Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“Hey, Morris,” Jessica said negligently. “Ready to go?”

Morris swallowed. “All set up,” he said, trying for her casual air. He gave me a red little glance that reeked of jealousy.

“No food, then,” Elise Gurstein said. “I'll bring you some wine in a minute. All I've got is cabernet.”

“Cabernet is fine.”

“And a Coke for little Jessica.”

“ Mom ,” Morris squealed in an agony of embarrassment.

“Fine, fine. Then I'll leave you to Morris.”

Morris, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, led us broodingly through a living room filled with modern, or maybe postmodern, shapes: hard-looking rectangles of white that probably posed as furniture as long as people were awake and then turned into giant sugar cubes. Mozart winged its way around the room, and what looked like copies of Klee and Kathe Kollwitz hung coolly on the wall. Thirties art and eighties furniture. Jessica touched my arm and pointed at Morris’ rear end: he had a patch on the rump of his pants that featured a bright red apple and the legend take a byte. He led us down a flight of stairs.

At the bottom, Morris-who hadn't looked back at either of us-threw open a door, and we entered a room that was lit by the shade of green they painted Margaret Hamilton's face in TheWizardofOz . The light, as I saw when I entered, came from three computer screens, all up and glowing.

The screens were only part of the picture. Computers, or parts of computers, were everywhere: on the floor, in the middle of the mussed-up single bed, on the big desk that had been made from a door and two sawhorses, and stacked on top of the filing closets that lined one wall.

“Floppies or flippies?” Morris asked, gazing in a preoccupied fashion at one of the screens. It was tossing up a frantic jumble of data, scrolling past far too fast to read.

“Beg pardon?” I asked.

“Floppies,” Morris said, closing his eyes with the air of a man whose patience is being tried, “or Hippies?”

“These,” I said, holding up the disks.

“Floppies,” Morris said with modulated disdain. “Nobody uses them anymore.”

“I stole them,” I said defensively. “I just want to know what's on them.”

“What's all this stuff?” Jessica asked, watching the screen with the flying data.

“The Yellow Pages,” Morris said in a completely different tone. If it was possible to say the words “The Yellow Pages” in a tone of abject adoration, Morris had just managed it.

“You copied the Yellow Pages into a computer !” Jessica sounded like she doubted her ears.

“It's a test,” Morris said, licking nervously at his lower lip. “I've been working with a scanner-you know, it reads a page and feeds it into the system? — and I thought I'd try to link it up with a data base. So I scanned about two hundred pages of the Yellow Pages, and reworked them into the data-base language and told the data base to rearrange them, by length of entry instead of alphabetically. I'll know in an hour or so whether it works.”

“Why bother?” Jessica said, moving on to the next screen.

“Just to see if I can do it,” Morris said, giving a tiny shrug. He looked at the flashing screen with new doubt. “I'll work out an application later.”

“Even if you can do it, what good is it?” Jessica said loftily. “Who wants a phone book arranged by the length of the name? You know, Morris, that's one of the things that's wrong with you. There's enough junk to learn without making up new stuff.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, pushing aside something that was probably vital to some computer in the room, and looked around her with the disinterested air of a deaf person who'd been dragged to a concert.

Morris swallowed the rebuke in silence, but then he reached down and twisted a knob that plunged the offending screen into darkness. He chewed on his lip as the silence lengthened.

“My, my,” I said heartily, looking at a large pair of apparently extraterrestrial landscapes on the wall, an oddly colorless mountain and a shoreline, jumbles of rocks and natural forms, as lifeless as the moon. “Where are these?”

Morris wasn't buying peacemaking from anyone he was jealous of. “To the extent that they're anywhere,” he said tartly, “they're in Benoit Mandelbrot's frontal lobe.”

“Old Bennie,” I said. “I knew they looked familiar.”

“They're fractal landscapes,” Morris continued, ignoring me, “computer-generated mathematical pictures that approximate the natural world. Only less sloppy.”

“I like the world ‘sloppy,’ ” Jessica said. “I don't want some egghead turning it into a bunch of numbers. What good is it?”

“It helps us to understand the world,” Morris said doggedly, looking everywhere but at her.

“Ah, we've gotten to fractals,” Elise Gurstein said, com- ing into the room with a glass of red wine in one hand and a Coke in the other.

“I don't know why everybody has to understand everything,” Jessica said defiantly. “Why can't we just leave things alone? Can't I like a blue sky without someone like you explaining to me that it's because the air scatters the light waves? When I go body-surfing, do you think I need some schnook in goggles swimming along next to me telling me about the movement of liquids?”

“But you don't understand anything ,” Morris insisted, holding his ground. His color had heightened, making his eyes even paler. “Don't you want to know how things work?”

“See you,” Elise Gurstein said, leaving the room. “I've heard all this.”

“I can start a car,” Jessica said silkily, turning her hazel eyes on Morris. “I can go shopping. I can read a map and use a calculator and turn on a television set. I can find something in a library if I need to. What else do I need to know?”

Morris gave an exaggerated Gilbert-and-Sullivan shrug, as though he were rolling the weight of the entire globe from one shoulder to another. “Nothing,” he said with a finality that would have been impressive in anything but a soprano. “Just nothing. You're doing great.”

“There are already people who know all the stuff you're talking about. That's their job. Haven't you heard, Morris? It's called specialization.”

“You want to know what's wrong with the world?” Morris said to me. “Attitudes like that.”

“Oh, talk to each other,” Jessica snarled. “You're both so much smarter than me.” She lay back on the bed, rolled over, and faced the wall.

“Than I,” Morris said, looking longingly at her back.

“Find the appropriate orifice, Morris,” Jessica said, plumping one of Morris’ wrinkled pillows and curling herself around the computer.

“Listen,” I said, “this could go on all night.” I waved the disks in the air. “The floppies.”

“I'm not sure Morris is interested in the floppies,” Jessica said to the wall.

“Of course I'm interested,” Morris said, shamefaced.

“Then do something, Morris,” Jessica said in a voice that was pure saccharine. “Show us what a genius you are. Who knows, maybe you'll inspire me to learn something myself.”

Morris wedged his hands back into his pockets and then realized that I was holding the disks out. He pulled out one hand with some difficulty and took them from me. “What are they?” he said.

“Some kind of code. It looks like algorithms or something. Lots of numbers and calculus signs. Some stuff that looks like Greek.”

“Hmmm,” Morris said, slipping one disk into the drive of the nearest computer. He sat down on a stool and peered at the screen. “You don't know what language they're in?”

“The beginning is English,” I said.