Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow (best classic books to read .txt) 📗

She snorted and drank her coffee. "I don't have any say in it."

"Tell your boss," he said. "It's how good ideas happen in business -- people working at the cash register figure stuff out, and they tell their bosses."

"So I should just tell my boss that I think we should change our whole rental system because it's creepy?"

"Damned right. Tell him it's creepy. You're keeping information you don't need to keep, and paying to store it. You're keeping information that cops or snoops or other people could take advantage of. And you're keeping information that your customers almost certainly assume you're not keeping. All of those are good reasons not to keep that information. Trust me on this one. Bosses love to hear suggestions from people who work for them. It shows that you're engaged, paying attention to their business."

"God, now I feel guilty for snooping."

"Well, maybe you don't mention to your boss that you've been spending a lot of time looking through rental histories."

She laughed. God, he liked working with young people. "So, why I'm here," he said.

"Yes?"

"I want to put an access point in the second-floor window and around back of the shop. Your boss owns the building, right?"

"Yeah, but I really don't think I can explain all this stuff to him --"

"I don't need you to -- I just need you to introduce me to him. I'll do all the explaining."

She blushed a little. "I don't know, Abe..." She trailed off.

"Is that a problem?"

"No. Yes. I don't know." She looked distressed.

Suddenly he was at sea. He'd felt like he was in charge of this interaction, like he understood what was going on. He'd carefully rehearsed what he was going to say and what Natalie was likely to say, and now she was, what, afraid to introduce him to her boss? Because why? Because the boss was an ogre? Then she would have pushed back harder when he told her to talk to him about the rental records. Because she was shy? Natalie wasn't shy. Because --

"I'll do it," she said. "Sorry. I was being stupid. It's just -- you come on a little strong sometimes. My boss, I get the feeling that he doesn't like it when people come on strong with him."

Ah, he thought. She was nervous because he was so goddamned weird. Well, there you had it. He couldn't even get sad about it. Story of his life, really.

"Thanks for the tip," he said. "What if I assure you that I'll come on easy?"

She blushed. It had really been awkward for her, then. He felt bad. "Okay," she said. "Sure. Sorry, man --"

He held up a hand. "It's nothing."

He followed her back to the store and he bought a tin robot made out of a Pepsi can by some artisan in Vietnam who'd endowed it with huge tin testicles. It made him laugh. When he got home, he scanned and filed the receipt, took a picture, and entered it into The Inventory, and by the time he was done, he was feeling much better.

They got into Kurt's car at five p.m., just as the sun was beginning to set. The sun hung on the horizon, right at eye level, for an eternity, slicing up their eyeballs and into their brains.

"Summer's coming on," Alan said.

"And we've barely got the Market covered," Kurt said. "At this rate, it'll take ten years to cover the whole city."

Alan shrugged. "It's the journey, dude, not the destination -- the act of organizing all these people, of putting up the APs, of advancing the art. It's all worthwhile in and of itself."

Kurt shook his head. "You want to eat Vietnamese?"

"Sure," Alan said.

"I know a place," he said, and nudged the car through traffic and on to the Don Valley Parkway.

"Where the hell are we going?" Alan said, once they'd left the city limits and entered the curved, identical cookie-cutter streets of the industrial suburbs in the north end.

"Place I know," Kurt said. "It really cheap and really good. All the Peel Region cops eat there." He snapped his fingers. "Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you about the cop," he said.

"You were," Alan said.

"So, one night I'd been diving there." Kurt pointed to an anonymous low-slung, sprawling brown building. "They print hockey cards, baseball cards, monster cards -- you name it."

He sipped at his donut-store coffee and then rolled down the window and spat it out. "Shit, that was last night's coffee," he said. "So, one night I was diving there, and I found, I dunno, fifty, a hundred boxes of hockey cards. Slightly dented at the corners, in the trash. I mean, hockey cards are just paper, right? The only thing that makes them valuable is the companies infusing them with marketing juju and glossy pictures of mullet-head, no-tooth jocks."

"Tell me how you really feel," Alan said.

"Sorry," Kurt said. "The hockey players in junior high were real jerks. I'm mentally scarred.

