The Tragic Age (9 page)

When Mr. Taylor opens the bedroom door, he sees nothing. Five minutes later he and Mrs. Taylor are unpacking. Mrs. Taylor opens the closet to put clothes away. She gasps in fright. I'm standing there hiding behind her designer clothes. They reek of Mrs. Taylor's perfume. Mrs. Taylor looks puzzled.

“Billy?” she says.

Of course, this doesn't happen. This would be embarrassing.

“Fear,” warns the Taylors' dachshund, “makes an animal capable of anything.”

I move to the bureau. I open the drawer as quietly as I can but still it creaks. Out in the hall it's suddenly silent.

“Is someone here?” I hear Mrs. Taylor say.

“Shhh,” says Mr. Taylor.

“Maybe we should call the police,” says Mrs. Taylor.

“Be quiet,” says Mr. Taylor.

I reach into the bureau drawer for the gun. I can see it all so clearly. Mr. Taylor is opening the door to his son's bedroom. Robby Taylor is a senior at UC Santa Barbara majoring in drinking and is an asshole. Mr. Taylor grabs a baseball bat and turns back into the hallway.

“Tom, just call the police—”

Holding the gun now, I turn toward the closed bedroom door.

“Anything,” repeats the Taylors' dachshund.

Mrs. Taylor screams as Mr. Taylor throws open the bedroom door and, bat raised, comes running in. I shoot him in the face. The gun is deafening. Blood and brains spatter the wall. Mrs. Taylor screams again. And then with a shock, she realizes it's me.

“Billy?” she says.

I blow Mrs. Taylor away.

Of course, this doesn't happen. This is a youthful imagination twisted and distorted by the soulless idiocy that is movies and television.

The Taylors' dachshund sighs with impatience. “With no place to run and no place to hide,” it says, “an animal freezes and hopes for the best.”

I'm just standing there when Mr. Taylor opens the door, charges in and, screaming, brains me with the baseball bat. I hit the floor like a sack of grain. I lie there. I can feel blood beginning to pool beneath my head. I'm vaguely aware of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor looking down at me.

“Billy?” says Mrs. Taylor.

Fortunately another option presented itself.

“Tom!” screams a terrified Mrs. Taylor as Mr. Taylor comes rushing in with nothing in his hands. He stops in surprise. Mrs. Taylor sticks her head into the room, behind him.

I'm holding the dachshund in my arms. The gun is in the bureau drawer. I'm trying to look as if I have no idea what's going on.

“Billy?” says Mrs. Taylor.

“Hi. You're home,” I say. “I came over to feed, y'know,
the dog
?”

Twenty minutes later, I'm back at my house, sitting at the kitchen table, a bowl of cold cereal in front of me. Far from being suspicious, the Taylors have been ridiculously grateful. Mr. Taylor has even given me twenty bucks “to say thanks.” I should probably have told him that there was a time when neighbors did things for one another for free, that it never occurred to them that they were going to get rewarded for helping out, that everyone was in it together and that they had to be to survive. But frankly, I wasn't around at that time so I took the money.

“Billy?”

Somewhere someone is talking.

“Billy!”

I look up. The someone is Mom.

“Huh?” I say.

“I said, did you have a good time last night?”

For a moment I think she's talking about the Taylors.

“What do you mean?”

“Gretchen,” Mom says. “Did you have a nice time with Gretchen?”

Oh.

“It was okay,” I say. “We went to the movies.”

“Has she changed much?” says Mom.

“She's older,” I say.

“Well, I know that,” says Mom.

“She's still nice,” I say.

“I'm sure she's lovely,” Mom says.

Suddenly, and I'm not sure she even knows it, Mom looks sad and faraway. It suddenly makes me wonder if she has dreams of Dorie too. Mom catches herself. She tries to make herself look happy. She's not as good at it as I am.

“You'll have to have her come over sometime.”

“Sure,” I say.

I finish my cereal, hardly tasting. I'm thinking about last night. I'm thinking about this morning. I'm thinking I'm not sure if there is a word that adequately describes what sleep is to an insomniac. Release? Relief? Liberation? Mostly I'm thinking it might be time to go a little outlaw.

