The Egg Code (10 page)

The Divine Ray
of Inspiration

What have we been talking about all night?” Derek Skye held his hands over the lectern, fingertips touching, thumbs flexed, pointing at the ceiling. “We’ve been talking about stress. We’ve been talking about what you can do as an individual to remove stress from your life.” He stepped around to the side of the podium, taking the microphone with him. In the audience, Scarlet Blessing watched with an intensity that singled her out, even in a crowd of three hundred. She’d deliberately chosen the third row, although she’d arrived early enough to have her pick. She couldn’t sit too close. The aura, the sheer force of the man.

“Here’s a question,” he said, whipping the cord. His voice sounded hoarse this late in the evening. “You’ve heard the expression ‘the survival of the fittest’? Who’s heard it? You’ve heard it? You’ve heard it?” A scattering of hands. “Well, the fact of the matter is, it’s
not
the survival of the fittest. Historically speaking, the groups that have survived have been those groups best able to
manage time effectively
.” He went back to the lectern and fished for a pair of reading glasses. A prop. “The ancient Greeks have a phrase for it which roughly translates into
motivation plus
dedication divided by time awareness equals bliss
.”

Scarlet nodded, her lips moving—
motivation plus dedication
—but then the words ran out and she could only shake her head, comprehending nothing beyond the awesome fact that she was here and so was he. Her feet marched in place, mashing her gym bag under her heels. The bag contained her leotard, her jazz shoes, a bottle of Motrin, a split of champagne, a full change of clothes, three hundred and thirty dollars in cash, an array of contraceptive devices, a portable cassette player and two tapes (Walter Gieseking’s recording of the Debussy preludes and
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
), dental floss, a roll of athletic tape, an expensive calculator, a loaded .22 revolver, three Sooper Seller gift certificates from Living Arrangements, half of a chicken-salad sandwich and a copy of Derek Skye’s latest compilation,
The Skye’s the Limit
(wrapped in a T-shirt to keep the jacket from getting smudged). Hot and sweaty from the long day, she stuck her nose under the neck of her shirt and smelled. Old apples. She disgusted herself, the smells she made. She wondered what Derek smelled like. She wanted to smell his hair. His neck. Behind his ears.

“Gratification. Who knows the word? You know it? Who knows it? It’s a big word. Who can say it for me? Let’s all say it. Can we? Can we do this? Better yet, let’s spell it. Can we spell it? Who can do that? Come on. Let’s all spell it together. Let’s go. G-R—good—A—
good!
”

A police siren passed the conference center, a faint swirl and then silence. No one looked, no one cared. Even with the interstate closed down for construction, Derek had still managed to draw a sell-out crowd. As he ended his presentation—fifteen minutes ahead of schedule—Scarlet stood up and pushed her way to the front of the room. A few dozen admirers were pressed against the podium, asking for autographs. Reaching the stage, she could feel her legs begin to tingle—a strange sensation, similar to the special buzz she sometimes felt in dreams, the weightless place inside her mind. Only the others held her down, the mob, their voices calling out questions that sounded so small and ordinary compared to hers.

“Derek, hi, my name is—”

“Yeah, hi . . . I’m sorry—”

Face. Skin. White!

“My name is Scarlet and I—”

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to go—”

Muh-mustache. Chin, neck. Shirt colla—

“I just have a—”

—collar, blue shirt, wrinkles, dark lines moving.

“—got to get to my car, I’m sorry.”

The crowd parted as Derek hurried out of the room. The round end of Scarlet’s gym bag nudged her in the belly. A big hand blocked her way—spread fingers, the spaces in between. She sagged, giving up. Trash on the floor. Shoes—all different! Still, he had seen her. He had wanted to respond. Oh, these damn people . . .

Refusing his escort, Derek fled down three flights of stairs to an underground parking garage. Doors on every level cautioned against entry; yellow tape wrapped around the push bars made bright warnings, snaky zags of toxic color. Wanting only to get away, he tripped the alarm on the basement floor and scurried past a security light. The siren sounded against the cement I-beams as he climbed into his car and drove off, hearing the siren, then hearing only the noise of a carnival, the low roar of the people on the streets. What a night. Well, a necessary ordeal. One last chance to check his resolve, to say goodbye to the scene. Staring out at those hungry hopeful faces—eyes eagerly swallowing the icon—he was reminded of why he’d left in the first place. They loved him. They loved a monster! Something verging on sadism made his hands go tense on the wheel. Pedestrians swarmed the crosswalks, looking for bars, places to piss, and he hated them, he wanted to mow them down, to feel their bones turn to mush under his wheels. They would pay. They would pay for their love. His followers were fragile things, overly ornate creatures too elaborate to survive outside of the greenhouse. What would they say when he finally revealed his true self? At least one might go over the edge. And
then
what?

