“Salutations,” Comstock said now, his standard greeting. Then he added, “？Qué pasa, hombre?”
The Spanish startled Chris—was it a comment on his ethnicity? He looked like his dad, who was, in fact, Latino—self-hating, Chris liked to needle him, although that was too extreme. But it was fair to say that Bennie Salazar had subsumed his Honduran origins in a Countercultural Mien [1Aiiip] starting in high school, right here in San Francisco. A punk rocker who’d presided over a band unforgivably named the Flaming Dildos, his father had been too ashamed to bring a single friend home to Daly City, where he lived with Chris’s grandmother （who lived there still） and one of Chris’s four aunts, who’d had a baby while in high school.
Chris would have liked to greet Comstock’s ?Qué pasa? with a torrent of Spanish, but his father had always insisted he take French. “How long have you worked at SweetSpot?” he asked instead.
“Too long.”
“Meaning—a week?”
“Five years.”
Chris felt a squiggle of doubt. “Haven’t we only existed for three…？”
“I was in it before it was SweetSpot,” Comstock said. “Sid and I go way back.”
Chris had never met anyone who knew Sid Stockton; only others like himself, who had been hypnotized by him. “How come you’re stuck in Diagnostics if you and Sid are tight?” he asked.
“I’m not a team player,” Comstock said. “But Sid can’t chuck me—I know where the bodies are buried.”
Chris felt a quiver of awareness: a sense of new experience tilting his way. It was the feeling he’d had when he first spotted Pamela at Colin’s graduation from Sylvan Shires, an inpatient rehab in the East Bay: a sense that the excitable girl with dangly heart-shaped earrings would lead him somewhere new. Chris had mistaken Pamela for a friend or relative of a graduate, not a person with an addiction. But the feeling had been right: He’d never loved anyone so much. And Pamela had loved him, or seemed to until her relapse, after which point Chris could only fume ineffectually as she nodded off in front of the Yu-Gi-Oh! cartoons she liked to watch when she was high, strands of orange hard-candy drool lazing from her mouth. Chris’s shouting, begging, and intermittent weeping couldn’t touch Pamela in that state; she greeted all of it with tender, blinkered euphoria.
Comstock was talking—which, for Comstock, meant sweeping words in Chris’s general direction without looking at him. “… take my bike for a… Want to come…？”
“Sure,” Chris said reflexively, aware that Raffish Outsiders seldom repeated an offer. In truth, he couldn’t go anywhere—he’d have to work the rest of the day to complete his algebraizations by morning. But there was no need to pull away just yet. He walked downhill beside Comstock away from SweetSpot’s blond-wood lobby, which soared invitingly behind plate glass. The block facing theirs was bisected by “Junkie Alley,” where Chris had seen people injecting into their groins and necks when he dared to look. SweetSpot claimed it couldn’t regulate what took place across the street, but the smokers had a different theory: Management tolerated the dire symmetry because it kept SweetSpotters from venturing outside their cushy citadel.
Comstock’s dented black Harley-Davidson was parked amid a bevy of bicycles that looked like cowering fawns beside it. The moment had come for Chris to peel off—or, rather, a succession of moments had come and gone, each having seemed just slightly premature. Comstock tapped the seat of his bike, inviting Chris to experience firsthand its brand-new leather padding. Chris mounted, aware that the moment had now decisively arrived, then was taken aback when Comstock hopped on in front of him with surprising agility for a big man, bringing their torsos into disarming union. Comstock gunned the engine and the bike lurched forward, forcing Chris to seize his acquaintance’s warm midriff in order not to somersault backward into the street. They gobbled up a hill and plunged down its backside, pounded by wind and the quaking, shrieking vibrations from the machine. Chris was terrified. He had little experience of physical danger; his parents had taught him, in earnest unison, that his young life was precious, and he had absorbed the lesson.