Ollie was running late and Pete called his cell to see if he was coming in:

    "Hey, Ollie, it's Pete. Hope everything's alright. Maybe you're stuck in the subway or something. If so, I hope you have a seat. That would nice. Or, if you don't have a seat, maybe you can, like, lean up against the doors. Though that is officially frowned on.

    "If you had a book, that'd be cool. Provided it was a good book. Then you could read it. I enjoy reading on the subways. My wife – you've met my wife, you remember – she can't read on the subway because she says it gives her headaches. Which I kind of get, because I get headaches when I try to read in the car. Though I didn't always. When I was a kid, I could read in the car and it never bothered me. Not my mother. She's get motion sickness and feel all pukey unless she was in the front seat. But me, I'd sit in the back just reading comic books. Never bothered me. It just now occurs to me, if you're one of those people who gets sick when you read, then I hope you don't have a book. Or if you do, that it doesn't have a lot of words so you can read it quickly. Like a kids book or something. That'd be good, right? Breeze through the adventures of Babar, the so-called King of the Elephants, on the train. I say so-called because I'm an American and I'll be dead and cold in the ground before I recognize the governmental authority of any 'king.' I don't care whether he's and elephant or not.

    "Your phone really has the longest pause I've ever heard on a phone.

    "My brother's cell phone has a really long pause too. I don't know why. Do more expensive phones have longer pauses? I don't know what you spent on your phone, but my brother spent a fortune on his. He's always dropping cash for gadgets he dubiously needs. He was one of the early adopters of laser disks. He had two players and several titles, a ton of titles, actually. I remember he used to have this Playboy karaoke disk. It was just this karaoke thing with the hot chick dancing. And then, eventually, she'd strip down to the music. You know, you're singing 'I Will Survive' and this strictly third-rate Heff hanger-on is ditchin' gear on the screen above the yellowing subtitles. 'I should have thrown away the keys.' Good stuff. He had a ton of normal karaoke things, but he'd wire the player so he could hold a party and kick over to the Playboy one without anybody noticing. We watched the Playboy and actually timed how long it took the various girls to start stripping. We found the track were it took the girl the longest time to start actually stripping. Then we had a karaoke party and invited all these people. When it was my brother's turn to sing, I switched everything over and he'd just start singing. If you must know, it was Pat Benatar's 'Hit Me with Your Best Shot.' Of it was 'Hit Me,' right? What is it going to be, he cover of Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' or 'Hell is for Children'? Which is totally true, by the way, hell is so for children that it isn't even funny.

    "Man, you phone will just keep recording . . .

    "So where was I? Oh, Pat Benatar, so, anyway, that was funny and he'd pretending to not know this girl behind him was practically giving herself a BSE, if you know what I mean. So he's totally rocking out to it. He was like that. I thought it was funny. He would do the same sort of stuff when we went camping. I mean not the laser disk stuff, but he'd . . ."

    Pete then hung up the phone. "That was Ollie's machine," Pete said to the residents of the cube-de-sac. "I don't know what the story is."