Gain

  Time, that universal solvent, dissolved the mystery. Resolve learned the truth some while after the three men set up shop and produced their first joint slab of soap. Ennis had held out for the most specific of capital investments. The pitiful sum just covered the cost of digging Cathleen Ennis a real grave.

  OUR GET UP AND GO

  JUST GOT UP AND WENT

  How would you like

  • to run your lawn mower . . . on garbage?

  • to power up your computer . . . with light?

  • to light your whole house . . . with bacteria?

  • to take a little joyride . . . on hydrogen?

  • to play your favorite hits . . . with nothing but the heat of your hand?

  A man stretched out at the beach watches a woman in an apricot one-piece plunge into the surf. He holds a tiny portable radio between thumb and index finger. Through the earpiece there issues a tinny but unmistakable “Getting better all the time.”

  The Energy and Fuels Group

  CLARE MATERIAL SOLUTIONS

  Two weather-beaten men gossip in line in front of Laura at the Bounty Mart. They must be farmers. They have that natural-history skin. Farmer’s tan—beet red from the top of the wrist to the middle of the upper arm, and ivory above. They’ve come in from the outlands, like the accidentals that stumble bewildered upon her finch feeder. They’ve wandered back into town to be hospitalized or die.

  So odd to her: Lacewood, with its billion-dollar money machine, sitting in the middle of this scattered Stone Age tribe. Farmers always fill her with vague shame. She, an amateur gardener, a dabbler in drippy slipperworts and lilies, a potterer whose most useful crop is chives, having to mince around the real growers, the only people on earth whose work is indispensable.

  How do they live? Homesteading in those hundred-year wooden boxes on their little knolls in the middle of nowhere. The houses go onto the market now and then, when all the children die or move to Chicago, selling out to inevitable Agribiz. She brokers them now and again. Tons of white pine wrapped around a sump pump sunk into a hummock. Irreplaceable. But not much of a market, except for Sawgak junior faculty who want to get back to nature.

  She wouldn’t know how to talk to these men if one turned around and chatted her up. All she can do is take from them. These boxes of multigrain cereal. The corn dogs that Tim eats unheated, right out of the pouch. Ellen’s tubes of fat-free whole wheat chips. The nonstick polyunsaturated maize oil spray. The squeezable enriched vegetable paste. The microwave tortillas. The endangered-species animal crackers. Everything in her cart, however enhanced and tangled its way here.

  The line is slow. The cashier pages her supervisor for the fourth time, pleading for anyone with authorization to come unjam a bungled card payment. With infinite patience, the cash register commands, Please make another selection. The customer jabs repeatedly at a touch screen where a package of cold cuts does two-and-a-half gainers in holographic space.

  On the magazine rack in front of the register, next to the free booklets of the monthly Next Millennium Realty listings, an issue of Trends beckons to her. Cover story on the New Spirituality. As the wait turns eternal, she starts to read. Former drug-abusing wild teen star says it’s time for America to reexamine its values. Sexiest man alive divorces supermodel and turns Buddhist. Maybe something Ellen would read. Nothing better to do, she lays it on the belt with her other offerings.

  The farmer in front of Laura, wearing a Deere Moline cap, says, “Right here’d be a great place to open a supermarket.”

  Without losing a beat, the Archer Daniels Midland Company Decatur cap next to him replies, “You’d make a killing.”

  The usual, resigned abiding that people who make their own way reserve for the weather, collective idiocy, and other things beyond their control.

  Nothing Runs Like a Deere asks Supermarket to the World: “Doing any gasohol this year?”

  “I’m in for about a dozen, fifteen. You?”

  “Well, I don’t know. They’re all of a sudden making this big gluten push, you see?”

  “That’s part of that Europoort B.V. angle they’re trying to pull off. You blink your eyes, and bingo. It’s kickbacks all over the globe.”

  They pay for their pouch tobacco and reconstituted orange juice and disappear, chatting about futures pricing and getting one of those clip-on cellular modems so they can receive commodities reports while out hoeing the north forty.

  Laura’s turn. One by one her goods glide over the laser enfilade and surrender their bar-coded secrets. The name of each item appears on the LCD panel in front of her, like a teach-your-child-to-read machine. A machine voice chants each price out loud like hymn numbers.

