The Cookbook Collector

  “You like working all night,” she said.

  “I’m good at it.” Orion was showing off a little, but he was also telling the truth. He had an eye for detail, a grasp of the small picture, the obsessive game-playing mind of a superb hacker.

  They shared her computer now, and the monitor glowed before them as they found their way back inside the code. They made their way without a map; the program was their map, spreading in rivulets before them. Their hands hovered over the keyboard and overlapped. Her wrists were delicate, her skin fine as rice paper, but he pretended that he didn’t notice when their hands brushed. She pretended as well, even when she felt his fingers close reflexively on hers. The task before them made pretense easier, because they had to concentrate. They were like diviners, searching for the source of her mistake.

  Suddenly Sorel found the bug. “Stupid, stupid,” she groaned. “Over there. I forgot the bounds check.”

  “Aha!” cried Orion. She had neglected to specify enough memory for the number of items in her piece of the Lockbox system.

  “It’s not even an interesting mistake,” she griped as she typed in proper array bounds. “Wait, why isn’t it working now?”

  “Be patient.” He took over the keyboard.

  “No.” Gently she pushed his hands away. “Let me.”

  By the time they got Lockbox up and running, the sun was rising, shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows, drenching East Cambridge in liquid gold.

  “Got it.” Orion basked for a moment in accomplishment. “We got it back up,” he announced to the nearly empty room.

  “Cool,” somebody said faintly from across the way.

  Orion extended his hand to Sorel, and she shook it. He felt joyous, masterful after the all-nighter. “I knew I’d get to the bottom of this.”

  “You!” she said. “Give credit where credit is due.”

  “You found the bug,” he admitted.

  “And don’t forget that I created the bug too. I created a monster!” She picked up the rubber chicken and told it sweetly, “I’m going to murder you.”

  “Let’s go down to the river and drown it.”

  “Yes!” She hunted for the black heap that was her coat. As she turned it here and there, trying to figure out which end was up, her pack of cigarettes fell from one of the pockets. She didn’t notice.

  “I can carry that….” Orion took her guitar. “What kind of …” He was about to ask her what kind of music she played, when everything faded. The lights dimmed, the computer monitors darkened. The constant whirring of machines ceased, and only the EXIT signs remained illuminated.

  “The control room,” Orion said, and they sprinted downstairs to the new ISIS nerve center with its monitors covering the entire wall, illuminating the world in all its time zones. There on that map, green dots indicated servers for the ISIS global security network. At desks in the control room, as at NASA, at least two ISIS programmers monitored the ISIS network at all times.

  Clarence and Anand were watching that night, and they saw the power fade, even as Sorel and Orion burst through the door. The overhead lights died, and for a moment only the wall of monitors illuminated the space in wavering blue.

  “Are you still online?” Orion asked Clarence.

  “The network hung.” He typed frantically.

  “But what about the generators?” Sorel asked.

  “Nothing,” Anand said.

  For a moment ISIS went dark, and its vast network, all its points of light, disappeared. It was as if the stars themselves had vanished from the sky, the whole fabulously rich ISIS enterprise, the solar system, the galaxy, the entire Milky Way had vaporized. And then power returned. Overhead lights blazed white again. The electronic map glowed, the ISIS security network restored itself onscreen in all its particulars. The soft whirring of the building’s myriad machines resumed, replacing harsh silence to reassure the ear.

  “Just a brownout,” Sorel murmured. Like all brief frights, this one was instantly forgotten.

  They walked outside between the half-built laboratories and biotech offices of Kendall Square. Orion carried the guitar as they picked their way around the slushy puddles.

  “Did you ever see such ugly code?” Orion asked her.

  “Disgusting,” Sorel said. “I suppose Jonathan thinks there will be time to straighten out Lockbox later on, but by then everyone will be too rich to care. I know I will.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t you want to be fabulously wealthy?” she asked him.

  He considered a moment. “I think I’d like to buy my mom a new car. And I’d buy my dad a house. He probably wouldn’t stay in it, but …”

  “Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. I’d buy Mum a car if she promised to leave my dad.”

  “You don’t like your father?”

  “Well, he’s just my stepdad, really. Why wouldn’t yours stay in a house?”

  “Oh, my dad’s a little bit … Sometimes he falls asleep on park benches,” Orion said. “He’s a professor at Middlebury, but since he doesn’t dress that well, sometimes he looks kind of—homeless. Once he fell asleep on a bench, and when he woke up, he found two dollars in his hat.”

  “Oh, no!” She laughed, and as she looked at him, sidelong, her cheeks were pink in the chilly air, her long hair spilled red-gold over her black cloth coat. She was so tall. He didn’t have to bend down to look at her. The light caught in her eyes.

  “Wait, stop a minute.” They stopped walking, and right there on the sidewalk, he looked into her eyes. “Green.”

  “Yes, thanks, I knew that.”

  They hurried on through Central Square, with its piles of dirty snow and flattened cardboard, its closed shops and somnolent bars. The Plough & Stars, the Cantab Lounge, the Middle East.

  “Coffee?” Orion asked.

