After James

by Michael Helm

  Maybe it was her way of putting things, saying “we” instead of “you,” promoting a note of shared romance, that kept me from feeling her degree of concern. What if we were just a couple of suggestible dopes, Amanda and I, knocking around in a crazy world?

  “So you’re visiting the chat rooms,” I said.

  “No one comes right out and admits it, but that’s why everyone needs to talk online about Three Sheets. Each of them believes in this secret communication, but they’re afraid to say so. Instead they debate about the poems and build up profiles of the Poet.”

  It was the theory I’d presented to Dominic. She drew her feet up under her, which had the effect of tilting her slightly in my direction. Her posture was exactly that of the Londoner in our pre- and postcoital talks on the rented Spanish couch. We weren’t bed loungers. We made use of our few rooms, reading at the kitchen table, having sex in the shower, watching TV shows on the couch, talking at the kitchen table, watching sex between people in a shower or in bed or on a couch on her laptop on the couch. The memory belonged to some other life.

  “I can’t get free,” she said. “I’ve seen details in the poems, things about Marcus, and now I can’t stop looking for more.” She said he was killed in Guatemala City when a pallet of construction bricks fell on him from the roof of a restaurant where he had lunch every day. “Same patio, same chair. The official version is, a kid working construction, twenty. The pallet was on scaffolding. The kid claimed to be trying to secure the platform but it tilted and the pallet fell perfectly off the side. From just two storeys up. Most of the bricks weren’t even broken.” Marcus had just written her that he had evidence and the names of Guatemalan government and military figures who were using the U.S.-funded surveillance apparatus to identify and detain human rights activists, some of whom had died in custody or been found dead in the streets. “Marcus died before the list could be published. It wasn’t in his effects.”

  Suddenly I was cold, sorrowful, still. She looked at my chest, as though it might offer what she needed, then up again. Out of nowhere, the way of things could come crashing down on us. We all knew this fact and worked hard to forget it. You could make millions from people’s need to forget the way of things.

  “I need to stop talking for a while,” she said.

  She disappeared into some isolated penetralium (great word, Keats, in a complaint about Coleridge) of her thoughts. There we sat, sometimes looking at each other. A minute passed. I didn’t move or speak or check my phone. Then I felt it coming on, a dread truth I hadn’t been willing to admit, but just in time she reached across and cupped a hand behind my neck.

  The word that came to mind—nothing to be done—was penetration.

  —

  The first time I woke it was still dark. I knew instantly where I was and felt wonderful. When next I woke the sun lit everything and I lay in pristine confusion. I rolled over and there she was, head on pillow, looking at me. She smiled. Her face seemed a little fuller, her eyes somehow a different shape. She unfolded herself from the sheets and walked out of the room in the underwear she’d slept in. More even than the sex, which we hadn’t actually had, just a kind of making out, gropings and glimpsings, what felt like teenage prewar sex, then falling asleep together half-clothed, this was so far our most intimate moment. She returned with a sheet of paper and we sat on top of the covers, shoulder to shoulder. She looked down at the page—there was a poem on it—and said that it was why she couldn’t let go of Three Sheets.

  The poem was “Seconding.” I remembered it from the site. To read a poem is one thing; to be directed to it, another; to be directed by a new, half-nude semi-lover, a thing of a whole different order.

  A former general back home in the jungle

  capital from DC where specialists made

  the first breaches in the wall around

  his forever silent teenage daughter

  inquired about transforming the vacant

  third floor of the old municipal building

  into a school for children in need, not

  knowing that the floor processed

  cocaine. The lords kidnapped

  his wordless girl, left her in a stream,

  though death was not by water. And now

  the general is talking. In the beginning

  we killed one, he says, though which

  one is debated. By the third day

  and thereafter we killed without

  distinction. In the end we killed our natives,

  Americans, Dutch, the British,

  Canadians. We killed wives and daughters,

  uncles and mothers. Workers, piano teachers,

  men on the road.

