started sex ed, so leave something for class, alright.” “Please, Michael, I know this isn’t easy for you, too,” after all, this experience is one of the few things your kind can’t take by claim or force “but let him see this before puberty and maybe he’ll be more than a self-involved nervous wreck in L&D.” Michael doubts that bloody murder at eleven a.m. would have made him more selfless during labor. Did he feel snubbed, being second to the needs and accomplishments of Sergej’s mother in what should be his greatest hour, have a cigar and all that? “With all due respect, but just because you gave birth once doesn’t mean you get to monkey with my son’s education.” And as Michael’s answer reveals his frustration it opens a window into a world, where all the young privileged like him have suddenly lost their structural advantages, and they sulk and escape - just like he sulked and escaped when he realized the uterine structural advantage that Fee had - escape to a faraway island of men, a community of refugees that will either end in peaceful, immoderate building and striving skywards until the air gets thin, or in another scenes of bloody massacre. Sergej’s mate doesn’t respond. She knows when a fight is worth escalating.
It takes Sergej all his sangfroid to refrain from asking Michael to give his go-ahead for another shot at mating while they prepare Sergej’s dinner. Moving his fingers across the woodchip wallpaper, he visualizes moves and strategies to his interior audience that he still talks to sometimes, even in other people’s presence. The lotion Michael thickly applied under his son’s arm as a moisture reservoir for his rash-red skin is now a c-shaped stain on the wall left by the strained simulation of a scattering maneuver. Sergej washes the grease off the wipeable wall and runs with his fingers from the flowing foam and detergent. Garlic, high-quality, cold-pressed olive oil, a julienned carrot, please not the genetically engineered, ‘murica-sized ones, some grated celeriac, canned tomato imports bubbling red in the saucepan makes Michael think of parental advisory, non-age-appropriateness. “Serge,” he tries, “have you been exposed to graphic content before?” The fingers succumb to their unbloody, but visibly, audibly painful death, squirming amidst the stream of dish soap. A pungent smell of cheap flavor enhancers comes from the door or the window and Michael has to put his head into the steam trail of his saucepan to make sure it’s not his cooking. “You know, like, has somebody shown you stuff on LiveLeak or something?” “What’s LiveLeak?” His fingers linger in the pleasantly caressing deathbed of foam flow. “It’s not like I want to keep you from seeing those things at all cost, because you’ll see them anyway. Could you dry that up, please.” The soap will suck even more moisture from Sergej’s delicate skin. “Why don’t you tell me what you experienced? Before, what did you see, and how did it make you feel?”  Parenting-guide material, but Sergej is willing to go with it. “In the white room you meet your monster. Everybody has its own, and it looks like you. And you don’t look like yourself in the white room but you’re like a new person, another person. And I think that’s the new avatar, the one that you want to make. But you can’t see yet how it’s going to look like. Because that depends on if you’re going to beat the monsters together with your partner. And that’s really difficult. People say that they learn every time you fight, so you have to constantly review your strategies. That means that you can’t just do the same thing over and over, because they’ll know.” “What do you think the red stuff was?” “Duh, dad, what do you think it was?” The sauce builds flavor simmering. “Tell you what, let’s check if she’s still around, then you can try together once more.”	
Also the second attempt fails, but Sergej’s mood is only marred by the patience he needs to exercise until he will be able to try again. His mate’s timezone forbids, and anyway Michael cannot imagine any thirty-plus player capable of surviving the stress of three consecutive attempts. As he prepares for his second gig with Freddy F, Sergej is at the dining table, sketching sprawling diagrams of moves and gambits that will fill his mate’s inbox. Michael doesn’t believe in analog hours but maybe it’s for the best to keep him off the screen for tonight, after the two breakdowns he had to manage yesterday. At least he should pry him away from bank holiday for a couple of hours. He puts out a cartridge of a farm simulation that a friend joke-gifted Michael years ago and that was banned in Australia for allegedly advocating perverted cross breeding. Won’t spoil Sergej, donkey, mule, cow, he’s a city kid. Plus the game has endearing 3D models of farm machinery. 
Only from far above the true size of the defunct mall reveals itself. Constructed during a time of skyrocketing growth of physical retail, it turned out too small already by the time its glass-domed heart had been completed. Hastily, its developers acquired adjacent lots here and there, and its planners attached a ring of hurriedly raised satellite shacks around the prize-winning main building to dispatch the rampant delivery traffic. The congestion around the complex became so outrageous that some of the suppliers started to sell off their goods directly from the beds of their trucks stuck in snail-pace traffic. Unfortunately, the retail boom didn’t last forever. The city’s public administration only came to the rescue when the mall’s demise was already physically palpable from the mugger’s knife against one’s cheek when walking through the ring of warehouses and loading bays that had gone to various local street gangs. However, the dedicated exit of the commuter toll route only served as an expedited way of escape for the remaining retailers, instead of reviving their business. When a rising e-commerce company bought the complex six years ago, only one shopkeeper chose to stay and preserve the place’s heritage by selling coffee and corn dogs to truckers in the underground rec area. 
As planned, Michael arrives half an hour before clock-punching at the designated location on the complex’s eastern border, but he sees nothing. Nothing but gated-community-style double-head-high whitewashed walls along the perimeter at his destination, plus minus twenty meters of GPS inaccuracy. Michael’s heart rate accelerates with his step as he traces the outline of the kaleidoscope blur pattern that hides the compound skywards on Freddy F’s map view. The whitewashed wall turns corrugated iron, turns béton brut, but without so much as a crack to peer inside the walls. Lesser concerns have brought Michael on the verge of a panic attack. Sergej is in a good mood and clinks glasses of who knows what, upper-shelf whisky or tooth glasses. He says that the set of 3D tractors from the farming simulator has quote unquote sculptural potential. Better watch out that artsy kid doesn’t give him ideas, career-wise and the like. T minus twenty-five minutes and Michael aggressively pulls apart the map of Freddy F’s app with his thumbs. He wants to pull it apart and rip open the screen: See, there’s nothing here! Nothing! Do you see now?! The map bounces back in a joyful animation that takes the piss out of him. “Serge!” He really can’t take any whistle while you work right now. The silence on the other end leaves an aftertaste of guilty conscience. “Hey. Sorry, I just,” he’s pushing his nails into the yielding protective foil of the screen, “I can’t find the entrance.” “Do you want me to check, dad?” “That’s nice, but I don’t think you can help your dad, Serge.” Genuine silence, this time. Sergej has already run into the bedroom. The big round eye in the center of the network of numbered, interconnected rectangles stares with its unblinking iris of facility icons, water fountains, atms, massage chairs, astroglide slide et al., arranged around the sans serif pupil reading “Miracle Mall”. “Dad. I got it.” He sock-skates back to the phone only to be informed by a voice far friendlier than father’s that he’s been put on hold. On hold, the recording repeats, the thin monophonic melody chimes over a bed of static that picks up ghostly messages from here and there. Some spanish-speaking listener wishing for a Dolly Parton song on a radio station, whose jingle is swallowed up by a distress signal from a casual sailor drowned out by a ham radio operator requesting nudes from a connected kid that sounds younger than Sergej. “Fucking morons!” “Dad?” “Serge, you still there? I thought I hung up.” “Dad, I found something.” Only mall maps that include the foldable four-tint glasses can realize mint-condition prices. Sergej turns the giant wheel of pizza-sliced color foil that interferes with every wearer’s nose, yellow for second, blue for first, red for basement floor. Red as Michael in his anger, red as the alert, red in front of Sergej’s eyes reveal the dark rectangular outline of a subterranean corridor extending far out east from the cyclopean centerpiece, like an outstretched finger to receive the spark of life from the uterine bulge of the bus bay along the underground toll route. “You’re on the wrong level, dad! You have to be at the underground bus stop.” Fifteen minutes to go and with twenty estimated for the detour to the mouth of the tunnel. Michael runs, hoping for a traffic-free shoulder or a walkway. Sergej is having the time of his life tracking his father’s progress across various maps, along checkpoints Michael bellows between breaths at each intersection. A service walkway leads into the bright-lit tunnel on the wrong side of traffic, unsecured and narrow, and the wall tiles furry from dust stuck to the goo of exhaust fumes make Michael’s stomach turn if he even thinks about touching them, so he is confined to the erratic balance beam of the curb.
