STEPHEN KING

EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL

1

I've got a good job now, and no reason to feel glum. No more hanging out with
the gumbyheads at the Supr Savr, policing up the Kart Korral and getting
bothered by assholes like Skipper. Skipper's munching the old dirt sandwich
these days, but one thing I have learned in my nineteen years on this Planet
Earth is don't relax, there are Skippers everywhere.

Ditto no more pulling pizza patrol on rainy nights, driving my old Ford with the
bad muffler, freezing my ass off with the driver's side window down and a little
Italian flag sticking out on a wire. Like somebody in Harkerville was going to
salute. Pizza Roma. Quarter tips from people who don't even see you, because
most of their mind's still on the TV football game. Driving for Pizza Roma was
the lowest point, I think. Since then I've even had a ride in a private jet, so
how could things be bad?

"This is what comes of leaving school without a diploma," Ma would say during my
Delivery Dan stint. And, "You've got this to look forward to for the rest of
your life." Good old Ma. On and on, until I actually thought about writing her
one of those special letters. As I say, that was the low point. You know what
Mr. Sharpton told me that night in his car? "It's not just a job, Dink, it's a
goddam adventure." And he was right. Whatever he might have been wrong about, he
was right about that.

I suppose you're wondering about the salary of this famous job. Well, I got to
tell you, there's not much money in it. Might as well get that right up front.
But a job isn't just about money, or getting ahead. That's what Mr. Sharpton
told me. Mr. Sharpton said that a real job is about the fringe benefits. He said
that's where the power is.

Mr. Sharpton. I only saw him that once, sitting behind the wheel of his big old
Mercedes-Benz, but sometimes once is enough.

Take that any way you want. Any old way at all.

2

I've got a house, okay? My very own house. That's fringe benefit number one. I
call Ma sometimes, ask how her bad leg is, shoot the shit, but I've never
invited her over here, although Harkorville is only seventy or so miles away and
I know she's practically busting a gut with curiosity. I don't even have to go
see her unless I want to. Mostly I don't want to. If you knew my mother, you
wouldn't want to, either. Sit there in that living room with her while she talks
about all her relatives and whines about her puffy leg. Also I never noticed how
much the house smelled of catshit until I got out of it. I'm never going to have
a pet. Pets bite the big one.

Mostly I just stay here. It's only got one bedroom, but it's still an excellent
house. Eventual, as Pug used to say. He was the one guy at the Supr Savr I
liked. When he wanted to say something was really good, Pug'd never say it was
awesome, like most people do; he'd say it was eventual. How funny is that? The
old Pugmeister. I wonder how he's doing. Okay, I suppose. But I can't call him
and make sure. I can call my Ma, and I have an emergency number if anything ever
goes wrong or if I think somebody's getting nosy about what's not their
business, but I can't buzz any of my old friends (as if any of them besides Pug
gave Shit One about Dinky Earnshaw). Mr. Sharpton's rules.

But never mind that. Let's go back to my house here in Columbia City. How many
nineteen-year-old high school dropouts do you know who have their own houses?
Plus a new car? Only a Honda, true, but the first three numbers on the odometer
are still zeroes, and that's the important part. It has a radio/tape-player, and
I don't slide in behind the wheel wondering if the goddam thing'll start, like I
always did with the Ford, which Skipper used to make fun of. The Assholemobile,
he called it. Why are there so many Skippers in the world? That's what I really
wonder about.

I do get some money, by the way. More than enough to meet my needs. Check this
out. I watch As the World Turns every day while I'm eating my lunch, and on
Thursdays, about halfway through the show, I hear the clack of the mail-slot. I
don't do anything then, I'm not supposed to. Like Mr. Sharpton said, "Them's the
rules, Dink."

I just watch the rest of my show. The exciting stuff on the soaps always happens
around the weekends -- murders on Fridays, fucking on Mondays --but I watch
right to the end every day, just the same. I'm especially careful to stay in the
living room until the end on Thursdays. On Thursdays I don't even go out to the
kitchen for another glass of milk. When World is over, I turn off the TV for a
while -- Oprah Winfrey comes on next, I hate her show, all that
sitting-around-talking shit is for the Mas of the world -- and go out to the
front hall.

Lying on the floor under the mail-slot, there's always a plain white envelope,
sealed. Nothing written on the front. Inside there'll be either fourteen
five-dollar bills or seven ten-dollar bills. That's my money for the week.
Here's what I do with it. I go to the movies twice, always in the afternoon,
when it's just $4.50. That's $9. On Saturday I fill up my Honda with gas, and
that's usually about $7.1 don't drive much. I'm not invested in it, as Pug would
say. So now we're up to $16. I'll eat out maybe four times at Mickey D's, either
at breakfast (Egg McMuffin, coffee, two hash browns) or at dinner (Quarter
Pounder with Cheese, never mind that Arch shit, what dimbulb thought that one
up). Once a week I put on chinos and a button-up shirt and see how the other
half lives -- have a fancy meal at a place like Adam's Ribs or the Chuck Wagon.
All of that goes me about $25 and now we're up to $41. Then I might go by News
Plus and buy a stroke book or two, nothing really kinky, just your usual like
Variations or Penthouse. I have tried writing these mags down on DINKY'S
DAYBOARD, but with no success. I can buy them myself, and they don't disappear
on cleaning day or anything, but they don't show up, if you see what I'm getting
at, like most other stuff does. I guess Mr. Sharpton's cleaners don't like to
buy dirty stuff (pun). Also, I can't get to any of the sex stuff on the
Internet. I have tried, but it's blocked out, somehow. Usually things like that
are easy to deal with -- you go under or around the roadblocks if you can't bash
straight through -- but this is different.

Not to belabor the point, but I can't dial 900 numbers on the phone, either. The
auto-dialer works, of course, and if I want to call somebody just at random,
anywhere in the world, and shoot the shit with them for a while, that's okay.
That works. But the 900 numbers don't. You just get a busy. Probably just as
well. In my experience, thinking about sex is like scratching poison ivy. You
only spread it around. Besides, sex is no big deal, at least for me. It's there,
but it isn't eventual. Still, considering what I'm doing, that little prudey
streak is sort of weird. Almost funny ... except I seem to have lost my sense of
humor on the subject. A few others, as well.

Oh well, back to the budget.

If I get a Variations, that's four bucks and we're up to $45. Some of the money
that's left I might use to buy a CD, although I don't have to, or a candy-bar or
two (I know I shouldn't, because my complexion still blows dead rats, although
I'm almost not a teenager anymore). I think of calling out for a pizza or for
Chinese sometimes, but it's against TransCorp's rules. Also, I would feel weird
doing it, like a member of the oppressing class. I have delivered pizza,
remember. I know what a sucky job it is. Still, if I could order in, the pizza
guy wouldn't leave this house with a quarter tip. I'd lay five on him, watch his
eyes light up.

But you're starting to see what I mean about not needing a lot of cash money,
aren't you? When Thursday morning rolls around again, I usually have at least
eight bucks left, and sometimes it's more like twenty. What I do with the coins
is drop them down the storm-drain in front of my house. I am aware that this
would freak the neighbors out if they saw me doing it (I'm a high school
dropout, but I didn't leave because I was stupid, thank you very much), so I
take out the blue plastic recycling basket with the newspapers in it (and
sometimes with a Penthouse or Variations buried halfway down the stack, I don't
keep that shit around for long, who would), and while I'm putting it down on the
curb, I open the hand with the change in it, and through the grate in the gutter
it goes. Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle-splash. Like a magician's trick. Now you see it,
now you don't. Someday that drain will get clogged up, they'll send a guy down
there and he'll think he won the fucking lottery; unless there's a flood or
something that pushes all the change down to the waste treatment plant, or
wherever it goes. By then I'll be gone. I'm not going to spend my life in
Columbia City, I can tell you that. I'm leaving, and soon. One way or the other.

The currency is easier. I just poke it down the garbage disposal in the kitchen.
Another magic trick, presto-change-o, money into lettuce. You probably think
that's very weird, running money through the sink-pig. I did, too, at first. But
you get used to just about anything after you do it awhile, and besides, there's
always another seventy falling through the letter-slot. The rule is simple: no
squirreling it away. End the week broke. Besides, it's not millions we're
talking about, only eight or ten bucks a week. Chump-change, really.

3

DINKY'S DAYBOARD. That's another fringe benefit. I write down whatever I want
during the week, and I get everything I ask for [except sex-mags, as I told
you). Maybe I'll get bored with that eventually, but right now it's like having
Santa Claus all year round. Mostly what I write down is groceries, like anyone
does on their kitchen chalkboard, but by no means is groceries all.

I might, for instance, write down "New Bruce Willis Video" or "New Weezer CD" or
something like that. A funny thing about that Weezer CD, since we're on the
subject. I happened to go into Toons Xpress one Friday after my movie was over
(I always go to the show on Friday afternoons, even if there's nothing I really
want to see, because that's when the cleaners come), just killing time inside
because it was rainy and that squashed going to the park, and while I was
looking at the new releases, this kid asks a clerk about the new Weezer CD. The
clerk tells him it won't be in for another ten days or so, but I'd had it since
the Friday before.

Fringe benefits, like I say.

If I write down "sport shirt" on the DAYBOARD, there it is when I get back to
the house on Friday night, always in one of the nice earth-tone colors I like.
If I write down "new jeans" or "chinos," I get those. All stuff from The Gap,
which is where I'd go myself, if I had to do stuff like that. If I want a
certain kind of after-shave lotion or cologne, I write the name on DINKY'S
DAYBOARD and it's on the bathroom counter when I get home. I don't date, but I'm
a fool for cologne. Go figure.

Here's something you'll laugh at, I bet. Once I wrote down "Rembrandt Painting"
on the DAYBOARD. Then I spent the afternoon at the movies and walking in the
park, watching people making out and dogs catching Frisbees, thinking how
eventual it would be if the cleaners actually brought me my own fucking
Rembrandt. Think of it, a genuine Old Master on the wall of a house in the
Sunset Knoll section of Columbia City. How eventual would that be?

And it happened, in a manner of speaking. My Rembrandt was hung on the living
room wall when I got home, over the sofa where the velvet clowns used to be. My
heart was beating about two hundred a minute as I walked across the room toward
it. When I got closer, I saw it was just a copy ... you know, a reproduction. I
was disappointed, but not very. I mean, it was a Rembrandt. Just not an original
Rembrandt.

Another time, I wrote "Autographed Photo of Nicole Kidman" on the DAYBOARD. I
think she's the best looking actress alive, she just gets me on so much. And
when I got home that day, there was a publicity still of her on the fridge, held
there by a couple of those little vegetable magnets. And that time it was the
real deal. I know because of the way it was signed: "To Dinky Earnshaw, with
love & kisses from Nicole."

Oh, baby. Oh, honey.

Tell you something, my friend -- if I worked hard and really wanted it, there
might be a real Rembrandt on my wall someday. Sure. In a job like this, there is
nowhere to go but up. In a way, that's the scary part.

4

I never have to make grocery lists. The cleaners know what I like --Stouffer's
frozen dinners, especially that boil-in-the-bag stuff they call creamed chipped
beef and Ma always called shit on a shingle, frozen strawberries, whole milk,
preformed hamburger patties that you just have to slap in a hot frying pan (I
hate playing with raw meat), Dole puddings, the ones that come in plastic cups
(bad for my complexion but I love em), ordinary food like that. If I want
something special, I write it down on DINKY'S DAYBOARD.

