Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  They weren’t finished with the umlauts, though. They put another in the center of the pentagram. If you stood back and looked at it the right way, the inverted star then became a face. The umlaut made two beady red eyes, the bottom prong of the star made a sharp muzzle, the top prongs a pair of horns, and the two side prongs a pair of goatlike ears.

  The name of the brand was written a few other places, billboard-sized, along with a bunch of incantations I didn’t recognize. Old magic symbols cribbed from a book on the occult, I guess: circles and lines and dots connected in rigid but meaningless patterns. A nonchemist might mistake them for molecular diagrams.

  The Satan worshippers had left a few other symptoms of their presence scattered around the island. For example, a wrecked toilet with a cross painted on it, surrounded by the remains of five bonfires. A mock shrine, I guess. I knocked it apart by throwing football-sized rocks at it, not because I’m some kind of heavy Christian, but only because it got on my nerves. Besides, there’s no incentive to keep a garbage pile neat, which was the problem with Boston Harbor to begin with. I kicked at one of the old bonfires and noticed that they had been burning old wood that had been pressure treated with some kind of preservative. That was fine with me. When you burn that kind of wood, the smoke contains an amazingly high concentration of dioxin. Let’s hope Pöyzen Böyzen fans like to roast marshmallows.

  A curl of that toxic smoke rose up out of the ashes. This fire was brand new, left over from last night.

  I hadn’t seen any boats beached near here, so they must have all gone home. Hell, maybe it was the same group we’d been arguing with. I went down to the pseudobeach next to the barge and looked for signs of activity and, sure enough, a few footprints. This obviously was their landing zone, and the graffiti was dense. WELCOME TO HELL, it said, and a few yards after along, written higher than I could reach, a small pentacle and the word SATAN with an arrow pointed upward.

  THE ANTICHRIST IS

  IN

  That’s why the unrusted area caught my eye. It was way up at the top of the barge, above the SATAN sign. A pair of little spots, a silver umlaut, where the rust had been worn away. They were a little more than a foot apart. At first I thought they were paint spots, but then caught them glinting in the sun.

  I went over and stood beneath them. This patch of ground looked smoother, harder-packed. There were some weak indentations, a little more than a foot apart. The Pöyzen Böyzen people had been using a ladder to climb up into the barge.

  It didn’t look like a rusted-out hulk to me anymore. It looked like an iron-walled fortress, something out of Tolkien. God knows what was going on inside of it.

  I had a pretty good idea: high-school kids came out here to drink Narries and fornicate. Maybe they traded in cocaine, or cheaper highs, but at any rate the lunatic fringe to this group owned a lot of red spray paint and had been to some bookstore in Cambridge with an “occult” section in the back.

  There was no reason in the world I would want to discover their purpose, so I limped back to the Zode and went back to our pipepounding operation.

  Frank, the biggest guy on the Blowfish crew, had broken through for us. Something was definitely escaping from the pipe. If you held your hand over it, the warm, moist draft made your skin crawl. I had everyone stand back, lit a 4th of July sparkler, and threw it toward the pipe from about ten feet away. I didn’t see the rest, because I turned away instinctively, but I heard a large but quiet thwup as a big ball of gas went up. Then there was a mild roaring sound, like distant traffic. The crew of the Blowfish applauded and I turned around. We had a nice flare going, a big raggedy yellow flame.

  We lengthened the pipe so that its outlet was about ten feet off the ground and then we left it there, burning. In my fantasies, I wanted to encircle Spectacle Island with a blazing corona of yellow flares, a beacon to ships at sea, a landmark for airline pilots, permanent fireworks for the yuppies in the new waterfront condos. It wouldn’t really accomplish that much, other than to remind people: Hey. There’s a harbor out here. It’s dirty.

  13

  When I got home I washed my foot again, applied vodka (a particular brand that I keep around strictly as an organic solvent) and rebandaged. My dreams were hallucinatory nightmares about fleeing from oversized, heavily perfumed PR flacks with chrome revolvers. I got up three times during the night to vomit, and when my alarm went off I couldn’t move my arm to hit the snooze button because all my joints had gone stiff. My vision was blurry and I had a 104° fever. My muscles and joints were all welded into a burning, smoking mass. I lay there and moaned “two hundred pounds of tainted meat” until Bart came in and brought me a Hefty. When I took enough nitrous to get to the bathroom and finish up with the vomiting and diarrhea, I looked in the mirror and found that my tongue was carpeted with whitish-brown fuzz.

  Bart drove me to the big hospital downtown to see Dr. J., my old college roommate. He’d gotten his M.D. on the six-year shake-and-bake program, done an Ivy League residency, and now he worked ERs. Not very prestigious, but the pay is steady. A fine way to subsidize other life projects.

  When I explained how I’d cut my foot, he looked at me as though I had just taken both barrels from a twelve-gauge.

