Makers Part 30

"I'm saying yes," Tjan said, grinning piratically. "I'm saying that I'll join your little weird-a.s.s hobby business and I'll open another ride here for the Ma.s.sholes. I'll help you run the franchising op, collect fees, make it profitable."

Perry felt his face tighten.

"What? I thought you'd be happy about this."

"I am," Perry said. "But you're misunderstanding something. These aren't meant to be profitable businesses. I'm done with that. These are art, or community, or something. They're museums. Lester calls them *wunderkammers* -- cabinets of wonders. There's no franchising op the way you're talking about it. It's ad hoc. It's a protocol we all agree on, not a business arrangement."

Tjan grunted. "I don't think I understand the difference between a agreed-upon protocol and a business arrangement." He held up his hand to fend off Perry's next remark. "But it doesn't matter. You can let people have the franchise for free. You can claim that you're not letting anyone have anything, that they're letting themselves in for their franchise. It doesn't matter to me.

"But Perry, here's something you're going to have to understand: it's going to be nearly impossible *not to* make a business out of this. Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good s.h.i.+t."

"Tjan, I want you to come on board to help me create an octopus,"

Perry said.

"I can try," Tjan said, "but it won't be easy. When you do cool stuff, you end up making money."

"Fine," Perry said. "Make money. But keep it to a minimum, OK?"

The next time Perry turned up at Logan, it was colder than the inside of an icebox and s.h.i.+tting down grey snow with the consistency of frozen custard.

"Great weather for an opening," he said, once he'd climbed through the roof of Tjan's car and gotten snow all over the leather upholstery. "Sorry about the car."

"Don't sweat it, the kids are murder on leather. I should trade this thing in on something that's less of a deathtrap anyway."

Tjan was balder than he'd been in September, and skinnier. He had a three-day beard that further hollowed out his normally round cheeks. The Lada sports-car fishtailed a little as they navigated the tunnels back toward Cambridge, the roads slick and icy.

"We scored an excellent location," Tjan said. "I told you that, but check this out." They were right in the middle of a built-up area of Boston, something that felt like a banking district, with impressive towers. It took Perry a minute to figure out what Tjan was pointing at.

"That's the site?" There was a mall on the corner, with a boarded up derelict Hyatt overtopping it, rising high into the sky. "But it's right in the middle of town!"

"Boston's not Florida," Tjan said. "Lots of people here don't have cars. There were some dead malls out in Worcester and the like, but I got this place for nothing. The owners haven't paid taxes in the ten years since the hotel folded, and the only shops that were left open were a couple of Azerbaijani import-export guys, selling junky stuff from India.

"We gutted the whole second floor and turned the ground-floor food-court into a flea-market. There's an old tunnel connecting this to the T and I managed to get it re-opened, so I expect we'll get some walk-in."

Perry marveled. Tjan had a suit's knack for pulling off the ambitious. Perry had never tried to even rent an apartment in a big city, figuring that any place where land was at a premium was a place where people willing to spend more than him could be found. Give him a ghost-mall that was off the GPS grid anytime.

"Have you managed to fill the flea market?" It had taken Perry a long time to fill his, and still he had a couple of dogs -- a tarot reader and a bong stall, a guy selling high-pressure spray-paint cans and a discount p.o.r.n stall that sold naked shovelware by the petabyte.

"Yeah, I got proteges up and down New England. A lot of them settled here after the crash. One place is as good as another, and the housing was wicked-cheap once the economy disappeared. They upped stakes and came to Boston as soon as I put the word out. I think everyone's waiting for the next big thing."

"You think?"

"Perry, New Work is the most important thing that ever happened to some of those people. It was the high-point of their lives. It was the only time they ever felt useful."

Perry shook his head. "Don't you think that's sad?"

Tjan negotiated a tricky tunnel interchange and got the car pointed to Cambridge. "No, Perry, I don't think it's sad. Jesus Christ, you can't believe that. Why do you think I'm helping you? You and me and all the rest of them, we did something *important*. The world changed. It's continuing to change. Have you stopped to think that one in five American workers picked up and moved somewhere else to do New Work projects? That's one of the largest American resettlements since the dustbowl. The average New Work collective s.h.i.+pped more inventions per year than Edison Labs at its peak. In a hundred years, when they remember the centuries that were America's, they'll count this one among them, because of what we made.

"So no, Perry, I don't think it's sad."

"I'm sorry. Sorry, OK? I didn't mean it that way. But it's tragic, isn't it, that the dream ended? That they're all living out there in the boonies, thinking of their glory days?"

"Yes, that *is* sad. But that's why I agreed to do the ride -- not to freeze the old projects in amber, but to create a new project that we can all partic.i.p.ate in again. These people uprooted their lives to follow us, it's the least we can do to give them something back for that."

