“Nah. This isn’t Canada, you don’t need to go line up for the blessing of the authorities to get anything done. Nobody cares. If they pretend to, you just give them twenty bucks and they stop. Let me go pay off Zavier and we’re out of here.”
I was not particularly reassured by either his words or the sight of Captain Wilfrid opening a bottle of Prestige. Figuring when in Rome, I did the same. Sophie followed suit, and Jesse joined us on his return. As the teenage boy undid the mooring ropes, the four of us clinked our bottles together.
“Welcome to Haiti,” Jesse said, “The land of voodoo, violence, venality, and surprisingly decent beer.”
“Why here?” I asked, as we eased our way out into the sea. “Why not Jamaica or the Caymans or something?”
“It’s not that bad. No red tape. And the reefs near the south coast are prime shipwreck territory.”
Wilfrid took over the wheel from the teenager and throttled the engine forward. Its churning roar precluded conversation as the boat surged into the bay. I turned back and watched the vast and soiled conurbation of Port- au-Prince, and the steep green hills beyond, dwindle into the distance. We passed an island the size of Manhattan, then hit the open ocean, where the slow swells were bigger than the boat and the salt wind whipped at us unceasingly.
Jesse guided us by GPS. I felt increasingly uneasy as the last hint of land disappeared, and the endless ocean surrounded us. This turquoise sea was the watery graveyard for thousands of ships, that was the whole reason Jesse was here, and this particular boat didn’t seem much more seaworthy than the lake-going vessels of the summers of my Canadian youth. This was hurricane season, too; the sky was clear, but I knew all too well that in the tropics blue sky could become brutal storm in minutes.
Beside me Sophie stared at the infinite monotony of the ocean. I could tell by her abstract fascination that she was marvelling at something I wouldn’t understand.
“What is it?” I asked anyway.
“Fractal patterns,” she said softly. “In the waves and the spray. They’re amazing.”
I watched her rapt expression and wondered, not for the first time, what it must be like to see patterns and connections everywhere, to speak the mathematical language of the universe with such instinctive fluency.
Chapter 23
I had known Jesse Ruby since we were fifteen years old. I had been the smartest kid in my high school until he transferred in and claimed that title, so at first we butted heads; but a month after we met, at his instigation, he and I smuggled sulfuric acid out of the school laboratory and used it to synthesize nitroglycerine in my garage. The resulting explosion left me deaf for three days and cemented our friendship forever.
In most respects we were opposites. I was shy, introverted, and awkward, skinny and bespectacled, a classic geek who invariably blushed and turned incoherent on the rare occasions I tried to talk to a girl. Jesse had won the genetic lottery outright: in addition to his razor-sharp mind he was tall, handsome and outgoing, a swimmer and soccer player who could charm anyone and never lacked for a girlfriend. But I was the only one in town who truly spoke his language. So he dragged me to parties and soccer matches, until the edge came off my social anxiety and I learned how to talk to strangers and even girls, as long as they weren’t too pretty; and I introduced him to Stanislaw Lem, the Descartes mathematics contest, programming languages, multiplayer video games, and the more interesting nooks of the then-burgeoning Internet.
After I got my driver’s license – I was six months older – he would often stay over at my place, and late at night we would smuggle my parents’ car out of the garage, pushing it halfway down the street in neutral before we dared start to the engine, and drift aimlessly past the deserted strip malls that defined the disaffected geography of our lives, or drive through dark country roads and corn fields to neighbouring towns, steal street signs that matched the names of girls we wanted to impress, or even venture all the way to Toronto and its 24-hour diners populated by scary big-city drifters. Despite our nocturnal anomie we graduated with near-perfect marks, because we were always competing with each other. Jesse’s senior-year computer-science project, a primitive but functional first- person shooter he wrote from scratch, got the attention of the outside world and earned him a full scholarship at MIT. I had to settle for Canada’s University of Waterloo.
There I missed him. There were plenty of other geeks around, but nobody near as fun as Jesse, and I had grown used to having a friend who could open non-geek social doors for me. When we went home for the holidays we were inseparable. I drove down to Boston at least once a term in my rusting Chevy Acadian. In May after our junior year we continued down to New York, and on our first night in the Big Apple dug my old tent out of the trunk and camped in Central Park because hotels were too expensive. The next day he made friends with two waitresses who turned out to be avant-garde theatre actresses, and that night we went to a warehouse party with them. It wasn’t until the police turned up that we realized the party-throwers had broken into the warehouse illegally. Jesse somehow escaped with the actresses in the confusion that followed; I spent the night in jail, shuddering with terror. If convicted I could have been barred from the USA forever, but the charges were stayed and all records expunged. These were the years of the dot-com boom, and no judge wanted to ruin the life of a mild-mannered white geek with a bright future who had apparently just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We talked about starting a company after college, but instead Jesse decided to go to Columbia for his doctorate, which upset me more than I was willing to admit. It was then that we finally began to drift apart some, but we were still family. I wound up working for a dot-com startup in Silicon Valley. Once I answered a 3AM knock on the door of my Oakland apartment to find him there. He had given me no warning, but I just nodded, muttered “Hey,” waved towards my fold-out couch, and staggered back to bed, as if his unexpected materialization from across the country was nothing unusual. During that visit he slept with a girl named Linda Lee who I had been crushing on for months. Eventually I forgave him.
Our encounters grew increasingly sporadic. After his folks moved to Vancouver I no longer saw him over the holidays. He soon lost interest in academia and fell into the hacker scene, that loose-knit global subculture of shady young computer experts. Ultimately he dropped out of Columbia without even getting his master’s degree.
While I toiled in the Valley, Jesse worked contract software jobs in New York, Dubai and Hong Kong, backpacked through Burma, attended Burning Man, and gave talks at hacker conferences in Russia. Once he spent a week in prison in Laos and got out just in time to fly across the Pacific and attend a clothing-optional party in Malibu. After Christmas one year I went to visit him in New York, and there, at a hacker party held in and atop a Brooklyn warehouse, he introduced me to a cute blonde girl named Sophie.
In the years since she and I had grown used to Jesse disappearing for long stretches with no explanation, only to reappear with a grin, a few colourful anecdotes that said little or nothing of substance about his life, and maybe a new tattoo. Then one day he showed up with a gorgeous Russian girl in tow, a fat cheque in his hand, and a plan to use unmanned vehicles and Sophie’s neural networks to find and recover billions of dollars’ worth of ancient treasure long sunk beneath the turquoise Caribbean.
Chapter 24
It turned out that while aboard the
“Hey, darlin’,” Jesse said, kissing her perfunctorily. “Look what followed me home. I tried to say no, but they just looked so woeful.”
Sophie and I climbed onto the
