“And not one with sugar coating either,” his mother had said.
But these were rules he liked overall. He liked to compare prices. Look at the cost per unit and the pounds. He would estimate how many ounces. Test in the silver hanging scale.
He took the aisles with a red basket. Fruit from Chile. Sauce from Italy. He could spray the whole store out in every direction like a map in foods.
The line was long. The woman ahead was arguing about the price of Pampers. She was jabbing old coupons.
He checked the other lines, made estimates. There were probabilities to consider. The chance of hold-ups. He stayed in this line. Also, the cashier was cute.
Her hand touched his as she counted back the difference on his change.
Back home trudge. Forty-eight seven-two. The receipt is in his pants pocket with the keys. Circle. Triangle.
He was studying the receipt as he walked, working up a theory over the numbers under the barcode. There’s an order to it. His mother said everything happened for a reason. Like with his dad and how he came back from Afghanistan.
“Watch it,” a man in a plaid shirt said. Tyrell had walked straight into his torso. His head in this man’s belly button.
“Watch it, please,” he said, because his mother was a manners fanatic, and he was his mother’s son.
At home, the smell in the doorway was fresh breeze out of a can and morning coffee burning on the machine. He walked in through the door to the kitchen, bags bumping corners, furniture. There was a bowl of bananas sitting up top a blue and white checkered tablecloth, and his grandma had her sudoku out, but she wasn’t answering in pencil like usual. A thin man waved, loose-limbed and smiling. He wore a red T-shirt with a bulldog face on the front.
“I know you,” the man said. “Tyrell. From the pictures.”
Tyrell squinted. “Mom?” he said, and she came out from the TV room, nodded.
“This is Eddie, Tyrell,” his aunt Rhonda said. “My boyfriend.”
He stepped back. The counter was there. “You don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Oh, but she do.”
“Before I was talking to Eddie, I was talking to his persona,” Auntie Rho explained. “Eddie said we had to meet in person, and I wasn’t sure.”
“Because you sent a fake picture.”
“It wasn’t fake. It was squeezed for a lengthening effect.”
“I decided no fear,” Eddie cut in. “I decided let’s stop talking through windows; we aren’t in a zoo.”
Tyrell stared at Aunt Rhonda. She wore rugs of mascara and a lipstick the color of a Bulls jersey. There were small flowers on her nails, and her nails were on a mug picturing bug-eyed animals. She had always been big-time for Tweety Bird.
“Didn’t your mother wonder where you were when you missed curfew?” his grandmother said. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen going on forty, know what I mean?” Eddie said, rubbing down his own arm.
“You’re dating a teenager, Rho?” his mother said.
“Age looks backwards, ma’am. I’m about the present, mindfulness. Think how you think. Is it serving you? That philosophy’s where I’m at.”
“Nineteen and a man,” his aunt Rhonda said. She was tearing open a bag of potato chips and pouring them into a large, ugly bowl painted with the words movie popcorn. She pinched one and placed it in Eddie’s mouth.
“Made with avocado oil, plop, right into the kettle. Our hearts love healthy fats,” Eddie said, swirling the bowl toward Tyrell. “Try them.”
“He could be your son,” his grandma said. “You’re thirty-four years old.”
“It’s what men and women have been doing since cave times,” Aunt Rhonda said.
“You’d be dead already if we were cave people,” Tyrell said. And his mother was laughing crazy. She was crying from laughing and she jumbled her hand on top of his head. She slapped herself and laughed. His grandma did. “What?” he said.
Chapter 5
The what game: What color is this crayon? Black. What else is black? Jill. Besides Jill. Hair. Not my hair. Hair. What about just outside the window, Han? Sky. What kind of sky? Night. And what do we do at night? Story time.
“We also sleep,” Jeremy said.
He hadn’t recently.
Anagrams are the technique. Wright and Lawrence had met at least once, or Wright was making up the Cain-Lawrence connection. Wright and Lawrence had met at least once, and Wright had confected the Cain-Lawrence connection. Cain-Lawrence, it mattered or it didn’t. But Alexandra, her brother.
“Story time, Baba,” Han said.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Nathanael and his beautiful fiancée Klara. But he fell in love with a doll called Olimpia. He did not know her limbs were wooden. He did not know that when people stared it was because they knew he was a fool. Then one day, Nathanael saw Olimpia’s eyes on the floor, and he was thrown from his madness. It seemed for a time that he would recover. But one day, he looked in his spyglass at Klara, and the sight drove him to hurt her. In his madness, he cast himself to his death.
And once upon a time, a man named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn threw a log into a fire. He did not know that the log had rotted, that it was full of ants. The ants poured out into the flames. They were burning up, squirming in pain, and they fled the fire for the cool sand of the fireplace. But then, as Aleksandr watched, they began to circle, circle, circle in the sand, distraught. They began to return to their home, though there, it was certain they would be eaten up by hot flames.
Chapter 6
In the dream, a crack accommodated a slivered view. He can sense Gunner, a focal point.