Once I asked for a homemade apple pie, specifically not from the supermarket,
and when I came back that night around the time it was getting dark, my pie was
in the fridge with the rest of the week's groceries. Only it wasn't wrapped up,
it was just sitting there on a blue plate. That's how I knew it was homemade. I
was a little hesitant about eating it at first, not knowing where it came from
and all, and then I decided I was being stupid. A person doesn't really know
where supermarket food comes from, if it comes to that. Right? I mean, we assume
it's okay because it's wrapped up or in a can or "Double-sealed for your
protection," but anyone could have been handling it with dirty fingers before it
was double-sealed, or sneezing great big whoops of booger-breath on it, or even
wiping their asses with it. I don't mean to gross you out, but it's true, isn't
it? The world is full of strangers, and a lot of them are "up to no good." I
have had personal experience of this, believe me.

Anyway, I tried the pie and it was delicious. I ate half of it Friday night and
the rest on Saturday morning, while I was running the numbers in Cheyenne,
Wyoming. Most of Saturday night I spent on the toilet, shitting my brains out
from all those apples, I guess, but I didn't care. The pie was worth it. "Like
mother used to make" is what people say, but it can't be my mother they say it
about. My Ma would burn boiling water.

5

I never have to write down underwear on the DAYBOARD. Every five weeks or so the
old drawers disappear and there are brand new Hanes jockey shorts in my bureau,
four three-packs still in their plastic bags. Double-sealed for my protection,
ha-ha. Toilet paper, laundry soap, dishwasher soap, I never have to write any of
that shit down. It just appears. Very eventual, don't you think?

* * *

I have never seen the cleaners, any more than I have ever seen the guy [or maybe
it's a gall who delivers my seventy bucks every Thursday during As the World
Turns. I never want to see them, either. I don't need to, for one thing. For
another, yes, okay, I'm afraid of them. Just like I was afraid of Mr. Sharpton
in his big gray Mercedes on the night I went out to meet him. So sue me.

I don't eat lunch in my house on Fridays. I watch As the World Turns, then jump
in my car and drive into town. I get a burger at Mickey D's, then go to a movie,
then to the park if the weather is good. I like the park. It's a good place to
think, and these days I've got an awful lot to think about.

If the weather is bad, I go to the mall. Now that the days are beginning to
shorten, I'm thinking about taking up bowling again. It'd be something to do on
Friday afternoons, at least. I used to go there with Pug.

I sort of miss Pug. I wish I could call him, just shoot the shit, tell him some
of the stuff that's been going on. Like about that guy Neff, for instance.

Oh, well, spit in the ocean.

While I'm away, the cleaners are doing my house from wall to wall and top to
bottom -- wash the dishes (although I'm pretty good about that myself), wash the
floors, wash the dirty clothes, change the sheets, put out fresh towels, restock
the fridge, get any of the incidentals that are written on the DAYBOARD. It's
like living in a hotel with the world's most efficient (not to mention eventual)
maid service.

The one place they don't mess around with much is the study off the dining room.
I keep that room fairly dark, the shades always pulled, and they have never
raised them to let in so much as a crack of daylight, like they do in the rest
of the house. It never smells of Lemon Pledge in there, either, although every
other room just about reeks of it on Friday nights. Sometimes it's so bad I have
these sneezing fits. It's not an allergy, more like a fucking protest
demonstration.

Someone vacuums the floor in there, and they empty the wastepaper basket, but no
one has ever moved any of the papers that I keep on the desk, no matter how
cluttered-up and junky-looking they are. Once I put a little piece of tape over
where the drawer above the kneehole opens, but it was still there, unbroken,
when I got back home that night. I don't keep anything top secret in that
drawer, you understand, I just wanted to know.

Also, if the computer and modem are on when I leave, they're still on when I
come back, the VDT showing one of the screen-saver programs (usually the one of
the people doing stuff behind their blinds in this high-rise building, because
that's my favorite). If my stuff was off when I left, it's off when I come back.
They don't mess around in Dinky's study.

Maybe the cleaners are a little afraid of me, too.

7

I got the call that changed my life just when I thought the combination of Ma
and delivering for Pizza Roma was going to drive me crazy. I know how
melodramatic that sounds, but in this case, it's true. The call came on my night
off. Ma was out with her girlfriends, playing Bingo at the Reservation, all of
them smoking up a storm and no doubt laughing every time the caller pulled B-12
out of the hopper and said, "All right, ladies, it's time to take your
vitamins." Me, I was watching a Clint Eastwood movie on TNT and wishing I was
anywhere else on Planet Earth. Saskatchewan, even.

The phone rings, and I think, oh good, it's Pug, gotta be, and so when I pick it
up I say in my smoothest voice, "You have reached the Church of Any Eventuality,
Harkerville branch, Reverend Dink speaking."

"Hello, Mr. Earnshaw," a voice says back. It was one I'd never heard before, but
it didn't seem the least put-out or puzzled by my bullshit. I was mortified
enough for both of us, though. Have you ever noticed that when you do something
like that on the phone -- try to be cool right from the pickup -- it's never the
person you expected on the other end? Once I heard about this girl who picked up
the phone and said "Hi, it's Helen, and I want you to fuck me raw" because she
was sure it was her boyfriend, only it turned out to be her father. That story
is probably made up, like the one about the alligators in the New York sewers
(or the letters in Penthouse), but you get the point.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I say, too flustered to wonder how the owner of this strange
voice knows that Reverend Dink is also Mr. Earnshaw, actual name Richard Ellery
Earnshaw. "I thought you were someone else."

"I am someone else," the voice says, and although I didn't laugh then, I did
later on. Mr. Sharpton was someone else, all right. Seriously, eventually
someone else.

"Can I help you?" I asked. "If you wanted my mother, I'll have to take a
message, because she's --"

"-- out playing Bingo, I know. In any case, I want you, Mr. Earnshaw. I want to
offer you a job."

For a moment I was too surprised to say anything. Then it hit me -some sort of
phone-scam. "I got a job," I go. "Sorry."

"Delivering pizza?" he says, sounding amused. "Well, I suppose. If you call that
a job."

"Who are you, mister?" I ask.

"My name is Sharpton. And now let me 'cut through the bullshit,' as you might
say, Mr. Earnshaw. Dink? May I call you Dink?"

"Sure," I said. "Can I call you Sharpie?"

"Call me whatever you want, just listen."

"I'm listening." I was, too. Why not? The movie on the tube was Coogan's Bluff,
not one of Clint's better efforts.

"I want to make you the best job offer you've ever had, and the best one you
probably ever will have. It's not just a job, Dink, it's an adventure."

"Gee, where have I heard that before?" I had a bowl of popcorn in my lap, and I
tossed a handful into my mouth. This was turning into fun, sort of.

"Others promise; I deliver. But this is a discussion we must have face to face.
Will you meet me?"

"Are you a queer?" I asked.

"No." There was a touch of amusement in his voice. Just enough so that it was
hard to disbelieve. And I was already in the hole, so to speak, from the
smartass way I'd answered the phone. "My sexual orientation doesn't come into
this."

"Why're you yanking my chain, then? I don't know anybody who'd call me at
nine-thirty in the fucking night and offer me a job."

"Do me a favor. Put the phone down and go look in your front hall."

Crazier and crazier. But what did I have to lose? I did what he said, and found
an envelope lying there. Someone had poked it through the mail-slot while I was
watching Clint Eastwood chase Don Stroud through Central Park. The first
envelope of many, although of course I didn't know that then. I tore it open,
and seven ten-dollar bills fell out into my hand. Also a note.

This can be the beginning of a great career!

I went back into the living room, still looking at the money. Know how
weirded-out I was? I almost sat on my bowl of popcorn. I saw it at the last
second, set it aside, and plopped back on the couch. I picked up the phone,
really sort of expecting Sharpton to be gone, but when I said hello, he
answered.

"What's this all about?" I asked him. "What's the seventy bucks for? I'm keeping
it, but not because I think I owe you anything. I didn't fucking ask for
anything."

"The money is absolutely yours," Sharpton says, "with not a string in the world
attached. But I'll let you in on a secret, Dink -- a job isn't just about money.
A real job is about the fringe benefits. That's where the power is."

"If you say so."

"I absolutely do. And all I ask is that you meet me and hear a little more. I'll
make you an offer that will change your life, if you take it That will open the
door to a new life, in fact. Once I've made that offer, you can ask all the
questions you like. Although I must be honest and say you probably won't get all
the answers you'd like."

"And if I just decide to walk away?"

"I'll shake your hand, clap you on the back, and wish you good luck."

"When did you want to meet?" Part of me -- most of me -- still thought all this
was a joke, but there was a minority opinion forming by then. There was the
money, for one thing; two weeks' worth of tips driving for Pizza Roma, and
that's if business was good. But mostly it was the way Sharpton talked. He
sounded like he'd been to school ... and I don't mean at Sheep's Rectum State
College over in Van Drusen, either. And really, what harm could there be? Since
Skipper's accident, there was no one on Planet Earth who wanted to take after me
in a way that was dangerous or painful. Well, Ma, I suppose, but her only weapon
was her mouth ... and she wasn't into elaborate practical jokes. Also, I
couldn't see her parting with seventy dollars. Not when there was still a Bingo
game in the vicinity.

"Tonight," he said. "Right now, in fact."

"All right, why not? Come on over. I guess if you can drop an envelope full of
tens through the mail slot, you don't need me to give you the address."

"Not at your house. I'll meet you in the Supr Savr parking lot."

My stomach dropped like an elevator with the cables cut, and the conversation
stopped being the least bit funny. Maybe this was some kind of setup --
something with cops in it, even. I told myself no one could know about Skipper,
least of all the cops, but Jesus. There was the letter; Skipper could have left
the letter lying around anywhere. Nothing in it anyone could make out (except
for his sister's name, but there are millions of Debbies in the world), no more
than anyone could've made out the stuff I wrote on the sidewalk outside Mrs.
Bukowski's yard ... or so I would have said before the goddam phone rang. But
who could be absolutely sure? And you know what they say about a guilty
conscience. I didn't exactly feel guilty about Skipper, not then, but still...

"The Supr Savr's kind of a weird place for a job interview, don't you think?
Especially when it's been closed since eight o'clock."

"That's what makes it good, Dink. Privacy in a public place. I'll park right by
the Kart Korral. You'll know the car -- it's a big gray Mercedes."

"I'll know it because it'll be the only one there," I said, but he was already
gone.

I hung up and put the money in my pocket, almost without realizing I was doing
it. I was sweating lightly all over my body. The voice on the phone wanted to
meet me by the Kart Korral, where Skipper had so often teased me. Where he had
once mashed my fingers between a couple of shopping carts, laughing when I
screamed. That hurts the worst, getting your fingers mashed. Two of the nails
had turned black and fallen off. That was when I'd made up my mind to try the
letter. And the results had been unbelievable. Still, if Skipper Brannigan had a
ghost, the Kart Korral was likely where it would hang out, looking for fresh
victims to torture. The voice on the phone couldn't have picked that place by
accident. I tried to tell myself that was bullshit, that coincidences happened
all the time, but I just didn't believe it. Mr. Sharpton knew about Skipper.
Somehow he knew.

