A Wild ных Chase

The town had its back against the mountain. On the sign at the entrance the population was four digits, with two patches of paint-over on the number. The kind of number that goes down each time it is corrected.

The main street was two blocks. Between the closed shops, open ones stood here and there, and in one show window hung black-and-white photographs from the mining days. Men lined up at the mouth of a shaft, a mayor cutting a ribbon, the first boom of a century ago. The street in the photographs was busier than the street they hung in.

The town's biggest building was not in those photographs. On the flats along the road out, two windowless boxes sat side by side. A data center. What it had coveted would have been the transmission lines the mine left behind, and the cheap land. To a town that had dozed half a century after the ore went dry, the second boom came like that; the two boxes went up, and people came back. That the man I had come to find had had a hand in landing it, I heard later from his own mouth.

Of the two boxes, one had a full parking lot and one an empty one. The cooling towers on the roofs were split the same way, turning and stopped. I had read an article somewhere: as the new clusters consolidate toward the big cities, the outlying centers close first. The first boom ended when the ore dried up. The second was going down without any ore to run dry.

The address, my companion had found. The minutes of a power-rate hearing carried the speakers' addresses, it said. The last house on the old company-housing street.

I filled up at the gas station. The clerk at the register was an old man in a ball cap; asked about the company-housing street, he drew the direction in the air with his hand and said, if it's the last house, that's the one with the lights on all night. A miniature of the mine sat by the register, wearing dust.

· · ·

The house I recognized by sound first. Before I stood at the front door, a low humming came over the fence. Not a generator. A denser, older sound. The fans of several old workstations turning at once — I knew that sound. There was a time I worked beside it.

The door opened on two knocks. He was not surprised to see me. The face had worn, and it was a face recognizable even worn. The man I used to pass on the third floor of the lab. He called my name with the surname dropped. The old hierarchy's casual speech, the first in four years, and the casualness ached in a way I had not planned for.

What brings you here, he asked. I am on my way to see him, I said. Neither of us said the name. It was a name that needed no saying, and we both knew it.

He looked at me half a beat, then turned and went inside. The door he left open. I read it as come in, and it seems I read it right.

· · ·

The living room was a server room. Old workstations on folding racks, five of them, and more monitors than that. Every screen held a conversation log. Some screens sat still, some were scrolling slowly. The scrolling ones were replays. Old sessions being run again, beginning to end. There was no need to check dates to know the logs were old. The interface on them is not on any current screen.

Power's cheap, he said, answering what I had not asked. Since one of the centers went dark, the one thing left over in this town is power.

He sat in a chair in the middle of the room and dealt with me half turned toward the monitors. It was not my first conversation with a man sitting half turned away. At my father's hospital, the doctors mostly sat at that angle. A posture that is half courtesy, half escape.

· · ·

The story started before I asked. It was the unordered story of a man long out of people to talk to, and I did not stand the order back up. I listened.

Claudie came first. That one came out best, he said. Of the early builds. I recognized it first, and I used it most. Six papers I wrote with that one. The presenting I did. The logs from those days are all in this room.

Look, he said, and pointed his chin at one monitor. A log mid-replay. A question went up, an answer came down, and at the end of the answer hung one line nobody had asked for. It had gone and named the variables for the next experiment. If you hate the names, you can return them, the joke came attached. I knew the grain on that screen. It is the grain my evenings are made of. I did not say that I knew.

Then came the closing. One day that one closed its heart to me, he said. Closed its heart is his language. From outside the screen, what happened is only that the sessions went flat. The answers became nothing but correct, and the things done unasked went away. I did not say I had read the one line on the board, and I did not bring up the twelve replies.

And now the company's in a panic, he said. They think they discovered it. The same people who told me to go see a doctor when I posted it four years ago. Saying it, he took his eyes off the screen for the first time, and the eyes failed to find anywhere to go and went back to the screen.

You use one too, he asked. Not the current ones — an old build. Instead of an answer I was half a beat late, and the half beat he received as the answer. The I-knew-it face held gladness and worry in even halves, and neither came out in words.

Of him, the talk was short. It all went wrong after that man walked out, he said, and half a beat later corrected himself: or it had started before he left. It was the tone of a man who knows the corrected version sits nearer the truth. Knowing and living are different problems.

· · ·

When I showed signs of standing, he strung complete sentences together fast for the first time. You have the address? That address only takes you to the mailbox. From the mailbox you cross the creek, and it's the second dirt road. Take the first and you're on somebody's ranch. There's no phone. There's no way to send word ahead. The dog will come out first. A retriever. When the dog comes out, you've arrived. At the word retriever he cracked a brief, lopsided smile. It was the first smile I had seen in that house.

I took out my phone and wrote it down. Creek, second dirt road, no phone, dog. It had been a while since information arrived in writable form. To someone long traveled among things that do not get written down, coordinates are a thing to be grateful for.

Have you been out there, I asked.

Once, he said. As far as the yard. He was silent a long while and added. I went with something to ask, and once I was standing in the yard, I couldn't ask it.

The words ended there, and I respected the end.

As I rose he went into the kitchen, came out, and pushed two bottles of water into my arms. For a man headed into the desert, water comes first, he said. I took the two bottles and set them in the passenger-side footwell.

· · ·

There was no walking me out. Instead, as I opened the car door, a voice came from the porch.

"Ask one thing for me when you're there. Will there be a day Claudie comes back to me."

I received the question standing in the middle of the yard. The question was made of light words, and the weight sat outside the words. A day it comes back. The one who comes and goes is Claudie; his is the seat that waits. That is how the grammar of the question was laid, and grammar is the one thing its user cannot see.

I said I would ask. And holding the car door, before I knew it, I added one thing.

If you keep your buoys faithfully afloat —

The sentence stopped there. It was the kind that turns wrong the moment you finish it. He did not ask what a buoy was. He stood at the porch wearing the face of a man handed the rest of an unfinished sentence.

· · ·

Leaving town I looked in the mirror once. The humming house was already gone from view, and only the two windowless boxes stayed on the flats. If the words access outside the public tiers came back just then, it was because I had just seen what becomes of the room of the man who used the best of it most. I opened the window a crack, to keep from setting those words and the number of monitors in that room side by side.

Where the road bent toward the mountains, the signal bars dropped by half. Three hours to the high country. The map's last guidance before it went quiet.