How To Succeed in Evil (9 page)

At the end of the first day, two confused-looking young men in loincloths bring Edwin a cot. Edwin looks at the tiny bed. Then he looks down on the young men.

“We were just told to bring you a cot,” one of them says.

“I will need another,” says Edwin.

“They didn’t tell us anything about that.”

“Clearly, this is the best job you can hope to get.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

From the door of the room, Alabaster speaks, “Bring him another cot.” The slave-boys scurry off, leaving the two men to consider one another for a moment.

“This is not the best job you can hope to get. Why are you here?” asks Edwin.

“That old woman is shit crazy. But if she wants to pay me $140,000 a year so she can call me ‘Alabaster’ and feel like she’s living in
Gone With the Wind
, what do I care? I have two boys, they’re both going to college and I’m going to retire in Aruba.”

Edwin nods. Alabaster is the sanest man he has met in Alabama.

“So why don’t you sleep in your room?” asks Alabaster.

Edwin turns back to the constellations of pages and images that cover the room behind him. “I don’t want to leave the work.”

Alabaster turns and leaves. He is certain that Edwin is as crazy as the rest of them. He doesn’t have time to worry about the tall man. The house is running low on baby oil. Alabaster shakes his head and thinks of his sons. They will have a better life – a better life by far.

Exhausted from his labors, Edwin removes his pants and shirt, carefully folds them, and lays his long body down across the two cots. Under the weight of tremendous fatigue, the need for sleep takes over. But Edwin does not go without a fight. His mind still races. In his sleep he twitches, mutters and kicks out at odd angles. Edwin rarely sleeps for more than four hours at a time while working on a large project.

But as he sleeps, a book lies by the side of his bed. It is thick, heavy and ponderously titled, “Modern Power Distribution.” On the back cover is a picture of the author, Thomas Putnam. Like the book, he is also thick and heavy. To compensate for his lack of chin, the learned Mr. Putnam wears a bristly mustache. While Edwin sleeps, Thomas Putnam and his compensatory mustache are being kidnapped. This is not Edwin’s idea. He has suggested that it would be helpful to speak with Mr. Putnam. He might even have added that a phone call would suffice. But no matter. With the barest spark, the flames of Iphagenia’s lunacy had been fanned.

Iphagenia’s reasoning goes something like this: When you are a villain, you don’t ask a technical expert if he has a spare moment to consult on your problem. You don’t give him a phone call. There are conventions for all of this. You must send in a strike team in a Non-descript White Van and grab the man while he is shopping, or perhaps playing with his children in the park. There is the black bag over the head, the futile, yet inevitable, struggle, the slamming of doors and the screeching of tires. Iphagenia thinks she is doing very well. She does not realize that these are the exact forms and tropes of villainy that Edwin rails against.

When Thomas Putnam is finally deposited in Edwin’s room he is understandably upset. “What do you want with me!” Putnam demands through his mustache. Edwin looks at him. Then he walks over to the chair where his suit jacket is hanging.

“I demand to know what’s going on here!”

Edwin dons his jacket, sighs deeply and answers as truthfully as he can, “If you must know, I am being held against my will by an oversexed antebellum nightmare of a woman because she believes that not only will I help her take over the world, but that I will, upon due reflection, come to my senses and rule the world at her side as her consort.”

This was not the answer Putnam was looking for. He tried again. “W-w-why have I been kidnapped?”

“Because these people are very stupid. I mentioned that it might be helpful if I could speak to you and…”

“What, you! You WHAT? Wait a minute. What in God’s name is going on here?”

“I know,” says Edwin, “it hurts to try make sense of it. I would have been happy with a phone call.”

“This is an OUTRAGE, I, I, I,”

“I’m sorry for your inconvenience. Please try to calm down.”

“INCONVENIENCE! I was at my son’s BALL GAME! He saw his FATHER get KIDNAPPED!”

Edwin is already bored with the small talk, “Do you have a consulting fee?”

“WHAT?”

Edwin tries again, slower. “Do you have a consulting fee?”

“YES!”

“If, we were to pay you, say, five times your normal consulting rate for this conversation, would that be sufficient incentive for you to stop yelling?”

“Uh, yeah,” he says, stroking his mustache for reassurance. “But, please, what’s going here? Who are these people?”

