Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  “He asked how I knew what I got was everything from my informant, how I knew I’d seen the edge of disclosure and not an appeasing fraction of the picture. I’d the sense that to know was different than to be able to evidence, but I said I’d wager my life.” He paused. “One Rock told me I was wagering abundantly more than mine.”

  “Go on,” Lawrence said.

  “I thought he was after proof my informant’s pledge was in good faith,” Jeremy continued. “But he thought the Irish were different, more Mediterranean in temperament, that their women were dictators and that they looked like but weren’t us. So he told me, ‘Operation Banner is a contest of exhaustion. Northern Ireland unfolds and unfolds. Who retires upstairs first, Allsworth? That is the only question.’”

  “Sounds like him.”

  “Because he said it,” Jeremy said, more sharply than he’d intended.

  “I believe you.”

  “I promised him that my informant wanted to succeed, and he saw right through me. He said, ‘So do you, Allsworth.’”

  “So you’re saying.”

  “There’s no permanent success to intel. I’m happy without it. I do not have the stamina for getting mixed up in another plot spinning through perpetuity.”

  There were damp orbs growing in his armpits. He kept his elbows tight to him. Back erect. He sliced a length of asparagus. He could hear someone drop a glass. Apologies.

  “Thomas came up clean,” Lawrence said after a moment, sliding a file across the table. “You’ll see for yourself in the report.”

  Jeremy secured a pink brick of tuna on the prongs of a fork. He had learned to wipe himself out of his face. The face can be taught to no longer answer, bland as a boiled potato. The trick is clamp onto language. Don’t let it penetrate the dermis. He did not touch the folder. He knew Lawrence was waiting for him to react, but even now, all these years out of HUMINT, it seemed foolish to show relief.

  “You’re certain.”

  Lawrence signaled for the dessert menu. “I’m certain,” he said, “that I wasn’t able to find anything.”

  Chapter 8

  Northern Ireland had asked her back repeatedly for meetings. Northern Ireland had not decided repeatedly if she added value to their long-term objectives. And so, Alexandra had stayed late at the office to review her final pitch: nations were seeping out, losing borders to companies spread across continents, transnational legal frameworks, global telecom. The internet disperses culture; therefore, the nation needs a way to hold the noise together. It was this or continue watching capital jump across borders. What she gave, it was a gathering device. There was a social science to it. Two hundred and thirty metrics. But in layman’s terms, all that data compressed is a story, a brand: this is the birthplace of Thin Lizzie.

  Outside the office, it was raining. She tied the belt at her waist tighter and raised an elbow, drawing open her bag. She looked for an umbrella in the papers and devices, waterless soap. A shadow slid, and there was a cold feeling in her stomach that meant the touch of someone she didn’t know. Man’s hand: size of a paperback novel.

  It had happened to every woman she knew. There were plenty of theories. Scream, or in silence do what you are told. Find the solar plexus, soft spots. Use a key. Do not give reason for a weapon. Something white and hard as bone stilled her limbs. He had her wrist, and there was weather coming down onto them. The smell was damp smoke.

  “I know you,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  Jeremy tried her mobile as he looked at a print on the wall, Leviathan. His financial advisor had told him it was a non-volatile asset, but it was horrifying, an enormous, smiling sea thing beneath a small boy’s fishing canoe, miles of ocean with no other human in sight.

  Seven digits to four syllables. Alexandra.

  For too long he had not trusted luck.

  Until Alexandra, his life had been mostly noise, a few false signals, and even now, he did not know who had recommended him into secrecy. He had not at the time asked questions. It was simply one phone call and he’d adhered to another agency after the Wall fell. The Intelligence Corps recruiter had been calm, meditative almost, musing, or maybe mirthlessly amused: “Executive power is limited to reaction politically, and reacting is a little late when we’re past insurgency into car bombs, Armalites, cordite sunup to -set. Corpses don’t react, if you see what I’m saying.” Jeremy had not quite seen what he was saying, had seen only someone telling him, remarkably, he was needed.

  He was supposed only to get answers.

  He had not always gotten the right ones.

  And so that day, the day, the day he met Alexandra, he had wanted to hear nothing for a few hours once more. He’d taken the aisles of the library slowly. Numbers on spines announced boundaries. The subject is not that, they said, delineation in digits. Probably, he had appeared lost because he was searching, and this woman, then a stranger, offered to help him find what he needed. Jeremy removed his gaze from the codes. She came into his eyes sudden and permanent as a photograph. It was an accidental smile, his. He had forgotten happy accidents.

  He would trust happy accidents, he decided now.

  “You’ve reached Alexandra,” the recording said when she did not respond to his call.

  Chapter 10

  He peered behind books on the shelf. He looked in the corner where a diploma hung. He ran a hand over the top of a filing cabinet. The smell of cleaning chemicals clung to Alexandra’s office. Bleachy. Sharp. She took in the shape of the skull, hairline. So many times she’d tried to picture and failed.

  “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me,” he said.

  “You stole a bike for me.”

  “Allegedly.”

  “Pointedly,” Alexandra said. “Where have you been?”

