It is a place to learn the cheats.
But also, there were other things, bigger things. Other secret winning. There is something they get, and it is math.
Stash soda went down easy. Suck gentle at the bottom with the straw. His mother could hear a slurp down the hallway with the TV on.
She’d been weighing him.
But the bigger he got, the smaller the treatment, baby stuff. It had gotten to the point of no snack money and packing apples. The green ones made his mouth all funny. She didn’t know the dire hole in his stomach.
He looked at the can. Thirty-eight grams of sugar. One hundred fifty calories. Not his kind of math.
But in chat there is no scale, no rules like salad first.
Started simple. A cheat here and there. You want, you got to migrate the conversation from in-game chat to relay chat. They noticed other things about him: he was good with numbers, for example, and moms’s bitches.
He thought of listening in on the conversation with the STARK lady. He typed some. He typed not my mom. So but, the thing about cheats: they are minor coding. You can be major too. He wanted to be major. And in the way-late, with his stolen soda, Mom down the hall eating corn chips in her front-and-center TV seat, him 180 pounds, they say, you like math; we can show you some sickass other type-a equations if you want to get serious.
Chapter 2
To not be one of them to his client, Jeremy made his face flat. It was nearly the end of the day, and he sat with Tyrell, and Tyrell had been meeting strangers online whom he wanted to see in person. He talked to them about how to beat a video game, and Jeremy could see they shared an idiom that evaded him—Alliance, Horde—so he must not use the terms in a sentence. He’d only manifest his ignorance.
“This is meet to beat,” Tyrell said.
“Or run away?” he said.
He wondered the same of Alexandra.
He had thought the child meant something about them.
Tyrell was enumerating quests. Win one, advance. He wanted to advance. He wanted to put particular maps behind him.
Jeremy recognized it as a classic problem of Cathexis. Conquer universes. Universes have conquered the father. “Perhaps, though, you think the metaphor pins down the meaning more precisely, only to find by definition it means something else.”
“Mr. Jordan?”
“What if there’s always another quest?” he said. And he didn’t have the answer.
When Tyrell’s session ended, he found himself dialing, found himself bridging a later hour in London. His fingers carried themselves with an intelligence beyond his better instincts.
“Isn’t this breaking the rules?” the voice said.
“We never got to codifying,” he said.
Work up to Alexandra, he figured. Listen. He was a good listener.
“Well, I suppose Alexandra talks to Angeline.”
“The girlfriend.”
“The girlfriend,” Genevieve said.
A conversation sometimes picks up knots in accumulating utterances. They were coming faster. He waited to ask the question, then decided he couldn’t ask the question. Because what if he was right? He’d still want to stay, want Alexandra to.
Genevieve was speaking about Angeline still, it seemed. They were supposed to go together—both liberals, both Americans in London, both on that particular dating website—but Angeline had posted pictures of them without permission. Angeline invoked symbols as though prima facie. The Arab Spring. The Persian Awakening. Angeline would say, “For people like us, thirty, forty years ago.” She was angry Genevieve didn’t Cathect her politics. She said remember the slogan silence = death.
Jeremy thought of the day at the beach, the belch of ocean and his son’s laugh skipping a wave. Alexandra snapped them, showed them a just-passed moment on her phone, and there was pride in her pride of them. A gull’s cry died in its soar above.
“What’s the worst that could happen if strangers knew the happiest part of your life?” Jeremy said.
Genevieve paused. “Anything you say can and will be used against you.”
Chapter 3
Internet Relay Chat capture:
AlbertInTheShade: Two days ago, an individual, identity undisclosed, is charged with hacking the computers of twenty-one merger lawyers from three US firms. They are saying he hacked the emails, bought shares in the companies, then sold after the merger announcements. All while squatting in a wee flat in Northern Ireland.
LM224: Insider trading from the outside.
AlbertInTheShade: Right. But the thing is, one of the twenty-one is the firm through which Cathexis, under their adorable little research outfit STX, brokered a deal with a consortium of universities: STX gives the schools funding for research projects and keeps the intellectual property. One of these universities has been developing virtual worlds for military training and for PTSD treatment. Another drones. Another education software and diagnostic programs. You’re naive if you don’t see this hacked firm is also the firm that brokered some quiet deals for a company that does data protection for military hardware.
LM224: Naive because.
AlbertInTheShade: Because altogether, you have a research group that will be a neat little loop. Kid is brown or black and taking Risperdal. Then they track him to combat. But the one who likes computers? They find a nice little seat for him where he’s not just playing video games. He’s playing real war, drones. Later, they’ll strap all of them up for Simulated Environment Therapy. On Cathexis, the ads will be for anxiety meds, sleeping pills. Whole lives can be decided by a few folks who are too smart for their own good. And get this: the hacker? It’s RabbidUnicorn.
LM224: You said there was never a RabbidUnicorn.