 

23

When Gretchen comes out of her first period class, I pretend I'm not there waiting for her. I just
happen
to be there as if studying strange linoleum is something I do on a daily if not hourly basis. Gretchen, of course, is talking to other girls. Girls always are talking to other girls. When she sees me, though, Gretchen stops and comes right over. She seems happy to see me. Which is pretty great because frankly I'm so glad to see her it's all I can do not to roll over on my back and pee on my belly like the Taylors' dachshund.

“Hey,” Gretchen says.

“Hey.”

We're both scintillating conversationalists.

“I thought you were going to call.”

“You know how I don't have a driver's license?” I say. “Well, I don't have a phone either.”

“Maybe you ought to do something about that,” says Gretchen. Which is also pretty great because what she's saying is if I had a phone and I called her, yes, she'd answer every time.

I'm starting to feel a little calmer.

“I thought I could walk with you to class or something,” I say. Because we're just standing there.

“Okay,” Gretchen says, and we turn and walk.

All of about twenty-five feet.

“Well, here we are,” says Gretchen, stopping.

“Whoa. Pretty convenient,” I say. Which it is but not necessarily for me. We stand there for a moment, not really looking at one another. It feels like everyone who passes is staring at us. It's not a feeling I'm entirely crazy about.

“I was thinking we could hang out together again,” I say. Actually I don't say it, I just sort of breathlessly blurt it.
“Iwasthinkingwecouldhangouttogetheragain.”

“I'd love to,” says Gretchen. Which, when you get right down to it, is really the perfect thing to say.

“What do you like to do?” I say.

“Anything,” Gretchen says.

“That makes it easy.” Gretchen giggles and all of a sudden I'm feeling sort of confident. It's a nice feeling and I'm almost getting ready to trust nice feelings. But then it all goes very bad.

“Hey! Hey, Quinn! Yo! G. Quinn!”

Gretchen and I both turn. Across the hall, John Montebello and his jock posse are passing, pushing through the crush like a herd of muscle-bound primates. Montebello, looking enormously entertained, is leering at us.

Correction. At me.

“Careful, it might be contagious!”

John Montebello twists his face and puffs out his right cheek. He begins to walk like a zombie as if his head weighs too much for his body to carry. His buddies, as usual, find him hysterical.

Har-har! Har-de-har-har!

The port-wine hemangioma on my face flares so hot my eyes seem to melt. The hallway is suddenly a blur and my ears are filled with laughter and noises that sound like static. “Leave him alone,” a voice somewhere says. I turn and walk. There are people coming at me as if through a fish-eye lens. I have to push around their wide, distorted bodies and between their bulging faces. I have to force myself not to run. When someone grabs at my shoulder, I spin, raising a fist, ready to swing.

Gretchen flinches and backs away a step. The lens snaps back to normal. I can hear again. I drop my hands.

“Are you okay?” Gretchen asks. She's breathing hard. She sounds concerned. It might have been her voice I heard.

“Fine,” I say. “Why?” My voice is under control. I'm glad it is. “I gotta get to class, is all.”

“We are going to do something, right?”

“Yeah. Sure. We'll figure it out.”

“Okay.” Gretchen seems to be waiting for me to say something else but I don't.

“Well…” she finally says, “okay, see you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Great.”

Gretchen turns and walks toward her classroom. It occurs to me she might look back and so I spin away and move down the hall. I go to the boy's lavatory on the other side of the school. I go into a toilet stall and lock the door behind me. I don't come out until sometime after lunch.

I solidify my plans.

 

24

Ephraim's bedroom is a filthy mess of comic books, discarded clothes, DVDs, video game posters, potato chip bags, soda cans, and on a table against the wall, computers in various stages of disrepair. The smell of sweat, mold, unwashed sheets, and pimple cream is even worse.

