Free The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker Page B

chef named Hiroshi. Hiroshi worked at Yong’s, a restaurant near the eastside San Jose college where Carol taught. I actually met Hiroshi one time when I accompanied Carol to Yong’s. He was a tall, hip guy with a long ponytail that he untucked from his chef’s hat when he joined us at our table for a cup of tea. A native-born Californian, Hiroshi spoke perfect English.

    I’d sensed Hiroshi and Carol’s attraction for each other right away, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. They’d gotten to know each other because Carol was such a glutton for sushi that she came to Yong’s for lunch nearly every day. For his part, Hiroshi seemed to find Carol both intellectually fascinating and exotically desirable.
    Six weeks after I met Hiroshi, he and Carol were living together. In her parting speech, Carol had said that Hiroshi made her feel young and loved for the first time in years, that Hiroshi listened to her, and that Hiroshi cared about her feelings. “Not like you, Jerzy! You have a heart of stone!” Carol could chatter on endlessly in that vein, babbling out the most hurtful things imaginable, seemingly quite unaware that the despised white middle-aged middle-class male she was addressing was a person with feelings too.
    â€œI saw poor Ida’s face at supper,” Carol was saying now. “You can’t tell me nothing’s wrong. What did you do to them? It’s hard enough for me to keep them cheerful now that you’ve wrecked our marriage. You have no idea how it feels for . . .”
    It occurred to me that I had nothing whatsoever to gain by listening to yet another of Carol’s self-indulgent tirades. “Leave me alone,” I said, and hung up.
    It was too cold to go back outside. I was, in fact, shivering. The house was dead quiet; there was no sound but the chattering of my teeth and the distant hum of my computer. I wandered into the living room. There was one of Carol’s paintings right over the fireplace. It was a hard-edged cartoonlike landscape with a woman in it. What if I were to slash a big X in the canvas? I was cold, empty, and mean—a man nobody could ever love.
    I looked through my CDs and S-cubes, but I couldn’t find one I wanted to hear. In the old days—in my thirties—I
liked playing music, but Carol pretty well cured me of that. For some reason she was technically incapable of putting on an S-cube or a CD. Our receiver is, admittedly, kind of funky, with confusing controls and a reset button in back that you have to hit every time the wall plug wiggles in its socket. Even so, Carol could have learned how to use it. But why should she, when it could be something else to bug me about. “Play that old CD I like,” she’d say, depending on me to remember its name. “Or play the new blue S-cube.” Always those same two recordings. Christ.
    I was probably better off with Carol out of my life, but Lord the house was empty. Especially once it got dark. Nobody home but me and—Studly! I’d forgotten good old Studly! I found my car keys and went out to the car and opened the trunk.
    â€œOkay, boy, time to get out.”
    â€œAre we at Queue’s?”
    â€œNo, I didn’t go there. I couldn’t get any money. I was going to try to get her to sell me some pot.”
    â€œWhat is pot?” asked Studly as he carefully extricated himself from the trunk. He hoisted himself partly out of the trunk with his arms, put one leg out and extended it to reach the ground, then swung around and got his other leg out too.
    â€œPot is a special plant leaf which I roll into thin cigarettes to smoke.” A thought hit me. “The butts of the pot cigarettes are thin and little. They’re called roaches. Have you happened to find any roaches when you cleaned the house recently?”
    â€œI do not know,” said Studly. “But we can look in my nest. I have an accumulation of