“Very careful,” Pohlhaus agreed. He looked at me. “Our Dangerous Materials Squad handles this kind of thing. I’ll get them out here. We’ll probably want to pull down that miserable wall, give us some room to maneuver.”
He went up to the strip of ground that looked like temporarily neglected farmland. “Gary, give me that tool, please.”
Gary Sung went across eight feet of ground and passed it to him, handle first.
“Come over here,” Pohlhaus said to me.
I moved up beside him. He hunkered down next to the wide brown stripe on the ground, slid the entrenching tool into the soft earth, and scooped away some dirt, then a little more. “Ah,” he said. I bent over and caught the stench drifting out of the little opening Pohlhaus had made; death and rot and ammonia, a smell of primal process. In a second, it seemed to coat my skin.
I’ve been writing for more than an hour, and I can’t go on. Anyhow, some kind of earthmoving machine is coming up the alley, making a noise like a motorcycle gang.
Tim put down his pen and thought about what he was going to do next. Dressed in his Principal Battley costume of gray suit, white shirt, and necktie, Philip had announced that he had no interest in “standing around” in his backyard and “gawking at” the police while they leveled the cement wall and excavated for bodies. While Tim had occupied himself with his journal, Philip had wandered around the house, snapping the television on and off, picking up magazines and putting them down again. Around three P.M., Philip clumped up the steps; he reappeared downstairs ten minutes later minus the necktie.
“I hope you’re not going to stand out there and watch,” he said. Without his necktie, he looked oddly naked, like a man seen for the first time without his glasses.
“They’re just going to knock down a wall,” Tim said.
“I mean after that.” He was obviously in anguish, and just as obviously had no idea of how to cope with it. “Anybody can knock down a wall. I could knock down a wall. Even you could knock down a wall. It’s the part that comes after. You might want to spectate, but not me. I’m serious.”
“Spectate?” Tim said.
“Frivolity is par for the course with you, isn’t it?” He charged into his den.
“I never heard the word before,” Tim said to himself. “Spectate. Philip chooses not to spectate.”
The living room seemed to retain some of the tension of Philip’s little speech and annoyed departure. Tim felt like moving around, going somewhere, yet he did not want to leave Philip alone, if only because it would be counted against him later. Then he remembered that Mark’s computer—the very computer from which he had e-mailed his Uncle Tim—was still upstairs, waiting to be used. With the help of good old Gotomypc.com and Mark’s laptop, he could spectate his e-mail, see if anyone interesting had written to him, and clean out the spam before it became overwhelming. It would be a way to fill the time: spam as distraction.
“Philip,” he said to the obdurate door, “I’m going upstairs to look at my e-mail on Mark’s computer. Do you mind?”
Philip said he could do whatever he liked.
Upstairs, Tim sat in Mark’s desk chair and clicked open the lid of the laptop. He felt slightly guilty, as if he were trespassing on his nephew’s privacy. Instantly, the computer screen sprang to life. Icons in neat rows arranged themselves across a charcoal-green field. Tim clicked an icon and waded through the inevitable commands and delays before he managed to get connected.
On a dial-up modem, his program moved with excruciating sluggishness, and the server was having a grouchy, error-ridden day. After three tries, Tim finally succeeded in linking up with his computer at home. Using Mark’s mouse, he moved his cursor to the Outlook Express icon on his screen and clicked once. It was like watching the Mississippi River drift around a wide bend: everything swam along in a brown, sleepy current. The boldface of the new e-mails came to life on his screen. Five and six appeared, then a rapid, ascending column that even at one remove hit the screen with the rapidity of microwave popcorn exploding in a bag. The number at the bottom of Tim’s screen rose from 24 to 30 to 45 to 67. There it stayed, all the popcorn having popped.
He read wearily down the From list, bypassing Depraved and PC Doctor and Virtual Deals and the first names of women he did not know because they did not exist, and was then all but levitated out of the chair by the familiar but entirely unexpected name munderhill. munderhill had e-mailed his old adviser and confidante tunderhill a message bearing the subject line 4 u 2 c . There was no date.
Tim selected this heading with a click and cursed the draggy modem, the draggy server, and the sluggish program.
At length, the message appeared in the wide lower-left-hand box.
From: munderhill
To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com
Sent:
Subject: 4 u 2 c
deer :) my unk
old writer
try this link
lostboylostgirl.com
it is
4 u 1nce 2 c
so u know
u have & hold our luv
m & lc
Did he hesitate, did he think about it? He rammed the cursor over the blue underlined text and double- clicked, double-clicked, double-clicked.
Another brown, blurry Mississippi episode overtook both monitors, his on Grand Street and Mark’s in Millhaven, and while it lasted, Tim Underhill, otherwise known as tunderhill, leaned forward far enough to breathe on the screen were he breathing. Onto his screen, then Mark’s, appeared the ordinary Explorer window bearing the link’s URL.
Across the top of the larger interior window scrolled the words BROUGHT TO YOU BY lostboylostgirl.com. Beneath that was: 1-Time Only Showing! The Windows Media Player’s rectangle opened beneath the caution, if that was what it was and, without the conventional delay for buffering, filled immediatelty with light and color. So Tim was to see a film clip. The line on the bottom of the rectangle told him that the clip ran for one minute and twenty- two seconds, one of which had already slipped into oblivion. A golden beach ornamented with arching palm trees, a long blue ocean, occupied the little window. A movie, a webcam? A webcam, Tim thought, broadcasting to an audience of one from a world where there were no webcameras. Faintly, he heard the sound of gentle surf and wind rustling the palm fronds. His heart tightened.
The bright sky darkened above the water. First a blond head, then a dark, entered the screen from the bottom left-hand corner. “Lucy,”
They paused, the lovers, mid-beach and looked toward the turmoil over the darkening water, which rolled toward them. Oh stay; oh hurry.
Their beautiful poised slim legs lifted into a sprint; their rags flew.
Tim could not see the faces turned from him, but he knew them. They were unforgettable. Through the