I was afraid to meet him, but I didn't see what choice I had. If nothing else, I
ought to find out what else he knew. And who he might tell. I got up, put on my
coat (it was early spring then, and cold at night --although it seems to me that
it's always cold at night in western Pennsylvania), started out the door, then
went back and left a note for Ma. "Went out to see a couple of guys," I wrote.
"Will be back by midnight." I intended to be back well before midnight, but that
note seemed like a good idea. I wouldn't let myself think too closely about why
it seemed like a good idea, not then, but I can own up to it now: if something
happened to me, something bad, I wanted to make sure Ma would call the police.

8

There are two kinds of scared -- at least that's my theory. There's TV-scared,
and there's real-scared. I think we go through most of our lives only getting
TV-scared. Like when we're waiting for our blood tests to come back from the
doctor or when we're walking home from the library in the dark and thinking
about bad guys in the bushes. We don't get real-scared about shit like that,
because we know in our heart of hearts that the blood tests will come back clean
and there won't be any bad guys in the bushes. Why? Because stuff like that only
happens to the people on TV.

When I saw that big gray Mercedes, the only car in about an acre of empty
parking lot, I got real-scared for the first time since the thing in the box
room with Skipper Brannigan. That time was the closest we ever came to really
getting into it.

Mr. Sharpton's ride was sitting under the light of the lot's yellow
mercury-vapor lamps, a big old Krautmobile, at least a 450 and probably a 500,
the kind of car that costs a hundred and twenty grand these days. Sitting there
next to the Kart Korral (now almost empty for the night, all the carts except
for one poor old three-wheeled cripple safely locked up inside) with its parking
lights on and white exhaust drifting up into the air. Engine rumbling like a
sleepy cat.

I drove toward it, my heart pumping slow but hard and a taste like pennies in my
throat. I wanted to just mat the accelerator of my Ford (which in those days
always smelled like a pepperoni pizza) and get the hell out of there, but I
couldn't get rid of the idea that the guy knew about Skipper. I could tell
myself there was nothing to know, that Charles "Skipper" Brannigan had either
had an accident or committed suicide, the cops weren't sure which (they couldn't
have known him very well; if they had, they would have thrown the idea of
suicide right out the window -- guys like Skipper don't off themselves, not at
the age of twenty-three they don't), but that didn't stop the voice from
yammering away that I was in trouble, someone had figured it out, someone had
gotten hold of the letter and figured it out.

That voice didn't have logic on its side, but it didn't need to. It had good
lungs and just outscreamed logic. I parked beside the idling Mercedes and rolled
my window down. At the same time, the driver's side window of the Mercedes
rolled down. We looked at each other, me and Mr. Sharpton, like a couple of old
friends meeting at the Hi-Hat Drive-In.

I don't remember much about him now. That's weird, considering all the time I've
spent thinking about him since, but it's the truth. Only that he was thin, and
that he was wearing a suit. A good one, I think, although judging stuff like
that's not my strong point. Still, the suit eased me a little. I guess that,
unconsciously, I had this idea that a suit means business, and jeans and a
T-shirt means fuckery.

"Hello, Dink," he says. "I'm Mr. Sharpton. Come on in here and sit down."

"Why don't we just stay the way we are ?" I asked. "We can talk to each other
through these windows. People do it all the time."

He only looked at me and said nothing. After a few seconds of that, I turned off
the Ford and got out. I don't know exactly why, but I did. I was more scared
than ever, I can tell you that. Real-scared. Real as real as real. Maybe that
was why he could get me to do what he wanted.

I stood between Mr. Sharpton's car and mine for a minute, looking at the Kart
Korral and thinking about Skipper. He was tall, with this wavy blond hair he
combed straight back from his forehead. He had pimples, and these red lips, like
a girl wearing lipstick. "Hey Dinky, let's see your dinky," he'd say. Or "Hey
Dinky, you want to suck my dinky ?" You know, witty shit like that. Sometimes,
when we were rounding up the carts, he'd chase me with one, nipping at my heels
with it and going "Rmmmm! Rmmmmm! Rmmmmm!" like a fucking race-car. A couple of
times he knocked me over. At dinner break, if I had my food on my lap, he'd bump
into me good and hard, see if he could knock something onto the floor. You know
the kind of stuff I'm talking about, I'm sure. It was like he'd never gotten
over those ideas of what's funny to bored kids sitting in the back row of study
hall.

I had a ponytail at work, you had to wear your hair in a ponytail if you had it
long, supermarket rules, and sometimes Skipper would come up behind me, grab the
rubber band I used, and yank it out. Sometimes it would snarl in my hair and
pull it. Sometimes it would break and snap against my neck. It got so I'd stick
two or three extra rubber bands in my pants pocket before I left for work. I'd
try not to think about why I was doing it, what I was putting up with. If I did,
I'd probably start hating myself.

Once I turned around on my heels when he did that, and he must have seen
something on my face, because his teasing smile went away and another one came
up where it had been. The teasing smile didn't show his teeth, but the new one
did. Out in the box room, this was, where the north wall is always cold because
it backs up against the meat locker. He raised his hands and made them into
fists. The other guys sat around with their lunches, looking at us, and I knew
none of them would help. Not even Pug, who stands about five-feet-four anyway
and weighs about a hundred and ten pounds. Skipper would have eaten him like
candy, and Pug knew it.

"Come on, assface," Skipper said, smiling that smile. The broken rubber band
he'd stripped out of my hair was dangling between two of his knuckles, hanging
down like a little red lizard's tongue. "Come on, you want to fight me? Come on,
sure. I'll fight you."

What I wanted was to ask why it had to be me he settled on, why it was me who
somehow rubbed his fur wrong, why it had to be any guy. But he wouldn't have had
an answer. Guys like Skipper never do. They just want to knock your teeth out.
So instead, I just sat back down and picked up my sandwich again. If I tried to
fight Skipper, he'd likely put me in the hospital. I started to eat, although I
wasn't hungry anymore. He looked at me a second or two longer, and I thought he
might go after me, anyway, but then he unrolled his fists. The broken rubber
band dropped onto the floor beside a smashed lettuce crate. "You waste," Skipper
said. "You fucking longhair hippie waste." Then he walked away. It was only a
few days later that he mashed my fingers between two of the carts in the Korral,
and a few days after that Skipper was lying on satin in the Methodist Church
with the organ playing. He brought it on himself, though. At least that's what I
thought then.

"A little trip down Memory Lane?" Mr. Sharpton asked, and that jerked me back to
the present. I was standing between his car and mine, standing by the Kart
Korral where Skipper would never mash anyone else's fingers.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"And it doesn't matter. Hop in here, Dink, and let's have a little talk." I
opened the door of the Mercedes and got in. Man, that smell. It's leather, but
not just leather. You know how, in Monopoly, there's a Get Out of Jail Free
card? When you have a car that smells like Mr. Sharpton's gray Mercedes, you
must have a Get Out of Everything Free card.

I took a deep breath, held it, then let it out and said, "This is eventual."

Mr. Sharpton laughed, his clean-shaven cheeks gleaming in the dashboard lights.
He didn't ask what I meant; he knew. "Everything's eventual, Dink," he said. "Or
can be, for the right person."

"You think so?"

"Know so." Not a shred of doubt in his voice.

"I like your tie," I said. I said it just to be saying something, but it was
true, too. The tie wasn't what I'd call eventual, but it was good. You know
those ties that are printed all over with skulls or dinosaurs or little golf
clubs, stuff like that? Mr. Sharpton's was printed all over with swords, a firm
hand holding each one up.

He laughed and ran a hand down it, kind of stroking it. "It's my lucky tie," he
said. "When I put it on, I feel like King Arthur." The smile died off his face,
little by little, and I realized he wasn't joking. "King Arthur, out gathering
the best men there ever were. Knights to sit with him at the Round Table and
remake the world."

That gave me a chill, but I tried not to show it. "What do you want with me,
Art? Help you hunt for the Holy Grail, or whatever they call it?"

"A tie doesn't make a man a king," he said. "I know that, in case you were
wondering."

I shifted, feeling a little uncomfortable. "Hey, I wasn't trying to put you down
--"

"It doesn't matter, Dink. Really. Listen up, now: I'm two parts headhunter, two
parts talent scout, and four parts walking, talking destiny. Cigarette?"

"I don't smoke."

"That's good, you'll live longer. Cigarettes are killers. Why else would people
call them coffin nails?"

"You got me," I said.

"I hope so," Mr. Sharpton said, lighting up. "I most sincerely hope so. You're
top-shelf goods, Dink. I doubt if you believe that, but it's true."

"What's this offer you were talking about?"

"Tell me what happened to Skipper Brannigan."

Kabam, my worst fear come true. He couldn't know, nobody could, but somehow he
did. I only sat there feeling numb, my head pounding, my tongue stuck to the
roof of my mouth like it was glued there.

"Come on, tell me." His voice seemed to be coming in from far away, like on a
short-wave radio late at night.

I got my tongue back where it belonged. It took an effort, but I managed. "I
didn't do anything." My own voice seemed to be coming through on that same
shitty short-wave band. "Skipper had an accident, that's all. He was driving
home and he went off the road. His car rolled over and went into Lockerby
Stream. They found water in his lungs, so I guess he drowned, at least
technically, but it was in the paper that he probably would have died, anyway.
Most of his head got tom off in the rollover, or that's what people say. And
some people say it wasn't an accident, that he killed himself, but I don't buy
that. Skipper was ... he was getting too much fun out of life to kill himself."

"Yes. You were part of his fun, weren't you?"

I didn't say anything, but my lips were trembling and there were tears in my
eyes.

Mr. Sharpton reached over and put his hand on my arm. It was the kind of thing
you'd expect to get from an old guy like him, sitting with him in his big German
car in a deserted parking lot, but I knew when he touched me that it wasn't like
that, he wasn't hitting on me. It was good to be touched the way he touched me.
Until then, I didn't know how sad I was. Sometimes you don't, because it's just,
I don't know, all around. I put my head down. I didn't start bawling or
anything, but the tears went running down my cheeks. The swords on his tie
doubled, then tripled --three for one, such a deal.

"If you're worried that I'm a cop, you can quit. And I gave you money --that
screws up any sort of prosecution that might come out of this. But even if that
wasn't the case, no one would believe what really happened to young Mr.
Brannigan, anyway. Not even if you confessed on nationwide TV. Would they?"

"No," I whispered. Then, louder: "I put up with a lot. Finally I couldn't put up
with any more. He made me, he brought it on himself."

"Tell me what happened," Mr. Sharpton said.

"I wrote him a letter," I said. "A special letter."

"Yes, very special indeed. And what did you put in it so it could only work on
him?"

I knew what he meant, but there was more to it than that. When you personalized
the letters, you increased their power. You made them lethal, not just
dangerous.

"His sister's name," I said. I think that was when I gave up completely. "His
sister, Debbie."

9

I've always had something, some kind of deal, and I sort of knew it, but not how
to use it or what its name was or what it meant. And I sort of knew I had to
keep quiet about it, because other people didn't have it. I thought they might
put me in the circus if they found out. Or in jail.

I remember once -- vaguely, I might have been three or four, it's one of my
first memories -- standing by this dirty window and looking out at the yard.
There was a wood-chopping block and a mailbox with a red flag, so it must have
been while we were at Aunt Mabel's, out in the country. That was where we lived
after my father ran off. Ma got a job in the Harkerville Fancy Bakery and we
moved back to town later on, when I was five or so. We were living in town when
I started school, I know that. Because of Mrs. Bukowski's dog, having to walk
past that fucking canine cannibal five days a week. I'll never forget that dog.
It was a boxer with a white ear. Talk about Memory Lane.

