Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  In meetings, she’d say she had a theory. It was a rote script, hurried off and practiced, mindless almost now. She’d say if fashion is an imitation that the privileged abandon once picked up by others, there was something to be learned by social media. She would say, this is true of words too, stories. She would say, sharing the news creates a social unit. There is a fear of being cut off.

  We are seeing tantrums of data. We are looking at the metrics. How many words. When. This is survey research embedded into life.

  We have never had so much inner life to process.

  At home, Jeremy was preparing lunch or reading books. He was taking Han for a walk. The black hair on her son’s head took a burnt-red hue at the tips when the sun was so. It was just one of the ways she’d begun to know him.

  She kept a notebook. She wrote: the set mouth before every bite. She wrote: giraffe. She remembered the day he plucked a flower at the park and ran with it until every petal had dropped, how he cried.

  And we are seeing that there is an effect created by the early splash. A piling on. This is partially algorithmic. These codes are time-sensitive. They take the early data, make what is big huge. People like it. Show them more.

  There is primal psychology to the fashionable narratives, she said. She said, the stories that can’t be missed. What if you failed to be alarmed?

  She brought home wooden trains. She brought home the bear with the velvet nose. They would turn on the music and spin. His favorite game was to hide and scream goodbye. That face peeking from behind corners, turned up from beneath chairs. Goodbye. Goodbye! Maybe it was only the joy of a known word. The repetition of adults.

  She would not repeat the adults of her life.

  Current climate is we get coverage for social justice, and we get coverage for failed justice. Narrative cycle. That is the fashion of it. That is how you sustain attention to the brand. We amplify our advertisement free of charge when the writers think they are Roland Barthes but thirst after tabloids.

  She pointed to the graphs. She said, this is the science of winning the online content cycle. She said this is the singles generation. Forget publications. These stories embed in Cathexis. I am talking about insisting the brand into every day.

  Her speech was automatic as an electronic clock alarm. She was thinking about Jeremy and Han, playing the game that persisted the longer you said anything but the word. Your opponent was trying to know, and you were saying bread crumbs, bloodstain. You were saying gone.

  The missing thing: it is still present.

  She had thought the addition of a son would mean she’d not feel the subtraction of a brother, but the desire persisted to say the unuttered thing. She wished she could tell Shel that he was an uncle.

  Chapter 2

  Shel Chen had many names. Shel Chen, OneEyedRoyal, McCreight, and M. But McCreight was the one he told Lyle to call him. McCreight was the one who had built the tools of revelation that both succeeded and failed too much. He was the one Lyle decided to trust because he was who was worth a story.

  Over recent weeks, as he’d continued to narrate, deeper and flatter was the way McCreight’s voice had gone. Lyle could hear the way the years had pulled him down, just like anyone else, and it made it easier for him to put the hack behind them.

  They were both disappointed men.

  But there was a sharpness too, he recognized in the audio recording, that blade running beneath. He knew he must be careful. That blade—it pointed at Lyle.

  You ought to look at data and say, there is an editorial unit here, a unit being the shape life doesn’t have. But I look at you, and you are too hungry to tell data, Michaels.

  Lyle had tried to compliment McCreight into returning to the subject of Glen Close. He’d talked about vision, scope. Sometimes what looks like misanthropy is for the potential utopia of the whole world.

  You want me to say I did it for heroic reasons, Michaels. You want me to be your protagonist, and I’m not. I wasn’t after good. I was after the top.

  Lyle said they were not so different. They were both data analysts of sorts.

  I buried everyone I was to be who I wanted to be, Michaels, McCreight said in the recording. Don’t do the same. If you don’t stop now, you’ll become your profile: set, finite. Wait too long, you’ll never spread out again. You’ll wake up who you wanted to be with nothing you want. Change the theorem.

  In the recording, there was a silence before his own voice. What do you want? Lyle had asked. And he remembered how McCreight had leaned over the table, quick as a slammed door.

  For you to be someone worth trusting, McCreight said.

  The computer spoke again in Lyle’s voice. It said that they were not talking about Lyle but Sean.

  You aren’t the one who will be punished. Comes to a point, I will never be alone of witness again.

  Lyle coughed, asked who was witness.

  They are.

  Lyle again asked who.

  Let’s imagine they were waiting for someone like me. Let’s imagine they’ve been following me since Nevada. Maybe there never was a RabbidUnicorn, Michaels. Maybe RabbidUnicorn was many shadow operatives. They wanted a loner. I was a body no one would claim, so ripe for them, controvertible. From work to cocktails— you can wear him so many ways!

  A guttural sound. A quick four beats of flesh on table.

  Of course, Alexandra thinks it couldn’t possibly be. Everything ugly is always somewhere over the rainbow. And if it isn’t, she’ll send it there first class.

  Alexandra isn’t here, Lyle said. Let’s focus on the story.

  Crazy would rather think, her own brother crazy she’d rather think than that her government is.

  Lyle heard the record of his voice glom on to RabbidUnicorn. Then there was a drawn-out silence, a thinking one.

