by Jim Nelson
He set the dumbbells beside his feet. “Gannon Chancellor.” He shook my hand with a fraternal ease. “He was your friend, then,” Gannon said as we shook.
“He wasn’t a friend,” I said. “A business associate.”
“I’m the head of the Samuel Justin campaign’s Nexternet strategy,” Gannon said. “Mike worked for me.” He looked me up and down, sizing me up. “I recognize your name. I think Mike listed you as a reference.”
“We did that kind of thing for each other,” I said. “He was a good guy.”
He nodded with his jaw set in a thoughtful way, making his carved chin even more prominent. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
It was the canned response of a man who deploys canned responses as stratagems for interpersonal navigation. Gannon may have been thirty-five, but he was putting on the airs of a man ten years older. With his good looks and quarterback presence, plenty of people would have played along with it too. When you’re appealing enough, people naturally give you the benefit of the doubt—it’s genetic, it’s how our brains are wired. Attractive people provide comfortable blanks for our minds to fill in.
“I confess, I have no idea why anyone would have jumped your friend,” Gannon said. “He seemed a likeable guy to me. I certainly had no problem with him.”
I looked around and asked, “Did he have a desk here?”
“Here?” Gannon shook his head. “This is for canvassing the northern districts.”
“So you have a desk here?”
“I have a desk in all the San Francisco offices. Sometimes I come here to think. It’s close to my apartment.”
“And Agg? He worked…?”
“Mike did not have a desk.”
I cleared my throat and tried again. “In what capacity did Agg work for you?”
“For me?”
He was grinding on my patience, sharpening it into a knife.
“No,” I said, “for the campaign.”
“Michael Aggaroy did not work for the Samuel Justin campaign.”
He picked up the dumbbells and carried them into the shadows of the campaign center. “Care for a drink?” he called out, his brick voice echoing off the brick walls.
“Sure.” I plunged into the darkness behind him.
A bottle of bourbon stood guard on a corner desk. He selected an overturned mug from the coffee service and poured me a slug of the whiskey. He drank his from a rocks glass lacking rocks. He offered me the bottle to inspect.
“Buck’s Run,” he said, repeating the name embossed in gold across the blood-red label. “Aged four years in old-growth oak barrels. The angel’s share is nineteen percent. Do you know your whiskeys?”
“Not like you.”
“Four hundred dollars.” He motioned at the bottle with his rocks glass. His fist cradled the glass’ wide base the way a baseball pitcher holds the seams for a change-up. “There’s no reason wasting your time drinking sub-par whiskey.”
He sipped his drink. With his lips pursed to savor the spirits, he held the glass before him as though visually inspecting the craftsmanship that went into producing every ounce.
He took up the dumbbells. He casually pumped them left and right and up and down while we talked. The perspiration on his tanned chest and arms gleamed in the shadowy light, like a flashlight beam scanned across a still pool of crude oil.
“The morning after Aggaroy's murder," I said, "the police think he was planning on having breakfast with an outside consultant about a security question."
“The police told me the same thing.”
“I was the security consultant.”
He stopped pumping the barbells. Gannon’s head swiveled, his profile perfectly outlined in black against the dim gray light coming from the plaza lamps below.
He said, “Is that so.”
“I didn’t get a chance to hear what his question was about. He only told me he wanted to pick my brain. Do you know what he was looking into?”
Gannon left the question unanswered for so long, I wondered if he’d heard it over the patter of rainfall against the windows.
“Are you asking for work?” he said. “You want to pick up where your friend left off?”
“Call it professional curiosity. I’m not looking for a handout. I’d like to know what happened to Agg. I have to wonder if he turned over a rock he wasn’t supposed to turn over."
Gannon began pumping the barbells again, slowly, thoughtfully. "What makes you think he was turning over rocks for us?"
"Because that's the kind of work Agg did. Agg was the best in this town, maybe the best in Northern California. He was beyond background checks and employment interviews."