Jeremy, his body becomes more present in the waiting. Spying is looking at mostly nothing changing except time. How long. Long. That is how it feels, but wait long enough and the revenge of the languid comes. Brendan, Clarence, Padraig—ordinary frames busy with grudges—and, squatting on a dolly in the corner, Gunner.
Brendan is pacing the garage, springing puffy hands. Brendan takes two steps, stops. “It was Chinky Bratty who did it, not a doubt,” he says. “Chinky Bratty who we should’ve gotten in November when we had the chance.”
“He wasn’t home,” Gunner says. “I don’t suppose the point was kill a bit of air in the kitchen.”
The clock is broken. Jeremy can’t keep time straight. The hands on the face say it is night, or afternoon, or all-time in never. Dream time.
Jeremy smells shrimp. He smells burnt bread. Something bright and cold accumulates in Jeremy’s stomach. Someone raises two hands on a grip, fires, infringes on idyll. Clumped in the carpet: the slop of meat thrown by a bullet, the body kneels like praying, falls. Life gone before the tax of cordite clears.
Brendan stands, slow and loose-limbed. Something is happening in him, a revelation real as a woman. Jeremy closes his eyes. He opens them.
“Alexandra?” Jeremy says.
An orange cat crosses the floor. “Your bake.” She laughs. “Your bake.”
And then he was awake, and there was a toy horse staring at him from the bedside table, a light pricking from his phone. Wright. He turned to the flapped-open blanket on her side, empty of Alexandra.
Chapter 7
For the poor flames, they blamed yesterday’s weather. The sticks remained damp, and their early attempts didn’t catch. They burned newspaper after newspaper, days of events curling above the lighter.
And look at him so careful with the graham crackers when she pointed to the perforations, the breaking points. He studied them. He pressed his lips together.
Jeremy placed chocolates in bowls. He reached down to kiss Han’s head. She watched them spear marshmallows on the stairs of the weekend cottage.
“You must be very careful,” Jeremy said. “They can burn.”
“Ants,” Han said.
“Fire,”
Alexandra said.
“Or they can swell up big, big, big like a brown cloud,” Jeremy said, “and the cloud tastes delicious.”
The fire was dying, and Alexandra prodded with a stick. She added more newsprint, cartoon families and office cynics. A weak little hand came to her knee. He warned her, her son.
“Smile for Auntie G,” she said as she took the picture.
A blue lick swerved around a marshmallow, and Han blew it, told his father to make a wish. She could smell the burnt sugar settling between pine. Their heads were bent together, blond and black.
“I’m so happy,” she said.
Jeremy straightened, a green coat stiff around his neck. “Are you?” he said.
Chapter 8
She had told Jeremy that she was flying to Nevada to entrust her mother to someone after her mother had taken a fall, which was true. She was also planning to stay in Brooklyn for a day on the return. She was planning to meet Lyle Michaels and her brother.
Lately, Jeremy removed himself from the apartment or else he was a roving camera trained on her body. He turned to her when she said his name, and his eyes were flat black, and he asked sharp questions about her mother’s health. She believed if she pretended not to notice, he would stop. A romantic idea: a woman in control, emotions tight to her, all tucked in, administrative almost, capable of being a woman who had it all.
When she got to Nevada, there were ten résumés. Ten curations of history. She had made the calls. But references were strangers too. Everyone with a horror story had trusted someone once.
“My own flesh,” her mother said, “can’t stick at home for her mother. My own flesh hiring the cheapest person.”
“You think this doesn’t cost me?”
But there was a moment, Alexandra already at the door. She turned back. Federica, the new nurse, was folding a towel. Her mother was a slumped thing, thick but wilting, and there was black mascara all over her eyes. It would be different when Shel returned and Alexandra brought her son. There would be a phenomenon of numbers, multiplied people. Her mother had never believed a life turned better was common sense. It was not in the evidence she’d accrued, the years, and now she was old too soon, had been some years, aged by small checks and worry and all the disdain from the neighbors, teachers. It would be a shock, no, a surprise, such goodness.
Alexandra looked at her mother with the remote control in her lap and the dry, loose gullet. Her hands were lumpy on the arms of the chair, and Alexandra remembered their tremble on a pencil when once Alexandra had asked for help with her algebra homework. Her mother had copied the problem slowly, begun and then erased and then started over again, had gotten a new sheet of paper and tried once more. Her mother’s hands were shaking. Her mother had crumpled the new sheet eventually and stood, told her she would not tolerate a stupid daughter who didn’t pay attention in school, didn’t learn any better, and as Alexandra watched Federica place a blanket on her hunched mother’s shoulders, the pity and rage were fast in her chest.
Her mother was slapping Federica’s hands away, but she was very weak now, clumsy with opioids. She was moaning like a child, and Alexandra wished her mother would call out to her. She wished, for a moment, she could with no fear of retort tell her mother she loved her.
“I thank God my husband isn’t alive to see his ungrateful daughter,” her mother told Federica loudly.
When she’d gotten many miles away from her mother, inside the hotel, Alexandra could smell the exhaust of expensive food. Fried cremini mushrooms. Aged steaks. She cut straight through the lobby with all its dark wood and leather. Up the elevator.
