This was true in 1986, too, but the entities gathering the data weren’t as well-organized as they would later become, and the market for consumer data was still relatively elite. Over time, as the storage space needed for vast troves of memory shrank to microscopic sizes, the detail available to data hounds has become almost obsessively minute: behaviors too trivial to recount are lovingly enumerated. Every transaction locked, every point of contact recorded. There was a time, now hard to imagine, when you had to rely largely on self-reporting to know what people were up to.
For this reason, the dead from the distant past—even if you frame “distant” at fairly close range; even if the ever-advancing present seems, each year, to exist at further remove from the days that gave it birth—tend to look, in the mind’s eye, like ghosts who don’t know they’re dead yet. The impressions they left on the world, great or small, seem to outline a prophecy, one consisting of hunches you can’t verify and stories largely woven from inference and innuendo. Even once you’ve collated as much real evidence as you can collect, the ends they met enshroud and obscure their remembered figures, as if gathered, rumpled at the shoulders, like a cloak.
Marc Buckler met Evelyn Gates at a Morton’s Steakhouse in San Jose—the venue had been her choice. If she was impressed by him, I don’t know about it. If she found him ridiculous, as I do most days, I don’t know about that, either. She’d probably changed into some fresh clothes: simple sales instincts. She wasn’t a real estate agent, but hiring somebody to sell a building she owned would have struck her as silly. People want to own property; her father, in so many words, had drummed the lesson into her all her life. All you have to do is tell people you have something and they want it. They want it already; they learn what they want when you show it to them.
As the lone steward of the properties her father’d left her, she considered herself rich, just as she’d always considered her father rich: collecting rent every month on places whose tenants didn’t have enough leverage to demand repairs, tenants who lacked the social standing to assert their right to a plumbing upgrade or to functional wiring in every room. At Morton’s, her focus would probably have been on the strong monthly cash flow her properties represented, and on ways one might increase their yield if he felt so inclined. Cosmetic improvements—subdivisions, even, if he felt up to it. Pay for themselves in a year, two at most. There was a whole side yard adjacent to the bookstore, big enough to build a second property on, an easy sell depending on what kind of client you found for the—
“I looked it up,” he might have said. “The porno store, right?” I know from the books his parents had to retrieve from his office later that he’d been reading up on the importance of establishing yourself as fearless in business.
“It’s closed now,” she might have said with a little irritation. “Do you want to give it the once-over? I haven’t had a chance to see if they moved everything out.”
These are possibilities. We know that Evelyn Gates paid for dinner, tipping twelve percent, and that they then drove to Milpitas. His hotel was near the airport, but I’m not sure if they left his car at the Morton’s parking lot or drove in separate cars. I’m not sure it matters. I just want to be able to get a clear picture of it, because they were both in here once, and my need to see what that looked like has become sharper since I moved in.
KNIGHTS QUEST
The brochure had a detailed map showing Kenyon College as it related to nearby cities and counties. Derrick couldn’t stop studying it. Some of the best science fiction books, he’d found, feature maps of imaginary terrain on their opening pages. He always found himself going back to the map as he read through them, trying to situate himself within the fictional space again and again, until it seemed as real as the outside world. Knowing where the rivers were, the names of the lakes. Anything short of full immersion felt like a cheat.
People his age often feel trapped by the towns they grow up in, he knew. They complained about it all the time, even if plenty of them were born elsewhere—Seattle, some of them; San Francisco, several more; Colorado, at least two he knew of. A couple of sophomores at school, two years back, had come all the way from Florida; they’d been welcomed with that mixture of awe and suspicion usually reserved in America for visiting royalty.
The other side of the coin, however, never seemed to merit much thought from his classmates: the comfort of living in a place you’d always known, the ease of knowing your parameters. Derrick’s bike ride from the store to his house, for example: he’d never once had to plot it out. Even when they tore up the street to put in fiber-optic lines, the grid beneath remained familiar. Second nature. Sometimes these days they’d pave over a whole cluster of old buildings to make way for an office building, but it made no difference to Derrick’s sense of his own position on the map, because the coordinates didn’t change.