AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 37

Courtney was able to salvage most of Reed’s breakfast into something edible.  Reed wolfed it.  Courtney watched him while picking at her own portion.

“Uncle Byron’s prescription for emotionally distraught females,” he announced.

“Oh, dear . . .”

“Dominate them.  Put them on a busy schedule of activity.  And don’t let them be alone for a second.”

“Pig,” she said fondly.

“Until they get so sick of it, that their former healthy personality asserts itself full force.”

Courtney sighed.  “With all the dynamic force of a drugged turtle.  Female drugged turtle with herpes.”

“This afternoon, you’re coming into SoundSync with me.   I blew it, I completely forgot, but there’s a guy coming in to New York to meet with me about a computer project I want to develop.  I can’t just shine him off.  He’s a Major Dude.  I know, it’s cause for annulment of engagement, it’s basis for a kick in my butt; but Courty, I gotta go see this guy.”

She just looked at him blankly.

“Tonight, I want to take this guy out to dinner.  I want you to play matchmaker.  Set him up with a blind date.”

“Gawwd.”

“Come on, I want him to have a nice time tonight in New York before he has to go back to the Silicon Valley.  He’s single, twenty-nine, shy, a computer-fanatic, and a nerd.”

“Gawwd.”  She shook her head.  “Forget it, Reed.  This social turtle doesn’t know any nerd-lovers.  A blind date?  It would be impossible to interest anyone.”

“His name is Tom North.”

She nodded, slowly.  “Should be no problem.”

“Yeah, well, try to do it without telling her that he’s the Chairman of the Board of Softbyte Corporation.”

“You mean I can’t tell her that he’s the youngest living billionaire?”

“Fight against it.  He may be a nerd, but he’s pretty sensitive.  Actually, he’s not a billionaire anymore: his stock went down in that little mini-crash.  I think he’s only worth something like $900 million now.”

“How is it that you know Tom North?”

“It’s a long story.  Tomorrow morning, you and I will fly out to Los Angeles to see my mother.”  He paused.  “My father just died.”  He said it so strangely, that at first Courtney thought he was saying some sort of horrible joke.  “I have to arrange for the funeral.  And whatever else has to be taken care of.”  His eyes stared, not quite at hers.

Courtney pushed aside her full plate, and pushed his empty plate aside, and held his hand with both of hers.

“I’m so sorry for you, Darling.  Really.  Truly, I am.”  When Reed didn’t say anything, she added: “I liked your dad.  He seemed so full of life.”

“Yeah.”

|

Courtney wasted away at SoundSync East.  All the doofus deference of the employees for the owner’s ladyfriend.  What had Reed done?  Gone around and told everyone to ‘Treat her like a queen or you’re out the door’?

Tom North was the original computer-linked nerd, freckle-faced & blazing with energy: the candescent kid.  A thin giant at 6’3”.  He talked in a torrent of terminology.  A lick of Dennis-the-menace hair shot up wildly off the back of his head, and his two thousand dollar suit was all wrinkled and slept in.  Reed introduced her to him, and he didn’t even look at her, just charged back into the MIDI-this, megabyte-that conversation.  Courtney hadn’t a clue.  Dooming a delicious deb to this dorky dorf for a double-date seemed like deviate devilkin deportment!

She asked to be put to work; maybe there was something to the busy-bee dirt, after all.  So she listened to prototype CDs on the Magnalok player to see if they would track.  The lab had——she counted——22 CD players of different brands, to make certain that the CDs they manufactured would play on all the various consumer-brand players, but the Magnalok brand was the essential test-case.  If American Magnalok liked it, all the Japs would play it.

Don Bovi: Stiff When Aroused.  Extended-play, stainless steel version of the intellectually underprivileged chicken-chokers’ latest melted heat sonic ejaculation.

Ick.

|

But Reed had not considered the logistics.

How the heck am I supposed to line up a date for this guy if I’m at SoundSync?

Courtney took Reed’s hired car (an overgrown BMW sedan + driver) back to her apartment building, promising that she would have the driver come up and stay with her until Reed arrived.  But that was just too cowardly . . . or maybe it was that she didn’t feel completely comfortable being alone with a strange man.  She told him to wait in the garage.

Two packages were waiting down-elevator for her, and up-elevator there were three Ma Bell messages on Lauren’s telephone answering machine.

Michael——berating her for being a female flake who can’t even handle a punch in the face without falling apart into hysterics, and CALL ME, DAMN IT, WE’RE LOSING MONEY!

Kathy——kicked out of her cohabitation by cheating bastard Oh-I-Hate-Him-I-HATE-HIM Bob; have no money and no apartment; need place to stay for three days, promise, Only Three Days, only three days, really, really, Please?

Mom——I love you, call me, clipping pictures of you out of Citizen and U magazine, call me, collecting mint copies of your covers, call me, I love you, and what’s this I’m reading about you practicing Voodoo, dear those things can be dangerous!

Voodoo?

Courtney opened the first package with confusion. It was from the Mount Barmach Press; they had returned her collection of poems.  The cover letter explained.  They now had no intention of publishing her work, and were very upset that she had misrepresented herself.  They were a Literary press, and had no desire to be associated with commercial trash-poets, such as those popularized in Mass-Art magazine.

Courtney didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  She had quite innocently mentioned in her short bio to Barmach Press that she was working as a fashion model ‘to pay the rent’ and that some of her new poems were scheduled to appear in a future issue of Mass-Art magazine.

They had accepted her work on the basis of its merit, but when they found out who wrote it, it was suddenly no good!

Even stranger, no mention was made of the $500 dollars that had been paid as an advance for her poetry.  She had long ago cashed the check. She could keep the money, apparently, but she would get no publication.  Actually, she would have much preferred the reverse.

It left her feeling dead and burnt-out inside.  It hurt her deeply, and soured the one good thing that was finally going right in her life: her poetry.  Now, she was stalled there too.

The second, slightly smaller package had arrived UPS from Staedtler Graphics.  Courtney opened it.

Inside: no packing slip, no letter, just popcorn stuffings and a half-inch VHS videocassette.

COURTNEY, Chapter 38
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47