Big If Read online

  Jens and Kai sat at the table. They looked at the splat together.

  Jens said, “This is where I tell you not to lie.”

  “I didn’t lie,” said Kai. “It slipped.”

  Jens wet a sponge at the sink, planted Kai next to the oatmeal on the floor.

  “Clean it up,” said Jens.

  “No.”

  “Clean it up,” said Jens.

  “No.”

  “Clean it up or else you’ll get a time-out.”

  Kai wound up like a pitcher and with a leg kick threw the sponge against the fridge.

  Fine. Jens carried the boy to his little bedroom on the front side of the house. The shades were drawn. The room was dark. Jens dumped Kai on the racecar bed and stood by the rocking chair.

  Kai was sobbing, facedown on the bed. Jens and Peta didn’t hit, weren’t hitters, did not believe in hitting. Instead they did time-outs. A child having a time-out was supposed to lie still in the dark, deprived of stimuli, and ponder the connection between naughtiness and punishment until time was in again.

  Kai slid off the bed and ran for the door. Jens caught him and returned him, kicking, to the bed. Jens was never sure what to do or say when Kai made a break for it. What was the caring parent’s counterthreat? Have a time-out or else you’ll have a time-out? Did they really expect Kai to lie in the dark and think, this is what happens if you don’t lie in the dark?

  Jens said, “Kai Kai Kai. This is a time-out.”

  They had rules. Don’t lie—this was a rule. Pretending is okay, but we never lie. We don’t bite or hit or spit. We share and use our words. They were trying to communicate a moral world. Jens did not feel up to it some days. He looked at Kai, still sobbing on the bed. Something was missing. The boy deserved a lesson, a teaching, a rule for the future.

  Jens said, “Son, we don’t throw our sponges at the fridge.”

  Jens went to the dining nook, copied SmoShadow to a disk, and packed the laptop in a shoulder bag. SmoShadow was still buggy. Jens would have to clear the error flags before his morning meeting. He expected a rough meeting even with SmoShadow totally debugged; without it, he’d be dead. Jens was as that moment six weeks overdue on his last assigned project, not SmoShadow (SmoShadow was his own idea), but rather a new-series software bot, known around the company as Project Todd. Like all the monsters Jens had written for BigIf, Todd had come to him as a set of specs from the head creative, the game’s chief imagineer. The specs for Monster Todd were simple on the surface, a knock-off of the target-and-attack algorithms Jens had written for prior wildly popular monsters, Hamsterman, Skitz the Cat, Farty Pup, and Seeing Eye. Jens knew that the corporate planners at BigIf considered Project Todd a high priority, a crucial counterstroke to bolster BigIf’s stagnant market share.

  Jens hadn’t understood what was new or special about Todd until he saw the rough-up of the monster on the screen of Phoebe Rosenthal, their artist in residence. The other monsters Jens had helped develop for BigIf were preposterous, cartoonish. Hamsterman, with his saucy killer twinkle, looked no more like a hamster than Bugs Bunny looked like a pellet-chewing rabbit in a hutch. It was comfortable to Jens, this distance from reality. Phoebe’s sketch of Todd, in contrast, was a boy of fifteen, slouchy, acned, callow, carrying a backpack like any skateboard kid in downtown C.E., like a million kids who played the game. There was something in this business of making monsters real or realistic which filled Jens with a deep sense of unease, as if the game were poised to cross some kind of line. He found it hard to concentrate on the code for Todd, simple though it was or should have been. His inability to finish the assignment was like a head cold which descended every time he clicked his buffers and opened a draft of Monster Todd. Jens had surrendered in frustration, turning to a program he liked working on, a problem he enjoyed, a nice bright piece of value-neutral engineering, SmoShadow.exe. He would show the shadow to his bosses at the morning meeting when they asked what he had been doing for the last six weeks.

  Jens went down the flagstone walk, keys between his teeth, Kai riding on his hip carrying a peeled banana like a torch to light the way. They got in the car. Jens pulled around Bluffs Circle, waiting for a break in traffic on 1A. Kai was in his crash seat, singing to himself. Jens saw a gap and gunned it, heading up the shore to a chorus of car horns. Time was definitely in again.

  Jens heard a yawn.

  “Kai is tired, Poppa.”

  Jens slugged Glucola as he drove. Lobstermen plowed rows along the shore. Gulls attacked a Chinese restaurant dumpster, wings pumping, drifting backwards in the wind. Gypsum ships waited at the head of Portsmouth Channel, three miles out. It was clear enough to see their rust.

