Part seven of Themepunks is live today. That’s the novel-in-progress whose first third Salon has been serializing every Monday — three more installments to go! Today we learn about how Perry and Lester’s crazy school of invention can be applied to urban squatting:
The new shantytown went up fast — faster than she’d dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters — building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic — and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.
Little things went missing from the workshops — tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry’s wallet — and they started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in amongst the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren’t beside her desk-lamp, where she’d left them the night before, and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.
She found the earrings later that day, in the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn’t voiced a single accusation, she’d accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.
“I have to write about this,” she said to Perry. “This is part of the story.” She’d stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn’t go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.
“Why?” Perry said. He’d been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn’t join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young bucks and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he’d been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. “Can’t you just concentrate on the business?”
