“Ah, there is an echo in here,” she says, looking into the high corners of the room.
“What do you mean he hasn’t called?”
“Perhaps a rug would dampen it.”
“He hasn’t called? Is he in trouble?”
“Or some tapestries.”
“He’s in trouble. He’s got to be in trouble.”
“Ah, but I fear Edwin would not care for tapestries. Perhaps one of those newfangled white noise generators?”
“YOU CRAZY BROAD EDWIN’S IN TROUBLE! ANSWER MY QUESTION!”
Agnes pauses to let Topper complete a twitching and cursing fit. Once again she has reduced him to a state of apoplexy. Mission accomplished, she thinks to herself. But she cannot not resist one last dig. “Quite enough noise in here already.”
Topper sucks air into his lungs in preparation for a full-on tantrum. Agnes feels it best to cut him off: “I have not attempted to call him because we have a protocol.”
“Protocol? What’s this protocol?” asks Topper.
“It’s a set of rules that we have agreed to use when facing such situations.”
“Arrrrrrrrrrrgh! I know that. You don’t think I could pass the bar without knowing what a protocol is?”
“Pass the bar? Why, I always assumed you had merely walked underneath it.”
“Ah, cheap shot you old bat. Tell me what’s what or I’ll let everybody know you’re the reanimated mummy of Mary Poppins’ grandma.”
“If Edwin does not make contact in 36 hours, there are a series of steps that I take to resolve any untoward situation and recover him.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
“There are still five minutes remaining in the waiting period.”
“Five minutes. FIVE MINUTES! You’ve got to be shitting me. We gotta go. We gotta go right now.”
“Go whither and do which?”
Topper paced the wide marble floor furiously as he tried to piece a plan together. “We gotta go get him. We gotta get a shitload of guys. C’mon, this has to be in the plan, the protocol, whatever. Edwin’s good at this. Guys, guns, some dynamite. A bulldozer to knock in some walls. Hell, an armored bulldozer. Yeah, yeah. And a Cadillac. A big friggin’ Caddy to use as a getaway car. And make it a convertible ‘cause Edwin’s so tall.”
“Truly, you think of everything,” Agnes says as she calmly picks up the phone.
“Yeah, yeah. So that’s in the plan. Right?”
Agnes shakes her head.
“Then who are you calling? Somebody with a crapload of Ninjas in black body armor or something? Oh, oh, it’s gotta be somebody badass. Like a guy who farts laser beams out of his ears. A guy who can blow the side of a house in just by thinking about PEACHES!”
“No,” says Agnes, “This is far more important.”
“Who? Who is it?”
“I am calling Edwin’s tailor.”
Chapter Fourteen
Just a Consultant
Edwin is taken to a large room with good light. Once upon a time, an attempt had been made to make this room into a kind of conservatory for the musical edification for young Eustace. When Eustace had shown no interest or aptitude for music, the attempt had been abandoned. All that remains is a grand piano.
A guard is placed on his door but, to everyone’s surprise, Edwin makes no attempt to escape. He hangs his jacket over a chair, rolls up his shirt sleeves and goes to work.
From Edwin’s point of view, escape attempts are pointless. To begin with, he’s not exactly sure where he is. And when you don’t know where point A is, it’s almost always impossible to get to point B. That makes any “heroic” effort a foolish risk to one’s person and one’s health.
Besides, Edwin has a problem to work on. Edwin is never so happy as when he is faced with an intricate and potentially lucrative problem to solve. He thinks it unlikely that this entire escapade will wind up being anything other than a waste. But, for the moment, this is out of his hands. So Edwin ignores everything that is beyond his control and does what he does best. He thinks.
For the first two days, Edwin’s requests keep a team of assistants working around the clock. They gather information, collate data and print documents. Edwin is computer illiterate. Of course, that’s not the way he says it. He will tell you that he is not easily fooled by computers, or seduced by any of the attendant fetishes of the cult of data. Data, in itself, is meaningless. For data to be of any use at all it requires a mind. A mind that, working from a coherent theoretical framework, can draw inferences, see patterns, use logic, overcome the narrow-minded thinking that infects a world of specialists.