  “Paper or plastic?” the fifty-five-year-old bagger asks her. What is she supposed to say? Liberty or death? Right or wrong? Good or evil? Paper or plastic? The one kills trees but is one hundred percent natural and recyclable. The other releases insidious fumes if burned but requires less energy to make, can be turned into picnic tables and vinyl siding, has handles, and won’t disintegrate when the frozen yogurt melts.

  She panics. “Whatever is easiest,” she tells the bagger, who grimaces.

  On the way to the car, she catches herself limping. Hanging on the cart, favoring one side. It’s a sickness. How she always gets everyone else’s symptoms. Psychosympathetic. Choking to death on Don’s asthma. Laid up with her colleagues’ migraines. Or that nightmare on Elm Street: working for months to sell Bill Mason’s split-level cinder block bunker while all the while trying not to mimic his speech impediment.

  Now Nan. Laura, favoring her right side ever since the funeral. But was it the right leg, where it started, or the left? No sooner does she wonder than both legs start to throb.

  A universe of things can go wrong with you. More all the time. When she was twelve, science had conquered all the diseases. Now look at the place. And the cost of the smallest accident: five days in the hospital—that weird thing with Tim’s joints that they never diagnosed—would have wiped her out if it hadn’t been for the Next Millennium group emergency coverage. How can people out west of the tracks live? Just going to the dentist must ruin them. She still hasn’t paid off the kids’ last trip. Still recovering from the shock of learning that the past tense of “floss” is “fleeced.”

  Behind the wheel, her arms start to feel cold, like Nan’s after the clot settled in. She manages to make it home without incident. Fortunately, she hasn’t started copying other people’s crazy driving tics. She talks to the aggressive cars, backs them off, keeps them in their lanes. Man, woman, or machine: everyone becomes “Ludwig.” Nice going, Ludwig. Hey, Ludwig, it’s my turn. An old habit of her mother’s, picked up without her realizing.

  The bagger used plastic. In the kitchen, the counter overflows with this week’s haul. Three people, one week, eleven plastic sacks. She’s going to build an addition. Maybe expand the dining nook out past the flower beds.

  “Hey, guys. Salvation Army’s back.”

  She hears Tim clicking in the next room, little soundblasted caissons rolling along, punctuated by subvocalized profanities. The war, going wrong on some encroaching front.

  “Timmo? Ellie? I said, ‘Hey, guys . . . ’”

  A “Hey, Mom” emanates from upstairs.

  From the computer: “Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

  Ellen comes down to inspect the booty. She roots through the sacks, extracts a new requested commodity. Peanut sheets. Laura is not sure what problem the sheeting of peanuts actually solves. What was wrong with yesterday’s peanut concept? The little oblong things? Or butter, for that matter? Sheets must be more manageable. More predictable, somehow. Flatter.

  Anyway, they make Ellen happy. No mean feat, these days.

  “Way to go, Mom. Bodacious.” She peels off the first page of rubbered goober and pops the corner in her mouth.

  “Ellen!”

  “What?”

  “I used that word less than four weeks ago. And all you
could do then was roll your eyes at me.”

  “That was you, Mom.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “It sounds stupid and pathetic when you use it.”

  All adulthood the enemy, since Nan died. For failing to intervene.

  “You could help put some of this stuff away, you know.”

  “I could.”

  “In the cabinets, I mean. Not your gullet.”

  “What difference does it make? It all ends up in the toilet, eventually.”

  Laura says nothing. Nothing she can do for her daughter but limp with her.

  It’s not all grief. Raging hormones were already kicking in, even before Nan. Things will probably just get worse for another ten, fifteen years. Once her daughter turns thirty, they can be friends again.

  Another volley of cybernetic mortar erupts from the study. It ends in a commanderly expletive, decidedly not “Nuts.” Tim was better off in the hammering-ants-with-Wiffle-bats stage than in this one. Not so great for the ants, but at least Tim got some exercise. Worked his muscles. At least the bat was real.

  Ellen disappears upstairs, squirreling away the peanut sheets. Lining her private nest with them. She buries her grief in fan ’zines, music with deeply suggestive lyrics Laura hopes she doesn’t understand, and long phone conversations.

