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This was what responsibility meant in a dinosaur industry, toward the end of yet another quarter of bad-to-worse news: that you called the travel agent back, and even though there was indeed an economy room in the hotel where the conference was being held, a room overlooking the cooling towers, you asked if there wasn’t something still cheaper. And when Marie-the-new-girl came back with something amazingly cheap, you took it—only to discover, as Art Woo was discovering now, that the doors were locked after nine o’clock. The neighborhood had looked not great but not bad, and the building itself, regular enough. Brick, four stories, a rolled-up awning. A bright-lit hotel logo, with a raised-plastic, smiling sun. But there was a kind of crossbar rigged across the inside of the glass door, and that was not at all regular. A two-by-four, it appeared, wrapped in rust-colored carpet. Above this, inside the glass, hung a small gray sign. If the taxi had not left, Art might not have rung the buzzer, as per the instructions.

But the taxi had indeed left, and the longer Art huddled on the stoop in the clumpy December snow, the emptier and more poorly lit the street appeared. His buzz was answered by an enormous black man wearing a neck brace. The shoulder seams of the man’s blue waffle-weave jacket were visibly straining; around the brace was tied a necktie, which reached only a third of the way down his chest. All the same, it was neatly fastened together with a hotel-logo tie tack about two inches from the bottom. The tie tack was smiling; the man was not. He held his smooth, round face perfectly expressionless, and he lowered his gaze at every opportunity—not so that it was rude, but so that it was clear he wasn’t selling anything to anybody. Regulation tie, thought Art. Regulation jacket. He wondered if the man would turn surly soon enough.

For Art had come to few conclusions about life in his forty-nine years, but this was one of them: that men turned surly when their clothes didn’t fit them. This man, though, belied the rule. He was courteous, almost formal in demeanor; and if the lobby seemed not only too small for him, like his jacket, but also too much like a bus station, what with its smoked mirror wall, and its linoleum, and its fake wood, and its vending machines, what did that matter to Art? The sitting area looked as though it was in the process of being cleaned; the sixties Scandinavian chairs and couch and coffee table had been pulled every which way, as if by someone hell-bent on the dust balls. Still Art proceeded with his check-in. He was going with his gut, here as in any business situation. Here as in any business situation, he was looking foremost at the personnel, and the man with the neck brace had put him at some ease. It wasn’t until after Art had taken his credit card back that he noticed, above the checkout desk, a wooden plaque from a neighborhood association. He squinted at its brass faceplate: FEWEST CUSTOMER INJURIES, 1972–73.

What about the years since ’73? Had the hotel gotten more dangerous, or had other hotels gotten safer? Maybe neither. For all he knew, the neighborhood association had dissolved and was no longer distributing plaques. Art reminded himself that in life, some signs were no signs. It’s what he used to tell his ex-wife, Lisa. Lisa, who loved to read everything into everything; Lisa, who was attuned. She left him on a day when she saw a tree get split by lightning. Of course, that was an extraordinary thing to see. An event of a lifetime. Lisa said the tree had sizzled. He wished he had seen it, too. But what did it mean, except that the tree had been the tallest in the neighborhood, and was no longer? It meant nothing; ditto for the plaque. Art made his decision, which perhaps was not the right decision. Perhaps he should have looked for another hotel.

But it was late—on the way out, his plane had sat on the runway, just sat and sat, as if it were never going to take off—and God only knew what he would have ended up paying if he had relied on a cabbie simply to take him somewhere else. Forget twice—it could have been three, four times what he would have paid for that room with the view of the cooling towers, easy. At this hour, after all, and that was a conference rate.

So he double-locked his door instead. He checked behind the hollow-core doors of the closet, and under the steel-frame bed, and also in the swirly-green shower stall unit. He checked behind the seascapes to be sure there weren’t any peepholes. The window opened onto a fire escape; not much he could do about that except check the window locks. Big help that those were—a sure deterrent for the subset of all burglars that was burglars too skittish to break glass. Which was what percent of intruders, probably? Ten percent? Fifteen? He closed the drapes, then decided he would be more comfortable with the drapes open. He wanted to be able to see what approached, if anything did. He unplugged the handset of his phone from the base, a calculated risk. On the one hand, he wouldn’t be able to call the police if there was an intruder. On the other, he would be armed. He had read somewhere a story about a woman who threw the handset of her phone at an attacker, and killed him. Needless to say, there had been some luck involved in that eventuality. Still, Art thought that (a) surely he could throw as hard as that woman, and (b) even without the luck, his throw would most likely be hard enough to slow up an intruder at least. Especially since this was an old handset, the hefty kind that made you feel the seriousness of human communication. In a newer hotel, he probably would have had a lighter phone, with lots of buttons he would never use but which would make him feel he had many resources at his disposal. In the conference hotel, there were probably buttons for the health club, and for the concierge, and for the three restaurants, and for room service. He tried not to think about this as he went to sleep, clutching the handset.

