The Starving Years

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “You got a phone on you?” Randy said.

  “No. We weren’t supposed to bring one to the job fair.”

  “And you actually left yours at home? What’d you think, they were gonna frisk us at the door? I’ll bet you believe in Santa Claus, too. Or the Tooth Fairy. That’s who I need. The Tooth Fairy.”

  Marianne emerged from the bathroom in her stocking feet. “My mom and dad are probably worried sick about me. They never wanted me to move to New York.” She perched on the arm of the recliner as she was too keyed up to actually sit in it. “They said it was too dangerous. I thought they were just being overprotective, and if I stayed away from crackhouses and dark alleys they’d have nothing to worry about.”

  “Don’t worry,” Randy said. “By the time they hear about whatever’s going on, this whole thing’ll be over and done with and you can tell ’em yourself.”

  Javier only half-listened to the two of them. As much as he wanted to convince himself that the real Tim Foster, an actual flesh-and-blood human being, had nothing to do with the image he’d conjured in his own imagination, he still felt compelled to find some detail, however small, that would prove his attraction hadn’t been entirely off-base.

  But the apartment was small, and dingy, and except for the sprawling homemade computer system, devoid of any sort of personal touches. Though he hadn’t seen the whole apartment, yet. There was still…the bedroom.

  Javier glanced at the closed door. Tim was in the bedroom. With Nelson.

  Marianne and Randy began arguing about how phone lines worked, but their voices dwindled, shut out by the rushing in Javier’s ears. Maybe he’d had it all wrong. Maybe Tim hadn’t seemed cold because Javier had gotten his expectations overinflated.

  Maybe Tim had seen Nelson kissing him in the back of the truck.

  ***

  It would have been more efficient to snap a picture: Nelson, face partially exposed by the wadded sheet, hair splayed on Tim’s pillow. Tim didn’t do it, of course. It would have been creepy. But he wanted to.

  Tim would need to settle for etching to his memory the curve Nelson’s throat made where his Adam’s apple dipped when he swallowed in his sleep, the eyelash fringe, the faint dusting of freckles high on his cheekbone.

  How many shots did we do? The memory of Nelson asking him that replayed, over and over, like a sound bite. Did Nelson actually see Tim as someone he would “do shots” with? Maybe drinking wasn’t as overrated as Tim had always assumed it was.

  Voices rose and fell through the closed door, which made Tim more acutely aware that he and Nelson were most certainly not alone. Though if they were…he would never have worn such a conservative shirt. He’d always pictured Nelson as more of a computer techie, like himself. Never mind that it wasn’t even Nelson he’d been chatting with all along, but Javier, who was even less like Tim had pictured him. But if he’d known he was about to meet someone who managed to look cool even in a torn button-down shirt and tie, he would have worn something different. He glanced into his cramped closet. He wasn’t sure what, exactly. Suddenly everything he owned looked like it came with a matching pocket protector.

  The black shirt, maybe. His last boyfriend, Phil (or was it two boyfriends ago? Sometimes they blended together. Whoever it was) had said it made him look pasty. But guys like Nelson wouldn’t let some conservative guy’s opinion stop them from wearing black.

  Tim glanced back at the bed. Nelson rolled, hugging one of the pillows. The borrowed sweatpants rode low on his hips. It felt entirely wrong to stare. And yet….

  More tattoos. Symbols trailed down the crest of Nelson’s hipbone. Tim felt like his suddenly-ugly shirt was strangling him.

  The impulse to change his clothes was too strong to resist—and if anyone asked…well, why should they ask why he’d changed? Why would they care? It was Tim’s apartment. He was well within his rights to change his shirt without being interrogated for it. He began to pull off the shirt he was currently wearing (horrible thing—he couldn’t even imagine why he’d ever bought it) and as he did, the bedroom door opened.

  Javier.

  Tim acted as if he’d just been straightening his collar. “What?” It came out a lot more defensively than he’d meant it to. He could hear as much even over the pounding of his own heart.

  “These people,” Javier said, “I didn’t plan to bring them.”

  Tim nodded, fairly sure he looked fully clothed and normal.

