Lurkers Read online

‘No one believes that Odin slew Ymir and built the universe into his skull? What’s wrong with that creation myth: it’s unsupported by evidence, contrary to established facts, and entirely unfalsifiable. So what’s it lacking.’

  ‘A real god.’

  ‘What’s it lacking,’ I asked, ‘which differentiates it from any other creation myth. What’s yours got that this one’s lacking.’

  ‘Mine’s been proved,’ he said.

  ‘Your myth has been proved? I wonder why it remains a myth.’

  ‘It’s not a myth.’

  ‘It’s the definition of a myth,’ I said, ‘It attempts to explain an origin, using deities, and lacking external evidence.’

  ‘That sounds more like evolution.’

  ‘Not really: evolution is observed, replicable, predictive, and lacking in deital excuses. Also, it’s got nothing to do with your mythology.’

  The creatard having only listened to one word before starting to think up a response: ‘It’s not observed; no one’s ever seen a dog turn into a bird.’

  ‘No one’s ever seen a stick turn into a snake,’ I said, ‘Which fortunately is still immaterial: evolutionary biology doesn’t expect dogs to turn into birds. I take it then that you still have no evidence supporting your myth.’

  ‘Evidence,’ he said, grinning stupidly, ‘How can you ask for evidence when evolution is only a theory.’

  ‘Begging the question,’ I told him, ‘That things evolve is an observed fact; that things evolve through natural selection is a theory founded to explain that fact.’

  ‘It’s not a fact.’

  ‘By the same token,’ I added, ‘that gravity occurs is a fact; the theory of gravity—that gravitons cause gravity to occur—is the theory founded to explain that fact.’

  He blinked. ‘Gravity’s a law; evolution’s just a theory; there’s no law of evolution.’

  ‘There’s no law of gravity either.’

  ‘Sure there is: “What goes up must come down”.’

  ‘So gravitons must come down? Because, in theory, they kinda can’t.’

  ‘Then you’ve just disproved the theory,’ he said.

  ‘The theory isn’t that upwardly moving things can’t fall down; that was your sophistic misunderstanding of your fictional law of gravity. The theory is that gravity, which causes gravitation toward the most massive object, is itself caused by gravitons. Just like the theory is that, evolution being nothing more or less than periodic allelic frequency vicissitude, the causal function allowing us to predict that dogs won’t beget birds is what we lightheartedly call natural selection. None of which excuses your deital creation myth from requiring evidence to support it.’

  He only stared at me for a moment.

  ‘Which word confused you.’ Something I’ve become used to asking people.

  ‘Well okay but,’ he began rapidly, as though understanding anything I’d just said was as unimportant as its content to a cdesign proponentsist, ‘you still can’t show that you evolved from monkeys.’

  ‘I never claimed that I had.’

  ‘Then what are you claiming,’ he demanded.

  ‘That your myth lacks supporting evidence. And by implication that I’ll need to see its supporting evidence, preferably at about the time I read that you’ve won the Nobel Prize for Physical Sciences by surviving peer review, before I can take it seriously.’

  ‘Why would they give out the Nobel Prize for proving what everyone already knows.’

  ‘Why’d they give it to Fire and Mello in two thousand six for reaffirming evolution in RNA Interference.’

  ‘What’s that mean,’ he asked.

  ‘That your bronzeaged myth is outdated.’

  ‘Well, one Nobel Prize doesn’t prove anything. Al Gore got one of those.’

  ‘Gore got a Nobel for Peace—which, granted, anyone can get for any thing. The Nobel for Physiology is a bit more real; and, really, every Nobel won in that category since the beginning of the twentieth century has been for something reaffirming evolutionary biology. How many have been won for showing humans to have evolved from dirt?’

  Jessica returned with my coffee, and one of those looks. I told her: ‘Thanks; and I didn’t start it: he came to me.’ She shrugged and wandered off again.

  ‘God making man from dirt isn’t evol—’

  ‘Sorry: which deity are you talking about? Jehovah?’

  ‘Yeah. The only one.’

