The Starving Years

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “It wouldn’t be the first time Canaan drew protestors,” Tim said; no one but Javier would know him well enough to sense he was being deliberately vague.

  “What now?” Marianne turned the Fair and Equal flier one way, then the other, as if she couldn’t pick out from all the small print what the actual message was supposed to be. “Did they find another factory full of illegals working twenty-hour days?”

  “The thing with all those protestors,” Randy said, in a loud, easy voice, as if he was accustomed to people actually listening to him when he waxed philosophical, “Is that they take it too far. They make themselves come off like a bunch of assholes, and no one actually listens to what they have to say.”

  The moment was ripe for a pot-and-kettle comment, but Marianne resisted the temptation. Randy thumbed in a number on her phone and got another loud circuits-are-busy message. “No way. You’re not on All-atel, are you?”

  “No, Transdata.” She answered absently, still focused on Tim, who she’d obviously pegged as someone who knew what was going on. No matter how he tried to act otherwise. “What could possibly be so bad they’re out there tearing each other up like that?”

  “It’s crowd psychology,” Randy said. “People start freaking out, and it spreads like a cold sore. And once everything’s crazy, the predators swoop in.” He pressed the now semi-frozen bag to his cheek again. “And then they take your hundred dollars.”

  Again, Marianne didn’t rise to the bait. “It can’t be just crowd psychology. It happened too fast. It was too vicious. I wasn’t kidding about the working conditions. They have plants in Mexico, you know—I read about it on Facebook. Most of the laborers should be in school, but they’re pumping out manna instead. Maybe someone had photos. Maybe they posted them online.”

  “If the working conditions at Canaan are so bad,” Randy said, “then what were you doing at that job fair?”

  Tim looked at Marianne with what he hoped was an expression that was somehow...normal. Polite interest. He had no social skills, so his ex always told him, but hopefully he was intelligent enough to fake it.

  Marianne had reached the point where Randy’s comments were starting to wear, though, and she didn’t even notice Tim’s efforts. “Never mind me. What about you, Mr. Smartypants? What were you doing there—running up to the stage with Nelson’s answer.”

  Randy held up a hand in a semi-conciliatory “chill” gesture. “Have you seen the Canaan’s health club? Have you heard about the quarterly sales bonuses? I’m sick of busting my hump for a two-point-four percent raise. I want to get in on Canaan’s sweet benefits package.”

  “Look,” Javier said, “regardless of the reason anyone was or wasn’t there, what matters now is getting everyone home in one piece.”

  Yes. Definitely. Tim couldn’t have said it better—because eye patch or no eye patch, he needed to see if Javier’s inside tip had panned out, and he couldn’t do that in front of just anyone.

  Except maybe Nelson Oliver. He was fast asleep, anyway.

  “So what do you think everyone’s flipping out about this time?” Marianne said. “Broadcast news will be useless. Fire up that computer over there and see if anyone online knows something yet.”

  Everyone looked at Tim—who suddenly realized he had absolutely no idea what might appear on his monitor when the browser came up. Something innocuous, like the local traffic report? Or something telling, like the dirt he’d been trying to dig up on Canaan? Or, worse, the transcript of the last chat he’d had with Javier.

  The one he’d jerked off to.

  More than once.

  “My connection’s spotty,” Tim said.

  He glanced at the mess of daisy-chained power strips, and the redundant server rack draped with yards of cable. Maybe, to an untrained eye, it would look like a salvage job of a home PC held together with duct tape and spit.

  Javier knew different, of course. Javier had been the one, with his promise of insider information and his riveting private chats, to talk Tim into scoping out Canaan Products to begin with.

  Marianne stared down at a coil of network cable. “My Internet sucks, too. But can’t we at least try? Don’t you want to know why the whole lower east side’s gone nutso?”

  “I gotta email my dentist first,” Randy said, “since the phones are bogus. I feel like my tooth is gonna fall right out of my head. Do dentists have email? Fuck. I hope so.”

  “I’ll see if it connects.” Tim put his hand on the back of his computer chair in a not-so-subtle signal for Javier to relinquish it. When Tim sat, the seat was warm. He shivered. Or maybe it was a shudder. Or maybe, despite the eye patch, he couldn’t get past the last few lines Javier had typed in chat, less than a week before....

  It’s not your hand. It’s mine. You can tell it’s mine, because it’s sliding down to skim over your balls and feel the curve of them. It’s testing, with fingers that aren’t yours, how you like to be touched. What turns you on. What makes you hard. And finally, when you’re stiff, and you’re so ready you ache...only then can you feel my fingers wrapping around you and stroking you....

  Unlike Javier, Tim focused more on facts than on pretty prose when he wrote. His replies consisted of things like “yeah” and “do it” and “feels good.” Which would probably be even more incriminating in their simplicity, if they were the first words that flashed up on the screen. He grabbed his monitor as if to readjust its position, and hit the manual brightness control.

  Tim swore he could feel the heat of everyone’s attention riveted on him as the monitor powered on—and while he hadn’t quite managed to tweak the contrast low enough to prevent Javier and Marianne from entirely seeing the screen, it did, at least, support the lie that his computer was a cobbled-together heap of scrap, and not a cleverly proxied server.

  The browser, thankfully, was minimized, and a command prompt window was showing. “What’s that?” he said, unsure if he sounded even remotely convincing. It was the way all his help desk clients tended to start their conversations, though, so he suspected it sounded authentic. While most of them then added, “This piece of shit’s been acting weird all week,” Tim decided he’d better not tempt fate by laying it on too thick. He hit caps lock a few times to pretend as if he was actually trying keys, then quietly closed the minimized browser, and finally, dismissed the window.

  His fingers found the macro keys to pull up a half-dozen local news sites before he remembered he probably should hunt and peck his way there like a majority of the population did, but he was too late. He pulled up another window to cover their landing pages, which were already loading in tabs, lightning fast, and he navigated to a search engine and typed in Canaan Products job fair Bowery.

  An ad for a foodie store with the phrases “our job is to make you happy” and “exclusive Canaan Products selection” and “fair prices” and “shop our new East Village location” popped up. He pretended to search it until he figured even a slow computer would have accessed all the news tabs, and he began to scan the pages in earnest. “Nothing on Channel Twelve. Nothing on ABC.”

  Marianne clucked her tongue. “Oh, I’m so surprised. Like they ever have any breaking news that hasn’t been sanitized by their sponsors.”

  Marianne was sounding more and more like the type of activist who gave rational people like Tim a bad name. It seemed unlikely, though, that if she actually were the sort of dissident who’d blow up the ethanol plant in Tennessee and kill half a town, she’d be clever enough to hide her leanings by voicing them so unabashedly.

  “There’s nothing about it on any of the state or local outlets,” Tim said.

  “Now can we try to find my dentist?” Randy said. “It’s Dr. Bergman at Midtown Dental.”

  Marianne crossed her arms and frowned. “What about Voice of Reason? Sometimes that site updates so fast I’d swear the guy’s psychic.”

  Tim stared very, very hard at his murky, dark monitor and tried to imagine how anyone else in the world would react to
hearing the name of their own site suggested to them. He took a quick glance over his shoulder in Javier’s direction, obvious, but he just couldn’t resist...and Javier turned and slipped into the bathroom.

  “Haven’t you heard of it?” Marianne asked. “You seem like the type of guy who would. It’s thevoiceofreason.com. You have to put the ‘the’ in there. Otherwise you get another one of those sappy religious sites.”

  “And here I thought he was the kind of guy who’d help me call my dentist before I lost my tooth.”

  “Try the land line,” Tim said. His head was spinning with the effort to look natural as he did his best impression of a two-fingered typist. “Uh, nope. Nothing there.”

  “You have a land line? Hello, you could have said something.” Randy clomped into the kitchenette. “What do you dial for information?”

  “Try zero.”

  The phone company’s “all circuits are busy” message was twice as obnoxious as the cell companies’, and twice as loud, too. Three angry-sounding tones blared out of the heavy plastic rotary phone. “Are you kidding me?” Randy shouted.

  Marianne glanced at him, then focused on Tim again. “Keep it on The Voice of Reason,” she suggested. “Refresh it every now and then. I’m pretty sure the main writers live in Manhattan. They’ve always got really good local coverage.”

  Writers? Plural? The Voice of Reason had one, unless you counted Javier—and Tim wasn’t entirely sure he trusted Javier anymore.

  “They’ll update any minute now.” Marianne went to the window and spread the blind slats, though there was really no view but the fire escape of the opposite apartment building. “Unless they’re stuck out there. They could be trapped in that mob. Jeez.”

  It was unsettling for Tim to hear that someone who didn’t even know who he was cared so deeply about his safety. Even if she was referring to his one-man (or maybe two-man) operation as if a whole team was behind the site.

  “How much manna do you have?” Randy asked.

  Tim kept a stockpile on the recommendation of some of his more survivalist-oriented online acquaintances, enough to last himself thirty days—which would mean the five of them could wait it out for maybe a week, if need be. But it would probably seem weird for a single person in a cramped apartment to have all that food. “Plenty, I guess. I just went shopping.”

  “Maybe there’s a dentist around here. They’d probably be some creepy-assed Soviet-trained Ukrainian dentist with a cash-only operation, but they’d be able to do something to keep my tooth in by the time I could get to my regular guy. Right?”

  “You saw how it was out there,” Marianne said. “Everything’s closed, locked up tight.” She paced from the window to the computer a few times, and then said, “Someone’s got to know what’s going on out there. Can I try searching?”

  Tim dumped his cache and erased his history with a quick macro. “If you think you can find something.” He stood and Marianne slipped into the chair. She was a quick touch-typist. Tim suspected the probability of her accidentally activating one of his custom macros was low. “I’ll go see how Nelson’s doing,” he said, and again, he wondered if he sounded casual. Normal. Or if the tone of his voice was broadcasting his fascination with Nelson for everyone to hear.

  Marianne brought up a new browser window, while Randy held on to the back of the chair and spelled out the name of his dentist for her. Neither seemed particularly interested in Tim’s opinion of Nelson. And Javier, who Tim had been fantasizing about meeting all week...well, thankfully he was taking his time in the bathroom.

  Tim slipped into his closet-sized bedroom and shut the door behind him. The cheap carpet was stiff against the bottom of the door. He seldom shut it, seldom had anyone else in the tiny efficiency, therefore never had any need to keep it closed. He pressed his back against the door, took a deep breath, allowed his eyes to adjust to the dim light of the bedroom...and there he was, tangled in Tim’s sheets. Nelson Oliver.

  Tim couldn’t imagine what it was about Nelson that had captured his imagination so. When he’d broken free from the crowd and headed straight for the truck with such determination, such purpose, and noticed the red bandanna, Tim was so sure of his identity there was no question. It was as if a week’s worth of fantasies coalesced in a single moment of utmost significance, and the fire in his eyes had blazed straight through to Tim’s soul. By the time Tim figured out he wasn’t Javier, the mark had been made. The spark had been struck.

  The sight of Nelson in his bed only served to douse the flames...with gasoline.

  “Why were you at that job fair?” Tim whispered. They may not have had the chance to speak more than a few words to one another, but even so, Nelson didn’t strike him as someone gullible enough to believe that Canaan Products was still in the business of helping third-world countries raise their standards of living. “The benefits? The job security? The salary?”

  Nelson, well and truly dead to the world from whatever medication he’d taken, sighed in his sleep.

  Chapter 7

  Javier hadn’t gone into the bathroom with the intention of rifling through Tim’s private things. He’d only slipped out of the crowded living room to buy himself a bit of time, a bit of space, to figure out his next move. And yet he couldn’t help but steal a look at the “box of rubbers” Randy had so crassly announced to everyone.

