by James Smythe
The light comes on for the passengers to fasten their seatbelts, waking Laurence up. He looks over at Amit.
‘I feel like hell,’ he says. Amit tries his best to smile, to hide whatever he’s thinking from his boss. ‘Sleeping on a plane always does this to me. Remind me to not do this.’
‘Lots more flights in our future,’ Amit says, ‘you’re going to need to get better at it.’ The words feel rote in Amit’s mouth; the sort of thing he would say, rather than actually carrying any meaning.
‘You all right?’
‘Same as you,’ Amit lies. ‘Weird flight.’ The man next to him snorts, listening in to their conversation. That’s a voter lost, Amit thinks; and that almost makes him laugh.
They stay silent for the descent, watching out of the windows at the ground coming towards them; at the desert, stretching off, the yellows and oranges and scatterings of green, as it all gives way to the concrete, to the hotels and office blocks and residential streets. They land, a bumpy landing, and at the back of the plane somebody gently screams and the rest of the passengers laugh, united in relief that they didn’t, and then pull into the gate. The seatbelt sign goes off again and Laurence stands up.
‘Okay,’ he says, ‘let’s do this.’ He switches on his phone. ‘What’s the first appointment?’ His phone beeps, and he presses the screen. ‘Email from ClearVista,’ he says. ‘Did you see this?’
‘You shouldn’t read that,’ Amit says.
‘What do you mean?’ Laurence asks, but Amit doesn’t reply. He stays seated and watches Laurence swipe through the document, squinting at the screen; and then, as the man next to Amit coughs and nudges him to stand so that they can leave the plane, Laurence’s face falls. Amit knows the page that he’s reading, but he doesn’t know what to say to make it any better. ‘What is this?’ Laurence asks. He raises his voice, panic in his eyes. ‘What does this mean, Amit?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Amit says. ‘Seriously, not here. It’s a mistake. Look at the other results.’
‘I’m looking at them!’ Amit looks at Laurence’s hand as it fumbles for the back of the seat in front of him, to steady himself.
‘I’ll call them and straighten this out. This is their mistake.’
‘It’s not a mistake. It’s because of Sean,’ Laurence says. His voice drops in volume, the words coming from between gritted teeth. ‘This is because of Sean. They think that I can’t handle the grief.’
‘They?’
‘They asked that question. Look, sixth page. About if I can handle grief.’
Amit reaches across the aisle. ‘Laurence, listen. This is okay. This is nothing but a screw up. It’s software.’
‘They’re fucking monsters,’ Laurence says. ‘What can I do? I lost my son. I lost him, and that’s not my fucking fault.’ There’s panic in Laurence’s eyes as they dart around. Amit leans across the aisle and grabs his shoulders, to calm him, even as the people behind them queue to leave the plane and he notices the man from when they were boarding, with the blue jacket. Five or six rows back, waiting to leave with everybody else. Amit watches as the man pulls his phone out and points the camera at them, quickly taking a picture of this. Amit scans the rest of their section; he sees other people holding their own cameras out, above their heads, above the line of the headrests.
‘You have to calm down,’ Amit says. ‘You calm down, and we get off the plane, and we sort this out. We can’t do anything here and people are watching. We don’t need this, Laurence. Okay?’
There’s sudden clarity in Laurence’s eyes; the politician is back.
‘Okay,’ he agrees.
Amit pulls their bags from the overhead lockers, passes Laurence his and ushers him to the aisle. They shuffle forward to the exit in silence and Amit prays that nobody else on flight 334 from Philadelphia International to Dallas/Fort Worth knows who Laurence is and that if they do they didn’t see the ex-senator’s minor break in composure.
Amit doesn’t talk to Laurence all the way through baggage control. Instead, he leaves him standing by the carousel, staring at the black, slatted rubber that the plane’s suitcases are being fed through; and he goes to find the man in the blue jacket. There’s a photograph – or, worse, a video – of Laurence’s panic, and Amit wants to control it before it becomes something.
He spots the man in the distance, no luggage, headed for the exit. Amit runs after him. He doesn’t shout as he chases him – you don’t put the sirens on a cruiser when you’re pursuing a fugitive, he thinks – but when he catches up with him he grabs at the arm of his crumpled suit jacket, stopping him in his tracks.