  The Turks we killed and their enemies.

  The Spartans, Persians and Prussians

  and Mongols. We killed ancient mud

  warriors carrying spears. Their final words

  covered the earth in languages. The elephants

  they rode. Their caged birds.

  You have to understand we killed

  them all many times over, as I will now be killed.

  Words recorded by a visitor

  to this country of punctuated endings,

  in his blue notebook stolen from the bag

  at the scene not secured by police who

  didn’t ask questions.

  “Marcus.”

  She nodded. I reached to touch her but she shook her head. A dull longing to put my feet on the ground, a longing made all the duller by my clichéd condition to have been born into a safe class in a safe country, a good family, born lucky. By degrees, many Westerners feel the same. We are our own country, the young, dumb-lucky educated Westerners.

  “Which details?”

  “The jungle capital is Guatemala City. The killers. The blue notebook, which would have contained the names.”

  “Not the general and his daughter?”

  “He never mentioned them. But don’t tell me there’s still room for coincidence. I’ve been reading around, trying to figure it out. That’s what I’m doing with my days here, searching online, emailing contacts in Holland and Central America, trying to find the identity of the general. He might know who killed Marcus, or at least maybe I can get the same story he did.”

  “With the same result.”

  “Not if I don’t travel there.”

  “Did you ever see this notebook?”

  “He always had one with him. A blue one was in a picture he sent me the week before he was killed. But it wasn’t in his belongings they sent. I asked about it. The police claimed there was no notebook at the scene or in his room.”

  “Is this the only poem about your brother?”

  “Before ‘Seconding,’ every now and then there was a phrase or line that seemed sort of loaded, but they showed up in the more obscure poems and I wasn’t really sure what I was seeing. I was actually afraid to see more. It was like any day there’d be a poem called ‘When Marcus Was Killed Under a Ton of Bricks.’ And then this.”

  She got up and stood by the window and lit a cigarette. She said something about the sky and I tried to make a note to myself that there’s this in life, too, there’s murder, killing upon killing, but there’s also seeing this person in this moment. If only I could see her against a window once a season, life would be easier. She stubbed out the smoke and returned to bed. Before reading the poem I’d been planning to keep some light in the hour, some hope she’d find a way for me to stay in Rome without money. Now the breathing fact of her was overwhelming. I turned and held her and when she started to cry she pushed me away and let the tears come, then go, closed on herself. At some point she raised her knees and hugged them and dropped her head to her legs in a kind of cannonball-tuck position.

  I was looking at the part of her I could see, more or less at her thighs. I tried to take them in as part of my sense of her. Those thighs are Amanda. Those feet. That forearm. Amanda. So clearly all three syllables. She could never have been Mand
y. Three syllables, the same vowel in each, an assonant echo inside the whole—

  “Penetration,” I said.

  She turned her head to me, made a sort of cautioning expression.

  “Penetration. It’s hacker language. You didn’t tell anyone about the notebook, but you must have written about it. In emails to the police, you just told me. You’ve been hacked.”

  We looked at each other, a distance of about eighteen inches.

  She paused, then slowly nodded.

  I had it, I had it.

  “I have it.”

  She said nothing. I kept my eyes on her, thinking it through, as she must have been. Her round belly, its single roll of skin, heaved a little.

  The theory had weight. People of political interest are flagged. Their online habits fit them into a profile. False sites are seeded, sites for, whatever, eco-activists, currency traders, poetry readers, a site exactly like Three Sheets. But why? Could people be reliably manipulated through a website? Of course they could, if it was one they visited daily and it presented with some authority or inviolable mystery.

  Not quite believing myself, I laid it all out for her. Her thoughts were divided, I could tell.

  “Me with my Solaris effect, you with your conspiracy theory.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, the theory still building in me, cumulonimbus, airy and full of violent consequence. “But still.”