He did not sleep well.

In the morning, he debated whether to take the handset with him into the elevator. It wasn’t like a knife, say, that could be whipped out of nowhere. Even a pistol at least fit in a guy’s pocket. A telephone handset did not. All the same, he took it with him. He tried to carry it casually, as if he was going out for a run and using it for a hand weight, or as if he was in the telephone business.

He strode down the hall. Victims shuffled; that’s what everybody said. A lot of mugging had to do with nonverbal cues, which is why Lisa used to walk tall after dark, sending vibes. For this, he used to tease her. If she was so worried, she should lift weights and run, the way he did. That, he maintained, was the substantive way of helping oneself. She had agreed. For a while they had met after work at the gym. Then she dropped a weight on her toe and decided she preferred to sip piña coladas and watch. Naturally, he grunted on. But to what avail? Who could appreciate his pectorals through his suit and overcoat? Pectorals had no deterrent value, that was what he was thinking now. And he was, though not short, not tall. He continued striding. Sending vibes. He was definitely going to eat in the dining room of the hotel where the conference was being held, he decided. What’s more, he was going to have a full American breakfast with bacon and eggs, none of this continental bullshit.

In truth, he had always considered the sight of men eating croissants slightly ridiculous, especially at the beginning, when for the first bite they had to maneuver the point of the crescent into their mouths. No matter what a person did, he ended up with an asymmetrical mouthful of pastry, which he then had to relocate with his tongue to a more central location. This made him look less purposive than he might. Also, croissants were more apt than other breakfast foods to spray little flakes all over one’s clean dark suit. Art himself had accordingly never ordered a croissant in any working situation, and he believed that attention to this sort of detail was how it was that he had not lost his job like so many of his colleagues.

This was, in other words, how it happened that he was still working in a dying industry, and was now carrying a telephone handset with him into the elevator. Art braced himself as the elevator doors opened slowly, jerkily, in the low-gear manner of elevator doors in the Third World. He strode in, and was surrounded by, of all things, children. Down in the lobby, too, there were children and, here and there, women he knew to be mothers by their looks of dogged exasperation. A welfare hotel! He laughed out loud. Almost everyone was black; the white children stood out like little missed opportunities of the type that made Art’s boss throw his tennis racket across the room. Of course, the racket was always in its padded protective cover and not in much danger of getting injured, though the person in whose vicinity it was aimed sometimes was. Art once suffered what he rather hoped would turn out to be a broken nose, but was only a bone bruise. There was so little skin discoloration that people had a hard time believing the incident had actually taken place. Yet it had. Don’t talk to me about fault. Bottom line, it’s you Japs who are responsible for this whole fucking mess, his boss had said. Never mind that what was the matter with minicomputers, really, was personal computers, a wholly American phenomenon. And never mind that Art could have sued over this incident if he could have proved that it had happened. Some people, most notably Lisa, thought he at least ought to have quit.

But he didn’t sue and he didn’t quit. He took his tennis racket on the nose, so to speak, and when his boss apologized the next day for losing control, Art said he understood. And when his boss said that Art shouldn’t take what he said personally—that he knew Art was not a Jap, but a Chink, plus he had called someone else a lazy Wop that very morning, it was just his style—Art said again that he understood, and also that he hoped his boss would remember Art’s great understanding come promotion time. Which his boss did, to Art’s satisfaction. In Art’s view, this was a victory. In Art’s view, he had made a deal out of the incident. He had perceived leverage where others would only have perceived affront. He had maintained a certain perspective.

But this certain perspective was, in addition to the tree, why Lisa had left him. He thought of that now, the children underfoot, his handset in hand. So many children. It was as if he were seeing before him all the children he would never have. His heart lost muscle. A child in a red running suit ran by, almost grabbed the handset out of Art’s grasp. Then another, in a brown jacket with a hood. Art looked up. A group of grade-school boys was arrayed about the seating area, watching. Art had become the object of a dare, apparently; realizing this, he felt renewed enough to want to laugh again. When a particularly small child swung by in his turn—a child of maybe five or six, small enough to be wearing snow pants—Art almost tossed the handset to him. But who wanted to be charged for a missing phone?

