“What’s happened?” Robin asked from across the table.
“Nothing’s happened,” he said.
“Then why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a man who’s been told he’s won a million dollars but isn’t sure it’s worth it, what with all the tax problems.”
“What a strange, untrammelled imagination you have,” he said. “I wonder if selling computers does justice to all your talents.”
“Let me see the page you’re reading.”
“No. I’m still reading it.”
“Henry, are you going to make me stand up and walk around the table?”
He handed her the creamcheese-stained obituary page, which was toward the end of Section C today, this being Saturday and the paper the Weekend Edition. Robin, while the rounded masseters of her wide jaw thoughtfully clenched and unclenched on the last milky crumbs of her whole-bran flakes, flicked her quick brown eyes up and down the columns of print. Her eyes held points of red like the fur of a fox. Morning sun slanting through the big loft window kindled an outline of light, of incandescent fuzz, along her jaw. Her eyelashes glittered like a row of dew-drops on a spider-strand. “Who’s Deborah Frueh?” she asked. “Did you know her?”
“A frightful literary scold,” he answered. “I never met the lady, I’m not sorry to say.”
“Did she ever review you or anything?”
“I believe she did, once or twice.”
“Favorably?”
“Not really.”
“Really unfavorably?”
“It could be said. Her reservations about my work were unhedged, as I vaguely recall. You know I don’t pay much attention to reviews.”
“And that Englishman last month, who fell in front of the subway train—didn’t you have some connection with him, too?”
“Darling, I’ve been publishing for over fifty years. I have slight connections with everybody in the print racket.”
“You’ve not been quite yourself lately,” Robin told him. “You’ve had some kind of a secret. You don’t talk to me the breezy way you used to. You’re censoring.”
“I’m not,” he said, hating to lie, standing as he was knee-deep in the sweet clover of Deborah Frueh’s extermination. He wondered what raced through that fat harpy’s mind in the last second, as the terrible-tasting cyanide tore into her esophagus and halted the oxidation process within her cells. Not of him, certainly. He was but one of multitudes of writers she had put in their places. He was three thousand miles away, the anonymous progenitor of Jason Johnson, Jr. Sic semper tyrannis, you unctuous, hectoring, covenanted shrew.
“Look at you!” Robin cried, on so high a note that her orange-juice glass emitted a surprised shiver. “You’re triumphant! Henry, you killed her.”
“How would I have done that?”
She was not balked. Her eyes narrowed. “At a distance, somehow,” she guessed. “You sent her things. A couple of days ago, when I came home, there was a funny smell in the room, like something had been burning.”
“This is fascinating,” Bech said. “If I had your imagination, I’d be Balzac.” He chattered on, to deflect her terrifying insights, “Another assiduous critic of mine, Aldie Cannon—he used to be a mainstay of The New Republic but now he’s on PBS and the Internet—says I can’t imagine a thing. And hate women.”
Robin was still musing, her smooth young mien puzzling at the crimes to which she was an as yet blind partner. She said, “I guess it depends on how you define ‘hate.’ ”
But he loved her. He loved the luxurious silken whiteness of her slightly thickset young body, the soothing cool of her basically factual mind. Beauty, the newspapers were saying that summer, is a matter of averaging out—babies and adults alike are more attracted to photographs of a morphed combination of faces than to the image of any specific one. What we desire is supernormality, a smooth statistical average; yet inevitably it comes in a package unique, fragile, precious. He could not long maintain this wall between them, this ugly wallboard partition in the light-filled loft of their intimacy.
The next day, the Times ran a little follow-up squib on the same page as the book review and the book ads. The squib was basically comic in its tone, for who would want to murder an elderly, overweight book critic and juvenile author? It stated that the Seattle police had found suspicious chemical traces in Frueh’s autopsied body. They were closing in. Bech panicked. He was going to fry. The lights would dim in Ossining when they pulled the switch. He confessed to Robin. The truth rose irrepressible in his throat like the acid burn of partial regurgitation. Pushing the large black man who pushed a body that pushed Featherwaite’s. Writing Deborah Frueh three fan letters with doped return envelopes. His belief, possibly delusionary, that before he died he had a duty to rid the world of critics, or at least of conspicuously malignant ones. Robin listened while reposing on his brown beanbag chair in Claire Hoagland’s old terrycloth bathrobe. She had taken a shower, so her feet had babyish pink sides beneath the marble-white insteps with their faint blue veins. It was Sunday morning. The bells in that sinister walled convent over at Prince and Mulberry had sounded their unheeded call. Robin said when he was done, “Henry, you can’t just go around rubbing out people as if they existed only on paper.”
