Makers

EPILOGUE

Lester was in his workshop when Perry came to see him. He had the yoga mat out and he was going through the slow exercises that his physiotherapist had assigned to him, stretching his crumbling bones and shrinking muscles, trying to keep it all together. He’d fired three physios, but Suzanne kept finding him new ones, and (because she loved him) prettier ones.

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 inconsequentalities 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.”

“She never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the story. The people who blame her — ”

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 were 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 — ”

“That’s the beauty of contracting — you don’t stick around long enough to hate it, and you never have to worry about the org chart. Come on, pal — ”

“I’ll think about it.”

Lester fell asleep on the car ride home, and Kapriel didn’t mind if Perry didn’t want to chat, so he just rolled his windows down and watched the LA lights scream past as they hit the premium lanes on the crosstown freeways, heading to Lester’s place in Topanga Canyon. When they arrived, Lester roused himself heavily, clutched his stomach, then raced for the house. Kapriel shook his head and rolled his eyes, then showed Perry to the front door and shook his hand.

In the morning, he prowled Lester and Suzanne’s place like a burglar. The guesthouse had once served as Lester’s workshop and it had the telltale leavings of a busy inventor — drawers and tubs of parts, a moldy coffee-cup in a desk-drawer, pens and toys and unread postal spam in piles. What it didn’t have was a kitchen, so Perry helped himself to the key that Lester had left him with the night before and wandered around the big house, looking for the kitchen.

It turned out to be on the second floor, a bit of weird architectural design that was characteristic of the place, which had started as a shack in the hills on several acres of land and then grown and grown as successive generations of owners had added extensions, seismic retrofitting, and new floors.

Perry found the pantries filled with high-tech MREs, each nutritionally balanced and fortified in ways calculated to make Lester as healthy as possible. Finally, he found a small cupboard clearly devoted to Suzanne’s eating, with boxes of breakfast cereal and, way in the back, a little bag of Oreos. He munched thoughtfully on the cookies while drinking more of the flat, thrice-distilled water.

He heard Lester totter into a bathroom on the floor above, and called “Good morning,” up a narrow, winding staircase.

Lester groaned back at him, a sound that Perry hadn’t heard in years, that theatrical oh-my-shit-it’s-another-day sound.

He clomped down the stairs with his cane, wearing a pair of boxer-shorts and rubber slippers. He was gaunt, the hair on his sunken chest gone wiry grey, and the skin around his torso sagged. From the neck down, he looked a hundred years old. Perry looked away.

“Morning, bro,” Lester said, and took a vacuum-sealed pouch out of a medical white box over the sink, tore it open, added purified water, and put it in the microwave. The smell was like wet cardboard in a dumpster. Perry wrinkled his nose.

“Tastes better than it smells. Or looks,” Lester said. “Very easy on the digestion. Which I need. Never let me pig out like that again, OK?”

He collapsed heavily into a stool and closed his sunken eyes. Without opening them, he said, “So, are you in?”

“Am I in?”

“You going to come on board as my consultant?”

“You were serious about that, huh?”

“Perry, they can’t fire me. If I quit, I lose my health bennies, which means I’ll be broke in a month. Which puts us at an impasse. I’m past feeling guilty about doing nothing much all day long, but that doesn’t mean I’m not bored.”

“You make it sound so attractive.”

“You got something better to do?”

“I’m in.”

Suzanne came home a week later and found them sitting up in the living room. They’d pushed all the furniture up against the walls and covered the floor with board-game boards, laid edge-to-edge or overlapping. They had tokens, cards and money from several of the games laid out around the rims of the games.

“What the blistering fuck?” she said good naturedly. Lester had told her that Perry was around, so she’d been prepared for something odd, but this was pretty amazing, even so. Lester held up a hand for silence and rolled two dice. They skittered across the floor, one of them slipping through the heating-grating.

“Three points,” Perry said. “One for not going into the grating, two for going into the grating.”

“I thought we said it was two points for not going into the grating, and one for dropping it?”

“Let’s call it 1.5 points for each.”

