A Moment of Doubt Read online

you would see HELLO’s question on your screen

  What is your name?

  but you would still have to type the reply,

  Fame and Fortune

  forcing the machine to salute obsequiously:

  Hi, Fame and Fortune!

  Warm Boot

  AØ>

  XSUB, however, allows the user to preselect keyboard input, in this case ‘Fame and Fortune’, so that if you want to set things going and just watch, so-called ‘green-screen voyeurism’, a common malady among graphics freaks, just type

  AØ>SUBMIT HELLO

  which goes looking for HELLO.SUB, and finding it, shows you

  Warm Boot

  AØ>XSUB

  AØ>HELLO

  What is your name?

  Fame and Fortune

  Hi, Fame and Fortune!

  (xsub active) . . .

  Warm Boot

  AØ>

  in its entirety, no further input needed. Moreover, short of unplugging the machine, it can be diffcult to interrupt or interdict XSUB once it’s been set going. Notice the parenthetic reminder concerning who’s in charge. Is it insidious yet?

  If there were a second command, or further keyboard input applicable to the HELLO.COM routine, the SUBMIT program, after printing the parenthetic reminder, would run until all had been completed. After each completed program, the prompt (xsub active) or (xsub still active) comes up on the screen. There are many file functions, file manipulations and other matters that need never send information to the screen. And, of course, if whatever it is you’re doing precludes any interest you have in seeing its various functions output to the screen, you can just rewrite the BIOS calls accordingly, so that when programs are running, the operator, or the person watching the screen, need never be the wiser. This is particularly true for a large machine, whose video terminals wouldn’t want to get completely tied up by such a simple little thing as, say, publishing a book. Like the machine at Crow Mignon.

  Finally, take a look at this.

  :100100000E09112D01CD05000E0A114601CD050085

  :100110002146013620235E3620160023193621237E

  :1001200036240E09114101CD0500C3000057686156

  :100130007420697320796F7572206E616D653F2040

  :07014000240D0A48692C415F

  :0000000000

  That’s the entire HELLO.ASM routine assembled into hexadecimal format, one step closer to what the computer actually reads when you implement the command HELLO. Tiny, isn’t it? It’s an ant on the elephant of memory. You could hide something that size almost anywhere, let alone in the vast memory of a big machine; like, say, in the machine at Crow Mignon Books . . . .

  And you know what it comes down to? A modest series of intermittent beeps and whistles, a little white noise, in the audio background of a little session with Ms. Michelov. That’s all. Then the same between Crow Mignon’s computer and Pre-Eminent’s, a little more tweeting between the latter and various distributors, and between those and the retailers . . . Next thing you know the book’s been remaindered . . . Little chapters sneaking along the phone lines, one computer to another . . . nobody ever had the slimmest idea . . . It sounded like the distant calls of a sheepherder, enthusiastically encouraging his flock to get home before dark . . . Yes, almost bucolic . . . In the thick crepuscular light you can hear the bells on the rams, far down the arroyo, and smell the piquance of burning mesquite and scalded coffee, and there goes a straggle of ravens, chuckling themselves home to roost, they own a chain of bookstores . . . .

  Is it insidious yet?

  FIVE

  I couldn’t take it any more and left the house. Marlene provocatively straddled the long chromium wand of her vacuum cleaner as I squeezed past her on the narrow landing. She wore a summery lavender house dress with large yellow bougainvilleas on it, its loose bodice caught at the waist between her breasts and hips by a broad elastic woven into the material, and suspended from her shoulders by a couple of slim ribbons that left most of her back exposed. “Excuse me,” I said, over the roar of the vacuum cleaner. She looked at me dreamily and placed her lips very close to my ear, pressing the vibrating hose between us. “What,” she breathed into my ear, completely in symphony with the roar, “I can’t hear you . . .” Her hands slid down my shoulders to my hips. She wore no shoes, certainly she wouldn’t wear anything under the lavender and yellow dress. Even as my resolve began to disinte-grate I muttered something to the effect that I must take the air. Marlene smiled and turned her back on me. As she leaned into her work her buttocks brushed my pelvis. I was pressed between these and the wall as she moved the vacuum hose from side to side over the ancient hall carpet. My hand involuntarily strayed up the thin Dacron over the vertebrae of her spine, and onto the naked field beyond. My fingers plowed into the luxuriant tangle of hair at the nape of her neck, her hair was reddish blonde, but a tail of pure gold lay hidden there, I knew, beneath the strawberry curls and just above the hollow at the base of her neck, it flashed at me as I combed her hair with my fingers. She turned her head from side to side, against my palm. Much woman, Marlene O’Shaughnesy, this marvelous landlady, I thought to myself, but I must take the air, and I pushed her gently forward, stepped toward the stairs, and released her. She rocked gently backwards against the wainscot and bounced back into her work, humming “The Long and Winding Road.”

