“Bring deli to Miami?”
“Right, right,” he said. “Forget I asked. Besides, we’d have to charter a chopper to get into Manhattan and back without dying in traffic.”
Something about the light through the open hatch or the sound or the smell—something indefinably New York—made her yearn for Miami. The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.
“Let’s go,” she said. The champagne buzz had crashed and she had a touch of headache. “I’m bushed.”
“Me too,” Kettlewell said. “I left San Jose last night to get into Miami before Tjan left. Not much sleep. Gonna put my seat back and catch some winks, if that’s OK?”
“Good plan,” Suzanne said.
Embarrassingly, when were fully reclined, their seats nearly touched, forming something like a double bed. Suzanne lay awake in the hum of the jets for a while, conscious of the breathing human beside her, the first man she’d done anything like share a bed with in at least a year. The last thing she remembered was the ten thousand foot bell going off and then she slipped away into sleep.
:: Perry thought that they’d sell a million Home Awares in six
:: months. Lester thought he was nuts, that number was too high.
::
:: “Please,” he said, “I invented these things but there aren’t a
:: million roommate households in all of America. We’ll sell half
:: a million tops, total.
Lester always complained when she quoted him directly in her blog posts, but she thought he secretly enjoyed it.
:: Today the boys shipped their millionth unit. It took six weeks.
They’d uncorked a bottle of champagne when unit one million shipped. They hadn’t actually shipped it, per se. The manufacturing was spread out across forty different teams all across the country, even a couple of Canadian teams. The RFID printer company had re-hired half the workers they’d laid off the year before, and had them all working overtime to meet demand.
:: What’s exciting about this isn’t just the money that these guys
:: have made off of it, or the money that Kodacell will return to
:: its shareholders, it’s the ecosystem that these things have
:: enabled. There’re at least ten competing commercial systems for
:: organizing, tagging, sharing, and describing Home Aware objects.
:: Parents love them for their kids. School teachers love them.
:: Seniors’ homes.
The seniors’ homes had been Francis’s idea. They’d brought him in to oversee some of the production engineering, along with some of the young braves who ran around the squatter camps. Francis knew which ones were biddable and he kept them to heel. In the evenings, he’d join the guys and Suzanne up on the roof of the workshop on folding chairs, with beers, watching the sweaty sunset.
:: They’re not the sole supplier. That’s what an ecosystem is all
:: about, creating value for a lot of players. All this competition
:: is great news for you and me, because it’s already driven the
:: price of Home Aware goods down by forty percent. That means that
:: Lester and Perry are going to have to invent something new, soon,
:: before the margin disappears altogether—and that’s also good
:: news for you and me.
“Are you coming?” Lester had dated a girl for a while, someone he met on Craigslist, but she’d dumped him and Perry had confided that she’d left him because he didn’t live up to the press he’d gotten in Suzanne’s column. When he got dumped, he became even touchier about Suzanne, caught at a distance from her that was defined by equal parts of desire and resentment.
“Up in a minute,” she said, trying to keep her smile light and noncommittal. Lester was very nice, but there were times when she caught him staring at her like a kicked puppy and it made her uncomfortable. Naturally, this increased his discomfort as well.
On the roof they already had a cooler of beers going and beside it a huge plastic tub of brightly colored machine-parts.
“Jet engine,” Perry said. The months had put a couple pounds on him and new wrinkles, and given him some grey at the temples, and laugh lines inside his laugh lines. Perry was always laughing at everything around them (“They fucking pay me to do this,” he’d told her once, before literally collapsing to the floor, rolling with uncontrollable hysteria). He laughed again.
“Good old Kettlebelly,” she said. “Must have broken his heart.”
Francis held up a curved piece of cowling. “This thing wasn’t going to last anyway. See the distortion here and here? This thing was designed in a virtual wind-tunnel and machine-lathed. We tried that a couple times, but the wind-tunnel sims were never detailed enough and the forms that flew well in the machine always died a premature death in the sky. Another two years and he’d have had to have it rebuilt anyway, and the Koreans who built this charge shitloads for parts.”
