Makers Part 10

And so Suzanne got on an airplane that night and flew back to San Jose and took a pricey taxi back to her place. The marketdroids had left it in pretty good shape, clean and tidy, clean sheets in the linen cupboard. She made up her bed and reflected that this would be the last time she made this bed -- the next time she stripped the sheets, they'd go into a long-term storage box. She'd done this before, on her way out of Detroit, packing up a life into boxes and shoving it into storage. What had Tjan said? "The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can't find room for -- that's superabundance."

Before bed she posted a cla.s.sified on Craigslist for a couple helpers to work on boxing stuff, emailed Jimmy to see if he wanted lunch, and looked up the address for the central police station to swear out her complaint. The amp, speakers, and A/V switcher were all missing from her home theater.

She had a dozen helpers to choose from the next morning. She picked two who came with decent references, marveling that it was suddenly possible in Silicon Valley to get anyone to show up anywhere for ten bucks an hour. The police sergeant who took the complaint was sympathetic and agreed with her choice to get out of town. "I've had it with this place, too. Soon as my kids are out of high-school I'm moving back to Montana. I miss the weather."

She didn't think of the marketdroids again until the next day, when she and her helpers were boxing up the last of her things and loading them into her U-Haul. Then a BMW convertible screeched around the corner and burned rubber up to her door.

The woman marketdroid was driving, looking crazy and disheveled, eyes red-rimmed, one heel broken off of her shoes.

"What the f.u.c.k is your problem, lady?" she said, as she leapt out of her car and stalked toward Suzanne.

Instinctively, Suzanne shrank back and dropped the box of books she was holding. It spilled out over her lawn.

"Fiona?" she said. "What's happened?"

"I was *arrested.* They came to my workplace and led me out in handcuffs. I had to make *bail*."

Suzanne's stomach shrank to a little pebble, impossibly heavy. "What was I supposed to do? You two took off with my home theater!"

"What home theater? Everything was right where you left it when I went. I haven't lived here in *weeks*. Tom left me last month and I moved out."

"You moved out?"

"Yeah, b.i.t.c.h, I *moved out*. Tom was your tenant, not me. If he ripped something off, that's between you and him."

"Look, Fiona, wait, hold up a second. I tried to call you, I sent you email. No one was paying the rent, no one told me that you'd moved out, and no one answered when I tried to find out what had happened."

"That sounds like an *explanation,* she said, hissing. "I'm waiting for a f.u.c.king *apology.* They took me to *prison*."

Suzanne knew that the local lockup was a long way from prison. "I apologize," she said. "Can I get you a cup of coffee? Would you like to use the shower or anything?"

The woman glared at her a moment longer, then slowly folded in on herself, collapsing, coughing and sobbing on the lawn.

Suzanne stood with her arms at her sides for a moment. Her Craigslist helpers had gone home, so she was all alone, and this woman, whom she'd met only once before, in pa.s.sing, was clearly having some real problems. Not the kind of thing she dealt with a lot -- her life didn't include much person-to-person hand-holding.

But what can you do? She knelt beside Fiona in the gra.s.s and took her hand. "Let's get you inside, OK?"

At first it was as though she hadn't heard, but slowly she straightened up and let Suzanne lead her into the house. She was twenty-two, twenty-three, young enough to be Suzanne's daughter if Suzanne had gone in for that sort of thing. Suzanne helped her to the sofa and sat her down amid the boxes still waiting to go into the U-Haul. The kitchen was packed up, but she had a couple bottles of Diet c.o.ke in the cooler and she handed one to the girl.

"I'm really sorry, Fiona. Why didn't you answer my calls or email?"

She looked at Suzanne, her eyes lost in streaks of mascara. "I don't know. I didn't want to talk about it. He lost his job last month and kind of went crazy, told me he didn't want the responsibility anymore. What responsibility? But he told me to go, told me it would be best for both of us if we were apart. I thought it was another girl, but I don't know. Maybe it was just craziness. Everyone I know out here is crazy. They all work a hundred hours a week, they get fired or quit their jobs every five months. Everything is so expensive. My rent is three quarters of my salary."

"It's really hard," Suzanne said, thinking of the easy, lazy days in Florida, the hackers' idyll that Perry and Lester enjoyed in their workshops.

"Tom was on antidepressants, but he didn't like taking them. When he was on them, he was pretty good, but when he went off, he turned into... I don't know. He'd cry a lot, and shout. It wasn't a good relations.h.i.+p, but we moved out here from Oregon together, and I'd known him all my life. He was a little moody before, but not like he was here."

"When did you speak to him last?" Suzanne had found a couple of blister-packs of anti-depressants in the medicine chest. She hoped that wasn't Tom's only supply.

"We haven't spoken since I moved out."