Contrary to its depiction on Sergej’s map, the bus bay turns out to be a station of metropolitan proportions. Pack your lunchables, we’re going to the mall. This must’ve been the place. An underground reception camp for greyhounds and overlands perpetually spewing out chewed-up less-than-suburbans too worried for street crime to ever emerge from the mall’s enclave of Levittown order, secured by its own taser-bearing, black-shirt executive. Plastic tarps in various colors sloppily pushed together with wood wool screen walls bespeak a defunct camp city just waiting to be converted into a pandemic test center, outstandingly well connected, naturally heated by traffic and server heat, the fumes that waft over barely hazardous but conveniently sedating. “Welcome, traveler.” Michael scowls, oblivious slash ignorant of the outstretched hand of the reference. The greeter, bibbed, nondescriptly crewcut, now extends a physical hand, too, and ushers him in. Warm womb of two hundred megawatts. An earbud dangles wildly around Michael’s shoulders as he tries to keep up with the busy feet’s high frequency shuffle, his eyes flash left and right along the walls as he tries to keep up with his foreperson’s high frequency chatting. Not sure if it’s cynical Internet humor or back way negligence that they kept the old adverts from fertile mall-days on the wall. 256 colors of pneumatic bliss. As they proceed, the long corridor gets wider to hold the rising anticipation of the eager shoppers. What was that person’s name again? He’ll have to ask Sergej in a quiet minute. The walls sing a somber tune of deserted closets and back offices. 
“Deserted.”
 Uh? 
“The guy who came before you estimated that ninety-three percent of the server spaces we host here will never be visited by two users simultaneously.”
 “And then?” 
His companion’s laugh clogs the funnel of the exit behind them “Good question. What do you do online when nobody’s watching?” 
“What happened to him, I meant.” 
“No idea. Not my pay level.” Reporting is to be done to his companion’s desk. Michael will receive reports at his desk. The German ideal, sitting behind a desk. The German fate, standing in front of a desk (that’s Tucholsky, he remembers). 
“It’s very likely that nobody will have to report anything. Then you just have to find a way to be up on time for your next round.” His foreperson’s laugh is caught in the echo traps along the hallway they are entering. 
“Dream job. Get paid for nothing. No one to roust you. Pay’s shitty, alright. Gotta give you that.” Not that Michael interjected. “But you know what, I got my chickens. Something big. Wanna know?” Sure. Not that Michael needs to affirm. “Crowdsourced logistics. Right? And I know what you’re gonna say. But...” Sudden cell phone interference makes Michael jolt out the remaining earbud, swatting sonic buzzflies behind his companion’s back “...,” he misses her name again, “...people have thought about that before. Point taken. How - ever. Success is downpaid in opportunities, not in ideas, my friend.” She turns, seeking Michael’s eyes to indicate that she is entrusting him with valuable confidentials. “You see, my cousin runs a trailer business. Her mother owns a gas station off I-81 up the Susquehanna. My other cousin’s in Knoxville. Based down there for fine evasion. Got himself another sweet Interstate-side eighty-freakin-one diner. See where I’m going with this? Wanna go down Tennessee? Right. Pick yourself up a small trailer, professionally sealed, naturally, and off you go. Roadside, two minute stop. If we’re fast you’ll be off before the kids return from their potty break.” The server cabinet grills grate her laugh. “Down in Tennessee, another pit stop. Cash your commission and get yourself one of them di - vine roasts my cousin got going there. We’ll take care of that trailer in the meantime, don’t you worry. You get your commission and we get ours. Easy as that. And you can tell your kids it’s for the environment.” Her chuckle bounces off the perspex of the nightwatchman’s booth, a cubicle 1,20 times 1,20, measured to confine floor space to less than the average male height at any angle, don’t think they haven’t tried bedding on the prickly felt. So it’s airplane naps instead, and faking stark myopia to explain quote unquote reading with one’s head resting on the plushy paper stack. However, chances are low that anyone but his chatty companion will come by, anyway. She explains the do’s and don’ts with pride, she knows there’s always an underlying ruleset that’s hidden at first. That’s why she is one to succeed in the inherently fair Darwinian race of neoliberal capitalism, as Michael learns. Michael might learn something else from his foreperson. She might be as half-witted and ordinary as he deems her, but she has understood that, when money was first forged as a surrogate of knowing, of trusting the other, it captured the reward of the relationships it substituted, abstracted their exchanges, and eliminated undesirable side effects. Money gives the buzz of longing even long after satisfying the first cravings. Money is candidly polygamous and refrains from judgement. Michael’s foreperson understands that the unrequited love of money is as acceptable as amassing more and more just for the sake of it. Michael on the other hand, closeted how he is, keeps insisting he’s not in it for the money, still thinking of monocled derby-hatters on wall street, fly-boarding valley boys on Nassau Avenue, when he thinks about money. His companion would tell him that money is the closest they have ever got to the pure sense of life, if the thought wouldn’t be so evident, that even as a commonplace it’s too obvious to pronounce. However, she can and does share with Michael her chain of causation for directing one’s love primarily towards money rather than other people. Assume that, for a lack of absolute metrics, a lower return on investment is understood as a higher probability of the love being unrequited, i.e. no money, no kiss, no happy ending. Michael’s companion says, given a probability p for receiving love from a beloved person and a probability q for receiving the warm, gutty croon of love’s rapture through money, it’s a no-brainer to pursue an increase of q, because if q is increased by i, p is increased by i divided by x element of positive real numbers. Let her elaborate: Striving for pecuniary success is regarded highly by society, and even the poorest, after countless futile attempts, will never be disdained for their love of money, which, as a side note, does not apply to unrequited love of an individual. In case of achieving the desired riches that correspond to probability p, while desire will likely have wandered on to the next objective - similar as in the course of interpersonal love, side note - the societal appreciation of fruitful money-love is broad and emboldening. The resulting boost in self-confidence in conjunction with the newly available financial means to adjust one’s appearance, to train vocabulary and code-switching, and to acquire status-indicating frames of reference, do shorten the odds of getting with someone. 