As it was, Art wondered if he shouldn’t put the handset back in his room rather than carry it around all day. For what was he going to do at the hotel where the conference was, check it? He imagined himself running into Billy Shore—that was his counterpart at Info-Edge, and his competitor in the insurance market. A man with no management ability, and no technical background, either, but he could offer customers a personal computer option, which Art could not. What’s more, Billy had been a quarterback in college. This meant he strutted around as though it still mattered that he had connected with his tight end in the final minutes of what Art could not help but think of as the Wilde-Beastie game. And it meant that Billy was sure to ask him, What are you doing with a phone in your hand? Talking to yourself again? Making everyone around them laugh.

Billy was that kind of guy. He had come up through sales, and was always cracking a certain type of joke—about drinking, or sex, or how much the wife shopped. Of course, he never used those words. He never called things by their plain names. He always talked in terms of knocking back some brewskis, or running the triple option, or doing some damage. He made assumptions as though it were a basic bodily function. Of course his knowledge was the common knowledge. Of course people understood what it was that he was referring to so delicately. Listen, champ, he said, putting his arm around you. If he was smug, it was in an affable kind of way. So what do you think the poor people are doing tonight? Billy not only spoke what Art called Mainstreamese, he spoke such a pure dialect of it that Art once asked him if he realized he was a pollster’s delight. He spoke the thoughts of thousands, Art told him; he breathed their very words. Naturally, Billy did not respond, except to say, What’s that? and turn away. He rubbed his torso as he turned, as if ruffling his chest hairs through the long-staple cotton. Primate behavior, Lisa used to call this. It was her belief that neckties evolved in order to check this very motion, uncivilized as it was. She also believed that this was the sort of thing you never saw Asian men do—at least not if they were brought up properly.

Was that true? Art wasn’t so sure. Lisa had grown up on the West Coast. She was full of Asian consciousness, whereas all he knew was that no one had so much as smiled politely at his pollster remark. On the other hand, the first time Art was introduced to Billy, and Billy said, Art Woo, how’s that for a nice Pole-ack name, everyone broke right up in great rolling guffaws. Of course, they laughed the way people laughed at conferences, which was not because something was really funny, but because it was part of being a good guy, and because they didn’t want to appear to have missed their cue.

The phone, the phone. If only Art could fit it in his briefcase! But his briefcase was overstuffed; it was always overstuffed; really, it was too bad he had the slim silhouette type, and hard-side besides. Italian. That was Lisa’s doing; she thought the fatter kind made him look like a salesman. Not that there was anything the matter with that, in his view. Billy Shore notwithstanding, sales were important. But she was the liberal arts type, Lisa was, the type who did not like to think about money, but only about her feelings. Money was not money to her, but support, and then a means of support much inferior to hand-holding or other forms of fingerplay. She did not believe in a modern-day economy, in which everyone played a part in a large and complex whole that introduced efficiencies that at least theoretically raised everyone’s standard of living. She believed in expressing herself. Also in taking classes, and in knitting. There was nothing, she believed, like taking a walk in the autumn woods wearing a hand-knit sweater. Of course, she did look beautiful in them, especially the violet ones. That was her color—Asians are winters, she always said—and sometimes she liked to wear the smallest smidgen of matching violet eyeliner.

Little Snowpants ran at Art again, going for the knees. A tackle, thought Art as he went down. Red Running Suit snatched away the handset and went sprinting off, trimphant. Teamwork! The children chortled together. How could Art not smile, even if they had gotten his overcoat dirty? He brushed himself off, ambled over.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “That was some move back there.”

“Ching chong polly wolly wing wong,” said Little Snowpants.

“Now, now, that’s no way to talk,” said Art.

“Go to hell!” said Brown Jacket, pulling at the corners of his eyes to make them slanty.

“Listen up,” said Art. “I’ll make you a deal.” Really he only meant to get the handset back, so as to avoid getting charged for it.

But the next thing he knew, something had hit his head with a crack, and he was out.

