Time Bomb

17

Mahlon Burden’s answering machine message was ten seconds of chamber music followed by a clipped “Leave your message,” and three short beeps.

I said, “This is Alex Dela-”

Click. “Hello, Doctor. What have you decided?”

“I’m willing to explore the possibilities, Mr. Burden.”

“When?”

“I’ve got time today.”

“Doctor, I’ve got nothing but time. Name the place and the time.”

“An hour. Your house.”

“Perfect.” Strange word considering his circumstances.

He gave me an address I already knew and followed it up with precisely detailed directions.

“An hour,” he said. “Looking forward to it.”

No pride of ownership. I’d expected something flagrantly deviant- slovenly- at 1723 Jubilo. But at first glance the house was like all the others on the block. Single-story ranch, the walls sided with aluminum designed to resemble wood, painted the green-gray of a stormy sea. The window casements and front door were the same gray- ah, the first bit of deviance, a monochrome statement when viewed alongside the neighboring houses with their carefully contrasting color schemes.

I parked, began noticing other misdemeanors. The small lawn, mowed and neatly edged but a half-shade paler than the sprinkler-fed emerald of all the others on the block. A few thin spots in the grass that threatened to raise the offense to felony level.

No flower beds. Just a girdle of creeping juniper separating grass from house. No trees, either- none of the dwarf citrus, avocados, or birch triplets that graced the lawns of the other homes.

The gestalt: austere, but hardly quirky. Ocean Heights was easily offended.

The front door had been left slightly ajar. I rang the bell anyway, waited, then walked into an entry hall carpeted with a disc of mock-Persian. Before me was a compact, square living room, white-walled, flat-ceilinged, and rimmed with an obtrusively ornate band of egg-and-dart crown molding. The carpeting was green wool, spotless but thin as the lawn, and looked to be about thirty years old. The furniture was of similar vintage, the wood stained oxblood, the chairs and sofas quilted and upholstered in a chrysanthemum print that shouted spring, pleat-skirted and sheathed in condom-snug dear plastic. Everything matched, every piece arranged with showroom precision. An ensemble. I was certain all of it had been bought at the same time.

I cleared my throat. No one responded. I waited and gave myself over to fantasy. A young couple Sunday shopping in some suburban department store- Sears or a counterpart. The smell of popcorn, the ding of elevator bells. One child in tow- a boy. The parents anxious, budget-conscious, but intent on acquisition. Furniture, appliances, soft rolls of carpeting. Cookware, dishes, all the brand-new, optimistic words it took to fill a proper 50’s populuxe home: Pyrex, stainless, vinyl, Formica, rayon, nylon. Sheaves of receipts. Warranties. More promises. A shopping spree worthy of a game-show winner…

All these dreams reduced to an ensemble, static as a museum exhibit.

I said, “Hello?”

A white-painted brick mantel framed a fireplace that was too clean ever to have been used. No screen, andirons, or tools. The top of the mantel was as bare as the walls. White walls, blank as giant sheets of virgin notepaper.

The tabula rasa approach to domestic life…

Across the living room was a dining room two thirds its size. Crenelated molding. More green carpet, more notepaper walls. Pecan-finish china cabinet, matching buffet. A couple of souvenir plates on one of the cabinet shelves. Grand Coulee Dam. Disneyland. The rest of the shelves empty. An oval table surrounded by eight straight-backed, plastic-sheathed chairs and topped with a brown pad filled most of the floor space. A pass-through with sliding wooden doors was cut into the wall behind the head of the table, offering a view of a yellow kitchen.

I went over and peeked in. Thirty-year-old refrigerator and stove glazed with yellow porcelain. No magnets or reminders on the fridge. No cooking smells.

There was a doorway leading to the rear of the house. A note was tacked onto the threshold.

DR. D.: IN THE BACK. M.B.

Beyond the note, an unlit hallway lined with closed doors. White space deepening to gray. I stepped closer, made out the sound of music. A string quartet. Haydn.

I walked toward it, followed the right turn of the hallway, and came to a final door. The music was loud and clear enough to be live.

