The Egg Code

by Mike Heppner

  “Reggie doesn’t work for me anymore.”

  “That’s . . . that’s a thing.” Stopped short, Donna pressed her tongue between her teeth. The conversation seemed to change speeds, though faster, slower, she wasn’t sure. “What are you telling me? You’re telling me stupid things.”

  “Reggie’s your boy now. Use him well. I hope you enjoy yourself—”

  “Derek, you should sit down.”

  “—when they pick your heart to death.”

  Scarlet moved closer, touching his arm. Donna pushed her hand away and screamed, “Stay away from him!” Nervous now, she touched the fringe of a lampshade and picked at the brittle paper with her thumb. “You dropped Reggie? Why?”

  “He dropped me.”

  “Because you knew he was working with me?”

  “He dropped me, Donna . . . don’t you even listen? When I say he dropped me, that means one thing.”

  “Okay, so he dropped you. I still don’t know—”

  Suddenly angry, Derek kicked the coffee table. “Dropped me, dropped the book. Now I’ve got nothing!”

  “Christ. I just saw him! He didn’t say anything.”

  Scarlet went into the kitchen and switched off the stove. “So this means what?”

  “This means a lot of bad things, Scarlet.”

  Donna stiffened, hearing the girl’s name. “I thought Reggie liked you,” she said.

  Derek stared at his wife—sadly, because an awful thought occurred to him, that maybe Donna was stupid, and this made him wonder about everything else. Blinking, he went on: “He was looking forward to this year too. He wanted to throw us together. Number one and number two.”

  “But he figured you’d win.”

  “He figured I’d win. Well, I would win. What the hell, Donna. Who are you?”

  Donna lowered her head. Her turban had come undone, and she could feel it loosening, unwinding around her hair. The room was quiet, if dazedly so, and a part of her wanted to stay here all afternoon, to just be friends with everyone, even with Derek’s new little confidante. All at once she missed her domestic life, and the reassurance of chores, and the lovely thrill of staying inside all day. Even the things that once made her unhappy—the condescending smiles of her husband’s associates, the sense of being stared at with a kind of lewd, patronizing contempt (by everyone, men and women, even Derek himself)—now made her regret her new position, somehow less desirable than the first. It wasn’t so bad, really, being a trophy wife. There was something fundamentally good about it. Donna’s goodness had contributed as much to her marriage as Derek’s book contracts and lectures and mail-order Super-Success Kits. No one appreciated this, of course; Derek certainly didn’t. The assumptions were always negative; so much material comfort, others reasoned, automatically disqualified the beneficiary—in this case, the trophy wife—from being treated like a human being. So what do you get the woman who has everything? Love, maybe. Respect. A real place in the world.

  Derek and Scarlet listened as Donna turned and, weeping, hurried out of the apartment. Self-consciously, Scarlet crept back to the living room. It hurt her, the idea that someone else, particularly another woman, might think bad things about her. “She sure knows how to get to you,” she said.

  “Yes, she does.”

  “I can tell. You’re not like that. But sometimes it’s hard. I’m always saying stupid stuff.”

  Derek looked at her—small and hunched over the coffee table. “Scarlet, you . . . are a tremendous help to me. And a great comfort, too. I’m not sure I even know why.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand. “Wow . . . when you said that . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m totally flashing.”

  “Mmm.”

  “It’s not like literal flashing . . . it’s like this strange, bright blue pulsating thing.”

  “I’d like to give you something.” Walking back into the kitchen, he rifled through the cupboards, careful not to disturb Scarlet’s neat arrangement of cups and plates.

  She came forward slowly, shyly. “Oh now . . . HA! You’ve been keeping things from me.”

  “No, I haven’t.” He reached inside the silverware drawer and pulled out a small jewelry box. Opening it, he assumed a formal voice. “It’s a simple thing, but I feel—”

  “Oh! It’s beautiful!” She removed the pin from the box and held it up. The little bit of color sparkled between her thumb and forefinger. “Oh, God . . . this is too nice.”

