Makers by Cory Doctorow (read this if .txt) 📕

kids in tow. Ada spotted the two old, lovely baseball mitts on the crowded coffee table and made a bee-line for them, putting one over each hand and walking around smacking them together to hear the leathery sound, snooping in drawers and peering at the business-end of an arc-welder that Perry hastily snapped up and put on a high shelf, which winked once to let him know that it had tracked the movement and noted the location of the tool.
The little boy, Pascal, rode on his mother’s hip. Eva had clearly had a bit of a cry, but had gotten over it. Now she was determined, with her jaw thrust out and her chin up-tilted.
“I don’t know what to do about him. He’s been driving me crazy since he retired. You know he had an affair?”
“He told me.”
She laughed. “He tells everyone. He’s boasting, you know? Whatever. I know why he did it. Mid-life crisis. But before that, it was early-adulthood crisis. And adolescent crisis. That guy doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s a good man, but he’s out of his fucking mind if he’s not juggling a hundred balls.”
Perry tried out a noncommittal shrug.
“You’re his buddy, I know. But you have to see that it’s true, right? I love him, I really do, but he’s got a self-destructive streak a mile wide. It doesn’t matter how much he loves me or the kids, if he’s not torturing himself with work, he’s got to come up with something else to screw up his life. I thought that we were going to spend the next twenty years raising the kids, doing volunteer work, and traveling. Not much chance of that though. You saw how he was looking at Suzanne.”
“You think he and Suzanne—”
“No, I asked him and he said no. Then I talked to her and she told me that she wouldn’t ever let something like that happen. Her I believe.” She sat down and dandled the little boy until he gurgled contentedly. Perry heard Ada going crazy in the kitchen with a mechanical sphincter he’d been building. “Rides are a lot of fun, Perry. Your ride, it’s amazing. But I don’t want to ride a ride for the rest of my life, and Landon is a ride that doesn’t stop. You can’t get off.”
Perry was at a loss. “I’ve never had a relationship that lasted more than six months, Eva. I’ve got no business giving you advice on this stuff. Kettlewell is pretty amazing, though. It sounds like you’ve got him pretty wired, right? You know that if he’s busy, he’s happy, and when he’s slack, he’s miserable. Sounds like if you keep him busy, he’ll be the kind of guy you want him to be, even if you won’t have much time to play with him.”
She unholstered a tit and stuck it in the boy’s mouth and Perry looked at the carpet. She laughed. “You are such a geek,” she said. “OK, fine. I hear what you’re saying. So how do I get him busy again? Can you use him around here?”
“Here?” Perry thought about it. “I don’t think we need much empire building around here.”
“I thought you’d say that. Perry, what the hell am I going to do?”
There was a tremendous crash from the kitchen, a shriek of surprise, then a small “oops.”
“Ada!” Eva called. “What now?”
“I was playing ball in the house,” Ada said in the same small voice. “Even though you have told me not to. And I broke something. I should have listened to you.”
Eva shook her head. “Plays me like a goddamned cello,” she said. “I’m sorry, Perry. We’ll pay for whatever it was.”
He patted her arm. “You forget who you’re talking to. I love fixing stuff. Don’t sweat it.”
“Whatever—I’ll buy you one and you can use it for parts. Ada! What did you break, anyway?”
“Made of seashells, by the toaster. It’s twitching.”
“Toast-making seashell robot,” Perry said. “No sweat—it was due for an overhaul, anyway.”
“Christ,” she said. “Toast-making seashell robot?”
“Kettlewell is why we gave up making that kind of thing,” he said.
“Have you seen him?”
“I’ve seen him.”
“How penitent was he?”
He thought back to Kettlewell’s long puss on Francis’s terrace. “Yeah, pretty penitent. He’s pretty worried, I’d say.”
She nodded. “All right then. Maybe he’s learned a lesson. Ada! Stop breaking things and get your shoes back on!”
“We going back to Daddy?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Good,” Ada said.
They were barely out the door when Suzanne and Lester came in. They nodded at Perry and disappeared into the bedroom. Ten minutes later, Suzanne stomped out again. She barely looked at Perry as she disappeared into the corridor, slamming the door behind her.
Perry waited five minutes to see if Lester would come out on his own. This happened sometimes with the fatkins girls; love among the fatkins was stormy and unpredictable and Lester seemed to like bragging about the melt-downs they experienced, each one an oddity of sybaritic fatkins culture to boast about.
But Lester didn’t come out this time. Perry thought about calling him or sending him an email. Finally, Perry went and knocked at his door.
“Oh, go back to the living room, I’ll come out, I’ll come out.”
Perry went back and moused desultorily at some ride-fan blogs for a while, listening for Lester’s door opening. Finally, out he came, long-faced and puffy-eyed.
Perry shook his head. Was everyone miserable tonight?
