Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  He could not tell her that, no. It had been too many years of the partial story. Time made silence a betrayal. But he could tell her she’d remember their good life. He could tell her there was hope in what they now had.

  Their boy was yawning. Their boy’s eyes were closing.

  “Nap time,” Jeremy said.

  In his room, Han slipped under the covers and Jeremy began to read. What did it say on the cover of this book? Did it say there’s a fright at the end of the book? I am so afraid! The end! The end! I am so afraid of the fright at the end of the book!

  “Mama, a fright,” Han said.

  “Will you protect me?” she said.

  Chapter 12

  The flowers were white, and the sun came in colored through panes of wicked men and the betrayed martyr. It had been many years since she’d entered a church, but her hands found each other. They clasped, and perhaps it was prayer, the impulse behind the gesture to hold together.

  Job answered Bildad the Shuhite and said:

  Oh, would that my words were written down!

  Would that they were inscribed in a record:

  That with an iron chisel and with lead

  they were cut in the rock forever!

  But as for me, I know that my Vindicator lives,

  and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust.

  When the service was over, Alexandra watched Mrs. Michaels kiss Mr. Michaels on the cheek, and she watched Mr. Michaels turn away. He tried to make the movement into tissue resemble a sneeze. Alexandra saw someone cut through a slant of light. She knew him, or she knew that she knew him somehow, this flicker.

  She took a white lily from a basket. She searched the dark cluster by the door for the man she was sure she knew, and she was hopeful a moment. She thought of how there’d been no remains. Outside, the contours of a narrow vista were blanched with sunlight, and she called his name.

  Chapter 13

  On an evening when Alexandra promised tomorrow there would be a surprise, they went to Robert and Cassandra’s. It was a temperate night. It was Sunday dinner. The sun pinked high-rises they could see from the apartment window, and there was a frantic milling in the streets. It was the first time in a long time Alexandra had seemed like the woman he met.

  She followed Cassandra into the living room. The children went to color with Robert at the table, and Jeremy made drinks in the kitchen. “Pouring drinks, you mean,” Alexandra called over her shoulder. “And slowly, I might add. We’re parched.”

  “Slow and steady,” he said.

  “And sober,” Alexandra said.

  Jeremy stood quietly with wineglasses in his hand. She was very beautiful standing by the couch in the living room. She made the air soft, and he passed a glass.

  “Was it worth the wait?” he said.

  “Perfectly seasoned,” she said, “don’t you think, Cassandra?”

  “Girl, we know all about Jeremy’s family recipes,” Cassandra said. “And it is that traditional good stuff.”

  They did not dwell on the dead who were news. They teased Robert. They offered their hands to be slapped by Wally, by Han, now school age. They spoke of the fine-wine atmosphere, and when a new bottle was removed from a shelf and opened, they spoke of the fine whiskey atmosphere.

  When it was far beyond bedtime, Jeremy carried Han down the stairs. Emerging from an overhang, they saw that a storm had not come. Glowy, ambiguous weather pressed down on the pavement, and the street was dark with minor damp.

  “Are we home yet?” Han asked.

  “Almost.”

  Alexandra stopped in the street. “Don’t lie to him,” she said.

  Chapter 14

  Jeremy looked at her the next day, and he could have framed her face. Pleasure and future, or maybe anticipatory nostalgia, some deep instinct loosing and disarraying composure. Her hair lifted with gust, black flame against city street and business. For a moment, she was arrested like that, her face touching sky.

  Just as quickly, the picture faltered. Alexandra stopped. She conferred with something on her phone.

  “Are you ready for the surprise?”

  “Not quite surprising,” he said in his joking voice, “if I’m ready for it.”

  Jeremy did not know how to arrive. He followed beside her. Alexandra was intent on the device. She did not glance at him.

  “This is us,” she said, pointing west away from them, already crossing and still in the thrall of her phone.

  He followed her into the halted traffic, pushed off the trunk of a taxi as though it would propel him to her. She was very lovely and very strange, and that she was remembering their good life again, stood now beneath a burgundy awning, a record of why he wished to persist— what was the word for it?

  “Bill!” said someone behind Jeremy.

  An odd signal broke up the information of the scene. What a sound does not lose of energy to objects is lost as heat. That is what he felt first, the burn. His eyes ran to catch the ears, a turn and a figure filling in, prioritized by instinct, the avenue dropping off.

  Jeremy caught view of a plaid sleeve lurching, a white blur extended to a glint. The deadliest objects reflect light. He couldn’t help it—his hand shot out when he saw the arm jerk toward Alexandra. There was weight in the arm, a confusion of lines leading to a black flame, the sound a contained hiccup, a small emission into the noon air.

  He could see time then from afar, a story intractable but perhaps not inevitable. One in denial might think they are not in denial, but what of the person who admits they are in denial? The one who says there is reason to hope?

  He thought they could be safe.

