“It’s not that I wanted to send him to school tomorrow, Step.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to keep him home.”
“I know, Fish Lady. You have a heart so soft that you’d die of terminal compassion if you ever let it get out of control.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“You’re a wonderful wife and a wonderful mother and now you better go tell Stevie the good news so he won’t get an ulcer before morning.”
“Come with me,” said DeAnne.
“He doesn’t want to see me.”
“Step, don’t be as petulant as he was.”
“What about my sandwich?”
“Let it dry out. I’ll poach you those eggs.”
“I ate two candy bars at work, it’s not like I need dinner,” he said as he followed her down the hall to the boys’ room. “I’m going to get fat working there. There’s a candy machine right around the corner from my office. Twenty steps and I have a Three Musketeers in my mouth.”
“Well, don’t do it,” said DeAnne. “You worked too hard to get down to this weight.”
Stevie was still awake, of course. DeAnne explained what Dr. Mariner had suggested. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
Stevie nodded.
“She really is a good principal, Stevie. So you remember, you do have at least one friend at school already.”
He nodded again. Then, glancing at his father, he reached out and put his hand behind her neck, to draw her close, so he could whisper in her ear. “You didn’t tell Dad that I cried, did you?”
She almost told him that Step had wanted to keep him home from school; but they had decided years ago that they would never hint at disagreement between them on decisions dealing with the children, so that they’d never get the idea that they could play one parent off against the other. So instead she just shook her head. “But even if he guessed it,” she whispered, “that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I know,” he said softly. “But don’t tell.” He lay back down and she tucked him in again and turned off the light.
“Leave the hall light on!” said Robbie loudly.
“Are you still awake, Road Bug?” asked Step.
“Don’t nobody go to school tomorrow,” said Robbie. “Not Stevie and not you either, Dad!”
“Don’t I wish,” said Step. He left the hall light on.
5
HACKER SNACK
Here is how Step’s days were spent: Most days he drove to work, leaving the car for DeAnne only when she knew she was going to need it for shopping. He would rather have left it all the time, but he was never sure when he’d be coming home, and it was hard to carpool with such an uncertain schedule.
He always began the workday by drifting into the programmers’ pit, a large room with even more computers than Gallowglass’s office. Most of the machines were already up and running, usually with lines and lines of assembly language on the screen, though sometimes there was a screen filled with the faded-looking colors of the 64. As he moved from machine to machine, the programmers would point out what they were doing, and sometimes they’d have a problem and Step would pull up a chair beside them and help spot the flaw in the code or find some simple, elegant solution. Step usually felt inadequate at this, because all the programmers knew the workings of the 64 better than he did and quite often he had to ask, What are you getting from this register? Or, What does it mean to store that value in that location? And they’d kind of laugh and say, That’s the current location of the character set, or, That’s the wave-form for the sound, and the tone of their voices always suggested that everybody knew that.
But the truth is that while they knew the 64, Step had a gift for code and he knew it and they knew it. He could look at a routine for a few minutes and then rewrite it to cut the amount of memory it used in half, or make it run twice as fast, or make it smoother and more responsive on the screen. Back when he’d been working alone on programming, he thought of himself as a clumsy amateur, and he was always vaguely ashamed of his code. But now he realized that he was pretty good after all, or at least good enough to be better than the caliber of programmer that Eight Bits Inc. was able to attract.
Still, it wasn’t too smart for him to keep thinking of himself as a programmer. Because whenever Dicky poked his head into the pit, Step had to drop back into manual-writer mode, asking questions of the programmer he was with about how the game worked. As often as not, he was asking about the very things he had just shown the programmer how to do, and as soon as Dicky left, the others in the room would erupt in silent laughter. But Step didn’t think it was funny. It made Step feel dirty and cheap, to be playing a continuous trick on Dicky like that. And so many people knew about it he could not believe it was possible that Dicky would never find out. In fact, he suspected that Dicky already knew. Yet he dared not test the hypothesis, because what if he was wrong? So Step kept up the charade.
Usually this took till noon, and he would go to lunch with a group of programmers and that was the good time during the day, because he wasn’t lying to anybody then, he wasn’t hiding anything, he was just himself, talking about stuff with these guys. It dawned on him during one of those lunches, as they sat there bantering with each other or swapping stories across the table at Swensen’s or Pizza Inn or Libby Hill, that this was really the first time in his life that he had been part of a group of guys like this. He had never been an athlete, part of the team or even part of a pickup game at school or in the neighborhood. His friends during his school years had always been girls. He liked the way they talked, he had things to say to them. And they didn’t despise him for being smart and getting good grades, they weren’t ashamed of being smart themselves, and so they could talk about ideas in a way that he never heard guys talking about anything, as if they mattered, as if they cared. His only male friends during high school and on into college had been the few who were like him, who hung out with the smart girls.