Gannon, eyes on the windows, made no response.
“If you could tell me what he was looking into when he was killed, I can pick up the trail.” I held up my hands, fingers splayed. “No charge. Pro bono.”
Gannon faced me in silhouette for a protracted quiet moment. His body odor had filled our corner of the gymnasium and it wasn’t sweet. The gray light from the plaza smeared across the left half of his face. Emotionless, his eyes dull and sunken, Gannon set down the barbells. “The matter is closed as far as I'm concerned.” He stretched a palm toward the door. “I’d ask you to leave now.”
12.
I still needed to talk to Leigh Blessing. Unlike Gannon and his prodigious Nexternet presence, I had almost no lead on her. This I knew: Leigh Blessing was age twenty-five, in a relationship with Gannon Chancellor, held multiple degrees in computer science, and drank Blue Pharjé like a fish, if Dr. Warwick's estimation could be trusted.
More than the computer science degrees, I knew the mind of a Pharjé junkie. I began making the rounds to every blue lounge in the vicinity of the Lake Street apartment house. I didn’t even have to query my memex for a map. I knew where to find them. I’m like a water dowser when it comes to blue lounges. Place me on any intersection in San Francisco and I'll sniff out the closest one.
The Russian Orthodox cathedral on Geary Street pealed eight o’clock with clanging bells. The fourth blue lounge I found stood at the middle of a busy commercial block on Balboa Street. Slavic couples and lone Chinese strolled each side of the street.
There I struck gold. Approaching from the east, I spotted Leigh Blessing on the sidewalk staring into a boutique shop window, the store now closed. I don’t believe she was studying the dresses or shoes in the window. In one motion, she ducked her head and stepped through a blue lounge entrance next door to the shop. She entered the way a shame-ridden man enters a pornography shop: head down, eyes focused ahead on nothing, a single forward motion made without pause, hoping not to be noticed. I gave her ninety seconds and followed her inside.
Blue velvet strips formed a skimpy curtain past the door, but it was sufficient to make the lounge a dark and quiet sanctuary from the city. Air-conditioning extracted the muggy heat and made the oasis dry and cool, a welcome change. The interior illumination was neon-blue uplights on the walls and a rope of marshmallow-sized blue bulbs snaking along the back of the bar. Teardrop-shaped liter bottles of Blue Pharjé lined the rear wall. Fluted stemware waited upside-down on bar mats.
Not every blue lounge offers a theme. This one did. Backlit ornate illustrations from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland hung on the walls. The Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit in houndstooth and paisley were all represented in rococo portraiture. The largest was the Caterpillar on a polka-dotted mushroom stool, smoking his hookah.
A couple in Victorian costumes occupied a small table in the rear. He dressed as landed gentry in top hat and a stiff-collared jacket. Uncomfortably, she was costumed as a prepubescent girl in a baby-blue dress with white knee-highs and hair in curls. She was obviously his age, but still. An older man in a linen suit with a porkpie hat slouched in the far corner of the bar. He looked detached from the world, memories wiped and only the present moment preoccupying him. Other patrons were scattered about, recessed against the walls and hidi
ng in shadows, a solitary blue candle flickering on each table. Each had a flute of the neuroliqueur before them, the Blue Pharjé.
Leigh Blessing sat at the keystone of the horseshoe-shaped bar, her slim figure erect, her upright spine almost curved backwards. She wore a woven leather purse on a spaghetti strap. The purse was smaller than my pocket billfold. She held it open eagerly before her while the bartender prepared her Pharjé. The liquid fell from the tender neck of the teardrop bottle as a clean neon-blue filament. It filled the narrow bottom of her fluted glass like filling a test tube, the blue forming a meniscus across its surface.
I claimed a wire-backed stool close to Leigh. I doffed my hat and casually set it on the stool between us. The bartender finished pouring and presented her the Pharjé with a dainty dish of savory crackers. She produced a twenty-dollar bill from the tiny purse like a magician producing the correct card. He filed it away in the cash register.