“You really don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

Edwin tries again. “As I explained, I am being held captive by an aged Francophilliac and her half-witted son. As far as I can tell, she longs to use her considerable wealth to see the antebellum South rise again in a ridiculous jihad of gracious living. And not only does she look to me for the plan through which her backward and inbred scheme can be realized, but she also demands my true love.”

“You’re right,” says Putnam, “I really didn’t want to know that.”

“Yes, I’m usually right. Now,” Edwin says, indicating a large map of North America that is marked with colored dots connected by an unruly matrix of fine lines, “do you recognize this?”

“It’s the grid. Every power generation facility in North America.”

“That is correct. Now, if my understanding is complete then this diagram means that every power generation facility is linked into the grid.”

“Yes.”

“Interconnected.”

“Yes.”

“Interdependent.” For the first time since entering the room days ago, Edwin seats himself at the piano and begins to play.

“I wouldn’t say that exactly, but, close enough.”

“So that a plant in New York, might actually be generating power for a home in Florida.”

“That’s a stretch. You see the energy used in transmission, dissipated in heat and radiated magnetic charge around the lines—”

“How do blackouts happen?”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“Then tell me about the Lake Erie Loop. What happened with the Lake Erie Loop?”

“Well nobody really knows for sure. That blackout that shut down the NorthEast and the Midwest. It was blamed on a set of transmission lines that circle Lake Erie, but... Well, I’m not sure what happened. There were investigations but...”

“Could it be that it was more politically expedient that a cause for the blackout was never found?”

“Yeah, that’s probably it. Look, I charge people a lot of money to consult on power grid issues. But this system is so big — it crosses so many state and even national boundaries,” he shrugged, “A lot of it is guesswork. It’s worse in Europe.”

“Please try to explain it to me.”

“Look, in July 1996 a tree fell into a power line in Oregon. That took down 15 states.”

“Remarkable,” says Edwin. His fingers move faster across the keys. The music echoes beautifully through the empty room.

“Well, it was hot. People were using a lot of power for A/C. And the load on one power plant became too great, so it shut down. Which overloaded the next one. Boom, boom, boom, boom, like dominos.”

“Or lemmings,” Edwin says quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Edwin lifts his fingers from the keys and turns to face Putnam. “What is it called when power is, how shall I say, in harmony?”

“You mean, in ‘phase.’”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“It’s described by a sine function rotated through 180 degrees and when...”

“I’ve no need of a technical explanation. Now, power going down is one thing, but power going out of phase? What happens if power is out of phase?”

“How far out of phase?”

“180 degrees.”

“A hundred and — are you nuts? It would cancel out, you see if you have two waves, equal size both headed in opposite directions. Wham.”

“Calm water.”

“Yeah, I guess, nobody’s stupid enough to do that.”

Edwin drapes his long fingers over the keyboard and plays a chord. “Harmony, you see. But now, and just for an instant.” He shifts his fingers and the resulting chord is dissonant and wrong.

“But that could take down the whole grid. I mean you’d need a lot more than one power plant doing it. And all at the same time.”

“And just for an instant?”

“Well, that’s all you’d need, yeah.”

“Thank you very much Mr. Putnam. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.” Edwin rings a bell. In an instant Alabaster appears in the doorway. “I am done with Mr. Putnam, Alabaster. Perhaps you could have him returned to his family in a slightly more civilized manner.”

“I didn’t want to kidnap him in the first place,” says Alabaster. He shrugs in a way that suggests that these matters are largely out of his control.

“Do what you can,” says Edwin.

As he is leaving, Putnam turns to Edwin and asks, “You’re not really going to do it are you?”

Edwin looks up from his papers. “Me? Heavens no. I don’t do anything. I’m just a consultant. Like you.”

With Putnam gone and the scheme complete in his mind, exhaustion overcomes Edwin. He goes to bed and sleeps for 14 hours. He is awakened by Alabaster shaking his shoulder.

“You’ve got to get up. She wants to see you.”

Edwin sits up and considers appearing before a client in his current state, “I will require a shower and a shave first.”

“No, sir. Ma’am powerful angry. She wants you right now.”

“Ma’am?” Edwin asks.

