Just Deserts

Excerpt from the novel The Stand icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Stephen King icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     Irma Fayette lived in Lodi, California. She was a lady of twenty-six, a virgin, morbidly afraid of rape. Her life had been one long nightmare since June twenty-third, when looting had broken out in town and there had been no police to stop the looters. Irma had a small house on a side-street; her mother had lived there with her until she had died of a stroke in 1985. When the looting began, and the gunshots, and the horrifying sound of drunken men roaring up and down the streets of the main business section on motorcycles, Irma had locked all the doors and then had hidden in the spare room downstairs. Since then she had crept upstairs periodically, quiet as a mouse, to get food or to relieve herself.
     Irma didn’t like people. If everyone on earth had died but her, she would have been perfectly happy. But that wasn’t the case. Only yesterday, after she had begun cautiously to hope that no one was left in Lodi but her, she had seen a gross and drunken man, a hippie man in a T-shirt that said I GAVE UP SEX AND DRINKING AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST 20 MINUTES OF MY LIFE, wandering up the street with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He had long blond hair which cascaded out from under the gimme cap he was wearing and all the way down to his shoulders. Tucked into the waistband of his tight bluejeans was a pistol. Irma had peeked around the bedroom curtain at him until he was out of sight and then had scurried downstairs to the barricaded spare room as if she had been released from a malign spell.
     They were not all dead. If there was one hippie man left, there would be other hippie men. And they would all be rapers. They would rape her. Sooner or later they would find her and rape her.
     This morning, before first light, she had crept up to the attic, where her father’s few possessions were stored in cardboard boxes. Her father had been a merchant seaman. He had deserted Irma’s mother in the late sixties. Irma’s mother had told Irma all about it. She had been perfectly frank. Her father had been a beast who got drunk and then wanted to rape her. They all did. When you got married, that gave a man the right to rape you anytime he wanted. Even in the daytime. Irma’s mother always summed up her husband’s desertion in three words, the same words Irma could have applied to the death of almost every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth: “No great loss.”
     Most of the boxes contained nothing but cheap trinkets bought in foreign ports—Souvenir of Hong Kong, Souvenir of Saigon, Souvenir of Copenhagen. There was a scrapbook of photographs. Most of them showed her father on ship, sometimes smiling into the camera with his arms about the shoulders of his fellow beasts. Well, probably the disease that they were calling Captain Trips out here had struck him down in whatever place he had run off to. Not great loss.
     But there was one wooden box with small gold hinges on it, and in this box was a gun. A .45 caliber pistol. It lay on red velvet, and in a secret compartment below the red velvet were some bullets. They were green and mossy-looking, but Irma thought they would work all right. Bullets were metal. They didn’t spoil like milk or cheese.
     She loaded the gun under the single cobwebby attic bulb, and then went down to eat her breakfast at her own kitchen table. She would not hide like a mouse in a hole any longer. She was armed. Let the rapers beware.
     That afternoon she went out on the front porch to read her book. The name of the book was Satan Is Alive and Well on the Planet Earth. It was grim and joyful stuff. The sinners and the ingrates had gotten their just deserts, just as the book said they would. They were all gone. Except for a few hippie rapers, and she guessed she could handle them. The gun was by her side.
     At two o’clock the man with the blond hair came back. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He saw Irma and his face lighted, no doubt thinking of how lucky he had been to finally discover some “pussy.”
     “Hey, baby!” he cried. “It’s just you and me! How long—” Then terror clouded his face as he saw Irma put down her book and raise the .45.
     “Hey, listen, put that thing down… is it loaded? Hey—!
     Irma pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded, killing her instantly. No great loss.

And it Tore Pieces Out of My Heart, As it Always Does

Excerpt from the novel The Golden Compass icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Philip Pullman icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     “Why en’t you cold, Serafina Pekkala?”
     “We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth being cold for that.”
     “Could I feel them?”
     “No. You would die if you took your furs off. Stay wrapped up.”
     “How long do witches live, Serafina Pekkala? Farder Coram says hundreds of years. But you don’t look old at all.”
     “I am three hundred years or more. Our oldest witch mother is nearly a thousand. One day, Yambe-Akka will come for her. One day she’ll come for me. She is the goddess of the dead. She comes to you smiling and kindly, and you know it is time to die.”
