BODY Chapter 6.0

You do not give generously,

& with no thought of reward,

to the motherless child.

You are not feeding the hungry

joyfully. You

only consume avariciously

what you have been given.

You create nothing.

You will leave nothing.

& you love wealth with a passionate

devotion that only belongs god.

Hey Bitch! Fig said as Sameer walked into the large office space a kind of open office with a few rather diminutive partitions here and there, but for the most part no walls, none at all, just workspaces, tables, desks, drafting tables, distributed with some degree of chaosometry around the room. The chairs were made for the tables but there were also sofas and two barcalounges. Here was natural lighting from ordinary lamps and from the extensive picture windows that overlooked the downtown from the dizzying heights of the third floor. One chair looked like a giant teal egg trapped in a metal frame with a backrest. It was supposedly ergonomic. Jackson, his first name, was sitting on it, trying to write something and squirming to get comfortable, he gave the impression that the egg was trying to hatch. Johan was poking Tjon whispering to her to look at the scene.

          Hey Bitch! Sam did not turn at the shout, even though he knew without looking that Fig was trying to get him to look. Hey Sam, Fig finally said, Didn’t you hear me? Sameer, said his name carefully, not Sam. Okay. Fig said with false seriousness, I stand corrected. I thought the name was Bitch. Because after all Sam, you are my bitch, aren’t you? Sam then looked at him with a kind of wry smile trying to ignore the insult. Then Tjon said, Stop it Figueroa. Leave him alone. It is harassment to bully people, she continued, and you could get in trouble. Yes, Fig said loudly, Sam might report me But I don’t think so. Anyway, isn’t harassment about sex. Sam knows that I will not have sex with him. No matter how much he begs. But anyway I wanted to ask him a question and it is about work. So Sameer Come here. It rhymes.

            Sam tried to give the impression that he was strong enough to ignore the taunting, to withstand the joking around and still keep his dignity and his manhood, but he wasn’t. To the others he was determined to show th others that he didn’t really care, and he was capable of taking a joke. He didn’t want the others to know what he was thinking. They stood there watching the whole scene like speechless eye witnesses to a car wreck with plenty of guilty feelings, but no intention of turning the spotlight on themselves by intervening. They were innocent bystanders, who somehow turned to spectators enjoying this banquet of abuse. All of it was produced by Fig, a character a comedian. He broke the tedium of work with his antics. He was good for the team in the clubhouse. He punked people. He played pranks and brought people down from their arrogant snobby perches, off their high horse. He was the straw the stirred the drink. He was a diversion from the tension of performing in a job where you could be fired for nothing t all.  In fact, the guilt that came with his clowning around just seemed to turn up the juice on the whole predicament. It was excruciatingly painful and strangely a turn on. Johan stood as far away as he could from the action but he later told Howard, a very quiet young game designer from Hong Kong, It was like watching the torture scenes in the movie Saw.

          Tjon, as the only woman, was seemingly safe, somehow exempt from verbal abuse, from any danger. But she experienced very different threats everyday; most of the taunts addressed to her were never spoken aloud in front of her. She was the victim of behind the scenes bullying. Bit she had suffered enough as an undergrad. It was different now she thought but when she went to Stanford fifteen years ago, she was one of the very few women in software engineering. Nothing would ever rival the blistering and disappointment of that experience. It drove most of the other female student to change their major. But she fought the prejudice.

          The prejudice was not like the expletives and violence of a few decades ago. Of course there were still bigots who did violence. Now, however, it was surprisingly invisible to many of the perpetrators themselves, who thought that a joke was inoffensive play when it was really a dagger in the heart. You were expected as a cool woman geek to not only tolerate the jokes, but to enjoy them. That was the greatest humiliation to be an accomplice to your own torturer. To applaud your own mortification your own degradation. To laugh at their jokes. She recalled that, in her first year, everyday she went to the dining hall and her classmates, especially one guy, who reminded her of Fig, would tell her offensive racist jokes about her culture about her history abut her people. It’s like watching someone slap your mother and not fighting back and feeling like a coward every day, dishonored ironically by people who felt like anti-racist heroes because they would eat lunch with you and talk with you and laugh with you, just the same as if you were a friend. It was a shirt trip from this nightmare to Sameer’s. But he never seemed to appreciate when she came to his defense.

Listen Sam –Ear, Fig said. I read a story that these Arabs in Pakistan are blowing up little kids again? Sameer did not turn to look at him but Fig seemed to circle around him and in this room there was no place to hide. Well, They drive a Vespa into a busy market, park it, and walk away and then set off a bomb with a cellphone.  Fig stood waiting for some kind of response.

          Sameer was now sitting at his desk with a massive monitor that showed his latest design ideas. An illustration of a setting for a game: a postmodern city on a featureless island with no birds and in fact with no trees, nothing seemed organic, on the surface. The cityscape was dominated by impossibly tall skyscrapers that had a modern stark quality, nothing warm, nothing human scale, much like Doha in Bahrain, his secret archetype. He had never been there. But Bahrain was for him, the epitome of excess, a gold-plated threat to a moral life, unfettered and irresponsible pleasure just outside the backdoor of the territory, which guarded the holy cities and shrines. His game idea combined global finance and gambling, with dreams of wealth and pleasure.  Of course, he was desperate to find a hero and a threat to this world that was not the stereotype. But he could feel himself being sucked into the inevitable pigeonhole. 

        Hey, Bitch? Fig said again knocking on Sameer’s desk with his fist.  So these brave guys, they just had an election or something and this was their way of campaigning ... Fig made quote marks in the air ...  to keep people from even thinking about going to the supermarket. No less going to vote.

        Sameer, Fig gave an air of seriousness, I think this is a situation that might make a good game. So I see it like this: We have this first person bomber on a scooter with a bag full of IEDs and he navigates through the city, we can get a kind of google map of maybe some city like Calcutta, and the player can decide who he wants to blow up and he gets you know points for different kinds of people, rich or poor, homeless derelicts or street musicians, grandmothers or young punks or

     Shut the fuck up! The words were pronounced in an aggressively slow way and Sameer felt exhilarated, a wave had washed over him, the tension was dissipating, the shock of relaxation was almost too much and his knees buckled. He thought for an instant that not only the skirmish but the clash was over. He felt the jubilance of victory.  Then he realized the words did not come from him. His mouth had not opened. Maybe he had thought those words so hard that they materialized without being enunciated, perhaps a voice from heaven. The exact words were in his mind, just those words. But they had been spoken by a different mouth.  It was not his voice. It was the voice of his boss, a young guy who started h business and was hardly ever there. He looked with disgust at both of them. Get to work!