  “Absolutely.” They bought coffee and donuts at the Store 24 near the Central Square bus stop. Sorel devoured her donut while Orion paid. “Sorry,” she said. “They’re very small!”

  Orion felt an almost overwhelming desire to kiss the corner of Sorel’s mouth. He wanted to lick the powdered sugar from her lips. The young cashier in her head scarf startled him with her question: “Anything else?”

  They walked all the way down Pleasant Street to the river, icy in the middle, brackish at the edges. Sorel handed the rubber chicken to Orion, who sat on a bench with the coffee cups and guitar. He watched her fumble for her cigarettes.

  “Don’t you want to throw it?” he asked her.

  “I suppose.” She was a little distracted, irritated that she hadn’t found what she was looking for. Sorel walked right up to the edge of the muddy riverbank and balanced on a wobbly rock.

  “You do the honors,” Orion encouraged her.

  She lifted the rubber chicken like a football and then stopped. “If I get arrested, they’ll deport me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m on a student visa. And I think there’s something in there about never throwing chickens in the water.”

  “I’m sure they meant live chickens,” Orion said.

  “Oh, that’s all right then.”

  She hurled the rubber chicken into the air, and it sailed for an instant above the water. Then it splashed down and floated, sickly yellow on the surface.

  “I’m going to write about you,” she called after the chicken. She returned to Orion on the bench, opened her guitar case, and unwrapped her instrument, which she’d swaddled in soft T-shirts. “I got it at a pawnshop. Isn’t that sad? It’s a bit scarred here, but it’s a good traveling instrument.” Experimentally she tried some chords, and then launched into song.

  Ugly little chicken

  Where have you gone?

  Don’t you be pickin’

  Where you don’t belong.

  He laughed with surprise. Her throaty voice was not English or European, but bluesy African-American. “Those Folkways records,” he said, thinking of his dad’s LPs. ??
?You listened to them too.”

  “I listen to everything.” Leaning back, Sorel felt his arm on the bench, against her shoulders. “Everything American. Do you think that’s strange?”

  When he looked into her lively eyes, Orion saw the possibilities before him, each spreading outward, the branches of a decision tree. He could answer her. He could keep quiet. He could make some excuse to leave. He could kiss her. He imagined kissing her. “I don’t want to go public,” he confessed.

  She shook her head at him. “Poor you! When the time comes, you’ll just have to find the strength.” She strummed out a second verse.

  Rich little chicken

  Keep movin’ on

  “Stop! I get it!” He pulled her toward him and tickled her.

  “No tickling!”

  He stopped.

  “Hold on.” Carefully she put her guitar away, and then she turned to him, and he did kiss her, softly, on the lips.

  “Sorry,” he said immediately.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I surprised you,” he said.

  “It’s all right.” She spoke as though she weren’t the most lovely girl he’d ever seen. Sensibly, she said, “It’s just a kiss.”

  That was when he began to fall in love with her. He felt a wave of sleepiness, or possibly just contentment, hearing her calm voice, sitting there with her, sharing the illusion that they would remain nothing more than friends.

  “What do you really think of ISIS?” Sorel asked him.

  “I don’t like it as much as I did.”

  “Just because you were fighting with Jonathan?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I saw you through the glass,” she said. “And I could hear you too.”

  “Useless conference room.”

  “I heard you defending the Free Software Foundation and all that.”

  “I happen to believe in the free exchange of ideas,” Orion said. “And the individual’s right to privacy and self-expression …”

  “You can afford to,” Sorel pointed out.

  “It’s not a question of affording to believe something,” Orion said.

  “Well,” said Sorel, “I can’t afford to believe quite so many things. I’m just a graduate student—supposedly. I used to be, until Mel hired me.”

  “What were you studying? Computer science?”

  “Physics.”

  “Oh, physics. Molly’s father would like you then,” he mused.

  “Who’s Molly’s father?”

  “Carl Eisenstat.”

  She sat up straight. “You know Carl Eisenstat?”

  There was Molly’s father again with Orion in his sights. There was Carl, sometimes disdainful, sometimes delighted, always examining Orion with his quick hawk’s eye.

  “The Eisenstat Principle of Viscosity,” said Sorel.

  “So that’s what it’s a principle of. I always forget.”

  “You didn’t know?” she asked him, and then, “Who’s Molly?”

  “My girlfriend.” He darted a look at her. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the space between them had grown. “I guess I should have mentioned her earlier.”

  “But she didn’t come up,” Sorel said.

  “No.”

  She smiled and said, “Right. I should get breakfast.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he told her.

  She shook her head. “Not this time.” He thought she was talking about breakfast, but she explained, “I can’t see someone who’s involved with someone else. I’ve done that.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Orion said again.

  “I was too,” she said. “Thanks for all your help. Good-bye, good morning, and all that. You’ll have to explain about the rubber chicken.”

  “It was your idea to drown it,” he called after her as she hurried away. “You should be the one to tell them.”

  She turned and smiled. “I’ll say you donated it to the Free Software Foundation. Everyone will understand.”

  13

  “Where’s the milk?” Molly asked as soon as Orion arrived home.

