disappears up thestairs at the back of the show room to the second floor, where I followhim. I get up to his counter and say, '*Pardonnez moi*,' but he holds upa hand and points behind me and says, 'Numero!' I make an elaborateshrug, but he just points again and says, '*Numero*!' I shrug again andhe shakes his head like he's dealing with some kind of unbelievablemoron, and then he steps out from behind his counter and stalks over toa little touchscreen. He takes my hand by the wrist and plants my palmon the touchscreen and a little ribbon of paper with zero-zero-oneslides out. I take it and he goes back behind his counter and says,'*Numero un*!'
"I can tell this is not going to work out, but I need to go through themotions. I go to the counter and ask for a seven-day card. He opens hiscash drawer and paws through a pile of cards, then smiles and shakes hishead and says, sorry, all sold out. My girlfriend is probably throughher second cup of coffee and reading brochures for nature walks in theAlps at this point, so I say, fine, give me a one-day card. He takes amoment to snicker at my French, then says, so sorry, sold out those,too. Two hours? Nope. Half an hour? Oh, those we got.
"Think about this for a second. I am sitting there with my laptop inhand, at six in the morning, on a Swiss street, connected to Swisscom'snetwork, a credit card in my other hand, wishing to give them some moneyin exchange for the use of their network, and instead I have to gochasing up and down every hotel in Geneva for a card, which is not to befound. So I go to the origin of these cards, the Swisscom store, andthey're sold out, too. This is not a T-shirt or a loaf of bread: there'sno inherent scarcity in two-hour or seven-day cards. The cards are justa convenient place to print some numbers, and all you need to do to makemore numbers is pull them out of thin air. They're just numbers. We haveas many of them as we could possibly need. There's no sane, rationaluniverse in which all the 'two-hour' numbers sell out, leaving nothingbehind but '30-minute' numbers.
"So that's pretty bad. It's the kind of story that net-heads tell aboutBell-heads all around the world. It's the kind of thing I've made it mybusiness to hunt down and exterminate here wherever I find it. So I justwrote off my email for that week and came home and downloaded a hundredthousand spams about my cock's insufficient dimensions and went in towork and I told everyone I could find about this, and they all smilednervously and none of them seemed to find it as weird and ridiculous asme, and then, that Friday, I went into a meeting about our newhigh-speed WiFi service that we're piloting in Montreal and the guy incharge of the program hands out these little packages to everyone in themeeting, a slide deck and some of the marketing collateral and -- alittle prepaid 30-minute access card.
"That's what we're delivering. Prepaid cards for Internetaccess. *Complet avec* number shortages and business travelers prowlingthe bagel joints of Rue St Urbain looking for a shopkeeper whose cashdrawer has a few seven-day cards kicking around.
"And you come in here, and you ask me, you ask the ruling Bell, whatadvice do we have for your metro-wide free info-hippie wirelessdumpster-diver anarcho-network? Honestly -- I don't have a fuckingclue. We don't have a fucking clue. We're a telephone company. We don'tknow how to give away free communications -- we don't even know how tocharge for it."
"That was refreshingly honest," Kurt said. "I wanna shake your hand."
He stood up and Lyman stood up and Lyman's posse stood up and theyconverged on the doorway in an orgy of handshaking and grinning. Thegraybeard handed over the access point, and the East Indian woman ranoff to get the other two, and before they knew it, they were out on thestreet.
"I liked him," Kurt said.
"I could tell," Alan said.
"Remember you said something about an advisory board? How about if weask him to join?"
"That is a *tremendous* and deeply weird idea, partner. I'll send outthe invite when we get home."
#
Kurt said that the anarchist bookstore would be a slam dunk, but itturned out to be the hardest sell of all.
"I spoke to them last month, they said they were going to run it down intheir weekly general meeting. They love it. It's anarcho-radio. Plus,they all want high-speed connectivity in the store so they can webcasttheir poetry slams. Just go on by and introduce yourself, tell 'em Isent you."
