A Billion Ways to Die (31 page)

Most importantly, she slipped me the password to the computer the university had given her to use over the course of her research, which provided me at least one tidy level of security.

The study room was little bigger than a closet—windowless, all white, with a black office chair and a silver Mac. A kind of academic tomb. Perfect for my state of mind.

I invested my first two online hours tracking down Strider.

“Long time, no hear,” she wrote, once we snuck into a private chat room. “I have things for you.”

“Good. I need things.”

“Has to be a sit-down,” she wrote, in other words, the web wasn’t safe enough. “Shouldn’t be hard for you, Spankman. It’s, like, reality. The Final Frontier.”

Then she signed off.

“Great,” I told the stark, white room.

S
ECOND
C
HANCE
U
NIVERSITY
didn’t mind listing me as John Doe on their resident register. I wasn’t the only one there with that name. They allowed us a week’s anonymous stay under a type of rescue status. But if I wanted longer than that, I needed to fork over a name, some type of history, and financial capability.

I had taped to my torso enough money to buy their building, but it was more useful to appear broke. So I offered the psychologist, whose name was Cary McNichol, a form of community service.

“Here’s the deal,” I said, after pulling him into a private room. “If I volunteer my time to one of the do-gooder operations you got around this town, can I stick here for like another month or so? If things go well, I’ll get a credential I can use to get a regular job. Then I’m out of your hair.”

“You’re not in our hair,” said Cary, with a kind smile. “Not yet, anyway. I suppose it’s worth a try. How’re you feeling?”

He meant, are you in control of your mania.

“Right as rain. Seriously.” I held up my hand to show how steady it was. “Totally in control.”

“Okay, have any organization in mind?”

“Yeah, in fact I have. The People Project. You just gotta tell ’em I’m a resident in good standing and a great man to have around a computer. Everybody’s got computer issues. Look at yourselves.”

He didn’t argue that.

“I know the director, Sylvan,” he said. “It’s only a satellite office focused on fund-raising. Their headquarters are in Switzerland. Why them?”

“Fund-raisers have big databases, which means data-crunching applications that I guarantee are in need of scrubbing and polishing. That’s me all over. Mr. Cleanup.”

He took my elbow and gently moved me back into the hall and toward his office.

“I can make the introduction, but no guarantees. Sylvan’s a really good guy, but he doesn’t have the bandwidth for micromanagement.”

Another tacit warning not to act like a crazy person.

“Read you loud and clear, Cary. You won’t get any blowback over me.”

“You just owe me one more thing,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A name.”

“Stan Lee?”

“Inventor of super powers?”

“Something like that.”

He let me sit in his office while he had a friendly call with Sylvan van Leeuwan, clearly a brother in New Haven’s fraternity of social welfare professionals. He pitched my concept like a seasoned sales pro, and partway through gave me a thumbs-up. Cary McNichol was an easy man to like.

He made it even easier by walking me south to The People Project offices, which were above a corner restaurant on Chapel Street across from the New Haven Green. A big woman with a colossal head of unkempt frizzy hair jumped up from her desk and threw her arms around Cary, who took it as well as you could expect. Neither her cranberry-colored sweater or matching polyester pants were big enough to conceal her lumpy bulk. She looked me fiercely in the eye when she shook my hand and introduced herself as Finnegan.

“Geek, huh?” she said to me. “Where’s your pocket protector?”

“The geek police made us turn ’em in. They’re upgrading our image.”

Her laugh was mostly a snort.

“We don’t want any police trouble around here,” she said.

“Won’t get any from me,” I said, looking around her at her computer screen. “What’re you running for your back-end database?”

“C-View Plus. I think the plus part means extra aggravation.”

“Stayin’ current on updates?” I asked.

“That’s the problem. Every time I update it gets worse.”

An older, slightly heavier version of Cary came out of his office. The men hugged and traded laughs in the opaque way insiders usually do.

“Cary has good things to say about your computer skills,” he said, as if just realizing I was standing there. He had the accent of a Dutch person who’d likely spoken English his whole life.

“I know C-View well enough,” I said, telling him I’d trained on the original open source application that C-View was derived from. The speed with which his eyes began to glaze over was encouraging. There would be plenty of systems work there at The People Project satellite office.

“What do you know about vacuum cleaners?” said Finnegan. “Havin’ trouble with one of them, too. Kidding,” she added, looking over at Sylvan.

They told me to come back the next morning so they had a chance to set up my own workstation and decide how to get me started. I thanked them with more gratitude than appropriate, though actually heartfelt.

Cary walked me back to the big Victorian house.

“When was the last time you had a regular job?” he asked, as we walked.

“Depends how you define regular,” I said. “I’ve actually learned a lot more since things have been a little irregular. Necessity bein’ the best of all mothers of invention.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“You’re a fuckin’ shrink, man. You can ask me anything you want.”

“I know, but I respect your privacy.”

“So ask,” I said.

“Did you leave anybody behind? When you left, wherever you left from.”

“Whoa, Nelly. I didn’t mean you could ask me
that
kinda shit.”

“I thought so.”