  On the street the sun shone brightly, and a cool breeze with a tang of salt on it blew briskly from the west. Marlene’s house was an immaculate Victorian facing the south side of Alta Plaza Park, a block off Fillmore Street, in a neighborhood full of immaculate Victorians so expensive as to virtually assure that each contained a two-income executive couple or a bordello of international reputation. As I approached the steps that rose from the sidewalk north into the park, a lemon yellow two-seat Mercedes convertible pulled into a driveway across from me, and a woman in a uniform dating from the reign of Victoria herself, rather like a maid’s costume, a black satin camisole, trimmed with scarlet piping, black stockings, loosely wrapped withal by a white fur stole, exited the vehicle, leaving the top down and slamming the door. She precisely crushed a cigarette beneath the sole of her ebony high heel pump, carefully sectioned and draped the length of her impeccably groomed platinum blonde hair, so that three-fourths of it cascaded over her shoulders down to the middle of her back, the other one fourth over her ample bosom beneath the stole, and tripped purposefully up the steps of a lovely house, also facing the park, not four doors down from Marlene’s, and let herself in with her own key.

  Pausing at the top of the concrete steps, fifty yards up the hill and into the park, I turned and scanned the automobiles parked along the block I call home. Behind me, children squealed with delight as their maids, au pairs , tutors, and rarely a mother or two pushed them in chain swings with canvas seats. The A-frame swing-sets, rusty from years in the salt air, squeaked loudly in a half-acre sandbox in the middle of the fenced-off kiddie park, beneath a tall grove of eucalyptuses that rattled and swayed in the afternoon westerly.

  After awhile I spotted him, asleep in a four year old Plymouth parked across the street a few doors down from the house with the Mercedes in its driveway. All the signs were there. Sections of the Chronicle, the green sports page well-read and on top, piled on the dashboard, along with a digital clock, sandwich wrappers and several white styrofoam cups—deli food and coffee. The car was a mess inside, but not too dirty outside, according to the recent rains and the caliber of the neighborhood. But parking places were very difficult to find here, undoubtedly the vanguard of the detail had spent most of their shift lurking around waiting for someone to vacate a space, and not just any space. So, once they’d scored a good one, they would rotate shifts but not cars, let alone parking places. At this point, any number of cops had sat in that old Plymouth, watching their quarry down the street. By now, the inside of the car would smell like a bus station bathroom. The ashtray would be filled to overflowing with butts and gumwrappers. Coffee would have been spilled on the floors a
nd seatcovers. The odors of mustard, chilidogs, onions, farts, cigars and cigarettes, newsprint, fried electronics would have mixed with the disgusting native odor of Plymouth upholstery to the extent that only a man who had been in there already for seven or eight hours could stand it, by virtue of being used to it. And there he was, behind the wheel, Martin Windrow himself. Unshaven, tie knot loosened, collar unbut-toned, head thrown back against the seat, sound asleep. His coat was thrown open, and you could see the ugly checkered grip of his pistol sticking out from under his arm against the white of his shirt. Any kid with time on his hands might have reached in the open window and blown out the guy’s brains with his own gun. His snoring mouth looked like the final hole in the final game of the U.S. Open. It’s a good thing for him there are no flies in California. Asleep on the job,

  . . . and who can blame him. Only a novice or a dedicated man can stand to stay awake on a boring and repetitive stakeout. It’s very cozy in a Plymouth in the sun on the lee side of the park, and a man gets tired of keeping a close eye on something he’d either rather fuck or try not to think about . . .

  Actually, Windrow drives a Toyota. Or did, until it was destroyed in an ass-kicking car chase in Ulysses’s Dog . Then he switched to a red ’64 Ford Fairlane V-8, a classic.

  But a disconcerting thought came to me as I stood there in the breeze, and a sudden chill racked my frame. The hookers had been in the neighborhood for a long time. Why had they not been busted before? Maybe they had. Perhaps I’d not heard about it. They were good neighbors, too. They belonged to the neighborhood association, which had gotten some trees planted along the sidewalks in front of our houses, and successfully fought against a liquor license being issued to a man who wanted to open a fern bar down on the corner. The hookers gave lots of quality candy to the local kids on Halloween, nary a razor-bladed bonbon or PCP-laced sucker in the lot. They caroled the eight blocks forming the square around the park every Christmas with members of the Episcopal choir, but otherwise never made too much noise or had to have the cops come tell them to turn down their stereo. They had tastefully if gaily painted their house just a couple of years ago, gave a fifth of cognac to the mailman and a case of beer to the garbagemen every New Year. They had even caught a cat burglar breaking into the house next door to them. The hookers were, by anyone’s standard, decent neighbors. One might go so far as to speculate that the neighborhood would rise up in arms, were the girls to get busted, but one also suspects the hypocrisy of one’s neighbors. Besides, hookers break the law.

