by Megan Angelo
“I try to console her,” he said, adding wistfully, “My daughter has same case.”
In the grocery store, he found more of the same. The cashier behind the belt where Andriy plunked down his order, a lanky redhead with an asymmetrical haircut, ran away halfway through the transaction. The man’s phone, sitting next to the register, had begun to emit moans and gasps. Andriy looked down to see a sex tape playing at top volume. “Two men, both have gray hair, equivalent penis size,” he reported to Orla. “I was not staring. The quality was very good.”
When the cashier left, Andriy said, he took his things into the next lane, to a Hispanic girl with doorknocker earrings who was pretending not to watch her coworker. She rung up Andriy’s things without making eye contact, snapping her gum. Suddenly, a ding rang out from her midsection. She looked down. A square of white light shone through the thin purple cotton of her apron.
The girl pulled the phone out slowly and looked at it. Swiped once, twice. Put the phone back and picked up Andriy’s bag of trail mix.
“What are you seeing?” he asked her. “What makes everyone go so crazy?”
“Not the same thing for everyone,” the girl said. “I hear they got stuff for everybody.”
“What stuff?” Andriy said. “Who is they?”
The girl shrugged. “Nobody knows,” she said. “Had a guy in here, FBI or something. Said that everybody who has stuff turning back on, it’s weird. The first thing you see is something you don’t want nobody to see, and then you see where they sent it.” She was dragging items over her scanner even though it wasn’t working. “Like for me, they say they sent my mom a lotta shit I talked on her, like a lotta lotta shit. I said I fantasize about her dying.”
“You said this in a text?” Andriy asked.
The girl, he said, had shaken her head. She was oddly calm. Only the gold in her ears shook. “Copies of notes from my shrink,” she said, and she showed him. “Apparently, that’s a big one. They’re in the medical systems. It’s like they know how to look for secrets.” She punched at her calculator, held up the total, closed her hand on his exact change. “So if you got something fucked up, man, spill it now. Before they do it for you.”
* * *
Andriy was very sorry; in the three-bedroom penthouse, there were no beds. Floss was right, all those months ago—he lived in Delaware, close to his ex-wife and daughter, and when he stayed in the city for work, he slept on the couch. But there was a beanbag in the corner of the largest bedroom, so Orla sat there, her whole body screaming from the lack of support. She let Marlow eat and looked around uneasily. The room’s walls were covered with the sort of posters Orla remembered from dorm rooms—models in shreds of swimsuits and lingerie, kneeling seaside or draped over beds. At college, boys stuck them to the cinder block with putty, but Andriy had framed and hung his.
He made Orla eggs, scrambled and dry. Next to her plate, he set down two Advil. It was all he had, he said. It was better than nothing, she answered.
They sat and ate the eggs while Marlow slept on the couch, the pillows in a makeshift fortress around her. They were almost finished when the screen of the television went black, then blue, then, suddenly: it was all back, confusing Orla’s eyes. The channel guide stared at them like it had never left. Andriy jumped up. He lunged for the remote on the coffee table. Orla watched, half-aware her mouth was full of eggs and open, as he fumbled, pressing buttons with both thumbs.
Most of the stations had not recovered. They were dark or rainbow-blocked or frozen on something from before. When Andriy came to a news channel, they both yelped like children—the image was moving. They could see the face of a grim man at a desk. They could hear his voice, too. The usual cable-news trimmings—the chyrons, the ticker, the little clock in the corner—were nowhere to be found. It made the man look naked. On the desk next to him was a drugstore alarm clock, brown faux wood with red numbers.
“Emotional terrorism,” he was saying. He stopped and picked up his papers. He waited a few moments. “If you’re just joining us,” he said, “we have returned to live broadcast after almost three days of being off the air. It is December 27, 2016, and—” He checked his clock proudly. “It is 1:20 p.m. here in New York.”
Orla got up and crossed to the couch. She sank down next to Andriy, taking care not to jostle Marlow.