  “Turn your phone off,” Shel said. “Not just sound. Not vibrate. All the way off.”

  It was instantaneous, the flip back into the old roles. Little sister. Big brother. She did as she was told. He folded at the waist and unplugged every appliance from the power strip.

  “Point’s you’re here,” she said. And then, because it was strange, that is, wonderful, worth corroborating, she said again, “You’re here.”

  There was a water bubbler in the corner. She watched the orbs rise up and break, let the cool slide to the back of her throat. She did not know how to ask what he’d been doing more than half his life. She didn’t even know where to look on him. Time had grown Shel’s shoulders, made his hair mellow. All that difference expressed.

  “You should get out of this business, Lex,” he said finally. “There won’t be much left of it soon for those like us.”

  She gazed into the howling mouth on his shirt. “Like us?”

  “Humans,” he said.

  Alexandra laughed. He walked to the window, opening it with a flatulent little groan and lighting a joint. His pupils were fat as dimes.

  “Don’t be blind,” he said. “You won’t be equivocating states forever. It’s been a good run for you. But Kasparov was beat by Deep Blue a decade ago.” Smoke drifted out the window. “Minds are slow and life is short. That is not true of computers. You think you want them to pick up the slack, but the slack cuts in, ends the dance. Computers will be the global conscience, Lex. You can kiss the commandments goodbye. Juries. This is who lives. This is who dies. Send the drones. It will happen. It does.”

  She took a tissue from her pocket. The overhead lights latched onto the edges of his face, dimmed, brightened, so that he appeared to waver before her. Something in her belly contracted, flipped. He was saying forget the man who’d called her to Northern Ireland. He was saying something about the man’s troubles. He was saying avoid an outcome, then avoid better.

  “Can we talk about something else?” she said.

  “Else.”

  “Because I’m uncomfortable.”

&
nbsp; “All of America is uncomfortable when it’s convenient. Discomfort is your red, white, and blue standard-issue panic button. Everybody keeps their front-load washers in America. All the blankies in all the world and the Second Amendment to sleep at night. Every patriot loves his fabric softener.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Western civilization with its neurotic skin. Hives. Allergies. Every American is worried about niceties, little Tommy’s peanut problem.”

  Her voice shot high, broke. “You’re American.”

  From across the room, she saw his teeth. “I always told you, never give the tells you’re a dreamer, and here you are with the moon in your eyes, a grown woman wringing her hands around a tissue.”

  She put the tissue in her pocket. She remembered her image, its fragility, but she did not know what shape would keep him here. The bleach scent was doing something to her head.

  “Maybe I’m not trying to win,” she said.

  “It’s the only thing you know how to do, Alex And Dra. Isn’t that what this entire getup is meant to convey? That you, in your pantsuit and sensible bob cut, don’t take no for an answer? I’m telling you the truth.”

  On the ground, plugs splayed. Caring made air of her, turned her transparent. The aphorisms and bland, expensive garments fell away. For a moment she was thirteen again, watching her mother throw garbage bags of her brother’s clothes out the door onto the dying lawn, thirteen again, telling him she couldn’t change anyone’s mind. She had remained in the threshold until evening, long after Shel had gone down the street with a bag and a skateboard, while her mother smoked cigarettes and sighed, cried over a can of soup and declared she had not known she had a stupid daughter.

  “I’m sorry,” Alexandra said. “I was only a kid.”

  “And what was I?”

  They didn’t look at each other. The tissue was in her hand again. It seemed ever since he’d come, objects had begun to appear without any sign of eventhood.

  “You won’t tell her I was here,” Shel said finally.

  “Whatever you want,” she said.

  “Or anyone, Lex. You could put me in a position.”

  “What kind of position?”

  “Corner kind. Kind you don’t come back from, those corners.”

  The danger of asking questions was being permitted no more questions. She was quiet as from his jacket, he removed a lighter.

  “It’s simple. If we’re going to have a relationship, the promises have got to be Hippocratic. First, do no harm and all that. So, I’m not here.”

  “Of course you aren’t,” she said.

  Just to make the moment hold.

  He nodded, his eyes indicating that his mind had wandered outside the room. “Okay,” he said, to himself perhaps. “Okay.” He fidgeted a lighter with his thumb, making a flame hop, and the noise of it scratched the air, scratched the air, scratched the air. “You remember that movie Fatal Attraction?” She nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s good. It was a warning for all men. Once you enter the Forrest, you can never leave.”

  There were years between them. There was a loop in her stomach from trying to fit him with the image she’d carried so long. He returned the lighter to his pocket. “I’m glad I saw you.”

  Alexandra grasped to make sense of his standing. There was a lag, and he was at the door by the time she perceived feet moving. She was still thinking of who he might have been at seventeen, eighteen, where he’d been the day he first thought himself a man.

  “Is that it?” she said. “You’re leaving?”

  “I’m only leaving because I came, Lex. There’s a seat over the Atlantic waiting for me. You’ll remember me, won’t you?”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “I can find you.”

  “I don’t even know where you live.”

  “I can only tell you a big hunk of the map. I can tell you the American Northeast.”