“I can’t? And who says they don’t? That’s where they tried to eliminate me, on paper. They tried to put me out of business. They preyed on my insecurities, to shut off my creative flow. They nearly succeeded. I haven’t written nearly as much as I could have.”
“Was that their fault?”
“Partly,” he estimated. Maybe he had cooked his own goose, spilling his guts to this chesty kid. “O.K. Turn me in. Go to the bulls.”
“The bulls?”
“The police—haven’t you ever heard that expression? How about ‘the fuzz’? or ‘the pigs’?”
“I’ve never heard them called that, either.”
“My God, you’re young. What have I ever done to deserve you, Robin? You’re so pure, so straight. And now you loathe me.”
“No, I don’t, actually. I might have thought I would, but in fact I like you more than ever.” She never said “love,” she was too post-Jewish for that. “I think you’ve shown a lot of balls, frankly, translating your resentments into action instead of sublimating them into art.”
He didn’t much like it when young women said “balls” or called a man “an asshole,” but today he was thrilled by the cool baldness of it. They were, he and his mistress, in a new realm, a computer universe devoid of blame or guilt, as morally null as an Intel chip. There were only, in this scannable universe, greater or lesser patches of electricity, and violence and sex were greater patches. She stood and opened her robe. When Martina had done that, in this same loft, a few years ago, a nutritious warm-dough smell had spilled forth; but Robin had no strong smell, even between her legs. She gave off a babyish scent, a whiff of sour milk; otherwise her body was unodoriferous, so that Bech’s own aromas, the product of over seven decades of marination in the ignominy of organic life, stood out like smears on a white vinyl wall. Penetrated, Robin felt like a fresh casing, and her spasms came rapidly, a tripping series of orgasms made almost pitiable by her habit of sucking one of his thumbs deep into her mouth as she came. When that was over, and their pulse rates had levelled off, she looked at him with her fox-fur irises shining expectantly, childishly. “So who are you going to do next?” she asked. Her pupils, tiny inkwells as deep as the night sky’s zenith, were dilated by excitement. He pushed back her hair from her face, and let the wiry mass spring forward again.
“Well,” Bech reluctantly allowed, “Aldie Cannon is very annoying. He’s a forty-something smart-aleck, from the West Coast somewhere. Palo Alto, maybe. He has one of these very rapid agile nerdy minds—whatever pops into it must be a thought. He began by being all over The Nation and The New Republic and then he moved into the Vanity Fair/GQ orbit, writing about movies, books, TV, music, whatever
, an authority on any sort of schlock, and then got more and more on radio and TV—they love that kind of guy, a thirty-second opinion on anything, bing, bam—until now that’s basically all he does, that and write some kind of junk on the Internet, his own Web site, I don’t know—people send me printouts whenever he says anything about me, I wish they wouldn’t.”
“What sort of thing does he say?”
Bech shifted his weight off his elbow, which was hurting. Any joint in his body hurt, with a little use. His body wanted to retire but his raging spirit wouldn’t let it. He rested his head on the pillow beside Robin’s pillow and stared at the ceiling, which had been recently fabricated of polystyrene acoustical tiles perforated by tiny dots. The dots were distributed with a studied irregularity that suggested the mountains and valleys of a shallow safe country as yet uncoagulated into cities. This bedroom had been carved, with wallboard and lumber, out of the loft’s great space, complete with ceiling, like a cage in a circus tent. “He says I’m the embodiment of everything retrograde and unenlightened in pre-electronic American letters. He says my men are sex-obsessed narcissistic brutes and all my female characters are just anatomically correct dolls.”
“Ooh,” murmured Robin, as if softly struck by a bit of rough justice.
Bech went on, aggrieved, “For twenty years he’s been getting a cheap ride hitchhiking on feminism, saying, ‘Tut tut’ and ‘Too bad’ to every novel by us older guys that isn’t about an all-male platoon in World War Two being saved by a raft of angelic Red Cross nurses. He’s been married, but never for long, and the word on the street is the jury’s still out on his sexual orientation. Physically, he’s a wimp—a pair of thick hornrims and a haircut like a toothbrush. He never got over George Gobel on television. You’re too young to remember George Gobel.”