  In retrospect, maybe the whole group was run by them, McCreight said finally. A quiet game of make-pretend geek revolutionaries. They groomed me like pedophiles. You think there are two sides, that the discontents are disrupting the rodeo, but they’ve filled in every side. Modus operandi: you teach them to code, wait for something useful. Or you embed in hacker collectives, disrupt service. Then you make the arrests, turn anarchists to work for the government. Who are they? They are Mr. Potato Head with all his mustaches.

  You feel tricked?

  The worst way to be was duped, I used to think. But that was because I’d never really been scared.

  What is the fear?

  One day you are us. The next you’re recategorized. Guy I worked with on terrorist finance tracking applications: dead. Three bullet holes. He was thinking of getting out. He was investing in properties. Over fast as three bends of a finger.

  “And you believe him,” Bri Freeman said on the phone when he called her.

  “He’s emotional when he speaks. It’s not practiced. You can hear that he feels he’s being followed.”

  “Sounds like Gülen,” Bri said.

  “The cleric.”

  “He will cry as he lectures about interfaith dialogue, the West. But meanwhile, he prays in the Poconos, the beneficiary of the CIA’s hospitality.”

  Lyle looked at the ceiling. He couldn’t see the full figure of McCreight, summarize him. Just as Lyle caught a trace, Sean dropped off. “The entire story will crumble if he’s a fraud or a crazy.”

  “You think he might be.”

  “And you think?”

  A pause. “I think it’s hard to tell a true story,” she said. “Even for Lyle Michaels. Maybe you need a wider sample.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Who can you talk to who knows the guy?”

  Chapter 3

  Alexandra was lovely against the horizon at the Rockaways with Han. They bought ice cream and corn dogs, dough still hot and trailing sugar the whole way to the ocean. Han used the stick to draw Elmos i
n the sand. One, two, over and over, until finally as far as they could see it was face after face of smiles made by his hand.

  There had been Elmo in China. It was something he recognized. It was a word they shared, the smiling monster.

  Elmo, he said, and they knew he meant he was happy or wanted. That, at least, they were people he wanted on the other end of a conversation.

  They pointed to the sky. This is bird. This is cloud. This is rain. His boy loved weather. It was nearly a hobby. At home, every picture book, his finger moved to the sky. Jeremy would sponge nimbuses into the blue walls of his bedroom so that Han would know his father wanted to give him more than the world.

  They ran back to the car, and he was laughing. They were.

  And that’s what Jeremy thought of the rest of his life: redeemed weather. The flight and soar. There were droplets clung to the ends of the boy’s black hair as he was fastened.

  Han turned his face from the window in the car, said, “Baba.” And he was pointing. He was pointing at Jeremy, and they were an impossibly beautiful thing, the three, a family.

  Chapter 4

  Because they did not want to wake Han, their sex was quieter now, and there was something about this quietness, this holding sound in, the pressure. She pressed her fingers harder into Jeremy. Something deep inside her was more thrown. From behind it was almost unbearable, but she asked for it. Sometimes she cried into a pillow, and when she felt him nearly forget her, faster and much harder, light spiked behind her closed eyes, and after they came, she was pristine, desireless.

  Usually, she fell asleep quickly. But some nights she would lie there, whispering with Jeremy. Some nights, he dozed first, and as she had not since the early days, she lingered on his taut belly, the crease in his pelvis. There were short grays in his hair now. She counted them.

  At these times, she would hold his arm, shake him awake, and he would be confused. She would say his name. She would roll onto him. She kept her knees tight to his ribs. And when her thighs were very tired, she disciplined herself from the scream.

  Chapter 5

  It was impossible to go back to before McCreight. This was obvious to Lyle. It was obvious when he thought of the editor with whom he’d gotten the appointment via strings of strings pulled.

  The book proposal had been simple: America had always been a culture of fakers, a backlash to the British Empire stretching into the present. This is where it starts: trade imbalances between the Empire and the colonies, gold and silver specie made scarce in the new world, opening up a solution: paper currency. These are bills of credit, people saying, you can’t create money out of nothing. Where are the precious metals? This is including John Locke. But then you have Ben Franklin saying, let’s try mortgage-backed cash.

  The editor’s eyes had been blue and cold, but he had continued. There were banks printing money all over. This was not centralized. This was make nice to your state politician, he gives you a charter to print cash money. No one knew how much circulated. No one was saying this is the standard bearer because there were no standards. So the counterfeiter is not so different. He’s one of many creating new financial instruments. He is the American self-made man with his self-made money. He says, freedom is the freedom to make money.

  Lyle had pressed the exigencies. He had told the editor, by the end of the eighteenth, beginning of the nineteenth century, you have a nice grip of entrepreneurs printing money to underwrite speculation. It’s open season. This money’s value is based totally on trust. This is not an IOU from your neighbor. You have bills, you can operate a little anonymous, do business with this paper in which value is supposed to inhere. It is not a matter of reputation. But of course, the value is slipping on and off all the time because there’s zero regulation. You see this arc, you see the whole financial crisis of the aughts was in the country’s DNA.