  His slow arm reached. Fingers. He felt her fingers. But she was already caving at the waist. He saw the gold rope of her necklace float up. He had not before noticed the open cellar grate on the sidewalk. He had only seen her arm raised to a man who held a streak of light.

  Later, at the hospital, he would be holding her hand when she woke. He would say, there is something I have to explain.

  He would say, this man was going to hurt you. He already has. I have known him, and I’ve never known him. I know he knew about your brother, that he followed him.

  He would say, I wanted to tell you before. But for men like us, it is never before. It is always too late to be forgotten by danger.

  PART TEN: REMAINDER

  I didn’t know if I was really there or not. I thought that I wasn’t really there, it was just a nightmare. Even though I knew it would always happen, I never expected that I would be there.

  —Sudhesh Dahad, 7/7 survivor

  Chapter 1

  It was the year Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, was, after four days of interrogation over the 1972 murder of a single mother of ten, released without charge. It was the year STX developed a meditation tracker that uploaded stress indicators to cloud storage. It was the year the right to be forgotten was recognized in Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González. It was not a case that Genevieve Bailey worked.

  It was the year judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals denied a twenty year-old American citizen in Chicago named Adel Daoud access to classified FISA court records part of his warrant application. In the concurring opinion, it was acknowledged that a FISA-related warrant could only be challenged if errors were caught, and errors would only be caught if access to the documents had been obtained. But the decision had been made for reasons of national security.

  There were new symbols then. Rejection was a direction of the finger. But perhaps that was old too, a gladiator legacy, or rather, a legacy of the wisdom of the audience. Populist. Young people volunteered themselves to be shown on screens to strangers, hoping for love or sex or just some minutes in communion.

  To the south, Fernando Sepúlveda, a member of the social media team for an opposition party and suppo
sed leader of an obscure intelligence unit, was arrested in Colombia for intercepting communications between the president and the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

  Vape was the word of the year, according to a dictionary website.

  It was the year a documentary, released on a streaming service provided by the world’s largest online store, traced an industrial espionage suit against Bayer. In memory, the credits declared, of the late Lyle Michaels.

  Records were broken, exempli gratia, a Russian player, Хируко, comprehensively beat World of Warcraft.

  Meanwhile, the United States ended operations of the Human Terrain System, the counterinsurgency program in which social scientists trained military commanders in the customs of invaded territories. The program had been rejected by the American Anthropological Association, holding that it conflicted with the Code of Ethics, particularly the clause “to do no harm” to those studied. One of HTS’s founders, Montgomery McFate, under the name Montgomery Cybele Carlough, had written her doctoral dissertation on Irish republican paramilitaries. In response to Professor Roberto Gonzalez’s critique of the program’s misappropriation of scholarship, McFate, then a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, wrote that charges of misappropriated knowledge constituted epistemological censorship. It is in the nature of knowledge to escape the bounds of its creator; to believe otherwise is to persist in a supreme naïveté about the nature of knowledge production and distribution.” It was suspected that she was the woman behind the blog I Luv a Man in Uniform.

  That same year, an American whistleblower granted asylum in Russia denied that his leak had been orchestrated with Russian intelligence, which was the stated position of some members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. They disseminated these speculations on the television show Meet the Press.

  A biopic about the Irish-American mobster Whitey Bulger, a man who had once smuggled guns in coffins to the IRA, was pilloried as an uncritical reproduction of mob lies.

  Around the time of the release of the film, shortly after the publication of an article criticizing Turkey’s bombing of PKK-affiliated forces, Professor Bri Freeman received a package of anthrax in a cardboard shipping box. In the article, she had noted that the separatist group repelled ISIS in Iraq.

  It was the year a coroner reported that the fatal gunshot wounds of a black man named Avery James might have been self-inflicted in the back of a police cruiser, as his hands were handcuffed behind him. For her coverage, a Noze writer received a United States Journalism Award in the area of commentary.

  It was the year Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared.

  It was the year a boy named Tyrell Owens studied for his GED.

  It was the year LeBron James went home to Cleveland, and Republicans took control of the House and Senate again. Diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba were reestablished. It was the year two hundred Nigerian schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram. It was the year Scotland voted against leaving the United Kingdom. It was the year the American president expressed disappointment over failed peace talks in Northern Ireland. It was the year a hedge fund mogul named Lawrence Coffers tripled profits off new financial instruments, packaging what he referred to as “nonprime” mortgages. His daughter, Winnie, announced that she would be buying a newspaper. Barry Cain was assigned to a net neutrality task force.

  It was a year of many stories. It was a year it was difficult to remember them all, even when they were buzzing in your pocket. There were acronyms for news missed. There were acronyms for the fear of what would be missed. And there were many dead.

  What happens to the dead man’s email account was something very few people knew. Historians were considering the legalities of entering these emails into archives for future historians. It was a question that might once have bothered Shel Chen.

