All the Birds in the Sky (20 page)

“Ah.”

“I keep almost having a conversation with Kevin about what it is we’re doing, and then it doesn’t materialize.”

Somehow seeing the wooden Mr. Rose had been a turning point in Laurence and Patricia’s relationship, not just as a bonding thing but also as a reminder that they had known each other as total losers in eighth grade. Patricia might be the hardest person for Laurence to disappoint, because she’d already seen him at his worst. In fact, this was the most at ease Laurence had felt in months, and not just because of the elf bong.

Nobody talked for a while, until Patricia changed the subject: “So how are your parents? Still wanting you to be outdoorsy?”

“I think they are actually pretty happy,” said Laurence. “They got divorced about seven years ago, and my mom found a guy who likes to go bird-watching. My dad quit his awful job and went back to college to become a high-school teacher. I always kind of thought they’d be happier if they split up, even though you never want to root for your parents to do that. How are yours?”

“They’re, uh … okay,” said Patricia. “They actually disowned me for a few years, but this past year they’ve made this big effort to reconnect.” She sighed and sucked in more smoke from the elf’s head, even though her throat was getting scratchy. “It’s all thanks to my sister, sort of. Roberta keeps getting arrested, or winding up in the ER. She was always the one who had it together, of the two of us. Now, all of a sudden, my parents have noticed that I’m holding down a job and don’t have a criminal record, and they’ve decided that I can be the good daughter now. Like Roberta and I could just trade places. I have no idea how to deal.”

Laurence was going to say something else, but Isobel came home. She was soaked, because it was raining and the experimental self-configuring umbrella had gotten stuck in a nonoptimal shape, judging from the complainy servo noises it was making and the fact that the left side of Isobel’s cardigan was drenched while the right side was totally dry. She no longer had the long brown braids she’d sported when he’d first met her as a child and instead wore her graying hair in a bob.

“Oh dear,” Laurence said. “Lord Umber let you down.” This nickname had not caught on with anybody else yet, but he kept trying.

Isobel just snorted and threw Lord Umber at the kitchen sink, where he could drain. Lord Umber groaned and attempted to transform into a shape that would protect the sink from any indoor precipitation. He got stuck again, making loud whining noises.

“Not cool.” Isobel grimaced. “Not cool at all. A regular umbrella would have been way better. Oh, hello.” She had gotten enough rain out of her eyes to see the unfamiliar young woman seated on the couch. “Nice to meet you. I’m Isobel.”

Patricia said her name and they shook hands, then Isobel ran off to get out of her half-wet clothes. When she came back, she had a snifter of brandy. She sat on the sofa next to Patricia and started making low-maintenance small talk about all the places around the world that would kill for some of this rain.

“So I think I heard about you,” Isobel told Patricia. “You go back almost as far with Laurence as I do. He seems to collect people for life.” She glanced at Laurence, who squirmed, as he sensed he was supposed to.

They were pretty high up in the hills—despite its name, most of Noe Valley was a steep hillside. The living room had picture windows facing over the downward slope of garden out front and the tops of trees farther out. Potrero Hill answered the hill they were on, with its own trees and split-level houses. Their front room had high ceilings, and then a spiral staircase led up to the upper level containing Isobel’s bedroom, bathroom, and study, with a balcony overlooking the living room. Laurence’s in-law bedroom was down a few steps, over on the other side of the kitchen, with a view of the tiny backyard.

The three of them ordered burritos, and judged that the rain had stopped long enough to risk trudging down the hill to pick them up. The evening had turned warm, despite the massive puddles at every street corner and the clouds on the skyline. Laurence walked between Isobel and Patricia, and was conscious of being hemmed in by women. Especially with them talking past him.

“How did you end up having Laurence as a housemate?” Patricia asked Isobel.

Isobel told the story about Laurence running off to see the rocket when he was a kid. “I kind of kept an eye on Laurence, and when he got done at MIT I offered him my spare room for a while. Actually, Laurence is hardly ever home; this is the first I’ve seen him in weeks. Which can only mean one thing:
Red Dwarf
marathon.”

Laurence made a big show of rolling his eyes, even though he was kind of in the mood for the long-threatened marathon.