Anyway, I was looking out and there were these flies buzzing around at the top
of the window, you know how they do. I didn't like the sound, but I couldn't
reach high enough, even with a rolled-up magazine, to swat them or make them go
away. So instead of that, I made these two triangles on the windowpane, drawing
in the dirt with the tip of my finger, and I made this other shape, a special
circle-shape, to hold the triangles together. And as soon as I did that, as soon
as I closed the circle, the flies -- there were four or five of them -- dropped
dead on the windowsill. Big as jellybeans, they were -- the black ones that
taste like licorice. I picked one up and looked at it, but it wasn't very
interesting, so I dropped it on the floor and went on looking out the window.

Stuff like that would happen from time to time, but never on purpose, never
because I made it happen. The first time I remember doing something absolutely
on purpose -- before Skipper, I mean -- was when I used my whatever-it-was on
Mrs. Bukowski's dog. Mrs. Bukowski lived on the corner of our street, when we
rented on Dugway Avenue. Her dog was mean and dangerous, every kid on the west
side was afraid of that white-eared fuck. She kept it tied in her side yard --
hell, staked out in her side yard is more like it -- and it barked at everyone
who went by. Not harmless yapping, like some dogs do, but the kind that says If
I could get you in here with me or get out there with you, I'd tear your balls
off, Brewster. Once the dog did get loose, and it bit the paperboy. Anyone
eise's dog probably would have sniffed gas for that, but Mrs. Bukowski's son was
the police chief, and he fixed it up, somehow.

I hated that dog the way I hated Skipper. In a way, I suppose, it was Skipper. I
had to go by Mrs. Bukowski's on my way to school unless I wanted to detour all
the way around the block and get called a sissy-boy, and I was terrified of the
way that mutt would run to the end of its rope, barking so hard that foam would
fly off its teeth and muzzle. Sometimes it hit the end of the rope so hard it'd
go right off its feet, boi-yoi-yoinng, which might have looked funny to some
people but never looked funny to me; I was just scared the rope (not a chain,
but a plain old piece of rope) would break one day, and the dog would jump over
the low picket fence between Mrs. Bukowski's yard and Dugway Avenue, and it
would rip my throat out.

Then one day I woke up with an idea. I mean it was right there. I woke up with
it the way some days I'd wake up with a great big throbbing boner. It was a
Saturday, bright and early, and I didn't have to go anywhere near Mrs.
Bukowski's if I didn't want to, but that day I did want to. I got out of bed and
threw on my clothes just as fast as I could. I did everything fast because I
didn't want to lose that idea. I would, too -- I'd lose it the way you
eventually lose the dreams you wake up with (or the boners you wake up with, if
you want to be crude) -- but right then I had the whole thing in my mind just as
clear as a bell: words with triangles around them and curlicues over them,
special circles to hold the whole shebang together ... two or three of those,
overlapping for extra strength.

I just about flew through the living room (Ma was still sleeping, I could hear
her snoring, and her pink bakery uniform was hung over the shower rod in the
bathroom) and went into the kitchen. Ma had a little blackboard by the phone for
numbers and reminders to herself -- MA'S DAYBOARD instead of DINKY'S DAYBOARD, I
guess you'd say -- and I stopped just long enough to gleep the piece of pink
chalk hanging on a string beside it. I put it in my pocket and went out the
door. I remember what a beautiful morning that was, cool but not cold, the sky
so blue it looked like someone had run it through the Happy Wheels Carwash, no
one moving around much yet, most folks sleeping in a little, like everyone likes
to do on Saturdays, if they can.

Mrs. Bukowski's dog wasn't sleeping in. Fuck, no. That dog was a firm believer
in rooty-tooty, do your duty. It saw me coming through the picket fence and went
charging to the end of its rope as hard as ever, maybe even harder, as if some
part of its dim little doggy brain knew it was Saturday and I had no business
being there. It hit the end of the rope, boi-yoi-yoinng, and went right over
backward. It was up again in a second, though, standing at the end of its rope
and barking in its choky I'm-strangling-but-I-don't-care way. I suppose Mrs.
Bukowski was used to that sound, maybe even liked it, but I've wondered since
how the fucking neighbors stood it.

I paid no attention that day. I was too excited to be scared. I fished the chalk
out of my pocket and dropped down on one knee. For one second I thought the
whole works had gone out of my head, and that was bad. I felt despair and
sadness trying to fill me up and I thought, No, don't let it, don't let it,
Dinky, fight it. Write anything, even if it's only FUCK MRS. BUKOWSKI'S DOG.

But I didn't write that. I drew this shape, I think it was a sankofite, instead.
Some weird shape, but the right shape, because it unlocked everything else. My
head flooded with stuff. It was wonderful, but at the same time it was really
scary because there was so fucking much of it. For the next five minutes or so I
knelt there on the sidewalk, sweating like a pig and writing like a mad fiend. I
wrote words I'd never heard and drew shapes I'd never seen -- shapes nobody had
ever seen: not just sankofites but japps and fouders and mirks. I wrote and drew
until I was pink dust halfway to my right elbow and Ma's piece of chalk was
nothing but a little pebble between my thumb and finger. Mrs. Bukowski's dog
didn't die like the flies, it barked at me the whole time, and it probably drew
back and ran out the length of its rope leash another time or two, but I didn't
notice. I was in this total frenzy. I could never describe it to you in a
million years, but I bet it's how great musicians like Mozart and Eric Clapton
feel when they're writing their music, or how painters feel when they're getting
their best work on canvas. If someone had come along, I would have ignored him.
Shit, if Mrs. Bukowski's dog had finally broken its rope, jumped the fence, and
clamped down on my ass, I probably would have ignored that.

It was eventual, man. It was so fucking eventual I can't even tell you.

No one did come, although a few cars went by and maybe the people in them
wondered what that kid was doing, what he was drawing on the sidewalk, and Mrs.
Bukowski's dog went on barking. At the end, I realized I had to make it
stronger, and the way to do that was to make it just for the dog. I didn't know
its name, so I printed BOXER with the last of the chalk, drew a circle around
it, then made an arrow at the bottom of the circle, pointing to the rest. I felt
dizzy and my head was throbbing, the way it does when you've just finished
taking a super-hard test, or if you spend too long watching TV. I felt like I
was going to be sick ... but I still also felt totally eventual.

I looked at the dog -- it was still just as lively as ever, barking and kind of
prancing on its back legs when it ran out of slack -- but that didn't bother me.
I went back home feeling easy in my mind. I knew Mrs. Bukowski's dog was toast.
The same way, I bet, that a good painter knows when he's painted a good picture,
or a good writer knows when he's written a good story. When it's right, I think
you just know. It sits there in your head and hums.

Three days later the dog was eating the old dirt sandwich. I got the story from
the best possible source when it comes to mean asshole dogs: the neighborhood
mailman. Mr. Shermerhorn, his name was. Mr. Shermerhorn said Mrs. Bukowski's
boxer for some reason started running around the tree he was tied to, and when
he got to the end of his rope (haha, end of his rope), he couldn't get back.
Mrs. Bukowski was out shopping somewhere, so she was no help. When she got home,
she found her dog lying at the base of the tree in her side yard, choked to
death.

The writing on the sidewalk stayed there for about a week, then it rained hard
and afterward there was just a pink blur. But until it rained, it stayed pretty
sharp. And while it was sharp, no one walked on it. I saw this for myself.
People -- kids walking to school, ladies walking downtown, Mr. Shermerhorn, the
mailman -- would just kind of veer around it. They didn't even seem to know they
were doing it. And nobody ever talked about it, either, like "What's up with
this weird shit on the sidewalk?" or "What do you suppose you call something
that looks like that?" (A louder, dimbulb.) It was as if they didn't even see it
was there. Except part of them must have. Why else would they have walked around
it?

10

I didn't tell Mr. Sharpton all that, but I told him what he wanted to know about
Skipper. I had decided I could trust him. Maybe that secret part of me knew I
could trust him, but I don't think so. I think it was just the way he put his
hand on my arm, like your dad would. Not that I have a dad, but I can imagine.

Plus, it was like he said -- even if he was a cop and arrested me, what judge
and jury would believe Skipper Brannigan had driven his car off the road because
of a letter I sent him? Especially one full of nonsense words and symbols made
up by a pizza delivery boy who had flunked high school geometry. Twice.

When I was done, there was silence between us for a long time. At last Mr.
Sharpton said, "He deserved it. You know that, don't you?"

And for some reason that did it. The dam burst and I cried like a baby. I must
have cried for fifteen minutes or more. Mr. Sharpton put his arm around me and
pulled me against his chest and I watered the lapel of his suit. If someone had
driven by and seen us that way, they would have thought we were a couple of
queers for sure, but nobody did. There was just him and me under the yellow
mercury-vapor lamps, there by the Kart Korral. Yippy-ti-yi-yo, get along little
shopping cart, Pug used to sing, for yew know Supr Savr will be yet new home.
We'd laugh till we cried.

At last I was able to turn off the waterworks. Mr. Sharpton handed me a hanky
and I wiped my eyes with it. "How did you know?" I asked. My voice sounded all
deep and weird, like a foghorn.

"Once you were spotted, all it took was a little rudimentary detective work."

"Yeah, but how was I spotted?"

"We have certain people -- a dozen or so in all -- who look for fellows and gals
like you," he said. "They can actually see fellows and gals like you, Dink, the
way certain satellites in space can see nuclear piles and power plants. You
folks show up yellow. Like match flames is how this one spotter described it to
me." He shook his head and gave a wry little smile. "I'd like to see something
like that just once in my life. Or be able to do what you do. Of course, I'd
also like to be given a day -- just one would be fine -- when I could paint like
Picasso or write like Faulkner."

I gaped at him. "Is that true? There are people who can see --"

"Yes. They're our bloodhounds. They crisscross the country-- and all the other
countries -- looking for that bright yellow glow. Looking for matchheads in the
darkness. This particular young woman was on Route 90, actually headed for
Pittsburgh to catch a plane home -- to grab a little r-and-r -- when she saw
you. Or sensed you. Or whatever it is they do. The finders don't really know
themselves, any more than you really know what you did to Skipper. Do you?"

"What --"

He raised a hand. "I told you that you wouldn't get all the answers you'd like
-- this is something you'll have to decide on the basis of what you feel, not on
what you know -- but I can tell you a couple of things. To begin with, Dink, I
work for an outfit called the Trans Corporation. Our job is getting rid of the
world's Skipper Brannigans --the big ones, the ones who do it on a grand scale.
We have company headquarters in Chicago and a training center in Peoria ...
where you'll spend a week, if you agree to my proposal."

I didn't say anything then, but I knew already I was going to say yes to his
proposal. Whatever it was, I was going to say yes.

"You're a tranny, my young friend. Better get used to the idea."

"What is it?"

"A trait. There are folks in our organization who think of what you have ...
what you can do ... as a talent or an ability or even a kind of glitch, but
they're wrong. Talent and ability are born of trait. Trait is general, talent
and ability are specific."

"You'll have to simplify that. I'm a high school dropout, remember."

