by Julian Folk
The Lexus spins. Ayelet succumbs to dizziness. Gladys throws up. The smell and spray of her vomit induces Ayelet to vomit.
Baby, don’t be a preemie.
CRASH.
The spinning of the Lexus stops. A body of water stopped it. Gladys pulls the handle, kicks the door and brown gunk pours in. Ayelet’s door opens for her.
Connor extracts her. The paintball welt on his forehead captivates her. The reeking of the water induces dry heaves.
Dizzy, Gladys twists and falls in the waist-high water. Goes under. Students raise her up. Geese divebomb them.
Ayelet stands on her two feet. Connor marches her to the grass. Unharmed geese hiss, nip and beat their wings. The birds divebomb and Connor bats them away.
The college ambulance meets them at the pavement. Paramedics lay Ayelet on a stretcher. “My laptop,” she says.
Connor shows her the bag, not a wet spot.
She detects a glint of a smile on him.
Hubby did well.
Chapter 7
The nips and scratches broke Ayelet’s skin. The wings batted her eyes, mouth and nose. The goose-shit water soaked three quarters of her body. On a borrowed phone, she Google searches goose shit:
“The feces may contain parasites, bacteria, viruses, fungus.”
None of it fazes the Student Health Center’s boyish doctor:
“I’m discharging you, Mrs. Martin,” he says. “Buy a burner. Call an ambulance if symptoms develop. Don’t do any driving.”
Officer Isoldi walks Connor and Ayelet home in exchange for Ayelet’s promise to sign her books. At the house, Isoldi kicks back, drinks wine and discusses her MMA sideline. “I’m undefeated, but I haven’t fought outside of Western Mass yet.”
Connor scissors the burner package, reads the directions and sighs. “Requires email activation,” he says. “We’re fucked.”
“Jason Bourne never had to—” Ayelet says.
“We’re not Jason Bourne,” he says.
With a measure of tenderness, he knocks his forehead against the table.
“I’d let you use mine but I’m sure it’s hacked,” Isoldi says.
The ladies’ chat segues to girl talk. Isoldi snaps a selfie with Ayelet, who snatches the phone and tells the cop, “Make a muscle.” Standing back-to-back, they strike a Rosie the Riveter pose.
Connor volunteers to take the photo.
Isoldi’s belt attracts his curiosity. Specifically, the weapons it hosts: gun, Taser, baton and pepper spray. Nobody hacks that hardware.
He leaves the ladies be. His body demands exercise, a furious six-mile-run. But it absorbed a lot of paintballs last night. The welt on his forehead embarrasses him; the other welts ache. Nobody knows the dangers awaiting him tonight. So he heads to the backyard and plops in the hammock. The awesome overhang of the spruce branches provides the illusion of protection. The evergreen smell lulls him to sleep as the local news plays in Gladys’s porch.
Four people died in front of the Post Office today.
A Boston news producer, Ilyse, contacts Xavier. Xavier walks to the house—he won’t drive—and connects her to Connor. Husband and wife agree to be interviewed on local news about the hacking/stalking/abuse. Ilyse and her team will travel to the house, from Boston, to prep them.
“Do a good job,” Ilyse says, “and the story might go national.”
Xavier hugs Connor goodbye.
“I’d like to put you on leave, man,” Xavier says.
“No. Two students emailed me,” Connor says. “They said they’re coming tomorrow. Let me teach. I need to.”
Xavier nibbles on his fist as he ponders the risk/reward. “Sure,” he says. “But if any bad shit goes down…”
“I’ll voluntarily take leave.”
They shake.
This will be the first and last time I teach a class.
Ayelet sleeps.
Within Connor’s mind, high hopes and low paranoia run amuck.
He pictures Big Bro pulling up, pledging to bring the full weight of the FBI down on these murderous hackers. But Robert ain’t here. And he hasn’t sent anyone.
Big Bro’s busy, no doubt. High-maintenance wife, high-maintenance sons. Plus, the counterterrorism beat. Robert’s likely in Iraq, neck-deep in ISIS atrocities.
But Connor must reach Robert somehow, give him a full update of this madness, just in case Big Bro has the power to act.
He’s gotta do it on the sly.
