The Egg Code (33 page)

Closing In

Derek waited for a few days before giving the book to Julian. This was a part of the torture, the glorious torture. Making it last. Lately he’d been dreaming of tortures, various weird punishments. He remembered as a boy going with his mother to the ice-cream shop on the campus of the University of Michigan (in his legend-filled mind, there was only one). In those days, the proprietor distributed little slips of paper listing the special flavors for all the upcoming months. Derek always took more than his share, a dozen perhaps, and he’d roll them up into a horn and blow at his mother’s hair, trying to piss her off. How far he’d fallen, from that to this. Now he dreamed of oddly precise, almost sterile tortures—the calm extraction of a finger, that sort of thing. His erection woke him up most nights, and he could smell himself on the sheets; a kind of hyphenated light poured through the venetian blinds, and the world outside was just a moon and nothing else.

Then one day, he decided to go for it. Leaving his apartment, he locked up and cut across the front lawn. At the end of the walkway, two long black Lincolns sat with their engines running. He squinted, trying to see past the tinted windshields. The license plates were both from Michigan, an hour to the north. The numbers lurked behind a haze, a mind-scramble of sorts. They were low-series plates, he knew that much. Government? Military? One of those. He worked his jaw in a rough, obsessive arc, considering his past. Bartholomew Hasse was dead two years now, yet his was a power that never went away. There were minions everywhere, paid lackeys from uncertain points of origin. Something dangerous followed this book—one man, or a group of men, determined to snuff it out. Never before had a cash cow like Derek so willingly gone to the slaughter. At some point, every superstar comes to the same realization:
My life is no longer my own.
Writing this book was the most selfish thing Derek had ever done. The whole organization— so much pointless bureaucracy—stood to lose millions of dollars. And all because of his little indulgence. He didn’t blame them for being annoyed.

Behind him, he heard one car door open, then another. Looking over his shoulder, he saw two men standing beside their vehicles. In their black coats, they resembled junior vicars come to call on a wayward parishioner. They seemed hesitant to approach the complex. Hands behind their backs, they scanned the jagged roof line, searching the horizon for something awful and remote, some abstraction of their own inner fear. Derek gulped and wiped the cold sweat from his upper lip. They were thugs, no doubt about it. Crossing the street, he skipped over the curb and jogged into town. At the base of the hill, the men waited, one per car. Derek panicked, recognizing their uniforms; the worst possible solution became apparent, and he knew at once who they were.

The Gloria Corporation. Gloria all the way. Realizing this, he didn’t know what to think. He’d told them, hadn’t he? He’d sent in his letter of resignation, even made a personal appearance,
Sorry, guys, getting old
for this line of work,
and everything seemed fine, a few regretful smiles, a handshake, an open offer to come back sometime soon. Of all his former contacts, the Gloria Corporation was one Derek didn’t wish to alienate. They would take it too personally, see it as a philosophical rejection, whereas to him the whole setup was just another job, a dozen or so speaking engagements per year and that was that. No further commitments. He surely didn’t expect to have some goddamn
ideology
crammed down his throat. Only as the full extent of the organization’s interests became apparent—the fact that they’d spent the past decade forging their own semi-legal monopoly, taking over damn near every Network Access Point in the country and leasing out peering “privileges” to a few lucky subscribers—did he begin to wonder what he’d gotten himself into. Those who worked for the GC were committed enough. Once idealists, they’d grown up during a time when every good idea seemed possible—public housing, public health care,
decent
public education for a change—and now that the bastards whom they’d tried to help had turned out to be such fucking
ingrates
, their desire to wallow in the corporate sludge was almost appalling to behold.

Eager now to reach his destination, Derek hurried through the small commercial district. Auburn light filled the storefronts, but the proprietors of Big Dipper Township clearly did not expect much business today. A barber sat in one of his customer’s chairs, reading the paper and smoking a cigarillo. Next door, two insurance salesmen gathered around a gray aluminum desk, tossing dice and gorging themselves on junk food. A few waved at Derek as he passed, for he was a known eccentric, and this was a small place anyway.