On Ephraim's Dumpster of a worktable is a CyberPower PC Black Pearl computer which comes with two graphic cards; a six core, 12thread chip processor; six gigabytes of RAM; and an 80GB memory board. All told, it costs over four thousand bucks and is the only clean-looking thing in the room.

I've given Ephraim a copy of the local newspaper and explained to him what I want him to do. Thrilled to be of use, Ephraim gets right to work.

Fact.

The first invented computer was called an automatic sequence calculator. It was fifty feet long. It weighed five tons. In 1969, UCLA and Stanford linked computers, creating the first information highway. Almost immediately the first hackers appeared at MIT.

Ephraim is what's known as a green hat. This means he sits in the middle of the modern hacking community somewhere between the black hats who are cybercriminals searching for flaws, glitches, and zero-day vulnerabilities in software and computer networks, and the white hats who are the so-called security experts trying to stop them. It's yet to be determined which direction Ephraim will go. Either way he's going to make a lot of money. United States of Nerd, on the planet Geek.

Sidebar.

Computer engineers and futurists now predict that the event known as the singularity will happen around the year 2036. This is the moment when the intelligence of a single computer will surpass the collective knowledge of all of mankind. It is seen as an
event horizon,
which means no one has any real idea what will happen
after
. It could be Terminator Time. Rise of the Machines. Or it could be the dawning of a brand-new age. As the computers continue to get smarter and smarter, in order to be compatible with them, mankind will choose to merge with them. We'll insert little pea-sized computers into our brains and microscopic machines into our bloodstream to repair our bodies and fight disease. Deus ex machina. God from a machine. We will know everything. We will feel nothing.

Just another thing to look forward to.

The Singularity, of course, is contingent on whether or not the computers don't wake up, take a pixilated look around, and quickly self-destruct in mass horror.

I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at a movie poster of the naked Queen of Sparta telling me
I will not enjoy this
, when Ephraim slams the table in excitement. “Backdoor! I'm in!” he says. He spits the air in disgust. “Puh! Their security isn't even security.” He's all smiles. It's taken him all of about a minute and a half. “So what'll it be? Names, addresses, account status? You want it, we got it.”

Thirty minutes later sirens are screaming as a fire engine descends on a home one hundred yards up the street from the Landgraf house. Police cars and home security vehicles already line the curb. An hysterical Mexican maid is trying to explain herself to a crowd of distrustful cops.

“
No ladrones! No es un fuego!
No fire!
La alarma no funciona!
Crazy—
loca
!”

Ephraim and I are sitting on the stone wall in front of his driveway watching. Call it a trial run. To prove he can do it, Ephraim has hacked into his neighbor's home security company's database. From there he's burrowed his way into the neighbor's security system where he's activated every alarm in the house. Even I have to admit the results have been both educational and entertaining.

“Told you,” says Ephraim, proud of himself.

I'm equally proud of him and have no reason to hide it. I hold out my hand, palm up and open.

“This is between you and me,” I say.

Looking excited beyond words, Ephraim taps my open palm with his fist.

“Totally.”

 

25

“I'm goeing 2.”

It's written in bold letters on the page of an open spiral notebook.

It's mid-week, late morning, third period English, and Twom, Ephraim, and I are sitting at desks in the back of the classroom. In the front of the room the teacher, Mrs. Soriano, she of the Brillo-pad hair and the hips like a yardstick, is lecturing on the subject of
Beowulf.

Point of reference.

Beowulf
is an epic poem that was written on something other than paper sometime around the eighth century. It is considered one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature and is, needless to say, even more brain paralyzing and irrelevant than Hammurabi.

“Grendel isn't just the enemy, he's a personification of
evil,
” Mrs. Soriano says. “He's a
fiend
out of hell,
lusting
for
flesh,
working
evil
in the world.” Mrs. Soriano isn't so much talking to the class as she is breathlessly talking to herself. Her eyes are glassy and she keeps licking her lips. It's like she'd like to have sex with Grendel. Or maybe Beowulf. Or maybe a threesome with both.

I turn to a fresh, clean, lined page in the spiral notebook, scribble a message and show it to Ephraim.