Cyberpunk

a big new padlock on the door.
    “What happened?” he asked one of the men hanging out on the corner, someone from this year’s team.
    “They busted Charlie this morning. Got him for selling speed, first thing this morning. Now the club be gone for good, and the team too.”
    When he got back to the apartment building it was late, after midnight. He went to Rochelle’s door and tapped lightly.
    “Who is it?”
    “Lee.” Rochelle opened the door and looked out. Lee explained what had happened. “Can I borrow a can of soup for Debra for tonight? I’ll get it back to you.”
    “Okay. But I want one back soon, you hear?”
    Back in his room Debra was awake. “Where you been, Lee?” she asked weakly. “I was worried about you.”
    He sat down at the hot plate, exhausted.
    “I’m hungry.”
    “That’s a good sign. Some cream of mushroom soup, coming right up.” He began to cook, feeling dizzy and sick. When Debra finished eating he had to force the remaining soup down him.
    Clearly, he realized, someone he knew had ripped him off—one of his neighbors, or a park acquaintance. They must have guessed his source of weed, then followed him as he made his rounds. Someone he knew. One of his friends.
    Early the next day he fished a newspaper out of a trashcan and looked through the short column of want ads for dishwashing work and the like. There was a busboy job at the Dupont Hotel and he walked over and asked about it. The man turned him away after a single look: “Sorry, man, we looking for people who can walk out into the restaurant, you know.” Staring in one of the big silvered windows as he walked up New Hampshire, Lee saw what the man saw: his hair was spiked out everywhere as if he would be a Rasta in five or ten years, his clothes were torn and dirty, his eyes wild . . . With a deep stab of fear he realized he was too poor to be able to get any job—beyond the point where he could turn it around.
    He walked the shimmery black streets, checking phone booths for change. He walked down to M Street and over to 12th, stopping in at all the grills and little Asian restaurants; he went up to Pill Park and tried to get some of his old buddies to front him, he kept looking in pay phones and puzzling through blown scraps of newspaper, desperately hoping that one of them might list a job for him . . . and with each foot-sore step the fear spiked up in him like the pain lancing up his legs, until it soared into a thoughtless panic. Around noon he got so shaky and sick-feeling he had to stop, and despite his fear he slept flat on his back in Dupont Circle Park through the hottest hours of the day.
    In the late afternoon he picked it up again, wandering almost aimlessly. He stuck his fingers in every phone booth for blocks around, but other fingers had been there before his. The change boxes of the old farecard machines in the Metro would have yielded more, but with the subway system closed, all those holes into the earth were gated off, and slowly filling with trash. Nothing but big trash pits.
    Back at Dupont Circle he tried a pay phone coin return and got a dime. “Yeah,” he said aloud; that got him over a dollar. He looked up and saw that a man had stopped to watch him: one of the fucking lawyers, in loosened tie and long-sleeved shirt and slacks and leather shoes, staring at him open-mouthed as his group and its bodyguard crossed the street. Lee held up the coin between thumb and forefinger and glared at the man, trying to impress on him the reality of a dime.
    He stopped at the Vietnamese market. “Huang, can I buy some soup from you and pay you tomorrow?”
    The old man shook his head sadly. “I can’t do that, Robbie. I do that even once, and—” he wiggled his hands—“the whole house come down. You know that.”
    “Yeah. Listen, what can I get for—” He pulled the day’s change from his pocket and counted it again. “A dollar ten.”
    Huang shrugged. “Candy bar? No?” He studied Lee. “Potatoes. Here, two potatoes from the back. Dollar ten.”
    “I didn’t think you had any potatoes.”
    “Keep them for family, you see. But I sell these to you.”
    “Thanks, Huang.” Lee took the potatoes and left. There was a trash Dumpster behind the store; he considered it, opened it, looked in. There was a half-eaten hot dog—but the stench overwhelmed him, and he remembered the poisonous taste of the discarded liquor he had punished himself with. He let the lid of the Dumpster slam down