Approaching the edge of town, he could see the roof of Julian’s house through the woods. Although he hardly knew the man, Derek felt oddly reluctant to hand over such a disquieting piece of work, more self-incriminating than anything he’d written before. It was silly, he knew, but he didn’t want Julian to think anything bad about him. He’d even removed some of the most disturbing passages from the manuscript. The bit about his mother was the worst. It was just too awful, even for a confession like this. He remembered those years as a black murk, a word scribbled out. Coming home for the first time after his father’s death, he’d wanted to be loving and supportive, but an insistent voice urged him to misbehave, to avoid his mother’s company until the end of the visit, to reject her suggestions of fun things to do, plans they’d discussed and both happily agreed to over the phone. This was a wretched fantasy, and when he finally arrived home, the feeling had passed, and he kissed her in the doorway, bags slumped on the step, and together they spent a happy weekend, and he was grateful to himself for not heeding his darker instincts because a year later she was dead, and now she was rotten.

Stepping across Julian’s lawn, he held the manuscript out at arm’s length, watching the pages curl in the wind. Brief flashes of black on white conveyed recollections of other bad moments. There: a
betrayal
, and with that betrayal came the memory of a night in Phoenix in the mid-eighties, when Derek had offered to visit a child at home—a tiny wreck of a boy, deathly ill, lost in a swirl of cotton bedsheets. Forgetting his appointment, he flew home a night early—he missed Donna and things were still good then—but the next week he received a letter of thanks from the boy’s mother, “It meant the whole world to us, etc.” and he realized with a sick thrill that she’d imagined the whole encounter— Derek Skye holding her son’s hand, autographing a baseball pennant or two. For this woman, believing was enough. His actual presence was no longer necessary; like Santa Claus, he was a myth, something you told your children to help them visualize a more abstract horror, the horror of the senseless universe.

Then the pages blew, and another word,
deception
, burned in his hands like an accusation, and he could see a private room in a cocktail lounge in New York City, a pool table near the back where he and Reggie Bergman sat in two high leather chairs, Reggie with a glass of brandy and Derek cradling the restaurant’s last bottle of Glenfiddich. With a look of cocksure arrogance, he cleared the pool table by himself, calling his shots and improvising aphorisms for each as Reggie dutifully wrote them down on the back of a deposit envelope. “Number three in the side pocket: never fear the future, for the future—ha!—will surely arrive . . . ,” his voice rising as the cue stick turned slack in his hands, “Okay, number ten in the corner pocket: you are the center of your own universe . . . damn, write that down!” and Reggie wrote it down and the stick sailed out of Derek’s hands and broke against the floor, and even though the night ended badly for both men
(Beer before liquor, never
sicker),
those same empty formulations later appeared in Derek’s 1980 schlocksterpiece,
You Gotta Love It!,
which wound up financing a few more years worth of equally empty, albeit comfortable, living. There: that was deception. The deliberate misuse of the public trust.

But then the pages ruffled and a new word confronted him with its bold black type.
Death
—Derek’s great thesis. Projected over the lawn, he could see a multitude of cloaked strangers, their desert-colored turbans swishing in the breeze, faces concealed behind blank ivory masks. The wind carried the leader’s mask across the yard, and it cracked against the sidewalk. Derek leaned over to touch one of the fragments, but the mask changed, and a puddle of milk broke under his fingers. Raising his hand to his mouth, he tasted the milk; it tasted bitter, still warm from the body. Already he could feel a solution—a warm liquid, yellow/clear—leaking from the base of his spine. The essence, now gone. The pages blew against his chest, and he knew that with a sudden toss he could release himself from this misery, but instead he stayed, locked in place, for Derek Skye was a man strapped to a conveyor belt, the floor moving, drawing him helplessly into the arms of Julian Mason, black man of the North.

Tales from
Typographic Oceans

A Julian’s heart is racing. It goes up and down.

B Big eyes, when he read the book, the terrible manuscript. What is this man doing? This is what Julian thought. What is he doing to himself? What will his family think?

C He’d convinced himself of one thing. He’d gone from one point to another. He wanted to be helpful. He wanted to purge himself of his earlier mistakes. But this—this was much worse. Worse than the Egg Code, because the Egg Code was never about anything to begin with. This book was a travesty, written by a demented kook. And so Julian found himself slowly changing his mind. Going from one point to another.

