Excerpt:

“Hi. I’m Ed. I’ll be interviewing you for the permanent position. If you’ll walk this way.” Ed turned and a brilliant gleam of light ricocheted off his craggy clown nose. I followed his muffin top as it bent to the task of walking and I did well by not mocking his bow-legged and unique pronation. Turning, I managed a small ‘wish me luck’ wave to Nita then followed Ed down a long hallway to a rather ancient set of stairs that emptied into an outer, unkempt courtyard. The sky was threatening rain and the flowers looked as if they were in dire need of the moisture. It smelled like someone was burning their lunch next door. Ed paid no mind to the beauty that surrounded us, having passed this way everyday. He continued his march into a narrow alleyway and through a door that led to the basement of the building.

I tried some conversation…“Your office is in the basement?’

“I prefer keeping my distance from the rest of the staff. Besides, I need space for my experiments.”

“Like animating the dead?”

“That’s pretty funny. What did you say your name was again?”
“Dio.”

“Right this way, Dio.”

The hallway ended at the threshold of a huge empty room where the only furniture was a desk overfilled with monitors and computer intestines, tucked into the far corner, and as Ed walked toward this distant point, his feet reverberated around the walls and his figure grew smaller, until he stopped at the desk and sat in one of the small chairs that strained under his geek gut. Over Ed’s head was the lone decorative touch, a poster of a famous Bosch scene, boats made out of fish parts, prostrate saints, hybrid devil animals, fires and upheaval—hung dorm-room style, with no frame and no bottom tacks.

Ed mistook my disapproval for interest, asking, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Do you know it?”

“Bosch’s tribute to the patron saint of lost things.”

“And lost people.” Ed snickered and looked me over. He’d mastered his look thirty years before, and then ran with it, never looking back. Mid-fifties with scant strands of brown hair that somehow managed to smother his moon face. He wore a pearl earring in one ear and if I had to guess, I would say that he had a tiny rat tail that sat limp between the butt cheeks of his sweaty neck. He motioned me to sit in the other chair next to a giant walled mirror. Knowing that two-way mirrors are used in this line of work, I kept one eye on Ed at the controls, and one eye on the mirror, hoping that I might see through it.

I said, “Is there a studio audience back there?”

“No, we’re alone.” He finished his Mountain Dew, crumpled the can in his fist and tossed it at the trash. It ricocheted off the lip of the can. I can’t say I wasn’t surprised that Ed, the slob, didn’t recycle. But it did seem strange that as a self-proclaimed “founder” of the internet, he did not see the value in something as simple as a blue bin for his crap soda cans.

“So,” he began, “What brought you here to us?”