John has been published in Terra Incognita (read it here), written numerous non-fiction pieces for Cricket magazine, and wrote a juvenile book on Japan’s Kensai Airport that can still be found on Amazon.com.
A Hard Life
by John C. Waugh
It makes me boil. Don’t they know how easy I break? You’d think soft creatures--soft except for those teeth--would think soft thoughts and do soft things. I mean, they weave and bump and rub up against each other sometimes when there’s just two of them, and then they put their soft lips together--so why clank me down like I don’t even matter?
Anyway, Ralph comes in at two-thirty like he always does, except that he’s been out sick for a week. Ralph’s never sick, but that’s what he told Shirley. “Shirl,” he said last Monday, “I feel terrible. Like I’m gonna collapse. I’m going home.” So Shirley rubs up against him and says “How about if I come home with you and make you some chicken soup?” And they bump a little and put their lips together. I don’t know if those teeth connect, but Ralph says, “Uh-uh Shirl. We’ve got a good thing going here. Let’s not push it.” But that’s what Shirley does--she pushes Ralph away and turns her head just a little so she’s looking at me instead. But she doesn’t really see me. She says, “You’re afraid of commitment aren’t you?” And Ralph says, “No, I’m not afraid. I’m just not ready.”
I knew something was wrong because Ralph’s never been sick a day while working here. He was always doing the rubbing and twisting with Shirley in the stock room--I can see in there when the door is open--and they’d smack up against the shelves sometimes, and then slam the door, and then I couldn’t see any more. So Ralph was out sick for a week, or so he said, and Shirley asked if people had seen him, but nobody had. At first Shirley was worried about Ralph but then later she was mad.
On Thursday, Wayne was talking to Peggy and he says, kind of quiet, “You know where Ralph is?” and Peggy says, “He’s out sick.” And Wayne says, “No he isn’t. He’s in Aruba with that blond from human resources. What’s-her-name.” And Peggy says, “You’re kidding! Ralph?” And Wayne says, “That’s what I heard,” and he refills his mug and--of course--flops me down hard.
So as I was saying, Ralph came in at two-thirty as usual after being sick--or in Aruba--and grabs me by the handle. No soft caressing like he does with Shirley. He jerks me around so I spill some on the floor, and that’s plenty embarrassing. His mug says “The Only Ultimate Bitch”-- it’s the one he gave to Shirley on Valentine’s Day--and he slaps me down on the metal as if he thinks I’ve got Superman’s ass. He takes a swig and then Harris comes in. Is Harris a first name or a last name? I don’t know. Harris, that’s all anybody ever calls him in my room.
So Harris says, “Jesus, Ralph, you’ve gone and done it now. I mean, who would’ve guessed.” Then, of course, he picks me up, slops coffee into a Styrofoam cup, and whacks me back down. Then he says “Jesus,” again.
Ralph says, “Don’t get a coronary Harris. How the hell did you find out about it anyway? I thought I’d covered my tracks.”
“Hey man,” Harris says, dumping sugar in his cup, “what do you think? You think being a sysadmin I don’t know every frickin’ detail about what goes on here? Didn’t I get you the lowdown on Brenda? Her emails? That was in like Flint, man. Aruba--go Ralph. There ain’t no...”
Ralph cuts him off. “What do you mean? I thought you were talking about Brenda. Us going to Aruba. Isn’t that what you found out about?”
Harris gets this expression like he’s smiling and sort of wondering and then it clears up and he’s just smiling. “Hah,” he half laughs. “Hell no. Think again pal. Your secret’s ...”
Then Bremerton walks in and whaddya know, Harris and Ralph clam up pretty quick. Except some small talk, like Harris says to Bremerton, “Hello Bremerton. What brings you down here? Not the coffee I’d bet.”
And that hurts. I mean, I do my best with what they give me. What am I supposed to do when I get stuffed with supermarket brand? A good roast is as tricky as making fine wine. It’s as if they want some kind of magic, like Arabica comes out when you put in Robusta. Bastards. Sometimes I think I oughta jump off and smash myself on the floor. But then I come to my senses. I’ve got no legs anyway. So Bremerton says, “Hell no, dang, this stuff’s like it’s been sitting here all day.” But he takes a cup anyway--Styrofoam like Harris--and guess what. Slams me down too as if I was a stapler or something. Damn. Why can’t I be soft?
“Hell no,” Bremerton says, “I heard a rumor that Ralph was into something big.” Then Bremerton looks at Ralph with those dark eyes with the heavy black eyebrows and that graying hair. “That so Ralph?”
“Me? Nah,” Ralph says. “I haven’t done one original thing since I was hired. I’m just a technician. Where’d you hear this anyway?”
