The Egg Code

by Mike Heppner

  But then the pages ruffled and a new word confronted him with its bold black type. Death—Derek’s great thesis. Projected over the lawn, he could see a multitude of cloaked strangers, their desert-colored turbans swishing in the breeze, faces concealed behind blank ivory masks. The wind carried the leader’s mask across the yard, and it cracked against the sidewalk. Derek leaned over to touch one of the fragments, but the mask changed, and a puddle of milk broke under his fingers. Raising his hand to his mouth, he tasted the milk; it tasted bitter, still warm from the body. Already he could feel a solution—a warm liquid, yellow/clear—leaking from the base of his spine. The essence, now gone. The pages blew against his chest, and he knew that with a sudden toss he could release himself from this misery, but instead he stayed, locked in place, for Derek Skye was a man strapped to a conveyor belt, the floor moving, drawing him helplessly into the arms of Julian Mason, black man of the North.

  Tales from Typographic Oceans

  A Julian’s heart is racing. It goes up and down.

  B Big eyes, when he read the book, the terrible manuscript. What is this man doing? This is what Julian thought. What is he doing to himself? What will his family think?

  C He’d convinced himself of one thing. He’d gone from one point to another. He wanted to be helpful. He wanted to purge himself of his earlier mistakes. But this—this was much worse. Worse than the Egg Code, because the Egg Code was never about anything to begin with. This book was a travesty, written by a demented kook. And so Julian found himself slowly changing his mind. Going from one point to another.

  D Derek’s face was red when he handed Julian the manuscript. Granted, it was cold. That would account for the redness. But there was something else about the color, something unnatural. The world had stopped, and a transparency hung over the still scene, and the transparency was red, and everything behind it was red as well.

  E Three things, really. First, it was so poorly written. The ravings of a desperate soul. Second, the whole thing was offensive. What right did Derek have to abandon his followers? And third, Julian questioned the man’s sanity. He wondered if he should call the police, the suicide team (if they had one).

  F Two other things. First, he hadn’t had time to dress, and it was cold standing there in his bathrobe, and the wind was blowing snow into the foyer, so he figured he might as well ask the man in. Second, he hadn’t read the book yet. How could he possibly know?

  G Tea? That’s fine. I got it all ready. Nice place. And there’s cookies in the box. Pretty view. The lake sure looks peaceful. Oh, absolutely—listen Julian, let me cut right to it, because I want to get this project out by April at the latest, and that means that you need to get—well, you know the drill, you’re a professional, I’m just gonna let you do your job, but what I want to say is, do what you gotta do because this is important, I’m telling you, this one’s different and I want it to be just fucking amazing, you know, and whatever you’ve got to do, just make it incredible because it’s got to be huge and it’s got to be big and—whoops! ah, shit. I’ll get that. Damn it. Don’t worry about it. You got a napkin?

  H The abbot Suger stood beneath the shadow of the church of St. Denis. Spreading a parchment, he squinted at the words on the page. The scroll was an invoice for the construction of the narthex, with its double towers and its great rose window suspended over the entrance, a strange combination but one which the abbot felt drawn to as if by the hand of God. His fellows were not openly critical of these unconventional plans, but he knew what they were thinking—that the towers were too high, that they would soon collapse in a ruin of stone and stained glass. Suger knew better. The building was sound, and the foundation would hold. This, then, was God’s great triumph: the ability to build tall churches. In this twelfth century after the birth of our Lord, the works of man must reflect a grandiose reaching for the heavens. The abbot gave a quick word of thanks, knowing full well that the brotherhood would eventually come around. In the years ahead, all of France would catch the mania. Even the scribes sensed this new thirst for increased verticality, and as the abbot reexamined the invoice, he noticed how the h of the old Carlovingian minuscules had already started to reach beyond their small dimensions, their high extenders mirroring the twin towers at the top of this fine new church. The abbot smiled. Here was his confirmation. As the words go, so goes the world.