Computer screens are too small for non-specialized thoughts. Edwin prefers to organize information in physical space. Tables, floors, walls. He has all the furniture removed from the room except for several large tables and a grand piano. While he thinks he constantly rearranges papers, books, pictures. He often changes where he stands or sits. Even the sweep of sunlight across the room indicates new connections. Edwin literally erects the structure of the challenge around him so that he can immerse himself in the problem.
At the end of the first day, two confused-looking young men in loincloths bring Edwin a cot. Edwin looks at the tiny bed. Then he looks down on the young men.
“We were just told to bring you a cot,” one of them says.
“I will need another,” says Edwin.
“They didn’t tell us anything about that.”
“Clearly, this is the best job you can hope to get.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
From the door of the room, Alabaster speaks. “Bring him another cot.” The slave boys scurry off, leaving the two men to consider one another for a moment.
“This is not the best job you can hope to get. Why are you here?” asks Edwin.
“That old woman is shit crazy. But if she wants to pay me $140,000 a year so she can call me “Alabaster” and feel like she’s living in Gone With the Wind, what do I care? I have two boys; they’re both going to college and I’m going to retire in Aruba.”
Edwin nods. Alabaster is the sanest man he has met in Alabama.
“So why don’t you sleep in your room?” asks Alabaster.
Edwin turns back to the constellations of pages and images that cover the room behind him. “I don’t want to leave the work.”
Alabaster turns and leaves. He is certain that Edwin is as crazy as the rest of them. He doesn’t have time to worry about the tall man. The house is running low on baby oil. Alabaster shakes his head and thinks of his sons. They will have a better life — a better life by far.
Exhausted from his labors, Edwin removes his pants and shirt, carefully folds them, and lays his long body down across the two cots. Under the weight of tremendous fatigue, the need for sleep takes over. But Edwin does not go without a fight. His mind still races. In his sleep he twitches, mutters and kicks out at odd angles. Edwin rarely sleeps for more than four hours at a time while working on a large project.
But as he sleeps, a book lies by the side of his bed. It is thick, heavy, and ponderously titled “Modern Power Distribution”. On the back cover is a picture of the author, Thomas Putnam. Like the book, he is also thick and heavy. To compensate for his lack of chin, the learned Mr. Putnam wears a bristly mustache. While Edwin sleeps, Thomas Putnam and his compensatory mustache are being kidnapped. This is not Edwin’s idea. He has suggested that it would be helpful to speak with Mr. Putnam. He might even have added that a phone call would suffice. But no matter. With the barest spark, the flames of Iphigenia's lunacy had been fanned.
Iphigenia's reasoning goes something like this: When you are a villain, you don’t ask a technical expert if he has a spare moment to consult on your problem. You don’t give him a phone call. There are conventions for all of this. You must send in a strike team in a Nondescript White Van and grab the man while he is shopping, or perhaps playing with his children in the park. There is the black bag over the head, the futile
yet inevitable struggle, the slamming of doors and the screeching of tires. Iphigenia thinks she is doing very well. She does not realize that these are the exact forms and tropes of villainy that Edwin rails against.
When Thomas Putnam is finally deposited in Edwin’s room he is understandably upset. “What do you want with me!” Putnam demands through his mustache. Edwin looks at him. Then he walks over to the chair where his suit jacket is hanging.
“I demand to know what’s going on here!”
Edwin dons his jacket, sighs deeply and answers as truthfully as he can. “If you must know, I am being held against my will by an oversexed antebellum nightmare of a woman because she believes that not only will I help her take over the world, I will also, upon due reflection, come to my senses and rule the world at her side as her consort.”
This was not the answer Putnam was looking for. He tried again. “W-w-why have I been kidnapped?”