  Her face was turning colors. Swallow and she’d blank her face out again. That unplaceable face. She swallowed. She held her own hands.

  “You can’t tell anyone, Lex.”

  “I won’t.”

  He took the doorknob with the bottom of his T-shirt. “Get out while you can.”

  PART TWO: OBELUS

  As the pain that can be told is but half a pain,

  so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

  —Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

  Chapter 1

  Jeremy had told her as a boy, he was called by his mother Jam, since his face turned red as jam. Later, he had learned to be less embarrassed. Less pensive. He remantled himself, had even changed his surname, and when he told her, Alexandra thought she recognized something of herself, a sense of destiny’s fungibility.

  Jeremy had told her too that when he was growing up there was nowhere much to go in Edwinstowe. That the nothing made it ripe for stories. It was a picture-book place outsiders knew as the Robin Hood village. Steal from the rich, give to the poor. Their childish hearts were tense bows, tongues rolling happily ever after, and the men they knew were fathers and uncles who tunneled into the earth, rose with blossoms of coal. Only as teenagers had they learned that the enemy was Thatcher, and then only later, for some, had it become apparent that their fathers and uncles did not rise. They stooped in soot and glazed out over beers to the FC playing. They were men who knew their days down below were numbered and still carried on, though the strikes had failed.

  To Jeremy, it seemed bleak, but still, what he had told her, or rather because he was who had told her, it rang ascendant to Alexandra. And so when he invited Alexandra to his parents’ house in Northern England for dinner, her lips spread and her hands went moist in her pockets, the invitation plump with anagrams of regular fairy tales.

  That afternoon in Edwinstowe, Alexandra knew she wanted Mrs. Allsworth to like her when Mrs. Allsworth talked about her in the third person. “Carl, we’ve got company,” she said, gesturing to Alexandra. “Turn off the telly.” Later, it was about the silverware. “Carl, we’ve got company. The good silver, if you will.” The house was small and warm like a toaster oven. For a while, Mrs. Allsworth fussed around the kitchen roughly with thick, efficient arms as Mr. Allsworth, Carl, looked at Alexandra shyly. Anyone could tell he wasn’t used to shaking hands with women. He moved a chair for her to sit down and then paced when he didn’t know what to do with himself.

  Round sheaths of pink ham on their plates, they drank whole milk, talking over a bouquet of wildflowers. There was an assumption fat amongst them, she thought, a lengthy romantic habit suggested in turns. “I don’t follow politics anymore because I want peace,” Mrs. Allsworth said, “but Carl follows politics because he wants peace too. That’s everything you need to know about marriage.”

  “That’s everything you need to know about their marriage,” said Jeremy.

  “He’s the polite child, if you can believe that,” Mrs. Allsworth said.

  “Shane was the bad one,” Jeremy said.

  Mrs. Allsworth dropped more green beans on his plate. “A bad one.”

  “Don’t listen to a word she says,” Jeremy said. “She’s very sly.”

  The afternoon glided on, frictionless, as Alexandra teased Jeremy with questions directed at Mrs. Allsworth and Carl. She could see that they came to like her too when she asked them about their boy. Speaking of him in the third person linked them beyond Jeremy. She looked at them, wondered aloud if, as she suspected, he’d always been best in class, copping extravagant paranoia, good-natured chicanery. The Nottingham Forest spread nearby, ancient and mythic and real, but it was inside where Alexandra wanted to remember everything. Dish of butter. Brown bread. Lace on Mrs. Allsworth’s dress. She had never sat at a table with a family that she wanted to photograph.

  Chapter 2

/>   The kittens had become cats. They had become regal, Alexandra said. They took the laundry baskets as their duchies, were spoiled with breakfast kippers. Sometimes, she called him from the office. She asked what So-So and Jill were thinking about.

  “They want to know why we haven’t got them mobiles yet,” Jeremy told her, “conveniently forgetting they’ve not washed the dishes in ever.”

  “This generation,” she said.

  “A whole other species, you’d think.”

  For a while, she’d talk about her work. He liked to listen to her take a whole place and make it fit in the grip of her hand, tell it in a sentence. Lately, she was researching a new internet scrapbook of sorts, Cathexis, and though it was still only for individuals, she said just he wait. She said just wait and nations would declare themselves in online patchwork, any brand would, and he was a little drunk with her clarity, her faith that there was clarity. We are past the Iraq fallout, the agrarian deal. We see consistent positives on innovation. You see Spain’s strategy in ’82, ’92. When there’s the thought to fall to one knee, it will be beneath the Galata Tower at sunset.

  He’d had the thought.

  And in time, he thought he was clearer too. He was clearer because he knew she ate meat but did not like to see the raw slop. He was clearer because he came to know she did not watch sports except horseback riding. She did not wear perfume. She wore scented lotion. He’d look at the nightstand and see her bottle. Together, they were becoming the routine of his longing.

  So it was that in the routinization, he became fluent. The New One was whomever Genevieve Bailey was dating. Lyle Michaels was the journalist. So-So Jordan was So-So when she’d done something naughty with her claws. Jeremy understood the implication when Alexandra relayed that she was sure the wife must know her boss was playing snooker with the secretary.