  She got off the bed and left the room and I realized I could never truly know what it meant to her to have solved the mechanism, if not the whole mystery itself, if that was what I’d done. The solution connected to her brother’s murder, to emotions I couldn’t know. I tried to isolate what I did feel about the possibility my own computer had been hacked. I should have felt violated, but didn’t especially. Maybe I didn’t believe my theory, or did believe it in the abstract—big data trawlers could see all—but not the actual. I had no deep secrets or pictures of inflamed privates on my laptop, but the thought of some stranger looking around in my emails new and old, between me and Dominic, me and the Londoner, seemed too unreal to anger me. To make it real, when Amanda returned I imagined a third person with us, hiding somewhere in the room. Did I want to brain them with a bottle of Peroni, or ask them to leave, or just let them listen and watch? Neither. Nor. All. I couldn’t decide. The real world contrives to be unbelievable.

  We wouldn’t tell Durant just yet. We agreed to test the theory’s holding capacity, though how, we had no idea. A way forward would come to us if we stopped looking for it.

  “Tell me about Michigan,” I said.

  —

  The verb surveil is young, a 1960s back-formation of surveillance, itself young, nineteenth century, though from older fragments, the French sur, meaning “over,” and veiller, meaning “watch,” from the Latin vigilare, to “keep watch.” As I noodled around online in Amanda’s bed, learning all this, these unsuspected links between, say, surveil/watch and vigil/witness, with their half-opposing connotations, I pictured Voth’s reflection, there or not, in the window of the watch shop, and felt I was skirting the labyrinth again. One of these days my cha-chas would dance me completely out of sense. Maybe they already had.

  Alpha, beta, gamma…

  “Detta,” she said. Somehow we were dressed and walking now, eating so-so pastries, watching the rhythms of the traffic shooting along beside the Tiber. “Her brother works in cybersecurity.”

  She began to tap Detta on her cell, paused.

  “Is it safe?” Holding up the phone.

  Seeing it in her hand made me think again of my mother, tapping me on her cellphone when she’d sent the picture of the cuneiform tablet. After they died I dreamed of my parents, one or both, almost every night for months, and was still dreaming of them in Rome. Dreams are ours alone. Never to be spied on, stolen, and never really to be shared, even when we try. If we’re lucky something in the waking world, some artifice, roof of wet cedar shingles, sail of meringue on a passing dessert plate, poem, maybe a poem about a dream of a dog in a port slum street, will seem to have the impress of the dream, and for a short time we can set the secret inside the found shape, and imagine that we are known.

  We took a trolley car north and walked to the wide mall outside the entrance to the MAXXI museum. In the courtyard was an enormous, maybe one-hundred-foot sculpture of a human skeleton on its back, all its bones present and exact except for a long, sharply pointed god’s doodle of a witch’s nose. We sat on a low wall in the sun and watched people walk around the skeleton, interested but not visibly moved. Were they thinking of mortality or thinking about the artist thinking about it? Some leaned in very close, inspecting the bones, the materials. I was re-experiencing the thought of my parents lying on their backs, struck and struck until struck dead, working backward to them getting out of the car, my father hit hard in the face, unconscious and no trouble, my mother next, the both of them dragged back into the car, and then I stopped thinking altogether, closed my eyes and listened to the day, to my breathing, and opened them on the curving, white museum building. I told Amanda the museum was audacious simply for being contemporary and in Rome. We discussed ancient capitals, how age and beauty are oppressive, and nostalgia to be feared as a bearer of troubles, losses, animosities, and gilded never-weres.

  Or else they died in a car accident. I got some purchase on the idea and decided I could hang on for the day.