Avoid hackable gadgets/appliances/vehicles.
Avoid surveillance cameras.
Avoid aerial surveillance—drones.
Eric Rice is dead. Somehow, his grudge survives. It has been adopted by a group more systematic, organized and thorough than Eric ever was.
And possibly more violent.
The man behind it was hurt. Hurt badly. The injured man developed great skill and acquired scary power. He’s the mastermind. Harming Connor and Ayelet feels like justice to him. As it would for Eric.
Connor consulted Eric’s Wikipedia page during each of his empty lectures. The entry, which Connor wrote, hasn’t changed. After Eric separated Connor from his scrotum, he spent a year in a psych hospital. The castrator demonstrated remorse and proclaimed Jesus Christ his Lord and Savior. MIT bought it. Eric completed a degree in computer science. Perfect GPA in their system, 5.0.
The morning of graduation, Cambridge police raided Eric’s campus apartment. Found a male Jamaican-American sophomore chained to a pipe in the basement. Eric had kidnapped the man in January and imprisoned him for five months. He forced the victim to adopt a program of extreme self-improvement, while locked in the basement. Police kicked the door down and cornered Eric in his bedroom. He aimed an illegal handgun at them. Cops filled his skinny body full of bullets. The count was fifty-four.
Connor, Robert, Jan and Jimmy attended the funeral.
No pictures of the body leaked, but Officer Rice sobbed and howled and collapsed in church.
Eric must be dead.
So who’s doing this?
In Ayelet’s office, Connor secures a pen, paper and envelope. The letters to Robert—one to his work; one to his home; the other to his boss, O’Neil—write themselves. Now he needs a stamp.
Same drawer. Rolls of stamps. Because Ayelet sometimes mails manuscripts.
Connor dresses head-to-toe in his least-faded black clothes, throwing a black hoodie over his torso. Ouch. The strained shoulder still burns. He folds the envelopes and zips them in his pocket.
He darkens the house and stares through the open blinds at the moonlit backyard. Tonight, a different cop parks in front but nothing moves, nothing stalks, back here. He exits.
Last night’s was a full moon. This one lavishes just as much light, looks just as a full. Although a nerd might call it waning gibbous. The spruce trees block the moonlight from above, but it seeps in from the side and gives gothic illumination to the spiked wood fence.
Challenges annoy Connor. But this challenge differs from the usual kind. This challenge is physical. A gateway to nature. It invites, entices, even seduces. This is a man who spent thirty years cooped up in cities and suburbs.
He leaps vertically, a few inches, and grasps the slanted sides of the spikes. He pulls himself up, swings his leg high, wedges his black sneaker in a crevice and looks down at the earth on the other side.
Short drop.
His sneakers clear the spikes. He lands in a crouch. With beautiful indifference, the woods greet him.
That was Olympic shit: perfect 10 on the landing.
But the terrain resists him. The lake comes closer to the fence than he knew. Steep dropoff, unstable ground. Possibly, the lake extends underneath it. The old spruce roots resemble small gnarled trees. Very smooth. Tough to traverse. Easy to twist an ankle on…
So Connor accepts the obvious. He uses vines and roots to climb fifteen feet down to the water. Leery of snapping turtles and bathing bears, he wades at a brisk clip.
Ooh, warm water. In up to his shins. Heal
thier smell than the campus pond. He sees a campsite fire on the other side. Nobody out here tonight—except me—has work or school tomorrow. His legs slice the water to minimize splashing. Enthusiasm never flags. He arrives at the road unmolested.
Main Street sleeps. The police investigated speedily and the town cleaned the intersection meticulously. No visible surveillance outside the Post Office.
He darts across the street the way he thinks a ninja would and pulls the handle. Sticker says nine a.m. He unzips his pocket, flattens the envelopes, dumps them in the mailbox.
Mission accomplished.
Wading home, Connor pictures Robert’s triumphant arrival in North Berkshire, perhaps by next Monday. The white knight catches the hackers—a bunch of neckbeards influenced by Eric Rice’s example. Federal prosecutors try them. Jury of their peers convicts. Law-and-order judge gives them hell and a hundred years each.