  I Candace Mason is a pale, semi-transparent specter growing from the basement of her son’s house. A column of blue light marks off her territory, along with a faint music that sounds like a Glenn Miller tune played too slowly and with too much rubato. When Julian enters the column, the light changes from blue to red, and the music fades away. For a moment he is paralyzed, and he can hear his mother’s voice, a soft burbling: “Julian, how are you? Julian, how are you?” The light generates a thick mist, nearly opaque. The world outside no longer exists. He becomes nervous and can feel his heart pressing against his lungs. Soon the frozen feeling goes away, but if he dares to venture beyond the lighted column: instant frostbite! Eventually his mother lets him go.

  J Eventually the type wars developed into two camps, the Roman and the Gothic. During the first fifty years after Gutenberg—the incunabula period, as historians like to call it—the Roman font began to draw away from its competitors. Thanks to the business acumen of Aldus Manutius—a kind of fifteenth-century Don King—books printed in Roman fonts began to appear all over Europe. The only notable holdout was Germany, who would pay for their reluctance nearly five hundred years later, at the close of World War II. Even today, the sight of a Gothic J inspires a flurry of insults and angry remarks: “Jew-Killer! Jew-Killer!”

  K The sympathy riots began a few days after the big fires in Detroit. Julian spent the weekend working in his rooftop studio in Greenwich Village. From his window, he could gaze down at the street four flights below. The edge of the building on the corner looked two-dimensional— a line of brick, then nothing. The police officers wore helmets with Plexiglas face shields, and the troublemakers were white college students, NYU types in caftans and torn military jackets. One of the students was standing next to the wall, trying to roll a Drum cigarette with one hand and having a bad time of it, and when a cop told him to move, the kid ignored him, so the cop grabbed him by the collar, lifted him a foot off the ground, thrust him with a diagonal lunge into the wall, then pulled him away from the edge and held him a foot above his head, and Julian, looking down from his studio, dropped his pencil and said, “It’s a K—my God, it’s a K!”

  L My pulse drops and dips. Every beat is a new surprise. Will this one be too fast, too slow, not regular enough? A few good ones in a row. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Okay). Then? Ah! There! . . . N-now . . . aahhh! . . . aaahhhh! . . . pfeehhnneeehh . . . muh-muh-muh-muh-mama . . . guh . . . guh . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . better. Wooo! Wooo! Oh, stars. Fat cheeks. A few good ones in a row.

  M The men were going to die. Trapped in a pool of ice, they looked up at the steep rise to the east, where Mont Blanc towered over the Italian border, and then to the west, where a secondary peak ascended to an equal height. One of the men, Thierry, pulled out a square cut from a blood-soaked flag and held it to his forehead, whispering a prayer on the life of King François. His brother, René, reached for a wood-framed sack—its heavy truss now splintered into two neat halves—and brought out a small leather handbook. An embossed dolphin winked on the cover, its bright gold features reflecting the light from the snowy hillside. With one frozen hand, he pushed back the cover. “Where’d you steal that?” Thierry asked. “I bought it,” his brother sneered back. “It’s an Aldine. Cheap, you know.” Thierry glowered. “Aldus was an infidel,” he snarled. Pressing the book against his chest, René smiled at Thierry, and a wind from the east blew his long black hair over his eyes. “Do not curse the Italian. It is because of Aldus that peasants may die with Virgil on their lips.” Turning to the first page, he hunched over the book and began to read. His brother was dead by th
e sixteenth stanza.

  N Derek stood in the foyer, his hands braced against the doorjamb. A tall man, he filled the entrance with his diagonal presence. “I’m so glad you’ve got it now,” he said. Leaving the door open, he skipped down the steps and hurried across the lawn. As Julian watched him go, a complicated lie began forming in the back of his brain. His mother’s voice came to him, disguised as his own: Well, Julian, you gotta keep your word now.

  O bury it I could bury it but that would be unprofessional no I’ll just do what he says but couldn’t I just play around with the format though that wouldn’t be professional not the proper thing to do hell what’s that they say a good typographer never calls attention to himself but what if there’s no choice what if the words themselves are evil what if the words are wrong what then what does a good typographer do then does he

  P In 1957, Julian Mason stands naked in the bedroom with one arm raised, trying to make a muscle. There! he says, holding his breath. Joyce Ganz touches his forearm, squeezing it once and then again. Her clothes are piled on the floor, left from last night. Her own nakedness means nothing to her. Ooh! she laughs, and covers her mouth. So strong! Why you want to be an artist? You shoulda been a wrestler! HA! Bullshit.

