Lurkers Read online

  I turned the lense back to frame the manager. Flustered now: ‘Well, no—we—we’re up to code and—it shouldn’t be a problem—even if it was raining—and it’s not—we just...our policy is to not allow our valued customers to plug things into our outlets.’

  I turned the camera on myself again ‘Then I should be okay, being not a valued customer, being instead a lurker drinking coffee to the chagrin of thousands upon thousands of invisible people waiting for Table Seventy-one specifically while more than half the tables in this place sit empty and forgotten.’ I turned it back. ‘Rebuttal?’

  He nearly grinned, possibly to give his face something to do while thinking of his next catastrophe of words. ‘All right, Sir: so long as we agree that, in the event that anything should happen to your computer upon these premises, this establishment can’t be held accountable for the damages.’

  I didn’t turn the camera back on myself. ‘I can live with that. Legally, you probably would be liable, in a number of circumstances; but, this laptop costing less today than I’ve made in interest while filming you, I could absorb it; we have an accord.’

  Scowling and smirking, impossibly at the same time, he nodded and backed away toward the upper seventies in his mission to beleaguer others. I ended the recording, saved it, and posted it to my blogue.

  In point of fact, I wrote my laptop off the year I bought it, which as I’ve suggested was some time ago. I could replace it with a newer, cheaper, smaller, bigger, faster, more conspicuously consumptive model if I wanted to; I just don’t especially want to: I know where everything is in its Start Menu, while I don’t know where everything is on its installation disc. For similar reasons I don’t replace my car, though I suppose I could do that too.

  Also in point of fact, looking at the video I’d sent to my website seconds after filming it, the night in question was Friday 7th August 2009. Just for reference. I guess it wasn’t the middle of July after all.

  In point of incidental fact, the manager having looked at his watch had reminded me to wonder what time it was getting to be, caused me to find out, and suggested that it had become time to get up and go outside for a smoke. Naturally, I found the waitress, Chuck, Hutch, and one of the scenekids out there doing the same thing. After lighting my cigarette, I asked generally: ‘Is anyone in there even a nonsmoker, let alone an antismoker?’

  Jessica shrugged. ‘Maybe a couple over in the old nonsmoking section; but I really don’t know.’

  Chuck flicked his eyebrows. ‘If they’re gonna ban smoking in public, it should only be during normal hours. No one in a restaurant at night is an antismoker. Few if any are nonsmokers. No one at all cares much either way.’

  Jessica smirked. ‘You should see the bar rush.’

  ‘I have,’ Chuck said, ‘Just, not lately.’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ she acknowledged, ‘But, the little rush we still get is mostly drunks who forget that they can’t smoke in there. You know how stupid it is that I have to remind them that the place is nonsmoking, when all I’m trying to do is get caught up enough to get out here to smoke with them?’

  Chuck nodded gravely.

  ‘The point is, though,’ she added, ‘that, if I didn’t tell them they couldn’t smoke, no one would care. Well, Larry—the manager—would probably care, just because he’s a dick; but he’s also enough of a coward that he hides back in the office and leaves it to me to tell a buncha drunk morons that they can’t smoke. Like tips aren’t down enough just because less people come in here now, now I’m alienating the people who do by going all Big Brother on them.’

  ‘People have on average got an IQ of one hundred,’ I said, ‘It’s not something to brag about.’

  She nodded. ‘I don’t mean you, by the way; you guys never stiff me.’

  ‘The manager is a dick,’ the emo said, ‘There’s a policy that you can’t unscrew the lights? What if you’re, like, photophobic?’

  ‘Are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘How’d you get here.’

  He pointed to an ageing MiniCooper. ‘I drove here.’

  ‘And the oncoming headlights didn’t wash out your vision?’

  He pulled a pair of cheap sunglasses out of his pocket and brandished them. I nodded.

  ‘I’m not a poser,’ he said, ‘I know: a lot of us are; I’m just in the scene because it fits what I’ve always been. I don’t pretend to be a vampire; I fucking hate Anne Rice—christian little cunt. But, I’m all about MCR and Rites of Spring and, really, do you see me punking out in a suit and shit? I figure I can look and act all emocore without the histrionics.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘You can live.’

  He grinned.

