The Monkeyface Chronicles (12 page)

“Okay.”

I know the rules. When my father has a conference with an associate, noise is to be kept to a minimum, using the kitchen and living room is strongly discouraged, and entering the basement is strictly forbidden. This leaves just two options: either leave the house entirely, or hide upstairs.

The door clicks shut behind my mother. I ask to be excused from the table, but my father doesn't hear me; he is deep in thought again, wringing his hands and flexing his muscles. He must be thinking through some complex problem. I tiptoe from the kitchen to the living room where Dennis reclines on the sofa, reading one of the glossy investment magazines that fuel his obsession with becoming obscenely wealthy as quickly as possible. This one is
Techno Entrepreneur
, a magazine that uses dollar signs instead of the letter S. The cover story is
CA$H
IN on the HOME $ATELLITE RU$H!
Dennis' lips are twisted into a crooked smirk, his eyes bugging out, and his face takes on an unsaintly glow as I slip past.

“Hey! Douchebag!” he says. “I've got that
feeling
again! Wanna invest some of your savings in a winning business venture?”

A strange sense of déjà vu rushes through me. I've seen this look on his face before, and I've heard almost these exact words.

About a year and half ago, in the summer of 1999, Dennis was reading an article called,
Make BIG BUCK$ from the Y2K
$CARE
! when the same wide-eyed eureka expression appeared on his face. “Hey! Douchebag!” he said, “How would you like to earn some easy cash? You've heard about this Y2K Bug thing, right?”

It had been the major news story of 1999. The Y2K
Bug
was a computer problem that was supposed to result when the calendar year changed from 1999 to 2000. Someone noticed that the processors on a lot of computers were designed to count only to the end of the year 1999, and predicted that there would be worldwide computer crashes, and an ensuing state of anarchy beginning at midnight, January 1, 2000.

“Well,” Dennis said, waving his magazine in the air, “I just got a great idea to make some big money from Y2K, but I'm a bit short on venture capital right now. Wanna loan me some money?”

“No,” I said.

“Listen, Douchebag. All I want you to do is go down to the office supply store and buy me a box of computer disks, okay?”

I reiterated my earlier position on the matter. “No.”

“C'mon! In a month I'll give you
double
whatever the disks cost, okay? Guaranteed.”

“Forget it.”

“Listen. I'm so confident about my plan that I'll pay you
triple
. Not bad for a one-month investment. I'll even put it in writing.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. And, if you do this for me, I'll make you another promise.” He sat up straight and brushed his hair out of his face. “When I'm a successful businessman, I'll pay for the cosmetic surgery to get your face fixed, the best surgeons money can buy. Isn't
that
worth the cost of a box of computer disks?”

I decided that maybe it would be worth the gamble. I went upstairs to the bedroom I share with Michael, and I dialed the combination to the little safe I keep hidden in the back of my half of the closet. While Michael's allowance money was invested in hockey sticks, pucks, tape, and trading cards, I'd been saving mine for when I turned eighteen, so I could pay to get my face fixed. Along the way I realized that ten bucks a week would not add up to nearly enough to pay for elective cranio-facial surgery, but I had nothing else to spend it on, so I just kept saving.

On my way out to buy the disks, Dennis gave me a handwritten note, and said, “Drop by the newspaper office on your way, and get this put in the classified section. I'll pay you triple for whatever that costs, too, okay?”

Is your computer

VULNERABLE to

Y2K MELTDOWN ????

Protect your hardware and datta!

Get

DSM 2000 ATVL

Y2K AUTO-FIX PROGRAM !!!!!!!

Only $29.95

Send check or money order to

BOX 1611, Faireville, Ontario

“You have your own post office box?” I asked Dennis.

“The less you know, the better,” he said.

“Is this legal?”

“There's no law against people
voluntarily
sending thirty bucks to a post office box.
Carpe Diem
.”

“You know Latin?”

“I know that one,” Dennis said. “It means,
‘If people are
stupid enough to give you their money for nothing, take it.'
”

“But it
is
illegal to take people's money for
nothing
.”

“They won't be getting
nothing.
They'll be getting exactly what they pay for — a disk with a copy of the
DSM 2000 ATVL
Y2K Auto-Fix Program.
You know why I'm calling it the
DSM
2000 ATVL?”

“Because you need a name that sounds convincing?”

“It stands for
‘Dennis Skyler Makes 2000 bucks — At The Very
Least.'
And that two thousand is gonna multiply into hundreds of thousands when I invest it in other business ventures. And when you turn eighteen, you get your face fixed.”

“You spelled ‘data' wrong in your ad,” I told him. “I'll correct it.”

“Good boy,” he said.

A month later, Dennis gave me exactly triple the money I paid for the disks and the newspaper ad. “People are such
suckas
,” he gloated as he handed me the cash. “I shoulda charged
forty
-nine ninety-five!”

Even after January 1, 2000 had passed, Dennis continued to mail out copies of his “Y2K Auto-Fix Program.” He sold ninety-seven copies, just three disks short of the full box of 100 disks I bought for him, comfortably surpassing his profit projection of $2000.

