Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,43

apologize for. I have scuttled around all morning with my lips puckered, afraid to breathe. Swallowed a bag of air. I should have been a pair of ragged claws. What is it the young ones say? Get a grip. Hang on. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

What was it I never said to Josh?

She can see the numbers as they rise. A bustle from the elevator shaft and a loud chatter. They are comfortable already. Wish I had met them earlier, in some coffee shop. But here they are, here they come.

What was it?

—Hello, she says, hello hello hello, Marcia! Jacqueline! Look at you! Come in, oh, I love your shoes, Janet, this way, this way. Gloria! Oh, hi, oh, look, please, come in, it’s lovely to see you.

The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.

—

IT WAS AS IF SHE could travel through the electricity to see him. She could look at any electronic thing—television, radio, Solomon’s shaver—and could find herself there, journeying along the raw voltage. Most of all it was the fridge. She would wake in the middle of the night and wander through the apartment into the kitchen and lean against the freezer. She would open the door then and blast herself with cool. What she liked about it was that the light wouldn’t come on. She could go from warm to cold in an instant and she could remain in the darkness and not wake Solomon. No sound, just a soft plop of the rubber-edged opening, and then a rush of cold over her body, and she could gaze past the wires, the cathodes, the transistors, the hand-set switches, through the ether, and she could see him, all of a sudden she was in the very same room, right beside him, she could reach out and lay her hand on his forearm, console him, where he sat under the fluorescents, amid the long rows of desks and mattresses, working.

She had inklings, intuitions about how it all worked. She was no slouch. She had her degree. But how was it, she wondered, that machines could count the dead better than humans? How was it that the punch cards knew? How did a series of tubes and wires know the difference between the living and the dead?

He sent her letters. He called himself a hacker. It felt like a word to chop down trees. But all it meant was that he programmed the machines. He created the language that tripped the switches. A thousand microscopic gates fell in an instant. She thought of it as opening up a field. One gate led to another, and another, over the hill, and soon he was on a river and away, rafting down the wires. He said that just being at a computer made him so giddy that he felt he was sliding down the banisters, and she wondered what banisters he meant, because there had been no banisters in his childhood, but she accepted it, and she saw him there, in the hills around Saigon, sliding down the banisters toward a concrete basement in a cinder-block building, stepping to his desk, punching the buttons alive. The crisp cursor flicking in front of his eyes. The furrow of his brow. His fierce scan through the printouts. His laughter at a joke as it rippled along the row of desks. The breakthroughs. The breakdowns. The plates of food on the floor. The Rolaids strewn on the desks. The web of wires. The whirl of switches. The purr of fans. It got so hot in the room, he said, that they would have to step out every half an hour. Outside, they kept a water hose to cool down. Back at their consoles they would be dry within seconds. They called each other Mac. Mac this, Mac that. Their favorite word. Machine-aided cognition. Men against computers. Multi-access cognition. Maniacs and clowns. Must ask coyly. Might add colostomy bag.

Everything they did centered around their machines, he said. They divided, linked, nested, chained, deleted. Rerouted switches. Cracked passwords. Changed memory boards. It was a sort of black magic. They knew the inner mysteries of each and every computer. They stayed inside all day. Working with hunches, failures, intangibles. If they needed sleep they just slid in under the desk, too tired to dream.

The Death Hack was his core project. He had to go through the files, key all the names in, add the men up as numbers. Group them, stamp them,