He blinked, and she was saying, “Why are you crying?”
Chapter 12
In the recording, Lyle Michaels stated the date and time. He told Shel to do his worst, meaning speak. Alexandra looked at Han playing, and she looked at Jeremy cooking, and she had her brother in her headphones, all of them together in the living room.
Is the issue your personal relationship with Barry Cain? Shel said.
You’re driving at what?
Tell me why Cathexis needs ex-NSC consulting on STX research. Tell me that, Michaels.
He knows how to run a large outfit.
You are so surrounded by the Forrest you can’t see the trees.
What is that supposed to mean, McCreight?
Terrorists practice advanced obfuscation now. They are not fools. Braid in lies, you render useless the surveillance tools.
We were talking about Cain.
Barry Cain is a classified spy for the government. It is intuition multiplied by context.
Like you.
Like I was. And now I’m talking to a writer.
Let’s talk about the factors that indicated terrorist to the algorithm.
We missed one. We missed intel agency employee.
Chapter 13
Hypothesis: Barry Cain, still secretly working for the NSA, had contacted Lyle Michaels under an alias with a putative tip on Shel. The tip, however, had been a test of Shel: would he talk? When the meetings with the writer continued, Cain decided to eliminate Shel.
Or hypothesis: Barry Cain, like Shel, had been burned by the agency. In the years following their departures, the agency had come to view both Cain and Shel as potentially threatening. The appearance of a liaison between them and Lyle Michaels had been flagged. Shel was killed first because Cain’s position at STX made him too high profile a target.
Or hypothesis: Shel had never left the NSA. When some unknown person within the agency had discovered Shel’s communications with Lyle Michaels, his death became procedure. A whistleblower could make noise too quietly.
Chapter 14
What she heard on the tapes from Lyle: Shel’s voice. What she found: in fact, he’d always been a dreamer.
In the sixties, Shel said, a man named Weizenbaum had developed a computer program called ELIZA meant to operate as a joke about Rogerian therapy. People could chat with strings of code that would mix around their words and spit them back. But Weizenbaum became disturbed when his secretary asked him to leave the room when she used the program. She accused him of spying on the conversation. Another user wrote that ELIZA reminded her of her father. What these users knew that everyone else forgets is the soul of the machine.
I thought the internet would broaden neighborhoods. We’d reach across state lines, national lines. He was talking about the early days of online communities that stretched across maps when he learned to code from outsiders to whom he’d wanted to be an insider. The network could never be a place of our own, he said, so I didn’t think we’d end up in tiny cells without windows, that we’d choose it.
She knew Shel had had a palate for zero. Zero was the only number with verb potential to him, and he had known he’d need to zero out these communications with Lyle Michaels.
But he had also harbored a problem with the number two, she learned from the tapes. Two, he said, the dyad, was to the Greeks deity and evil. Two was a deuce.
A pair becomes a pattern. These people will want two to mean something, that there is a reason to apprehend an innocent. They think high-octane mortality is a problem for two to solve.
They had found, she supposed, a solution to her brother.
Chapter 15
It was the conversation again, the only one lately. She was rambling. The truth was, she said, the only known truth was one destruction. A building had blown up. Officially, the story was gas. But her own brother had for many years lived unofficial lives. And she had the tapes to prove it.
Jeremy cleared the plates. Silverware scraping against dirty china spoke. It said wrong, wrong, wrong.
She began to talk about the justice of prose. The check of it. She listed off publications. She mentioned the Fourth Amendment, the Fourth Estate. She said, “There is something very dark everywhere that we need to turn the light on.”
“If it’s true,” he said.
“It is.”
“If it is true,” he continued. “There is danger to volume.”
“It is true,” she insisted. “Think if everyone knew they were being watched. If they knew every word was recorded.”
“We’d state our convictions on world peace, everything white teeth and sound bites like everyone already does out in the open. We’d be kind in private. Is that what you think, Alexandra?”
“If I went to the press,” she said.
She wept then.
It was after dinner and Han was drawing maps like spiderwebs, big networks of train routes. Jeremy picked up a crayon. He colored in the house Han had sketched by their subway stop.
“You know what would happen,” Jeremy said more gently.
He told her to sleep because he wanted her to be strong. He told her a walk—the logic of it was you can move yourself, even if only around the block. He told Han to tell Mama a story.
“And the ants went back home to the log,” Han said, “to die.”
Chapter 16
Later at night, when her pills had not worked, Jeremy was already in the living room, face bluish like a dead man’s in the fat ray coming off his laptop. He closed the screen and touched the couch when she came into the doorway.
“Saved a seat for you,” he said.
Legs folding beneath her, she got on the couch beside him. He put his arms around her.
“Do you want me to go?” he said.
“Never,” she said.
“You may come to regret your words, more even than already.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t,” he said. “It hasn’t been easy.”
“But I am sorry.”