Lisa had left in a more or less amicable way. She had not called a lawyer, or a mover. She had simply pressed his hands with both of hers and, in her most California voice, said, Let’s be nice. Then she had asked him if he wouldn’t help her move her boxes, at least the heavy ones. He had helped. He had carried the heavy boxes, and also the less heavy ones. Being a weight lifter, after all. He had sorted books and rolled glasses into pieces of newspaper, feeling all the while like a statistic. A member of the modern age, a story for their friends to rake over, and all because he had not gone with Lisa to her grieving group. Or at least that was the official beginning of the trouble. Probably the real beginning had been when Lisa—no, they—had trouble getting pregnant. When they decided to, as the saying went, do infertility. Or had he done the deciding, as Lisa later maintained? He had thought it was a joint decision, though it was true that he had done the analysis that led to the joint decision. He had been the one to figure the odds, to do the projections. He had drawn the decision tree according to whose branches they had nothing to lose by going ahead.

Neither one of them had realized how much would be involved—the tests, the procedures, the drugs, the ultrasounds. Lisa’s arms were black and blue from having her blood drawn every day, and before long he was giving practice shots to an orange, that he might prick her some more. Then he was telling her to take a breath so that on the exhale he could poke her in the buttocks. This was nothing like poking an orange. The first time, he broke out in such a sweat that his vision blurred; he pulled the needle out slowly and crookedly, occasioning a most unorangelike cry. The second time, he wore a sweatband. Her ovaries swelled to the point where he could feel them through her jeans.

Art still had the used syringes—snapped in half and stored, as per their doctor’s recommendation, in plastic soda bottles. Lisa had left him those. Bottles of medical waste, to be disposed of responsibly, meaning that he was probably stuck with them, ha-ha, for the rest of his life. This was his souvenir of their ordeal. Hers was sweeter—a little pile of knit goods. For through it all, she had knit, as if to demonstrate an alternative use of needles. Sweaters, sweaters, but also baby blankets, mostly to give away, only one or two to keep. She couldn’t help herself. There was anesthesia, and egg harvesting, and anesthesia and implanting, until she finally did get pregnant, twice. The third time, she went to four and a half months before the doctors found a problem. On the amnio, it showed up, brittle-bone disease—a genetic abnormality such as could happen to anyone.

He steeled himself for another attempt; she grieved. And this was the difference between them, that he saw hope, still, some feeble, skeletal hope, where she saw loss. She called the fetus her baby, though it was not a baby, just a baby-to-be, as he tried to say; as even the grieving-group facilitator tried to say. Lisa said Art didn’t understand, couldn’t possibly understand. She said it was something you understood with your body, and that it was not his body, but hers, which knew the baby, loved the baby, lost the baby. In the grieving class, the women agreed. They commiserated. They bonded, subtly affirming their common biology by doing 85 percent of the talking. The room was painted mauve—a feminine color that seemed to support them in their process. At times, it seemed that the potted palms were female, too, nodding, nodding, though really their sympathy was just rising air from the heating vents. Other husbands started missing sessions—they never talked anyway, you hardly noticed their absence—and finally he missed some also. One, maybe two, for real reasons, nothing cooked up. But the truth was, as Lisa sensed, that he thought she had lost perspective. They could try again, after all. What did it help to despair? Look, they knew they could get pregnant and, what’s more, sustain the pregnancy. That was progress. But she was like an island in her grief—a retreating island, if there was such a thing, receding toward the horizon of their marriage, and then to its vanishing point.

Of course, he had missed her terribly at first. Now he missed her still, but more sporadically, at odd moments—for example, now, waking up in a strange room with ice on his head. He was lying on an unmade bed just like the bed in his room, except that everywhere around it were heaps of what looked to be blankets and clothes. The only clothes on a hanger were his jacket and overcoat; these hung neatly, side by side, in the otherwise-empty closet. There was also an extra table in this room, with a two-burner hot plate, a pan on top of that, and a pile of dishes. A brown cube refrigerator. The drapes were closed. A chair had been pulled up close to him; the bedside light was on. A woman was leaning into its circle, mopping his brow.

“Don’t you move, now,” she said.