"So I'm driving away and the law pulls me over. The local cops, they know me, mostly, 'cause I phone in B&Es when I spot them, but these guys had never met me before. So they get me out of the car and I explain what I was doing, and I quote the part of the Trespass to Property Act that says that I'm allowed to do what I'm doing, and then I open the trunk and I show him, and he busts a nut: 'You mean you found these in the garbage? My kid spends a fortune on these things! In the garbage?' He keeps saying, 'In the garbage?' and his partner leads him away and I put it behind me.

"But then a couple nights later, I go back and there's someone in the dumpster, up to his nipples in hockey cards."

"The cop," Alan said.

"The cop," Kurt said. "Right."

"That's the story about the cop in the dumpster, huh?" Alan said.

"That's the story. The moral is: We're all only a c-hair away from jumping in the dumpster and getting down in it."

"C-hair? I thought you were trying not to be sexist?"

"C stands for cock, okay?"

Alan grinned. He and Kurt hadn't had an evening chatting together in some time. When Kurt suggested that they go for a ride, Alan had been reluctant: too much on his mind those days, too much Danny on his mind. But this was just what he needed. What they both needed.

"Okay," Alan said. "We going to eat?"

"We're going to eat," Kurt said. "The Vietnamese place is just up ahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. It was amazing -- it was like he was a tourist even at home, an ugly fucked-up tourist. People suck."

"Do they?" Alan said. "I quite like them. You know, there's pretty good Vietnamese in Chinatown."

"This is good Vietnamese."

"Better than Chinatown?"

"Better situated," Kurt said. "If you're going dumpster diving afterward. I'm gonna take your cherry, buddy." He clapped a hand on Alan's shoulder. Real people didn't touch Alan much. He didn't know if he liked it.

"God," Alan said. "This is so sudden." But he was happy about it. He'd tried to picture what Kurt actually did any number of times, but he was never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jump in and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it, picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willing to sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he'd bought one day after the shirt he'd worn to the store -- the wind-up toy store? -- got soaked in a cloudburst.

The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran the restaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling with cops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab a salad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. "Cops always know where to eat fast and cheap and good," Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of pork chop and fried rice. "That's how I found this place, all the cop cars in the parking lot."

Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunks of rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce before popping them in his mouth. "Where are we going?" he asked.

Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. "Wherever the fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull into a parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There's enough dumpsters out this way, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I've got to be selective. I know how each company's trash has been running -- lots of good stuff or mostly crap -- lately, and I trust my intuition to take me to the right places. I'd love to go to the Sega or Nintendo dumpsters, but they're like Stalag Thirteen -- razorwire and motion-sensors and armed guards. They're the only companies that take secrecy seriously." Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the driveway of an industrial complex.

"Spidey-sense is tingling," he said, as he killed his lights and crept forward to the dumpster. "Ready to lose your virginity?" he said, lighting a cigarette.

"I wish you'd stop using that metaphor," Alan said. "Ick."

But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car, pulling open Alan's door.

"That dumpster is full of cardboard," he said, gesturing. "It's recycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. This one," he said, oofing as he levered himself over it, talking around the maglight he'd clenched between his teeth, "is where they put the good stuff. Looky here."

Alan tried to climb the dumpster's sticky walls, but couldn't get a purchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled, reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. He scrambled over the dumpster's transom and fell into it, expecting a wash of sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead, amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes.

"What's this?" he asked.

Kurt was picking up the boxes and shaking them, listening for the rattle. "This place is an import/export wholesaler. They throw out a lot of defective product, since it's cheaper than shipping it all back to Taiwan for service. But my kids will fix it and sell it on eBay. Here," he said, opening a box and shaking something out, handing it to him. He passed his light over to Alan, who took it, unmindful of the drool on the handle.

It was a rubber duckie. Alan turned it over and saw it had a hard chunk of metal growing out of its ass.

"More of these, huh?" Kurt said. "I found about a thousand of these last month. They're USB keychain drives, low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug them in and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They light up in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they've all got a manufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color -- whatever shade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.

"I've got a couple thousand of these back home, but they're selling briskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there and we'll snag a couple hundred more."

Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the dumpster: more