Read Online Ghost of a Flea by James Sallis - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: James Sallis
Ads: Link
be.”
“Things get that way at our age.”
She sat before her computer. “They don’t have to.” Fingers rippled on the keyboard as though with a will of their own, the very figure of the socialist agenda, each finger acting independently though in concert, courting the common good.
“At some level, always, we’re just looking for the secret stuff. Not much difference there between Molly Bloom and Sally Raphael.”
Fingers went on as she spoke. I thought of H. G. Wells’s Martians stilting towards London, soldiers in blue peering down from the hills over Vicksburg, young men in Sopwith Camels who cast an eye on life, on death, flew on.
“This whole thing,” she said, nodding towards the computer, “is a morass, an ethical slough. I can punch in and find out instantly who’s left messages on my machine, cruise business prospects and keep up with friends, have the world’s news at my fingertips. But I can also, with the flick of that same finger, call up a list of sex offenders and their current addresses. These are people, mind you, who’ve served their time, paid their debt. People who, according to every tenet of a Constitution we go on and on claiming to be so proud of, are fundamentally protected.”
Menus and directories bloomed on the screen, gave way to others, in a constant wash.
“Most days I bemoan that loudly. Decry, despise and disavow it.” She stopped, fingers still, and read what she had, then clacked a few more keys. Columns of icons and keywords filled the screen. “Here’s a file Alouette had tucked away in a private folder. Swept under the rug, as it were. Correspondence, mostly. And mostly electronic, from the look of it.”
“Can I get a—”
But she’d already pushed the eject button, and was handing me a disk.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I hope it helps.” She smiled. “Hate to invade someone’s privacy for nothing. Maybe you’ll let me know?”
Valerie LeBlanc replaced her glasses. Mission accomplished, good deeds done. No one would take her for the hero she was, now. Back to the workaday world.
Three hours and spare change later, I was sitting at a rear table in Tender Buttons, a converted drugstore where the food is great if profoundly idiosyncratic even by New Orleans standards. Service, on the other hand, might best be described as postmodern: sketchy, nonsequential and difficult to follow, forever self-conscious and oddly parodic as though in some indecipherable way alluding to other things entirely, say yakraising or kazoo artistry.
Many of the entries from Alouette’s computer, lacking referents or perspective, proved utterly indecipherable. Others had to do with various projects at work and appeared to be of no more than utilitarian interest. There was a file of personal letters and e-mail messages, another of (I think) references to newspaper and magazine articles. But the one that caught my attention had been identified simply as GOK—Alouette’s code, I recognized, for an intellectual shrug, God Only Knows—and I sat thinking about it as the waiter brought my catfish au beurre noir and grit cakes studded with bits of bright habanero pepper, side of white asparagus, and vanished to reappear at irregular intervals, bursting suddenly upon the scene to linger there like a declaimed quote, or shuttling up all but unnoticed, superfluous as a footnote.
The GOK file was a hodgepodge of lists, passages from novels and self-help books, advertising slogans, obituaries, cross sections of classified ads, altogether the most eclectic jumble of disparate things heaped up in a single place that I’d ever come across, a tour through America’s waste lots and past its false, ruined faces, a landfill of used-up words, expended cartridges of old thoughts clattering to the floor. One list comprised science-fiction titles.
“The Education of Drusilla Strange”
A Fabulous, Formless Darkness
To Walk the Night The
Man Who Fell to Earth
A Mirror for
“Things get that way at our age.”
She sat before her computer. “They don’t have to.” Fingers rippled on the keyboard as though with a will of their own, the very figure of the socialist agenda, each finger acting independently though in concert, courting the common good.
“At some level, always, we’re just looking for the secret stuff. Not much difference there between Molly Bloom and Sally Raphael.”
Fingers went on as she spoke. I thought of H. G. Wells’s Martians stilting towards London, soldiers in blue peering down from the hills over Vicksburg, young men in Sopwith Camels who cast an eye on life, on death, flew on.
“This whole thing,” she said, nodding towards the computer, “is a morass, an ethical slough. I can punch in and find out instantly who’s left messages on my machine, cruise business prospects and keep up with friends, have the world’s news at my fingertips. But I can also, with the flick of that same finger, call up a list of sex offenders and their current addresses. These are people, mind you, who’ve served their time, paid their debt. People who, according to every tenet of a Constitution we go on and on claiming to be so proud of, are fundamentally protected.”
Menus and directories bloomed on the screen, gave way to others, in a constant wash.
“Most days I bemoan that loudly. Decry, despise and disavow it.” She stopped, fingers still, and read what she had, then clacked a few more keys. Columns of icons and keywords filled the screen. “Here’s a file Alouette had tucked away in a private folder. Swept under the rug, as it were. Correspondence, mostly. And mostly electronic, from the look of it.”
“Can I get a—”
But she’d already pushed the eject button, and was handing me a disk.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I hope it helps.” She smiled. “Hate to invade someone’s privacy for nothing. Maybe you’ll let me know?”
Valerie LeBlanc replaced her glasses. Mission accomplished, good deeds done. No one would take her for the hero she was, now. Back to the workaday world.
Three hours and spare change later, I was sitting at a rear table in Tender Buttons, a converted drugstore where the food is great if profoundly idiosyncratic even by New Orleans standards. Service, on the other hand, might best be described as postmodern: sketchy, nonsequential and difficult to follow, forever self-conscious and oddly parodic as though in some indecipherable way alluding to other things entirely, say yakraising or kazoo artistry.
Many of the entries from Alouette’s computer, lacking referents or perspective, proved utterly indecipherable. Others had to do with various projects at work and appeared to be of no more than utilitarian interest. There was a file of personal letters and e-mail messages, another of (I think) references to newspaper and magazine articles. But the one that caught my attention had been identified simply as GOK—Alouette’s code, I recognized, for an intellectual shrug, God Only Knows—and I sat thinking about it as the waiter brought my catfish au beurre noir and grit cakes studded with bits of bright habanero pepper, side of white asparagus, and vanished to reappear at irregular intervals, bursting suddenly upon the scene to linger there like a declaimed quote, or shuttling up all but unnoticed, superfluous as a footnote.
The GOK file was a hodgepodge of lists, passages from novels and self-help books, advertising slogans, obituaries, cross sections of classified ads, altogether the most eclectic jumble of disparate things heaped up in a single place that I’d ever come across, a tour through America’s waste lots and past its false, ruined faces, a landfill of used-up words, expended cartridges of old thoughts clattering to the floor. One list comprised science-fiction titles.
“The Education of Drusilla Strange”
A Fabulous, Formless Darkness
To Walk the Night The
Man Who Fell to Earth
A Mirror for
Similar Books