  Javier added, “I couldn’t just leave them behind.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Javier’s eyes went to the bed, to Nelson curled on his side, clinging to the pillow. “Good. I’m glad you see it that way. As soon as things die down, we’ll get them to leave.”

  “We can’t just…throw them out on the street.”

  “Once it’s safe,” Javier reiterated.

  “Well…right.”

  Javier took a step closer. Tim did his best not to stare at the eye patch, but between avoiding that, and avoiding looking at Nelson, and attempting to look like he hadn’t just been stripping out of his shirt, it seemed like there was nowhere he could actually look or stand or act without coming off like a freak. Javier dropped his voice low, and said, “You won’t let a little delay change your mind about posting the exposé, will you?”

  “No,” Tim stuttered, “I mean, yeah…I mean…I didn’t really get anything very newsworthy back there. A few photos. And they’re nothing special. They just look like a clump of people. Nobody I talked to actually knew what was going on.”

  Javier looked Tim in the face for a long moment with his single eye, and then he stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled something out: a USB flash drive.

  “What’s that?”

  “You said with the right cookies, you could get into a company’s mainframe. Right?”

  “Y-yeah.” Tim’s heart began to pound, really pound, harder than it had when he’d nearly been caught shirtless.

  “Well, here it is. All the temporary Internet folders—and the whole document folder, too. Right from the laptop of an HR rep.” Javier held up the tiny drive and allowed Tim to take it from him. It was small enough to conceal in the palm of his hand, and still warm from Javier’s pocket. Only its implications were so profound, it seemed as if it should have been able to burn right through Tim’s flesh and bone, and leave a smoking hole behind.

  “This is serious stuff,” Tim said. His voice shook. “You could get into real trouble for this.”

  “What good does it do to blog that a riot took place if we can’t prove what it’s about or why it happened?”

  Tim turned the flash drive around in his hand. “Even if I can hack in…I wouldn’t know where to start looking.”

  “In the warehouse.”

  Tim narrowed his eyes. “Why there?”

  “The Leftists showed up at the job fair just like we expected, didn’t they? Let’s figure out what they were protesting. I was told Canaan corporate was covering up something in the warehouse. I’m sure you can find out what it is.”

  Despite the insanity of the day, and despite Nelson Oliver tangled in his clean sheets, Tim was seized by the urge to plug in that drive and dig through those cookies. He’d never perused the database of a company where he wasn’t on the payroll, and the thought of it was actually rather…thrilling. “I can’t believe you actually did it. What would happen if they’d caught you?”

  “It was no problem. The lights went off and no one was paying attention to the laptops.”

  “My God.” Tim squeezed the memory stick—not too hard—and wondered if Javier would consider sending Randy and Marianne off to find a dentist so he could start sifting through its data. The ability to make a remote computer accept an old session ID was all he needed to get his foot in the door…and he had a script for that.

  Chapter 8

  Tim squeezed out of the bedroom. There was nowhere to walk, nowhere to even stand comfortably. Randy had the recliner open so far it was practically
horizontal. He lay still beneath the plastic bag of veg-o-mix, which sagged, mostly thawed, to cover the top half of his face. Javier followed and planted himself by the window with no view. Marianne was engrossed in the Internet. Tim hoped she didn’t notice how fast the connection was, or if she did, that she’d chalk it up to a quirk of the telecom system.

  “Voice of Reason still hasn’t updated,” she said. She sounded genuinely concerned.

  Javier went to her side and placed a hand on the back of her chair. “I’m sure it’s nothing. They…probably can’t get online. That’s all.”

  Marianne pressed her head against his arm. “I wish I was home.” She gave a sheepish look over her shoulder. “No offense, Tim. I totally owe you one for getting me away from the crazies. But right now I want to crawl into bed, pull my covers up over my head, and pretend today was just a really messed-up dream.”

  Tim wished she was home, too. Especially now that he had a flash drive that was practically screaming to be looked at.

  Marianne pushed back from the computer and rubbed her eyes. “Do you have anything to drink—water, even? I feel all shaky and nauseated.”

