The Egg Code (24 page)

“Different is a problem.”

“Well, that’s too bad.”

“Are you trying to wreck your career, Derek?”

Derek snaps, raging: “My career is . . . a lie! My career is . . . a fiction! And if I want to do something . . . either unconventional or maybe a bit reckless . . . then that’s up to me! If nothing else, if I get to say one true thing to people—”

“Oh, one true thing. What horseshit is this?”

“One true thing—”

“Derek, I am not going to allow you to destroy in one foolish act everything we’ve been working toward since NINETEEN SEVENTY-THREE when your father-in-law—”

“Ex-father-in-law.”

“—ex-father-in-law came up to me and said:
Reginald. Do it.
And I said
okay
.”

Derek presses his hands to the sides of his head. “So you’re not going to do this for me, is that what you’re saying? You’re unwilling to . . . execute your role as my legal representative . . .”

“I am unwilling to do something I don’t believe in. I believe in Derek Skye. I’ve believed in Derek Skye. For twenty-five years. That’s a long time. Maybe too long?”

A bell rings, and the two men turn toward the door.

“Let me get that.”

“I’m leaving anyway.”

“Reggie?” Derek stands in the way, searching the old man’s face for reassurance.

“We’ll talk later. Really, I’ve got to go.”

Downstairs, they bump into a girl—short, barely five feet tall, with brown pigtails that sit on either shoulder like a pair of fancy epaulets. She holds a heavy canvas sack between her ankles; a pink ballet shoe spills ribbons through the zipper. Her outfit is that of the proverbial madwoman—white rubber sneakers, black tights, a flimsy dress stained in batik patterns of purple and orange. Novelty buttons urge a desperate message: KISS ME; LOVE GOD; I ❤ ARTICHOKES. Her round sunglasses are blue and mirrored, something a Deadhead would wear. She chews gum like a child trying to push out a front tooth, a kind of anxious wadding of her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

“Hi, Derek. Wow, you’re like—here.”

“Scarlet, this is my agent, Reggie Bergman. Reggie—”

“Oh, my.”

“Hi, Reggie.”

“—this is my new assistant, Scarlet—”

“Oh, God, listen to him.”

“Scarlet . . . Scarlet, did you ever tell me your last name?”

“Scarlet, yeah, hi, how you doin’?”

“Lovely. We were just . . . what were we doing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Doing those crazy things that guys do. Scarlet, what’s your last name?”

Scarlet pulls her dark glasses down the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are dark, marred by a lack of sleep. “My last name? Hmmm. My last name. My last name is a strange, wonderful, awesome and mysterious thing.”

“Oh. I guess that answers my question.”

Reggie holds his briefcase against his chest and twists sideways, trying to squeeze past. “Right, well, I’ve gotta head out.”

“Fabulous. That’s really fabulous. Reggie.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s such a cool name.”

“Well, thank you.”

“I mean . . . that’s a
really
cool name.” She smiles, her eyes beaming. “It’s just totally a name that a little kid would have.”

“Right.”

“I mean—that’s cool! That’s totally great. That’s great that you’re keeping up with that.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“It’s great that you’re, you know, keeping in touch with that part of you . . . that little kid part of you that we always forget about but it’s always there, you know? Even when you get older and more distant from the things that are really important . . . doesn’t matter. It’s all good. It’s like one day you just realize—wow, this is wild . . . this is what life’s really about . . .”

Reggie nods, making excuses as he shuffles down the path. “Right, well . . . it was very pleasant meeting you, and I’ll just . . . let you two do your business. I’ve got to get back to the city.”

“Nice, nice. Doing that crazy commute thing. I know how that is.”

Derek leans in. “Reg, give me a call. Next week sometime.”

“Will do. Bye, Derek—bye, miss.”

Scarlet waves as the old man climbs into his car and drives away. Taking her bag, she turns and climbs the stairs. Slowly, Derek follows; he stalls before entering the apartment.

In the kitchen, Scarlet flips through a few cabinets, then opens the refrigerator, searching for some magic ingredient. “Can I make you something to eat?” she asks. From the freezer, a thick white mist curls around her head.

“No thank you.”

She closes the door; the mist rises, lingering near a vent. “Man, you
do
need an assistant. When was the last time you went grocery shopping?”

“There’s some money in the drawer by your hand. Maybe you could pick up a few things.”

“Gotcha. Ten four. I would be more than happy to do that, sir!”

“Excellent. Use your own discretion.”

Scarlet paces the room, pointing, counting it out. “We’ll start with peanut butter. That sounds about right. You need peanut butter. And just regular butter too. Several different kinds of butter. Anything else?”

“I don’t believe so.” Feeling awkward, he sifts through a pile of mail on the table. Head down, he speaks to a manila envelope. “Thank you, Scarlet,” he says. “I’m glad you stopped by.”

She smiles and shrugs. “Hey, anything you need. I can do ironing, I can take care of the kids—but you don’t have any kids, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I can still do it, just in case. Let me see. I can type. I can take dictation, so if there’s ever a time when the inspiration’s really flowing, and you can’t write it down fast enough, feel free to, you know, impose on my secretarial skills.”

