Read Online Watchlist by Bryan Hurt - Free Book Online Page B

on the porch, my vigorous young father, who was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and didn’t have even a trace of gray in his hair, my father, who always made everything right. But not this time. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What is it?”
    And my mother coming through the screen door to the porch, a towel in one hand and her hair snarled wet from the lake. And me. I was fighting back tears, my legs and arms like sticks, striped polo shirt, faded shorts. “It’s,” I said, “it’s—”
    â€œStop,” I said. “Reset.” It was my dog, Queenie, that was what it was, dead on the road that morning, and who’d left the gate ajar so she could get out in the first place? Even though he’d been warned about it a hundred times?
    I was in a dark room. There was a pot between my legs, and it was giving off a fierce odor. I needed to go deeper, needed out of this. I spouted random dates, saw myself driving to work, stuck in traffic with ten thousand other fools who could only wish they had a fast-forward app, saw myself in my thirties, post-Lisa, pre-Christine, obsessing over Halo, and I stayed there through all the toppling hours, reliving myself in the game, boxes within boxes, until finally I thought of God, or what passes for God in my life, the mystery beyond words, beyond lasers and silicon chips. I gave a date nine months before I was born, “December 30, 1962, 6:00 a.m.,” when I was, what—a zygote?—but the box gave me nothing, neither visual nor audio. And that was wrong, deeply wrong. There should have been a heartbeat. My mother’s heartbeat, the first thing we hear—or feel, feel before we even have ears.
    â€œStop,” I said. “Reset.” A wave of rising exhilaration swept over me even as the words came to my lips, “September 30, 1963, 2:35 a.m.,” and the drumbeat started up, ba-boom, ba-boom , but no visual, not yet, the minutes ticking by, ba-boom, ba-boom , and then I was there, in the light of this world, and my mother in her stained hospital gown and the man with the monobrow and the flashing glasses, the stranger, the doctor, saying what he was going to say by way of congratulations and relief. A boy. It’s a boy.
    Then it all went dead, and there was somebody standing in front of me, and I didn’t recognize her, not at first, how could I? “Dad,” she was saying. “Dad, are you there?”
    I blinked. Tried to focus.
    â€œNo,” I said finally, shaking my head in slow emphasis, the word itself, the denial, heavy as a stone in my mouth. “I’m not here. I’m not. I’m not.”

Scroogled
    by Cory Doctorow
    Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.
    â€”Cardinal Richelieu
    We don’t know enough about you.
    â€”Google CEO Eric Schmidt
    Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8:00 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck.
    Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.
    Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-aged couple ahead of him.
    â€œThe marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: IMMIGRATION—POWERED BY GOOGLE.
    â€œI thought that didn’t start