Did I wonder who Muffin’s owner was, or what he had done to warrant TransCorp’s attention, or exactly what was going to happen to him? I did not. The idea that my conditioning at Peoria might have been partially responsible for this disinterest never crossed my mind, either. I was doing my thing, that was all. Just doing my thing, and as happy as a clam at high tide.
I called the number on the screen. I had the computer’s speaker on, but there was no hello, only the screechy mating-call of another computer. Just as well, really. Life’s easier when you subtract the human element. Then it’s like that movie, Twelve O’Clock High, cruising over Berlin in your trusty B-25, looking through your trusty Norden 247
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bombsight and waiting for just the right moment to push your trusty button. You might see smokestacks, or factory roofs, but no people. The guys who dropped the bombs from their B-25s didn’t have to hear the screams of mothers whose children had just been reduced to guts, and I didn’t even have to hear anyone say hello. A very good deal.
After a little bit, I turned off the speaker anyway. I found it distracting.
MODEM FOUND,
the computer flashed, and then
SEARCH FOR E-MAIL ADDRESS Y/N.
I typed Y and waited. This time the wait was longer. I think the computer was going back to Chicago again, and getting what it needed to unlock the e-mail address of Mr. Columbus. Still, it was less than thirty seconds before the computer was right back at me with E-MAIL ADDRESS FOUND
SEND DINKYMAIL Y/N.
I typed Y with absolutely no hesitation. The computer flashed SENDING DINKYMAIL
and then
DINKYMAIL SENT.
That was all. No fireworks.
I wonder what happened to Muffin, though.
You know. After.
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XVI
That night I called Mr. Sharpton and said, “I’m working.”
“That’s good, Dink. Great news. Feel better?” Calm as ever. Mr.
Sharpton is like the weather in Tahiti.
“Yeah,” I said. The fact was, I felt blissful. It was the best day of my life. Doubts or no doubts, worries or no worries, I still say that. The most eventual day of my life. It was like a river of fire in my head, a fucking river of fire, can you get that? “Do you feel better, Mr. Sharpton?
Relieved?”
“I’m happy for you, but I can’t say I’m relieved, because—”
“—you were never worried in the first place.”
“Got it in one,” he said.
“Everything’s eventual, in other words.”
He laughed at that. He always laughs when I say that. “That’s right, Dink. Everything’s eventual.”
“Mr. Sharpton?”
“Yes?”
“E-mail’s not exactly private, you know. Anybody who’s really dedicated can hack into it.”
“Part of what you send is a suggestion that the recipient delete the message from all files, is it not?”
“Yes, but I can’t absolutely guarantee that he’ll do it. Or she.”
“Even if they don’t, nothing can happen to someone else who chances on such a message, am I correct? Because it’s . . . personalized.”
“Well, it might give someone a headache, but that would be about all.”
“And the communication itself would look like so much gibberish.”
“Or a code.”
He laughed heartily at that. “Let them try to break it, Dinky, eh?
Just let them try!”
I sighed. “I suppose.”
“Let’s discuss something more important, Dink . . . how did it feel? ”
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“Fucking wonderful. ”
“Good. Don’t question wonder, Dink. Don’t ever question wonder.”
And he hung up.
XVII
Sometimes I have to send actual letters—print out the stuff I whomp up in DINKY’S NOTEBOOK, stick it in an envelope, lick stamps, and mail it off to somebody somewhere. Professor Ann Tevitch, University of New Mexico at Las Cruces. Mr. Andrew Neff, c/o The New York Post, New York, New York. Billy Unger, General Delivery, Stovington, Vermont. Only names, but they were still more upsetting than the phone numbers. More personal than the phone numbers. It was like seeing faces swim up at you for a second inside your Norden bombsight. I mean, what a freak-out, right? You’re up there at twenty-five thousand feet, no faces allowed up there, but sometimes one shows up for a second or two, just the same.
I wondered how a University Professor could get along without a modem (or a guy whose address was a fucking New York newspaper, for that matter), but I never wondered too much. I didn’t have to. We live in a modern world, but letters don’t have to be sent by computer, after all. There’s still snail-mail. And the stuff I really needed was always in the database. The fact that Unger had a 1957 Thunderbird, for instance. Or that Ann Tevitch had a loved one—perhaps her husband, perhaps her son, perhaps her father—named Simon.
And people like Tevitch and Unger were exceptions. Most of the folks I reach out and touch are like that first one in Columbus—fully equipped for the twenty-first century. SENDING DINKYMAIL, DINKYMAIL SENT, velly good, so long, Cholly.
I could have gone on like that for a long time, maybe forever—
browsing the database (there’s no schedule to follow, no list of primary cities and targets; I’m completely on my own . . . unless all that shit is also in my subconscious, down there on the hard disk), going 250
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
to afternoon movies, enjoying the Ma-less silence of my little house, and dreaming of my next step up the ladder, except I woke up feeling horny one day. I worked for an hour or so, browsing around in Australia, but it was no good—my dick kept trespassing on my brain, so to speak. I shut off the computer and went down to News Plus to see if I could find a magazine featuring pretty ladies in frothy lingerie.
As I got there, a guy was coming out, reading the Columbus Dispatch. I never read the paper myself. Why bother? It’s the same old shit day in and day out, dictators beating the ching-chong out of people weaker than they are, men in uniforms beating the ching-chong out of soccer balls or footballs, politicians kissing babies and kissing ass.
Mostly stories about the Skipper Brannigans of the world, in other words. And I wouldn’t have seen this story even if I’d happened to look at the newspaper display rack once I got inside, because it was on the bottom half of the front page, below the fold. But this fucking dimbulb comes out with the paper hanging open and his face buried inside it.
In the lower right corner was a picture of a white-haired guy smoking a pipe and smiling. He looked like a good-humored fuck, probably Irish, eyes all crinkled up and these white bushy eyebrows. And the headline over the photo—not a big one, but you could read it—
said NEFF SUICIDE STILL PUZZLES, GRIEVES COLLEAGUES
For a second or two I thought I’d just skip News Plus that day, I didn’t feel like ladies in lingerie after all, maybe I’d just go home and take a nap. If I went in, I’d probably pick up a copy of the Dispatch, wouldn’t be able to help myself, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more about that Irish-looking guy than I already did . . . which was nothing at all, as you can fucking believe I hastened to tell myself. Neff couldn’t be that weird a name anyway, only four letters, not like Shittendookus or Horecake, there must be thousands of Neffs, if you’re talking coast to coast. This one didn’t have to be the Neff I knew about, the one who loved Frank Sinatra records.
It would be better, in any case, to just leave and come back tomorrow. Tomorrow the picture of that guy with the pipe would be gone. Tomorrow somebody else’s picture would be there, on the 251
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lower right corner of page one. People always dying, right? People who aren’t superstars or anything, just famous enough to get their pictures down there in the lower right corner of page one. And sometimes people were puzzled about it, the way folks back home in Harkerville had been puzzled about Skipper’s death—no alcohol in his blood, clear night, dry road, not the suicidal type.
The world is full of mysteries like that, though, and sometimes it’s best not to solve them. Sometimes the solutions aren’t, you know, too eventual.
But willpower has never been my strong point. I can’t always keep away from the chocolate, even though I know my skin doesn’t like it, and I couldn’t keep away from the Columbus Dispatch that day. I went on inside and bought one.
I started home, then had a funny thought. The funny thought was that I didn’t want a newspaper with Andrew Neff’s picture on the front page going out with my trash. The trash pick-up guys came in a city truck, surely they didn’t— couldn’t— have anything to do with TransCorp, but . . .