Nate smirked and downed the last of his own beer. “Nothing.”
The older man held up the pack and they each pulled a new bottle. “Nothing?”
Nate thought about it while he twisted the cap off the beer. “You know how you got to high school and college and you thought your life’s going to be
this
? But then you get out and your life ends up being
this
instead? And eventually everything settles down and you figure out what you’re going to do for the rest of your life?”
Tim nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, I never figured out what I wanted to do,” said Nate. “I saw all my friends and coworkers figure it out, and now they’ve all got homes and families and cars built in this decade.”
“But not you?”
“Not me. I’ve had four different jobs since college. I figured it was just my restless twenties. I’d hit thirty and it’d be a wake-up call and everything would get clear.” He shook his head. “I turned thirty back in 2010. Still don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”
The sun vanished on his last words. The sky was still lit up with streaks of orange and red.
“I wouldn’t worry,” said the older man. “Lots of people don’t figure out what they’re doing until later in life. Case in point.” He raised his bottle, and the two men clinked their beers together again.
They each took a drink. “The flipside to what you’re saying,” continued Tim, “is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who’ve decided they want to do
this
despite the fact that they’re no good at it. They devote all their energy toward being a doctor or a loan officer or something when they’re really better suited to another career altogether. Not to mention all the folks who end up trapped in a career they don’t like because they can’t afford to leave it. I’ve met a lot of people who would’ve been millionaires if they figured out what they were doing wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing.”
“Like you?”
He shook his head. “No, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. And I did it for a long time. Then it was time to do something else.” Tim shrugged and took a long drink of beer. He turned to Nate. “One day you’re just going to find the thing you’re supposed to do and it’s going to click. Until then, yeah, it’ll be a big mystery. Speaking of which...what is that?”
Nate turned and followed Tim’s gaze to the block of bricks next to the stairwell door. “It’s part of the elevator,” he said. “It’s where all the cables and motors and stuff are.”
“The machine room?”
“I guess.”
“You sure?”
Nate shrugged. “It’s what Xela told me. She said it’s what Oskar told her.”
Tim wrinkled his brow. “It’s way too big for a building this size.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. She said it’s because it’s so old. Everything was bigger back then. Less miniaturization or something.”
Tim shook his head again. “No,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of old buildings with elevators. None of them had a machine room that big.” He paused. “Well, nothing this size, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “The last time I saw one that big was on a tour of the Empire State Building.”
Nate overslept Sunday. By a lot.
He woke up and stretched under the covers. Moving had fluffed up the mattress on his futon and the past few weeks had been some of the best sleep of his life. If nothing else, the move had been worth it for that.
It was a warm day. Almost hot. He guessed it was part of the reason he’d slept so well.
He stretched again and glanced at the clock. It was twenty past twelve. Still, it wasn’t like he had big plans for the day. If he could find a Target or Walmart in the area, he might get a new lamp for the kitchen, or maybe a—
Stop by my apartment tomorrow at noon and I’ll give you a password. Don’t be late.
“Ahhh, crap,” he muttered.
A few quick sniffs of his armpits told him he could get by without a shower. He yanked a t-shirt off the bookshelf and pulled on yesterday’s jeans. He stepped into the bathroom, dabbed his teeth with Crest, and swished the paste around in his mouth for a moment. Not great, but hopefully he’d make a slightly better impression this time, aside from being half an hour late.
Veek yanked open her door on the third knock. Despite the heat she was wearing another long-sleeved dress shirt, this time over a black tee. She didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, sorry,” he said. “My alarm didn’t go off.”
She glared at him through her glasses for a moment, then pushed the door open and walked back inside. He waited for an invitation, but when one didn’t come he just followed her in.
Her apartment was a studio like his. Her kitchen wasn’t separated by a wall, but the basic layout looked the same past that. He even saw the same blue and white tile checkered across her counters. She had a rumpled, blanket-covered twin bed shoved under the windows. The room was cool, and he understood why she had the extra layers on.
The right wall of Veek’s apartment was dominated by a folding table, the kind used by caterers or hardcore yard salers. It was covered with computer components. Or maybe it was just one big computer. Everything looked connected by lots of cables.
In front of the chair were three flat screens, one of them on a long arm. A swirling blue and silver screensaver, like underwater lightning, rolled back and forth across them. The keyboard looked foreign, and he realized a beat later it was a Dvorak setup, arranged for efficiency and speed over classic training. A set of what he thought were black phonebooks stood next to the tower under the table, and Nate recognized them as old Playstations just before he saw the name on one. A small cluster of external hard drives stood on the table above the towers.
She saw him studying the setup. “Got a problem?”
“Nope,” he said. “This is pretty impressive.”
“It’s nothing great,” she said. “Just some stuff I’ve scavenged and got secondhand.”
“It all looks pretty new to me.”
“I got some good deals. People throw out a lot of stuff with life left in it. If I could afford a real machine it’d be one-fourth the size.”
“Must use a ton of power.”
She smirked. “Well, that’s not a real problem here, is it?”
“I guess not.”
She dropped into the chair and tapped the mouse. The rolling screensaver vanished and the screens were filled with windows. “For now your password’s just your last name spelled backwards. I got it off your mailbox. I can change it right now if you like.”