  “Oh. Uh, right.” He maneuvered around Randy, slipped behind the kitchen island and took stock of his supplies. Most of his stored manna was in the upper cabinets, where the mice were less likely to get to his stockpile. Marianne wouldn’t be able to reach it, Randy didn’t seem to have any interest in rifling through Tim’s things beyond the medicine cabinet, and Javier wouldn’t be surprised to know Tim had stocked up for emergencies.

  Though right now, in the face of an actual riot, he felt anything but ready.

  What if it had been a bomb? A chemical attack? Water was a really great idea—and coffee, even better. Tim felt shaky and nauseated himself, and making coffee would give him something useful to do with his hands. He opened a lower cabinet. Two mugs. One tumbler. He used to have two tumblers, but his ex had shattered one on the floor to make a point when they broke up. Jackass.

  He dragged out his coffee press and cleared a space for it on the countertop. Caffeine was probably the last thing they needed now, but it was something to do that wouldn’t incriminate him as the Voice of Reason.

  “Is that real coffee?” Marianne asked.

  “It is.”

  “Wow. How long have you been brewing your own?”

  “A few years now. It’s a lot fresher than the stuff you get at a restaurant.”

  “In Colombia,” Javier told her, “near the plantations, the coffee is so fresh you can smell them roasting the beans. It’s so rich you feel like you can drink the air.”

  “Are you Colombian?”

  Tim paused with a carafe full of water hovering over the stovetop to hear the answer. Javier needed to think about the question, he noticed. Or at least think about how he cared to answer it.

  “I’ve done some traveling.”

  “Is it all retro in South America,” Randy asked from under the veg-o-mix, “with cows and chickens roaming around and coconuts falling from the trees?”

  “Not like you see in old movies. No.”

  “But it’s the rise of leisure time,” Randy said sarcastically. “The biggest thing since the Industrial Revolution. Aren’t all the natives dancing around and being all cultural and stuff because they’re not stuck scratching out a living from the land?”

  “Not anywhere I’ve been.”

  Where exactly had he been? He’d never mentioned his travels while they were in the chatroom, and it would have been interesting stuff. Tim had never visited anywhere but the biggest tourist traps: Disneyworld, Vegas, Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls. His parents weren’t particularly creative.

  Javier caught Tim watching him and quickly looked away.

  Tim wanted to be annoyed with Javier, but kept forgetting because he was so damn interesting—and really, wasn’t that what had first drawn Tim to him to begin with? If only he’d mentioned the thing about his eye….

  Javier looked up again, saw Tim was still considering him, and turned away to browse a stack of books beside the door.

  If only.

  Marianne joined Tim behind the counter, drawing his attention from Javier. “Do you do a lot of cooking, too? Your kitchen seems so small—smaller than mine, even.”

  “No, no cooking. Just coffee. It…helps me stay awake when I’m working on projects.”

  Javier sat in the computer chair and began typing. The incriminating chat was gone, and the history was clear. He’d have no way of knowing Tim had revisited their last online rendezvous to blow off some steam. Still, the thought of someone else working on his computer made Tim feel edgy. He reminded himself, as he showed Marianne how to measure the ground coffee into the press, that just last night he’d been dying to have Javier in that very spot—sitting in his chair, touching his keyboard.

  And that, on some level, it did feel kind of right.

  “Pour in the hot water…there you go…and now put this lid on to keep it warm while it steeps.”

  Marianne scowled at the press. “That’s all?”

  “Well, you push this thing down to shove the grounds out of the way when you’re done.”

  “Yeah, but I mean…you soak it in boiling water? That’s it? That’s what they charge you for at a restaurant?”

  “They charge you for the overhead,” Randy interjected. “Rent, heat, staff, advertising. Same as anything else.”

  Marianne stood on her tiptoes and looked down at the plunger as if it might give her some clue.

  “The coffee’s not totally cheap,” Tim said. “It’s imported.”

  “Shipping,” Randy said. “More overhead. And all of it’s marked up, every step of the way. People don’t realize how the economics break down.” He shifted the plastic bag so he could peek out from underneath it. “Then they get mad when they realize that ninety percent of the cost of a product is in the overhead.”