Turning right to avoid the interstate, he found himself caught in the congestion of a narrow side street. A stoplight near the center of the block exploded, spraying hot glass across the road; ladies in nice dresses hurried away from the lamppost, stepping carefully to avoid the mess. As he veered into the left lane, a group of drunks muttered and shook their fists. Two men straddled the yellow line, waiting to see which way he’d go. Their faces were hidden; a neon slash winked across the lenses of the shorter man’s glasses. Derek checked his mirror and saw the man’s middle finger, stiff and proud in the dim light. He nodded, accepting his punishment.

Gray Hollows lowered his hand as he stepped over the curb. “Meatheads,” he said, grinding the broken glass under his heel. “The world is full of ’em.” The urge to add something sarcastic swelled and went away. Past the corner, his friend continued, moving easily through the crowd. Gray raced to catch up. Together, they entered a shady vestibule; their shoes crunched and clacked against the sticky floor tiles. A fat man eating a hot dog casually checked IDs by the door. Embarrassed, Gray pulled out his driver’s license. The man in the photo was smirking, looking off to one side, lips parted in an interrupted remark.

“Remember this dump?” he shouted in his friend’s ear. “Back when we were in school, this place used to be a cannery.” Olden nodded, then turned his shoulders, pressing through the mob. Gray followed, speaking the whole time, changing his voice according to the fluctuating ratio of men to women. “This is what we do now, this is the thing. ‘Oh, wow, here’s this condemned building, let’s turn it into a nightclub, kinda rustic, kinda dangerous, glass on the floor, bums passed out in the doorway, aw, yeah, cool, it’s right on the water, can’t you see, prime property, we’ll hire a couple of derelicts to piss on the carpet, get that authentic vibe going on, if the customers complain, we’ll take a hammer and knock their teeth out.’ ”

The bar was a circular counter with one woman covering the whole shift. Out of breath, she ran between the customers, stretching for money, taking orders over her shoulder. Olden pointed at the bar and slipped her a ten. Regardless of his plans for the evening, he never liked to run a tab. Too much to remember. Quick exits, no obligations. He needed his freedom.

“Hmmm, Gray. I don’t know.” He frowned, hooking an empty stool with his foot.

“Sure! Advertising 101!” Gray slumped onto the stool. The leather cushion settled under his weight. “What I say goes, fuck it, I tell my boss over at Enthusiasms Inc., ‘Hey, West, I got an idea for a new campaign,’ he drops a half-mil into my lap, ‘Don’t spend it all in one place,’ the worst that can happen is we go out of business, two weeks later I’m back on unemployment where I goddamn belong.”

Olden smiled. His long hair hung over his face, a dark curtain. “I don’t know, Gray. You’ve got a lot of power at that place. You should use it. Look.” Reaching across the counter, he grabbed a cocktail napkin and tore it into halves and quarters. “Here’s your client,” he said, holding up a square. “ ‘We’ve got this business. Help us to reach our customers.’ You prove to the client why you should be trusted. The pamphlets, the fancy brochures. The type.” He pointed. “Don’t forget about the type. You tell them what they want to hear. Then you go home and you do what you feel is right. You come back the next day.” Another square. “ ‘See. I did what you wanted.’ They believe you.”

Gray slammed the rest of his pint. “I’m not looking to get away with anything, Olden! You know what it’s going to take to get me out of there? Those people own my ass, I’m telling you. You talk to my father up in Battle Creek about it, he’s probably got the next twenty years of my life all mapped out!” Still shouting, he pointed randomly at the stranger sitting next to him. The other man scooted away, guarding his drink. “Sheer incompetence. That’s my only chance. A major screw-up. Otherwise, I’m dead. ’Cause I don’t belong up there, stuck with those idiots: ‘Ooh, Gray, pretty cool guy’ . . . Yeah, fuck
you
. This is all marking time, you know that. You know I haven’t given up.
You
haven’t given up either.”

“I’ve given up on everything, Gray. That’s why I live in the country.”

