Bugs (2 page)

Fred was now thirty-one, though he thought of himself as twenty. He still appreciated rainbows. Here in Minneapolis, you could imagine rainbows of any style, popping up daily. There was plenty of other life up there besides: boiling cumulus heaped up like clotted cream, the distant rainstorm ploughing the land, high clouds like streaky bacon, lush
tropical sunsets, or hundreds of Canada geese in huge formations, braying like donkeys as they surveyed the land they owned. At night the moon rose huge and yellow and healthy over a low horizon. The stars were so numerous and bright that they seemed like clusters of night cities on a landscape. It was possible to look up and imagine that he was falling from space, head first down towards some unimaginable land.

He had indeed fallen here from the sky, landing at sunset at an airport where the full magnificent blaze was visible. He paused by a great window to admire it. People kept jostling him aside, as they made their way past the window to a glass case displaying a replica of an antique car.

Minneapolis disturbed him as it does not disturb many people. It was, after all, a part of Minnesota, that low-stress locale of lakes, lutefish, and lack-lustre politicians. Dullness was all, in a city worthy of a Eugene McCarthy, a Walter Mondale or a Hubert H. Humphrey.

The city’s reputation for dullness went back a century or more. Scandinavian settlers drank gallons of strong coffee to keep their brains alive in Minneapolis. German settlers before them drank fiery peppermint schnapps and felled huge Christmas trees in the snow to keep awake. No doubt the Indians before them nodded off by its waterfalls. Before the Indians, beavers dozed in their lodges, certain that nothing would ever happen here.

So far, nothing had ever happened. The city was surrounded by sleepy suburbs through which wove a great network of biking- and jogging-paths. The centre of each suburb was a shopping-mall. Citizens of Minneapolis were able to go around wearing buttons reading
BORN TO SHOP,
though this irony, too, was soon lost in the general porridge of boredom. The sun rose and set on freeways carrying people from ‘town homes’ in one suburb to their work in another. Wishfully, people called it ‘Silicon Prairie’, but it was not excitingly awash in high-tech wealth. Nor was it excitingly poor and dangerous, like Detroit, or excitingly
historical like Atlanta, or excitingly raw like (he filled in a name) Cody. He understood Minneapolis to offer nothing more exciting than cleanliness and good manners. And, in Fred’s case, a job.

He picked a direction (towards a distant water-tower shaped like an enormous boiled egg in its cup) and started walking.

At first the road seemed to be cutting straight through a forest, with nothing either side except the darkness of trees. Then the trees fell away quickly, replaced on both sides by high metal fences bearing the signs of security companies. An asphalt footpath began. Across the road were
PREMISES SECURED BY PEACE EYE AGENCY.
This side was
GUARDED BY TALOS – DANGER, UNLEASHED DOGS.
Talos, the bronze man of Crete. The old Cretan story had no doubt been garbled in Minoan B or something, because it no longer made any sense at all. The idea of one bronze man patrolling the entire perimeter of Crete was hard enough to imagine. His peculiar methods of defence exceeded the bounds of the possible. Talos had two tactics: before invaders could land, he shied rocks at their ships; if they managed to land, he heated himself to a glowing heat and killed the invaders by embracing them. A couple of likely stories, Fred thought.

Soon the fences gave way to humming power-transformers and railway crossings. Then came a double row of mean-looking houses covered with asphalt shingles. There were a few families sitting on porches, men in undershirts standing on steps or sitting in cars. Everyone stared at him.

He came to a corner where two men sat, and one stood, on the steps of a small grocery store. One of the men, a tall man whose costume included a camouflage undershirt and a beret, stepped out and blocked his path. He emitted a kind of drawn-out groan that, when it was repeated, Fred identified as speech.

‘What you doin’ down here?’

A man wearing a baseball cap spoke from the steps, laughing. ‘He down here lookin’ for black pussy.’

‘That right? You lookin’ for black pussy? I fix you up.’

‘Well, no, I –’

‘He say he ain’t lookin’ for no black pussy. Black pussy ain’t good enough for him.’

‘Sure it is. How much money you got, man? I fix you up.’

‘Have you ever looked at the sky?’

The tall man looked at him with hatred. ‘Don’t give me that hippie jazz. I asked you how much money you got.’

Fred tried to think of a suitable line from ‘All My Cops’, but nothing came to mind. Meanwhile, Camouflage slapped him across the mouth.

‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll be going now.’