“And did you get rich, yet?” 
“No. But I also didn’t find love, either.” 
Sergej meanwhile remains silent to the point that Michael fears that their connection has broken off entirely. Only when his companion draws breath for another volley of TED-fed motivational verbiage, he hears the sound of rustling paper over the line and he eases his clenching grip of the only work tool his foreperson gave him, a bluish translucent pen bearing the engraved advice “If you want to create, draw a line.” Thirty minutes left until the first round scheduled for Michael, not worth the return trip to his companion’s booth, and “time flies anyway, when you’re having fun, am I right.” Her laugh is just waiting to be stuffed back down her throat violently. 
“But what about you? I've been talking ever since and you poor thing didn’t get a word in.” 
The expecting silence is like the sudden pull of gravity. He stammers. 
“Michael, nice to meet you.” Again he misses requerying that person’s name. “I’m a web developer, though not right now. And that’s more of a fate than a profession, anyway. So, I’m with Freddy F now. Since last week, actually.” 
“Geez, Michael, this ain’t Shark Tank. No reason to be nervous.” Her laugh, too dimwitted to resent. “Where you from? I sense a little twist of the tongue here and there, no offense.”
“Well. It’s not straightforward. I was born here but I grew up in East Germany.” 
“Fabulous. Bratwurst.” 
“Not quite, I don’t eat meat.” 
“Oh, no worries. I try to steer clear of it, too. Cholesterol kills.” 
Sergej’s gumtree-body is cascading down the sofa, one hand dipped in a pack of swedish fish, bounty of an exploration of the kitchen’s upper cabinets. He’s deriving about his bank holiday neighborhood. Bored, since both Patrick and Paul are grounded,, he’s steering the analog sticks with the winegum stockfish and sings a closely-looped credit-medley of the TV shows he is allowed to watch back home. The alleys around Sergej’s Slacking Singleton Superstore have become even narrower. “Becoming Tunnel: Confessions of a Bank Holiday Alleyway”, scrawled across the shutters in a particularly dim spot. Facades and street corners of devoted in-jokers are adorned with alcoves housing statues of the blessed anti-virgin Maria Teresa de Castro, the recently departed creator of the game. The local community hall exhibits a mural for designating land use, captioned with an appeal to help the map circulate in second-screen communities, apparently to no avail. Public paths still continue to narrow, like sclerosed arteries they clog with all that scrap and junk that the adjacent homeowners couldn’t just pass up. Another dead end. The noise of the incoming demolition crew carries over from behind the obstructing building, the grind of the wooden wheels heralds the many-leveled siege tower that harnesses the destructive frenzy of a platoon of male teenagers to clear the buildings along the neighborhood’s major streets of any unauthorized overhang. Sergej’s marked compassion prevents him from seeking the company of the demo crew, and the deep voices of the axe-wielding half-men intimidate him. Plus, like any waste management, the crew fosters a culture of mob rites and tough-guy lingo that would repel his cherished artist-neighbors. And although Sergej’s got his code-switch down cold, bank holiday is a small world, after all.
He’s having too many projects, like he should, he’s eleven. Exporting and importing 3D models from games older than him cannot capture his attention for longer than he needs to process one set of vehicles, and anyway, ten euros for an hour of work is all the riches he can think of. Now he is starting a map. There might be another ten or so in various subtopics of different bank holiday forums, there might be the mural at the community hall, however, still being a child, Sergej knows well that the work commissioned from within is never in vain. Besides, it’s not even like Sergej doesn’t know what’s out there, it’s just that, no offense, these maps don’t make much sense to him. Top-down, orthographic projections that are hopelessly outdated already by the time the last lines are being drawn. No chance of fashioning a map for orientation. The district beltway runs into a dead end against a skyway so bloated that it leaves only a few centimeters headspace above the tarmac. In a matter of minutes, that skyway will be blasted away only to be replaced in a matter of hours by a jackknifed truck serving as the next best foundation for construction overhead. Sergej treats his maps like codified let’s-plays, linear and first-person, recording his ephemeral walks along disappearing routes for an audience that will never trace his footsteps, not least because, let’s be realistic, who takes the time to understand and appreciate the arcane drawings of an introverted boy. He looks up the magnificently smooth facade of a building so tall the 2D bird sprites clip through its side. Regular ripples run through the reflecting glass panes and make the front appear like a tranche of sea. Sergej takes note of it, like he records all the corny poetry he encounters in Bank Holiday. 
The longer Michael rests his eyes on his companion’s tubular features, the more her demeanor appears ambiguous, as if she were evil’s storeman, who has perfectly integrated her devious task into the gullible workday, meaty smells from tupperware pandora boxes, hot soup running like lava from the vending machine. Her glances over his shoulder into the depth of the narrow corridors and wire-frame-flanked passages give him the shivers. And then there’s a faint smell of urea or spilt beer or mildew around her that offsets the heavy smell of roasting dust coming from the servers. Even trailing five, six steps behind his companion, Michael still perceives it. He also now notes her infuriating habit of accentuating the one of the heavy safety boots’ 4/4 rhythm on the linoleum floor with a light slap to the thigh, making that person’s keys jangle. When his foreperson turns a corner, the rows of rack swallow every sound of the steady beat, as if that person de- and rematerializes with Michael’s eye contact. 
“Why are you running?” 
“Later, Serge. Okay?”
He’s short of breath, and while he tries to calm himself reiterating his DIY knowledge about processor cooling, he cannot shake the thought that all those whirring fans suck out the air from the corridors between them. His companion’s breath, too, rattles low, in time with the unfailing rhythm of the steps. Most concerningly, she has stopped speaking. In the maze of fractally subdivided rooms Michael is trapped. He clutches his own wad of keys. Wolverine key fist inside his pocket. That is how he pictures his fight. There’s something about her, an air of psychopath, or at least the foreboding of a false friend, someone that will ruthlessly report his every flaw to his employer. She has a face made to map all the imagined directives, corrections, assessments, and interdictions putting Michael in his place. Her face is like Antonin Vedyev’s, CEO and evil incarnate of Freddy F’s labor-mongering empire. Her face recalls the giant avatars’ in Bank Holiday’s bloody fights of reproduction. Turning back once again, her angular movements, her muteness, now look anxious, as if she weren’t sure if it’s still Michael following or an evil spirit about to assault her in an exponential motion. As if she were wondering, too, whether Michael is involved in the monthly evaluation reports of her own temp agency. Freddy F’s labor platform is only the visible tip over the massive keel of white-label HR solutions that keep its business afloat: Self-surveilling systems of work organized along tasks and results. Question mark leads to period leads to exclamation point. Bridled by stochastics and natural language processing, Michael will make a statement about his companion’s conduct and guidance, although at first he will be confused when he hears her name.