I turned the knob, stepped into a large, peak-ceilinged room, the planks and cross-beams painted white. Dark hardwood floor. Three walls of blond birch paneling; the fourth, a bank of sliding glass doors that looked out to a small backyard that was mostly cement driveway. A silver-gray Honda sat in front of a corrugated aluminum garage door.

The glass gave the room an indoor-outdoor look. What realtors used to call a lanai, back in the days when they were peddling tropical dreams. What had become, in this age of transience and marital fracture, the family room.

The Burden family room was big and cold and devoid of furniture. Devoid of nearly everything, except for six-figures’ worth of stereo equipment arranged in a bank against one of the birch walls. Black-matte cases, black-glass instrument panels. Dials and digital readouts bleeping green and yellow and scarlet and gas-flame blue. Oscilloscopic sine waves. Fluctuating columns of liquid laser. Pinpoints of bouncing light.

Amps and preamps, tuners, graphic equalizers, bass-boosters, treble-clarifiers, filters, a reel-to-reel tape player, a pair of cassette decks, a pair of turntables, a compact disc player, a laser-disc player. All of it connected via a tangle of cable to a Stonehenge arrangement of black, fabric-faced speaker columns. Eight obelisks, spread throughout the room, big enough to project a heavy metal band into the bleachers of a baseball stadium.

A string quartet flowed out at medium volume.

Three quarters of a quartet. Both violin parts and the viola.

Mahlon Burden sat on a backless stool in the center of the room cradling a cello. Playing by ear, eyes closed, swaying in tempo, thin lips pursed as if for a kiss. He had on a white shirt, dark trousers, black socks, white canvas tennis shoes. His shirt sleeves were bunched carelessly at the elbows. Gray stubble flecked his chin, and his hair looked unkempt.

Seemingly unaware of my presence, he played on, fingers assuming positions along the ebony board, bearing down, quivering with vibrato. Floating the bow across the strings in a horsehair caress. Controlling his volume so perfectly that the cello meshed seamlessly with the recorded sounds regurgitated by the speakers.

Man and machine. Man as machine.

To my ears he was good, symphony quality or close to it. But I was put off by the sterile staginess of the whole thing.

I was here to exhume, not to be serenaded. But I heard him out, kept waiting for him to make a mistake- some flaw in tempo or sour tone that would justify an intrusion.

He kept playing perfectly. I endured an entire movement. When the piece was finished he kept his eyes closed but flexed his bow arm and took a deep breath.

Before I could say anything, the next movement began, opening with an arpeggiated solo by the first violin. Burden smiled as if meeting an old friend, readied his bow.

I said, “Mr. Burden.”

He opened his eyes.

I said, “Very pretty.”

He gave me a blank look and his face twitched. The second violin joined in. Then the viola. He glanced back at the columnar speakers, as if making eye contact with their fabric faces could somehow forestall the inevitable- forestall what he’d initiated.

The moment for the cello’s entry arrived. The music flowed, exquisite but incomplete. Unsettling. Like a beautiful woman without a conscience.

Burden gave one last look of regret, then stood, put his cello in its case, then the bow. Out of a trouser pocket came a small black remote-control module.

A single button push.

Fade to black.

The silence emptied the room of more than music. I noticed for the first time that the birch paneling was really some kind of photoprinted plyboard. The scuffmarks on the hardwood stood out harsh as keloid scars. The sliding glass door hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Through the cloudy panes, the concrete and grass view was depressing.

Family room without a family.

He said, “I play every day without fail. Concentrate on the technically challenging pieces.”

“You play very well.”

Nod. “At one time I had ambitions of doing it for a living. But it’s not a very good living unless one is extremely lucky. I never counted on luck.”

Uttered with more pride than bitterness. He walked over to the stereo bank.

“I believe in doing things systematically, Dr. Delaware. That’s my main talent, actually. I’m not much in terms of innovation, but I do know how to put things together. To create systems. And to use them optimally.”

He fondled the equipment, then began delivering a lecture on each of the components. Waiting out delay tactics was one of my talents. I just stood there and listened.

