Seven Deadly Pleasures

by Michael Aronovitz

  "Right!" Melvin entered his room. He hung the towel on the doorknob. He slipped on an old T-shirt, and sagging underwear with rips and tears beneath the band. "Right-O!"

  But he would forget. He always forgot. Dot was bound to come home and ask up front if he had gotten it done. Melvin would look up in guilt and surprise. "Gosh, honey. I forgot!" Then she would explode and do it herself. It was an old, familiar routine. Melvin pulled his glasses down to the end of his nose and mimicked Sigmund Freud under his breath.

  "It is a vicious cycle of reciprocal punishment that dates so far back we fail to expose its very origin, silly, silly."

  He reached into the closet and got out plaid trousers and a wool sweater with tan patches on the elbows.

  "Practicalities get in the way," he thought. "They work against the very fabric of creative thought." He stroked his chin. "But we must always make room for greatness, mustn't we?" Melvin turned toward his home computer and his eyes danced with lust. Was it still there? The naughty treasure hidden inside the terminal, was it still there?

  Of course it was. It had to be, for Melvin had kept the computer running all night. He hadn't dared shut it down for fear of losing it forever. He approached the dark screen, flipped the dimmer switch to bright, and was greeted by words on a electric green background:

  WELCOME TO PASSIVE PASSENGER

  "Melvin!"

  The voice came from behind his closed door, but he still jerked up and slapped the dimmer button across so to blacken the screen. "Yes, mother?"

  "Stop calling me that! I'm your wife, Goddammit!" Melvin stared at the carpet and made no reply.

  "I'm going out," she said to the silence. "I'll be back later." Her announcement did not require a response, so there was no hesitation in her footsteps that marched down the hall.

  "Go ahead, stay out all day," Melvin said to himself. "Out all day so Mel can play." He slid the dimmer again to bright and the letters surfaced, cat's eyes with black lids. How he had stumbled on PASSIVE PASSENGER was a bit of a mystery, all starting with a website address that he had downloaded onto his flashdrive yesterday before lunch, and subsequently forgotten by dinnertime.

  Innocent. That morning he'd signed on for a fellowship offered through the college by the U.S. Navy. The same as last year, the program commissioned two thousand dollars to the candidate most qualified to chart the voice patterns of dolphins. The website was an innocent little orientation page, and the announcement received on his school e-mail was jammed on his already overloaded flashdrive that was slung on his lanyard with his college ID, tucked under his jacket, and out of mind as he shuffled through his daily routine. After classes, he stopped at Kelly's for a chocolate donut with rainbow sprinkles. He flipped through some science magazines at Borders, lost track of time, and wound up back at the house after six.

  "Sorry I'm late," he called out at the door, as if it was not standard practice.

  "I'm in here," Dot said. She was watching the tail end of the evening news. Melvin stood at the edge of the room.

  "Well, I'm home," he said. "Anything for dinner?"

  "I already ate."

  "Oh. Time just kind of passed by, and—"

  "I know."

  "Oh."

  Melvin still had his coat on. He held his hat in his hands, fidgeted with it, and considered joining his wife in the living room for the nightly ritual in which they viewed the news together and passed it off as communication. He watched his wife watch TV for a moment, the image reflecting off her emotionless face.

  "Melvin, either come in or go out. You know it annoys me when you stand—"

  "Hey, I know him!"

  "What on earth are you talking about?"

  "They just said Engine 38, look!" He pointed at the television. It was a firefighter, dirty, tired, and at the conclusion of what seemed a strained interview.

  "Here with Captain Hugh McNulty, I'm Marylin Chang for Newswatch."

  Melvin took a step farther into the room. "So that's his name, Captain Hugh McNulty! It's his mobile unit that I pick up on my radio scanner. By God, I've heard his voice a thousand times!"

  Dot sniffed and rubbed her nose.

  "Melvin, why don't you toss all those contraptions into the garbage where they belong? That room of yours is an eyesore."

  "But—"

  "Melvin, it's a junkyard in there."

  His shoulders sagged. He had constructed his radio scanner of parts from an ancient radio, digital clock, and Press-N-Play record player. Yes, it was locked onto one lone frequency. It was true that his electric trains only ran in reverse and he had to concede the fact that the automatic pencil changer couldn't be run on 110 without blowing a fuse. He sighed. Originally, he had built his scanner with the hope of picking up a variety of weather stations, and what he had gotten was Engine 38 of the Philadelphia Fire Department. It was a lot of code words, background sirens, and probable D.O.A.'s.