In the room, she poured three drinks and sat at a table reflecting city light. Out the window, there were windows. Alexandra could see a figure in an adjacent building pacing. She was certain if only there was one more, just one, she would fall into the filled boxes of their life, part of a company, a marriage, a family, all the indices of experience. It was not too much to ask, she was certain, in the twenty-first century.
An alert in her pocket. Unlock phone. Not going to happen tonight.
Lyle Michaels.
Chapter 9
Barry Cain was off booze for now. He had a glass of red confection come out of a soda gun, claim of the barkeep: cranberry juice. In the days since the wife’s imposition of dietary austerity measures, his belt band was softening off him. Lyle Michaels took in the droopy suit, slid up by a bar stool next to him. Cain grabbed a shoulder and a hand at once, quick gentleman greeting dance and then they hunched up over the bar, leaning on forearms.
“You said you thought I could help verify some information.”
“Still do,” Lyle said. “I’m hearing a lot.”
“And yet the information seems full until it doesn’t. For a while, you have everything, a whole theory of the world. Then you are saying, what was the date and what is the model. The facts spread. You did the right thing making the call.”
Lyle looked at the chalkboard menu. “I’m going to order.”
“It’s a better place to go than chaos,” Cain said, a cramped little smile turning at him. “My wife hates that joke.”
“The animal trainer,” Lyle said, finger in the air. The bartender lifted a chin in question. “An IPA. Whatever IPA you’ve got.”
“That’s right. Got a ribbon display.”
“Confess I looked you up on the internet.”
For a while, Cain talked about the structure of competition, all the ramps and obstacles. It was different from regular show, less eugenics to it. At their house in Virginia there was the Australian shepherd–Maltese mix Sweet Tea and the two houndish ones, Jezebel and Secret. His wife had started into dog agility contests when their kid began applying to colleges.
“An empty-nest thing.”
“Maybe a little.”
“You’re visiting your kid without her this week, you said.”
“The dogs. There are seasons to these things. It’s also that she hates a goodbye. Don’t think she even realizes it’s part protective of herself.”
“But you do.”
“I infer, anyway. She knows her own way. Natural survivalist in tennis whites, you know.”
“Why do you think she does it, the competitions?”
“The bodies of animals don’t perjure, for one,” Cain said. “Two, there is making herself a sight. She wanted to be a singer, you know, and then, it’s got the verbal aspect. She likes talking to them, giving orders. I think it gives her a sense of control over the natural world.”
He needed a few more beats to bring Cain to temperature. It was a technique Cain undoubtedly knew. But Cain was far from DARPA and the National Security Council now, and it made Lyle easier too, the small talk as though they were friends, easier, anyway, than McCreight. He’d ventured rapport work. But try and there was snapback.
Barry Cain twiddled a straw.
“It’s been hard for her losing the house,” Lyle said.
“She didn’t cry when her daddy died. It was Katrina drilled grief down. She grew strong on crawfish boils. Didn’t matter we didn’t go more than twice a year. Some women go elbow-deep in relief efforts. For her it was pups.”
“Wasn’t Jezebel eaten by dogs?”
“Only her corpse,” Cain said.
Lyle untucked a notebook from the inner pocket of his blazer. He made a slow show of curling the flap back, curling over used pages. He hit the end of a pen against the bar to snap the writing point into protrusion. There was something in the gesture, he was sure, of Jack Burden, the first not the second adaptation, John Ireland. It was a story that had once entered his eyes and stayed there in the place of a question, the rhythm of a nod, structured the way he leaned into space with a stranger under the gaze. He understood the shape he took in the other person’s eyes, he, a writer.
“I wanted to ask you about something. A human r
esources question.”
Cain smiled. “Alrighty.”
He had a large forehead like a pink lightbulb. Lyle squinted into the light of it and cleared his throat. “Hackers.”
“That a question, Michaels?”
“There hackers on the federal payroll?”
“You know I’m not a federal employee anymore. Legislators made sure of that. I’ve got consulting, of course, but these are private companies we’re talking about.”
“Private companies under contract with the US government. Your Booz Allen Hamiltons and such get intimate, I understand.”
“Given,” Cain said. “You having another?”
His hand moved to a thatched wooden bowl gritty with some kind of man-made dust designed for onion flavor. Lyle pulled his hand away, ate a cereal piece at a time, not saying anything. The bartender sat a beer, sailboat etched onto the pint glass, on top of a foamy branded coaster.
“What kind of singer?”
“Singer?”
“Your wife.”
“She liked the jazz standards all right, but her daddy said he didn’t want his own onstage performing Jew-boy librettos. She has long blood if you know what I’m saying.”
“Hence the pups.”
“Hence the pups.”
“But you wouldn’t know anything about hackers. You have contacts but wouldn’t know about hackers.”
Cain folded his hands, resting his elbows wing-like on the back of the stool and the bar, torso facing Lyle. “What’s the difference between a self-taught programmer with a bad sense of humor and a hacker, Michaels?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“Sincere question.”
“Because I’m hearing things.”
“Are you.”
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