The guy who hacked Scarlet Johansson’s phone got ten years, so…
Thanks to his engrossment in fantasy, Connor gets lost. So lost. He waits for daylight. The sun rises. A terrible fear rises inside him:
What if the hackers already messed with his family? WHAT IF ROBERT, MELODY, THE BOYS AND MOM AND DAD ARE ALREADY HURT, ON THE RUN, OR DEAD?
Chapter 8
Ayelet writes her heart out. Longhand. The trauma of the Siege instigates riots of creativity. These riots play out on the page. Leery of forfeiting her momentum, she calls Martha and asks a favor. Martha marches a counter girl up the block bearing coffee and a black-and-white. Time escapes Ayelet’s attention. Her hands fly across front page/back page/next page. A printing press in one hand. She forgets the local news interview.
Even after the doorbell rings.
It rings twice or ten times.
Ayelet’s chapter races to its conclusion like her Lexus raced, in reverse, to murder the geese.
“It’s Ilyse, Miss Martin.”
The TV producer cracked the door on her own initiative.
Ayelet can’t believe she forgot to lock it…
She slams her pen and bangs her fist. Ink stains her hand like a birthmark. I haven’t showered…
She runs her hair under the faucet, answers the door and says, “I was in the shower.”
Tall, blond, toned: Ilyse is a tide of aggression. She comes in fast and sizes up the scenery. Ayelet’s ebonized hardwood floor and Flemish prints gain Ilyse’s favor. Those piercing eyes, that pointed nose. How strange it is the producer’s not more than twenty-five. Ilyse signals. Her crew of three middle-aged men in t-shirts and cargo shorts lug their equipment bags and rig the lights and mics. A timid female stylist, Cara, trails them.
Cara wipes Ayelet’s face with a warm wet cloth and shows her the ink and chocolate that was on it. Then she applies makeup.
A shaggy man pins a mic on Ayelet.
“Just so you’re prepared, Miss Martin, Amber must ask about the emails,” Ilyse says, “but they won’t be the focus of the interview.”
“Emails?” Ayelet asks.
“Yes, of course,” Ilyse says. “The leaked ones.”
Cara holds a mirror to Ayelet’s made-up face. It reflects the expression of a dog lover who just found out she accidentally ate labradoodle steak.
Ilyse’s lack of understanding resolves instantly. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Miss Martin. You don’t know yet. Of course. The hackers blocked your phone and internet.”
Ayelet hops up, connects the retro phone and dials Dov’s cell.
News of the scandal guts her:
HACKTIVATE published her whole personal email account, even the deleted stuff. Creative Arts Agency fired Dov for his vicious-but-private criticisms of Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen/James Franco. Showtime canceled The Mother of the World and Hachette is threatening to cancel Ayelet’s contract due to the “toxic, bigoted nature” of her correspondence.
While Dov’s emails take shots at the powerful, Ayelet’s take shots at the powerless. He reads her the lowlights: she derided a homeless panhandler on his knees as “a fat bitter pigeon”; Hasidic men in her old Brooklyn neighborhood as “eighteenth century time-travelers”; and Connor as “not man enough for my high school girls’ volleyball team.”
Ayelet processes, calculates, strategizes.
Her memories are vague but she knows she wrote this stuff. Quite a dilemma: legit emails, non-legit leakers—HACKTIVATE already got busted on the I-Stand-with-Frank bullshit. So I won’t own this garbage.
“Nope, Dov. Doesn’t sound like me,” Ayelet says, in Ilyse’s hearing. “Those emails are fakes. You should read yours more closely. I remember you saying great things about Apatow. I wouldn’t be surprised if yours are fakes, too. Generated by hacker software. We’ll fight this together.”
Ayelet hangs up.
Ilyse pounces:
“You’re denying across the board, ma’am?”
“Absolutely,” Ayelet says. “I don’t have a cruel bone in my body.”
Connor walks in, hugs his wife, asks after her injuries and for a status update on Baby.
“Still kicking,” she says.
“Gladys stopped me outside and officially rescinded her apology,” he says. “Didn’t say why.”
“They published fake emails, babe,” she says. “I lost the series.”
“No…”
The soundman jams buds inside their ears.
