The Tourist Trail (8 page)

Two days had passed since Aeneas had left. No, a day and a half. Actually, twenty-eight hours, to be precise.

Angela used to find comfort in being precise, methodical, unemotional. But that was before Aeneas. Before he filled her head with passion, with talk of battles on the high seas, with ideas for making a difference. She used to be numb—able to stare at a penguin carcass, still warm in her hands, and think only of the cause of death, of when and what it last ate. She could weigh it and measure the feathers around its beak. She could glance at her GPS and note the coordinates. Finally, she could unfold the old pocket knife she kept in her backpack, calmly saw through the fibrous left wing of the bird, and pocket the stainless steel tag.

But this was all before Aeneas. Now, every penguin she measured had the saddest of eyes. Every dead chick nearly brought her to tears. Just a day and a half. Two nights. And now it was morning again, and the pain of his absence, like a migraine, had not subsided, blurring the terrain.

In her backpack was a new satellite tracking device. A wealthy supporter had recently “adopted” a penguin with a generous donation. Shelly had selected the penguin to be tagged. She had a knack for selecting males who would return, a feat that Angela had not yet mastered, with penguins or men.

Angela hiked alone to the nest in the north, at the very edge of the colony. She tried to ignore the fact that it was not far from where she'd first found Aeneas. At the nest, the penguins crouched defiantly in their burrow, guarding their young, heads waving. Angela did not want to bother them this morning, to tear them apart from each other even for a moment.

For now, for once, she would let science wait. She sat down and stared off into the hills. Then she heard a voice.

“Angela.”

She turned around. It was Aeneas, in his yellow florescent jacket.

She blinked, doubting her eyes. But he was still there, watching her. She stood and smiled, but he did not smile back. Slowly, he approached and pressed a shiny steel penguin tag into her tattered, blood-stained wool glove. She held it up and read the numbers.

Zero four two two nine.

“I am sorry,” Aeneas said.

He had remembered Diesel's number. The only man who probably ever would. He told her that he'd boarded two fishing vessels before he located Diesel's body. He terrified the men with a squarely aimed shotgun that had never been fired. The crew resisted him, so he stuck them on lifeboats and sunk their trawler, the trawler that took Diesel's life. But it was worth it, she thought. He brought Diesel home to her. He could have sunk them all, every last one.

She pressed the metal hard between her fingers. The indentations of each digit. She could feel Diesel now, on her lap, the raspy purring noise. Gazing into his reddish-brown eyes. Imagining the thousands of miles he had traveled to be there, right there with her. This tag was all that was left.

“I can't stay,” he said. “They know I'm here.”

Of course they did. She told him about her visitors. She could picture Aeneas cutting through the feathers and cartilage and cold blood. Sawing the tag free to return it to her. To return Diesel to her, in number only, something she could feel with her fingers and her eyes. Numbers did not lie.

She grabbed his jacket by the sides and pulled him to her. She kissed him, his beard sanding her lips. She smelled salt air and his hands were cold but firm. She held him tight, as she would a penguin beak.

She took him to her trailer. She lit a candle she had been saving in the sink with the drain to nowhere. The wind picked up and the walls began to vibrate. They made love as Geraldo brayed, calling out to the female he had yet to find, or had yet to find him.

* * *

In the morning, while Aeneas slept, Angela slid out of their cramped alcove and stared at him. Though his face and neck and arms were tanned dark brown, his body was pale and soft like a polar bear. He snored. He rolled away from her, eyes closed.

She stepped out the trailer door and down the cinder block steps. She peeked underneath to find Geraldo blinking at her, still alone. She blinked back and smiled. In the office she hung Diesel's tag on a chain around her neck. She looked down at the latest satellite tracking logs, more out of habit than hope. Outside the office, researchers had gathered, some with coffee. Backpacks and teams assembled. She abstained.

“I'm not feeling well,” she said, and no one objected. How could they; she had never before called in sick. Shelly gave her a knowing look; Doug had probably told her everything by now. A day ago, Angela might have turned red and lowered her eyes. But not now. She was already somewhere else.

