I shouldn’t complain, though—I didn’t expect her to go out antiquing for me when she hired me to digitize her family archive, and she topped up her old equipment with everything I said I’d need for the job. I have a great computer with two big screens for editing, all the most up-to-date software, a brand-new scanner, and a photo-quality printer as well as an inkjet one for ordinary documents. And then there’s the old photo equipment, the ancient slide carousel, the two-reel projector, the eight-track player, two typewriters. (I jot a note on a Post-it that one is almost out of ribbon.) Even the Betamax video player in orange-and-beige faded plastic and the clunky black audiocassette player have a certain charm. I pull up my chair and press the on buttons, listen to the fizzle and crack of the machines waking up. I log in and check my email; yeah, I didn’t expect anything to have come through from my folks since I left the house. It doesn’t matter.

Mrs. Tyburn thinks I’m some kind of genius. I feed myself with her mistake. It’s a good thing I have the place to myself up here. I spend most of my time googling error messages and watching online tutorials and asking questions on forums about how to do this or that in Photoshop, winging it, hitting undo a hundred times until I manage. I’m not bad at most things now, but when I started I didn’t have a fucking clue.

* * *

Mrs. Tyburn and I met on a First Friday just after I arrived last January. First Fridays are when they let visitors onto Swan. Some of the Wrinklies want it to be less often than that, the hard-line separatists, like Nick. I wish they could just be patient. I didn’t ask to exist, and I certainly didn’t ask to exist here. It’s just shit luck. My mom had my full astrological chart read once. The guy kept talking about hard lessons and learning experiences and I could tell he was really saying, “Sorry, kiddo; your life is going to be shit.” My mother was always getting me stuff I didn’t need for my birthday, stupid trinkets or experiences she thought would be, like, groovy, when I really could have used the cash.