Spaceland Read online

  “I think this is the first time I’ve ever eaten crab in my life,” I said. “I was scared it might be fishy. But it’s not. The sauce helps. Horseradish. More champers?”

  “Right on,” said Jena. “Is the salad all right?”

  “Sure! I like all the stuff you put in it. It’s great with the crab.”

  We ate and drank for a couple of minutes, the house music pooting and tweeting along in the background. So far so good.

  “Three and a half hours to go,” said Jena presently. “That’s a long time. Do you really think the power will fail?” She pursed her lips the way she did when she was thinking.

  “We’re ready,” I said, not wanting to get into a debate on this. “We’ve already got our candles happening. We got that candle holder for our wedding, huh?”

  “Candelabrum,” said Jena. “My Aunt Sue gave it to us. She said it’s sterling silver. And she gave us this tablecloth, too. ‘For your little celebrations,’ she said. Aunt Sue is such the romance hound. She almost caught my bouquet herself. I didn’t want orange candles, but they were the last thing left on the shelves. You’re not the only one who’s freaking out. Oops.” She hopped to her feet. “I forgot to turn out the lights. Glamour. Not to mention disguising the fact that we’re in a four-hundred-thousand-dollar white cardboard packing crate next to a freeway.”

  “Aw, come on, Jena. Hey, it looks good with the lights out. Did you get a lot of candles?”

  “A whole box. Happy Halloween! The orange glow is nice, isn’t it? You look pretty, Joe. Remember how back in college you’d light a candle when I spent the night in your room? You had it stuck into a Ruffino wine bottle.” We’d dated for a couple of years before moving in together.

  “The only way to go,” I said. Actually, the candle had been my roommate’s. I glanced at my watch. “It’s almost nine. I’ll fire up the 3Set and see how the Millennium comes down on the East Coast.”

  “Oh great,” said Jena. “We spend the next three hours watching TV. Do they still do Dick Clark? Or is he finally dead? I hope so.”

  “Did I mention that this guy from work might stop by?” I offered.

  “Visiting the shut-ins,” said Jena. “Who?”

  “Spazz Crotty. You met him at the Christmas party. Skinny guy with bleached blonde hair and a nose ring?”

  “Oh, I remember him all right,” said Jena. “He kept staring at my butt. I was like ‘Take a picture, it lasts longer.’”

  “You said that to him?”

  “You know how I get when I have margaritas. He laughed it off. He was embarrassed. I said it in front of his girlfriend. This tall girl with really nice smooth brown skin—though she did have some acne scars—she had some kind of flower name, but I was so wasted I don’t—”

  “Tulip,” I said. “Yeah, I told Spazz and Tulip to come by around nine.”

  “Well good,” said Jena. “We can share our dessert. I bought this decadent tiramisu cake.”

  I got the 3Set going and we watched the Millennium roll over in Time Square. I thought it was kind of cool that we were the only people in the world watching it on a 3Set, but Jena wasn’t impressed. The 3Set image was pale and grainy and didn’t look all that three-dimensional; it only, fattened up when the camera was on one person who was moving a lot. Jena said it was like watching a motel TV, which was, she added, appropriate for the kind of place we were living in. The champagne wasn’t doing my cause a lot of good.

  The ball dropped and the lights in Times Square kept right on shining. Everyone was laughing and yelling and parrying their asses off. I was sort of surprised there was no disaster.

  “We should be out with other people,” said Jena, slitting her eyes. “I can’t believe we’re sitting in this crappy little townhouse watching your weird television. 1 feel like such a loser.” She’d poured out the last bit of the champagne. “Where’s Spazz and Tulip?” she continued. “When did you say they’d come?”

  “Um, I’ll call him.”

  So I got Spazz on his cell phone, and, naw, man, he’s not gonna make it over, him and Tulip came straight up to San Francisco, with the bike it wasn’t all that hard, and now they’re down near the waterfront dancing and waiting for the fireworks. It’s great. I should’ve come, too. Maybe I’ll see him and Tulip. on TV. Spazz, telling me all this like it’s something really worth hearing, and stopping every few sentences to cough. I said good-bye and hung up.