     “Are there men witches? Or only women?”
     “There are men who serve us, like the consul at Trollesund. And there are men we take for lovers or husbands. You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you’ll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female; human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn’t. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches’ lives are as brief as men’s are to us.”
     “Did you love Farder Coram?”
     “Yes. Does he know that?”
     “I don’t know, but I know he loves you.”
     “When he rescued me, he was young and strong and full of pride and beauty. I loved him at once. I would have changed my nature, I would have forsaken the star-tingle and the music of the Aurora; I would never have flown again—I would have given all that up in a moment, without a thought, to be a gyptian boat wife and cook for him and share his bed and bear his children. But you cannot change what you are, only what you do. I am a witch. He is a human. I stayed with him for long enough to bear him a child….”
     “He never said! Was it a girl? A witch?”
     “No. A boy, and he died in the great epidemic of forty years ago, the sickness that came out of the East. Poor little child; he flickered into life and out of it like a mayfly. And it tore pieces out of my heart, as it always does. It broke Coram’s. And then the call came for me to return to my own people, because Yambe-Akka had taken my mother, and I was clan queen. So I left, as I had to.”
     “Did you never see Farder Coram again?”
     “Never. I heard of his deeds; I heard how he was wounded by the Skraelings, with a poisoned arrow, and I sent herbs and spells to help him recover, but I wasn’t strong enough to see him. I heard how broken he was after that, and how his wisdom grew, how much he studied and read, and I was proud of him and his goodness. But I stayed away, for they were dangerous times for my clan, and witch wars were threatening, and besides, I thought he would forget me and find a human wife….”
     “He never would,” said Lyra stoutly. “You oughter go and see him. He still loves you, I know he does.”
     “But he would be ashamed of his own age, and I wouldn’t want to make him feel that.”
     “Perhaps he would. But you ought to send a message to him, at least. That’s what I think.”
     Serafina Pekkala said nothing for a long time. Pantalaimon became a tern and flew to her branch for a second, to acknowledge that perhaps they had been insolent.
     Then Lyra said, “Why do people have dӕmons, Serafina Pekkala?”
     “Everyone asks that, and no one knows the answer. As long as there have been human beings, they have had dӕmons. It’s what makes us different from animals.”
     “Yeah! We’re different from them all right…. Like bears. They’re strange, en’t they, bears? You think they’re like a person, and then suddenly they do something so strange or ferocious you think you’ll never understand them…. But you know what Iorek said to me, he said that his armor for him was like what a dӕmon is for a person. It’s his soul, he said. But that’s where they’re different again, because he made this armor hisself. They took his first armor away when they sent him into exile, and he found some sky iron and made some new armor, like making a new soul. We can’t make our dӕmons. Then the people at Trollesund, they got him drunk on spirits and stole it away, and I found out where it was and he got it back…. But what I wonder is, why’s he coming to Svalbard? They’ll fight him. They might kill him…. I love Iorek. I love him so much I wish he wasn’t coming.”
     “Has he told you who he is?”
     “Only his name. And it was the consul at Trollesund who told us that.”
     “He is highborn. He is a prince. In fact, if he had not committed a great crime, he would be the king of the bears by now.”
     “He told me their king was called Iofur Raknison.”
     “Iofur Raknison became king when Iorek Byrnison was exiled. Iofur is a prince, of course, or he wouldn’t be allowed to rule; but he is clever in a human way; he makes alliances and treaties; he lives not as bears do, in ice forts, but in a new-built palace; he talks of exchanging ambassadors with human nations and developing the fire mines with the help of human engineers…. He is very skillful and subtle. Some say that he provoked Iorek into the deed for which he was exiled, and others say that even if he didn’t, he encourages them to think he did, because it adds to his reputation for craft and subtlety.”
     “What did Iorek do? See, one reason I love Iorek, it’s because of my father doing what he did and being punished. Seems to me they’re like each other. Iorek told me he’d killed another bear, but he never said how it came about.”
     “The fight was over a she-bear. The male whom Iorek killed would not display the usual signals of surrender when it was clear that Iorek was stronger. For all their pride, bears never fail to recognize superior force in another bear and surrender to it, but for some reason this bear didn’t do it. Some say that Iofur Raknison worked on his mind, or gave him confusing herbs to eat. At any rate, the young bear persisted, and Iorek Byrnison allowed his temper to master him. The case was not hard to judge; he should have wounded, not killed.”