“… so you might be asking yourself, why two cassette players? This one”- he pointed- “is conventional magnetic tape, but this one is DAT. Digital audio tracking. State of the art. The inventors hope to compete with CDs, though I’m not yet convinced. Still, the sound quality is impressive. I had a prototype a full year before it hit the market. It interfaces quite well with the rest of the system. Sometimes that’s a problem: Components will meet individual specifications but not blend well with other members of the system. Like an instrument that’s been tuned to itself with no regard for the rest of the orchestra. Acceptable only in a very limited context. The key is to approach life with a conductor’s perspective. The whole greater than its parts.”

He moved his hand as if wielding a baton.

I gave him a dose of therapist’s silence.

He stroked a black glass face and said, “I suppose you’ll want to know about our origins- Holly’s origins.”

“That would be a good start.”

“Come with me.”

We walked down the hallway. He opened the first door on the left and we entered a white-walled room with a single window covered with gray drapes. The drapes were drawn. Light came from a spindly chrome halogen lamp in one corner. The carpeting was an extension of the green I’d seen in the living room.

From the size and placement I guessed it had once been the master bedroom. He’d converted it into an office: one wall of sliding mirrored closet doors and, against the other three, white Formica cabinet modules arranged in a U, shelves on top, cabinets on the bottom, black Formica work space sandwiched in between. The shelves were filled with boxes of floppy disks, computer manuals, software manuals, hard-disk replacement units, stationery, office supplies, and books- mostly reference works. One entire wall was given over to phone directories- hundreds of them. Conventional, business only, something called the Cole Reverse, compendia of ZIP codes, and a hand-lettered volume entitled ZIPS: SUBANALYS.

The walls behind the desk tops were lined with power strips- a continuous stripe of electrical outlets, each connected to something by stout black cable: three PC work-stations, each with a brushed-steel and black vinyl secretary chair, battery backup, laser printer, and phone modem. An additional ten multiline phones, five connected to more modems and fax machines, the others to automatic answering machines; a trio of automatic dialers; a huge batch-copying Xerox machine sunk into one of the cabinets, only the top half of its bulky chassis visible; a smaller, desktop copier, an automatic check-writer, an electronic postage meter. Other apparatus I couldn’t identify.

The room buzzed and hummed and flashed, phones ringing twice before answering machines kicked in. Fax machines excreting sheets of paper at odd intervals, each sheet falling neatly into a collecting bin. The computer monitors displayed amber rows of letters and numbers bunched in groups of four and five- an incomprehensible series of alpha-numeric codes that moved across the screen in tiny increments, like cars in a traffic jam.

A herky-jerky electromagnetic kinesis that worked hard at simulating life.

Burden looked proud- paternally proud. His clothes blended with the room. Black-and-white camouflage.

This was where he went to disappear.

“My nerve center,” he said. “The hub of my enterprises.”

“Mailing lists?”

He nodded. “As well as marketing consultations to other corporations- demographic targeting. Give me a ZIP code and I’ll tell you worlds about a person. Give me a street address and I’ll go a good deal further- predict trends. It’s what led me to this.”

Another conductor’s flourish as he slid open a drawer, removed a booklet, and handed it to me.

Heavy stock. Glossy. A title in bright-yellow computer-type lettering: New Frontiers Technology, Ltd. over a jet-black banner.

Below the title, an ostentatiously muscular dark-haired man, naked from the waist up and wearing yellow Spandex pants, straddled a meter-laden exercise machine. Cords ran from the equipment to a yellow belt around his waist and to a matching sweatband. His deltoids, pecs, and biceps were hypertrophied meat-carvings. Veins popped as if worms had burrowed under his skin; every bead of perspiration stood out in vitreous bas-relief. His smile said pain was the ultimate high. Behind him, a similarly hewn blond woman in a yellow body suit and a belt/headband hookup created a marathon blur on a cross-country skiing machine- not unlike the one I had at home. The cords and headgear made them resemble candidates for electrocution.

I turned a page. Mail-order catalogue. One of those yuppy-stroking affairs that seemed to arrive in the mail every day. I thought I remembered throwing this one out.

