Audio: T. Coraghessan Boyle reads.
The Purse
The car says this to her: “Cindy, listen, I know you’ve got to get over to 1133 Hollister Avenue by 2 p.m. for your meeting with Rose Taylor, of Taylor, Levine & Rodriguez, L.L.P., but did you hear that Les Bourses is having a thirty-per-cent-off sale? And, remember, they carry the complete Picard line you like—in particular, that cute cross-body bag in fuchsia you had your eye on last week. They have two left in stock.”
They’re moving along at just over the speed limit, which is what she’s programmed the car to do, trying to squeeze every minute out of the day but at the same time wary of breaking the law. She glances at her phone. It’s a quarter past one and she really wasn’t planning on making any other stops, aside from maybe picking up a sandwich to eat in the car, but as soon as Carly (that’s what she calls her operating system) mentions the sale, she’s envisioning the transaction—in and out, that’s all it’ll take, because she looked at the purse last week before ultimately deciding they wanted too much for it. In and out, that’s all. And Carly will wait for her at the curb.
“I see you’re looking at your phone.”
“I’m just wondering if we’ll have enough time . . .”
“As long as you don’t dawdle—you know what you want, don’t you? It’s not as if you haven’t already picked it out. You told me so yourself.” (And here Carly loops in a recording of their conversation from the previous week, and Cindy listens to her own voice saying, “I love it, just love it—and it’d match my new heels perfectly.”)
“O.K.,” she says, thinking she’ll forgo the sandwich. “But we have to make it quick.”
“I’m showing no traffic and no obstructions of any kind.”
“Good,” she says, “good,” and leans back in the seat and closes her eyes.
Hitchhike
The fleet is available to everybody, all the time, and you don’t even have to have an account for Ridz. The thing is, Ridz isn’t going to take you directly to Warren’s house or to the skate park or whatever destination you tell it, because it’s programmed to take you first to the Apple Store or GameStop or wherever you might have spent money in the past. So it isn’t really free, and you have to plan for the extra time to listen to the spiel and say no about sixty times, but then, eventually, you get where you want to go. Some kids—and his mother would kill him if she knew he was one of them—just step out in front of any empty fleet car that happens to be going by and commandeer it. You can’t get inside if you don’t have the trip code, of course, but you can climb up on the roof and cling to the Lidar till you get to the next stop or the one after that.
That is what Jackie happens to be doing at half past one on this particular school day, clinging to the roof of one of Ridz’s S.D.C. Volvos and catching bugs in his teeth, when his mother’s car suddenly appears in the other lane and he freezes. His first instinct is to jump down on the curb side, but they’ve got to be going forty miles an hour—which feels like a hundred with the way the wind is tearing at him—so he flattens himself even more, as if that could make him invisible. His plan was to go over to Warren’s and hang out, nothing beyond that, though he could see a forty-ouncer in his future and maybe another hitch over to the beach with Warren and Warren’s girlfriend, Cyrilla, but now, with his mother’s car inching up on him, all that’s about to go south in a hurry. She’ll ground him for sure, cut his allowance, probably report him to his father (who won’t do much more than snarl over the phone from Oregon, where he’s living with Jennifer and never coming back), and then go through the whole charade of taking away his phone and his games for a week, or however long she thinks is going to impress on him just how dangerous that kind of behavior is.
All bad. But then, when the car pulls even with him, he sees that his mother, far from looking out the window and catching him in the act, isn’t even awake. She’s got her head thrown back and her eyes closed and Carly’s doing the driving without her. He doesn’t think in terms of lucky breaks or anything like that—he just accepts it for what it is. And, at the next light, he slides down off the car and takes to his feet, his back turned to the street, to the cars, to her.
knightscope
The reason for the meeting with Rose Taylor is to arrange legal representation for a homeless man named Keystone Bacharach, who spends his days on the steps of the public library with a coterie of other free spirits and unfortunates, and at night sleeps under a bush in front of the S.P.C.A. facility, where he can have a little privacy. What most people don’t realize—and Cindy, as an advocate for the homeless, does—is how psychologically harrowing it is to live on the streets, where through all the daylight hours you’re under public scrutiny. Your every gesture, whether intimate or not, is on display for people to interpret or dismiss or condemn, and your only solace is the cover of darkness, when everything’s hidden. And this is the problem: the S.P.C.A., in a misguided response to a rash of break-ins, graffiti tagging, and dumpster diving for syringes and animal tranquillizers, had deployed one of Knightscope’s Autonomous Data Machines to patrol the area, which meant that Mr. Bacharach was awakened every thirty minutes, all night long, by this five-foot-tall, four-hundred-pound robot shining a light on him and giving off its eerie high-pitched whine before asking, in the most equable of tones, “What is the situation here?” (To which Mr. Bacharach, irritated, would reply, “It’s called sleep.”)