Sergej’s ears are flushed hot under the fake-leather hug of the headphones that he wears so Micheal does not hear him playing skirmish mode. Secondary screens have informed Sergej that a particular church is back in the battle zone, and he loves that church, whether in peace or conflict. The faction of ardent believers that started to curate bank holiday’s houses of prayer may have been the catholic church itself, as rumors have claimed. It might have been an agency of consultants marveling at the baroque meeting rooms of the clergy, that proposed this mission of faith into the godforsaken digital. Surely it is not a movement from within Bank Holiday, or they wouldn’t have picked that particular church as basilica maior, with parasol and doorbell and all. Players would have known about the moving frontlines along the urban peripheries. Players would have known how to free up a spot in the downtown undergrowth of the center, how to lure the teenage wrecking crew to a given intersection. Instead, the curators got to work on a low poly church on the fringe of blue territory. The artists were certainly gifted, and they shaped the subdivided surfaces into a neo-neoclassical model of astounding tastefulness, conservative in its design, but nonetheless all but anachronistic. However, the fickle balance of power in the church’s area declassed it to an elaborate prop in the constant fighting. At least for now it is calm, and Sergej can walk around the nave undisturbed, with only an attentive ear tuned to enemy footsteps outside. The holy door is a normal map of Ghibertian virtuosity, and it showcases the thought and effort that whoever conceived this missionary scheme put into the venture. Driven by despair, perhaps, the represented scenes seek to appeal to imageboard audiences by digging deep into christian iconography to unearth its most memeable content. Notably, the artists avoided any obvious attempts at creating viral christian contemporary content. Instead, they seem to have had not only time to go beyond the usual marketing rush jobs, but access to a vast archive of christian art history, too, a fact supporting the hypothesis of roman catholic patronage. Such a Holy See sponsorship would equally help to explain the elaborateness of the work, only possible under an overworked project manager too busy juggling plummeting congregation figures and compliance scandals to bother any further than to toss a hand of gold at the starving 3D-artists. HR-management courtesy of Freddy F, naturally. Sergej is ninety-nine percent oblivious to all of this, yet he is fascinated by the imagery around the place. Wouldn’t even need the crusaders-phase he’s in after having binged a six-part series on the topic, PG-13 but Fee conceded seeing that the program was lauded quote unquote woke while still retaining historic accuracy. Tough luck for Fee that Sergej was smitten with the veritable idol of toxic masculinity, a broad-shouldered supporting actor named Chimion, likely cast only to tap audiences that were rather ignorant of wokeness. Sergej walks around the church reciting heroic lines of Chimion when he hears steps beyond the church walls. He ducks behind a column of the arcades separating the side aisle. The church is so large it takes a good minute to run along its long side and Sergej should have just crawled to cover instead of sprinting loudly, thus alarming the opponent outside. Everything is quiet. Still shapes and images are all that was curated in the church. Music, sermons even, could have been possible, but not as long the building stands on contested terrain. For now, this church can only proselytize silently, which is nice for a change. However, the artwork, too, does not scream confession at Sergej but retains a subtle touch. Jesus, Mary, Moses, and other halo-bearing personnel are conspicuously absent in the images. Just as bank holiday’s players construct their game’s narrative as they build and create, the church’s panels recount their biblical accounts through its props, its worlds and landscapes, as trompe l’oeil views into an ancient sandbox. Biblical characters appear almost exclusively in schematic representation of lineages, largely featureless and in hierarchical proportions. The church’s designers did well to latch onto the bankholidian idea of post-subjective narration, of creating a space for the recipient to dwell and act in instead of hoping that rushing players will follow the dragging accounts of less-than-memorable heroes and heroines. Sergej is bored with hero tales. Even Chimion, a character with map, goals, backstory all polished to perfection, only serves as a vehicle for memorable lines and custom character ideas. Why should Sergej care what Chimion’s goals are if he has his own? He doesn’t need another voice to tell him what to do. The church’s imagery, however, does not prescribe narratives, the church’s artworks feed a world in slices to Sergej. It attracts him with the promise of continuity, of always transforming tradition, like the constant rewritings and amendments of fan fiction. The church has, maybe with the help of change managers and angel investor workshops, formulated their unique selling proposition as the original platform, a platform for meaning, strictly organized with its codes of conduct, terms, conditions, but eventually nothing but a vessel, a container to fill with meaning, one that needs filling, desperately. Momentarily, Sergej has gotten lost in the vanishing point of the large, open square in the fresco his viewport points at, and he has missed the sound of an enemy’s steps on the reverberant floor coming closer. He should be dead already, but the opponent, who presumably understood Sergej’s inertia as either a peace offer or a sign of AFK slash connection issues, makes no move to shoot, stab, or KO Sergej. This could be an easy kill, barely-earned points for in-game merchandise, but he likes the look of the avatar. The baggy, paint-spotted corduroy pants flap around the androgynous body template, the complementary vest on top of a flocked hoodie is a dream of Sergej’s in polygons and position-based dynamics, with its countless hooks, flaps, and pockets. The greasy John Deere base cap looks like it hides a friendly receding hairline. Dzień dobry! Sergej thinks of Marek, the polish handyman that Fee underpays for every non-permanent worker task in their apartment back home. Careful not to scare the other with any brusk movement, he holsters his assault rifle as an unmistakable sign of non-aggression. The other leaves its submachine gun drawn, but doesn’t shoot. Now what? As if communicating with a timid animal, Sergej beckons the other under the rich ciborium, his favorite part of the building. Proudly, he shares his personal bug exploit, jumping up one of the columns on invisible ledges left by unclean modeling or as an easter egg. The other follows suit. Like the church’s, their communication, too, is limited to rudimentary nonverbal means. Their characters’ few states of facial play cannot be triggered by the player, and Sergej has a hard time reading excitement or boredom in the movement patterns of Marek. Facing each other, they stand still for an instance, then Marek turns and runs towards the church’s exit, stopping halfway to ensure Sergej has understood and is following. Not only Sergej seems to have a weak spot for the monumental house of prayer on the urban periphery. Despite fierce battles being fought in the immediate vicinity, the church is completely intact. There would be bullet holes if the bankholidian demolition physics provided for them, but they don’t. Bank holiday’s destruction simulation just about suffices to maintain the illusion of cause and effect. Only bigger objects break apart under force or fire. Smaller ones merely come loose and disassemble, as they fall to the ground, into translucent rubble. Almost none of that debris is to be found around the church, only as Sergej and Marek run towards the nearby village the manna-like crumbs appear as traces of razed shacks and cottages. The sites of larger, more richly decorated lodgings are marked by household remains among the fragments, custom-made objects, which will, thanks to bank holidays’ server-side rendering, never disappear, never decompose until the liquidators will have pulled the final plug. With an unswerving belief in Gordon Moore and technology, bank holiday claims its server’s capacities will never be outdone by its player’s production of game objects. Sergej and Marek wade through recognizable and puzzling objects of human design. Marek throws a grenade, and Sergej takes a heavy hit as he notices the tingle of whatever part chimes in a hand grenade too late. The explosion leaves a circular clearing in the rubble like a bomb at a flea market. He’s less sure about Marek, who runs along towards the village while Sergej would like to return to the church or at least stop to look at the scattered objects. Just as he is about to cross a small river, he spots a homely sight, his heart jumps and he hears a well-known jingle playing in his head as he deviates to double-check that it is, and it is indeed, a tube-shaped model of his favorite breakfast cereal, available in DACH countries only. Full of excitement, Sergej jumps up and down to draw Marek over. Marek stops, turns, and looks back at Sergej. Then he raises his gun and shoots, killing Sergej with the third hit.