  Detta’s brother, Pierluigi, a suave, young hypomaniac, turned out to be a lot of work. She’d told us he had a disorder, which she had trouble translating but seemed to be a kind of compulsive talking problem, which would be worse when he spoke about the internet. As he emerged from the museum and crossed toward us he looked somehow both fashionable and genuinely (as opposed to fashionably) unkempt, like an undead model, the summer-weight grey sports jacket wrinkled and unevenly faded, tie improvisationally knotted, blond hair wilted from the over-application of some product. He said hello and explained without prompting that he worked with the museum, building the database and conducting penetration tests and vulnerability assessments. It took him some time to convey this because though his English vocabulary was good, his pronunciation was god-awful, as if he’d never heard the language. Amanda addressed him in Italian, which she spoke musically but not well, it turned out, because they settled on English.

  We outlined the Three Sheets phenomenon and my theory. We asked about hacking. Suddenly he became very animated and, oddly, more fluent. His hands began moving in little circles before him, slightly out of phase with each other, as he started to talk about himself. As he spoke through his lunch hour and dinner that night at Detta’s apartment (Detta helping in real time and afterward with the clarifications), and then again in an email sent in the middle of the night, when I was asleep, written in a mix of English and idiomatic Italian that I used Detta and an online site to work through, with a few interpolations of my own, I developed a composite sense of his thoughts, and a very clear one of the ways his condition presented.

  “When you think of the ‘hacker,’ ” he said or wrote, “you will imagine subcultures, crooks and perverts, the geeks in the basements. But these groups overlap like it’s crazy. Political, criminal, government, black hats and the white hats, hats of other stripes and races.” Sometimes his fingers held a cigarette, the smoke sailing in little loops as he performed his hand circles. “No matter how strange we are, always there’s someone who feels like us. We can find these people online. My people are called Keyholers. The name comes from the spy satellites. We are nineteen, in Italian branch. We agree in words and thinking. In English they would call us ‘hacktivists.’ Why have I never met you, Amanda? Are you two lovers?”

  She smiled and asked if we could record him on our phones. He nodded.

  “Detta has mentioned you often. We were bound to meet,” she said. I put my arm around her waist, a move not native to me. Pierluigi seemed to be looking at her clavicle and nodded at it, and kept nodding for maybe twenty seconds after she as
ked if there was any way of finding out if our computers had been hacked.

  “In Keyhole language, what we do, hacker practice, is we call ‘entering all.’ We are the sailors. We sail on virtual wind. We are”—this took many tries to arrive at—“ ‘lifted up into the god prospect.’ Like satellite cameras we can see at same time great distances and smallest movements far below. We see search trends within masses, hear music in the tap tap of the password,” he said. He talked about his special connection to the world, the hunger that develops once you realize you can know more and more. “It’s like religious, the hunger, but the faith is not being blind. It’s all right there in one grosso evidence field.”

  Detta got up from the table (there were four of us, it was evening now) and began massaging his shoulders, trying to relax him, slow him down, but he stopped only to scold her jokingly, in English, for not having introduced him sooner to her North American friends. Around his sister he seemed to speak with more control but then couldn’t stop himself from accelerating. I wanted to pour cold water over his head to save him from his all-seeing vision.

  “Hackers know the living and dead. We’re all the same, no clock time. We float with ghosts and angels and some of them turn and look in your face from the screen, and you know inside them. I am a secret inside a secret.”

  Whenever he started into what seemed to be an answer, he lost track of the question. He never once answered a direct question about anything. I began paying more attention to Detta and Amanda. Their silent exchanges were about managing Pierluigi, Amanda nodding interrogatively at his third empty beer glass, Detta shaking her head slightly. I was worried about him, too, but admit to hoping for some signal about me. Did Detta know Amanda and I had slept together? But then I barely knew it. It was sleep, after all.

  Detta put her hand on her brother’s arm and asked him again to assess our theory. Could he determine if we’d been hacked?

  “Of course they are hacked. Everyone is hacked.” He explained the mechanism. There were dozens of ways into our files. Even clicking on an unsubscribe button could open the gates. “You know Troy, story of the horse. You’re all hosts for remote-access trojans. Someone controls your computer camera and microphone. They’ve installed the keylogger and tracked every password you have.”