"Petey, talk to me. Are you there? Petey?"
"I've been fired. From my own company."
"I can hardly hear you. I don't understand. What do you mean fired?"
"Fired," he shouted, and immediately regretted it. The sting in his head and heart diverged, spread. As if on cue, the secret thing in his heart asserted itself again. With its arrival, an abstraction formed in his drunken mind. He thought of the word "mate." It represented the start of his life. Because of the Mate, he had met Kate. She was his soul mate, and with her he had experienced his coming of age. And wasn't she, in some ways, the inspiration behind the Joey? Wasn't their nomadic relationship what had inspired him to design a computer you could take with you when you went away? Now it had been taken from him. How long, he wondered, before Kate was gone too? The more aware he was of this feeling, of losing the things close to his heart, the more aware he became of his newest mate, the disagreeable feeling that had burrowed inside him. At this moment it was troubled, like a tiny caged creature suffering from hunger spasms, nourishment lying within its line of sight, in its owner's hand, beyond its reach, so close, yet so far away.
Kate shouted his name into the phone, breaking him out of his stupor. "Tell me what happened."
"Matthew's in control. They want me to sit in an office. Be a thinker." He became outraged by his own account. "A fucking thinker."
"Then you're not fired, right, Peter. Then you're not fired?"
"Good as. Nothin' left for me to do there."
"Baby, I'm in LA at the studio. I'm leaving right now. I'll be there as fast as I can. No more than a couple hours."
"Okay," he said softly.