  “He’s not gonna make it,” I told Jena, not looking directly at her. I stared into the tank of our 3Set like I was seeing something interesting. There were a lot of chips with micro mirrors on the bottom, the mirrors vibrating like crazy and painting virtual images up into the empty space of the tank. Like those saucer-shaped novelty items that make it look as if there’s a quarter floating up above them? That’s kind of the way the 3Set worked. There was no air in the tank, because if there were air, the supersonic vibrations of the mirrors would hit you and it would be bad. Poach your brain like an egg. As it was, the thing gave off a pretty loud hum—more like a whine than a hum. And in there I could see Dick Clark and some girl singers; they were about six inches high, and they looked pretty much like flat cut-outs, except that whenever they moved, the chips managed to fatten them up to look 3D. For being so expensive and complicated and dangerous, the 3Set was kind of a cheesy product. We were probably never going to ship it, and Kencorn was never going to go IPO. I was wasting my time working there. I was a loser and my wife was mad at me.

  “How about some margaritas?” said Jena.

  “Um …”

  “I’ll make them,” she said.

  If Jena got into the margaritas we were doomed. “Look,” I said. “Maybe we should go out.”

  “Right on. Where?”

  “Hell, we’ll go bar-hopping in Los Perros. We can be there in ten minutes.”

  “Fun.” Jena smiled and looked relaxed for the first time that evening. I realized how stupid I’d been acting. If Jena was happy, so was I. When it came down to it, making Jena happy was what I cared about the most. Even my gecky little DBS index—it wasn’t really about the numbers. It was just my idiotic way of measuring our relationship. If only I could ever remember for more than fifteen seconds that it all came down to the relationship, and not to my getting my own way.

  “Be sure to bring some walking shoes and a warm coat,” I heard myself saying. “In case we have to hike home.”

  “We can always take a cab.”

  “If the axe comes down there might not he cabs.”

  “Poor Joe,” said Jena with a little smile. “He worries so much that he acts middle-aged. We’ll take him out and cheer him up. Just a sec while I fix my makeup. You can get our leather coats. Don’t even think of wearing a tie.”

  Ten minutes later I’d parked my SUV on a side street and we were out on Santa Ynez Avenue, the Los Perros main drag. It was a two-lane street lined by single-story shops. Los Perros was a yuppie enclave embedded in the southern lobe of San Jose’s suburban sprawl; its charm stemmed from the fact that it felt like a village. The stores’ lit-up windows didn’t cover the fact that the buildings themselves were cheap and rickety, as makeshift and cobbled together as what you’d see in a Colorado mining town.

  I liked this flat little village under the big night sky. It was human-scale, homey, and—as long as you didn’t hear the people talking, or compare their clothes—not so different from rural Matthewsboro, the town I’d grown up in. It seemed like a good place to raise children, not that we were planning that for any time soon. Jena and I were both hell-bent on moving up in our companies. Even so, I couldn’t help thinking sometimes that it would be nice to have a kid.

  There were a fair number of people out and about, though maybe less than on a normal Friday night. I wasn’t the only one worried about the Y2K bug. The Christmas decorations were still up on the lampposts, wobbling in the gusty breeze. It was a damp night with a chill in the air. Some highschoolers rolled past on skateboards; three guys and a wiry
girl in an orange watch cap. A pickup full of kids slowed to whoop at them, the skater girl raised her arm to pump the heavy metal, devil’s-horns salute, and the kids in the truck whooped some more and pulled over to hang out. Up on the corner ahead of us was a middle-aged married couple frowning at each other. Bickering. Like my parents before they’d gotten divorced. Ah yes, my parents.

  With my parents it had gone further than bickering. Ed and Mary Cube. They were country people who’d come into town to work, my mother as an accountant at a WalMart, my Dad as a clerk in a store selling ranching supplies. Dad would have liked to have been a rancher himself, but he didn’t have any land. Being a high-school graduate, he felt he was too educated to be a mere cowhand, though he looked and talked like one. The only concrete sign of Dad’s education that I ever noticed was that he read and collected Western comic books.

