The Egg Code (9 page)

And I don’t curse. Ever . . . at . . . almost at all.

Threw my napkin down. Better believe it.

Now I can’t talk to my son. Lydia doesn’t care—she’s got her purse out, writing a check. Got the pen in one hand, she’s eating with the other like there’s no tomorrow. I said heck, enough of this screwing around, people getting angry at each other for no reason. I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna clean up, shampoo my hair and work on the train set for a few hours, just see if I don’t. Now she’s not talking to me. I’m trying to keep the mood as light as possible. I say what on earth are you doing, you know, just making mild conversation. She doesn’t even answer, just holds the check up, puts it about two inches in front of my face and says here. No, I don’t play that game, lady. Not my style. You’ve got your money, I’ve got mine—I get it. If the ol’ lady wants to buy my family, she can move to another cemetery. Just don’t screw around with my son. I hardly ever see the kid anymore. He spends most of his time with his mother. They’re usually out with people I don’t know, going to one function or another, I’m totally out of the loop. It’s like, hey guys, I’m here too. Just once, wouldn’t it be great . . . everyone’s in a good mood, and we go out to get some ice cream or check out a movie? I mean, that would be dynamite and I’d be all for it, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon. My old man, now. He
ruled
that family. No question. It was his way or the highway, and if you didn’t believe it, he’d bust you right in the chops, boy. Good ol’ “Barndoor” Mould, man. Hard. As. Nails! ’Bout the meanest guy in the world. Hoooo, I didn’t argue with the man, I just said yes sir, no sir, watched my P’s and Q’s and to this day I’m still grateful to him for giving me that particular kind of upbringing, I mean it really worked out for the best. Heck, if it wasn’t for him, I’d probably still be sweeping floors, making three bucks an hour, Lydia would’ve taken off by now and I never would’ve had the chance to experience firsthand what it’s like to have a child of your own, which is something that, if you haven’t been through it yourself, I can’t hardly explain how wonderful it is. The best is when they’re still babies. I even like the crying. It’s just noise. The back talk is what I can’t stand. Once they start talking, once they start saying words. That’s when it gets rough.

And one more thing. All you men? Watch out. ’Cause once the baby’s born, that’s when the woman changes. And that’s just totally a fact.

V

The Terrorist

I Want Some Answers

http://
www.eggcode.com

FACT: The Internet is a diverse place. Very little binds us together, except for our—perhaps random—decision to visit this site. That said, let us celebrate what little we
do
share! All across the country, roads join our cities, connecting families with businesses, churches and schools. The traffic jam is part of modern Americana—long waits, angry faces, construction cones on the highway. The naive reader would accept these inconveniences as simply the price we all must pay for smoother roads and faster commutes. Good-natured fools would hardly suspect the federal government’s true intentions, the insidious motive behind every blocked lane, every orange flag. Ah, yes. The Egg Code knows, though we have been threatened under pain of death to keep our silence, to protect those who would do us harm. For this reason, we would ask our subscribers to please excuse the bits of conjecture and allusion. It is for our own personal safety that we must hide behind such clever subterfuge.

The history of the road extends back to ancient times. With the greater speeds and braking capabilities of the automobile, modern highways required a better means of guiding fast-moving traffic along a set course. Two competing technologies grew out of this need; of the two, most engineers preferred concrete over asphalt. This method held on into the postwar years, when freeway construction was at a premium. It was in this context that the United States first established the U.S. Interstate Highway System—or, as it was originally called, the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

The reader might wonder what a transcontinental series of roads had to do with defense in 1956, but the answer, sadly, is everything. This was the height of the Cold War, when federal agents envisioned a network of military convoys shuttling weapons to the suburbs. Well-connected, the American people stood strong against the Russians. The defense rationale had another, perhaps more cynical purpose. In those days, scientists believed that the only way to obtain federal funding was through the Defense Department. This phenomenon was certainly not unique to the United States. England and France were both reluctant to establish major road-building initiatives in the aftermath of World War II, and in both cases it was the military argument that finally won the day.

With the money finally in place, the U.S. Interstate Highway System began digging across America. It was definitely a learn-as-you-go operation. Thousands of miles of ineptly laid road eventually had to be torn up and reconfigured, pushing the project well past its tentative 1971 completion date. Frustrated engineers— their eyes still glassy with visions of bold “Freeway of the Future” campaigns staged at World’s Fair conventions—had not anticipated such high speeds, such chaos on the roads. Neither asphalt nor concrete had provided any real solutions to the titanic demands of twentieth-century mass transportation. Moreover, as the eighties became the nineties, the federal government showed signs of withdrawing support from the project. The Interstates were a financial bust.

At about the same time, an interesting discovery was made, namely that bitumen—critical in the formation of asphalt—was a natural by-product of petroleum. The other major by-product just happened to be
gasoline.
Whammo! Faster than you can say “heinous misuse of appropriations,” road commissioners throughout the states, in concordance with their federal bosses, recognized the beauty of the system. As the demand for gasoline increased, the production of bitumen likewise increased, lessening the cost of purchase and deployment. The fact that asphalt was considerably less resilient than concrete was an added bonus. Faster wear increased the need for maintenance. Cars stuck in slow construction zones burned more fuel than cars cruising along a slick road. More gasoline meant more bitumen meant more asphalt meant more construction meant more gasoline. A perfectly closed circuit. An economist’s dream.

Only one question remained. Where would the money come from to pay for all this? For our answer, we must return to the Roman Empire, to the golden days of a statute known as the corvée. The corvée, unpopular in its time, was a kind of tax paid in the form of enforced labor. At this very moment, officials in Washington—with the full cooperation of representatives from all fifty states—are busy drafting a plan that would reinstate the corvée as an option to heavy taxation. Because it would be “unconstitutional” to demand this kind of service from its constituents, all the government can do is offer it as a handy alternative, knowing that the only people who will take the bait will be members of the lower class. They will also try to make us feel grateful. Can’t pay your taxes? Grab a shovel! We at the Egg Code refuse to participate. This is imperialism of the highest order, and the only reason why we haven’t burned our 1040 forms in protest is that it’s just so fucking clever.

The Fear of
Being Touched

1998

Shirtless, Olden Field stood at the edge of the lake and stared out over the horizon. His face was clean-shaven, his lips sienna, his hard and bony chin marked by a slight groove in the middle. Long black hair blew over his shoulders. A tendon in his neck throbbed with energy, a constant pulse. At age twenty-nine, he’d given up on everything—junk food, television, regular sex—in exchange for a well-conditioned body, tight muscles, the ass of a quarterback. Living alone in Big Dipper Township, he saved his words like pennies, resting his voice for days at a time. His longest conversations were rehearsed bits of patter, the same five or six themes revisited in endless cycles. He was even quieter around women, choosing never to discuss his strange occupation. Left to guess, most interested young ladies—and most were, indeed, interested—pictured him spread across the pages of a Manhattan fashion magazine.
Olden on page 48, shirt torn, belt loose. The clothes are for
sale, by the way.

A big crappie cartwheeled over the lake, striking the water with its tail. Overhead, a line of warblers raced toward the horizon. Thick clouds brooded in the sky, standing apart like guests at a funeral. Olden peeled off his shorts and stepped into the water. Crossing his legs, he dropped to the muddy bottom. Water filled his ears. He opened his eyes and saw long weeds and flecks of debris illuminated by something pale and green. His own hands looked puffy and distorted. Standing up, he swiped his hair back and tasted the water on his lips. A big shrub rustled near the far shore. He’d disturbed the boy, evidently. The naked boy. This happened sometimes, always around dusk. The child belonged to the couple across the lake; he’d grown bolder over the past few weeks, staying outside for minutes at a time, far from the secret place where he’d stashed his clothes, his balled-up socks and red cotton underwear. Olden’s hard-on was an automatic response. Remembering his own childhood, he felt drawn to proto-freaks such as these: troublemakers in the making. He wanted to be the boy, to be naughty and alone like the boy. Following his erection out of the lake, he stepped back into his shorts, then started up the hill to his cabin. The trail was rocky, and it hurt the bottoms of his feet.

At the top of the hill, he peered across the basin, the steep slope of pines running all the way down to the water. With its rough stones and empty windows, the tower in the middle of the lake recalled the turret top of a submerged fortress. Its vaguely medieval architecture suggested a castle built centuries ago. Over the past three years, Olden had proposed many theories, none of them conclusive. An old utility station. The crumbled remains of a massive stone bridge. But a bridge here, in Big Dipper Township? It would have to be enormous, an absurd waste so far from the city. So, neither a bridge nor a castle. A mystery. Olden’s little obsession. He planned his days around this pointless ritual. Every evening, he paid his respects to the enigma, then turned and walked home. The walk, the look, solved nothing. Feeling the shadow of the tower at his back, the same thought always troubled his mind. I did not come here by choice. I was brought here by an outside force. A man named Bartholomew Hasse gave me this place, and now he is dead and my father is still not free.