  Suddenly, he remembered the stuff on his flashdrive. He straightened up and cleared his throat. "I'm going to work on my computer." With her eyes, Dot gave the cold permission for him to sneak back to his room.

  It's a junkyard in there.

  Melvin closed the door and searched for a place to toss his coat amidst the disorder of games and gadgets that were scattered across the room on tabletops and milk crates.

  Yes, but it's my junkyard.

  Melvin got his last yellow post-it note, found a pen, and wrote the name "Captain Hugh McNulty" on it. He stuck it to the top plate of his radio scanner, the name behind the voice. Then he turned, smiled, and approached his computer. His coat went to the floor, his briefcase to the side. Some things never spoke back at him. He gently pressed on the power to his electric friend and ran two fingers down the screen. It winked on with quiet obedience.

  It's my junkyard and here, my little subjects hum and buzz and radiate like music.

  With an artist's flair, Melvin inserted his flashdrive. The checkerboard of files came up, but the announcement for the orientation page was missing. Melvin backed out and went online. After a bit of tooling around he found the website and clicked. Then came the sudden pop and coppery smell of overloaded wires.

  "Balls," Melvin said. The screen shut down to a rude shade of black. Melvin sighed and reached down for the power strip. He flicked it off and on in quick succession and bolted upright when his computer made a sharp beeping noise he had never heard before. Melvin rested his fingers on the keys, ready to log it off and start over again. But atop a strange green background, words were materializing that had nothing to do with Annapolis and the songs of dolphins.

  MCGILLICUTTY / DELSORDO

  PROJECT SOKAR

  DEAD FILE

  PRESS ESCAPE TO CONTINUE

  Melvin snatched his fingers off the board. Ryan McGillicutty and Angel Delsordo had not been front page news since the seventies, but they were as much a part of the cultural fabric of the greater Philadelphia area as was Rocky Balboa. They were mobsters who had demanded protection from more than a third of the small downtown businesses back then. It was rumored that by 1982 they had taken control of the plumbers' and electricians' unions as well as the Department of Transportation. But hadn't McGillicutty died of lung cancer back in '87? And wasn't Delsordo serving multiple life sentences at Graterford now? If anything, this was a new generation. Melvin looked over his shoulder, turned back, and read the screen again.

  PRESS ESCAPE TO CONTINUE

  He stared at it and it stared back. Could they trace this to him through his cookies, or whatever they called those things? Too late, he was already in. And what the Dickens was "Project Sokar" anyway?

  PRESS ESCAPE TO CONTINUE

  Melvin rubbed his chin thoughtfully. It was in the "dead file," right? How often did people really check back into closed dossiers? He pictured the basement level of a huge warehouse, crammed down there to its dark corners with boxes of old, rotting invoices. It was the same kind of thing, right? Melvin hit the ESCAPE button and new screen win
ked up. A title page of sorts.

  WELCOME TO PASSIVE PASSENGER

  "That's interesting," Melvin said. He hit the ESCAPE button again.

  INSTRUCTIONS—OPERATOR WILL ENTER HIS

  SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. NEXT, ENTER THE

  S.S. # OF SUBJECT AND STRIKE ANY KEY TO

  ACTIVATE. OPERATOR WILL THEN JOIN WITH

  THE MIND OF THE SUBJECT AS A PASSIVE

  PASSENGER FOR THE LAST FIVE MINUTES OF TIME

  PASSED. ACTUAL TIME ELAPSED FROM POINT OF

  ACTIVATION UNTIL CONCLUSION IS ZERO HOURS,

  ZERO MINUTES, AND ZERO SECONDS.

  It had to be a gag of some sort. Melvin hit the ESCAPE button again.

  O—ENTER SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

  "O" is for "Operator," Melvin said. "OK, what the hell." He entered his own number. He tabbed to the next screen and gasped. Under the bolded words

  S—ENTER SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

  (and a space to enter the nine characters) was what seemed the first page of a massive subject-directory; a glossary of names, occupations, and social security numbers. Melvin punched the ESCAPE button again and again, but it seemed an endless sea. Screen after screen, there were thousands, no hundreds of thousands loaded into the program.