Gray removed his spectacles and tightened the screws with his thumb. Without his glasses, his face looked extra-large, swollen in spots, almost hydrocephalic in its strange design, starting wide and tapering toward the bottom.

“Art-school rejects, that’s you and me,” he laughed, replacing his glasses. “When the academics don’t like you, you know you must be doing something right.”

Olden shook his head. “I like everyone.”

Oblivious, Gray plundered on, holding up a rolled five for another beer. “Sanctioned mediocrity, that’s what I always used to say—and goddamnit, Olden, I believe it now more than ever. Let some of those college pansies with their phony liberalism and their arrogant ideals work in advertising for two weeks, then we’ll see what happens. Ah, yes—the
artist
! The divine ray of inspiration! Lick my balls.”

Olden listened without looking, keeping his eyes fixed on the woman behind the bar. Relaxing between customers, she adjusted the hang of her floppy tie, pulling on one side, then the other, pressing it smooth to save the changes. “I think you romanticize things too much.”

“Romanticize what?”

“You’ve always known what you wanted to do with your life, Gray. That’s wonderful. You should be grateful. Most of us are lost.”

Still staring at the bartender, Olden reached between his legs and fixed the tilt of his hard-on. In recent months he’d forgotten all about women, how they walked, spoke, their different gestures, the course of their strange logic. He wanted to talk to one, just to watch the thoughts pass from one thing to the next. Hearing Gray’s voice, he rubbed his eyes and focused on the sound, trying to distinguish the words from the background din.

“. . . I should be grateful that I wasted my entire childhood parked in front of a word processor—‘Ooh, he’s so cute, he thinks he’s Truman Capote,
Herbert, where’s the Instamatic? Get a shot of his feet swinging
under the table’—
meanwhile all the other kids are busy throwing rocks at each other and masturbating to the chick in the life-insurance commercial, HA HA!”

Olden selected a toothpick from a jar of three hundred and held it between his fingers. His gestures seemed designed to mislead, to deliberately override the listener’s better sense.

“Think about it, Gray. You’re a writer. This is what you want to do. Okay. There are certain steps you have to take if you want to succeed. For example. I am someone who might be able to help you. Now what does this mean? This means that no one knows who I am. You do, but you don’t say anything about it. It’s not in your best interest that anyone should know this part of the story. What I do, I’m a person who can take a message and put it someplace where everyone’s going to find it.” He wiggled the toothpick. “The message, we say, in this case, is that your product—it could be a story, it could be a piece of music, it could be something as simple as an
idea
—is a desirable commodity. There. It’s done. It’s out there. Now I go away.” No more toothpick. “We act like, oh, it just happened—but it didn’t just happen. I put it there.”

Giving up on the bartender, Gray unrolled the five-dollar bill and set it on the counter. “And then what?”

Olden tucked his hair behind his ears. The bartender looked up, stubbed out her cigarette and walked over to the beer pulls.

“Well, this is all just speaking hypothetically,” he said, shrugging, “but I’m working on a little project that you might find interesting.”

“What project?”

Olden didn’t answer, just smiled as the bartender filled two pint glasses with expensive bock. She set the drinks in front of the men and shook her head, rejecting their money.

Olden tasted his beer. “Remember this name,” he said, nudging the woman’s hand with his glass. Her fingers curled around his palm.

“What name’s that, honey?” she asked.

Olden lingered, then took his hand back. “The Egg Code,” he said.

She wrinkled her nose, puzzling it out. “Egg Code, let’s see . . .” Looking up at the ceiling, she tapped a ballpoint pen against her throat. “That’s amaretto . . . and Drambuie . . .”

“No.” He raised his half-empty pint glass, toasting the girl. “That’s not it at all,” he said.

Coming Together

It was still early when they left the bar, so they followed the crowd to a nearby theater, where free shows played from nine to eleven. The the-ater was small, and the floor rose at such a steep angle that you could put your feet on the seat in front of you without bending your knees. It reminded Olden of a lecture hall, or maybe a dissection room: white and clean, camera trained on a splayed lizard. Tonight the stage was bare, with only a few mirrors running along the back wall. Gray shifted in the darkness, making the whole row of connected seats shake on a spring. Olden breathed into his hand. Not so bad. A few beers, an hour drive and he’d be all set to work until morning. The city made him nervous—too many people, too many schedules to coordinate. Out in the sticks, he could make his own hours. An easy lifestyle. In the city, he saw the proof of his own wildness. Every multiplex, every three-story strip mall revealed his basic inability to
get with the program.
The women were nice, and they all seemed to like him, but overall he preferred his solitude. Even Gray was starting to get on his nerves.