The program, by the way, did nothing but display a screen that flashed the words “
Finding and fixing Y2K Bug,
” then, after a sixty-second countdown, another screen that read, “
Auto-fix
sequence successful!
”

Since his Y2K cash-in, Dennis has been looking for an equally lucrative yet non-labour-intensive method for quickly making money. He regularly trades penny stocks on the internet from the computer in his bedroom, usually losing all of his pool-shark earnings in a single sitting. He also does a lot of online gambling, and has had about equal success with the computerized slot machines. Our parents know less about Dennis' financial activities than we know about my father's scientific work.

“Dad's got a meeting soon,” I tell Dennis. “We'd both better go upstairs.”

Dennis sits upright, tosses his magazine on the coffee table, and says, “Not this time, buddy. Not this time.”

“What?”

“Tonight we're going
downstairs
.”

“To the
basement
? Are you crazy?”

“I've got a great idea, but I need to do a little experiment first, and I can't do it by myself.”

“No way. The basement is off limits tonight.”

“Come on, buddy. Five minutes. We can both profit from this. I haven't forgotten the promise I made you.”

“Forget it, Dennis. If we get caught . . . ”

“You won't get even with those little rich bitches by throwing mud at them,” Dennis snaps. “The only way to beat people with lots of money is to have
more
money than they've got. If they wear three-hundred-dollar pants, you show up in a three-
thousand
-dollar suit. They hate it. It makes ‘em crazy.”

How did Dennis find out about the mud-bomb incident? He wasn't even in the house when Mom and I were talking about it.

As if he's reading my mind, Dennis says, “I was kicking Boner Simpson's ass at the pool table in Jackie Snackie's when his little brother Sam came in crying that you had pasted him in the face with a mud ball. Boner sends his congratulations, by the way. He says his brother's a shithead.”

Dennis glances into the kitchen, where our father is still wringing his hands and staring at the refrigerator. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Philip, there's another reason you need to come down to the basement with me.”

He's got my full attention now. He just called me by my name. Usually he calls me
Douchebag
, unless he wants something from me, then it's
buddy
. He never calls me by my actual name.

“It's time you knew the truth,” he says.“The truth about what?”

“The truth about Dad. The reason why you're the way you are.”

“I was born this way.”

“There's more to it than that. And it's time you knew.”

Dennis rises and walks toward the door to the basement. “We've got half an hour.”

“You're just saying this to trick me into helping you with whatever you're planning to do down there.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. There's only one way to find out.”

So I follow him down the stairs, holding on to both handrails as we descend into the darkness below.

Jacob's Ladder

D
ennis closes the door at the bottom of the basement stairs, and for a moment everything is pure black.
The
total absence of visible radiation
; no wavelength, no colour, nothing. It is silent and cool, like I imagine the inside of a crypt would be. When the flame inside the water heater ignites, it sounds like an explosion.

“Dammit!” Dennis curses, “Where is that friggin' light switch? I can't see a damn thing . . . ah.”

The banks of fluorescent tubes crackle and then hum overhead, flooding the space with white light. The basement still looks much the way it did when it was built by the crazy gas speculator who wanted to be a Medieval Lord. The joists and support posts are all rough-squared and blackened to look like castle beams, and the grey stone foundation is exposed. There used to be an arched window at the top of each wall to let in a little natural light, but they were filled in with brick when our father began his secret work.

There is one blatant exception to the Medieval Dungeon motif: in the corner farthest from the stairs is a room built from concrete blocks. There are no windows inside or out, only a quadruple-locked metal door, with the hinges on the inside. My father's laboratory. I've never even peeked through the door, let alone committed the unforgivable sin of actually stepping inside. All I know is that there are two sturdy ventilation grids at ground level outside the lab; one draws in fresh air, while the other emits exhaust which sometimes smells chemical and noxious, but gives no clue to what my father actually does in there all day.

Dennis and I are standing in the corner opposite the concrete-block room, where the vital organs of the house reside: the wire-veined electrical panels, the ancient, unused cistern, and the water heater, which continues to roar behind us, warning us away.

“Come on, Douchebag,” Dennis says, “let's get this done before
Father
shows up.”

The remaining space in the basement is like a museum of my father's accomplishments. There is an oil painting he did in high school, with its blue first-prize ribbon still attached. It is a portrait of a Roman Centurion, leaning on a sword and wearing an expression like he knows something the rest of us don't. It is the only glimpse of my father's budding artistic talent, which would soon after be crushed under the weight of his staggering scientific ability.

The remaining wall space is covered with degree certificates, awards and photographs. There is a photo of my father arm-in-arm with some long lost friend, both of them wearing the robes and mortarboards of Masters of Science, and another of Dad and the same young man standing next to a silo-sized optical telescope they helped to construct for the Royal Astronomical Society, which was the largest lens-based scope in the world at the time. There is the framed cover of a scientific journal called
Biochemistry Quarterly
, with a black-and-white photo of my father and the same academic colleague wearing white lab coats and holding plastic models of DNA sequences, with the title “Pioneers of the Double Helix” in bold white lettering.