You were on the mental health specialist list.

I had bought my ski machine from a catalogue. But not this one…

Burden was staring at me, prouder than ever. Waiting. I knew what I was expected to do. Why not? All part of the job.

I examined the catalogue.

The inside cover was a two-paragraph letter above a color photo of a handsome, broad-shouldered man in his mid-thirties. He had wavy hair, luxuriant walrus mustaches, and a clipped beard- the Schweppes man in his prime. He wore a pink button-down shirt with a perfect collar roll, blue foulard, and saddle-leather braces, and had been posed in a clubby atmosphere: mahogany-paneled room, high-backed leather chair, carved leather-topped desk. On the desk were an antique hourglass, brass nautical instruments, a blue-shaded banker’s lamp, and a cut-crystal inkwell. Baronial oil portraits hung in the background. I could almost smell the sealing wax.

Under the letter was a fountain pen signature, elaborate and illegible. The photo caption identified him as Gregory Graff, Esq., Chief Consulting Officer of New Frontiers Technology, Limited, headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. The letter was concise but friendly, just this side of preachy. Extolling the virtues of vitamins, exercise, balanced nutrition, self-defense, and meditative relaxation. What Graff called the “New Age Actualization Life-style for Today’s Striving Man and Woman.” The second paragraph was a pitch for this month’s New Products, offered at special discount for those who ordered early. The facing page was an order form complete with an 800 number and the assurance that “purchase specialists” were standing by to take calls twenty-four hours a day.

The catalogue was divided into sections marked by blue-tabbed index pages. I turned to the first. “Body and Soul.” An assortment of iron-pumping gizmos that would have done the Inquisition proud, demonstrated by the sculpted couple on the cover, followed by nirvana-nostrums for the post-exhaustion wind-down: massage oil, air-purifiers, wave machines, white-noise simulators, little black boxes that promised to change the atmosphere in any home into one that stimulated “alpha-wave meditation.” An electric “Tibetan Harmony Bell, re-creating one developed centuries ago in the Himalayas to capture the unique harmonies and overtones of high-altitude wind currents.”

Section Two was “Beauty and Balance.” Organic cosmetics, high-fiber cookies and candies, little yellow bottles of beta-carotene powder, lecithin capsules, bee pollen, zinc lozenges, water-purifying crystals, amino-acid combos, something new called “NiteAfter 100” that claimed to repair physiological damage wrought by “the 3 Deadly P’s: pollution, pigging-out, and partying.” Pills for sleeping soundly, for waking up cheerful, for enhancing “personal power during business meetings and power lunches.” A mineral concoction that claimed to “restore psychophysiological homeostasis and enhance individual tranquillity”- presumably during bathroom breaks.

Next came “Style and Substance.” Clothing and accessories in exotic hides and brushed steel. A programmable, self-locking and -opening “Briefcase With a Brain”; pseudo-antique accoutrements “conceived for the 21st Century and beyond”; pre-distressed aviator jackets; Mega-Sweat Personal Sauna warm-up suits, a symphony in nylon, latex, Teflon, down-fill, napa-lamb, and cashmere.

Four was “Access and Excel,” which seemed to translate to geegaws the world had done quite well without till now. Voice-activated car starters, self-cooling oven mitts, motorized bagel slicers, chamois microwave covers, everything monogrammable for a modest extra charge. I zipped through and was about to close the catalogue when the title of the last section caught my eye: “Life and Limb.”

A study in style-conscious paranoia. Bugging devices, hidden tape recorders, phone-tap detectors, infrared cameras and binoculars for “turning your adversary’s night into your day.” Privacy Locks for conventional phones. Direct-link phones in hot-line red (“Take control of Ma Bell. Talk only when you want and to whom you want”). Polygraphic “stressmeters” camouflaged as transistor radios that promised to “unscramble and digitalize the double and multiple meanings in other people’s communications.” Voice-modifiers, footstep-triggered attack dog tapes (“Choose from 345D. Doberman, 345S. Alsatian Shepherd, or 345R. Rottweiler”). Ultra-thin paper shredders that fit into an attaché case. Cameras that looked like pens. Radios that looked like pens. Packets of dehydrated “Survival Cuisine.” A reprise of the water-purifying crystals. When l got to the New Age Graphite-Handled Swiss Army knife with Mini-Surgical Array, I closed the catalogue.

