Skeleton Crew (46 page)

He got up, went around to the back of the VDT, and looked through the slots. Yes, it was as Nordhoff had said. Wires stamped RADIO SHACK MADE IN TAIWAN. Wires stamped WESTERN ELECTRIC and WESTREX and ERECTOR SET, with the little circled trademark r. And he saw something else, something Nordhoff had either missed or hadn’t wanted to mention. There was a Lionel Train transformer in there, wired up like the Bride of Frankenstein.

“Christ,” he said, laughing but suddenly near tears. “Christ, Jonny, what did you think you were doing?”

But he knew that, too. He had dreamed and talked about owning a word processor for years, and when Lina’s laughter became too sarcastic to bear, he had talked about it to Jon. “I could write faster, rewrite faster, and submit more,” he remembered telling Jon last summer—the boy had looked at him seriously, his light blue eyes, intelligent but always so carefully wary, magnified behind his glasses. “It would be great ... really great.”

“Then why don’t you get one, Uncle Rich?”

“They don’t exactly give them away,” Richard had said, smiling. “The Radio Shack model starts at around three grand. From there you can work yourself up into the eighteen-thousand-dollar range.”

“Well, maybe I’ll build you one sometime,” Jon had said.

“Maybe you just will,” Richard had said, clapping him on the back. And until Nordhoff had called, he had thought no more about it.

Wires from hobby-shop electrical models.

A Lionel Train transformer.

Christ.

He went around to the front again, meaning to turn it off, as if to actually try to write something on it and fail would somehow defile what his earnest, fragile

(doomed)

nephew had intended.

Instead, he pushed the EXECUTE button on the board. A funny little chill scraped across his spine as he did it-EXECUTE was a funny word to use, when you thought of it. It wasn’t a word he associated with writing; it was a word he associated with gas chambers and electric chairs ... and, perhaps, with dusty old vans plunging off the sides of roads.

EXECUTE.

The CPU was humming louder than any he had ever heard on the occasions when he had window-shopped word processors; it was, in fact, almost roaring.
What’s in the memory-box, Jon? he wondered. Bed springs? Train transformers all in a row? Soup cans?
He thought again of Jon’s eyes, of his still and delicate face. Was it strange, maybe even sick, to be jealous of another man’s son?

But he should have been mine. I knew it ... and I think
he
knew it, too.
And then there was Belinda, Roger’s wife. Belinda who wore sunglasses too often on cloudy days. The big ones, because those bruises around the eyes have a nasty way of spreading. But he looked at her sometimes, sitting there still and watchful in the loud umbrella of Roger’s laughter, and he thought almost the exact same thing:
She should have been mine.

It was a terrifying thought, because they had both known Belinda in high school and had both dated her. He and Roger had been two years apart in age and Belinda had been perfectly between them, a year older than Richard and a year younger than Roger. Richard had actually been the first to date the girl who would grow up to become Jon’s mother. Then Roger had stepped in, Roger who was older and bigger, Roger who always got what he wanted, Roger who would hurt you if you tried to stand in his way.

And if those things were true—if Lina and Seth had somehow belonged with his no-good of a brother and if Belinda and Jon had somehow belonged with him, what did that prove? And exactly how was a thinking person supposed to deal with such an absurdly balanced screw-up? Did you laugh? Did you scream? Did you shoot yourself for a yellow dog?

EXECUTE.

His fingers moved swiftly over the keys. He looked at the screen and saw these letters floating green on the surface of the screen:

MY BROTHER WAS A WORTHLESS DRUNK.

They floated there and Richard suddenly thought of a toy he had had when he was a kid. It was called a Magic Eight-Ball. You asked it a question that could be answered yes or no and then you turned the. Magic Eight-Ball over to see what it had to say on the subject—its phony yet somehow entrancingly mysterious responses included such things as IT IS ALMOST CERTAIN, I WOULD NOT PLAN ON IT, and ASKAGAIN LATER.

Roger had been jealous of that toy, and finally, after bullying Richard into giving it to him one day, Roger had thrown it onto the sidewalk as hard as he could, breaking it. Then he had laughed. Sitting here now, listening to the strangely choppy roar from the CPU cabinet Jon had jury-rigged, Richard remembered how he had collapsed to the sidewalk, weeping, unable to believe his brother had done such a thing.

“
Bawl-
baby,
bawl-baby,
look at the baby
bawl,”
Roger had taunted him. “It wasn’t nothing but a cheap, shitty toy anyway, Richie. Lookit there, nothing in it but a bunch of little signs and a lot of water.”

“I’M TELLING!”
Richard had shrieked at the top of his lungs. His head felt hot. His sinuses were stuffed shut with tears of outrage.
“I’M TELLING ON YOU, ROGER! I’M TELLING MOM!”

“You tell and I’ll break your arm,” Roger said, and in his chilling grin Richard had seen he meant it. He had not told.

MY BROTHER WAS A WORTHLESS DRUNK.

Well, weirdly put together or not, it screen-printed. Whether it would store information in the CPU still remained to be seen, but Jon’s mating of a Wang board to an IBM screen had actually worked. Just coincidentally it called up some pretty crappy memories, but he didn’t suppose that was Jon’s fault.

He looked around his office, and his eyes happened to fix on the one picture in here that he hadn’t picked and didn’t like. It was a studio portrait of Lina, her Christmas present to him two years ago.
I want you to hang it in your study,
she’d said, and so of course he had done just that. It was, he supposed, her way of keeping an eye on him even when she wasn’t here.
Don’t forget me, Richard. I’m here. Maybe I backed the wrong horse, but I’m still here. And you better remember it.

