All the Birds in the Sky(48)
*
“SO WHAT WAS the thing you couldn’t tell me about over the phone?” Laurence asked as he brought their espressos from the counter.
In response, Patricia just pulled the tiny wooden figurine out of her bag and told Laurence who it was. Mr. Rose stared up at them, wide-eyed frog face looking prayerful one moment, whimsical the next.
“This is him? This is the actual person?” Laurence kept holding it up to the light, like he was trying to see some resemblance. “He’s so … tiny.”
“Yeah,” Patricia said. “I have no idea what to do with him.”
Laurence and Patricia were in the Circle of Trust, which had been the trendy coffee shop in the Valencia Street corridor about eighteen months earlier. It still had all of the nice wooden fixtures and the super-expensive espresso machines, but it was half-empty because all the best people had already moved on to the new place, a block away. The Circle of Trust was having an art show featuring finger paintings done by a twenty-eight-year-old woman, with subversively naive word balloons. The coffee was super-pricey, with all the shortages, but they still went Dutch.
“Seeing him so helpless, and watching him get transformed into this tiny object.… it doesn’t change my memories of how huge and terrible he was,” Patricia said. “It’s like two different people. And it sounds like he’s spent a lot of the last several years being a thorn in the side of the other witches. Because he went crazy and had some kind of apocalyptic vision. That’s why he was at our school in the first place, because he thought I would grow up to become a monster.”
“Huh.” Laurence stared at the figurine. Patricia felt self-conscious about how borderline obscene the raised skirts were, how weird this was in general. “But you didn’t. Grow up to become a monster, I mean. And come on. Did he ever tell anyone the truth? About anything?”
“No,” Patricia said. She took the figurine and slipped it back into her purse. She was going to beg Kawashima to take Mr. Rose off her hands. “No, he didn’t.”
“He was a compulsive liar. Is. Was. Not sure what tense to use.”
There could be a better conversation killer than plunking down your most hated childhood authority figure, shrunk to the size of a man’s thumb. But Patricia couldn’t think of one. The two of them sipped coffee and shook their heads, trapped in recursively horrible memories. Patricia had to fetch water and guzzle it. The café’s stale air had stayed almost as hot as noon, even as the sun drifted below the skyline.
Laurence was staring at Patricia’s purse, where she’d put the figurine away. “I think all the time about how close he came to ruining my life. It’s one of the reasons I’m so desperate to succeed, because I almost didn’t get this chance.” Abruptly he stood up. “Come on. I want to show you something.” Patricia was struck anew by just how tall he’d gotten. Patricia was tall too, but she came up to his collarbone. And he had enough nervous energy for nine ferrets.
Patricia followed Laurence down to Mission Street and then around a couple of side streets until they were near Shotwell, on one of those streets that goes for just a block or two. It was another itchy parched day. Patricia remembered hearing there was a creek here originally, before it was drained or paved over. Sometimes she imagined she could still feel the current of the banished ecosystem.
They reached a cement block with nothing to distinguish it from the other blocks. Laurence pulled out a key but didn’t put it in the lock on the maroon steel door. Instead, he punched a series of a dozen numbers into a keypad recessed into the wall, which Patricia hadn’t even noticed. And then he turned the key in the lock.
Two and a half flights of steps up, there was a door with a bunch of metal studs in it, and a sign that read: “PROCRASTINATION SOLUTIONS. COME BACK TOMORROW.” Laurence knocked seventeen times, in a precise sequence of long and short knocks, and the door swung open.
“Welcome to the Ten Percent Project,” Laurence said. “The local office, anyway.”
The space behind the steel door was bigger than you’d expect, and much cooler than the outdoors: a square loft, with an opaque skylight along one edge of the ceiling. Ergonomic chairs jostled against workbenches, which were stacked with equipment and soldering irons and Arduino boards and laser tools. The centerpiece of the room, though, was a massive piece of equipment, the size of a Buick, culminating in a sort of ray-gun nozzle. It was aimed at a white Plexiglas circle.
Laurence introduced Patricia, in turn, to the three people in the room:
Tanaa was an African-American woman wearing a welding mask, tank top, and shorts. Her forearms were strong, but her neck and shoulders were fluid, mercurial. Tanaa could build anything, said Laurence—in fact, she’d found Milton the same way Laurence had long ago, by figuring out some schematics on the internet. Except that these schematics were ones that nobody else had managed to make work, and they’d led to that oversized ray gun on bent legs. Tanaa waved, then went back to shooting sparks in all directions.
Anya was a freckled Midwestern girl whose nut-brown hair had blue tips, like she’d dyed it and then given up. She wore denim overalls and chunky engineer glasses, and looked like someone who never smiled. She muttered to Laurence about giving tours to outsiders.
Sougata had a thick black mustache, a Southern California surfer accent, and a Caltech sweatshirt. Laurence whispered that Sougata had wanted to work in television and had even interned at the Space: Above and Beyond reboot, but now he’d fallen back on his second-choice career of saving the world in real life.