  And the thought that chilled me, as I stood there in the wind, was: of course, they’re not the only ones around here breaking the law. Are they. Nope.

  At that precise moment, the cop in the Plymouth, whom I no longer was sure was in the vice squad, stirred in his sleep. A long arm stretched out of the window on the driver’s side, shooting its cuff, bent double, and presented the wrist with the watch back into the window for the inspection of the awakened sleeper. And I jumped a foot, a queer little hop, which reversed my direction and launched me into the walk I’d intended from the beginning, which rapidly took me through the eucalyptus grove teeming with squealing children, and its benches lined with watchful women. It seemed to me then that the penalties pertaining to computer fraud were much stiffer than the ones applied to prostitution. And rightly so, I mused, as I circled past the hedges beyond which soft, periodic thwops betrayed the presence of tennis courts. Though not as noble an enterprise, computer crime is a much loftier offense to the public good than mere prostitution. And incredibly enough, this was the first time, since the very beginning of my endeavors, that the potential illegality of BOOK.SUB had so much as crossed my mind. So involved had I become in the theory of its enactment, the creation of the books necessary to test and employ it, the intricacies of the routine itself, the telephone networks interdicted by it, the computer knowledge I had necessarily gained to implement it, that, no one will ever believe you Jas, but so thoroughly had my mind taken up the project that the specter of prison as a reward only now presented itself.

  A helicopter abruptly exploded over the rooftops of the houses to the east of the park, banked sharply not 500 feet overhead, and blasted south toward the Western Addition. Though such an intrusion is not uncommon in any city, I was momentarily terrified. Hardly anyone else strolling in park paid it any notice. But as my fear subsided, the question remained. Who, exactly, were those policemen in my neighborhood watching? Me? Or someone else? Were they vice or were they bunko?

  Phrasing the question that way had a certain pleasing ring to it and I repeated it to myself as I continued to walk, are they vice or are they bunko, are they vice or are they bunko . . . And then I asked myself, what the fuck is bunko? We all know what vice is, we appreciate many forms of vice, but bunko, bunko, what is this bunko, and, is BOOK.SUB bunko?

  “Bunko, you slime,” Martin Windrow intoned evenly, “is to con, to swindle. It’s what scum like you do to little old ladies with pension funds who don’t know any better than to sign them over to the first scumbag that walks in the door and asks for it. It’s like fraud, only a lesser crime, maybe involving lesser funds, and, since it’s such an innocuous thing to be doing with your time, that scumbags like you like to jazz it up by raping, bludgeoning, and slicing into the bargain, so as to get a little press, so you know by reading your name in the newspaper you’re alive, on account of the fact that you’re dead inside. Putrifacted. Gone. Just a bag of scum with a sap in his pocket and a couple of big ideas he got when his father locked him in a closet in a hotel room in 1962. You carry these ideas around in that receptacle tip up on top there you call a head. But you don’t want to be engaging on any of these one or two ideas with anybody that might offer a difference of opinion you might not be able to handle. So you do a couple of dry runs on little old ladies, ideally in wheelchairs and blind, that you can say to yourself are practically dead anyway, and if they can’t take the little punishment you have to dish out to them to make them cough up the mortgage or their savings passbook or a sock stuffed with 252 dollars in ones and fives and loose change, why then they deserve to die, if they can’t take a little taste of the sap . . . .” Windrow looked from the one hoodlum to the other, lurking in the shadows outside the yellow cone thrown by the dirty lamp on the bedstead. “But those little old victims are nowhere near as dead as you guys, nowhere near it. They got kids and grandkids, they had husbands and lovers, mothers and fathers, that cared for them and that they took care of and that took care of them. They saw World War II, they heard Martin Luther King speak, they gave to the United Way and to the Salvation Army, they saved somebody’s kid from drowning in a frozen lake. And when they got old, and alone, when everybody was dead or gone off raising their own kids or too busy or too crazy and fucking up and forgetting who they are and where they come from, and they leave their old ones alone a little too much for whatever reason, but alone just long enough for buzzards like you to find them, to torture them and strip them and kill them and even rape them. That’s when . . . That’s when . . .” A zebra of yellow light streaked across Windrow’s vision and his voice failed him, he nearly lost consciousness again. His head lolled onto his shoulder and he drooled on himself. The light from the lamp hurt his eyes.