“But he’s clever,” Robin prompted. “Clever enough to get under your skin.”
“He’s clever if glib cheap shots and a souped-up pseudo-show-biz lingo are clever, yeah.”
“What else has he said about you?”
“He says I have no imagination. He says things like, and I quote, ‘Whenever Bech attempts to use his imagination, the fuse blows and sparks fall to the floor. But short circuits aren’t the same as magic-realist fireworks.’ End quote. On top of being a smart-aleck he’s a closet prude. He hated the sex in Think Big; he wrote, as I dimly remember, ‘These tawdry and impossible wet dreams tell us nothing about how men and women really interact.’ Implying that he sure does, the creepy fag. He’s never interacted with anything but a candy machine and the constant torrent of cultural crap.”
“Henry, his striking you as a creepy fag isn’t reason enough to kill him.”
“It is for me. He’s a local blot on the universe.”
“How would you go about it?”
“How would we go about it, maybe is the formula. What do we know about this twerp? He’s riddled with insecurities, has all this manicky energy, and is on the Internet.”
“You have been mulling this over, haven’t you?” Robin’s eyes had widened; her lower lip hung slightly open, looking riper and wetter than usual, as she propped herself above him, bare-breasted, livid-nippled, her big hair tumbling in oiled coils. Her straight short nose didn’t go with the rest of her face, giving her a slightly flattened expression, like a cat’s. “My lover the killer,” she breathed.
“My time on earth is limited.” Bech bit off his words. “I have noble work to do. I can’t see Cannon licking return envelopes. He probably has an assistant for that. Or tosses them in the wastebasket. He thinks he’s big-time, the little shit.” Bech stared at the ceiling’s unearthly geography. He averted his eyes from Robin’s bared breasts, their gleaming white weight like that of gourds still ripening, snapping their vines.
She said, “So? Where could I come in?”
“Computer expertise. You have it, or know those that do. My question of you, baby, is, Could we break into his computer?”
Robin’s smooth face, its taut curves with their invisible fuzz, hardened in intellectual engagement. “If he can get out,” she said, “a smart cracker can get in. The Internet is one big happy family, like it or not.”
The Aldie Cannon mini-industry was headquartered in his modest Upper East Side apartment. Even the most successful operatives in the post-Gutenbergian literary world lived modestly, relative to the arriviste young wizards of electronic software, pop music, fashion design, and hair styling, not to mention the thousands of the already rich, whose ancestors or earlier, shrewder selves had scooped up a fortune from some momentary turn in the evolution of a rural democracy into a capitalist powerhouse; in recent years they had all needed to do nothing but watch their investments double and redouble in a stock market that, under the lubricious young President, knew no downside. Cannon lived, with his third wife and two maladjusted small children, not on one of the East Side’s genteel, ginkgo-shaded side streets but in a raw new blue-green skyscraper, with balconies like stubby daisy petals, over by the river. His daily Internet feature, Cannon Fodder, was produced in a child-resistant study on a Compaq PC equipped with Windows 95. His opinionated claptrap was twinkled by modem to a site in San Jose, where it was checked for obscenity and libel and misspellings before going out to the millions of green-skinned cyberspace goons paralyzed at their terminals. E-mail sent to fodder.com went to San Jose, where the less inane and more provocative communications were forwarded to Aldie, for possible use in one of his columns.
Robin, after consulting some goons of her acquaintance, explained to Bech that the ubiquitous program for E-mail, Sendmail, had been written in the Unix ferment of the late 1970s, when security had been of no concern; it was notoriously full of bugs. For instance, Sendmail performed security checks only on a user’s first message; once the user passed, all his subsequent messages went straight through. Another weakness of the program was that a simple I, the “pipe” symbol, turned the part of the message following it into input, which could consist of a variety of Unix commands the computer was obliged to obey. These commands could give an intruder log-in status and, with some more manipulation, a “back-door” access that would last until detected and deleted. Entry could be utilized to attach a “Trojan horse” that would flash messages onto the screen, with subliminal brevity if desired.
