Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

“You lost me,” I said.

“Look at it this way. If you get a puppy, you have to teach him to do his business outside, right?”

“Right.”

“If you had a puppy that wasn’t housebroken, would you give him a treat for shitting in the living room?”

“Course not,” I said.

He nodded. “It would be teaching him the exact opposite of what you want him to learn. And when it comes to commerce, Craig, most people are like puppies that need to be housebroken.”

I didn’t much like that concept, and don’t today—I think the punishment/reward thing says a lot about how Mr. Harrigan made his fortune—but I kept my mouth shut. I was seeing him in a new way. He was like an old explorer on a new voyage of discovery, and listening to him was fascinating. I don’t think he was really trying to teach me, either. He was learning himself, and for a guy in his mid-eighties, he was learning fast.

“Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it. Like puppies that crap on the floor, then look you in the eye, and what they’re thinking is, ‘You taught me this was all right.’ If I were the Wall Street Journal … or the Times … even the damn Reader’s Digest … I’d be very frightened by this gizmo.” He picked up the iPhone again; couldn’t seem to leave it alone. “It’s like a broken watermain, one spewing information instead of water. I thought it was just a phone we were talking about, but now I see… or begin to see…”

He shook his head, as if to clear it.

“Craig, what if someone with proprietary information about new drugs in development decided to put the test results out on this thing for the whole world to read? It could cost Upjohn or Unichem millions of dollars. Or suppose some disaffected person decided to spill government secrets?”

“Wouldn’t they be arrested?”

“Maybe. Probably. But once the toothpaste is out of the tube, as they say… i-yi-yi. Well, never mind. You better go home or you’ll be late for supper.”

“On my way.”

“Thank you again for the gift. I probably won’t use it very much, but I intend to think about it. As hard as I’m able, at least. My brains aren’t as nimble as they once were.”

“I think they’re still plenty nimble,” I said, and I wasn’t just buttering him up. Why weren’t there ads along with the news stories and YouTube videos? People would have to look at them, right? “Besides, my dad says it’s the thought that counts.”

“An aphorism more often spoken than adhered to,” he said, and when he saw my puzzled expression: “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow, Craig.”

On my walk back down the hill, kicking up clods of that year’s last snow, I thought about what he’d said: that the Internet was like a broken watermain spewing information instead of water. It was true of my dad’s laptop as well, and the computers at the school, and ones all over the country. The world, really. Although the iPhone was still so new to him he could barely figure out how to turn it on, Mr. Harrigan already understood the need to fix the broken pipe if business—as he knew it, anyway—was going to continue as it always had. I’m not sure, but I think he foresaw paywalls a year or two before the term was even coined. Certainly I didn’t know it then, no more than I knew how to get around restricted operations—what came to be known as jailbreaking. Paywalls came, but by then people had gotten used to getting stuff for free, and they resented being asked to cough up. People faced with a New York Times paywall went to a site like CNN or Huffington Post instead (usually in a huff), even though the reporting wasn’t as good. (Unless, of course, you wanted to learn about a fashion development known as “sideboob.”) Mr. Harrigan was totally right about that.

After dinner that night, once the dishes were washed and put away, my dad opened his laptop on the table. “I found something new,” he said. “It’s a site called previews.com, where you can watch coming attractions.”

“Really? Let’s see some!”

So for the next half hour, we watched movie trailers we would otherwise have had to go to a movie theater to see.

Mr. Harrigan would have torn his hair out. What little he had left.

Walking back from Mr. Harrigan’s house on that March day in 2008, I was pretty sure he was wrong about one thing. I probably won’t use it very much , he’d said, but I had noted the look on his face as he stared at the map showing the Coffee Cow closings. And how quickly he’d used his new phone to call someone in New York. (His combination lawyer and business manager, I found out later, not his broker.)

And I was correct. Mr. Harrigan used that phone plenty. He was like the old maiden aunt who takes an experimental mouthful of brandy after sixty years of abstinence and becomes a genteel alcoholic almost overnight. Before long, the iPhone was always on the table beside his favorite chair when I came up in the afternoon. God knows how many people he called, but I know he called me almost every night to ask me some question or other about his new acquisition’s capabilities. Once he said it was like an old-fashioned rolltop desk, full of small drawers and caches and cubbyholes it was easy to overlook.

He found most of the caches and cubbyholes himself (with aid from various Internet sources), but I helped him out—enabled him, you might say—at the start. When he told me he hated the prissy little xylophone that sounded off when he had an incoming call, I changed it to a snatch of Tammy Wynette, singing “Stand By Your Man.” Mr. Harrigan thought that was a hoot. I showed him how to set the phone on silent so it wouldn’t disturb him when he took his afternoon nap, how to set the alarm, and how to record a message for when he didn’t feel like answering. (His was a model of brevity: “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.”) He began unplugging his landline when he went for his daily snooze, and I noticed he was leaving it unplugged more and more. He sent me text messages, which ten years ago we called IMs. He took phone-photos of mushrooms in the field behind his house and sent them off via email to be identified. He kept notes in the note function, and discovered videos of his favorite country artists.

“I wasted an hour of beautiful summer daylight this morning watching George Jones videos,” he told me later on that year, with a mixture of shame and a weird kind of pride.

I asked him once why he didn’t go out and buy his own laptop. He’d be able to do all the things he’d learned to do on his phone, and on the bigger screen, he could see Porter Wagoner in all his bejeweled glory. Mr. Harrigan just shook his head and laughed. “Get thee behind me, Satan. It’s like you taught me to smoke marijuana and enjoy it, and now you’re saying, ‘If you like pot, you’ll really like heroin.’ I think not, Craig. This is enough for me.” And he patted the phone affectionately, the way you might pat a small sleeping animal. A puppy, say, that’s finally been housebroken.

We read They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in the fall of 2008, and when Mr. Harrigan called a halt early one afternoon (he said all those dance marathons were exhausting), we went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Grogan had left a plate of oatmeal cookies. Mr. Harrigan walked slowly, stumping along on his canes. I walked behind him, hoping I’d be able to catch him if he fell.

He sat with a grunt and a grimace and took one of the cookies. “Good old Edna,” he said. “I love these things, and they always get my bowels in gear. Get us each a glass of milk, will you, Craig?”