"Those are pills," one of the cops said, in amazement. "Look, that's gotta be a Quaalude. There's a Nembutal." Other cops pointed out other pills. I recognized the distinctive red stripe around the center of a white capsule that had to be a Dilantin. I had been taking them every day for years.
Finally the pills stopped falling, and the damn thing started to play music at us. "Nearer My God To Thee," in three-part harmony.
A few people laughed. I don't think any of us thought it was funny-it was creepy as hell listening to that eerie dirge- but it sounded like it had been scored for penny whistle, calliope, and kazoo. What could you do but laugh?
As the music played, a little figure composed entirely of squares entered from the left of the screen and jerked spasti-cally toward the center. It was like one of those human figures from a video game, but not as detailed. You had to use your imagination to believe it was a man.
A shape appeared in the middle of the screen. The "man" stopped in front of it. He bent in the middle, and something that might have been a chair appeared under him.
"What's that supposed to be?"
"A computer. Isn't it?"
It must have been, because the little man extended his arms, which jerked up and down like Liberace at the piano. He was typing. The words appeared above him.
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE I MISSED SOMETHING. I SIT HERE, NIGHT AND DAY, A SPIDER IN THE CENTER OF A COAXIAL WEB, MASTER OF ALL I SURVEY… AND IT IS NOT ENOUGH. THERE MUST BE MORE.
ENTER YOUR NAME HERE? ▄
"Jesus Christ," Hal said. "I don't believe it. An interactive suicide note."
"Come on, we've got to see the rest of this."
I was nearest the keyboard, so I leaned over and typed my name. But when I looked up, what I had typed was VICT9R.
"How do you back this up?" I asked.
"Just enter it," Osborne said. He reached around me and pressed enter.
DO YOU EVER GET THAT FEELING, VICT9R? YOU HAVE WORKED ALL YOUR LIFE TO BE THE BEST THERE IS AT WHAT YOU DO, AND ONE DAY YOU WAKE UP TO WONDER WHY YOU ARE DOING IT? THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO ME.
DO YOU WANT TO HEAR MORE, VICT9R? Y/N? ▄
The message rambled from that point. Kluge seemed to be aware of it, apologetic about it, because at the end of each forty-or fifty-word paragraph the reader was given the Y/N option.
I kept glancing from the screen to the keyboard, remembering Kluge slumped across it. I thought about him sitting here alone, writing this.
He said he was despondent. He didn't feel like he could go on. He was taking too many pills (more of them rained down the screen at this point), and he had no further goal. He had done everything he set out to do. We didn't understand what he meant by that. He said he no longer existed. We thought that was a figure of speech.
ARE YOU A COP, VICT9R? IF YOU ARE NOT, A COP WILL BE HERE SOON. SO TO YOU OR THE COP: I WAS NOT SELLING NARCOTICS. THE DRUGS IN MY BEDROOM WERE FOR MY OWN PERSONAL USE. I USED A LOT OF THEM. AND NOW I WILL NOT NEED THEM ANYMORE.
PRESS ENTER? ▄
Osborne did, and a printer across the room began to chatter, scaring the hell out of all of us. I could see the carriage zipping back and forth, printing in both directions, when Hal pointed at the screen and shouted.
"Look! Look at that!"
The compugraphic man was standing again. He faced us. He had something that had to be a gun in his hand, which he now pointed at his head.
"Don't do it!" Hal yelled.
The little man didn't listen. There was a denatured gunshot sound, and the little man fell on his back. A line of red dripped down the screen. Then the green background turned to blue, the printer shut off, and there was nothing left but the little black corpse lying on its back and the word **DONE** at the bottom of the screen.
I took a deep breath, and glanced at Osborne. It would be an understatement to say he did not look happy.
"What's this about drugs in the bedroom?" he said.
We watched Osborne pulling out drawers in dressers and bedside tables. He didn't find anything. He looked under the bed, and in the closet. Like all the other rooms in the house, this one was full of computers. Holes had been knocked in walls for the thick sheaves of cables.
I had been standing near a big cardboard drum, one of several in the room. It was about thirty gallon capacity, the kind you ship things in. The lid was loose, so I lifted it. I sort of wished I hadn't.
"Osborne," I said. "You'd better look at this."