We walked in silence for a while, both of us with our hands stuffed in the pockets of our jackets. Bulling along over the tattered but irrepressible New Haven sidewalks.

“How’d you know?” I asked, eventually giving in.

“How do you know how to fix computers?”

That was the last we spoke of it. I left him and went upstairs, through the metal detector and into the big open room where a few of the guys, like me, were in early, taking advantage of the daylight to organize their paltry belongings, sleep off a hit of meds or simply lie on their beds and either ignore or bathe in their respective sorrows and regret.

C
HAPTER
24

T
hings come to people in the middle of the night. I’m no different. That night two things came to me simultaneously. In a half dream, I knew how to find Strider, and as I rose up into a much more wakeful state, realized I was being robbed.

I was lying on my side in such a way that I could see the pale movements of a man with his hand inside the front pocket of my backpack. I stayed still and watched through partially closed eyes, getting my bearings and gaining full consciousness.

It was the guy who’d just taken possession of the bunk next to me. I’d barely noticed him since the men came and went with such regularity it rarely made sense to get sociable. Though I did recall he had long hair, more haphazard than entirely unkempt. A younger man than me, but not by much. Clearly stronger, judging by the shape of his forearm.

Hoping he was too focused on the backpack to see me slide the tips of my fingers into the back pocket of my jeans until I felt the bristle end of my modified toothbrush. I slipped my hand deeper into the pocket until I established a firm grip. Then I waited to see what the man would do next.

I was disappointed to see him move from the front pocket that only held a small notebook, to the zipper that opened the pack’s principal compartment. However, the greater angle forced him into a more awkward position, so that much of his upper torso had slid off his bunk.

In more or less a single motion, I rolled over far enough to free my left hand, which I used to grab a handful of his stringy hair, and used my right to bring the business end of the toothbrush up under his chin.

He froze. I growled.

“Not cool, dude,” I said.

“Easy, brother,” said the guy, in a near whisper. “Don’t mean to offend.”

“I’m extremely offended. You think you can steal from me?” I asked.

“I did, yes. Apparently I was wrong.”

“No shit. So I shouldn’t shove this shiv up into your brain?”

“You could,” he said. “Though the prosecution will consider manslaughter a disproportionate response to attempted petty theft. The point of that thing is actually beginning to puncture my skin. What do you say?”

I pulled back on the shiv and he rolled back onto his bed.

“At least you’ve succeeded in stealing my sleep,” I said. “What little I get of it.”

“I can see how that would be. Sorry.”

“I’m gonna get your ass tossed out of here.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll go voluntarily.”

“What did you do it for?”

“Meds. I like to experiment.”

“I would’ve given you some if you’d asked,” I said.

“How am I supposed to know that?”

“By asking. I just said that.”

“Want to guess what’s wrong with me?” he asked.

“I’m not into ‘What’s My Disease.’ ”

“Schizoaffective disorder. How ’bout you?”

“I don’t want a friend. Especially one who steals my shit.”

“That’s simply your assumption.
Cogitationis poenam nemo patitur
.”

“Bullshit.
Animus nocendi
,” I answered, despite myself.

“Lawyer?”

“Polyglot.”

“I had my own law firm specializing in intellectual property, and then I lost my mind. Uh? You don’t think that’s funny? They tossed me out of the bar when I got sick. Clearly discriminatory, don’t you agree?”

“You should get yourself a lawyer.”

I lay on my side facing him. I took my pack off the floor and clutched it to my chest.

“My name is Davis,” the guy said. “My first name, not my last. I have to explain this every time. I think it might be the origin of my trouble.”

“I’m going to sleep now. Please keep your hands off my stuff.”

“The threat of death is a decent deterrent, no matter what they say.” He rolled over with his back to me. “You could tell me your name. I told you mine.”

“Stan.”

“
Compos mentis
to all, and to all a good night.”

T
HE
NEXT
day was Saturday. I took the train down to New York and made the quick walk from Grand Central Station to the giant hotel where the Star Trek convention was in its first big day. I had a simple strategy—expose myself, as myself, to as many convention-goers as possible. I might have spotted Strider in the guise of Uhura, Deanna Troi or Captain Janeway, but unlikely. That I also might be spotted by an FBI agent or a known threat like Ian MacPhail was a distinct possibility, but I had no other way to proceed.

There were thousands of people at the conference. I moved from room to room, standing at doorways when large audiences flowed out of ballrooms, mingled at receptions and coffee stations, hung in the bar and gently avoided attempts to engage me in conversation. It was a long day of studying faces and negotiating crowds of aliens and Starfleet personnel.

I’d booked a room a few blocks away, and was making one last pass through the bar area before retreating to my hotel room when a small hand took me by the sleeve.

It was T’Pol, the Vulcan liaison officer. Actually, Strider’s nicely rendered impersonation.

“You continue to impress, Spanky,” she said.

The magnitude of my pleasure at seeing her there in the flesh, albeit in modified form, surprised me. I told her as much.

“I’m happy to see you, too,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”

“I’m worried about me, too.”

“Let’s find a dark corner.”

I let her buy me one of her hurricanes, further proof that I’d become slightly unhinged by the bizarre nature of the day. We clinked.