D Derek’s face was red when he handed Julian the manuscript. Granted, it was cold. That would account for the redness. But there was something else about the color, something unnatural. The world had stopped, and a transparency hung over the still scene, and the transparency was red, and everything behind it was red as well.

E Three things, really. First, it was so poorly written. The ravings of a desperate soul. Second, the whole thing was offensive. What right did Derek have to abandon his followers? And third, Julian questioned the man’s sanity. He wondered if he should call the police, the suicide team (if they had one).

F Two other things. First, he hadn’t had time to dress, and it was cold standing there in his bathrobe, and the wind was blowing snow into the foyer, so he figured he might as well ask the man in. Second, he hadn’t read the book yet. How could he possibly know?

G Tea? That’s fine. I got it all ready. Nice place. And there’s cookies
in the box.
Pretty view.
The lake sure looks peaceful.
Oh, absolutely—listen Julian, let me cut right to it, because I want to get this project out by April at the latest, and that means that you need to get—well, you know the drill, you’re a professional, I’m just gonna let you do your job, but what I want to say is, do what you gotta do because this is important, I’m telling you, this one’s different and I want it to be just fucking amazing, you know, and whatever you’ve got to do, just make it incredible because it’s got to be huge and it’s got to be big and—whoops! ah, shit.
I’ll get that.
Damn it.
Don’t worry about it.
You got a napkin?

H The abbot Suger stood beneath the shadow of the church of St. Denis. Spreading a parchment, he squinted at the words on the page. The scroll was an invoice for the construction of the narthex, with its double towers and its great rose window suspended over the entrance, a strange combination but one which the abbot felt drawn to as if by the hand of God. His fellows were not openly critical of these unconventional plans, but he knew what they were thinking—that the towers were too high, that they would soon collapse in a ruin of stone and stained glass. Suger knew better. The building was sound, and the foundation would hold. This, then, was God’s great triumph: the ability to build tall churches. In this twelfth century after the birth of our Lord, the works of man must reflect a grandiose reaching for the heavens. The abbot gave a quick word of thanks, knowing full well that the brotherhood would eventually come around. In the years ahead, all of France would catch the mania. Even the scribes sensed this new thirst for increased verticality, and as the abbot reexamined the invoice, he noticed how the
h
of the old Carlovingian minuscules had already started to reach beyond their small dimensions, their high extenders mirroring the twin towers at the top of this fine new church. The abbot smiled. Here was his confirmation. As the words go, so goes the world.

I Candace Mason is a pale, semi-transparent specter growing from the basement of her son’s house. A column of blue light marks off her territory, along with a faint music that sounds like a Glenn Miller tune played too slowly and with too much rubato. When Julian enters the column, the light changes from blue to red, and the music fades away. For a moment he is paralyzed, and he can hear his mother’s voice, a soft burbling: “Julian, how
are
you? Julian, how
are
you?” The light generates a thick mist, nearly opaque. The world outside no longer exists. He becomes nervous and can feel his heart pressing against his lungs. Soon the frozen feeling goes away, but if he dares to venture beyond the lighted column: instant frostbite! Eventually his mother lets him go.

J Eventually the type wars developed into two camps, the Roman and the Gothic. During the first fifty years after Gutenberg—the incunabula period, as historians like to call it—the Roman font began to draw away from its competitors. Thanks to the business acumen of Aldus Manutius—a kind of fifteenth-century Don King—books printed in Roman fonts began to appear all over Europe. The only notable holdout was Germany, who would pay for their reluctance nearly five hundred years later, at the close of World War II. Even today, the sight of a Gothic
J
inspires a flurry of insults and angry remarks:
“Jew-Killer! Jew-Killer!”

K The sympathy riots began a few days after the big fires in Detroit. Julian spent the weekend working in his rooftop studio in Greenwich Village. From his window, he could gaze down at the street four flights below. The edge of the building on the corner looked two-dimensional— a line of brick, then nothing. The police officers wore helmets with Plexiglas face shields, and the troublemakers were white college students, NYU types in caftans and torn military jackets. One of the students was standing next to the wall, trying to roll a Drum cigarette with one hand and having a bad time of it, and when a cop told him to move, the kid ignored him, so the cop grabbed him by the collar, lifted him a foot off the ground, thrust him with a diagonal lunge into the wall, then pulled him away from the edge and held him a foot above his head, and Julian, looking down from his studio, dropped his pencil and said, “It’s a K—my God, it’s a K!”

