“Everybody. Are you kidding? This whole building is talking about you.”
“They’re not scared of me. They’re scared of getting caught.”
“Getting caught by you. Just knowing that you’re snooping around their Sent folders every night is enough to keep them following the rules.”
“But I’m not snooping around.”
“You could,” Greg said.
“I could?”
Greg went back to what he was doing, some sort of laptop autopsy. “Look, Lincoln, I’ve told you. Somebody has to be here at night anyway. Somebody has to answer the phone and say, ‘Help desk.’ You’re just sitting around, I know. You don’t have enough work, I know. I don’t care. Do the crossword. Learn a foreign language. We had a gal who used to crochet …”
Lincoln didn’t crochet.
He read the newspaper. He brought in comic books and magazines and paperback novels. He called his sister sometimes, if it wasn’t too late and if he felt lonely.
Mostly, he surfed the Net.
CHAPTER 5
From: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
To: Beth Fremont
Sent: Wed, 08/25/1999 10:33 AM
Subject: This is only a test. In the case of an actual emergency …
It’s here. Return to your usual programming.
> It?
> You know …it, the thing that tells you you’re not pregnant.
> It? Do you mean your period? Your monthly? Did your aunt Ruby arrive for a five-to seven-day visit? Is it …that time?
Why are you talking like you’re in a feminine napkin commercial?
> I’m trying to be more careful. I don’t want to trigger one of those red flags and send some company watchdog computer into a frenzy, just because I sent an e-mail about it.
> I can’t imagine that any of the company’s red-flag words involve menstruation.
> So you’re not worried about it?
> About your period?
> No, about that note we got. The one that warned us not to send personal e-mails. The one that said we could be fired for improper use of our computers.
> Am I worried that the bad guys from Tron are reading our e-mail? Uh, no. All this security stuff isn’t aimed at people like us. They’re trying to catch the pervs. The online porn addicts, the Internet blackjack players, the corporate spies …
> Those are probably all red-flag words. Pervs. Porn. Spies. I bet red flag is a red flag.
> I don’t care if they are reading our mail. Bring it on, Tron! I dare you. Try to take away my freedom of expression. I’m a journalist. A free-speech warrior. I serve in the Army of the First Amendment. I didn’t take this job for the bad money and the regressive health care coverage. I’m here for the truth, the sunshine, the casting open of closed doors!
> Free-speech warrior. I see. What are you fighting for? The right to give Billy Madison five stars?
> Hey now. I wasn’t always a spoiled movie reviewer. Don’t forget my two years covering North Havenbrook. Two years in the trenches. I bled ink all over that suburb. I went Bob Woodward on its ass.
Furthermore, I would have given Billy Madison six stars if they were mine to give. You know how I feel about Adam Sandler—and that I give bonus stars for Styx songs. (Two stars if it’s “Renegade.”)
> Fine. I surrender. Company Internet policy be
[email protected]: I started my period last night.
> Say it loud, say it proud. Congratulations.
> Yeah, that’s the thing …
> What’s the thing?
> When it started, I didn’t feel my usual hurricane of relief and Zima cravings.
I mean, I was relieved—because, on top of the Zima drinking, I don’t think I’ve eaten anything with folic acid in the last six months. I may even be eating things that leach folic acid from your system, so I was definitely relieved—but I wasn’t ecstatic.
I went downstairs to tell Mitch. He was working on marching band diagrams, which, normally, I wouldn’t interrupt, but this was important. “Just FYI,” I said, “I started my period.”
And he set down his pencil and said, “Oh.” (Just like that. “Oh.”)
When I asked him why he said it that way, he said he thought that maybe I really was pregnant this time—and that that would have been nice. “You know I want kids,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Someday.”
“Someday soon,” he said.
“Someday eventually. When we’re ready.”
And then he turned back to his diagrams. Not mad or impatient. Just sorrowful, which is much, much worse. So I said, “When we’re ready, right?” And he said …
“I’m ready now. I’m ready last year, Jenny, and I’m starting to think that maybe you never will be. You don’t even want to be ready. You act like getting pregnant is a disease you can catch from public toilets.”
> What did you say?
> What could I say? I’m not ready. And maybe I misled him every time I used the words “someday” and “eventually.” I can’t picture myself with kids …
But I couldn’t picture myself married, either, until I met Mitch. I always thought the kid idea would grow on me, that all Mitch’s healthy desires would infect me, and one morning I’d wake up thinking, “What a beautiful world in which to bring a child.”
What if that never happens?
What if he decides to cut his losses and find some perfectly normal woman who—on top of being naturally thin and never having turned to prescription antidepressants—also wants to have his babies ASAP?
> Like Barbie in a state of perpetual ovulation.
> Yes.
> Like the fictional new consumer-science teacher.
> Yes!
> It won’t happen.
> Why not?
> For the same reason Mitch tries to grow giant pumpkins every summer—even though your yard is too small, is infested with beetles and doesn’t get enough sun. Mitch doesn’t want the easy thing. He wants to work a little harder to get the thing he really wants.