As this ceremony unfolded, I realized each portrait on the wall was subtly animated. The measurement in the Hatter’s hat changed numbers as his maniacal grin shifted shape. The Cheshire Cat disappeared and reappeared with only his confounding smile as a constant. The Caterpillar’s pipe smoked a shimmering string of spicy-sweet patchouli that hung oily over his head. The movements were so subtle, I had to stare for what seemed a minute to notice.
The bartender approached with a grin not dissimilar than the damnable cat’s. He offered a scented hand towel on a tray. I accepted and cleaned my hands. There’s no ordering in most blue lounges. There’s only one drink on the menu, after all, other than a glass of ice water or ginger ale to clear your palate. He placed a bone-china dish before me with blue flowers and hummingbirds painted across its surface. It too appeared Victorian. The dish was small enough to be an ashtray, but of course no one smokes any longer. I pried my memex from the base of my neck and set it on the sanitized tray. Its tendrils wilted as he poured me my drink, the thick Blue Pharjé draining from the bottle in a slender blue thread. Perspiring from the mugginess and walking all evening, I asked for a glass of ginger ale to start with.
A bone-china tray sat before Leigh Blessing as well. Her memex lay wilted on the lip of the tray. That’s one reason for entering a blue lounge: To disconnect from the Nexternet, its alarms and timers, its messages and voice calls, and most of all, its torrential onslaught of emotional-sensory streams broadcast from the world’s population. Connected to everything, connected to nothing. God’s omniscience and omnipresence is comprehensible once one’s suffered a decade on the Nexternet.
After twelve years of constant exposure to the Nexternet, people were beginning to confuse the real world with the digital world. The real world is a world of oak and steel and cement. The digital world is a world of plastic and molding putty and Play-Doh. When the two conflicted, the world of the digital won out every time. People’s memories were tied to their memexes, and that meant their memories were tied to the Nexternet. When you remembered an event, were you tickling a neuron or accessing a server via Neural Transmission Datagram? People’s digital memories and organic memories had conflated, much like a senile Hollywood actor recalls his early roles as though actual experiences in his young life.
Leigh stared into the blue luminescence of the fluted Pharjé before her with furrowed brow and a piercing gaze. She studied the drink as though emotionally preparing to leap off a high diving board.
Without warning, she faced me and said, “Have we met before?”
Taken aback, I struggled for a bluff. “I don’t think so.”
“I’ve seen you before,” she said. “I know you.”
Her voice was reassuring and not accusatory. It warmed me to hear her speak to me this way. I was a fifty-five-year-old man with a face like a chipped-up dartboard and a grin that sent children running. Young pretty women do not talk to me if they don’t have to. Most don’t have to.
“I used to work on the Old Internet.” I had to stay on track. This wasn’t a social visit. “Years ago, I wrote networking software and developed web sites.”
She turned in her seat toward me and crossed her feet under her floppy summer dress. She’d changed to a different pair of sandals than I’d seen before. These were sandals like Roman gladiators, the straps crisscrossed up her shins. What motivates a woman to wear one style of sandals in the afternoon and another style in the evenings? What memories do these sandals trigger for her? What satisfaction does she feel when she’s crossing the straps like an ancient weaver producing a basket? Feelings so foreign to me, a man who dares not experience cross-gender livestreams.
“Were you famous?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “That was forward of me. I’m just trying to figure out how I know you. I've been studying the Old Internet for two years now.” She made a tight smile. “Let me try that again. What layers of the stack did you work on when you were working on the Internet?”
“That’s not how we thought of it back then.” I was more than familiar with the terminology, but we never spoke in those terms when writing software. “I supposed you would say I worked on transport and presentation, mostly.” I named some of the companies I’d worked for during the first Dot Com boom, as well as some of the contracting work I did afterward.
