Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  I just sneered out the windshield. After I’ve gotten the date and done the work for them, ecocrats love to give me some pointers on real life. If it makes them feel better, I don’t care.

  “We want to prosecute these people,” Cohen continued, “but getting evidence is hard.”

  “What’s so hard about it?”

  “Come on, Mr. Taylor, look at it from a cop’s point of view. We aren’t chemists. We don’t know which chemicals to look for, we don’t know where or how to look. Infiltration, sampling, analysis, all those activities require specialists—not state troopers. You’re very scornful, Mr. Taylor, because for you—with your particular skills—for you all those things are easy. You can do them with your eyes closed.”

  “Holy shit, is this going where I think it is?”

  It was. Cohen wanted me to break into a fucking chemical plant in the middle of the night, with cops and a warrant, in his home state, and get samples. Me, I was far too tired to hear this bizarre stuff. I desperately needed cold beer and loud rock and roll. So Cohen went on and on, about how I should think this over, and then I found myself sitting alone in the Omni, leaned back in the reclining seat with Debbie’s Joan Jett tape blasting on the stero—I’m in love with the modern world / I’m in touch, I’m a modern girl—drawing stares from the company suits, wondering if I’d just dreamed the whole thing.

  12

  Back in Boston, we worked out a settlement with Fotex. They had just lost their most vicious negotiator, my oldest and wiliest enemy in this business, who had toppled off a rusty catwalk into an intake pond, been sucked into a pig pipe, shredded into easily digestible bits by rotating knives and processed into toxic sludge. I guessed it was suicide. This Fotex deal was a big hassle since Wes, who runs the Boston office, was using the Omni for a business trip through northern New England. I had to ride my bike to and from their goddamn plant, way up north in the high-chemical-crime district and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.

  Someone had donated an old computer system, a five-terminal CP/M system about ten years old. Boston already had a Computer Museum, but we were neck-and-neck with them as a showcase of obsolete machinery. Old used computers are economically worthless and we pick them up for little or nothing. Usually they’re good enough for what we want to do: telecommunications, printing up mailing lists, slowly crunching a few numbers.

  Debbie and I took a vacation up to Quebec City and then over to Nova Scotia for a couple of days. I had a terrible time.

  “If we get up now—” I said one night at about 3:00 A.M., looking at my digital nerd-watch.

  “—and roll up the tent real fast,” she continued, and by this time I was already embarrassed, but she kept going, “and jump into the car and drive all night, we could reach the ferry that runs down to the states, and be in Boston, wallowing in sludge, within twenty-four hours.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Instead of being out here on the beach, listening to the waves, relaxing and screwing,” she continued.

  “We aren’t screwing,” I pointed out, but suddenly we were. Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in tune with nature. Fortunately there was a trawler out there somewhere, maybe a mile out, and when its wake attacked the beach, the waves started piling in on top of each other, blending into one fast pounding whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. I burst the zipper out of my sleeping bag, Debbie kicked a pot of cold hot chocolate out into the sand, and for a while we just lay there, half tumbled out onto the beach, feeling the cold and the warmth on opposite sides, and I said to hell with the damn ferry. Every so often I got some hint that this woman really wanted me, and it was scary. When she wanted other things she was so crafty and effective.

  Eventually we found our way back and then didn’t see each other for a while. It was a nice summer and I spent more time at the beach, or playing ski-ball, than working. Bart had a friend in Tacoma who mailed us a shitload of powerful fireworks he’d bought on an Indian reservation. We got arrested shooting them off in a park and I had to sell off some shares of my old Mass Anal stock to pay the fine. The guy who arrested us was good—some kind of exmilitary man. He waited until we lit off a whistle, so we couldn’t hear his engine, then he closed on us at some huge speed, with his lights off, stopped right in front of us, pinning us against a retaining wall, and hit us with all of his cop lights at once. Brilliant tactics. I congratulated him heartily; it was useful to remember that smart cops did exist.