> So he’s a fool. A fool whose seeds find no purchase.
> That’s not the point. The point is, he’s a fool who won’t give up on you.
> I’m not sure that you’re right, but I think I might feel better now. So, good work.
> Anytime.
(You know that I mean anytime after 10:30 a.m. or so, right?)
> (I do.)
CHAPTER 6
JENNIFER SCRIBNER-SNYDER, ACCORDING to the company directory, was a Features copy editor.
Beth Fremont, Lincoln knew. He knew of, anyway. He’d read her movie reviews. She was funny, and he usually agreed with her. She was the reason he’d gone to see Dark City and Flirting With Disaster and Babe.
By the time Lincoln realized that he hadn’t sent a warning to Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder—after who knew how many offenses, three? half a dozen?—he couldn’t remember why not. Maybe because he couldn’t always figure out what rule they were breaking. Maybe because they seemed completely harmless. And nice.
And now he couldn’t send them a warning, not tonight. Not when they were actually worried about getting a warning. That would be weird, wouldn’t it? Knowing someone had read an e-mail you’d written about whether someone was reading your e-mail? If you were an excessively paranoid person, it could make you wonder whether all the other things you were worried about were also true. It might make you think, “Maybe they are all out to get me
.”
Lincoln didn’t want to be the bad guy from Tron.
And also …Also, he kind of liked Beth and Jennifer, as much as you can like people from reading their e-mail, only some of their e-mail.
He read through the exchange again. “Ass” was definitely a red-flagged word. So was “blackjack” and “porn.” He wasn’t sure about “perv” or “menstruation.”
He trashed the files and went home.
“YOU DON’T HAVE to pack me a lunch,” Lincoln told his mother. Even though he liked it when she did. He’d practically given up fast food since he moved back home. There was always something baking in his mother’s kitchen, or frying or simmering or cooling on a plate. She was always pushing Pyrex containers into his hands on his way out the door.
“I’m not packing you lunch,” she said. “I’m packing you dinner.”
“But you don’t have to,” he said. He didn’t mind living with his mother, but there are degrees of living with your mother. And he was pretty sure that letting her cook every meal for him was too many degrees. She’d started planning her days around feeding him.
“I don’t have to do anything,” she said, handing him a grocery bag with a heavy glass dish clinking inside.
“What’d you make?” he asked. It smelled like cinnamon.
“Tandoori chicken. I think. I mean, I don’t have a tandoori or a tandoor, one of those ovens, and I didn’t have enough yogurt, they use yogurt, don’t you think? I used sour cream. And paprika. Maybe it’s chicken paprikash …I know I don’t have to make you dinner, you know. I want to. I feel better when you eat—when you eat real food, not something that comes in a wrapper. I’m already so worried about you, the way you don’t sleep, and you’re never in the sun …”
“I sleep, Mom.”
“During the day. We’re meant to be awake with the sun, soaking up vitamin D, and sleeping at night, in the dark. When you were a little boy, I wouldn’t even let you sleep with a night-light, do you remember? It interferes with melatonin production.”
“Okay,” he said. He couldn’t think of a time he’d argued with her and won.
“Okay, what does ‘okay’ mean?”
“It means, okay, I hear you.”
“Oh. Well. Then that doesn’t mean anything at all. Take the chicken, would you? Eat it?”
“I will.” He held the bag against his chest and smiled. He tried to look like somebody she didn’t need to worry about so much. “Of course I will,” he said. “Thank you.”
GREG WAS WAITING for Lincoln when he walked into the IT office. It was always a few degrees colder in there, for the servers. You’d think that would be nice. Refreshing. But it was more of a clammy than a cool.
“Hey, Senator,” Greg said, “I got to thinking about what you were saying a few days ago, you know, about not having enough to do. So I found you something.”
“Great,” Lincoln said, meaning it.
“You can start archiving and compressing all the user-stored files from the last six months or so,” Greg said, clearly thinking this was an inspired idea.
Lincoln wasn’t so sure.
“Why would you want me to do that?” he said. “It’s a waste of time.”
“I thought that’s what you were looking for.”
“I was looking for …Well, I wasn’t looking for anything. I just felt bad getting paid to do nothing.”
“And now you don’t have to feel bad,” Greg said. “I just gave you something to do.”
“Yeah, but archiving and compressing …That could take years. And it doesn’t matter.”
Greg put on his Windbreaker and gathered up a stack of folders. He was leaving early to take his kid to the orthodontist. “There’s no pleasing you, is there, Lincoln? This is why you don’t have a woman.”
How does he know I don’t have a woman, Lincoln wondered.
He spent the rest of the night archiving and compressing files, just to spite Greg. (Even though Greg would never notice that the work was done, let alone that it was done spitefully.) Lincoln archived and compressed and thought hard about quitting. He might have walked out, there and then, if anyone had been in the IT office to accept his resignation.
It was almost ten o’clock when he remembered his mother’s tandoori chicken.
