by Jim Nisbet
“It looks as if they are arresting that man. Was he the driver?”
A tow truck arrived, yellow lights flashing, and stopped so as to perfectly obscure Klinger’s view of Chainbang. The driver stepped down from the cab of his truck and initiated some paperwork with one of the cops.
“I don’t know,” Klinger said. “I was walking up the hill, heard a crash and …” He shrugged. “I think he took out a streetlight. Next thing I knew, there were many flashing lights down there. They got here really quick.”
“Both the fire house and the police station are just up the street. Maybe he’s impaired,” the girl suggested.
“Could be.” Klinger managed a smile. “It’s pretty late not to be impaired.”
The young woman looked at him. He looked at her. If I had the money, Klinger thought to himself, I damn sure would be impaired. By the look of you, young lady, you can well afford to be impaired and yet, at three-thirty in the morning, you’re not. “Just getting home from work?” he ventured.
“Just long enough to freshen up,” she nodded, “walk the dog, grab a nap, get back by eight.”
“Some kind of deadline,” Klinger inferred.
“IPO,” the woman told him.
“IPO,” Klinger repeated stupidly.
“It’s very exciting,” she told him. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”
“That’s the damn truth,” Klinger nodded wearily.
The labradoodle whimpered.
“Latte’s gotta go,” the woman said. “Nice talking to you.”
She turned the dog with his lead and walked quickly down the hill, toward all the lights.
Klinger watched her go, then turned up the hill, where there were no lights.
TWO
Mary Fiducione always took her morning coffee in the little yard behind her studio.
Dexter Gordon’s cover of “Don’t Explain” quietly interpolated the morning, emanating from a pair of battered speakers screwed to opposite ends of the header above the seven-foot slider, and under the short eave that provided a little protection from the elements. A hummingbird took turns with a fat bumblebee as they both investigated the refulgent trumpets of a datura that towered over the back corner of the little yard. A neighboring ornamental plum, heralding spring only a week ago, now lofted its mauve blossoms above the graying board fence that ran along the north side of the lot.
The weathered table before her was covered by a fading cloth depicting a woman wearing sunglasses, a Jackie O coiffure, and a cocktail dress, surmounting the motto, queen of fucking everything. On it lay the New York Times, the Chronicle, a copy of The Furies by Janet Hobhouse, a pot of Scottish breakfast tea, a teaspoon, and a very delicate-looking ceramic cup and saucer decorated with pinkly-tinged cerise tea roses.
But what compelled her interest this morning was the Idiot’s Guide to Programming iPhone Applications, a scratch pad, a small netbook computer, and her iPhone itself.
The doorbell rang.
Mary frowned and continued to tap at the phone’s virtual keyboard.
After a minute, the doorbell rang again.
Mary suddenly remembered that she was expecting UPS to deliver a new belt holster for her phone. Still frowning at the keyboard, she stood up, passed through the open side of the sliding glass door, through the length of the ground floor apartment, and opened the front door.
“Hey,” said Klinger.
Mary looked up from her phone, looked back at it, then looked up again. “Are those the sepals of Salvia leucantha woven into your hair, or are you just glad to see me?”
Klinger lifted his eyeballs to the tops of their orbits. “If it’s the purple parts of Mexican sage you’re referring to, yes. Probably.”
She looked up again, said, “There’s blood on your cheek,” and looked back down at the device in her hand.
Klinger touched a fingertip to his cheek and looked at it. “Must have cut myself texting.”
With no visible reaction to this quip, Mary held her phone aloft and stepped aside.
Klinger entered. “Checked your mail lately?”
Mary frowned. “It doesn’t come until—. Oh.” She stepped into the entry hall.
Klinger went straight to the bathroom, closed the door, and relieved himself. Flushing the john and zipping up, he headed into the kitchenette to draw and down, in quick succession, three large glasses of tap water.
“Hydrating so early?” Mary commented, closing the entry door behind her.