“Gentlemen,” Suzanne said, “I believe I asked a question? To wit, ’What the blistering fuck — ’”

“Calvinball,” Lester said. “Like in the old Calvin and Hobbes strips. The rules are, the rules can never be the same twice.”

“And you’re supposed to wear a mask,” Perry said. “But we kept stepping on the pieces.”

“No peripheral vision,” Lester said.

“Caucus race!” Perry yelled, and took a lap around the world. Lester struggled to his feet, then flopped back down.

“I disbelieve,” he said, taking up two ten-sided dice and rolling them. “87,” he said.

“Fine,” Perry said. He picked up a Battleship board and said, “B7,” and then he said, “What’s the score, anyway?”

“Orange to seven,” Lester said.

“Who’s orange?”

“You are.”

“Shit. OK, let’s take a break.”

Suzanne tried to hold in her laughter, but she couldn’t. She ended up doubled over, tears streaming down her face. When she straightened up, Lester hobbled to her and gave her a surprisingly strong welcome-home hug. He smelled like Lester, like the man she’d shared her bed with all these years.

Perry held out his hand to her and she yanked him into a long, hard hug.

“It’s good to have you back, Perry,” she said, once she’d kissed both his cheeks.

“It’s fantastic to see you, Suzanne,” he said. He was thinner than she remembered, with snow on the roof, but he was still handsome as a pirate.

“We missed you. Tell me everything you’ve been up to.”

“It’s not interesting,” he said. “Really.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

So he told them stories from the road, and they were interesting in a kind of microcosm sort of way. Stories about interesting characters he’d met, improbable meals he’d eaten, bad working conditions, memorable rides hitched.

“So that’s it?” Suzanne said. “That’s what you’ve done?”

“It’s what I do,” he said.

“And you’re happy?”

“I’m not sad,” he said.

She shook her head involuntarily. Perry stiffened.

“What’s wrong with not sad?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, Perry. I’m — ” she faltered, searched for the words. “Remember when I first met you, met both of you, in that ghost mall? You weren’t just happy, you were hysterical. Remember the Boogie-Woogie Elmos? The car they drove?”

Perry looked away. “Yeah,” he said softly. There was a hitch in his voice.

“All I’m saying is, it doesn’t have to be this way. You could — ”

“Could what?” he said. He sounded angry, but she thought that he was just upset. “I could go work for Disney, sit in a workshop all day making crap no one cares about? Be the wage-slave for the end of my days, a caged monkey for some corporate sultan’s zoo?” The phrase was Lester’s, and Suzanne knew then that Perry and Lester had been talking about it.

Lester, leaning heavily against her on the sofa (they’d pushed it back into the room, moving aside pieces of the Calvinball game), made a warning sound and gave her knee a squeeze. Aha, definitely territory they’d covered before then.

“You two have some of the finest entrepreneurial instincts I’ve ever encountered,” she said. Perry snorted.

“What’s more, I’ve never seen you happier than you were back when I first met you, making stuff for the sheer joy of it and selling it to collectors. Do you know how many collectors would pony up for an original Gibbons/Banks today? You two could just do that forever — ”

“Lester’s medical — ”

“Lester’s medical nothing. You two get together on this, you could make so much money, we could buy Lester his own hospital.” Besides, Lester won’t last long no matter what happens. She didn’t say it, but there it was. She’d come to grips with the reality years ago, when his symptoms first appeared — when all the fatkins’ symptoms began to appear. Now she could think of it without getting that hitch in her chest that she’d gotten at first. Now she could go away for a week to work on a story without weeping every night, then drying her eyes and calling Lester to make sure he was still alive.

“I’m not saying you need to do this to the exclusion of everything else, or forever — ” there is no forever for Lester “ — but you two would have to be insane not to try it. Look at this board-game thing you’ve done — ”

“Calvinball,” Perry said.

“Calvinball. Right. You were made for this. You two make each other better. Perry, let’s be honest here. You don’t have anything better to do.”

