GoKawiil“Wanna see a dead body?” Milo asks from the back seat. The 5 is a white blade under the Valley sun, everything bleached flat, overexposed as we fly toward Fry’s Electronics. It’s 1999. The Acura’s sweating leather sticks to my thighs. My skin feels amphibian, a tween-age Geico gecko blinking too hard, raw in the new light of too much consciousness.
Even at eleven, Milo likes to pull out provocations sourced from some dark aquifer on the internet not yet known to me. Unlike Milo, I don’t have a PC in my bedroom. But we’re on our way to fix that.
Now Milo pivots, unzipping his backpack like a schoolyard dealer to flash two CD jewel cases. Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe (1998): an X carved into his gristly forehead flesh, chrome flames across the plastic. Busta Rhymes’s Extinction Level Event (1998): a world on fire, his mouth mid-detonation. “Which one?” he asks.
I don’t answer, reluctant to admit I know neither. Noah, my brother, at the wheel, picks Busta in the rearview.
“If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more),” Busta belts.
I, too, am eleven. A child of a recent bicoastal divorce, spending the summer in the Pacific Palisades, being driven to Fry’s to assemble my first desktop PC—my twenty-three-year-old brother’s gift in the key of fraternal benevolence, pedagogical duty, and Californian techno-optimism. A deal struck with my dad: if we can build it, I can keep it in my room.
Milo—my surf-tanned, platinum-blond, Point Dume–living, feral best friend with an Insane Clown Posse fixation and a household parrot that mimics his mother’s laugh—is along for the ride. He’s beautiful and hectic. I want to live in his house. I want to live in his brain, his skin. I’m high on his confidence the way only a young girl without much of her own can be. So yes, sure: I want to see a dead body.
We pull into the parking lot. Fry’s is a postmodern cathedral dressed up as a computer store, its facade impaled by a crashed UFO, the aisles flanked by gargantuan fiberglass ants—making us feel like we are in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) but shot in Valley glare, catching the reflecting sun of an out-of-reach Hollywood. We move through motherboards, mice, and surge protectors, with Busta—“Gimme some more”—still looping in my head.
Back home, in my specifically Betsey Johnson pink-and-green-inspired bedroom, we drink sun tea, clear Beanie Babies from the desk. We slot in the motherboard, attach the fan. Noah, our IT magus, presides. We wait for the Windows start-up chime to ring out. The tower blinks alive. It’s wholesome enough, with something even like holiness in the air. The light shifts. The internet opens its putrid maw. We are off to see the bodies.
We riffle through the mail pail and find an AOL-installation CD. The dial-up crackles as sound ricochets off the gates of the internet underworld. A rush of cold air lifts the muslin drapes and raises the downy hair on our too-tanned summertime prepubescent flesh.
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