by Kevin Shay
Rafael has overheard this. “Aw, dude, is that a Lincoln Vance party? I love that dude’s parties. I want to go.”
“Sorry,” Paige says.
“She used to bring me to those,” Rafael tells me. “What’s he got that I haven’t got?” he asks Graham.
“Guitars. I keep telling you, dude,” Graham says, “we gotta get guitars.”
chapter 16
393
Days
Paige meets me on the corner in front of Lincoln Vance’s palatial apartment building, right across the street from Central Park.
“Hey, you.”
“Hey, Paige. You look nice.” Stunning, actually. First time I’ve seen her in anything other than casual attire. Beneath her long suede coat she’s effortlessly beautiful in a blood-red dress, with subtle but effective makeup, hair done in an elaborate braid. I spot a slight resemblance to her mother that I didn’t notice before, although I doubt Frances still has all her original facial features.
Paige takes a drag of her cigarette. “Just let me finish this, then we’ll go in.”
“Sure.”
“Randall, one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Remember I told you once I was engaged to a kid in high school?”
“Uh-huh.”
She looks at the wall. “Um, Rafael was the kid.”
“OK.”
“I thought you should know.”
“OK.”
“Also, I hooked up with Graham last year. Briefly, very briefly.”
“OK.”
“It’s not all as incestuous as it probably sounds. I just didn’t want it to come up later at a bad time or anything.” She bites her lip guiltily. Afraid I might be upset, when instead I’m elated. A girl doesn’t suddenly blurt out things like that for no reason. Unless my instincts are uncalibrated from long disuse, those are precoital confessions.
“OK. Thanks. Anyone else?”
“No, that’s it for the time being. You want to go up?”
We give our names to the doorman, who tells the elevator man to take us to the twelfth floor.
“Good thing the blood came off this jacket.”
“What blood? Oh, when your brother-in-law tried to kill you.”
“Yep. But give him some credit, he had it cleaned and pressed.”
“Was there much blood?”
“Nah. Few sprinkles.”
The elevator man, a consummate pro, doesn’t bat an eye at this discussion as he levers us smoothly upward.
“This should be fun,” Paige says. “I think you’ll like Lincoln.” Lincoln Vance, often called the man who invented the Internet, knew Paige’s father in their Silicon Valley days. The details are over my head, but he wrote some paper, or developed some protocol, that’s pretty much the cornerstone of the whole ball of wax. Wish I could pick his brain about Y2K, but I don’t want to bring it up in front of Paige.
So here’s what a seminal protocol buys you: a penthouse apartment on Central Park West. Paige raps twice on the door with an ornate cast-iron knocker. Two seconds later an impeccably groomed fellow in a gold vest and wingtips opens the door and leads us down a hallway lined with mahogany bookshelves, to the living room.
And what a living room. Lincoln Vance may have made his money in the electronic age, but he’s spent it on exquisite objects from before the Depression. A glass chandelier hangs from the high ceiling. A pianist noodles loungily at a baby grand. And you hardly notice any of it, because of the view. The park in panorama right below us, close enough to touch, and a glittering skyline beyond.
“Wow. This is incredible.” I hand the man—caterer? butler?—my coat, help Paige off with hers.
“Paige!” Our host’s voice resonates through the room. Lincoln Vance lumbers bearishly up to us, a tuxedoed Santa Claus, and folds her in a perilous hug, scrubbing her forehead with his beard.
“Hi, Lincoln. Merry Christmas.”
“And who’s your fortunate beau?”
“This is Randall.”
“Randall Knight,” I say, noting that she didn’t correct his assumption.
“Randall, Lincoln Vance.”
“Pleasure to meet you. You have an amazing apartment.”
“Thank you, thank you. And you have an amazing young lady.”
“Heh. Well, we’re not quite—”
“Of course, I’ve known this girl since she was in diapers.”
“He loves to say that.” Paige puts her arm around him. “Every time he introduces me to someone, diapers this and diapers that. Randall, I want you to keep a running total of how many times he mentions diapers tonight. So what’re we drinkin’, Lincoln?”
Eggnog, of course. The real stuff, cream and butter and yolks, and laced with rum that won’t hit your bloodstream for hours. Mugs in hand, we’re introduced to Lincoln’s wife. Not, Paige told me earlier, the one he was with in the California era. This one’s easily thirty years his junior. Her polite glazed eyes as we speak say she’s sized me up and decided there’s no need to retain me in her memory bank.
We hit the food table to fuel up on toast points. I look around at the revelers, mostly in Lincoln’s age group but a few sons and daughters around our age. All aglow with the holiday spirit, sometimes called Bacardi. A sort of native flavoring.
“How long ago did Lincoln leave California?” I ask Paige. “I want to say fifteen years? He grew up here, though. On, like, the Lower East Side. Pretty poor, too.”
“Rags to riches.”
“No joke. Remind me to invent the Internet in my next lifetime.”
We stare out the picture window at Central Park, sipping our nog. The piano player has segued into “Winter Wonderland.”