  The last harvest burger brought in, Laura pours a Thirst-Aid for Tim and a loganberry-kiwi seltzer for herself. She takes the drinks into the computer room and sets them next to the speakers, using the mouse pad for a coaster.

  “So, General. How goes the war?”

  Tim twitches his shoulders. A deniable shrug.

  “Hey, buster. I’m talking to you. Give me the order of battle, at least.”

  He takes his eyes off the screen for a second, inspecting this bizarre sneak attack. He sighs, the most he has moved anything above the joystick elbow all morning.

  “This is a Stuka. This here is, like, Warsaw.”

  “Warsaw, Poland?”

  “Just Warsaw.”

  The Stuka looks to her like a winged saltshaker. Warsaw looks like two ranch eggs over easy. She can see nothing more than a ragged, rushing, panning, zooming blur. Colored dots sloshing around. A tapeworm’s-eye view of the dog’s GI tract after he’s gotten into a dish of bridge mix. Every so often, some digital Göring screams “Jawohl,” and there’s this bloodcurdling death rattle, like a lawn mower hitting a section of chain-link fence.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That horrible noise.”

  He smiles. The most pleasure she’s given him in days.

  “Those are the 88s. We’re movin’.”

  “Moving?”

  “Movin’ now, puss.”

  She thinks of a house she sold last month. That subdivision out north of Fairview, just airlifted in by helicopter. The new couple, Clare executives, and their little daughter. She stood in the treeless, bald lot with them. Across the lunar landscape, a common flicker clung and rapped at the polyurethane, simulated-wood-grain gingerbreading, completely baffled. Couldn’t sink a hole and wouldn’t give up. Living things never know when to.

  “Sucker doesn’t know what I’m doing. Rearin’ back on his heels. Puss.”

  “Don’t say ‘puss.’ Who doesn’t know? Stalin?”

  He takes his fingers off the buttons to glare at her. Stalin? “Rosen. That stupid sucker.”

  “Don’t say ‘sucker.’ Rosen? You mean Andy Rosen? In Warsaw?”

  “Jeez, Mom.” Get an ethos. “Yeah. In Warsaw.” The soundblasted digital signal for total disgust. “No. Jeez. Like . . .” Where to begin? “Like, he’s on the modem?”

  “You’re using the modem to—?”

  “You said if I paid for half of the local calls on the second phone, I—” He slams down the joystick. Rage starts to flare out of him again. “This sucks. Unfair. Why the hell do you think I got that stupid job taking those dumbass Citizen’s Shoppers—?”

  “Okay. Chill out. I said, chill.” Maybe the nurse is right. Maybe she should consider that medication. “I didn’t say you couldn’t. I just didn’t know you could.”

  “Could what?”

  “Andy is playing this same game, on his machine, while you . . . ?”

  “Duh, Mom. And right now he’s wiping my butt. So, if you don’t mind?”

  “Oh. You mean me. It’s called a diversionary tactic. Andy said he’d pick up the other half of the phone bill if I’d . . .”

  She lets the joke fall into the silicon ether. Five seconds later, squeezing the trigger, Tim registers. He rears his head back and snorts. “Whatever.”

  He could be blitzkrieging anyone, there on the other end. Andy Rosen, his dad, some strange digital hitchhiker he’s picked up from some bulletin board. Master of the Universe seeks fast-shooting companion with good communications skills for chat, file exchange, and occasional Eastern Front apocalypse.

  She finally understands the appeal of the computer revolution. In virtual reality, no one can tell that you’re twelve.

  At day’s end, she thinks, we’ll all be disembodied. Mobile microcomputer puppets doing our shopping and socializing. Human heads pasted onto modem bodies. Insert your face here. Like those billboards that Next Millennium posts everywhere around town. Pictures of all the agents, half photo, half cartoon. Hers is a black-and-white passport photo superenlarged and stuck upon a generic fairy godmother torso complete with wings and magic wand. She sits on a haystack of sparkling bullion, underneath a caption reading, “Good as Sold.” The kids wince every time they drive past the thing.