  This was no gag. Melvin scanned the H's and saw that his own name was listed.

  Melvin felt a sudden shiver run straight between his shoulder blades. The planets were named after Roman god figures. Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld and "Sokar" was the Egyptian equivalent. "Sokar" must have been Pluto's brother planet located in a different solar system! The offspring of McGillicutty and Delsordo had gone into research and development, for God's sake. They'd reached out and touched someone. Did they really have the money to do such a thing? Melvin supposed that if AIG could go on a week-long junket for four hundred and forty thousand dollars without blinking an eye, anything was possible. Those bastards were selling names. And the payoff? A simple trade. The outworlders got to invade the human of their choice for the sake of study and the mobsters got to learn everybody's secrets. Clearly, the subject would not be aware of the operator's presence so as to insure that "Big Brother" could keep on watching, and Melvin Helitz had caught this tiger right by the tail.

  Yes.

  The program was his now, was it not?

  Melvin fought with this question. Part of him wanted to shut the thing down immediately for the sake of legality and morality. The other side of him, however, the professor, the theorist, and yes, the inner child, could not help but marvel at the possibilities of this device. Could it actually work? Did he have the courage to give it a test run? Would he get caught?

  He thought of that big, dark warehouse again. Garbage in, garbage out. And the mobsters were nothing but conduits anyway. Stooges working the sale. The ones in charge came from beyond. It was even possible that they did not have the corrupt intentions that their association with McGillicutty and Delsordo suggested. Did they understand our system of law and ethics to begin with? Didn't the presence of the program itself suggest a certain need to be educated in the ways of humanity? They were most probably scientists, and it was entirely possible that they were under the assumption that those with the power to make first interplanetary contact would have been our world leaders.

  Melvin gave a scan to the subject directory and found no mention of McGillicutty or Delsordo. Of course not. Moreover, there was probably a failsafe even if their social security numbers were discovered, that which would keep them forever immune to scrutiny. The circumstance that built this relationship across worlds was meant to remain secret.

  And whether the alleged aliens were aware that they were in league with criminals was not finally the point. While Melvin would have dearly loved to have had the opportunity to unravel the politics of all this, chart the history of the initial encounter, and communicate with beings from another world, he did not have McGillicutty's nor Delsordo's initial exploratory technology on hand. He had the spawn, and the question was whether or not he had the balls to use what he had accidentally pirated. Friendly aliens or not, Melvin was trespassing. And stooges or bosses, those "conduits" did have nasty reputations for taking matters into their own hands. At least their fathers had.

  On the other side of that, the horse was already out of the barn now, wasn't it? The thing was on his computer. What difference would a test run make at this point?

  Melvin spent the evening tabbing through the subject directory. He saw plain people, rich people, famous people, faceless people, beautiful people. What would it be like to read their thoughts for five minutes? He ran scenarios through his head of various journeys, and countered them with possible consequences. His eyelids were drooping. He needed a fresh start here. He needed to sleep on this.

  Melvin backed out to screen number two and dimmed it for safe keeping. He killed the light and climbed into bed with the residue of fluorescent green still dancing in his eyes.

  It's mine as long as I wish to keep it. I don't have to use it. I can just . . . possess it.

  That thought tailed Melvin through the first stages of sleep and followed him into the R.E.M. state. All night, he tossed and turned, in and out of erratic dreams in which he became a melodramatic, cartoon villain. He wore a top hat and black coattails. He had a thick, waxed, handlebar moustache. He wrung his hands, twisted his lips to a sneer, and gloated over his evil machine. His shoulders and arms then began moving against his will. His dance became erratic and violent. One of his hands ripped off at the wrist, the other at the elbow. From the shadows above, blue alien fingers worked the strings. He'd woken in a cold sweat.

  Out all day so Mel can play.

  Melvin cracked a window to breathe in the smell of the pines, winter's kiss on this crisp morning's breeze. He buttoned his sweater. Now that he was showered and Dot was gone, he was free to consider the mind-melding time machine that sat amidst his clutter of private projects.

  It's a junkyard in there.

  "Oh, bug off," Melvin thought. The recurring memory of her criticism distracted him.

