Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“Gene was my boss,” he said. He held on to the ball to talk for a while. He kept his eyes on the basket, though. “I was the youngest on the Black Dragon team, but he put me in the fire right away. Gave me a lotta responsibility. I owe him a lot.” He shot and missed everything.

I chased the ball, threw him a long pass. I called out, “Why don’t you try from a different angle?”

He smiled, ignored my advice, and shot again. Another miss. He got the rebound this time; I was still off the court.

“Gene told me …” I had to pause for breath as I returned. It was hot in the sun. My hair was damp. Not Andy’s. His mop of straight black hair was as unaffected and unmoving as a wig. “Gene used to say,” I continued, “he wasn’t all that great as an innovator, that his real skill was managing all the geniuses who worked under him.”

“Don’t know what that means.” He shot. The ball thudded off the backboard right into my hands. Andy turned away from his target to look at me. “We’re not inventing microprocessors. We just assemble what the geniuses invent. He was as good at that as anybody.”

“But how you assemble them amounts to inventing them, doesn’t it?”

He asked for the ball with his hands. I passed it. He measured another shot. “Maybe. I don’t think that’s genius anyway.” He shot and missed again. The ball hit the side of the rim and returned to him in two bounces. “Gene was pretty good at basic design. As good as me. Maybe less sure of himself.” He lifted the ball to shoot, then lowered it. “Yeah, that’s the difference. He was a little slow to make a leap. Like with Centaur. He had the first instinct for Centaur and kind of let it go. Somehow it became Stick’s …” Andy cut off that thought and covered the interruption by dribbling.

“What’s Centaur?”

He returned his attention to the basket, raising the ball. “Our portable PC. That’s what I’m working on. I can’t talk about it much, but that’s what Gene put me in charge of after Black Dragon. He concentrated on Unicorn, our mainframe. That was a disaster. I told him it was going to be a disaster.” He shot. The ball thudded on the front of the rim and fell off lamely, as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “What a brick,” he commented.

I gathered the ball and said, as I passed it, “It was Stick’s idea for him to concentrate on Unicorn, right?” This was a pure guess. Gene hadn’t discussed the details of his work in our handful of phone conversations during the previous year.

“Yeah,” Andy laughed at a private thought, so my pass bounced off his hands. He quickly gathered it. “I guess I should ask you if what I say is going to be repeated. Nah,” he shot again, missed again. I didn’t move for the ball, nor did he. It bounced until reaching the grass, where it rested, a dimpled pumpkin in the sun. “Stick knows what I think. That’s why he likes me. I’m not scared of him.”

“Do you think it was fair to fire Gene?”

“I got his job, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “Do you think it was fair?”

“No.” Andy’s expressive face certainly belied the racist cliché of Chinese inscrutability: he frowned, looked down and his lips trembled. He trotted onto the grass, picked up the basketball, and dribbled awkwardly back to the same spot. He stared at the basket and let it fly. For the first time, the pumpkin went right through the hoop. “Gene taught me that,” he said, eyes still on the rim.

“How to shoot?”

“No,” he said and smiled at me. “To keep trying no matter what.”

I walked over to Andy. Although his brow was dry, his hair unmussed, the large glasses were spotted by perspiration. “He was very proud of you,” I said softly.

“He didn’t give me a hard time,” Andy said, his expression impassive. “Everybody does, sooner or later. Gene never gave me a hard time. Not even when I got his job. He said, ‘Congratulations. You deserve it.’ He must’ve hated me. Must have wanted to kill me. But he sure didn’t show it.”

I allowed a silence, a respectful silence to prevail for a while. Voices drifted from the parking lot while we stood and looked at each other solemnly. Finally I said, “I first met Gene when he was fifteen. While he was coming to me, he discovered how much he loved computers. I’ve never had a chance to see where he worked. I know you’re all a little paranoid about who goes in—”

“I’m in his office,” Andy interrupted. “They gave me his office. I didn’t want …” He sighed, held up a finger to signal I should wait. He walked over to the basket, picked up a green polo shirt I hadn’t noticed, neatly folded on the ground. He put it on in what seemed like a single movement. “Come on,” he said.

We entered West Building through one of the rear emergency doors. This wasn’t surreptitious, merely Andy’s normal route to the court. The half-hour practice shooting was a ritual, he told me, when he was stuck on something or just bored. Contrary to the central glass building’s cold elegance, and my own expectation of what a computer lab would be like, the halls and open central rooms for the technicians were sloppy and old-fashioned. They were drearily lit by fluorescent ceiling panels; the gray or green or black metal work tables were arranged without a pattern; the springs in the swivel chairs were often broken, their upholstery ripped; and everywhere were empty paper cups of coffee, crumpled cans of soda or fruit drinks, balled-up bags from McDonalds or crushed boxes from Pizza Hut. Even the odd personal possession was either old-tech or dilapidated: a radio with its antenna snapped off halfway and tinfoil balled at the end; a dusty plant, the edges of its drooping leaves black with disease; an attaché case with its handles amputated. The biggest surprise was the computers themselves. Few were housed in cases. Most were open circuit boards stacked into jumbles, thin wide gray cables crossing every which way, connecting them. The keyboards were stained by coffee. I noticed a dented one lying askew under a table, although still connected by a long curlicued cable.

“Welcome to Centaur team,” Andy said. “It’s messy ’cause we kick out the cleaners when we’re on a deadline.” They worked without a set schedule, some staying all night, sleeping all day, others arriving at dawn, leaving at four in the afternoon. The key men, like Andy, were there at least twenty hours of the day’s twenty-four. And they were all men. Boys really, living in a barracks. Gene, I knew, had spent most of his waking life since college in this hellhole, or another just like it: the windows closed to preserve the machines from dust and changes of temperature, the Venetian blinds shutting out the sun and the moon, presumably to thwart industrial spies armed with binoculars, but really to block out the temptation of daytime or the desolation of night. They exchanged colds, they shared a deathly pallor, they addressed each other with the rude, exasperated familiarity of siblings. That last quality of their lives was illustrated immediately.

As we neared his office, Andy was accosted by a fat, prematurely balding man I later learned was named Tim. Dirty blond hair draped from the hairless center of his head in tangled clumps. His torn stretched jeans hung well below his navel, the distended hole appearing quizzically whenever he raised his arms. “What did you do to the IO board?” he demanded. “It’s fucked.”

Andy ignored him, going into his cheerless office. Tim followed him so closely, I was cut off and entered last. Gene’s old work place was medium-sized, furnished with another of those metal tables. It was covered by a jumble of circuit boards and wires in no apparent order, as if someone had dropped a computer from the ceiling and we were looking at the smashed result. There were no files, no cabinets, no posters, no photographs, no personal possessions, except for an expensive chess set, lying on the once white linoleum floor, the pieces in a complicated position that I recognized as arising from a dynamic line of the Sicilian Defense. A terminal connected to Black Dragon stood in the corner under the covered window.