Lowering the empty third glass as he swallowed, Klinger nodded with a wordless, weary vigor, and exhaled loudly.
“Nobody about,” Mary said simply as she passed him. Klinger nodded, then sighed so raggedly that his lips flapped. “Cold last night,” he said at last. “Foggy, too. Damp. Wet. Miserable.”
“You should pick your camping dates a little more rigorously,” Mary suggested as she exited the sliding door. “Although, I feel compelled to remind you, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear.” Once in the yard, she resumed her seat and waved at an empty chair across the table. “Come in, sit down.” She gestured toward Klinger with the phone. “Hungry? Still thirsty?”
“Tired,” Klinger said as he passed through the back door. “Worn out. Damp through and through.” He took a seat as Dexter Gordon faded to silence. “Unshaven. Unlaundered. On the run. A failure in life.”
Mary tapped the screen on the phone. “Whining,” said a robotic voice, followed by the very tinny sound of someone scratching out “Beautiful Dreamer” on an out-of-tune violin. “Whining,” the phone repeated.
“The fuck?” Klinger blinked.
“Pissed off,” the phone said. “Pissed off …”
“Mood-identification app.” Mary tapped the screen and the phone went silent. “It’s been around for maybe two months and already clocked 135,000 downloads.”
Klinger exhibited bepuzzlement by lifting a hand and shaking his head.
“Can you multiply nine ninety-five by 135,000?” Mary said impatiently. “I’ll give you a hint.”
Klinger frowned.
“Round up to ten.”
Klinger scowled.
“One million, three hundred and fifty thousand,” Mary told him, “is the answer. That’s dollars, and that’s gross.”
Klinger sighed loudly.
“The current arrangement grants the developer a seventy percent royalty against sales. Can you do seventy percent of 1.350 × 10^6? I’ll save you the trouble: 945,000.” She held up the phoneless hand. “That’s laughably close to one million dollars.” She slapped the table so that the teapot, the cup, the saucer, Klinger, and even Janet Hobhouse jumped. “In two months!”
Klinger clasped both hands over his stomach and stared at the ground. “I think I’m about to puke.”
Mary ignored him. “And my own sublime app, Aunty Cringle’s Guide to California Flora, has been downloaded a miserable thirteen thousand times,” she grumbled.
“Yeah?” Klinger’s stomach made noises like unto those it might emit if he’d swallowed a vibraslap. “So what’s that mean? You made, what, a lousy nine thousand bucks in, what, the two months since you launched your application?”
“Three,” Mary corrected him sententiously. “I made nine thousand bucks in three months. What with rent control and socialist health care, I quit my day job two weeks ago,” she added proudly.
Klinger frowned. “Were you still at the fortune cookie factory?”
Mary nodded.
“Good on you.” Klinger belched sincerely. “Now you’ll have the time to get really good at canasta.”
Mary sat forward in her chair and spoke in earnest. “You know what the best-selling sensory app is?”
“No,” Klinger admitted truthfully.
“You hold up the phone to a person who’s belching or farting?”
Klinger frowned suspiciously. “Yeah … ?”
Mary nodded. “The phone tells you what the person’s been eating.”
&
nbsp; “You mean you … you hold the phone to their mouth or their asshole?” Klinger said incredulously. “Are you serious?”
“As serious as Mahler’s Ninth.” Mary thumped the table in syncopation with various syllables of the bottom line: “Fourteen million, five hundred thousand downloads.”
”What if you’ve been eating nothing?”
“Fasting?” Mary frowned. “Probably generate a discontinuity,” she concluded. “An error code.”
Klinger burped, not so quietly. “I’ll buy that.”
“Well over ten million in royalties,” Mary pointed out dreamily.
“Talk about your motherfucking charlatan culture endorsing its own reality,” Klinger declared testily. Klinger was beginning to wonder about his stomach. Strange gases were making their way to the surface of the water he’d just consumed, thoroughly acidifying its pH along the way. His stomach hadn’t been right since he’d started shitting blood during a drinking binge about … Since … Klinger frowned. Klinger couldn’t remember. Anyway, he’d cut back on his drinking lately, somewhat. Having no money, of course, made cutting back easier. Wrong word. But he was worried that the damage was permanent, which called the bluff on his slow-motion suicide-by-alcohol, which made him nervous.
