The Starving Years (6 page)

“You were at the Canaan Products job seminar. There was a riot.”

“Oh, what a shock. Who’d they screw over now? Fuckin’ soulless corporate fucks.”

Tim cut his eyes to Nelson as he untangled the last few slats and let them fall. It sounded dangerously close to leftist propaganda…or maybe it was just intoxicated babble.

“They can shove that job up their ass. Didn’t want it anyway.”

Tim smoothed the blinds into place. Dust coated his hands. And here he’d been so proud of his cleaning job.

Nelson had turned onto his back. “You’re really tall.”

“Get some sleep now,” Tim said.

“Good idea—I didn’t mean to drink so much. After I sleep it off, we can have a little fun.”

Nelson rolled toward the wall again, winding the sheets around his head. Tim stared at the blanket-wrapped lump in his bed. Nelson’s voice rose from the sheets. “Alcohol m’tabolizes at one ounce every hour, so…how many shots did we do?”

Tim wasn’t usually a drinker, but a shot suddenly sounded really appealing. There was no time, though. Not now. Too much to take care of. “Get some sleep,” he repeated, stepping out of the bedroom and gently easing the door shut, but only partway, so he would hear if Nelson needed something and called out to him.

Not that he was under any illusion Nelson even knew his name.

The sight of his main room, when he took it all in, was startling—two other people were in it, with Marianne still in the bathroom. Tim only owned two chairs, his computer chair, and the recliner he’d found on the curb when Mr. Boswell moved into the retirement community. Randy was now sprawled in the recliner, holding a bag of frozen veg-0-mix to his face. Javier sat in the computer chair with Marianne’s broken shoe on the floor between his feet, attempting to pry the heel off the other shoe with a bottle opener.

Tim went to the sink and got himself a drink of water. He realized he only had two mugs.

“So I saw that box of rubbers in the medicine cabinet,” Randy said. “You dating a debutante, or what?”

The bathroom door opened. Marianne, in stocking feet, with a wide, ladder-like run that spanned the entire length of the right leg of her panty hose, shot Randy a reproachful look. “You’re such a pig.”

“You’ll have to tell me your secret,” Randy went on, as if he hadn’t even heard her. “I can’t see why a Fertile Myrtle would be interested in a guy like you. Unless she’s out slumming. Is that it? You feed their need to get back at their rich mummies and daddies? Act like some rebel who doesn’t give a damn?”

“In case you didn’t notice,” Marianne said, “If it wasn’t for him, you’d be a stain on Eighth Street.”

Randy looked to her with exaggerated patience. “Just making guy-talk.”

“Earth to Mister Guy-Talk: there is no ‘Fertile Myrtle.’” She grabbed a flier for a Fair and Equal LGBTQ meeting off the top of a teetering stack of books and waved it in his face. “Everyone here but you is into men.”

Chapter 6

“I didn’t mean nothing by it.” Randy did his best to backpedal, as though his natural assumption, that everyone was just like him, could hardly be construed as homophobia. “I have a friend who’s gay.”

“What’s his middle name?” Marianne asked.

Randy peered at her around the veg-o-mix.

“Uh huh,” she said. “Some friend.”

He ignored her, pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed, and got a canned message loud enough for the whole room to hear that said all the circuits were busy. “I hate this contract. Either I’m roaming or I’m breaking up or some other dumb shit. Anyone else got a phone?”

Marianne tossed him her cell phone and turned back to Tim. “What just happened out there? That’s what I want to know. It was thickest right by the job fair.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Canaan drew protestors,” Tim said; no one but Javier would know him well enough to sense he was being deliberately vague.

“What now?” Marianne turned the Fair and Equal flier one way, then the other, as if she couldn’t pick out from all the small print what the actual message was supposed to be. “Did they find another factory full of illegals working twenty-hour days?”

“The thing with all those protestors,” Randy said, in a loud, easy voice, as if he was accustomed to people actually listening to him when he waxed philosophical, “Is that they take it too far. They make themselves come off like a bunch of assholes, and no one actually listens to what they have to say.”
 

The moment was ripe for a pot-and-kettle comment, but Marianne resisted the temptation. Randy thumbed in a number on her phone and got another loud
circuits-are-busy
message. “No way. You’re not on All-atel, are you?”

