The Egg Code

by Mike Heppner

  “I’m leaving.”

  “And then you started coming after me with this, like, battle ax.”

  “You are now officially talking to yourself.”

  T. Kenneth West strode out of the office as Gray fake-cheerfully waved farewell, his right arm moving up and down like an automaton at a theme park: “Thank you for visiting Pirates of the Deep.” Ah, goodbye, fucker. He grinned and saluted, then put his head down on his desk. Naptime, nyum nyum. Another day wasted. Time was the big problem in Gray’s life. No one cared about his own little ambitions. Lifting his head, he blared out the chorus to a Van Halen song—PA-NA-MA! PA-NA-MA-AA!—but no one came by to investigate, so he stopped singing. This shit sucked . The first meeting with a client was always the worst. These fuckwad business types were rarely adept at shaping their own marketing concepts. Their contradictory adjectives smacked of a certain nose-holding schizophrenia. Make it snappy, they always insisted, yet sincere. Oh, sure. Catchy yet dignified. Such naive ideals. Gray could only hope that the board of directors would have the sense to leave the matter in his hands. Grabbing his briefcase, he slunk out of the office and stepped outside. If he hurried, he’d have enough time to scribble a few sentences back at his apartment. With that in mind, he climbed into his car and left work for the day.

  When he arrived at the furniture store—not at three-thirty, more like three-forty-five—the parking lot was nearly empty, and he could see bored employees standing under the vinyl awning, smoking and waiting to go back on-shift. The air smelled of diesel fuel and hot upholstery. A bright sign hung over the front door: a red signature scrawled across a blue background.

  “You got the right place,” a middle-aged Vietnamese man called out as he walked down a wheelchair-access ramp and pointed up at the sign. “Living Arrangements, you got it, Cam Pee, president, CEO, here we are, you the guy from downtown, you come with me.”

  Gray fake-smiled as he shook the man’s hand. Cam Pee was dressed in a slate-colored three-piece suit with narrow sleeves that tightened around his armpits. His constant leer seemed poised on the verge of implosion. Shiny black hair flopped about as he gestured and nodded, leading the way.

  Living Arrangements was, so far as Gray could tell, a flea market in disguise, cut-rate crap ferried across the Pacific from Indonesia, the Philippines. Poorly manufactured furniture in wicker and pine leaned over the main aisle—chairs on top of desks on top of dresser drawers, an overabundance of stuff. The cashiers all were young ladies in their late teens and early twenties, each lost in a private void as they stared out the windows at the traffic on the highway. Six executives from the home office formed an anxious row near the main entrance. Dressed in blue suits and mirrored sunglasses, they each blandly reiterated the same basic look of the other five. Gray could see his reflection widen and contract from lens to lens as he followed Cam Pee down the receiving line.

  “Last, here, you meet Jim Carroll.” The CEO introduced Gray to a tall man with high, strangely solid hair. “Jim is Visual Merchandiser for—whole zone!” he said, pointing at both men, then crossing his arms, indicating an exchange of some sort. “You two work together—tight!”

  The executives laughed; odd, thought Gray—nothing funny there. Suppressing an urge to—oh, lord, anything . . . play air guitar, complete with windmills and manic fingers on the fretboard—he followed the others past the cash wrap. A hand tugged lightly on his sleeve.

  “Hey, mind if I stick my fat neck in here too?”

  The team of executives shifted as a new man joined the group. He coughed, smiled, waved hi.

  Jim Carroll scratched his forehead, hiding his embarrassment. “Oh, yeah, this is, uhh, Steve, Steve Mould, he’s the—”

  “I’m the manager of this store, Steve Mould. Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “Yeah. He’s not the manager of . . . all the stores.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Just this particular one.”

  “My little corner of the world. Betcha.”

  “Steve has been kind enough to let us borrow his office while we work out our business.”

  Steve’s big brown shoes changed clock positions as he wheeled around and pointed at the girls behind the cash wrap. “Yeah. You all just do what you gotta do, and we’ll . . . hold down the fort!”

  Gray rubbed his eyes. “Super,” he said, resenting the associations— his life, this man’s enthusiasm.