“Because these people are very stupid. I mentioned that it might be helpful if I could speak to you and…”
“What, you! You WHAT? Wait a minute. What in God’s name is going on here?”
“I know,” says Edwin, “it hurts to try make sense of it. I would have been happy with a phone call.”
“This is an OUTRAGE, I, I, I...”
“I’m sorry for your inconvenience. Please try to calm down.”
“INCONVENIENCE! I was at my son’s BALL GAME! He saw his FATHER get KIDNAPPED!”
Edwin is already bored with the small talk, “Do you have a consulting fee?”
“WHAT?”
Edwin tries again, slower. “Do you have a consulting fee?”
“YES!”
“If we were to pay you, say, five times your normal consulting rate for this conversation, would that be sufficient incentive for you to stop yelling?”
“Uh, yeah,” he says, stroking his mustache for reassurance. “But, please, what’s going here? Who are these people?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
“Yes I do.”
Edwin tries again. “As I explained, I am being held captive by an aged Francophilliac and her half-witted son. As far as I can tell, she longs to use her considerable wealth to see the antebellum South rise again in a ridiculous jihad of gracious living. And not only does she look to me for the plan through which her backward and inbred scheme can be realized, but she also demands my true love.”
“You’re right,” says Putnam, “I really didn’t want to know that.”
“Yes, I’m usually right. Now,” Edwin says, indicating a large map of North America that is marked with colored dots connected by an unruly matrix of fine lines, “do you recognize this?”
“It’s the grid. Every power generation facility in North America.”
“That is correct. Now, if my understanding is complete, this diagram means that every power generation facility is linked into the grid.”
“Yes.”
“Interconnected.”
“Yes.”
“Interdependent.” For the first time since entering the room days ago, Edwin seats himself at the piano and begins to play.
“I wouldn’t say that exactly, but close enough.”
“So that a plant in New York might actually be generating power for a home in Florida.”
“That’s a stretch. You see, the energy used in transmission, dissipated in heat and radiated magnetic charge around the lines — ”
“How do blackouts happen?”
“Well, it’s complicated.”
“Then tell me about the Lake Erie Loop. What happened with the Lake Erie Loop?”
“Well nobody really knows for sure. That blackout shut down the Northeast and the Midwest. It was blamed on a set of transmission lines that circle Lake Erie, but... well, I’m not sure what happened. There were investigations but...”
“Could it be that it was more politically expedient that a cause for the blackout never be found?”
“Yeah, that’s probably it. Look, I charge people a lot of money to consult on power grid issues. But this system is so big — it crosses so many state and even national boundaries,” he shrugged, “a lot of it is guesswork. It’s worse in Europe.”
“Please try to explain it to me.”
“Look, in July 1996 a tree fell into a power line in Oregon. That took down 15 states.”
“Remarkable,” says Edwin. His fingers move faster across the keys. The music echoes beautifully through the empty room.
“Well, it was hot. People were using a lot of power for A/C. And the load on one power plant became too great, so it shut down. Which overloaded the next one. Boom, boom, boom, boom, like dominos.”
“Or lemmings,” Edwin says quietly.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Edwin lifts his fingers from the keys and turns to face Putnam. “What is it called when power is, how shall I say, in harmony?”
“You mean, in ‘phase.’”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“It’s described by a sine function rotated through 180 degrees and when...”
“I’ve no need of a technical explanation. Now, power going down is one thing, but power going out of phase? What happens if power is out of phase?”
“How far out of phase?”
“180 degrees.”
“A hundred and — are you nuts? It would cancel out; see if you have two waves, equal size, both headed in opposite directions. Wham.”
“Calm water.”
“Yeah, I guess. Nobody’s stupid enough to do that.”
Edwin drapes his long fingers over the keyboard and plays a chord. “Harmony, you see. But now, and just for an instant...” He shifts his fingers and the resulting chord is dissonant and wrong.