An hour later, the mystery was solved. The police went to Tom's workplace and discovered that he'd been fired the week before. They tried the GPS in his car and it finked him out as being in a ghost mall's parking lot near his old office. He was dead behind the wheel, a gun in his hand, shot through the heart.

Suzanne took the call and though she tried to keep her end of the conversation quiet and neutral, Fiona -- still on the sofa, drinking the warm, flat c.o.ke -- knew. She let out a moan like a dog that's been kicked, and then a scream. For Suzanne, it was all unreal, senseless. The cops told her that her home theater components were found in the trunk of the car. No note.

"G.o.d, oh G.o.d, Jesus, you selfish s.h.i.+t f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Fiona sobbed. Awkwardly, Suzanne sat down beside her and took her into a one-armed hug. Her helpers were meeting her at the self-storage the next day to help her unload the U-Haul.

"Do you have someone who can stay with you tonight?" Suzanne asked, praying the answer was yes. She had a house to move out of. Christ, she felt so cold-blooded, but she was on a G.o.dd.a.m.ned schedule.

"Yes, I guess." Fiona scrubbed at her eyes with her fists. "Sure."

Suzanne sighed. The lie was plain. "Who?"

Fiona stood up and smoothed out her skirt. "I'm sorry," she said, and started for the door.

Groaning inwardly, Suzanne blocked her. "You'll stay on the sofa," she said. "You're not driving in this state. I'll order in pizza. Pepperoni mushroom OK?"

Looking defeated, Fiona turned on her heel and went back to the sofa.

Over pizza, Suzanne pulled a few details out of her. Tom had fallen into a funk when the layoffs had started in his office -- they were endemic across the Valley, another bust was upon them. His behavior had grown worse and worse, and she'd finally left, or been thrown out, it wasn't clear. She was on thin ice at Google, and they were laying people off too, and she was convinced that being led out in handcuffs would be the straw that broke the camel's back.

"I should move back to Oregon," she said, dropping her slice back on the box-top.

Suzanne had heard a lot of people talk about giving up on the Valley since she'd moved there. It was a common thing, being beaten down by life in the Bay Area. You were supposed to insert a pep talk here, something about hanging in, about the opportunities here.

"Yes," she said, "that's a good idea. You're young, and there's a life for you there. You can start something up, or go to work for someone else's startup." It felt weird coming out of her mouth, like a betrayal of the Valley, of some tribal loyalty to this tech-Mecca. But after all, wasn't she selling up and moving east?

"There's nothing in Oregon," Fiona said, snuffling.

"There's something everywhere. Let me tell you about some friends of mine in Florida," and she told her, and as she told her, she told herself. Hearing it spoken aloud, even after having written about it and written about it, and been there and DONE it, it was different. She came to understand how f.u.c.king *cool* it all was, this new, entrepreneurial, inventive, amazing thing she was engaged in. She'd loved the contrast of nimble software companies when compared with gigantic, brutal auto companies, but what her boys were doing, it made the software companies look like lumbering lummoxes, cras.h.i.+ng around with their fifty employees and their big purpose-built offices.

Fiona was disbelieving, then interested, then excited. "They just make this stuff, do it, then make something else?"

"Exactly -- no permanence except for the team, and they support each other, live and work together. You'd think that because they live and work together that they don't have any balance, but it's the opposite: they book off work at four or sometimes earlier, go to movies, go out and have fun, read books, play catch. It's amazing. I'm never coming back here."

And she never would.

She told her editor about this. She told her friends who came to a send-off party at a bar she used to go to when she went into the office a lot. She told her cab driver who picked her up to take her to the airport and she told the bemused engineer who sat next to her all the way back to Miami. She had the presence of mind not to tell the couple who bought her house for a sum of money that seemed to have at least one extra zero at the end -- maybe two.

And so when she got back to Miami, she hardly noticed the incredible obesity of the man who took the money for the gas in her leased car -- now that she was here for the long haul she'd have to look into getting Lester to help her buy a used Smart-car from a junker lot -- and the tin roofs of the shantytowns she pa.s.sed looked tropical and quaint. The smell of swamp and salt, the pea-soup humidity, the ba.s.s thunder of the boom-cars in the traffic around her -- it was like some kind of sweet homecoming for her.

Tjan was in the condo when she got home and he spotted her from the balcony, where he'd been sunning himself and helped her bring up her suitcases of things she couldn't bear to put in storage.

"Come down to our place for a cup of coffee once you're settled in,"

he said, leaving her. She sluiced off the airplane grease that had filled her pores on the long flight from San Jose to Miami and changed into a cheap sun-dress and a pair of flip-flops that she'd bought at the Thunderbird Flea Market and headed down to their place.

Tjan opened the door with a flourish and she stepped in and stopped short. When she'd left, the place had been a reflection of their jumbled lives: gizmos, dishes, parts, tools and clothes strewn everywhere in a kind of joyful, eye-watering hyper-mess, like an enormous kitchen junk-drawer.