  Tim put Marianne’s hand on the press, and his hand on top of hers. “Push down. Like this, ’til you feel the resistance. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I can’t believe they charge two dollars a cup and get away with it.”

  “Coffee demystified,” Randy said. “Now your innocence is destroyed.”

  “Ha ha.”

  Tim lined up the two coffee cups and the glass on the counter. “I only have these. We’ll need to drink it in shifts.”

  “None for me,” Randy said. “I’ll probably end up swallowing my damn tooth.”

  That makes life marginally easier. Tim began pouring into the nearest cup—the glass tumbler. It obligingly shattered, spraying glass and hot coffee over the side of the counter.

  “Sonofa—”

  “Don’t.” Marianne tried to stop Tim from making a grab for a shard of glass that was teetering on the edge of the countertop, but she was too late. He hissed and jerked his hand back.

  Marianne took his hand gently and unfurled his fingers to expose the cut. “Not too deep. Why don’t you go, uh,” she seemed to recall there were only two chairs, “relax. I’ll clean this up.”

  Tim lingered between the kitchen island and the rest of the room, watching. It felt surprisingly liberating to see that tumbler disappear shard by shard as she picked up the glass and threw it in the trash. One more vestigial piece of his past put to rest.

  He glanced down at his hand. The tiny cut was already closing. He felt resilient, for a change.

  Marianne found the broom, not difficult to do as it was leaning against the wall, and started sweeping up the wet glass. “Did the Voice of Reason update yet?” she asked.

  Javier glanced at Tim—was that a smile? Almost—and made a show of navigating to the webpage. “Not yet.” He typed a few lines in a text editor, then gestured for Tim to come take a look with a subtle nod.

  Tim approached and read over his shoulder: If you update your site, she’ll stop hovering around your computer. Javier waited just a moment, then selected the text and hit the delete key, stood up, and wen
t to the window.

  “Does that window open?” he asked.

  Why? Tim did his best not to sound suspicious. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll take my coffee on the fire escape. I can use the air.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Randy stood and dropped the damp bag of veg on the arm of the recliner. “I’m getting stir-crazy.”

  Right. Jam four strangers in to his house and see how he’d like it. Randy opened the window and climbed out. “You go ahead,” Tim told Marianne. “I only have two mugs.”

  She looked at him with such pity it was almost comical. “But….”

  “You’re the guest. Go on.”

  Randy was barely halfway out when he spotted someone on a neighboring fire escape and yelled, “Hey, what’s going on? You speak English?” He pulled his head back in and motioned for Javier to join him. “C’mere, we can get the scoop from those Puerto Ricans across the way.”

  And then, just as suddenly as Tim’s solitary existence was invaded by this horde of strangers, he found himself standing beside his computer, alone. Well…mostly alone. He could hear Randy and Javier outside—Javier yelling in Spanish to the next building over.

  Tim sat down at the computer and tried to see if anyone had pulled up anything they shouldn’t have, but an empty browser window faced him. Nothing more incriminating than that. He pulled up an HTML file and began typing it in Text Edit, and over the snap of his fingers flying across the keyboard, more Spanish carried through the closed window. He had no idea what it meant—everyone always sounded pissed-off and urgent in Spanish.

  It sounded good on Javier.

  Bowery riot makes Broadway impassable from Bleecker to 4th. Phone lines down. Canaan Products recruitment fair in the Pamoda Building—coincidence?

  Ending with a question was good—it was vague enough to deflect a potential libel suit, if anyone at Canaan Public Relations ever decided the Voice of Reason was a bigger threat than the psycho left-wingers who lay in wait to ambush the company’s senior partners and fling buckets of algae at them to protest sanitation violations at the upstate plant. Violations that turned out to be a total fabrication, in fact. Some jilted factory drone blew the whistle on his boss. His boss, it turned out, had committed the crime of poor judgment. She’d had an affair with the whistle-blower, thought better of it, and finally opted to go back to her husband. The allegations had made Canaan look bad—for maybe half a day. Until every last test came back well within recommended range. Bacteria, mold, heavy metals, even pesticides. All Mr. Algae had accomplished in the end was making his fellow protesters look like a bunch of deranged freaks.