But then the dance began, and something changed. An instant reversal, for as soon as Olden saw the girl, he wanted only to look at her, to watch her body move. She danced in the center of the troupe, a leader of sorts; the other performers gave her space when she needed it, space to shine and rock. The music was loud, an electronic mix, and it boomed from speaker to speaker—a bit more, really, than this crowd expected. The people in the front row covered their ears and crossed their legs and smiled tolerantly, waiting for it to end. The choreography slashed in violent thrusts across the stage. The women were more daring than the men, and they threw themselves down from the scaffolding, striking the ground with a terrible force. The first thing Olden noticed about the girl was her hair—pigtails, an innocent touch, so out of place in the midst of this awful rite. She was small, barely five feet tall. Fat, grinning cheeks, pale, pockmarked skin, pitted across the forehead. Her eyebrows were thick and dark, and they joined at the bridge of her nose, her eyes hidden in cinch-folds of happy wrinkles. But it was her body that Olden watched, for it amazed him—the violence inside, the strange contrast between the sweet face and the angry gestures. Her body was a super piston, machine-made, ultra-efficient in the way it reached and tore and swatted. Flat feet banged the boards, bent legs stepping with leaden effort, then flexing to kick the air. He admired the way she’d trained herself, knowing that his own body could never do those things. This was a skill, a secret that she knew and he didn’t, and in that secret he saw another life, years of dreams and discipline, an ambition similar to his own except in the course it took, and he respected her for this, respected her for being so good at one thing. As her hips swiveled in a wide bop, he thought about the work involved, the complex terminology, the words used to describe this and that, words unfamiliar to him but a part of her daily routine, common to the point of habit (like checksums and sequence numbers, only not . . . not
quite
). He wanted to stay there, to learn more. Onstage, the dancers divided, came back, bowed quickly. Olden clapped, staring at the girl.

“I don’t think that’s going to help my hangover,” Gray said, rubbing his temples as the lights came up and the audience moved toward the exits, embarrassed by the incongruence between their own lives and the big-ness on the stage. Stepping over the back of his chair, he hurdled the rows, lifting one leg, then the other.

Olden stayed in his seat, thinking. An elderly couple slowed the traffic, clotting the aisle with their tiny waddle. A teenager made a gun finger with his right hand, held it up to the back of the old man’s head and pulled the trigger. Olden waited for the crowd to pass, then met Gray out in the lobby. A circular sofa surrounded a steel post in the center of the room. Gray was in the middle of saying something sarcastic about an advertisement hanging over the concession stand. Olden tuned the words out, hearing only the cadence of sounds, the jesting rise and fall.

“Let’s stay,” he said, finding a space on the circular sofa between two heaps of children’s coats. “I want to meet the dancers.”

Gray slid his hands into his pockets as he paced around the sofa. “Tiny clothes,” he muttered, inspecting the jackets, the lightweight windbreakers, yellow and red. He seemed to be pitching ideas to himself, searching for an angle, a satirical point-of-attack. “The shelf life is ridiculous. Six months and it’s no good. This is part of the psychology. In this way, we will train you to buy, to become dependent upon the consumer culture. We, meaning corporate America. Fashion! Today, tomorrow and the next day. That’s what the third-world countries know that we don’t. The children go naked. The children go naked, and once they’re sixteen years old, they get a little tunic and they’re all set. HA HA! No more
buying
.”

A group of kids ran into the lobby, screaming, swirling their fists, each clutching the same neon doodad—a free souvenir, evidently. A few tired adults followed behind—mussed hair, coats dragging, the worn-out remnants of parental authority.

Olden stood up and stepped out of the way, watching the swarm of children, their munchkin bodies darting in chaotic directions. He wondered about the underlying principle behind all of this apparently random activity. If child A equals child B. His father would know. Peering down the corridor, he saw a few of the performers mingling with the parents, answering their questions in an even, professional tone, poised like representatives for some worldwide youth organization. The girl with the pigtails was standing with her arms around two of the men. In her street clothes, she seemed even further removed from himself, a real woman instead of a prop, instead of a two-dimensional phantasm, a woman who owned more than one pair of shoes, more than one shirt, a fully accessorized human being, a complex and remote
other
. There she was. He wanted her to be not-perfect. He would love her more for these imperfections. Weird habits. Things to apologize for. Oh, Christa
always
does that. Christa—where did
that
come from? Generic dream-girl. No, don’t think of her that way. Keep the name open. Only truth, only true things. Let her come to you. Stay empty. Start with nothing.