A week ago, she went down there after hours to see for herself, though her sister had called her crazy (“You’re just asking to get raped—or worse”) and even Carly, on dropping her off, had asked, “Are you sure this is the correct destination?” But they didn’t know Keystone the way she did. He was just hurt inside, that was all, trying to heal from what he’d seen during his tour of duty in Afghanistan, and if he couldn’t make a go of it in an increasingly digitized society, that was the fault of the society. He had an engaging personality, he was a first-rate conversationalist comfortable with a whole range of subjects, from animal rights to winemaking to the history of warfare (light years ahead of Adam, her ex, who toward the end of their marriage had communicated through gestures and grunts only), and he was as well read as anybody she knew. Plus, he was her age, exactly.
He was waiting for her in front of the S.P.C.A., dressed, as always, in shorts, flip-flops, T-shirt, and denim jacket, his hair—he wore it long—pulled back tightly in a ponytail. “Thanks for coming,” he said, taking the gift bag she handed him (trail mix, dried apricots, a pair of socks, a tube of toothpaste) without comment. “This is really going to open your eyes, because, no matter how you cut it, this is harassment, pure and simple. Of citizens. In a public place. And it’s not just me.”
She saw now that there were half a dozen other figures there, sprawled on the pavement or leaning against the wall, with their shopping carts and belongings arrayed around them. It was almost dark, but she could see that at least one of them was familiar—Lula, a woman everyone called Knitsy, because her hands were in constant motion, as if trying vainly to stitch the air. The street was quiet at this hour, which only seemed to magnify the garble of whining, yipping, and sudden startled shrieks coming from the S.P.C.A. facility behind them, and if it felt ominous it had nothing to do with these people gathered here but with the forces arrayed against them. She said, “Is it due to come by soon?”
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
How Hard Is It to Find a Cheap Sofa in New York?
He nodded in the direction of the parking lot at the far end of the facility. “It went down there, like, fifteen, twenty minutes ago, so it should be along any minute now.” He gave her an angry look. “Like clockwork,” he said, then called out, “Right, Knitsy?,” and Knitsy, whether she knew what she was agreeing to or not, said, “Yeah.”
The night grew a shade darker. Then one of the dogs let out a howl from the depths of the building, and here it came, the Knightscope K5+ unit, turning the corner and heading for them on its base of tightly revolving wheels. She’d seen these units before—at the bank, in the lot behind the pizza place, rolling along in formation in last year’s Fourth of July parade—but they’d seemed unremarkable to her, no more threatening or intrusive than any other labor-saving device, except that they were bigger, much bigger. She’d only seen them in daylight, but now it was night, and this one had its lights activated—two eerie blue slits at the top and what would be its midriff, if it had a midriff, in addition to the seven illuminated sensors that were arrayed across its chest, if it had a chest. Its shape was that of a huge hard-boiled egg, which in daylight made it seem ordinary, ridiculous even, but the lights changed all that.
“So what now? It’s not going to confront us, is it?”
“You watch,” Keystone said.
The K5+, as she knew from the literature, featured the same Light Detection and Ranging device that Carly had, which used a continuously sweeping laser to measure objects and map the surrounding area, as well as thermal-imaging sensors, an ambient-noise microphone, and a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree high-definition video capture. It moved at a walking pace, three miles an hour, and its function was surveillance, not enforcement. She knew that, but still, at this hour in this place, she felt caught out, as if she’d been doing something illicit—which, she supposed, was the purpose of the thing in the first place.
But now it was stopping, pivoting, focussed on Knitsy, whose hands fluttered like pale streamers in the ray of light it emitted, which had suddenly become more intense, like a flashlight beam. “What is the situation here?” it asked.
Knitsy said, “Go away. Leave me alone.”