But Bremerton--I kinda like Bremerton; he treats me nicer than most--Bremerton is perceptive. I think he’d understand me if he thought about me because he doesn’t see things like everybody else sees them. He looks deeper, like maybe he’d understand about how it’s no fun to listen all the time and never get to talk, and to sometimes get left all weekend with coffee that turns into sludge by Monday. Like when Doris is out. So Bremerton looks at Ralph, then at Harris, then back at Ralph, and smiles. “So it’s true,” he says. “So what is it? Come on Ralph. No secrets from Ops.
Ralph says, “Screw off,” and holds his hand up with all but one middle finger folded down, which usually makes folks mad. But Bremerton just grins at Ralph and says, “You’ll come around. You’re gonna realize I can help you. Ops can make or break you in this place. Think about it.” Then he throws his cup in the trash, still mostly full, and walks out without closing the door.
I’m pretty low by now and thinking Doris ought to come in soon to set me up again. Harris has finished his coffee and pours another cup, leaving me with maybe four ounces. The music on the overhead speaker is disgusting. I hate that puppy love crap. “…lost in a kiss…my heart slips away…baby I’m sorry…” I’ve only been kissed once, back before Y2K. Yeah, ok, it was just Doris but it was great. Not like I’m gonna pine over it for the rest of my life though. So Harris closes the door and says to Ralph, “Ok, Pardner, I know you’ve made a breakthrough. Something to do with luciferase in the tk binding ring. This is big isn’t it? We’re gonna make a bundle.”
Ralph isn’t buying. He’s mad but he’s hiding it. He leans against the counter trying to look casual and takes a sip from his mug. “How the hell do you know about this? How long have you been spying on me?”
Harris dumps another spoonful of sugar in his coffee, stirs, and smiles at Ralph. “Oh, long time now. Told you, as an admin I get everything. Tryst-mail from Ms. Big. She thinks she’s going through her own encrypted port but I see all of it. Hey, every time you air into the network with your notebook, I upload your hidden directories.”
“You could go to prison,” Ralph says.
“Me?” Harris plays the naïf. “How about you? Must be five years you’ve been using Company equipment to do your own work. You’ve scarfed up trade secrets left and right.”
Ralph’s brow creases as he pans a worried look around the room. “Maybe this isn’t a good place to talk,” he says.
“Why the hell not?” Harris says. “Best place around. Remember? I looped the security camera so you could bag that bitch in here. Right now they’re watching the canned stuff. Not that those guys watch rooms like this anyway. Only thing we need is some decent coffee.”
There he goes again, ragging on me. Harris takes a crunch donut and dips it in his cup. I hope he chokes.
Ralph sets his mug on the counter. “You’ve got some damn nerve.”
“You noticed.”
“Look, the military would kill for this thing. I can’t tell anybody about it. They’d come in and lock this place down. Probably lock you up, too.”
“That’s why we need each other Ralphie baby. See, I know enough to blow this wide open already. Clue me in. What’s really going on?”
Ralph paces around the room shaking his head. He runs a hand through the hair around his bald spot. He picks up his mug and dumps cold coffee down the sink. Then he grabs me and pours the last couple ounces. He mutters to himself and turns fast to face Harris. “You swear you won’t let anybody in on this? Swear on your mother’s head. Christ, how did Bremerton find out? I wonder how much he knows?”
Harris sits down at the table, smiling. “He doesn’t know shit. I sent him an anonymous email.”
Ralph stares at Harris. “Huh?”
“Insurance policy. I had to put the pressure on. Know what I mean? We’ll feed him something he’ll be happy with. Bremerton’s no problem. So what’s the skinny?”
Ralph hesitates, his eyes wild, like something’s burning inside. “Swear it won’t go beyond the two of us,” he says.
“Christ. Of course I swear.”
“God, I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Ralph says. “Ok. Look, you know my unit is working on coding viruses to do customizing, right?”
Harris nods.
“You’ll get a virus in a chewable tablet that goes inside every cell in your body and changes what needs to be changed. We’ve engineered the docking into the surface receptors and we’ve got the fail safes locked down. That HIV mutant that’s been giving trouble--that was our Manna from Heaven. If this works, you can get fuller lips. No shaving. Bigger tits. Heart shaped birthmark. It’s not that far off.”
“Yeah yeah,” Harris says. “Old news. The Company’s gonna have the patents screwed down tight. Trillions. Bigger than Google.”
“Well there’s a dark side to it.”
“The whole thing’s a dark side. Like crack. People will sell their souls to look like movie stars.”
“No,” Ralph says, “that’s not what I mean. It’s …”
And just as Ralph says that, the door swings open and in walks Doris. “Hi guys,” she says. “How’s it going?”
After pleasantries, Doris sets me up for the next round. A few more words and Doris leaves. Ralph and Harris look at one another, saying nothing. I sense that this moment is critical. Ralph is not one hundred percent convinced he really wants to tell Harris his secret. Or that he needs Harris’s help. Or that he can buck Harris’s blackmail.
