“Competing against kids who were much older—high school seniors some of them,” Nordhoff said. “Or that’s what his mother said.”
“It’s true. We were all very proud of him.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Richard had been proud, and Jon’s mother had been proud; the boy’s father didn’t give a shit at all. “But Science Fair projects and building your very own hybrid word-cruncher—” He shrugged.
Nordhoff set his beer down. “There was a kid back in the fifties,” he said, “who made an atom smasher out of two soup cans and about five dollars’ worth of electrical equipment. Jon told me about that. And he said there was a kid out in some hick town in New Mexico who discovered tachyons—negative particles that are supposed to travel backwards through time—in 1954. A kid in Waterbury, Connecticut—eleven years old—who made a pipe-bomb out of the celluloid he scraped off the backs of a deck of playing cards. He blew up an empty doghouse with it. Kids’re funny sometimes. The super smart ones in particular. You might be surprised.”
“Maybe. Maybe I will be.”
“He was a fine boy, regardless.”
“You loved him a little, didn’t you?”
“Mr. Hagstrom,” Nordhoff said, “I loved him a lot. He was a genuinely all-right kid.” And Richard thought how strange it was—his brother, who had been an utter shit since the age of six, had gotten a fine woman and a fine bright son. He himself, who had always tried to be gentle and good (whatever
“good” meant in this crazy world), had married Lina, who had developed into a silent, piggy woman, and had gotten Seth by her. Looking at Nordhoff’s honest, tired face, he found himself wondering exactly how that had happened and how much of it had been his own fault, a natural result of his own quiet weakness.
“Yes,” Richard said. “He was, wasn’t he?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if it worked,” Nordhoff said. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all.” After Nordhoff had gone, Richard Hagstrom plugged the word processor in and turned it on. There was a hum, and he waited to see if the letters IBM would come up on the face of the screen. They did not. Instead, eerily, like a voice from the grave, these words swam up, green ghosts, from the darkness: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD! JON.
“Christ,” Richard whispered, sitting down hard. The accident that had killed his brother, his wife, and their son had happened two weeks before—they had been coming back from some sort of day trip and Roger had been drunk. Being drunk was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Roger Hagstrom. But this time his luck had simply run out and he had driven his dusty old van off the edge of a ninety-foot drop. It had crashed and burned.
Jon was fourteen—no, fifteen. Just turned fifteen a couple of days before the accident, the old man said. Another three years and he would have gotten free of that hulking, stupid bear. His birthday… and mine coming up soon.
A week from today. The word processor had been Jon’s birthday present for him.
That made it worse, somehow. Richard could not have said precisely how, or why, but it did. He reached out to turn off the screen and then withdrew his hand.
Some kid made an atom smasher out of two soup cans and five dollars’ worth of auto electrical parts.
Yeah, and the New York City sewer system is full of alligators and the U.S. Air Force has the body of an alien on ice somewhere in Nebraska. Tell me a few more. It’s bullshit. But maybe that’s something I don’t want to know for sure.
He got up, went around to the back of the VDT, and looked through the slots. Yes, it was as Nordhoff had said. Wires stamped RADIO SHACK MADE IN TAIWAN. Wires stamped WESTERN ELECTRIC and WESTREX and ERECTOR SET, with the little circled trademark r. And he saw something else, something Nordhoff had either missed or hadn’t wanted to mention. There was a Lionel Train transformer in there, wired up like the Bride of Frankenstein.
“Christ,” he said, laughing but suddenly near tears. “Christ, Jonny, what did you think you were doing?” But he knew that, too. He had dreamed and talked about owning a word processor for years, and when Lina’s laughter became too sarcastic to bear, he had talked about it to Jon. “I could write faster, rewrite faster, and submit more,” he remembered telling Jon last summer—the boy had looked at him seriously, his light blue eyes, intelligent but always so carefully wary, magnified behind his glasses. “It would be great… really great.”
“Then why don’t you get one, Uncle Rich?”
“They don’t exactly give them away,” Richard had said, smiling. “The Radio Shack model starts at around three grand. From there you can work yourself up into the eighteen-thousand-dollar range.”
“Well, maybe I’ll build you one sometime,” Jon had said.
“Maybe you just will,” Richard had said, clapping him on the back. And until Nordhoff had called, he had thought no more about it.
Wires from hobby-shop electrical models.
A Lionel Train transformer.
Christ.
He went around to the front again, meaning to turn it off, as if to actually try to write something on it and fail would somehow defile what his earnest, fragile (doomed) nephew had intended.
Instead, he pushed the EXECUTE button on the board. A funny little chill scraped across his spine as he did it – EXECUTE was a funny word to use, when you thought of it. It wasn’t a word he associated with writing; it was a word he associated with gas chambers and electric chairs… and, perhaps, with dusty old vans plunging off the sides of roads.
EXECUTE.
The CPU was humming louder than any he had ever heard on the occasions when he had windowshopped word processors; it was, in fact, almost roaring. What’s in the memory-box, Jon? he wondered. Bed springs? Train transformers all in a row? Soup cans? He thought again of Jon’s eyes, of his still and delicate face. Was it strange, maybe even sick, to be jealous of another man’s son?
But he should have been mine. I knew it… and I think he knew it, too. And then there was Belinda, Roger’s wife. Belinda who wore sunglasses too often on cloudy days. The big ones, because those bruises around the eyes have a nasty way of spreading. But he looked at her sometimes, sitting there still and watchful in the loud umbrella of Roger’s laughter, and he thought almost the exact same thing: She should have been mine.
It was a terrifying thought, because they had both known Belinda in high school and had both dated her.
He and Roger had been two years apart in age and Belinda had been perfectly between them, a year older than Richard and a year younger than Roger. Richard had actually been the first to date the girl who would grow up to become Jon’s mother. Then Roger had stepped in, Roger who was older and bigger, Roger who always got what he wanted, Roger who would hurt you if you tried to stand in his way.
I got scared. 1 got scared and I let her get away. Was it as simple as that? Dear God help me, I think it was. I’d like to have it a different way, but perhaps it’s best not to lie to yourself about such things as cowardice.
And shame.
And if those things were true—if Lina and Seth had somehow belonged with his no-good of a brother and if Belinda and Jon had somehow belonged with him, what did that prove? And exactly how was a thinking person supposed to deal with such an absurdly balanced screw-up? Did you laugh? Did you scream? Did you shoot yourself for a yellow dog?
Wouldn’t surprise me if it worked. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.
EXECUTE.
His fingers moved swiftly over the keys. He looked at the screen and saw these letters floating green on the surface of the screen: MY BROTHER WAS A WORTHLESS DRUNK.
They floated there and Richard suddenly thought of a toy he had had when he was a kid. It was called a Magic Eight-Ball. You asked it a question that could be answered yes or no and then you turned the Magic Eight- Ball over to see what it had to say on the subject—its phony yet somehow entrancingly mysterious responses included such things as IT IS ALMOST CERTAIN, I WOULD NOT PLAN ON IT, and ASK AGAIN LATER Roger had been jealous of that toy, and finally, after bullying Richard into giving it to him one day, Roger had thrown it onto the sidewalk as hard as he could, breaking it. Then he had laughed. Sitting here now, listening to the strangely choppy roar from the CPU cabinet Jon had jury-rigged, Richard remembered how he had collapsed to the sidewalk, weeping, unable to believe his brother had done such a thing.