“Very interesting.” I held it out to Burden.

He shook his head. “Keep it, Doctor. My compliments. You’ve been receiving it for five months but haven’t ordered anything yet. Perhaps a closer look will change your mind.”

The catalogue went into my jacket pocket.

I said, “Quite an eclectic collection.”

He responded with all the hesitation of a rodeo bull let out of the stall. “My brainchild. I was in the army just after Korea. Cryptography and decoding and computer technology- the infancy of the Computer Age. After discharge I went to Washington, D.C., and worked for the Census Bureau. We were just starting to computerize- the old days of clunky mainframes and IBM cards. I met my wife there. She was a very bright woman. Mathematician. Master’s degree. I’m self-taught, never finished high school, but I ended up being her mentor. All those years working with statistics and demographic patterns, we got a good fix on shifting population masses, trends, how people in different regions and social strata differ in their purchasing patterns. The predictive power of residential variables. When ZIP codes came into being it was beautiful- such simplification. And now the new sub-codes make it even easier.”

He sat down in one of the secretary chairs, made a half whirl, and spun back.

“The beauty of it, Doctor- of the informational age- is that things can be done so simply. When I left public service, I adapted my knowledge to the business world. Given my excellent typing skills combined with programming ability, I’m a corporation to myself- don’t even need a secretary. Just a few toll-free lines, several free-lance operators working from home stations, and a few privately contracted printers in various locations around the country. I interface with all of them by modem. No inventory or warehousing costs- because there’s no inventory at all. The consumer gets the catalogue and makes his or her choice. The operators take the order, communicate it immediately to the manufacturer. The manufacturer sends the product directly to the consumer. Upon delivery confirmation, the manufacturer’s hired for retail markup- my fee for facilitating.”

“Electronic middleman.”

“Yes. Exactly. The advanced state of my technology allows me to be extremely flexible. I can add and delete products based on sales performance, alter copy, and produce highly focused mail-outs within a twenty-four-hour period. I’ve even begun experimenting with an automated operator system- pretaped messages combined with voice-activated pauses: The tape waits until the consumer’s finished talking, then talks back in perfectly modulated, grammatical, regionless English. So one day I may not need any employees at all. The ultimate cottage industry.”

“Who’s Graff?”

“A model. I got him through a New York agency. You’ll notice he’s designated as Chief Consulting Officer- a title that’s meaningless from a legal point of view. I’m the President and Chief Executive Officer. I went through hundreds of photos before picking him. My marketing research told me exactly what I was looking for: youthful vitality combined with authority- a beard works very well for the latter, as long as it’s short and neat. The mustache implies generosity. The surname Graff was chosen because upscale consumers respect anything Teutonic- regard it as efficient, intelligent, and reliable. But only up to a point. A forename like Helmut or Wilhelm wouldn’t have done. Too German. Too foreign. ‘Gregory’ scores high on the likability scale. All-American. Greg. He’s one of the boys, with Teutonic ancestry. A great athlete, smartest boy on the block- but someone you like. My research shows that many people assume he has a graduate degree- usually law or an M.B.A. The button-down shirt communicates stability; the tie, affluence; and the suspenders provide a flair- creativity. He’s a man you believe in, instinctively. Aggressive and goal-oriented but not hostile, dependable but not stodgy. And concerned. Humanistic. Humanism is important to my target consumers- feeling charitable. Twice a year I give them the option of donating one percent of their total purchase to a selection of charities. Gregory’s an excellent fund-raiser. People reach deep into their pockets. I’m thinking of franchising him.”

“Sounds very well thought-out.”

“Oh, it is. And very lucrative.”

Emphasizing the last word to let me know he meant megabucks. A cottage industry tycoon.

That didn’t mesh with the worn carpet, the thirty-year-old furniture, the dirty Honda. But I’d met other rich men who didn’t care to show it. Or were afraid to show it and hid behind a Just Plain Folks facade.