Home again, he stepped through the wide-open door and instinctively made his way past the heaps of junk on the floor. Olden’s one-room cabin was an assertion of the solitary lifestyle; seen from the road above, it resembled an abandoned summer cottage. The cement foundation sloped toward one end, causing him to sleep at an angle, his head lower than his feet. Semen stains embedded in the rumpled comforter gave the sheet a flaky texture, like mica. Tattered blankets led in kicked swirls from the mattress to a computer station near the far wall. The computer, currently in sleep mode, was always on. Electricity, much more important than water or decent insulation, was never a problem; a power generator stashed next to the desk guaranteed his system a sure supply. Built essentially from spare parts, the circuitry approximated the configuration of a Spark 20, albeit with a few extra features not available outside of the business market. The Spark was a UNIX device, functioning under a Solaris 2.5 operating system, with 256 Mb of RAM and a pair of 20-gigabyte fast and wide scuzzy drives. The showpiece was a Reduced Instruction Set Computing Processor, far more elegant than the high-profile Pentium. Because of the success of the Pentium chip’s widespread marketing campaign, many of Olden’s customers specified it in their service requests. His clients were mainly business folks who liked to check up on the stock market while their wives downloaded recipes from the Martha Stewart page. Their interest in the technology did not extend past the consumer level. One of the reasons he’d been so quick to accept Mr. Hasse’s offer back in ’95—despite the obvious questions about Hasse’s own relationship to Martin Field—was his growing intolerance for hi-tech poseurs such as these, cocksure morons with too much power on their hands. The peasants were taking over, crowding out the intellectuals with their chatrooms and their user-friendly interfaces. Plotting from afar, he’d resolved to inject just enough fear into the system to render the whole thing useless.

Not that he considered himself much of an insider. Quite the opposite. In fact, he hated computers—the specs, the endless upgrades, the byzantine bits of lore. That was what had driven him away from the scene all those years ago. Because of who he was—his technical background, his father’s work for the computer science department at Stanford in the 1970s—he found himself unable to engage in any conversation that didn’t ultimately return to the same tired subjects. The early days of FTP. The fine points of packet switching. The best ways to infiltrate a PBX. It all seemed so beside the point. Like a surrogate hobby, this fascination with gadgetry acted as a substitute fix for people with no real interests. Of course, speed was the main qualitative distinction, the factor that finally determined your place in the crowd. Olden’s RISCP was fast enough, but fast enough for
what
? Now almost thirty, he’d developed a new taste for slow pleasures. Stacks of damp, warped books made pillars on either side of his bed. They were his protectors, guarding against a national need for quick and easy satisfaction. For three years he’d educated himself by going back to the source, circumnavigating the user-friendly synopsis. A little bit of fiction, but only lengthy, dense works, novels whose proud agendas bordered on the academic.
The Glass Bead
Game
.
Atlas Shrugged
. He liked the idea of the intellectual willingly sequestering himself from the rest of society. Screw you, peasants! Lacking a point, fiction seemed indulgent and narrow-minded. The bumbling misadventures of the individual. Olden was more interested in the general than the particular. Armed with evidence, his bookshelf described mobs, howling throngs of thugs, the world as he saw it.
The
Mass Psychology of Fascism
.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds
. None of these books were easy to read. For Olden, they represented three years’ worth of sheer effort. Apart from the crowd, he’d joined the ranks of the brilliant and the self-educated. Books were his way of resisting the circuits, the phantom fingers of the twenty-first century working past the zipper of your fly, turning, twisting, trying to get at the goods.

Feeling sleepy, he reached for a cup of coffee, cold dregs left over since morning. The battle could wait, at least for another few hours. Tonight he’d attend to other matters. Groping about for something to wear, he pushed past a windsurfer standing against the wall, the skeg cutting into the rotten floor. He’d owned the board for years, although he rarely went out anymore, even with the lake so convenient and the weather nice in September. Nearby, a steamer suit lay in a derelict slouch, and he squeezed a chunk of it between his thumb and middle finger. Thick, like whale fat. Well, the same idea really. The safety of skin. Chugging his coffee, he put on his clothes, then went outside to his car. The keys, already hanging from the ignition, were cold as icicles. The bald tires struggled up the hill to the main road. Pausing at the intersection, he checked his look in the mirror.
Olden on page 39—
pants in charcoal, rust, and parchment.
Yes, he thought. Keep it quiet. Lie low. Take advantage of the country.