The Cookbook Collector (16 page)

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

“W
here’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. Subject: 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.

He was so much fun, thought Jake. Otherworldly, mused Orion. Egomaniacal, Jonathan protested silently.

Jonathan was slightly out of sorts, annoyed with Orion for coming late, jealous of Jake’s easy brilliance. As CTO, Jonathan did the most on a day-to-day basis to build the company. He did the most and cared the most, and yet, in Oskar’s office, Jake’s ideas were the best. Jake did not work for those ideas; he did not have to travel or negotiate or fight for them. He was original. And Jonathan was smart enough to understand the value of everything Jake said. The businessman he was becoming rejoiced and looked for ways to capitalize on Jake’s gifts, but the boy in Jonathan felt differently.

“Don’t you think it’s good for you to fall short sometimes?” Emily had suggested once, a question sweet and also cutting as she lay folded in his arms.

“No,” Jonathan had retorted. “I don’t think it’s good for me at all.”

“This may be possible.” Oskar delivered the verdict on Jake’s drawing. “This is slightly faster.”

“I don’t think slightly faster is really what we’re after,” Jonathan said. “We want more than incremental improvements.”

Oskar spread his hands. “What you want,” he said, “is not always what you get.”

“Then we need a different paradigm,” said Jonathan.

“A paradigm is not a dime a dozen,” Oskar pointed out.

“I never said it would be easy,” Jonathan said. “We need new products, and we need to start developing them now.”

“You have a proposal?” Oskar’s challenges were all the more potent because they were so gentle, always so bemused. “Tell us!”

And that was the moment of temptation. That was when Jonathan wanted to pull out electronic fingerprinting and say: Look, surveillance is where we should be going. Record every touch on every piece of data, know its security status at every turn. Other companies are starting to pursue this. We need to move into this space too. He knew Oskar would turn toward him, fascinated. He would say, Ah, now this is interesting. And in his pride and his frustration, in the heat of the moment, with Oskar calling his bluff and Jake standing there, and Orion daydreaming in the corner, Jonathan struggled against the impulse to shock them all.

“I see you have not yet decided on your new paradigm,” Oskar taunted Jonathan mildly.

“I do have one.” It was against Jonathan’s nature to turn the other cheek, and yet, once again, he felt Emily near him, and remembered her voice.

“I have to trust you,” she’d told him late that night in his apartment. “I have to, if I’m going to love you.”

He had never known anyone like her. She made his previous relationships seem trivial. It was her unusual strength, the courage of her convictions that drew him to her. She insisted she was nothing like him, but he understood her differently. He saw himself in Emily—not the man he was now, but the man he could be. Sometimes he rebelled against this solemn feeling; sometimes he didn’t want to love her quite so much, and he was secretly, cruelly relieved to leave her in California and return to his less-reflective life apart. He felt unready to give up childish things like rugby and lying and beating the crap out of Green Knight. But he never stopped thinking about her; he never stopped longing for her or anticipating their time together. Being with her was still new for him, her warmth still startling because she was also so reserved. When she kissed him and wrapped her arms around him, she seemed to overcome something in herself, and he knew that he was exceptional in her life as she was in his.

“So when you are ready, please let us know,” said Oskar.

“Oh, I will,” Jonathan said, and he pretended that his phone was buzzing, and left the room.

He wished his phone really was ringing. He had to speak to Emily, to hear her steady voice.

He closed his office door and dialed. Her phone rang and rang again, and each time it rang he missed her more.

“Hello?” Emily answered at last, surprised.

“Did I wake you?” He looked at his watch. It was only seven thirty in the morning in California.

“No, no,” she said sleepily. “I’m up. I’m on the phone with Jess.”

“Do you want me to call you back?”

“No, that’s okay. I think we’re done.”

“You’re never done,” he said.

“She’s making me crazy,” Emily admitted. “Hold on….” When she got back on the line he heard her sigh.

“Where is she now?”

“You don’t want to know,” said Emily.

“Where are you now?”

“In bed with my computer. I have to get up.”

“No, don’t,” he said. “Stay there.”

“It’s getting late.”

“I left Oskar’s meeting,” he blurted out.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He had nothing to confess except a brief opportunistic impulse, and he was not about to upset her by admitting that. The uneasiness he felt required reassurance, not expiation. Perhaps his logic was circular. He followed the circuit nonetheless: He needed Emily to believe in him so that he could believe in himself. Because of this, he did not always tell the whole story about himself, or even about ISIS. That night, when she had pressed him to explain what was wrong with Lockbox, he had lied to her, glossing over the structural problems Orion had discovered, insisting Orion broke the system by willfully abusing code. He lied now, as well. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“You’re not happy.”

“I am happy,” he contradicted. “We’ve got Yahoo!”

“I know, but—”

He interrupted, “I miss your voice.”

“Just my voice?”

“Not just your voice.”

“You have my voice,” she pointed out.

He pulled down the shades. “Keep talking. I’ll imagine the rest.”

“I’m in your arms,” she whispered. “I’m kissing you and I can taste the coffee on your tongue.”

“And then what?”

“Then what! You tell me.”

“I’m kissing your neck,” he said. “My hands are around your waist. I’m lifting up your nightgown.” He closed his eyes, imagining her slender neck, her skin, her breasts. “Take off your nightgown.”

She was quiet.

“Are you?” he whispered after a moment.

She hesitated, and then said, “Yes.”

And he was with her, and he began to forget the meeting. “Please,” he urged her.

“Will you?”

“Yes,” he breathed, and he was not upset anymore. His company was going public within the week. He’d celebrate with her; he could hear her even now. He felt almost, on the verge, soon to be intensely happy. He was no longer lying. What were lies, anyway? Only futures waiting to come true.