“Too bad,” Lester said. “It’s pretty. Gorgeous, even.” He mimed its curve in the air with a pudgy hand, that elegant swoop.
“Aerospace loves the virtual wind-tunnel,” Francis said, and glared at the cowling. “You can use evolutionary algorithms in the sim and come up with really efficient designs, in theory. And computers are cheaper than engineers.”
“Is that why you were laid off?” Suzanne said.
“I wasn’t laid off, girl,” he said. He jiggled his lame foot. “I retired at 65 and was all set up but the pension plan went bust. So I missed a month of medical and they cut me off and I ended up uninsured. When the wife took sick, bam, that was it, wiped right out. But I’m not bitter—why should the poor be allowed to live, huh?”
His acolytes, three teenagers in do-rags from the shantytown, laughed and went on to pitching bottle-caps off the edge of the roof.
“Stop that, now,” he said, “you’re getting the junkyard all dirty. Christ, you’d think that they grew up in some kind of zoo.” When Francis drank, he got a little mean, a little dark.
“So, kids,” Perry said, wandering over to them, hands in pockets. Silhouetted against the setting sun, biceps bulging, muscular chest tapering to his narrow hips, he looked like a Greek statue. “What do you think of the stuff we’re building?”
They looked at their toes. “’S OK,” one of them grunted.
“Answer the man,” Francis snapped. “Complete sentences, looking up and at him, like you’ve got a shred of self-respect. Christ, what are you, five years old?”
They shifted uncomfortably. “It’s fine,” one of them said.
“Would you use it at home?”
One of them snorted. “No, man. My dad steals anything nice we get and sells it.”
“Oh,” Perry said.
“Fucker broke in the other night and I caught him with my ipod. Nearly took his fucking head off with my cannon before I saw who it was. Fucking juice-head.”
“You should have fucked him up,” one of the other kids said. “My ma pushed my pops in front of a bus one day to get rid of him, guy broke both his legs and never came back.”
Suzanne knew it was meant to shock them, but that didn’t take away from its shockingness. In the warm fog of writing and living in Florida, it was easy to forget that these people lived in a squatter camp and were technically criminals, and received no protection from the law.
Perry, though, just squinted into the sun and nodded. “Have you ever tried burglar alarms?”
The kids laughed derisively and Suzanne winced, but Perry was undaunted. “You could be sure that you woke up whenever anyone entered, set up a light and siren to scare them off.”
“I want one that fires spears,” the one with the juice-head father said.
“Blowtorches,” said the one whose mother pushed his father under a bus.
“I want a force-field,” the third one said, speaking for the first time. “I want something that will keep anyone from coming in, period, so I don’t have to sleep one eye up, ’cause I’ll be safe.”
The other two nodded, slowly.
“Damn straight,” Francis said.
That was the last time Francis’s acolytes joined them on the rooftop. Instead, when they finished work they went home, walking slowly and talking in low murmurs. With just the grownups on the roof, it was a lot more subdued.
“What’s that smoke?” Lester said, pointing at the black billowing column off to the west, in the sunset’s glare.
“House-fire,” Francis said. “Has to be. Or a big fucking car-wreck, maybe.”
Perry ran down the stairs and came back up with a pair of high-power binox. “Francis, that’s your place,” he said after a second’s fiddling. He handed the binox to Francis. “Just hit the button and they’ll self-stabilize.”
“That’s my place,” Francis said. “Oh, Christ.” He’d gone gray and seemed to have sobered up instantly. His lips were wet, his eyes bright.
They drove over at speed, Suzanne wedged into Lester’s frankensmartcar, practically under his armpit, and Perry traveling with Francis. Lester still wore the same cologne as her father, and when she opened the window, its smell was replaced by the burning-tires smell of the fire.
They arrived to discover a fire-truck parked on the side of the freeway nearest the shantytown. The fire-fighters were standing soberly beside it, watching the fire rage across the canal.
They rushed for the footbridge and a firefighter blocked their way.
“Sorry, it’s not safe,” he said. He was Latino, good looking, like a movie star, bronze skin flickering with copper highlights from the fire.
“I live there,” Francis said. “That’s my home.”