  “Hey buddy, see the gulls?”

  “Where?” said Kai.

  “Right there. They’re flying backwards, man. Isn’t that crazy?”

  Kai tried to turn and look in his harness. He said, “Where?”

  “Back there. We’ll look for them tomorrow.”

  Jens pointed out the sights as drove his son to school. He did this to pass the time, and keep Kai awake, and because Walter Asplund had done it long ago, pointing out the sights, and Jens remembered being happy in those days. After a winter storm, there were many things to see: flooded parking lots, stop signs sheared and headless, tree limbs down along the road. Today there was nothing but houses, motels, condo courts, gulls, and lobster boats, and the big ships waiting for a river pilot in the gulf. Jens liked driving up 1A—you always knew what was coming next. This was home to Jens, the commercial coastline of his boyhood, a dial tone for the eyes.

  He explained about the gypsum ships and the river pilots.

  Kai didn’t understand. “Why do ships need pilots?”

  “Because the port is rocky and the Piscataqua’s fast. It’s tricky getting in there, son. Your grampa used to do a lot of accidents in there.”

  “Do they fly into the port?”

  “The gypsum ships? ’Course not. That’s why they need pilots.”

  Jens pulled into the gravel lot at Li’l People and walked Kai up the handicapped ramp.

  Li’l People Montessori was three years old, a mecca for new money on the shore. Tuition for pre-K was like another mortgage, but the parents paid it happily. It was a lovely school. The classrooms were sunny and open-plan. Up the stairs was music, gym, and napping mats. The coatroom was a daily scene. Mothers and a few stray dads brokered playdates and babbled last instructions to their well-dressed heirs. One kid was always finishing his muffin by the door, one kid was always screaming, at least one kid, but never Kai. He found his cubby, shed his jacket to the floor.

  Jens said, “Have a good day, Kaiyawatha.”

  Kai was marching off. Jens followed at a distance, watching from the parents-and-caregivers’ observation area, a red batter’s box painted on the floor behind a half partition and the hanging spider plants. The children were already busy, one group making dolls from socks, another pounding clay, a third group on the pillows getting a story from the teacher’s helper, a high school girl in baggy flame-retardant-looking pants. Kai stood unnoticed in the center of the room, rocking in his pudgy sneakers, double-jointed at the knees, no ass whatsoever, and he was just fine, a total individual, alone in the universe. Jens was proudly terrified. The teacher would spot Kai in a moment, guide him to a group, and that would also be just fine, but until then Kai rocked and asked his little questions. Why do gulls fly backwards? Why do ships need pilots? Why is music up the stairs? Why is music? Why is Kai?

  The old house on Santasket Road was set back in the trees, neat-looking and well-kept, a sign hammered in the lawn, Another offering by MOSS PROPERTIES. Jens pulled into the driveway, cut the engine, and got out.

  The house had been on the market since September, asking the low threes, which seemed like quite a lot to Jens for a nothing sort of saltbox in a humdrum part of town, but also not enough for the first place he remembered knowing well. Peta was a broker at Moss Properties, of course, but she
was a mansion specialist and this house, four bedrooms on a quarter acre, was well below the bottom of her market bracket. She had farmed it out to her secretary, Claus, a purring German boy working toward promotion as a junior sales associate. Claus had arranged for regular landscaping, a paint job in November (gray, the shutters white), leaving Jens to check the place once a week, the pipes and pumps and lawn, a job he had no time for, a duty he resented, although he seemed to come out more than once a week, often for no reason, just to stand here and look up at the trees.

  He looked up at the trees. When he came with Kai, Jens showed him all the bedrooms, here is Auntie Vi’s (Kai barely knew her), here is Grampa Walter’s (Kai knew him as a person in a picture) and Grammy Evelyn’s (Kai knew her as the lady who sent oranges from Florida), and the highlight of the tour, Jens’ own boyhood bedroom. Kai would climb up on the bed and bounce. “Poppa, look!” he’d shout and crack his little skull against the eaves, just as Jens had in the glory days of beds and bouncing. Other times, as now, Jens came out alone to walk the lawn and listen to the wind stirring in the cat grass of the marshes, a sound like faraway applause.

