One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “We’ve got trouble,” he said.

  Rosten took the chair at Joyce’s right hand where Sabby Chandrahary usually sat. Odd how different a room can look from an unfamiliar spot at the table.

  “With the deal?” Rosten said.

  “This can kill the deal,” said Joyce. “Somebody has penetrated the database.”

  Rosten turned to the door out of a strange impulse to see if he had been followed.

  “How?” he said.

  “We don’t even know what damage he’s done,” said Joyce. “Or she. Or they. Or it. A phantom. Anyone and no one. He comes and goes and leaves no tracks.”

  Rosten looked to the door again.

  “That can’t be true,” he said. “There’s always a way to trace.”

  “Anything can be true, I’m afraid,” said Joyce. “That is the sum total of our knowledge—that this could be absolutely anything.”

  Rosten closed his eyes.

  “It doesn’t go away,” said Joyce.

  Rosten looked upward. The chandelier had begun to move.

  “You’ve informed the Audit Committee?” he said.

  “We don’t know enough,” said Joyce.

  9

  The waiting room was empty—its walls blank. The only color was a bouquet of magazines on a low rack, and they had wilted. Gunderman could not get comfortable in the chair. He looked at his watch. In two minutes he would be losing time from his session. Not such a terrible thing, since he was not sure what was safe to talk about.

  When Lawton and Gunderman had gone to give Rosten a lack of progress report, Gunderman had wanted to include Joyce. “Let’s leave the CEO clear of this, OK?” Rosten had said. No dispute there. As far as Gunderman was concerned, the responsibility was all on him. Until he changed jobs, system security had been at the top of his position description. The Wise Man probably would remind him that even if he had gotten board approval to test the new encryption system, it could not possibly have prevented the disaster. Gunderman knew this was logically correct, but sometimes his brain drove past the accumulation point into the tumult where all failures swirled together—the disaster at the board, Maggie’s growing list of his faults, the hacking. No wonder Lawton had traded him away to the only man at Day and Domes who would have him.

  Suddenly a large head appeared in the doorway to the inner hall. Gunderman jumped up from the chair as if he had been found out. He followed the Wise Man to his office.

  “So, Sam. Where to begin?”

  Gunderman was only sure where not to.

  “Have you ever heard of the three-body problem?” he said.

  “Most of my patients find that having one body is problem enough.”

  “When Isaac Newton used differential equations to explain the movement of the heavenly spheres, he only considered them two by two. Earth and sun, for example. The pull of the mass of the moon was too small to have an effect anyone could imagine measuring at that time, so he simply disregarded it.”

  “This has something to do with your feelings?”

  “The trouble was that over the years measurements became more and more precise, and the problem of the effect of the third body became unavoidable. When scientists attempted to use Newton’s calculus to compute it, the equations became unsolvable. This became one of the great mathematical mysteries of the 19th Century, so intractable that the King of Sweden offered a prize for its solution. The French mathematician Poincaré won, and in the process of writing up his proof for publication, he got the first glimpse of what mathematicians now call chaos.”

  “It’s an old story. Things fall apart, make a mess.”

  “Chaos isn’t random. It is deterministic—fully governed by the laws of physics—but not predictable the way the arc of a parabola is. Think of the weather.”

  “That’s a comfort.”

  “When you model a three-body system, you get a fuzzy-looking orbit diagram. You see, you cannot say precisely where each of the three bodies will be in relation to one another at any given moment in the future. There are laws, but they’re not linear.”

  “Have you been feeling unsteady?”

  “I guess what I’m feeling is perturbed.”

  “That’s a word from physics, Sam. Try another.”

  “Something is happening at home. My wife. I can’t solve her anymore.”

  “You see her as a mathematical problem?”

  “The thing is, biological systems themselves are nonlinear, given to chaos.”

  “Often we intellectualize in order to avoid our feelings. How does chaos feel to you? See if you can tell me in common language.”

  “Her mood has been oscillating.”

  “A story. Tell me a story, Sam.”

  “Sometimes at dinner, when I’m talking about my day, she just gets up and leaves the table. Not just the table. Sometimes she leaves the house altogether.”

  “Do you ever ask about her day?”

  “When I do, it always seems to be that she has been caught in the middle between women she thought were friends. The three-body problem.”

  “You were doing well up till the end.”

  “Even if I take her side, she says that I don’t really mean it, that I’m only humoring her, that I treat her as though I think she’s being too sensitive.”

  “Do you think that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well then.”

  “She keeps an iterative map.”

  “Try again.”

  “It’s like keeping score. Each of my failures sets off a strobe and stops that moment in time, preserves it forever. Pop! A data point. She never forgets even one of them. Pop! What is it that you call it, like when the twin towers fell?”

  “Flash memory.”

  “And when the strobe goes off again, she flashes back on all the earlier data points.”

  “Do you ever connect the dots?”

  “Imagine them spreading to the right from the y axis. The x axis is time, the y is intensity of resentment. As time passes, the dots rise and become more concentrated. Little things: an unsympathetic word. Big things: leaving the hospital room during delivery because I was beginning to feel faint. More and more of them accumulate until the map is so heavily populated that when you connect the dots, it looks like a piece of woven cloth. That’s what I mean when I say I can’t solve her anymore.”

