Bound God

Chapter 3: The Second Door

Six came and he was awake for it.

The refrigerator held a jar of pickles, four eggs, and a bottle of water he had opened three days ago and hadn't finished. He drank some of it standing up with the door open, put the bottle back on the shelf, and looked at the eggs for a while. Then he changed his shirt and went down the stairs.

He had slept ninety minutes in the desk chair with his shoes on, and he had decided that counted as a night.

July in the District was eighty degrees before the sun got over the buildings, and the air had been sitting on the city all night with nothing moving through it. He walked to the corner. The bus came at 6:14, smelled like a bus, and was full. Nobody on it was talking, which was the best thing about six in the morning.

He did the month's arithmetic on the way in, because the ride was long and the numbers were short. The stipend came once a month and covered the rent and about one meal a day, if the meal was a decision. Troy paid by the hour — forty hours in a good month, eleven in a bad one — and Troy had given him last night off by leaving him off the schedule and not mentioning it. Tutoring and the bar both paid cash, and the cash was the only money in his life that moved at the speed he did. The bar paid the worst rate of the three and took the most out of him, and it was the one he wasn't going to give up.

*Ask a busy man.* He had been telling himself that for two years. It was a joke the first hundred times, and after that it was closer to a job description.

Today: the paper, until his eyes quit. Tutoring at two, cash, across town. The bar at eight, where the boss had asked him to bring two more people who could keep their mouths shut, because somebody was coming in that was worth closing the back room for. Two people who could keep their mouths shut. That ruled out the regulars, the other three on the rota, and, on a bad night, him.

The east building on the quad had a card reader at the front door and a frosted panel beside it with a department name in letters somebody had ordered once and never reconsidered. His card worked on the front door, on the elevator, and on the lab on the fourth floor. There was exactly one door in that building it had never opened.

At 6:40 the lab was empty and cold the way rooms are cold when nobody has been in them and nothing has been running. He hit the lights on the far side, woke his machine, and sat down.

What he'd carried in from the bus was a cost model. It had ridden with him from the third stop and it wanted out: what it actually costs to split a table across a second index, and where the second index stops paying for itself and starts eating the write path. Nobody had asked him for it. Nobody had ever asked him for it.

He typed for forty minutes. No sentences. Terms, arrows, the crossover point written down with a number under it, then the same model again with the assumptions changed to see if the number moved. It moved. He wrote that down too, and saved the file, and made a second copy of the file, out of a habit he had never worked out and did not intend to.

At 7:40 he got a granola bar out of the machine by the elevators and ate it in three bites at his desk, because the machine took the card and the card had money on it today.

At eight exactly, the door opened and Professor Alan Vance came in and shut it with his heel.

Vance was sixty-something and did not sit down. His name was on the cover of the book the department handed to sophomores and on the cover of the book they handed out after that, and when he stopped in a doorway, graduate students stopped talking.

"Banks."

"Professor."

"Your paper isn't in."

"It's close."

"Close is a place, not a date." Vance came down the aisle between the desks and stopped at Coin's monitor and read what was on it for about two seconds and said nothing about it. "The summer session closes Thursday. Two days. The department can hold a door open for a graduate student. I can't hold it open on nothing."

"Tomorrow morning."

Vance looked at him.

"Tomorrow morning," Coin said again. "I've been clearing work off my desk."

"I noticed." Vance put his hands behind his back. "You're in here at six. The other two knuckleheads won't cross the quad before nine — one of them with a smoothie, one of them with a story about his machine. I have three students and one of them shows up."

"Sir—"

"I'm not chasing you, Banks. I don't have the time for it and you're not a child. I'm telling you what this looks like from where I sit, and I'm telling you the door closes Thursday, and I'm telling you that in thirty years I have never once written a letter for a student who missed it."

He meant it. He was also the same man who had walked into the registrar's office in May with one sentence about one name on one list, and by that afternoon the list had changed and three weeks of form had evaporated, and Vance had come back to the lab and complained about the coffee. Coin had watched the whole thing from his desk and hadn't said anything then, and wasn't going to say anything now. He put the two halves of the man in the same drawer and closed the drawer on both of them.

