“I can’t help you there, Dink,” he said, calm as ever. “So solly, Cholly.”
“What do you mean? You’ve got to help me! You recruited me, for jeepers’ sake!”
“Let me give you a hypothetical case. Suppose I’m the President of a well-endowed college. Do you know what well-endowed means?”
“Lots of bucks. I’m not stupid, I told you that.”
“So you did—I apologize. Anyhow, let’s say that I, President Sharpton, use some of my school’s plentiful bucks to hire a great novelist as the writer-in-residence, or a great pianist to teach music.
Would that entitle me to tell the novelist what to write, or the pianist what to compose?”
“Probably not.”
“Absolutely not. But let’s say it did. If I told the novelist, ‘Write a comedy about Betsy Ross screwing around with George Washington in Gay Paree,’ do you think he could do it?”
I got laughing. I couldn’t help it. Mr. Sharpton’s just got a vibe about him, somehow.
“Maybe,” I said. “Especially if you whipped a bonus on the guy.”
“Okay, but even if he held his nose and cranked it out, it would likely be a very bad novel. Because creative people aren’t always in charge. And when they do their best work, they’re hardly ever in charge. They’re just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut, yelling Wheeeee. ”
“What’s all that got to do with me? Listen, Mr. Sharpton—when I try to imagine what I’m going to do in Columbia City, all I see is a great big blank. Help people, you said. Make the world a better place.
Get rid of the Skippers. All that sounds great, except I don’t know how to do it! ”
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“You will,” he said. “When the time comes, you will.”
“You said Wentworth and his guys would focus my talent. Sharpen it. Mostly what they did was give me a bunch of stupid tests and make me feel like I was back in school. Is it all in my subconscious? Is it all on the hard disk?”
“Trust me, Dink,” he said. “Trust me, and trust yourself.”
So I did. I have. But just lately, things haven’t been so good. Not so good at all.
That goddam Neff—all the bad stuff started with him. I wish I’d never seen his picture. And if I had to see a picture, I wish I’d seen one where he wasn’t smiling.
XIV
My first week in Columbia City, I did nothing. I mean absolutely zilch. I didn’t even go to the movies. When the cleaners came, I just went to the park and sat on a bench and felt like the whole world was watching me. When it came time to get rid of my extra money on Thursday, I ended up shredding better than fifty dollars in the garbage disposal. And doing that was new to me then, remember.
Talk about feeling weird— man, you don’t have a clue. While I was standing there, listening to the motor under the sink grinding away, I kept thinking about Ma. If Ma had been there to see what I was doing, she would have probably run me through with a butcher-knife to make me stop. That was a dozen twenty-number Bingo games (or two dozen cover-alls) going straight down the kitchen pig.
I slept like shit that week. Every now and then I’d go to the little study—I didn’t want to, but my feet would drag me there. Like they say murderers always return to the scenes of their crimes, I guess. Anyway, I’d stand there in the doorway and look at the dark computer screen, at the Global Village modem, and I’d just sweat with guilt and embarrassment and fear. Even the way the desk was so neat and clean, without a single paper or note on it, made me sweat. I could just about hear the walls muttering stuff like “Nah, 244
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nothing going on in here” and “Who’s this turkey, the cable-installer?”
I had nightmares. In one of them, the doorbell rings and when I open it, Mr. Sharpton’s there. He’s got a pair of handcuffs. “Put out your wrists, Dink,” he says. “We thought you were a tranny, but obviously we were wrong. Sometimes it happens.”
“No, I am, ” I say. “I am a tranny, I just need a little more time to get acclimated. I’ve never been away from home before, remember.”
“You’ve had five years,” he goes.
I’m stunned. I can’t believe it. But part of me knows it’s true. It feels like days, but it’s really been five fucking years, and I haven’t turned on the computer in the little study a single time. If not for the cleaners, the desk it sits on would be six inches deep in dust.
“Hold out your hands, Dink. Stop making this hard on both of us.”
“I won’t,” I say, “and you can’t make me.”
He looks behind him then, and who should come up the steps but Skipper Brannigan. He is wearing his red nylon tunic, only now TRANSCORP is sewn on it instead of SUPR SAVR. He looks pale but otherwise okay. Not dead is what I mean. “You thought you did something to me, but you didn’t,” Skipper says. “You couldn’t do anything to anyone. You’re just a hippie waste.”
“I’m going to put these cuffs on him,” Mr. Sharpton says to Skipper. “If he gives me any trouble, run him over with a shopping cart.”
“Totally eventual,” Skipper says, and I wake up half out of my bed and on the floor, screaming.
XV
Then, about ten days after I moved in, I had another kind of dream.
I don’t remember what it was, but it must have been a good one, because when I woke up, I was smiling. I could feel it on my face, a big, happy smile. It was like when I woke up with the idea about Mrs.
Bukowski’s dog. Almost exactly like that.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and went into the study. I turned on the 245
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computer and opened the window marked TOOLS. There was a program in there called DINKY’S NOTEBOOK. I went right to it, and all my symbols were there—circles, triangles, japps, mirks, rhomboids, bews, smims, fouders, hundreds more. Thousands more. Maybe millions more. It’s sort of like Mr. Sharpton said: a new world, and I’m on the coastline of the first continent.
All I know is that all at once it was there for me, I had a great big Macintosh computer to work with instead of a little piece of pink chalk, and all I had to do was type the words for the symbols and the symbols would appear. I was jacked to the max. I mean my God. It was like a river of fire burning in the middle of my head. I wrote, I called up symbols, I used the mouse to drag everything where it was supposed to be. And when it was done, I had a letter. One of the special letters.
But a letter to who?
A letter to where?
Then I realized it didn’t matter. Make a few minor customizing touches, and there were many people the letter could go to . . .
although this one had been written for a man rather than a woman. I don’t know how I knew that; I just did. I decided to start with Cincinnati, only because Cincinnati was the first city to come into my mind.
It could as easily have been Zurich, Switzerland, or Waterville, Maine.
I tried to open a TOOLS program titled DINKYMAIL. Before the computer would let me in there, it prompted me to wake up my modem. Once the modem was running, the computer wanted a 312
area code. 312’s Chicago, and I imagine that, as far as the phone company is concerned, my compu-calls all come from TransCorp’s headquarters. I didn’t care one way or another; that was their business. I had found my business and was taking care of it.
With the modem awake and linked to Chicago, the computer flashed
DINKYMAIL READY.
I clicked on LOCALE. I’d been in the study almost three hours by then, with only one break to take a quick piss, and I could smell 246
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myself, sweating and stinking like a monkey in a greenhouse. I didn’t mind. I liked the smell. I was having the time of my life. I was fucking delirious.
I typed CINCINNATI and hit EXECUTE.
NO LISTINGS CINCINNATI
the computer said. Okay, not a problem. Try Columbus—closer to home, anyway. And yes, folks! We have a Bingo.
TWO LISTINGS COLUMBUS
There were two telephone numbers. I clicked on the top one, curious and a little afraid of what might pop out. But it wasn’t a dossier, a profile, or—God forbid—a photograph. There was one single word:
MUFFIN.
Say what?
But then I knew. Muffin was Mr. Columbus’s pet. Very likely a cat. I called up my special letter again, transposed two symbols and deleted a third. Then I added MUFFIN to the top, with an arrow pointing down. There. Perfect.