Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
—Emily Dickinson
Chapter 1
Tyrell was supposed to call his mother if he was going to be late, but the boys were crowded up on the corner with their breaths clumping in a huddle, and he was calling bullshit on triple-doubles. The game was this weekend, and he was looking to push clarity. His, theirs. Derek had his headphones swung around the back of his neck and his hands in his pockets, and Omar was popping his hands low to the pavement, a torso pumped in and out of the circle, step back, set, shoot, score.
“Like that,” Omar said. “Right off the glass but easy.”
“Look like an elf.”
“Elves’s tall though.”
Derek sucked his teeth, crossed his arms. He squinted at Omar. “How would you know? You been to fantasyland or whatever?”
“Because I saw the movie,” Derek said, “and elves’s lanky.”
“Lanky and short.”
“No such thing, Omar.”
Tyrell was waiting for the pause, opening. But the talk showed no seams. His own concept shook in his stomach, and he was edgy and he needed to say what needed to be said before it was time he was expected home. Ever since they’d left school, Derek and Omar were saying triple-double, triple-double, it was always triple-double on a guy. But Tyrell had thought about this. There were better ways to do the numbers.
“Point’s nobody better in the paint, D.”
“What I’m saying is why is that your stat when assists are half on your boy?” Tyrell said.
“Paint’s small and the court is long. And elves are tall with bows.”
Tyrell hit a fist into his other palm. It had started as vengeance. He wanted to demote Jason Kidd in history. Tyrell hated his face. But it was bigger than that too, the whole system of it. “Which is like okay, so how about we think about sometimes you pass a ball and someone’s butterfingers meltdown change your stats.”
“Okay, Tank Top,” Derek said.
“Because the number isn’t yours. It’s never just yours,” Tyrell said.
“We heard, okay.”
Derek made a long imaginary shot. “I’m saying, all I want to see from him is some shooting from downtown.”
“Why are you changing the subject?” Tyrell said. “It’s wrong. One hundred percent, all the way, twenty-four-seven wrong.”
“You don’t even play, Tank Top.”
“I know math.”
“You heard? He knows math,” Derek said. “Little tank top bitch.”
“What I’m saying.”
“How about stop saying, Tyrell. Just stop.”
“Boys.”
They looked up. Mr. Abiola. A tall man, all right for a teacher and on the younger side. “All right over here?”
“All right, all right,” Derek said.
“Tyrell?”
“All right,” he said.
“You need a ride?”
“I’m good,” Tyrell said.
“You two?”
They got in the car fast. The car shuddered and pulled off, and when it had turned the corner, Tyrell began to walk home. He thought about Kobe, and he thought about LeBron. He thought about how you could come up with a whole different set of numbers that was smarter. He was thinking about how he’d vote in any system to downgrade Jason Kidd.
He got the key out, and when he’d gotten upstairs, he got the other key out. He had a mnemonic like for planets in school. Triangle for home as in the building. Circle for home home. And when he turned the key for home home, he could smell the night-before’s stew still.
At the kitchen table, his grandma was talking about all the excuses she wouldn’t make if her younger daughter were murdered. She was saying all the warnings she was going to repeat. She was saying how she’d tell how many times she told her younger daughter not to do it and wouldn’t cry.
“Everybody does it online now,” his aunt Rhonda was saying.
“Maybe this century.” Grandma raised her eyebrows. “When I was young, people met waiting around like staring dopes, just hanging around a spot looking at everyone who came in, in case someone special happened to them.”
“Oh, okay now. Touché, ma.” His aunt turned to Tyrell. “She’s competitive with history, you know? Always it’s she’s got more history. I give her that, I do. Credit where credit’s due. I’m about to make a sandwich. You eating a sandwich, Tyrell?”
He shrugged.
“You don’t even like sandwiches anymore?” Grandma said.
His mother came in the kitchen with her scrubs still on, wiping her hands from the bathroom and her head the degrees to one side that said sarcasm. “He’s still upset about the overnight.”
“Am not.”
“Are too. But I’m saying what kind of man wants to spend a night at the pool with a bunch of boys.”
Grandma was shaking her head and pressing a pink fake nail on his aunt Rhonda. His mother put her hands on his shoulders, kissed his cheek. In the mornings, he could smell her shampoo even if she’d gone to work already. Sweet like fruit out of a bottle.
“It’s unnatural is what,” his mother said.
“But every day you hear.”
“Mr. Abiola’s okay,” Tyrell said.
“Wasn’t born yesterday,” his mother said.
“When you were a girl, I didn’t care uncle, cousin, grandfather. Could be anyone.”
His aunt was blowing her nails. She was shaking her head and blowing.
“A grown man in a locker room overnight with boys in their shorts.”
“I’m hungry,” his aunt Rhonda said.
“Every day it’s another story you hear on Channel One.”
His mother filled up her mouth with a mean little voice. “Mentor. Community. Not my boy.”
She was still leaning over him with her shampoo smell and her scrubs. Her earring was blinding gold, and sticky stuff was on his face where she’d kissed him. A too-sweet scent. Vanilla.
