2. People who had completed the game were notoriously quiet about the later levels, and seemed bizarrely enthusiastic that the rewards for completing the game were worthwhile.
I was pretty infected with their unquestioned enthusiasm about the whole thing when the Cowtown parking lot finally began emptying out.
At around 4:30, I spotted Kurt Butler’s van as it pulled out of the lot. I followed. Kurt did not go home, nor did he go to someplace where he might acquire more of the rocks. I was surprised to find that he went to a service call at a hotel in Wolton. As nice hotels got nicer and cheap motels became aggressively cheaper, the Wolton Motor Inn had been stranded in the middle. New awnings and a fresh paint job couldn’t obscure the outdated facade, and it looked like an attached restaurant had been closed for renovations that were no longer happening. It was trying its best to be nice, but it just wasn’t.
Kurt’s van pulled around the back to what I assumed was a service entrance. I thought about following him, but that seemed too obvious.
But then a half hour passed and Kurt still hadn’t come back out. And then another half hour. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me.
I pulled around the corner, and there was Kurt “PBS Is Fake News” Butler, in the quickly darkening evening, rummaging through a heap of detritus at the back of the hotel. As soon as I was all the way around the corner, he looked up at me, at first guilty and then confused as our eyes locked and, I assumed, he recognized me. I should have stayed calm. I should have pretended like I was just witnessing a weird cable guy rummaging through a trash pile. But instead I freaked out and hit the accelerator way too hard. I wasn’t familiar with the truck. It had more kick than expected, and I was looking more at Kurt than the road. I drove into a utility pole.
Kurt, familiar with utility poles and my face, then needed to make a decision. Did he get in his van and ignore maybe the weirdest thing that had happened to him in his whole life (the Black girl he had messed with at Cowtown for overfondling his weird rocks snuck around the back of a sleazy hotel in a Nissan Frontier to witness him dumpster diving, only to then drive into a pole)? Or did he walk over to ask if I was OK and also what on earth I was doing there?
I didn’t like my odds, so as Kurt began disentangling himself from the pile of old shelves, bar stools, and wiring, I threw the Nissan in reverse. Luckily, the truck had enough horsepower to get me off the curb. Kurt was running up to me, yelling, “Hey! What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?!” I fumbled with the shifter, and then I was off, Kurt running behind me.
—
So, good news, Kurt “Very Probably Thinks the Deep State Is Out to Get Him” Butler and I did not have a physical, or even verbal, confrontation. Indeed, Kurt Butler still (thank god) knew nothing about me. I could only hope that he hadn’t gotten a look at my license plate, though I’m not sure what he’d be able to do if he did.
I drove for half an hour, taking random turns, not paying attention to where I was going, before pulling into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts to check how jacked my truck was. It was jacked enough that I spent the next hour on the phone with the rental company and my insurance company, feeling deeply incapable. But I didn’t cry and I didn’t call my mom because I’d helped lead an international movement and, damn it, I could handle a fender bender.
And then I went back to the hotel because now I knew that either:
1. Kurt Butler was doing some kind of official business in a trash pile behind a gross hotel.
Or:
2. That is where he had found the rocks.
I decided that I’d start inside because I wanted to ask a question. The check-in desk had been sprayed with stucco to make it look like stone. And yes, an Egyptian Eye of Horus had been pressed into the stucco, because it was Wolton, so of course it had.
I walked up to the check-in desk to a gray-haired man in his fifties.
“Hi, I’m sorry to trouble you about this, but have you been visited by Carson Communications recently?”
“Goddamn it, this is the last time, we are not doing anything hinky here!”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re in and out of here every week telling us that we’re up to whatever, I dunno, but we’re just a hotel. Our guests use the internet . . . when it works, which it doesn’t more often than not. I’m sick of this.”
He had a North Jersey accent, which I had discovered was different from the more Philly-inspired accents I heard day to day in Wolton. I love the accent, and I don’t mind the lack of pretense that often comes with it. Still, I was caught off guard.
“I’m sorry, I just have a friend who works for them and he said he might be here.” I thought of this lie on the fly, and I was pretty proud of it.
“Well, tell him he better not be because we’re not doing anything, and they better start solving some problems instead of accusing us of being the problem!”
“I’m sorry, this sounds really annoying. Can you tell me more about what they say is going on?”
“They say that the whole neighborhood is down because we’re using too much internet. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t times, like evenings, when, y’know, people are watching a lot of pornos. But we’ve had high speed here for twenty years and nothing’s changed. They even made me go through each room to make sure no one had hooked