“Ten million dollars,” Mary repeated. “You know what Stendhal said?”
“Fuck no,” Klinger replied with certainty.
“He said he’d rather spend fifteen days a month in prison than be forced to converse with the people he saw around him on the street.”
“Oh yeah?” Klinger almost smiled.
“Something to that effect.”
“And when did he say this?”
Mary considered the question. “I guess by now it must be almost two hundred years ago.”
Klinger nodded grimly. “Some things never change.”
“So it would seem.”
Adjacent to one of the legs of the table, a sow bug stumbled through the grass. Blade by blade, brother. Klinger moved his foot out of its path. “Can this gizmo detect the stink of acetylene on a drunk? Or whatever that byproduct of the metastasis of alcohol and the poor liver’s remaining enzymes is?”
Mary shrugged. “I’m not sure.” She snapped her fingers. “Maybe that’s one you and I could write.” She repositioned herself in her chair. “Sure. The phone could tell you how few or many of those enzymes you got left. Maybe scare the bejesus out of a drunk enough to make him reform.” She snapped her fingers. “Our app could be the canary in the gold mine.”
“For that matter,” Klinger said, engaging the jest, “you could turn the phone into a breathalyzer. Guy makes a call, he’s too drunk to drive, the phone locks up his car’s ignition and calls him a cab.” He closed his fist in front of his mouth and contorted his voice. “You’re a cab.”
Mary looked at Klinger, aghast. “That’s fucking brilliant.”
“Wait,” Klinger said. “Guy gets too drunk to be in public, his phone calls the cops and drops the dime on him. Saves the cops the time and expense of random checkpoints.”
“Fucking great!” Mary enthused. “They used to say that the state is best served by silence. But, any time now, the state will be best served by phones!”
“Snitchahol.” Klinger laughed in spite of himself. “Now you’re talking!” He pointed at Mary: “The iSnitch.”
“The iSnitch!” she pointed back. “What an app!”
“We’ll make millions!” they said in unison.
After only a little time, their laughter subsided into silence.
Having managed to pierce the morning fog, the sun had begun to warm the yard. The hummingbird whirred overhead. The bumblebee buzzed lazily up and over the fence and out of sight. Klinger, whose every bone ached from his three or four hours of exposure to the elements in Alamo Square Park, not to mention the walk to Mary’s from the park, a distance of about two miles, not to mention the impact with the light pole, moved his head, his legs and arms, his every hinged joint, just to feel them creak.
The sow bug had advanced to halfway between the legs on Klinger’s side of the table. Klinger wondered what sow bugs eat.
“So,” Mary said, not looking up from her phone. “You working these days?”
Klinger gave the sow bug half a smile. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
Her thumbs busy on the phone, Mary made no response.
Klinger’s smile went away. After a minute he repeated himself. “I said, Not so’s you’d notice.”
“Hm,” Mary responded, thumbing the phone. “Need any money?”
Klinger nodded tiredly. “I need money, false identity papers, a car, a dry place to sleep, a steak, and a fifth of whiskey. Even so,” he smiled feebly, “I’m a cheap date.”
Mary, who had continued to watch her phone while nodding against each item in Klinger’s list, now dispensed a definitive half-shake of her head. “I’ll give you breakfast and a hundred bucks,” she said. “After that, you’re on your own. Unless you want to write that app.”
“Christ,” Klinger said. “If only I wasn’t allergic to digging ditches. Then I could feel good about myself.”
“They got an app for that,” Mary advised him. “It’s called a backhoe.”
Klinger ran his fingers through his thinning, too-long hair. “What the hell am I gonna do with a hundred bucks?”
“I don’t know,” Mary said simply. “What were you gonna do without it?”
