She stopped to watch them. No one stopped to watch her. She was a leggy stranger in black jeans and a men’s V-neck undershirt, with a backpack and sleepover bag, seventeen years old, lost, female, and invisible. She was exactly where she wanted to be.
NOT LONG AFTER HER ARRIVAL, SHE STARTED WORKING FOR A COMPUTER CONSULTING firm called RIACD. Everything about it was mismanaged, from the wordplay in the name, which was not an acronym and was properly pronounced as “react” only by foreigners, to the one-man marketing division. The address, far downtown on John Street in the financial district, lent the company pecuniary cachet along with crooked drop ceilings and gurgling toilets.
A possible exception to the general mismanagement was its thirty-year lease, signed in 1985. RIACD’s founder, Yuval Perez, was a draft evader who had turned eighteen just before Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Owing landlords money didn’t scare him. He didn’t take contracts seriously as threats.
Only mismanagement could make a consultancy hire a dropout with radiation head to learn C from a Usenet tutorial, so Pam didn’t fault it. (Radiation head was the world’s easiest, and also worst, punk hairdo. Using scissors, the wearer cut his or her own hair really short, and the patchiness made him or her look like a cancer patient.) They met in a bar, where Yuval gave her an aptitude test and hired her to start the next day. The test involved imagining a set of ninety-nine pegs numbered left to right, one to ninety-nine, in a hundred holes also numbered left to right, with the right-hand hole empty. You were supposed to say how you’d move the sequence one slot to the right, reversing the order. A typical programmer’s first move was to posit additional holes.
Pam had been raised on short rations. She never assumed additional anything. Thrift was a cardinal virtue in the business in those days. Computers were slow, with definite limits. Programs had no graphics or menus. Stinginess was called “elegance.” In aesthetic terms it resembled the elegance of cutting your hair instead of washing it and wearing the same boots every day with no socks. Ultimate elegance was realized when all the programs in a mainframe lived naked and barefoot, sharing a single overcoat.
Her first project after the C tutorial was an auto-execute system for the American Stock Exchange. She wrote it in a day, and it compiled the first time. It ran on SCO Xenix on a 286 in a pipe room in their basement. The traders liked it enough to call her back to install anonymity—not security; the Morris worm hadn’t happened yet. They wanted fantasy usernames, so as to lend deniability to stupid auto-execute positions.
Immediately, and for all time, she got cocky. Routinely, she neglected input validation, memorably writing an interface that crashed if a user entered an accented character. On one too many occasions, she left a client’s system without turning off the debugging fire hose. Yet Yuval considered her a key asset. More conscientious consultants with better social skills regularly put them to use over long lunches, during which they argued that Merrill Lynch or Prudential might economize by employing them directly. Because of Pam’s outbursts, meltdowns, and mistakes—universally regarded as aspects of her femininity—there was never a danger that a client would hire her away.
She was one of two women at RIACD. New colleagues often had trouble making eye contact with her in the one-on-one encounters they liked to bring about by blocking her way to the ladies’ room, while others exposed her to the crass insults that passed for flirtation in Queens. Yet their respect for the RIACD receptionist, an angel-faced Yemenite in oversized tops and long skirts, no older than Pam, was deep and unfeigned. Pam deduced that in the fantasy universe of a Mediterranean American man’s virgin/whore complex, it was best to come down on the side of the virgins. She told new colleagues she was gay. Sexists in those days were familiar with the work of Howard Stern. His sadomasochistic radio talk show invested the unapproachable lesbian with powerful taboos.
It didn’t cost her any dates, because she never met a suit she wanted to date. Sex was part of the leisure-time world where she made art. In her mind art was ideally commercial, feeding and housing its creator. She loved coding’s austere beauty, but she didn’t regard it as an art. It was too restrained. It made the suits too happy. It was how she made money. An artist needed money in great abundance. Without it, she would bounce off Manhattan like a bird off a plate-glass window.
IN 1989, WHEN SHE MET JOE, HER ART PROJECT WAS A BAND CALLED THE DIAPHRAGMS. Even the name embarrassed her. She thought it sounded early eighties. Simon, the singer and bass player, claimed that his masculinity made it ironic. He was a grad student from Yorkshire on a fellowship to study opera practice at NYU. He possessed a bulky, sticky gray keyboard that incorporated an analog drum machine. She played a Gibson SG guitar. The band was supposed to be a No Wave power duo. Everybody except Simon knew it was shitty Casio-core.
Of course the Diaphragms had played CBGB. Anybody could play there once. All it took was signing up for audition night. Their gig was at seven o’clock on a Wednesday. Their twenty dearest friends ordered beer by the pitcher, but the manager still said their set needed work. When Pam asked him what aspects in particular, he shrugged and said, “Your set. The songs. How you play them. The arrangements. You know. Everything.”
They rehearsed every weekend in a space in Hell’s Kitchen. It charged a reduced rate of ten dollars per hour between eight A.M. and noon on Sundays. They arrived at eight, because rehearsing their set took forever. The songs were hard to memorize or tell apart. She had slept with Simon eight times and heard him refer to her in public as his “ex” on at least ten occasions. To compound her embarrassment, he was still her roommate. They lived in an overpriced doorman building on Bleecker near the folk clubs and Italian bakeries, in the eastern part of the West Village known to gentrifiers farther east as “Little Jersey.” A flimsy drywall partition divided what had once been a one-bedroom apartment into a one-and-a-half. Simon had the half bedroom. It was too cheap. He would never, ever move out voluntarily. She was out of town a lot for work, and every time she got back, she could tell he’d been sleeping in her bed. They were not friends. She hated him. They were both on the lease.
JOE ADDRESSED HER HAIR ISSUES FIRST THING WHEN THEY MET. “YOU’RE GREAT-LOOKING, except for your hair!” he said. “I love your body. It’s so elongated. You have an incredible-looking mouth. Your eyebrows are moody, like you have a romantic soul. You should wear liquid eyeliner and have long hair all the way down to your butt!”
This was after he’d known her for not even ten seconds, or five. He’d tapped her on the shoulder while she was standing in line for fifty-cent coffee from a cart.
“That would take forever,” Pam said. “Hair grows, like, an inch every three months.”
“I don’t do math,” Joe said.
“Me neither, but if we call it a foot every three years, and it’s three feet from my head to my butt, we’re looking at nine years.”
“Nine years!” He patted his own hair thoughtfully. It was mousy brown and wavy, cut in an inverted bowl shape. “How old do you think my hair is?”
“You are quite the mutant,” she said, making so as to leave. She had ordered but neither paid for nor gotten her coffee. Before she could abandon him, Joe took hold of her arm.
She was in a mood to put up with it. She was at a cart on lower Broadway, buying weak coffee at four P.M., because she had been escorted out of Merrill Lynch for calling this one dickhead “fuckwad” in the presence of his subordinates. He had responded that he’d have her fired from RIACD. Immediately she had called Yuval, who observed that the term “fuckwad” is considered denigrating by members of certain ethnic groups, as in all of them everywhere, and she had yelled into Merrill Lynch’s house phone that if he ever invested a dime in marketing RIACD’s platform-independent programming language (her side project for slow days in the office), none of them would have to deal with dickheads like this fuckwad ever again. Then she had felt a strong hand gripping her arm. That had been half an hour ago.
Joe’s touch was a pleasant contrast. He was beaming as though he’d been looking for her all his life and finally found her, but in