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When I understood all this, I was elated, hysterical with happiness, and began to shout, “I found it! I found it!” over and over again. And I kept shouting even after Mara Margolies’s face, startled to find me so insane, rose over the top of our partition. Because the world suddenly felt right agai…

And so began a period that lasted just two weeks, but that now (visible to me only as I look back, and only after allowing myself to remember Ethan Levin and everything that happened) is a time I see as a gate, a suddenly opened door that introduced me to the real pleasures of the programming life:…

He went in, sat down, looked at the screen. The debugger was still running, the cursor steadily blinking. Waiting for him: suspended in the exact place he’d left it, unchanged. Here he could never disappoint; here he’d never have to feel worthless, unable to love; here there was no one and nothing …

She’s waiting for him to say it’s okay, to embrace her, say he loves her, they’ll work it out. He can feel her desire like a rope tugging on him. It would make her so happy. But he can’t make her happy. All he can think is that, on paper, he should be ready for this. He’s thirty-four. He has a good…

How long had they been at it, Ethan wondered? He was by now lying on his mattress on the floor, one arm flung over his eyes, the neighbor’s stereo crashing, and for the first time he tried to imagine the whole course of their affair. While he was at work worrying over click-and-drag: Were they neck…