“But that could take down the whole grid. I mean you’d need a lot more than one power plant doing it. And all at the same time.”
“And just for an instant?”
“Well, that’s all you’d need, yeah.”
“Thank you very much Mr. Putnam. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.” Edwin rings a bell. In an instant, Alabaster appears in the doorway. “I am done with Mr. Putnam, Alabaster. Perhaps you could have him returned to his family in a slightly more civilized manner.”
“I didn’t want to kidnap him in the first place,” says Alabaster. He shrugs in a way that suggests that these matters are largely out of his control.
“Do what you can,” says Edwin.
As he is leaving, Putnam turns to Edwin and asks, “You’re not really going to do it, are you?”
Edwin looks up from his papers. “Me? Heavens no. I don’t do anything. I’m just a consultant. Like you.”
With Putnam gone and the scheme complete in his mind, exhaustion overcomes Edwin. He goes to bed and sleeps for 14 hours. He is awakened by Alabaster shaking his shoulder.
“You’ve got to get up. She wants to see you.”
Edwin sits up and considers appearing before a client in his current state, “I will require a shower and a shave first.”
“No, sir. Ma’am powerful angry. She wants you right now.”
“Ma’am?” Edwin asks.
Alabaster shrugs again. “She pays me $20 extra every time I call her Ma’am. I guess the habit stuck.”
Edwin splashes water on his face, and cleans himself up as best he can. As he unrolls his sleeves he is moved to ask, “What is your real name?”
“Daniel.”
“You won’t mind if I don’t call you Alabaster?”
“Nobody around here will know who you are talking about.”
As Daniel helps him into his suit jacket, Edwin says, “That’s fine. I’m afraid that no matter what I say, no one around here knows what I’m talking about.”
Chapter Fifteen
Using the 'Asset'
Gus lights another cigarette. He takes a long drag and looks into the sky. In all the years Gus has known him, Excelsior has never just walked up. Would Gus walk if he could fly? Gus takes another drag
and coughs some more. If Gus could fly, he’d probably just leave. But that’s not the way it works. It feels like all the important decisions were made long ago and now Gus is just trying to live out his own epilogue with as little grief as possible.
There is a belch of diesel and a roaring noise as a generator comes to life. Arc lights cast harsh shadows across the decaying parking lot. Gus turns back to the nest of trailers and personnel that has sprung up in the last hour. Men in unofficial uniforms rush to and fro. Not a single one of them is without some kind of electronic doohingy. Typing and talking — struggling to get their thumbs on impossibly tiny little keys. And for what? Gus knows that they’re all just talking to each other. And all while running around in the same damn parking lot. Why the hell are they running around? This isn’t the runnin’ around part. This is the waiting part.
He leans back against a car and watches minor bureaucrats swarm around him. He wouldn’t give a damn for any of ‘em. Not one tinker’s damn. He coughs some more. Gus is too old for this shit. And yet they keep trotting him out to deal with the big man. That’s one of the things they call Excelsior. The Big Man. Ha. When Gus found him he’d been a scared little boy in the middle of Kansas. Sure, he’s gotten bigger since then. He’s even figured out how to fly. He is way, way more powerful. But still, whenever Gus looks at Excelsior, all he sees is a scared little boy.
Shit, that was back in the days when they would send one guy to do a job. One guy and precious few regulations. Now they send a car full of guys and a trunk full of procedure manuals. And they still screw it up. Nobody has any initiative any more. Excelsior grows more powerful and all these drones grow weaker. Gus gives a bitter chuckle. The chuckle grows to a cough. And the coughing seizes him right down to his boots. As the air runs short, he wonders if this is finally it. But the coughing slows and the bright lights dance behind his eyes. Life, such as it is, goes on.
Radios crackle all around him. “The asset is inbound. Repeat, the asset is inbound.” Men in jumpsuits scramble around frantically. As if what they do matters. As if what they do makes a difference at all. They’re just ordinary men. Excelsior doesn’t need their help.
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