     “So otherwise he’d be king,” Lyra said. “And I heard something about Iofur Raknison from the Palmerian Professor at Jordan, ’cause he’d been to the North and met him. He said…. I wish I could remember what it was…. I think he’d tricked his way on to the throne or something…. But you know, Iorek said to me once that bears couldn’t be tricked, and showed me that I couldn’t trick him. It sounds as if they was both tricked, him and the other bear. Maybe only bears can trick bears, maybe people can’t. Except… The people at Trollesund, they tricked him, didn’t they? When they got him drunk and stole his armor?”
     “When bears act like people, perhaps they can be tricked,” said Serafina Pekkala. “When bears act like bears, perhaps they can’t. No bear would normally drink spirits. Iorek Byrnison drank to forget the shame of exile, and it was only that which let the Trollesund people trick him.”
     “Ah, yes,” said Lyra, nodding. She was satisfied with that idea. She admired Iorek almost without limit, and she was glad to find confirmation of his nobility. “That’s clever of you,” she said. “I wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t told me. I think you’re probably cleverer than Mrs. Coulter.”
     They flew on. Lyra chewed some of the seal meat she found in her pocket.
     “Serafina Pekkala,” she said after some time, “what’s Dust? ‘Cause it seems to me that all this trouble’s about Dust, only no one’s told me what it is.”
     “I don’t know,” Serafina Pekkala told her. “Witches have never worried about Dust. All I can tell you is that where there are priests, there is fear of Dust. Mrs. Coulter is not a priest, of course, but she is a powerful agent of the Magisterium, and it was she who set up the Oblation Board and persuaded the Church to pay for Bolvangar, because of her interest in Dust. We can’t understand her feelings about it. But there are many things we have never understood. We see the Tartars making holes in their skulls, and we can only wonder at the strangeness of it. So Dust may be strange, and we wonder at it, but we don’t fret and tear things apart to examine it. Leave that to the Church.”
     “The Church?” said Lyra. Something had come back to her: she remembered talking with Pantalaimon, in the fens, about what it might be that was moving the needle of the alethiometer, and they had thought of the photomill on the high altar at Gabriel College, and how elementary particles pushed the little vanes around. The Intercessor there was clear about the link between elementary particles and religion. “Could be,” she said, nodding. “Most Church things they keep secret, after all. But most Church things are old, and Dust en’t old, as far as I know. I wonder if Lord Asriel might tell me….”
     She yawned.
     “I better lie down,” she said to Serafina Pekkala, “else I’ll probably freeze. I been cold down on the ground, but I never been this cold. I think I might die if I get any colder.”
     “Then lie down and wrap yourself in the furs.”
     “Yeah, I will. If I was going to die, I’d rather die up here than down there, any day. I thought when they put us under that blade thing, I thought that was it…. We both did. Oh, that was cruel. But we’ll lie down now. Wake us up when we get there,” she said, and got down on the pile of furs, clumsy and aching in every part of her with the profound intensity of the cold, and lay as close as she could to the sleeping Roger.
     And so the four travelers sailed on, sleeping in the ice-encrusted balloon, toward the rocks and glaciers, the fire mines, and the ice forts of Svalbard.

Custom Had Not Reconciled My Mind to It

Excerpt from the novel The Sign of the Four icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Arthur Conan Doyle icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
     Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.
     Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.
     “Which is it to-day?” I asked,—”morphine or cocaine?”
     He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said,—”a seven-per-cent. solution. Would you care to try it?”
     “No, indeed,” I answered, brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”
     He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”
     “But consider!” I said, earnestly. “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.”
     He did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his finger-tips together and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation.