They’re both sitting at the table now. The air is stiff between them. Then it melts somehow, maybe it’s the piped-in music, and Ralph says, “All right. It’s like this. We’re all ninety-nine point nine percent the same. More really. But there are differences. You have green eyes, mine are brown. You’re taller. It’s all in the DNA.” Harris comes over, pours a cup of my fresh brew, and sits down again.
Harris was clueless, but I saw that the critical moment had just passed. Ralph decided to talk. Harris would have ruined it by getting coffee a few seconds sooner, when Ralph was fragile. Harris is an ignorant, lucky son-of-a-bitch. Such is the soft life. They’re blind. I see everything, but what can I do?
Ralph continues, “I think I’ve made a mutant that can detect that tiny percent difference. Call it the bloodhound virus. Give it the scent and it’ll lock on to just one individual. Or a group. Joe. Sally. Blacks. Gays. Schizophrenics.”
Harris isn’t convinced. “How do you know your detecto-virus works? Haven’t similar things been tried? And failed? Couldn’t spot the target?”
In response, Ralph turns around and pulls down his pants, revealing a perfect star-shaped mark on his left butt cheek. “I gave it skin cells from inside my mouth,” he says. “That’s my gold star. Nobody’s done anything like this yet. Mine works. Get the picture?” Ralph pulls his pants back up.
Harris laughs. “Hell yes. Get this to work on other people, and pretty soon the Asians go blond. The Aryans turn black. Your grade school bully grows tits!” Harris is practically rolling in the aisle. “Fabulous. I love it. Chaos reigns.”
Personally I don’t see the big deal. “But don’t you see?” Ralph says, almost pleading. “The military will grab it. This would be the greatest assassination tool ever conceived. All you need are a few skin cells or a bit of hair and that head of state is toast. You can target whole groups. Bye bye to the Chechens or the Sunnis.”
“Jesus Chainsaw!” Harris says. “I get it. World domination. Absolute power. Whoever controls the spice controls the universe. But hey, Ralph, baby, if you can figure this out, somebody else will too.”
“I don’t think so,” Ralph says. “I got an MS in Biotech but my BA was in poetry.”
Harris has a blank look and opens his hands in front of him. “Huh?”
“DNA is information, like movies or poetry. At least that’s how I looked at it. They used to call most of it junk DNA because nobody knew what it was for. Well it’s encoded holographically but you’ll never find that by experiment or brute force or trial and error. You’ve got to feel the rhythm in the codes, touch the meter. Stanzas in the strands. A few billion years of evolution--how could the music of the spheres not be in there? But how many poets are also gene lab techs working for big greedy companies? And if I was more than just a technician here, I’d have been pounding down all the wrong paths, full of myself, looking for that Nobel. I wouldn’t have smelled the roses. No, it’s a once a millennium thing. If that.
“But now that I know that,” Harris says frowning, “say I’m a big fancy scientist and I know I need poetry ...”
Ralph shakes his head. “You don’t get it. It’s not a science kind of thing at all. It’s not ‘if this then that.’ It’s the dawn chorus from the dawn of man. Haiku of the heart. The dream of life.”
“But if I read your notes ... hell, I did read your notes. I didn’t see any dawn chorus thing in there.”
Ralph smiles. “What do you think, I’m stupid? I didn’t write that part up. Didn’t need to. Once you know it, you don’t need notes. Sure, for the biochemistry. But not for the Rosetta stone.”
So they just sit there for a minute facing each other across the table. I figure Harris is thinking, how the hell do I get this secret out of Ralph? I can almost smell his brain smoking. And Ralph is thinking, do I really give him this?--I haven’t crossed the line yet. And me, I’m playing God like I always do. The perfect observer. I see all, but I can’t do a damn thing except brew coffee.
A sappy remake of Revolution is playing on the overhead. No lyrics. Arranged by some dumbass who didn’t know a bassoon from a b-flat. Shirley comes in, pushing the door wide open. She looks different. Hard. “You fucking low-life son-of-a-bitch,” she says, way too calm. “With Brenda yet.” She’s holding what the detective, Styrofoam cup in hand, later calls “one huge gun,” and pulls the trigger.
Well personally I wouldn’t care either way. Some bigger-than-Hitler asshole takes over the world with fancy chemistry, what’s it to me? I still gotta make the coffee and they’ll still complain about it. You say you want a revolution, well you know. I feel sorry for Shirley. I liked her; she had spunk. But look where it got her. And I liked Ralph better alive than dead, but oh well. At least Shirley made sure his secret’s safe now. All I can do is make coffee. Still, they talk and talk and what do they get? Hard bullets in soft bodies.
I’m still unbroken though. Being hard isn’t so bad after all.
Don’t you know, it’s gonna be all right...
Copyright 2007 by John C. Waugh