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  Manny stood at the entrance, exhausted, hugging his half-full box of electronic equipment

  chapter 3

  “Nê ahm hâi dek! Nê nu nu hâi ke!” Manny yelled as he kicked the soccer ball back to the orphans. They were getting close to the steep edge of the mountainside, and Manny reminded them to be careful because if they lost this soccer ball there would be no more soccer for the foreseeable future.

  In his six years here Manny had managed to pick up the Western Bhutanese language of Tchanchzka and was now close to fluent in the local dialect of one of the most remote slices of land on earth. The language and the people of this part of Bhutan were known only to a small, insulated group of academics and Bhutanese historians.

  The mountainside where he made his home – a desert-like terrain a few thousand feet above sea level where very little plant life existed – was as far from the world he left as he could imagine. A few days before, a snow leopard strolled onto the soccer field, and Manny stood at a window with the children and marveled at its sleek form as it made a single circuit about the orphanage, leapt the small wall on the outskirts of the property as if stepping over a pebble, and disappeared. Six years after his arrival here, the beauty of the snow leopard’s movements still left Manny awestruck.

  Manny’s thinning salt and pepper hair was now halfway down his back, un-groomed and perpetually in the early stages of dreadlocking. His beard was thick in the neck region but splotchy and uncertain on his cheeks. He would be all but unrecognizable to anyone who knew him before. He dropped thirty pounds and no longer suffered from hamstring cramps or neck and arm pain. His ankle-length brown cotton robe rid him of the uncomfortable constraints of pants, and he never wore a watch or shoes (only sandals). He committed himself to living a simpler life dedicated to the well-being of the Bhutanese orphans who served as his surrogate children. Mindy and Manny never had children. When Manny was 25, the miscarriage happened. They almost never spoke of it after that. But Manny knew it weighed on Mindy. And work was starting to monopolize Manny’s time anyway, he never would have been around, he told himself. When Mindy did talk about it, she usually just brushed it off, or made a half joke about how she may never be able to have kids (example: “You had to go and name your company furtl, didn’t you? The one thing that I am NOT!”).

  When they did discuss it seriously, once, she told him she thought it was a sign. A sign of what, Manny never really understood. Regardless, they both created rationalizations for why the miscarriage happened and how it was for the best. In the early days after that event, they would say to each other, “We’ll know when it’s time to try again.” Then fifteen years went by.

  In six years, Manny had yet to make it past janitor/gardener at the orphanage, but that was okay with the new Manny. Old Manny would have pushed himself to make his presence felt at the orphanage. New Manny mostly swept up after the monks running the place and made sure the kids didn’t fall off the mountain.

  At the end of every workday, Manny sat outside his humble bamboo hut working his outdoor stove to produce a hearty meal of daal and rice. He then spent the evening by himself, sitting cross-legged on a thick burlap mat overlooking the Maapurnauma mountain range and meditating. All his food was local, and there were no refridgermators to remind him when he was running low, or that a new cereal was all the rage and he had to try it, or asking him if he wanted to add some kombucha to his order. Technology was no longer part of Manny’s life. His village had only received electricity eight years ago, and it was still only available at odd hours of the day. One old large-screen TV sometimes showed American movies in town — Rambo 3 was popular — but Manny never partook in that activity.

  One day, Manny entered the orphanage, and a strange image in the main classroom caught his eye. A dusty desktop computer was perched atop one of the desks off to the side. The room’s decor consisted of two large wood desks, a chalkboard and about twenty chairs and stools made of plastic or wood, most of them in some stage of disrepair, scattered across the dirt floor of the stone building. The computer sat on one of the desks. Both the desks and the computer had been gifts from the Belgian Development Agency. The BDA had made computer access a primary component of its international development strategy. Benard Flernzoiux, a BDA employee who’d been traveling the country and delivering the computers, dropped the computer off and set it up in the classroom earlier that day. He then retreated to his helicopter, waving at the kids and screaming, “Zonder dank!” (“You’re welcome!” in Flemish).