Right now he was hiding something else.

I said, “Let’s talk about Holly.”

He looked surprised. “Holly. Of course. Is there anything else you need to know about me?”

The naked narcissism threw me. I’d thought his self-absorption was a means of delaying painful questions. Now, I wasn’t sure.

I said, “I’m sure I’ll have lots of questions about all your family members, Mr. Burden. But right now I’d like to see Holly’s room.”

“Her room. Makes sense. Absolutely.”

We left the office. He opened a door across the hall. More notepaper walls. Two windows, covered by Venetian blinds. A thin mattress lay on the floor, parallel to a low wooden bedframe. The mattress had been slit open in several places, the ticking peeled back, the foam scooped out in handfuls. A crumpled ball of white bed sheet lay rolled in one corner. Nearby was a pillow that had also been slit and sat in a pool of foam chunks. The only other furniture was a pressed-wood three-drawer dresser below an oval mirror. The mirror glass was finger-smudged. The dresser drawers were pulled open. Some clothing- cotton undergarments and cheap blouses- remained inside. Other garments had been removed and piled on the floor. Atop the dresser sat a plastic clock radio. Its beaverboard back had been removed and it had been gutted, parts spread across the wood.

“Compliments of the police,” said Burden.

I looked past the disarray, saw the sparseness that had pre-existed any police intrusion. “What did they take with them?”

“Not a thing. They were after diaries, any sort of written record, but she never kept any. I kept telling them that but they just went in and pillaged.”

“Did they say you were allowed to clean it?”

He fingered his eyeglasses. “I don’t know. I suppose they did.” He bent and picked a piece of foam from the floor. Rolled it between his fingers and drew himself up a bit.

“Holly used to do most of the cleaning. Twice a year I’d bring a professional crew in, but she did it the rest of the time. She liked it, was very good at it. I guess I’m still expecting her to… walk right in with a dustrag and start tidying.”

His voice broke and he walked quickly to the door. “Please excuse me. Take as long as you like.”

I let him go and turned my attention back to the room, trying to conjure the place as it had been when Holly had been alive.

Not much to work with. Those white walls- no nails or brackets, not a single hole or darkened square. Young girls typically used their walls as plaster notebooks. Holly had never hung a picture, never tacked a pennant, never softened her life with rock-poster rebellion or calendar imagery.

What had she dreamed about?

I kept searching for some sign of personal imprint but found none. The room was cell-like, assertively barren.

Did her father realize this wasn’t right?

I recalled the back room, barren except for his toys.

His own place of refuge, cold as a glacier.

Emptiness as a family style?

Daughter as charwoman, handmaiden to the cottage tycoon?

The room began to close in. Had she felt it too? Living here, sleeping here, feeling her life drift by?

Ike- anyone who cared, who’d taken the time to care- might have been seen as a liberator. Prince Charming.

What had his death done to her?

Despite what she’d become- what she’d done- I felt for her.

I heard Milo’s voice in the back of my head. Getting mushy on me, pal?

But I wanted to believe that if Milo were to come to this place, he’d feel something too.

The door to the closet was partially ajar. I opened it and looked in. The poison/perfume of camphor. More clothing- not much of it, mostly casual knits, T-shirts, sweaters, a couple of jackets. The pockets had been slit, the linings shredded. Faded colors.

More heaps of clothing on the floor.

Bargain-bin quality. Daughter of a tycoon.

Above the clothes pole were two shelves. The lower one bore two games. Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders.

Preschool amusements. Had she stopped playing at the age of six? Apart from that, nothing. No books, no fan magazines, no stuffed animals or mugs printed with fatuous phrases. No clear-plastic things that snowed when you turned them upside down.

I closed the closet door and turned back to the ravaged room, tried to picture the way it had looked before the police had come. The damage made it seem more human.

Cot and a dresser. Blank walls. A radio.

The word cell kept flashing.

But I’d seen jail cells that looked more inviting.

This was worse. Punitive.

Solitary confinement.

I had to get out of there.