“Can I just change it myself later?”
Veek shrugged. “It’s all through me. I know all the passwords. If I cared to look I could tell you every email address you use and what kind of porn you download. But I don’t care.”
“Gotcha.”
“So, do you want a new password or not?”
“Can you add one-four-four to the front of it?”
She nodded. “Twelve squared? Not bad. Easy to remember, and using it at the front instead of the end gives you a bit more security.” Her fingers danced on the keys. It was an odd dance, and Nate realized he’d never seen someone use a Dvorak keyboard before.
“Done,” she said. “Ten bucks a month. I’m not a hardcase about getting it on the first, but the first week’d be cool.”
He fished in his wallet and pulled out his lone twenty. “Do you have change?”
“No,” she said. “Tell you what, though. Give me the twenty and we’ll say you paid for the first three months.”
It was a good deal, but he still crunched numbers in his head to see if he could afford it. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said.
He held out the bill. She plucked it from his fingers and stuffed it into her shirt pocket. “You’re good to go,” she said. “You should have access when you get back to your apartment. Sometimes the signal gets a little hinky going through walls. If it does, try opening your door or going out in the hall if you’ve got a laptop. It’s usually stronger out there.”
He nodded. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“So,” he said, “Veek is short for...?”
“Why do you care?”
Nate shrugged. “Just trying to be polite and neighborly.”
“Malavika Vishwanath. Don’t try to say it, you’ll just piss me off.”
“Okay.” He nodded at the computer. “So, seriously, what do you use it for?”
The screensaver kicked back in. “I do a lot of work from home. I’m in the office half the time, but they let me work here, too.”
“What kind of work?”
Veek’s eyes narrowed. “Just data entry. Nothing exciting.”
He bit back a chuckle.
“What?”
“I do data entry,” said Nate. “Worthless job. And it doesn’t need a machine like that.”
“I told you, it’s not that great.” She settled back in her chair. “You’re all good.”
He shrugged and shook his head. “Thanks.” He turned to leave and saw what had been behind him the whole time.
There were five thermometers on the wall by the door. One was an old-fashioned glass rod filled with mercury. One was a dial. There was a brass, baroque thing where an arrow swung on a graded circle. The largest was a square of white plastic that gave a digital readout. The smallest was also digital, the size of a cell phone. He peered at each of them and confirmed they all said the same thing.
69
“Go on,” she said.
He glanced back. “What?”
Veek nodded at the wall. She had her arms crossed again. “Get the stupid sex joke out of the way.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“Just say it. I’ll give you points if you can come up with something original.”
“Seriously. I didn’t think of—”
“You’re a guy who just saw the number sixty-nine repeated five times. Don’t try to tell me you didn’t think of sex. Just say it so we can get it out of the way.”
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and gave an awkward shrug. “You... really like sixty-nine, don’t you?”
“No,” she said. “It’s weird and everything looks wrong. More to the point, it’s not my choice.”
“Sorry?”
She turned in her chair and waved her hand at the apartment. “It’s always sixty-nine degrees in here. I can put the oven on high and crank the heat in the middle of summer and it’ll be sixty-nine degrees in here. I can open all the windows in January and put the AC on full and it’s sixty-nine degrees in here.”
He looked at the wall of thermometers. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
He took another step toward the door and stopped to look at her. “Yesterday,” said Nate, “you told me twenty-three wasn’t a real door.”
Veek took off her glasses and wiped them on the corner of her shirt. “It’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been living here for two years now. I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff.”
“But how do you know?”
She looked at him and she smiled. It was a tight, secretive smile.
“What’s up with apartment fourteen, then?” he asked. “All the padlocks?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Seriously, I don’t know. It’s been like that the whole time I’ve been here. I’ve seen the door get painted twice, but as far as I know it’s never been opened.”
He studied her eyes through the large lenses. “You’ve tried to open it, haven’t you?”
Her lips twitched. “Oskar was furious. I came
this
close to getting evicted. I even went down on the street once and tried to look in the windows with the zoom on my phone. The windows are painted black.”
“What?”
“Yep. Solid black. Every inch of ‘em.”
Nate stared through the wall in the direction of the mystery apartment. His eyes crept across the wall of thermometers to Veek’s kitchen. He cleared his throat. “Any bulb I put in my kitchen fixture lets off black light,” he said.
Her eyebrows went up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean any bulb I put in the fixture lets off black light.”
“You’re sure it’s not just one of the ones they sell at Halloween?”
He nodded. “I’ve traded it out four times now. Twice with bulbs I brought from my other place, twice with bulbs I bought over at Vons. Whatever I put in it becomes a black light. I think it’s a voltage thing, or amperage or something.”
Veek shook her head. “I don’t think it works that way. You need to make the bulbs specifically.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
He shrugged. “It’s the only thing I can think of.”
She tapped her fingers on the arms of the chair. “Nobody stays in apartment five. They rent it and the people move out as soon as their lease expires. Some of them move out sooner.”
He nodded. “There was a guy moving out the day I moved in. Craig?”
“Carl. Jerk stiffed me for two months of internet. And they never rent the apartment across the hall, sixteen.”