  The monitor took up the entire desk, which was buckling from the weight. The desktop computer said DELL, a name from the past, and an octopus of wires on the ground were already caked in dirt. The rusty generator hummed outside, struggling to fulfill the energy requirements of this new machine. Manny thumbed through the instruction manual next to the machine. It was in Flemish.

  The first month the computer mostly sat idle. Every now and then a monk would try to navigate the operating system, but seldom did anything come of it, and they soon gave up, uncomfortable in front of this foreign object operating in a foreign language. One time Manny saw a child playing Minesweeper and was surprised to find himself nostalgic for his early days of computer programming, when he would procrastinate for hours on end trying to beat the expert level in under thirty seconds. But the nostalgia was fleeting. New Manny reprimanded old Manny for thinking about those days with fondness, and so new Manny reprimanded the orphan for playing Minesweeper and told him to go outside and kick the soccer ball instead. He then turned off the computer, the first time he had touched one of those machines since leaving the US. Manny felt a slight surge of energy in his hand as his forefinger lingered on the power switch, caressing it like an elderly howler monkey caressing a three legged baby kitten with its forefinger (a video of that activity was trending heavily on the furtl social network just before Manny’s demise). Manny stood in the room, allowing his mind to wander to that particular viral video. It was the first time he had allowed himself to think about such things since he had arrived in Bhutan. That video had amassed a respectable, but not record setting, 690 million views, placing it well behind the video of a female kitten dressed up in a French maid costume and snuggling with a honey badger in a French Revolutionary Soldier Costume, all while the kitten’s male and female owners sang “On My Own” from Les Miserables off-screen and in a fake French accent after sucking on helium balloons. That was the first video to hit a billion views in less than a month.

  Manny caught himself mid-reflection, terrified by his feelings, by the memory, and he fled to the meditation room to clear his mind and expunge the taint of technology from his soul.

  A few weeks later, Manny entered the classroom with some gardening tools in his hand and stopped to watch the kids standing around the computer, yelling and pointing at the screen with unbridled enthusiasm, as if their bodies were responding to their first sugar rush.

  “The Inteeertubes, the inteertubes!” one child said as he ran up to Manny and grabbed his arm while pointing to the computer.

  “Internet,” Manny said.

  “Intearnit, Inteeeaaarrrnniitttt!” the child responded, then he ran back to the computer.

  Manny walked over to the now Internet-ready computer, which Monsieur Flernzoiux set up on a recent visit to the orphanage. Manny saw that the children were watching World Wrestling Extravaganza coming to them live from the Angry Birds Arena in Louisville, Kentucky. The kids jumped up and onto each other, turning the space around the computer into a pre-teen Bhutanese mosh pit as they struggled to see the screen, which featured the Undertaker 5.0 battling it out with the Human Indestructible Virus (HIV).

  After HIV performed a run-of-the-mill vertical suplex, lifting his opponent via a headlock up and over his body, two of the kids tried to perform the move on each other. Then two other kids tried it. Then the screen froze. The kids all stood motionless, staring blankly at the screen. As if confronted with the relative mundaneness of their Bhutanese existenc
e, the kids then groaned in agony as their Internetless fate sunk in. Their confusion and anxiety morphing into wide-eyed hysteria, they turned and looked at Manny.

  “Ta kâi châ ga KAM NGAAAN!!!!!” one child said to Manny.

  “Ay,” Manny said, nodding to let the child know that he was correct, the Internet had indeed stopped working.

  “Nun sa-mâat KA NO KA-hàat yà ben?” (Can you fix it, large-eyed man?) another child asked.

  “Mâi ka-mâat,” Manny replied, informing them he could not.

  When the Internet connection began to work again without Manny’s help, the kids rejoiced and turned their back on Manny. He went to the supply closet and began to unload his gardening equipment, like he did pretty much every day.

  Two hours later, Manny was cleaning up around the classroom and the kids were all still attached to the computer. But now they were quiet, transfixed. Manny watched them watch the screen. Not one child blinked. Manny had never seen them so still, paralyzed by the images they were consuming. The eerie quiet from the room was abruptly replaced by thick New York-accented English from the lo-fidelity computer speakers. “Ram my glaaawry hole, you dirty Guadamalan day laboruh!” a young female screamed as the speakers, turned all the way up, crackled, her words distorted because of the high volume output.