AlbertInTheShade: This guy with the charges, they are saying his alias is RapeUnicorn. It’s the same fucking guy, Michaels.
LM224: You said you thought RabbidUnicorn was a long con coming somewhere out of a federal agency.
AlbertInTheShade: That’s exactly what I’m saying, Michaels.
LM224: Say you’re right—and I’m not, by the way—but just say you are. This quote-unquote guy who hacked the merger lawyers is RabbidUnicorn. Who is really spooks. And they are hacking a law firm retained by Cathexis because?
AlbertInTheShade: They do not know who else Cathexis is working for. Other countries, splinter groups. They do not know if weapons are being developed for China, Russia, ISIS.
LM224: Or it really is some Irish kid.
AlbertInTheShade: They claim he hacked Northern Irish police computers as well. Could be RabbidUnicorn is a real, live hacker. Doesn’t mean this guy’s not also a scapegoat on the merger case. A criminal of not this crime.
LM224: What would be in it for the feds to go after this guy?
AlbertInTheShade: Maybe they’ve got a wee reason to take interest in the Irish police force, or their allies in Westminster do. Maybe they’re interested in taking him as their own.
LM224: That’s a lot of different hypotheses.
AlbertInTheShade: Possibilities, Michaels. Science is generating possibilities, then eliminating them.
LM224: And what do you want me to do?
AlbertInTheShade: Stop talking to Barry Cain about me. He’s one of them.
Chapter 4
Alexandra had no idea how her gestures, tiny things really, crept into him and set off ancient biological instincts. Hypothalamus. Nerves. Caveman stuff. It was not a consecution of logic, just the wisdom imprinted in his body from thousands of years of hunting, gathering. His conscious mind wanted to believe her, but his pulse knew better, his heart following her footsteps around the apartment.
“Who’s my one true love?” she asked Han.
And so, now, he waited until he heard water striking ceramic, the metallic squeal of rings on the rod twice: once to open, once to close. He trusted
the quiet voice of the intestinal twist but did not mistake the face for a symbol of the mind. Speculation was childish, indulgent behavior; you could age with scenarios. A scientist would look beneath surfaces, find necklaces of proof, clasping into a conclusive loop. It was this sense that had made him inspect objects, seek closures.
The apartment was small enough that he could hear the heavy slap of her hair against her neck when, after raising it to rinse closer to the showerhead, she dropped it, only to pick it up again. Jeremy picked up the accessory she said contained her life. Until that night, her purse had been a black box.
Alexandra had little spoken recently, but her device would reveal her.
To Lyle Michaels: Seven tomorrow. Bowery Hotel.
He looked around the apartment. On one side of the door, he was half a successful marriage. On the other, that is, the home side, he was the person rifling in his wife’s purse. But the pivotal point was to keep the sides, he thought, their life and life out there. He opened a beer.
Later, after the dinner plates had been filled and emptied, cleared and washed, Jeremy watched her over the top edge of his book. Han had been put to bed and on the couch beside him, she put her hands on the machine, its standardized keys and sleek lines, the warm power emanating off its surfaces.
The apartment carried a charge, as though he had snuck into someone else’s life and would be caught any minute. He calibrated the television volume to hear something outside his head. On-screen, a stagey transatlantic voice: Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.
In a book, Jeremy pretended to read about minds betraying survival instincts: old women who stopped eating, believing their nurses to be poisoning them, or teenagers who jumped out of windows to quiet voices. A disorder was what it was supposed to be, but it occurred to him that maybe his entire biography was only other people’s voices.
I do, she had said. The words of his life.
She left the room and she entered, now strangled by a corona of bedroom light. He poured her a glass of wine that she swallowed mindlessly, opening quadrangles on a screen until Cathexis glowed off her laptop. She showed Jeremy pictures of people carving Halloween pumpkins, dancing in the street, and eating graphic arrangements of food. These people wanted to be makers, she said. This was the lesson of Cathexis. They were the babies of baby boomers. It was not a matter of counterculture anymore. It was much more democratic. Every one of them, their generation, could see the unappreciated art in their lives, could see the danger of falling into all the snowing noise, how you could be covered by the dramas of the world. It was why they Cathected every Milestone: a post was a mnemonic for the experience.
“A mnemonic or a metonym?”
“I always forget you studied literature at Oxford,” she said.
“Me too,” he said.
For the cruise company, she continued, she would suggest Seven-Word Versions. The company would call for seven-word stories about The Horizonview Experience. It was new and old in fangle, on the one hand a chance to exhibit that sense of everyday special, and on the other, old-fashioned word of mouth for a younger grip of consumers. They would contribute because they wanted to be seen as makers, creatives. They would be listened to because they were not corporate, an obvious advertisement. Everything they distrusted about ads, the slickness and regularity and theater, the blemish of inauthenticity, would be what they defined themselves against in the art of autobiography—portrait of the artist as account manager—even as they presented the fiction that was life redacted of complications. Already, vacation photographs and gushings-on were transacted, image and text pointing to fine, reduced narratives. Horizonview would, therefore, be sewn into the technosocial fabric of their lives. Seven words. Stories that stuck.
