Everything but the Squeal

she began to cry.

She was making rapid little high-pitched sounds. I pushed the door open, and she came out. Her ears were flat against her head, and her tail was between her legs. She went past me and onto the lawn without looking back.

“Woofers,” I said. “Come here, Woofers.”

She sat down with her back to me and threw a mournful yelp at the moon. The sound of it sent shivers down my back.

“Birdie?” I said, pushing the door open with my foot.

The place was immaculate. It had been clean before, but someone had gone over it with the ultimate dust rag. Surfaces shone as though they were newly minted. The masks on the wall had had their tongues polished.

He was in the bedroom, sitting doubled over on the bed.

The bed was a terrible reddish-brown, covered with crinkly little coils of gift-wrap ribbon. Birdie was wearing an ancient silk kimono that once might have been yellow. Now it was reddish-brown, like the bed. His awful hairdo hung limply over his face, turban renewal gone permanently awry. One hand grasped something long and silvery, an antique Japanese sword.

He'd committed seppuku, Japanese ritual disembowel-ment, one of the world's most painful means of suicide. The gift-wrap ribbon spread over the bedspread was his intestines.

The little shit had had more guts than I'd thought. He'd also had the last laugh.

On the pillow next to his head was a piece of paper with a ragged top edge, torn from a secretary's steno pad. As Woofers mourned at the moon outside, I picked it up and read what he'd written.

FIND THEM YOURSELF, it read. AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, FUCK YOU.

I was nowhere again.

25

Ones and Zeros

“Tell me about the scanner,” I said. It hadn't been I much of a drive, but I felt like I'd run a triathlon. Woofers skulked next to me, keeping very close to my feet. She'd begun to cry when I'd tried to leave her in the car.

Morris looked down at her, blinking in semaphore, obviously rattled by my unannounced appearance at nine p.m., obviously wishing Jessica were there. Unless a good woman straightened him out, Morris was always going to be the kind of guy who needed moral support.

“The scanner?” he asked Woofers. He pronounced it as though it were a word he'd memorized phonetically from a foreign language.

“That gizmo,” I said impatiently, “that doodad that you were fooling around with the first day I was here. The Yellow Pages, remember?”

“The scanner,” he said. “Why didn't you say so?” His room was the usual technological mare's nest. Upstairs his mother was working on a full-size loom to the accompaniment of Dvorak's NewWorldSymphony. It was a family whose members kept to themselves.

“Morris,” I said gently, “forgive me. I'm not a technical whiz like you.”

He scratched the back of his head while he mentally replayed the conversation. There was a child's scrabbled drawing of grass above the pocket of his shirt where he'd repeatedly put away his pens without retracting the points. “You did say scanner, didn't you?”

“Just tell me about the goddamn thing.” I was desperate enough to be slightly menacing.

“It's very simple,” he said, not noticing. “It just absorbs graphic information, digitizes it, and then inputs it onto disk. It has to interface with your software, of course. And your EGA board, if you're not scanning print.”

Wondering what it was about teenagers that made people want to find the ones who disappeared, I drew back my hands-which had stretched involuntarily toward his neck- and said, “Morris. Morris, we're both going to make an effort now. I'm going to try to speak plain old English and you're going to try to understand it. Are we together so far?” I cracked my knuckles.

He started to say something and then looked at me more closely. Then he looked down at my hands, which, I was surprised to see, had moved again and grasped the points of his shirt collar. He shut his mouth and nodded. His Adam's apple did a little bob.

“Good,” I said, pulling my hands back and forcing them into my pockets. “Good beginning. Now, using the scanner, if I follow you, you can take a picture off a piece of paper, put it into a computer, and then print it out again. Is that right?”

“That girl,” he said nervously. “That Japanese girl who was on that lady's client list. The picture I showed you at your house was a scanned image. It was kind of low-res, remember?”

“Morris,” I said threateningly, pulling out my right hand. It balled itself into a fist as we both watched.

He took a step back. “Low resolution. Like, dotty, you know?”

“It was good enough,” I said.

“Good enough for what?”

“Okay,” I said, ignoring his question. “Now, can you send these pictures around somehow, or do they have to be on a piece of paper?”

“I'm not sure I know what you mean. Do you want some coffee?”

“Your mother already offered me some coffee. Thanks, anyway.”

“So what do you mean, send them?” he asked.

I tried to think of a way to explain what I meant. My train of thought was chugging slowly uphill when Morris derailed it.

“How about some wine?” Morris had the makings of a good host, in the unlikely eventuality that he'd live long enough to have a house of his own.

“The picture, Morris. Is there some way of sending it, like over the phone?”

“A modem,” he said. He held up a hasty hand. “That's a digital decoder that works over a phone line. It reads the disk and then sends out the little ones and zeros-that's all a computer deals in, you know, ones and zeros-and the modem at the other end puts the code back together and stores the picture in the computer.”

It sounded right to me. “I asked you before if you could get into that data base and fool around with it.”

“Piece of cake,” he said. “I could screw it up so bad that they'd never be able to figure out what hit them. By the time I was finished, they'd think they'd ordered four thousand girls' fingers to use as Coke stirrers, and no chicken.” He made a dry, twiggy little sound in appreciation of his own wit.

“You can fool with the records,” I said. “But what about the whaddyacallit, the interface?”

He furrowed his brow. “You mean could I change what happens when they call in?”

“Exactly,” I said, almost weak with gratitude that we hadn't hit another semantic stone wall.

“That's more complicated,” he said, dashing my hopes. “I mean, to do that I'd have to get inside the bulletin board.”

I sat down on his bed and closed my eyes. Woofers sat on my left foot. An image of Birdie, his intestines coiled around him, bled into my consciousness.

“I'm not trying to be difficult/’ Morris said, shifting from foot to foot and twisting his fingers apologetically. “I mean, let's talk about the bulletin board, which is what this program is. A bulletin board is just, you know, data by phone. People call in and make requests or whatever, and the program answers them and then stores the dialogue in the data base. Well, the first thing that comes up on the screen when the person calls in is something called a menu. The interface, like you said.”

“You said there were dating services that work that way.”

“Um,” he said, blushing again. “They're more like an electronic post office. You know, you call in and leave a message for some type of person and wait for an answer. Not that they ever answer.”

Poor Morris. “You can specify what type of person?”

“Well, sure,” he said, looking like someone on the verge of pleading the Fifth Amendment.

“Like how?”