     “My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession,—or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”

Strangle a Muskrat

Excerpt from the novel Cryptonomicon icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Neal Stephenson icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     Randy grew up in a college town in eastern Washington State, graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, and landed a Clerk Typist II job at the library there—specifically the Interlibrary Loan Department—where his job was to process incoming loan requests mailed in from smaller libraries all over the region and, conversely, to mail out requests to other libraries. If nine-year-old Randy Waterhouse had been able to look into the future and see himself in this career, he would have been delighted beyond measure: the primary tool of the Interlibrary Loan Department was the Staple Remover. Young Randy had seen one of these devices in the hands of his fourth-grade teacher and been enthralled by its cunning and deadly appearance, so like the jaws of some futuristic robot dragon. He had, in fact, gone out of his way to staple things incorrectly just so he could prevail on his teacher to unstaple them, giving him another glimpse of the blood-chilling mandibles in action. He had gone so far as to steal a staple remover from an untended desk at church and then incorporate it into an Erector-set robot hunter-killer device with which he terrorized much of the neighborhood; its pit-viper yawn separated many a cheap plastic toy from its parts and accessories before the theft was discovered and Randy made an example of before God and man. Now, in the Interlibrary Loan office, Randy had not just one but several staple removers in his desk drawer and was actually obligated to use them for an hour or two a day.
     Since the UW library was well-endowed, its patrons didn’t request books from other libraries unless they had been stolen from their own or were, in some way, peculiar. The ILL office (as Randy and his coworkers affectionately called it) had its regulars—people who had a whole lot of peculiar books on their wish lists. These people tended to be either tedious or scary or both. Randy always ended up dealing with the “both” subgroup, because Randy was the only Clerk Typist in the office who was not a lifer. It seemed clear that Randy, with his astronomy degree and his extensive knowledge of computers, would one day move on, whereas his coworkers did not harbor further ambitions. His larger sphere of interests, his somewhat broader concept of normalcy, was useful when certain patrons came into the office.
     By the standards of many, Randy was himself a tedious, scary, obsessed character. He was not merely obsessed with science but also with fantasy role-playing games. The only way he could tolerate working at a such a stupid job for a couple of years was that his off time was completely occupied with enacting fantasy scenarios of a depth and complexity that exercised all of the cranial circuitry that was so conspicuously going to waste in the ILL office. He was part of a group that would meet every Friday night and play until sometime on Sunday. The other stalwarts in the group were a computer science/music double major named Chester, and a history grad student named Avi.
     When a new master’s degree candidate named Andrew Loeb walked into the ILL office one day, with a certain glint in his eye, and produced a three-inch-thick stack of precisely typed request forms from his shitty old knapsack, he was recognized immediately as being of a particular type, and shunted in the direction of Randy Waterhouse. It was an instant meeting of the minds, though Randy did not fully realize this until the books that Loeb had requested began to arrive on the trolley from the mail room.
     Andy Loeb’s project was to figure out the energy budgets of the local Indian tribes. A human body has to expend a certain amount of energy just to keep breathing and to maintain its body temperature. This figure goes up when it gets cold or when the body in question is doing work. The only way to obtain that energy is by eating food. Some foods have a higher energy content than others. For example, trout is highly nutritious but so low in fat and carbohydrates that you can starve to death eating it three times a day. Other foods might have lots of energy, but might require so much work to obtain and prepare that eating them would be a losing proposition, BTU-wise. Andy Loeb was trying to figure out what foods had historically been eaten by certain Northwest Indian tribes, how much energy they expended to get these foods and how much they obtained by eating them. He wanted to do this calculation for coastal Indians like the Salish (who had easy access to seafood) and for inland ones like the Cayuse (who didn’t) as part of an extremely convoluted plan to prove some sort of point about the relative standards of living of these tribes and how this affected their cultural development (coastal tribes made lots of fantastically detailed art and inland ones occasionally scratched stick figures on rocks).
     To Andrew Loeb it was an exercise in meta-historical scholarship. To Randy Waterhouse, it sounded like the beginnings of a pretty cool game. Strangle a muskrat and you get 136 Energy Points. Lose the muskrat and your core temp drops another degree.
     Andy was nothing if not methodical and so he had simply looked up every book that had ever been written on such topics, and every book mentioned in those books’ bibliographies, yea, even unto four or five generations; checked out all of them that were available locally; and ordered the rest from ILL. All of the latter passed across Randy’s desk. Randy read some and skimmed all. He got to learn about how much blubber the Arctic explorers had to eat in order to keep from starving to death. He perused detailed specifications for Army C-rations. After a while, he actually began sneaking into the photocopy room and making copies of key data.