“No, Transdata.” She answered absently, still focused on Tim, who she’d obviously pegged as someone who knew what was going on. No matter how he tried to act otherwise. “What could possibly be so bad they’re out there tearing each other up like that?”

“It’s crowd psychology,” Randy said. “People start freaking out, and it spreads like a cold sore. And once everything’s crazy, the predators swoop in.” He pressed the now semi-frozen bag to his cheek again. “And then they take your hundred dollars.”
 

Again, Marianne didn’t rise to the bait. “It can’t be just crowd psychology. It happened too fast. It was too vicious. I wasn’t kidding about the working conditions. They have plants in Mexico, you know—I read about it on Facebook. Most of the laborers should be in school, but they’re pumping out manna instead. Maybe someone had photos. Maybe they posted them online.”

“If the working conditions at Canaan are so bad,” Randy said, “then what were
you
doing at that job fair?”

Tim looked at Marianne with what he hoped was an expression that was somehow...normal. Polite interest. He had no social skills, so his ex always told him, but hopefully he was intelligent enough to fake it.

Marianne had reached the point where Randy’s comments were starting to wear, though, and she didn’t even notice Tim’s efforts. “Never mind me. What about you, Mr. Smartypants? What were you doing there—running up to the stage with Nelson’s answer.”

Randy held up a hand in a semi-conciliatory “chill” gesture. “Have you seen the Canaan’s health club? Have you heard about the quarterly sales bonuses? I’m sick of busting my hump for a two-point-four percent raise. I want to get in on Canaan’s sweet benefits package.”
 

“Look,” Javier said, “regardless of the reason anyone was or wasn’t there, what matters now is getting everyone home in one piece.”
 

Yes. Definitely. Tim couldn’t have said it better—because eye patch or no eye patch, he needed to see if Javier’s inside tip had panned out, and he couldn’t do that in front of just anyone.

Except maybe Nelson Oliver. He was fast asleep, anyway.

“So what do you think everyone’s flipping out about this time?” Marianne said. “Broadcast news will be useless. Fire up that computer over there and see if anyone online knows something yet.”

Everyone looked at Tim—who suddenly realized he had absolutely no idea what might appear on his monitor when the browser came up. Something innocuous, like the local traffic report? Or something telling, like the dirt he’d been trying to dig up on Canaan? Or, worse, the transcript of the last chat he’d had with Javier.

The one he’d jerked off to.

More than once.

“My connection’s spotty,” Tim said.

He glanced at the mess of daisy-chained power strips, and the redundant server rack draped with yards of cable. Maybe, to an untrained eye, it would look like a salvage job of a home PC held together with duct tape and spit.

Javier knew different, of course. Javier had been the one, with his promise of insider information and his riveting private chats, to talk Tim into scoping out Canaan Products to begin with.

Marianne stared down at a coil of network cable. “My Internet sucks, too. But can’t we at least try? Don’t you want to know why the whole lower east side’s gone nutso?”

“I gotta email my dentist first,” Randy said, “since the phones are bogus. I feel like my tooth is gonna fall right out of my head. Do dentists have email? Fuck. I hope so.”

“I’ll see if it connects.” Tim put his hand on the back of his computer chair in a not-so-subtle signal for Javier to relinquish it. When Tim sat, the seat was warm. He shivered. Or maybe it was a shudder. Or maybe, despite the eye patch, he couldn’t get past the last few lines Javier had typed in chat, less than a week before....

It’s not your hand. It’s mine. You can tell it’s mine, because it’s sliding down to skim over your balls and feel the curve of them. It’s testing, with fingers that aren’t yours, how you like to be touched. What turns you on. What makes you hard. And finally, when you’re stiff, and you’re so ready you ache...only then can you feel my fingers wrapping around you and stroking you....

Unlike Javier, Tim focused more on facts than on pretty prose when he wrote. His replies consisted of things like “yeah” and “do it” and “feels good.” Which would probably be even more incriminating in their simplicity, if they were the first words that flashed up on the screen. He grabbed his monitor as if to readjust its position, and hit the manual brightness control.