  Gunderman stopped and looked over at the Kleenex box.

  “Do you want to take a moment?”

  Gunderman did not answer. Nor did he take a tissue.

  “Can you try to describe the feeling another way?”

  “The score isn’t right. Some of her data points are moments when I actually stood by her, when it was a sacrifice to do so, when I felt what she felt, moments when I really loved her. As far as she was concerned, even then I failed the test. If you look at a distorting mirror long enough, you’ll see the reflection as real.”

  “Do the strobe lights ever make you cry?”

  “I don’t cry.”

  “You got close a little bit ago.”

  “Frustration.”

  “Or was it anger? You are allowed to be angry when you are wronged. A great scientist once said that.”

  “I’m getting annoyed now.”

  “Or is it fear?”

  “I’m afraid of what exactly?”

  “I want you to think more about that third body. The one that perturbs you. Can you come in twice next week?”

  “I’m going to be very busy. I may have to cancel the sessions we already have on the calendar.”

  “Well, we’ll need to think about the why of that, too.”

  Grace had worked in a lot of temporary offices over the years: sans music, sans art, sans view, sometimes even sans window. Just a Steelcase desk, a phone with a single line and no voice mail, an Aeron knockoff to sit on, and perhaps a tiny, round table with two uncomfortable chairs. She always brought along a family photo in an Office Depot frame. Until recently it was Jim and kids at
the beach, cross-country skiing, hiking in the mountains at Banff. She and Jim took turns with the camera, so each photo was a member of a pair, one with him in it for her and one with her in it for him. Now the one she brought along had just the kids, and soon the older photos would be divided, the family as a matter of law being two overlapping sets, like a Venn diagram.

  She looked at her BlackBerry for the nth time since returning from the war room but still found nothing but RSS feeds about the companies she followed, the usual traffic from the bank, and some more ads for something called Viagra for women. She had never been in less need of pharmaceutical aid. OK, except for the pill. She had restarted that when she made the bid to be on the Day and Domes engagement. She felt foolish when she took the first one, but she did not fail to take the second. By the time the bank had put her on the team, she was toggling between thrill and shame. Tom hadn’t even known she was working on the project until he’d walked into the war room to do the first overview. His expression when he saw her pushed her deep into the shame quadrant. He left as soon as he finished his presentation, giving scarcely a look in her direction. She didn’t see him again for days. Once, after hours, when she knew he was out of town, she looked into his office. She could have used some pharmaceuticals then—a Xanax-SSRI cocktail—because she had gone beyond shame into mortification.

  Now she could scarcely believe there was a straight line between that time and this. The first night, she came close to the fear quadrant, but then they were touching, and she flew all the way out beyond time and the best corner of the graph.

  “I am so sorry for leaving you,” he said.

  She reached out and touched his hand.

  “Now is not the time for talking,” she said.

  They fell asleep without turning off the lights, and by the time she woke up, he had already gone to the Dome. Later that morning, they were together in the war room. He was called away, then in the afternoon he came to her temporary office. He kept the desk between them as he put a key next to her BlackBerry.

  “To let you in tonight,” he said.

  “You won’t be there?”

  “I don’t know when.”

  “Did he hate the presentation?”

  “It isn’t that,” he said.

  “I’ll get something we can warm up.”

  “Maybe you’d rather stay at the hotel,” he said, “so I don’t wake you.”

  “Wake me,” she said and came around the desk. He turned toward the door before she was ready.

  “I’d feel better if I knew you would let yourself fall asleep,” he said.

  “Whatever it is, good luck,” she said.

  The rest of the day there were no meetings in the war room, no bustle in the hall, no hint of what was going on. At one point she took the elevator to the boardroom floor, prepared to describe her purpose as architectural if she were caught. She saw no one and felt no hint of his presence.

  When she let herself into his townhouse that evening, everywhere she looked she sensed diminishment: the colorless walls; the way the furniture kept a distance; the picked-up pieces that lay on flat surfaces—a lake-polished stone, a large feather of brown and white, an empty picture frame. Whatever it was that had happened to him had taken away most of what he was.

  She ordered pizza with a lot on it. Waiting for the delivery, she turned on CNN. The news passed through her without snagging. When her BlackBerry rang with “What a Feeling” and it wasn’t him, she didn’t answer. After eating, she put the rest of the pizza in plastic containers, wrapped herself in a sweater, and disposed of the cardboard box in a Dumpster outside. Back in front of the TV, she soon caught herself nodding. She checked her BlackBerry again, but there was nothing from him. She did not want to get into bed, but what was wrong with curling up on the couch? It must have been much later when the door opened, because at first it was a dream.

  “Tom?” she said, raising herself on an elbow.

  The only light came from the television. He turned it off. She started to sit up.

  “Stay,” he said, slipping out of his coat and pulling off his tie. He sat down, put his hand on her head, and eased it onto his lap.

  “Is everything OK?” she said.

