"I never set out to get famous --"

"You took part in a national movement, Perry. You practically *founded* it. What did you think was going to happen --"

"You're saying that we were just attention wh.o.r.es --"

"No, Perry, no. We weren't *just* attention wh.o.r.es. We were attention wh.o.r.es *and* we built and ran cool s.h.i.t. There's nothing wrong with being an attention wh.o.r.e. It's an attention economy. If you're going to be a working stiff, you should pick a decent currency to get paid in. But you can't sit there and tell me that it didn't feel good, didn't feel *great* to have all those people looking up to us, following us into battle, throwing themselves at us --"

Perry held up his hands. His friend was looking more alive than he had at any time since Perry had been ushered into his workshop. He sat up straight, and the old glint of mischief and good humor was in his eye.

"I surrender, buddy, you're right." They ordered desserts, heavy "diplomat puddings" -- bread pudding made with cake and cherries, and Lester dug in, after making Perry swear not to breathe a word of it to Suzanne. He ate with such visible pleasure that Perry felt like a voyeur.

"How long did you say you were in town for?"

"I'm just pa.s.sing through," Perry said. He had only planned on maybe seeing Lester long enough for lunch or something. Now it seemed a foregone conclusion that he'd be put up in the "guest cottage." He thought about getting back on the road. There was a little gang in Oregon that made novelty school supplies, they were always ramping up for their busy season at this time of year. They were good people to work for.

"Come on, where you got to be? Stay a week. I'll put you on the payroll as a consultant. You can give lunch-hour talks to the R&D team, whatever you want."

"Lester, you just got through telling me how much you hate your job --"

"That's the beauty of contracting -- you don't stick around long enough to hate it, and you never have to worry about the org chart. Come on, pal --"

"I'll think about it."

Lester fell asleep on the car ride home, and Kapriel didn't mind if Perry didn't want to chat, so he just rolled his windows down and watched the LA lights scream past as they hit the premium lanes on the crosstown freeways, heading to Lester's place in Topanga Canyon. When they arrived, Lester roused himself heavily, clutched his stomach, then raced for the house. Kapriel shook his head and rolled his eyes, then showed Perry to the front door and shook his hand.

In the morning, he prowled Lester and Suzanne's place like a burglar. The guesthouse had once served as Lester's workshop and it had the telltale leavings of a busy inventor -- drawers and tubs of parts, a moldy coffee-cup in a desk-drawer, pens and toys and unread postal spam in piles. What it didn't have was a kitchen, so Perry helped himself to the key that Lester had left him with the night before and wandered around the big house, looking for the kitchen.

It turned out to be on the second floor, a bit of weird architectural design that was characteristic of the place, which had started as a shack in the hills on several acres of land and then grown and grown as successive generations of owners had added extensions, seismic retrofitting, and new floors.

Perry found the pantries filled with high-tech MREs, each nutritionally balanced and fortified in ways calculated to make Lester as healthy as possible. Finally, he found a small cupboard clearly devoted to Suzanne's eating, with boxes of breakfast cereal and, way in the back, a little bag of Oreos. He munched thoughtfully on the cookies while drinking more of the flat, thrice-distilled water.

He heard Lester totter into a bathroom on the floor above, and called "Good morning," up a narrow, winding staircase.

Lester groaned back at him, a sound that Perry hadn't heard in years, that theatrical oh-my-s.h.i.t-it's-another-day sound.

He clomped down the stairs with his cane, wearing a pair of boxer-shorts and rubber slippers. He was gaunt, the hair on his sunken chest gone wiry grey, and the skin around his torso sagged. From the neck down, he looked a hundred years old. Perry looked away.

"Morning, bro," Lester said, and took a vacuum-sealed pouch out of a medical white box over the sink, tore it open, added purified water, and put it in the microwave. The smell was like wet cardboard in a dumpster. Perry wrinkled his nose.

"Tastes better than it smells. Or looks," Lester said. "Very easy on the digestion. Which I need. Never let me pig out like that again, OK?"

He collapsed heavily into a stool and closed his sunken eyes. Without opening them, he said, "So, are you in?"

"Am I in?"

"You going to come on board as my consultant?"

"You were serious about that, huh?"

"Perry, they can't fire me. If I quit, I lose my health bennies, which means I'll be broke in a month. Which puts us at an impa.s.se. I'm past feeling guilty about doing nothing much all day long, but that doesn't mean I'm not bored."

"You make it sound so attractive."

"You got something better to do?"

"I'm in."

Suzanne came home a week later and found them sitting up in the living room. They'd pushed all the furniture up against the walls and covered the floor with board-game boards, laid edge-to-edge or overlapping. They had tokens, cards and money from several of the games laid out around the rims of the games.

"What the blistering f.u.c.k?" she said good naturedly. Lester had told her that Perry was around, so she'd been prepared for something odd, but this was pretty amazing, even so. Lester held up a hand for silence and rolled two dice. They skittered across the floor, one of them slipping through the heating-grating.

"Three points," Perry said. "One for not going into the grating, two for going into the grating."

"I thought we said it was two points for not going into the grating, and one for dropping it?"

"Let's call it 1.5 points for each."

"Gentlemen," Suzanne said, "I believe I asked a question? To wit, 'What the blistering f.u.c.k --'"

"Calvinball," Lester said. "Like in the old Calvin and Hobbes strips. The rules are, the rules can never be the same twice."

"And you're supposed to wear a mask," Perry said. "But we kept stepping on the pieces."

"No peripheral vision," Lester said.

"Caucus race!" Perry yelled, and took a lap around the world. Lester struggled to his feet, then flopped back down.

"I disbelieve," he said, taking up two ten-sided dice and rolling them. "87," he said.

"Fine," Perry said. He picked up a Battleship board and said, "B7,"

and then he said, "What's the score, anyway?"

"Orange to seven," Lester said.

"Who's orange?"

"You are."

"s.h.i.t. OK, let's take a break."

Suzanne tried to hold in her laughter, but she couldn't. She ended up doubled over, tears streaming down her face. When she straightened up, Lester hobbled to her and gave her a surprisingly strong welcome-home hug. He smelled like Lester, like the man she'd shared her bed with all these years.

Perry held out his hand to her and she yanked him into a long, hard hug.