Tim swore he could feel the heat of everyone’s attention riveted on him as the monitor powered on—and while he hadn’t quite managed to tweak the contrast low enough to prevent Javier and Marianne from entirely seeing the screen, it did, at least, support the lie that his computer was a cobbled-together heap of scrap, and not a cleverly proxied server.

The browser, thankfully, was minimized, and a command prompt window was showing. “What’s that?” he said, unsure if he sounded even remotely convincing. It was the way all his help desk clients tended to start their conversations, though, so he suspected it sounded authentic. While most of them then added, “This piece of shit’s been acting weird all week,” Tim decided he’d better not tempt fate by laying it on too thick. He hit caps lock a few times to pretend as if he was actually trying keys, then quietly closed the minimized browser, and finally, dismissed the window.
 

His fingers found the macro keys to pull up a half-dozen local news sites before he remembered he probably should hunt and peck his way there like a majority of the population did, but he was too late. He pulled up another window to cover their landing pages, which were already loading in tabs, lightning fast, and he navigated to a search engine and typed in
Canaan Products job fair Bowery
.

An ad for a foodie store with the phrases “our job is to make you happy” and “exclusive Canaan Products selection” and “fair prices” and “shop our new East Village location” popped up. He pretended to search it until he figured even a slow computer would have accessed all the news tabs, and he began to scan the pages in earnest. “Nothing on Channel Twelve. Nothing on ABC.”
 

Marianne clucked her tongue. “Oh, I’m so surprised. Like they ever have any breaking news that hasn’t been sanitized by their sponsors.”

Marianne was sounding more and more like the type of activist who gave rational people like Tim a bad name. It seemed unlikely, though, that if she actually were the sort of dissident who’d blow up the ethanol plant in Tennessee and kill half a town, she’d be clever enough to hide her leanings by voicing them so unabashedly.

“There’s nothing about it on any of the state or local outlets,” Tim said.

“Now can we try to find my dentist?” Randy said. “It’s Dr. Bergman at Midtown Dental.”

Marianne crossed her arms and frowned. “What about Voice of Reason? Sometimes that site updates so fast I’d swear the guy’s psychic.”

Tim stared very, very hard at his murky, dark monitor and tried to imagine how anyone else in the world would react to hearing the name of their own site suggested to them. He took a quick glance over his shoulder in Javier’s direction, obvious, but he just couldn’t resist...and Javier turned and slipped into the bathroom.
 

“Haven’t you heard of it?” Marianne asked. “You seem like the type of guy who would. It’s thevoiceofreason.com. You have to put the ‘the’ in there. Otherwise you get another one of those sappy religious sites.”

“And here I thought he was the kind of guy who’d help me call my dentist before I lost my tooth.”

“Try the land line,” Tim said. His head was spinning with the effort to look natural as he did his best impression of a two-fingered typist. “Uh, nope. Nothing there.”

“You have a land line? Hello, you could have said something.” Randy clomped into the kitchenette. “What do you dial for information?”

“Try zero.”

The phone company’s “all circuits are busy” message was twice as obnoxious as the cell companies’, and twice as loud, too. Three angry-sounding tones blared out of the heavy plastic rotary phone. “Are you kidding me?” Randy shouted.

Marianne glanced at him, then focused on Tim again. “Keep it on The Voice of Reason,” she suggested. “Refresh it every now and then. I’m pretty sure the main writers live in Manhattan. They’ve always got really good local coverage.”

Writers? Plural? The Voice of Reason had one, unless you counted Javier—and Tim wasn’t entirely sure he trusted Javier anymore.
 

“They’ll update any minute now.” Marianne went to the window and spread the blind slats, though there was really no view but the fire escape of the opposite apartment building. “Unless they’re stuck out there. They could be trapped in that mob. Jeez.”

It was unsettling for Tim to hear that someone who didn’t even know who he was cared so deeply about his safety. Even if she was referring to his one-man (or maybe two-man) operation as if a whole team was behind the site.

“How much manna do you have?” Randy asked.

Tim kept a stockpile on the recommendation of some of his more survivalist-oriented online acquaintances, enough to last himself thirty days—which would mean the five of them could wait it out for maybe a week, if need be. But it would probably seem weird for a single person in a cramped apartment to have all that food. “Plenty, I guess. I just went shopping.”