another cup of coffee and a New York Times. Vo wanted him to understand that he had yesterday acquired a bushel of ripe Yakima Valley apples from a personal connection at the Pike Place Market—just enough to make a few tartes tatin, which he was keeping in reserve for special customers. Not that it was much of a secret, since the apple-y aroma had permeated the whole ground floor. He was wont to back up his verbal communications with physical demonstrations, perhaps a habit acquired during the decades when he had been learning English the hard way. Gently cupping one of Richard’s elbows in the palm of his hand, he led him around behind the counter to display a cardboard box stashed there, half-full of apples. He bent down and pawed through them until he had found a worthy specimen, then pulled it out and held it up in front of Richard’s face, perching it atop his fingertips in a pose that strongly called to mind Escher’s Hand met Spiegelende Bol, save that in this case, of course, it was an apple. It was an apple from which earlier generations of American grocery shoppers would have recoiled in dismay, had they seen it in the produce section at their local Safeway. It was half the size of the brawny, cottony Red Delicious apples usually seen in such places, its color ranged from an almost purple shade of red to an almost yellow shade of green, it had a few minor spots and dimples, and a couple of actual leaves were still attached to its stem. But it was so round and taut that it looked ready to explode. Vo kept thrusting it higher and higher into the air, looking back and forth between it and Richard.
“Now, that is a real apple!” Richard finally said. It was not a particularly clever thing to say but he knew it was the only thing that would calm Vo down. Vo rewarded him by insisting that he take the apple “for lunch.” Richard received it with due ceremony, like a Japanese businessman accepting a business card, running his fingers over its curves and turning it this way and that to admire its color, then placed it carefully into the bag slung over his shoulder. He soon found himself at his customary table with his coffee, his crossword puzzle, and his slice of tarte.
He was at least two-thirds finished with it when he remembered with a start that he was under doctor’s orders not to eat any food before the medical procedure. He had obeyed earlier but forgot himself when confronted with the opportunity of tarte tatin fresh from the oven.
He looked at the remaining part—the best part, since it comprised the edge crust, and he had been raised to save the best for last—with a mixture of guilt and embarrassment. In the end he decided to eat it. He doubted that having food in the stomach was really a significant danger. It was just one of those general recommendations, like turning off your cell phone while pumping gas, that had been promoted to a hysterical warning by lawyers. And to the extent it might actually be dangerous, the die was already cast. Having three-thirds of a slice in his stomach couldn’t be much worse than having two-thirds. And if he left the remainder on his plate, Vo would notice it and take it the wrong way and perhaps demote him from special-customer status.
More important than the possible medical complication was the question, which came quickly to mind, of whether this lapse was an early indicator of senility. The speed with which he had demolished the crossword puzzle seemed to argue against it. But that was all long-term memory, right? He wasn’t sure. As a boy he had been oblivious to the existence of this thing called senility until an older cousin had clued him in to it during a family reunion and supplied a brief (and in retrospect hilariously imprecise) rundown of its symptoms while casting significant glances at Grandma. After that, young Richard had overcompensated for his earlier naivete by becoming hypervigilant to its onset in family members of even modest decrepitude.
The doctor’s staff had been very firm on the point that, following the procedure, he would be unfit to drive because of the powerful drugs they were going to give him—that he would, for all practical purposes, be an ambulatory basket case, and that they wouldn’t even begin the procedure unless he had a designated minder who would sign him out afterward and take responsibility for keeping him away from heavy machinery. Accordingly, Richard now walked two blocks to a transit stop, boarded a city bus that would take him to the medical complex on the hill above downtown, and made himself comfortable in a seat amidships.
He woke up his phone. Its home screen was chicken-poxed with little red dots with accusatory numbers in them, the consequences of having turned a deaf ear to the Din for twelve whole hours. He willed himself not to see those and instead brought up his address book. He scrolled to the K section and found five different entries for Corvallis Kawasaki. Some of them had little pictures attached to them, which helped Richard guess how out-of-date they were. Most had accumulated during the years that Corvallis had worked hand-in-glove with Richard at Corporation 9592, the game company that had made Richard a billionaire and Corvallis, in the lexicon of the tech business world, a decimillionaire. The pictures on those tended to show him hoisting pints in bars or in various funny/celebratory poses connected with the company’s rise to prominence in the online gaming industry. One of them, however, was a very straight, formal head shot of Corvallis with his hair neatly trimmed and gelled, wearing a suit and tie. This card—which was only a few months old—identified him as the CTO of Nubilant Industries, a company that did cloud computing. It had been formed last year as part of a “roll-up,” which was tech biz parlance for acquiring and combining several companies that were all operating in the same “space.” Corvallis had been induced, by means of a hefty stock option grant, to leave his position at Corporation 9592 and join the new company. Richard had been sorry to see him go, but he had to admit that it was an excellent fit—Corvallis had overseen the shift of all Corporation 9592’s operations from old-fashioned server racks to the cloud, and he hadn’t been as lavishly compensated as others who had been luckier in their timing. Since Corvallis’s departure to Nubilant—which was headquartered near downtown Seattle—he and Richard had exchanged texts on several occasions, trying to find time to meet up for a drink. So far, it had not come together. But when Dodge pulled up his Corvallis text message stream, he found, at its tail, a flurry of messages from over the preceding weekend, in which Corvallis agreed to take the afternoon off and serve as Richard’s designated minder, collecting him from the clinic in his narcotic haze and taking him to lunch or something as he returned to his senses.
omw to clinic, Richard thumbed. Then he fetched a substantial pair of headphones from his bag and placed them over his ears. The sounds of the bus were muted. He plugged the cord into the phone and turned the headphones on. For these were electronic noise-canceling headphones. Directly they began to feed anti-noise into his ears, making everything quieter yet.
Corvallis texted back, K. The phone displayed the ellipsis indicating that he was still typing.
Dodge activated the music player app and began scrolling through his playlists, looking for the P section. His tinnitus was ramping up because of the unearthly quiet produced by the noise-canceling feature.
Corvallis added, if u r feeling up to it I will take you by the office—would like to show you what we are up to—cool stuff!
Richard decided not to respond to that one. As much as he liked Corvallis, he dreaded going on tours of high-tech companies. He tapped the words “Pompitus Bombasticus.” The lavish tonalities of a full symphony orchestra, backed up by a choir and fortified by a driving modern percussion section, filled his ears. Pompitus Bombasticus was Richard’s favorite group. Apparently it was just one guy working alone in a studio in Germany; the philharmonic, the choir, and all the rest were faked with synthesizers. This guy had noticed, some years ago, that all inexpensive horror movies used the same piece of music—Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—in their soundtracks. That opus had become a cliché, more apt to induce groans or laughs than horror. This German, who had been living the starving-artist lifestyle while trying to establish a career as a DJ, had been struck by an insight that had transformed his career: the filmmakers of the world were manifesting an insatiable demand for a type of music of which Carmina Burana was the only existing specimen. The market (if the world of composers and musicians could be thought of as such) was failing to respond to that demand. Why not then begin to make original music that sounded like the soundtrack of the sort of movie scene in