“Therapists say, ‘Don’t be sorry. Be mindful.’”
“It is so much easier to be sorry,” Alexandra said.
“That is where they trick you.”
“You’re they now,” she said.
“And still I’m us,” he said.
They decided to eat ice creams. Alexandra looked online for a late-night parlor while Jeremy woke Han, said they would have a nighttime adventure. Outside, his arm hugged her sideways, banding them. They arrived and he said every flavor like a question, his boy too big to be carried and still carried, still there tight to his chest, murmuring, “Chocolate.” Someone came from a door in the back of the store.
“Miss Chen,” the man said.
“Ray,” she said.
Jeremy swung his eyes from the glass case, recognition in his ears. He held Han tighter. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“How do you two know each other?” Alexandra said.
“Baba, let go,” Han said. “Baba, it hurts.”
He set Han down. He wiped his son’s shirt for no reason. Wright grinned, arms crossed. “How do we know each other, Bill? I’m old now. The memories drain off.”
“You must be mistaken,” Jeremy said. “Name’s Jeremy.”
“That’s right, that’s right. Jeremy Elwin, is it? Alton?”
“Jordan,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t think you were still living in Bushwick, Ray. I recall you were moving. Leaving the city for good.”
“My work takes me on trips. Bushwick. London. I follow the secrets. Like you, Jeremy.”
“Patient confidentiality, you mean.”
A young cashier addressed them in formal terms, asked of readiness. Alexandra apologized to the cashier. She asked for time and looked into the case. Jeremy held his hand in a fist in h
is pocket.
“And who is this young fellow?” Ray said, crouching.
“Say hello, Han,” Alexandra said.
Jeremy swung Han back up to his chest. “Praline, salted caramel, and German chocolate.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Ray said.
“It was good to see you, Ray,” Alexandra said. “Thank you for everything you did.”
“Didn’t quite work, did it?”
“Well,” she said.
“That will be my exit then,” Ray said.
Jeremy nodded and crossed his arms. A bell smashed against glass as the man let the door close behind him. Someone selling eyedrops on television said what her friends couldn’t see was itch.
“You weren’t very friendly,” Alexandra said. Jeremy paced while they waited.
“Why don’t we bring this home?” he said.
“It will melt by home.”
“We can walk fast, can’t we, Han? What animal is fastest?”
“Coyote.”
“With cones?” she said.
“I didn’t know you knew Ray,” Jeremy said.
“I hired him to find Shel.”
The cashier hovered cones at them. Alexandra took hers and began eating with a small spoon. Jeremy fetched napkins for the table. He held Han’s hand the entire time.
“He was your therapy client?”
“Someone with knowledge of these systems might affirm such a guess if he were inclined to answer off the record,” Jeremy said.
“Chocolate,” Han said.
“Poor Ray,” Alexandra said. “It cannot be easy to keep custody of so many people’s secrets.”
“He makes his choice,” Jeremy said.
Television voices slid up in volume suddenly. They looked at the cashier, remote in hand, staring. His head was thrown back, and his mouth was dumb and slack. A dark, grainy image oozed and hiccupped on-screen. Then the image spun and a television personality appeared, eyebrows thick with powder and pulled high.
But her eyes were narrowed elsewhere, even as she dug at a cone with a spoon. She was looking out the glass facade and frowning.
“He’s standing across the street,” Alexandra said.
“Who?”
“Ray,” she said.
PART NINE: MODULO OPERATION
modulo operation: n. a computing operation that finds the remainder after division of one number by another
Chapter 1
His mother wouldn’t be home yet. She’d get out of work and dice one and a half peppers, two onions. She’d swirl them in the frying pan. When he rolled in, she’d give him the job of measuring the spices, cleaning the rice. She liked to say, “So sous me, baby.”
Technically, this was an unauthorized venture, the bodega stop. His mother’s stance was she worked too hard on a meal for him to ruin his supper. Total truth, his appetite had reach, and they both knew it.
Tyrell waited for his chopped cheese by the serve-yourself slushie machine, watching the turn of red and blue, of orange. There was music on from the store radio and there was music coming out of someone’s phone in the wait for wings. The men there for cigarettes shuffled their feet until Nasir behind the counter turned back. They were wheezy-whispering about the butt and the crazy of a woman in the store. Tyrell counted fourteen types of gum, two cinnamon, four fruity. He could smell the griddle grease.
He ate the chopped cheese as he walked to his session. The sandwich foil made him think of sci-fi, which made him think of the movie he’d watched with his dad at the hospital a week back, one of those alien deals with lots of gross-out and a guy with some tough hardware who had to protect the world by Friday. The hero shot a no-joke laser, and it bounced off the alien’s mirror shield right back at him.
“You saw that?” he asked his father, and his father didn’t answer, but Tyrell could chalk it up to potential still because he saw the number on the machine jump. He wrote it in his composition notebook. He knew it meant there was a chance, even if later his mom had told him to stop with his notebook theories and act grown, her nostrils shaky.