“That probably won’t be necessary.”

“No, I didn’t think so. I just thought I’d mention it. I’m sure your writing is so personal, you know, like . . . ‘one-on-one conversations with myself’ or whatever, and I’m totally cool with that, so anytime you need me to just get lost, that’s totally fine.”

He garbles a few empty words of gratitude, staring at her feet. Scarlet’s eyes glow; his voice fills her throat with a weightless energy. Slowly, she rises, standing en pointe. “I’m writing that down,” she says, then taps her head. “Soon as I get home.”

“What?”

“What you just said.”

He tries to remember what he just said—something about the groceries, yeah, and be sure to get a receipt for the returnables. This scares him, how his words seem to imply more than they mean. He blinks as his mind gropes for something reasonable to say. “You’re a very special girl, Scarlet . . . you’re a . . . duuhh . . .”

“What?”

“I forgot.”

“Don’t worry about it. Look, let me go get your groceries and I’ll be right back.”

Her sneakers squeak as she takes the stairs in twos and bursts through the front door. Crossing the street, she skips past a few cars, trusting in her own ability to avoid disaster. This man has made her feel untouchable. Upstairs, Derek watches through the venetian blinds, then smiles with the pleasure of a new thought. Blessing. That’s the girl’s name. What a pretty name.

XV

Virus

2

Ever since late September, Julian had been working on his letters, making them ready for his big commission. It was a lonely job. He worked quickly, churning out the major alphabet in little more than ten days, adding the dingbats and diacritics the following week. After this job was complete, he would take a long vacation. He was tired. His clothes stunk. He’d forgotten how to live like a human being.

Only one thing stood between him and his goal. The Z. Could not do it. It seemed like a simple task, on the surface. A line. A slash. Another line. Even so, a growing hesitation kept him from finishing the job. Obsessed, he began to dream of letters, giant, anthropomorphic letters that crowded him in his sleep, a gang of twenty-six.

“HA!” scoffed the Z, its beak pecking the space above the old man’s head. “I laugh at your inability to comprehend my inherent complexity.” The Z spoke in a canned voice reminiscent of Mexican banditos. “You think—LIKE FOOL, you think—three lines, boom-boom-boom—is simple, no? AI, DIABLO! You will burn for such treachery!”

Trying to wake up (he’d dozed off at the drafting table), Julian called across the dream-space, “Give me a clue, man. Tell me where you came from.”

“Ahhh.” The Z paused, choosing its words. “Okay, then. You wish to know what I am. I confess. I am . . . three erect phalli, bonking madly, a great gang bang! HA HA!” The Z unhinged at its corners, then returned to its proper size. “No. I tease. Look, I don’t know. A winding stream, a snake, a bunch of twigs, who cares? The important thing is this—what will you do, now that I am here?” Julian looked down at his shoes. “Keep in mind my history. Nicolas Jenson—has drawn the Z. John Baskerville—has drawn the Z. Giambattista Bodoni, the great wop himself— has drawn the Z! And now, you! I scoff at your impossible predicament!”

The old man blinked, raising his head from the table. His right cheek ached where a chunky eraser had been pressing against the side of his face. His eyelids fluttered, and soon he was back in letter-land, floating in a thick, soupy mist. A woman was with him this time—Donna Skye, of all people—and she reached up and wrapped her arms around the Z’s big foot.

“Hey!” The letter reared, shaking its limb. “Who is this madwoman, clinging to my mighty abutment?” Donna tightened her grip. The tapered projectile groaned and bent, twisting one hundred and eighty degrees. The Z wailed. “Oh, you gringo bitch!” It shook its leg. “Look at my foot! The Z’s serif never points down! Is a failure of my manhood, no?”

Donna struggled with the letter, trying to hold on, finally giving up as the last of her phony fingernails broke off, sending her spinning into the partly cloudy depths of Julian’s subconscious. “Good,” snarled the Z. Bits of busted graphite poured from its damaged foot. “Now that the she-devil is gone, you—typemaker—may restore me to my proper position.”

Julian smiled, regarding the letter’s altered shape. “You look good like that.”

“I look good?!” The Z spat. “I look ridiculous!” Its spine twisted as it tried to nudge its dangling article back into place. “The Z’s serif never points down!”

“Well, I think it looks good, and I’m going to keep it.”

The irate letter howled, slashing at Julian’s face with its barbed tail. “Licker of poisoned cupcakes! You would let a woman come between you and your sense of aesthetics? Pfeh! I say. Double pfeh!”

Julian woke up; the blank page before him was now covered with sketches, as unfamiliar to him as if a stranger had put them there. The Z on the page was the same Z he’d seen in his dream; even the serif looked the same, a downward pointing wedge, just odd enough to give the rest of the series a personal stamp. Like that, the job was done. His head hurt and the back of his throat felt dry—a snifter of cheap brandy was sitting on the table, the bottle open and half-empty—yet an overriding desire to show his work to his partner made him feel jubilant, almost cocky.
You
the man, Julian.
Creaking down from his stool, he slid his drawings into a leather carrying case and zipped up the sides. It was a warm day in mid-October; he would walk to the place.