  “There’s some very serious stuff out there in the Harbor, man. I’m not kidding. All those decay organisms? They work on your body too, S.T.,” he said, shooting me up with some kind of stupendous antibiotic cocktail. He gave me more of the same in pill form, but in the end I was to take only about half the bottle. Whatever those antibiotics were, they just blew the shit out of whatever was in my system. That included the natural bacteria in my colon, the E. coli, so I had continuing diarrhea. Life is too short to spend on a toilet, wondering if there’s more, so I stopped taking the pills and let my own defenses handle the mop-up work. And yes, I got a tetanus shot.

  “I ran into some people you’d like,” I told Bart as he drove me home. “Pöyzen Böyzen fans.”

  He sniffed the air and frowned slightly. Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. “Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of material—they write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point of heavy metal?”

  “Yeah. I’m the one who told you that,” he reminded me. “Heavy metal will never leave you behind.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Long Island somewhere. Not the Brooklyn end.” He looked at me. “Who were these dudes? How’d you know they were fans?”

  “Instinct.” I told him about the barge.

  “Shitty bargainers,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “These people sold their souls to the Devil and all they got was a rusty old barge? I would’ve held out for something with a wet bar. Close to the T.”

  When we got home, he went to his racks of albums and tried to remember whether Pöyzen Böyzen was filed under P or B. The answering machine was blinding, so I rewound it, listening to the message fast and backwards. And when you run it backwards, it’s supposed to be gibberish. But this wasn’t. It was a melody, a song with a strong beat that was compressed into a tinny tik-tik-tik by the machine. And above that rhythm, a little high-pitched voice was babbling: “Satan is coming. Satan is coming.”

  When it rewound all the way, I played it forward. It was heavy-metal thrash. Bart came running in, amazed. “What the fuck?” he was saying. “That’s on the machine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s Pöyzen Böyzen, man. Second album. It’s called ‘Hymn.’”

  “Nice song.”

  They’d left the entire song for us. When it was over, there was about ten seconds of a woman screaming. And that was it.

  It didn’t sound like Debbie, really, but then I’d never heard Debbie scream. She wasn’t the type. So I dialed her number and she answered the phone, sounding fine.

  “I’d like to talk to you,”
she said, and I knew I was in trouble.

  “You want to get together?” I said.

  “If that’s okay with you.” Okay, so I was in trouble.

  We had dinner at the Pearl. She let me twist for a long time before she got down to business.

  “Are you still interested in seeing me?” she asked.

  “Shit, of course I am. Jesus!”

  She just fixed me with a big-eyed stare, penetratingly cute, yet one of keen intelligence.

  “I’m sorry that I haven’t been calling you enough,” I said. “I realize that I don’t call enough.”

  “How about if I just stopped calling you? Would that give you any more incentive?”

  “Isn’t that what you did?”

  “Not like that, I didn’t.”

  “You lost me, Debbie. Explain.”

  “I like you, S.T., and I’ve tried, a few times, to reach out and get in touch with you. And now you’re addicted to it.”

  “Howzat?” She was a speck on the horizon.

  “We’re getting into this shit now where you expect me to follow you around. To keep track of where you are, pick up the phone and call you, do the social organizing, set up our dates. And then, when we’re together, you give me this gruff shit.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. You make me come on to you, and then you pretend you don’t want it. I had to put up with that once or twice on the Canada trip and I’m never going to do it again. No way. You want something from me, call me up—you’ve got my fucking number—and ask for it.”

  After that, my eyes didn’t blink for about half an hour. It reminded me a whole lot of being popped by that smart cop when Bart and I were having our boys’ night out. You go around thinking you’re cool, a veritable shadow in the night, and then you find out that someone’s got your number.

  Like the Pöyzen Böyzen fans. A band of assholes I probably wouldn’t even recognize in civilian dress.

  “That reminds me of something,” I said. “I’m being kind of threatened, kind of, by a bunch of Satan worshippers. I want you to look out.”

  “How the fuck…” she said, then got up and walked out of the restaurant.

  I finished her five-spices chicken and doodled around with my nerd watch. After a major social fuck-up, it’s good to have machinery to screw around with. I programmed the alarm to go off in ten days. When it did, I’d give her a call.

  Between now and then I could drink a lot, meditate on my own unfitness to live, and get nice and shit-eatingly lonesome. And worry about the Pöyzen Böyzen thing. When I got done wandering home slowly, I played the tape backwards again, listened to the backwards message, then erased it.

  For cavemen, they were quick on their feet. Was I that easy to track down?

  The thing of it was: nobody had my number. Six months ago I’d gotten another damn call at 3:00 A.M. from some GEE hanger-on who’d just landed at Logan and wanted to be picked up and given a free place to crash. That was enough of that, so I changed to an unlisted number and didn’t tell anybody. Not even my employer. If GEE wanted to reach me, they had to get clever.

  Which brought up another sore point. Usually they called Debbie and got her to call me, and she had said a few things about not being a receptionist. Another relationship felony. Just another reason to get to drinking.

  But I still didn’t know how the crew from the island had tracked me down. Maybe one of them worked at the phone company or something. Maybe one of them knew someone who knew someone who knew Bart.