  The Blowfish showed up. It was about to turn the corner around Maine and head into the Buffalo area. But first we took a trip out to Spectacle Island, a couple of miles off of South Boston. It really ought to be called Gallagher Tow Island, because it was kind of a patrimony for that family. The guy who’d founded Gallagher Tow—I don’t know his first name—had held down the city garbage-towing concession for fifty years. He’d clung to that concession like something out of an Alien movie; he couldn’t be removed without killing the patient. He’d used everything—graft, blackmail, bullshit, violence, Irishness, defamation of character, arranged marriages, the Catholic church, and simple groveling. He’d hung on to that garbage contract, built up his fleet of tugs from one to fifteen, created an entire goddamn island out in the middle of the Harbor, and, like a true magnate, died of a massive stroke. Now his grandson, Joe, ran Gallagher Tow, and he’d moved on to other forms of envirocide. They had a brand new behemoth named Extra Stout, a 21,000-horse tugboat that could probably haul Beacon Hill out to sea if they could figure out where to attach the hawser. Instead they used it to haul oil rigs through twenty-foot swells in the North Atlantic.

  So the Gallagher garbage-dumping days are over, but the evidence is still there. You can go walk around on it. Someday, I’m sure, a set of yuppie condos will spring up on Spectacle Island. The heating bills would be low, because all that trash is still decaying; if you stick a probe into its bowels in the middle of the winter, you will find that the entire island is blood-warm. It just sits there decomposing, throwing off heat and gases. As far as I’m concerned it kind of sums up Boston Harbor.

  You can dig a hole and sample the blood of Spectacle Island, a reddish-brown fluid that permeates the entire dump, a cocktail of whatever’s been piled up there, mingled together and dissolved in rainwater. But once you analyze it, you know there’s more to the island than used diapers, rotting sofas and Sox scorecards. There are solvents and metals, too. Industry has been out dumping its trash.

  Sometimes I got the impression that companies were still coming out here and unloading difficult pieces of garbage. That was hard to prove, unless I camped out on the island and waited for them to show up, and I didn’t want to live on a mound of garbage. Roscommon’s house was close enough.

  Our Blowfish expedition was an experiment. I’d been reading about a place in Seattle where they’d constructed houses close to an old covered-over dump site. The houses started to explode spontaneously and it was found that methane gas, created by the decay, was seeping into their basements. So the city sank pipes into the ground to let the gas escape, and if you lit them they’d make nice flares.

  We loaded a number of long pipes onto the Blowfish, rented a drilling rig, and cruised out there on a sunny Saturday morning. When we got there, the obligatory crew of under-age shitheels, half a dozen of them, were throwing a party on the fetid beach. They were all standing around a bonfire because there’s no place on Spectacle Island where you’d want to sit down. They were drinking Narragansett, which had put them into kind of a traditional Russian mood; whenever they finished a bottle, they’d fling it down and shatter it. They were drinking in a hurry, because it was windy and cool, the place stank and they probably knew the whole trip was a mistake. The tinkling explosions were almost nonstop. Gulls circled, hoping some edible garbage would show up, swooping down to intercept the flying glass.

  We an
chored a little ways offshore and used a Zode to ferry the equipment onto the island. The Narry drinkers had come out here in someone’s dad’s boat, an open, four-seat fishing cruiser, and had pulled it up onto the best landing spot. It hurt just to see that, because the bottom of that nice fiberglass hull had probably picked up some long, deep scars. We settled for a less-convenient spot about a hundred yards away, and started piling up our equipment.

  I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather. If Bartholomew were here, he could identify their favorite band just by looking at their colors. I stayed on shore with the equipment while Wes ran stuff back and forth. He’d dumped off some pipes and was on his way back to the Blowfish when he noticed that the partyers had found a stack of junk tires. They were swarming like ants on candy, shouting, laughing, calling each other “dude,” and throwing them on the bonfire.

  My attitude was, who the fuck cares? That’s why I’ll never be in charge of a regional office. Wes was a different type.

  To me it was just some black smoke into the air. Kind of unsightly, a little toxic, but unimportant in the big scheme of things. To Wes it was a symbolic act, a desecration of the environment. It didn’t matter that, in this case, “the environment” was an immense garbage dump to begin with. So before I could tell him not to worry about it, he was drowning out my voice with his outboard, buzzing over there to intervene.

