nd then there was the time that The Unknown actually won a major writing award, and were invited to read at Brown University, and war actually broke out Kosovo, and the server went down, all within a period of two weeks. At first I suspected that something was up with Brian. He had a surprising reaction to the news of my engagement to Marla (he growled deeply and then broke an IBM Thinkpad in half, liquid crystal spilling all over knees), and though I knew that Marla would be no party to a romantic relationship with our network coordinator (she’s not fickle), I had begun to suspect that perhaps something was going on of which I had no idea what, but that he was somehow trying to leverage his control of the physical server on which The Unknown was housed into some kind of marginally twisted relationship with my betrothed. This is turn caused me a great deal of anxiety, because while I know that Marla would never do anything to harm me, the inverse is in fact true: she would do anything for me, and anything for The Unknown, even if it would unknowingly injure me more than she could possibly imagine. But then I banished these thoughts, for Brian is a happily married man, and a truly nice guy. I phoned Brian and he told me the network outage had something to do with a router. Or 5 routers, rather, sending packets back and forth and never to readers. Then I thought on it, and I began to suspect a conspiracy at the University of Cincinnati; one that was going on beyond even Brian’s control. The motive was there, clearly: while they’re good people, the University of Cincinnati Board of Trustees has a healthy representation of the Cincinnati corporate community. We had ripped on Chiquita, we had ripped on Procter and Gamble, we had even ripped on the Cincinnati Enquirer, we had done all this on The Unknown. It was only logical. They had placed a mole into the network, there was some kind of corporate Gordon Liddy type wandering the building, some spook who had been assigned the duty of destroying The Unknown by whatever means necessary. Then I realized that none of those people would ever get caught dead reading a hypertext novel. Vollman? Leyner? And then the obvious which had eluded me became most clear. The timing of these events need to be taken into consideration. The network started to get fucked on the evening of March 30—Passover, and continued through April 4—Easter. Clearly, God was fucking with us. So in the end, as usual, Dirk, the would-be messiah, was ultimately to blame. Then Brian spent some time in a mosque, Scott took in a gospel choir at a Baptist church on the South Side, Dirk performed a briste at a synogogue, and William meditated for 47 hours straight. Katie said she thought we had gone over the deep end, but she went to confession nonetheless, anyway it worked, and soon everything was as it was before again.

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