needed. This was, very possibly, the coolest book she had ever seen. And certainly not anything Charlie would be able to appreciate, especially in his current state of heightened neurosis. She slipped the book into her backpack, then tore the note and the envelope into tiny pieces and buried them at the bottom of the wastebasket.
Chapter 4
4
THE BETA MALE IN HIS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
Jane," said Charlie, "I am convinced by the events of the last few weeks that nefarious forces or people - unidentified but no less real - are threatening life as we know it, and in fact, may be bent on unraveling the very fabric of our existence."
"And that's why I have to eat yellow mustard?" Jane was sitting at Charlie's breakfast counter eating Little Smokies cocktail sausages out of the package, dipping them in a ramekin of French's yellow. Baby Sophie was sitting on the counter in her car-seat/bassinet/imperial-storm-trooper-helmet thingy.
Charlie paced the kitchen, marking off his evidentiary points in the air with a sausage as he went. "First, there was the guy in Rachel's room that mysteriously disappeared from the security tapes."
"Because he was never there. Look, Sophie likes yellow mustard like you."
"Second," Charlie continued, despite his sister's persistent indifference, "all the stuff in the shop was glowing like it was radioactive. Don't put that in her mouth."
"Oh my God, Charlie, Sophie's straight. Look at her go after that Lil' Smokie."
"And third, that Creek guy, got hit by a bus up on Columbus yesterday, I knew his name and he had an umbrella that was glowing red."
"I'm so disappointed," said Jane. "I was looking forward to raising her on the all-girls team - giving her the advantages I never had, but look at her work that sausage. This kid is a natural."
"Get that out of her mouth!"
"Relax, she can't eat it. She doesn't even have teeth. And it's not like there's a moaning Teletubby on the other end of it. Oh, jeez, it's going to take major tequila to get that picture out of my head."
"She can't have pork, Jane. She's Jewish! Are you trying to turn my daughter into a shiksa?"
Jane snatched the cocktail sausage out of Sophie's mouth, and examined it, even as the fiber-optic strand of drool stayed connected to the tiny kid. "I don't think I can eat these things ever again," Jane said. "They'll always conjure visions of my niece blowing a terry-cloth puppet person."
"Jane!" Charlie grabbed the sausage from her and flung it into the sink.
"What?!"
"Are you listening at all?"
"Yes, yes, you saw some guy get hit by a bus so your fabric is unraveling. So?"
"So, someone is fucking with me?"
"And why is that news, Charlie? You've thought someone was fucking with you since you were eight."
"They have been. Probably. But this time it's real. It could be real."
"Hey, these are all-beef Lil' Smokies. Sophie's not a shikster after all."
"Shiksa!"
"Whatever."
"Jane, you're not helping with my problem."
"What problem? You have a problem?"
Charlie's problem was that the trailing edge of his Beta Male imagination was digging at him like bamboo splinters under the fingernails. While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes - size, strength, speed, good looks - selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastodons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an angry, woolly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows. When Alpha Males set out to conquer neighboring tribes, to count coups and take heads, Beta Males could see in advance that in the event of a victory, the influx of female slaves was going to leave a surplus of mateless women cast out for younger trophy models, with nothing to do but salt down the heads and file the uncounted coups, and some would find solace in the arms of any Beta Male smart enough to survive. In the case of defeat, well, there was that widows thing again. The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.
The problem (Charlie's problem) is that the Beta Male