Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,94
goes dead. I look up, and Gareth and Compton are staring at me.
—Toodle-pips, roars Gareth. Get a load of that! He’s poised!
—Shut up, man.
—That’s fortuitous!
—Shut up, asswipe.
—Touchy, touchy.
—Someone fell, says Compton with a grin.
—I was just messing with her. I was just fooling.
—Toodle-pips!
—Can I get your number, please?!
—Shut your mouth.
—Hey. The Kid gets angry.
I step over to the phone and hit the enter key on the keyboard again, but it just rings and rings and rings. Compton’s got this strange look on his face, like he’s never seen me before, like I’m some sort of brand-new guy, but I don’t care. I dial again: it just keeps ringing. I can see Sable, in my mind’s eye, walking away, down the street, up into the World Trade Center towers, to the fifty-ninth floor, all woodwork and file cabinets, saying hello to the lawyers, settling down at her desk, putting a pencil behind her ear.
—What was the name of that law firm again?
—Toodle-pips, says Gareth.
—Forget about it, man, says Dennis.
He’s standing there in his T-shirt, hair all askew.
—She ain’t coming back, says Compton.
—What makes you so sure?
—Women’s intuition, he says with a giggle.
—We got to work on that patch, says Dennis. Up and at it.
—Not me, says Compton. I’m going home. I haven’t slept in years.
—Sam? How about you?
It’s the Pentagon program he’s talking about. We’ve signed a secrecy agreement. It’s an easy enough thing to do. Any kid could do it. That’s what I’m thinking. You just use the radar program, key in the gravitational pull, maybe use some rotation differentials, and you can find out where any missile will land.
—Kid?
When there’s a lot of computers going all at once, the place hums. It’s more than white noise. It’s the sort of hum that makes you feel that you’re the actual ground lying under the sky, a blue hum that’s all above and around you, but if you think about it too hard it will get too loud or big, and make you feel no more than just a speck. You’re sealed in by it, the wires, the piping, the electrons moving, but nothing really moving, nothing at all.
I go to the window. It’s a basement window that doesn’t get any light. That’s one thing I don’t understand, windows in basements—why would anyone put a window in a basement? Once I tried to open it, but it doesn’t move.
I bet the sun is coming up outside.
—Toodle-pips! says Gareth.
I want to go across the room and hit him, a punch, a real punch, something that’ll really hurt him, but I don’t.
I settle down at the console, hit Escape, then the N key, then the Y key, leave the blue-box hack. No more phreaking today. I open up the graphics program, use my password. SAMUS17. We’ve been working six months on it, but the Pentagon’s been developing it for years. If there comes another war, they’ll be using this hack, that’s for sure.
I turn to Dennis. He’s already hunched over his console.
The program boots. I can hear it clicking.
There’s a high that you get when you’re writing code. It’s cool. It’s easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You’ve got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It’s about being connected, access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing wrong you’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning.
THIS IS THE HOUSE THAT HORSE BUILT
THEY DIDN’T LET ME GO to Corrigan’s funeral. I woulda walked the bakery line to get there. They put me back in the pen instead. I weren’t crying. I laid straight out on the bench with my hand over my eyes.
—
I saw my rap sheet, it’s yellow with fifty-four entries. Typed up not so neat. You see your life with carbon copies. Kept in a file. Hunts Point, Lex and Forty-ninth, West Side Highway, all the way back to Cleveland. Loitering. Prostitution offense. Class A misdemeanor. Criminal possesion controlled substance 7th degree. Criminel trespass 2nd degree. Criminal posession narcotic drug, Class E felony. Prostitution solicitation, Class A, Misdemeaner Degree 0.
The cops musta got a D in spelling.
The ones in the Bronx write worse than anyone. They get an F in everything except pulling us up on our prop’rties.
—
Tillie Henderson alias Miss Bliss alias Puzzle alias Rosa P. alias Sweet-Cakes.