is always a singularity. Friday is the night of the Saturday Night Special.
That’s the name of a restaurant up in the Hidalgo part of town, more expensive than I would normally patronize, and more pretentious: the theme of the place is the romanticized California Gang Era—grease, graffiti, and grime, safely distant from the table linen. As far as I’m concerned, those people were no different from today’s whackers and slicers—if anything, worse, since they didn’t have to worry about the federal death penalty for using guns. The waiters come around in leather jackets and meticulously grease-stained T-shirts, black jeans, and high boots. They say the wine list is the best in Houston.
I’m the youngest of the Saturday Night Special crowd by at least ten years; the only one who’s not a full-time intellectual. I’m “Blaze’s boy”; I don’t know which of them knew or suspected I literally was her boy. I came as her friend and coworker, and everybody seemed to accept that.
My primary value to the group was the novelty of being a mechanic. That was doubly interesting to them, because a senior member of the group, Marty Larrin, was one of the designers of the cyberlink that made jacking, and thus soldierboys, possible.
Marty had been responsible for designing the system’s security. Once a jack was installed, it was failsafed at a molecular level, literally impossible to modify, even for the original manufacturers; even for researchers like Marty. The nanocircuitry inside would scramble itself within a fraction of a second if any part of the complex device was tampered with. Then it would take another round of invasive surgery, with a one-in-ten chance of death or uselessness, to take the scrambled jack out and install a new one.
Marty was about sixty, the front half of his head shaved bald in a generation-old style, the rest of his white hair long except for the shaved circle around his jack. He was conventionally handsome, still; regular leading-man features, and it was obvious from the way he treated Amelia that they had a past. I once asked her how long ago that had been, the only such question I’ve ever asked her. She thought for a moment and said, “I guess you were out of grade school.”
The population of the Saturday Night Special crowd varies from week to week. Marty is almost always there, along with his traditional antagonist, Franklin Asher, a mathematician with a chair in the philosophy department. Their jocular sniping goes back to when they were graduate students together; Amelia’s known him nearly as long as Marty.
Belda Magyar is usually there, an odd duck but obviously one of the inner circle. She sits and listens with a stern, disapproving look, nursing a single glass of wine. Once or twice a night she makes a hilarious remark, without changing expression. She’s the oldest, over ninety, a professor emeritus in the art department. She claims to remember having met Richard Nixon, when she was very small. He was big and scary, and gave her a book of matches, no doubt a White House souvenir, which her mother took away.
I liked Reza Pak, a shy chemist in his early forties, the only one besides Amelia with whom I socialized outside the club. We met occasionally to shoot pool or play tennis. He never mentioned Amelia and I never mentioned the boyfriend who always drove up to fetch him, exactly on time.
Reza, who also lived on campus, usually gave me and Amelia a ride to the club, but this Friday he was already uptown, so we called a cab. (Like most people, Amelia doesn’t own a car and I’ve never even driven, except in Basic Training, and then only jacked with someone who knew how.) We could bike to Hidalgo in daylight, but coming back after dark would be suicide.
It started raining at sundown anyhow, and by the time we got to the club it was a full-fledged thunderstorm, with tornado watch. The club had an awning, but the rain was almost horizontal; we got drenched between the cab and the door.
Reza and Belda were already there, at our usual table in the grease section. We talked them into moving to the Club Room, where a phony-but-warm fireplace crackled.
Another semi-regular, Ray Booker, came in while we were relocating, also drenched. Ray was an engineer who worked with Marty Larrin on soldierboy technology, and a serious ’grass musician who played banjo all over the state, summers.