“The nation is in the midst of an unprecedented attack,” the man said. “On our power grid, our communications systems, and, as it’s now becoming clear, our personal privacy and security. Let’s review.” The man waited a beat, blinking. “Debra,” he said, when nothing happened, “do we not have that graphic?” He sighed and flipped up the top page on his pile. On it, someone had hand-drawn a timeline.
“Here,” he said, tapping the sketch. “Here’s what we know. In the late hours of December 24, hackers launched a multipronged attack on America, marked by the quote-unquote stoppage of time. These perpetrators were able to sabotage our power grid in such a way that they could tweak the electrical current that devices use to keep time.” He splayed out his fingers to count. “At the same time: they were hacking into the operations of major internet, cable, and phone service providers. They were infiltrating medical records systems, banks, and other large-scale keepers of personal information. They were disabling, or tampering with, GPS satellite communication. The assault was swift, comprehensive, and devastating. And now we seem to be in the midst of another phase of the sabotage. We’re getting dozens of reports about people finding their phones and other devices finally and mysteriously unlocked—only to learn that the hackers have leaked personal, and often humiliating, information about them. Leaking it to the people around them, or the people directly concerned by the matter. ‘Emotional terrorism’ is the term we’ve been—”
The man was interrupted by a distant ringtone: vaguely aquatic, like plinking rain. He looked up and past the camera. “Mine?” he said. He sounded afraid. He stood up.
A moment later, a woman in not enough makeup, her hair limp and stuck to her skull, slid into his seat. “I’m Dana Marshall,” she said. “I’ll be taking over for Bill. My husband just found out I lied about having breast cancer. So you can bet I’ll be with you all day.” She rolled around, collecting Bill’s papers. They had scattered when he pushed out of his chair.
Orla looked down at Marlow and found that the baby had awoken without making a sound. Her eyes were the widest Orla had seen them yet, and she locked them on Orla’s. They stared at each other, and Orla felt, though the clocks were back, time slipping away from her again.
Sounding over the voice coming from the TV: three hard knocks on the door.
Orla curled her body over Marlow. She looked at Andriy, who clicked off the television. He held a finger to his lips. Slowly, silently, he opened a drawer in the coffee table and took out a small switchblade. He went to the door. He leaned his eye to the peephole.
When he turned back to Orla, he was trembling with relief. He clutched his chest with one hand. “Jesus,” he said with a smile. “She is crazy, your friend.”
There was no time to explain, no time to cry out don’t. All Orla could think to do was sweep the baby into one arm and reach for the patio door with the other. She had to yank it three times, hard. When they got out onto the roof, she looked down and saw her shirt was soaked in blood. Her incision had burst.
She banged Andriy’s patio gate aside and ran across the roof, toward the door that led to the elevator. By the time she pulled the handle and felt it go nowhere—locked—Floss’s face was in the glass. She was behind her.
Orla turned around. “Get back,” she yelped. “Get away from us.”
The wind whipped Floss’s hair across her face, trapping strands of it in her lip gloss. She clawed them away. “She shouldn’t be out here. It’s cold,” she said. She turned her face this way and that, examining Marlow. Orla could tell Floss wanted to grab the baby but was
n’t sure how to hold her.
“No,” Orla said. “No, no, no.” She tightened her grip.
“Orla.” Floss backed her toward the door. “Stop being insane. This was the deal, and you know it.”
“How did you find us?” Orla said, her voice quaking. She pressed Marlow’s face into her chest, to keep her warm and one inch farther from Floss. “How did you know I left the hospital—how did you even know I had her?”
Floss was calm. “The cops said they would search our whole building,” she said. “I knew you had her, I knew you left, because the hospital tracked me down. One of your nurses follows me on Twitter. She saw me tweet, before all this shit went down, that me and Aston were at the St. Regis.”
“But why,” Orla spit, “would they call you?”
Floss bent her finger up and down in a tiny wave at Marlow. “You put me down when you preregistered at the hospital,” she said. “I’m your emergency contact. They didn’t call me because you took Marlow. They called me because you went missing.”
