The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away by Cory Doctorow

Author:Cory Doctorow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2008-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

The address was on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that had been scorchingly trendy the last time Lawrence had been there. More importantly: it was Wednesday.

* * *

The Half Moon Café turned out to be one of those New York places that are so incredibly hip they don’t have a sign or any outward indication of their existence. Number 164 was a frosted glass door between a dry-cleaner’s and a Pakistani grocery store, propped open with a squashed Mountain Dew can. Lawrence opened the door, heart pounding, and slipped inside. A long, dark corridor stretched away before him, with a single door at the end, open a crack, dim light spilling out of it. He walked quickly down the corridor, sure that there were cameras observing him.

The door at the end of the hallway had a sheet of paper on it, with HALF MOON CAFÉ laser-printed in its center. Good food smells came from behind it, and the clink of cutlery, and soft conversation. He nudged it open and found himself in a dim, flickering room lit by candles and draped with gathered curtains that turned the walls into the proscenia of a grand and ancient stage. There were four or five small tables and a long one at the back of the room, crowded with people, with wine in ice-buckets at either end.

A very pretty girl stood at the podium before him, dressed in a conservative suit, but with her hair shaved into a half-inch brush of electric blue. She lifted an eyebrow at him as though she was sharing a joke with him and said, “Welcome to the Half Moon. Do you have a reservation?”

Lawrence had carefully shredded the bit of cardboard and dropped its tatters in six different trash cans, feeling like a real spy as he did so (and realizing at the same time that going to all these different cans was probably anomalous enough in itself to draw suspicion).

“A friend told me he’d meet me here,” he said.

“What was your friend’s name?”

Lawrence stuck his chin in the top of his coat to tell his pan to stop warning him that he was breathing too shallowly. “I don’t know,” he said. He craned his neck to look behind her at the tables. He couldn’t see the man, but it was so dark in the restaurant—

“You made it, huh?” The man had yet another fantastic sweater on, this one with a tight herringbone weave and ribbing down the sleeves. He caught Lawrence sizing him up and grinned. “My weakness—the world’s wool farmers would starve if it wasn’t for me.” He patted the greeter on the hand. “He’s at our table.” She gave Lawrence a knowing smile and the tiniest hint of a wink.

“Nice of you to come,” he said as they threaded their way slowly through the crowded tables, past couples having murmured conversations over candlelight, intense business dinners, an old couple eating in silence with evident relish. “Especially as it’s your last night in the city.

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