The studio portrait with its unnatural tints went oddly with the amiable mixture of prints by Whistler, Homer, and N. C. Wyeth. Lina’s eyes were half-lidded, the heavy Cupid’s bow of her mouth composed in something that was not quite a smile.
Still here, Richard,
her mouth said to him.
And don’t you forget it.

He typed:

MY WIFE’S PHOTOGRAPH HANGS ON THE WEST WALL OF MY STUDY.

He looked at the words and liked them no more than he liked the picture itself. He punched the DELETE button. The words vanished. Now there was nothing at all on the screen but the steadily pulsing cursor.

He looked up at the wall and saw that his wife’s picture had also vanished.

 

He sat there for a very long time—it felt that way, at least—looking at the wall where the picture had been. What finally brought him out of his daze of utter unbelieving shock was the smell from the CPU—a smell he remembered from his childhood as clearly as he remembered the Magic Eight-Ball Roger had broken because it wasn’t his. The smell was essence of electric train transformer. When you smelled that you were supposed to turn the thing off so it could cool down.

And so he would.

In a minute.

He got up and walked over to the wall on legs which felt numb. He ran his fingers over the Armstrong paneling. The picture had been here, yes,
right here.
But it was gone now, and the hook it had hung on was gone, and there was no hole where he had screwed the hook into the paneling.

Gone.

The world abruptly went gray and he staggered backwards, thinking dimly that he was going to faint. He held on grimly until the world swam back into focus.

He looked from the blank place on the wall where Lina’s picture had been to the word processor his dead nephew had cobbled together.

You might be surprised,
he heard Nordhoff saying in his mind.
You might be surprised, you might be surprised, oh yes, if some kid in the fifties could discover particles that travel backwards through time, you might be surprised what your genius of a nephew could do with a bunch of discarded word processor elements and some wires and electrical components. You might be so surprised that you’ll feel as if you’re
going
insane.

The transformer smell was richer, stronger now, and he could see wisps of smoke rising from the vents in the screen housing. The noise from the CPU was louder, too. It was time to turn it off—smart as Jon had been, he apparently hadn’t had time to work out all the bugs in the crazy thing.

But had he known it would do this?

Feeling like a figment of his own imagination, Richard sat down in front of the screen again and typed:

MY WIFE’S PICTURE IS ON THE WALL.

He looked at this for a moment, looked back at the keyboard, and then hit the EXECUTE key.

He looked at the wall.

Lina’s picture was back, right where it had always been.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

He rubbed a hand up his cheek, looked at the keyboard (blank again now except for the cursor), and then typed:

MY FLOOR IS BARE.

He then touched the INSERT button and typed:

EXCEPT FOR TWELVE TWENTY-DOLLAR GOLD PIECES IN A SMALL COTTON SACK.

He pressed EXECUTE.

He looked at the floor, where there was now a small white cotton sack with a drawstring top. WELLS FARGO was stenciled on the bag in faded black ink.

“Dear Jesus,” he heard himself saying in a voice that wasn’t his. “Dear Jesus, dear good Jesus—”

He might have gone on invoking the Savior’s name for minutes or hours if the word processor had not started beeping at him steadily. Flashing across the top of the screen was the word OVERLOAD.

Richard turned off everything in a hurry and left his study as if all the devils of hell were after him.

But before he went he scooped up the small drawstring sack and put it in his pants pocket.

When he called Nordhoff that evening, a cold November wind was playing tuneless bagpipes in the trees outside. Seth’s group was downstairs, murdering a Bob Seger tune. Lina was out at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, playing bingo.

“Does the machine work?” Nordhoff asked.

“It works, all right,” Richard said. He reached into his pocket and brought out a coin. It was heavy—heavier than a Rolex watch. An eagle’s stern profile was embossed on one side, along with the date 1871. “It works in ways you wouldn’t believe.”

“I might,” Nordhoff said evenly. “He was a very bright boy, and he loved you very much, Mr. Hagstrom. But be careful. A boy is only a boy, bright or otherwise, and love can be misdirected. Do you take my meaning?”

Richard didn’t take his meaning at all. He felt hot and feverish. That day’s paper had listed the current market price of gold at $514 an ounce. The coins had weighed out at an average of 4.5 ounces each on his postal scale. At the current market rate that added up to $27,756. And he guessed that was perhaps only a quarter of what he could realize for those coins if he sold them as coins.

“Mr. Nordhoff, could you come over here? Now? Tonight?”

“No,” Nordhoff said. “No, I don’t think I want to do that, Mr. Hagstrom. I think this ought to stay between you and Jon.”

“But—”

“Just remember what I said. For Christ’s sake, be careful. ”There was a small click and Nordhoff was gone.

 

He found himself out in his study again half an hour later, looking at the word processor. He touched the ON/OFF key but didn’t turn it on just yet. The second time Nordhoff said it, Richard had heard it.
For Christ’s sake, be careful.
Yes. He would have to be careful. A machine that could do such a thing—

How
could
a machine do such a thing?

He had no idea ... but in a way, that made the whole crazy thing easier to accept. He was an English teacher and sometime writer, not a technician, and he had a long history of not understanding how things worked: phonographs, gasoline engines, telephones, televisions, the flushing mechanism in his toilet. His life had been a history of understanding operations rather than principles. Was there any difference here, except in degree?