Andriy and a policeman reached them then—what had taken them so long? Orla would never know, just as she would never know why the cop took Floss’s side. She could guess. He was young, younger than them, and frightened by Floss, by the envelope of contracts she had with her, under her fur-collared parka, by the way she looked familiar-famous and carried herself like who she was—someone who didn’t mind ruining people. Orla knew, too, that the way she bled from her middle must have made her look crazy, and that it couldn’t have helped, the way Marlow started howling in a way that sounded scared. She knew it made things even worse when Andriy kept stammering, over and over, that he really didn’t know these girls at all. She knew it made a difference, the way the cop didn’t have any backup, because the backup was all needed somewhere else. Everywhere else.
The cop lifted Marlow from Orla’s arms. He kept repeating that it was standard procedure: he had to check the baby out.
“Support her head,” Orla choked out as she let Marlow slip from her arms. The cop nodded, then asked Andriy to please come with him back inside. The men walked away with the baby.
Orla and Floss stood alone, together, apart, waiting to see what would happen, on the smaller side of the roof. The part for everyone else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Orla
Atlantis
2051
At the age of sixty-two, Orla has made peace with her hair. It’s funny; now that it is old, her hair is the loveliest, the most tolerable, it has ever been. She still has so much of it, and its youthful frizz and bulk has mellowed, leaving her with mermaid kinks and more natural volume than most women her age. Not that anyone else has settled for natural. Most of Orla’s friends, those former revolutionaries, have quietly taken advantage of science. Their hair and faces look almost the same as they did when they came to Atlantis. But that’s one of the things Orla has always missed here: old people. There is something so uncertain, so home-alone-feeling, about a world without anyone white-haired. So, now that she can, she lets herself become an old woman. And Kyle swears he doesn’t mind.
Kyle is a good man, but he is still a man. It is why he doesn’t understand, even after he shows Orla how it would boost the store’s profits, why she refuses to diversify into baby gifts, stocking tiny smocked dresses and soft pink shoes. It is why he doesn’t notice that she always goes straight to a restroom when another woman, half joking, tells Orla she is lucky to not have any daughters. It is why he has to ask her where her mind is when her eyes glaze over each Christmas morning, only at a time that’s convenient for everyone. She is a mother—she knows how to keep her own thoughts waiting until everyone else has had breakfast.
If Kyle were a woman, he would intuit all of this. But he is a man, so he would tell anyone who asked that they know everything there is to know about each other, he and his wife. And he does know that, long ago, Orla had a baby girl. He knows that the baby was taken away. He thinks it is an old story. But for Orla, the story never ends.
* * *
After Floss and the cop took Marlow, Orla lasted two and a half more months in New York. She fantasized that another cop—an Irish-looking lady cop with a sturdy bosom, that was what she always pictured—would knock on the door of 6D one day and present her with her baby. She would say she had been looking after Marlow herself, whispering every night in her ear that she’d see her mother soon. She also had a more realistic fantasy: that Floss would come back one day and thrust Marlow over the threshold, broken from putting up with her crying and begging to go back on the deal.
Besides wait and dream, there wasn’t much to do. Orla’s phone still didn’t work; the internet was still dark. She was afraid to go to the police, who might know, when they tapped her name into a computer, that she had kidnapped her own child from the hospital. Orla dug a damp, warped phone book out from the stack behind the building’s foyer door and pored over it, looking for groups and agencies that had “children” or “parents” or “family” in the name. She walked to their offices, even when it took hours, just to find locked doors and wary staff. Did she really think, at a time like this, they could—What was it she wanted, again? She went back to the lawyer’s office where she had signed all the papers and found a note taped to the front desk: GONE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Not closed, she thought, staring at it. Gone.
She went twice to the house in Brooklyn Heights. Both times, every window was dark.
January brought more files—that was what they called them, the things their phones came back on displaying, the photos and videos and texts and emails that ruined their lives—and the return of the late-night shows. When the programs came back, their studio audiences rose with tears in their eyes. At home and ravaged by hormones, Orla cried, too. But the attempt at normalcy proved premature. Within the month, all the hosts would be ruined. The last man to go, the perkiest one, was called away in the middle of his monologue one night. His lapel mic picked up the frantic whispers of the producer who rushed into his shot. “Your home computer turned on,” he said. “I don’t know what it said, but I just got a call that Rachel’s locked herself in the bathroom. She says—she says she’s going to—”
The host hurried off the stage. The band stood there, agape. Their horns swung silent by their sides.