‘What were you doing?’ he asks.
‘Do I know you?’ the man asks. His smile is over-exaggerated, a simpering grin of false ignorance.
‘You were filming my boss, on the plane.’
‘No,’ the man says. He tries to leave, pulling away from Amit’s grip. Amit tightens it.
‘You were. You met him before we got on the plane. Don’t play dumb with me.’ Amit suspects that he probably works for one of the big gossipy websites, worst case; or, best case, he’s just a random chancing his luck, thinking that he might have something worth selling. The footage won’t show much more than Laurence being upset about his son. And who wants to be the asshole that mocks a man for that? Amit can spin this; he just doesn’t want to have to, given the choice.
‘Of course,’ the man says. ‘But I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. Can I leave?’ the man asks, looking down at Amit’s hand, still clinging to his sleeve. Amit lets go. ‘Thanks. Hey, good luck with your campaign, okay?’
‘Prick,’ Amit says, unable to tell if the man was being sincere or not, but assuming the worst. He watches him rush off, through the doors and past the cab stand – there’ll be somebody waiting for him, Amit knows; there’s always somebody waiting for people like that – and then turns and walks back to Laurence who is staring at the carousel, barely there. Amit can see his bag going round, completely missed. He grabs it, and Laurence’s. ‘Come on,’ he tells his boss and leads him through the exit.
Outside, pulled up, is a town car, and Amit loads the trunk while Laurence gets inside. Amit climbs in after him and tells the driver that they’re ready, and then he puts up the window between the front and back seats.
‘You have to get yourself together,’ he says, finally. ‘This is a mistake. Accept that, and don’t screw this.’
‘What if it’s already screwed?’
‘I’ll call and work out what’s happened. They got it wrong, we can threaten all manner of shit. We don’t live in a world where Homme gets a 60% possibility result and you get fuck all.’ He checks his phone to see that he’s got their contact details. ‘But start to melt down, and we are screwed. That asshole from the queue with the jacket? All we need is somebody to see it like him. He maybe got a photo, so he’s going to be pimping that the rest of today.’ Outside, the landscape rushes: out of the gray buildup of the airport, and into the expanse, fields of rocks and golden dust that stretch off for as far as they can see. ‘I have to do damage control. Maybe we say that you’re ill – a migraine, that always works – that you’re overworked. It’s been a busy few weeks.’
‘They’ll know it’s a lie.’
‘It’s all about how we sell it. We cancel today, maybe tomorrow, we book the meetings for another time.’
‘We say I’m sick,’ Laurence says.
‘Don’t ever use that word.’ He opens his laptop and minimizes the report. Laurence sees a glimmer of the boxed-out section. Amit opens a document and writes URGENT at the top. ‘I’ll call ClearVista when we’re at the hotel, sort this out. This means nothing, Laurence.’
Laurence watches Texas race by as Amit types. He thinks how flat it is; how the texture, the weight of the place, is all in the distance.
The hotel could be anywhere, which is the kind that Amit favors. Less confusion when moving from state to state: nothing distinct, nothing disorientating. If you al
ways got to the same chain of hotels, the design and décor has real consistency, even down to the art on the walls of the bedrooms and the menu that they serve to the rooms. Then there are the reward schemes, allowing for complementary nights to build up. Amit fully intends to save them over the duration of his work for Laurence and then take an all-expenses holiday that won’t cost him a dime. Between this and the air miles he’ll be able to go anywhere in the world. Another reward scheme bonus: you rarely get put in one of the worst rooms, near an elevator or an ice machine or a laundry room. Chains like – and need – repeat business. The room that they’ve taken has two double beds, a shared bathroom, a large old-style plasma TV set hidden inside a wooden cupboard, a mini bar that looks not unlike a safe, a wall-mounted table with a stool in front of it. On the wall above the bed is a piece of abstract art that Amit’s seen before, over and over. The hotel could be anywhere.
‘Lie down and rest,’ Amit says to Laurence, putting the bags at the foot of the bed. ‘I’m going to cancel your meetings and then I’m calling about the report. Okay?’
