Kurt drummed his fingers nervously on his palms the whole way to Bell offices. Alan grabbed his hand and stilled it. “Stop worrying,” he said. “This is going to go great.”
“I still don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Kurt said. “They’re the phone company. They hate us, we hate them. Can’t we just leave it that way?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll still all hate each other when we get done.”
“So why bother?” He sounded petulant and groggy, and Alan reached under his seat for the thermos he’d had filled at the Greek’s before heading to Kurt’s place. “Coffee,” he said, and handed it to Kurt, who groaned and swigged and stopped bitching.
“Why bother is this,” Alan said. “We’re going to get a lot of publicity for doing this.” Kurt snorted into the thermos. “It’s going to be a big deal. You know how big a deal this can be. We’re going to communicate that to the press, who will communicate it to the public, and then there will be a shitstorm. Radio cops, telco people, whatever—they’re going to try to discredit us. I want to know what they’re liable to say.”
“Christ, you’re dragging me out for that? I can tell you what they’ll say. They’ll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn, terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They’ll tell us that any tool for communicating that they can’t tap, log, and switch off is irresponsible. They’ll tell us we’re stealing from ISPs. It’s what they say every time someone tries this: Philly, New York, London. All around the world same song.”
Alan nodded. “That’s good background—thanks. I still want to know how they say it, what the flaws are in their expression of their argument. And I wanted us to run a demo for some people who we could never hope to sway—that’s a good audience for exposing the flaws in the show. This’ll be a good prep session.”
“So I pulled an all-nighter and busted my nuts to produce a demo for a bunch of people we don’t care about? Thanks a lot.”
Alan started to say something equally bitchy back, and then he stopped himself. He knew where this would end up—a screaming match that would leave both of them emotionally overwrought at a time when they needed cool heads. But he couldn’t think of what to tell Kurt in order to placate him. All his life, he’d been in situations like this: confronted by people who had some beef, some grievance, and he’d had no answer for it. Usually he could puzzle out the skeleton of their cause, but sometimes—times like this—he was stumped.
He picked at the phrase. I pulled an all-nighter. Kurt pulled an all-nighter because he’d left this to the last minute, not because Alan had surprised him with it. He knew that, of course. Was waiting, then, for Alan to bust him on it. To tell him, This is your fault, not mine. To tell him If this demo fails, it’s because you fucked off and left it to the last minute. So he was angry, but not at Alan, he was angry at himself.