She held her breath. It had been years since she’d spoken to Perry, years since she’d had the right to say things like that to him. Once upon a time, she wouldn’t have thought twice, but now —

“Let me sleep on it,” Perry said.

Which meant no, of course. Perry didn’t sleep on things. He decided to do things. Sometimes he decided wrong, but he’d never had trouble deciding.

That night, Lester rubbed her back, the way he always did when she came back from the road, using the hand-cream she kept on her end-table. His hands had once been so strong, mechanic’s hands, stubby-fingered pistons he could drive tirelessly into the knots in her back. Now they smoothed and petted, a rub, not a massage. Every time she came home, it was gentler, somehow more loving. But she missed her massages. Sometimes she thought she should tell him not to bother anymore, but she was afraid of what it would mean to end this ritual — and how many more rituals would end in its wake.

It was the briefest backrub yet and then he slid under the covers with her. She held him for a long time, spooning him from behind, her face in the nape of his neck, kissing his collar bone the way he liked, and he moaned softly.

“I love you, Suzanne,” he said.

“What brought that on?”

“It’s just good to have you home,” he said.

“You seem to have been taking pretty good care of yourself while I was away, getting in some Perry time.”

“I took him to Musso and Frank,” he said. “I ate like a pig.”

“And you paid the price, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. For days.”

“Serves you right. That Perry is such a bad influence on my boy.”

“I’ll miss him.”

“You think he’ll go, then?”

“You know he will.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Some wounds don’t heal,” he said. “I guess.”

“I’m sure it’s not that,” Suzanne said. “He loves you. I bet this is the best week he’s had in years.”

“So why wouldn’t he want to stay?” Lester’s voice came out in the petulant near-sob she had only ever heard when he was in extreme physical pain. It was a voice she heard more and more often lately.

“Maybe he’s just afraid of himself. He’s been on the run for a long time. You have to ask yourself, what’s he running from? It seems to me that he’s spent his whole life trying to avoid having to look himself in the eye.”

Lester sighed and she squeezed him tight. “How’d we get so screwed up?”

“Oh, baby,” she said, “we’re not screwed up. We’re just people who want to do things, big things. Any time you want to make a difference, you face the possibility that you’ll, you know, make a difference. It’s a consequence of doing things with consequences.”

“Gak,” he said. “You always get so Zen-koan when you’re on the road.”

“Gives me time to reflect. Were you reading?”

“Was I reading? Suzanne, I read your posts whenever I feel lonely. It’s kind of like having you home with me.”

“You’re sweet.”

“Did you really eat sardines on sorbet toast?”

“Don’t knock it. It’s better than it sounds. Lots better.”

“You can keep it.”

“Listen to Mr Musso and Frank — boy, you’ve got no business criticizing anyone else’s food choices.”

He heaved a happy sigh. “I love you, Suzanne Church.”

“You’re a good man, Lester Banks.”

Perry met them at the breakfast table the next morning as Suzanne was fiddling with the espresso machine, steaming soy milk for her latte. He wore a pair of Lester’s sloppy drawstring pants and a t-shirt for a motorcycle shop in Kansas City that was spotted with old motor-oil stains.

“Bom dia,” he said, and chucked Lester on the shoulder. He was carrying himself with a certain stiffness, and Suzanne thought, Here it comes; he’s going to say goodbye. Perry Gibbons, you bastard.

“Morning,” Lester said, brittle and chipper.

Perry dug around on Suzanne’s non-medicated food-shelf for a while and came up with a bagel for the toaster and a jar of peanut butter. No one said anything while he dug around for the big bread knife, found the cutting board, toasted the bagel, spread peanut butter, and took a bite. Suzanne and Lester just continued to eat, in uncomfortable silence. Tell him, Suzanne urged silently. Get it over with, damn you.

“I’m in,” Perry said, around a mouthful of bagel, looking away.

Suzanne saw that he had purple bags under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept a wink all night.

“I’m staying. If you’ll have me. Let’s make some stuff.”

He put the bagel down and swallowed. He looked back at Lester and the two old comrades locked eyes for a long moment.