L My pulse drops and dips. Every beat is a new surprise. Will this one be too fast, too slow, not regular enough? A few good ones in a row. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Okay). Then? Ah! There! . . . N-now . . . aahhh! . . . aaahhhh! . . . pfeehhnneeehh . . . muh-muh-muh-muh-mama . . . guh . . . guh . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . better. Wooo! Wooo! Oh, stars. Fat cheeks. A few good ones in a row.

M The men were going to die. Trapped in a pool of ice, they looked up at the steep rise to the east, where Mont Blanc towered over the Italian border, and then to the west, where a secondary peak ascended to an equal height. One of the men, Thierry, pulled out a square cut from a blood-soaked flag and held it to his forehead, whispering a prayer on the life of King François. His brother, René, reached for a wood-framed sack—its heavy truss now splintered into two neat halves—and brought out a small leather handbook. An embossed dolphin winked on the cover, its bright gold features reflecting the light from the snowy hillside. With one frozen hand, he pushed back the cover. “Where’d you steal that?” Thierry asked. “I bought it,” his brother sneered back. “It’s an Aldine. Cheap, you know.” Thierry glowered. “Aldus was an infidel,” he snarled. Pressing the book against his chest, René smiled at Thierry, and a wind from the east blew his long black hair over his eyes. “Do not curse the Italian. It is because of Aldus that peasants may die with Virgil on their lips.” Turning to the first page, he hunched over the book and began to read. His brother was dead by the sixteenth stanza.

N Derek stood in the foyer, his hands braced against the doorjamb. A tall man, he filled the entrance with his diagonal presence. “I’m so glad you’ve got it now,” he said. Leaving the door open, he skipped down the steps and hurried across the lawn. As Julian watched him go, a complicated lie began forming in the back of his brain. His mother’s voice came to him, disguised as his own:
Well, Julian, you gotta keep
your word now.

O bury it I could bury it but that would be unprofessional no I’ll just do what he says but couldn’t I just play around with the format though that wouldn’t be professional not the proper thing to do hell what’s that they say a good typographer never calls attention to himself but what if there’s no choice what if the words themselves are evil what if the words are wrong what then what does a good typographer do then does he

P In 1957, Julian Mason stands naked in the bedroom with one arm raised, trying to make a muscle.
There!
he says, holding his breath. Joyce Ganz touches his forearm, squeezing it once and then again. Her clothes are piled on the floor, left from last night. Her own nakedness means nothing to her.
Ooh!
she laughs, and covers her mouth.
So
strong! Why you want to be an artist? You shoulda been a wrestler! HA!
Bullshit.

Q Qu’est-ce que c’est? Ah, this Robert Granjon is crazy, ahhh-oui? For twenty years, he says, “No, I no like ze Italians, with their simple letters that go chop-chop-chop across ze page. So? I make a new one,
ahhh-oui?
For ze French language. I call it
Civilité
, ze national typeface for ze people of France!” Very clever, monsieur. But this Robert Granjon, he no think straight. Ze national typeface is
nothing! Merde!
Is too hard to read,
ahhh-oui
? So in France, we stick with ze Italians. We are happy here! No more bloodshed . . . no more bloodshed . . .