  “We’re all set to go. I’ve got a great staff working for me today, and we’re gonna . . . pump it out!” Steve made a little fist and punched the air.

  “Nice, nice.”

  “No messing around, man. We’re . . . yeah. Yup.”

  Jim Carroll moved between Gray and Steve, blocking the conversation.

  “Cam, do we want to take Mr. Hollows into the back now?”

  As the executives moved across the sales floor, Steve tripped along, walking backwards, latching onto the CEO’s cufflink. “It’s a real pleasure—and for you especially, Mr. Pee—to have you all here in my store. Or the store. The store, my store, whichever the case, uh . . . may be. And I just wanted to say—”

  “Steve.” Jim waved his hand in front of the manager’s face. The crowd moved ahead as Steve backed into a display of stacked carafes.

  “If you need anything at all, sir—coffee or paper or whatever—you just let us know, because my people are fired up to be here today, and we’re all just set to rock ’n’ roll!”

  Jim took Steve’s shoulder and pulled him back a step. “Cam, Frank, Bernie, you go ahead. I’ll be right there. I just got a page from Cathy in auditing. It’ll take me two minutes.” He waited for the others to leave, then pinned Steve against an endcap. “What are you doing here, pal?”

  “Just trying to be sociable to the new ad account, Jim.” A bit miffed, Steve fanned out the front of his work apron.

  “Yeah, well let me tell you something—you want to be sociable, try being sociable to Cam Pee’s big fat heinie unless you want a fourth-division write-up next performance review. Where do you get off trying to upstage the Big Guy?”

  “Oh, Jim,” Steve whispered, feeling pretty slick. “A few words, a little hello, I’m entitled to that much.”

  “Steve, do you realize we’ve choreographed this entire affair down to the last maneuver? Every single motion—planned out in advance. I’m breaking the choreography right now, just standing here, giving you this reprimand.”

  Steve let go of his apron. “Is that what the heck this is? A reprimand?”

  “An informal reprimand. Now come on! We picked this site for a reason—because you’re a decent manager and because your cashiers are remotely presentable, compared to those jigaboos we’ve got working downtown. Don’t fuck it up!” Catching himself, he noticed an old woman creeping along the knickknack wall, browsing the keepsakes. He smiled professionally and said, “I think this lady has a question.”

  Adjusting his tie, he hurried past the double doors to the backroom. Through the circular windows, Steve could see the executives filing into his office—his office!—and so casual about it too, standing in the doorway, blabbing away, the usual chat, all part of the act, a stupid kids’ game, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, MBA ballbusters fresh out of school, not one idea to call their own, but they look good and they know the talk, and that’s what it takes, m’friend, that is it right there in a nut-shell and it’s too bad but it’s true, American business, wave of the future, leaves the good men out on the sales floor with the batty old ladies and their stupid questions, got nothing better to do, all of her friends are dead so she has to pester sales clerks trying to make a decent living, pushing their meaningless merchandise, keeps you forty-five minutes on a three-buck sale, good God, the same ol’ yaya, yes ma’am, that there is one hundred percent gen-you-wine Southeast Asian lacquer, made and manufactured in Indonesia, special keen, just 4 U.

  Thriller

  1984

  On television, a man stands before a series of charts. “H
ello,” he says, “my name is Herbert Hollows. I’m a scientist. I design prototypes for the Kellogg Corporation. When someone opens a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, he should know exactly what to expect. The flakes must all convey the same message. Speaking anthropomorphically, the ideal flake should say to the consumer, ‘Greetings. Allow me to introduce myself. I am a Kellogg’s Corn Flake. Please note my familiar shape.’ ” The man continues past a long drafting table. Cheesy music plays in the background, something from a sci-fi movie. “For this reason, the people at Kellogg have hired me to develop six templates, six variations on a basic theme. All future flakes will derive from these primary sources.”