"I know," he said. "I also know that you didn't drop out because you were
stupid; you dropped out because you didn't fit. In that way, you are like every
other tranny I've ever met." He laughed in the sharp way people do when they're
not really amused. "All twenty-one of them. Now listen to me, and don't play
dumb. Creativity is like a hand at the end of your arm. But a hand has many
fingers, doesn't it?"

"Well, at least five."

"Think of those fingers as abilities. A creative person may write, paint,
sculpt, or think up math formulae; he or she might dance or sing or play a
musical instrument. Those are the fingers, but creativity is the hand that gives
them life. And just as all hands are basically the same -- form follows function
-- all creative people are the same once you get down to the place where the
fingers join.

"Trans is also like a hand. Sometimes its fingers are called precognition, the
ability to see the future. Sometimes they're postcognition, the ability to see
the past -- we have a guy who knows who killed John F. Kennedy, and it wasn't
Lee Harvey Oswald; it was, in fact, a woman. There's telepathy, pyrokinesis,
telempathy, and who knows how many others. We don't know, certainly; this is a
new world, and we've barely begun to explore its first continent. But trans is
different from creativity in one vital way: it's much rarer. One person in eight
hundred is what occupational psychologists call 'gifted.' We believe that there
may only be one tranny in each eight million people."

That took my breath away -- the idea that you might be one in eight million
would take anybody's breath away, right?

"That's about a hundred and twenty for every billion ordinary folks," he said.
"We think there may be no more than seven hundred so-called trannies in the
whole world. We're finding them, one by one. It's slow work. The sensing ability
is fairly low-level, but we still only have a dozen or so finders, and each one
takes a lot of training. This is a hard calling ... but it's also fabulously
rewarding. We're finding trannies and we're putting them to work. That's what we
want to do with you, Dink: put you to work. We want to help you focus your
talent, sharpen it, and use it for the betterment of all mankind. You won't be
able to see any of your old friends again -- there's no security risk on Earth
like an old friend, we've found -- and there's not a whole lot of cash in it, at
least to begin with, but there's a lot of satisfaction, and what I'm going to
offer you is only the bottom rung of what may turn out to be a very high
ladder."

"Don't forget those fringe benefits," I said, kind of raising my voice on the
last word, turning it into a question, if he wanted to take it that way.

He grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. "That's right," he said. "Those
famous fringe benefits."

By then I was starting to get excited. My doubts weren't gone, but they were
melting away. "So tell me about it," I said. My heart was beating hard, but it
wasn't fear. Not anymore. "Make me an offer I can't refuse." And that's what he
did.

11

Three weeks later I'm on an airplane for the first time in my life-- and what a
way to lose your cherry! The only passenger in a Lear 35, listening to Counting
Crows pouring out of quad speakers with a Coke in one hand, watching as the
altimeter climbs all the way to 42,000 feet. That's over a mile higher than most
commercial jetliners fly, the pilot told me. And a ride as smooth as the seat of
a girl's underpants.

I spent a week in Peoria, and I was homesick. Really homesick. Surprised the
shit out of me. There were a couple of nights when I even cried myself to sleep.
I'm ashamed to say that, but I've been truthful so far, and don't want to start
lying or leaving things out now.

Ma was the least of what I missed. You'd think we would have been close, as it
was "us against the world," in a manner of speaking, but my mother was never
much for loving and comforting. She didn't whip on my head or put out her
cigarettes in my armpits or anything like that, but so what? I mean, big whoop.
I've never had any kids, so I guess I can't say for sure, but I somehow don't
think being a great parent is about the stuff you didn't do to your rug-monkeys.
Ma was always more into her friends than me, and her weekly trip to the beauty
shop, and Friday nights out at the Reservation. Her big ambition in life was to
win a twenty-number Bingo and drive home in a brand-new Monte Carlo. I'm not
sitting on the pitypot, either. I'm just telling you how it was.

Mr. Sharpton called Ma and told her that I'd been chosen to intern in the Trans
Corporation's advanced computer training and placement project, a special deal
for non-diploma kids with potential. The story was actually pretty believable. I
was a shitty math student and froze up almost completely in classes like
English, where you were supposed to talk, but I was always on good terms with
the school computers. In fact, although I don't like to brag (and I never let
any of the faculty in on this little secret), I could program rings around Mr.
Jacubois and Mrs. Wilcoxen. I never cared much about computer games -- they're
strictly for dickbrains, in my humble opinion, but I could keyjack like a mad
motherfucker. Pug used to drop by and watch me, sometimes.

"I can't believe you," he said once. "Man, you got that thing smokin and tokin."

I shrugged. "Any fool can peel the Apple," I said. "It takes a real man to eat
the core."

So Ma believed it (she might have had a few mere questions if she knew the Trans
Corporation was flying me out to Illinois in a private jet, but she didn't), and
I didn't miss her all that much. But I missed Pug, and John Cassiday, who was
our other friend from our Supr Savr days. John plays bass in a punk band, wears
a gold ring in his left eyebrow, and has just about every Subpop record ever
made. He cried when Kurt Cobain ate the dirt sandwich. Didn't try to hide it or
blame it on allergies, either. Just said, "I'm sad because Kurt died." John's
eventual.

And I missed Harkerville. Perverse but true. Being at the training center in
Peoria was Tike being born again, somehow, and I guess being born always hurts.

I thought I might meet some other people like me -- if this was a book or a
movie lot maybe just an episode of The X-Files), I would meet a cute chick with
nifty little tits and the ability to shut doors from across the room -- but that
didn't happen. I'm pretty sure there were other trannies at Peoria when I was
there, but Dr. Wentworth and the other folks running the place were careful to
keep us separated. I once asked why, and got a runaround. That's when I started
to realize that not everybody who had TRANSCORP printed on their shirts or
walked around with TransCorp clipboards was my pal, or wanted to be my long-lost
dad.

And it was about killing people; that's what I was training for. The folks in
Peoria didn't talk about that all the time, but no one tried to sugarcoat it,
either. I just had to remember the targets were bad guys, dictators and spies
and serial killers, and as Mr. Sharpton said, people did it in wars all the
time. Plus, it wasn't personal. No guns, no knives, no garrotes. I'd never get
blood splashed on me.

Like I told you, I never saw Mr. Sharpton again -- at least not yet, I haven't
-- but I talked to him every day of the week I was in Peoria, and that eased the
pain and strangeness considerably. Talking to him was like having someone put a
cool cloth on your brow. He gave me his number the night we talked in his
Mercedes, and told me to call him anytime. Even at three in the morning, if I
was feeling upset. Once I did just that. I almost hung up on the second ring,
because people may say call them anytime, even at three in the morning, but they
don't really expect you to do it. But I hung in there. I was homesick, yeah, but
it was more than that. The place wasn't what I had expected, exactly, and I
wanted to tell Mr. Sharpton so. See how he took it, kind of.

He answered on the third ring, and although he sounded sleepy (big surprise
there, huh), he didn't sound at all pissed. I told him that some of the stuff
they were doing was quite weird. The test with all the flashing lights, for
example. They said it was a test for epilepsy, but --

"I went to sleep right in the middle of it," I said. "And when I woke up, I had
a headache and it was hard to think. You know what I felt like? A file cabinet
after someone's been rummaging through it."

"What's your point, Dink?" Mr. Sharpton asked.

"I think they hypnotized me," I said.

A brief pause. Then: "Maybe they did. Probably they did."

"But why? Why would they? I'm doing everything they ask, so why would they want
to hypnotize me?"

"I don't know all their routines and protocols, but I suspect they're
programming you. Putting a lot of housekeeping stuff on the lower levels of your
mind so they won't have to junk up the conscious part ... and maybe screw up
your special ability, while they're at it. Really no different than programming
a computer's hard disc, and no more sinister."

"But you don't know for sure?"

"No -- as I say, training and testing are not my purview. But I'll make some
calls, and Dr. Wentworth will talk to you. It may even be that an apology is
due. If that's the case, Dink, you may be sure that it will be tendered. Our
trannies are too rare and too valuable to be upset needlessly. Now, is there
anything else?"

I thought about it, then said no. I thanked him and hung up. It had been on the
tip of my tongue to tell him I thought I'd been drugged, as well ... given some
sort of mood elevator to help me through the worst of my homesickness, but in
the end I decided not to bother him. It was three in the morning, after all, and
if they had been giving me anything, it was probably for my own good.

12

Dr. Wentworth came to see me the next day -- he was the Big Kahuna --and he did
apologize. He was perfectly nice about it, but he had a look, I don't know, like
maybe Mr. Sharpton had called him about two minutes after I hung up and packed
his asshole with some nice hot Minute Rice.

Dr. Wentworth took me for a walk on the back lawn -- green and rolling and
damned near perfect there at the end of spring -- and said he was sorry for not
keeping me "up to speed." The epilepsy test really was an epilepsy test, he said
(and a CAT scan, too), but since it induced a hypnotic state in most subjects,
they usually took advantage of it to give certain "baseline instructions." In my
case, they were instructions about the computer programs I'd be using in
Columbia City. Dr. Wentworth asked me if I had any other questions. I lied and
said no.

You probably think that's weird, but it's not. I mean, I had a long and sucky
school career that ended three months short of graduation. I had teachers I
liked as well as teachers I hated, but never one I entirely trusted. I was the
kind of kid who always sat in the back of the room if the teacher's seating
chart wasn't alphabetical, and never took part in class discussions. I mostly
said "Huh?" when I was called on, and wild horses wouldn't have dragged a
question out of me. Mr. Sharpton was the only guy I ever met who was able to get
into where I lived, and ole Doc Wentworth with his bald head and sharp eyes
behind his little rimless glasses was no Mr. Sharpton. I could imagine pigs
flying south for the winter before I could imagine opening up to that dude, let
alone crying on his shoulder.

And fuck, I didn't know what else to ask, anyway. Mostly I liked it in Peoria,
and I was excited by the prospects ahead -- new job, new house, new town. People
were great to me in Peoria. Even the food was great --meatloaf, fried chicken,
milkshakes, everything I liked. Okay, I didn't like the diagnostic tests, those
boogersnots you have to do with an IBM pencil, and sometimes I'd feel dopey, as
if someone had put something in my mashed potatoes (or hyper, sometimes I'd feel
that way, tool, and there were other times -- at least two -- when I was pretty
sure I'd been hypnotized again. But so what? I mean, was any of it a big deal
after you'd been chased around a supermarket parking lot by a maniac who was
laughing and making race-car noises and trying to run you over with a shopping
cart?

13

I had one more tal on the phone with Mr. Sharpton that I suppose I should
mention. That was just a day before my second airplane ride, the one that took
me to Columbia City, where a guy was waiting with the keys to my new house. By
then I knew about the cleaners, and the basic money-rule -- start every week
broke, end every week broke -- and I knew who to call locally if I had a
problem. (Any big problem and I call Mr. Sharpton, who is technically my
"control.") I had maps, a list of restaurants, directions to the cinema complex
and the mail. I had a line on everything but the most important thing of all.

"Mr. Sharpton, I don't know what to do," I said. I was talking to him on the
phone just outside the calf. There was a phone in my room, but by then I was too
nervous to sit down, let alone lie on my bed. If they were still putting shit in
my food, it sure wasn't working that day.

"I can't help you there, Dink," he said, calm as ever. "So solly, Cholly."

