CHAPTER NINE
Accept, accept, accept, reject, reject, accept, accept, accept, 1-0-0-1-2 enter, accept, reject. Seven hours a day, forty-nine weeks a year. That was the rhythm of his work as well as the lot in life of U.S. Postal Service mail sorter Bernard Keyes. With sixteen years in, he was relegated the post of senior sort operator. His $38,000-a-year salary limited his life, like a small bowl stunts the growth of the fish in it. He was better than this and he knew it. As he heard his supervisor coming up behind him, he laid out his plan. He would grab the prodding tool used to un-jam the sorter and turn and smack him with it right across his fat, redneck face, and he would continue beating him until there was nothing but brains everywhere. He glanced down at the stick as the footsteps got closer.
“Bernie, what the fuck did you screw up now, you dipshit?”
He turned around with nothing more than a meek smile and a swallow. “It wasn’t me, Burt. Wanda up the line’s been screwing up the opcodes. Here, look.” His hand reached out toward the heavy prodding tool but passed it by, grabbing a mangled envelope instead. “She over inked the pads again! The shit’s smearing everywhere.” He pointed to the blob of ink where sharply defined lines should have been. Knowing even his lunkhead boss could see that these smeared bar codes would not be easily recognized by the laser reader, he felt he successfully defended his turf.
“Well then, get back to work, and try to be more productive.”
I’ll produce a bat right up your ass, you cocksucker, he thought. But out loud he whined, “It ain’t me, it’s up the line.” He went back to sorting. As he stood there accepting, rejecting, and revising the zip codes on a million letters, he was thinking of how his boss would cower if he knew what Bernard Keyes did when he wasn’t on the sorters.
It started seven years ago in a chat room called “Going Postal,” where U.S. postal workers logged on mostly to gripe about everything. An irony not lost on Keyes was the fact that in the chat room, the soldiers of paper mail used e-mail — the realm of the enemy — to communicate.
It was in the “Going Postal” room that the calling first came to him. A web surfer spouted off about actually “going postal” by getting a gun and wiping out his substation. At first, Bernie thought it was just a guy acting big, but as the rest of the room discounted him as a nut, Bernie read something that resonated between the lines of his rants. The man spoke truths about the threats everyone faced— potential losses of freedoms, property, and lives. Bernie instant messaged him. The man responded to Bernie’s IM and they started chatting without anyone else knowing what they discussed.
Bernie found his battle cry that night. This was a cry so loud that the crazy interloper, who was all set to buy an Uzi and spray his workplace, became, instead, satiated by the beginnings of a plan that would, in the end, be much more satisfying.
CHAPTER TEN
You make your bed and you sleep in it, but you don’t always make your bed during the week, unless you are expecting company or your mother to drop by. Therefore, it was only sensible for Hiccock to have his usual once-a-week dinner with his ex-wife, Janice, at his home on Wednesdays, which just so happened to be the same day Mrs. Phelps, his combination cleaning woman, plant waterer, and surrogate mom, worked a full day sprucing up the Hiccock residence.
Having dinner with your ex-wife every week certainly made some people question either the dinner part or the “ex” part. Hiccock married Janice Tyler because she was the best person he ever knew. She was the best lover he ever had, and remained, to this day, his best friend. He wasn’t at all sure what he brought to the union.
He thought for a while it was a case of reading the wrong signals; two people, temporarily appearing to be going in the same direction at the same moment, only to realize they were on a course that would separate them.
Actually, he was the one who veered away. He allowed himself to become besieged with work. It was almost as if getting married checked off the relationship box on his “Things in Life to Do” list and made more room for work. And so they became the other half of the American Dream, the one nobody likes to acknowledge, the divorced couple. Nevertheless, Janice still possessed all those wonderful things he admired about her in the first place. Not having her to talk to was not an option. He needed her feedback on his ideas. Watching her while she focused on the pasta before her and the almost mechanical precision of each fork twirl, perfectly sized to slip into her mouth without requiring her to open it too far, his mind returned to their time together at Stanford.
It had been the start of a new research project, ambitious in scope and grand in scale. 2,000 sets of twins were to be interviewed and studied. An adjunct professor of statistical analysis had recommended Bill to the head of the project, Janice Tyler. Bill had heard of Janice. She was almost famous. Apparently she was a brilliant undergrad student who distinguished herself in behavioral sciences and won an unprecedented full project grant from the National Science Foundation. She even had office space in the Human Sciences building. Bill found the room number on an open door leading into a space that even an optimist would call cramped, and knocked on the doorframe.
“Hello,” he said as he entered into the tiny empty office. As he took a step inside, Janice came from around the back of the door with a pile of books and almost crashed into him.
“Here, let me get those,” he offered.
“I got it,” she said.
“You sure?”
“I said I have them.” They stood together for a second, then she squinched her nose. “What’s that I smell? Curry!”
“Uh, yeah I guess I had Indian food for lunch.”
“Yuck. I hate Indian food. You walk around smelling like you all day.” She waved away the “curry-fied” air from her nostrils as she walked off to put the books down on her desk.
“Maybe I should step outside and come in again?”
“Okay, do it.” Janice encouraged.
Bill stepped back outside into the linoleum-tiled hallway and rapped on the doorframe again.
“Who is it?”
“Miss Janice Tyler?”
“Yes.”
“I’m delivering your order from the Bombay Palace, with extra curry.”
When she laughed, he knew it was going to be okay. She wasn’t the stick in the mud she first appeared to be.
“I’m William Hiccock, referred to you by Professor Parnes. He said you could use a Scientific Methodologist on your team.”
“Well, listen buckaroo, I am the quarterback, coach, and manager of this team. We are going to generate a lot of data. Do you think you can handle the workload and still play your little mindless reenactment of warfare every weekend?’
“You know who I am?” the quarterback said with just a little self-satisfaction.
“I know that you are supposed to be good. Do you think you can handle crucial data and keep your facts straight?”
“GM”
“What?”
“You said quarterback, coach and manager of this team. There is an aberration in the framework of the hierarchical order of succession you just employed to establish your archetypal position. Stemming from the fact that there are no managers in football, that titled position would be better suited to a baseball analogy.”
“So what do I want to be in that analogy?”
“I dunno… how about ‘bitch!’”
Janice was stunned. He could read all kinds of changes of mood and thought on her face. He wondered whether he had just blown it or blown it wide open. She took a deep breath as he waited for the explosion.