“So this is that New York City place they keep talking about,” I say.
Paige takes my hand.
Making his rounds, Lincoln chooses this moment to rotate over to us.
“Paige, how’s your father doing? I haven’t spoken to him in months.”
Hands released. “He’s doing well. He’s advising a startup company.”
“Oh, yeah—wireless networking, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
“Has to keep his hand in, right? I got over that myself, but I know the feeling.”
“Well, you have more laurels to rest on, Lincoln.”
“Pssh. And you, Randall? What’s your line of work?”
“I’m a music teacher, mostly.”
“Fantastic! Whereabouts?”
“Sort of between schools right now.”
“Oh, I see. Well, hey, you came to the right party.” He sweeps the room with his eyes, pointing furtively at various people. “Trustee, trustee, major donor, board of directors, trustee. You want boys, girls, or coed?”
“I, um—”
Paige jumps in. “Hey, Lincoln. Randall’s been telling me about this Y2K problem. Do you think he’s right to be worried?”
My stomach flips over at the unexpected mention of the subject, and also because I’m afraid of his answer. Lincoln Vance Gets It, he must—he invented the Internet, for God’s sake. If anyone’s in a position to understand our fatal reliance on interconnected machines that are due to fail, it’s this guy.
“Nah,” he says.
“No?” I say.
“Nah. Oh, sure, you’ll have computers blowing out left and right. But I don’t think it’ll cause any problems you’d notice if you weren’t looking for ’em.” He grins. “I imagine you’ll be one of the ones looking for ’em.”
“But, Mr. Vance—”
“Lincoln.”
“Lincoln, do you mean you think it’s all hype?”
“Of course not! It’s a huge snafu. Most of the money they’re throwing at it is money well spent. But come a little closer and I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret about software.” He leans toward us in mock secrecy. “Only about eighty percent of it even works in the first place. And that eighty percent only works eighty percent of the time. And why? B
ecause that seems to be all we need to muddle through. Oh, there are exceptions—your space shuttle computers, your missile launch computers. But when I hear someone talking about how some record company, some…ad agency needs to fix its ‘mission-critical’ software! Don’t make me laugh. So if you look at it the right way, not as all these life-or-death bugs that either get fixed or don’t but as eighty percent maybe going down to seventy percent for a month or two, that might help you sleep a little easier.”
“But listen, Lincoln, what gets me is that so many of the people who are most concerned, the biggest pessimists, are experienced programmers.”
He throws back his head and laughs.
“Programmers. Randall, let me ask you. You ever spend much time with programmers?”
“I guess not, no.”
“Didn’t think so. Sure, if you want to know what a piece of code will do or how to fix it if it breaks, take it to a geek. But you want to know whether it matters if it breaks? The last people you want to ask are the programmers. For one thing, the computer nerds of North America are not exactly a wellspring of wisdom about how the world at large operates, you know? But that aside, think about this. Say you ask a bunch of people to rank the importance of various problems that face us. If you ask a fireman, don’t you think fire might show up a little too high on his list?”
“Firemen—”
“Peter!” Lincoln waves at a new arrival behind us. “Excuse me, guys, have to play host.” And off he goes.
“That was interesting,” I say, blinking.
“He’s a character.”
“Thanks for asking him about it.”
“Yeah, I could tell you were sort of dying to bring it up.”
“You want another eggnog?”
“I’m gonna switch to wine.”
“Me too. This is a lot to digest.”
After the party we end up at Paige’s place, a third-floor apartment a couple of blocks above East Houston. Decent size, or would be if not for the stacks of painted canvases that dominate the living room. “Sorry about all this shit,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to get a storage space.”
“Nice place.” The steam pipes are going full blast, hissing and clanking, and we quickly take off our coats. I look for a place to hang mine.
“Oh, throw that anywhere. No, let me take it.”
I start to hand her the coat but instead give her a small experimental kiss. She smiles, then kisses me in earnest. I notice we’ve both dropped our outerwear to the floor. She presses her hips and stomach against me but doesn’t pull me toward her, just rests her arms lightly around my neck. I put one hand on the small of her back, clutching silk, and the other on a shoulder. When, after a couple of tongue-filled minutes, my hands converge on the zipper of her dress, she pulls away, entwines her fingers in mine, and leads me into the bedroom.
A tidy room not much bigger than the bed, which is covered with a fluffy forest-green comforter. Paige pulls off her shoes, unzips her dress, lets it fall to the floor, steps out of it, and starts to roll down her stockings. I think of the drive from Texas, stolen glimpses of a few inches of those ankles when she’d cross her legs in the passenger seat. Now the legs in their entirety are laid bare before me, slender and a little awkward, knees adorably knobby—
“Well?” Paige says, and I realize I haven’t lifted a finger to remove my own clothes. Hannah was big on the undress-your-partner thing, and I’ve forgotten it’s not a universal practice. I kick off my loafers, unbutton my shirt, pause for kissing, and ultimately make it down to underclothes, so we’re on equal footing. Paige sits on the bed and pulls me down to join her.