Ambrose nodded and skewered up a hunk of omelet and swirled it in thelive yogurt the Greek served, and chewed. "All right," he said, "I'll doit this afternoon. You look exhausted, by the way. Hard night in thesalt mines?"
Kurt looked at his watch. "I got about an hour's worth of diving in. Ispent the rest of the night breaking up with Monica."
"Monica?"
"The girlfriend."
"Already? I thought you two just got together last month."
Kurt shrugged. "Longest fucking month of my life. All she wanted to dowas go clubbing all night. She hated staying over at my place because ofthe kids coming by in the morning to work on the access points."
"I'm sorry, pal," Andy said. He never knew what to do about failedromance. He'd had no experience in that department since the seventhgrade, after all. "You'll find someone else soon enough."
"Too soon!" Kurt said. "We screamed at each other for five hours beforeI finally got gone. It was probably my fault. I lose my temper tooeasy. I should be more like you."
"You're a good man, Kurt. Don't forget it."
Kurt ground his fists into his eyes and groaned. "I'm such a fuck-up,"he said.
Alan tugged Kurt's hand away from his face. "Stop that. You're anextraordinary person. I've never met anyone who has the gifts youpossess, and I've met some gifted people. You should be very proud ofthe work you're doing, and you should be with someone who's equallyproud of you."
Kurt visibly inflated. "Thanks, man." They gripped one another's handsfor a moment. Kurt swiped at his moist eyes with the sleeve of hiscolorless grey sweatshirt. "Okay, it's way past my bedtime," hesaid. "You gonna go to the bookstore today?"
"Absolutely. Thanks for setting them up."
"It was about time I did some of the work, after you got the nut-shopand the cheese place and the Salvadoran pupusa place."
"Kurt, I'm just doing the work that you set in motion. It's all you,this project. I'm just your helper. Sleep well."
Andy watched him slouch off toward home, reeling a little from sleepdeprivation and emotional exhaustion. He forked up the rest of hisomelet, looked reflexively up at the blinkenlights on the AP over theGreek's sign, just above the apostrophe, where he'd nailed it up twomonths before. Since then, he'd nailed up five more, each going moresmoothly than the last. At this rate, he'd have every main drag in theMarket covered by summer. Sooner, if he could offload some of the laboronto one of Kurt's eager kids.
He went back to his porch then, and watched the Market wake up. Thetraffic was mostly bicycling bankers stopping for a fresh bagel on theirway down to the business district. The Market was quite restful. Itshuffled like an old man in carpet slippers, setting up streetsideproduce tables, twiddling the dials of its many radios looking forsomething with a beat. He watched them roll past, the Salvadoran pupusaladies, Jamaican Patty Kings, Italian butchers, Vietnamese pho-tenders,and any number of thrift-store hotties, crusty-punks, strung-outartistes, trustafarians and pretty-boy skaters.
As he watched them go past, he had an idea that he'd better write hisstory soon, or maybe never. Maybe never nothing: Maybe this was his lastseason on earth. Felt like that, apocalyptic. Old debts, come to besettled.
He shuffled upstairs and turned on the disused computer, which had saton his desk for months and was therefore no longer top-of-the-line, nolonger nearly so exciting, no longer so fraught with promise. Still, hemade himself sit in his seat for two full hours before he allowedhimself to get up, shower, dress, and head over to the anarchistbookstore, taking a slow route that gave him the chance to eyeball thelights on all the APs he'd installed.
The anarchist bookstore opened lackadaisically at 11 or eleven-thirty orsometimes noon, so he'd brought along a nice old John D. MacDonaldpaperback with a gun-toting bikini girl on the
cover to read. He likedMacDonald's books: You could always tell who the villainesses werebecause the narrator made a point of noting that they had fat asses. Itwas as good a way as any to shorthand the world, he thought.
The guy who came by to open the store was vaguely familiar to Alfred, aKensington stalwart of about forty, whose thrifted slacks and unravelingsweater weren't hip so much as they were just plain old down and out. Hehad a frizzed-out, no-cut haircut, and carried an enormous army-surplusbackpack that sagged with beat-up lefty books and bags of