He was down on all fours, his ass stuck way up in the air, when Perry came through the door. He looked back through his ankles and squinted at the upside-down world. Perry’s expression was carefully neutral, the same upside-down as it would be right-side-up. He grunted and went down to his knees, which crackled like popcorn.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Perry remarked mildly.
“Funny man,” Lester said. “Get over here and help me up, will you?”
Perry went down in a crouch before him. There was something funny about his eye, the whole side of his head. He smelled a little sweaty and a little gamy, but the face was the one Lester knew so well. Perry held out his strong, leathery hands, and after a moment, Lester grasped them and let Perry drag him to his feet.
They stood facing one another for an uncomfortable moment, hands clasped together. Then Perry flung his arms wide and shouted, “Here I am!”
Lester laughed and embraced his old friend, not seen or heard from these last 15 years.
Lester’s workshop had a sofa where he entertained visitors and took his afternoon nap. Normally, he’d use his cane to cross from his workbench to the sofa, but seeing Perry threw him for such a loop that he completely forgot until he was a pace or two away from it and then he found himself flailing for support as his hips started to give way. Perry caught him under the shoulders and propped him up. Lester felt a rush of shame color his cheeks.
“Steady there, cowboy,” Perry said.
“Sorry, sorry,” Lester muttered.
Perry lowered him to the sofa, then looked around. “You got anything to drink? Water? I didn’t really expect the bus would take as long as it did.”
“You’re taking the bus around Burbank?” Lester said. “Christ, Perry, this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars.”
Perry looked away and shook his head. “The bus is cheaper.” Lester pursed his lips. “You got anything to drink?”
“In the fridge,” Lester said, pointing to a set of nested clay pot evaporative coolers. Perry grinned at the jury-rigged cooler and rummaged around in its mouth for a while. “Anything, you know, buzzy? Guarana? Caffeine, even?”
Lester gave an apologetic shrug. “Not me, not anymore. Nothing goes into my body without oversight by a team of very expensive nutritionists.”
“You don’t look so bad,” Perry said. “Maybe a little skinny—”
Lester cut him off. “Not bad like the people you see on TV, huh? Not bad like the dying ones.” The fatkins had overwhelmed the nation’s hospitals in successive waves of sickened disintegrating skeletons whose brittle bones and ruined joints had outstripped anyone’s ability to cope with them. The only thing that kept the crisis from boiling over entirely was the fast mortality that followed on the first symptoms—difficulty digesting, persistent stiffness. Once you couldn’t keep down high-calorie slurry, you just starved to death.
“Not like them,” Perry agreed. He had a bit of limp, Lester saw, and his old broken arm hung slightly stiff at his side.
“I’m doing OK,” Lester said. “You wouldn’t believe the medical bills, of course.”
“Don’t let Freddy know you’ve got the sickness,” Perry said. “He’d love that story—’fatkins pioneer pays the price—”
“Freddy! Man, I haven’t thought of that shitheel in—Christ, a decade, at least. Is he still alive?”
Perry shrugged. “Might be. I’d think that if he’d keeled over someone would have asked me to pitch in to charter a bus to go piss on his grave.”
Lester laughed hard, so hard he hurt his chest and had to sag back into the sofa, doing deep yoga breathing until his ribs felt better.
Perry sat down opposite him on the sofa with a bottle of Lester’s special thrice-distilled flat water in a torpedo-shaped bottle. “Suzanne?” he asked.
“Good,” Lester said. “Spends about half her time here and half on the road. Writing, still.”
“What’s she on to now?”
“Cooking, if you can believe it. Molecular gastronomy—food hackers who use centrifuges to clarify their consomme. She says she’s never eaten better. Last week it was some kid who’d written a genetic algorithm to evolve custom printable molecules that can bridge two unharmonius flavors to make them taste good together—like, what do you need to add to chocolate and sardines to make them freakin’ delicious?”
“Is there such a molecule?”
“Suzanne says there is. She said that they misted it into her face with a vaporizer while she ate a sardine on a slab of dark chocolate and it tasted better than anything she’d ever had before.”
“OK, that’s just wrong,” Perry said. The two of them were grinning at each other like fools.
Lester couldn’t believe how good it felt to be in the same room as Perry again after all these years. His old friend was much older than the last time they’d seen each other. There was a lot of grey in his short hair, and his hairline was a lot higher up his forehead. His knuckles were swollen and wrinkled, and his face had deep lines, making him look carved. He had the leathery skin of a roadside homeless person, and there were little scars all over his arms and a few on his throat.
“How’s Hilda?” Lester asked.
Perry looked away. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” he said.
“Yowch. Sorry.”
“No, that’s OK. I get email blasts from her every now and again. She’s chipper and scrappy as always. Fighting the good fight. Fatkins stuff again—same as when I met her. Funny how that fight never gets old.”
“Hardy har har,” Lester said.
“OK, we’re even,” Perry said. “One-one on the faux-pas master’s tournament.”
They chatted about inconsequetalities for a while, stories about Lester’s life as the closeted genius at Disney Labs, Perry’s life on the road, getting itinerant and seasonal work at little micro-factories.
“Don’t they recognize you?”
“Me? Naw, it’s been a long time since I got recognized. I’m just the guy, you know, he’s handy, keeps to himself. Probably going to be moving on soon. Good with money, always has a quiet suggestion for tweaking an idea to make it return a little higher on the investment.”
“That’s you, all right. All except the ’keeps to himself’ part.”
“A little older, a little wiser. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
“Thank you, Mister Twain. You and Huck been on the river a while then?”
“No Huck,” he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This wasn’t the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasn’t the same person, either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, though—gregarious Perry, always making friends. Alone.
“So, how long are you staying?”
