by Jim Nisbet
“I remember Malvina’s,” Klinger said. “Over there in North Beach. Next to Washington Square.”
“Jim was talking about the old Malvina’s,” the waitress told him. “On Union at Grant. Before it moved to Washington Square.”
“Is it still there?”
“Beats me,” she said. “I live in Bernal Heights.”
“What about the poet guy?”
“Deader than a letter to Santa,” she said. “The sauce got him.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“We had our fun.” She gathered up Klinger’s empty plate with her free hand. “Then I threw him out. Anything else?”
Frankie looked as if he were about to manage a shrug, but the gesture eluded him.
“I think that’s it,” Klinger told her. “Let’s have a check.”
“You got it.”
Klinger watched her walk away.
“Yeah …” Frankie’s eyes were barely open, and he smacked his lips once in a while, ever so slightly.
Klinger folded his hands on the Formica and waited. Not two minutes later, the check came. The total was $9.87, in return for which Klinger had more food in his belly than any day in recent memory. Plus, he’d been taking up real estate for two and a half hours. He laid a ten and two ones on the tray. “Keep it.” Eleven dollars and sixty-nine cents entered the ruled ledger of his mind.
“Appreciate it,” the waitress said. If she noticed that Klinger’s table-mate was on the nod, she made not a sign. Instead, once more, she showed Klinger the coffee pot. Klinger lifted both hands off the laminate and made them flutter. The waitress smiled and went away with the coffee and twelve bucks.
After fiddling with his cup for a few minutes Klinger got bored watching his host convincingly imitate a man catching forty winks in Business First. Plus, Klinger’s ass was getting sore from abusing the Naugahyde. Not to get uppity, for he was as simultaneously sated and warm as he’d been in weeks, if not months. Finally, he asked Frankie how long he’d been out.
Frankie frowned slightly. “About two weeks,” he said, not bothering to open his eyes.
Klinger kept his voice down. “How the hell did you get a habit going in two weeks?”
Frankie smiled vaguely. “Who said I ever lost it?”
Oh, Klinger reminded himself, of course.
“Besides,” Frankie added, allowing the hint of a frown to flit across his brow, “do I look like I gotta habit?”
For the first time in weeks, Klinger laughed without rancor.
Frankie opened his eyes a little wider. “Lemme tell you something about a habit.”
Klinger made no response. He was going to hear about it whether he wanted to or not.
“As a musician once told me,” Frankie said, “any time you see a sixteenth note? Or a whole row of them? And you gotta habit?” Frankie sailed the flat of his hand over the table. “Every one of them sixteenth notes looks like a half note.”
“A half note,” Klinger repeated.
“And you,” Frankie said, “got allllll day,” he floated the hand back over the table, “to play every one of them just right.”
“That’s …” Klinger pursed his lips, “persuasive.”
Even with the shades between them, Klinger could see Frankie’s eyelids flutter. It reminded him of the reflection of the revolving blades of a ceiling fan on the surface of his drink just … Was that yesterday?
“But,” Klinger said, “you’re not a musician.”
“But,” Frankie said, raising an admonitory if languid forefinger, “I am an artist.”
“Ah ha,” Klinger said. “I’d forgotten.”
“Pay attention,” Frankie suggested. Once again his hand sailed over the Formica, toward the window and beyond where a dog, as Klinger now noticed, crouched to defecate on the sidewalk, as its mistress patiently watched.
“I regard the teeming boulevard …” Frankie stopped. After a moment he said, “Where was I?”
“The teeming boulevard,” Klinger prompted him. “You are an artist.”
Again Frankie sailed the hand over the Formica. “… To and fro march the marks …” Frankie smiled. “Each and every one a half note.”
“And you got allllll day,” Klinger smiled, “to play them just right.”
“Not all of them. By no means all of them.” Frankie redeployed the forefinger. “Just the one. The exact right one.”
“You’re an artist,” Klinger had to agree.
Frankie did not dissemble.