Bech’s wicked idea was to undermine Cannon’s confidence and sense of self—fragile, beneath all that polymathic, relentlessly with-it bluster—as he sat gazing at his monitor. Robin devised a virus: every time Aldie typed an upper-case “A” or a lower-case “x,” a message would flash, too quickly for his conscious mind to register but distinctly enough to penetrate the neuronic complex of brain cells. The subversive program took Robin some days to perfect; especially finicking were the specs of such brief interruptions, amid the seventy cathode-ray refreshments of the screen each second, in letters large enough to make an impression that could be read unawares by a modern mind habituated to the lightning message, the commercially loaded seme, the come-hither flutter of sexually loaded images. She labored while Bech slept; half-moon shadows smudged and dented the silken smoothness of her face. Delicately she strung her contingent binaries together. They could at any moment be destroyed by an automatic “sniffer” program or a human “sysadmin,” a systems administrator. Federal laws were being violated; heavy penalties could be incurred. Nevertheless, out of love for Bech and the fascination of a technical challenge, she persevered and, by the third morning, succeeded.
Bech began, once the intricate, illicit commands had been lodged, with some hard-core Buddhism. BEING IS PAIN, the subliminal message read; NON-BEING IS NIRVANA. The words invisibly rippled into the screen’s pixels for a fifteenth of a second—that is, five refreshments of the screen, a single one being, Robin and a consulted neurophysiologist agreed, too brief to register even subliminally. After several days of these basic equations, Bech asked her to program the more advanced, NO MISERY OF MIND IS THERE FOR HIM WHO HATH NO WANTS. It was critical that the i
dea of death be rendered not just palatable but inviting. NON-BEING IS AN ASPECT OF BEING, AND BEING OF NON-BEING: This Bech had adapted from a Taoist poem by Seng Ts’an. From the same source he took TO BANISH REALITY IS TO SINK DEEPER INTO THE REAL. With Aldie’s manicky productiveness in mind, he dictated, ACTIVITY IS AVOIDANCE OF VICTORY OVER SELF.
Together he and Robin scanned Cannon’s latest effusions, in print or on the computer screen, for signs of mental deterioration and spiritual surrender. Deborah Frueh had taken the bait in the dark, and Bech had been frustrated by his inability to see what was happening—whether she was licking an envelope or not, and what effect the much-diluted poison was having on her detestable innards. But in the case of Aldie Cannon, his daily outpouring of cleverness surely would betray symptoms. His review of a Sinead O’Connor concert felt apathetic, though he maintained it was her performance, now that she was no longer an anti-papal skinhead, that lacked drive and point. His roundup of recent books dwelling, with complacency or alarm, upon the erosion of the traditional literary canon—cannon fodder indeed, the ideal chance for him to do casual backflips of lightly borne erudition—drifted toward the passionless conclusion that “the presence or absence of a canon amounts to much the same thing; one is all, and none is equally all.” This didn’t sound like the Aldie Cannon who had opined, of Bech’s collection When the Saints, “Some of these cagey feuilletons sizzle but most fizzle; the author has moved from not having much to say to implying that anyone’s having anything to say is a tiresome breach of good taste. Bech is a literary dandy, but one dressed in tatters, plucked up at the thrift-shop bins of contemporary ideation.”
It was good for Bech to remember these elaborate and gleeful dismissals, lest pity bring him to halt the program. Where the celebrant of pop culture would once wax rapturous over Julia Roberts’ elastic mouth and avid eyes, he now dwelt upon her ethereal emaciation in My Best Friend’s Wedding, and the “triumphant emptiness” of her heroine’s romantic defeat and the film’s delivery of her into the arms of a confirmed homosexual. Of Saul Bellow’s little novel, he noticed only the “thanatoptic beauty” of its culmination in a cemetery, where the hero’s proposal had the chiselled gravity of an elegy or a death sentence. The same review praised the book’s brevity and confessed—this from Aldie Cannon, Pantagruelian consumer of cultural produce—that some days he just didn’t want to read one more book, see one more movie, go to one more art show, look up one more reference, wrap up one more paragraph with one more fork-tongued aperçu. And then, just as the Manhattan scene was kicking into another event-crammed fall season, Cannon Fodder now and then skipped a day on the Internet, or was replaced, with a terse explanatory note, by one of the writer’s “classic” columns from a bygone year.