The firefighter looked away. “It’s not safe,” he said.
“Why aren’t you fighting the fire?” Suzanne said.
Francis’s head snapped around. “You’re not fighting the fire! You’re going to let our houses burn!”
A couple more fire-fighters trickled over. Across the river, the fire had consumed half of the little settlement. Some of the residents were operating a slow and ponderous bucket-brigade from the canal, while others ran into the unburned buildings and emerged clutching armloads of belongings, bits of furniture, boxes of photos.
“Sir,” the movie-star said, “the owner of this property has asked us not to intervene. Since there’s no imminent risk to life and no risk of the burn spreading off his property, we can’t trespass to put out the fire. Our hands are tied.”
“The owner?” Francis spat. “This land is in title dispute. The court case has been underway for twenty years now. What owner?”
The movie-star shrugged. “That’s all I know, sir.”
Across the canal, the fire was spreading, and the bucket brigade was falling back. Suzanne could feel the heat now, like putting your face in the steam from a boiling kettle.
Francis seethed, looking from the firemen and their truck back to the fire. He looked like he was going to pop something, or start shouting, or charge into the flames.
Suzanne grabbed his hand and walked him over to the truck and grabbed the first firefighter she encountered.
“I’m Suzanne Church, from the San Jose Mercury News, a McClatchy paper. I’d like to speak to the commanding officer on the scene, please.” She hadn’t been with the Merc for months, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say, I’m Suzanne Church with SuzanneChurch.org. She was pretty sure that no matter how high her readership was and how profitable her ad sales were, the fire-fighter wouldn’t have been galvanized into the action that was invoked when she mentioned the name of a real newspaper.
He hopped to, quickly moving to an older man, tapping him on the shoulder, whispering in his ear. Suzanne squeezed Francis’s hand as the fire-chief approached them. She extended her hand and talked fast. “Suzanne Church,” she said, and took out her notebook, the key prop in any set piece involving a reporter. “I’m told that you are going to let those homes burn because someone representing himself as the title-holder to that property has denied you entry. However, I’m also told that the title to that land is in dispute and has been in the courts for decades. Can you resolve this for me, Chief...?”
“Chief Brian Wannamaker,” he said. He was her age, with the leathery skin of a Florida native who spent a lot of time out of doors. “I’m afraid I have no comment for you at this time.”
Suzanne kept her face deadpan, and gave Francis’s hand a warning squeeze to keep him quiet. He was trembling now. “I see. You can’t comment, you can’t fight the fire. Is that what you’d like me to write in tomorrow’s paper?”
The Chief looked at the fire for a moment. Across the canal, the bucket-brigaders were losing worse than ever. He frowned and Suzanne saw that his hands were clenched into fists. “Let me make a call, OK?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned on his heel and stepped behind the fire-engine, reaching for his cellphone.
Suzanne strained to hear his conversation, but it was inaudible over the crackle of the fire. When she turned around again, Francis was gone. She caught sight of him again in just a moment, running for the canal, then jumping in and landing badly in the shallow, swampy water. He hobbled across to the opposite bank and began to laboriously climb it.
A second later, Perry followed. Then Lester.
“Chief!” she said, going around the engine and pointing. The Chief had the phone clamped to his head still, but when he saw what was going on, he snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and started barking orders.
Now the fire-fighters moved, boiling across the bridge, uncoiling hoses, strapping on tanks and masks. They worked in easy, fluid concert, and it was only seconds before the water and foam hit the flames and the smoke changed to white steam.
The shantytown residents cheered. The fire slowly receded. Perry and Lester had Francis, holding him back from charging into the fray as the fire-fighters executed their clockwork dance.
The steam was hot enough to scald, and Suzanne pulled the collar of her blouse up over her face. Around her were the shantytowners, mothers with small children, old men, and a seemingly endless parade of thug-life teenagers, the boys in miniature cycling shorts and do-rags, the girls in bandeau tops, glitter makeup, and skirts made from overlapping strips of rag, like post-apocalyptic hula outfits. Their faces were tight, angry, smudged with smoke and pinkened by the heat.