  Dr. Hollows’s voice upsets you: drab, distinctly Midwestern. This is not how scientists are supposed to talk. You seek the comfort of an exotic German accent, the fruity vowels, the v for w transpositions, the lab coat, the thrilling graphs, the clipboard, the adventurous eyebrows, the gurgling beakers. You want the font. You want the scientist font. This is why it bothers you, seeing this complicated schematic hanging above a drafting table two miles north of Battle Creek, Michigan. In pencil-drawn lines and dashes, the common corn flake appears otherworldly, like a supernatural gemstone. Already you fear that you are in way over your head. Television spoils everything. You would like to believe that these things just happen, that no greater purpose informs their structure beyond a plain desire to please you, the informed shopper. Touchingly naive, you still cling to the notion that there is fun in the world. Nothing is fun, my friend. Your every pleasure is a function of rigidly formulated theorems carried out to an irreducible conclusion.

  But while your unhappiness stems from these impersonal revelations, Herbert Hollows has more daunting reasons for his concern. With malicious intent, his own son responded to the advertisement in the Kellogg newsletter last fall, calling for submissions from ambitious young filmmakers. Deliberately, dishonestly, he rented a 16mm camera and scads of editing equipment, needlessly wasting a whole year’s allowance. Equipment in hand, he knocked on the studio door—said he was interested in his dear old daddy’s work, and Dr. Hollows believed him, flattered by the attention, not knowing that his comments would later appear in the boy’s contemptible commercial. Edited down, given a cheap, ironic spin, the thirty-second spot won a special citation from the heads of Enthusiasms, Inc. “What a talented son you have,” they said, shaking his hand, calling him mister. Those shark-eyed salesmen would never understand the real work of the engineer. If they want his child, they can have him.

  Walking off-screen, Dr. Hollows leaves his drafting table and strides down the hall of his modern, prefab home. Teenybopper music rises up from the boy’s room. The window over the landing shows a two-lane highway cutting across a brown field. The sky above is blue and empty. He leans against the banister and shouts down the stairs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What I’m always doing.”

  “Well, get up here.”

  “I can’t now.”

  “Yes, you can now.”

  “Minute.”

  “And don’t get sarcastic with me.”

  Downstairs, he hears the sound of typing, then a frustrated silence. His wife, Joan, encourages these literary pursuits, and while Herbert takes a moderate pride at the boy’s obvious intelligence, he cannot approve of the time wasted, time better applied to other things. When Dr. Hollows was a student, math and physics were the only subjects he considered worth studying; he read literature occasionally, taking notes and demanding a refund from the publisher whenever the author got the science wrong. And now his only son, aged thirteen, is two hundred pages into a projected million-word epic called Walter Munch, from Morning to Night, seeking to reinvent the Ulysses tale by grafting it onto the mundane existence of a young resident of Battle Creek, Michigan. Herbert has not read the manuscript, despite his son’s urgings. These fruitless ambitions must not be humored in a child of thirteen. Dr. Hollows has known too many marginal prodigies whose lives of frustration began with a parent’s unconditional support.

  “Coming?”

  “I’m doing something.”

  “Now.”

  “All right.”

  “Hup-two.”

  “Come on.”

  “Well, do it. Now. And don’t get smart.”

  Leaving his work, Gray steps over a pile of spiral notebooks and climbs the stairs. His room is small, and he keeps it neat. A top-of-the-line Atari 2600 game console lies in its unopened box. A curl of wrapping paper sticks to the package. A chimney. A black boot (Mr. Claus is coming). Gray’s birthday is on the twenty-fourth of December. He feels personally responsible for the holiday buildup. The bustle, the chaos, the Christmas vacation—but at the end, no parties and the usual number of gifts.

  “I will say this in as few words as possible. I’m angry with you. I’m very disappointed in you. I don’t know what to say to you right now.”

  “Well, I don’t . . . I don’t know.”

  Dr. Hollows hates the look on his son’s face. Loose lips, open mouth—What did I do?—as if any of this should come as a surprise. His shirt—oh! nice shirt (choke you with it).

  “It seems to me—and you can address this any way you see fit, because if you want me to treat you like a man, I’ll treat you like a man—but it seems to me that you have no respect for the hard work I do, and if you think you can ridicule me in front of your little TV camera, then I just don’t know what to say about that.”

