“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? ”
249
STEPHEN KING
“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 hus-band, 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 pri-mary 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.