“Ruins, right?” Her voice. “Or this one: ‘One bedroom with your very own bathroom.’ Your very own! No need to find a public restroom in your own apartment!”
“Television, computer, phone. Am I right?”
“The more screens the fewer minutes. The more screens the fewer minutes. Repeat the mantra, Jeremy.”
“I should think you could just click quicker.”
“The connection is slow. The pictures lag for days,” she said. “One and a half rooms. What is a half room? A closet?”
“Likely a cabinet.”
“Windowsill, Jeremy.”
“When there are windows, they say views.”
“What about none?”
“Intimate. Private.”
His phone vibrated, an organ exterior to his chest. He twisted knobs, grabbed towels.
Water finds water, said the message. The code to meet.
Jeremy knew trust was like murder. You couldn’t do it halfway. He didn’t trust Wright entirely anymore, and what, after all, did he know of Wright except they had been men who collected secrets from the side they intended to destroy?
Wright had buried himself in hypotheticals, guessed connections. He saw in systems, secrets. The St. Andrews agreement didn’t mean the war was over. It meant Sinn Féin had its teeth sunk in the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Someone had followed him. If they knew about him, they knew Allsworth was Jordan. He could be right. His head or tails? A coin flip. And a coin flip, too, whether Wright had been only angry, desperate, desperately angry when he accused Jeremy, accused him, he couldn’t quite make out, of what.
Alexandra came in with her china smeared red. He could smell her shampoo. Lilac or that other purple flower. Jeremy turned away from the faucet, sopped up. What was spilled could be recovered in civilian life. He needed the quiet bide. Evoke nature.
“Why didn’t you invite Gavin to the wedding?” she said. “I never asked.”
“Why would I?”
Alexandra leaned an elbow on the counter. “He was your best friend at Strategic.”
She was speaking and he didn’t look at her. His head was noisy. His face was red. Red as jam. Purple flower. Jammed.
“I was my best friend at Strategic,” he said. “That’s why you have a rich husband.”
He did not want to believe that a single decision leaked out into forever. But a desperate Wright might act. A desperate Wright would strike out before stricken. He must convey that they were of a side. Together.
“And a joke without humor is only an evasion.”
Another vibration. Flick of metal: Precipitation north to south. The Gulf Stream warms the waters of the River Lagan.
And because somewhere deep and animal where it was fight or flight she preceded every thought, gesture, he hardened his face against collapse. “So is going to New York for a reunion that your classmates aren’t attending.”
“What are you saying?”
“I ran into Genevieve while you were in New York,” he said, turning back, “or wherever you were.”
Her face looked slapped. She sucked her cheeks in, released them. “She was in the School of Arts and Sciences. I was in the B-school. It wasn’t her reunion. It was mine. Just like my time, Jeremy. Not yours. Mine.”
The metal flutter in his breast pocket again. He turned. Forecast: continued showers followed by lightning. It’s not a question, was the message.
“I’m talking to you. Shouldn’t that take precedence over someone typing to you?” she said.
“You take precedence over everyone doing anything,” he said. “Why haven’t you got that in your head yet?”
Chapter 10
Jeremy paused by the entrance for a moment as his eyes adjusted to the depressed light of the interior. A man stood half in shadow toward the back of the room. He was working at something with a small, pointed knife and the pips of his whistling competed with a low ambient hum.
“Come to see the good doctor Boswell for a medicinal cocktail, have we?” came his voice.
Jeremy watched the man scalp an arc of skin off a great yellow orb. Boz busied himself with gestures structured around glass and tin. He passed a menu. “We have a special going,” Boz said. “You buy, I pretend to fancy the company.”
“Christ,” Jeremy said.
“You don’t believe in God,” Boz said. “You probably only believe in economists.”
“Categorically, no. Occasionally, yes.”
“So what does that make you?”
Jeremy passed the menu back to Boz, pointed. “A misanthrope with a 401(k).”
With a quick flick of tins and ice, Boz poured a drink and slid it toward Jeremy. He held his hips, cocked his head. “Something wrong?”
“Why would you assume something’s wrong?” Jeremy said.
“Because you’re drinking at two on a weekday,” Boz said. “And because you look like a popped piñata.”
“Half three. What do I look like normally?”
Boz returned to slicing lemon rinds for martini twists. “Wary and waiting.”
“You might know me better than anyone, Boz.”
“How did you fuck up your life enough that a bartender knows you best?” Boz said. “A bartender who isn’t fucking you, I might add.”
It was a good question. It was a fine drink. “By having very little of myself to know.”
PART FOUR: PARTITION
I adore a moat.—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Chapter 1
Once, Lyle’s sense was the internet was reorganizing the world. Third world cell phones connected to everywhere else, so where you stood needn’t be where you were, virtually. Technology was only half of it. The ethos reached deeper. Pedestals were falling, boundaries drawn by nationalists. And most of all there was the thought that democracy means elites get the media they deserve.