  “If you can’t—”

  “Here . . . pin it on my collar.”

  “Oh, okay.” She held the neck of her T-shirt out to one side as Derek fiddled with the pin. “Let’s see if I can get the back off.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Damn. There! That looks nice.”

  “It does. Oops, I think it’s upside-down.”

  “No, that’s right. It’s a tree.”

  Scarlet’s lips made an ugly shape as she scrutinized the pin. “Oh, I see! I’m just looking at it wrong. What a cool thing. It’s like a Star Trek communicator.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I can, like, go to the fourth stratosphere from here.”

  “Great.”

  She patted her collar, holding her hand against the pin, keeping it there. “Thank you so much! It’s almost my birthday, did you know that?”

  “When’s that coming up?”

  “Actually, it’s in April, so not really that soon.”

  “We’ll have to do something.”

  “No, this is all set—for my birthday. Thank you.”

  “That’s fine.” At a loss, he mumbled, “You’ve made me very happy.”

  “Oh, you’ve made me happy too, Derek. You always make me happy.”

  He smiled, then went into the living room. One hand reached, feeling for the sofa. “Scarlet, I’m afraid . . . there’ll be less and less to do around here. With the book . . . not happening. Evidently.”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  “There’s so many things, though, Scarlet. I’m frightened even to tell you about them.”

  “Don’t . . . we don’t have to talk . . .”

  Derek said nothing at first. He felt safe, standing behind the sofa— behind it or next to it. “The book is an awful thing, Scarlet. That’s why Reggie left me. He was right to leave me. It’s an awful thing. And now that I’ve written it, I’m not sure what to do with it, because it has the potential to . . . hurt a lot of people. But I need to do it—”

  “You need to—”

  “But you don’t know yet, Scarlet. You don’t know what you’re saying. This is a terrible book. Not that it’s poorly written. That’s not it at all. The message is what’s terrible. It’s a horrible thing, in every way . . . and yet it’s me, and that’s why I’ve written it, and that’s why it has to come out.”

  “Yes.”

  “Please. I have to explain.”

  Derek felt her hands tugging on his shirt. Her eyes were big ovals, marred only by a tiny pock near the fold.

  “You don’t, Derek. I’m here, I’m here with you.”

  “Oh, Scarlet. It’s only getting worse.”

  “Shh. Come here. Listen, here’s an idea. Derek? Just once. Let’s lie down. That’ll make it better.”

  “I—I can’t, Scarlet. Believe me, it has nothing to do with . . . look, I have to do this and I have to do it now. The book I’ve written is an evil book. It’s dark, it’s evil, it’s wrong—and it’s me, Scarlet! I’ve never been honest like this before. The Skye’s the Limit and all that. It was insincere. Your father, his recovery. I didn’t mean any of that. I didn’t necessarily not mean it, I didn’t have any feeling about it one way or the other. It was a job, a job that I did for a long time, and now it’s over, I’m retired, I’m alone—”

  “No . . .”

  “I don’t even have you, because you don’t know who I am, how sick I am. I’m an opportunist, Scarlet! I am a capitalist and a fraud! I’ve lied to pe
ople and I’ve made a fortune off it. I’ve lied to you! In every way, I’ve lied to you. This nonsense about flying. You can’t fly, Scarlet!”

  “Please . . .”

  She backed away, and he took her wrists in his hands. “Wait, listen to me. This is important. If nothing else, you must hear me. You can’t fly because you are a human being. Human beings can’t fly—they never will!”

  “I—I don’t agree with that . . .” Scarlet’s words were weak things, spoken without conviction.

  Derek dropped her hands and walked away, fingers curled into claws, a man on the prowl. “You don’t have to agree, Scarlet. Go through your whole life not agreeing, believing in the impossible. UFOs. Government conspiracies. Happiness. Take it all! You’ve done it before, so why stop now? This is what we believe, that everything’s connected. That our little dramas mean something. No one’s special, Scarlet! No one cares! We’re mulch, fertilizer, dirt, big black clumps of it—a whole globe of dirt!”