     In order to run a realistic fantasy role-playing game, you had to keep track of how much food the imaginary characters were getting and how much trouble was involved in getting it. Characters passing across the Gobi desert in November of the year 5000 B.C. would have to spend more time worrying about food than, say, ones who were traveling across central Illinois in 1950.
     Randy was hardly the first game designer to notice this. There were a few incredibly stupid games in which you didn’t have to think about food, but Randy and his friends disdained them. In all of the games that he participated in, or that he himself designed, you had to devote a realistic amount of effort to getting food for your character. But it was not easy to determine what was realistic. Like most designers, Randy got over the problem by slapping together a few rudimentary equations that he basically just pulled out of thin air. But in the books, articles, and dissertations that Andrew Loeb was borrowing through ILL, he found exactly the raw data that a mathematically inclined person would need to come up with a sophisticated rules system based on scientific fact.
     Simulating all of the physical processes going on in each character’s body was out of the question, especially in a game where you might be dealing with armies of a hundred thousand men. Even a crude simulation, tracking only a few variables and using simple equations, would involve a nightmarish amount of paperwork if you did it all by hand. But all of this was happening in the mid-1980s, when personal computers had become cheap and ubiquitous. A computer could automatically track a large database and tell you whether each character was well-fed or starving. There was no reason not to do it on a computer.
     Unless, like Randy Waterhouse, you had such a shitty job that you couldn’t afford a computer.
     Of course, there’s a way to dodge any problem. The university had lots of computers. If Randy could get an account on one of them, he could write his program there and run it for free.
     Unfortunately, accounts were only available to students or faculty members, and Randy was neither.
     Fortunately, he started dating a grad student named Charlene at just about this time.
     How the hell did a generally keg-shaped guy, a hard scientist, working a dead-end Clerk Typist job, and spending all his spare time in the consummately nerdy pastime of fantasy role-playing games, end up in a relationship with a slender and not unattractive young liberal arts student who spent her spare time sea kayaking and going to foreign films? It must have been one of those opposites-attract kind of deals, a complementary relationship. They met, naturally, in the ILL office, where the highly intelligent but steady and soothing Randy helped the highly intelligent but scattered and flighty Charlene organize a messy heap of loan requests. He should have asked her out then and there, but he was shy. Second and third opportunities came along when the books she’d requested began to filter up from the mailroom, and finally he asked her out and they went to see a film together. Both of them turned out to be not just willing but eager, and possibly even desperate. Before they knew it, Randy had given Charlene a key to his apartment, and Charlene had given Randy the password to her free university computer account, and everything was just delightful.
     The university computer system was better than no computer at all. But Randy was humiliated. Like every other high-powered academic computing network, this one was based on an industrial-strength operating system called UNIX, which had a learning curve like the Matterhorn, and lacked the cuddly and stylish features of the personal computers then coming into vogue. Randy had used it quite a bit as an undergraduate and knew his way around. Even so, learning how to write good code on the thing required a lot of time. His life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role-playing game circuit altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and began to spend all of his free time either with Charlene or in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn’t have done otherwise, like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be something completely useless, but at least he was creating.
     He spent a lot of time talking to Andrew Loeb, who actually went out and did the stuff he was writing programs for; he’d disappear for a few days and come back all wobbly and haggard, with fish scales caught in his whiskers or dried animal blood under his fingernails. He’d ram down a couple of Big Macs, sleep for twenty-four hours, then meet Randy in a bar (Charlene wasn’t comfortable with having him in the house) and talk learnedly of the difficulties of day-to-day life, aboriginal style. They argued about whether aborigines would eat the more disgusting parts of certain animals or throw them away. Andrew voted for yes. Randy disagreed—just because they were primitive didn’t mean they couldn’t have taste. Andrew accused him of being a romantic. Finally, to settle it, they went up into the mountains together, armed with nothing but knives and Andrew’s collection of exquisitely crafted vermin snares. By the third night, Randy found himself seriously thinking about eating some insects. “Q.E.D.,” Andrew said.
     Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having built something so complicated that actually worked, but he had no illusions about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he hadn’t been writing code, he’d have spent the same amount of time playing games or going to Society for the Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills, which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he’d done it all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers—not a savvy move in an age when all the money was in personal computers.
