Coverly’s resolve to do something illustrious settled on a plan to diagnose the vocabulary of John Keats, a project that in turn depended upon a friend named Griza. Most of the employees lunched in the subterranean cafeteria but Coverly usually took the elevator up and ate a sandwich in the sunlight. This choice was odd enough to serve as the basis for a friendship. One of the technicians in the computer room also ate a sandwich in the sun, and this and the fact that they both came from Massachusetts made them fast friends. In the spring they threw a baseball; in the autumn they spiraled a football back and forth with a conspicuous sense of simpler things than the gantry line on the horizon. Griza was the son of a Polish immigrant but he had been raised in Lowell and his wife was the granddaughter of a Yankee farmer. He was one of the technicians who serviced the big computer and might have been recognized as one. There were no mandates for dress in the computation center and no established hierarchies but over the months the outlines of a society and a list of sumptuary laws had begun to emerge, expressing, it seemed, an inner love of caste. The physicists wore cashmere pullovers. The senior programmers wore tweeds and colored shirts. Coverly’s rank wore business suits and the technicians seemed to have settled on a uniform that included white shirts and dark ties. They were separated from the rest of the center by the privilege of manipulating the console and by the greater privilege of technical knowledge and limited responsibility. If a program failed repeatedly, they could be sure it was not their fault, and this gave them all the briskness and levity that you sometimes see in the deck hands on a ferry boat. Griza had never been to sea but he walked as if he walked on a moving deck and looked somehow as if he slept in a bunk, kept watches and did his own laundry. He was a slight man with less than a stomach—that whole area seemed limber and concave; he used a fixative on his hair and combed it in a careful cross-hatch at the nape of his neck, a style that had been popular with street boys ten years earlier. Thus he seemed to have one foot in the immediate past. Coverly expected him, sooner or later, to confess to some eccentric ambition. Was he building a raft in his cellar for a trip down the Mississippi? Was he perfecting a machine for compressing empty beer cans? A simplified contraceptive? A chemical solvent for autumn leaves? A project like this seemed necessary to settle the lines of his character, but Coverly was mistaken. Griza hoped to work at the site until the retirement age, when he planned to invest his savings in a parking lot in Florida or California.
From his position at the computer Griza seemed to know a great deal about the politics at the site. He did not seem to have the disposition of a gossip and yet Coverly came away from their lunch hours each day with a wealth of information. The receptionist at the security center was pregnant. Cameron, the director of the site, wouldn’t last six weeks. The top brass were bitterly divided in their opinions. They quarreled over whether or not coherent radio signals had been received from Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, they disputed the existence of other civilizations in the solar system, they challenged the intelligence of dolphins. Griza passed along his news indifferently but there was always plenty of it. Coverly cultivated Griza with the hope that Griza might help him. He wanted Griza to put the vocabulary of Keats through the computer. Griza seemed undecided but he did invite Coverly to come home with him for supper one night.
When they finished work they took a bus to the end of the line and began to walk. It was a part of the site that Coverly had never seen. “We’re in the emergency housing section,” Griza explained. It was a trailer camp although most of the trailers stood on cement block foundations. Some of them were massive and had two levels. There were street lights, gardens, picket fences and inevitably a pair of painted wagon wheels, a talisman of the rural and mythical past. Coverly wondered if they had come from the farm near the computation center. Griza stopped at the door of one of the more modest trailers, opened the door and let Coverly in.
There was one long and pleasant room that seemed to serve a number of purposes. Griza’s mother was standing at the stove. His wife was putting a fresh diaper on their daughter. Old Mrs. Griza was a heavy, gray-haired woman who wore a Christmas tree ornament on her dress. Christmas was far away and this ornament had the appeal of those farmhouses you pass, coming down from the ski trails in the north where the colored Christmas lights burn way past Epiphany and are sometimes not dismantled until the snow melts, as if Christmas had been unself-consciously enlarged to embrace the winter. Her face was broad and kindly. Young Mrs. Griza wore a torn man’s shirt and a pair of tartan slacks that she had outgrown. Her face was large, her long hair pretty and disheveled, her eyes were beautiful when they were open wide, which they seldom were that evening. The cast of her eyes and her mouth was downward, suggesting sullenness, and it was this sullenness, so swiftly contradicted by the light and authority of her smile, that made her face compelling. Gentling and dressing the baby she seemed nearly imperious. Griza opened two cans of beer and he and Coverly sat down at the end of the room farthest from the stove.
“We’re a little crowded in here now,” the old lady said. “Oh, I wish you could have seen the house we had in Lowell! Twelve rooms. Oh, it was a lovely house; but we had rats. Oh, those rats. Once I went down cellar to get a stick of wood for the stove and this big man rat jumped at me, jumped right at me! Well, he missed me, thank God, went right over my shoulder but ever after that I was afraid of them. I mean when I saw how fearless they was. We used to have a nice centerpiece in the dining room. Fruit, you know, or wax flowers, but I come down one morning and there was this nice centerpiece all chewed up. Rats. It broke my heart. I mean it made me feel I didn’t have anything I could call my own. Mice too. We had mice. They used to get into the pantry. One year I made a big batch of jelly and the mice chewed right through the wax tops and spoiled the jelly. But the mice was nothing compared to the termites. I always noticed the living-room floor was kind of springy and one morning when I was pushing the vacuum cleaner a whole section of the floor give way and sagged into the cellar. Termites. Termites and carpenter ants. It was a combination. The termites ate the underpinnings of the house and the carpenter ants ate the porch. But the worst was bedbugs. When my cousin Harry died he left me this big bed. I didn’t think anything about it. I felt funny in the night, you know, but I’d never seen a bedbug in my life and I couldn’t imagine what it was. Well, one night I turned on the light good and quick and there they were. There they were! Well, by this time they’d spread all over the house. Bedbugs everywhere. We had to have everything sprayed and, oh, my, the smell was dreadful. Fleas too. We had fleas. We had this old dog named Spotty. Well, he had fleas and the fleas got off him into the rugs and it was a damp house, the fleas bred in the rugs and you know there was one rug there when you stepped onto it there would be a cloud of fleas, thick as smoke, fleas all over you. Well, supper’s ready.”
They ate frozen meat, frozen fried potatoes and frozen peas. Blindfolded one could not have identified the peas, and the only flavor the potatoes had was the flavor of soap. It was the monotonous fare of the besieged, it would be served everywhere on the site that night, but where were the walls, the battering rams, where was the enemy that could be accounted for this tasteless porridge? Coverly was happy there and they talked about New England during the meal. While the women washed the dishes Coverly and Griza spoke about running the Keats vocabulary through the computer. Griza’s invitation to dinner seemed to have been a gesture of trust or assent and he agreed to run the vocabulary through the hardware if Coverly would make the preparations. They drank a glass of whisky and ginger ale and Coverly went home.