The K5+ didn’t move. It had been specifically programmed not to engage in conversation the way Carly did, because its designers wanted to avoid confrontations—it was there to deter criminal activity by its very presence and to summon the police if the need should arise. Now it said, “Move on.”
“Hey,” Keystone called out, waving his hands. “Over here, Tinhead.”
She watched the thing swivel and redirect itself, starting down the sidewalk toward them. When it came up even with her and Keystone, it stopped and focussed its light on them. “What is the situation here?” it asked her, employing the voice of one of NPR’s most genial hosts, a voice designed to put people at ease. But she didn’t feel at ease—just the opposite—and that was a real eye-opener.
What happened next was sudden and violent. Keystone just seemed to snap—and maybe he was showing off for her, thinking, in some confused way, that he was protecting her—but in that moment he tucked his shoulder like a linebacker and slammed into the thing, once, twice, three times, until he finally managed to knock it over with a screech of metal and shattering glass. Which was bad enough—vandalism, that was what she was thinking, and her face was on that video feed, too—but then he really seemed to take his frustration out on the thing, seizing a brick he’d stashed under one of the bushes and hammering at the metal frame until the unit set off a klaxon so loud and piercing she thought her heart would stop.
Just then, just as she was thinking they were both going to get arrested, Carly pulled up at the curb. The door swung open. “Get in,” Carly said.
Rebel Without A Cause
It was a meme, really, that got them into it, a clip of the scene in the old movie where two guys were playing chicken and the greaser who wasn’t James Dean got the strap of his leather jacket caught on the door, which repeated over and over till it was just hilarious. After that, curious about the movie itself, they dug deeper and it was a revelation—teen-agers stole cars and raced them on the street and there was nobody there to say different. Even better, because this was back in the day, the cars just did what you wanted—all you had to do was put the key in the ignition (or hot-wire the car, if you wanted to steal it), hit the gas, and peel out. He must have seen the movie (or parts of it) at least twenty times with Warren and Cyrilla, and, if Warren was James Dean and Cyrilla Natalie Wood, he guessed he’d have to be Sal Mineo, though that wasn’t really who he wanted to be.
“Better than the dude that goes over the cliff, though, right?” Warren says now, waving his forty-ouncer at the screen, and Cyrilla lets out a laugh that’s more of a screech, actually, one of her annoying habits, but that’s all right—he doesn’t mind playing a supporting role. Warren’s almost a year older than he is, and he doesn’t have a girlfriend himself, so to be near Cyrilla, to hang out with her, see what she’s like—what girls are like, up close—is something he really appreciates on every level.
They’re coming up on the part where Natalie Wood, her eyes burning with excitement, waves her arms and everybody stands back and the two cars hurtle off into the night, when Warren, who has his arm around Cyrilla on the couch and one hand casually cupping her left breast, says, “I have this idea?”
Warren’s grinning, so Jackie starts grinning, too. “What?” he says.
“Let’s us play chicken. Reënact the scene, I mean. For real.”
He just laughs. Because it’s a joke. Real cars, cars that do what you want, cars you can race, are pretty much extinct at this point, except for on racetracks and plots of private land in the desert, where holdovers and old people can pay to have their manual cars stored and go out and race around in them on weekends, though he’s never seen any of that, except online, and it might just be a fantasy, for all he knows. “What are you talking about?” he says. “You going to steal a fleet car?”
“No,” Warren says, levelling a look at him. “I’m going to steal two.”
Risk Assessment
She’s in the car on her way to the library to pick up Keystone and bring him to Rose Taylor’s office so they can begin the process of filing a public-nuisance lawsuit against the S.P.C.A., when Carly says, “I don’t mean to worry you, but the house sensors indicate that Jackie hasn’t come home from school yet—and the calendar shows no extracurricular activities for today, so I’m just wondering . . . ?”
Cindy’s feeling distracted, her mind on Keystone and the way he stood up for her that night on the street, or at least thought he was standing up for her, which amounts to the same thing. “I wouldn’t worry. He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”
“Granted, yes, but I can’t help thinking of last week, when he didn’t get in till after dark and had no explanation except”—and here she loops in Jackie’s voice from the house monitor—“ ‘I was at Warren’s, O.K., and his mom made dinner, O.K., so I’m not hungry, so don’t even go there.’ ”
“Listen, Carly, I’m just not up to this right now, O.K.? I’m trying to focus on getting Keystone over to Rose Taylor’s and then I’ve got to get back to the office for that five-o’clock meeting, as I’m sure you’re aware, and then there’s the fund-raiser after that . . .”