  “Yeah?” said a shadow to his right. “Yeah, Windrow? Keep going, Windrow, this is interesting.”

  “Yeah,” Windrow whispered, “yeah. That’s when a little felony, a big bunko, becomes . . . becomes . . .”

  “Becomes . . . ?” the other voice coaxed.

  “. . . Becomes interesting, becomes capital crime, murder, and if you get caught, when you get caught . . . .”

  The other man laughed quietly. “When I get caught.”

  “You burn.”

  “I burn.”

  “B . . . b . . .” Windrow couldn’t talk any more.

  The shadow approached him. “Well that’s fine, Windrow. That’s just fine. You through now? You got anything else to tell me about my career?”


  “F . . . f . . . fuck . . . y-y . . .”

  “I thought so,” said the voice, and the blackjack came down on Windrow’s mind.

  There’s a porn theater on Chestnut St. where I like to go to think. It’s a nice joint, as such joints go, maybe too nice, depends on your taste, but by that I mean there’s nobody in the place offering to blow you in the dark, distracting you from your train of thought long enough to tell them yes or no, thank you. It’s the kind of place straight couples go in and out of holding hands. Some of them are shy, some smiling, some furtive; they’re cute to watch. And the films are mindless enough, so they don’t distract you, either. Once in awhile you see something that’s very funny, or very stupid, and very occasionally, rarely, something that’s horny. But those are the exceptions. Usually the sounds are the same, the visuals are the same, the people are the same. Production values have improved over the years, it’s true. These days you see fewer pimples on the untanned body parts, competent follow-focus, and less of the really disgusting mistakes people can make while they’re trying to do outrageous sexual stunts in front of a camera. But by and large there’s nothing to distract you, you can just sit there and think, with popcorn if you want, the wall of mindlessness flickering up there like a big hearth in a dark library, so that, even if you were paying attention the absurdity of it all would dawn on you eventually. I mean, in the close-ups the dicks are fifteen feet tall, and the vaginas are automobile-sized portals to other worlds . . . . Well maybe there’s something to consider in there . . . . But like a beach or a church it’s a good place to think . . . .

  This day was no different than any other. There are little incongruities I like about the location. Chestnut St. is a ‘nice’ neighborhood. There’s a flower shop down the street, an old Italian market, a couple of banks, a fair newsstand full of magazines and newspapers with cigars and of course Amber Twilight books mixed in with the pornography in the back. There are several well-known restaurants and fern-type bars, another, straight, movie theater, liquor stores, respectable town houses and apartment buildings. Amongst it all is this pornographic theater. Usually such things keep to their own neighborhoods, in San Francisco these would be the Tenderloin and North Beach, maybe the Financial District, period. Nowhere else, particularly an upstanding neighborhood featuring mothers strolling their babies, merchants sweeping their sidewalks, a store across the street specializing in jogging equipage . But the anomaly persists. Pay six bucks at the turnstile. Get some popcorn, if you like, above a glass countertop full of fleshly videotapes, condoms, and small tubes of ruby lubricants. Pass through a spanking clean lobby, paved in no-longer-obtainable linoleum. Enter through swinging brushed stainless-steel doors with portholes in them. Try not to trip over masturbators as you find a relatively isolated corner in the dark to relax in, an area—volume, really—whose neutrality will at first seep into your brain and cool it off , filling it with nothingness, before, rested, the mind begins to push its boundaries outward again, and fill not only your head but a territory several seats in diameter with its thrash and conflict and ideas, like the shavings and dust piled up behind a radial arm saw. There’re never too many people in the place, especially in the middle of a sunny afternoon, when it’s so bright outside that it takes a customer’s eyes a full five minutes to adjust to the total darkness of the theater. So you lean against the high rail between the entrance and the seats, eating popcorn, studying the seating arrangements by the light bouncing off the creamy thighs up on the screen. When you find an area without too many heads slouched down in the seats, or none, you then figure a way to get to it without having to step over another patron, so as not to interrupt any jerking off , or disturb his or her—a lot of women come with their men to this theater, the films are rigidly heterosexual— private whatever. Or, hell, for all I know, everybody in the place is in there mainly to think, to escape into a vacuum from everything else, like me. After all, anybody in San Francisco who wants real pornography can settle for a lot more than just a movie.