We settle into our new day jobs, Marianne in the production department, me in proofing. After the initial excitement of our reunion wore off—about fifteen minutes, by my clock—my brother and I have fallen into our old roles. Ray is the devious boss. I am the silent helper and straight man with the fast fingers. Marianne becomes the beautiful coworker he’s always trying to impress.
From my desk up in the loft, I catch Marianne’s eye and wave. She smiles. Ray spots us.
“I really need that new paper over here, Marianne.” At the center of the barn, Ray stands at the helm of the enormous Heidelberg offset press, big as a truck. Marianne rolls over a cart loaded with paper and Ray docks it to the back of the press.
Ray hits a lever, the rollers start to spin, and the whole press starts to hiss like a dragon.
“This is a sheet-fed press,” he shouts at Marianne. “At the Bureau of Engraving, they’d be running huge rolls of paper on a web press. But their runs are a lot longer, naturally.” Though he left Chicago decades ago, somehow Ray’s accent has deepened until he sounds like a ranting fry cook in some dump under the El.
Ray runs the barn like a squat, loudmouthed martinet. But as he reminds me constantly, he’s saving our asses.
I watch Ray ink up the press, then send some paper running through it. He struggles to the other end and picks up the sheets, frowns at them, then tosses them into the burn can.
He resents printing $100 bills, the domain of any amateur with a color photocopier. It’s like we’ve asked him to print the counterfeiting equivalent of Moondance, over and over. Five hundred thousand times, to be exact.
“What’re you doing?” Marianne has left her post without permission and climbed up the stairs to my station.
“Getting rid of little pieces of dust.” I point to the light board where the negative is lit from behind like a hospital X ray.
Marianne leans closer. “When’s he actually going to start printing, Ross? We’ve been here for almost a month and he’s still getting everything . . .” She raises two fingers on each hand for quotes. “Just right.”
“Ray’s annoying. And paranoid. And a perfectionist. But we really don’t have a choice.”
“I’m going to see if Malcolm will book us a couple of gigs in Montpelier, or maybe over in Burlington,” Marianne says. “There’s got to be somewhere to play. The holidays are coming up. I haven’t gone this long without a gig in years.”
“We just have to deal with Ray for a couple of months,” I say.
“Maybe we should have just let them cut your finger off,” Marianne says.
I look up from covering a dust speck above Benjamin Frank-lin’s head with opaque fluid.
“Kidding,” she says. “Anyway, we have until New Year’s Day to repay the Jersey boys.
Using her powers of persuasion, Marianne convinced Malcolm to connect her to a consortium of unnamed con men in New Jersey, who loaned her the $5 million in real cash to pay off the Banana Man. In return, we have to deliver $50 million in fake cash to a Paramus bar on January 1. The ten-to-one ratio seemed fair at the time, but now that we’re in the trenches, printing money is starting to remind me of sorting peas.
Ray stands at the bottom of the ladder and tosses a printed page on the floor. “New proof!”
I sigh, stand up to retrieve the page.
There’s a loud knock on the door.
“Lockdown!” Ray presses the button near the press and the burn can bursts into flame, destroying the evidence. Massive bolts click into place on the front and back doors.
Someone knocks again. Seven times, very loudly. “Hey! It’s just me. I did the secret knock, Dad. Let me in, damn it. It’s snowing out here.”
Ray presses the button again and unlocks the door. Cray stumbles in, his parka hood bejeweled with ice.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“We stuck a mannequin in the snow in the middle of Route 12,” Cray says. “Right near that new ski lodge place. Three Hummers in a pileup.”
Ray rolls his eyes, pulls Cray close. “That’s my boy.”
Cray looks up, waves. “Hey Uncle Ross, Aunt Marianne.” He’s taken to calling Marianne this to annoy her. Or me. Or both of us. “Take a break for a minute. I got something to show you.”
Marianne and I look at Ray. “Okay, okay. Take five. But no more.”
Cray sheds his parka in a wet heap. He waves us over to the skinny ladder to his “office,” the former cupola of the barn.
“The great thing about this place,” he says as we climb the rickety ladder, “is that Dad’s physically incapable of ever coming up here.”
We nod. The idea of Ray on any ladder seems impossible. The cupola has windows on all four sides showing snow falling steadily over the low hills. The lights of Montpelier glow on the horizon, cut by the meandering black line of the Winooski River.
I can’t imagine how the library table at the center of Cray’s office ever got up here. But it is definitely never leaving. It’s crowded with an ominous black computer, enormous flat-screen monitor, and all sorts of unidentifiable devices.
Cray slides into his chair and slumps down at the table, presses a few buttons to bring his electronic universe to life. Marianne and I stand behind him, holding hands the way young uncles and aunts do.
“You are going to totally dig this, Uncle Ross. I just got all the files back from the Japanese guy I’m collaborating with on The Good Parts.”
“Your novel, right. I remember you telling me about it.”
“My novel?” Cray looks up. “What century are you from?”
“This one. And the last one too, kind of.”
Cray looks me in the eye. “I’m working on a next-level, multi-player interactive questing experience for gamers eighteen and over. In other words, a really dirty game that every fourteen-year-old will kill his grandmother to buy.”
“Sounds great,” Marianne deadpans. “And to think I killed grandma just to get Scrabble.”
“Okay, now Aunt Marianne, promise not to get offended?”
Marianne nods. “Believe me, you’re going to have to do a lot to offend me.”