  “Sleep,” he said.

  “What about you?” she said. “There’s pizza.”

  “This is what I need,” he said.

  She rolled her head for a kiss, but he was looking straight out into the darkness. She touched his cheek and he leaned down to meet her. Then he began gently stroking her upper arm, and she relaxed into him.

  When she woke up again, it was still dark. Four thirty by the LED next to the TV, and he was gone.

  two

  THE

  MAN ON A

  BRIDGE

  1

  Rosten left her a note saying he was sorry to have gotten back so late and gone so early: “Crisis at the Dome. Nothing to do with what you’re working on. We’ll talk tonight.”

  She did not see him all day and ended up getting back to his apartment before him in the evening. She had no idea what he had steeled himself to do, so she just chatted away as she warmed the pizza and put it out on the coffee table with some vegetables and dip. He had no taste for any of it.

  “I need to tell you what happened,” he said.

  “You were tied up,” she said. “I understand.”

  “I mean in New Haven and after,” he said.

  “Let’s just enjoy our time together,” she said. “Now is now.”

  “Now came of then,” he said.

  Her plate went down onto the glass tabletop with such precision that it made no sound.

  “It started at the Lizzie,” he said.

  “That was a whole other life,” she said.

  “Professor Hawthorne had invited me to meet him there,” he said. “I can’t say I wasn’t flattered. Whenever he spoke to you, it made you feel like you were something.”

  “Actually, he only spoke to you,” said Grace.

  “It was one of those late-February days that seem like spring,” he said. “It got me thinking about graduation—starting to write, getting some kind of job, reading difficult verse at the Elizabethan Club.”

  “And being with me,” she said.

  She put it out there as if to get the worst on the table, which saddened him, because she had no idea how much worse it was going to get.

  “I was early, so I waited outside in the garden near the statue of Shakespeare,” he said. “When it was time and I went inside, Hawthorne was at the table, directly under the portrait of the Virgin Queen, his hair as electrostatic as hers. He was wearing that Army field jacket of his with the upside-down American flag on the back, the janitor pants with a hammer sling on the leg, and, of course, the awful black Keds. He was immersed in Critical Inquiry. I started to pull out a chair, but he stopped me and said we had to go into the vault. You remember it.”

  “It was like the basement of a bank.”

  “Why didn’t you let me get you into the Lizzie?” he said. “The Elizabethan was your period. Marlowe. Kyd. Jonson. They were all in the vault.”

  “I would have still been your guest,” she said.

  “Everybody gets in through somebody,” he said. “Hawthorne got me in.”

  “That was different,” she said. “It meant something.”

  “Not what I thought,” he said.

  The vault had stood wide open. It had always made Rosten think “The Cask of Amontillado,” so when Hawthorne began pulling the door closed behind them, he stepped forward and put out his hand.

  “Don’t worry,” Hawthorne said, dropping his eyes to the floor, where a brick prevented it from closing all the way.

  Deprived of the light from the outside room, the shelves of ancient volumes under the bare incandescent bulb went amber. Hawthorne looked like some extinct creature preserved in it.

  “I asked you here,” he said, “because we need to discuss something that cannot go beyond the two of us.”


  For a moment Rosten thought he was being tapped.

  “Is there a secret society?” he said.

  “A secret society,” Hawthorne said. “Very good. I had never considered it that way.”

  Rosten felt worse than a Fool; there was always some wisdom in a Fool.

  “Actually,” Hawthorne said, “I’m acting on behalf of Ernest Fisherman. I don’t imagine you know the name.”

  “It seems familiar,” Rosten said. He saw his lameness reflected in Hawthorne’s expression.

  “From time to time I encounter a young man who strikes me as having the qualities that suit him to help in Fisherman’s work,” Hawthorne said.

  “He’s a scholar?”

  “A very unconventional one.” Hawthorne’s face took on a sudden intensity that Rosten had not seen even in the pictures from the years of rage. “I’m not talking theory,” he said. “This is real life and real death. Fisherman is with the CIA.”

  Grace pulled back at the head and shoulders.

  “It was Hawthorne who recruited you?” she said.

  “He had gone to work for the Agency straight out of the College,” Rosten said, “brought into it by a man named James Jesus Angleton. Angleton had grown up in Italy, had known Ezra Pound there. He had come to Yale as an undergraduate and soon was editing a literary journal, Furioso. Very avant-garde for its day. You’d be surprised at the names he published. As Angleton rose in the intelligence world, he kept his contacts in the English Department. Fisherman was his first recruit. The two of them pulled in Hawthorne, who had already managed to publish a dazzling paper on the Pisan Cantos.”

  “He did like to dazzle,” said Grace.

  “They had a lot to talk about. Angleton thrived on the Cantos’ opacity,” said Rosten. “In his line of worked, he lived it.”

  “So the spy novels are right,” she said.

  “Understated,” said Rosten. “The best were by Beckett.”

  Grace darkened as the opacity began to descend on her.

  “There’s that famous picture of Hawthorne leading a huge antiwar rally on the Green,” she said. “You’re telling me that was all an act?”