But his undoing was swift. Maybe it was to be expected. Lyle’s boss, Greenie, had always said there wasn’t time for long stories on the internet; there was time to be first. Break before the others. Lyle had broken faster and faster, found the complacent hypocrites, gunned for traffic. Once a week, Greenie would gather them for editorial meetings and show them their rise and fall, so Lyle published the address of an internet troll sent by a tipster. He published hacked emails proving racial targeting by predatory lenders. He published screenshots of the New Left editor James Hausman’s engagement of a male prostitute via an online classifieds page.
But it was this story that had made everyone who was and was not paid to think on the internet opine that his work was malicious and unnecessary. James Hausman was a good editor of important, progressive pieces. James Hausman had not been ready to come out, and people were calling Lyle Michaels worse than a reckless blogger; they called him a homophobe. Then there was the speculation that the hooker who’d provided Hausman with oral sex had been paid by conservatives. Maybe Lyle had. When nine months of unemployment checks had passed, he still hadn’t found a job.
At times, his daughter, Marina, placated his anxiety, just looking at her. A scalp freckle that one day would go secret with hair. Sequin of nail. He had never felt the athlete impulse until he had first carried her outside, one defensive arm blocking the crush of city torsos. She fell asleep clutching a fist of T-shirt on his weekends, and for a while, he could forget to catch up to the person he had decided he ought to be as he held his daughter.
But lately, paper stating debts had begun arriving in the afternoons. Lyle could hear the postman’s keys from the apartment as he stared at an endless log of horrible jobs. Chink of cheap metal, the clamp of shut doors. He dreaded envelopes. He got a second credit card, and then he was denied a third. He had to ask his father for money when Ingrid pressed for late child support. It was one of several humiliations.
Still, when he thought about it, which
was not infrequent, he figured the worst of his termination was missing the financial collapse. Late 2008, he’d watched the web of stories grow on the internet. Lehman Brothers. Bear Stearns. The drama of subprime-backed CDOs. This was everyday terror: bogus credit ratings, profit on people who still believed in the American Dream.
In graduate school he had been meant to come to conclusions about advances in the printing press or the television or the phone, something about the utopia of a connected world getting caught in de facto monopolies, that there were only two ways to be—powerful or fucked—and that every unchecked politician perpetuated the naturalization of capitalism. He’d left graduate school for journalism to peel back all the undifferentiated apathy, exposing corruption. He had wanted to knock the egos out of powerful men. Yet somehow what had happened was people who professionally defaced former child stars in Photoshop were telling the generational story he had been circling around most of his adult life. It only made him resent Greenie more. He obsessed over Noze bylines. And when his replacement, Saul Vaughn, published an investigative piece in a major legacy magazine about a Monsanto ghostwriter who’d placed articles in peer-reviewed science journals concluding their weed killer was not carcinogenic, absolute lies based on fabricated research, he called Bri Freeman, something jumpy inside.
“So he’s got weed killer,” she said. “There’s a pesticide scandal for everyone out there.”
“Actually,” Lyle said, “there is not.”
The line was dead a beat, then: “And that’s disappointing to you.”
It was, he supposed, the sort of condescension afforded someone preternaturally successful, a view from on high, where, once you’d deserved it, that position, you could see everything else as small, small-minded, petty considerations.
“How’s my old pal Frank?” Bri Freeman asked finally.
“He says the Micellis always worked.”
“And you say?”
“I say I’m an entitled white male, and I intend to preserve my energy for intellectual labor.”
“Some people would say the thing about irony,” Bri began.
“Some people would be all right with sustenance.”
“But you.”
“I’m not all right with being less than who I used to be on the way to becoming.” He moved his phone to the other ear. Shift ears, shift what is heard. Shift something of the conversation.
“There’s a woman in my department,” Bri began.
“I wish I joined a department.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t.” He scratched his beard.
“But you know you always could come back, if you wanted,” Bri said after a while. “Stand in front of a classroom, get chalk on your pants.”
And because he did not know how to go back, he said, “I spill coffee on my shirt. Isn’t that enough?” It was more bitter in the utterance than he’d anticipated.
“I’m asking,” she said.
It seemed on Cathexis that everyone he knew was always doing something that occasioned wine and cheese, and he had begun to think the only way back, the only way out was a book, a book bigger than the internet, more important and lasting, a book that would make the think pieces look as small as they were. Not weed killer, but something else. Something other than not even reading the book on weed killer, not even the glowing review, but the title on a list of books notionally connected by quality that the list-maker probably hadn’t read either. “It doesn’t work like that. There’s an order of operations.”
“Since when is happiness math, Lyle?” Bri began.
“Since Jeremy Bentham,” he said. Then he turned to the window. “What I took from studying history is you make certain decisions at certain moments, and they compound through time, and then that’s your life. It’s how you invent the weapon that ends the war. It’s how you become the leader of the free world or are too late for victory.”
“But sometimes it isn’t too late.”