It’s after the bedside lamp is off and we’re roaming up and down each other under the comforter that FlockWatcher flickers into my mind.
Not the man himself—I can’t even remember his face—but his writings, vivid spiteful phrases emblazoned in typewriter font on the LCD of my mind’s eye.
fortunately, you won’t be around much longer to spout your polly gibberish. Good riddance. ROFL ROFL
Stop that. Concentrate on bra removal. Tiny hooks. Faint smell of wine on her breath as her lips move to my neck.
not saying I WANT them to die, butthead, I’m saying that because of their own inaction they DESERVE to die
I drowned his computer—is this his revenge? Paige inserts an inquisitive hand through the fly of my boxers.
and most likely WILL die. See the difference, moron?
Shut up, shut up. Her touch is playful but firm, her fingers dexterous and callused.
some advice for city dwellers—or shall we refer to them as “corpses-in-waiting”?
“You OK?”
“Just hot. Can we take this thing off?”
Comforter shoved to the floor, then back in action. God, she’s eager, making these amazing soft purring noises and I’ve barely begun to do anything.
the pollies’ platitudes will serve them well when they and their families are lapping water from a rusty hubcap
No, no. Unbelievable, I’m losing it. A perfect nipple in my mouth, my hands kneading an ass I’ve dreamed about for a week, and all I can think is
If you live within 5 miles of a 7–11, you’re toast.
“Am I doing something wrong?”
“No. Not at all. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
She redoubles her efforts.
you’re toast
Enough. Get the fuck out of my head. Have to think about something else, anything but that madman. There was a man and he was mad. Doggerel, maybe that’ll work. How does it go?
There was a man and he was mad
And he jumped into the pudding bag
The pudding bag it was so fine
He jumped into a bottle of wine
“Ooh, that’s better.”
The bottle of wine it was so clear
He jumped into a bottle of beer
The bottle of beer it was so thick
He jumped into a walking stick
With every couplet, FlockWatcher’s words recede.
The walking stick it was so narrow
He jumped into a wheelbarrow
Whispering a prayer of thanks to Pete Seeger, I find my way back to the here and now, where Paige is waiting.
chapter 17
392
Days
But it’s out there.
I wake up soaked with sweat, reality crashing in on me.
It’s all true.
Two A.M., Paige asleep facedown next to me in an oversized T-shirt, her side of the sheet kicked away.
It all comes flooding back, every incontrovertible statistic and inexorable prediction I’ve seen since the beginning.
I’ve been distracting myself into a fool’s paradise. Drawing pictures, destroying computers. Willful oblivion.
“This is suicide,” I say softly. Paige stirs.
And I guess I knew all along that that’s what it was, had simply managed to stop caring. Because I’d written off my loved ones one by one and had nobody left to fear for. But now there’s her.
I have to save her, have to save myself for her sake. Which means I have to know. To know the worst.
I get up, trying not to shake the bed, and put on my pants and shoes.
“Randall?”
“Hey. Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just gonna run to the store. Be right back.”
“Mm-hm.” She rolls onto her side, pulls the pillow under her cheek.
Don’t worry. I’ll save us.
I let myself out quietly, go down the stairs and out the front door. Still quite a few people out and about on the streets of Alphabet City, leaving the bars. Deathtrap, deathtrap. Young faces, pink-cheeked from the cold, breathing steam, smiling, in the last year of their lives and don’t even know it, corpses-in-waiting and can’t be told.
Let’s see, which block was it on? Ah, over there. Kinko’s. Its round-the-clock fluorescence beckonin
g me inside.
“Why did I know I’d find you here?”
“Hi, Paige.”
She sits down next to me in front of the computer, hands in the pockets of her down jacket. “You said you’d be back soon.”
“Has it been long?”
“Randall, what exactly is going on?”
“This is an interesting article.” I tap the screen. “These guys have calculated an eighty-seven percent chance of the collapse of modern civilization.”
“God, Randall, I wish you could hear yourself.”
“Their math is pretty convincing.”
“I’m sure.”
“Pret-ty convincing.”
“Why don’t you shut that off and come back to the apartment?”
Paige puts her hand on my knee. I flinch, pull my leg away. Don’t touch me, the world is ending.
“I can’t right now.”
“Randall, talk to me. What happened? I thought you were sort of not doing this anymore. Can you look at me instead of at the computer? Thank you.”
Her face is hot with anger, hurt, confusion. Doesn’t understand I’m doing this for her. “I know you want to help me, Paige. But it’s not about me. If you could just let me show you some information—”
“Didn’t you hear anything Lincoln said?”
“Lincoln, yeah. No offense, but he’s retired, right? He’s not on the front lines anymore, of course he doesn’t see how bad things have gotten.”
“So you were just, what, pretending to be normal, until you got me to—”
“No! I was—Look, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is, I want us to get out of here. I was hoping maybe at some point soon we could head back to your aunt and uncle’s place.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Or go without me. But you should really think about a plan for getting out of the city.”
“Shit, Randall.” She stands up. “I really do not need this right now. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.”