Distraction

“I don’t want to put it that way …”

Oscar gazed emptily at the back of the bus. The blank shell of the bus suddenly struck him as an alien and horrible thing. It had stolen him from his home and the woman in his bedroom. The cam-paign bus had kidnapped him. He turned his back on the bus and began walking with his phone, randomly, toward the tangled Texan woods. “No,” he said. “I know. It’s the work. It’s our careers. I did it first. I took on a big job, and I left you. Didn’t I? I left you alone, and I’m still gone. I’m far away, and I don’t know when I’ll come back.”

“Well,” she said, “you said it, not me. But that’s very true.”

“So I really have no business finding fault with you. If I did, I’d be a hypocrite, wouldn’t I? We both knew this might happen. It was never a commitment.”

“Tha t’ s right.”

“It was a relationship.”

“I liked the relationship.”

“It was good, wasn’t it? It was very good, for what it was.”

Clare sighed. “No, Oscar, I can’t let you say that. Don’t say that, it wouldn’t be fair. It was better than good. It was great, it was totally ideal. I mean, you were such a great source for me. You never tried to spin my stories, and you hardly ever lied. You let me live in your house. You introduced me to all your rich and influential friends. You supported my career. You never yelled at me. You were a real gen-tleman. Brilliant. A dream boyfriend.”

“You’re being so sweet.” He could feel himself hemorrhage.

“I’m really sorry that I was never able to… you know… quite get over your personal background thing.”

“No,” Oscar said bitterly, “I’m very used to that.”

“It’s just — it’s just one of those permanent tragedies. Like, you know, my own troubled minority background.”

Oscar sighed. “Clare, I don’t think anybody really holds it against you that you’re a white Anglo-Saxon.”

“No, life is hard in a racial minority. It just is. I mean, you of all people ought to have some feeling for what that really means. I know you can’t help the way you were born, but still … I mean, that’s one of the real reasons I want to do this Dutch assignment. There’s been so much white flight from America back into Europe… My people are there, you know? My roots are there. I think it might help me, somehow.”

Oscar was finding it hard to breathe.

“I feel bad about this, sweetheart, like I’ve really let you down.”

“No, this is better,” Oscar said. “It hurts a lot, but it hurts less than dragging it on and keeping up a false pretense. Let’s part as friends.”

“I might be back, you know. You don’t have to be all hasty like that. You don’t have to turn on a dime. Because it’s just me, your pal Clare, you know? It’s not like an executive decision.”

“Let’s have a clean break,” he said firmly. “It’s best for us. For both of us.”

“All right. If you’re sure, then I guess I understand. Good-bye, Oscar.”

“It’s over, Clare. Good-bye.” He hung up. Then he threw the phone into the trees.

“Nothing works,” he told the red dirt and gray sky. “I can’t ever make anything work!”

3

Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-sca

“I’m a cornerstone,” the cinder block a

“I’m a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left.” Oscar ignored this demand, and swiftly taped six more blocks. He whipped the sca

As he set his gloved hands to it, the last block warned him, “Don’t install me yet. Install that cornerstone first.”

“Sure,” Oscar told it. The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn’t hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape’s thumbnail-sized speak-ers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt.

Bambakias had created this construction system. Like all of the architect’s brainchildren, his system was very functional, yet rife with idiosyncratic grace-notes. Oscar had full confidence in the system, a pragmatic faith won from much hands-on experience. Oscar had la-bored like a mule in many Bambakias construction sites. No one ever won the trust of Alcott Bambakias, or joined his i

Heavy labor was the heart and soul of the Bambakias intellectual salon. W. Alcott Bambakias had quite a number of unorthodox be-liefs, but chief among them was his deep conviction that sycophants and rip-off artists always tired easily. Bambakias, like many members of the modern overclass, was always ready with an openhearted ges-ture, a highly public flinging of golden ducats. His largesse naturally attracted parasites, but he rid himself of “the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots,” as he insisted on calling them, by demanding fre-quent stints of brute physical work. “It’ll be fun,” Bambakias would a

Bambakias was no day laborer. He was a wealthy sophisticate, and his wife was a noted art collector. It was for exactly those reasons that the couple took such perverse pleasure in publicly raising blisters, straining tendons, and sweating like hogs. The architect’s ruggedly handsome face would light up with hundred-watt noblesse oblige as he chugged away in his faux blue-collar overalls and back brace. His elegant wife took clear masochistic pleasure in hauling construction equipment, her chiseled features set with the grim commitment of a supermodel pumping iron.

Oscar himself had grown up in Hollywood. He’d never minded the poseur elements in the Bambakias couple. The trademark hat-and-cape ensemble, the hand-tailored couture gowns, the glam-struck Boston charity events — Oscar found this sort of thing reassuringly homey. In any case, the construction system made it all worthwhile. There was no pretense to the system — no question that it worked. Any number could play. It was a system that could find a working role for anyone. It was both a network and a way of life, flowing from its basis in digital communication and design into the rock-hard emer-gent reality of walls and floors. There was a genuine comfort in work-ing within a system like this one, because it always kept its promises, it always brought results.

This Texan hotel, for instance, was an entirely virtual construc-tion, ones and zeros embedded in a set of chips. And yet, the hotel direly wanted to exist. It would become very beautiful, and it was already very smart. It could sweet-talk itself into physical existence from random piles of raw material. It would be a good hotel. It would brighten the neighborhood and enhance the city. It would keep the wind and rain off. People would dwell in it.

Oscar lugged the self-declared cornerstone to the corner of the southern wall. “I belong here,” the cornerstone declared. “Put mortar on me.”

Oscar picked up a trowel. “I’m the tool for the mortar,” the little trowel squeaked cheerfully. Oscar put the trowel to use and slathered up a grainy wedge of thick gray paste. This polymer goo was not actually “mortar,” but it was just as cheap as traditional mortar, and it worked much better, so it had naturally stolen the word from the original substance.

Oscar hefted the cinder block to the top of the hip-high wall.

“To the right,” urged the block. “To the right, to the right, to the right… To the left… Move me backward… Twist me, twist me, twist me … Good! Now scan me.”