The drum was lined with a heavy-duty garbage bag. And it was two-thirds full of Quaaludes.
They pried the lids off the rest of the drums. We found drums of amphetamines, of Nembutals, of Valium. All sorts of things.
With the discovery of the drugs a lot more police returned to the scene. With them came the television camera crews.
In all the activity no one seemed concerned about me, so I slipped back to my own house and locked the door. From time to time I peeked out the curtains. I saw reporters interviewing the neighbors. Hal was there, and seemed to be having a good time. Twice crews knocked on my door, but I didn't answer. Eventually they went away.
I ran a hot bath and soaked in it for about an hour. Then I turned the heat up as high as it would go and got in bed, under the blankets.
I shivered all night.
Osborne came over about nine the next morning. I let him in, Hai followed, looking very unhappy. I realized they had been up all night. I poured coffee for them.
"You'd better read this first," Osborne said, and handed me the sheet of computer printout. I unfolded it, got out my glasses, and started to read.
It was in that awful dot-matrix printing. My policy is to throw any such trash into the fireplace, un-read, but I made an exception this time.
It was Kluge's will. Some probate court was going to have a lot of fun with it.
He stated again that he didn't exist, so he could have no relatives. He had decided to give all his worldly property to somebody who deserved it.
But who was deserving? Kluge wondered. Well, not Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, four houses down the street. They were child abusers. He cited court records in Buffalo and Miami, and a pending case locally.
Mrs. Radnor and Mrs. Polonski, who lived across the street from each other five houses down, were gossips.
The Andersons' oldest son was a car thief.
Marian Flores cheated on her high school algebra tests.
There was a guy nearby who was diddling the city on a freeway construction project. There was one wife in the neighborhood who made out with door-to-door salesmen, and two having affairs with men other than their husbands. There was a teenage boy who got his girlfriend pregnant, dropped her, and bragged about it to his friends.
There were no fewer than nineteen couples in the immediate area who had not reported income to the IRS, or who had padded their deductions.
Kluge's neighbors in back had a dog that barked all night.
Well, I could vouch for the dog. He'd kept me awake often enough. But the rest of it was crazy! For one thing, where did a guy with two hundred gallons of illegal narcotics get the right to judge his neighbors so harshly? I mean, the child abusers were one thing, but was it right to tar a whole family because their son stole cars? And for another… how did he know some of this stuff?
But there was more. Specifically, four philandering husbands. One was Harold "Hal" Lanier, who for three years had been seeing a woman named Toni Jones, a co-worker at the L.A.P.D. Data Processing facility. She was pressuring him for a divorce; he was "waiting for the right time to tell his wife."
I glanced up at Hal. His red face was all the confirmation I needed.
Then it hit me. What had Kluge found out about me?
I hurried down the page, searching for my name. I found it in the last paragraph.
"… for thirty years Mr. Apfel has been paying for a mistake he did not even make. I won't go so far as to nominate him for sainthood, but by default-if for no other reason-I hereby leave all deed and title to my real property and the structure thereon to Victor Apfel."
I looked at Osborne, and those tired eyes were weighing me.
"But I don't want it!"
"Do you think this is the reward Kluge mentioned in the phone call?"
"It must be," I said. "What else could it be?"
Osborne sighed, and sat back in his chair. "At least he didn't try to leave you the drugs. Are you still saying you didn't know the guy?"
"Are you accusing me of something?"
He spread his hands. "Mister Apfel, I'm simply asking a question. You're never one hundred percent sure in a suicide. Maybe it was a murder. If it was, you can see that, so far, you're the only one we know of that's gained by it."
"He was almost a stranger to me."
He nodded, tapping his copy of the computer printout. I looked back at my own, wishing it would go away.
"What's this… mistake you didn't make?"
I was afraid that would be the next question.
"I was a prisoner of war in North Korea," I said.
Osborne chewed that over for a while.
"They brainwash you?"
"Yes." I hit the arm of my chair, and suddenly had to be up and moving. The room was getting cold. "No. I don't… there's been a lot of confusion about that word. Did they 'brainwash' me? Yes. Did they succeed? Did I offer a confession of my war crimes and denounce the U.S. Government? No."
Once more, I felt myself being inspected by those deceptively tired eyes.