Dan Bevacqua
The Human Variable
From The Literary Review
This part of Northern California was too dark, Ted felt. It freaked him out. Without a moon, the lack of streetlights gave everything a creepy redneck vibe. Driving with his high beams on reminded him of certain back roads in Vermont — little pit-stop towns he used to speed through when he was a teenager and first had his license. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ventured this far out of San Francisco. Palo Alto for work at the startup, yes. Oakland to visit friends. But those places weren’t like wherever he was now. The overwhelming, almost chemical smell of the pines blew in through the open car window. At a stoplight, he heard a coyote howl. The old, dense forest was otherwise silent, and Ted flinched when the console in the Prius beeped and the Bluetooth said, “Incoming.”
“Boo!” Kathy said.
“Hey.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Ted stared at the GPS. “I’m just a red dot on a blank screen.”
“Well, find out,” his wife said.
He pulled over at a gas station. Standing out front near the bug light was an incredibly tall, incredibly thin man with an orange beard. He had the word SELF tattooed above his right eyebrow. MADE was above the left. Ted asked him.
“Liberty.”
“Thanks.”
“Yut,” SELF MADE said, as if he were offended by language, as if it had done something horrible to him as a child.
Ted got back in the car and locked the door.
“Liberty,” he told Kathy.
“Keep going north,” she said. “Another twenty miles. You’ll see a condemned Mexican restaurant called Señor Mister. Pull into the lot and then text me.” Ted drove on through the darkness of Liberty, SELF MADE shrinking in his rearview, and considered once again the fact that he needed $350,000 by tomorrow. Without it, MicroWeather.com, his baby, was finished. He’d lose his house too. His wife probably. But what should he say when he got to the weed farmer’s? How should he act? As if it were a regular business meeting? More casual? He had no prior experience interacting with marijuana kingpins. He bought an eighth sometimes. That was it. It would last him a month. It was a Friday-night, smoke-a-joint-out-on-the-patio kind of thing. He wasn’t the guy for this.
“Be your normal self,” Kathy had said that afternoon. “He’s from New Hampshire. He’s New England. Like you. Be New England together.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Ted asked his wife.
They were in the offices of MicroWeather.com, which took up half a floor in a once-industrial building on the outskirts of Palo Alto. To the south, out the floor-to-ceiling windows, was the promised land: Google, Facebook, various other big ideas that had turned people into billionaires. MicroWeather.com was five geeks Ted knew from Caltech and his wife. The company was seven desks, seven chairs, and a very large room, basically. The geeks were out to lunch.
“How do you even know him?” Ted asked.
His wife was thirty-five and beautiful. She had long, straight blond hair, an MBA from Stanford, and ran four miles every other day. But there was a tattoo of a unicorn on her inner thigh that told a story of forgotten dreams. Only the month before, she’d disappeared to Chicago for the weekend in order to catch the final three Grateful Dead shows. Her first ever email address had been indigochild79@hotmail.com. She knew how to roll a blunt.
“I know him from the old days,” Kathy said. “The rave scene. He was around.”
“And you just called him?”
“I just called him,” Kathy said. “I explained the situation.”
“The whole situation?”
“The whole situation. I told him about the bank. How this was all very time-sensitive,” Kathy said. “But Ted, he’s a businessman. He’s not going to give us the money out of the kindness of his heart. He’s willing to hear the pitch. But please, sweetie, do me one favor.”
“What’s that?” Ted asked.
“Make it sound cool,” Kathy said.
Like its founder, “cool” had always been a problem for the company. While at Caltech, Ted, and every other grad student who cared about these sorts of things, noticed how localized weather websites and apps were becoming all the rage. He also noticed that they were all terrible. They relied on National Weather Service info combined with wonky algorithms. For months Ted thought about the problem, the inefficiency, and the ways in which, as an engineer, science had taken over his life, but then one day he looked at his iPhone. Radio waves streamed in and out of it 24/7. He could map the waves and chart the way they flowed inside the pressure systems. With enough subscribers, with enough data pinging back and forth, the information would domino. Essentially, the future — whether it would rain, sleet, or snow — would always be known, and down to the square inch. No more surprise storms. No more Whoops, here comes a tsunami! How many cell phones were in the world? Seven billion? More? That’s an accurate forecast, Ted thought. That’s the new weather.
“But it is cool,” he said to Kathy. “It’s totally cool.”
“I know it is, honey. I believe that, really,” Kathy said. “Just don’t, you know, overdo it on the algorithms.”
Kathy was the cool one, Ted knew. Everybody thought so. Friends said it to his face all the time, like it didn’t hurt, like he didn’t know what that made him — the uncool one. There wasn’t room for two cools in a marriage. He understood that. There could be only one, like in Highlander. The same was true for business. But that meant his wife should be the spouse/business partner pulling into Señor Mister’s empty parking lot. She should be the one texting her. But instead Kathy was out to dinner with the loan officer, trying to flirt out a few extra days on the repayment, and Ted was texting to his cool wife: I’m here, Kath!! Now what? Now what do I do?!?
She sent the reply and then smiled back at the red, drunk face of Mr. White.
“Oh, I know,” Kathy said. “Believe me, I know. It’s a bubble. Only a matter of time.”
She was glad he was old. Old and a little fat. Had he been young, it might have been a different story, one she didn’t want to think about.
“I mean, theoretically, a bubble should never burst,” Mr. White said. “It should swell, sure. It should contract, yes. But it should never burst, not really.”
She’d heard all this before. At Stanford. Regurgitated Friedman. The market will prevail. Live long and prosper. Have faith. At the time she’d believed it enough to have had two Republican boyfriends. Like that was okay. Like that was something people like her did. But it was her choice, Kathy reminded herself. She was the one who’d student-loaned her way into the club. She was the one who’d grown tired of being poor. Tired of having nothing. Tired of being tired.
“But then people,” Kathy said.
“But then people, yes,” Mr. White said. “The human variable.”
“They’re unpredictable.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” he said.
“What’s another?” she asked.
“Foolish,” he said. “Delusional. Unrealistic.”
Like an old pro, Mr. White quarter-turned the last of the Barbera into her glass. They were seated by the front window. To Kathy’s right, the dining room was awash in men and women eating alone. Everyone had a cell phone in one hand and a fork in the other.
“Which of those am I?” Kathy asked. “Foolish, delusional, or unrealistic?”
“If you’re one of them, you’re always all three,” Mr. White said.
Kathy looked at the people in the restaurant — they were talking, texting, masticating — and thought of a diner in Fresno called the Chat ’n’ Chew. For years her mother had waitressed there.