For her part, Isobel had just come back from Greenland, where Milton Dirth was building a vault that was supposed to last ten thousand years, and would only be opened by solving a math problem. “It looks like a bomb shelter, crossed with a Caddy store and a high-end funeral parlor. Everything is shiny steel and chrome, and marble, with glass partitions.”

“What’s in the vault?” Patricia asked. “Seeds? Genetic material?”

“Nope,” said Isobel. “Milton figures whoever opens it in five thousand or ten thousand years will have plenty of edible crops, or they won’t be around at all. It’s all technological and scientific knowledge. Schematics, plans—basically, an instruction manual for re-creating our level of technology, including some ideas for what to do if there are no fossil fuels and certain other elements are unavailable. He’s assuming a roughly early-nineteenth-century science level in whoever finds it. Which might be a stretch, yes. At least the vault will be easy to find: The one piece of electronics in the whole place will be a vertical beam of light, like a searchlight, going off twice a day for at least ten thousand years. That was one of the hardest parts to create.”

“It’s not a serious project,” Laurence said as they crossed Castro Street. “Milton doesn’t think the human race will still be here in a hundred years, much less a few thousand. This is just his way of hedging his bets. Or assuaging his conscience.”

“It’s gotten me three free trips to Greenland,” Isobel said. “Honestly, I think Milton’s opinions depend on how many interns he’s killed today.” She half-winked, to indicate this was a joke and Milton killed no interns.

During the dinner, Isobel talked more about her career transition, from rockets to Milton’s Ten Percent Project. “I used to dream about rockets.” Isobel scooped a corn chip into the communal
pico de gallo
. “Every single night, for months and months. After we pulled the plug on Nimble Aerospace. I had these weird dreams that there was a rocket launch going up any minute, and we’d misplaced the final telemetry. Or we were sending up a rocket, and it looked beautiful and proud shooting up into the air, and then it collided with a jumbo jet. Or worst of all was the dreams where nothing went wrong, rockets just soared for hours, and I sat on the ground watching with tears in my eyes.”

“Wow.” Laurence touched Isobel on the wrist. “I had no idea.”

“So how did you stop dreaming about rockets?” Patricia asked.

“I think I just got bored with it,” Isobel said. “Boredom is the mind’s scar tissue.”

*   *   *

LAURENCE AND SERAFINA
went to an organic burger place, locally sourced, etc., and Serafina talked about her emotional robots. “You won’t believe the heuristics. They recognize faces, but also they recognize each face’s habitual emotional states. They are getting the concept of moods. They are having moods. Moods are weird—it’s not just manifesting an emotion, or even sustaining an emotion, it’s like a disease state. Like the way we say you nurse a grudge.”

Serafina seemed to be letting go of the idea that Laurence was on probation. He’d gotten her a nice scarf, that matched her outfit by some fluke. He was practicing active listening. They’d had brilliant, sunburst-in-your-face sex a few times. Laurence did not talk about himself too much. He kept thinking about the Nuclear Option. He tried to judge when would be the optimal time to unleash it: These things work better if you build up to them, rather than as a desperation play. Laurence remembered his Grandma Jools, one of the last times he saw her alive, slipping the ring box into his ski-jacket pocket when nobody else was looking, and whispering in his ear, “Give this to whoever you end up marrying, OK?” And Laurence, still a little kid, realizing this was a solemn request, whispering back that he would do that.

Laurence had a conviction, in his loins, that he deserved to be dumped. Because he took Serafina for granted, while he was working fourteen-hour days on the Project, or because she was too excellent for him. But the whole point of being a grown-up and an uber-hacker is that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you can get.

After burgers and shakes, he and Serafina went to see the new Tornado Surfer movie, and Patricia phoned just as they were debating what snacks to get from the concession stand. Patricia asked if this was a bad time, and Laurence said sort of.

“Oh, I can call back,” Patricia said.

“What was it?”

Serafina wandered off to look at yogurt-covered pretzels, probably annoyed at him for talking on the phone. Her long fingers lifted the packets of white twists, as though plucking flowers. Her nose twitched and she smiled, as if the pretzels had told her a joke.
I will not let you get away,
he said to Serafina in his mind.

“Just that my friends want to meet you. You know, my
special
friends. They know I told you my secret, and they want you to come over for dinner or something. Maybe Thursday?”