Klinger sat back against his side of the booth and fingered his cup of coffee. If Frankie noticed a pause, awkward or otherwise, he manifested no sign. I’m sick of drinking coffee, Klinger thought to himself, that’s for sure. He glanced up. The clock on the wall above the entry door told him it was one-fifteen. This clock, too, had Chinese numerals. What the hell’s with the Chinese numerals? A notice posted beside the clock announced opening time at six a.m. and closing time at two p.m. A notice posted on the other side of the clock announced the San Francisco Minimum Wage as $9.79 per hour.
Klinger’s eyes fell until they found the waitress, who was behind the sit-down counter making a fresh pot of coffee.
“I’ll bet you’re thirsty,” Frankie announced, as if reading Klinger’s mind.
“Yes,” Klinger admitted. “I’m about as caffeinated as I can stand.” He lay the flat of his palm on the lower-left corner of his stomach. Though masked by satiety, the twinge lurked. “It’s time to take the edge off.”
“Let’s go,” Frankie said, without betraying the impulse to act on his own suggestion.
Klinger got to his feet.
“We’ll take a cab to North Beach,” Frankie said, still not getting up, his eyes slits. “Get you something to drink.”
“Talk about your perfectly executed half notes,” Klinger said. “But it seems fair to mention that I’m just about tapped.”
Frankie opened his hand over the Formica, and a twenty-dollar bill, folded twice, fell out of it. “Be my guest.” Klinger marveled at the twenty. Frankie stood out of the booth. “Taxi and drinks, on me.”
Klinger shook his head. “Two weeks?”
No comment accompanied Frankie’s fey gesture. Gaining the sidewalk, Frankie said, “Jesus Christ,” and reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket.
“You already got them on,” Klinger told him.
Frankie touched the hinge of his sunglasses with the other hand. “Oh.”
The dog was tied to the parking meter nearest the corner. Seeing Klinger, it stood up and wagged its tail. Klinger offered him the backs of his fingertips. The dog licked them with barely a sniff, redoubling the oscillations of its tail. Klinger ruffled its ears. “Somebody’s glad to see me.”
“A little doggie every day,” its owner said, as she dropped a bag of waste into a trash can beyond the parking meter, “is all a body needs.”
“Yeah,” Klinger murmured, as a taxi magically pulled to the curb. With not so much as a backwards glance at the woman or her dog, Frankie opened the curbside door and slid across the back seat. “Broadway and Columbus,” he told the cabbie. “C’mon, man,” he said to the open door.
“What’s his name?” Klinger asked the owner.
“Douglas Englebart, Jr.,” she told him.
“The—.” Klinger frowned. “Who?”
“He’s named for Douglas Englebart.”
The dog sat down and looked expectantly up at his mistress. “I don’t—,” Klinger began.
“Sure you do.” The woman fed the dog a biscuit. “He invented the mouse.”
“The mouse?” Klinger repeated stupidly.
Frankie was chuckling, but at or with what or whom, it would have been difficult to say.
The woman made a squeezing motion with her free hand. “Point and click? Englebart,” she laughed, “can you point and click?” The dog wagged its tail.
“Englebart,” Klinger told the dog. The dog looked at Klinger. “I’ll see you later.” The dog turned its head. �
�Won’t I see you later?” The dog furrowed its brow and turned its head the other way.
“He’s hip to the interrogative tone,” the woman said, “but he has no idea what you’re asking.”
Klinger nodded thoughtfully.
“Let’s go!” Frankie said.
SEVEN
“The problem with this app,” said the voice in the phone, “is that its memory footprint imposes conflicts in cache. Period.”
Phone clasped to his right ear, Phillip Wong twirled fettuccine onto the fork in his left hand, its tines held against the curvature of the spoon in his right hand. “You’re blaming my app for an out-of-date hardware fault,” he protested. “That shit flies on the dual core.” He filled his mouth with pasta puttanesca.