"What do you mean? You've got to help me! You recruited me, for jeepers' sake!"

"Let me give you a hypothetical case. Suppose I'm the President of a
well-endowed college. Do you know what well-endowed means?"

"Lots of bucks. I'm not stupid, I told you that."

"So you did -- I apologize. Anyhow, let's say that I, President Sharpton, use
some of my school's plentiful bucks to hire a great novelist as the writer in
residence, or a great pianist to teach music. Would that entitle me to tell the
novelist what to write, or the pianist what to compose?"

"Probably not."

"Absolutely not. But let's say it did. If I told the novelist, 'Write a comedy
about Betsy Ross screwing around with George Washington in Gay Paree,' do you
think he could do it?"

I got laughing. I couldn't help it. Mr. Sharpton's just got a vibe about him,
somehow.

"Maybe," I said. "Especially if you whipped a bonus on the guy."

"Okay, but even if he held his nose and cranked it out, it would likely be a
very bad novel. Because creative people aren't always in charge. And when they
do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge. They're just sort of rolling
along with their eyes shut, yelling Wheeeee."

"What's all that got to do with me? Listen, Mr. Sharpton -- when I try to
imagine what I'm going to do in Columbia City, all I see is a great big blank.
Help people, you said. Make the world a better place. Get rid of the Skippers.
All that sounds great, except I don't know how to do it!"

"You will," he said. "When the time comes, you will."

"You said Wentworth and his guys would focus my talent. Sharpen it. Mostly what
they did was give me a bunch of stupid tests and make me feel like I was back in
school. Is it all in my subconscious? Is it all on the hard disc?"

"Trust me, Dink," he said. "Trust me, and trust yourself."

So I did. I have. But just lately, things haven't been so good. Not so good at
all.

That goddam Neff -- all the bad stuff started with him. I wish I'd never seen
his picture. And if I had to see a picture, I wish I'd seen one where he wasn't
smiling.

14

My first week in Columbia City, I did nothing. I mean absolutely zilch. I didn't
even go to the movies. When the cleaners came, I just went to the park and sat
on a bench and felt like the whole world was watching me. When it came time to
get rid of my extra money on Thursday, I ended up shredding better than fifty
dollars in the garbage disposal. And doing that was new to me then, remember.
Talk about feeling weird --man, you don't have a clue. While I was standing
there, listening to the motor under the sink grinding away, I kept thinking
about Ma. If Ma had been there to see what I was doing, she would have probably
run me through with a butcher knife to make me stop. That was a dozen
twenty-number Bingo games lot two dozen coveralls) going straight down the
kitchen pig.

I slept like shit that week. Every now and then I'd go to the little study -- I
didn't want to, but my feet would drag me there. Like they say murderers always
return to the scenes of their crimes, I guess. Anyway, I'd stand there in the
doorway and look at the dark computer screen, at the Global Village modem, and
I'd just sweat with guilt and embarrassment and fear. Even the way the desk was
so neat and clean, without a single paper or note on it, made me sweat. I could
all but hear the walls muttering stuff like "Nah, nothing going on in here, it's
really just a closet" and "Who's this turkey, the cable installer?"

I had nightmares. In one of them, the doorbell rings and when I open it, Mr.
Sharpton's there. He's got a pair of handcuffs. "Put out your wrists, Dink," he
says. "We thought you were a tranny, but obviously we were wrong. Sometimes it
happens."

"No, I am," I say. "I am a tranny, I just need a little more time to get
acclimated. I've never been away from home before, remember."

"You've had five years," he goes.

I'm stunned. I can't believe it. But part of me knows it's true. It feels like
days, but it's really been five fucking years, and I haven't turned on the
computer in the little study a single time. If not for the cleaners, the desk it
sits on would be six inches deep in dust.

"Hold out your hands, Dink. Stop making this hard on both of us."

"I won't," I say, "and you can't make me."

He looked behind him then, and who should come up the steps but Skipper
Brannigan. He was wearing his red nylon tunic, only now TRANSCORP was sewn on it
instead of SUPR SAVR. He looked pale but otherwise okay. Not dead is what I
mean. "You thought you did something to me, but you didn't," Skipper said. "You
couldn't do anything to anyone. You're just a hippie waste."

"I'm going to put these cuffs on him," Mr. Sharpton says to Skipper. "If he
gives me any trouble, run him over with a shopping cart."

"Totally eventual," Skipper said, and I woke up half out of my bed and on the
floor, screaming.

15

Then, about ten days after I moved in, I had another kind of dream. I don't
remember what it was, but it must have been a good one, because when I woke up,
I was smiling. I could feel it on my face, a big, happy smile. It was like when
I woke up with the idea about Mrs. Bukowski's dog. Almost exactly like that.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and went into the study. I turned on the computer
and opened the window marked TOOLS. There was a program in there called DINKY'S
NOTEBOOK. I went right to it, and all my symbols were there -- circles,
triangles, japps, mirks, rhomboids, bews, smims, fouders, hundreds more.
Thousands more. Maybe millions more. It's soft of like Mr. Sharpton said: a new
world, and I'm on the coastline of the first continent.

All I know is that all at once it was there for me, I had a great big Macintosh
computer to work with instead of a little piece of pink chalk, and all I had to
do was type the words for the symbols and the symbols would appear. I was jacked
to the max, I mean my God. It was like a river of fire burning in the middle of
my head. I wrote, I called up symbols, I used the mouse to drag everything where
it was supposed to be. And when it was done, I had a letter. One of the special
letters.

But a letter to who?

A letter to where?

Then I realized it didn't matter. Make a few minor customizing touches, and
there were many people the letter could go to ... although this one had been
written for a man rather than a woman. I don't know how I knew that; I just did.
I decided to start with Cincinnati, only because Cincinnati was the first city
to come into my mind. It could as easily have been Zurich, Switzerland, or
Waterville, Maine.

I tried to open a TOOLS program titled DINKYMAIL. Before the computer would let
me in there, it prompted me to wake up my modem. Once the modem was running, the
computer wanted a 312 area code. 312's Chicago, and I imagine that, as far as
the phone company is concerned, my compu-calls all come from TransCorp's
headquarters. I didn't care one way or another; that was their business. I had
found my business and was taking care of it.

With the modem awake and linked to Chicago, the computer flashed

DINKYMAIL READY

I clicked on LOCALE. I'd been in the study almost three hours by then, with only
one break to take a quick piss, and I could smell myself, sweating and stinking
like a monkey in a greenhouse. I didn't mind. I liked the smell. I was having
the time of my life. I was fucking delirious.

I typed CINCINNATI and hit EXECUTE.

NO LISTINGS CINCINNATI

the computer said. Okay, not a problem. Try Columbus -- closer to home, anyway.
And yes, folks! We have a Bingo.

TWO LISTINGS COLUMBUS

There were two telephone numbers. I clicked on the top one, curious and a little
afraid of what might pop out. But it wasn't a dossier, a profile, or -- God
forbid -- a photograph. There was one single word:

MUFFIN

Say what?

But then I knew. Muffin was Mr. Columbus's pet. Maybe a cat. I called up my
special letter again, transposed two symbols and deleted a third. Then I added
MUFFIN to the top, with an arrow pointing down. There. Perfect.

Did I wonder who Muffin's owner was, or what he had done to warrant TransCorp's
attention, or exactly what was going to happen to him? I did not. The idea that
my conditioning at Peoria might have been partially responsible for this
disinterest never crossed my mind, either. I was doing my thing, that was all.
Just doing my thing, and as happy as a clam at high tide.

I called the number on the screen. I had the computer's speaker on, but there
was no hello, only the screechy mating call of another computer. Just as well,
really. Life's easier when you subtract the human element. Then it's like that
movie, Twelve O'Clock High, cruising over Berlin in your trusty B-52, looking
through your Norden bombsight and waiting for just the right moment to push the
button. You might see smokestacks, or factory roofs, but no people. The guys who
dropped the bombs from their trusty B-52s didn't have to hear the screams of
mothers whose children had just been reduced to jelly-covered guts, and I didn't
even have to hear anyone say hello. A very good deal.

After a little bit, I turned off the speaker anyway. I found it distracting.

MODEM FOUND

the computer flashed, and then

SEARCH FOR E-MAIL ADDRESS Y/N

I typed Y and waited. This time the wait was longer. I think the computer was
going back to Chicago again, and getting what it needed to unlock the e-mail
address of Mr. Columbus. Still, it was less than thirty seconds before the
computer was right back at me with

E-MAIL ADDRESS FOUND SEND DINKYMAIL Y/N

I typed Y with absolutely no hesitation. The computer flashed

SENDING DINKYMAIL

and then

DINKYMAIL SENT

That was all. No fireworks. I wonder what happened to Muffin, though. You know.
After.

* * *

16

That night I called Mr. Sharpton and said, "I'm working."

"That's good, Dink. Great news. Feel better?" Calm as ever. Mr. Sharpton is like
the weather in Tahiti.

"Yeah," I said. The fact was, I felt blissful. It was the best day of my life.
Doubts or no doubts, worries or no worries, I still say that. The most eventual
day of my life. It was like a river of fire in my head, a fucking river of fire,
can you get that? "Do you feel better, Mr. Sharpton? Relieved?"

"I'm happy for you, but I can't say I'm relieved, because --"

"-- you were never worried in the first place."

"Got it in one," he said.

"Everything's eventual, in other words."

He laughed at that. He always laughs when I say that. "That's right, Dink.
Everything's eventual."

"Mr. Sharpton?"

"Yes?"

"E-mail's not exactly private, you know. Anybody who's really dedicated can hack
into it."

"Part of what you send is a suggestion that the recipient delete the message
from all files, is it not?"

"Yes, but I can't absolutely guarantee that he'll do it. Or she."

"Even if they don't, nothing can happen to someone else who chances on such a
message, am I correct? Because it's ... personalized."

"Well, it might give someone a headache, but that would be about all."

"And the communication itself would look like so much gibberish."

"Or a code."

He laughed heartily at that. "Let them try to break it, Dinky, eh? Just let them
try!"

I sighed. "I suppose."

"Let's discuss something more important, Dink ... how did it feel?"

"Fucking wonderful."

"Good. Don't question wonder, Dink. Don't ever question wonder." And he hung up.

* * * 17

Sometimes I have to send actual letters -- print out the stuff I whomp up in
DINKY'S NOTEBOOK, stick it in an envelope, lick stamps, and mail it off to
somebody somewhere. Professor Ann Tevitch, University of New Mexico at Las
Cruces. Mr. Andrew Neff, C/O The New York Post, New York, New York. Billy Unger,
General Delivery, Stovington, Vermont. Only names, but they were still more
upsetting than the phone numbers. More personal than the phone numbers. It was
like seeing faces swim up at you for a second inside your Norden bombsight. I
mean, what a freak-out, right? You're up there at 25,000 feet, no faces allowed
up there, but sometimes one shows up for a second or two, just the same.

I wondered how a University Professor could get along without a modem (or a guy
whose address was a fucking New York newspaper, for that matter), but I never
wondered too much. I didn't have to. We live in a modern world, but letters
don't have to be sent by computer, after all. There's still a post office. And
the stuff I really needed was always in the database. The fact that Unger had a
1957 Thunderbird, for instance. Or that Ann Tevitch had a vanity license plate.