  Mom and Dad were always kind of raw and yokel, even tor Matthewsboro, Colorado. They did some incredible things. The worst was this: My father was a terrible womanizer, a real Casanova, and my mother ended up stabbing him in the stomach with a carving knife. It was the worst thing I ever saw. It happened right before, dinner one evening; I was twelve and my sister Sue was fourteen. Sis told Mom she’d just seen Dad on top of a girl in the woods by the lake, and all at once Mom’s patience was gone and she stabbed him.

  Dad recovered—and settled for an easy divorce instead of pressing charges. I’d expected it to be a relief to have lanky, ne’er-do-well Dad out of the house and all the fighting over. But it turned out I never felt safe around Mom again. The stabbing wasn’t the kind of thing I could forget. In high school I joined every activity I could to stay out of Mom’s way, and once I left for college, I never went home to Matthewsboro for more than a day or two at a time.

  Eventually Mom died from a series of increasingly debilitating strokes. I used to go see her twice a year in this little nursing home at Centerville, a slightly bigger town near Matthewsboro. Even when Mom was in her wheelchair with half her face paralyzed, I was still a little scared of her pulling a knife, my fear mixed in with heartbreaking pity.

  Mom had hated it in the home, the food especially. Raised on a farm as she’d been, she was very particular about the purity of what she ate. Mom’s final stroke came while she was eating. She died choking on a mouthful of canned, over-salted, cut-rate chicken soup. Terrible. It had been five years now.

  As for Dad, he drifted down to Denver, where he worked for a ranch supply wholesaler. He still kept up his interest in collecting comics, branching out from Westerns to include Batman and Donald Duck. He lived alone in a rooming house. He had a series of woman friends—some of whom he met at comic book conventions. Women were always interested to meet a cowboy type like Dad. But he never married again, or even moved in with a woman.

  In high school, every now and then I’d go down to Denver and spend a couple of nights with Dad, reading his comics and following him to work to listen to the ranchers and cowboys wrangling about feed, horse troughs and barbed wire. In college and after, we’d get together a few times a year to “tie on the feedbag” at some roughneck Denver watering hole near the tracks. He wasn’t a bad guy, even though he talked like a dumb cowhand. Part of that was just an act.

  It had only been a year now since I’d found out Dad had lung cancer—the news had come on Christmas Day, 1998. He’d gone down fast. I’d only been to see him the one time in the Denver VA hospital before he died. I’d thought he would last longer; I missed my chance to get any last words or final blessings out of him.

  “Let’s never get old, Joe,” said Jena, who’d been looking at the middle-aged couple, too.

  “We won’t,” I said, glancing over at her. When Jena was worrying about things, like she was now, her nose got sort of a pointed look to it. Her cheeks a little drawn in. You could see the unhappy young girl right there under her beauty. She worried more than most people realized. I put my arm around her and kissed her. She kissed me back, and for a few seconds it was just us inside the kiss, the way it’s supposed to be. But then I broke the kiss, wanting to start on the task of figuring out which bar to go to.

  The middle-aged couple had crossed the street to head for D.T. Finnegan’s, the yuppie pub I’d been planning to steer us to. But, hell with that, if Finnegan’s was where the bickering geezers were going, it wasn’t for Jena and me. We walked on down the block to a dive bar named the Night Watch. It was jammin’ inside, with Nirvana blasting on the speakers, colored little Christmas lights tacked to the black plywood walls, loads of happily drunk people our age, and not a suit or a necktie in the bunch. Lots of the women were decked out in sparkly little dresses. Jena and I looked just right. We found a spot to stand in, and I pushed my way to the bar and got us two glasses and a shaker full of margaritas. Let it come down.

  When I got back to Jena, there were a couple of people talking to her, a tall, slim-waisted woman and a handsome guy with short bleached-blonde hair, the sides of his head shaved, a T-shirt with a picture of The Finger, and a silver stud in the top of his ear. It took me a second to believe my eyes.

  “Spazz? Didn’t you just tell me you were in San Francisco?”