In the audio background, Enrico Caruso was shedding a fugitive tear. “Phil Phil Phil,” the phone chided. “Do you have any idea of the ratio of dual-core owners versus every other goddamn phone on the market?”
“That’s not my problem, Marci.” Phillip dropped the spoon, took the phone to hand and glanced at the screen. At that moment, for some reason, he recalled a hod carrier he’d noticed on a construction site a couple of weeks back, stacking cinderblocks with a phone clenched between ear and shoulder. They’ll have to build a special coffin for that guy, Phillip had thought at the time, with a dogleg toward the top. If I couldn’t afford out-call shiatsu, I’d be courting a similar fate. He reparked the phone on his opposite shoulder and took up the fork. “Besides, it’s nine fucking thirty. Can’t this wait till tomorrow?”
“In two and a half hours, Phillip,” Marci pointed out, “it will be tomorrow.”
“Fuck, Marci,” Phillip whined, “this is the first hot meal I’ve had in, in …” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a hot meal. He inserted a figure anyway. “… Two weeks.”
“Show me where it says you are allowed hot meals,” Marci said.
Phillip failed to dignify this quip with a laugh or an answer.
“More to the point,” Marci continued, “does your hotass phone have a debugger and a compiler?”
Phillip dropped the fork, downed the second half of his Sangiovese, and waved the empty glass at the wait-staff. “No,” Phillip told the phone, “but it did steer me to an empty table in a North Beach Italian restaurant on a Thursday night.”
“That’s a good app,” Marci pointed out. “Too bad you didn’t write it.”
Not for nothing, Phillip cursed to himself, did somebody make this chick Vice President of Compliance. “True,” he managed to retort despite a mouthful of pasta. “I use it every time I’m allowed to eat off-site.”
His phone groaned. “What’s that?”
“I just sent you a pdf of a monograph on software architectures for real-time caching—nonconflicting real-time caching. It’s a little theoretical and there’s some math, but you can probably apply its wisdom to a patch for your code in time for a demo on Sunday morning.”
“Sunday morning?” Phillip nearly screamed. The waiter appeared with the bottle and poured Phillip’s glass half full. Phillip gestured. The waiter frowned. Phillip gestured again. Without missing a beat, the waiter retrieved a second glass from a setup on the adjacent table, filled that one half full, inclined his head slightly, and went away. Phillip downed half the first half-glass. “Sunday morning …” he repeated, a little more calmly.
“It took all the persuasion this girl could muster to get them to bump it from Saturday night. I bought you twelve hours.”
“Twelve hours,” Phillip repeated numbly.
“Aren’t you going to thank me?”
“I’m …” Phillip toasted the air in front of him. “Pulverized with gratitude.”
“Mere gratitude will get you nowhere,” Marci pounced. “What I need is results. What I need is code that doesn’t crash. What I need is the Phillip I went to college with, the Phillip who was too shy to sleep with me, the Phillip who wrote the code that caused our class robot to chain-saw MIT’s robot in half and, when the contest committee disassembled our code, the first thing they discovered was seventeen bytes in the credit header that spelled out I Marci Kessler, including the extravagant three spaces, and the second thing they found out was that there wasn’t an unoriginal thought in the whole twenty-five thousand instructions.”
“But Marci,” Phillip protested, “that was a robot. This is a fucking secondary app for a lonely hearts site designed to filter out date-rape potential.”
“So?”
Phillip downed the second half of the first half-glass, set the empty down on the table next to him, and picked up the second half-glass. “So robots are not people,” he pointed out.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Marci screamed. If they’d been video-conferencing, Marci could have seen Phillip shrug as he switched the phone to his other ear and downed the first half of the second half-glass of wine. “What it’s got to do with, Marci,” he said as he lowered the glass, “is cache. People algorithms need bigger caches than robot algorithms.” He burped. “It’s—excuse me—that simple.”
He could hear Marci taking a deep breath. “Phillip,” she finally said. “How much is Corazonics paying you?”
“You know damn well how much you’re paying me,” Phillip told the phone. “To the penny.”