  She was unable to share in the thrill of creation because her eyes could not see past the bald results. To her, the room was not some storybook playground laden with the very landscape of her husband's potential, but rather a metaphor for failure, a wasteland of bogus inventions that refused to function properly.

  The hair suddenly rose on the back of Melvin's neck as if he were being watched. It was the computer with the words WELCOME TO PASSIVE PASSENGER smiling across its screen.

  "I work properly," it seemed to whisper.

  "Let's find out," Melvin said. He sat down at the terminal. A final vision of himself as a fifth grader reciting the Pledge of Allegiance came into his head, and he combated the vision of purity with cold logic.

  I won't do this for gain, and I won't invade someone famous. That would be rude somehow. I will do this scientifically and democratically.

  He backed off to the Subject Directory, closed his eyes, tabbed multiple screens in, and pointed his finger. He opened his eyes.

  "Floyd Lynch—Truck Driver."

  Melvin tabbed back to screen number four.

  O—ENTER SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

  Melvin entered his own.

  S—ENTER SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

  Melvin looked at his watch. Ten seconds until 9:10 A.M. He counted it down. At precisely 9:10, Melvin hit the RETURN button and activated Passive Passenger.

  It was immediate. There was no sense of travel, no supernatural feeling of exit and entry, but an instant exchange of physical presence. A moment before, Melvin Helitz had been sitting in his bedroom, but now pushed through the doors of Lucy's Bar and Grill, hungry, pissed off, and ready to drink anything that would smooth his raging hangover.

  In the back of his mind, Melvin had imagined that the experience would be somehow removed, like being in a theater and watching a movie shot in first person. But he was there, not only with Floyd Lynch, but as Floyd Lynch, the
finest West Virginia had to offer, thank you very much. He felt the greasy perspiration that had built up already that morning around the dirty inner band of Floyd's Mountaineers baseball cap and down the back of his underwear. He had a cut on the ring finger of his meaty left hand from breaking down cardboard and carelessly slipping with a box-cutter last week on Bay #2, and the small of his back was killing him. The thick smell of sausage, lard, and home fries doused in onions sickened Floyd in a vague, friendly sort of way that made Melvin know that Floyd isolated the smells as those of preferred breakfasts most mornings after a run. Not today. American fire-water was going to do just fine. He walked heavily past the seating area and its steel booths with maroon, plastic cushions. A busboy moved out of his way.

  The place was so busy that there were a few stragglers eating breakfast in the bar at dark tables by the windows. The shades were pulled, and Floyd's eyes adjusted to the shadows. He ambled past the pool tables on the right, and approached the long mahogany bar. Three green paper lampshades hung above it with old tobacco smoke suspended underneath like veils. Though Lucy's advertised all-night service, the idea of cocktails at 9:00 in the morning only seemed to appeal to an old-timer at the far corner of the bar wearing old gray overalls, weathered boots, and a John Deere hat pulled over his eyes. A Garth Brooks song came from a vintage jukebox that actually played vinyl.

  "Double, Jack Daniel's," Floyd said. The bartender, a stiff, quiet type, set down the Pilsner glass he had been wiping and chucked down a cardboard coaster. A rock glass followed, and he filled it two-thirds.

  "Two-fifty."

  "Tab it," Floyd said. The barkeep left the bottle within reach, and Floyd grabbed his glass. He downed it, refilled it, and Melvin had a sudden, clear understanding of why alcoholics drank for the purpose of remedy. The jolt of whiskey was like dark fire, deliciously burning the throat, warming the stomach, and coursing into Floyd's throbbing headache with kneading, soothing fingers. Everything loosened, and suddenly Melvin felt Floyd's arms and thighs come to the forefront of his perception of personal physicality. Gone was the idea that the stomach creeping over the beltline defined "Floyd Lynch," and the backache from lifting fifty-pound crates from concrete dock to rusty truck bed slipped far into the background like a dream. The ghost of a teenage Floyd, starting center for the Jarvisville Panthers, rose right up behind the eyes, and concentrated old feelings of power in the junctions of the knees, the elbows, the hips, and the balls of his feet. Floyd sat up straighter and glanced to his right. A thin woman with straight black hair had just taken a seat two stools down. Her back was to the bar, elbows propped backward upon it, and she watched the game of pool that began to unfold in front of her with mild interest. She pushed out her lower lip and blew upward to fluff her bangs.