Makers Part 19

Lester stayed long enough to see the first prototype printer-printers running, then he lit out with a duffel bag jammed into the back of his modded Smart car. "Where are you going?" Suzanne said as Perry looked on gloomily. "I'll come and visit you. I want to follow your story."

Truth be told, she was sorry to see him go, very sorry. He was such a rock, such an anchor for Perry's new crazy pirate energy and for the madness around them. He hadn't given much notice (not to her -- Perry didn't seem that surprised).

"I can't really talk about it," he said. "Nondisclosure."

"So it's a new job," she said. "You're going to work for Tjan?" Tjan's Westinghouse operation was fully rocking. He had fifty teams up the eastern seaboard, ten in the midwest and was rumored to have twice as many in Eastern Europe.

He grinned. "Oh, Suzanne, don't try to journalist me." He reached out and hugged her in a cloud of her father's cologne. "You're fantastic, you know that? No, I'm not going to a job. It's a thing that's an amazing opportunity, you know?"

She didn't, but then he was gone and boy did she miss him.

Perry and she went out for dinner in Miami the next night with a PhD candidate from Pepperdine's B-school, eating at the same deco patio that she'd dined at with Tjan. Perry wore a white s.h.i.+rt open to reveal his tangle of wiry chest hair and the waitress couldn't keep her eyes off of him. He had a permanent squint now, and a scar that made his eyebrow into a series of small hills.

"I was just in Greensboro, Miss," the PhD candidate said. He was in his mid-twenties, young and slick, his only nod to academe a small goatee. "I used to spend summers there with my grandpa." He talked fast, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, eyes wide, fork stabbing blindly at the bits of crab-cake on his plate. "There wasn't *anything* left there, just a couple gas-stations and a 7-Eleven, s.h.i.+t, they'd even closed the Wal-Mart. But now, but now, it's *alive*

again, it's buzzing and hopping. Every empty storefront is full of people playing and tinkering, just a little bit of money in their pockets from a bank or a company or a fund. They're doing the dumbest things, mind you: tooled-leather laptop cases, switchblade knives with thumb drives in the handles, singing and dancing lawn-Santas that yodel like hillbillies."

"I'd buy a tooled-leather laptop case," Perry said, swilling a sweaty bottle of beer. He waggled his funny eyebrow and rubbed his fuzzy scalp.

"The rate of employment is something like ninety-five percent, which it hasn't been in like a hundred years. If you're not inventing stuff, you're keeping the books for someone who is, or making sandwiches for them, or driving delivery vehicles around. It's like a tiny, distributed gold rush."

"Or like the New Deal," Suzanne said. That was how she'd come to invite him down, after she'd read his paper coining the term New Work to describe what Perry was up to, comparing it to Roosevelt's public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression.

"Yeah, exactly, exactly! I've got research that shows that one in five Americans is employed in the New Work industry. Twenty percent!"

Perry's lazy eye opened a little wider. "No way," he said.

"Way," the PhD candidate said. He finished his caipirinha and shook the crushed ice at a pa.s.sing waiter, who nodded and ambled to the bar to get him a fresh one. "You should get on the road and write about some of these guys," he said to Suzanne. "They need some ink, some phosphors. They're pulling up stakes and moving to the small towns their parents came from, or to abandoned suburbs, and just *doing it*. Bravest f.u.c.king thing you've seen in your life."

The PhD candidate stayed out the week, and went home with a suitcase full of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer that could print out all of the parts necessary to build a three-d printer.

Lester emailed her from wherever it was he'd gone, and told her about the lovely time he was having. It made her miss him sharply. Perry was hardly ever around for her now, buried in his work, buried with the kids from the shantytown and with Francis. She looked over her last month's blogs and realized that she'd been turning in variations on the same theme for all that time. She knew it was time to pack a duffel bag of her own and go see the bravest f.u.c.king thing she'd seen in her life.

"Bye, Perry," she said, stopping by his workbench. He looked up at her and saw the bag and his funny eyebrow wobbled.

"Leaving for good?" he said. He sounded unexpectedly bitter.

"No!" she said. "No! Just a couple weeks. Going to get the rest of the story. But I'll be back, count on it."

He grunted and slumped. He was looking a lot older now, and beaten down. His hair, growing out, was half grey, and he'd gotten gaunt, his cheekbones and forehead springing out of his face. On impulse, she gave him a hug like the ones she'd shared with Lester. He returned it woodenly at first, then with genuine warmth. "I will be back, you know," she said. "You've got plenty to do here, anyway."