“Sorry, I just thought you’d want to know.”
She’s staring out the side window watching the street lights clip by, picturing Keystone pushing himself up off the concrete steps of the library and crossing the sidewalk with that smile of his lit up just for her. She’s curious to see what he’ll be wearing—“I clean up pretty good,” he told her, promising to dress up for the meeting—not that it matters, really, just that she’s never seen him in anything other than what he calls his “street commando” outfit. The street lights are evenly spaced, like counters, and after a moment it occurs to her that the intervals between them are getting shorter and shorter, so she turns, focusses on the street ahead, and says, “Aren’t you going too fast, Carly?”
Immediately the car slows. “Forty-four in a thirty-five zone, but there’s no indication of speed traps or police units, and since we are running six minutes and sixteen seconds late, I thought I would expedite matters.”
She’s feeling angry, suddenly—and it’s not Carly’s fault, she knows that, but the comment about Jackie just rubbed her the wrong way. “I didn’t give you permission for that,” she snaps. “You ought to know better. I mean, what good is your program if you can’t follow it?”
“I’m sorry, Cindy, I just thought—”
“Don’t think—just drive.”
Of course, Carly was right, and if they wind up being ten minutes late to pick up Keystone that’s nobody’s fault but her own. “All right, Carly, I’m sorry—good job, really,” she says, only vaguely aware of how ridiculous it is to try to mollify a computer or worry about hurting its feelings.
“Since we’re at the library,” Carly says, “will you be acquiring books? Because they have three copies of the latest installment of the Carson Umquist series you like—and they’re all in the special ‘Hot Reads’ rack when you first walk in. I mean, they’re right there—you don’t have to go twenty feet. If that’s what you’re looking for. I’m not presuming, am I?”
“Pull up here,” she says, and that’s when she sees Keystone, in a pair of tan Dockers and an emerald long-sleeved shirt with a pair of red fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the front. He looks . . . different—and if she’s surprised by the dragons, which really aren’t the sort of thing she imagines Rose Taylor appreciating, she tries to hide it. She’s smiling as he comes up to the car, and he’s smiling, too, and now he’s reaching for the door handle . . . but the door seems to be locked, and she’s fumbling for the release. “Carly,” she says, turning away from the sight of his face caught there in the window as if Carly were an actual person sitting in the driver’s seat, when, of course, there’s no one there. “Carly, is the child lock on?”
“I’m sorry,” Carly says, “but this individual is untrustworthy. Don’t you recall what happened last Tuesday evening at 9:19 p.m. in front of the S.P.C.A. facility at 83622 Haverford Drive?”
“Carly,” she says, “open the door.”
“I don’t think that’s wise.”
“You know what? I don’t give a God damn what you think. Do you hear me? Do you?”
Her Father’s Last Drive
He was in his mid-seventies back then and he’d never really been what anybody would call a good driver—too rigid, too slow to react, baffled by the rules and norms of the road and trying to get by on herd mentality alone. To complicate matters, he suffered from arthritis and wound up developing a dependency on the painkillers the doctor prescribed, which, to say the least, didn’t do much for his reflexes or his attention span. He was a disaster waiting to happen, and Cindy and her sister, Jan, kept nagging him to give up driving, but he was stubborn. “I’ve seen ‘King Lear,’ ” he said. “Nobody’s going to take my independence away from me.”
Then one morning, when her car was in the shop (this was before S.D.C.s took over, when most people, including her, still got around the retro way), she asked him for a ride to work and not only was he half an hour late but when they finally did get on the freeway he drove his paint-blistered pickup as if the wheels had turned to cement blocks, weaving and drifting out of his lane and going at such a maddeningly slow pace she was sure they were going to get rear-ended. She was a wreck by the time she got to the office and so keyed up she didn’t dare even take a sip of her morning grande, let alone drink it. She Ubered home that night, though, as a recent divorcée and the mother of a two-year-old, she was trying to cut her expenses, so that was no fun. As soon as she got in the door, she called Jan.
