Ed was the first adult to take enough interest in Owen to give him a nickname, “O.” He reminded Owen of Buddy Rourke—same stiff hair shooting forward so his brow looked low, same big teeth, corrected in Ed’s case by boyhood braces that left him with teeth that looked a little false, not quite what his face had in mind. He was the same inch or two taller than Owen, though unlike Buddy he was younger, just enough younger to be more at home with the idea of machines that help people think, thousands of tiny thoughts, or bit transactions, a second. To Owen it was a marvel; to Ed it was a fact of life.

“So what are you suggesting? We become better assholes?”

“You got it. Smart boy. Contract programming and advisory services. IBM is sucking our blood, and it’s going to go down one of these years. The company’s too fucking big. Smaller is better, more agile. The hardware is shrinking exponentially. Low overhead is the only way to keep up, to see the next thing possible. Set up the operation where there’s low overhead and see what develops.”

“Where’s this low overhead?”

“Beyond the commuter belt. Beyond Stamford. Beyond New Haven, even. The Connecticut sticks.”

“Ed, who would do this? You and me?”

Ed was unmarried. He gave off that sexless aura of the true computer devotee: stale air, Chinese takeout in paper cartons, Twinkies and Cokes at 2 a.m. His skin was clammy, he was twenty pounds overweight, his button-down shirt collar bunched around the knot of his necktie, which was askew and greasy. His teeth were false-looking choppers he kept cleaning with his finger, tongue, and a retracted upper lip like a chimpanzee’s. He said, “Why not? Your wife has another in the oven. You were telling me yesterday how you can’t find an apartment that Phyllis likes you can afford.”

He was, Owen realized, being proposed to. He had somehow become more desirable since the afternoon when Buddy Rourke had sneered at his loving Monopoly arrangement. “Ed, I’m not a city boy like you. I’m from the sticks, I don’t want to go back to them. Bugs, dirt; Jesus. You get mindless.” He was stalling. He thought of Elsie, the night in her father’s woods, her silky yielding body animated by a sexual will, the scrabbling things that hooted and rustled around them. The sticks had their excitements. “Phyllis and I,” Owen admitted, “are beginning to think about the ’burbs. Either Westchester or New Jersey north of Paterson.”