Free The Eighth Day by John Case Page B

startling.
    He threw open the windows, stretched the tarps out on the floor, and applied a dab of Vicks VapoRub to each nostril, hoping it would mask the sour smell emanating from the bags of garbage. That done, he dumped one of the sacks onto the tarp and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves.
    The trash was anything but fresh, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It looked as if Terio had been a vegetarian. At least there wasn’t any meat in the bags, so there weren’t any maggots, either. But there
were
fruit flies, a cloud of them that rose up, dancing in the air above the tarp.
    Using the handle of a broom, he stirred the trash around, separating it so he could see if there was any medical waste. For all Danny knew, Terio could have been a junkie, a diabetic, or a hemophiliac. But there were no needles or bandages or anything else with blood. What there was, was a lot of packaging: an empty box of Cheerios, an egg carton, some yogurt containers, and a wad of corn husks, black with mildew. There were coffee grounds and Melitta filters, some crushed Coca-Cola cans, and half a dozen Dasani water bottles. A crumpled shoe box that had once held a pair of Nike Predators (size 10 1 ⁄ 2 )—and lots of old newspapers.
Not a recycler,
Danny thought.
    More substantively, he found some notes with handwriting on them, Post-its with telephone numbers, reminders and short lists
(butter leeks yogurt bread)
, envelopes and bills, junk mail, catalogs, and credit card receipts. Danny set the paperwork aside to be examined later—the priority being to get the trash back into the bags and onto the street before the smell could take up residence.
    Meanwhile, he noticed that the television was tuned to Caleigh country, MSNBC, where a couple of analysts were yakking about “basis points” and an upcoming meeting of the Fed. For Caleigh, MSNBC was more entertaining than a U2 concert. In the apartment, it seemed like the channel was always on, with his girlfriend mesmerized by the ebb and flow of valuations, the hubris of the dot-coms, the moving-average of the Dow.
    The first time he’d realized that her interest in finance was as much an avocation as a job, he’d reacted with suspicion—as if he’d learned a dark secret. It seemed to Danny that Caleigh’s interest must be symptomatic of some deeper flaw—specifically, greed—and that this flaw did not bode well for a future with an artist. But, very quickly, he’d come to understand that while her fascination with finance had a lot to do with money, it had nothing to do with consumption. She was not a shopper. For Caleigh, the equity markets were a kind of track meet in which she was called upon to perform feats of insight and analysis. The money itself was just a measure of performance, the financial equivalent of a stopwatch.
    Danny understood all this, but he didn’t share her enthusiasm—not for the market and not for the channels that covered it. To him, MSNBC was a kind of visual Novacain, with talking heads droning on and on above an inscrutable scroll of red and green symbols. He would have changed the channel, but his hands were filthy. At least it was company of sorts, and it had the advantage of being easy to ignore.
    Soon he was finished with the first bag, his “finds” pushed to one side of the tarp. Rebagging the rest of the trash, he pulled the red drawstring tight and set that bag aside. Then he dumped the second bag onto the tarp and, crouching, began to sort through the mess, glancing up from time to time at the TV.
    The numbers on the tube were mostly green—which was good, because it meant that Caleigh would come home in a good mood. It occurred to him that it might be fun to create something involving Wall Street. Maybe he could put together an installation using a ticker of some kind. Get it to undulate, rather than scroll. Or not just undulate. Why not put it on the forehead of a guy in a pinstriped suit? And not just any guy—the Man in a