Perry stewed on that the rest of the way to Tjan's, staring at the sleet, hand resting against the icy window-gla.s.s.

Sammy checked in to a Comfort Inn tucked into the thirty-seventh storey of the Bank of America building in downtown Boston. The lobby was empty, the security-guard's desk unmanned. B of A was in receivers.h.i.+p, and not doing so hot at that, as the fact that they had let out their executive floors to a discount business-hotel testified.

The room was fine, though -- small and windowless, but fine: power, shower, toilet and bed, all he demanded in a hotel room. He ate the packet of nuts he'd bought at the airport before jumping on the T and then checked his email. He had more of it than he could possibly answer -- he didn't think he'd ever had an empty in-box.

But he picked off anything that looked important, including a note from his ex-, who was now living in the Keys on a squatter beach and wanted to know if he could loan her a hundred bucks. No sense of how she'd pay him back without work. But Mich.e.l.le was resourceful and probably good for it. He paypalled it to her, feeling like a sucker for hoping that she might repay it in person. He'd been single since she'd left him the year before and he was lonely and hard-up.

He'd landed at two and by the time he was done with all the bulls.h.i.+t, it was after dinner time and he was hungry as h.e.l.l. Boston was full of taco-wagons and kebab stands that he'd pa.s.sed on the walk in, and he hustled out onto the street to see if any were still open. He got a huge garlicky kebab and ate it in the lee of a frozen ATM shelter, wolfing it without tasting it.

He went and scouted the location of the new ride. He'd gotten wind of it online -- none of his idiot colleagues could be bothered to read the public email lists of the compet.i.tors they were supposedly in charge of oppo researching. Shaking loose the budget to get a discount flight to Boston had been a major coup, requiring horse-trading, blackmail, and pa.s.sive-aggressive gaming of the system. With the ridiculously low per-diem and hotel allowance he'd still go home a couple hundred bucks out-of-pocket. Why did he even do his job? He should just play by the rules and get nothing done.

And get fired. Or pa.s.sed up for promotion, which was practically the same thing.

The new ride was in an impressive urban mall. He'd spent his college years in Philly and had pa.s.sed many a happy day in malls like this one, cruising for girls or camping out on a bench with his books and a smoothie. Unlike the c.r.a.ppy roadside malls of Florida, there had been nothing but the best stores in them, the property values too high to make anything but high-margin, high-turnover, high-ticket shops viable.

So it was especially sad to see this mall turned over to the junky stalls and junkier ride -- like a fat, washed-up supermodel sentenced to a talk-show appearance for her shoplifting arrests. He approached the doors with trepidation. He was resolved not to buy anything from the market -- no busts or contact lenses -- and had stuck his wallet in his front pocket on the way over.

The mall was like a sauna. He shucked his jacket and sweater and hung them over one arm. The whole ground floor had been given over to flimsy market-stalls. He skulked among them, trying to simultaneously take note of their contents and avoid their owners' notice.

He came to realize that he needn't skulk. It seemed like half of Boston had turned out -- not just young people, either. There were plenty of tweedy academics, big working-cla.s.s Southie boys with thick accents, recent immigrants with Scandie-chic clothes. They chattered and laughed and mixed freely and ate hot food out of huge cauldrons or off of clever electric grills. The smells made his stomach growl, even though he'd just polished off a kebab the size of his head.

The buzz of the crowd reminded him of something, what was it? A premiere, that was it. When they opened a new ride or area at the Park, there was the same sense of thrilling antic.i.p.ation, of excitement and eagerness. That made it worse -- these people had no business being this excited about something so. . . lowbrow? Cheap?

Whatever it was, it wasn't worthy.

They were shopping like fiends. A mother with a baby on her hip pushed past him, her stroller piled high with shopping bags screened with giant, pixellated Belgian pastries. She was laughing and the baby on her hip was laughing too.

He headed for the escalator, whose treads had been anodized in bright colors, something he'd never seen before. He let it carry him upstairs, but looked down, and so he was nearly at the top before he realized that the guy from the Florida ride was standing there, handing out fliers and staring at Sammy like he knew him from somewhere.

It was too late to avoid him. Sammy put on his best castmember smile. "h.e.l.lo there!"

The guy grinned and wiggled his eyebrow. "I know you from somewhere,"

he said slowly.

"From Florida," Sammy said, with an apologetic shrug. "I came up to see the opening."

"No *way*!" The guy had a huge smile now, looked like was going to hug him. "You're s.h.i.+tting me!"

"What can I say? I'm a fan."

"That's *incredible.* Hey, Tjan, come here and meet this guy. What's your name?"