by Stephen King
“Forbes,” he said, still watching the screen. He reminded me of me at four, studying the Magic 8 Ball I’d gotten for my birthday.
“Yeah, that one. Can I have the phone for a minute?”
He handed it over rather reluctantly, and I was pretty sure I had him after all. I was glad, but I also felt a little ashamed of myself. Like a guy who’s just clonked a tame squirrel on the head when it came up to take a nut out of his hand.
I opened Safari. It was a lot more primitive than it is today, but it worked just fine. I poked Wall Street Journal into the Google search field, and after a few seconds, the front page opened up. One of the headlines read COFFEE COW ANNOUNCES CLOSINGS. I showed it to him.
He stared, then took the newspaper from the table beside the easy chair where I’d put his mail when I came in. He looked at the front page. “That isn’t here,” he said.
“Because it’s yesterday’s,” I said. I always got the mail out of his box when I came up, and the Journal was always wrapped around the other stuff and held with a rubber band. “You get it a day late. Everybody does.” And during the holiday season it came two days late, sometimes three. I didn’t need to tell him this; he grumbled about it constantly during November and December.
“This is today’s?” he asked, looking at the screen. Then, checking the date at the top: “It is!”
“Sure,” I said. “Fresh news instead of stale, right?”
“According to this, there’s a map of the closing sites. Can you show me how to get it?” He sounded positively greedy. I was a little scared. He had mentioned Scrooge and Marley; I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, using a spell he didn’t really understand to wake up the brooms.
“You can do it yourself. Just brush the screen with your finger, like this.”
I showed him. At first he brushed too hard and went too far, but he got the knack of it after that. Faster than my dad, actually. He found the right page. “Look at that,” he marveled. “Six hundred stores! You see what I was telling you about the fragility of the . . .” He trailed off, staring at the tiny map. “The south. Most of the closures are in the south. The south is a bellwether, Craig, it almost always . . . I think I need to make a call to New York. The market will be closing soon.” He started to get up. His regular phone was on the other side of the room.
“You can call from this,” I said. “It’s mostly what it’s for.” It was then, anyway. I pushed the phone icon, and the keypad appeared. “Just dial the number you want. Touch the keys with your finger.”
He looked at me, blue eyes bright beneath his shaggy white brows. “I can do that out here in the williwags?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The reception is terrific, thanks to the new tower. You’ve got four bars.”
“Bars?”
“Never mind, just make your call. I’ll leave you alone while you do it, just wave out the window when you’re—”
“No need. This won’t take long, and I don’t need privacy.”
He touched the numbers tentatively, as if he expected to set off an explosion. Then, just as tentatively, he raised the iPhone to his ear, looking at me for confirmation. I nodded encouragingly. He listened, spoke to someone (too loud at first), and then, after a short wait, to someone else. So I was right there when Mr. Harrigan sold all of his Coffee Cow stock, a transaction amounting to who knows how many thousands of dollars.
When he was finished, he figured out how to go back to the home screen. From there he opened Safari again. “Is Forbes on here?”
I checked. It wasn’t. “But if you’re looking for an article from Forbes you already know about, you can probably find it, because someone will have posted it.”
“Posted—?”
“Yeah, and if you want info about something, Safari will search for it. You just have to google it. Look.” I went over to his chair and entered Coffee Cow in the search field. The phone considered, then spewed a number of hits, including the Wall Street Journal article he’d called his broker about.
“Will you look at this,” he marveled. “It’s the Internet.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, thinking Well, duh.
“The worldwide web.”
“Yeah.”
“Which has been around how long?”
You should know this stuff, I thought. You’re a big businessman, you should know this stuff even if you’re retired, because you’re still interested.
“I don’t know exactly how long it’s been around, but people are on it all the time. My dad, my teachers, the cops . . . everyone, really.” More pointedly: “Including your companies, Mr. Harrigan.”
“Ah, but they’re not mine anymore. I do know a little, Craig, as I know a little about various television shows even though I don’t watch television. I have a tendency to skip the technology articles in my newspapers and magazines, because I have no interest. If you wanted to talk bowling alleys or film distribution networks, that would be a different matter. I keep my hand in, so to speak.”
“Yeah, but don’t you see . . . those businesses are using the technology. And if you don’t understand it . . .”
I didn’t know how to finish, at least without straying beyond the bounds of politeness, but it seemed he did. “I will be left behind. That’s what you’re saying.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Hey, you’re retired, after all.”
“But I don’t want to be considered a fool,” he said, and rather vehemently. “Do you think Chick Rafferty was surprised when I called and told him to sell Coffee Cow? Not at all, because he’s undoubtedly had half a dozen other major clients pick up the phone and tell him to do the same. Some are no doubt people with inside information. Others, though, just happen to live in New York or New Jersey and get the Journal on the day it’s published and find out that way. Unlike me, stashed away up here in God’s country.”
I again wondered why he’d come to begin with—he certainly had no relatives in town—but this didn’t seem like the time to ask.
