Everything but the Squeal

“They hit me.”

“My golly, my gosh. The brutes. Well, now I've hit you too. Maybe we know something you don't.”

She turned over on her stomach and cried into Morris’ pillow, abandoning logic in favor of something that usually worked. I wiped the coffee off my nose, gave her rear a thwack with the back of my hand, and turned to Morris.

“You're a jerk too,” I said. “What did you think you were doing, guarding the ideal of justice?” He gave me a startled look that told me that that was exactly what he'd thought he'd been doing. “Listen,” I said, trying for a tone of sanity and taking one of his hands in mine as I sat on the bed next to Jessica's heaving back. I balanced the coffee against her thigh. “I'm here this morning because there are people in the world who think that kids like you and Jessica are merchandise. Some of the kids they sell are dead. Some of the others probably wish they were. Your parents, hers and yours, Morris, aren't monsters. They're trying to help you get to the point where you can tell the monsters from the human beings. That's all. They know they can't make you happy for your whole lives. They know you're going to fuck up and make mistakes.”

Morris made a dismissive gesture with his free hand, and I caught it. Now I had both of them, and he looked faintly uneasy. “You're going to marry some twit who beats you or cheats on you or takes everything you've earned,” I said. “You're going to vote for the wrong presidential candidate and go to work at some job that grinds your soul to dust. You're going to wake up some morning when you're forty-five and look around you and realize that you're living someone else's life by mistake and that it's too late to change your mind. Those are things they can't do anything about. But they can protect you from monsters while you're still too young and dumb to see them for yourselves, and you have to let them do it. Hell,” I said, “give them a break, okay? It's not like they think they're going to get anything out of it. They do it, even though they'll probably fail, because they love you.”

Morris looked down at Jessica on the bed. He looked like a man watching a sparrow fall. She'd given up on crying. I let go of his hands.

“I told her she should go home,” he said to her back.

“You've got to take love where you find it,” I said to Jessica. “There's not so much of it in the world that you can turn your nose up at it.”

“They hit me,” she said again, her face buried in the pillow.

“You're breaking my heart,” I said.

“Well,” she said, rolling onto her back and wiping her eyes on her sleeve, “they shouldn't have.” The coffee cup tilted over and made a brown stain on Morris’ bed. There were a lot of stains on Morris’ bed, so I gave up on it.

“You're going home with me. Your home, not mine.”

She looked at Morris, who immediately focused on one of the computer screens. She swallowed and then nodded. “But you can't let them hit me.”

“I'll see to it.” I looked up at Morris, hovering over us. “And you,” I said, “you have to promise not to kill me with a flying fist when my back is turned.”

He considered it in all seriousness. “Okay,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Let's look at the disks.”

As Morris busied himself with the computers, Jessica pulled herself up to a sitting position, took one last wipe at her face, wiped the coffee off her jeans, and tucked her knees under her arms. “Do you know what's on these?” I asked.

“I've seen them,” she said. “I don't have any idea what they mean.”

“I figured it out about six,” Morris said, doing something esoteric to a keyboard. “I woke her up and we looked at it, and then we called you.”

“Six? You mean, in the morning? What time did you get up?”

“He didn't,” Jessica said with a note of concealed pride. “He got me started on my math at about ten last night and then came in here. The next thing I knew, he woke me up to tell me that he'd busted it.”

“You worked all night?” I said. I wanted to hug him.

“I'm a kid,” Morris said. “Kids don't need as much sleep as old people.”

“You win,” I said. “Let's look at them.”

“Hold on,” he commanded, back in his element, “let me bring the first one up.”

Keys clacked, and then he grunted. I patted Jessica on the head in a paternal, old person's fashion, picked up the empty cup, and peeked over his shoulder. Morris was looking at a screen full of words. I'd seen it before.

“Morris,” I said, feeling disappointed, “I got that far.” I was considering a new career.

“This is real cute,” Morris said, gazing at the screen as though it were TheLastSupper and he'd just bought it to hang on his wall among the fractals or whatever they were. “It looks just like word processing. In fact, it is, it's Wordstar, one of the later upgrades. Now watch.” He typed a few words and a warning came up at the bottom of the screen:

DISK FULL.

“I've gotten that far too.” Maybe I should go back to teaching, I thought. Tenure, pretty young students, regular office hours. It all looked a lot better to me than it had while I was doing it.

“But you haven't gotten this far,” Morris said triumphantly. He typed the word and, and added a question mark.

“My sentiments exactly,” I said.

He hit Enter.

The words fell away, and instead of a bunch of impenetrable math I found myself looking at a data-base entry just like the one I'd seen on Birdie's console. It read like this:

RECORD 1. (186–486)1. 3088 Compton Blvd., Bellflower, CA 90266 (213) 555-12962. 4 yrs3. Turkey4. CURRENT5. ORDERSa. Fingers, 1200 orders, last order 1000 (913)b. Parts, 2800 orders, last order 2300 (913)c. Paper, 4000 orders, last order 3300 (913)d. Drinks, “A” category (no change) (911)6. SPECIAL ORDERSa. 188,u.r.,188(422–427)JX6b. 217,c.r., 188(517–522)CP1c. 217, c.r., 188 (523–529) UId. 202, u.l., 687 (unavailable) BXe. 226,u.r., 188(74-711)BXf. 226,u.r., 188(712–718)UIg. 193, I.e., 188(1001–1010)BX

We sat there, all three of us, and stared at it. Nobody said anything.

“Turkey?” Jessica finally said.

“It still looks like garbage,” Morris said in his soprano, “but it can't be. Look at the trouble they went to to hide it.”

“Page down,” I said. “I think there's more.”

There was. There were five more records on the disk. They all consisted of similar gobbledygook. It was a classic data-base form, the same from screen to screen. All that changed was the data, and we didn't have any idea what it meant.

“Fingers,” Morris said, flipping through the forms. “Parts. Paper. Drinks.” He shrugged. “All the disks are more or less the same.”

“Let me sit down,” I said.

He gave me a look full of deep misgiving. “Which keys are you going to touch? I haven't backed these up and I don't want you to trash them.”

“I'll touch the keys you tell me to touch. Now get up.” He did, and I sat. “Page down, right?” I asked. “That moves me to the next screen.”

“Right,” Morris said, “but be careful.”

The next screen, even upon closer examination, looked pretty much like the last screen. So did the others.

“Concentrate on one field,” Morris suggested.

“What's a field?” Jessica asked.

“The little answers after the periods. Each one of those answers is a field. The whole thing is called a record.”

“Let's look at the first disk,” I said, pulling out the floppy that Morris had put in and inserting the one I'd labeled one, in imitation of Birdie. The top of the screen read: record 1. (186–486). “Since we haven't got anything