  Jens fetched the bottle of Glucola from the car and took a walk. The grass was February brown. His mother’s garden, her ex-garden, untended since the summer Walter passed away, was a patch of dirt and dried weeds down to the climbing roses, which hung heavy and would bloom again in May, though nobody would notice. Jens remembered the battle over tulips in the den, Evelyn and Walter, and Walter always lost. He remembered Evelyn feeding slop to dogs, Dingo I, Dingo II, Dingo III, a dynasty of Dingos in the yard, and Walter up late with his pipe, reading back issues of Shop Safety Monthly, and writing on his money, IN WE TRUST, IN US WE TRUST. Center Effing didn’t understand his father, the godless moderate Republican, a radical of large ideas whose life, paradoxically, was bounded by this town, by the rhythms of his habits in this town, poplin suits in summertime, a haircut every week. People understood Walter as the plodding adjuster, not as the eccentric atheist. Jens saw it the other way. He understood the atheism (Walter said, We’re merely molecules—why is that so frightening?), but not the insurance work, Walter as enforcer of the letter of the policies, ten thousand dollars for a foot, thirty thousand for an eye. If Walter could see the lies of scripture, why couldn’t he see the lies of the loss-and-compensation charts devised by The Connecticut? Why was an eye worth thirty thousand dollars, not twenty and not forty? Walter wouldn’t buy into the lie of the motto printed on his money, yet he went about adjusting, serving The Connecticut, buying into a much bigger lie, or so it seemed to Jens.

  Jens was looking at the beech tree in the corner of the yard, remembering the day Walter bought a half-dipole antenna, every hammer’s envy, and how they puzzled over where to rig it. It was a powerful antenna, but it needed to be high. Then Major Wade, the grounded bomber pilot, wandered over from the Coopers’ pool followed by good old Mrs. Cooper, the Asplunds’ frowsy neighbor, whose tits and exhibitionism had hastened puberty in Jens by at least two years. Major Wade, the man who shot the arrow through the tree, came down to the basement a few times after that. He would sit with Jens at the console, drinking a beer, taking a break from Carol Cooper’s conversation. Wade would fiddle with the dial and say, “Can you get Greenland on this thing?” Jens could get the world with his dipole on a good hot afternoon when the waves were skipping, a weird effect. On days like that, he could get Uganda on the ten-band, but not his buddies up the shore. It had to do with solar radiation, poison atoms in the air fifty miles up. Major Wade, as a bomber pilot, knew all about fallout in the stratosphere, although he didn’t ham and couldn’t fly anymore. He had a beer and a headache and an inner ear infection and had been reassigned as base recreation officer. He enjoyed various base recreations, but was finished as a bomber pilot.

  Carol Cooper sunbathed on her diving board all summer. Jens watched her brown herself all day, or swim at midnight, drunk and alone, when Major Wade was off with other wives. Jens stayed up late, spying on Carol Cooper, or reading weather books or his hammer magazines as he listened to the Red Sox in Anaheim or Oakland (the games would start at ten and run until one or two). If a bomber left at night, he’d listen on his pillow as the rumble dwindled. Jens knew the sound of every plane at Pease, the B-52s, the swept-wing supersonic F-111s. Rumbling was bombers, heading north and east. Listen for the sound. Was it gone? Was it absolutely gone? Was there nothing in the room again but play-by-play and moths against the screen and Carol Cooper, sloppy drunk and stumbling over a chaise longue? Even half asleep or jerking off, you couldn’t mistake the bombers for the hairy exits of the fighter-interceptors, the F-111s, a sound like Christmas wrapping tearing and the man-made thunder at Mach One. Every house Jens ever saw, or visited, or stayed in, anywhere in Portsmouth or the shore, had the same ceiling cracks from the sonic booms. When the nights were quiet, Jens knew that the squadron had left for Thule in Greenland, their forward-ready base under the ice cap. Major Wade, grounded and depressed, talked about Thule, flying out of Thule, the endless whiteouts and snow-blindness, compass spinning as you hopped the pole, arctic lows depressing the altimeter. You’re blind and your instruments are giving impossible readings—you’re flying at zero feet and everywhere is north. The first runway at Thule was black asphalt, but the color black stored heat from the sun, melting the permafrost, and one day the Greenland ground swallowed up the runway. The Air Force built a new runway, bigger than the first, bigger than the lakebed macs out west, said Major Wade, biggest on the planet maybe, five miles of paved tundra, and it was painted white to bounce the light and not melt the permafrost, and the pilots coming back from the Russian aerial frontier had to search for white in whiteness, which was the same as being blind.

