The Tourist Trail by John Yunker Page A

and no one objected. How could they; she had never before called in sick. Shelly gave her a knowing look; Doug had probably told her everything by now. A day ago, Angela might have turned red and lowered her eyes. But not now. She was already somewhere else.
    She retreated to the trailer and found Aeneas seated outside on a cinder block, tying his shoes. “Love ’em and leave ’em?” he said.
    â€œSomething like that.”
    She waited for him to ask her to come along. She pleaded with her eyes for an invitation, even though she knew she could not say yes.
    â€œYou are always welcome on my ship,” he said. “Always.” He noticed the tag around her neck, and he held it and kissed her forehead. “Now you’re a known-age bird,” he said.
    He left the trailer, and she waited a few minutes, but he did not return. When she poked her head out the door, she saw a small canvas sack on the ground. She remembered him carrying it the night before so she looked around, but did not see him. She picked up the bag, and it jingled as if full of bottle caps.
    She kneeled and opened the bag to find penguin tags. Nothing but penguin tags. She ran her hands through the metal and held up one after another. How many of these were her birds? So many mothers and fathers caught up in nets. So many abandoned chicks. So many red dots. She turned the bag upside down and spilled them out. She felt rage building inside of her, the need to fight back. Perhaps she was a warrior after all.
    She returned to the office, finding it empty. She grabbed her backpack and wrote Shelly a note. She began walking up the hill, toward the water, then picked up her pace until she was running. Tourist buses passed her, coughing dust. She could feel the eyes and cameras upon her. But she no longer cared. From the distance came the sound of a boat engine. There was still time. She crested the hill, leaping onto soft dirt and patches of grass, hopping the prickly quilambay bushes. She could feel Diesel’s tag around her neck, reminding her that he was now looking over her, tracking her movements. In places cold and always blowing. In sickness and in health. In absentia.

Part II: Memory Leak

    I don’t love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
    Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
    â€” Pablo Neruda

Ethan
    When Ethan first set eyes on Annie Miller, he thought he’d made a mistake. She was far more attractive than the other women he had been paired with. Her short spiked hair drew attention to her blue eyes, skin browned from the sun. And though her face exhibited eight piercings—three on each ear, a silver ring on her upper right lip, and a tiny stud through the left nostril—they did nothing to reduce her appeal. If anything, the perforations only illustrated just how durable her beauty was. She could change her hair color, pierce her nose and lip, tattoo her forehead if she wanted—and Ethan still would have been seduced by her.
    He was at work when he first encountered Annie. She was one of the three million members in the eCouplet.com database, and he was the programmer tasked with improving the member search engine. Every search engine ran on algorithms—lines upon lines of a language that was indecipherable to most humans but was poetry to a computer. Ethan’s algorithms parsed each profile—the favorite movies and foods and colors, the income levels and hometowns—all toward that goal of pairing one person with another.
    Ethan sometimes used his own profile for testing. He had developed an entire stable of artificial member profiles that he would insert into the pairing engine, but these were not real people. His, on the other hand, was an authentically average profile, representative of so many millions of people who joined these Web sites—people who did not stand apart in looks or career.
    Ethan was taller than most men, with a runner’s build, but he was not