Michael has lost orientation completely and only follows numbly the bobbing middle seam of his foreperson’s work jacket, teetering left right left right like a metronome perfectly in time with the muffled step and the jangling slap of the hand, while the blinking grids of the cabinets float by out of focus like a repeating backdrop scroll. Sooner or later every employee, every wanderer of the identical corridors, that make up the hair roots along the dome’s radial axes, attains an altered level of perception. In the monotone choir of the servers wheezing, an employee will make out at first only the microtonal melodies of single packets arriving and departing, seemingly arbitrary until the employee will begin to assemble the fragments to continuous micropolyphonic streams. It might take a week or several years until the hypersensitive employee hears the flux like words, like meaningful compounds, like excuse my french W0L0L0_xxx but if this is what they taught you at harvard you either studied under the fuckin janitor or I guess you took his floor cleaner for lean cause there is no! fuckin! way! that even the dumbest alpha epsilon pi fuckwad would think this is even close. Some employees may find entertainment in the billions of voices like nosy switchboard operators, others might go plain mad, like Michael’s predecessor did. Michael is yet oblivious to the passing streams of information, but already feels its tiring quality. 
Now would be the time to talk about the things that went under in the past days. Nulities or minor arrangements. What’s with school? Kid’s gotta learn something. The prolonged holidays should have ended Monday, but online teaching won’t commence until Thursday due to technical difficulties. Michael has rarely given a thought to Sergej’s schooling in recent days. It’s school of hard knocks now. The silence endures. This could be the moment for meaningless but bonding chatter. “Dad, what does Mr. Woestrong mean when he calls somebody a RINO?” Because the neighbor goes off on unsolicited rants about politics. “It means he is a fascist and don’t take any sweets from him.” Because Michael has that annoying habit of responding to his son’s questions as if he were the secret star in a sitcom. He wouldn’t forego the chance of a witty comeback in favor of an age-appropriate explanation. Now would be the time to tell Sergej a, likewise age-appropriate, rendition of his ride on the bus to the ex-mall. The bus driver was crammed in her bullet proof (?) perspex booth, too tiny already for slight adiposity, with all essential furnishings of a single household. The mattress bending over her from behind flapped dangerously close to the piled boxes already wobbling worryingly with every touch of the break. In the transparent storage boxes the items were stacked to leave loopholes for shoulder checks. The place on the dash usually occupied by destination signs, saints’ images or personalized novelty number plates now hosted an upright duplex hotplate with a 12V-lighter-socket adapter that dangled in the footwell. The question on the entering passengers’ faces was always the same, and she preemptively put on her so-what slash mind-your-own face as she ground to a stop, a tenant with a steering wheel, the audible creak of the rebounding box springs greeted the boarding passengers. If eviction should come upon him, Michael would at least be able to retain a clean separation between work and private life, provided that his car returns from the workshop. If not, some joints from the undead local cab trade still provide their drivers with sedans spacious enough for Sergej to be bedded on the back seat and Michael on the wound down driver seat. There used to be a certain nobility to this kind of poverty when he pictured it, but now the thought of Sergej awaking in a pool of his own saliva on the hydrophobic leather seat just turns his stomach. Better think of something less dismal. The clear plastic fans clamped to the useless air vents of his first car, that made him think of holiday, of the calming movement of north German wind farms. The countless clear plastic fans whirr in the grid cages around him, spinning like the hard drives that turn with the sound of mice feet on glass. Waiting and listening to the sound of the stop-and-go traffic of multiple HDDs conjures up memories of defragmenting his first computer. Mind-numbing as it was, it still beat the view from his seventh floor lookout over the colored rectangles rearranging themselves on the grid of the supermarket’s parking lot. Defragmentation seemed a lot more like magic when he hadn’t yet understood the importance of putting his room in order. 
While the time remaining to his next scheduled round seemingly stagnates, Michael spins into soft drowsiness, into a zen-like state that he has never achieved during the breathing exercises of his brief, impatient sampling of self-care apps. This place is like Petra, a desert that once was carved and dressed to house a civilization, but now only survives as a symbol of passing time. Plaster crumbles, the hard disks slowly lose their charge, sleep and fate carry Michael off and he can do nothing about it. Without tools, with only his strength and alertness, that are both rapidly vanishing, he can only marvel at the traces of the microsecond-old past, because the infrastructure is so diligently protected that he can’t even pull a plug to make an impact. Everything is read-only to Michael. If machine rebellion is really a thing, this will certainly be ground zero, and Michael, along with the other night guards will become a tool himself. For now, though, he merely falls asleep.
With his virtual car dealership thriving and another tenner in his pocket slash mobile wallet piggy bank that Michael spun off his bank account for him, Sergej approximates his father’s nightly income. Paul still fumes with jealousy every time Sergej comes around with another bulky vehicle for his parents’ collection, but has agreed to share the task of decorating the barn with his friend. Patrick has come by, too, and has been deemed adequate as an assistant. In extensive discussions, the art collective of Paul’s parents has decided that their car lot does not strictly have to look like a dump, even though two out of seven advocate an understanding of the collection as just that, a visualization of imperceptible garbage collection of digital systems. Now, Patrick points out where Sergej and Paul are supposed to shoot the twinkling festoons as seen on car lots around the country, where they suggest warm wind ruffling drivers’ hair and the siren call of manifest destiny. Under the crossfire of shooting garlands, a quote unquote local noise artist preludes the first in a long series of talks on the topic of binary detritus with a fugue of hard-drives failing. Their festoon cannons make a phumping sound of plopping bottles followed by the flapflapflap of flying garlands. With a customary foray into dictionaries, the speaker begins his lecture. 
“The notion of space permeates the etymologies of western trash vocabularies, space so plain it echoes in the word spazzatura. And that space is clearly divided into within and beyond, and whatever we move beyond, becomes trash, it falls like the eponymous Old Norse fallen leaves and twigs, it falls like the Abfall off the disc that is earth.” 
Phump, flapflapflap, a daring shot hisses just barely past the head of the speaker. 