“I wish I could have been there,” she said. “It was so amazing, I bet.”
The bartender pushed a flute of the blue across the bar to me. Out of habit, I reached for it greedily. I needed to get more out of Leigh before I drank myself into a blue-out. I retracted my claws.
“Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong decade,” Leigh told me. “Sometimes I think I should have been born when the Old Internet was all we had. I mean, I remember it when I was a child. But I didn’t really understand it. My parents wanted me to become a doctor. I didn’t spend much time on the computer until after the Internet was retired.”
“It was a crude system,” I said. “No, it was. It was modeled after the phone company’s system. Packet-switching and numbered endpoints. That kind of engineering goes back to the nineteenth century.”
“I think its simplicity is its beauty.”
“Don’t romanticize it,” I said. “Things were not simpler then. Trust me. They never are. There are no Golden Ages.”
She made a wistful smile that warmed me and told me she didn’t quite believe what I said. She directed her wistfulness to the drink before her. “Are you ready?” She was more eager than me.
I needed to get more out of her before we both blued-out. Sixty seconds was all the time it took for Blue Pharjé’s effects to be felt. Once we drank, question-and-answer time would cease for three or four hours.
You may be surprised I was planning on drinking. A blue-out effectively ended my work day right when I was questioning the most important person in this investigation. I have no defense. I knew I was going to drink the moment I entered the blue lounge and saw her there. Hell, I knew I was going to blue-out the moment I left Gannon Chancellor at the campaign center, him and his quarterback good looks and his smug attitude that someone like me would never have to face the responsibilities he managed each and every day.
“It’s been years since I’ve spoken to anyone who knew a thing about the Old Internet.” It was my turn to make a wistful smile. “Sometimes I feel like an auto mechanic the day after the internal combustion engine was outlawed.”
“At least they never outlawed the Internet.” Every word from her landed as soft as a dandelion ball.
“They didn’t have to. People just lost interest in it.”
“I’m the kind of person who likes old movies and old music,” she said. “I even own a compact disc player. People think I’m crazy wasting space on physical discs. Do you miss those days?”
“Power, greed, and ambition,” I said. "At the end of the day, that's what the Internet turned out to be. And it was built by a naive counterculture who thought all legitimate power resided in the people. The peop
le turned out to be just as greedy and ambitious as the establishment."
“You don't really believe that."
“Tell me more about your studies,” I said.
She took a breath and launched. “I finished my postdoc at Stanford. All my graduate work was exclusively on the Old Internet. ICMP, TCP, UDP—all the way up the stack.”
The acronyms and terminology were like a trip to my hometown. I felt like my great-grandfather listening to a young person marveling at the wild abandon of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.
“That doesn’t sound profitable these days,” I said. “Where are you going to find work?”
“Out on the island,” she said softly. “I thought, at least. I used to live on Alcatraz.”
“You’ve been to the island?” I asked, excited-like.
“I know, it’s a real privilege, you know?” She brightened. “Out on the island, I walked among the Old Internet every day. I was paid to walk through fields of memories.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.”
“Not as much as you might think.”
“Doing what, though? I thought they just kept the Old Internet on ice out there.”
“Don’t you visit it?” She pointed at my memex. “You can access the Old Internet directly. You’re probably pulling old memories from there without knowing it. Like, when you think about being young, your memories are probably coming from the island and not your brain.”
“Trust me,” I said. “I can tell the difference.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said.
“Besides, the Old Internet is embalmed now. The people on the island have encased it in amber, like a prehistoric mosquito.”
“Oh, no, no, no.” She shook her head out of solemn respect. “The Internet is alive and breathing out on the island—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.” She extended a delicate hand. “I’m Leigh.”
“Just call me Naroy.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Naroy.”
Her hand was soft and delicate. If she was writing Internet code, these hands were probably pounding the keyboard, banging out primitive for loops and if-then blocks. Scratch that. I banged out code. These were the hands of an artist. She painted code.