“I saw you!” The girl was pointing at Olden, who just stood there, marked, unable to move. Kissing each of her partners once on the cheek, she kicked her nylon gym bag down the hallway until it came to a stop against the foot of the sofa. “You were sitting up front,” she said, hoisting the bag.

“You can see from onstage?” he asked, liking her voice, liking it all so far.

“Not too good.” She reached between her legs and pulled out a wedgie. “With the long hair, though.”

“Oh, yeah, right.” Olden touched his hair, suddenly remembering it, finding it strange for some reason.
His
hair. She’d noticed his hair. Why not?

“I like it when guys do that. With the hair. It looks sexy.”

He smiled, she smiled. The whole thing was real nice. Looking over her head, he nodded at the two male dancers, who stood leaning against each other with their arms folded—sizing him up, sure. Well, fine. Guilty until proven innocent. Not a problem. Olden saluted and they waved back. H . . . i.

“You must be real tired, after all that,” he said.

“Not too.” She shifted the bag, working her arms through the wide straps.

“I really liked the show.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“You want to have a drink with me?”

“Oh, sure, yeah, let’s go.”

The girl waved goodbye to her partners. One of them said, “Scarlet, gimme your cigarettes.” Scarlet, then? Olden tested the name out in his head, trying a variety of pitches—the bored purl, the sexy shout. Hi, Scarlet. Let me ask Scarlet. Scarlet, where’s my wallet? Sure, Scarlet. Scarlet’s not here, can I take a message?

Passing the vestibule, they saw Gray standing by the entrance, watching the children pile onto a short yellow bus. A chaperone manned the door, scooping the air with his left hand, moving the kids along.

Olden nudged his friend in the gut. “Come on,” he said, his arm now around Scarlet’s waist. They looked good like that. A nice height ratio. Him and her. “We’re going back to the bars.”

“Okay,” Gray stammered. His tongue felt pasty, his brain slow to react. Shaking his head to clear the fog, he followed Olden and Scarlet out into the chilly night. “I can do that,” he said, keeping a few steps behind.

The Meet Market was a dreadful place: club tunes and boys and girls writhing on spiral staircases like in a television dance show. The three of them waited in line, then took a booth by the front door, where the music wasn’t quite so loud. Olden and Scarlet sat together arm-in-arm while Gray stayed on the other side, stirring his vodka with a bright red straw. Yellow foam leaked from a big rip in the upholstery, and he picked at it until finally the fabric caught and the seam split along the edge. Embarrassed, he covered the hole with his jacket.

“Cheap place anyway,” he muttered, chugging his vodka down to the ice. “Adds to the effect. Graffiti on the tables, probably done by a professional, some hired hand—oh, make it look authentic, use real curse words, ‘Jimmy loves Cathy’ and the whole bit, signed by the artist, collect all five, lookit, this one’s different than the other but it’s all bullshit, HA HA!”

Scarlet rubbed Olden’s thigh under the table, but talked mostly to Gray, cupping her hand around her mouth, almost burning her chin on the hot orange of her cigarette. “I think graffiti is cruel,” she said, dragging on the filter, making the ash go bright. “When they do that to trees. Or even if it’s plastic. Then that’s just as wrong, because you’re still killing a living thing.”

Gray wadded up a napkin and dropped it into his empty glass. “Ah, but by that same logic, what about this table?”

Scarlet looked down at the nondescript slab of wood. Already she’d lost track of the argument. She wanted to talk about something else. Cars. Magic spells. “It’s kind of a cruddy table,” she shrugged.

“Why are we talking about this?” Olden asked, his own little contribution. Scarlet laughed and touched his cheek.

“Let’s drop it then, baby.” A curl of smoke hovered between her lips, not moving, maintaining its wave-shape. Putting her hand back under the table, she looked at Gray and said, “Oh! Do you like baseball?”

Gray stared for a moment. “Wait,” he said. “I still haven’t made my point yet.”

“Oh, about the . . .” She blunted her cigarette in the tray and coughed without covering her mouth—a loud, phlegmy hack. “Well. What?”