R One of the few times Julian saw his daughter after Joyce moved upstate to study law, it was 1971 and Emily was thirteen, a tall girl with a big squared-off Afro and heavy eyelids that flickered pretentiously every time her father asked her a question. That day in New York, she wore a T-shirt tied in the middle to show off her belly button. Julian thought it ludicrous to waste an entire afternoon inside a downtown movie house, but Emily wanted to go and that was that. He stood underneath the theater marquee dressed in a gray trench coat—much too hot for the weather, but he was used to winter and March was a temperamental month. Joyce had given the girl enough money to pay for both tickets, but Julian said no and crammed the wad of cash back into her pants pocket. Looking up at the marquee, he exclaimed, “That’s a dirty movie!” “Come on, Jules, it’s not a dirty movie. It’s an R-rated movie, and besides, Mom said I could.” Oh boy, the magic words, Julian wasn’t going to argue with that, so he followed his daughter inside, past the concession stand (“yeah . . . gimme some
black
licorice . . . I really like the
black
licorice . . . heh, kidding pal, just gimme a Pepsi-Cola . . .”) and into the theater, where they sat near the front because Emily had left her glasses on the train. A love scene came on halfway through, the faces of the actor and the actress backlit so you could only see their silhouetted profiles, his profile staring down at hers, a regular rhythm, a few soft cries, the woman’s breasts implied by a dim slice of moonlight. Trapped, Julian could see his daughter’s face out of the corner of his eye, her little bent wrist diving periodically into the popcorn box, and he gripped the sides of his chair and told himself this would all be over soon. After the film, they went across the street to an Italian diner, where she boldly ordered a glass of wine. Discussing the film, Julian made a few genteel remarks, and Emily—sipping her grape juice—said, “Come on, Jules. Kids today have sex in the sixth grade, gawd.”

S This is how Julian Mason paces from one end of the living room to the other. He starts at the northwest corner, then makes an abrupt right turn, stepping around a recliner, a rickety end table, a ceramic lamp with a pleated shade. Reaching the far corner, he swings around and heads diagonally across the room, where he stands for a moment, looking at the point where the two walls meet. Sometimes he speaks, if only to hear the hollow return of his own voice. The things he says are never interesting.
Whoo boy. Lord, lord.
Adjusting his robe, he turns around and retraces his steps, keeping strictly to the established path. He does this one hundred and sixty-one times in an hour and forty-three minutes. If you asked him what was wrong, he would say
mmmmm?

T J. Oporinus, Basel, May 6, 1541. I have learned of your efforts to obtain a Latin translation of the book known to the Roman Church as the Infidel’s Bible. This is a worthy endeavor, yet I am certain you have also considered that Paul III will persecute your establishment with unfair levies if you publish this work. The papacy sadly refuses to acknowledge the potential benefits of the Koran to the Christian world. Educated men will not convert to heresy, but will affirm the essential wisdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The forces of Satan will die an angry death, and we will serve as their tormentors. This publication must go forth—in Basel, or in one of the other free lands. I myself will lend my name to the introduction, as an added safeguard to your liberty. The time has come. Mohammed must speak. Your lover in Christ, Martin Luther.

U In the memory he has of Derek Skye (and he does not know whether it is a real memory or the memory of a dream), Derek is crossing the street when a red pickup shoots around the corner. The driver leans on the brake and the truck jerks to a stop. Standing on the double yellow line, Derek waves, “Go ahead, pal. You go first.” The truck grinds ahead a few feet, then makes an abrupt U-turn. Derek keeps waving as the truck roars out of sight. His hand slows; it flutters to his side. He stands there, quiet for a moment. A memory, or a dream?

D Won’t you wear this flower? I can’t. Come on, look, you’ve got a nice suit.
I’m meeting a young lady for dinner.
Let me just pin it right here.
No, I’d rather not.
You don’t want to wear this flower?
I have to go.
You don’t want to wear this flower for peace?
You have a pleasant
evening.
DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE CHILDREN DYING IN VIETNAM?!

W Candace Mason died in a room with six other women. Nylon shower curtains divided the room into sections. Through a thin screen, she could see the vague forms of her roommates; every night, the woman to her right sat up in bed, arms wrapped around her knees as the woman to her left blew on her soup, holding the spoon at the very tip of the handle, splashing herself whenever the spoon fell into her lap. The women spoke to each other through the semi-transparent curtains. Candace often mentioned her son, who lived in New York City. She talked about the war, how she used to take Julian out to the factories each day, and sometimes let him paint the serial codes on the hulls of the airplanes. One of the women had bad diarrhea, and the other ladies would kid about it whenever she was out of the room. In August 1970, the woman with bad diarrhea passed away, and another woman with bad diarrhea took her place. One afternoon, Julian appeared at the foot of his mother’s bed, dressed in a nice hat and a dark trench coat. Candace looked up at her boy. “Julian,” she asked, “do I
smell?
” He began to cry. Mrs. Mason died the next morning, and the doctors cut bright pieces out of her body and put them into bottles.