“I may have been arrogant.” He brooded on this, then actually smiled. Which was like watching the sun break through heavy cloud cover on a cold day. “I have been arrogant.” He raised the iPhone. “I’m going to keep this after all.”
The first thing that rose to my lips was thank you, which would have been weird. I just said, “Good. I’m glad.”
He glanced at the Seth Thomas on the wall (and then, I was amused to see, checked it against the time on the iPhone). “Why don’t we just read a single chapter today, since we’ve spent so much time talking?”
“Fine with me,” I said, although I would gladly have stayed longer and read two or even three chapters. We were getting near the end of The Octopus by a guy named Frank Norris, and I was anxious to see how things turned out. It was an old-fashioned novel, but full of exciting stuff just the same.
When we finished the shortened session, I watered Mr. Harrigan’s few indoor plants. This was always my last chore of the day, and only took a few minutes. While I did it, I saw him playing with the phone, turning it on and off.
“I suppose if I’m going to use this thing, you better show me how to use it,” he said. “How to keep it from going dead, to start with. The charge is already dropping, I see.”
“You’ll be able to figure most of it out on your own,” I said. “It’s pretty easy. As for charging it, there’s a cord in the box. You just plug it into the wall. I can show you a few other things, if you—”
“Not today,” he said. “Tomorrow, perhaps.”
“Okay.”
“One more question, though. Why could I read that article about Coffee Cow, and look at that map of proposed closing sites?”
The first thing that came to mind was Hillary’s answer about climbing Mount Everest, which we had just read about in school: Because it’s there. But he might have seen that as smartass, which it sort of was. So I said, “I don’t get you.”
“Really? A bright boy like you? Think, Craig, think. I
just read something for free that people pay good money for. Even with the Journal subscription rate, which is a good deal cheaper than buying off a newsstand, I pay ninety cents or so an issue. And yet with this . . .” He held up the phone just as thousands of kids would hold theirs up at rock concerts not many years later. “Now do you understand?”
When he put it that way I sure did, but I had no answer. It sounded—
“Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” he asked, reading either my face or my mind. “Giving away useful information runs counter to everything I understand about successful business practices.”
“Maybe . . .”
“Maybe what? Give me your insights. I’m not being sarcastic. You clearly know more about this than I do, so tell me what you’re thinking.”
I was thinking about the Fryeburg Fair, where Dad and I went once or twice every October. We usually took my friend Margie, from down the road. Margie and I rode the rides, then all three of us ate doughboys and sweet sausages before Dad dragged us to look at the new tractors. To get to the equipment sheds, you had to go past the Beano tent, which was enormous. I told Mr. Harrigan about the guy out front with the microphone, telling the passing folks how you always got the first game for free.
He considered this. “A come-on? I suppose that makes a degree of sense. You’re saying you can only look at one article, maybe two or three, and then the machine . . . what? Shuts you out? Tells you if you want to play, you have to pay?”
“No,” I admitted. “I guess it’s not like the Beano tent after all, because you can look at as many as you want. At least, as far as I know.”
“But that’s crazy. Giving away a free sample is one thing, but giving away the store . . .” He snorted. “There wasn’t even an advertisement, did you notice that? And advertising is a huge income stream for newspapers and periodicals. Huge.”
He picked the phone up, stared at his reflection in the now blank screen, then put it down and peered at me with a queer, sour smile on his face.
“We may be looking at a huge mistake here, Craig, one being made by people who understand the practical aspects of a thing like this—the ramifications—no more than I do. An economic earthquake may be coming. For all I know, it’s already here. An earthquake that’s going to change how we get our information, when we get it, where we get it, and hence how we look at the world.” He paused. “And deal with it, of course.”
“You lost me,” I said.
“Look at it this way. If you get a puppy, you have to teach him to do his business outside, right?”
“Right.”
“If you had a puppy that wasn’t housebroken, would you give him a treat for shitting in the living room?”
“Course not,” I said.
He nodded. “It would be teaching him the exact opposite of what you want him to learn. And when it comes to commerce, Craig, most people are like puppies that need to be housebroken.”
I didn’t much like that concept, and don’t today—I think the punishment/reward thing says a lot about how Mr. Harrigan made his fortune—but I kept my mouth shut. I was seeing him in a new way. He was like an old explorer on a new voyage of discovery, and listening to him was fascinating. I don’t think he was really trying to teach me, either. He was learning himself, and for a guy in his mid-eighties, he was learning fast.
“Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it. Like puppies that crap on the floor, then look you in the eye, and what they’re thinking is, ‘You taught me this was all right.’ If I were the Wall Street Journal . . . or the Times . . . even the damn Reader’s Digest . . . I’d be very frightened by this gizmo.” He picked up the iPhone again; couldn’t seem to leave it alone. “It’s like a broken watermain, one spewing information instead of water. I thought it was just a phone we were talking about, but now I see . . . or begin to see . . .”
He shook his head, as if to clear it.
“Craig, what if someone with proprietary information about new drugs in development decided to put the test results out on this thing for the whole world to read? It could cost Upjohn or Unichem millions of dollars. Or suppose some disaffected person decided to spill government secrets?”