"Two days," Vance said.

"Tomorrow morning."

Vance looked at the racks along the north wall, and then at his shoes, which he did about once a week.

"I had a grandson sit at that desk," he said.

"Sir?"

Coin let it sit.

"My grandson." Vance straightened his sleeve. "He had hands for this. He could look at a system and see where it was going to break. He's in finance now. He didn't change his mind, is what I'm saying. He quit." He said *quit* the way other people said a diagnosis. Then: "Two days."

"Tomorrow morning."

"Good." Vance took the key ring and the card out of his pocket. "Come here."

***

The second door opened onto cold.

It wasn't a room with a machine in it. It was a machine that had been given a room. The racks went up a floor and a half and ran back further than the light did, aisle after aisle of them, and the noise came down on him all at once — a wall of hum at a frequency that got into his teeth. The floor was cold through his shoes. Overhead the trays of cabling ran in gray channels, and every few feet a small light blinked green out of the dark like something keeping count.

He stopped two steps inside and priced it, out of habit: cabinet count, power, cooling, the ratio of floor to metal, what a month of this would cost at market. The number he came out with was a number he would have had to work a year and a half to see.

"You can walk it," Vance said. "Don't touch anything with a light on it."

They went up the center aisle. Somewhere in the middle of the room, two people in matching polo shirts came around the far end with a clipboard between them — badges clipped at the collar, the same two shades of gray as the racks. They were checking indicator lights, one row at a time. Neither of them looked at Vance, and one of them looked at Coin for slightly longer than the other one did, and then they were past and it was just noise again.

There had been a page for this building once, at the beginning. Three lines and a signature line. The first line said he wouldn't talk about it. The second said he wouldn't bring anybody in. The third said he wouldn't photograph anything. He'd read the first three lines. He'd assumed there were more on the back, and for as long as he'd had the card, the back of that page had been the least interesting thing in the building.

"Nine in the morning, this is the fastest thing the department's got, and it isn't the fastest thing in the country," Vance said. "The department has a slice of it. I decide who eats the slice."

"Can I run on it."

"You can run on it when your paper is in my box." Vance kept walking. "That's the order. It was the order before you asked and it'll be the order after."

"Okay."

"Okay what."

"Okay, tomorrow morning."

Vance grunted, which was as close as he came to pleasant, and went to the console at the end of the room and started bringing up the day's work.

They ran it for three hours. The database had come in from two places that didn't know about each other and weren't supposed to — different vendors, different schemas, one of them still carrying a column named for a product that hadn't existed since 2009 — and Coin's job was to make them one thing without losing a row or inventing one. He had done this enough times that his hands knew the order: dump, map, normalize the dates, run the checksum, find the forty rows that didn't match, find out why, fix why, run it again. Full service, satisfaction guaranteed. He was the full service.

"Here," he said, somewhere around ten.

Vance leaned over. "Show me the count."

"Four ninety-two."

"Before?"

"Four ninety-two plus two."

"Which two."

"One was a duplicate the second vendor created by retrying a failed insert. The other one's a real record with a birthday in 1901."

Vance thought about it. "Keep both."

"I kept both."

By 11:20 the merge was clean and the report was in the share and Vance was already talking about Thursday. Coin stood up and stretched until his back popped. They went out through the inner door, and Vance locked it behind them and put the keys back in his pocket, and the hallway was warm again.

There was a person in it.

He was leaning on the wall beside the water fountain with one foot flat against the baseboard, arms folded, looking down the corridor like he was reading it. Tall. Dressed too well for a Tuesday morning. Left ear ringed with small studs, a dozen of them on the one side, catching the overhead light every time his head moved. Nineteen, twenty, somewhere in there.

He looked at Coin — the look you give a chair you have to walk around, brief, with no need to repeat it — and then he was looking at nothing again.

Coin didn't know him. He guessed, in order: an undergraduate who'd ignored the office hours on the door; somebody's brother; somebody from the front office with bad news. He didn't ask. He walked past the kid and pushed the button for the elevator.

Vance was still at the door behind him, working the lab lock with the key ring, in no hurry about it. The numbers came down. By the water fountain, the kid hadn't moved at all.