  “Oh,” Orion said.

  “I tried to call you.”

  “I was working all night.”

  “And what do you think I was doing?”

  Coming in from that gold morning, he felt as though he were returning from Italy—from some far country filled with art. The apartment looked sad, neglected. Dark. He yanked on the shade in the bedroom and light poured in to reveal the pile of clean laundry on the bed.

  “That’s depressing,” Molly said.

  “I just got home,” Orion protested.

  “So did I!”

  This was their competition—to see who could stay out working longer.

  “All I asked you to do was buy milk,” Molly said.

  “I know. I’ll get it.”

  “And when you go down you could take out the recycling,” she said.

  “Okay.” He settled on the futon in the living room and opened his laptop.

  “Now.”

  “I said I will.”

  Then she shook her head at him, snatched the recycling bin and carried it downstairs, magazines and plastic bottles trailing behind her.

  “I said I’d do it.” He followed, picking up after her.

  “I’m not interested in waiting until you feel like doing it.”

  “Molly.” He opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, and she ran down the cracked cement steps in front of their building and heaved the bin onto the curb. Too late. The orange Cambridge Public Works recycling truck was driving away.

  She didn’t say a word, but turned back, tromping the stairs to their apartment with heavy dejected feet. Orion followed her inside with the recycling bin. The city would fine them if they left it out.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he called up to her on the stairs.

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  “I did the laundry like you asked,” he said as they reentered the apartment.

  She looked through the open door at the pile of clean rumpled clothes. “Half the laundry.”

  “All of it!”

  She turned on him. “If you don’t put it away, that’s half the laundry.”

  There was something grand and ridiculous in this argument, but he knew better than to say so. “We need a wife,” he said lightly.

  “Good idea. You can give her options.” Molly strode into their bedroom, tore off her scrubs, and went to bed. He had never imagined that pulling up the sheets could be so much like slamming a door.

  Later, much later, she woke and showered and they ordered pizza and picnicked in the living room, and they talked about hiring Merry Maids to come once a week to clean the apartment, and they agreed to send out their laundry and have it all washed and folded, and they decided to buy a car for Molly to drive to the hospital so that she wouldn’t have to take the T at all hours. They didn’t have the money yet, but they would in six months. They could solve almost all their problems soon.

  The next day at ISIS, Orion kept busy writing code, but he could not stay inside it. Numbers no longer printed themselves on his retina. He saw Sorel’s face instead, and heard her low voice. Her chicken song. Where was she? Her desk was bare, her cubicle empty. Was she somewhere in the building? Out on the sidewalk smoking? She was such a strange, compelling person, the only one he liked at ISIS. Why, then, had he kissed her under false pretenses? What a stupid thing to do. He sat at his desktop and typed:

  Sorel: How was breakfast?

  He deleted the line.

  Sorel, he typed, forgive me if I made you uncomfortable.

  Forgive me? Uncomfortable? He deleted again.

  Sorel, how are you? Delete.

  Sorel, who are you? Delete.

  Sorel, you didn’t come in today. Delete. Obviously she knew that.

  Sorel, where are you? The moment he sent this message, his own words returned to him in his in-box, and for a split second he imagined she was writing back. New message. Sub
ject: Where are you?

  But the message wasn’t from Sorel, it was the usual ping from Jonathan. Orion was late. The R & D meeting had started. Where are you?

  R & D meetings weren’t bad—just Orion, Aldwin, Jake, Jonathan, and Oskar, their old advisor, now chief scientist. As students, Orion and his friends had gathered in Oskar’s office and worked for results worthy of a paper at STOC or FOCS. Now the aim was new product and patents for the company: more customers, fresh revenue, to build on the upcoming IPO. The stakes were higher now, the goals financial, but meetings with Oskar were the same as always. Four guys in mismatched swivel chairs, vying to impress their difficult-to-please professor.

  Oskar did not acknowledge Orion when he bounded in and took his seat in the corner. He continued scribbling on the oversized whiteboard covering his office wall. When Oskar finished, he stood back and everyone gazed at his new model for a secure system. The drawing looked like an exploding star.

  “What if you drew these edges together?” Jonathan asked.

  “Show me.”

  Jonathan took a green dry-erase marker and simplified the star.

  Oskar shook his head and took the marker out of Jonathan’s hand. “This is the flaw. Do you see?”

  Orion didn’t see, but Jonathan flushed a little where he was standing by the board, and tried to explain himself.

  “N-N-N-No.” Oskar wagged his finger at Jonathan, shooting him down.

  “What if you tried this?” Jake rubbed out half of Jonathan’s star with his hand and redrew it in red.

  Long pause, as Oskar considered the board, and his students waited for his verdict. Their resident cryptographer was a lively seventy-year-old who had come to America by way of Israel. His eyes were small and gleaming, as was his bald head. He had been married “once upon a time” as he put it, and his son and daughter were both theoretical computer scientists, one at Hebrew University and one at Carnegie Mellon. Oskar’s accomplished children were nowhere near as accomplished as he, but Oskar did not lose sleep over this. He was accustomed to his superiority.