“That’s right, Phillip. To the penny. But I want to hear it from you.”
“A hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour,” Phillip said wearily. And it used to be worth it, he annotated to himself.
“That’s right,” Marci told him. “How often do you bill?”
“Every two weeks.”
“And the last invoice?”
“Well I’m glad you brought that up, Marci,” Phillip said, assuming the role of aggressor. He took a look at the screen of his phone and paged past the newly arrived pdf along with several recent text and voice messages until he’d accessed his cloud-based consultancy spreadsheet: “$18,375.”
Despite her considerable crust, Marci gasped. “A tidy sum,” she finally managed to point out.
“I earned every fucking cent of it,” Phillip said evenly. “Do you know how much of my life that bill represents?”
“I’m sure it’s on the invoice,” Marci hedged.
“One hundred and forty-seven hours,” Phillip told her. “Two seven-day weeks of ten-and-a-half-hour days. And just in case forty thousand lines of C-plus-plus don’t verify that I was at least near the job if not on it, your brand-new and totally insulting electronic pass-key system will. I was on the job and on the case—compiling, debugging, running … On fumes, I might add, though I would stipulate they were high-octane fumes. As a matter of fact, Marci, I’ve been noticing something lately.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Marci said quickly. A little too quickly.
“Well, Marci,” Phillip said calmly, “I’m not changing the subject. Not really.”
“Phillip …”
“When we got into this deal,” Phillip interrupted, “I was promised equity.”
“And when there is some goddamn equity,” Marci came back, “you’ll be the first to know.”
Phillip took a beat. He looked at his pasta. Without even tasting it, he knew it had gone as cold as the untouched salad. Cold as the heart on the other end of the phone. Too cold for nourishment. Now he said, as if offhandedly, “I been hearing about an IPO.”
Marci said nothing.
“Marci?”
“Phillip?”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“I-P-O.”
“That’d be sweet,” she hedged.
“Especially if we had something written down.”
Silence.
“My bad, of course,” Phillip said simply. “For not getting something in writing, I mean.”
More silence.
“My badder,” Phillip continued, still with the calm voice, “for trusting you.”
Silence.
“Know how I found out about it?�
��
No response.
“It’s written on the back of the door of the second stall in the 27th-floor men’s restroom. That’s how.”
Silence.
“Talk about your sit-down blog.”
Silence.
“Huh, Marci?”
Silence.
“What’s the deal, here? You know and I know that programmers don’t come much better than me, and the ones that do, you can’t afford. They’re all contractually locked up—and the key to that lock is equity. As if you didn’t know. So I ask myself, Self, what’s with all this pressure? This deal sucks. All I do is work, my work’s never sufficient or good enough, there’s always more to do than any one single programmer can do, and, for the last few months, it’s always been about stupid modules that have little or nothing to do with our original mission statement, which is, get this app up and running and selling, take it public, cash out, and get on to the next thing. Am I right?”
After a long pause, Marci sighed and said, “That was the deal. It still is.”
“How many partners are there again?”
“You know the answer to that as well as I do.”
“You, Steve, Vikram, Bill, Mary P., Mary Y. Is that all of them?”
As if reluctantly, Marci filled in a blank with, “You forgot Steve’s father.”
“Ah yes. The seed money. I guess you’re not going to shaft him.” After a pause, Phillip repeated the statement as a question. “I guess you’re not going to shaft Steve’s father?”
More silence.
“Marci?” he said incredulously.
“Yes, Phillip?” came the chilly response.
Game over, Phillip said to himself. Phillip turned the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. The tablecloth beneath began to twist. One fucking year. He turned the stem the other way. The cloth untwisted. If only it were so simple. Times like these, he said to himself, it’s best not to be drinking so much. He lifted the glass and downed half of it. Or not at all, he added, setting the glass back on the table. If you don’t watch your own back, he reflected bitterly, nobody’s going to watch it for you. Not even your own son.
Maybe especially not even your own son.
“Phillip …” Marci began tentatively.