  “It’s awful—”

  “It is awful, Scarlet. Isn’t it? And this is what I am. This is what I’ve been doing. And you’ve helped me!”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “You’ve helped me! You’ve been here all these weeks, running errands while I’ve been locked away, eight hours a day, type-type-type. What did you think I was doing?”

  Crying now, she tried to speak, but the words escaped in tiny bursts, torn and well intentioned. “I thought . . . I was . . . helping . . .”

  “You were helping, Scarlet! You were helping me to do it. Each word I wrote. You were the inspiration. You made it possible. Thank you! This is what I’m saying to you. Thank you for your help. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Please . . . let me . . .”

  She staggered toward the front door. Derek stayed put; dumb words, like broken machine parts, spilled onto the floor. “And now I’m all alone . . .”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve got to—”

  “Truly alone . . .”

  “I’ll just . . . come back some other time.” Working the door open, she backed out into the corridor, wanting only one last look as she waved and blew kisses. “God bless you . . . God bless you . . .”

  Outside, she stumbled down the porch steps and turned right into town, pushed along by a strange force. Words softly repeated inside her—the things he said, the things she said. Through the window of a beautician’s office, she could see two cats fighting while a woman sat behind the register, fishing a crushed pack of cigarettes out of her mint-blue cashier’s blazer. Stopping to tie her shoes, she could hear Derek’s voice instructing her on how to make the knot. Her mind seemed frozen, locked in a mode. She needed him, needed his advice. Make a bow, Scarlet. That’s it. Now push it through. You can do it. Chest heaving, she touched the pavement and stared at her shoe, now neatly tied. It was a nice knot, with big hoops and a tight ball. Suddenly she wanted to understand everything, the real facts—the physical thing, right there. The frozen pavement bit into her skin, but she stayed for a while, savoring it—Scarlet’s pain, Scarlet’s fingers. This had nothing to do with Derek. Taking the cold air into her lungs, she listened as a thick fluid rumbled inside her throat. She wondered what the fluid was; thinking about it, she resolved to look it up in a science textbook when she got home. The science textbook would tell her so many things. How to fly, how to break the spell of gravity. Scientists were always proving the unprovable, defying every law with yet another law, and while people had known for years that gravity did not exist in outer space, Scarlet felt certain that someone somewhere would discover the secret number, and as soon as the final calculation was put into place, all those who believed in the scientist’s work would begin to fly, and those who didn’t would have to stay behind.

  Climbing around a curve, she could see the lake glinting between patches of bare trees. The tower in the middle of the lake looked like just another tree, except wider around the base and brick-brown instead of ash-gray. She crossed the road and slid down the bendy trail leading to Olden’s shack. The door was open, with some red fuel canisters piled near the step. Inside the room, Olden’s face was still and blue as he stared at the computer screen, a power generator humming between his feet.

  “Mind if I shut the door?” she asked.

  Olden didn’t look up. “Yeah, sure . . . don’t step on anything.”

  Scarlet tiptoed across the room, taking a wayward course around boxes filled with green transistor boards. “Don’t step on what?”

  “Just . . . never mind. I’m building a new processor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A new processor, in case I have to move this goddamn site. I’ve gotta use non-registered parts. I can’t just walk into a CompStomp and plunk down twelve hundred bucks for a new hard drive. They’d be on me like that.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “They’re probably monitoring the whole thing right now, but if I dump the page, they’d be down here by the time the last packet hits the server, so I’ve gotta figure out how to divert the address—”

  “You want to take a break?”

  Scarlet kept her bag slung over her shoulders as she fell back onto the bed. The springs whined, a sexy noise, but Olden heard only the sound of his own fingers slapping the keyboard, updating the information. “Five minutes,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Five minutes is all, hon, then I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Gee, I’m glad you could spare me the time.”

  Olden leaned forward to peer at the screen, apparently reading from some treatise he’d just written. “Go to sleep. I’ll be there in a while.”