Lester smiled. “All right!” He danced a shuffling step, mindful of his sore hips. “All right, buddy, fuckin’ A! Yeah!”

Suzanne tried to fade then, to back out of the room and let them do their thing, but Lester caught her arm and drew her into an embrace, tugging on her arm with a strength she’d forgotten he had.

He gave her a hard kiss. “I love you, Suzanne Church,” he said. “You’re my savior.”

Perry made a happy sound behind her.

“I love you, too, Lester,” she said, squeezing his skinny, brittle back.

Lester let go of her and she turned to face Perry. Tears pricked his eyes, and she found that she was crying too. She gave him a hug, and felt the ways that his body had changed since she’d held him back in Florida, back in some forgotten time. He was thicker, but still solid, and he smelled the same. She put her lips close to his ear and whispered, “You’re a good man, Perry Gibbons.”

Lester gave his notice that morning. Though it was 8PM in Tehran when Lester called, Sammy was at his desk.

“Why are you telling me this, Lester?”

“It says in my contract that I have to give my notice to you, specifically.”

“Why the hell did I put that there?” Sammy’s voice sounded far away — not just in Iran. It sounded like he had travelled through time, too.

“Politics, I think,” he said.

“Hard to remember. Probably wanted to be sure that someone like Wiener wouldn’t convince you to quit, switch companies, and hire you again.”

“Not much risk of that now,” Lester said. “Let’s face it, Sammy, I don’t actually do anything for the company.”

“Nope. That’s right. We’re not very good at making use of people like you.”

“Nope.”

“Well, email me your paperwork and I’ll shove it around. How much notice are you supposed to give?”

“Three months’.”

“Yowch. Whatever. Just pack up and go home. Gardening leave.”

It had been two years since Lester’d had any contact with Sammy, but it was clear that running Iranian ops had mellowed him out. Harder to get into trouble with women there, anyway.

“How’s Iran treating you?”

“The Middle East operation is something else, boy. You’d like it here. The post-war towns all look like your squatter city — the craziest buildings you ever saw. They love the DiaBs though — we get the most fantastic designs through the fan channels….” He trailed off. Then, with a note of suspicion: “What are you going to do now?”

Ah. No sense in faking it. “Perry and I are going to go into business together. Making kinetic sculptures. Like the old days.”

“No way! Perry Gibbons? You two are back together? Christ, we’re all doomed.” He was laughing. “Sculptures — like that toast robot? And he wants to go into business? I thought he was some kind of Commie.”

Lester had a rush of remembrance, the emotional memory of how much he’d hated this man and everything he stood for. What had happened to him over the years that he counted this sneak, this thug, as his colleague? What had he sold when he sold out?

“Perry Gibbons,” Lester said, and drew in a breath. “Perry Gibbons is the sharpest entrepreneur I’ve ever met. He can’t help but make businesses. He’s an artist who anticipates the market a year ahead of the curve. He could be a rich man a hundred times over if he chose. Commie? Page, you’re not fit to keep his books.”

The line went quiet, the eerie silence of a net-connection with no packets routing on it. “Goodbye, Lester,” Sammy said at length.

Lester wanted to apologize. He wanted not to want to apologize. He swallowed the apology and disconnected the line.

When it was time for bed, Suzanne shut her lid and put the computer down beside the sofa. She stepped carefully around the pieces of the Calvinball game that still covered the living room floor and stepped into a pair of slippers. She slid open the back door and hit the switch for the yard’s flood-light. The last thing she wanted to do was trip into the pool.

She picked her way carefully down the flagstones that led to the workshop, where the lights burned merrily in the night. There was no moon tonight, and the stars were laid out like a bag of synthetic diamonds arrayed on a piece of black velour in a street market stall.

She peered through the window before she went around to the door, the journalist in her wanting to fix an image of the moment in her mind before she moved in and disturbed it. That was the problem with being a reporter — everything changed the instant you started reporting on it. By now, there wasn’t a person alive who didn’t know what it means to be in the presence of a reporter. She was a roving Panopticon.

The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was typing, Lester holding something out of sight.