Gray looked at Olden, his eyebrows bobbing over the ridge of his glasses. “Can I make my point?”

“Sure, make your point, Gray,” Olden said, keeping an eye on the crowd.

Gray moistened his lips. “Look . . . all I’m saying is . . . people spend
way too much time
talking about . . . things that . . . don’t necessarily have anything to do . . . with anything.”

“Right.” Scarlet, trying to be nice, smiled and lit up another cigarette.

“You know?”

“Oh, totally.”

“And the problem with that is . . .” Gray slowly tipped forward, his mouth wide open, trying to sneak up on the next word, to take it between his teeth. “I completely forgot what I was going to say.”

They stared out at the growing crowd, feeling trapped inside their little booth by the bodies and the noise. A group of young guys—all dressed in nice slacks like men in a pants commercial—stood right next to them, talking about a pornographic movie; it was impossible not to hear the graphic details, what she did and then what he did to her. Olden was embarrassed, mostly for Scarlet’s sake, though if he knew her better maybe he wouldn’t have felt that way. Slowly, a new feeling came over him, and he imagined his left arm as a giant bird’s wing, draped protectively around her shoulder. Over the past three years, he’d conditioned himself against this sort of thing. One name—Gloria—stood for all the other women in Olden’s life. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Gray stood, jangling his keys. “Got to run.”

“No,” Scarlet said, but she offered her hand anyway, letting him go.

“Sure.” He waited for the expected line, the speech about driving home drunk, but neither Olden nor the woman said a word, so he added, a bit maliciously, “You two lovebirds.”

The couple moved closer together, thanking him for his endorsement. Turning, he waved over his shoulder. On his way out the door, he saw a woman standing in the entryway, trying to take an octopus costume off over her head. Foam tentacles waggled on strands of fishing line. A circle of people stood nearby, watching apprehensively. Gray approached the woman and said, “Do you need a hand?” but she didn’t respond, so he crouched down and peered inside the eyeholes, blowholes, whatever you call ’em, and he repeated, “Do you want me to pull?” but she just sniffled and told him to go away.

So, home again. Gray moved his car to avoid getting a ticket, then walked the six blocks back to his downtown apartment. A stack of take-out menus and Christian literature made a slippery mess on the entryway floor. A squashed roach decorated a tiled mosaic near the elevator—big guy, with distinct entrails like rodent guts, not just an amorphous jelly but something that looked like a stomach, something that looked like a heart. The elevator bucked up to the third floor. Each floor in Gray’s building had its own strange smell. His was pesticide. He leaned into the door with his key, missing the lock a few times before finally getting it right. Taking his shoes off, he followed his long floppy socks into the kitchen, where he downed a jar of pickled mushrooms and drank a beer. He looked at his reflection in the dark window and burped at it. The light on the answering machine blinked a constant rhythm, six messages for someone named Francis, each more desperate and ominous than the last. Gray stripped down to his boxer shorts and turned on his computer. The OS went through its usual sing-songy introduction as he bobbed in his seat, trying to stay awake. He wondered if he could do it tonight. Shut out the distractions, the other crap. Well, writing. A bit of a game. Just put the words down. Make something up. But lately everything that Gray made up sounded like bad copy, the same insincere nonsense he wrote every day, nine to six, the adman’s curse, meaning nothing, believing nothing, pushing other people’s products, and no room for yourself anymore. The margins between day and night were hazy; no longer could he compartmentalize, keep the BS on one side. Now it was all BS, even his own work, the big three pages per month, chapter one, chapter one, chapter one, every word of it as empty and unfelt as selling potato chips or fire insurance or—this week—orthopedic shoes. Still, in his mind he saw the character, the situation. He saw the story he wanted to tell. Then he felt ashamed for wanting to tell anything, embarrassed by his own arrogance, his vague dreams of greatness, the banality of it all; yes, even his own ambition was banal. Just do your job and shut up about it. Nothing wrong with that. But there was everything wrong with that, for he hated it, all the stupid commercials, the dip-shitty thirty-second spots, hated the whole
idea
of it—most of all, he hated himself for being good at it. And the less he cared, the better he was. Here’s Gray at work, designing citywide billboard campaigns, million-dollar affairs, half-drunk, half-asleep, half-looking at the page while half-jerking-off under the drafting table. For this he was rewarded. When would it end? Probably never. Promoted endlessly, up and up, ever closer to that great grave in the sky.