  ‘Just making sure it wasn’t Odin or Allah or Christ or Quetzalcoatl or something.’

  ‘No: those are myths.’

  ‘Christ is a myth; noted.’

  ‘No he’s not; he’s—’

  ‘You just said he was.’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘Everyone but you and your imaginary friend heard you call it a myth. But go on with your fable; it’s probably not entirely boring.’

  ‘Whatever. In the beginning—’

  ‘Define “beginning”.’

  ‘G—what? The beginning. When the universe began.’

  ‘Who told you it began,’ I asked.

  ‘Well...you did, for one.’

  ‘I never said the universe began. I don’t assume that there was ever anything here but a bunch of stellar whitish stuff in a big black bunch of nothingness. Do you?’

  ‘Well, yeah: because then the lord said “Let there be light”, and there was light.’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Yeah. The bible says so.’

  ‘And it said so before it introduced a talking snake, so it hadn’t yet become laughable. How’d this lord make the photons.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The light particles,’ I said, ‘The little bits of light themselves. How long did it take them to get from zero to a hundred eighty-six thousand, three hundred eighty-three miles per second.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

  ‘That’s the first plausible claim I’ve heard you make.’

  ‘You just want to argue.’

  ‘Actually, I just want evidence,’ I said, ‘Since you wanted to argue, I’m willing to settle for that if you lack the evidence I’d prefer.’

  ‘The evidence is everything. Look around.’

  ‘Everything’s only a theory; that’s why it’s called the Theory of Everything.’

  ‘That’s just dumb.’

  ‘You weren’t aware that we had a Theory of Everything?’

  ‘It’s not what it means.’

  ‘And “evolution is only a theory” isn’t what the Theory of Evolution means. So that’s settled now.’

  ‘But no one’s ever seen anything evolve!’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You have not! What have you ever seen evolve!’

  ‘Influenza.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The flu. It evolves semiannually. Hence flu shots: as the virus evolves, new antiviral agents are needed to combat it. Which is to say that, again, everyone knows that things evolve, even if few people know all the words required to explain it.’

  ‘Well then why do women have an extra rib; explain that.’

  ‘Urban legend believed only by intellectually lazy morons.’

  ‘It’s not a legend. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Have you. Which rib is extra; which side is it on; which vertebra.’

  ‘Uh...I dunno; but it’s there.’

  ‘But you saw it.’

  ‘It’s there.’

  ‘Ever read Exodus twenty sixteen?’

  ‘I’ve read the whole thing.’

  ‘Can you quote it?’

  ‘I’d need to look it up.’

  ‘I needn’t,’ I said, ‘It’s “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”.’ One of those silly rules people stuck to back when they believed in deities, I guess.’

  Flanders said nothing. But his kids were looking at me. So: ‘Kids: your dad’s an idiot who’s going to the bad hellplace for lying. Or, your dad’s, you know, the
milkman, who’s going to the bad hellplace for delivering milk on a Saturday. Either way: pray that nepotism doesn’t apply to egregious sin.’

  ‘Don’t you talk to my kids,’ Flanders warned.

  ‘Don’t you bring them to a restaurant...,’ I counterwarned, glancing at my watch, ‘at ten twelve at night, before vexing sojourning strangers for your dark lord satan with false witness about your vast experience in peeping at women’s ribs.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Flanders said, getting up and scanning the table for his bill, which wasn’t there; he gave up and slammed a twenty next to his malt, turning to me to pontificate: ‘Render unto Caesar.’

  ‘Yeah: you wouldn’t wanna risk crucifixion by christlikely adhering to Deuteronomy twelve thirty-two,’ I said. Did I at any point mention that I’ve actually read the bible, and that I tend to remember stuff? If not, it’s covered now.

  Redfaced, Flanders grabbed the closest lactosapien larva and yanked on it, ignoring its yelp, and dragged it quickly away toward the door to the carpark; the milkman’s concubine led the other kid by the hand without saying a word. Broads....

  I opened the laptop again.

  ‘See,’ Hutch invaded, ‘That was what I was trying to do.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said, not especially to him.