The container had tilted open in its paper bag, and there was a pool of bright orange sauce on the carpet under his desk. The girl who sat there during the day, Kristi, would be angry. She’d already left Lincoln a Post-it note asking him to stop eating at her workstation. She said he was getting crumbs in her keyboard.
Lincoln took what was left of the chicken up to the second-floor break room. Almost nobody used the break room at night—the copy editors ate at their desks—but it was still livelier than the empty information technology office. He liked all the vending machines, and sometimes his break would overlap with the janitors’. Not tonight. Tonight, the room was empty.
For once, Lincoln was glad to be alone. He grabbed a plastic fork and started eating his chicken at a table in the corner. He didn’t bother heating it up.
Two people walked into the break room then, a man and a woman. They were arguing about something. Amicably. “Give our readers some credit,” the woman said, wagging a rolled-up Sports section at the man and leaning against the coffee machine. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve met too many of them.” The man was wearing a dingy white shirt and a thick brown tie. He looked like he hadn’t changed his clothes or gotten a good night’s sleep since the Carter presidency. The woman was younger. She had bright eyes and broad shoulders and hair that fell to the middle of her back. She was too pretty to look at.
They were all too pretty to look at. He couldn’t remember the last time he had looked a woman in the eyes. A woman who wasn’t his mother. Or his sister, Eve.
If he didn’t look, he didn’t risk accidental eye contact. He hated that feeling—at the bank, in elevators—when you inadvertently catch someone’s eye, and she feels compelled to show you she’s not interested. They did that sometimes, looked away pointedly before you even realized you were looking at them. Lincoln had apologized to a woman once when their eyes had met, unintentionally, over a gas pump. She’d pretended not to hear him and looked away.
“If you don’t get a date,” Eve kept threatening, “I’m going to start fixing you up with nice, Lutheran girls. Hard-core Lutherans. Missouri Synod.”
“You wouldn’t,” he told her. “If any of your church friends met Mom, it would totally ruin your rep. Nobody would want to sit next to you at adult Bible study.”
The woman in the break room laughed and shook her head. “You’re being perverse,” she said. She was so preoccupied with her argument, it almost felt safe to watch her. She was wearing faded jeans and a soft green jacket that inched up when she bent over to get her coffee. There were freckles on the small of her back. Lincoln looked away.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Lincoln,” his sister would tell him. “You’ve been on dates. You’ve had a girlfriend. There is nothing about you that is inherently un-dateable.”
“Is this supposed to be a pep talk? Because all I’m hearing is ‘inherently un-dateable.’”
Lincoln had been on dates. He’d had a girlfriend. He’d seen the small of a woman’s back before. He’d stood at concerts and football games and basement parties with his hand on a woman’s back, on Sam’s back, with his fingers sliding inside her sweater. He’d felt like he was getting away with some secret intimacy, touching her like that when no one was paying attention.
Lincoln wasn’t inherently un-dateable. He’d gone on a date three years ago. A friend’s sister had needed a date to a wedding. She’d danced all night with one of the groomsmen, who turned out to be her second cousin, while Lincoln ate exactly thirteen cream cheese mints.
He wasn’t scared, exactly, to start dating again. He just couldn’t visualize it. He could imagine himself a year in, at the comfortable place, the hand-at-the-small-of-the-back place. Bu
t the meeting, the making a girl like him …He was useless at all that.
“I don’t believe that,” Eve said. “You met Sam. You made her fall in love with you.”
He hadn’t, actually. He hadn’t even noticed Sam before she started poking him in the shoulder during tenth-grade world geography. “You have very nice posture,” she’d said. “Did you know you have a mole on the back of your neck?
“I spend a lot of time looking at the back of your neck,” she said. “I could probably identify your body if there was ever an accident. As long as your neck wasn’t hopelessly disfigured.”
It made him blush. The next day, she told him that he smelled like peaches. She was loud. And funny. (But not as funny as loud.) And it was nothing for her to look you straight in the eye—in front of people—and say, “No, really, Lincoln, you smell like peaches.” And she would laugh, and he would blush.
She liked embarrassing him. She liked that she could.
When she asked him to Homecoming, he thought that it might be a joke, that she’d spend the night teasing him in front of her friends. But he said yes anyway. And she didn’t.
Sam was different when they were alone. She was quiet—well, quieter—and he could tell her anything, even things that mattered. She liked to talk about things that mattered. She was wholehearted, and fierce.
He hadn’t made Sam fall in love with him. She just did.
And he’d loved her back.
Lincoln looked up at the coffee machine. The man in the rumpled shirt and the girl with the freckles were gone.
CHAPTER 7
From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Mon, 08/30/1999 11:24 AM
Subject: Who looks good in a strapless dress?
Not just strapless. A strapless sheath. Who can pull that off?
> Um, Joan Collins. Lynda Carter. Shania Twain …
>
1. Do you only watch the Lifetime Network? Or do you also occasionally watch Hollywood Squares?
2. Even those lovely ladies would look hippy standing next to my sister’s bridesmaids. They’re all 20 years old and have “I might not be throwing up in the Tri-Delt bathroom after dinner, but my roommate is, and I like to borrow her jeans” hips.