Klinger considered this. “Starve sober, I guess.”
“You haven’t done either yet,” Mary reminded him. Klinger diverted his attention from the sow bug long enough to consider Mary. It was hard to credit that, at one time, she and he shared more sex than all the squids in the Pacific Ocean. Subsequently some twenty years had passed without either one of them aware of the existence of the other, even though, with the exception of various stretches Klinger had spent in the Santa Rita jail, and those during which Mary had been touring Europe with some skinny-butted rock star she’d had a kid with, they both lived in San Francisco. Then, early one afternoon, right before it was torn down to make way for condominiums and a shopping mall, they’d run into each other at Japantown Bowl, on Post Street. She was there for the bowling, he was there for the cocktail lounge, both of which were cheap, fun, and open all the time. And just like that they’d fallen into an easy friendship with little to no overt evidence of what might have been much potential baggage. It was a strange eventuality, what they had become. But on the whole it bespoke a genuine affection between them, with no extenuating circumstances to generate confusion.
Plus, neither one of them no longer even so much as thought about cocaine, let alone consumed it.
Coincidence?
Klinger smiled and looked down. The sow bug had disappeared.
Who the hell knew? Who understood? Who could even remember, much less keep track of it all?
Not Klinger.
In the interim, while Mary Fiducione worked her way through the rock star, parenthood, her first two or three businesses, and finally an apprenticeship in “botanicals” under an acknowledged and much-published expert in the field, Klinger had maintained himself within San Francisco’s asteroid belt of petty crime and criminals, never approaching too close to the warmth of the sun shed by the big score, never straying too far into the gelid outer reaches of the prison system.
Last night was an exception, he reminded himself hopefully. Chainbang, who had done plenty of time in real joints, long enough for his real moniker, Chang Yin Winter Horse, to have permanently metastasized into his nickname, was (a) not supposed to be in possession of a gun, being a felon and all, and (b) not supposed to have bashed that convenience store clerk on the side of his head with a frozen whole chicken. It was bad enough Klinger was hanging out with Chainbang at all; totally over his head, in fact. Chainbang had a theory, which was, either a man evolved at the expense of society, or it was going to be the other way around. Not that Chainbang could articulate this idea; but Chainbang had advanced
far down a path illuminated by its and his own lights. And now there seemed to be a, er, uh, shadow, that was it, a shadow hovering over, nay, blighting his existence as a result.
“Put your clothes in the washer,” Mary told him, still not looking up from her phone. “Take two ibuprofen and have a bath. There’s a box of epsom salts under the sink. Use two cups. Take your time. I’ll rotate your stuff into the dyer. There’s an Italian place around the corner on Chestnut Street that’s open for lunch. Little booths, excellent wines, only jazz on the sound system. It’s on me.” She tapped the face of the phone, dropped it onto the table cloth, stretched her arms, and yawned.
“Then you’re out of here,” she concluded with a sleepy smile.
THREE
When Klinger hit the door of the Hawse Hole, he had $120 in his pocket.
A couple drinks to take the edge off, he was thinking, then a good night’s sleep at the Tuolumne Meadows Residential Hotel, which was right upstairs, where he could put down the C-note against a week’s rent.
The well vodka was a Chinese brand he’d never heard of, but three dollars got you a good pour, and it was 100 proof.
“Can’t see how you can drink that shit,” said an old man seated two stools down from Klinger. “Ain’t fit for motor grader coolant.”
“Tastes pretty cool to me,” Klinger affably stipulated. “But you wait right there while I double-check.” Klinger assayed a second and then a third sip, each less dainty than the one preceding it. “Ahhhh,” he allowed, carefully centering the empty nervous glass on its coaster. “Cool as can be.”
“Cool as October punkins in a frosty moonlit field, I guess,” the old man obliged.
Klinger shook his head. “I’ve never seen a pumpkin in a field by day or by night. Though I have,” he added truthfully, “been frosted upon.” He turned the glass between his fingers reflectively.
