The air outside was crisp, the morning sun bright and true in a way that promised a gorgeous day, and the air smelled of damp, fresh grass and a faraway note of burning wood. For the first time in years, she was completely sober, and it seemed to her that even the depression of withdrawing from the Salt had finally receded—she felt light in her limbs, strong, and clearheaded.
Then Wes approached her, and they stood side by side contemplating the large touring coach that would convey them past the Salt Line, the silence surprisingly companionable.
“I gave you the wrong impression before,” Marta said. “When I acted like I didn’t want to be here doing this.”
“You did?”
“Yeah,” Marta said. “It was just the nerves talking.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it.” Wes lifted the crook of his left arm in an old-fashioned, gentlemanly way. “Shall we board?”
“Yes,” said Marta. “Let’s.”
Three
The beginning of the idea for Pocketz had come to Wes Feingold when he was only fourteen years old, and his parents were the inspiration.
They were having their best friends, the Duncans, over to the house for dinner in a couple of days, and his mother was frantic, scanning so many different feeds that she had to transfer some from her tablet to the wall monitor in the kitchen.
“Lynn served grouper the last time we were over there, and this site is saying that it was selling that week for sixty credits a kilo. And the wine—do you remember the vintage, Dan?”
“It was a Malbec,” Wes’s father said.
“And it had a red and black label, I remember that much.” Now his mother was using her thumb to deal out feed pages like playing cards, so that the kitchen monitor was cluttered two and three deep. “Crap. I think I found it.”
“Let me see,” Wes’s father said.
She put this most recent page on top of the pile and expanded it using her thumb and forefinger. “Cara de Roca. One hundred fifty credits. Damn. Damn it.”
Wes, who had been sitting at the counter working on his Advanced Calculus homework—he had already placed well beyond high school level in Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry, and so was taking distance courses for those subjects—looked up. This was a version of a conversation his parents had had hundreds of times in his life, but only today, for some reason, did it capture his interest. He studied the scatter of feed pages on the wall and then the stricken expressions on his parents’ faces. There were hardly ever times when Wes failed to understand some intellectual principle (though fine art and literature tended, with only rare but powerful exceptions, to leave him cold), but this mystification at people’s emotions, the fervency and utter lack of motivating logic behind so many of them, was familiar.
“You’re upset because your friends served you fish and wine?” he asked.
“We’re upset,” his mother said, “because they served us expensive, hard-to-get fish and wine.”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s nice of them, right?”
His mother exhaled harshly and rolled her eyes. “Oh, it’s nice, all right.”
When Wes cocked his head, still unable to process what had gotten his mother so upset, his father said, “Son, there’s nice and then there’s showing off.”
“But you wouldn’t have even known they were showing off,” Wes said, “if you hadn’t gone deliberately searching the feeds to see what they paid for things.”
“Everybody does that, Wes. It’s what you do. The Duncans wouldn’t have served us grouper and Argentinean wine if they hadn’t known we’d track the prices later.” His mother—she was only in her late thirties on this day, though she’d seemed to Wes, then, both ancient and ageless—swept her blond bangs roughly out of her eyes and started jogging her foot against the rung of the bar stool she was sitting on. “OK, Dan, you’ve got to help me think here. We should have started planning this last week. We should have checked the feeds the moment we got back from dinner that night.”
“I can get a nice Bordeaux from Lisa at work,” Wes’s father said.
“We served them that last time they were here.” She tapped the tablet’s stylus against her bottom lip. “What if we did something kind of whimsical, kind of off the wall. Like, OK, we do the Bordeaux again, but we get a bottle of port for after dinner?”
His father whistled. “That’s a lot of dough.”
“Dough?” Wes asked.
“Credits,” his mother said vaguely. “Yeah. But if we do the port, I think it would be OK to go cheaper on the meal itself. I could do my fresh ravioli with the good farmer’s cheese from Maple Street Market.”
Wes found himself getting excited, the way he did on the rare occasions when a difficult mathematical proof suddenly yielded its solution to him. “Because the ravioli is labor-intensive,” he said.
“Well, I suppose you could say that,” his mother said.
He filed his homework feed and brought up the sketch pad on his own tablet, syncing with the wall monitor so that his doodles would be projected. He swept his mother’s pages thoughtlessly to the side, and when she started to protest, he said, “Shh, shh, shh. Let me think a sec.”
“Young man, I wasn’t through with those feeds.”
“I can get them right back,” Wes said. He wrote on the top of the screen, in all caps, COMPARATIVE VALUATION OF DINNERS.
“Jesus Christ,” his father muttered.
Then:
Variables
Cost (C)
Rarity (R)
Novelty (N)
Complexity (X)
“But there’s perhaps another, secondary set of variables, and that’s where it gets tricky,” Wes said, scribbling. “Because complexity in one sense is valuable, but maybe also simplicity is valuable. In the case of the farmer’s cheese, for instance. Mom, you called it good, and I agree it tastes good, but it’s not all that rare or refined.”
“It’s made by local artisans,” his mother said. “It’s organic!”
“So that’s another variable. I mean, it’s funny to me, because you seem to think the wine they served was so great because it was from Argentina, but you think the cheese you’re going to serve is so great because it’s from here in Durham.” He moved his initial notes to the left and started another column of secondary variables. “The derivations are going to be messy,” he murmured apologetically. “But the general idea, it seems to me, is that the equation you’re working on is Value of the Duncan Meal, in which the primary variables are Cost, in this case roughly 210 credits, not counting the sides and dessert and miscellaneous, and Rarity, because the fish and wine are hard to get, though of course Rarity is a variable that is already factored into Cost by the manufacturer of those particular products.”
His mother and father exchanged bewildered looks.
“That’s the thing about Cost as a variable: it takes into account so many other variables. But—” He paused. “Do you think you’ll spend as much as the Duncans did?”