  Manny raced over to the computer and switched off the speakers just as a voluptuous yet anorexic actress began moaning with overwrought enthusiasm. He located the computer power button and switched it off as another woman entered the frame with a fire hose and an empanada. The kids were all still silent. Manny looked at them, his worst fears realized.

  “No more computer for you,” he said to them in Tchanchzka.

  The kids remained where they were, dumfounded and traumatized, staring at the blank computer screen. They were trying to process the unprocessable. Manny pried their frozen bodies away from the computer and coaxed them into walking toward the door.

  “Go outside,” he said.

  Manny’s experience with the children reminded him of just how much he had grown to despise the impact of technology on human activity. What was once the focal point of his life was now the source of his unyielding disdain. While he sat in the communal dining hall picking at his bowl of rice, he decided that he would raise this issue with the monks. In his six years at the orphanage he never suggested anything to them. He did what he was told and did it as effectively and inconspicuously as possible. As he decided this, a monk approached his table. Manny was taken aback by the Monk’s approach, a rare occurrence. This man was the eldest in the monastery, and his movements were slower than the other monks, who were also quite old and not known for swiftness.

  The monk stood over Manny’s table and nodded to him. Manny rose and bowed to the older man, then offered him the empty bench across the table. The monk moved the bench out from under the table, and Manny made his way to the other side of the table and helped the monk into his seat. He then supported the monk’s effort to get his tattered ankle-length black robe tucked under the bench. When this was complete, Manny returned to his side of the table. The two sat in silence as if one was waiting for the other to make a chess move. New Manny was not comfortable initiating conversations with the monks and only spoke when spoken to, and so he thought it not his place to ask the elderly monk what he wanted.

  After several moments, during which Manny grew uncomfortable and the old man across the table from him merely stared at him, the monk finally spoke. “Nun róo wa jà tâng nâ bhaa?” he said to Manny. Loosely translated, this meant: “Do you know how to configure the LTP 4.0 setting to allow protocol reconfiguration?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can help you,” Manny said.

  The monk again looked at Manny with a blank stare for a moment. Other monks shuffled over to the table to listen to the conversation. “Please,” the monk said, his use of the English word was used to soften Manny up and indicate the importance of this request.

  “I would prefer not to…” Manny said in Tchanchzka.

  The monk raised his arm, exposing about five inches of shriveled loose skin under his forearm and exercising his authority in as mellow a fashion as possible. The other monks were now hovering near enough to hear the conversation.

  “Please,” the monk whispered again, his scratchy voice struggling to enunciate each syllable.

  Manny saw the hopeful looks on the other monks’ drooping, leathery South Asian faces and could resist the request no more. “Did you adjust the administrator privileges and enable lava script 8.0 to access the legacy proliferation default?” He may have gotten some of the words wrong when translating from English to Tchanchzka.

  The monk’s facial expression didn’t change, but his body language did, slouching inward. The other monks looked at each other, some of them shrugging their shoulders in confusion, none of them able to make sense of Manny’s question. “Can you help us with that?” the head monk asked in Tchanchzka.

  “I’m sorry. I prefer not to use computers. I’m not sure it is such a good idea for the orphanage.”

  “We need help. You can help.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The monk looked at Manny. “There is a prince in Algeria who wants to send the orphanage $25 billion if we can help him escape political persecution. All I have to do is set up a safe FTP transfer zone.”

  “He is not going to send you money,” Manny said, trying hard to not sound patronizing. Old Manny would have been much more dismissive of their naïve acceptance of such a worn out scam.

  “What do you mean?” the monk asked. “I have received electronic mail from the prince every day for the last week.”

  “It’s a scam,” Manny said, clutching his tea in both hands and sipping slowly, then peering into the hot drink to avoid eye contact with the monks.

  “What’s a scam?”