  ‘I keep this internal list of people who can and can’t live, in the event that I ever become oligarch of the universe.’

  ‘What’s that,’ the emo asked.

  ‘Oligarch? Uh, despot, kinda; dictator, maybe.’

  ‘Oh, cool. Tha’d be a tight gig.’

  ‘It would be rad,’ I joked.

  ‘Totally.’

  ‘Arcane reference: the radical republicans; you had to be there.’

  He laughed. ‘It sounds like one of those sixties movements.’

  ‘It was,’ I said, ‘It was just the eighteen sixties.’

  ‘Whoa. So, you’re, like, smart and stuff.’

  People hit me with that all the time. And there’s exactly no proper response to it. Fortunately, the waitress was there.

  ‘You have no idea,’ she said, ‘this guy’s actually a genius. Not like a genius at something: an actual brokethescale genius. He just doesn’t dress like one.’

  I nodded. ‘I dodged the pocketprotector scene, since it fits what I’ve never been.’

  ‘Nice,’ the emo said.

  My cigarette was half gone. I flicked it clear of needless ash.

  ‘I should get back in there,’ Jessica said, then asking: ‘Do you need more coffee yet?’

  I shrugged. ‘I guess it wouldn’t hurt. If I have any, it’s probably coldish by now.’

  ‘I’ll get you some more,’ she told me, opening the door and hurrying inside.

  ‘You could so hit that if you wanted to,’ the emo said.

  I pondered that. ‘Maybe.’

  Hutch suddenly remembered that he was there. ‘Knowing this guy, he probably already did.’

  I hurried to finish my cigarette.

  ‘You shoulda seen it this one time,’ Hutch blathered, ‘We all came in here—this was back when you could smoke—and this one girl who looked like a stripper—like, a good one—is just watching him for hours until suddenly the waitress comes to our table with French Silk Pie, because she’d ordered it for him because you can’t really buy anyone a drink in this place. Then she came over to sit with him and took him home. Shit was so cash.’

  The emo looked at me. I nodded. ‘Pretty much. Except Hutch wasn’t sitting with me, didn’t show up with me, and isn’t sitting with me when he gets back inside.’ The filter being all hot now, I threw my cigarette into the carpark and waited until I was through the door and into the smokefree building to exhale.

  Leslie, having finished her Coke, had sat back with her paperback of Duma Key. She glanced at me as I sat down, asking the obvious question with her eyes. I nodded, confirming: ‘Hutch is still out there; give it a minute.’

  She rolled her eyes, tapping her lighter against her Marlboro Lights atop the table as she read her book.

  The thing with Hutch—well, one of the things with Hutch, which I haven’t already covered—is that, while he kinda looked like Shaun of the Dead’s fat friend, Ed, but with glasses, his specific psychosis not only suggested to him that he was everyone’s friend who’d be welcome at everyone’s table, and that he was everyone’s friend who’d be welcome in everyone’s conversation, but that he was everychick’s friend who’d be eaten alive if he weren’t svelte enough to escape their grabby little claws. Hutch was the type portrayed in half the films relea
sed in the eighties as the little geek claiming to have a girlfriend awaiting his return near the Canadian border.

  Leslie being unhideous, Hutch always had this idea that she was into him. Hutch was wrong.

  That Leslie was into me was a bit incidental. It was a casual thing. I as a rule stick to friends with benefits, adopting Cameron Frye’s mentality that seeing how your parents interact will put you off marriage; I’m not in a hurry to fuck up a relationship with a glorified tax shelter. I’m not quite exactly a player; but I was fairly thrilled to learn recently that—excluding the continent of Africa—even after almost thirty years, only about one in a thousand people have AIDS.

  Jessica showed up with my new coffee and Leslie’s new Coke [not literally New Coke, of course] as Hutch, Chuck, and EmoGuy returned from outside; Leslie jammed a Sweet&Low packet into her book and set it on the table, exchanging it for her smokes as she got up to go outside; I went back to typing something I never managed to write.

