Damn, what did she decide to do? That was shaping up to be a really good
opener.
Which is why she wasn't surprised when he didn't come home for
three nights in a row.
Aha.
"No hard feelings, Link," Adam said. "I'm really grateful for the help
you gave us and I hope you'll think about helping again in the fall..."
But on the fourth night, she got worried, and she started
calling his friends. They were all poor students, so none of
them had land-line numbers you could look up in the phone book,
but that was okay, since they all had accounts with the video
store where she worked, with their deadbeat pre-paid mobile
numbers listed.
"Yeah, that sounds great, you know, September, it gets dark early. Just
got word that I got into Ryerson for the fall, so I'll be taking
engineering classes. Maybe I can help out that way?"
"Perfect," Alan said. Link took a step backward, drained his beer, held
out the glass.
"Well, thanks," Link said, and turned. Alan reached past him and opened
the door. There were a couple of girls there, little suburban girls of
the type that you could find by the hatful in the Market on Saturday
mornings, shopping for crazy clothes at the vintage shops. They looked
14, but might have been as old as 16 or 17 and just heartbreakingly
naive. Link looked over his shoulder and had the decency to look
slightly embarrassed as they smiled at him.
"Okay, thanks, then," he said, and one of the girls looked past him to
get a glimpse inside the house. Andy instinctively stepped aside to give
her a better view of his showroom and he was about to offer her a soda
before he caught himself.
"You've got a nice place," she said. "Look at all those books!"
Her friend said, "Have you read all those books?" She was wearing thick
concealer over her acne, but she had a round face and heart-shaped lips
that he wouldn't have been surprised to see on the cover of a
magazine. She said it with a kind of sneer.
Link said, "Are you kidding? What's the point of a houseful of books
you've already read?"
They both laughed adoringly -- if Adam was feeling uncharitable, he'd
say it was simpering, not laughing, and took off for the exciting
throngs in the Market.
Alan watched them go, with Link's empty glass in one hand and his full
glass in the other. It was hot out in the Market, sunny, and it felt
like the spring had rushed up on him and taken him by surprise when he
wasn't looking. He had owned the house for more than a year now, and the
story only had three or four paragraphs to it (and none of them were
written down yet!).
"You can't wash shit," is what her mother said when she called
home and asked what she should do about her brother. "That kid's
been a screw-up since he was five years old."
He should write the story down. He went back upstairs and sat down at
the keyboard and pecked out the sentences that had come to him, but they
seemed very sterile there aglow on the screen, in just the same way that
they'd felt restless and alive a moment before. The sunny day beamed
through the study window and put a glare up on his screen that made it
hard to type, and when he moved to the other side of the desk, he found
himself looking out the window at the city and the spring.
He checked his calendar and his watch and saw that he only had a couple
hours before the reporter from NOW magazine came by. The reporter -- a
summer intern -- was the only person to respond to his all-fluff press
release on the open network. He and Kurt had argued about the wording
all night and when he was done, he almost pitched it out, as the
editorial thrash had gutted it to the point of meaninglessness.
Oh well. The breeze made the new leaves in the trees across the street
sway, and now the sun was in his eyes, and the sentences were inert on
the screen.
He closed the lid of the laptop and grabbed his coat and left the house
as fast as he could, obscurely worried that if he didn't leave then, he
wouldn't get out all day.
#
As he got closer to Kurt's storefront, he slowed down. The crowds were
thick, laughing suburban kids and old men in buttoned-up cardigans and
fisherman's caps and subcultural tropical fish of all kinds: Goths and
punks and six kinds of ravers and hippies and so forth.
He spied Link sitting on the steps leading up to one of the above-shop
apartments, passing a cigarette to a little girl who sat between his
knees. Link didn't see him, he was laughing at something the boy behind
him said. Alan looked closer. It was Krishna, except he'd shaved his
head and was wearing a hoodie with glittering piping run along the
double seams, a kind of future-sarcastic raver jumper that looked like
it had been abandoned on the set of *Space: 1999*.
Krishna had his own little girl between *his* knees, with heart-shaped
lips and thick matte concealer over her zits. His hand lay casually on
her shoulder, and she brushed her cheek against it.
Alan felt the air whuff out of him as though he'd been punched in the
stomach, and he leaned up against the side of a fruit market, flattening
himself there. He turned his head from side to side, expecting to see
Mimi, and wanting to rush out and shield her from the sight, but she was
nowhere to be seen, and anyway, what business was it of his?
And then he spied Natalie, standing at the other end of the street,
holding on to the handles of one of the show bicycles out front of Bikes
on Wheels. She was watching her brother closely, with narrowed eyes.
It was her fault, in some way. Or at least she thought it
was. She'd caught him looking at Internet porn and laughed at
him, humiliating him, telling him he should get out and find a
girl whose last name wasn't "Jpeg."
He saw that her hands were clenched into fists and realized that his
were, too.
It was her fault in some way, because she'd seen the kind of
person he was hanging out with and she hadn't done a thing about
it.
He moved into the crowd and waded through it, up the street on the
opposite side from his neighbors. He closed in on Natalie and ended up
right in front of her before she noticed he was there.
"Oh!" she said, and blushed hard. She'd been growing out her hair for a
couple months and it was long enough to clip a couple of barrettes
to. With the hair, she looked less skinny, a little older, a little less
vulnerable. She tugged at a hank of it absently. "Hi."
"We going to do anything about that?" he said, jerking his head toward
the steps. Krishna had his hand down the little girl's top now, cupping
her breast, then laughing when she slapped it away.
She shrugged, bit her lip. She shook her head angrily. "None of my
business. None of *your* business."
She looked at her feet. "Look, there's a thing I've been meaning to tell
you. I don't think I can keep on volunteering at the shop, okay? I've
got stuff to do, assignments, and I'm taking some extra shifts at the
store --"
He held up a hand. "I'm grateful for all the work you've done,
Natalie. You don't need to apologize."
"Okay," she said. She looked indecisively around, then seemed to make up
her mind and she hugged him hard. "Take care of yourself, okay?"
It struck him as funny. "I can take care of myself just fine, don't
worry about me for a second. You still looking for fashion work? I think
Tropicál will be hiring for the summer. I could put in that phone-call."
"No," she said. "No, that's okay." She looked over his shoulder and her
eyes widened. He turned around and saw that Krishna and Link had spotted
them, and that Krishna was whispering something in Link's ear that was
making Link grin nastily.
"I should go," she said. Krishna's hand was still down the little girl's
top, and he jiggled her breast at Alan.
#
The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-cropped
micro-dreads, and an attitude.
"So here's what I don't get. You've got the Market wired --"
"Unwired," Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as many
minutes. Alan shot him a dirty look.
"Unwired, right." The kid made little inverted commas with his
fingertips, miming, *Yes, that is a very cute jargon you've invented,
dork.* "You've got the Market unwired and you're going to connect up
your network with the big interchange down on Front Street."
"Well, *eventually*," Alan said. The story was too complicated. Front
Street, the Market, open networks...it had no focus, it wasn't a
complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He'd tried to
explain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she'd
been totally lost.
"Eventually?" The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He
claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an
intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who'd
been volunteering in the shopfront when he'd appeared.
"That's the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free
connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers
and incidental environmental interference." Alan steepled his fingers
and tried to look serious and committed.
"Okay, that's the goal."
"But it's not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community
a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in
the network is as important as providing the network itself -- hell, the
network *is* people. So we've got this intermediate step, this way that
everyone can pitch in."
"And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?"