But these programmers were all male, and it was definitely a male kind of conversation, and yet there was none of that hierarchical one-upmanship that had made Step so uncomfortable with “the guys” in school. Or rather, there was, but it was centered around programming rather than athletics or cars, and on that playing field Step was a star—with Gallowglass, he shared the preeminent position in the hierarchy, and since he and Glass got along so well themselves there was no rivalry at all. Step belonged, and it felt good.
Lunch ended, though—supposedly after half an hour, but they always took an hour or more—and then back they went to Eight Bits Inc., where now Step usually went to his own office and actually worked on manuals, often for games that weren’t even finished yet. In fact, in the process of writing the manual he would really be designing the game, describing rules and features of the game that the programmer hadn’t yet thought of. Or if he was writing about a game that was nearly done, he’d play the game over and over again to find bugs in the code or annoyances in the play of the game. Then he’d make notes and pass them on to the programmers. Because every game had to pass through his hands in order to get its documentation written, Step had his finger on the pulse of every project in the company. He knew, he knew what was going on. And since Dicky did not, it meant that in a way Step was the real head of the creative division of Eight Bits Inc. Dicky had the title and the salary and the Sunday afternoon visits with Ray Keene at the Magazine Rack, but Step had the respect and the influence and—most important to him—the results, the games with his fingerprints all over them.
The only program he never fiddled with was Scribe 64. That was Glass’s bailiwick, and Step had no intention of intruding. He was writing the documentation for the new update, which was adding right-and-left justification and Glass’s new 60-character screen, and while he still tested it and found bugs and passed them on to Glass, Step never, never touched the code. Because he didn’t need to—Glass knew what he was doing. And because that was the unspoken basis of their allia
nce, that Step would do nothing to weaken Glass’s position at Eight Bits Inc. So even when Step found a bug, he would pass the information to Glass in private, never giving a clue to anybody else that there had been the slightest flaw in the kid’s original code.
Five o’clock came and went every day, but it had nothing to do with Step’s schedule. He was always in the middle of something. There was always a section of code that he had to finish fiddling with before he went home, so he could leave it for the programmer to look at in the morning. Or a game that he had to finish play-testing at the highest levels, while the programmer hung around and kibitzed with him. Suppertime meant going around the comer to the candy machine and dropping in quarters. After a few candy bars there’d be a bag of potato chips because there was once a potato involved, which made it health food. And then a can of pop or even tomato juice, when Step was feeling really unrighteous about what he was doing to his body.
He was gaining weight, he could feel it. Some of his shirts were beginning to show a gap between the buttons when he sat down. His belt was getting less comfortable; he let it out a notch. Six weeks, and he was going to seed. But when during the day could he get any exercise? Back in Indiana he had ridden his bike fifty miles a week during the warm months and kept up on the exercise bike in the winter, but he could do that because he was keeping an academic schedule, which gave him plenty of free daylight hours.
Seven, eight, nine o’clock at night, depending on how stubborn the bug was or how fascinating the game, and Step would at last go outside into the darkness and find the Renault, pop the locks, and climb in. Then he’d head for home, saying to himself, I should have gotten away sooner, I should have been home for dinner. Most nights the kids were already in bed, or going to bed, before he got there; he could kiss them goodnight and hear a little bit about their day, but that was it, that was all.
It took him hours to unwind after the intensity of the day. He and DeAnne would talk, and now and then he’d help her fold the laundry or do up the dishes from a dinner that he hadn’t eaten, and sometimes she would have saved him something from dinner and then he’d eat it while they talked, even though he wasn’t hungry. She always looked so tired, and it made him feel terrible. She was pregnant, after all, and even though this pregnancy hadn’t had anything like the horrible morning sickness of the first three, he knew that it always left her feeling wrung out. When the other kids were on the way, Step had been home to take up the slack. He was no help now. In fact, he suspected that he was another drain on her energy, like the kids. She’d just be getting them down to bed, about to have a few moments to herself after having been on all day, and here came hubby, home from work and ready to be entertained.
So he tried to break away from her fairly early, to let her get to bed and get the sleep she needed while he wound himself down from the tension of the day. He watched TV, or went to bed and read a book. DeAnne would watch TV with him sometimes, but she didn’t really engage with most shows—she had enjoyed “M*A*S*H,” but they’d had the final episode of that, and Step hadn’t even been home to watch it with her. And when they lay in bed together, reading, she was so tired that he just didn’t have the heart to make her stay awake just to make love, not unless she actually initiated it herself, which wasn’t often. Even when she tried to stay awake to read something—he had bought her the new Anne Tyler novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, as soon as it came out in paperback—she’d end up asleep in moments, the book fallen over on her chest; he’d get up, slide her glasses off and lay them on top of the book on her nightstand, turn off her light, and then come back around to his side of the bed. Sacrificing his own sexual hunger for her sake made him feel both righteous and frustrated, a terrible combination because whatever satisfaction he got from knowing he had let her have the sleep she needed so badly did nothing to assuage his longing for sexual release. I could sleep myself, he thought, if only she could see how much I need her; and then he felt guilty even for thinking that, because he didn’t have to get up and feed the kids in the morning and get Stevie off to school, he didn’t have to go through a day of constant housework and tending kids while carrying around this growth inside his belly that was sucking the energy out of him, so how could he dare to feel resentful that she was so tired, that she didn’t reach out to him? Why couldn’t he just be satisfied that he had let her sleep? Why couldn’t he be satisfied?