Two lines on the stick makes three.
They decided on no more first dates.
Fifty years of dances. First on water.
Packed for everything except her first word.
Three states. Five kids. Together at last.
“What do you think?” she said.
“Those are the only kind of lives I want anymore,” he said.
“But would you book the cruise?” she said.
There was a trajectory she was averting. He could not ask what she was hiding or who. Ask the wrong question and it became an indictment. She would not in the future reveal. But every conversation carried its own geometry. Thesis, antithesis, triangle. Ask what you know. The answer becomes your metric. Memorize diameters. Pupils. Black holes evidence unbeknownst. There is such a thing as urgent patience; it is called intelligence.
“What are you doing at seven tomorrow?” he said. Questions: language that yielded language.
The molecules tensed. He could see it in her blank face, liquids going solid, clusters condensing. Her eyes widened, and she sat very still. “If I’m lucky, getting out of work,” she said.
“So we’ll try the new Sichuan place then? Han likes Sichuan.”
“Let’s see how my day goes.”
“You love spicy food,” he said. “They are supposed to serve an excellent dan dan mein.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Don’t you?” he said.
He could not help it; he imagined her tomorrow. He thought how if lucky, when she entered, he would be so content to sit with her in front of the television watching what she chose. If he were not lucky, she would return home with a long plan.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Alexandra said.
“You will eat chili oil on cereal given the option.”
“No, I would not.”
“You love dan dan mein.”
“Stop telling me what I love, Jeremy.”
“All right,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what you love then?”
“You, strangely. I’m tired. The campaign meeting is tomorrow. I need to sleep. I’ll call you about dinner when I know.”
Jeremy crossed his arms. “I moved across the world for you. Can you not muster the decency for even a conversation?”
Her face was flush, and she pushed her fists straight down into the couch cushions. “You wanted to come,” she said.
“You decided you wanted to marry me.”
“And you accepted,” she said. “If you don’t like it.”
“Then what?”
“I’ll just have to let you know tomorrow,” she said, wiping down the top of her computer. “I can’t make promises now.” She stood and moved to the door quiet-footed in ankle socks, laptop hugged to her chest. He brushed past her and spread his arms in the doorway so that his hands held both sides of the frame.
“I want to leave, so you’re going to block the exit?”
“You are changing the subject, Alexandra.”
“What do you want me to say, Jeremy? That I will join you when I don’t know if I can?”
“If I don’t like it, then what?” he said. “Then what?”
Time is slow. Do not count. Be still. Do not think of the rigors of stillness.
A mass descended her throat in a swallow. She tipped her face upward. He could feel his whole body red, pulsing. “I’m saying take it or leave it. Those are the options.”
Then she ducked beneath an arm and turned off the light, and he could hear their son crying.
Chapter 5
The smallest at this hotel was still royal. One couldn’t book lower than a queen. It was there, in the room whose size was female, that Alexandra waited, lying over the cover with her shoes still laced.
Lyle was late. Lyle was supposed to bring Shel.
She pressed buttons. A flicker of light on her pillow provided momentary hope, but then it was only coupons. The contact that came was from a department store that had decided “savings excludes home.”
&n
bsp; Earlier she had phoned Jeremy that she was working late again. She thought perhaps he half believed her, that is, that he wanted to believe her.
“How long can seven words take to conjure?” he had asked.
“You are the one who studied poetry,” she said.
“Food cools. Husband waits. Marriage is compromise.”
“Seven words. Passive-aggressive. Wife hangs up phone,” she said.
“Outwitted, husband accepts defeat. Says, love you.”
“This time she really hangs up though.”
“Already, seven words times five. Now six.” Alexandra ended the call.
Seven thirty passed. She looked at the clock and it was always 7:32. She had last heard from Lyle two days ago.
Alexandra turned on the television. Something expected had happened, which was a disaster. The newscasters were giving the numbers but not names yet, and still, already, a group had bragged. People on the television held their faces in their own hands. This morning, her son had wept when she left.
Now her husband’s name appeared on the pillow, green light pulsing, and she thought of what it was to lie in the rental car when they’d gone upstate once, looking through the greasy window at distant burning stars, the sweet rank of his mouth edging up from her neck, with the bright feeling in her stomach; how moaning meant something near to but different from pain, even as it was tied to every other moment in her life when, too, she was alone, boxed up in her own body without the right words, inarticulate sounds that followed clumsily from precise intentions, and she was fuller and less significant and freer and more trapped; and the endless sky was only the negative space in a frame holding someone over her.
In the hotel hallway, someone asked a question with a fist on a surface. She turned off the news and moved to the threshold, opened the door.
“You’re late,” Alexandra said. “I’ve been here over an hour already.”
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