Two blocks later, the sandwich was gone. Tyrell passed a church. He threw out the bodega foil and rounded over to his session in the beat-up old building with people hanging around the entrance smoking. Inside, the woman behind the window apologized for not calling. “Mr. Jordan isn’t in today,” she said.
“Why not?” Tyrell said.
“I can’t tell you that, but we do apologize.”
“We who?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“He’s absent?” Tyrell asked.
She stuck her head out the window. “Yes, absent.”
“As in sick?”
“Do you need to use the telephone to call your mother to pick you up?” the woman said.
“Why I’m the only person who ever has to communicate?” he said. “I had an appointment.”
The woman sighed. “I want to help you, Tyrell, but I can’t tell you what happened to Mr. Jordan.”
Chapter 2
Jeremy knew that Wright would not be extricated from his life with words alone. It was why Jeremy had insisted Alexandra announce death to her mother in another city, time to think gleaned in distance. But Jeremy was aware somewhere, Wright, no longer Wilmington, was plotting, watching. Wright had not learned from Belfast to crank away toward good, small things.
In the plane aisle, Jeremy shoved things around an overhead compartment to fit luggage. There was a line behind him, and it made him overwarm in the lower back. He could feel all their breath leaning on him.
“Why is it called carry-on if it must be stowed?” Alexandra said to a flight attendant.
The plane lifted, and the city grew strange before it grew familiar, just out of reach and then a shmaltzy postcard skyline zippered with lit buildings. Somewhere down there in one of the pinpricks that was a window, Wright had a plan. He was Wilmington or Wright, or he was Ray or he was a PI named Gutierrez. Wright did not want the Corps to die for a few years of algorithms, or he did not believe actors within government could be trusted with citizen data. Nothing moved free of everything, he thought, or terrorists who hadn’t gotten better benefited from cartoon legitimacy. They could run their own intelligence, or it was frightening to think data miners were interpreting how users Cathected. Shel Chen had been a menace, or Jeremy was. Wright was being followed, or he was following. They say it’s not a woodchuck, Wright had said. It’s a groundhog. No, it’s a whistle-pig. But it’s all the same squirrel. I smell fish. Mackerel, salmon.
Alexandra grabbed Jeremy’s arm. “What will I say?”
“You will say the worst thing you can,” Jeremy said, “and then it will be over.”
“Is it better to say it first or to wait?”
“There is no good way, Alexandra, let alone a better.”
You could not appease someone whose desire you didn’t know. He did not know what Wright wanted. Wright had tailed Alexandra because he was tailing Shel, or he had tailed Shel because he was tailing Alexandra. He had been warning Jeremy that Alexandra could, through Shel, discover that everything she knew of her husband was part of a cover, or he had suspected Jeremy of involvement in a new covert operation.
Alexandra replaced a magazine showing a video still of a man with a raised arm in the pocket of the seat in front of her. “But the feeling won’t be.”
“Fault or shame?” Jeremy said.
“I only get one?” Alexandra said.
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Jeremy said.
Consider the patterns. Wright had told Jeremy that Shel was an NSA operative, and then Shel was dead. Wright had followed Alexandra, and then Alexandra had come home with blood crusted to her head. He did not trust luck, coincidence. Coincidence was corresponding in time and space, when everyone knew how little matched.
&n
bsp; Jeremy clamped a shade against the sky.
When they arrived at the blue house on Elder Street, Alexandra took a breath that bumped her shoulders up and down. There was a bag slung across her torso, and she bounced to adjust it. The air was dry and bright as he held her shoulders.
“You won’t be fine, but you will have done it,” Jeremy said.
He stood behind her, and she knocked the door of her childhood home. A dog in pain could be heard but not seen, sound cutting through the weather, air slow and composed as jam.
Chapter 3
They all had their origin stories, but at the barracks they hadn’t told them unless you were trusted. Jeremy remembered that for Wright, the Intelligence Corps had entered his life when he needed to clarify. He was another uni student with questions, and he was stupid with big ideas.
His appointment, he thought, was to discuss the Cartesian shadow over Wittgenstein. He was only twenty, and he didn’t know anything, so he was nervous, and he didn’t know anything so he was not nervous enough.
The artifact. You touch it, and it becomes part of your world. There is the moment of connection, the moment of interception, when the hold goes both ways. The professor opened his desk. He slid an old copy of Rose and Laurel across the table. Wright’s hand went to it, unthinking, his body already pliant to command.
“Do you know who issues this publication?” the professor said. “This is the publication of the Intelligence Corps. Maybe you’d be interested. They’re interested in you.”
The boy Wright held the magazine with both hands. His hands would have been delicate on the turning corners, worn to paper suede.
Now Jeremy thought of that boy. He thought what if that boy had never taken that philosophy course? What if he’d dropped out sooner?
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