“Just looking out,” his mother said, still in her impression voice. “Please. Just please.” And he didn’t know why, but he yanked hard on her earring. It was just an energy in his hand, like someone lit up a lightbulb. He grabbed fast and pulled down, and it was quick relief right like taking a leak after holding it three school periods.
But then her voice changed again, and it was saying his name like a tragic question. His grandmother was talking to Jesus, and when he looked up, his aunt was holding his mother’s head.
“Why don’t you know how to act?” she said.
Chapter 2
It was nothing anybody could see on his body, but knowledge improved Lyle’s blood flow. How it happened, the story—his—had been nearly like the Noze days. Lyle had received a letter with a phone number. An anonymous tip. He had been curious enough to use it. Just see. And what came back was something more important than anything Lyle had been a part of in a long time.
On the phone, they talked about agencies. They talked about terror. They talked about why the man whose tip it was had chosen Lyle: the suppressions and delays of legacy media. You have the Miami Herald killing their Bay of Pigs story in deference to Dulles. You have the Times sitting on Little Bush’s surveillance program over a year. You believe the institution that held a story all those months has told the whole, you are sweet or stupid. You aren’t sweet or stupid, Michaels. You know that. It’s what you were getting at in that CUNY panel. I saw the video online. You took them on. You take them on. It’s been your prerogative your whole career. That’s why we’re here. The story was his generation’s The Jungle, and Lyle was going to break it.
Now Lyle could feel the life in his hands organizing paper piles, fingers following the lines and fragments. He sat in the crumbs of bodega sandwiches as he grafted events and thought about men who daunt, how their shadows angled off points of suggestion. He was reporting on something wonderful, that is, secret, and the code of it gave him quiet substance. In his notes, his source became M, and though he knew the official name, he thought and wrote in a language of his own that made being in the world outside possible again.
There was an aquatic name. TIDE. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment watch list had grown to half a million individuals. TIDE, a drowning by data. All the emails, geo-tagged photographs, credit card purchases, comments, and preferences announced indiscriminately. The phone conversations of diplomats in the Middle East and northern Africa went straight to earphones in a Georgia listening center. It was strange, Lyle thought, to think that he’d been so disappointed over the subprime crisis. It felt like a sound you could hear but couldn’t find the location of no matter the strain of the ear.
What M described was snatching scaled larger than numbers you could imagine. And it circled back completely, drawing a circumference around anyone. Fat politicians who thought they were infallible. Soccer moms. Shadow brokers. His potential audience had never been so enormous.
It was M the book would revolve around, M who had an affinity for granules. He could point to the smallest thing, make it cascade back into thousands of decisions: how to take the filth off data, the rhetoric of the code, epistemologies of the algorithms, all the aspects that led to the number telegraphing threat. He was a man with chapters in him. Did Lyle know what had happened in Iran? M had asked.
And yet, it was difficult to pin down M. Insider, outsider, ethnographer, native, histrionic, recluse. It annoyed M, Lyle’s ignorance, but he enjoyed lording knowledge. He took Darwinian pride in his intellect, but he believed no one got what they deserved. He had a teenage show-off’s penchant for the offending remark, but he liked to hide.
Lyle thought of how he’d portray M—an architect of something terrible, perhaps, but not like the career baskers who liked nothing better than to sit on leather furniture alongside important people calling them by their first names. M didn’t have urgencies for cigars or praise. He was in it for proving others wrong. It was why M had used the organization’s own tools against them. The weapon is swapping numbers.
Chapter 3
Tyrell kept his hands going like solving, but in fact, his math went back into seasons. Seventeen thousand seven hundred and seven points. Average 19.5 points per game. Restrict to playoffs, restrict to 1990 playoffs, and the number is 25.2. He was a free-throw man himself. That is where the variables pulled off, information clear and present, pure. You didn’t have other players poking into the percentages.
Mrs. Prince was walking around the room. She had everyone in fours, and she was saying, “I’m watching you.”
The problem he’d done for his group already, and they were rapping Young Jeezy, The Recession. On the table, there was graph paper. Questions at a level he was answering three years ago.
Joe rolled his shoulders and cocked his head. This way, that. Left and right. He had the beat stored up in his torso. “‘My president’s black.’”
“‘My Lambo’s blue.’”
Blue was his free-throw color in the mental graphs.
Tyrell was deep into something bigger.
He looked up with his hand on his chin. Thinking, thinking. The whole catalog of facts could be rearranged like Tetris. He was cooking new rankings. In his own body, he was clumsy. But his head was Magic. His head was Bird and LeBron. His head was Oscar and Michael. And he liked to watch. He liked to keep track. He would go on the computer on after-school program afternoons and look up the latest numbers, incorporate. He made tables. Pie charts.
Yellow rebounds. Pink assists. And other colors too.
“‘Bush robbed all of us.’”
“‘Would that make him a criminal?’”
“That gum I see, Mr. Williams?” Mrs. Prince said across the room. “Okay, that’s what I thought.”
