The Egg Code Read Online Free PDF

mother stayed close behind, her right hand smoothing a lock of his hair. Without speaking, they went outside and crossed the parking lot. There was a gym class on the field, playing a violent game. Like prisoners, the kids stared through the high wire fence as Simon and his mother drove away. Simon liked it when the other kids watched him. It made him feel warm under his clothes. Gazing at his classmates, he pressed one hand against the rolled-up window. “Do I have to be off book?” he asked. The passenger seat was too big for him—too deep and too cushy.
    “You’ll do whatever they tell you.” Lydia clutched the automatic transmission, working it like a stick shift. “You know how these things go. Now what’s this old fool doing in my way?”
    Julian Mason stepped onto the lawn, watching as Lydia sped around a curve. His heart seemed to rock back and forth, favoring the right side, a double pulse. He returned to the sidewalk and continued past the school, the car now only a screech in the distance. Closing his eyes, he remembered the driver’s face in the windshield. Her judgment of him. He tried to laugh, resolving not to take it personally. From now on, he wouldn’t take anything personally. He was tired of carrying his race on his shoulders. His clothes reflected this desire to blend in, to assimilate at all costs. Jeans and a T-shirt. The words QUALITY, INTEGRITY circled the rim of the button fly in a kind of unshadowed Gold Rush font. Julian knew the hidden language of print. Walking the streets of this, his new home, he made himself available to the information. Every sentence, every phrase bannered across an awning transmitted two signals at once—the literal meaning and the visual sense it conveyed. A black-letter Fraktur swinging above the entrance to Simster’s Biergarten expressed not only the building’s identity, but also the old German Reich, the Gothic type now reduced to the status of novelty, rendered harmless by the easy icons of the global theme park. Passing the bar, he smiled up at the sign, ignoring the woman in the entryway. A nice design. Black paint, varnished wood. Touch of the artisan. He liked this place. Now two blocks east of the school, he wondered at the town’s size. Mass communications, common in the city, seemed out of place this far off, where telephone lines and fiber optics crossed the main part of town, then vanished into the forest. The main road curved down a slight hill, and at the base of it he could see a row of detached apartments and walk-ups. A parked van sat with blinkers flashing in the street as a man made trips in and out of the building, his arms brimming with loose piles of clothes. A divorce, Julian guessed. Even the words on the side of the van underscored this impression of hasty flight: GET OUT OF DODGE TRANSPORTATION FACILITIES written in slanted block sans serifs with tiny scores of motion streaming past each word.
Pack up your things and run
, the letters said.
Leave nothing behind.
    “Hey, you got the same idea as me.”
    “What’s that?”
    “New to town.” Julian stood on the curb and slid his hands into his pockets. A dingy convertible, moving slowly, passed between the two men. A woman in the passenger seat made a face as he called across the roof of the car. “Just moved up from the city.”
    The car stopped, then turned at the corner. Heaving a pile of books, the man met Julian in the center of the road. “I’m not new to town. My wife and I, we’ve been here for quite some time.”
    “Oh, well, all right then.”
    “Yes, I’m a native of this place. Not exactly, of course.
Native
implies that I’ve been here my entire life, and that’s not true.”
    “Oh, okay.”
    “My wife and I used to live right by the lake. The lake, if you’ve seen it, it’s just up the road.”
    “Oh, well, then you got it going on.”
    The man lifted the stack of books and braced it with his chin. “My wife still lives in the same house. I—as you