“Sometimes it’s too early,” he sighed. “You die from diphtheria still.”
Chapter 2
It was New York, and it was a starting over. It was, after all, the first home they had chosen together. Jeremy looked at the appliances with the factory gleam still in them, the walls that meant the guts of the place had been renovated, and everything was clean. They peeled plastic off furniture straight from the store, and he bought a machine to juice oranges silky, all the pith removed in the morning.
Alexandra had given him a sense of newborn adulthood, a second chance, or some other ordinal of luck. It was somewhere between her lying against him in the gentling night and the graphite dust coming off sharpened pencils, fresh notebooks with the pages still huddled tensely together and the streets with their sweet nut smell. It seemed to Jeremy that with his name on an attendance sheet and a fine, modest home he had wedged himself away from a country where men followed him. Even when the walls were thinner, they were thicker here, secure borders. They kept out. Returned at night, he closed the door and called her name, and he did not hold his breath.
He had, after all, held off Wright.
It was simple. He had wire transferred seventy-five thousand dollars to Zurich to be rerouted to London. He had allocated an additional ten thousand for procurement. There had been a veil he operated under, careful language, neither affirmation nor denial that he and Wright shared a hostile follower, neither direction nor rejection of whatever means. Jeremy had reiterated that weapons exports applications in Germany were maintained confidential. He had reiterated that Heckler & Koch did not make fair-weather friends. He had reiterated: on you, Ray. He had reiterated what he gave was advice. He had reiterated, keep this many miles away. My help means we cannot make contact a long while. He had reiterated the silence drops off the trace. He had reiterated in the covert channels that there would be no more reiteration because that’s how men like them were caught.
And so, in icebreaker exercises at social work school, he told what he could, as he’d once told Alexandra. Edwinstowe. Robin Hood. In classes, he raised his hand. He took notes. The authorities stood in the fronts of rooms. Here, there were supposed to be no hiding experts. In twelve-point font, they honored the living and the dead flamboyantly.
Cite your sources, the professors said.
It was a regular life. He made a friend at school named Robert, who had a baby son he wore like a soft, knobby necklace on his chest the days the wife was working at the hospital. Jeremy found restaurants that served picturesque dishes, and after, when the sky was dark, Alexandra wrapped her legs around him in an act known as man and wife.
In the mornings, at his clinical internship, Jeremy sat with people for whom life had become difficult trips to the bathroom. Or else sometimes the people Jeremy spoke to were in trouble at school or in trouble with drugs. And he didn’t mind the new listening. He took in the volumes of sheer narration and tried to make less of a story of it. You could fit an individual into a service, name a disease. Reduce. Quiet the noise. It is not you. It is a pattern we call a mood disorder. We would like to recommend dialectical behavior therapy. It is a therapy to skim the habit of drama from the top of your life.
“The fuck accent is that?” a client asked.
But Jeremy found himself soothed by his own words. In the utterance, he became; he was convinced by the script.
Chapter 3
A book idea: write about the explosion of a Bayer pesticide plant in Institute, West Virginia. Put it to the page, and you could see the failed promise of safety everywhere. People worried about crop contamination had driven demand for pesticides, but the plant played fast and loose on manufacturing the chemicals. A tank burst. Two died. And the corporation went on. It was still associated with aspirin, healthy bodies. Consumers trusted the brand logo with the heart and familiar font, even though the betrayals traced back to the mid-eighties. What you saw if
you remembered 1985, though, was a toxic cloud over Institute. This was man-made. And a year before, the company’s Indian site had been scene to the worst industrial disaster in history. Five hundred thousand people exposed to the very same toxic compound, methyl isocyanate. The cycles of toxic clouds hung over towns little more than plants with dorms, but the reliable Republican voters continue to say the company puts dinner on the table, even when they are coughing up the company’s transnational fumes.
But another idea: information is only cheap when it isn’t expensive. Reporting costs are not the sort of thing Frank Michaels will write checks for. Lyle could not afford to tell this story.
Chapter 4
The stories from Washington were the stories from Iran or Afghanistan, and they were in their living room, and these days, she told him she felt as though she was always behind, even when she’d arrived. Alexandra was haggarded by stories. She told the stories of vegetable juices and pens that didn’t drag ink; goal: accrue in them the aura of hitting Cathexis Milestones. It was a time when that mattered, hitting Milestones.
And didn’t he know it?
Jeremy had thought he would be appeased by marriage, but happiness was like drugs. Once you had it, you wanted more and more. He drew a knot tight and pictured a family beyond two, a house thickening with people who were theirs.
And so, as she unfolded aluminum takeout containers, he was making the geographical case. A small campaign of information. Latitude, longitude. He said, “There is that Montessori school a few blocks away. It’s very creative. They don’t treat the children like ticking time bombs of failure. There is painting and movement class.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you get a puppy?”
“Naturally, I would train the child to pee outside,” he said, “and sit and heel and fetch.”
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