Ah, he thought. She was nervous because he was so goddamned weird. Well, there you had it. He couldn’t even get sad about it. Story of his life, really.
“Thanks for the tip,” he said. “What if I assure you that I’ll come on easy?”
She blushed. It had really been awkward for her, then. He felt bad. “Okay,” she said. “Sure. Sorry, man—”
He held up a hand. “It’s nothing.”
He followed her back to the store and he bought a tin robot made out of a Pepsi can by some artisan in Vietnam who’d endowed it with huge tin testicles. It made him laugh. When he got home, he scanned and filed the receipt, took a picture, and entered it into The Inventory, and by the time he was done, he was feeling much better.
They got into Kurt’s car at five p.m., just as the sun was beginning to set. The sun hung on the horizon, right at eye level, for an eternity, slicing up their eyeballs and into their brains.
“Summer’s coming on,” Alan said.
“And we’ve barely got the Market covered,” Kurt said. “At this rate, it’ll take ten years to cover the whole city.”
Alan shrugged. “It’s the journey, dude, not the destination—the act of organizing all these people, of putting up the APs, of advancing the art. It’s all worthwhile in and of itself.”