And people like Tevitch and Unger were exceptions. Most of the folks I reach out
and touch are like that first one in Columbus -- fully equipped for the
twenty-first century. SENDING DINKYMAIL, DINKYMAIL SENT, velly good, so long,
Cholly.

I could have gone on like that for a long time, maybe forever -browsing the
database (there's no schedule to follow, no list of primary cities and targets;
I'm completely on my own ... unless all that shit is also in my subconscious,
down there on the hard disc), going to afternoon movies, enjoying the Ma-less
silence of my little house, and dreaming of my next step up the ladder, except I
woke up feeling horny one day. I worked for an hour or so, browsing around in
Australia, but it was no good -- my dick kept trespassing on my brain, so to
speak. I shut off the computer and went down to News Plus to see if I could find
a magazine featuring pretty ladies in frothy lingerie.

As I got there, a guy was coming out, reading the Columbus Dispatch. I never
read the paper myself. Why bother? It's the same old shit day in and day out,
dictators beating the ching-chong out of people weaker than they are, men in
uniforms beating the ching-chong out of soccer balls or footballs, politicians
kissing babies and kissing ass. Mostly stories about the Skipper Brannigans of
the world, in other words. And I wouldn't have seen this story even if I'd
happened to look at the newspaper display rack once I got inside, because it was
on the bottom half of the front page, below the fold. But this fucking dimbulb
comes out with the paper hanging open and his face buried inside it.

In the lower right comer was a picture of a white-haired guy smoking a pipe and
smiling. He looked like a good-humored fuck, probably Irish, eyes all crinkled
up and these white bushy eyebrows. And the headline over the photo -- not a big
one, but you could read it -- said NEFF SUICIDE STILL PUZZLES, GRIEVES
COLLEAGUES.

For a second or two I thought I'd just skip News Plus that day, I didn't feel
like ladies in lingerie after all, maybe I'd just go home and take a nap. If I
went in, I'd probably pick up a copy of the Dispatch, wouldn't be able to help
myself, and I wasn't sure I wanted to know any more about that Irish-looking guy
than I already did ... which was nothing at all, as you can fucking believe I
hastened to tell myself. Neff couldn't be that weird a name anyway, only four
letters, not like Shittendookus or Horecake, there must be thousands of Neffs,
if you're talking coast to coast. This one didn't have to be the Neff I knew
about, the one who loved Frank Sinatra records.

It would be better, in any case, to just leave and come back tomorrow. Tomorrow
the picture of that guy with the pipe would be gone. Tomorrow somebody else's
picture would be there, on the lower right corner of page one. People always
dying, right? People who aren't superstars or anything, just famous enough to
get their pictures down there in the lower right corner of page one. And
sometimes people were puzzled about it ... the way folks back home in
Harkerville had been puzzled about Skipper's death -- no alcohol in his blood,
clear night, dry road, not the suicidal type.

The world is full of mysteries like that, though, and sometimes it's best not to
solve them. Sometimes the solutions aren't, you know, too eventual.

But willpower has never been my strong point. I can't always keep away from the
chocolate, even though I know my skin doesn't like it, and I couldn't keep away
from the Columbus Dispatch that day. I went on inside and bought one. Didn't
even bother with any ladies in lingerie -- had forgotten all about them, in
fact.

I started home, then had a funny thought. The funny thought was that I didn't
want a newspaper with Andrew Neff's picture on the front page going out with my
trash. The trash pick-up guys came in a city truck, surely they didn't --
couldn't -- have anything to do with TransCorp, but...

There was this show me and Pug used to watch one summer back when we were little
kids. Golden Years, it was called. You probably don't remember it. Anyway, there
was a guy on that show who used to say "Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness."
It was like his motto. And I sort of believe that.

Anyway, I went to the park instead of back home. I sat on a bench and read the
story, and when I was done, I stuck the paper in a park trash barrel. I didn't
even like doing that, but hey -- if Mr. Sharpton has got a guy following me
around and checking on every little thing I throw away, I'm totally fucked no
matter what.

There was no doubt that Andrew Neff, age sixty-two, a columnist for the Post
since 1970, had committed suicide. He took a bunch of pills that probably would
have done the trick, then climbed into his bathtub, put a plastic bag over his
head, and rounded the evening off by slitting his wrists. There was a man
totally dedicated to avoiding counseling.

He left no note, though, and the autopsy showed no signs of disease. His
colleagues scoffed at the idea of Alzheimer's, or even early senility. "He was
the sharpest guy I've ever known, right up to the day he died," a guy named Pete
Hamil said. "He could have gone on Challenge Jeopardy and run both boards. I
have no idea why Andy did such a thing." Hamil went on to say that one of Neff's
"charming oddities" was his complete refusal to participate in the computer
revolution. No modems for him, no laptop word processor, no handheld
spell-checker from Franklin Electronic Publishers. He didn't even have a CD
player in his apartment, Hamil said; Neff claimed, perhaps only half-joking,
that compact discs were the devil's work. He loved the Chairman of the Board,
but only on vinyl.

This guy Hamil and several others said Neff was unfailingly cheerful, right up
to the afternoon he filed his last column, went home, drank a glass of wine, and
then demo'd himself. One of the Post's chatter columnists, Liz Smith, said she'd
shared a piece of pie with him just before he left on that last day, and Neff
had seemed "a trifle distracted, but otherwise just fine."

Distracted, sure. With a headful of fouders, bews, and smims, you'd be
distracted, too.

Neff, the piece went on, had been something of an anomaly on the Post, which
sticks up for the more conservative view of life-- I guess they don't come right
out and recommend electrocuting welfare recipients after three years and still
no job, but they do hint that it's always an option. Neff was more or less the
house liberal. He wrote a column called "Eneff is Eneff," and in it he talked
about changing the way New York treated single teen mothers, suggested that
maybe abortion wasn't always murder, argued that the low-income housing in the
outer boroughs was a self-perpetuating hate machine. Near the end of his life,
he'd been writing columns about the size of the military, and asking why we as a
country felt we had to keep pouring on the bucks when there was, essentially, no
one left to fight except for that guy in Iraq, the one who looks like Wayne
Newton. He said we'd do better to spend that money creating jobs. And Post
readers, who would have crucified anyone else saying stuff like that, pretty
much loved it when Neff laid it down. Because he was funny. Because he was
charming. Maybe because he was Irish and had kissed the Blarney Stone.

That was about all. I started home. Somewhere along the way I took a detour,
though, and ended up walking all over downtown. I zigged and zagged, walking
down boulevards and cutting through parking lots, all the time thinking about
Andrew Neff climbing into his bathtub and putting a Ziploc Baggie over his head.
A big one, a gallon-size, keeps all your leftovers supermarket-fresh.

He was funny. He was charming. And I had killed him. Neff had opened my letter
and it had gotten into his head, somehow. Judging by what I'd read in the paper,
the special words and symbols took maybe three days to tear him apart enough to
swallow the pills and climb into the tub.

He deserved it.

That's what Mr. Sharpton said about Skipper, and maybe he was right ... that
time. But did Neff deserve it ? Was there shit about him I didn't know, did he
maybe like little girls in the wrong way or push dope or go after people too
weak to fight back, like Skipper had gone after me with the shopping cart?

We want to help you use your talent for the betterment of all mankind, Mr.
Sharpton said, and surely that didn't mean making a guy off himself because he
thought the Defense Department was spending too much money on smart-bombs.
Paranoid shit like that is strictly for movies starring Steven Seagal and
Jean-Claude Van Damme --

Then I had a bad idea -- a scary idea.

Maybe TransCorp didn't want him dead because he wrote that stuff.

Maybe they wanted him dead because people -- the wrong people -- were starting
to think about what he wrote.

"That's crazy," I said, right out loud, and a woman looking into the window of
Columbia City, Very Pretty turned around and gave me the old fish-eye.

I ended up at the public library around two o'clock, with my legs aching and my
head throbbing. I kept seeing that guy in the bathtub, with his wrinkled old
man's tits and white chest-hair, his nice smile gone, replaced by this vague
Planet X look. I kept seeing him putting a Boggle over his head, humming a
Smatra tune ("My Way," maybe) as he snugged it down tight, then peered through
it the way you'd peer through a cloudy window, so he could see to slit the veins
in his wrists. I didn't want to see that stuff, but I couldn't stop. My
bombsight had turned into a telescope.

They had a computer room in the library, and you could get on the Internet at a
very reasonable cost. I had to get a library card, too, but that was okay. A
library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.

It took me only three bucks' worth of time to find Ann Tevitch and call up the
report of her death. The story started, I saw with a sinking sensation, in the
bottom right-hand comer of page one, The Official Dead Folks' Nook, and then
jumped to the obituary page. Professor Tevitch had been a pretty lady, blonde,
thirty-seven. In the photo she was holding her glasses in her hand, as if she
wanted people to know she wore them ... but as if she'd wanted people to see
what pretty eyes she had, too. That made me feel sad and guilty.

Her death was startlingly like Skipper's -- coming home from her office at UNM
just after dark, maybe hurrying a little because it was her turn to make supper,
but what the hell, good driving conditions and great visibility. Her car --
vanity license plate DNA FAN, I happened to know -- had veered off the road,
overturned, and landed in a dry wash. She was still alive when someone spotted
the headlights and found her, but there had never been any real hope; her
injuries were too grave.

There was no alcohol in her system and her marriage was in good shape (no kids,
at least, thank God for small favors), so the idea of suicide was farfetched.
She had been looking forward to the future, had even talked about getting a
computer to celebrate a new research grant. She'd refused to own a PC since 1988
or so; had lost some valuable data in one when it locked up, and had distrusted
them ever since. She would use her department's equipment when she absolutely
had to, but that was all.

The coroner's verdict had been accidental death.

Professor Ann Tevitch, a clinical biologist, had been in the forefront of West
Coast AIDS research. Another scientist, this one in California, said that her
death might set back the search for a cure five years. "She was a key player,"
he said. "Smart, yes, but more -- I once heard someone refer to her as 'a
natural-born facilitator,' and that's as good a description as any. Ann was the
kind of person who holds other people together. Her death is a great loss to the
dozens of people who knew and loved her, but it's an even greater loss to this
cause."

Billy Unger was also easy enough to find. His picture topped page one of the
Stovington Weekly Courant instead of getting stuck down there in the Dead Folks'
Corner, but that might have been because there weren't many famous people in
Stovington. Unger had been General William "Roll 'Em" Unger, winner of the
Silver Star and Bronze Star in Korea. During the Kennedy administration he was
the Undersecretary of Defense, and one of the really big war-hawks of that time.
Kill the Russkies, drink their blood, keep America safe for the Macy's
Thanksgiving Day Parade, all that sort of thing.

Then, around the time Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam, Billy
Unger had a change of mind and heart. He began writing letters to newspapers. He
started his op-ed page career by saying that we were handling the war wrong. He
progressed to the idea that we were wrong to be in Vietnam at all. Then, around
1975 or so, he got to the point of saying all wars were wrong. That was okay
with most Vermonters.

He served seven terms in the state legislature, starting in 1978. When a group
of Progressive Democrats asked him to run for the U.S. Senate in 1992, he said
he wanted to "do some reading and consider his options." The implication was
that he would be ready for a national career in politics by 1996, 2000 at the
latest. He was getting old, but Vermonters like old guys, I guess. Nineteen
ninety-six went past without Unger declaring himself a candidate for anything
(possibly because his wife died of cancer), and long before 2000 came around, he
bought himself a big old dirt sandwich and ate every bite.

