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COTTAGES AND FROZEN RIVER / Ellen Herman FOR SIX MONTHS, Richard had his own office, windowless and spare. Then management hired a new programmer. Richard had hoped for a quiet man with a need for privacy that matched his own. But the new programmer seemed never to be quiet. His sneakers, gray with age and too large, squeaked when he walked and tapped the floor when he was at his desk. Seated, he muttered to himself, his long fingers strumming the plastic markers that stuck out of his open file drawer. He talked to his computer screen in a low, urgent voice, as if egging on a favorite horse. The walls of Richard's office became pimpled with notes the programmer wrote to himself on yellow tabs he stuck to the wall, where they accumulated, their edges fluttering under the ceiling ventilator like a new kind of weather. The programmer's name was Ira Lazar. "Feel free to call me Laz," he said, but no one ever did. Instead, he was referred to by his full name, as if the office had several Iras, and more than one Lazar. Though his resume said he was twenty-five, he looked much younger; his ears were shiny, and his pink skin stretched tight over the bones of his face. Ira Lazar's eyes were tiny and intense, raking over Richard, who would pull his suit jacket over his chest. They were working on a video and computer archive of Dutch paintings, which their program linked in every possible way: all paintings in a given year, all portraits of bearded men, all still lifes containing a squeezed lemon. All day, the pictures glowed on Richard's video screen while he tested his program, noting where the paths went wrong, and a robust woman scrubbing floors was linked erroneously with a fish head on a plate. "What?" Ira Lazar would shout at his computer when his program was wrong, and when he was right he'd shout: "Baby!" He assailed Richard with questions. Had he worked here long? Was he married, or what? Was he a native Angeleno? Then why had he moved here? Wasn't Los Angeles the tops, absolutely the cat's pajamas? Ira had an odd way of speaking that seemed to fuse the slang of disparate decades. "The topic is gals," he'd say, when one of the women walked by the office. He eyed them up 25S ยท The Missouri Review and down as if examining a totem pole in a museum; he even eyed Marsha, the vice president of their division. Tina, the blonde research assistant, was his favorite, a slender, breathy woman who tended to wear long scarves. "We're talking beauty here," Ira would say when her scarves drifted by. "We're talking serious lust." He jabbed Richard's arm. "How about you, Rich? You get much girlie action?" Richard stared at the bowl of apples on his screen and tried to imagine an empty office. At home, beneath Richard's living room window, the Ventura Highway made a wide curve. Passing cars made a constant purr below. At night their headlights glowed like eyes. He imagined a dry river, prowled by low, fast-moving beasts. But no, he would think, fingers smudging the window. Cars were metal and glass of course; engines stirred beneath, not breath. Dr. Ellers had advised that he continue to practice what she called "reality testing," just to remind his brain of the distinction between real scenes and those he imagined. For over a year, he hadn't slipped. But to get Henry back, he had to be careful. His apartment had been furnished in white by the landlady, who specified on the lease that he could not wear shoes indoors. The couch was sticky from the protectant she had sprayed over it. Water, spilled on the fabric, collected in beads and rolled off. At night he padded across the carpet in his socks, plotting new programs for work. Work, Dr. Ellers had said, made the time pass rapidly. Here in Los Angeles, he had little sense of the passage of time; summer followed summer, month after month. He had been here for...

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