She was the shade of black Lisa used to call mochaccino, and she was wearing a blue flowered apron. Kind eyes; a long face—the kind of face where you could see the muscles of the jaw working alongside the cheekbone. An upper lip like an archery bow; a graying Afro, shortish. She smelled of smoke. Nothing unusual except that she was so very thin, about the thinnest person he had ever seen, and yet she was cooking something—burning something, it seemed, though maybe the smell was just a hair fallen onto the heating element. She stood up to tend the pan. The acrid smell faded. He saw powder on the table. White; there was a plastic bag full of it. His eyes widened. He sank back, trying to figure out what to do. His head pulsed. Tylenol, he needed, two. Lisa always took one because she was convinced the dosages recommended were based on large male specimens, and though she had never said that she thought he ought to keep it to one also, not being so tall, he was adamant about taking two. Two, two, two. He wanted his drugs; he wanted them now. And his own drugs, that was, not somebody else’s.

“Those kids kind of rough,” said the woman. “They getting to that age. I told them one of these days somebody gonna get hurt, and sure enough, they knocked you right out. You might as well been hit with a bowling ball. I never saw anything like it. We called the Man, but they got other things on their mind besides to come see about trouble here. Nobody shot, so they went on down to the Dunkin’ Donuts. They know they can count on a ruckus there.” She winked. “How you feelin? That egg hurt?”

He felt his head. A lump sat right on top of it, incongruous as something left by a glacier. What were those called, those stray boulders you saw perched in hair-raising positions? On cliffs? He thought.

“I feel like I died and came back to life headfirst,” he said.

“I gonna make you something nice. Make you feel a whole lot better.”

“Uh,” said Art. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather just have a Tylenol. You got any Tylenol? I had some in my briefcase. If I still have my briefcase.”

“Your what?”

“My briefcase,” said Art again, with a panicky feeling. “Do you know what happened to my briefcase?”

“Oh, it’s right by the door. I’ll get it, don’t move.”

Then there it was, his briefcase, its familiar hard-sided Italian slenderness resting right on his stomach. He clutched it. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“You need help with that thing?”

“No,” said Art. But when he opened the case, it slid, and everything spilled out—his notes, his files, his papers. All that figuring. How strange his concerns looked on this brown shag carpet.

“Here,” said the woman. And again—“I’ll get it, don’t move”—as gently, beautifully, she gathered up all the folders and put them in the case. There was an odd, almost practiced finesse to her movements; the files could have been cards in a card dealer’s hands. “I used to be a nurse,” she explained, as if reading his mind. “I picked up a few folders in my time. Here’s the Tylenol.”

“I’ll have two.”

“Course you will,” she said. “Two Tylenol and some hot milk with honey. Hope you don’t mind the powdered. We just got moved here, we don’t have no supplies. I used to be a nurse, but I don’t got no milk and I don’t got no Tylenol, my guests got to bring their own. How you like that.”

Art laughed as much as he could. “You got honey, though. How’s that?”

“I don’t know, it got left here by somebody,” said the nurse. “Hope there’s nothing growing in it.”

Art laughed again, then let her help him sit up to take his pills. The nurse—her name was Cindy—plumped his pillows. She administered his milk. Then she sat—very close to him, it seemed—and chatted amiably about this and that. How she wasn’t going to be staying at the hotel for too long, how her kids had had to switch schools, how she wasn’t afraid to take in a strange, injured man. After all, she grew up in the projects; she could take care of herself. She showed him her switchblade, which had somebody’s initials carved on it, she didn’t know whose. She had never used it, she said, somebody gave it to her. And that somebody didn’t know whose initials those were, either, she said, at least so far as she knew. Then she lit a cigarette and smoked while he told her first about his conference and then about how he had ended up at this hotel by mistake. He told her the latter with some hesitation, hoping he wasn’t offending her. She laughed with a cough, emitting a series of smoke puffs.

“Sure musta been a shock,” she said. “End up in a place like this. This ain’t no place for a nice boy like you.”

That stung a little, being called boy. But more than the stinging, he felt something else. “What about you? It’s no place for you, either, you and your kids.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “But that’s how the Almighty planned it, right? You folk rise up while we set and watch.” She said this with so little rancor, with something so like intimacy, that it almost seemed an invitation of sorts.

Maybe he was kidding himself. Maybe he was assuming things, just like Billy Shore, just like men throughout the ages. Projecting desire where there was none, assigning and imagining, and in juicy detail. Being Asian didn’t exempt him from that. You folk.