  Manny looked up from his tea. They were not going away, he surmised. He put down his clay mug, took a deep, thoughtful breath, and proceeded to give the monks a quick history of Internet scams from phishing emails to penis enlargement pills, balance bracelets, starving babies who need help, and fake exiled princes looking to send you money. The monks listened. Still their expressions remain fixed. After Manny finished, the monk who approached Manny got up from the table and walked away with an even slower step than when he arrived. The rest of the monks departed behind him, unified in their disappointment.

  Manny chose not to push the issue of the evil computer any further with the monks. He decided to focus on remaining free from the computer’s grip and to let the others choose on their own how to embrace this new technology. On a number of occasions, however, Manny would inadvertently get a glimpse of the screen as the kids crowded around it, usually watching movies or short videos. One particular favorite at the orphanage was a how-to video showing the preparation of a turkey stuffed with hamburger meat, duck, and pork, then wrapped in bacon, covered in chocolate, folded up within a pizza, made into a burrito, and again covered in bacon, chicken tenders, sausage, and potato chips. Of course, none of that food was available to these kids. But they now often asked Manny if he could make them a “baconizzarito meatsplosion.”

  Since the Guatemalan porn incident, the monks banned the kids from looking at obscene websites. Sometimes, however, Manny saw a monk or two before the screen not following the edict. Manny continued to not pass judgment on these monks and went about his life, but he started spending less time inside the orphanage and more time in the communal rice fields with the women of Bhutan. They laughed at his inferior rice farming ways. He found the experience both humbling and rewarding.

  The kids played less soccer than they used to, but when they did play, Manny was now very much involved as game organizer, ball fetcher, timekeeper, and coach for all the teams. He saw this as a way to accentuate the positive alternatives, and Manny was very focused on staying positive. He did not want to disparage the computer and introduce negativity into the universe.

&nbs
p; One evening, however, Manny was reminded of negativity he introduced into the universe years prior. It was a few hours past sundown when Manny was typically readying for bed, but a number of outstanding janitorial tasks kept him later than usual. As he walked into the main classroom, he saw three kids crowded around the computer. Manny instructed them to go to their bunks, and the kids scattered, leaving the computer on. Manny reached for the button to shut it off when he noticed what was on the screen. The kids had left open a number of websites. One of them was a news website.

  The large headline on the screen read: FURTL SOCIAL DEVIANTS SENTENCED TO CULTURAL EDUCATION.

  Manny tried not to process that information but failed. His interest piqued, he read the article. What he learned was nothing short of horrifying: a group of activists were arrested and thrown in some new form of jail for trying to organize a protest against the government via their furtl social network page.

  Manny slid a chair out and sat, his focus directed at the computer as he read a number of articles, each with a headline more disturbing than the last:

  RIOTS AT FURTL HQ: ARRESTS OF POLITICAL AGITATORS CONTINUE

  INTERNET REVENUE CONTINUES TO DROP AMIDST FEARS OF GOVERNMENT SNOOPING OF PURCHASES

  THIRD BRIDGE COLLAPSE THIS WEEK

  WALL TO KEEP OUT CANADIANS NEARS COMPLETION

  GDP DECLINES 9% for SECOND STRAIGHT YEAR

  USER INFORMATION FROM FURTL RESULTS IN 46 MORE DCS RAIDS ON POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS

  New Manny died where he sat. Newer Manny was now overwhelmed with anger, gripping the mouse so hard he snapped the spring on the right click button as he read what was going on in the United States; what was going on with his former company; what was going on with his former company and the US government. He mumbled to himself, “Nâa ta bpai ku nâi?” (What have I done?).

  The next morning, Manny rose from his sleeping mat earlier than usual. He did not meditate, as was his custom first thing in the morning, but instead went to the bathing hole in his hut and grabbed an old razor that was sitting on a small toiletry shelf perched tenuously over a rusty bucket of water. Manny dipped the razor, which had not been used in four years, in the cold water, peered into a cracked pocket mirror that rested on the toiletry shelf, and shaved off his beard. On the shelf was also a battered picture of Mindy. Oblivious to the blood running down his now smooth cheeks, he took the picture from the shelf, put on his one pair of jeans, his one gray T-shirt, and his sandals. He put Mindy’s picture in his pocket and left the orphanage without saying goodbye.