‘Fine,’ Laurence says. He lies back on one of the mattresses, feeling it hard underneath him. He thinks that he should shower, but he doesn’t. He sleeps instead, Amit’s voice a thin murmur in the room with him, no louder than the stark, boxy air-conditioning unit that rattles against the wall beneath the window.
Amit waits on the phone for an answer. He knows how this goes: a certain number of rings, programmed to be just enough to make you feel that ClearVista is busy, but still eager for your custom. Then there is a voice, almost robotic in its hypnotic, soothing qualities. Behind it there is hold music, an ambient storm of guitars and synthesized drums.
‘ClearVista thanks you for waiting,’ the voice says.
Amit paces the room, looking at Laurence on the bed. His body is so lost in the clothes he’s wearing and his chest and brow are sweaty; they’ll need to put his suit in to be dry cleaned. Phone pressed to his ear, he goes into the wardrobe for the laundry bag and then looks on the desk for the form to fill in. He’ll prepare it for Laurence, so that it can be done as soon as he wakes up.
There’s a click on the line. ‘ClearVista,’ the voice says, ‘how can I help?’ It’s the same voice as the one that was asking him to hold: cold and slight and smooth. All of these systems are automated, designed to sound as real as possible. You know that they aren’t when you call, but still. Amit was there when they were choosing how the system should work: a software robot that acts human, but not too much so. It had to be a representation of reality that never reached for the genuinely real. Testers liked to know that they were still speaking to robots, because it made them feel better about themselves, somehow. As soon as the voices crossed the uncanny valley, the testers got nervous. So ClearVista front-loaded them with intentional glitches. A glitch was a reminder of the caller’s own humanity.
‘Hi,’ Amit says. ‘I have an account number?’
‘Thank you,’ the voice says. Amit reels it off. ‘I’m inputting that for you,’ she replies.
‘Do you have a password?’ the voice asks.
‘Oh-two-three-one-oh-oh-yankee-hotel-foxtrot,’ Amit says.
‘That’s excellent,’ she says, ‘how can we help?’ The pitch shifts on the last word, one of the intentional screw-ups.
‘You sent some results through. A report,’ Amit says, ‘I had a report commissioned.’
‘I can see that we have recently sent you a final results document,’ she says.
‘Yeah, you did. But I think there are problems with it,’ he says. ‘There are strange results that don’t make sense.’
‘I assure you that ClearVista makes every effort to ensure absolute accuracy in its products and reports.’
‘Yeah, I don’t doubt that. But I want to question the results. Can I speak with somebody about them?’
‘Sir, the results you were given were created with the algorithm signed off in last February’s agreement. They’re relevant to within a—’
‘I understand that,’ he says. The voice cuts off when he interrupts it. ‘I want to talk to somebody about them, okay? One of the decoders, or somebody.’
‘Very well, sir. I’ll flag the account,’ she says. ‘You will receive a telephone call from a specialist within the next seventy-two hours to discuss the results of the report with you,’ she says. The line cuts dead. Amit thinks about calling back, explaining how much money they spent on the report, demanding to speak to somebody immediately. He doesn’t. He slumps into a chair at the desk and looks at the still-sleeping Laurence, and starts writing emails and making calls to cancel or postpone their meetings.
Deanna parks the car – the new car, that she chose from the ones that Ann was able to get delivered to her straight away, brought over from one of the dealerships in the nearby towns. Ann was right, anyway: the old car was built for a family of five going on seven, large enough to have accommodated them all at any given point. Now, she knows, and she thinks of Sean as she counts the seats in the car, they only need something smaller. She wanted to go for something more efficient as well, because that felt like something she could do; and there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the old car – nothing, Ann told her, that couldn’t be beaten out with some elbow grease or replaced from salvage – so she still got a good trade-in price. She paid for the rest on her credit card. Her car, she reasoned. Laurence will barely be around to drive it for the foreseeable future. He’ll be off around the country, and Deanna will be here, still pretending that life is totally normal until the day that it suddenly isn’t any more. So this is hers, now. It fits her. It’s small and white – white! Laurence will go crazy, she thinks, although only because he always chooses black cars (which, he says, are easier to keep clean) – and when she ran the ClearVista algorithm on it, to check if it was the right car, it seemed to fit in perfectly with her lifestyle. She parks it and looks at it on their drive. She looks at their house, which will go on the market soon enough; as soon as Laurence knows more about his career, something that almost seems to be a done deal at the moment. And she thinks, This is all going to change, because it has no choice but to.