  Q Qu’est-ce que c’est? Ah, this Robert Granjon is crazy, ahhh-oui? For twenty years, he says, “No, I no like ze Italians, with their simple letters that go chop-chop-chop across ze page. So? I make a new one, ahhh-oui? For ze French language. I call it Civilité, ze national typeface for ze people of France!” Very clever, monsieur. But this Robert Granjon, he no think straight. Ze national typeface is nothing! Merde! Is too hard to read, ahhh-oui ? So in France, we stick with ze Italians. We are happy here! No more bloodshed . . . no more bloodshed . . .

  R One of the few times Julian saw his daughter after Joyce moved upstate to study law, it was 1971 and Emily was thirteen, a tall girl with a big squared-off Afro and heavy eyelids that flickered pretentiously every time her father asked her a question. That day in New York, she wore a T-shirt tied in the middle to show off her belly button. Julian thought it ludicrous to waste an entire afternoon inside a downtown movie house, but Emily wanted to go and that was that. He stood underneath the theater marquee dressed in a gray trench coat—much too hot for the weather, but he was used to winter and March was a temperamental month. Joyce had given the girl enough money to pay for both tickets, but Julian said no and crammed the wad of cash back into her pants pocket. Looking up at the marquee, he exclaimed, “That’s a dirty movie!” “Come on, Jules, it’s not a dirty movie. It’s an R-rated movie, and besides, Mom said I could.” Oh boy, the magic words, Julian wasn’t going to argue with that, so he followed his daughter inside, past the concession stand (“yeah . . . gimme some black licorice . . . I really like the black licorice . . . heh, kidding pal, just gimme a Pepsi-Cola . . .”) and into the theater, where they sat near the front because Emily had left her glasses on the train. A love scene came on halfway through, the faces of the actor and the actress backlit so you could only see their silhouetted profiles, his profile staring down at hers, a regular rhythm, a few soft cries, the woman’s breasts implied by a dim slice of moonlight. Trapped, Julian could see his daughter’s face out of the corner of his eye, her little bent wrist diving periodically into the popcorn box, and he gripped the sides of his chair and told himself this would all be over soon. After the film, they went across the street to an Italian diner, where she boldly ordered a glass of wine. Discussing the film, Julian made a few genteel remarks, and Emily—sipping her grape juice—said, “Come on, Jules. Kids today have sex in the sixth grade, gawd.”

  S This is how Julian Mason paces from one end of the living room to the other. He starts at the northwest corner, then makes an abrupt right turn, stepping around a recliner, a rickety end table, a ceramic lamp with a pleated shade. Reaching the far corner, he swings around and heads diagonally across the room, where he stands for a moment, looking at the point where the two walls meet. Sometimes he speaks, if only to hear the hollow return of his own voice. The things he says are never interesting. Whoo boy. Lord, lord. Adjusting his robe, he turns around and retraces his steps, keeping strictly to the established path. He does this one hundred and sixty-one times in an hour and forty-three minutes. If you asked him what was wrong, he would say mmmmm?

  T J. Oporinus, Basel, May 6, 1541. I have learned of your efforts to obtain a Latin translation of the book known to the Roman Church as the Infidel’s Bible. This is a worthy endeavor, yet I am certain you have also considered that Paul III will persecute your establishment with unfair levies if you publish this work. The papacy sadly refuses to acknowledge the potential benefits of the Koran to the Christian world. Educated men will not convert to heresy, but will affirm the essential wisdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The forces of Satan will die an angry death, and we will serve as their tormentors. This publication must go forth—in Basel, or in one of the other free lands. I myself will lend my name to the introduction, as an added safeguard to your liberty. The time has come. Mohammed must speak. Your lover in Christ, Martin Luther.