  Herbert can hear the stereo playing in his son’s room. Gray likes his music; it helps him to focus on his writing. On those tense weekends when the whole family stays at home to work on their individual projects, the low drum sometimes pounds against the floor of the upstairs studio. Herbert tolerates this racket without complaint. Being tolerant appeals to the doctor; these small inconveniences enhance his sense of responsibility.

  “Gosh, Dad. Most people thought it was funny. My English teacher liked it a lot.”

  “Do you think it’s funny?”

  He hates the shirt. The color. Nectarine.

  “Well, no. I’m sorry. I don’t know why you’re so mad at me all of a sudden. I’ll tell the guy you don’t like it, and maybe he can take it off.”

  Buttons. Three of ’em. One fastened, two loose.

  “Gray. Are you really that stupid?”

  The stereo pauses in the silence between songs. This particular record is quite popular with the kids these days. The cover shows a black man in a white suit cuddling a baby leopard. Gray’s mother purchased the record while out running errands with the boy. Seeing the covetous look on his face, she offered to buy it for him, but Gray said no, not wanting to endure the thank-you ritual, the questions he was now bound to answer (what? record? artist? do? you? like? other? kids?). Red in the face, he pretended not to see as his mother brought the record up to the cash register. Grateful, ashamed, he forced a reaction; thanx!—he said, then eagerly unwrapped the cellophane on the way home.

  “Everyone liked it. They showed it at school. They had a special assembly, and everyone sat down. Right when it was coming on, they said to wait and we’d watch it. And then it came on. And most people laughed. They thought it was funny. My English teacher—”

  “Your English teacher is of a questionable persuasion.”

  Gray’s throat feels dry. He sees his English teacher, sees his father pushing the small woman against a blackboard. The dry feeling inside his throat breaks. “She said it was really good. Mom was there.”

  Joan Hollows sits in the upstairs family room, pretending to read a TV Guide. This is what she does whenever she hears her husband yelling at the boy. Having experimented with several different periodicals, she has determined that the TV Guide is best suited to this purpose, thanks to the loud noise it makes when she flips through the pages.

  “So this is what you’re going to do. Run to your mother. Are you that much of a baby?”

  “Well, I’ll call the guy. I’ll do it right now. I’ll tell him t
o take it off, and to stop showing it.”

  He hates the shirt. Spoiled little jerk, his mother buys him everything.

  “Are you so stupid that you think you can call a man who’s in charge of billions of dollars in revenue and simply tell him to put a stop to it— because you didn’t think, and because you were selfish, and because you’re acting like an immature brat?”

  The buttons, and the little insignia, logo, whatever they call it—a small patch, what’s that, a muskrat? a tiger? some stupid gimmick, all the kids want to look the same.

  “I’m s-s-s—”

  “Now he’s going to cry. That’s an intelligent thing to do. How would you feel if I were to go on national television—‘This is my son, he stays in his room all day, he thinks he’s writing a goddamn novel, why don’t we put the camera right in his face and ha-ha, isn’t that funny?’ ”

  “P-p-please.”

  “Do you know what my colleagues are going to say about this piece of nonsense, this idiotic, unfeeling, uncaring thing you did?”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Listen to me! Do? You? Know? What? Listen to me!”

  Dr. Hollows brushes his son’s cheek—a symbolic slap—and goes back to his studio, pulling the door shut as the boy grabs for the knob. Gray does not want to let his father go. He wants forgiveness. His palm flaps against the wall as the space closes—now a sliver, now a seam.

  “Go away. I’ll be down for dinner.”

  Locking the door, Dr. Hollows sits at the drafting table and switches the overhead lamp from dim to bright. The pounding stops. Footsteps creep across the hall: Joan, coming to comfort, the mother smother, the easy part of the job. Dinner in two hours. Red eyes. Bills on the table. Food moving in a circle until everyone’s plate is full. Staring into the video camera—his own commerical, now—he waits for a light to flash, then begins his explanation. He hopes you will take this seriously. He hopes you will get it this time.