beach the sun seemed to come out less during the summer than it did during any other season. The blankness of the sky reminded her, for some reason, of Scott’s underwear left on the table, and of other things left undone at the house up on the hill, where Maureen was probably just now arriving to the quiet of a house without boys. Araceli would give anything to be back in Mexico City on one of those summer days when balls of white drift across the blue canvas of the sky and you can follow them on their march across the valley of the city, and know that they will soon drop a cooling rain shower on your face. She wanted to feel something cold or warm, because in this uniform, in the amphitheater of this park, she felt like a stiff pink box and not like a human being. Looking down at the beach, she saw the surfer climbing out of the water, a brown-haired teenager in a black wet suit, and in an instant she imagined he was Pepe the gardener, dripping water from his bare chest. She imagined herself sitting on the beach on a towel, Pepe walking toward her with beads of water clinging erotically to his pecs, climbing up the sand to reach her, leaning over her, dripping salt water over her dry and lonely skin.
Ten miles away from the Laguna Rancho Estates, on the third floor of an office building in a business park on a wide and sparsely traveled boulevard, in a corner of the city of Irvine, itself sparsely populated by various medium-sized corporations with generic and quickly forgettable names, Scott Torres toiled at work, sitting before a flat-panel computer screen displaying five different images of the perimeter fence at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky National Airport. He waited with a dulled sense of anticipation for the knee-high grass at the base of the fence to be whipped back and forth by a gust of wind or the back-draft of a passing airplane, a confirmation that the image was, in fact, “live.” Over the course of the morning, Scott had opened windows on his screen that revealed various locales in the United States, noting that it was raining at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, and watching the long, Arctic-summer shadows stretch underneath the Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline to the Bering Sea was a favorite summer place to spend time at the Elysian Systems office because there was a chance you might see an elk or deer scurrying across the tundra. All day long the computers on the third floor of the Elysian corporate headquarters were open to windows showing lonely stretches of fencing that seemed static and frozen in time, like the peopleless backdrops to a deep and disturbing dream, with only the effects of the weather and the moving of the shadows to prove they were objects in a real, living world.
Scott and his programmers at Elysian Systems were drawn to the images for their clandestine, remote allure and for the rare pleasure of officially sanctioned voyeurism. They had been given access to this government system to develop software, a contract that happened to be the only source of positive cash flow in the Elysian Systems corporate spreadsheet. When Scott thought about his responsibility to enforce this contract by telling his seven programmers never to discuss their project “with any individual outside our direct work group,” or when he was forced to ask them to sign numerous promises of confidentiality and loyalty to the United States of America, he could not help but feel silly, because such admonitions ran counter to the iconoclastic programming ethic of his youth, and even the essential élan of his initial foray into entrepreneurship. This was the central contradiction of Scott’s professional life, to be the enforcer and organizer of a project that did not fire his imagination, and to be the oddball in a moneymaking culture that as of yet generated little money. He was a relic, an aging survivor from that clan of “robust” programmers who came of age in the interregnum between the slide-rule epoch and the Ethernet era. There were moments during the workday when he felt this characterization growing among his underlings and Elysian’s executives; it was a fleeting sensation, a truth just beyond his grasp, like knowing the meaning of a word but not remembering the word itself, the syllables that described the idea unwilling to gather on your tongue.