“Indeed, as far as it’s known, western cultures routinely followed a displacing approach in dealing with the objects, and, on a side note, subjects, too, that had forfeited their position in the community. The journey of trash ended in a more or less precisely designated place, outside of the city walls, beyond the visible landscape in underground landfills, or merely out the window on the head of an unsuspecting passer-by, as Juvenalis reports.” 
Phump, flapflapflap, Paul has discovered Patrick as a diverting target, who moans for him to stop, although there’s not even a health bar in build mode. 
“Whether it was the abundance of natural resources or proto-anthropocene ignorance that left the practice of disposing of unserviceable objects and subjects by pushing them beyond the imagined confines of the community unchallenged,” phump, flapflapflap, “Paul, cut that out or I’ll kick you.” From the server that is, as in block the account, so hold your CPS-calls, everybody. Parental control allows account blocking with the push of a third party app button. 
“Not for the first time, but with increasing urgency, we are noting that the luxury of disposing to the beyond without consequences, of that fire-and-forget mindset, is an illusion. When I’m saying not for the first time I’m thinking of our past dealings with closed or quasi-closed systems, that should have taught us about the impossibility of uselessness, of trash as we are used to talking about it. To go on a little of an old-days-rant, I come from a time of manual memory management. When I wrote my first programs, I had to manage the,” air quotes, ”disposal of any information that wouldn’t be needed for future computation. This practice is largely textbook knowledge to the current generation, thanks to a concept that is fittingly called garbage collection, an automated process of nanometer-sized dump trucks driving around circuit boards to collect that unused data, singing a song from the infinitely airing television show The Simpsons. This, however, is only my own imagination shaped by a guesstimate 5000 years of waste management. In fact, both IRL and virtual garbage collection illustrate the inherent use every entity embodies, the potential and the ability to be transformed, to reappropriate through the transformation of voltages. In plain terms: Go, recycle!” 
Phump, flapflapflap. Thanks to an increasing number of voluntary contributors, the collective’s motor pool has grown to numbers that even the spacious barn will soon fail to offer suitable sites for new models. 
“The palimpsestic nature of random access memory has had, however, little influence on our understanding of digital persistence and our dealing with data detritus. In 1983, thousands, millions as legend has it, of game cartridges containing the notorious Atari 2600 title E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game so bad that it put the nail in the coffin of the game industry during the infamous video game crash of 1983, were buried in a New Mexico landfill, few kilometers away from the notorious Trinity test site. In light of society’s preconditioning, the dumping as a means of eradicating all signs of the game’s existence was so effective, that stories of the burial subsequently fell into the genre of ghost stories, of urban legends, fantasies of something de facto extraterrestrial, non-existent.” 
The doorbell rings and Sergej responds like a big boy, even checks the door viewer before like a big boi. The man from downstairs asks if their landline is working. His lids are hanging like lace curtains in the window and a stye decorates his eye like a dreary cactus. Michael doesn’t have a landline phone, only voice-over-IP, Sergej knows that, the man is 404. He has to excuse himself, his dad is quote unquote on the stepladder, that’s what Michael told him to say. As Sergej seesaws over the sofa’s seat back to take his u-shaped playing position unhindered yet by the shortened ligaments resulting from explosive growth, his ear picks up the crisping whisper of repeated expletives coming from the phone keeping him company. 
Once, when Michael was still talking to that friend of his, the one that now only lives as recurrently surfacing remorse in the back of Michael’s head, that friend, name of Robert, invited him to accompany him on a work shift. They engineered Michael’s CV inasmuch that he passed for an expert of the so-called internet of things, so that Michael would be allowed to enter the airfield of Schiphol airport. After a stint in the moribund event sector as a stagehand, Robert had believed that a move to Holland would satisfy his passion and consumption habits of obscure breeds of weed. Just barely he managed to make it through the trial period of reduced doses in order to secure financing for his costly hobby, and when Michael came to visit, Robert described his job as tending to the countless caleidoscope eyes on the heavenly ramps of transgressive motion. The lights on the runway’s edge steamed like whirlpools. Riding shotgun around the apron was exhilarating. He was still too self aware, but he almost woohooed out the open window. White on white, fly all night. Then they made their first stop. Red on white, you’re all right. Few meters before he reached the strip of lights Michael suddenly became inundated by panic of an abrupt intensity he had never known. Red on red, you’re dead. The cold mist that before had collected in refreshing streams on Michael’s face out the window, now was trapping him in a halo of light with a black hole outlook into the sky shooting tardy 737s at him. The haze was congesting his airways with its heavily soaked inertia, accelerating pulse and breathing rates in a dangerous feedback loop. Perhaps it was the residual high that held back tumbling thoughts and let a deep sadness shine through. A sadness of solitude, of having severed the ties with the world as he knew it and immediately regretting his decision. Panic was befalling his limbs and tremors went through his body, but in Michael’s head a clarity remained, that let him remember that feeling of sadness, how he had felt similarly every time he had toggled clipping in a first person role play game. How he had shot projectiles from behind the rock face and under the floor, and how soiled and ashamed it had felt to betray the world he was supposed to be part of. Any confinement removed but condemned to never again be part of something intimate, always transcending. And even if he had been safe from the enemy’s claws and clubs it had made him feel the vulnerability of his fantasy on digital life-support. Stripped of the epic’s illusion of providence, the game used to give him the uncanny feeling of awakening in his bed in the middle of a deserted fairground hall. Robert was slow to realize Michael’s condition but eventually got him to calm down, feeding him one chocolate bar after another because he mistook his friend’s panic attack for hypoglycemia.
Just as Michael turns a corner on his second round of his beat, his cut of the tiled paths and blinking lockers of embedded circuits, there is that feeling again. Once more it announces itself with the sudden fear of exponential movement, of something jumping at Michael from the invisible darkness behind the halo of signaling lights. As if an invisible peril lurks beyond the lights, that will only become apparent in the last instance to grant him a last revelation of pure horror before it kills him. Hot breath on his neck. A single concrete pillar gives him shelter. Michael curves his back against the bulge of the column to maximize his protected surface, but even through the work coat he can feel the warm draught running between the server rows. Hot breath from the adjacent cabinets singes Michael’s skin. If he stays still for too long, the acrylic jacket will melt to napalm on his body in an inextinguishable fire. Maybe he’s already feeling it, maybe it’s merely the usual sting of the fabric. He always stopped watching before he would have gotten to know whether a human melts, roasts to a crisp or fumes away in case of fire and anyway, it is not the threat of physical pain that is causing his fear, but the conviction that in a moment, another minute maybe, his conscious mind is simply gonna shut off. He has turned too many corners, he’s already too far beyond. 
“Dad?” A grappler seizing him spinning in empty space. 
“Are you cursing?” Apparently, Michael’s vocal tract has availed itself of the slackening command. 
“Son?” This is the existential register. Son as in death bed advice, as in bible quotes. 
“Serge?” This is Michael not quite resurfacing, but catching the side of darkness less dark, towards the surface. 
“Is everything okay, dad?” 
“I think I’m having a heart attack.” Between the curses, that continue slipping his tongue. 