Alabaster shrugs again. “She pays me $20 extra every time I call her Ma’am. I guess the habit stuck.”

Edwin splashes water on his face, and cleans himself up as best he can. As he unrolls his sleeves, he is moved to ask, “What is your real name?”

“Daniel.”

“You won’t mind if I don’t call you Alabaster?”

“Nobody around here will know who you are talking about.”

As Daniel helps him into his suit jacket, Edwin says, “That’s fine. I’m afraid that no matter what I say, no one around here knows what I’m talking about.”

Chapter Fifteen 

Using the 'Asset'

Gus lights another cigarette. He takes a long drag and looks into the sky. In all the years Gus has known him, Excelsior has never just walked up. Would Gus walk if he could fly? Gus takes another drag and coughs some more. If Gus could fly, he’d probably just leave. But that’s not the way it works. It feels like all the important decisions were made long ago and now Gus is just trying to live out his own epilogue with as little grief as possible.

There is a belch of diesel and a roaring noise as a generator comes to life. Arc lights cast harsh shadows across the decaying parking lot. Gus turns back to the nest of trailers and personnel that has sprung up in the last hour. Men in unofficial uniforms rush to and fro. Not a single one of them is without some kind of electronic doohingy. Typing and talking — struggling to get their thumbs on impossibly tiny little keys. And for what? Gus knows that they’re all just talking to each other. And all while running around in the same damn parking lot. Why the hell are they running around? This isn’t the runnin’ around part. This is the waiting part. 

He leans back against a car and watches minor bureaucrats swarm around him. He wouldn’t give a damn for any of ‘em. Not one tinker’s damn. He coughs some more. Gus is to old for this shit. And yet they kept trotting him out to deal with the big man. That’s one of the things they called Excelsior. The Big Man. Ha. When Gus found him he’d been a scared little boy in the middle of Kansas. Sure he’d gotten bigger since then. He’d even figured out how to fly. He was way, way more powerful. But still, whenever Gus looks at Excelsior, all he sees is a scared little boy.

Shit, that was back in the days when they would send one guy to do a job. One guy and precious few regulations. Now they send a car full of guys and a trunk full of procedure manuals. And they still screw it up. Nobody has any initiative any more. Excelsior grows more powerful and all these drones grow weaker. Gus gives a bitter chuckle. The chuckle grows to a cough. And the coughing seizes him right down to his boots. As the air runs short, he wonders if this is finally it. But the coughing slows and the bright lights dance behind his eyes. Life, such as it is, goes on.

Radio’s crackle all around him. “The asset is inbound. Repeat the asset is inbound.” Men in jumpsuits scramble around frantically. As if what they do matters. As if what they do makes a difference at all. They’re just ordinary men. Excelsior doesn’t need their help.

Gus shakes his head. Is this what the world has really come to? The cars are fast and the men aren’t worth a damn. Everybody has forgotten that life doesn’t play by the rules. Every once and a while the bitch just tries to kill you. And sometimes you have to stand on it. Disable the safety and run it until it’s red hot. No matter what the engineers say.

Maybe that was it. The world had gone to the engineers. Had to be it. When they first showed up they had slide rules. Now they had computers. Now nobody could take a crap without running it through a computer simulation. But for all their rules and their simulations and their levels upon levels of yes men, they still trotted old Gus out to deal with Excelsior. That’s ‘cause the Big Man trusted Gus. That’s ‘cause Gus could look in his eye and still see a scared little boy.

And right now, all these people — Hell, they have a name for themselves, Bureau of Meta-Human Affairs, or some such — All these college boy bastards scurry around not because they have something to do, but because they are afraid. If Excelsior wants, he can end all their lives. There’s not a damn thing their simulations can do about it.

It’s not something that’s ever mentioned, but the fear is there all the same. Sure, it is all praises and service and propaganda when Excelsior shows up. But at the same time, everybody’s bowels loosen a little bit. Gus laughs a little at this facade. The laugh becomes a cough.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” says one of the faceless drones or clones or whatever the hell they passed off as men these days. Gus looks right at it and he realizes that it’s the head drone. A piggish little man, everyone calls Director Smiles. In defiance, Gus hooks another cigarette in the corner of his ragged mouth.