The Impossible Fortress(27)

“Dusk-till-dawn patrols,” Clark said.

“First Arnold Schwarzenegger and now Tackleberry,” I said. “Maybe we need to rethink this plan.”

“I’m not rethinking anything,” Alf said. “You promised to get the code, Billy. We had a deal.”

“Exactly!” Clark said. “You can’t wuss out at the first sign of trouble. Are you saying you want to quit?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not quitting.” There were still eleven more days until the contest deadline. Eleven days to learn ML and get The Impossible Fortress into working order. “But I will need more time.”

They both seemed relieved. Alf rewound Top Gun to the start of Side 1 and pressed Play, blasting Kenny Loggins and redlining the equalizer lights. “You just get that alarm code,” he said, “and leave the rest to us.”





1200 REM *** ADVANCE COUNTDOWN ***

1210 TIMER=TIMER-1

1220 PRINT "{HOME}TIME LEFT:",TIMER

1230 IF TIMER=0 THEN GOTO 1600

1240 IF TIMER<25 THEN ER=25:RETURN

1250 IF TIMER<50 THEN ER=20:RETURN

1260 IF TIMER<75 THEN ER=15:RETURN

1270 IF TIMER<100 THEN ER=10:RETURN

1280 IF TIMER<150 THEN ER=5:RETURN





1290 RETURN




I STARTED GOING TO Zelinsky’s every day. I worked with Mary from three until seven, when her father promptly kicked me out. At first we made nothing but mistakes. Learning machine language was the hardest thing I’d ever tried, and I’m sure I would have quit if Mary hadn’t shown so much confidence. She acted like we’d already won the contest, and now programming the game was just a simple formality. I kept expecting her to lose interest in the project. Every time I arrived at the store, I expected her to tell me she’d made other plans—that she was going to the mall or babysitting or whatever normal fourteen-year-old girls did. But Mary never failed me. Every afternoon, she was waiting in the showroom, ready to work.

We fell into a routine. We started every afternoon with a Dr Pepper and a bag of pretzels. We took a Skittles break at five o’clock, when our energy flagged and we needed a sugar rush. Her mother’s mixtape played on an endless loop, the same fourteen songs over and over. Soon I had the entire sequence memorized and I was quietly anticipating my favorites.

On our third day working together, Mary explained that her mother had created the tape in the waning days of her illness, and the track list was a sort of poem. That didn’t make sense to me until I saw the whole sequence written out, in her mother’s delicate handwriting, on the liner notes of the cassette itself: Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You No One is To Blame . . . It’s Just the Way It Is Someday, Someway . . . Against All Odds . . .

Things Can Only Get Better.

Don’t Give Up . . . Be Good to Yourself.

I Won’t Hold You Back.

Dance the Night Away!

You Know I Love You, Don’t You?

(You Were) Always on My Mind

You Are So Beautiful

You Make My Dreams Come True

I could hear Zelinsky muttering at the cash register, cursing the stubborn gears of some ancient typewriter, and I couldn’t believe he had ever convinced a woman to love him. And yet here was a mixtape to prove that he had.

I returned the case to Mary. “I can see why you never get tired of it.”

Mary laughed. “Oh, I’m sick of it! But my dad and I can’t agree on anything else. Picking out the music was always Mom’s job.”

Mary explained that she had grown up in the store, playing on the hardwood floors with Weebles and Tinker Toys while her parents renovated the interior, painstakingly cutting and sanding and hanging all of the shelves, and hand-lettering all of the signs. The store was a lot busier back then, Mary explained, because so many regulars would stop in just to chat with her mom. “It was like Cheers in here. Three hundred people came to her funeral. The priest said that was a Wetbridge record. And so of course I fainted.”

She’d lowered her voice to a whisper. There were two women browsing nearby in the stationery aisle, comparing two different boxes of ivory linen resume sheets, and Mary was being careful to not broadcast her story.

“Did you say fainted?”

She nodded. “We’re at the Mass, and I’m standing in front of the whole church. And I’m doing okay. Crying a little, but I’m not hysterical. Then I make the mistake of looking at my dad, and he’s crying, he’s hysterical. I’d never seen him cry, ever. And that’s when I lost it. I fell on this giant spray of flowers from the Merchants Association. Knocked it over and cut my lip on the wire stand. It was awful.” She cringed at the memory, and then shook it off, suddenly embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You were only asking about the stupid music.”

“It’s not stupid.”

Mary put her back to me and leaned toward her monitor, like she was trying to immerse herself in the code. “Let’s get back to work.”

We were supposed to be animating the legs of the guards so they would bend their knees when they ran. But within minutes, I found myself telling Mary how my father lived in Alaska, how he and my mother were never even married, how we’d probably be in the poorhouse if it wasn’t for my aunt Gretchen. These were my biggest secrets and I was deeply ashamed of them, but I felt like I owed Mary a story in return.