Free The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei Page B

perfect grade point average and even studied philosophy and cultural theory and film. She told me she made out with Slavoj Žižek. See?”
    “Who?”
    Now there are two things I need to say about what I just said, first being that it’s not true, she never said she made out with Slavoj Žižek, she said to me that she had met him once and I understood by the look in her eye when she said it that she meant she had maybe slept with him or thought about it. And two, I know that HR Lady has absolutely no idea who Slavoj Žižek is, has probably never heard of postmodern post-Lacanian post-French Slovenian cultural theory, probably could not find Ljubljana on Google Maps.
    “Who?” she says.
    “This semi-Eurotrashy intellectual guy from NYU, it’s not important, I’m just saying, she’s a very smart girl, it’s possible she’s a computer hacker or knows someone who is.”
    I could tell that HR Lady was thinking I was a little paranoid. And, true, if you asked me to describe myself in a word or phrase I would probably say “a little paranoid.”
    “Maybe you’re being a little paranoid,” she finally says.
    “I’m not! She as much as admitted it!” I say. “Why don’t we get Tan to look into it?” Tan is one of our IT guys. He’s autistic, or rather he has Asperger’s syndrome, so he’s able to hold down a job but can’t really figure out the whole human interaction thing. He likes to talk to himself in the elevator, which is strange if you’re the only one in it with him and you think he’s talking to you. People are freaked by him and some of the younger guys had begun to call him “Cho” after that Asian dude who shot everybody up at Virginia Tech. To counter their perception and prejudice I made some posters and buttons that said TAN IS THE NEW BEIGE™ and put them around. I love the man. He’s from Cambodia, his parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge. I do think he’s capable of walking in here with an AK-47 and shooting the place to bits and killing us all but, first of all, so am I, and second of all, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
    “Why don’t we get Tan to look into it?” I say again.
    “Yes, if you think so,” replies HR Lady. Then she gets up and walks out. I sit there for a minute and then I go to Faco and drink three glasses of Sancerre. Then I go to Uniqlo and buy a hoodie because the temperature is dropping.
    When I get back to the office I locate Tan and ask him if he could tell if someone had hacked into my e-mail. He says he most definitely was going to be there but it was raining and so he had to take the subway. I wave my hand in front of his faceand then he says he could look at the log-ins. He goes onto some kind of odd-looking site, a back door into the Entourage servers that Microsoft provides for admins. He scrolls through lots of rows of numbers that I take to be the times and file sizes and so on of my e-mail. He keeps shaking his head.
    “What’s wrong?” I ask him.
    “The way they configured this is all screwy! It’s crazy!” he says in his accent. Then he dives into a diatribe about Bill (he means Gates) and Nathan (Myhrvold, the former Microsoft CTO) and how they had de-something-somethinged the preferences folder in 2002 and should never have upgraded the server-side admin features without talking to the Linux side. Then he looks deeper into the information and is reading the exact IP addresses of the people who sent me e-mail and the computers from which I checked it. It was kind of like watching your doctor stare at your X-rays while going
“hmmmm.”
    “What is it?”
    “You use your phone for e-mail?” he is asking me.
    “Yes.”
    “And you have BlackBerry?”
    “Yeah but I hate it and don’t use it. Mostly iPhone.”
    “And you have a home computer with no fixed IP and your work computer. Any other computers?
    “No.”
    “You didn’t check your e-mail from, like, a friend’s computer, or a computer at a library? Or the Apple