How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan’s amusement, Kettlewell’s enrichment? The postures were identical — though their bodies had changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with wizening makeup and hair-dye.

She must have made a noise, because Lester looked up — or maybe it was just the uncanny, semi-psychic bond between an old married couple. He grinned at her like he was ten years old and she grinned back and went around to the door.

“Hello, boys,” she said. They straightened up, both of them unconsciously cradling their low backs, and she suppressed a grin. My little boys, all grown up.

“Darling!” Lester said. “Come here, have a look!”

He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her to the bench, leaning on her a little.

It was in pieces, but she could see where it was going: a pair of familiar boxy shapes, two of Lester’s mechanical computers, their cola-can registers spilling away in a long daisy-chain of worm-gears and rotating shafts. One figure was big and round-shouldered like a vintage refrigerator. The other was cockeyed, half its gears set higher than the other half. Each had a single, stark mechanical arm extended before it, and at the end of each arm was a familiar cracked and fragrant baseball glove.

Lester put a ball into one of the gloves and Perry hammered away at the keyboard. Very, very slowly, the slope-shouldered robot drew its mechanical arm back — “We used one of the open-source prosthestic plans,” Lester whispered in the tense moment. Then it lobbed a soft underhand toss to the lopsided one.

The ball arced through the air and the other bot repositioned its arm in a series of clattering jerks. It seemed to Suzanne that the ball would miss the glove and bounce off of the robot’s carapace, and she winced. Then, at the very last second, the robot repositioned its arm with one more fast jerk, and the ball fell into the pocket.

A moment later, the lopsided bot — Perry, it was Perry, that was easy to see — tossed the ball to the round-shouldered one, who was clearly her Lester, as she’d first known him. Lester-bot caught the ball with a similar series of jerks and returned the volley.

It was magic to watch the robots play their game of catch. Suzanne was mesmerized, mouth open. Lester squeezed her shoulder with uncontained excitement.

The Lester-bot lobbed one to Perry-bot, but Perry-bot flubbed the toss. The ball made a resounding gong sound as it bounced off of Perry-bot’s carapace, and Perry-bot wobbled.

Suzanne winced, but Lester and Perry both dissolved in gales of laughter. She watched the Perry-bot try to get itself re-oriented, aligning its torso to face Lester-bot and she saw that it was funny, very funny, like a particularly great cartoon.

“They do that on purpose?”

“Not exactly — but there’s no way they’re going to be perfect, so we built in a bunch of stuff that would make it funnier when it happened. It is now officially a feature, not a bug.” Perry glowed with pride.

“Isn’t it bad for them to get beaned with a baseball?” she asked as Lester carefully handed the ball to Perry-bot, who lobbed it to Lester-bot again.

“Well, yeah. But it’s kind of an artistic statement,” Perry said, looking away from them both. “About the way that friendships always wear you down, like upper and lower molars grinding away at each other.”

Lester squeezed her again. “Over time, they’ll knock each other apart.”

Tears pricked at Suzanne’s eyes. She blinked them away. “Guys, this is great.” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t care. Lester squeezed her tighter.

“Come to bed soon, hon,” she said to Lester. “I’m going away again tomorrow afternoon — New York, a restaurant opening.”

“I’ll be right up,” Lester said, and kissed the top of her head. She’d forgotten that he was that tall. He didn’t stand all the way up.

She went to bed, but she couldn’t sleep. She crossed to the window and drew back the curtain and looked out at the backyard — the scummy swimming pool she kept forgetting to do something about, the heavy grapefruit and lemon trees, the shed. Perry stood on the shed’s stoop, looking up at the night sky. She pulled the curtains around herself an instant before he looked up at her.

Their eyes met and he nodded slowly.

“Thank you,” she mouthed silently.

He blew her a kiss, stuck out a foot, and then bowed slightly over his outstretched leg.

She let the curtain fall back into place and went back to bed. Lester climbed into bed with her a few minutes later and spooned up against her back, his face buried in her neck.

She fell asleep almost instantly.

October 7th 2010