“I’m just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning and I thought, ‘Shit, Lester’s in Burbank, I should say hello.’ But I got places to go.”
“Come on, man, stay a while. We’ve got a guest-cottage out back, a little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too.”
“Living the dream, huh?” He sounded unexpectedly bitter.
Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucks—kid-reporters she’d trained and set up in business—ran, and they never had to worry about a thing.
“Well, apart from dying. And working here.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on that he wasn’t happy at the Mouse, and the dying thing—well, Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what it had brought.
Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. “Must be hard on Suzanne.”
Now that was hitting the nail on the head. “You always were a perceptive son of a bitch.”
This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked about his health. Between the two of them, they’d popularized fatkins, sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation of the clinics in the US and Mexico.
But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it, still talking:
“—the FDA, the doctors. That’s what we pay them for. The way I see it, you’re a victim, their victim.”
Lester couldn’t say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, “Change the subject, OK?”
Perry looked down. “Sorry. I’m out of practice with people.”
“I hope you’ll stay with us,” he said, thinking I hope you leave soon and never come back.
“You miss it, huh?”
“Sometimes.”
“You said working here—”
“Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?” He snorted. “It’s like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.”
“I hate working with assholes.”
“They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it.”
“Why?”
“It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit.”
“Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent—81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
“Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus.”
“I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws.”
“Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative.”
“So what are virtues?”
“Additive, maybe. A shallower curve.”
“That’d be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements.”
“So what do you do around here all day?”
Lester blushed.
“What?”
“I’m building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble them. There’s something soothing about them. I have an Apple][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant.”
“I think I’d like to see that,” Perry said, laughing a little.
“That can be arranged,” Lester said.
They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy.
They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed.
They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still.
Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian who’d fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldn’t drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didn’t go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate.
Perry couldn’t bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarrassed by the luxury. It was too much like an invalid’s subsidy to feel excessive.
“Kap,” Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty health-food packages that he’d made of the back-seat.
Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. “Home now?” He barely had an accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar.
“No,” Lester said. “Let’s eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?”
“Ms Suzanne says—”
“We don’t need to tell her,” Lester said.
Perry spoke in a low voice, “Lester, I don’t need anything special. Don’t make yourself sick—”
“Perry, buddy, shut the fuck up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and a big-ass dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow gets old. My colon isn’t going to fall out of my asshole in terror if I send a cheeseburger down there.”
They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures of movie stars on the walls. The maitre d’ gave them a look, tilted his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill and slid it across the podium.
“We’d like Orson Welles’s table, please,” he said.
The maitre d’—an elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade beard—nodded affably. “Give me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you care to have a drink in the bar?”
They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. “Sorry,” he said to the waitress. “Just having an indecisive kind of night, I guess.”
Perry tried to figure out if Lester had been showing off with the c-note, and decided that he hadn’t been. He’d just gone native in LA, and a hundred for the maitre d’ when you’re in a hurry can’t be much for a senior exec.
Lester sipped gingerly at his beer. “I like this place,” he said, waving the bottle at the celebrity caricatures lining the walls. “It’s perfect Hollyweird kitsch. Celebrities who usually eat out in some ultra-modern place come here. They come because they’ve always come—to sit in Orson Welles’s booth.”
“How’s the food?”
“Depends on what you order. The good stuff is great. You down for steaks?”
“I’m down for whatever,” Perry said. Lester was in his medium here, letting the waiter unfold his napkin and lay it over his lap without taking any special notice of the old man.
The food was delicious, and they even got to glimpse a celebrity, though neither Perry nor Lester knew who the young woman was, nor what she was famous for. She was surrounded by children who came over from other tables seeking autographs, and more than one patron snapped a semi-subtle photo of her.
“Poor girl,” Perry said with feeling.
“It’s a career decision here. You decide to become famous because you want that kind of life. Sometimes you even kid yourself that it’ll last forever—that in thirty years, they’ll come into Musso and Frank and ask for Miss Whatshername’s table. Anyone who wants to know what stardom looks like can find out—and no one becomes a star by accident.”
“You think?” Perry said. “I mean, we we
re celebs, kind of, for a while there—”
“Are you saying that that happened by accident?”
“I never set out to get famous—”
“You took part in a national movement, Perry. You practically founded it. What did you think was going to happen—”
“You’re saying that we were just attention whores—”
“No, Perry, no. We weren’t just attention whores. We were attention whores and we built and ran cool shit. There’s nothing wrong with being an attention whore. It’s an attention economy. If you’re going to be a working stiff, you should pick a decent currency to get paid in. But you can’t sit there and tell me that it didn’t feel good, didn’t feel great to have all those people looking up to us, following us into battle, throwing themselves at us—”
Perry held up his hands. His friend was looking more alive than he had at any time since Perry had been ushered into his workshop. He sat up straight, and the old glint of mischief and good humor was in his eye.
“I surrender, buddy, you’re right.” They ordered desserts, heavy “diplomat puddings”—bread pudding made with cake and cherries, and Lester dug in, after making Perry swear not to breathe a word of it to Suzanne. He ate with such visible pleasure that Perry felt like a voyeur.
“How long did you say you were in town for?”
“I’m just passing through,” Perry said. He had only planned on maybe seeing Lester long enough for lunch or something. Now it seemed a foregone conclusion that he’d be put up in the “guest cottage.” He thought about getting back on the road. There was a little gang in Oregon that made novelty school supplies, they were always ramping up for their busy season at this time of year. They were good people to work for.
“Come on, where you got to be? Stay a week. I’ll put you on the payroll as a consultant. You can give lunch-hour talks to the R&D team, whatever you want.”
“Lester, you just got through telling me how much you hate your job—”
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