Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

“Ooh,” murmured Robin, as if softly struck by a bit of rough justice.

Bech went on, aggrieved, “He says things like, and I quote, ‘Whenever Bech attempts to use his imagination, the fuse blows and sparks fall to the floor. But short circuits aren’t the same as magic-realist fireworks.’ End quote. On top of being a smart-aleck he’s a closet prude. He hated the sex in Think Big ; he wrote, as I dimly remember, ‘These tawdry and impossible wet dreams tell us nothing about how men and women really interact.’ Implying that he sure does, the creepy fag. He’s never interacted with anything but a candy machine and the constant torrent of cultural crap.”

“Henry, his striking you as a creepy fag isn’t reason enough to kill him.”

“It is for me.”

“How would you go about it?”

“How would we go about it maybe is the formula. What do we know about this twerp? He’s riddled with insecurities, has all this manicky energy, and is on the Internet.”

“You have been mulling this over, haven’t you?” Robin’s eyes had widened; her lower lip hung slightly open, looking riper and wetter than usual, as she propped herself above him, bare-breasted, livid-nippled, her big hair tumbling in oiled coils. Her straight short nose didn’t go with the rest of her face, giving her a slightly flattened expression, like a cat’s. “My lover the killer,” she breathed.

“My time on Earth is limited.” Bech bit off his words. “I have noble work to do. I can’t see Cannon licking return envelopes. He probably has an assistant for that. Or tosses them in the waste-basket, the arrogant little shit.” He averted his eyes from Robin’s bared breasts, their gleaming white weight like that of gourds still ripening, snapping their vines.

She said, “So? Where do I come in, big boy?”

“Computer expertise. You have it, or know those that do. My question of you, baby, is could we break into his computer?”

Robin’s smooth face, its taut curves with their faint fuzz, hardened. “If he can get out,” she said, “a cracker can get in. The Internet is one big happy family, like it or not.”

The Aldie Cannon mini-industry was headquartered in his modest Upper East Side apartment. He lived, with this third wife and two maladjusted small children, not on one of the East Side’s genteel, ginkgo-shaded side streets but in a raw new blue-green skyscraper, with balconies like stubby daisy petals, over by the river. His daily Internet feature, “Cannon Fodder,” was produced in a child-resistant study on a Compaq PC equipped with Windows 95. His opinionated claptrap was twinkled by modem to a site in San Jose, where it was checked for obscenity and libel and misspellings before going out to the millions of green-skinned cyberspace goons paralyzed at their terminals. E-mail sent to fodder.com went to San Jose, where the less inane and more provocative communications were forwarded to Aldie, for possible use in one of his columns.

Robin, after consulting some goons of her acquaintance, explained to Bech that the ubiquitous program for E-mail, Sendmail, had been written in the Unix ferment of the late nineteen-seven-ties, when security had been of no concern; it was notoriously full of bugs. For instance, Sendmail performed security checks only on a user’s first message; once the user passed, all his subsequent messages went straight through. Another weakness of the program was that a simple I, the “pipe” symbol, turned the part of the message following it into input, which could consist of a variety of Unix commands the computer was obliged to obey. These commands could give an intruder log-in status and, with some more manipulation, a “back door” access that would last until detected and deleted. Entry could be utilized to attach a “Trojan horse” that would flash messages onto the screen, with subliminal brevity if desired.

Bech’s wicked idea was to undermine Cannon’s confidence and sense of self — fragile, beneath all that polymathic, relentlessly with-it bluster — as the critic sat gazing at his monitor. Robin devised a virus: every time Aldie typed an upper-case “A” or a lowercase “x,” a message would flash, too quickly for his conscious mind to register but distinctly enough to penetrate the neuronic complex of brain cells. The program took Robin some days to design; especially finicking were the specs of such brief interruptions, amid the seventy cathoderay refreshments of the screen each second, in letters large enough to make an impression. She labored while Bech slept; half-moon shadows smudged and dented the lovely smoothness of her face. Delicately she strung her binaries together. They could at any moment be destroyed by an automatic “sniffer” program or a human “sysadmin,” a systems administrator. Federal laws were being violated; heavy penalties could be incurred. Nevertheless, out of love for Bech and the fascination of a technical challenge, Robin persevered and, by the third morning, succeeded.

Bech began, once the intricate, illicit commands had been lodged, with some hard-core Buddhism, BEING IS PAIN, the subliminal message read; NON-BEING IS NIRVANA. Invisibly these truths rippled into the screen’s pixels for a fifteenth of a second — that is, five refreshments of the screen, a single one being, Robin and a consulted neurophysiologist agreed, too brief to register even subliminally. After several days of these equations, Bech asked her to program the more advanced NO MISERY OF MIND IS THERE FOR HIM WHO HATH NO WANTS. It was critical that the idea of death be rendered not just palatable but inviting, NON-BEING IS AN ASPECT OF BEING, and BEING OF NON-BEING: this Bech had adapted from a Taoist poem by Seng Ts’an. From the same source he took TO BANISH REALITY IS TO SINK DEEPER INTO THE REAL. Out of his own inner resources he proposed ACTIVITY IS AVOIDANCE OF VICTORY OVER SELF.

Together he and Robin scanned Cannon’s latest effusions, in print or on the computer screen, for signs of mental deterioration and spiritual surrender. Deborah Frueh had taken the bait in the dark, and Bech had been frustrated by his inability to see what was happening — whether she was licking an envelope or not, and what effect the diluted poison was having on her detestable innards. But in the case of Aldie Cannon, his daily outpouring of cleverness surely would betray symptoms. His review of a Sinead o’connor concert felt apathetic, though he maintained it was her performance, now that she was no longer an anti-papal skinhead, that lacked drive and point. His roundup of recent books dwelling, with complacency or alarm, upon the erosion of the traditional literary canon — cannon fodder indeed, the ideal chance for him to do casual backflips of lightly borne erudition — drifted toward the passionless conclusion that “the presence or absence of a canon amounts to much the same thing; one is all, and none is equally all.” This didn’t sound like the Aldie Cannon who had opined of Bech’s collection When the Saints, “Some of these cagey feuilletons sizzle but most fizzle; the author has moved from not having much to say to implying that anyone’s having anything to say is a tiresome breach of good taste. Bech is a literary dandy, but one dressed in tatters — a kind of shreds and patches, as Hamlet said of another fraud.”

It was good for Bech to remember these elaborate and gleeful dismissals, lest pity bring him to halt the program. Where the celebrant of pop culture would once wax rapturous over Julia Roberts’s elastic mouth and avid eyes, Aldie now dwelt upon her ethereal emaciation in My Best Friend’s Wedding, and the “triumphant emptiness” of her heroine’s romantic defeat and the film’s delivery of her into the arms of a homosexual. Of Saul Bellow’s little novel, he noticed only the “thanatoptic beauty” of its culmination in a cemetery, where the hero’s proposal had the chiseled gravity of an elegy or death sentence. The same review praised the book’s brevity and confessed — this from Aldie Cannon, Pantagruelian consumer of cultural produce — that some days he just didn’t want to read one more book, see one more movie, go to one more art show, look up one more reference, wrap up one more paragraph with one more fork-tongued aperçu. And then, just as the Manhattan scene was kicking into another event-crammed fall season, “Cannon Fodder” now and then skipped a day on the Internet, or was replaced, with a terse explanatory note, by one of the writer’s “classic” columns from a bygone year.