There was a small but loyal contingent in Stovington that claimed Roll 'Em's
death was an accident, that Silver Star winners don't jump off their roofs even
if they have lost a wife to cancer in the last year or so, but the rest pointed
out that the guy probably hadn't been repairing the shingles -- not in his
nightshirt, not at two o'clock in the morning.

Suicide was the verdict.

Yeah. Right.

18

I left the library and thought I'd go home. Instead, I went back to the same
park bench again. I sat there until the sun was low and the place had pretty
much emptied out of kids and Frisbee-catching dogs. And although I'd been in
Columbia City for three months by then, it was the latest I'd ever been out.
That's sad, I guess. I thought I was living a life here, finally getting away
from Ma and living a life, but all I've been doing is throwing a shadow.

If people, certain people, were checking up on me, they might wonder why the
change in routine. So I got up, went on home, boiled up a bag of that shit on a
shingle stuff, and turned on my TV. I've got cable, the full package including
premium movie channels, and I've never seen a single bill. How's that for an
eventual deal? I turned on Cinemax. Rutger Hauer was playing a blind karate
fighter. I sat down on the couch beneath my fake Rembrandt and watched the show.
I didn't see it, but I ate my chow and looked at it.

I thought about stuff. About a newspaper columnist who had liberal ideas and a
conservative readership. About an AIDS researcher who served an important
linking function with other AIDS researchers. About an old general who changed
his mind. I thought about the fact that I only knew these three by name because
they didn't have modems and e-mail capability.

There was other stuff to think about, too. Like how you could hypnotize a
talented guy, or drug him, or maybe even expose him to other talented guys in
order to keep him from asking any of the wrong questions or doing any of the
wrong things. Like how you could make sure such a talented guy couldn't run away
even if he happened to wake up to the truth. You'd do that by setting him up in
what was, essentially, a cashless existence ... a life where rule number one was
no rat-holing any extra dough, not even pocket change. What sort of talented guy
would fall for something like that? A naive one, with few friends and next to no
self-image. A guy who would sell you his talented soul for a few groceries and
seventy bucks a week, because he believes that's about what it's worth.

I didn't want to think about any of that. I tried to concentrate on Rutger
Hauer, doing all that amusing blind karate shit (Pug would have laughed his ass
off if he'd been there, believe me), so I wouldn't have to think about any of
that.

Two hundred, for instance. There was a number I didn't want to think about. 200.
10 x 20, 40 x 5. CC, to the old Romans. At least two hundred times I'd pushed
the button that brought the message DINKYMAIL SENT up on my screen.

It occurred to me -- for the first time, as if I was finally waking up -- that I
was a murderer. A mass murderer.

Yes indeed. That's what it came down to.

Good of mankind? Bad of mankind? Indifferent of mankind? Who made those
judgments? Mr. Sharpton? His bosses? Their bosses? And did it matter?

I decided it didn't matter a fuck in a rabbit hutch. I further decided I really
couldn't spend too much time moaning (even to myself) how I had been drugged,
hypnotized, or exposed to some kind of mind control. The truth was, I'd been
doing what I was doing because I loved the feeling I got when I was composing
the special letters, the feeling that there was a river of fire running through
the center of my head.

Mostly, I'd been doing it because I could.

"That's not true," I said ... but not real loud. I whispered it under my breath.
They probably don't have any bugs planted here, I'm sure they don't, but it's
best to be safe.

I started writing this ... what is it? A report, maybe. I started writing this
report later that night ... as soon as the Rutger Hauer movie was over, in fact.
I write in a notebook, though, not on my computer, and I write in plain old
English. No sankofites, no bews, no smims. There's a loose floor-tile under the
Ping-Pong table down in the basement. That's where I keep my report. I just now
looked back at how I started. I've got a good job now, I wrote, an d no reason
to feel glum. Idiotic. But of course, any fool who can pucker is apt to whistle
past the graveyard.

When I went to bed that night, I dreamed I was in the parking lot of the Supr
Savr. Pug was there, wearing his red duster and a hat on his head like the one
Mickey Mouse wore in Fantasia -- that's the movie where Mickey played the
Sorcerer's Apprentice. Halfway across the parking lot, shopping carts were lined
up in a row. Pug would raise his hand, then lower it. Each time he did this, a
cart would start roiling by itself, gathering speed, rushing across the lot
until it crashed into the brick side of the supermarket. They were piling up
there, a glittering junkheap of metal and wheels. For once in his life, Pug
wasn't smiling. I wanted to ask him what he was doing and what it meant, but of
course I knew.

"He's been good to me," I told Pug in this dream. It was Mr. Sharpton I meant,
of course. "He's been really, really eventual."

Pug turned fully to me then, and I saw it wasn't Pug at all. It was Skipper, and
his head had been smashed in all the way down to the eyebrows. Shattered hunks
of skull stuck up in a circle, making him look like he was wearing a bone crown.

"You're not looking through a bombsight," Skipper said, and grinned. "You are
the bombsight. How do you like that, Dinkster?"

I woke up in the dark of my room, sweating, with my hands over my mouth to hold
in a scream, so I guess I didn't like it very much.

19

Writing this has been a sad education, let me tell you. It's like hey, Dink,
welcome to the real world. Mostly it's the image of grinding up dollar bills in
the kitchen pig that comes to me when I think about what has happened to me, but
I know that's only because it's easier to think of grinding up money lot
chucking it into the storm drain) than it is to think about grinding up people.
Sometimes I hate myself, sometimes I'm scared for my immortal soul (if I have
one), and sometimes I'm just embarrassed. Trust me, Mr. Sharpton said, and I
did. I mean, duh, how dumb can you get? I tell myself I'm just a kid, the same
age as the kids who crewed those B-52s I sometimes think about, that kids are
allowed to be dumb. But I wonder if that's true when lives are at stake.

And, of course, I'm still doing it.

Yes.

I thought at first that I wouldn't be able to, no more than the kids in Peter
Pan could keep floating around when they lost their happy thoughts ... but I
could. And once I sat down in front of the computer screen and that river of
fire started to flow, I was lost. You see (at least I think you do), this is
what I was put on Planet Earth for. Can I be blamed for doing the thing that
finishes me off, that completes me?

Answer: yes. Absolutely.

But t can't stop. Sometimes I tell myself that I've gone on because if I do stop
-- maybe even for a day -- they'll know I've caught on, and the cleaners will
make an unscheduled stop. Except what they'll clean up this time will be me. But
that's not why. I do it because I'm just another addict, same as a guy smoking
crack in an alley or some chick taking a spike in her arm. I do it because of
the hateful fucking rush, I do it because when I'm working in DINKY'S NOTEBOOK,
everything's eventual. It's like being caught in a candy trap. And it's all the
fault of that dork who came out of News Plus with his fucking Dispatch open. If
not for him, I'd still see nothing but cloud-hazy buildings in the crosshairs.
No people, just targets.

You are the bombsight, Skipper said in my dream. You are the bombsight,
Dinkster.

That's true. I know it is. Humiliating but true. I'm just another tool, just the
lens the real bombardier looks through. Just the button he pushes.

What bombardier, you ask?

Oh come on, get real.

I thought of calling him, how's that for crazy? Or maybe it's not. "Call me
anytime, Dink, even three in the morning." That's what the man said, and I'm
pretty sure that's what the man meant -- about that, at least, Mr. Sharpton
wasn't lying.

I thought of calling him and saying, "You want to know what hurts the most, Mr.
Sharpton? That thing you said about how I could make the world a better place by
getting rid of people like Skipper. The truth is, you guys are Skipper."

Sure. And I'm the shopping cart they chase people with, laughing and barking and
making race-car sounds. I work cheap, too ... at bargain-basement rates. So far
I've killed over two hundred people, and what did it cost TransCorp? A little
house in a third-rate Ohio town, seventy bucks a week, and a Honda automobile.
Plus cable TV. Don't want to forget that.

I stood there for a while, looking at the telephone, then put it down again.
Couldn't say any of that. It would be the same as putting a Ziploc bag over my
head and then slitting my wrists.

So what am I going to do?

Oh God, what am I going to do?

20

It's been two weeks since I last took this notebook out from under the basement
tile and wrote in it. Twice I've heard the mail-slot clack on Thursdays, during
As the World Turns, and gone out into the hall to get my money. I've gone to
four movies, all in the afternoon. Twice I've ground up money in the kitchen
pig, and thrown my loose change down the storm-drain, hiding what I was doing
behind the blue plastic recycling basket when I put it down on the curb. Once I
went down to News Plus, thinking I'd get a copy of Variations or Forum, but
there was a headline on the front of the Dispatch that took away any sexy
feelings I might have had. POPE DIES OF HEART ATTACK ON PEACE MISSION, it said.

Did I do it? Nah, the story said he died in Asia, and I've been sticking to the
American northwest these last few weeks. But I could have been the one. If I'd
been nosing around in Pakistan last week, I very likely would have been the one.

Two weeks of living in a nightmare.

Then, this morning, there was something in the mail. Not a letter, I've only
gotten three or four of those (all from Pug, and now he's stopped writing, and I
miss him so much), but a Kmart advertising circular. It flopped open just as I
was putting it into the trash, and something fluttered out. A note, printed in
block letters. DO YOU WANT OUT? it read. IF YES, SEND MESSAGE "DON'T STAND SO
CLOSE TO ME" IS BEST POLICE SONG.

My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it did on the day I came into my
house and saw the Rembrandt fake over the sofa where the velvet clowns had been.

Below the message, someone had drawn a louder. It was harmless just sitting
there all by itself, but looking at it still made all the spit in my mouth dry
up. It was a real message, the louder proved it, but who had it come from? And
how did the sender know about me?

I went into the study, walking slowly with my head down, thinking. A message
tucked into an advertising circular. Hand-written and tucked into an advertising
circular. That meant someone close. Someone in town.

I turned on my computer and modem. I called the Columbia City Public Library,
where you can surf cheap ... and in relative anonymity. Anything I sent would go
through TransCorp in Chicago, but that wasn't going to matter. They weren't
going to suspect a thing. Not if I was careful.

And, of course, if there was anybody there.

There was. My computer connected with the library's computer, and a menu flashed
on my screen. For just a moment, something else flashed on my screen, as well.

A smim.

In the lower right-hand corner. Just a flicker.

I sent the message about the best Police song and added a little touch of my own
down in the Dead Folks' Nook: a sankofite.

I could write more -- things have started to happen, and I believe that soon
they'll be happening fast -- but I don't think it would be safe. Up to now, I've
just talked about myself. If I went any further, I'd have to talk about other
people. But there are two more things I want to say.

First, that I'm sorry for what I've done -- even for what I did to Skipper. I'd
take it back if I could. I didn't know what I was doing. I know that's a
piss-poor excuse, but it's the only one I have.

Second, I've got it in mind to write one more special letter ... the most
special of all.

I have Mr. Sharpton's e-mail address. And I have something even better: a memory
of how he stroked his lucky tie as we sat in his big expensive Krautmobile. The
loving way he ran his palm over those silk swords. So, you see, I know just
enough about him. I know just what to add to his letter, how to make it
eventual. I can close my eyes and see one word floating there in the darkness
behind my lids -- floating there like black fire, deadly as an arrow fired into
the brain, and it's the only word that matters:

EXCALIBUR