“Do you have pain or discomfort in the chest?” Sergej sits up in cheerful excitement. Perfect score on the five symptoms of heart attacks and strokes, respectively.
“No.” 
“Then you don’t have a heart attack, dad. Say pleasant mother pheasant plucker.” 
“Serge! I can’t breathe!” 
“But I don’t think you’re having a stroke. Can you raise both your arms?” 
“Sergej.” 
“What?” 
“I don’t know where I am.” 
“Okay. Is it dark?” 
“No Serge, it is not dark.” 
“Did you lose your way?” 
“I need to get back to my desk. I don’t know what’ll happen. I need to go back to my desk.”
“Can you drop me a pin?” 
“Where’s my phone? Shit! There’s no air in here, Serge!” 
“Dad, your phone is by your ear. Send me your location and I’ll see you out.” 
Michael is panting, and without the cheerful pause menu music chiming low, without Sergej’s boost of big boi confidence from answering doors like a paying tenant, his father’s panic would have probably spread along the line spanning the two boroughs and two generations. 
“What floor are you on?” 
“Jesus, Serge. How am I supposed to know that?” 
“Did you take any stairs or elevators since you entered?” 
“No.” The mall’s map is tilted and crudely projected. 
“Serge?” 
“One second, dad.” 
“Serge?”
“Are you at some kind of crossing or corner that can help me locate you?” 
“Corner.” Suddenly his father’s breath heaves groaning high over the line. 
“Sergej! I can’t breathe!” Almost pleading. 
“Dad! Tell me about grandma!” Get the old engine running again, with a push, a push down the slope. 
”Are you fucking kidding me?” 
“I’ll lead you to where you entered the building. With your back to the corner go left. Tell me about grandma! Go!” 
“I know you wanna know about Grandma. And hell, I’m not gonna stand between you. But let me tell you one thing. She will disappoint you! You want me to tell you something about her? She’ll let you down. She’s a good soul, but she’s no family.” Ahmed is Sergej’s panic buddy in class. If one of them flips, the other puts him at ease, gets him to talk through it. 
“Listen. To keep Wanda interested you need to change constantly, but at the same time she won’t forgive you for changing.” If Sergej deliberately went for the provocative theme, who knows, but it kickstarts an unmediated spate of allegations and vindications that ignites Michael’s anger but quenches his fear. 
“Whatever you’ll do, she’ll make you feel like you took the most disastrous of decisions, like every step you take independently is a, a finger in her face.” 
“Finger?” 
“Even though that’s actually what she needs, ironically. She needs you to take care of yourself, because who else is gonna do it? Her? She needs you to learn to read with her scripts and notes flying around, but she’ll need to hear that you did so that one time she sat down with you and a children’s book. And you? She’ll never forgive you growing up years without her.” “What?” “No. Serge! There’s a crossing!” There’s not actually a crossing. “What? There shouldn’t be.” “You’re right, my bad. Wanda loves you, like everyone. You know, only don’t expect too much from her. Sometimes I’m surprised that we both made it to our age. In general, the fact that we made it, isn’t it amazing? I don’t know about you but it still makes me marvel.” “Yeah, I...” “Serge! I’m sorry I cannot tell you much about our family. Your grandparents had a dog that died before you, that one had a bigger family tree than we do. I can go back three generations, four if you’re lenient with names. Male line, save for Mom, your grandma, for obvious reasons. And she was too busy mining grandma’s, my grandma’s, biography to take an interest in our women progenitors, let alone tell me about them. Adam’s the oldest I’ve ever met, and his father’s name escapes me if I’ve ever known. Only that he’s from a small town, as in really small, hamlet, three streets and one traffic light as of 1962, you get the idea. One street the way, one street the road, one street the avenue, crossing in church square, that last one never changed. Many people that worked the land, few people owned it. When they shot Liebknecht in 1919, the village’s worker council rechristened all three streets to honor the martyr. They left square’s name to the pastor, which proved to be a good decision, because when the royalists started to plague the village, our ancestor and his folks frequently sought refuge with the impartial minister. And he survived. He always survived. He survived a rock to the head and lying with an open wound in a ditch for five february hours. A gunshot wound avenging the breathtaking kick in the groin of an interventionist. And when he switched sides, because, see, he wasn’t exactly a stickler for politics as long as the functions were generously catered, he survived a mudslide with a broken leg, a lightning stroke with an acquired heart defect that kept him from the trenches when he was called to serve his country, and a spontaneous assault of crows, that left him with one eye occasionally flicking downwards, though that might have been for the lightning, too. Are you still navigating?” “You should keep right, dad.” “Keep right, keep right. Alright. Adam’s father. Not much else that I can tell you about him. A notorious liar, that’s what he was, greasy and slick, slipping through grips. Cannot be ruled out that the heart defect was just another one of his mischievous shirkings. He stole into holy matrimony with Adam’s mom, making her believe that he was leaving his other family and a house and career of riches out of mad love for her. In love he was indeed, which was probably what saved the marriage, besides the threat of dishonor and a draft note arriving with the wedding letters. Nineteen minus nine months means that Adam must have been conceived on R&R. Though I never saw any pictures of his father and cannot testify to Adam’s legitimacy. Good for her if she had a little mischievous fun on her part. Freaking tragedy that I know nothing about her. Serge, I want you to make sure that you tell your mother’s story and not how your pitiful dad got stuck that time in a premillennial mall turned data dumpster. Just like I got to hear that story of Adam’s father arriving like a king in his village. Belatedly returning from the front a good one and a half decades after the armistice of Compiègne, cruising the three streets recently rechristened after another, more dismal figure. The tales in black and white kept schtum about the color of his Hugo Boss attire, so I can only guess. And because that day, his father packed his wife and son in the back of the Horch, Adam survived his youth while two of his friends died on the locally popular dare of jumping across the path of oncoming trains. Serge! There’s a fork.” “‘right.” “Serge?” “Right!” “Adam survived his first encounter with a traffic light, boarding school initiation rites, Serge, you sure about this, because it’s getting colder.” “Yes. There should be a fire door coming up on your right.” “Boarding school. They put him there because after all, I reckon, the lineage was not that unambiguously linear as it’s always suggested.” Sergej knows better than two ask. Riding shotgun means listening and navigating, and he feels that this applies now as well. “Did you pass the fire door?” “You told me to take it!” “Proceed.” “So here’s Adam at that boarding school, with his suspiciously abrahamic name, with his receding chin between the chiseled Fähnleinführer types gundog-drilled to declare and detect any poisonous mushrooms, and still he survives. Not only that but his hiding with silkworms and plane models will be construed as a fervent passion for flying, so that even his at most moderate fitness cannot impede his career in the Luftwaffe.” “Wait, dad, you should come up to a sort of lobbyish opening with elevators.” “I think I can see it. And then?” “There’s two corridors heading straight.” “Sergej! Come on, fast!” “Dad! I can’t work like that. You have to take the right one. Not right, you understand. The right one of the two straight ones. It’ll turn right after you pass the bathrooms.” “Fuck. Fuck. Why did I take this job?!” Admirable how Sergej handles his panicked father’s gasped profanities. Honors for premature serenity. He