Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [105]
Chapter 59
I’m thinking of a short, ornery man I saw a few days earlier for a few fleeting seconds. He was walking out of the pretend dental offices. He wore a jeans jacket with a patch: “Khe Sahn.”
I call Directory Assistance. I ask for the main number for the Veterans Administration Hospital. I’m transferred to it, wind my way through an automated phone tree, get a live operator, and ask if there’s a Khe Sahn survivor organization, or club, office, anything of that general description.
There indeed is such a place. It’s in the Mission neighborhood, at Twenty-fourth and Valencia.
America’s greatest tensions play out in the Mission, in the form of a battle over the proper ingredients for a taco.
For many years, the neighborhood was a center of Mexican-American culture and a refuge for low-income residents huddling in the shadow of gentrification. The place was dotted with taquerias that served tortillas stuffed with rice, beans, and your choice of chicken, pork, or beef.
Then along came the organic tofu-crumble taco joints.
They and their brethren—the Bohemian brunch spots with meat substitutes and martini bars with elderberry-flavored vodka lite drinks—are the mainstays of the hipsters moving into the gentrifying neighborhood.
Their parents experimented with drugs and sex, but the hipsters are playing out their discontent by inventing new combinations of omelet ingredients using farm fresh produce and biotechnology.
In a way, the two cultures need each other. The low-income renters give the hipsters Bohemian legitimacy and flare, the hipster entrepreneurs hire the renters to serve the gluten-free wheat cakes—but the co-existence can’t last long. The cost of living is destined to drive out both and leave the rest of us with alternating Chili’s and Verizon outlets.
Certainly, there won’t long be room for the likes of 455 Twenty-fourth Street, the worn-down storefront that is home to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Mission District Center. It is a decidedly narrow property sandwiched between a pawnshop and Ike’s Ironic Organic Yogurt Creamery. (A sign reads: “Ike Taylor Green Tea Tofugurt packs a wallop!”)
The man sitting behind the computer at the Veterans Center looks like he might pack one too.
I recognize him from the dental offices—a compact fellow wound tight with unkempt facial hair and a bent-over posture that went out of style 800,000 years ago.
He does not look up when I walk in.
I approach his desk tentatively.
“What,” he demands, without looking up.
My own onboard computer almost crashes trying to process this creature’s multitude of medical issues. The bottom of his right ear is missing, I’m guessing from a war wound. A scar on his neck suggests tracheotomy, or shrapnel or puncture wound. His right hand, the one gliding the mouse, shakes. Doesn’t feel like Parkinson’s, so the movement probably speaks to side effects from an antidepressant.
“I’m Nat Idle. I’m a writer interested in the Human Memory Crusade.” “Writer” sounds exotic, “journalist” threatening.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“It’s the program on your computer that lets you talk about your memories.”
He smirks. “My memories stink.”
“I heard about the technology from Chuck Taylor, one of the higher-ups from DOD who’s helping design the software.”
“I don’t use it anymore. They took the computer and gave me a faster one.”
I step closer so I’m standing next to the desk. His computer is a new-model HP. On the screen is an image of a woman wearing a cheerleading skirt and she’s topless.
“Did they let you keep the transcripts of your conversations with the computer?” I ask.
“I don’t know about that.” He crosses his arms, defiant and irritated, finally looking at me.
“My grandfather served in the Pacific in World War II.”
Just after I say it, I feel my teeth clench. He’s watching his own reaction. My grandfather Harry. Too weird.
“So.”
“Maybe he should tell the computer about it.”
He shrugs. My efforts to bait him into a conversation are failing.
On the wall next