*
“These things are a bitch to fix,” the computer guy said Monday evening. “Seriously, these files are always corrupted. You’re probably better off just wiping the whole thing.”
The computer screen was black, and the computer guy was typing white numbers in a strange font. William had never seen this side of his computer before, and he felt a little betrayed.
“Might be better off starting over,” the computer guy tapped the monitor. “This one’s pretty archaic, no offense.”
He wasn’t offended. He’d gotten the old computer in the arrangement.
“She throw in the dot matrix printer?” The computer guy was making a joke. “Maybe she’s got a floppy drive you could have.”
William remembered the sound of a floppy drive, the same low grunting Hannah made as a baby nursing.
“I don’t have kids,” the computer guy shrugged. “I can take it in if you want.”
“Nah,” William said. “I’ll keep it.” He didn’t like the idea of his A15 forms completing themselves distantly. It made him feel lonely.
“Not my place to say,” the computer guy said. He picked up one of the dead leaves from the floor. “Some wind,” he said. “Crazy season.”
With the computer guy gone, the house was quiet. Down the street, someone was yelling, an angry garbled sound. It grew louder. William stood at the blinds and watched a dark figure shamble up the street. Then it was creaking the porch. Shadows shifted and flashed behind the blinds. The pavement glistened as if it had been raining. He glimpsed the sharp lights of the skyline, the bridges festooned with red taillights.
Something on the porch was heavy and coughing. It muttered and rang the doorbell. William had that feeling he sometimes had, a wish that someone bigger and older—his father, maybe— would arrive and take care of things for him.
A man stood on the porch with his collar pulled up. He had pockmarked cheeks, eyebrows puffed like knotty scars.
“You live here?” the man grunted. He coughed and turned to spit something over the railing.
“About a month, now,” William said. He wondered if his visitor had known the previous tenant.
“I wanted to ask,” the man said. “Do you want your lawn mowed?”
It was dark and the man didn’t have a lawn mower. William also did not have a lawn mower. “That might be nice,” he said, mainly because he was curious how it would work.
“Been in the neighborhood my whole life.” The man shrugged. “Wasn’t sure if they would be able to put someone in here,” he said. “Thought they’d maybe just tear the place down.” He turned to squint at the condos across the street, narrowing his eyes as if expecting those would be torn down, too. Maybe his landlord was telling him something different about the future of the neighborhood, prophesizing whatever the opposite of gentrification was. “I’ll come by later on,” the man said. “During the daytime.” He spoke the last part slowly, as if he were explaining something and he didn’t expect William to understand.
“Do you want me to help you buy a new computer?” Sara said when he called her. “There’s a sale this weekend. Maybe we can get a deal.”
“Sure,” William said. “Sure.” But he was already turning on the old one. There were websites that would tell you this kind of thing, would tell you if something terrible had happened in your house. The green light was missing, he realized, as he conducted his search unmolested. He guessed even hackers couldn’t sit in front of their computers all the time.
Just as he was thinking it, a photo appeared on his desktop. It was William, standing with the computer guy, their faces warm in the glow from the screen. A tree stood behind them in the doorway with gnarled bark and twisting branches. Its mouth gaped, and vines crept around the stacks of boxes. Branches curled in the doorway. “Safety is not an option,” the caption said.
William whirled around to find nothing. The dried leaf sat husk-like in the doorway where the computer guy had dropped it.