Art was late, but it didn’t much matter. His conference was being held in conjunction with a much larger conference, the real draw; the idea being that maybe between workshops and on breaks, the conferees would drift down and see what minicomputers could do for them. That mostly meant lunch, which probably would be slow at best. In the meantime, things were totally dead, allowing Art to appreciate just how much the trade-show floor had shrunk—down to a fraction of what it had been in previous years, and the booths were not what they had been, either. It used to be that the floor was crammed with the fanciest booths on the market. Art’s was twenty by twenty; it took days to put together. Now you saw blank spots on the floor where exhibitors didn’t even bother to show up, and those weren’t even as demoralizing as some of the makeshift jobbies—exhibit booths that looked like high school science-fair projects. They might as well have been made out of cardboard and Magic Marker. Art himself had a booth you could buy from an airplane catalog, the kind that rolled up into Cordura bags. And people were stingy with brochures now, too. Gone were the twelve-page, four-color affairs. Now the pamphlets were four-page, two-color, with extrabold graphics for attempted pizzazz, and not everybody got one, only people who were serious.

Art set up. Then, even though he should have been manning his spot, he drifted from booth to booth, saying hello to people he should have seen at breakfast. They were happy to see him, to talk shop, to pop some grapes off the old grapevine. Really, if he hadn’t been staying in a welfare hotel, he would have felt downright respected. You folk. What folk did Cindy mean? Maybe she was just being matter-of-fact, keeping her perspective. Although how could anyone be so matter-of-fact about something so bitter? He wondered this even as he imagined taking liberties with her. These began with a knock on her door and coursed through some hot times but finished (what a good boy he was) with him rescuing her and her children (he wondered how many there were) from their dead-end life. What was the matter with him, that he could not imagine mating without legal sanction? His libido was not what it should be, clearly, or at least it was not what Billy Shore’s was. Art tried to think game plan, but in truth he could not even identify what a triple option would be in this case. All he knew was that, assuming, to begin with, that she was willing, he couldn’t sleep with a woman like Cindy and then leave her flat. She could you folk him, he could never us folk her.

He played with some software at a neighboring booth. It appeared interesting enough but kept crashing, so he couldn’t tell much. Then he dutifully returned to his own booth, where he was visited by a number of people he knew, people with whom he was friendly—the sort of people to whom he might have shown pictures of his children. He considered telling one or two of them about the events of the morning. Not about the invitation that might not have been an invitation, but about finding himself in a welfare hotel and being beaned with his own telephone. Phrases drifted through his head. Not as bad as you’d think. You’d be surprised how friendly. And how unpretentious. Though, of course, no health club. But in the end, the subject simply did not come up and did not come up, until he realized that he was keeping it to himself, and that he was committing more resources to this task than he had readily available. He felt invaded—as if he had been infected by a self-replicating bug. Something that was iterating and iterating, crowding the cpu. The secret was intolerable; it was bound to spill out of him sooner or later. He just hoped it wouldn’t be sooner.

He just hoped it wouldn’t be to Billy Shore, for whom Art had begun to search, so as to be certain to avoid him.

Art had asked about Billy at the various booths, but no one had seen him; his absence spooked Art. When finally some real live conferees stopped by to see his wares, Art had trouble concentrating. Everywhere in the conversation he was missing opportunities, he knew it. And all because his cpu was full of iterating nonsense. Not too long ago, in looking over some database software in which were loaded certain fun facts about people in the industry, Art had looked up Billy, and discovered that he had been born the same day Art was, only four years later. It just figured that Billy would be younger. That was irritating. But Art was happy for the information, too. He had made a note of it, so that when he ran into Billy at this conference, he could kid him about their birthdays. Now, he rehearsed. Have I got a surprise for you. I always knew you were a Leo. I believe this makes us birthmates. Anything not to mention the welfare hotel and all that had happened there.

In the end, Art did not run into Billy at all. In the end, Art wondered about Billy all day, only to learn, finally, that Billy had moved on to a new job in the Valley, with a start-up. In personal computers, naturally. A good move, no matter what kind of beating he took on his house.

“Life is about the long term,” said Ernie Ford, the informant. “And let’s face it, there is no long term here.”

Art agreed as warmly as he could. In one way, he was delighted that his competitor had left. If nothing else, that would mean a certain amount of disarray at Info-Edge, which was good news for Art. The insurance market was, unfortunately, some 40 percent of his business, and he could use any advantage he could get. Another bonus was that Art was never going to have to see Billy again. Billy his birthmate, with his jokes and his Mainstreamese. Still, Art felt depressed.

“We should all have gotten out way before this,” he said.