“Because most gamers are like, dudes.” He hits a couple of keys. “Now remember, this is a rough compilation. We haven’t put in all the backgrounds, all the sound, special effects, and most of the 3-D stuff.” He turns off the dangling overhead light. “Here goes.”
On the screen, I see a guy in a white shirt and black suit gliding down a city sidewalk. The familiar chords of All Blues emerge from Cray’s speakers. “There are a bunch of choices for avatars,” Cray says. “This guy is Miles.”
A woman appears, coming toward us on the sidewalk. Cray hits a key and a list drops down on the side of the screen. “Here are your options.”
I move closer, read the list. Ask her to dinner. Buy her a drink. Steal her diamond. Have sex with her. The list goes on. I close my eyes.
“Sound familiar, Uncle Ross? Anyway, you get points by gathering up things that have value.” He clicks and a screen appears with icons—a diamond, a burrito, a six-pack of Amstel Light, wisdom (Socrates’ bulbous head), money (stack of cash), power (Donald Trump’s hair), freedom (Statue of Liberty torch).
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
“This is all customizable, of course,” Cray says. “Plenty of opportunities for product placement.”
“Who decides what’s valuable?” I ask.
“That, Uncle Ross, is a great question. This is no ordinary hunting and gathering game. You set the value on all your favorite things at the beginning and create—”
“A personal commodities market,” I blurt out.
Cray shrugs. “I guess so. We’re calling it a Values Profile. You can change it over time. You just gather up the things you decide are valuable and leave the rest of the shit alone. That’s why the game’s called The Good Parts, get it?”
“I get it,” I say. “I really do.”
“How do you win?” Marianne says.
“You kill all the other players,” Cray says. “No, I’m kidding, Aunt Marianne. No one gets killed. Unless they get too much of one commodity. Then they max out and morph into two players.”
“So there might be two guys named Miles out there, with one hunting for, say, diamonds, and the other hunting for burritos?”
Ross clicks his fingers. “That’s right, Uncle Ross. Two or two hundred. Or two thousand. The Good Parts isn’t about racking up points—there are armies of kids in Chinese click farms doing that all day. It’s about figuring out what you like and then searching for it, like, relentlessly. Isn’t that what life is all about?”
Marianne and I look at each other, stunned. There’s too much right with what Cray’s saying for us to disagree, too much wrong with it to nod blithely.
“Yes, exactly,” Marianne says, finally. Now that she’s seen Cray’s home life, she’s remarkably tolerant of him, feels sorry for him, even. “That’s exactly what life’s about, Cray.”
Cray sends Miles sidling down the street again, winding between pedestrians, gathering items of value, passing along things he’s done with, that he doesn’t care about.
Cray clacks away at the keyboard, typing faster and faster, giggling at his own creation.
“We’re about to do a press run!” Ray’s shout echoes from downstairs but we don’t pay much attention to it. Marianne and I take this stolen moment to look out over the frozen world, to pull closer and kiss.
Cray looks up from his computer. “Hey, get a room.”
“We have a room,” Marianne says. “It just isn’t very nice.”
Marianne and I are staying in what Ray calls his guest room, and if his guests were mushrooms, it would be fine. We’ve taken to reminiscing about hotel rooms with towels, heat, windows.
“So what do you think of it, Uncle Ross?”
“Of what?”
“The Good Parts.”
“I think you’ve found something pretty strange to spend your time on, Cray. And I mean that in a good way.”
“I know you do. We’re conferencing with a game packager in L.A. later this week. Any advice?”
“Get paid in advance,” Marianne says.
“Get the contract in writing,” I say. “Never go on a handshake.”
“Don’t give them anything extra.”
“Don’t bargain.”
“Remember that people who hire you aren’t your friends.”
“Never drop your rate.”
“You guys are brutal,” Cray says. “Where’d you learn all that?”
“Somewhere out on the road,” I say.
“What road, Uncle Ross?”
“The one that goes between nightclubs.”
“Oh. I don’t think I’m going to spend my life in nightclubs like you, Uncle Ross.”
“Good to hear it,” I say. “Warps your worldview.”
Marianne reaches out and ruffles Cray’s hair.
“Knock it off, Aunt Marianne.” He bends away from her, his fingers never leaving the keyboard. He’s connected to Tokyo, Beijing, San Francisco, New York. He’s out there searching for the good parts, not just waiting for the ones that come his way.
“Press run!” Ray bellows from downstairs.
We should go back downstairs and help, but it’s hard to leave Cray’s rooftop shop and return to the grinding work of undermining the Bureau of Engraving. But we have Franklins to print before we sleep. Marianne and I watch the snow falling in orderly lines. Every now and then, a flake breaks free and traces an errant path, falling more slowly than the others.
I wonder what Miles Davis would think of all this. Then I realize that I don’t really care. Miles has been dead for years.
“What are you guys going to do when we finally get all the money printed?” Cray asks.
I shrug. “Play some shows in New York.”
“Maybe we’ll get a new set together and head to Europe,” Marianne says. “Good gigs in Germany.”
“Or just see where the wind takes us.”
“Press run!” Ray shouts from downstairs.
“Sounds like you guys don’t have any more of an idea of what you’re doing than I do,” Cray says.
Marianne smiles. “We don’t.”
“And that’s okay.” I spent years at the keyboard, playing what people wanted to hear, what clubs paid me to play. It’s time to search for the good parts.
Why rush the ending now?