"Yeah," he said. "Course I do."

She kissed him firmly on the cheek and stepped out the door and into her car and drove to Miami International.

Tjan met her at Logan and took her bag. "I'm surprised you had the time to meet me," she said. The months had been good to him, slimming down his pot-belly and putting a twinkle in his eye.

"I've got a good organization," he said, as they motored away toward Rhode Island, through strip-mall suburbs and past boarded-up chain restaurants. Everywhere there were signs of industry: workshops in old storefronts, roadside stands selling disposable music players, digital whoopee cus.h.i.+ons, and so forth. "I barely have to put in an appearance."

Tjan yawned hugely and constantly. "Jet-lag," he apologized. "Got back from Russia a couple days ago."

"Did you see your kids?" she said. "How's business there?"

"I saw my kids," he said, and grinned. "They're amazing, you know that? Good kids, unbelievably smart. Real little operators. The older one, Lyenitchka, is running a baby-sitting service -- not baby-sitting herself, you see, but recruiting other kids to do the sitting for her while she skims a management fee and runs the quality control."

"She's your daughter all right," she said. "So tell me everything about the Westinghouse projects."

She'd been following them, of course, lots of different little startups, each with its own blogs and such. But Tjan was quite fearless about taking her through their profits and losses and taking notes on it all kept her busy until she reached her hotel. Tjan dropped her off and promised to pick her up the next morning for a VIP tour of the best of his teams, and she went to check in.

She was in the middle of receiving her key when someone grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it. "Suzanne b.l.o.o.d.y Church! What are you doing here, love?"

The smell of his breath was like a dead thing, left to fester. She turned around slowly, not wanting to believe that of all the hotels in rural Rhode Island, she ended up checking into the same one as Rat-Toothed Freddy.

"Hey, Freddy," she said. Seeing him gave her an atavistic urge to stab him repeatedly in the throat with the hotel stick-pen. He was unshaven, his gawky Adam's apple bobbing up and down, and he swallowed and smiled wetly. "Nice to see you."

"Fantastic to see you, too! I'm here covering a shareholder meeting for Westinghouse, is that what you're here for, too?"

"No," she said. She knew the meeting was on that week, but hadn't planned on attending it. She was done with press conferences, preferring on-the-ground reporting. "Well, nice to see you."

"Oh, do stay for a drink," he said, grinning more widely, exposing those grey teeth in a shark's smile. "Come on -- they have a free c.o.c.ktail hour in this place. I'll have to report you to the journalist's union if you turn down a free drink."

"I don't think 'bloggers' have to worry about the journalist's union,"

she said, making sarcastic finger-quotes in case he didn't get the message. He still didn't. He laughed instead.

"Oh, love, I'm sure they'll still have you even if you have lapsed away from the one true faith."

"Good night, Freddy," was all she could manage to get out without actually hissing through her teeth.

"OK, good night," he said, moving in to give her a hug. As he loomed toward her, she snapped.

"Freeze, mister. You are not my friend. I do not want to touch you. You have poor personal hygiene and your breath smells like an overflowing camp-toilet. You write vicious personal attacks on me and on the people I care about. You are unfair, meanspirited, and you write badly. The only day I wouldn't p.i.s.s on you, Freddy, is the day you were on fire. Now get the f.u.c.k out of my way before I kick your tiny little t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es up through the roof of your reeking mouth."

She said it quietly, but the desk-clerks behind her overheard it anyway and giggled. Freddy's smile only wobbled, but then returned, broader than ever.

"Well said," he said and gave her a single golf-clap. "Sleep well, Suzanne."

She boiled all the way to her room and when she came over hungry, she ordered in room service, not wanting to take the chance that Rat-Toothed Freddy would still be in the lobby.

Tjan met her as she was finis.h.i.+ng her coffee in the breakfast room. She hadn't seen Freddy yet.

"I've got five projects slated for you to visit today," Tjan said, sliding into the booth beside her. Funnily now that he was in the cold northeast, he was dressing like a Floridian in blue jeans and a Hawai'ian barkcloth s.h.i.+rt with a bright spatter of pineapples and Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles. Back in Florida, he'd favored unflattering nylon slacks and white s.h.i.+rts with ironed collars.

The projects were fascinating and familiar. The cultural differences that distinguished New England New Work from Florida New Work were small but telling: a lot more woodcraft, in a part of the country where many people had grown up in their grandfathers' woodworking shops. A little more unreflexive kitsch, like the homely kittens and puppies that marched around the reactive, waterproof, smash-proof screens integrated into a bio-monitoring crib.