Of the young guys, he was liking Russell Westbrook. This was a guy shooting fifty-four–eight at the free-throw line year one at UCLA, then seventy-one–three the next. Tyrell was thinking, this is a guy who will keep throwing the graphs.
He rubbed his hand over the carved-up desktop. FU-Q. Colored in blue.
Blue was also an OKC color. He liked blue. He liked OKC. He liked Russell Westbrook. And he hated Jason Kidd’s face.
He was trying to remember the MPGs.
“Stop looking at me,” Crystal said.
“I’m not.”
“Then who, Tyrell?”
“Russell Westbrook.”
She had her hands up and she was saying, “Nah.”
“Hold up, hold up, hold up,” Joe said. “Crystal looks like Westbrook?”
“Not like that.”
“Like what?” Crystal said.
Like what, he couldn’t say. There was nothing to explain it in the room. It was just another PS with its whiteboard glare and dried-out markers. It was just another year of two-digit fractions.
“Like what?” Crystal was saying. “Like what, Tyrell?”
Tyrell rolled his pencil on the desk. One edge and another and another. Hexagonal. Five, six, seven, eight sides.
“Saying you look like a man,” Joe said.
“That it, Tyrell?”
“Awful quiet now,” Joe said.
“Like what? Like what?” Crystal said.
He saw Omar turn around. He saw Derek pointing. He saw Mrs. Prince with her slow walk, meaning finish it up before I get over there. And where there were so many numbers, he couldn’t find the words, and the search of it swelled in him, pressed out from inside. He was tapping his foot. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. But the sound doesn’t connect. Something in him’s unplugged.
“Like what, Tyrell? You stupid?”
Joe was snapping fingers in front of his face. “Fat boy about to cry.”
His mother was always saying he should stand up for himself. She was always saying it feels good. But he couldn’t get a word in for anyone. He couldn’t find a silence.
“He’s about to blow,” Crystal was saying. “Look at him.”
“Miss Muñoz, Mr. Wood,” Mrs. Prince said. “Is that you volunteering to show us your work on the blackboard I’m hearing?”
“Sure is, Mizz Prince,” Joe said.
“Well then. I’m waiting.”
He watched Joe reach for the paper, but he was quicker. Tyrell slapped it up, stood. He ripped the paper and threw it on the ground. Throw down like someone just won the playoffs.
He could hear their vowels lengthen, all of them, every single and all together, and he was glad to hear the moan of a scene. It is the sound of him returning from the outside, from all of them. He was up high like a sugar rush until he felt someone clock him from behind.
“Who stupid now?” Joe was saying.
Then a game came back to him from somewhere deep, old retired voices. There were ways to measure the angles, the arcs. The fingers follow, suspended, even after the release. Fists in the air. Sunk shots. And the crowd was cheering.
Chapter 4
Glue was the scent of the room. Glue and onions, and it made him cranky for a snack. Thing was, his mother had stepped her business-meaning walk the whole way, so when he pointed out the hot nuts truck, she hadn’t noticed, and when he got into how it was not that long to buy a bag of corn chips, she said he knew what he’d done that he needed an appointment and ought to have thought of that before. Why is she getting calls at-risk this, at-risk that? Why is it they’re saying three strikes in the computer system means automatic appointment? There were supposed to be no strikes. Zero. And because he didn’t know how to explain it was him struck not making str
ikes, now he kicked at the rug like he was pushing off on a scooter.
“What do you mean a man social worker?” his mother said.
The waiting room door was open. There was a smeary picture right by it on the wall. “That’s who we have,” the lady at the desk behind the window said. “Are you rejecting services, ma’am?”
His mother spoke slowly, the way she did when she was trying to seem like she wasn’t upset. “I was referred by the school’s STARK counselor, Screening the At-Risk Kids. They are saying there are some very serious prodromes.”
“Our next available is next month.”
“My child got prodromes, and you’re saying next month? Do you know what a prodrome is? It could turn serious any minute.”
A skinny man in the doorway cleared his throat. “I want to assure you,” he started.
“With the door closed?” his mother said to the man, almost like she was winning. “An appointment with the door closed?”
“It’s whatever Tyrell wants,” he said. “Tyrell?”
Tyrell did not speak. Tyrell looked at his shoelaces. How many shapes? A triangle there where the lace cuts. A teardrop and another. Four triangles up the tongue equal a rectangle. A rectangle is a type of square. He missed those things in school. Tangrams they were called. His mother grabbed his shoulder.
“All right,” she said.
Tyrell’s mother told him she’d pick him up in an hour, no funny business, but really she was talking to the man, he knew. Wait for her right in the waiting room. If he did, he could choose a snack on the way home. For after dinner. Tyrell nodded.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Owens,” the man said. “My name is Jeremy Jordan. You can call me anytime.”
His mother took the card. She lined it up nice in her wallet. “My son eats organic,” she said. “He was doing times tables at seven. We had the talk when he was eight. That’s the kind of parent I am. I am not an ignorant woman, Mr. Jordan. Don’t think for a minute you won’t be watched.”
Chapter 5
Quotients Page 11