  FIVE

  The book before the one I didn’t get written that night, which was doomed, showed up back at the house today. I’ve got this arrangement with my publisher, being more multifaceted than the average novelist, in which I write the book, handle its layout, insert whichever images wherever I want them to be, edit the thing [yeah: that’s my fault], design the cover, and so on; for all that, once they’ve got everything they need on their end to transmogrify my digital submissions into the hard- and softcover versions you eventually see everywhere from amazon.com to Borders to Albertson’s to the Public Library of Boise, they send me a blueline proof. Meaning in the vernacular that I get the cover and all the pages in the book—though none of it’s bound yet—to look over and ascertain that it’s the way I want it to look. Alongside the blueline, I also get a functional mockup of the book you’d find in a store; the only difference is that, the mockup being a oneoff copy, whatever R&D goes into binding it causes it to cost a couple hundred bucks, which makes me feel all special somehow.

  In any case: The FedEx guy, having woken me up, then handed that off to me, damning me to five minutes of fighting the packaging and eventually getting rid of it by raking the DSLite’s twopronged electrical cord across it until I’d scored a slit I was able to grab and yank on until it got the hell outta my way.

  In case you’re concerned: the book looked okay—both the mockup and the blueline. Of course, if you’re concerned, then I’m a bit perplexed since, by the time you read this, it’ll have passed the Blueline Ripped Open by the Sharp Bits at the End of the DSLite Cord stage, been approved, gone into production, and been shipped to wherever you’d wound up buying your copy; by that time, the book I ripped open earlier today to look at and approve will have gone paperback, following another such process.

  Lucky for you, since I’m busy with this at the moment and had to find some shoes before heading out the door, I just glanced at the thing, seeing no glaring problems, and jammed it on the shelf to the left of my desk with all the other stuff I’ve written. Is it conceited, do you think, to note that it’s about time to buy a larger shelf? It’s hard to be humble when you’re as prolific as I am. Anyway: I’ll look it over in more detail when I get home to discover whether my publisher are a group of idiots this week.

  Back in August, though....

  Leslie returned nearly in time to get back to her Coke before its melting ice could dilute it into fizzless weak tea: something I’ve never personally understood and which I can only ascribe to the same American proclivities responsible for misspelling most words—etymology be damned—and driving on the portside of the car. But, again—as always—I’m not bitter. Much.

  The cursor was blinking, and I was staring at it; having nothing better to do, I saved the file—untitled2009—resulting in one of those tilded tempfiles filling up My Documents: ~$titled2009.doc, created at 22.36 on 7th August 2009. Then I sat back and stared at the blinking cursor some more.

  ‘Oh yeah...,’ Hutch suddenly erupted, somewhat extemporaneously—though I still suspect that realising he existed at all was more truly impromptu, ‘I almost lost my job the other day.’

  ‘It’s good to have goals,’ I said.

  ‘No; but, I’ve got a MySpace, right?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘So—oh, and my cellphone takes pictures.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘You’re the one.’

  ‘So, someone found my MySpace the other day—’

  ‘Let’s establish one thing first,’ I said, ‘Someone found it, or you told everyone you’ve ever met on the planet where it was.’

  ‘Well, yeah: I tell people about it; but that’s not the point.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘So anyway: you know how my cellphone can take pictures....’

  ‘At a guess? Badly. In about twelve eighty by nine sixty, overgrained to emulate film, underlit to simulate expertise, overblurred because pressing the Okay Button on something weighing a couple ounces will necessarily shift the thing a fraction of a degree while its proverbial shutter is open, saved to overcompressed jaypeg up in the riscbased flashram despite the aftermarket card measuring in the gigabytes beneath it, eventually clumsily implanted into a misconfigured cascading stylesheet maintained apathetically by a systembot at MyspaceDotCom which could flunk a turingtest performed by Terry Schiavo—present day—and made ultimately available to whatever shiftmanager found your profile and got uppity about its content.’

  Hutch blinked. ‘Yeah. Like that.’

  I told Leslie: ‘Don’t look at me; I just know stuff.’

  She and her straw nodded knowingly. We bipeds hate MySpace.com professionally.

  ‘Did I tell you this already?’ Hutch asked.

