Patrick McLean - How To Succeed in Evil

Computer screens are too small for non-specialized thoughts. Edwin prefers to organize information in physical space. Tables, floors, walls. He has all the furniture removed from the room except for several large tables and a grand piano. While he thinks he constantly rearranges papers, books, pictures. He often changes where he stands or sits. Even the sweep of sunlight across the room indicates new connections. Edwin literally erects the structure of the challenge around him so that he can immerse himself in the problem.

At the end of the first day, two confused-looking young men in loincloths bring Edwin a cot. Edwin looks at the tiny bed. Then he looks down on the young men.

“We were just told to bring you a cot,” one of them says.

“I will need another,” says Edwin.

“They didn’t tell us anything about that.”

“Clearly, this is the best job you can hope to get.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

From the door of the room, Alabaster speaks, “Bring him another cot.” The slave-boys scurry off, leaving the two men to consider one another for a moment.

“This is not the best job you can hope to get. Why are you here?” asks Edwin.

“That old woman is shit crazy. But if she wants to pay me $140,000 a year so she can call me ‘Alabaster’ and feel like she’s living in Gone With the Wind , what do I care? I have two boys, they’re both going to college and I’m going to retire in Aruba.”

Edwin nods. Alabaster is the sanest man he has met in Alabama.

“So why don’t you sleep in your room?” asks Alabaster.

Edwin turns back to the constellations of pages and images that cover the room behind him. “I don’t want to leave the work.”

Alabaster turns and leaves. He is certain that Edwin is as crazy as the rest of them. He doesn’t have time to worry about the tall man. The house is running low on baby oil. Alabaster shakes his head and thinks of his sons. They will have a better life – a better life by far.

Exhausted from his labors, Edwin removes his pants and shirt, carefully folds them, and lays his long body down across the two cots. Under the weight of tremendous fatigue, the need for sleep takes over. But Edwin does not go without a fight. His mind still races. In his sleep he twitches, mutters and kicks out at odd angles. Edwin rarely sleeps for more than four hours at a time while working on a large project.

But as he sleeps, a book lies by the side of his bed. It is thick, heavy and ponderously titled, “Modern Power Distribution.” On the back cover is a picture of the author, Thomas Putnam. Like the book, he is also thick and heavy. To compensate for his lack of chin, the learned Mr. Putnam wears a bristly mustache. While Edwin sleeps, Thomas Putnam and his compensatory mustache are being kidnapped. This is not Edwin’s idea. He has suggested that it would be helpful to speak with Mr. Putnam. He might even have added that a phone call would suffice. But no matter. With the barest spark, the flames of Iphagenia’s lunacy had been fanned.

Iphagenia’s reasoning goes something like this: When you are a villain, you don’t ask a technical expert if he has a spare moment to consult on your problem. You don’t give him a phone call. There are conventions for all of this. You must send in a strike team in a Non-descript White Van and grab the man while he is shopping, or perhaps playing with his children in the park. There is the black bag over the head, the futile, yet inevitable, struggle, the slamming of doors and the screeching of tires. Iphagenia thinks she is doing very well. She does not realize that these are the exact forms and tropes of villainy that Edwin rails against.

When Thomas Putnam is finally deposited in Edwin’s room he is understandably upset. “What do you want with me!” Putnam demands through his mustache. Edwin looks at him. Then he walks over to the chair where his suit jacket is hanging.

“I demand to know what’s going on here!”

Edwin dons his jacket, sighs deeply and answers as truthfully as he can, “If you must know, I am being held against my will by an oversexed antebellum nightmare of a woman because she believes that not only will I help her take over the world, but that I will, upon due reflection, come to my senses and rule the world at her side as her consort.”

This was not the answer Putnam was looking for. He tried again. “W-w-why have I been kidnapped?”

“Because these people are very stupid. I mentioned that it might be helpful if I could speak to you and…”

“What, you! You WHAT? Wait a minute. What in God’s name is going on here?”

“I know,” says Edwin, “it hurts to try make sense of it. I would have been happy with a phone call.”

“This is an OUTRAGE, I, I, I,”

“I’m sorry for your inconvenience. Please try to calm down.”

“INCONVENIENCE! I was at my son’s BALL GAME! He saw his FATHER get KIDNAPPED!”

Edwin is already bored with the small talk, “Do you have a consulting fee?”

“WHAT?”

Edwin tries again, slower. “Do you have a consulting fee?”

“YES!”

“If, we were to pay you, say, five times your normal consulting rate for this conversation, would that be sufficient incentive for you to stop yelling?”

“Uh, yeah,” he says, stroking his mustache for reassurance. “But, please, what’s going here? Who are these people?”

“You really don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

Edwin tries again. “As I explained, I am being held captive by an aged Francophilliac and her half-witted son. As far as I can tell, she longs to use her considerable wealth to see the antebellum South rise again in a ridiculous jihad of gracious living. And not only does she look to me for the plan through which her backward and inbred scheme can be realized, but she also demands my true love.”

“You’re right,” says Putnam, “I really didn’t want to know that.”

“Yes, I’m usually right. Now,” Edwin says, indicating a large map of North America that is marked with colored dots connected by an unruly matrix of fine lines, “do you recognize this?”

“It’s the grid. Every power generation facility in North America.”

“That is correct. Now, if my understanding is complete then this diagram means that every power generation facility is linked into the grid.”

“Yes.”

“Interconnected.”

“Yes.”

“Interdependent.” For the first time since entering the room days ago, Edwin seats himself at the piano and begins to play.

“I wouldn’t say that exactly, but, close enough.”

“So that a plant in New York, might actually be generating power for a home in Florida.”

“That’s a stretch. You see the energy used in transmission, dissipated in heat and radiated magnetic charge around the lines—”

“How do blackouts happen?”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“Then tell me about the Lake Erie Loop. What happened with the Lake Erie Loop?”

“Well nobody really knows for sure. That blackout that shut down the NorthEast and the Midwest. It was blamed on a set of transmission lines that circle Lake Erie, but... Well, I’m not sure what happened. There were investigations but...”

“Could it be that it was more politically expedient that a cause for the blackout was never found?”

“Yeah, that’s probably it. Look, I charge people a lot of money to consult on power grid issues. But this system is so big — it crosses so many state and even national boundaries,” he shrugged, “A lot of it is guesswork. It’s worse in Europe.”

“Please try to explain it to me.”

“Look, in July 1996 a tree fell into a power line in Oregon. That took down 15 states.”