  Jens talked on the half-dipole to a man in Kansas who was sitting in the path of a cyclone. They weren’t talking, of course. They were tapping Morse, Jens sitting in the basement, speaker to his ear, straining for each dit and dat, jotting as he strained. As the wind picked up in Kansas, the man keyed faster and faster until Jens was jotting without thinking, without translating, and then the cyclone hit and the man went silent. Jens translated the last lines of dots and dashes, the last broadcast of the martyred Kansas hammer, and the man said this: Two of them. They glow. Jens, alone at the console, let the pencil fall. Being a scientific kid, he knew that twin cyclones were comparatively common. He also knew that cyclones did on rare occasions glow. Rustics had reported this for centuries, but scientists had written it off as terror playing tricks on rustics, a known phenomenon, until it was shown that the vicious spinning sheer of a twister system can actually create a battery in air, building up a charge, and so the funnel glows. Some weather historians believed that these freaks of freaks, self-electrifying cyclones, might have been the source of Bible stories about God-as-fire, pillars of fire, tongues of fire, burning bushes burning unconsumed. Jens let the pencil fall that day and thought, I’ve seen it through Morse code, I’ve touched the lie of God.

  Ham radio and Morse—they were his two loves back then, the twin cyclones of his heart. But, looking back, he saw that they were part, one part, of a youth-long preparation for Jens’ shattering encounter with the true God: software. Like the God of Israel, it went by many names, one for every face it showed: logic, code, loop, routine, algorithm, source. JENSISNUMBER1—he remembered how it made him feel, the power and control, making the computer an extension of your will. He mastered Beginning Glyph and moved up over time, climbing to the realms of high abstraction, polymorphic logic. He left Dartmouth burning with ambition to build and write cool things, beauties made of code. He went to Harvard on a fellowship to do stochastic math, but the fellowship ran out, and then he did a Ph.D. at MIT, but he fought with his adviser and left after a semester, and then there was a series of start-ups with big dreams, but one thing happened or another, and Jens found himself five years farther down the road, married with a mortgage, Peta pregnant, and Jens again without a job, and so he started writi
ng monsters for BigIf.

  Jens drove out to the house for dinner around then, just after he went to work at BigIf. Walter was alive, presiding at the table, and Evelyn was there, fussing over Peta, who was pregnant, and Walter asked about BigIf, and Jens explained the vision of a Web-based war game, of how they would build it, the overall design.

  Walter said, “A war game?”

  Jens explained about the monsters, how kids would pay to kill them in the game, the old joystick thrill of killing.

  And Jens saw it on his father’s face, a cloud of disapproval. Jens saw and felt his father’s disapproval over the last months of Walter’s life. Mostly Walter kept his peace, said nothing, no lying praise but not criticisms either, and Jens, sensing this, had to pick a fight.

  “What’s wrong with my game?” he asked his father one night at the house. “What’s wrong with being a success?”

  Walter didn’t want to fight with his son—he wanted anything but that—and so he said, “Your game is immoral, Jens. Worse, it’s amoral. It’s a waste of your gifts. You must quit right now.”

  “Why?” said Jens. “To satisfy your idea of purity?”

  “No,” said Walter. “You have to quit because you’ll be unhappy if you don’t.”

  Jens felt judged and maybe he was. He went into a kind of sulk and didn’t call or speak to Walter for a week, which was a long time for Jens and his father to go without speaking. When Walter called Jens, they talked about the weather, or whatever, Jens did not remember, and two weeks later Walter died of heart attack, leaving the question of the judgment unresolved.

  Vi came back from Washington the summer after Walter’s death. She was working as a bodyguard by then, and had come through something terrible, a bungled operation (a flood, a shooting—she didn’t want to talk about it), and Jens was glad to have her home, to see her face. Vi would understand, he’d thought, she saw the things I saw, the paper train derailed, the farmhand with one foot, the losses calculated by their father. She’d known the man as Jens had known the man, and she would understand. But the Vi who came home that weekend was not his little sister, not the sister he remembered anyway. She was thin, too thin, and her eyes were vacant, gray and scary-vacant, and she seemed to scan everything, passing cars, strangers on the street, with the same alert indifference. Jens too—she scanned him like another stranger on the street. He thought at first that this was some kind of Secret Service thing, but then he realized, No—she’s judging me like Walter did, and what I’m seeing in her eyes is disapproval.