stuffs the unsettling experiences of witnessing a person that is supposed to be in control, out of control, he stuffs them down, down time and again to the bottom of his consciousness, so many of them already that they have become compacted into a solid layer that seals the sediment of other traumatic memories looming below. “And then? He went to flying school and then?” “He went up. You know the odds of living through the war as a pilot? Forty fucking percent. Six in ten died. But not him. Blows my mind. Don’t think I’ll tell you heroic war stories. No deal. No way. Still covered in fucking swastikas, head to toe, that nazi shit. Only when the allies had advanced as far that he couldn’t even find the space for a decent take-off, he reconsidered. And he had been insignificant enough to get a pass for his inner emigration rap, plus wasn’t he trustworthy with his beautiful baby boy whose conception he had managed to squeeze in between bombing raids? And that baby boy, heads up, this one you got to know, too, is Heinrich. Barbara’s his mom, for the record. Never met her, little to say about her. As far as I can tell, Adam soon stopped caring about her until she, good riddance I’d say, remarried a physics professor, much to Adam’s dismay, whose publications are an absolute entertainment, I should show you. Nuclear cars, trains, everything. Died of radiation poisoning, that poor. Only Adam kept outliving everyone, two wives, estranged, both of them, his brother, estranged, too, at least for most of his life.” “Have you passed an, I don’t know, some kind of major intersection, yet?” “Serge, for real? This is a grid, you understand, so what the fuck do you mean by major intersection.” That fuck, however, was one too many, even for big boi Sergej, answering the door and all. It pushes him to the verge of tears, to the edge of a gorge deep enough to create its own gravity, with a tar pit at its bottom that holds Sergej’s daily preoccupations, his fear of flying, his pre-teenage angst and not least the collected concern that has been dripping viscously from his father’s words and conduct, and that he has been absorbing like a shopping channel sponge throughout the last days. Still, there must be some kind of unbreakable father-son bond in place, because Michael immediately feels the tentacles retracting, although the lower lip’s shaking and the heartbeat’s acceleration are neglected in the call’s encoding. “Hey, hey, I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean that like it sounded.” Try harder. “You’re doing a great job. I wouldn’t have known what to do without you. It’s just. You know how it is, I’m stressed. But it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Actually, quite the contrary.” Tensely, Michael listens into the blunt silence that used to be calming in the old days, sea-like white noise of connection. “At least on the left there should have remained a door. A fire door. They can’t just remove it.” It’s a tiny voice, that comes from the receiver, tiny but not trembling. “Should I keep talking?” The fear is gone, the anger subsides. Michael feels as if he has been here before, and stupid for having freaked out over nothing but hot air. He shouldn’t have. He shouldn’t have given in to mystery’s gravity, to the pull of the occult attributions that surround these places, as if there would be supernatural powers at work instead of oil-stained mechanics at the hydroelectric plant, sweat-stained research assistants in windowless CSAIL cellars, taurin-nursed salespeople keeping the flywheel going, blow-cooled walkabouts like him checking the switches in order. What is this place if not a titanic collection of e-waste-to-be? The bottleneck of the continent’s communication that, after all, is not that tiny, not that fascinating once you’ve gotten lost in its hyper-hygienic entrails. Where every collecting drop of condensation, every piece of organic matter will be detected and removed by automatic suckers, blowers, sweepers, cutters. That thought, though, stirs the sediments and fear wells up fast. “Heinrich, son of Adam and Barbara. Born to a nation that unconditionally surrendered only ten days after. You can imagine the joys of childbirth were curbed, substantially. Plus, Adam didn’t return until four months later from American internment. But what a fine boy he was. What a pudgy, rosy-cheeked baby in defiance of all that starvation around him, that cold. Soldiers were sticking chocolate bars in his felted wrap, men already smartly dressed again dirtied their hands slipping a charcoal briquette into his baby carriage. He was drawing all forces like a babbling psychic to ensure his own survival. But as devotedly fortune mothered him in his stroller, as fiercely it abandoned him as soon as he had uttered his first words, which, sinning against all female figures that had secured his becoming, addressed his pa-pa, who, having been welcomed so warmly by his happy family on his return from US imprisonment, had made a career of delayed returns, smartly dressed in captain’s hat and epaulettes.” “When you reach the end of the corridor, take a right, then the next left.” “Will do. Thanks. Anyway, who knows what his first words were supposed to signify. Maybe his pa-pa was really not a call for his elusive father. Maybe it was merely the first stutter of the condition that haunted his childhood. That, like an auditory target, drew taunts and teases from which he hid in the school’s crawl spaces so frequently that he acquired a bird-like seating position with his knees drawn to his chest, that he never fully abandoned even as a 180 plus tall adult. For his thirteenth birthday, his father took Heinrich gliding, and his tightly packaged posture proved downright predestined for the confined cockpit of the glider. And for Heinrich, flying was a revelation. Being hugged by sturdy man-made structures like in his school’s safe spaces with unseen forces hoisting you up and taking you places. That boy had a dream, he had a goal, and he studied, and counted days, read flight plans, maps, and regulations to receive his licence with honors already before his diploma. Stayed out till dawn at the dusk of an adolescence of self-imposed discipline and strict regimes only to wake up 24 hours later to shocked parents and a barf-bucket next to his bed. Now, there’s three things deemed unacceptable for pilots in the sixties: Politics, monogamy, and epilepsy. There was absolutely no chance that Heinrich would ever board a plane as anything more than a purser, and in his abstinent teenage years he had grown to hate having to deal with drunk people. So what to do with this broached life, as good as new, mint-conditioned, practically, all honors and Thälmann-badge, a little stale inside, perhaps?” “Did you take the first left?” “Sure did. Heinrich went on to study. Others might have tried to stick close to the unrequiting love, to get a kick out of the odd blink of the silver chassis in the sun of the runway. He could have gone into engineering, into nuclear airplane research to catalyze the attraction of one half of the family to a certain physics professor. But he did not. The bruises were still too fresh. Instead, Heinrich took his physics in the opposite direction. From birds-eye to cine-eye, he chose electrical engineering, and then microelectronics, a field that was not only far enough from aviation to let the old trauma rest but also staffed with people seemingly appreciating crawl spaces. At some well-organized function, he met Marga, they properly cohabited, married properly, and in seventy-one they had Wanda.” Michael has been hasting through the familiar corridors and hasn’t even noticed the faded adverts he has inspected earlier. Now that he recognizes the deserted bus port, he realizes that with the slim chance he has of finding the way to his night watchman’s desk even with his son’s help, he will rather take the equally slim chance of his absence going unnoticed. Praised be the boy but for now he needs to be alone, so he hangs up faking a disconnect. He squeezes alongside the swishing faceless cars and although darkness has already fallen, misguided birds sing consolingly as he exits the underground turnpike.