Neal Stephenson - Reamde

It was then that she cut him off in midsentence and said that it was over. She said it with a certainty and a conviction in her voice and her face that left him fascinated and awed. Because guys, at least of his age, didn’t have the confidence to make major decisions from their gut like that. They had to build a superstructure of rational thought on top of it. But not Zula. She didn’t have to decide. She just had to pass on the news.

On Friday Zula had skipped out of work early and driven straight to Peter’s space (he always called it his “space”). She had parked her car inside the more warehousey part of the building, which was accessible through a huge, grade-level, roll-up door off the back alley, and left a few of her work things there. So despite the relationship termination event, she had to go back to his place to get her car and collect her things. From I-5 she exited onto Michigan Avenue, which ran diagonally along the northern boundary of Boeing Field, and after following it toward the water for a couple of blocks, doubled back north into Georgetown.

A hundred years earlier Georgetown had been an independent city specializing in the manufacture and consumption of alcoholic beverages. It was bounded by major rail lines and industrial waterways. Early in the twentieth century it had been annexed by Seattle, which couldn’t stand to see, so close to its city limits, an independent town so ripe for taxation.

When airplanes became common, the regional airport had been built immediately to the south. This was nationalized around the time of Pearl Harbor and then used by Boeing to punch out B-17s and B-29s all through the war. Georgetown’s quieter and narrower streets had become crowded with riveters’ bungalows. Still the neighborhood had preserved its identity until late in the century, when it had come under attack from the north, as dot-coms looking for cheap office space had invaded the industrial flatlands south of downtown, preying on machine shops and foundries that had lost most of their business to China. The mills and lathes had been torn out and junked or auctioned off, the high ceilings cleaned up and rigged with cable ladders creaking under the weight of miles of blue Ethernet wire. Truck drivers had had to get used to sharing the district’s potholed streets with bicycle commuters in dorky helmets and spandex. It was during that era that Peter, sensing an opportunity, had acquired his building. He had talked himself into it largely on the strength of a belief that he and some friends would launch a high-tech company there. This had failed to materialize because of changes in the financial climate, so he had ended up using part of it as live/work space and renting the rest of it to artists and artisans, who, as it turned out, didn’t pay the same kind of rent as high-tech companies. But what was bad for Peter had been good for Georgetown—at least, the aspect of Georgetown that was about actually making things as opposed to playing tricks with bits.

It was an old brick building. The ground floor had high ceilings supported by timbers of old-growth fir, which would have made it a fine setting for a restaurant or brewpub if the building had been on a more accessible street and if Georgetown hadn’t already had several of those. As it was, he’d subdivided that level into two bays, one leased by an exotic-metals welder who made parts for the aerospace industry, the other serving as Peter’s workshop. It was there that Zula’s car had spent the weekend. Above was a single story of finished space with nice old windows looking out toward Boeing Field. This too was subdivided into an open-plan live/work loft, where Peter lived, and another unit that he had been fixing up in the hopes of renting it to some young hip person who wanted to live, as Peter put it “in the presence of arches.”

The remark had made little sense to Zula until she had spent a bit of time in the neighborhood and started noticing that, yes, the old buildings sported windows and doorways that were supported by true functioning arches of brick or stone, the likes of which were never used in newer construction. For Peter to have noticed this was a bit clever, and for him to have understood that it would be attractive to a certain kind of person reflected somewhat more human insight than one normally looked for in a nerd.

So, that night, when they got back to his space at about 2 A.M. and she went upstairs to collect the stuff she’d left scattered around during the months that she’d been quasi living with him, and she saw the brick window arches that he had left exposed during the remodel, a lot went through her head in a few moments and she found herself unable to move or think very clearly. She stood there in the dark. The lights of Boeing Field shone up against a low ceiling of spent rain clouds and made them glow a greenish silver that filled the apertures of the windows smoothly, as if troweled onto the glass.

She was strangely comforted. The natural thing for Zula to be asking herself at this moment was What did I ever see in this guy? Other than his physical beauty, which was pretty obvious. Those occasional left-handed insights, like the arches. Another thing: he worked very hard and knew how to do a lot of things, which had put her in mind of the family back in Iowa. He was intelligent, and, as evidenced by the books stacked and scattered all over the place, he was interested in many things and could talk about them in an engaging way, when he felt like talking. Being here now, alone (for he was down in the bay unpacking his gear), enabled her to walk through the process of getting a crush on him, like reenacting a crime scene, and thereby to convince herself that she hadn’t just been out-and-out stupid. She could forgive herself for not having noticed the relationship-ending qualities that had been so screamingly obvious for the last twelve hours. Her girlfriends had probably not been asking each other, behind Zula’s back, what she saw in that guy.

Which led her to question, one last time—as long as she was alone in the dark and still had the opportunity—whether she should have broken up with him at all. But she was pretty certain that when she woke up tomorrow morning she’d feel right about it. This was the third guy she had broken up with. Where she’d gone to school, mixed-race computational fluid dynamics geeks didn’t get as many dates as, say, blond, blue-eyed hotel and restaurant management majors. But, like a tenement dweller nurturing a rooftop garden in coffee cans, she had cultivated and maintained a little social life of her own, and harvested the occasional ripe tomato, and maybe enjoyed it more intensely than someone who could buy them by the sack at Safeway. So she was not utterly inexperienced. She’d done it before. And she felt as right about this breakup as she did about the other two.

She turned on the lights, which hurt her tired eyes, and began picking up stuff that she knew was hers: from the bathroom, her minimal but important cosmetics, and some hair management tools. From her favorite corner, some notes and books related to work. A couple of novels. Nothing important, but she didn’t want Peter to wake up every morning and be confronted with random small bits of Zula spoor. She piled what she found at the top of the stairs that led down into the bay and looped back through the living quarters, gleaning increasingly nonobvious bits of stuff: a baseball cap, a hair clip, a coffee mug, lip balm. She went slower and took longer than necessary because when this was over she’d have to carry it all downstairs to the bay where Peter was fussing with his snowboarding gear, and that would be awkward. She was too tired and spent to contend with that awkwardness in a graceful way and did not want Peter’s last recollection of her to be as a fuming bitch.