Laurence said yes right away. Whereas if he hadn’t been in a hurry to hang up so he could go back to being a decent boyfriend, he would have contemplated the prospect of an evening with Patricia’s “special friends” and maybe invented an excuse.

“Who was that?” Serafina said. Laurence said it was his friend from junior high, the weird one, which put Serafina in a position of being able to say she didn’t think Patricia was that weird.

The movie sucked. Afterward, Serafina and Laurence went back to Serafina’s place and had the best sex of Laurence’s life thus far, the kind where you bite each other hard enough to leave toothdents and you keep crashing into each other long after you would have sworn you’d already broken everything. They held each other, both of them vibrating, until Laurence had to pee. He had to remind himself not to flush after only peeing, because everyone was conserving water. When Laurence got back to bed, Serafina had fallen into a cold sleep, and her elbow jutted into him.

*   *   *

LAURENCE DIDN’T LOOK
up from his workstation between the movie date and Thursday evening, because the Ten Percent Project was in permanent crisis mode and Milton was blowing up Laurence’s phone 24/7. Milton kept bringing up the idea, or rather the threat, of relocating Laurence and his team to a secure compound in the boonies so they could work with no distractions. As if Laurence wasn’t already driving himself insane. As if this wasn’t already his whole life.

Laurence had just enough time to run home, take a quick shower, and change before he had to be back in the Mission to see Patricia. They were meeting at some kind of used bookstore where one of the witches lived. Like, he was disabled or homebound or something, so he just spent all day and all night in his tiny bookshop, which Laurence suspected was illegal.

Laurence was the kind of sleep deprived where he saw LCD-monitor ghosts when he closed his eyes. When he was a couple blocks away from that bookstore, on the corner near the bacon-wrapped sausage cart, Laurence felt a panic attack starting. He was going to say the wrong thing, and these people would turn him into a knickknack. Like Mr. Rose.

“Practice your breathing,” Laurence told himself. He managed to get some oxygen into his brain, and it was like a temporary workaround for sleep deprivation. He was probably dehydrated thanks to this crazy heat wave, so he bought some water from the bacon-wrapped sausage guy. Then he made himself walk to the three-story mall with the Spanish-language signs. For Patricia, whom he sensed he really wanted in his life.

The mall looked deserted, and there was only one bulb on the ground floor to guide him to the winding staircase that led, past beauty-supply stores that looked dead, up to the top floor, where a sign read: “DANGER. BOOKSTORE IS OPEN.” Laurence hesitated, then pushed open the doorway to Danger Bookstore, with a jangle of chimes.

The bookstore was one surprisingly spacious room, with an ancient rug that looked symmetrical until you noticed that the big wheel of fire and flowers at the center was rolling off to the right. Bookshelves covered the walls and also jutted sideways into the room, and they were divided into categories like “Exiles And Stowaways” or “Scary Love Stories.” The books were about half-English, half-Spanish. Besides books, every shelf had memorabilia perched on its edge: an ancient ceremonial dagger, a plastic dragon, an assortment of ancient coins, and a whalebone that supposedly came from Queen Victoria’s corset.

Laurence didn’t get two steps inside Danger before someone ran an ultraviolet wand over him, to kill most of the bacteria on his skin. Patricia rose from one of the fancy upholstered chairs and hugged him, whispering that Laurence must not touch Ernesto, the man on the red chaise longue—the one who never left the bookstore. Ernesto hadn’t been out in the sun for decades, but his skin was still a warm brown, and his long, high-cheekboned face had deep wrinkles. His gray hair was in a single braid, and he wore eyeliner or kohl around his eyes. He was wearing a crimson smoking jacket and silky blue pajama pants, so his outfit looked quasi-Hefnerian. He greeted Laurence without rising from his chaise.

Everybody was super-friendly. Laurence’s first impression wasn’t of any one person, but just of a gaggle of people all talking at the same time and clustering around him, with Patricia watching from across the room.

A short older lady with wide glasses on a string, and black-and-white hair in an elaborate bun, started telling Laurence about the time her shoe had fallen in love with a sock that was much too big. A tall, handsome Japanese man in a suit, with a neat beard, asked Laurence questions about Milton’s finances, which he found himself answering without thinking. And a young person of indeterminate gender, with short spiky brown hair and a gray hoodie, wanted to know who Laurence’s favorite superhero was. Ernesto kept quoting the poetry of Daisy Zamora.