Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

Suffice to say, there is a direct linkage between the hallmarks of modernism as I understand them and murderous, barbarian thugs who would do us in because they hate us and our freedoms.

When my wife arrived at the end of the hour, I was feeling a little tired, and I made no attempt to bring her up to speed on the developments of the case. As long as she believed I was incapacitated, there was little danger of her taking note of my political activities.

8. Online Ordering as Part of the Resistance

Because I am a man of dignity with many important activities to pursue and enjoy in my twilight years, I had as yet failed to take advantage of the so-called online lifestyle. The online lifestyle, in my view, the Internet, the Web, however you might call this thing, was just a highfalutin set of Yellow Pages. Mainly, I allowed my wife, Helen, to do any and all Internet surfing, while I watched television and, where necessary, used the phone to upbraid employees and other hangerson who were not producing results for our family in a timely fashion. Helen would explain to me things she had seen on the Internet, and I’d have a good chuckle. However, once confined to the canes (or the walker), as I was after being restrained by government-employed medical experts, I found that I had more time on my hands. Accordingly, it became important to gain Internet facility on an accelerated schedule. I am not much of a typist, and in the past I used to pay people to type for me. But there was no getting around the fact that I was going to need the vast Internet databases to facilitate my investigation into the Omega Force and its dark-complected conspirators.

How I did this, initially, was by ordering any number of common household items through so-called online vendors. In fact, when I got home from the meeting just described, after a short nap, I fetched my son, Skip, who’d been watching the afternoon light on his sneaker, and I invited Skip to come upstairs with me to where my wife kept the extra computer, an old machine with few bells and whistles upon it. I promised Skip that we would select some toy or other for his occasional amusement.

“You do want a toy, don’t you?”

It was difficult for me to get these words out, as I have explained, by reason of traumatic neurological event, and Skip, since he was not the sharpest of the Van Deusens, though a fine rhymester, was stricken with the recognition that something was not right with his father. I could see that he was overcome with confusion. In fact, Skip began dabbing at his eyes. He had a nervous way of doing this that was often embarrassing to me, though I had long ago resolved never to be embarrassed by my son. He was worried about his father, who was normally so robust. His father could not speak clearly, was not moving easily, and he could not even have a glass of wine with dinner.

“What about a beach ball? Here, look at this one.” I pointed out a beach ball that had the whole of the earthly globe printed on it, and I instantly realized that this would make a very fine purchase for my son, Skip, who sometimes did not seem able to discern between various countries. For example, he was unable to locate Myanmar, though this may have been because he’d never really made the transition from Burma. And what about the Congo? It’d been Zaire and now it was the Congo again. I had Skip read my credit card numbers to me, and then I hugged him. At least I could still do that.

After the beach ball there was a set of fire irons, after the set of fire irons there was a baseball glove for Skip, and then a matching baseball glove for me, and then there was some new bedding for the divan in my office, and then there was a new set of beach towels, and then I ordered entire sets of compact disc recordings of various baroque composers, and then I ordered the great books as selected by professors at important national universities, with special attention to Heidegger and other Germans. When my wife, Helen, began to complain about the online ordering, I changed tactics and began ordering jewelry for her. First I ordered jewelry from Native American artisans in the Southwest, because my wife was very fond of the jewelry of that region, and when she began complaining further about having to drive down to the ferry dock to negotiate with the men in the freight office about the excessive room all my packages were taking up there (it was true, they were moving my packages around on pallets), I then began ordering items from Tiffany and other high-end retailers. All of this so that I could get more time here on the Internet to research germs.

Here were some of the germs that had begun to attract my attention. Brucellosis. Venezuelan equine encephalitis. African swine fever. Sandfly fever. Dengue fever. Yellow fever. Marburg virus. Foot-and-mouth disease. Bacillus anthracis. Rift Valley fever virus, Zagazig 501 strain. Rinderpest. Miscellaneous shellfish toxins, such as MSX. Dutch duck plague. Avian flu. Ebola fever. Hantavirus. Leishmaniasis. Heartwater. Bluetongue. Staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Serratia marcescens. Bacillus subtilis. Coxsackie B-5 virus, Louping ill, contagious ecthyma, Nairobi sheep disease, feline cytauxzoonosis.

I scoured the available databases for descriptions of how to weaponize these ailments. Had they hurdled the species barrier? Had some poor government worker been spat upon by an infected cow and then had himself necropsied like the rest of the nameless cows, goats, sheep, and rodents at the various laboratories? I waited for Helen to turn in. Each night, I waited until she cracked the spine of some dusty tome by Thackeray or Dickens, and then I got up, in my nightshirt and nightcap, and began to limp around the premises.

It was a large old house, designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White in the 1920s according to the elegant rigors of their style. The porch was well-known as a gem of this sort. Since we were on a grassy knoll above the bay side, the wind whipped up like nowhere else. As I’ve said, our island is sweet and gentle and full of breathtaking views and lovely residences, but in the off-season the wind does stay on duty . You can imagine how this kind of island living used to drive men to distraction. Late at night, I listened to the winds, and I read about germs, about how these germs were being manufactured only six miles from here, despite demurrals from the Department of Agriculture, whose officials I knew well back when I was in the public sector. After all, the Centers for Disease Control had been under our jurisdiction. I knew that with one good explosion, air-dropped from the appropriate height, the PIADC would be dust. Then the millions of innocents on the South and North Forks, and here on our own little island, would be hemorrhaging within days.

With Rift Valley fever, you know, the hemorrhaging is through the eye socket. First you have the high fever, and then the hemorrhaging through the eye socket, and the blood clots in the lens, resulting in blindness in most cases. When President Eisenhower first rubber-stamped the initial experiments with Rift Valley fever, he was reported to have found solace in the fact that the bug was incapacitating but not fatal. That was before the Egyptian variant, Zagazig 501. Now it’s fatal.

You would be right to ask if I was lonely during these nights. When my wife called for me to come to bed, was I lonely, knowing what I knew? I am pleased to say that I am given to such Yankee optimism about things that I knew we could somehow prevent these dark machineries of death from reaching our shores. With my rather unsteady hands, I moved the cursor across the screen, turning up any online remark no matter how trivial or alarmist. I felt rather buoyed knowing that I could make sure that my wife and son would not develop painful ulcerous blisters on their mouths and hands that would then give way to harmful secondary infections, ultimately condemning them to anguished, quarantined deaths. Nor would they bleed from the eyes.