5
When the article about what happened on their flight finally appears, it’s not as bad as it could have been. It breaks on one of the smaller blogs, and the video is grainy and dark and it’s hard to hear what’s going on, taken from one of many cellphone cameras; there’s nothing even vaguely professional about it. Amit can’t be sure it was even from the blue-jacketed man. The video doesn’t make the nationals, which is a relief. What does, albeit briefly, is Amit’s statement about Laurence. He plays it up, writing that Laurence is taking a few days off the trail to spend time with his family, a bit of gentle R and R. Make it sound like he’s a family man who works hard, nothing more. The statements repeat the phrases over and over, about how much Laurence has been on the road trying almost too hard to drill the point home. That’s when a story suddenly clicks. Entirely too hard and it’s lost, because people begin to pick holes. You can always tell when somebody’s trying too hard to bullshit you. Amit’s list of ways to run – and, in theory, win – a campaign, is huge. He began writing them when he was at university and then reworked them when he was hired by ClearVista in their early days. It wasn’t until the last election that people really began to notice his blog and his articles for the specialist press, when his predictions began jibing with – or trumping – the ones being made by the big boys, those companies who had invested billions over the years in their own software. His were a combination of math and guesswork, and they stood toe-to-toe.
Now, Amit reads the comments on the various blogs to serve as a distraction. Depending on who’s reporting the story, they vary wildly. Some are sympathetic, insinuating the toll that personal tragedy takes, understanding how hard it is to win the nomination in these trying times; others are callous, calling him names – or, worse still, calling him weak. He looks at Laurence, lying on one of the room�
�s beds: on top of the blanket that lies over the duvet, suit trousers still on, shirt a mess around his body. He is sunken into the mattress enough that he looks almost frail. It’s a shock, Amit reminds himself. Getting that data, those results, that’s not something that you expect – or want. And he knows that there wasn’t a problem with the report itself. Laurence doesn’t know it, but Amit logged in and proofed the answers before they were even submitted, making sure that there were no confessions slightly too askew to come back from. The survey was perfect. He thinks about the things that Laurence has said and done; those things that have caused issues with the public. But there are also the two major psychological factors that frequently come up, perhaps rightfully so – the twin traumas that he suffered in Afghanistan, and when Sean died.
Amit tells himself that the results of the report cannot be accurate, because there’s nothing in Laurence’s past that means they can be that cut and dried. The report works, he knows, by using every piece of information available about Laurence – hell, every piece of information about the election and anything related that it can find in the deepest, darkest corners of the Internet – in order to generate its results. There’s a margin of error, but not much of one. So maybe there’s something on the Internet that Amit hasn’t seen, something that he hasn’t taken into account?
There’s a nightmare scenario, one that statistics and jargon and rules for debate cannot overcome: that there is information about Laurence that hasn’t yet come to light. Information that maybe hasn’t been confessed, but that is somewhere, a rumor turned into plausible truth. Maybe it’s something that’s been buried underneath the veneer, a moment from the past that’s been dredged up by ClearVista’s data mining algorithms. There’s irony there, if that’s the case: that’s the part of the software that Amit was instrumental in helping to create.
He googles Laurence’s name again, and he clicks on the last page – the lowest visits, the lowest hits. He’s done this enough, and had whole teams of investigators on it – dredging up all the madness that’s going to be discovered when Laurence gets further down the line, when he’s actually pitching his tent in the electoral nominee field, when people are trying to discredit him and point out the times he smoked pot, the women he slept with and never called, the DUI charges he once had as a teenager – but now Amit wants to look again, just in case there’s anything new. He sorts it by date, to see the oldest mentions of Laurence, and then by popularity again. So many pages of hits, and nothing that, at a glance, he hasn’t seen before.