The lake was quiet; the vacationers had all taken their canoes and kayaks back to the city. Bird droppings covered the tower with a hard, bright crust. Julian stumbled down a steep slope of wet grass, holding his bag against his chest to keep it from jouncing around. The door to Olden’s shack was open; leaves blew across the step. He went inside.

Olden looked up from his computer screen and smiled. “Julian, hi. You look like you’ve been busy.”

The old man opened the carrying case; a leather smell rose and then sank. “It may be more than you need,” he said, hefting the pages. “I got excited.”

Clearing a space, he left his work on the computer table. Olden gave a cursory look to each of the drawings. “Good, yeah, this’ll do.” He pushed his chair aside and opened a plastic box, lid flopping on a bad spring. The inside was a clump of lightbulbs and bunched wires, circuits under glass. He arranged the pages, then nudged a jury-rigged switch. The box filled with blue light.

Julian laughed weakly, looking for a place to sit. Standing there in his corduroys and his old blazer, he felt hopelessly genteel, out-of-date. “I don’t know if you’re in a hurry,” he said, edging toward the desk. “There are some things that I’d like to call to your attention . . . tiny things, but . . . there’s a little quirk in the Z that I’d—”

“Little quirks, cool, I like little quirks.” Olden stared into the hot light. A bright bar traveled under the glass, grunting as it passed. “I have my own little quirks too.”

Julian slid his hands into his coat pockets. “I know . . . with
most
photocopiers—”

“I’m not photocopying it. I’m scanning it into my program.” Job done, Olden gathered the pages and handed them back to Julian. “They may look wonderful on paper, but they won’t do me any good unless they’re in here.” Hands on the keyboard, he struck the same button a half-dozen times. “It’s a fundamentally different medium, Julian. The foundries have been digitizing since the sixties, but they’ve always used old models—the latest Bodoni, another rehashed Jenson. Type must evolve, like everything else.”

“You know a lot about typography,” Julian remarked, nodding automatically.

“Enough to write this.” Rooting through a pile of junk, Olden pulled out a ratty notebook and tossed it across the room. Julian caught the notebook and turned it over. “There,” Olden said. “The first installment. I wrote it in honor of our collaboration.”

Finding a light, Julian damped his lips with his tongue and began to read. The essay was remarkably thorough, tracing the first post-Gutenberg experiments with Gothic type to the end of the incunabula period, the dominance of the Roman font, the French advances of the 1500s, the refinements of Baskerville and Fournier, the reactionary elitism of William Morris and Co. A rather amazing piece of scholarship. It was wonderful. It was horrible. Terror-struck, he slunk for a few steps, then dropped to the bed.

“I’ll probably cut it down a bit before I put it online.” Olden combed his fingers through his hair. On the screen, a capital
A
grew, stretched to an unnatural size.

“You’re a very good writer,” Julian said, rereading the first few sentences. His eyes scanned the page; he couldn’t look at it anymore. “There’s some . . . factual inaccuracies—”

“There’s a
lot
of factual inaccuracies.”

He blinked and tried again. “I just happened to notice . . . reading this over . . .”

“The world is an imperfect place, Julian.”

“Just . . . here . . . where it says . . .” He squinted at the page. “Oh yes . . . ‘in 1735, renowned English printer John Baskerville, proclaiming his homosexuality to a shocked community, began producing a series of erotic woodcuts under the alias of Jonny Foote-Sauce ...’ ”

Olden laughed, enjoying what he’d written. “I’m willing to bet that a good ninety to ninety-five percent of the people who read that will believe it’s the straight-up fucking truth.”

“But . . .” The word streamed; Julian’s logic seemed quaint, based on a lame premise. “Children will see this. Students. People who need the information.”

“Look, Julian . . .” Olden spoke reluctantly, not expecting Julian to understand. “The whole point is to make people
think
. There’s too much blind faith in this country. Even our paranoia’s way off-base. We’re paranoid about the wrong things. We should be paranoid about ourselves.”

The old man smiled, somewhat reassured. “I just want everything to be cool . . . like you say.”

Olden scowled. “Don’t you know anything about the Internet, Julian? These people don’t play around. Let me take you out on a road trip someday. You should see what the Network Access Points look like. They’re fucking concrete bunkers! MAE-West, MAE-East, no one knows where the hell they are.” His lips twisted, the look of a mindless wonk. “ ‘Oh, the Sprint NAP is in Pennsauken, New Jersey!’ Sure. Where in Pennsauken? Just follow the fucking barbed wire.”

“NAP?”

“The big peering points, the links to the backbone.” Rising, he began to pace. “And those are just the major centers. The routers are everywhere! Inside repeater towers, in the middle of the ocean, riding shotgun on the backs of satellites. Cyberspace is not a figment of our collective imagination. It’s real. Actual wires are involved.”

Calmer now, he returned to his desk. Julian watched from the edge of the bed, then, feeling like a nuisance, excused himself and hurried home.
The Golden Girls
was on television—a funny one, too. He sat in front of the TV with a beer and a bag of potato chips and just laughed and laughed and laughed.

All night, he dreamed of letters.