Despite the threat to her career, Ayelet’s hunger to write dominates her consciousness. The Siege is oxygen to the fire of her creativity. Just like pot was years ago, when, beset by all manner of nonsense at the law firm, she conceived The Mother of the World.
“I’m on no sleep,” Connor says.
“The camera will focus you,” Ilyse says.
Xavier raps his knuckles on the front door.
“The Sociology Department Chair?” Ilyse asks. “Perfect.”
“I’m just checking up on Ayelet,” Xavier says.
“I appreciate the thought,” Ayelet says, “but you shouldn’t get drawn in deeper…”
“I have faith in the truth,” he says.
The crew members seat Xavier on a stool, mic him up and jam in the buds. Cara dabs his shaved pate to reduce glare. Ilyse tells him, “Be calm and natural.”
“Babe, I hiked to the Post Office last night,” Connor says. “Hopefully, Robert, by Monday…”
She clasps his hand.
Audio suddenly pipes in. The anchor, Amber, mentions HACKTIVATE. She uses the word “damning” to describe the victims’ hacked emails.
Ayelet’s face appears on the monitor in front of them. No warning. Wow, I’m huge. Should I mention I’m seven months pregnant? Amber fires the first question at her:
“Hello, Miss Martin. Before we discuss the brutal digital siege that has upended your life, I want to ask you about deeply troubling emails of yours, published by HACKTIVATE, which resulted in the cancellation of your Showtime TV series, The Mother of the World. Let me quote—”
INTERRUPT. DENY. FILIBUSTER.
“Absolutely not, Amber. I will not let you read that drivel. Those emails were fabricated out of whole cloth. The hackers created the bullpucky I-Stand-with-Frank campaign to get my husband Connor fired. Because of that hoax, an unstable neighbor named Gladys threw a brick through my window and seriously injured an innocent educator. Now these same people who brought you the discredited I-Stand-with-Frank crap manufactured fictitious emails, thousands of them, using sophisticated software, in order to damage my career. This time it worked. And it’s a damn shame.”
Everyone in the house, the Boston studio and in the home viewing audience knows Ayelet lies to them. But no can prove it. So the anchor moves on.
“Alright,” Amber says. “We’ll keep viewers updated on any developments. Now, Mr. Yard, let’s talk about the hacked email attributed to you in which you say, and I quote—”
Ayelet hankers to jump in and cut Amber off again, but it’s not her place. Connor must do it, and do it vehemently. Though this tactic, like any other,
has its limits.
“ ‘The students have made our university a police state.’ This quote was made in reference to New York University, Professor Yard, where you earned your PhD. The quote continues: ‘Identity politics has gone too far.’ ”
UH-OH, CONNOR!
DENY! DENY! DENY!
CAST ASPERSIONS AT AMBER FOR REPEATING THIS NONSENSE!
TESTIFY TO THE VIRTUES OF CAMPUS POLITICS!
Connor goes pink with shame, then crimson with rage.
“That’s horseshit,” he barks.
YES!
Ilyse shakes her head in terror.
“I assisted in writing disciplinary guidelines for hate speech at the university,” Connor says. “Most of what we call ‘political correctness’ is nothing more than treating other people with equal concern, respect and dignity. Identity politics is, in fact, empathy politics.”
Ayelet nods along. Watch my husband save his job, everyone! Connor wrote those guidelines on a cruise to Nova Scotia. She paid his way.
But sleep deprivation strips away his filter:
“I support oppressed people more than oppressed people support themselves!”
Uh-oh. Hubby’s toast.
Xavier runs damage control:
“Connor’s just being silly. Joking around about a serious subject.”
Connor apprehends his mistake:
“Bad joke. I apologize.”
He’s still toast. He’ll never teach again. From now on, Ayelet’s the sole breadwinner…
Ayelet hears a polite knock at the door. A tap, really. The light rigger answers. Connor corrects his mistake and mixes in comments about the stalking.
Officer Isolidi peeks in, waves to Ayelet and whispers to the light rigger:
“Me and my partner got called away on an emergency. We’ll be back as soon as possible.”
Emergency?
Doesn’t smell right.
The anchor asks Xavier whether Connor can still be an effective teacher at the college.