She retreated to the trailer and found Aeneas seated outside on a cinder block, tying his shoes. “Love 'em and leave 'em?” he said.

“Something like that.”

She waited for him to ask her to come along. She pleaded with her eyes for an invitation, even though she knew she could not say yes.

“You are always welcome on my ship,” he said. “Always.” He noticed the tag around her neck, and he held it and kissed her forehead. “Now you're a known-age bird,” he said.

He left the trailer, and she waited a few minutes, but he did not return. When she poked her head out the door, she saw a small canvas sack on the ground. She remembered him carrying it the night before so she looked around, but did not see him. She picked up the bag, and it jingled as if full of bottle caps.

She kneeled and opened the bag to find penguin tags. Nothing but penguin tags. She ran her hands through the metal and held up one after another. How many of these were her birds? So many mothers and fathers caught up in nets. So many abandoned chicks. So many red dots. She turned the bag upside down and spilled them out. She felt rage building inside of her, the need to fight back. Perhaps she was a warrior after all.

She returned to the office, finding it empty. She grabbed her backpack and wrote Shelly a note. She began walking up the hill, toward the water, then picked up her pace until she was running. Tourist buses passed her, coughing dust. She could feel the eyes and cameras upon her. But she no longer cared. From the distance came the sound of a boat engine. There was still time. She crested the hill, leaping onto soft dirt and patches of grass, hopping the prickly quilambay bushes. She could feel Diesel's tag around her neck, reminding her that he was now looking over her, tracking her movements. In places cold and always blowing. In sickness and in health. In absentia.

I don't love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

— Pablo Neruda

When Ethan first set eyes on Annie Miller, he thought he'd made a mistake. She was far more attractive than the other women he had been paired with. Her short spiked hair drew attention to her blue eyes, skin browned from the sun. And though her face exhibited eight piercings—three on each ear, a silver ring on her upper right lip, and a tiny stud through the left nostril—they did nothing to reduce her appeal. If anything, the perforations only illustrated just how durable her beauty was. She could change her hair color, pierce her nose and lip, tattoo her forehead if she wanted—and Ethan still would have been seduced by her.

He was at work when he first encountered Annie. She was one of the three million members in the eCouplet.com database, and he was the programmer tasked with improving the member search engine. Every search engine ran on algorithms—lines upon lines of a language that was indecipherable to most humans but was poetry to a computer. Ethan's algorithms parsed each profile—the favorite movies and foods and colors, the income levels and hometowns—all toward that goal of pairing one person with another.

Ethan sometimes used his own profile for testing. He had developed an entire stable of artificial member profiles that he would insert into the pairing engine, but these were not real people. His, on the other hand, was an authentically average profile, representative of so many millions of people who joined these Web sites—people who did not stand apart in looks or career.

Ethan was taller than most men, with a runner's build, but he was not an athlete in the organized sports sense of the word. And though his height gave him every right to an extrovert personality, he was shy around women. His photo worked against him. Though his face compared favorably with those of his fellow programmers, he was competing in the gene pool of San Diego, competing against surfers and skateboarders who wore their free spirits in their tanned faces and sun-bleached hair. Ethan was pale, his body artless. He had a full head of dark hair, but the cut was conservative. He intended, one of these days, to visit a salon instead of a barbershop. He intended to take his well-meaning co-worker's advice: Get his teeth whitened; work on his posture; begin, finally, to look women in the eyes. He'd intended to make numerous self-improvements over the years, but he never followed through. He blamed the job, the long hours, the crunch-time leading up to a new software release. But the truth was, good intentions were no match for his periodic but extreme bouts of insecurity.

Fortunately, insecurity did not come across in a search query—which was how Ethan and Annie met.

When he saw her photo, his initial reaction was to close the search window and start over. When her face came up a second time, he clicked on her profile. She was twenty-four to his twenty-nine. She was an environmental activist. She had been in jail half a dozen times for various protests. She was a college dropout. She bagged groceries at the health food co-op in Hillcrest. She didn't eat meat.