Orla knew what the end of the producer’s sentence was. She had recently seen the newspaper story about Jordie, the freckled publicist from the pet party, jumping off his nineteenth-floor balcony. He would be remembered as the first, but there were hundreds right on his heels. Experts warned of uncharted territory.
In February, there were almost nine thousand. The next few years would be bad, but there would never be a month worse than that.
The government sprang into action. Bridges were wrapped in fencing, patrolled by men with rifles who scared jumpers back to the land. Prescription pads—the paper ones—were phased out altogether. The system that replaced them filtered its input through Homeland Security. Drugstores put glass over everything from Lysol to Wite-Out. Certain trees—ones that people somehow identified as doing the trick, if the driver held the wheel just right and kept his foot bravely on the gas—became morbid sensations, then mulch, when the police had them cut down. The wooded roads in Orla’s hometown, the ones that used to worry parents on graduation night, were now lined with stumps and filled with sunlight.
Weapon sales were halted by emergency mandate, which left people who already owned them to decide: Should they turn theirs in, or wait for someone desperate for a gun to break in and take it? People whose back doors had stickers that warned of how they handled intruders—Nothing in this house is worth getting shot over—got putty knives and oiled goo and scratched them off the glass.
The hangings were harder to stop. No one knew how to legislate rope. But at each hardware store in the country, there was an extra worker in jeans and a red vest, looking like all the rest of them as he glanced in
to people’s shopping carts and struck up pleasant talk—what were they working on, today, with their cord or their box cutter? The worker was always named Jeff, and he was never a worker named Jeff. He was something brand-new. A store marshal.
In March, Orla got herself drunk one night. She watched the antisuicide channel for a while, the looped urgings to persist from the actress with the pink cheeks who used to do insurance commercials. “Our country has been challenged,” she said, ninety-six times a day. “But our bravest people are working hard to end this trying time. If your file has already leaked, and you need help, please call the number below. If your file remains private, please: stay calm and stay positive. Know that these evil people will be caught soon. Do not give up hope.”
But for Orla, it was time to give up hope. She started packing.
* * *
Then she was back in her childhood room, all but ten pounds the same, like none of it had ever happened—Marlow, Floss, fame, 6D, the last ten years of her life. She told her parents everything. They listened. They never said a word about her breaking their hearts. The only way Orla knew her mother was ashamed: Gayle drew the blinds the day she got home and kept them that way forever.
Together, the three of them watched Dana Marshall every night. Dana—the woman Orla had first seen in Andriy’s apartment, filling in for her runaway colleague—had become the on-air star of the Spill. No one had known her before, and people would quickly forget her after, but for the moment they hung on her every word and sometimes copied her hairstyle.
Dana Marshall told them, one day, that she had a major update. That when they thought of this time as something that would end when some people were arrested, they were seeing things all wrong. Hackers weren’t in an office somewhere, finding and leaking files daily, she said. No: the Spill manned itself. For nearly a decade, the hackers had worked on bots that could root through data of anyone who shared anything online, who texted or emailed or backed things up on servers they didn’t own or used a screen instead of a pen at the doctor’s office. They located lies and debts and vices with search-engine speed and detached precision. The bots chewed through firewalls and curled up on infrastructure. They caught rides into people’s Twitter accounts via the fake-follower generators people like Floss used. They swan-dove into Facebook’s endless ocean of data, snatching up user profiles, shaking them out, collecting liabilities that came loose like coins. They spit out human-sounding DMs on Instagram, ravaging anyone who wrote back to the flattery. And then, when they had all the information they needed, they simply automated common sense. They could find a mistress easily: she would be nowhere in a man’s email, absent from his thousands of photos, but her number would be saved as something laughably benign, called briefly at the same time each week. The bots sifted bank statements for discrepancies in money going in and money going out. They turned up searches for ghastly porn and at-home abortion how-tos. They found names that appeared in cruel text chains, then went and found the same names in contacts. They copied and pasted. They hit Send.