  U In the memory he has of Derek Skye (and he does not know whether it is a real memory or the memory of a dream), Derek is crossing the street when a red pickup shoots around the corner. The driver leans on the brake and the truck jerks to a stop. Standing on the double yellow line, Derek waves, “Go ahead, pal. You go first.” The truck grinds ahead a few feet, then makes an abrupt U-turn. Derek keeps waving as the truck roars out of sight. His hand slows; it flutters to his side. He stands there, quiet for a moment. A memory, or a dream?

  D Won’t you wear this flower? I can’t. Come on, look, you’ve got a nice suit. I’m meeting a young lady for dinner. Let me just pin it right here. No, I’d rather not. You don’t want to wear this flower? I have to go. You don’t want to wear this flower for peace? You have a pleasant evening. DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE CHILDREN DYING IN VIETNAM?!

  W Candace Mason died in a room with six other women. Nylon shower curtains divided the room into sections. Through a thin screen, she could see the vague forms of her roommates; every night, the woman to her right sat up in bed, arms wrapped around her knees as the woman to her left blew on her soup, holding the spoon at the very tip of the handle, splashing herself whenever the spoon fell into her lap. The women spoke to each other through the semi-transparent curtains. Candace often mentioned her son, who lived in New York City. She talked about the war, how she used to take Julian out to the factories each day, and sometimes let him paint the serial codes on the hulls of the airplanes. One of the women had bad diarrhea, and the other ladies would kid about it whenever she was out of the room. In August 1970, the woman with bad diarrhea passed away, and another woman with bad diarrhea took her place. One afternoon, Julian appeared at the foot of his mother’s bed, dressed in a nice hat and a dark trench coat. Candace looked up at her boy. “Julian,” she asked, “do I smell?” He began to cry. Mrs. Mason died the next morning, and the doctors cut bright pieces out of her body and put them into bottles.

  X No, I’ll smother it. I’ll bury the book. I can’t let this happen to the children. A good typographer, yes, a good one, but no, I don’t know what a good typographer does.

  Y Julian Mason stands on the roof of his house in Big Dipper Township, his arms raised over his head, and he watches as the winter storm rolls in from the city, a northbound sway of illuminated cotton balls. He can smell the electricity in the air, and it makes the tiny hairs on the back of his neck bristle and twitch. High above the tower, Candace Mason swirls in a column of blue light. A kind of warm radiance emanates from her body. Closing his eyes, Julian smiles and laughs and pumps his fists, for at last he knows what it means to be a good son.

  Z Yes, but can you withstand the diabolical forces of the mighty zee, heh? This, I ask you!

  XX

  It Can’t Happen Here

  0001011101001101000110

  The house. Several apartments with high pointy rooftops. The
spaces between the rooftops look like inverted rooftops. Matching rows of teeth. A cold breeze, a forceful push. The air is filled with dirt and snapped twigs.

  —Rub eye? Don’t rub eye?

  —Rub eye.

  The wind blows into Olden’s mouth. His ears are rough and red and cold. His nose is wet with snot. A strand of snot flies in the wind; it flaps and flutters, clinging to his cheek.

  —Wipe away strand? Don’t wipe away strand?

  —Don’t wipe away strand.

  Two surveillance men are approaching the building. Olden has been spying on them for the past fifteen minutes. Crouched in a thicket of trees, he saw the whole thing—the two cars edging up to the curb, waiting for Derek Skye to come out of his apartment. Derek looked anxious as he crossed the lawn and hurried into town. He was carrying something, Olden noticed, a stack of papers. Maybe that’s what the men were looking for; the idea of a former insider writing a book certainly wouldn’t appeal to the Gloria Corporation, even though Derek has written many books in his life, most of them harmless enough.

  The surveillance men have now reached the front steps. They both walk with a stoop, as if expecting bullets to start flying over their heads at any moment. They knock on the door and begin to pick the lock with a specially designed, lock-picking kind of gizmo/doodad. The door swings open and one of them proceeds inside. Moments later, the venetian blinds on the second floor go from being skinny to being fat.

  —Feel sorry for Derek Skye? Don’t feel sorry for Derek Skye?

  —Feel sorry for Derek Skye.

  —Because he is an admirable man? Because you respect the work he is doing?

  —See other.

  —Because his predicament reminds you of your own? Because Scarlet Blessing would be unhappy?

  —Because his predicament reminds me of my own, and see other.