  In this year, it was estimated that there were more than 4 billion email accounts. Nevertheless, the New IRA, a paramilitary organization formed of Provisional IRA dissidents, conducted a letter bomb campaign, which included explosives sent to British Army recruitment offices and prison staff. In a failed RPG attack in North Belfast, the weapon bounced off a Land Rover. The officers inside the vehicle were said to have suffered shock. Over a decade after it was reported that the IRA had been supplied with Russian rifles, investigations into international gunrunning continued, just as classified operations continued even while the Belfast hotels and convention centers were built. But that was not quite a news story. Surveillance, investigation, the collating of facts and figures, the contacts—these were part of the regular ecology.

  There are no headlines “Today there is air” or “Today, still, so many people are dead.”

  It was something Frank Michaels, once a Micelli, thought of when he thought of the child he’d loved. But sometimes, he listened to the voices of angry men on the radio as he drove to fix the broken part of a home someone thought was in emergency, and he felt less alone. They spoke about how there used to be promise, and people around the country called in to send their heavy hearts over waves. Anger was the only honest thing Frank Michaels heard anymore.

  Chapter 2

  Many states away and across many miles, Janice Chen knew it was the computer who had provided Victor, her Victor, Victor Shumpert. Victor who was so gentle, so kind. Victor who knew her sorrow, too having lost a spouse. Victor whose very own younger brother, Wilhelm, had tricked their dying father into willing him all the family property, leaving not a penny for the older son, her Victor, to whom, when he asked for a picture of his sweet, soft angel, she sent a photograph of her daughter, Alexandra, whose face owed half to Mrs. Chen anyway.

  Dear Mrs. Janice, he wrote. Thank you, so very thank you for message. Only you show me God is Great. Because you have been stronger than a tree in a storm raining. Shame on Sister! Shame on Children! For some, we have saying, the fire is too hot that cooks their food. But be peace, my sweetheart! One day they will know. When will I see my angel princess Janice? When will I touch her? Perhaps it is not too much to say that you would like to see me too. You would send me wire transfer for visit, Princess Janice. I would need thirteen thousand dollars for plane and visa. Please when it is considerate will you write me again? Kisses, Your Victor

  These hands he loves, she thought, typing. Someone loves these hands.

  She had not been someone someone wanted to see in three decades.

  My Baby Vic, she wrote, I did some research. I discovered that French is the language in Haiti. I always wanted to go to Paris. One time, someone gave me a T-shirt with an Eiffel Tower on it, but it was only a fake. I knew this because of the tag saying Made in China. How do you say I love you forever in French? How about I miss you? Or, without you it hurts? Because I do, sweet Victor, even if Alexandra thinks my pain is my imagination because she can’t smell it or touch it, see it or feel it. She is scientific that way. I used to think she’d go to the moon. What helps is I will think of you tonight when I am in bed. I got a new nightgown. It is blue with pink flowers. Think about that! Lots of kisses for my baby Vic, Janice

  After the email, she rubbed on her cream so that she would be as soft as her Victor believed. She wrote to her merciless surviving child that she would need extra in her bank account this month, and she tried not to hear Alexandra’s voice in her head: You don’t have children. You have a child. Shel is dead.

  The next day, her daughter emailed. Scam was the word for the romance of her mother’s life. A foolish response.

  But that is love, she wrote back. I feel it. You will pay for love. You will be robbed by it, and the love of it is real.

  Chapter 3

  Alexandra slouched over the laptop in bed, letting herself take in the language of lingerie, the pure ballet of it—bustier, demi, basques. Her gaze seized up in the lace, scalloped edges. Hypnotic trims. She clicked her basket full, as she pulled at the smooth pad, producing a weather of fallen women,
and the repetition managed her imagination in a thin spectrum. Then she got up and went downstairs for a drink to dull out the buzzy trance of choosing amongst minor variation.

  Her son was with Genevieve until.

  Until was a time that still seemed far away.

  Across the street stood a bland restaurant with faux age painted on the walls and nostalgia designated by a certain cast of ochre light that rubbed off the edges of objects. She took a seat at the bar and ordered an amaro. There were framed posters with red Cyrillic letters spelling out Kino-Eye, and there were framed laundry detergent advertisements from the middle of the last century, women tipped back into martini glasses, holding lather in one hand and pearls in another. She half-noticed songs as she drank drink after drink. “La Vie en Rose.” “Sinnerman.”

  “I know you,” a man said.

  He had dark hair, teeth very white against his skin, and a face not unfamiliar in the half-light. But it was his hooking of his bag beneath the bar that gave him up. She remembered the abruptness of his movements as he settled himself beside her.

  “Robert,” she said, and she kept on with her amaro.

  But Robert insisted on buying them a round. He ordered a drink that made the bartender sigh, and she talked for a few minutes about her new job, a job, that’s what it was, nothing disappointing or epiphanic, just a company with a few procedures she knew. For a moment, she thought of the messages Jeremy sent her on behalf of So-So and Jill. So-So is skeptical of the new couch, but Jill thinks this must be the emery board she’s needed her entire life. In this way, some time passed quietly.

  “Where’s Cassandra?” Alexandra said finally.