  ‘No. But that doesn’t prevent me from knowing the story: blah, blah, fucking around with a phonecam getting supersensitive industrial espionage shots of drystorage at whatever glorified grocerystore pays you seven twenty-five an hour because unions and other mosquitoes were annoying enough to get minimum wage raised at a time when jobs worth doing were already being outsourced to India; blah, blah, uploading the shots to the goondocks of the internet wherein you can do your Chunk Shuffle; blah, blah, getting caught when “hit MySpaceDotCom slash I’m an Idiot” astonishingly led to results; blah, blah, telling everyone that the corporate media military industrial buzzword is quelling your freedom of speech, yo. Grow up, get over it, and move to Canada where life is all about happymoron legal sophistry and other assorted moosefucking.’

  I maintain that, at least, I’m not as bitter as I could be.

  ‘Well, no; because—see, my union rep—’

  ‘I was so hoping I was joking about that.’

  ‘—that, because there was nothing in the employee manual about cellphones or MySpace, they didn’t have a case.’

  ‘Yeah. Look. Go to hell. But also: they have a case. Or, they had one, before they made the mistake of explaining it. What I can almost promise is in the handbook is their—and your—prerogative to terminate the employment arrangement at any time, with or without reason. That they opted to give you a reason, which it happened was common, obvious knowledge but never explicitly covered in your how-to-stock-shelves manual, was stupid—arguably no more or less stupid than phonecamming shit you did likely agree implicitly to decline to talk about with the public at large, insofar as laughably amateur photojournalism is talking about something.’

  ‘So, you think it’s fair that a company can fire you for having a website?’

  ‘I think it’s in the rules, fair or not; I think you agreed to those rules first by applying for the job and perpetually since by cashing your paycheques. That said: not as such. To the extent that websites are fundamentally legal and available to everyone—especially at shitmills like MySpaceDotCom—rules outlawing the possession and maintenance of a site would overstep a simple, pedestrian boundary. But: a company—public or otherwise—still retains its own property rights and by extension its legal recourse to prevent and prohibit elements of it
s operation from being made public. It’s not the Department of Defence, I’ll grant; but even KingStoopids, or whatever, have a reasonable expectation of privacy and policy. Of course, I’m saying that in a restaurant full of smokers who all have to go outside every few minutes because that expectation specifically was cancelled out by other mosquitoes; but, for the fleeting moment, this place still enjoys certain protections against sabotage, foreign or domestic.’

  ‘This wasn’t sabotage,’ Hutch said, ‘It was like investigative journalism.’

  ‘So it made the news?’

  ‘Well, no; but, if I’d got a picture of something cool, it could have.’

  ‘And then we’d be talking about paparazzi instead of policy.’

  ‘Well, okay; but...what if it was just that they’d found my MySpace and there were pictures of me doing something stupid there?’

  ‘“If”?’ Shocked and appalled.

  ‘Yeah; like, if I uploaded shots of being drunk somewhere. They fire people for stuff like that too.’

  ‘Successfully?’

  ‘Um...maybe.’

  ‘Okay. So, the hypothetical here is...let’s stop talking about you for a minute. The hypothetical is that Leslie, here—’ She shot me a look warning me against giving Hutch any ideas regarding the skin beneath her clothes, which of course I missed completely, being not terribly intelligent [FakeEdit: I don’t expect her to believe that when she reads this; but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it], ‘—used to do webcam shows—probably accepting plastic, but maybe just at CamStreamsDotCom. That was in, say, two thousand five; maybe she was over eighteen by then. Now, nothing online being particularly temporary, everything being available—eventually—to everyone, screenshots or fullmotion SnagIt captures have been plaguing FourChanDotOrg and RapidShareDotCom ever since. Until, today, I happen across something, ascertain by whatever means that my coffeechick is in fact the chick in those files—doing whatever it was she was doing with that goat—and I’ve got something to think about for a minute. Could and should I sack her today for something she did online as a free agent four years ago? For that matter, if she’d done it online four days ago, but not while she was clocked in as my coffeechick, does it change much of anything? Now we’re into minutiae. If she was in my employment at the time, was she doing anything to disparage or even mention my company? Have I got a trademark, tradedress, copyright, or patent at risk due to this file? If I could sack her over this, would I benefit from publicising the reason as damage control, or would I be better off entirely for quietly telling her to get lost without any overexplained reason. All of that could be argued—possibly for years, until the supreme court returned a ruling. And yet, the simple fact remains: if people didn’t traipse about exercising their freedom of expression for nothing more than the sake of getting it some air, we wouldn’t have the problem in the first place.’