     Chester and Randy had nicknamed Avi “Avid,” because he really, really liked fantasy games. Avi had always claimed that he played them as a way of understanding what it was really like to live in ancient times, and he was a maniac about historical authenticity. That was okay; they all had half-assed excuses, and Avi’s historical acumen frequently came in handy.
     Not long after this, Avi graduated and disappeared, and popped up a few months later in Minneapolis, where he had gotten a job with a major publisher of fantasy role-playing games. He offered to buy Randy’s game software for the astonishingly large sum of $1000 plus a small cut of future profits. Randy accepted the offer in its general outlines, asked Avi to send him a contract, then went out and found Andrew boiling some fish guts in a birchbark kettle atop a Weber grill on the roof of the apartment building where he lived. He wanted to give Andrew the good news, and to cut him in on the proceeds. What ensued was a really unpleasant conversation, standing up there in a pelting, spitting, wind-blown rain.
     To begin with, Andrew took this deal far more seriously than Randy did. Randy saw it as a windfall, a lark. Andrew, who was the son of a lawyer, treated it as if it were a major corporate merger, and asked many tedious and niggling questions about the contract, which did not exist yet and which would probably cover a single piece of paper when it did. Randy didn’t realize it at the time, but by asking so many questions for which Randy had no answers, Andrew was, in effect, arrogating to himself the role of Business Manager. He was implicitly forming a business partnership with Randy that did not, in fact, exist.
     Furthermore, Andrew didn’t have the first notion of how much time and effort Randy had put into writing the code. Or (as Randy was to realize later) maybe he did. In any case, Andrew assumed from the get-go that he would share a fifty-fifty split with Randy, which was wildly out of proportion to the work he’d actually done on the project. Basically, Andrew acted as if all of the work he’d ever done on the subject of aboriginal dining habits was a part of this undertaking, and that it entitled him to an equal split.
     By the time Randy extricated himself from this conversation, his mind was reeling. He had gone in with one view of reality and been radically challenged by another one that was clearly preposterous; but after an hour of Andrew’s browbeating he was beginning to doubt himself. After two or three sleepless nights, he decided to call the whole thing off. A paltry few hundred dollars wasn’t worth all of this agony.
     But Andrew (who was, by now, represented by an associate of his father’s Santa Barbara law firm) vehemently objected. He and Randy had, according to the lawyer, jointly created something that had economic value, and a failure on Randy’s part to sell it at market value amounted to taking money out of Andrew’s pocket. It had become an unbelievably Kafkaesque nightmare, and Randy could only withdraw to a corner table at his favorite pub, drink pints of stout (frequently in the company of Chester) and watch this fantastic psychodrama unfold. He had, he now realized, blundered into some serious domestic weirdness involving Andrew’s family. It turned out that Andrew’s parents were divorced and, long ago, had fought savagely over custody of him, their only child. Mom had turned into a hippie and joined a religious cult in Oregon and taken Andrew with her. It was rumored that this cult engaged in sexual abuse of children. Dad had hired private dicks to kidnap Andrew back and then showered him with material possessions to demonstrate his superior love. There had followed an interminable legal battle in which Dad had hired some rather fringey psychotherapists to hypnotize Andrew and get him to dredge up repressed memories of unspeakable and improbable horrors.
     This was just the executive summary of a weird life that Randy only learned about in bits and pieces as the years went on. Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.
     Anyway Randy had blundered into this life and become enveloped in the weirdness. One of the young eager beavers in Andrew’s dad’s law firm decided, as a preemptive move, to obtain copies of all of Randy’s computer files, which were still stored on the UW computer system. Needless to say, he went about it in a heavy-handed way, and when the university’s legal department began to receive his sullen letters, it responded by informing both Andrew’s lawyer, and Randy, that anyone who used the university’s computer system to create a commercial product had to split the proceeds with the university. So now Randy was getting ominous letters from not one but two groups of deadly lawyers. Andrew then threatened to sue him for having made this blunder, which had halved the value of Andrew’s share!
     In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five thousand dollars. The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.
     It was the only time in his life where he had ever thought about suicide. He did not think about it very hard, or very seriously, but he did think about it.
     When it was all over, Avi sent him a handwritten letter saying, “I enjoyed doing business with you and look forward to continuing our relationship both as friends and, should opportunities arise, as creative partners.”