Consumed by guilt and desire, he would lie awake reading, or get up again and go in and watch the TV in the family room. Carson’s parade of guests touting movies and TV shows. Letterman dropping things off buildings and putting on fake bus company ads by Larry “Bud” Melman and sometimes still the guy who lived under the seats. Then flipping around the cable channels, watching two or three bad movies at once, back and forth whenever he couldn’t stand how boring or stupid one of them got. And then it was three in the morning and he knew he had to get up and finally, finally he was sleepy, maybe a little sleepy, and then he realized that he had been very sleepy for quite a while, that he had even dozed off in front of the set and now he knew that he hadn’t been watching TV because he couldn’t sleep, he had been watching TV because he didn’t want to sleep, because he was afraid to sleep, and he’d go in to the kids’ rooms where they slept with the lights on because they were so scared of the dark and he watched them lying there, Betsy alone in her room with the crib set up across from her, waiting for the new baby, her blond hair spilling across the pillow; Robbie in the bottom bunk in the boys’ room, his covers always in knots because he flailed around so in his sleep; Stevie, quiet in the top bunk, his face so beautiful in repose; and Step would stand there at three in the morning, barely awake, feeling like he was in a walking dream, and he’d look at the kids and his heart would break.
Then he’d go to bed, getting in gently so that DeAnne wouldn’t wake up; she usually stirred, but rarely did she wake—did she even know how late he stayed up at night? Three o’clock, three-thirty sometimes, sometimes four, and then he’d wake up with his alarm at seven-thirty or eight or eight-thirty and stagger into the shower and get ready for another day, thinking, It’s all right if I’m late, it’s all right if I take a long lunch, because I have to put in so much overtime at night.
DeAnne asked him once: If you got up and went to work on time, couldn’t you get your work done and come home at five? If I packed a lunch, couldn’t you take shorter lunch hours and come home when it’s still daylight and you can maybe take a walk with the kids while I fix dinner? And he’d say, I’ll try, and maybe the next day he would get up earlier and get to work on time, but then he’d be so tired that he’d drag around all day and hardly get anything done and the deadlines were still looming, weren’t they? And most of the programmers were working past five, so they needed him to stay late to fix this or look at that, and so even after getting up early he’d still not get home till seven and dinner was already over and DeAnne would say, “I need the car tomorrow,” and he’d say, “Fine, take me to work and I’ll catch a ride home with one of the guys,” and that would be the end of another experiment in trying to turn himself into an eight-to-five kind of guy.
Those were the days of Step Fletcher, and he hated his life and his job even though he loved his family and his work.
In April they were launching three new games and the Scribe 64 update at the Computer Faire in San Francisco at the Cow Palace, and Ray and Dicky and the marketing people decided they wanted to bring along Step and Class so that there’d be somebody there who actually knew how the programs worked.
The flight was at two-thirty Friday afternoon, so Step went home at lunch to pack and say good-bye to Robbie and Betsy and DeAnne. Even though Step had authored a top computer game, nobody had ever flown him to one of these computer shows before, and he was nervous and excited. DeAnne wasn’t all that excited—it meant a Sunday without him there, getting the kids ready for church on time and then handling them through sacrament meeting. And, as she said to him, “I get lonely when
you’re not here.”
“I’m not here even when I’m here,” he said.
“But you are here,” she said. “I mean, I know you’re coming home. And I sleep better when you’re in the house with me.”
“I’ll be back Sunday night.”
“I know,” she said. “Knowing that is what will keep me alive over the weekend.”
He was horrified. “What are you saying?’
She looked baffled. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not feeling suicidal or something, are you?”
“No,” she said, outraged at the suggestion. And then: “Oh, Step, I didn’t mean that I was thinking of killing myself, for heaven’s sake. I was trying to be romantic. I was trying to say that I live for you.”
He felt stupid. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking of.”
“Probably wishing you could get a new wife who didn’t have this big belly.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ in your belly that I didn’t put there,” he said. “Besides, I’m the one who’s getting fat. And after nine months of putting on weight, I don’t get a prize at the end.”
“July 28th,” she said. “The hottest part of summer. I can’t wait to be carrying around ninety pounds of baby in the summer.”
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
“I’ll miss you, too, Junk Man.” She wrapped herself around him, melted into him the way she did when she wanted to make love, only he had to go and catch the damn plane, why did she suddenly get romantic now, when there was no time, no way to do anything about it?
“What are you trying to do, make me late?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Come on out to the car, Fish Lady, and take me to the airport. We’ll take care of unfinished business when I get back.”
“You are no fun,” she said.
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