“Truer words were never spoke,” said Ernie. Ernie had never been a particular friend of Art’s, but talking about Billy was somehow making him chummier. “I’d have packed my bags by now if it weren’t for the wife, the kids—they don’t want to leave their friends, you know? Plus, the oldest is a junior in high school. We can’t afford for him to move now. He’s got to stay put and make those nice grades so he can make a nice college. That means I’ve got to stay, if it means pushing McMuffins for Ronald McDonald. But now you …”

“Maybe I should go,” said Art.

“Definitely, you should go,” said Ernie. “What’s keeping you?”

“Nothing,” said Art. “I’m divorced now. And that’s that, right? Sometimes people get undivorced, but you can’t exactly count on it.”

“Go,” said Ernie. “Take my advice. If I hear of anything, I’ll send it your way.”

“Thanks,” said Art.

But of course he did not expect that Ernie would likely turn anything up soon. It had been a long time since anyone had called Art or anybody else he knew of. Too many people had gotten stranded, and they were too desperate, everybody knew it. Also, the survivors were looked upon with suspicion. Anybody who was any good had jumped ship early, that was the conventional wisdom. There was Art, struggling to hold on to his job, only to discover that there were times you didn’t want to hold on to your job—times you ought to maneuver for the golden parachute and jump. Times the goal was to get yourself fired. Who would have figured that?

A few warm-blooded conferees at the end of the day—at least they were polite. Then, as he was packing up to return to the hotel, a surprise. A headhunter approached him, a friend of Ernest’s, he said.

“Ernest?” said Art. “Oh, Ernie! Ford! Of course!”

The headhunter was a round, ruddy man with a ring of hair like St. Francis of Assisi, and, sure enough, a handful of bread crumbs. A great opportunity, he said. Right now he had to run, but he knew just the guy Art had to meet, a guy who was coming in that evening. For something else, it happened, but he also needed someone like Art. Needed him yesterday, really. Should’ve been a priority. Might just be a match. Maybe a quick breakfast in the a.m.? Could he call in an hour or so? Art said, Of course. And when Saint Francis asked his room number, Art hesitated, but then gave the name of the welfare hotel. How would Saint Francis know what kind of hotel it was? Art gave the name out confidently, making his manner count. He almost hadn’t made it to the conference at all, he said. Being so busy. It was only at the last minute that he realized he could do it. Things moved around, he found an opening and figured what the hell. But it was too late to book the conference hotel. Hence he was staying elsewhere.

Success. All day Art’s mind had been churning; suddenly it seemed to empty. He might as well have been Billy, born on the same day as Art was, but in another year, under different stars. How much simpler things seemed. He did not labor on two, three, six tasks at once, multiprocessing. He knew one thing at a time, and that thing just now was that the day was a victory. He walked briskly back to the hotel. He crossed the lobby in a no-nonsense manner. An impervious man. He did not knock on Cindy’s door. He was moving on, moving west. There would be a good job there, and a new life. Perhaps he would take up tennis. Perhaps he would own a Jacuzzi. Perhaps he would learn to like all those peculiar foods people ate out there, like jicama, and seaweed. Perhaps he would go macrobiotic.

It wasn’t until he got to his room that he remembered that his telephone had no handset.

He sat on his bed. There was a noise at his window, followed, sure enough, by someone’s shadow. He wasn’t even surprised. Anyway, the fellow wasn’t stopping at Art’s room, at least not on this trip. That was luck. You folk, Cindy had said, taking back the ice bag. Art could see her perspective; he was luckier than she, by far. But just now, as the shadow crossed his window again, he thought mostly about how unarmed he was. If he had a telephone, he would probably call Lisa—that was how big a pool seemed to be forming around him, all of a sudden; an ocean, it seemed. Also, he would call the police. But first he would call Lisa, and see how she felt about his possibly moving west. Quite possibly, he would say, not wanting to make it sound as though he was calling her for nothing—not wanting to make it sound as though he was awash, at sea, perhaps drowning. He would not want to sound like a haunted man; he would not want to sound as though he was calling from a welfare hotel, years too late, to say Yes, that was a baby we had together, it would have been a baby. For he could not help now but recall the doctor explaining about that child, a boy, who had appeared so mysteriously perfect in the ultrasound. Transparent, he had looked, and gelatinous, all soft head and quick heart; but he would have, in being born, broken every bone in his body.