“We’ve got to do something,” she said. “He’s going to get killed—or kill somebody in the process. It’s a nightmare, believe me! Have you been in a car with him lately? It’s beyond belief.”
Jan was silent a moment, thinking, then she said, “What about that refrigerator you’ve got to move?”
“What refrigerator? What are you talking about?”
Her sister didn’t say anything, just waited for her to catch on.
“Can we do that to him? He’ll never talk to either one of us again, you realize that, right?” She was trying to picture the aftermath, the resentment, the sense of betrayal, the way he used his sarcasm like an icepick, chipping away at you flake by flake, and how he’d parcelled out his affection all his life and what that was going to mean for the future. “It’s not going to be me,” she said. “I’m not going to be the one.”
“We’ll both do it.”
“How’s he going to get around? I’m not driving him, I’ll tell you that.”
“The bus. The senior van. Whatever. Other people do it. But what about Luke—what if Luke asks him? He’d never refuse Luke.”
Luke was Jan’s seventeen-year-old son, and as soon as Jan pronounced his name Cindy realized they were going to take the easy way out—or, no, the coward’s way.
The next Saturday morning, Jan dropped her son off at their father’s apartment so that he could borrow the truck to move the imaginary refrigerator, and the moment the keys changed hands their father’s time behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle, which stretched all the way back to when he was two years younger than Luke was then, came to an abrupt end.
The Hack Supreme
Another day, another slow, agonizing procession of classes that are like doors clanging shut in a prison one after the other, and then they’re at Warren’s and Warren’s parents are at work, so they have the place to themselves to make preparations. The first thing is the punch, which means pouring grape juice, 7 UP, and about three fingers of every kind of liquor in the cabinet into a five-gallon bucket purchased at Walmart for just this purpose. Then snacks, but that’s easy, just bags of chips, pretzels, Doritos, and whatever. Cyrilla rolls a couple of numbers, and he and Warren pull out their phones and give everybody a heads-up: nine o’clock at the end of Mar Vista, where it dead-ends at that weed lot and the cliffs down to the ocean.
He’s not a bad hacker himself—since as far back as he can remember, he’s hacked into Web sites just for the thrill of messing with people a little—but Warren’s in another league. If anybody can steal a fleet car—two fleet cars—it’s him. So, after dinner (he texted his mother to tell her he’d be eating at Warren’s and then sleeping over, too), they go out on Cabrillo, where there’s a ton of cars going back and forth between pickups and drop-offs, and just step out in front of two empty ones, which slam on their brakes and idle there, waiting for them to move. But they don’t move. Warren has already hacked into the network on his laptop, and now he’s accessing the individual codes for these two cars while all the other cars are going around them and they have to hope no surveillance vehicles come by or they’re dead in the water.
That doesn’t happen. The doors swing open for them and they get in and tell the cars to take them out to Mar Vista, where Cyrilla and some of the others are already gathered around the punch and the chips, waiting for them to get the party started. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. He can’t remember ever seeing a prettier sunset, all orange and purple and black, as if the whole world were a V.R. simulation, and if his heart goes into high gear when a cop car comes up behind him and swings out to pass, that’s all part of the game and he’s O.K. with it. O.K. with everything. He’s going to be a hero at school, an instant legend, because nobody’s tried this before, nobody’s even thought of it. And, yes, it’s dangerous and illegal and his mother would kill him and all that, and he did say to Warren, trying to be cool and hide his nerves, “So who’s the greaser that goes over the cliff, you or me?,” and Warren said, “Forget it, because we’re both James Dean, and I’m not even going to try to make it close. I’m going to jump out way before and if that’s chicken, O.K., sue me, right?”
Once they’re there, the real work starts. Warren—and this other kid, Jeffrey Zuniga, who’s a genius and destined to be class valedictorian—start disabling the cars’ systems as much as possible, so they’ll go flat out, because what kind of a race would it be if these two drone cars just creep along toward the cliff? All right. Fine. And here comes the movie.
He and Warren, drawn up even, both of them drunk on the punch and laughing like madmen, revving the engines on command (it’s as simple as saying “Redline” to the computer), and Cyrilla there waving somebody’s white jacket like a flag. It’s fully dark now, kids’ eyes in the headlights like the eyes of untamed beasts, lions and hyenas and what, jackals, and then they’re off and all he’s thinking is, If Warren thinks I’m going to bail first, he’s crazy . . .