  He ran the water as he opened the medicine cabinet in case the hinges might let out a telltale squeak, and he looked at the box. Nothing fancy. Nothing flavored or colored, textured or ribbed. However, the box held not the typical dozen…but a value pack of thirty-six. He pulled out the box and peered inside. It was half empty. The plastic edge of the last wrapper had torn at a jagged angle as if to ensure Javier couldn’t help but notice its contents were being put to use. As if to ask him, “When was the last time you got laid?”

  Javier returned the box to its spot in the medicine cabinet. It was really none of his business.

  Tim had shown up outside the job fair, just like he’d agreed to. He extracted Javier from a situation that had deteriorated more rapidly than anyone expected—and in doing so, had enabled Javier to get what he’d come for.

  Tim had executed his part of the plan. He owed Javier nothing.

  And so this sick pining away for what might have been…it needed to stop. Now.

  Clearly, they should never have cybered. At the time, Javier had allowed his enthusiasm over meeting someone with ideals like his—someone willing to blow the whistle on a crooked corporation, despite the challenge, and despite the danger. And when the conversation turned from corporate responsibility to civil rights to gay rights, he probably should have just confirmed that he, too, was gay without being flirtatious about it. Maybe at the time, the suspicion was nagging at the back of his mind that he shouldn’t lead Tim on, especially since it was Tim who’d replied “What does it matter?” when Javier asked what he looked like.

  In retrospect, Tim’s reticence to discuss appearances had been a relief, not because Javier could cast whomever he wanted in their online encounter…but because he could be someone else, himself. Someone whole.

  And when Tim had said it probably wasn’t secure to swap photos, to just look for the red bandanna, Javier ate that up just as readily.

  Bad ideas all around. That was pretty obvious now.

  He drew a USB memory stick from his pocket and checked that it hadn’t been damaged back there in the crowd. He’d fallen, at some point, though it was kind of a blur. He turned the device around in his fingers. It seemed fine, though he wouldn’t know for sure until he plugged it in, verified that it still worked, and saw what he’d managed to copy.

  Once he pocketed the memory stick, he removed his eye patch, peeling the ties carefully from the semi-permanent ridge the strings had cut into his temple, and splashed the sweat and grime of the day from his face. The feel of the water centered him, made him feel more like himself. Disappointed? Perhaps. But dealing with Canaan Products was more important
than hooking up with some guy. And they couldn’t deal with Canaan until the people from the job fair left.

  He turned to dry his face with a towel hanging over the track that held the shower curtain around the chipped clawfoot tub.

  Tim’s towel.

  There was a tap on the door. “Javier?” Marianne called through it. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He stopped with the towel pressed to his cheek, but he resisted the urge to bury his nose in the terrycloth and breathe deeply. Resisted...barely.

  “You’ve been in there a long time. You’re not hurt or anything, are you?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  So much for letting go of the infatuation.

  “Okay. Well...I gotta pee. If you can, y’know, finish up.”

  Disgusted, he turned away from the towel, tied his eye patch back into place and opened the door. Marianne shot him an apologetic look as she squeezed past him. He stepped out into the living room and she shut the door. Randy was now the only other one in the room, seated at the computer, squinting as he typed. Tim was conspicuously absent.

  “Women,” Randy called over his shoulder. “That’s the second time she’s had to go in the last hour.

  “What did you find out about the riot? Anything?”

  “Traffic delays. That’s what they’re calling it on the news. No mention of phone lines not working, either. This sucks, man. I gotta get my dentist on the phone.”

  Javier scanned the tiny apartment as Randy spoke. It was smaller than he’d imagined it would be, and plainer, too. Not that he’d been expecting granite countertops and a view of the Manhattan skyline; Tim had made it clear that money was the least of his motivations. Crystal clear. Still, the shabbiness Javier had conjured up in his overstimulated imagination had looked more like set-dressing than actual poverty. Or asceticism. Or…Javier glanced at a window covered in yellowed newspaper. Whatever you would call it.

  Which only went to show how ridiculous his own romantic notions had been.