  Once they got over being stunned, they reacted exactly as you’d expect: went into a blind testosterone rage. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” “Now listen …” “Fuck you!” One of them dragged a strip of burning Goodyear out of the fire, whirled it up into a flaming spiral, and let it fly toward Wes, who had to knock it aside with an oar before he had time to get scared. He shot away, bottles splashing in his wake, and then, of course, they noticed me.

  Standing there with a five-gallon can of gasoline, recalling the Road Warrior, I could think of a thousand interesting ways to scare these twits off. Unfortunately, these were the sort who’d be apt to carry guns. If there wasn’t a Saturday Night Special in one of their belts, you could bet they had one in the boat. So a frontal assault wasn’t a wise idea.

  Wes believed anyone could be converted to an environmentalist by negotiation. It hadn’t worked, but at least he had the presence of mind to see that they were headed my way. Wes was no expert with the Zodiac, but the water was calm and he could make it faster than the goons could run. Unfortunately the goons had a head start. I ran away from them along the shore, and as Wes caught up with me I waded out so he wouldn’t have to pull his motor up, or, worse, forget and skrag the prop.

  When I was up to midthigh, he reached me and I took one last step forward, half-falling into the boat. My foot came down on a sharp piece of metal and I felt it slash through the sole of my tennis shoe and gouge me. Then I was lying crosswise on the Zodiac, random pieces of Gallagher’s trash pile were splashing into the water around us, and we were headed back to the Blowfish.

  We changed course halfway there when Wes noticed that the goons were trashing the equipment we’d left on shore. They were especially interested in the drilling rig, which they started wrecking with the primitive weapons at hand. It was like watching Homo Erectus discover how to make tools out of flint.

  Wes brought us to within about a bottle’s throw from the shore and shouted at them. I don’t think they even looked up.

  They did seem to notice when they heard the sound of a second Zodiac motor cranking out some high RPMs. We all looked down the shoreline. Artemis had taken her Zodiac in to shore, tied its stern rope to the back of their fishing boat and tugged it off the beach. Now she was hauling it ass-backwards out to sea.

  Later there were loud and long and dull debates about whether this was consistent with GEE principles. It wasn’t exactly violence, but it did imply a certain willingness to let these guys starve to death on a pile of garbage, within sight of home. Like most of these debates, this one never got resolved.

  It modified their attitudes, though. They stopped pounding on the drill motor and ran back to inform Artemis that she was a “fucking cunt.” When this didn’t work, they quieted down, watching their boat go out to sea.

  In about five minutes, the jerks had dumped all the Narries out of their cooler and were using it to haul water up from the surf and dump it on the bonfire. It never really went out—tire fires never do—but it stopped billowing smoke.

  I asked Wes to take me out to Artemis, then clambered on board their boat, hopped around leaving bloody waffle prints on the deck and checked in the glove compartment.

  The gun wasn’t the little .22 revolver I’d expected, but a big, chrome-plated cannon, stuck in a stiff new shoulder holster. When I pulled it out, it took me a minute to untangle the straps.

  “All six chambers are loaded,” Artemis observed. “Not a great idea unless you want to shoot yourself in the armpit.” When I shot her an odd look, she shrugged. “My dad was into guns, what can I say.”

  It looked like someone else had a real jackass for a dad too. I chucked the weapon into the sea. Then, just for the hell of it, I kept rummaging. We had all day, we were already into some serious criminality, and we’d never be prosecuted. But if these pricks gave us any more trouble, I wanted to know where they lived.

  Couldn’t find a damn thing. Other than the gun, this boat was eerily clean. No papers, no registration, no old beer cans. The life vests were brand new and unmarked. When I climbed back onto the Zode, I had no information at all, nothing but a chemical trace. There was an odor about that boat, and it followed me, unwelcome, onto the Zode. It was on my hand. The smell of some goddamned men’s cologne. I’d picked it up from the revolver.

  Artemis mocked me with no mercy. “Shit, I’d rather have PCBs on me,” I said. “PCBs you can wash off; other people’s perfume sticks with you like a bladder infection.” I trailed my hand in the water.

