"God," Alan said. "This is so sudden." But he was happy about it. He'd tried to picture what Kurt actually *did* any number of times, but he was never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jump in and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it, picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willing to sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he'd bought one day after the shirt he'd worn to the store -- the wind-up toy store? -- got soaked in a cloudburst. The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran the restaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling with cops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab a salad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. "Cops always know where to eat fast and cheap and good," Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of pork chop and fried rice. "That's how I found this place, all the cop cars in the parking lot." Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunks of rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce before popping them in his mouth. "Where are we going?" he asked. Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. "Wherever the fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull into a parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There's enough dumpsters out this way, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I've got to be selective. I know how each company's trash has been running -- lots of good stuff or mostly crap -- lately, and I trust my intuition to take me to the right places. I'd love to go to the Sega or Nintendo dumpsters, but they're like Stalag Thirteen -- razorwire and motion-sensors and armed guards. They're the only companies that take secrecy seriously." Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the driveway of an industrial complex. "Spidey-sense is tingling," he said, as he killed his lights and crept forward to the dumpster. "Ready to lose your virginity?" he said, lighting a cigarette. "I wish you'd stop using that metaphor," Alan said. "Ick." But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car, pulling open Alan's door. "That dumpster is full of cardboard," he said, gesturing. "It's recycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. This one," he said, *oof*ing as he levered himself over it, talking around the maglight he'd clenched between his teeth, "is where they put the good stuff. Looky here." Alan tried to climb the dumpster's sticky walls, but couldn't get a purchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled, reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. He scrambled over the dumpster's transom and fell into it, expecting a wash of sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead, amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes. "What's this?" he asked.