The Ghost in the Machine
It isn’t a date, not exactly, and if Jan ever finds out about it she’ll never hear the end of it, but she takes Keystone out to the local McDonald’s for a Big Mac and fries. It’s not as if she hasn’t taken other housing-challenged people out for fast food, men and women both, so they can sit in a booth with some kind of dignity and use the rest room to their heart’s content, without the manager badgering them every step of the way. But this is different. It’s a kind of celebration, actually, because Rose Taylor filed the suit and, within hours, she had a call from the head of the S.P.C.A. wondering if they couldn’t work something out, like using the K5+ primarily in the parking area and limiting its access to the public sidewalk.
Keystone is back to his usual garb, with the addition of a military-looking camouflage cap he’s picked up somewhere and an orange string bracelet Knitsy wove for him. He’s in good form, high on the moment and her company (and the dark rum he surreptitiously tips into their Diet Cokes when no one’s looking), and she’s feeling no pain herself. There’s something about him that makes her just want to let go—in a good way, a very good way. And the rum—she hasn’t had anything stronger than white wine in years—goes right to her head.
“You know that this place—the S.P.C.A., I mean—has a furnace out back, right?” he says, leaning into the table so she’s conscious of how close he is to her, right there, no more than two feet away. “And maybe your attorney friend can eventually get them to stop harassing us people, but what about the animals? You know what it smells like when they fire that thing up? I mean, can you even imagine?” He pauses, bites into his Big Mac, chews. “You’re in a house, right?”
“Uh-huh, yeah. With a yard. And I know I should really adopt one of those dogs, I really should, but I can never seem to get around to it—”
“That’s not what I’m saying—I’m not trying to lay any guilt trip on you. The people that should feel guilty are all these clueless shitwads that see a puppy in a store window and six weeks later dump it on the street. . . . No, what I’m talking about is the smell, which you don’t get out in the suburbs, with the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning going full blast. Am I right?”
He is right. But whether he’s right or wrong or whether he’s accusing her or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is the intensity of his voice, the gravel in it, and the way his eyes look right into her as if there were nothing separating them but the illusion of a Formica tabletop and the recirculating air, with its heavy freight of warmed-over meat and hunger.
In the car, she takes the leap and asks him if he wants to come home with her. “There’s a shower,” she says. “And clean towels—I can offer you clean towels, right? Isn’t that the least I can do? As your advocate, I mean?”
It’s dark now, but for the yellowish sheen of the McDonald’s arches and the fiery glow of the tail-lights of the cars at the drive-through window. He doesn’t say anything and she keeps waiting for Carly to butt in, though she gave her strict instructions to keep quiet, no matter what. Finally, he sighs and says, “It’s an attractive offer, and I thank you for it, but I don’t want to be anybody’s pet.”
She doesn’t know whether she should laugh or not. Really, is he joking?
“But why don’t we do this?” he says. “You drive me back to my place and we’ll sit on the wall there, finish the rum, and see what happens. O.K.? Sound like a plan?”
All the way there, Carly’s silent, except to comment on the traffic conditions—“There’s a lane closure on Mission because of roadwork, so I’m going to take Live Oak to Harrison, which is only a two-minute-thirty-five-second delay”—and she finds she doesn’t have much to say herself, anticipating what’s to come and thinking about the last time she had sex outdoors, which had to have been twenty years ago. With Adam. On a camping trip.
When they step out of the car, the night comes to life around her, rich with its crepitating noises and a strong sweet wafting scent of jasmine, which is all she can seem to smell—not the reek of the dogs or the crematorium or the hopelessness of Knitsy and the rest of them, but jasmine blooming in some secret corner. She likes the way the full moon comes sliding in over the treetops. The rum massages her. Then Keystone takes her hand and he’s leading her to the wall and everything’s falling into place . . . until one of the dogs lets out a howl and they both look up to see the K5+ unit wheeling toward them, its lights on full display. “Aw, shit!” Keystone spits, and before she can stop him, before the machine can wheel up to them and inquire what the situation is, he’s halfway up the block, confronting it. He seems to have something in his hand now, a pale plastic bag he’s pulled out of the bushes, and in the next moment he’s jerking it down like a hood over the thing’s Lidar, rendering it blind. It stops, emits its inquisitive whine for a count of eight, nine, ten seconds, and then triggers its alarm.