  “I don’t want to go to sleep, Olden. It’s four in the afternoon! I haven’t seen you for three days.”

  “I haven’t seen anyone for three days, Scarlet. Do you know what this is about? Look—”

  “I don’t want to look.”

  Revved up, he turned the monitor around until it faced the bed. “Sixty sites, Scarlet, sixty references. Sixty sites have taken my phony information and put it out over the Internet. Corporate sites too. And those are just the ones who’ve admitted it. Who knows how many others—”

  “Oh, God, Olden, just turn the fucking thing off and go outside. There’s a whole world out there—”

  “Here, listen to this—”

  “I . . . don’t . . . care!” Scarlet stood up, and the heavy gym bag pulled her toward the desk.

  “From Ten Thousand People, Maybe More: A Tribute to Simon and Garfunkel. Did you know—”

  “Oh, God.”

  “—in 1969, legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright toured with the famed rock duo, playing Fender bass and organ for a series of six dates on the West Coast.”

  “Right, and then the world comes to an end, right?”

  “This is fascinating to me—”

  “I can see where this is going.”

  “—particularly since he died in nineteen fifty whenever-the-fuck-it-was.”

  “Oh, who cares?”

  Olden frowned, then spun the console back around. “That’s what everyone thinks. They’re just facts. Little things to play with.”

  “Are you going to be angry about this forever?”

  He braced the keyboard between his elbows and muttered into his lap. “Maybe you don’t understand. This is serious, Scarlet. Everything you read, everything you see on the Internet . . . it’s people like me who make this shit up.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then don’t do anything! Let it go. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Oh, that’s a good idea.”

  “Okay, I’ll go by myself.” She hurried toward the door, then, hearing his soft, penitent voice, slowed and came back. They both looked at each other—tired, unhappy with the argument. Their hands groped across a dark space as she pressed his cheek against her stomach. His hair felt hot between her fingers—hot and thick, like heavy sand. “Oh,
Olden. What are we gonna do? You’re the only—”

  “What is this?” He pulled away, his eyes fixed on a speck of gold pinned to her collar.

  She could feel the pin against her neck, cold and sharp. “It’s nothing.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Derek Skye gave it to me.”

  “God-fucking-damnit.”

  “It was just a stupid little thing that he gave me, and I’m not going to see him anymore, so don’t worry.”

  “Shit. That’s the real thing.”

  She wrapped her hands around Olden’s neck, her desire inflamed by what she supposed was jealousy—a bad feeling, yet better than no feeling at all. She kissed him, but he did not kiss back, just kept staring at her collar. “Honey, I know what you think about him, and I want you to know I was wrong, and all that time I wasted, I want to spend it with you now.”

  “Christ.”

  “What? The pin still?”

  He pointed at her shirt. “Do you have any idea what this is?”

  “What? You’re gonna tell me it’s some sort of valuable code—”

  “The Gloria Corporation, Scarlet! The fucking Gloria Corporation—it’s a goddamn cult! They were the ones who picked up the DoD contract back in the mid-eighties. The makers of the Internet. The keepers of the flame. What the hell is Derek Skye doing with the Gloria Corporation?”

  “He’s not doing anything, Olden. Believe me—”

  “You can’t buy these things in a flea market. Jesus . . . and right here in Big Dipper Township. Amazing.”

  “It’s amazing. I’m bored out of my mind. I’m going.”

  Giving up, Scarlet turned and stormed out of the room. Olden followed, not because he wanted her to stay, but because the rant which had been building inside now needed, like a top, to spin itself out. “The routers, Scarlet. The routing tables all go through the GC. The hardware, even the goddamn real estate.”

  “It hurts me, though, Olden—”

  “It’s the GC. Fuck Cisco! It’s not Cisco. It’s the Gloria Corporation all the way. Christ! My father!”

  “And I thought musicians were bad.”

  Olden chased her down the steps. “Scarlet!” he called out. “Ten to one that thing is bugged. Take it home and melt it down. I’ll see you in a week.”