Ethan suspected a bug in his code. An if/else statement gone awry. A poorly defined algorithm. A memory leak.

Memory was like oxygen to a computer—and every piece of software required memory to function. Elegant software recycled memory after it was used. Poorly written software progressively consumed more and more memory until there was no oxygen left, and the system crashed. One sign of a memory leak was software that acted unusually or, in this case, a search engine that returned odd results.

Ethan returned to the code and meticulously scanned every line for a missing semicolon, a recursive loop, anything that would have paired a geek with a beauty, a meat eater with a vegetarian, a jailbird with someone who'd never gotten as much as a speeding ticket.

He re-compiled the code, ran the search again, and again her smiling face greeted him. He knew better than to believe the numbers could lie—and yet he wanted to believe that the code had functioned correctly, that he and Annie could be a match. That perhaps, for once in his life, destiny and data were in sync.

* * *

This was not a date, Ethan told himself. This was work. Field work.

He would meet Annie for an innocent meal. He would get to know her better. In doing so, he would diagnose why that search engine of his had placed them together. An hour in a restaurant would be far more effective in solving this mystery than another week spent debugging. This was what he told himself, and no one else.

He wasn't allowed to date Annie. Company policy forbade it. Last year, a competitor came under fire for pimping out its employees on dates to improve member retention rates. But these were details Ethan found easy to overlook; he had not been on a date in more than a year.

He arrived early at the Italian restaurant in Hillcrest and ordered a beer. Annie had suggested the place when she responded to his email; he'd been careful not to use his work account. Her email voice was bright and succinct. He appreciated the absence of smiley faces and exclamation points. As he sat at the table sipping his beer, he began to wonder why she'd agreed to meet him so readily. Surely she'd read his profile; what was the appeal? Unless, perhaps, the search engine was working as intended, had detected something between the two of them that Ethan had not, something that would lead to romance. Ethan's over-clocked brain began to imagine an evening turning into morning turning into happily ever after.

But this was not a date, he reminded himself.

If this were a date, he would have been visibly nervous. His forehead would have glistened. Words would have collided with one another on the way out of his mouth. The menu would have flapped like a bird's wing in his hands. But because this was not a date, he was calm. Work was the one area of his life in which he felt completely confident.

He watched her enter the restaurant and pause as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. At first glance, she was wildly contradictory. She wore a blue fifties-style poodle skirt cut a few inches too short for that decade. She wore a white-and-yellow plaid sweater that barely covered the tattoos on her arms. The tattoos on her legs emerged from her bobby socks, winding up her thin legs.

Ethan stood and waved her over. “Annie?”

“Hi, Ethan.” She shook his hand and they both sat down.

His confidence began to vanish, and Ethan looked around for their waiter, feeling the pressure of silence building. When he turned back to Annie, she was extending a clipboard towards him. “Since we've got a moment, I was hoping you could sign something,” she said. “It's a petition to ban foie gras.”

He looked at the clipboard and then at Annie. “I'll bet you say that to all your dates.”

“You can sign right there.” She handed him a pen and pointed at the bottom of the page, oblivious to his attempt at humor.

Ethan took the petition and squinted at it. The candle at their table didn't provide enough light to make sense of the fine print. Again he looked for their waiter. He knew he should just sign it and get on with the date—except that it wasn't a date, and he didn't like to sign petitions, even for causes he agreed with.

“Do you think we could eat dinner first?” he asked. “I promise not to order…faux…”

“Foie gras.”

“Right. To be honest, I don't even know what foie gras is.”

Annie gave him a sympathetic smile. The waiter finally arrived, and she ordered a beer. She told him, in surgical detail, about foie gras: the restraining cages, the metal tubes used for ritual force-feeding, the way the ducks would cry to one another at night.

“I have videos,” she said.

“I'll take your word for it.”

“My goal is a thousand signatures. We need more than a quarter million to have a shot at getting this on the ballot. Which is why I'm doing everything short of blocking intersections to get them.”