Baseball Cap stood up. Fred saw that he was holding something metal – a beer-can or a knife.

Camouflage continued to block the path. ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ He swung at Fred again, and pulled at his lapel.

The lapel tore as Fred pulled away. When Camouflage staggered for a second, Fred kicked him under the kneecap and ran.

‘You come back here, you fucker. I ain’t through with you. I ain’t through with you.’

A Diet Dr Pepper can sailed past him. There were groans from one voice, and laughter from another, but there were no pursuing footsteps. Fred loped on until he was out of breath. The kick had thrown off his shoe; the exposed foot hurt already from the asphalt path. On the positive side, he was still aimed towards VIMNUT.

A car pulled over to the kerb ahead of him. The car was big, rusty and battered. For a terrible moment, Fred thought Camouflage and his friends had caught up with him. But it was a white workman, his car half-full of strips of iron. The car smelt strongly of whisky.

‘VIMNUT? Sure, I go past it. Watch your head there. If I got to stop sudden, you better duck down – that stuff can slide forward and take your head right off, there.’

The whisky man introduced himself as Vern. He said that it was his job to install sheet rock in new houses. The strips
of iron were used to hold sheet rock in place. Watch your head.

Fred recalled that Talos had a hole in his foot, too. And a single vein, running up to his head. When they pulled the plug from Talos’ heel, the ichor ran out, and he was dead.

Maybe Talos was some kind of steam-powered catapult. That would explain the rock-throwing, and why he was searing hot to the touch. When they let the water and steam out, he came to a stop.

Or could Talos be a volcano? Fred was not a scholar, and he found it irritating not to have exact answers. He didn’t want a plausible hypothesis; he wanted truth, immediate and complete, as in a dream.

Full of fire, the car flew along freeways, then slammed down an exit to a minor road where it came to a stop.

Vern pointed at a large white building some distance from the road. ‘There she is. VIMNUT.’

By God, Fred thought, against all odds. Like an American success-story. Up from the gheddo. Overcoming polio to become an Olympic pole-vault champion. Fighting dyslexia to become a Supreem Cuort Jistuce.

The long white building lay before him on its lawn like a white leather jewel-box on a green velvet cushion, waiting to be opened. With all the signs of activity: hundreds of cars gleaming in the parking-lot (someone was here), sprinklers working away at the lawn, a row of flagpoles where a dozen or so American flags snapped in the wind. In the sky, a hot-air balloon disguised in rainbow colours drifted overhead. Civil War artillery-spotters, no doubt, come like a heavenly host to witness his triumph.

Fred’s first feeling of elation wore off quickly as he began his approach to the building. Though its whiteness shimmered only a hundred yards away, it seemed somehow to recede before him as he moved forward, the way a distant mountain retreats behind its foothills.

The foothills in this case were fences, roads, ditches, even a kind of moat (where a family of mallards could practise being picturesque); there was everything except a direct footpath to a door. For what seemed hours, he worked his way through parking-lots, past sealed hatches marked
RECEIVING – NO ADMITTANCE
and
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
And when he finally turned a corner and saw the main entrance it was flanked by a forty-foot sign:
CYBERK CORPORATION.
The wrong place! That drunken bastard had dropped him at the wrong place! Cursing to himself, Fred limped in the front door.

The young receptionist looked up with a cautious smile. Fred was suddenly aware of his torn jacket, his split lip.

‘Excuse me, can you tell me where VIMNUT Industries are located?’

‘Right here.’ She had a nice smile. ‘Today’s the official changeover to our new name, Cyberk Corporation.’

‘What a relief,’ he said. ‘M. E. Jones. I’ve come about a job.’

Her finger ran down a list. He was about to apologize for being late, when suddenly she beamed at him.

‘Please take a seat, Mr Jones.’

‘Er, would you happen to have a pin?’

‘Well, let me see, here.’ He noticed Minneapolisians often began sentences with
well
and ended them with
here
or
there
. And here he was, criticizing the speech patterns of someone who was helping him.

‘Here you go.’ She leaned over the desk and pinned up the torn flap for him. She had soft-looking dark hair. He smelt her perfume. ‘There you go.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

He sat down and thumbed through the VIMNUT annual report: pictures of men in grey suits smiling, pictures of women in white gowns, shower-caps and surgical gloves assembling tiny components, pictures of people pretending to look at computers and models of plumbing. Then he brought the rag of advertisement out of his pocket and reread it: