Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  Chapter 11

  Someone he’d not thought of in some time: his other informer, Pearse Campbell.

  “I’m not here because I want to be,” he had said the first time they met. “And I’ll tell you as much.”

  “No, you’re here because you solicited underage prostitutes.”

  “They were covert British operators and you know it. We both do,” Campbell had said.

  Jeremy had looked straight out through the windshield at the fading lines in the cement. “We’ll protect you,” he said. “Not because we want to, but because we’re covert British operators.” He did not want to be anyone’s friend. But his demeanor did not help, and Pearse pled ignorance to every question. “Then what the hell do you know except how to go on a pull for little boys?” Jeremy said.

  “I know that bombs sometimes end up in funny places, Allsworth,” Campbell said. “I know that sometimes even handlers aren’t jammie. They are on their way to meet an informer and they end up in five hundred little pieces of bacon. Fancy pigs, but still crispy.”

  Jeremy had told Wilmington about the meeting, and the next week Campbell was found shot in the stomach. The man who had since been given the name Wright had been irritated by the investigation into Campbell’s death, had said, “Quite a lot of water to boil over news that disappoints no one.”

  Chapter 12

  It was a period of offensive suggestions. He’d received, for example, a lead on a pharmaceutical company copywriting job from Alexandra Chen that was so ludicrously outside his ethical standards that he would not reply. Was this how far he’d fallen, he wondered, that his own acquaintances imagined him part of the psychopharma hegemony? It was not something he wished to ponder.

  Instead, in the corners of the apartment, Lyle inserted sticky traps and waited for a sighting of bedbugs. There were bites, itches all along his body. He’d think he felt them on his skin, check, and the only time he saw them was when they were disappearing into a crevice. He began to house his clothes in trash bags. He searched for the entry points, cracks in the wall, holes. He could see a way in everywhere, so many testaments to the insecurity of his home.

  Lyle began to knock on doors. He asked neighbors if they’d bought used furniture, traveled. He asked about their guests and where they’d been.

  “Ever thought it was you they came from?” the man next door said. This was the second offensive suggestion.

  But the third, the third had come from an unexpected source.

  It had come from Bri Freeman.

  Sledgehammer was one name. There was documented evidence. A plan for two: two mosques. Two explosions. We are talking both ends. Assassinate Jews. Assassinate Christians. Erdogan and his people would blame the shooting down of the Turkish plane on Greece. They would point to Gülen behind the conspiracy, if it could be called a conspiracy at all.

  “This so-called coup is going to so-called trial,” Bri had said. “It’s getting almost no coverage. This is your book, Lyle.”

  He ran a glass of water out of the sink. He drank it, and somehow the water was white before it was clear.

  “There are echoes of 2007,” she had continued. “What a lot of locals are saying is it’s a fake plot. Get critics out.”

  On his knees, he plucked white cards inscribed with story ideas from the floor. He fluttered dust off each. Bar fight. Raised rent. “You know I won’t get a US publisher interested in that,” he said. “Too expensive to report. Too expected. They expect that part of the world to be a shitshow.”

  “This is classic authoritarian optical illusion. They will say they must protect the regime from the radicals. It could happen here.”

  “To Americans coups happen elsewhere,” he said. “We expect moderate politics, liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats. You know that.”

  “If we can believe terrorists are radicalized online,” she said.

  “This isn’t my book.”

  “It is. It’s good, Lyle.”

  “So why don’t you write it then?”

  “I’m working on a project already. Historical contextualization of Western websites outsourcing comment moderation. I’m busy. I have students. I have a mortgage.”

  “But I have the time to tell your leftovers.”

  A blur in the corner of his eye was probably a bedbug. He stood too late, knelt back down. He was on his knees, and he was tired but twitchy. The tingle on his forearm. Ankle.

  “Do you need a loan?” she said. “Just to get the reporting started?”

  “Jesus, Bri. I don’t need anyone to take care of me, least of all you.”

  “Isn’t that what your dad’s doing?” she said. “That is not a provocation, by the way.”

  And he had, because he knew she intended to help, done the counting thing in his head. He counted down and before he responded imagined taking off, that he could depart himself.

  Chapter 13

  At Dulles International Airport, she waited in line for a taxi. A car stopped, and she gave the name of a big building. Alexandra brought her fingers to letters, made half-witness of Jeremy from afar.

  The Eagle has landed, she typed. Or the pigeon, anyway.

  His response was quick. Catch the worm.

  Now arrived, she peered around. It was a bare place inside, black walls and bluish coil bulbs, a leather couch belching stuffing from one seam of the upholstery. Glossy magazines with smiling dogs on the covers fanned over the coffee table, a glass and brass thing with no fingerprints showing. Spelled out on the bottom of the ashtray: thank you for not smoking. It did not look like the home of someone who’d irrevocably lost his mind.

  Shel took her phone battery to a corner, where a small locker opened when he pressed a finger to a small square of glass. She looked for a place in the room to fit herself, hung on to cursory gestures: the closing of the locker door, return to the folding chair. He reached for a box, lit a cigarette with a contained blue flame, and leaned back.

  “I have penetrated atmospheres of acronyms, Lex,” he said, ashing. “Learn the layers of bureaucracy, and the design’s brilliance is its inefficiency. You crowd the truth, make the grain disappear in the shore.”

  “Acronyms?”

  He did not seem to hear her.

  But she had telephoned a lovely place, where on the way out people functioned. She would tell him there was an outside, green expanse, tulips. The pictures: they were mansions set atop their own fields, lawns anyway, and there were, according to the website, hours for sporting. The testimonials spoke to newly unbroken people. They said, we got him back. And she wanted to get him back before her daughter came, so her daughter would always know her uncle as he really was.

  “They say you build the formula for what can be found,” Shel said, “you are better than five thousand boots on the ground. The agencies are afraid. They are looking at Nine-Eleven, Seven-Seven, and they are willing to believe in automated fortune-tellers, big bang event auguring.”

  Looking at him. Listening. She did not know how to start.

  “You wouldn’t believe the stuff being developed. I’m talking programs that can ID you by the rhythm and force of your typing. Facial recognition. Software matching social security numbers to gait. Can an algorithm know? Can we program peace? The dork warriors say yes and yes and yes. They say they need geo-location. What they mean is, they need to divine where to kill. They gain legal okays to seize our data, comb our Cathexes, all in the name of saving American lives. Just halt terror picking up on the ether, same as advertisers targeting customers.”

  “Cheers, Lex,” he said without waiting for their glasses to meet.

  She had practiced how to settle her face. She settled it.

  Because fact: Shel as a boy could trick you into believing the sky rained flowers just for you, just for a minute, just by leaning out a second-story window and dropping clipped blooms.
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  Because fact: Shel had practiced snow angels, in the dirt.

  Because fact: when once a purpling woman shook Alexandra in a shop, she did not have to confess the strawberry pops she stole; Shel yanked the shoulder strap of the woman’s purse and when she turned, Alexandra ran the whole way home, and they watched TV on the couch at home, breathless with what they wouldn’t tell their mother.

  Because also a fact: in sum, the facts meant. Reality did, and the professionals at the lovely places with visiting hours would help him remember that.

  But now, Shel was talking about a National Security Council vet named Barry Cain who’d wanted meteorology for spectacular bloodshed. Cain had hired a young guy named Sean McCreight who’d invented for casinos a program that culled the connections of criminal ecosystems using Relationship Assessment Prediction Engineering. Shortly after McCreight signed on to develop a program for counterterrorist use at DARPA, word of some other questionable efforts under the newly named Comprehensive Risk Assessment Program was leaked outside the Senate Intelligence Committee. There were some very unhappy Democrats, and some very embarrassed Republicans. So it was a bipartisan maneuver: get Cain out. The committee members knew how to reach across the aisle when there was someone to run off a cliff.

  But from the first it was clear the risk assessment program wouldn’t disappear with Cain. There was ugly intel on legislators, and there were an idealistic few senators who still imputed safety to analytics. They made calls, revised language. They figured every knot can loosen to a loophole. When it got to appropriations time, the project moved over to the NSA from DARPA, assuming the project alias Glen Close, a reminder of the valley of death always proximal, the valley of death they must close. The legislators had not destroyed it; they’d sent it under the auspices of classified projects, a place safe from journalists and political repercussions, a place with black protections. Now Glen Close was operating with almost no oversight.

  “That’s why you’re here. That’s why I asked you to meet,” Shel said. “That’s why I came to you in London.”

  Alexandra lifted her gaze. “What do you mean?”

  “Why I wanted to see you,” he said, a hand on her shoulder.

  It was like being folded between space. Warm air pressed all around her. It made it difficult to think, and when she looked at Shel, his features were strangely pointed, as though all the bones in his face had risen. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Because,” Shel said. “Sean McCreight is Shel Chen. Sean McCreight is me, and I’ve left the agency.”

  “Shel,” she said. “We’re going to get you help.”

  Chapter 14

  Alexandra had not yet made it from the airport to Murray Hill, where Robert and his wife, Cassandra, lived. Jeremy took the stairs two at a time, the smell of family dinners in the hallway, and at the door to the apartment held a bottle of wine in the style of demonstration. “You made it,” Cassandra said, wiping her hands on her pants to accept the bottle. “What’s cooking?”

  “Take this. It’s an old family recipe. Toss the grapes in a crock, get your feet going with fifty others, and then it is a piece of cake.”

  “Robert never told me you came from vineyard stock.”

  “Every man needs his secrets,” Jeremy said. “Do you drink red?”

  “I drink whatever color’s in front of me.”

  “My good-time gal,” Robert said, come from a deeper room and holding his wife’s waist from the side so that their hips touched.

  “It’s bad luck standing in a doorway,” Cassandra said, “The devil takes in the indecisive.”

  “And what’s more, there’s cheese inside,” Robert said.

  In the apartment, they leaned in various positions in the kitchen as the wine was poured, then moved into the living room, chewing on slices of Manchego. There was public broadcasting television playing, and the screen shunted between pictures of men in fatigues and men praying, tanks and regional maps and close-up shots of people with blurred-out faces.

  Robert lit a joint, closed his eyes, blew out. He leaned back on the couch.

  “PTSD treatment,” he said, stretching the joint toward Jeremy. “It doesn’t count.”

  Jeremy waved him off. “What’s the trauma today?”

  Robert moved his laptop to show Jeremy a video, grainy and cast in green light. There was a cloth bag atop a torso. Then there wasn’t. A beheading.

  “But why did you click?”

  “It was everywhere on Cathexis. I was positively surrounded. Terrorism was all anyone was Cathecting in today.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jeremy said. “I don’t participate in the twenty-first century.”

  “You don’t feel like you’re missing out?”

  “I don’t.”

  “But if you don’t Cathect, it’s like you don’t even exist. You miss invitations.”

  “I don’t know about that, Robert,” Cassandra said. “I happen to see two eyes and a nose myself.”

  “And you invited me here,” Jeremy said. “What more could I want?”

  The boy could be heard on the baby monitor. Robert went for Wally in another room, returned with the child held over his chest. He was humming a song.

  “It’s a good thing you’re not single,” Robert said. He pressed his mouth to his son’s stomach, kissed it. “These days, I don’t know a woman who trusts a man who doesn’t Cathect.”

  “It is a good thing I’m not single,” Jeremy said.

  “You’re like my sister, Marissa,” Robert said.

  “Sensible? A smart dresser?”

  Robert reached Wally overhead. A laugh. “She thinks it’s undignified to emote online.”

  “Meanwhile,” Cassandra said emphatically.

  “Meanwhile, she’s a test subject for an experiment on virtual reality treatment for PTSD and claims the algorithm is a better listener than humans.”

  “Of course, what kind of person isn’t ashamed to talk to a computer, if you ask me,” Cassandra said.

  “Maybe it works,” Jeremy said.

  Cassandra cleared her throat, put her hands out in the manner of halting traffic. “Marissa’s wonderful. Don’t get me wrong. Wonderful mother. Wonderful kids. But she is too much once in a while, and that’s all, folks.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” Robert said. “I don’t want to hide. I want my boy to grow up knowing it’s fine for men to express feelings. That it’s good to. That good men do.”

  “And that’s marvelous you do,” Jeremy said. “Better you than I.”

  A few minutes later, Alexandra arrived in a sleek black suit with small gold knobs in her ears. Cassandra’s face bunched up with friendliness. Wally was crying, and she was bending her knees rhythmically in soothe as Robert poured another glass of wine.

  “Cuh-yute shirt,” Cassandra said.

  Alexandra emitted a startled “Oh.” Her eyebrows quirked, and she seemed to search a moment. “Cute phone?” she said. Her face was turned to the baby, and it looked to Jeremy like a falling building.

  Chapter 15

  He did not quite know why today was different from any other, sadder, but he knew her palate, and so they walked until ice cream. Under glass, the swirled peaks were pink and white and brown. Jeremy and Alexandra took large pleated paper thimbles, and in the night air, when she was done with her little cup and her little spoon, Alexandra began looking at her phone, walking blindly again.

  “Tonight stars Chang and Eng, you and your mobile. Who are these people interrupting us, and why is everything they say urgent?”

  “It isn’t,” she said. “But the machine makes me compliant with communication. It isn’t my fault.”

  Jeremy disposed of the ruined paper. He looked at his wife, standing away from the waste bin on her phone. She was taking it hard, the wait for the child. Their whole lives
it seemed the waiting had run, and maybe it had, but he wanted to make his own hope spill onto her, and he didn’t know how.

  “Berkowitz had the demon dog Harvey. You will say, ‘The phone made me do it,’” he teased.

  Alexandra thumbed on, silent and busy in the eyes.

  “They’re so happy now,” Jeremy said. “Robert and Cassandra.”

  “Of course they are. They’re reaping the benefits of social currency,” Alexandra said.

  “Robert says the baby has a party trick. They say ‘the media’ and rub the baby’s belly until it farts. It works for ‘bureaucrats’ too. A joker already. A critic.”

  “Now everything that passes gas is a critic?” Alexandra said. “It’s an intentional fallacy.”

  Jeremy put his arm around her. She let him for a half block, maybe more. He was her eyes while she attended to her phone, let out all the discourse in her fingers. There was a ring around the moon indicating the presence of ice crystals, refraction, tiny mirrors glowing circumference into the sky. He wondered what she was typing, but he did not look at her hands.

  He decided to make a joke. He said, finally, “Everyone who passes gas is a critic.”

  “Only on Cathexis. Cathexis doesn’t afford neutrality.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Jeremy said. “They’re only proud.”

  “Social currency.”

  “Or love,” said Jeremy.

  “Because who hates parents?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Their children sometimes.”

  “Or their friends.”

  “Our daughter will come,” he said. “We’ll be so happy. Look at Robert and Cassandra.”

  “We aren’t Robert and Cassandra.”

  “We are far better-looking,” Jeremy said, “and less religious.”

  “Our daughter,” she said, losing track of the sentence. Maybe testing the words.

  PART FIVE: OR QUOTITION

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?