“Is this date one of your signature-gathering strategies?” Ethan asked.

“Of course not. I'm just here for a free meal.” She smiled.

Ethan assumed she was joking with him, but he could not be sure. While he could always tell what was going on inside of a computer, people were more of a challenge. He was a terrible judge of emotions and other human subtleties, and he knew it but couldn't seem to solve it. He spent a lot of time over the years asking “what?” as those around him laughed at some inside joke or sexual euphemism that he apparently missed altogether. He was on the outside of most conversations, looking in, trying to see what everyone else saw so easily. He tried not to let it bother him. He was smarter than other people in so many ways, and he contented himself with that knowledge. But he could not help but struggle in moments like this, not knowing if a girl was smiling because she was happy or because she was inwardly laughing at him. At times like this, Ethan often assumed the worst and responded defensively.

“Annie.”

“Yes?”

“I can't sign your petition,” he said. “It's not because I don't agree with your cause, but because as a matter of principle I don't sign petitions.”

“You don't sign petitions?” She stared at him.

“Petition drives have gotten out of hand in California. And the only way to fight back is to refuse to sign them altogether. It's been years since I last signed one.”

“You trying to win a medal or something?”

“Do you realize there were seventeen propositions on the ballot last year?”

“Yes. One was a proposition that I helped get on the ballot.”

“Oh?”

“Proposition 3. To expand the size of battery cages for chickens.”

“I thought you didn't eat meat.”

“I don't eat meat, or any animal product. But even those on death row deserve humanity.” Annie stood and reached for her backpack. “Look, Ethan, if you're not going to sign it, that's fine. It's your choice. Give me my clipboard.”

As Ethan handed it back, the waiter approached with Annie's beer, and she held the clipboard out to him. “Would you like to sign a petition banning foie gras?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “We don't serve it here.”

“And you don't have any principles against signing petitions?”

“Why would I?” he asked. Annie looked down at Ethan, and he wanted to jump to his feet, grab the clipboard back, and start again. But it was already too late—he had gone from first impression to last impression in record time.

“Nice to have met you, Ethan,” she said.

He nodded, avoiding eye contact, then stared at her back as she left the restaurant. He paid for the beers, and as he walked home he tried to convince himself that he'd done the right thing. She was trying to use him, and he had held his ground. Back in high school, the only pretty girls he'd gotten close to were those who needed help with their homework. He was branded a computer nerd, and even the emergence of fabulously rich computer nerds did not seem to brighten his prospects. He had come to assume the worst of beautiful women: They wanted something from him. How could they not? What good was he but for a late-night computer question, a re-installed operating system, a signature?

He had been accused by previous girlfriends—all three of them—for not talking enough. The last one—the one with whom he could see a real future, even marriage—told him he was emotionally distant. She was probably right, but he did not know how to rectify the situation. He was fluent in any number of programming languages, but these were foreign tongues to the women he most wanted to be with, and plain conversational English often seemed foreign to him. Over the years, he'd made significant upgrades to his repertoire of small talk. He could banter about the weather in San Diego (or lack thereof) and the best beaches to surf (though he didn't surf). But small talk only delayed the inevitable. Eventually a woman wanted more. Eventually, in quiet moments together in cars or in elevators or at home waiting for the toaster to pop, he would have nothing more to say. She would ask what she had done wrong. He would tell her that everything was fine. And eventually she would see him as mute, paralyzed, useless. And she would leave.

When Ethan returned home, he logged into eCouplet, telling himself he needed to check his work email, though he only wanted to see her face again. And then he realized his hypocrisy. He had accused Annie of using him for his signature. But he had been using her, too, manipulating a search engine, asking her out under cowardly pretenses. And neither had gotten what they wanted.

When Ethan went to look up her picture, he was denied access. She had blocked him from viewing it.

If he'd only signed that silly sheet of paper, just signed it. She would have put the clipboard away. They would have had a fantastic meal. They might have made the perfect match. Instead, she had dumped him, after only one date.

And it wasn't even a date.