So much for romance. So much for Rose Taylor and human rights. The noise is excruciating. Every dog in the S.P.C.A. starts howling as if it were being skinned alive, and you can be sure the cops are on their way, no doubt about that. But here’s Keystone and he’s grinning, actually grinning, as if all this were funny. “You know,” he says, raising his voice to be heard over the din, “maybe I am ready to be a pet. You want a pet? For tonight, anyway?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer, just puts his arm around her and guides her to the car. But Carly’s having none of it. Carly’s got her own agenda. The locks click shut.
“Open up,” Cindy demands.
The car ignores her.
“Open up. Carly, I’m warning you—”
One long pulse-pounding moment drifts by. The car is a dark conglomerate of metal, glass, and plastic, as inanimate and insensible as a stone. She’s angry—and frustrated, too, because she’d been ready to let go, really let go, for the first time in as long as she can remember. The dogs howl. The klaxon screams. And Keystone is right there, smelling of the Mrs. Meyer’s hand soap somebody must have given him a gallon of, his arm around her shoulder, one hip pressed to hers. She wants to apologize—For what, for a car?—but that doesn’t make any sense. “I don’t know,” she says, frantic now, and are those sirens she’s hearing in the distance?
“Oh, fuck it,” he says finally, throwing a glance over his shoulder. “Let’s just walk. We can still walk, can’t we?”
Chicken
He isn’t wearing a leather jacket. He doesn’t even own a leather jacket. He’s just a kid in a simulation, the fleet car jerking along over the bumps in the field, and the night waiting for him out there like an open set of jaws. He keeps glancing over at Warren and Warren keeps glancing over at him as if this really were chicken—and he’s not going to be the one to cave first, is he? But that’s not the issue, not any longer, because what he is just now discovering is that the door is not going to swing open no matter how many times he orders it to, and the brakes—the autonomous brakes, the brakes with a mind and a purpose of their own—don’t seem to be working at all.
Night Moves
On this, of all nights, she has to be wearing heels, but then she’s wearing heels to impress Keystone, whether she wants to admit it or not. Men find heels sexy. He finds them sexy—and he told her as much when they were standing at the counter in McDonald’s, placing their order. Now, though, she has her regrets—they haven’t gone five blocks and she’s already developing a blister on her left heel and her toes feel as if someone were taking a pair of hot pliers to them. “What’s the matter?” he asks, his voice coming at her out of the dark. “You’re not giving out already, are you?”
“It’s my feet,” she says, stopping and shifting her weight into him to take some of the pressure off.
“It’s not your feet—it’s your shoes. Here”—he braces her with one arm—“just take them off. Go barefoot. It’s good for you.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Hell, I’ll go barefoot, too, no problem—in fact, I like it better this way,” he says, and in the next moment he’s got his flip-flops in one hand and her shoes in the other and they’re heading up the sidewalk under the faint yellowish glow of the street lights in a neighborhood that may or may not feature broken glass strewn across the pavement.
It’s better than three miles to her house, and she’s so used to relying on Carly she manages to lose her way, until finally she has to pull out her phone and follow the G.P.S., which is embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing as seeing Carly sitting there in front of the house, running lights on, waiting for them. “You!” she calls out as they cross the lawn. “You’re going to hear from me tomorrow—and that’s a promise.”
But then something happens, something magical, and all the tension goes out of her. It has to do with the grass, its dampness, its coolness, the way it conforms to her toes, her arches, her aching heels. The simplest thing: grass. In that instant, she’s taken all the way back to her girlhood, before Adam, before Jackie, before her infinitely patient dark-haired father taught her to balance clutch and accelerator and work her way through the gears in a smooth, mechanical succession that opened up a whole new world to her. “This is nice,” she murmurs, and Keystone, a hazy presence beside her, agrees that, yes, it is nice, though she’s not sure he knows what he’s agreeing to.
There are no cars on the street. Her house looms over them, two stories of furniture-filled rooms humming with the neural network of all the interconnected devices it contains, the refrigerator clicking on, the air-conditioner, appliance lights pulsing everywhere. In a moment, she’ll lead Keystone up the steps, through the living room, and into the back bedroom, but not yet, not yet. Everything is still. The moon is overhead. And the grass—the grass is just like she remembered it. ♦
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