“A little older, a little wiser. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

“Thank you, Mister Twain. You and Huck been on the river a while then?”

“No Huck,” he said. His smile got sad, heartbreakingly sad. This wasn’t the Perry Lester knew. Lester wasn’t the same person, either. They were both broken. Perry was alone, though—gregarious Perry, always making friends. Alone.

“So, how long are you staying?”

“I’m just passing through, buddy. I woke up in Burbank this morning and I thought, ‘Shit, Lester’s in Burbank, I should say hello.’ But I got places to go.”

“Come on, man, stay a while. We’ve got a guest-cottage out back, a little mother-in-law apartment. There are fruit trees, too.”

“Living the dream, huh?” He sounded unexpectedly bitter.

Lester was embarrassed for his wealth. Disney had thrown so much stock at him in the beginning and Suzanne had sold most of it and wisely invested it in a bunch of micro-funds; add to that the money she was raking in from the affiliate sites her Junior Woodchucks—kid-reporters she’d trained and set up in business—ran, and they never had to worry about a thing.

“Well, apart from dying. And working here.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. He never let on that he wasn’t happy at the Mouse, and the dying thing—well, Suzanne and he liked to pretend that medical science would cure what it had brought.

Perry, though, he just nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. “Must be hard on Suzanne.”

Now that was hitting the nail on the head. “You always were a perceptive son of a bitch.”

“She never said fatkins was good for you. She just reported the story. The people who blame her—”

This was the elephant in the room whenever Lester and Suzanne talked about his health. Between the two of them, they’d popularized fatkins, sent millions winging to Russia for the clinics, fuelled the creation of the clinics in the US and Mexico.

But they never spoke of it. Never. Now Perry was talking about it, still talking:

“—the FDA, the doctors. That’s what we pay them for. The way I see it, you’re a victim, their victim.”

Lester couldn’t say anything. Words stoppered themselves up in his mouth like a cork. Finally, he managed to choke out, “Change the subject, OK?”

Perry looked down. “Sorry. I’m out of practice with people.”

“I hope you’ll stay with us,” he said, thinking I hope you leave soon and never come back.

“You miss it, huh?”

“Sometimes.”

“You said working here—”

“Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?” He snorted. “It’s like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.”

“I hate working with assholes.”

“They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it.”

“Why?”

“It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit.”

“Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent—81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.

“Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus.”

“I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But fuck me, it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws.”

“Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative.”

“So what are virtues?”

“Additive, maybe. A shallower curve.”

“That’d be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quantitative measurements.”

“So what do you do around here all day?”

Lester blushed.

“What?”

“I’m building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research assistants assemble them. There’s something soothing about them. I have an Apple][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant.”

“I think I’d like to see that,” Perry said, laughing a little.

“That can be arranged,” Lester said.

They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy.

They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed.

They were like gears, connected to one another and mismatched, clunking and skipping, but running still, running still.

Perry and Lester rode in the back of the company car, the driver an old Armenian who’d fled Azerbaijan, whom Lester introduced as Kapriel. It seemed that Lester and Kapriel were old friends, which made sense, since Lester couldn’t drive himself, and in Los Angeles, you didn’t go anywhere except by car. The relationship between a man and his driver would be necessarily intimate.

Perry couldn’t bring himself to feel envious of Lester having a chauffeured car, though it was clear that Lester was embarrassed by the luxury. It was too much like an invalid’s subsidy to feel excessive.

“Kap,” Lester said, stirring in the nest of paper and parts and empty health-food packages that he’d made of the back-seat.

Kapriel looked over his shoulder at them. “Home now?” He barely had an accent, but when he turned his head, Perry saw that one ear had been badly mangled, leaving behind a misshapen fist of scar.

“No,” Lester said. “Let’s eat out tonight. How about Musso and Frank?”

“Ms Suzanne says—”

“We don’t need to tell her,” Lester said.

Perry spoke in a low voice, “Lester, I don’t need anything special. Don’t make yourself sick—”

“Perry, buddy, shut the fuck up, OK? I can have a steak and a beer and a big-ass dessert every now and again. Purified medicated fatkins-chow gets old. My colon isn’t going to fall out of my asshole in terror if I send a cheeseburger down there.”

They parked behind Musso and Frank and let the valet park the town car. Kapriel went over to the Walk of Fame to take pictures of the robotic movie stars doing acrobatic busking acts, and they went into the dark cave of the restaurant, all dark wood, dark carpets, pictures of movie stars on the walls. The maitre d’ gave them a look, tilted his head, looked again. Calmly, Lester produced a hundred-dollar bill and slid it across the podium.

“We’d like Orson Welles’s table, please,” he said.

The maitre d’—an elderly, elegant Mexican with a precise spade beard—nodded affably. “Give me five minutes, gentlemen. Would you care to have a drink in the bar?”

They sat at the long counter and Perry ordered a Scotch and soda. Lester ordered water, then switched his order to beer, then non-alcoholic beer, then beer again. “Sorry,” he said to the waitress. “Just having an indecisive kind of night, I guess.”