  The editor had checked her phone. The editor had said his name. The editor had said, “I wish the market were different.”

  “Who will make it different if you don’t?” Lyle had said.

  Then she showed him the door.

  On the outside of people he wanted to be, he needed a “timely” story. On the outside of people he wanted to be, he needed to parse McCreight. And so on the outside of people he wanted to be, he dialed Alexandra Chen.

  Chapter 6

  It was the sort of hotel room that you could project onto, the walls and soaps and bedding white and lovely, all clean cotton ball feeling. Because of this blankness, the impossibility of maintaining it, Alexandra treated the room carefully, and, more than usual even, urged a personal spotlessness, without residue, scrubbed of aftermath. She flipped the television channel. A voice-over spoke of a Harvard psychiatrist accepting nearly two million dollars from a drug company manufacturing the drug Risperdal; in return, he’d signed a scientific abstract that reported Risperdal’s efficacy in treating child bipolar disorder and prescribed it out of a special clinic at Mass General. It might have gone unnoticed, the broadcaster said, if little boys with the prescription hadn’t started drooling and growing breasts.

  Now, trying Jeremy’s phone, she again stared at the television where the stories looped. Alexandra turned the television off. In her ear, the tone intoned. From some months ago, Jeremy’s voice through the earpiece apologized that he could not now be reached.

  “I miss you,” she said, “and you didn’t even go anywhere.”

  She heard muffled fingers on her door. In the peephole scope, a deformed figure stood squinting down the hallway. Something rushed down the inside of her torso that she didn’t trust, but she felt her fingers twist on brass, opening the door. Lyle leaned his head against a fist on the doorframe.

  “Figured you’d want to know,” he said.

  Lyle put his hands in his pants pockets. They looked at each other from either side of the threshold until something animated in her stomach, and she had to turn her head to look at an area of the floor.

  Lyle began to speak, and she focused on the gray matted in little snatches by his face, the slight paunch in his lower cheek. To do that to someone. He had understood something she didn’t. It was why Shel had gone to him, not her.

  “Are you going to offer me a drink out of a tiny bottle from a tiny refrigerator?” he asked.

  “There are only the bathroom cups.”

  “If it looks like a cup, and it walks like a cup, and it quacks like a cup,” he said.

  “It must be a goose.”

  “He doesn’t hate you,” Lyle said, “if that’s what you think.”

  “All right.”

  “Talk on the same side of the door like two civil human beings?” he said.

  She shrugged but turned. In the refrigerator, there were small bottles of vodka, gin, light and dark rum, whiskey, a green glass bottle of sparkling water, and small red cylinders of cola. Her hot hand clarified condensation on the can. She sat at the end of the bed, and when he did too, she stood. She walked across the room and didn’t look at him, stared into a hung masterpiece blanded by reproduction on the wall. Lyle Michaels had said that he needed her expertise, expertise on her brother. It was a competency she wanted to have, and she knew she didn’t.

  But for a while, she listened. She listened to Lyle say Sean McCreight was rueful on behalf of their century. He kept using that name. Sean McCreight. Sean McCreight could not believe all around them people saw intelligent boxes and didn’t want to know what lit them from within, what made them expel nearby restaurants and the sixth president of the United States. Sean McCreight thought these people were fools.

  And fool was his idea of her, she knew. She crossed the room. She opened a shade and looked down at all the people she didn’t know, would never, perhaps like her brother. She turned back to Lyle. “And why is he talking to you?”

  “Because he says he sees now it won’t stop. They are beginning to send cops to houses ba
sed on predictive policing and to develop diagnostic codes. They will round up people for crimes, for mental illness, and he doubts anyone will fight it because they don’t know how to argue with the science of safety. He doesn’t like agencies monitoring when you are home with Wi-Fi thermometers. All the unmitigated windows. And I think part of him wants to stop it. Part of him is saying the Fourth Amendment crisis slips into every crevice. Maybe he also wants to prove something simpler: that he was there. That he exists. That he did something bigger than what anyone expected of him. And I think he thinks, you make your life a public document, you can seek asylum. You get open arms in another country.”

  “I mean why you of everyone?”

  Lyle sucked on the inside of his cheeks. “Maybe because of you,” Lyle said.

  Alexandra took the glass and slid it in small circles on the table. “Do you think he’s happy?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Will you help me?”

  There was something nervy in her body, and there was nowhere to put it. McCreight. McCreight. She thought of what Lyle Michaels would never know about her brother, and it was all of when her brother had been Shel Chen.

  “Why would I do that?”

  Lyle twisted the top from a bottle. A little gasp indicated the release of pressure. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he said. “Tell me you don’t want to see him.”

  Chapter 7

  The boy did not want to see him. The boy had his hood up. Jeremy sat in a chair and pressed his fingers together. He had been asking the same questions for many sessions, but now, he watched Tyrell pull on the ties at the neck side to side as though milking a cow. In Jeremy’s professional paradigm, the question was what was really going back and forth? Perhaps this was the moment he’d finally tip, stop weighing pros and cons, speak openly.

  “Simple as it’s a scam.”