  We reunited these little fucks with their transportation and they left, quietly. The injured dignity on their faces was something to behold. You’d think we’d just busted up a monastery.

  They didn’t say a word until they were a hundred yards out, almost out of earshot. Then, I think, they looked in the glove compartment. They just exploded with more lusty fucks, cunts, and pricks. I could hardly make it out, and I didn’t want to.

  Wes turned to me with just a grin on his face. “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Satan will get you.”

  “That’s what they said?”

  “I think so.”

  “Shit. Then I’ll tell Tricia to expect a call from the Prince of Darkness.”

  “She’ll probably hang up on him.”

  We didn’t have the stuff we needed to repair the drilling rig. That was okay, since I didn’t really think it would work anyway. It was made to bore down through reasonably soft dirt, not a pile of trash that included lots of iron fragments. We had something more reliable: a couple of sledgehammers. I picked out a promising place on the north end, visible from both South Boston and downtown, and we started pounding pipe segments down into the bowels of Spectacle Island.

  Ridiculously slow work. We spent about four hours on it, taking turns on the sledgehammers and keeping an eye out for the goons on the boat.

  My foot had a one-inch gash in it, ranging from not very deep to pretty fucking deep. Back on the Blowfish, I scrubbed it out with soap and water, taking scientific care to probe the deepest parts of the cut, squeezing it to make it bleed, the whole bit; disinfected it with something incredibly painful and wrapped a sterile bandage around the foot. Walking around was painful, so when I wanted to do a little investigating I had to go by water, on a Zodiac.

  What I wanted to see was near the northeast corner of the island. It was a huge, rusty, old barge, a piece of shit, but apparently seaworthy. There was no cargo on it. It looked like it had simply run aground.

  Right now the tide was almost out and
about three-quarters of the barge was high and dry. It was way, way up there; when it had rammed this island, the tide must have been especially high, or it must have been going very fast, or both.

  Or maybe it had been deliberately abandoned. Maybe Joe Gallagher had come here and put the nose of the Extra Stout against the ass end of the barge and just tossed it up onto the rest of the garbage. The interesting thing was that it was new—it wasn’t here three months ago, the last time I was out—and it must have carved some pretty deep gashes into the island.

  Geologists love earthquakes and other natural upheavals because they tear things open, providing views into the earth’s secrets. I had a similar attitude about this barge. There was no way to drag it off the island and then jump down into the cavity it had dug, but I could skulk around the edges with my sampling jars and see what was coming out.

  But I probably wouldn’t bother. If I were doing a Ph.D. dissertation on Spectacle Island, I’d go wild over it. But I know what Spectacle Island is: a big heap of garbage. As long as there were bigger issues in the Harbor, no point in getting obsessed with the details.

  But just for the hell of it, because it was new and interesting, I circumnavigated the barge, partly on the water and partly by foot. Nothing much to see besides hundreds of feet of vertical, rustcovered wall. Graffiti was sprinkled near the waterline and on the part that stuck out into the Harbor. The walls were a natural for graffiti, but Spectacle Island wasn’t accessible to your average jerk with a spraycan. The SMEGMA man had made it out here—some guy who’d been wandering around Boston for a couple of years painting the word SMEGMA everywhere. Super Bad Larry had made it, probably swam one-handed all the way from Roxbury. Someone in the Class of’87, and VERN + SALLY = LOVE apparently had had access to a boat. Three-quarters of the graffiti was in red, though, done by a single group. Besides being red, it had a distinctive look to it. Most graffitists just scribble something down and run away, having made their point, but the people with the red spray-paint were performing black magic, exercising ritual care. This was most obvious with the pentacles, which were inscribed in a circle. It’s hard to stand on a rolling boat in the middle of the night and draw a perfect five-foot circle with a spray can, but the Satan worshippers had done it repeatedly, all around the barge. Then they drew upside-down stars in the circles, forming your basic pentagram, and an inverted cross underneath that. Arched over the top of the circle were the words PÖYZEN BÖYZEN—a heavy-metal band with a thing about nuns and pit bulls.