  After a moment, Flanders reappeared—this time without any of the milkman’s kids—to grab the twenty he’d left, probably because Jessica wasn’t going to let him leave without handling the bill properly. Instead of rushing past again, he stopped at my table. ‘You’re the antichrist!’

  ‘I get that a lot,’ I told my laptop.

  ‘This is what you do, isn’t it: you just go around trying to talk people out of believing on the lord so everyone can go to Hell—’

  ‘Stop spitting on my laptop, Perv.’

  ‘—not gonna work while I’ve got anything to say about it! I’m warning you: you’d—’

  ‘Ooh a threat.’

  ‘—watch out with your...that thing you do—’

  ‘That thing where I sit here not talking to crazy people until they ask where I’ll be in a thousand years?’

  ‘—and telling their kids—I didn’t start this; you’re not pinning that on me; you started it when you said...whatever you said...that it was makebelieve!’

  ‘That guy behind you said that, not me.’

  ‘Uh...well, you’re all in on it together! So you just keep it up, Mister; I’ll—’

  ‘Doctor. I didn’t spend twelve years in Evil Atheist School to be called “mister”.’

  ‘Oh whatever! You people—’

  ‘We people: we smart ones who deign to question talking snake books written by drunk goatherders.’

  ‘It was written by the lord—’

  ‘Then the lord is illiterate. “The wages of sin is death”; murr derr; “wages is”; who talks like that.’

  Unable to find another word for um, the twit simply stomped away again, letting me focus on my laptop after all.

  FOUR

  Flanders, wife, and lactosapiens must have made enough of a scene while leaving, up front at the register, to get the manager’s attention and remind him of his job description: to ensure by puritanical rule that no one within a parsec of the restaurant was having fun. Now, according to the timestamp on the video at about 10.21, he finally emerged from his office to patrol the dining area.

  He made a few casual stops at tables I couldn’t see from the seventies here at the edge of the map, beyond which be dragons, asking perfunctory questions of the last of the preferred caste who now remained after having come in for a late dinner while the world outside had still been open for business: How was everything tonight? Anything else I can have your server get you? Doctor Rigby: I didn’t see your Viper out in the lot; are they still working on it? And other chitchat reserved for those whom the manager respected for making more per month than he made per year.

  One might wonder, knowing that, why the manager didn’t go into sycophantic mode upon reaching my table as, all modesty extinct, I too make enough in royalties [albeit only every three months] to buy and sell the little twerp on a whim. The answer is simple, if slightly ironic: I don’t flaunt it. I drive a car twenty years old with 180,000 miles which cost in adjusted dollars about forty grand; it’s not made today, but the Mustang was made at the time and cost about the same amount; it falls under the Millennium Falcon class of automobilia, looking at a glance like a dilapidated roadster yet routinely beating everything from 1969 Chargers to 2009 Teslas off the line. My laptop, in contemporary dollars, cost a couple thousand bucks four years ago, its 3GHz singlecore 32bit CPU beginning to die of Alzheimer’s and its microscopic 60gig drive routinely begging me to relieve it of data eight gigabytes at a time through ThumbDrives, its CDBurner being slow and limited to 700meg discs. My watch, as I’ve mentioned, was forty bucks; so were my black and white ChuckTaylors; also my Knightsbridge twopocket buttondown, unbuttoned, and my Levi’s 501s; my TShirt would probably cost that or more today, as it was a concertshirt from Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies tour in 1973—at which show I actually wasn’t [as a fun matter of trivia, I was eighteen when the song Eighteen turned eighteen in 1989] but my older brother, who was there, bought the thing as a matter of course and, following something of a tantrum I barely remember now, gave it to me the next day, following which I’ve had it ever since; while I tend to collect sunglasses—Gargoyles for $150, Blindes for $300, et cetera—the shades I’d kept on until I could see the stars above the streetlights were RayBans Wayfarers without any obvious logo, concealing their value of $139.99 and equating them with any plastic ripoff selling for $6.99 at 7Eleven to anyone not noticing that the lenses were made of glass. The backpack containing my laptop was a hundred and thirty bucks, but not for any visible reason—one might assume it cost whatever the cheapest bookbag at Safeway sells for. My hair at any given time looks stylish for anyone aged twelve through twenty and, by whatever miracle, it hasn’t really begun to turn grey yet. On nights of clement weather, I’ve been known to leave the car [and the three-thousand-dollar leather trenchcoat] at home and arrive at the restaurant on a Santa Cruz skateboard adorned by stickers—one of which reads Skateboarding Is Not a Crime, Except Where Prohibited by Law—and which, while three hundred bucks in reality, looks to the average grownup like any Variflex toy selling for $14.95 at Target. So: my Patrick Bateman Bling Assessment out of the way, that I assume is why the manager neglects to infer my socioeconomic superiority, and therefore why I and by extension you get to see him for his true character—an elitist who, to borrow from Groucho Marx, shouldn’t be so thrilled to be a member of any club willing to accept him.