“Hello, Lester,” he said. “Something on your mind?”
He barked a humorless laugh. “With her, I’m still fat.”
Perry nodded as though he understood, though he didn’t.
“Since fatkins, I’ve felt like, I don’t know, a real person. When I was big, I was invisible and totally asexual. I didn’t think about having sex with anyone and no one ever thought about having sex with me. When I felt something for a woman, it was more like a big, romantic love, like I was a beast and she was a beauty and we could enjoy some kind of chaste, spiritual love.
“Fatkins made me...whole. A whole person, with a life below my belt as well as above my neck. I know it looks gross and desperate to you, but to me it’s a celebration. Every time I get together with a fatkins girl and we’re, you know, partying—for both of us it becomes something really intimate. A denial of pain. A fuck you to the universe that made us so gross and untouchable.”
“And with her, you’re still fat, huh?”
Lester winced. “Yeah, it’s my problem. I guess I really resent her for not wanting me when I was big, though I totally get why she wouldn’t have.”
“Maybe you’re angry that she wants you now.”
“Huh.” Lester looked at his hands, which he was dry-washing in his lap. “OK, maybe. Why should she want me now? I’m the same person, after all.”
“Except that you’re whole now.”
“Urk.” Lester started pacing. “Who broke the toast-robot?”
“Kettlewell’s daughter, Ada. Eva was over with the kids. She moved out on Kettlebelly.” He thought about whether he should tell Lester. What the hell. “She thinks he’s in love with Suzanne.”
“Jesus,” Lester said. “Maybe we should swap. I’ll take Eva and he can take Suzanne.”
“You’re such a pig,” Perry said.
“You know us fatkins—fuck, food and folly.”
“So what’s going on with you and Suzanne now?”
“She’s gone away until I can get naked around her without either bursting into tears or making sarcastic remarks.”
Jesus. Crying. Perry couldn’t remember when he’d ever seen Lester cry. It was waterworks city these days around here.
“Ah.” Perry just wanted this day to be over. He missed Hilda, though he barely knew her. It would have been nice to have someone here at home with him, someone he could cuddle up to in bed and talk this all out with. Maybe he should call Tjan. He hit the button on his computer that made the TV blink the time in Morse code. It was 1AM. He’d have to be up in six hours to get the ride up and running. Screw all this, he was going to bed. He hadn’t even gotten a single email from Hilda since he’d left Madison. Not that he’d sent one to her, of course.
Lester was still snoring when Perry slipped out of the condo, a bulb of juice and a microwavable venison and quail-egg breakfast burrito under his arm. He had a little glove-box microwave and by the time he hit his first red light, the burrito was nuclear-hot and ready to eat. He gobbled it one-handed while he made his way to the ride.
There were two cop cars at the end of the driveway leading to the parking lot. Broward County sheriff’s deputy black-and-whites, parked horizontally to blockade the drive.
Perry pulled over and got out of his car slowly, keeping his hands in plain sight. The doors of the cruisers opened, too. The deputies already had their mirrorshades on, though the sun was still rising, and they set down their coffees on the hood of the cars.
“This yours?” A deputy said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the flea market and the ride.
Perry knew better than to answer any questions. “Can I help you?”
“We’re shutting you down, buddy, sorry.” The cop was young, Latina and female, her partner was older, white and male, with the ruddy complexion that Perry associated with old time Florida cops.
“What’s the charge?”
“There’s no charge,” the male cop said. He sounded like he was angry already and anything Perry said would just make him angrier. “We charge you if we’re going to arrest you. We’re enforcing an injunction. Now, if you try to get past us, we’ll come up with a charge and then we’ll arrest you.”
“Can I see the injunction?”
“Sure, you can go to the courthouse and see the injunction.”
“Aren’t you supposed to have a copy of it to show to me?”
“Am I?” The cop’s grin was mean and impatient.
“Can I go and get some stuff from my office?”
“If you want to get arrested you can.” He pulled a dyspeptic face and drank some coffee, then got back into his cruiser.
The other cop had the grace to look faintly embarrassed at her asshole partner, but then she, too, got back in her car.
Perry thought furiously about this. The cop was clearly itching to bust his ass. Maybe he hated the ride, or this duty, or maybe he hated Perry—maybe he was one of the cops who had raided the shantytown all those years before. Perry had taken a pretty big settlement off the county over the shot in his head, and it was a sure bet that a lot of cops had suffered for it and now harbored some enmity for him.
As bad as this was, it was about to get worse. The goth kids who’d been hanging around in droves lately—they didn’t seem like the sort with a lot of good instincts when it came to dealing with authority figures. Then there were the flea-market stall owners, who’d be coming over the road to open their shops in an hour or so. This could get really goddamned ugly.
He needed a lawyer, and someone to front for him with the lawyer. He could call Tjan—he would call him, in fact, but