chose the bathroom. I figured I could lift my toothbrush.
Normally, I like waking up alone. I'm used to it. Of all the civilized skills, the power of speech is the last one to drop in on me each day. After I hung up the brush, wiped the rabid-looking foam from my chin, and turned off the water, I listened gratefully to the sound of Nana snoring daintily from the bedroom. I was happy that she wasn't up and around and bombarding me with snappy chatter, but those were pretty cloggy snores. I wondered whether someone had helped her to Toby's prized pink while Toby wasn't watching.
I spit out some Listerine and looked up. My face in the mirror looked like my face. I searched it for a moment and then turned the cold water back on and splashed myself to wash away the sleep. I keep waiting for some cataclysm to change my face. No dice. The only thing that seems to change the way I look is the patient accumulation of years. No matter what happens, nothing seems to make it to the surface, any more than the dirt of Toby's life left any unscoured stains on the all-American billboard of his grin.
Feeling a little better, or at least a little cleaner, I went in and checked out the living room. It was a wreck. It looked like Grendel's lair, except that in place of the gnawed human bones Grendel and his mother scattered around after their nightly Viking shish kebab were more commonplace odds and ends: a woman's hairbrush I didn't recognize, an ashtray full of somebody else's cigarettes, and dust rats curled languidly under the furniture. I hid the hairbrush under a couch cushion, studied the lump it made, and resolved to see what was causing the other lumps at some time in the near future.
Eleanor, my ex-girlfriend, was born to tame furniture. She'd managed to keep the place presentable during our years together, but I'd given up the effort, waiting for the occasional girlfriend to drop by with a sponge and a roll of paper towels. It had been weeks since that had happened. I was definitely not next in line for the cover of
Since I had time to putter, I puttered. Wrapping a towel around my middle, I gave some more water to the birds. Birds go through a lot of water. To my surprise, I was rewarded by a grateful cheep from Hansel. At least, I thought it was Hansel. With birds, who can tell? After last night, I wasn't even sure I could tell with people. Who, for example, was Toby? Or, hitting literally closer to home, who was Nana?
I realized I was gazing dully down into the birds' watering trough, roused myself, and headed for coffee. For what seemed like several hours I leaned against the kitchen counter, averting my eyes from the landscape of my life while I waited to hear water boiling. I managed to pour the water over the grounds without fatal consequences, found a relatively clean cup, and let the whole deal drip directly into it.
The first gulp took off on all cylinders, transversed the road map of my circulatory system on two wheels in the best Le Mans fashion, and screeched across the finish line into my brain, synapses snapping to attention behind it. The second swallow brought the sun out. Well,
I woke him up, the sluggard. 'What time is it?' he mumbled.
'Rise and shine, both of you. I'll be down there in about an hour and a half, and we've got a lot to talk about.'
'You didn't call me back.' He sounded aggrieved.
'What do you think I'm doing now?'
'Last night,' he said sulkily. 'You were supposed to call me last night. Don't you know how upset we were?'
'Yeah. Sounds like you haven't closed your eyes all night.'
'We didn't until about six. Finally we took a little something. What time did you say it was?'
'Almost eleven. I'll be there between one-thirty and two.'
I could hear Saffron in the background. She sounded querulous and cranky. 'No,' Toby said. 'I'll come to you. I've got to take Saffron home anyway.' He lowered his voice. 'Champ, if I don't get her out of here, I'm going to go crazy.'
'Just don't hit her.'
'What's a poor boy to do when he's not allowed to express himself? This girl is the ditz of the century.'
'She's also your alibi.'
'She's a dream walking. How do I get to your house?' I told him and hung up. I was replacing the receiver when I suddenly felt very strongly that someone was looking at me. I turned slowly and stared into the dark, accusing screen of the computer. What the hell, I thought. It's only a machine. How complicated can it be? I drained the cup, poured another and, with an unsteady Toshiro Mifune swagger, pointed myself at the computer, reached it, and switched it on.
A whir as the fan came to life, a blink on the screen, a message: disk error or non-system disk. Balls. I'd forgotten to put anything in the drive. Well, be reasonable, it wasn't the machine's fault. I slipped the DOS diskette in and hit a key. The fan gave way to a buzzing, choking sound as the computer chewed some information off the surface of the disk, and my old nemesis shouldered its way onto the screen: A›
Okay. I'd been this far before. Unknown territory was only a keystroke away. There were twenty-six regular keys, ten numbers, a bunch of keys that said Fl and F2, up to F12, and an irregular cluster of others with labels like CTRL and SYSREQ. Surely one of them did something.
Talk to it, I thought. I typed HELLO. The word appeared on the screen. Terrific, but now what? I hit the Enter key. BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME, the screen said smugly. I growled a little in the back of my throat. HOW YOU HANGING? I typed. The words hung there, glowing greener than electric chlorophyll. I hit Enter.
BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME.
'It's not a command, you asshole,' I said. 'It's a polite greeting. You want a command, I'll give you a command.' I typed ACHTUNG! and hit Enter. The machine, like a second-rate psychoanalyst, stuck with the tried and true: BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME. It also beeped, by way of emphasis.
I was galvanized by a surge of adrenaline, my hangover burned away by twelve million volts of emotional electricity. I leaned toward the computer screen, my throat tight. 'Okay, you electronic illegal immigrant, wanna know what I did to my last turntable? I backed the car over it. Do you want to wind up in a burlap sack, in pieces small enough to inhale, being mailed back to the factory with FRAGILE written all over you so the post office will drop you as often as possible?
The computer beeped and then laughed at me.
I sat back quickly and reached for my coffee, and the cup jangled nervously against the saucer. The computer laughed again. 'Honey,' it said, 'you're out of your mind.'
I almost jumped out of my chair as Nana's bare arms snaked around my neck and gave me a squeeze. 'How come I slept alone?' she said. Her breath smelled good even in the morning.
I had to inhale twice before I could talk. 'Don't startle me this early, okay? I'm a little bit jumpy. How are you feeling?'
'Great, better than I've felt in days.'
I ran my tongue experimentally over my teeth. My mouth was as furry as an inside-out puppy. 'What was so goddamn funny?' I asked a little sourly.
'You. Threatening that computer. How much RAM have you got?'
'As much as I need,' I said defensively. What the hell was RAM?
'What, though? Three twenty K, six forty K, or thirty-eight thousand K?'
'Thirty-eight thousand. And change.'
Nana gave my throat a vaguely threatening squeeze. 'You simp,' she said. 'Where's the coffee?'
'Where do you think?'
'Aren't we sweet in the morning?' She slipped past me and ambled into the kitchen. Against my will, I turned to look. She'd changed. She was wearing a pair of underpants. My underpants. They hung lazily lopsided, high up on her right hip and so far down on her left that the cleft between her buttocks peeked demurely over the white elastic waistband. Tiny as she was, the elastic was doing its job. She had wonderful, teaspoon-size dimples on either side of the base of her spine. They were the kind of dimples I'd always wanted to fill with salt and dip celery into.
'You don't know squat,' she said pleasantly as she poured. 'Everybody knows that six forty is the maximum RAM for that machine. What in the world did you buy it for?'
'Work.'
'Oh. Work.' She slurped her coffee. 'Whoo, hot,' she said. 'Where's the sugar?'