  Spazz gave me his hoarse laugh. “Sorry, boss, I couldn’t resist rattling your chain. Turns out Tulip’s like you. She didn’t want to chance going into the City. You remember Joe from the Christmas party, don’t you, Tulip? He’s Jena’s husband. Joe Cube.”

  “Cube?” said Tulip, laughing a little. She had nice teeth and a merry smile. Three heavy gold hoops in each ear. Her skin was smooth, with a few pimples. A hank of her black hair hung down on one side. “That’s not your true name, is it?”

  “Yes it is,” said Jena protectively. “And my last name’s Bonk, so go ahead and mock that too. Joe and I have odd, short names. We’re Americans of Humorous Descent. What’s your last name, Tulip?” Jena narrowed her eyes, waiting to pounce on the answer.

  “Patel.”

  “How nice. Does it mean something?” Jena took a quick sip of her margarita. She could definitely get into being bitchy.

  Tulip shrugged. I noticed that her skin was unusually dark underneath her eyes. “You’d have to ask my father. It’s a common Indian name. Don’t worry, be happy. I’m sorry I laughed. I can never tell when Spazz is joking. He has a humorous name too. Let’s drink to the new year! To Spazz, Cube, and Bonk! From sea to shining sea!” She had a standard California accent. An intriguing woman and, according to Spazz, one of the best custom-chip designers in the valley. She worked for ExaChip, the company that made our 3Set’s ASIC chips.

  “Long live Tulip,” I chimed in, and she smiled regally down at me. There was a seriousness around the corners of her mouth. With her heels she had an inch or two on me, though not on Spazz.

  The rest of the evening was your typical bar scene. Not really my favorite thing. The music gets louder and people yell whooo and there’s a line for the bathroom and everyone flirts like mad—except for the guys like me, who usually end up talking to each other about sports or cars or computers or the stock market. Talking about freaking numbers. It’s what I do.

  I was leaning close into Spazz, going over the performance specs of the 3Set and trying to figure why the display basically looked so crappy. But then Jena got me to start dancing with her. That was good. Jena’s fun to dance with, and it made me proud to be shakin’ it with a woman that everyone was staring at. Tulip and Spazz were dancing too, and we switched partners for a while, and then switched back again. Tulip smelled exotic, like spices. It was almost like the four of us were friends.

  And then, boom, it was countdown time and Jena and I were kissing and we all sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Like all the other New Year’s Eves. Even though it was the 21st Century now, it was still ordinary human people wanting to love and be loved, hoping for the best for themselves and their families, shooting for the same old goals like a place to live, enough to eat, and decent work. I got a little misty there for a minute.

  The bar had a
computer-driven laser up near the ceiling, with the vibrating green beam writing HAPPY 2000 on the wall. Spazz pointed at the computer and bugged his eyes. “Behold, O Cube,” he said to me in his most portentous tones. “Our Lord and Master liveth!” Whatever.

  Jena was wasted by now, out on her feet. Me, I’d switched to no-alcohol beer around ten so I could drive home. “We’re gonna bail,” I told Spazz.

  “We’ll leave too,” he said.

  On the street, Spazz gave the lamppost a kick and reeled back a little. “Still real,” he said. “Deep down, I thought there’d be like this instant decay of matter. All the electrons spiraling into their nuclear suns. The advent of the End Times.” He broke into a long, deep fit of coughing.

  “I’ll drive,” said Tulip, twisting the ropy hank of her hair that hung down across her cheek.

  “Okay,” croaked Spazz. He got on the back of his motorcycle and Tulip took the seat up front. She had a helmet and a leather jacket too. With a wave and a roar they were off.

  Jena and I passed a gaggle of three blonde girls talking on cell phones. I was glad to see the phones still working. Two of the girls were talking a lot, but the third looked like she was just pretending, trying to be like her friends, trying to blend in.

  The girls giggled after Jena and I walked by. I was pretty much holding Jena up; her feet kept turning at the wrong angles. And when we got to our car she puked on the street. I drove slowly and took the back way home.

  The 3Set was still on, though the display looked kind of screwy. I helped Jena into bed before going to power it down. There was no way we were going to have sex. Oh well. We’d made a night of it, one way or another. Bottom line? New Year’s Eve sucks.