“Wouldn’t they be arrested?”
“Maybe. Probably. But once the toothpaste is out of the tube, as they say . . . i-yi-yi. Well, never mind. You better go home or you’ll be late for supper.”
“On my way.”
“Thank you again for the gift. I probably won’t use it very much, but I intend to think about it. As hard as I’m able, at least. My brains aren’t as nimble as they once were.”
“I think they’re still plenty nimble,” I said, and I wasn’t just buttering him up. Why weren’t there ads along with the news stories and YouTube videos? People would have to look at them, right? “Besides, my dad says it’s the thought that counts.”
“An aphorism more often spoken than adhered to,” he said, and when he saw my puzzled expression: “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow, Craig.”
* * *
On my walk back down the hill, kicking up clods of that year’s last snow, I thought about what he’d said: that the Internet was like a broken watermain spewing information instead of water. It was true of my dad’s laptop as well, and the computers at the school, and ones all over the country. The world, really. Although the iPhone was still so new to him he could barely figure out how to turn it on, Mr. Harrigan already understood the need to fix the broken pipe if business—as he knew it, anyway—was going to continue as it always had. I’m not sure, but I think he foresaw paywalls a year or two before the term was even coined. Certainly I didn’t know it then, no more than I knew how to get around restricted operations—what came to be known as jailbreaking. Paywalls came, but by then people had gotten used to getting stuff for free, and they resented being asked to cough up. People faced with a New York Times paywall went to a site like CNN or Huffington Post instead (usually in a huff), even though the reporting wasn’t as good. (Unless, of course, you wanted to learn about a fashion development known as “sideboob.”) Mr. Harrigan was totally right about that.
After dinner that night, once the dishes were washed and put away, my dad opened his laptop on the table. “I found something new,” he said. “It’s a site called previews.com, where you can watch coming attractions.”
“Really? Let’s see some!”
So for the next half hour, we watched movie trailers we would otherwise have had to go to a movie theater to see.
Mr. Harrigan would have torn his hair out. What little he had left.
* * *
Walking back from Mr. Harrigan’s house on that March day in 2008, I was pretty sure he was wrong about one thing. I probably won’t use it very much, he’d said, but I had noted the look on his face as he stared at the map showing the Coffee Cow closings. And how quickly he’d used his new phone to call someone in New York. (His combination lawyer and business manager, I found out later, not his broker.)
And I was correct. Mr. Harrigan used that phone plenty. He was like the old maiden aunt who takes an experimental mouthful of brandy after sixty years of abstinence and becomes a genteel alcoholic almost overnight. Before long, the iPhone was always on the table beside his favorite chair when I came up in the afternoon. God knows how many people he called, but I know he called me almost every night to ask me some question or other about his new acquisition’s capabilities. Once he said it was like an old-fashioned rolltop desk, full of small drawers and caches and cubbyholes it was easy to overlook.
He found most of the caches and cubbyholes himself (with aid from various Internet sources), but I helped him out—enabled him, you might say—at the start. When he told me he hated the prissy little xylophone that sounded off when he had an incoming call, I changed it to a snatch of Tammy Wynette, singing “Stand By Your Man.” Mr. Harrigan thought that was a hoot. I showed him how to set the phone on silent so i
t wouldn’t disturb him when he took his afternoon nap, how to set the alarm, and how to record a message for when he didn’t feel like answering. (His was a model of brevity: “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.”) He began unplugging his landline when he went for his daily snooze, and I noticed he was leaving it unplugged more and more. He sent me text messages, which ten years ago we called IMs. He took phone-photos of mushrooms in the field behind his house and sent them off via email to be identified. He kept notes in the note function, and discovered videos of his favorite country artists.
“I wasted an hour of beautiful summer daylight this morning watching George Jones videos,” he told me later on that year, with a mixture of shame and a weird kind of pride.
I asked him once why he didn’t go out and buy his own laptop. He’d be able to do all the things he’d learned to do on his phone, and on the bigger screen, he could see Porter Wagoner in all his bejeweled glory. Mr. Harrigan just shook his head and laughed. “Get thee behind me, Satan. It’s like you taught me to smoke marijuana and enjoy it, and now you’re saying, ‘If you like pot, you’ll really like heroin.’ I think not, Craig. This is enough for me.” And he patted the phone affectionately, the way you might pat a small sleeping animal. A puppy, say, that’s finally been housebroken.
* * *
We read They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in the fall of 2008, and when Mr. Harrigan called a halt early one afternoon (he said all those dance marathons were exhausting), we went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Grogan had left a plate of oatmeal cookies. Mr. Harrigan walked slowly, stumping along on his canes. I walked behind him, hoping I’d be able to catch him if he fell.
He sat with a grunt and a grimace and took one of the cookies. “Good old Edna,” he said. “I love these things, and they always get my bowels in gear. Get us each a glass of milk, will you, Craig?”
As I was getting it, the question I kept forgetting to ask him recurred. “Why did you move here, Mr. Harrigan? You could live anywhere.”