  Her virtual billboard sits out above the parking lot in front of the Member’s Discount Club. The store’s $25 annual screening fee nags at her conscience, but there’s just no cheaper place. Tonight’s dinner, in fact, is a Member’s Exclusive. The Cool Juice comes from Bounty Mart. Bounty’s the easiest place to reduce the fat and cut back on the sodium. But all the rest is Discount Club: the fifteen-bean Old Almanac soup, the skip-dippers, the frozen melon medley.

  She’s probably saved close to a fifth of the meal cost right there. And if Tim and Ellen let her get away with that twice a week, there’s your membership costs back in a little over a month and a quarter.

  But you gotta pay to play. Ante up: that’s the catch. Hard to put aside a little bit for the future when the present is eating you alive. She’s heard that folks from the west side will check into motels on hot days to beat the heat. Three weeks, and you’d have your air conditioner. But who’s going to suffer through three weeks to get relief?

  “A cyst is like a little ball of water,” she tells the kids, over dessert. “They make a tiny incision. They hardly even have to use a scalpel.”

  “They just Shout it out,” Ellen cracks.

  Tim sneers at her. “Idiot.”

  “Geek.”

  “Guys. Please. I’m going in next Tuesday. You’ll just go stay with your father.”

  When they go to sleep at last, she tries to catch up on the New Spirituality. But she can’t stay with the article. A horrible thing, on the late show. Why do they rerun such nonsense? Some arrangement where the parent company owns a print of the film and the subsidiary cable racket doesn’t have to pay royalties.

  First you lose five sons in a war. Then someone goes and makes a feature film about it. Then they rerun the monster at midnight, forever. Until every child of every mother falls.

  The scorn of his former business partners would have killed Jephthah, had impossible packet dreams not already claimed him. At least death spared the old man the indignity of his sons’ fall. He did not have to witness Abomination drive a flourishing trading family into bastard handiwork.

  Clare’s sons had once sold Pech’s Soap by the shipload. They knew the jobbers and middlemen. The paths of bulk distribution were to them like favorite country lanes. But neither ever imagined stooping to make the cakes themselves. Yet still, the drop from trading to making was less inglorious than the drop that aw
aited them if they did not find some way to make a living.

  Prejudice crippled their venture from all sides. No bank would underwrite such a naked wager. No tooler stood ready to build the plant the brothers envisioned. Overnight, they learned the lay of the land: local manufacture had endless suitors, but no one wanted to marry it. Clare’s soap, like American Business at large, threatened to expire, crushed under its own start-up costs.

  Ennis brought his new owners to his North End tenement. He swore the Clares into a secret brotherhood. They toured the newly purchased candle works in the shed out back. Despite the crudity of the works, Ennis’s knowledge of fats and oils flowed through each cranny. Once a man knows what he is doing, the Irishman declared, he can do as he needs.

  The maxim struck both Samuel and Resolve with all the force of truth. Ennis’s stearin process placed him well out in front of his rival Boston chandlers. He showed the Clares the closed boiling vessel where he split tallow in the presence of a few percent lime. The lime, Ennis guessed, started the process that heat and steam then finished.

  Into this turbid boil Ennis sprinkled just enough sulfuric acid to dissolve the lime salts and precipitate them out as sulfate. Up from the resulting sea of glycerin floated the prized fatty acids. Ennis skimmed off the desired layer, clarified it, and clarified it again. He poured out the result into holding pans and waited for the fatty acids to crystallize into a lovely magma.

  This he split again and pressed, squeezing out the liquid red olein oil from the solid stearin. He melted, purified, and poured the stearin into his molds, through which he drew his cleverly plaited wicks. Cold water set the molding. He cracked the finished candles from their molds and packed them into his wedge. The rest the brothers already knew.

  While Resolve examined each mold and pan, Samuel looked over the scraps that Ennis referred to as his “books.” Together, the Clare sons discovered how Ennis was able to make so wonderful a product and to sell it so cheaply.

  The product’s quality came from Ennis’s innate perfectionistism. He lovingly repeated each purification beyond the point of visible improvement. Resolve asked about the value of such fastidiousness. Ennis scowled and declared that he would never let a cloudy product out his door.