  When my watch alarm went off, I called Debbie, and found out she was vacationing in Arizona for three weeks. So I set my alarm watch for three weeks later.

  It went off around Labor Day, in the middle of the night. I was deep in a chemical factory in another state, nestled up against a fiftyfive-gallon drum on a loading dock, doing a bag job for Cohen. Had to press the damn watch against my thigh to muffle the sound, unstrap the wristband, pry the back off with a screwdriver, and scramble the innards. That’s the last digital watch I’ll ever own.

  Despite that, the job was a cakewalk. It was just like being a criminal, except it was all pretend. If they caught you, you could just stand up and show them your warrant. They didn’t.

  14

  I sent Esmerelda a box of Turtles and she went through the Boston Globe Index and checked out all the entries under Spectacle Island for the last three months. I was interested in something along the lines of “Spectacle Island—Abandoned barges running into.”

  She found it, and I should have figured it out myself. It was Hurricane Alison, or the last remnants thereof, which had hit us when we were having an abnormally high tide. Whenever a big, systemic disaster hit, a blizzard or heat wave, the Globe ran enormous articles “compiled from reports by” followed by lists of twenty names. They had to list every single bad thing that had happened to Massachusetts or else people would call in, claim they’d been neglected and cancel their subscriptions.

  Buried in one of those was a paragraph about an old barge, due to be scuttled anyway, that had broken loose from Winthrop during the storm and had been batted around the Harbor all night. It wasn’t much of a problem because no boats were out in that weather. By the time they even noticed it was missing, the barge had dug itself into Spectacle Island, which was a fine place for it anyway.

  I was throwing a lot of work into Project Lobster. I wanted to get the damn thing finished, and Debbie was deliberately unavailable, and I was out of nitrous, and by that point in the summer I didn’t have enough money for anything but newspapers and ski-ball.

  All those tainted lobsters had to be run through a pretty complicated chemical analysis. It required equipment GEE didn’t have, so I’d worked out an arrangement with a lab at a university. Tanya, the Blue Kills Marauder, who’d been working for GEE since her high school days in California, was one of their grad students. She helped with various projects, and in return for “educating” her we got access to nifty analytical equipment.

  This particular university had a glut of it anyway, having been so successful in attracting the devotion of big Route 128 corporations that you had to think they’d made their own pact with Satan, negotiated by their toughest lawyers. The high-tech companies coughed up gobs of expensive equipment and the university had to hold hysterical fund-raising drives just to build buildings big enough to keep it out of the rain. You could wander through the basements and find analytical devices costing half a million dollars, so powerful, so advanced that no one was even using them. Once I had gotten access, I had to go down, study their owner’s manuals, take off the plastic, and calibrate the gizmos.

  Then we were in business. Tanya or I, usually Tanya, broke the lobsters open and located their livers. Whether you’re a human or a lobster, your liver filters the toxins out of your system, so that’s where you find the bad stuff. We checked them for obvious signs, like tumors or necrosis, and then we ran them through the big machines from Route 128. We got their levels of various metals and organic bad things and put it all into our database.

  And we stood around a lot, edgy as hell, because Tanya was Debbie’s roommate, and though she was willing to work with me, forgiveness had apparently not yet been earned.

  In the weeks surrounding Labor Day we were working at this for twelve or fourteen hours a day, I out on the Zodiac nagging my pals for fresh samples, and Tanya down in the basement cutting bugs. The university wasn’t far from the Charles, so once or twice a day I’d bring the Zode around—as I said, the fastest Boston transportation—and she’d come down to the water and we’d make a handoff.

  I was a little perturbed when she missed one, but not surprised. Probably in the middle of something. I hung out on the Zode for maybe half an hour. Why not? Even if the water below me was dirty, I was in the middle of a park. But I got sick of waiting, fast—I was tired of this project and wanted to get on with it. I tied the boat to a tree, took out the fuel line, and hiked inland, schlepping the beer cooler. Trotted up out of the wat
er-side park and into the campus.

  Our lab was down in a corridor that still smelled like fresh paint and linoleum glue. One room after another filled with microchips. But the odor got sharper as I approached our lab. Smells trigger memories, and this one made me think of building model airplanes when I was a kid.

  It was the smell of spray paint. And on the brand-new laboratory door was some graffiti, still wet, done up in cherry red. A rough pentagram, the inverted cross below, the staring umlaut in the middle. Above it: SATAN SEZ: STAY THE FUCK OUT. The laboratory was dark.

  Didn’t touch a thing. I ran upstairs to the lobby and phoned Tanya and Debbie’s place.

  Debbie answered, sounding kind of tense, even though she didn’t know it was me yet. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t hang up, this is business. Tanya there?”

  “She can’t come to the phone right now. What the hell have you guys been doing? What’s with her?”

  “I was going to ask you.”

  “Why is she acting so bent?”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “She came home crying, ran into the bathroom. I heard her throw up a couple of times and now she’s been in the shower for about half an hour.”

  “Sounds like—”

  “No. She wasn’t raped.”

  “You got your door locked anyway?”

  “Damn right.”