  The manager slumming it into the seventies stopped at my table first, hitting me with an exasperated if disparaging look of wanton contempt, his piebald Hannibal Lecter hair receding and the light bouncing menacingly off his pattern baldness from the suspended lamp behind him; slightly off the topic, I once overheard him boasting that he was already the manager [making no attempt to qualify that as graveyard manager] at thirty-nine years of age, meaning that he wasn’t at the Billion Dollar Babies concert either, and therefore has no excuse to look twice as old as I do. He glanced at his watch—an Armitron—and back at me, eyebrows knitting together in a weird hybrid of intimidation and throttled concentration.

  ‘Aren’t you here a bit early tonight?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. ‘The sun’s down; that’s about when I usually come in.’

  Glancing at the table, he asked rhetorically: ‘Just coffee and soda tonight.’

  Other writers—by whom I mean Stephen King, saying this of other writers, while for all I know only talking about himself—while in clever command of words on paper tend to stammer and freeze up in public, thinking only later of what they should have said, in a perfect world in which they were as cool live as on Memorex. Not me. I empathise more with Emo Philips—only thinking later, after the fact, of clever answerslike Yes while, during the moment
itself, saying things like Well, Officer Pythagoras: the closest you’ll ever come to a straight line is if they do an electroencephalogram of your own brainwave—I’ve always been every bit as good at slander as I am at libel, as it were. Thus: ‘I’d asked for Cerveaux Gestionnaires en Beurre Noir, but you’re apparently out of that.’

  ‘Is that French? We could probably figure something out. What is it?’

  ‘Managerial brains in black butter.’

  Really sad is that, once I’d translated it, it still took the ’tard a moment of thought to work out what I’d just told him. Then came the anger. ‘Y’know: you come in here every night, plug that thing in and use our power, sit here with coffee for hours, and take up a table other people could be using.’

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ I told him, pulling out my phone. My watch might not surf the ’net, but my LG Dare does; also, it records fullmotion video which I can then post to my website directly and approximately immediately; guess whether cops like it when I do that to them. In this case, I switched to videomode and aimed the thing at the manager, explaining: ‘I’m not real smart; let me get this down so I can memorise it later. You were saying?’

  Unabated, he reiterated, beginning at 10.21pm: ‘I said you come in here and drink coffee while other people could be sitting here eating; and you plug in your computer and use our electricity, which we don’t actually allow here.’

  ‘Oh? Why not. This place doesn’t make enough to afford the electricity used by a laptop, which happens to equal the electricity not being used by the lightbulb over there at the Emo Table?’

  He glanced at the scenekids before striding over and twisting the bulb back into place, causing them to shriek in melodramatic horror; then he came back to me. ‘We can’t risk liability if lightning hits the building and shorts out your laptop,’ he said.

  ‘So,’ I paraphrased from behind the phonecam, ‘In the event that lightning hits this building, on a clear, warm night during which it’s not even raining, this place is so desperately beneath standard Osha requirements that anything drawing power, from my laptop to your lightbulbs, could surge and possibly explode?’ Turning the phone to film myself, allowing the manager to see the fullmotion image and the small but obvious REC in the upper centre, I added: ‘Could this be a case for Geraldo Rivera?’